Vinicius Gonçalves’s Reviews > Hess: The Missing Years, 1941-1945 > Status Update

“But what the Führer said to you is important,” the psychologist persisted. “It is important for me personally,” retorted Hess, seated uncomfortably on the edge of his cot. “And, one day, for the German people too. But it is of no concern to the rest of the world or to you foreigners present in court.”

His ambition always was to make peace - both between individuals and between nations. The whole of Europe knows his speech to the veterans of all nations, the veterans who want peace, because they know war. He knew war, because he was a veteran too. If ever there was a statesman who was ready to make every personal sacrifice to bring about peace, it was Rudolf Hess.

But Hess remained aloof and uncollaborative, offering neither succour to the prosecution nor assistance to his own defence. It is not hard to divine his motive: all others might have deserted and betrayed the Führer; but he, Rudolf Hess, would deputize faithfully for him to the bitter end.

“How few people,” he wrote on 21 June 1945, “can claim the privilege that we can - to have shared right from the start with a unique personage all his joys and sufferings, his hopes and fears, his hatreds and loves: to have witnessed every expression of his greatness, as well as all the petty signs of human weakness which go to make a man worthy of affection.”

In our human existence, everybody has his purpose, even if some people take half a century to realize theirs. And some don’t perceive it at all.

... the man was the rarest of animals, a genuine idealist who unashamedly extolled the pure national socialist doctrine, and idolized its Führer.

Rudolf Hess heard the air-raid sirens and the rival bomber forces passing overhead. This was the development that he had feared, and it was compassion for Europe’s civilians that had inspired his winged mission one year before.

"I could draw up an endless list of Britain’s breaches of treaties and violations of international law down through history. Remember Lawrence of Arabia! It’s common knowledge that he resigned his rank of colonel because he could not approve of Britain not keeping her word to the Arabs. It ill behooves Britain to reproach others for repressing smaller nations. We have not suppressed any little nations..."

"... another telegram, from Connecticut, articulated the
feelings of millions of Americans at that time.
“Courage,” it adjured the now imprisoned deputy Führer. “Christ too thought himself defeated. From a friend in America.”
All of these telegrams were stopped and destroyed."

"Telegrams from neutral well-wishers - addressed to Hess care of British archbishops,
government officials and anywhere else thought likely to reach him - began to pile up in the racks of Churchill’s postal censorship."