Why the secrecy on Hess’s last flight?

Press, 21 April 1984, Page 19

Why the secrecy on Hess’s last flight?

By

JOSEPH MARSHALL,

Features International

Military guards will march down the echoing galleries of Spandau Prison on Saturday, carrying a large pink and white birthday cake. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, will be spending his 90th birthday, as usual, in the confines of his cell, visited briefly by his wife and son, who brought the gift. Under the watchful eyes of armed guards, only small talk is allowed. At any mention of politics or the past, they will be ushered swiftly out and the steel door slammed firmly behind them. Hess, celebrating 43 years behind bars, is the world’s loneliest prisoner — and the man who still holds the key to one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War. Despite many accounts of his curious solo peace mission to Scotland in 1941, Britain’s intelligence services still refuse to grant the Public Records Office permission to release certain key documents. Now, Hess’s son Wolf, a 47-year-old Bavarian civil engineer, is writing a book which, he claims, will shed more light on what exactly happened on the night of May 10, 1941. He still hopes that the Western powers will eventually pardon his

father, and was recently in Britain hoping to persuade members of Parliament to press for Hess’s release from Spandau. Then, after leaving the House of Commons, he slipped away for a secret assignation. On a station platform in Lancashire he searched for a man wearing a yellow flower in his lapel. Air crash researcher Kevin Mount, aged 45, met the distin-guished-looking German, and they spent 10 hours together, deep in conversation, at his terraced home in Nelson, Lancs. The subject was Mr Mount’s detailed log — the result of five years research into the last 60 minutes of the Deputy Fuhrer’s 830-mile flight, in a new silver-grey Messerschmitt 110, to a remote field near the Renfrewshire village of Eaglesham. Hess parachuted on to land owned by the Duke of Hamilton, whom he claimed to have met at the 1936 Olympic Games. The Duke, now dead, always denied the meeting. But, strangely, on the night Hess’s plane roared low over his estate, he was the R.A.F. sector

controller for a wide area of southern Scotland. Amazingly, the flight, a feat of navigation by any standards, was never intercepted. Winston Churchill was told that a lone Defiant fighter was scrambled, but some evidence suggests that it was merely on routine patrol. “There are many questions still unanswered,” Kevin Mount says. “My work has been sifting wreckage, eyewitness accounts, and R.A.F. war records that have been made available.” His patient enquiries have resulted in three telephone calls to his home by military intelligence officers. One request, at the Public Records Office, was turned down when archivists insisted that he would have to provide, at the request of security chiefs, a detailed account of his “line of approach.” This is the mysterious flight path of Hess’s aircraft, picked up on radar and labelled Raid 42. At 10.23 p.m., a W.A.A.F. at Fighter Command headquarters in Bentley Priory, 12 miles north of London, took a call from a remote

radar station in Northumberland. They reported an aircraft travelling at 300 miles an hour across the coast at Alnwick. It was not marked as hostile. At 10.30 p.m., the Royal Observer Corps at Chatton, Northumberland, logged a visual sighting at 100 ft when Hess roared from the cover of low cloud. There was confusion and disbelief at Fighter Command. No Messerschmitt would have the range to get to Scotland and back. By 11.20 p.m., the W.A.A.F. had taken the marker from the operations board, indicating that the intruder had been shot down. Later, it is thought its path had probably been confused with that of the Defiant. Hess, in fact, according to Mr Mount’s research, had taken a complex flight path which could have been only the result of total insanity — or an intimate knowledge of Britain’s air defence system. He chose the night of the heaviest German raids of the war, when every fighter squadron was on full alert. Yet no-one fired a shot at

him or attempted to turn him back. The Messerschmitt flew low over the Cheviots, then swung over an area heavily defended by the R.A.F. against bombing raids on industrial cities. At times, Hess was literally skimming the roofs of houses and farms. The anti-aircraft guns, however, remained silent. Then, Hess, a skilled pilot and navigator, banked over the west coast, flew out to sea, and made a low approach over a “protected” area used only by R.A.F. training aircraft. The Duke of Hamilton reported later to Mr Churchill that, at this point, the Defiant was only four miles behind in hot pursuit, but no research has unearthed evidence of this. The true story, and the explosive political intrigue surrounding it, lies in secret files, and in the memory of the man who has been forbidden to discuss it for 43 years. “Despite reports of insanity and rambling senility, Wolf Hess says that his father is still an extremely lucid and rational man,” Kevin Mount reports. “We can only hope that, before he dies, we will finally learn the truth of his extraordinary mission.”