William flew to cakes

William flew to cakes


Hess was moved to a hospital at Abergavenny, Gwent, where he remained for the rest of the war. He was found guilty of crimes against peace at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in Spandau Prison, Berlin, in 1987 One curious dimension of the Hess affair was a request from the Ministry of Economic Warfare at the end of May 1941 “that the textile experts of our intelligence department should have an opportunity of examining Hess’s clothing. “It throws much light both on Germany’s textile deficiencies and on the different situations of different classes of the community,” it said. An examination in this case “would be particularly interesting” and “might possibly produce something of propaganda value”. Observing that during the First World War the Kaiser had apparently insisted on wearing “nothing but British underwear”, it was thought “it would be fun if Hess were to have followed this illustrious precedent”.Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, was not convinced and, revealing that he was perhaps more of a Savile Row man himself, replied that Hess’s garments were “of the cheapest variety, and might well have been purchased at Marks & Spencer”. Menzies left the decision to Henry Hopkinson at the Foreign Office. “Do you have any objection,” he asked, “to my submitting H’s pants to test?” Hopkinson gave his approval, but no report survives as to the result. Hess’s pants are now held by the Imperial War Museum.After 70 years and countless conspiracy theories, MI6’s answer to the greatest wartime mystery of them all may be summed up simply: Rudolf Hess was out of his mind. That, broadly speaking, was the explanation put forward at the time by Churchill’s advisers (“mad . . . awkward . . . a lunatic”). It was also the reason given by Hitler for his deputy’s bizarre flight to Scotland in 1941. But because the circumstances of Hess’s arrival in Britain were so very strange, and the clamp of official secrecy so tight, the theories about what he was really up to have multiplied over the years.