Rudolf Hess (ᛉ1894 – ᛣ1987), Martyr for Peace

[DAVE_NYC]

Best wishes on Rudolf Hess Day. Very few people have remained dedicated to a great cause with as much fanatical zeal as did Rudolf Hess. Forty six years of confinement, much of it solitary confinement, could not force Hess to renounce Hitler or National Socialism. (The fraud of the Allied "democracies" was exposed by the cruel treatment of this political prisoner.)

Hess was the Deputy Fuhrer to Adolf Hitler. Hess recognized the great danger that a two front war would pose to Germany. Hitler was taking a great gamble by expanding the war. Hitler wanted peace with England and hoped to wipe out the Soviet Union in a lightning campaign to eliminate Communism and gain natural resources that would make Germany unbeatable.

As an historical footnote, Hitler may have even won the two front war against England and the Soviet Union if it were not for the massive military aid that Roosevelt sent to these nations in violation of the Neutrality Act. The foolish attack against Pearl Harbor by the Japanese brought the United States directly into the war. The loss of the war is more realistically placed on Japan and the deceitfulness and political maneuvering of Roosevelt than Hitler's mistakes. The Japanese logically should have attacked the
Soviet Union from the east and helped finish off Stalin's monstrous regime in 1941. Instead of reducing the number of enemies that the Axis powers were fighting, Japan attacked the nation with the greatest industrial potential in the world. Even Hitler must have been stunned by this catastrophic move.

Perhaps, Hess was convinced that the U.S. would enter the war if England stayed at war with Germany. On May 10th, 1941, six weeks before Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Hess flew an airplane over Britain and parachuted out to carry out a one-man peace mission. This is possibly the most heroic individual action by a high ranking politician in world history.

Rudolf Hess hoped that his action would convince the British government that the highest level of the German government sincerely desired peace with England. Churchill, however, was a relentless warmonger and a complete puppet of the Jews. No serious attempt to make peace and spare England from four more years of pointless warfare was considered by Winston Churchill. Churchill chose to fight the war to a Pyrrhic victory creating a legacy for himself built on the rubble of European cities and the mass graves of Germans killed by Allied bombers.

Rudolf Hess was confined in prisons from May 10th, 1941, to his death on August 17th, 1987. Hess spent literally half of his long life of 93 years confined in prisons for trying to bring peace between England and Germany. The imprisonment of Rudolf Hess is one of the most glaring war crimes by the Allied powers. Hate-filled, vengeful Jews were responsible for the judicial atrocities at Nuremberg, which included the treatment of Rudolf Hess, the murders of many of the surviving political leaders of Germany, and, worst of all, the creation of the Holocaust Lie that has slandered White people with the alleged mass murder of Jews.

In reality, the greatest mass murders in Europe were committed by Communist troops led by Jewish commissars, and by Allied bomber fleets following the orders of Capitalist Jews and their political puppets. Rudolf Hess was locked up for over 46 years. The truth about World War Two has been locked up even longer. The treatment of Rudolf Hess was completely inexcusable and should be a signal to any alert historian that the Allies were deliberately keeping Hess locked up so that he would not be able to challenge the Holocaust Lie or any of the other flimsy propaganda that the Jews maintain with brute force and intimidation.

Rudolf Hess: A Rebel with a Cause

[friedrich braun]

Monday, December 27, 2004


Mrs Foley's diary solves the mystery of Hess

By Michael Smith

A BRIEF entry in the diary of the wife of a British spy has led to the discovery of the true story behind one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War - the bizarre 1941 flight to Britain of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess.

No single incident in Britain's wartime history has given birth to so many conspiracy theories, all of them centred on an alleged plot by the intelligence services to lure Hess to Britain.

Kay Foley kept her diary between 1936 and 1942

They range from suggestions that the man imprisoned by the Allies after the war was not the real Hess, who allegedly died in the 1942 air crash that killed the Duke of Kent, to claims that British psychological warfare experts conned him into coming to Britain so they could use him in an anti-Nazi propaganda campaign.

The response from academics has always been disparaging. They regard the conspiracy theories as patent nonsense and, perhaps in response, invariably dismiss any claim of major MI6 involvement in the affair.

But the diary has revealed that MI6 was not only heavily involved in the run-up to Hess's flight but even planned "a sting operation" aimed at luring Hess or another prominent German into bogus peace talks with Britain.

The diary belonged to the wife of Frank Foley, the former MI6 head of station in Berlin, who was to become more famous for his work in getting "tens of thousands" of Jews out of Germany.

It was Foley, as the leading German expert in MI6, who was in charge of the year-long debriefing of the deputy führer. This much is known from Foreign Office files released to the National Archives some years ago.

Hess flew to Britain in a Messerschmitt-110 on May 10, 1941, intent on making contact with the Duke of Hamilton, who he believed would help him mediate a peace deal whereby Britain would join Nazi Germany in a war against the Soviet Union. It was a hopeless mission based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the British establishment.

Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, was convinced that it had produced an intelligence windfall for Britain.

But Churchill was wrong. The debriefing was a wasted effort. Hess knew astonishingly little and, to make matters worse, Foley swiftly realised he was mad.

That is where the role of both MI6 and Foley in the Hess affair begins and ends, according to the files released to the National Archives.

But the emergence of Kay Foley's diary, which she had given to one of her nieces, changed all that, sparking off an investigation that has uncovered the truth about Rudolf Hess.

Mrs Foley kept the diary for seven years, from January 1936 to December 1942. Not unnaturally for a journal covering such a long period, the entries were all frustratingly brief. Foley was only ever referred to as F (for Frank) and although records of his official activity appeared in the diary, they were vague.

For the most part, the diary provided nothing new about Foley and what he did.

A few entries added a minor piece of new information. One gave a precise date for a wartime change of job, another details of when and where Foley landed in Britain after the fall of France, adding interesting detail of what he did before returning home.

But the most puzzling entries by far concerned a visit to Lisbon that Foley made in early 1941. He flew out of Whitchurch aerodrome near Bristol on Friday, Jan 17, 1941, spending two weeks in Lisbon and arriving back in England on Saturday Feb 1, 1941, when the diary records that Kay received a telegram from F reassuring her that he had arrived safely back in England.
The dates were intriguing. Seven months before Hess flew to Britain, in September 1940, one of his close advisers, Albrecht Haushofer, the leading expert on Great Britain in the German Foreign Office [Website note: wrong!] , had written to the Duke of Hamilton at Hess's request, attempting to set up a meeting in Lisbon.

The letter, sent via an intermediary, an old family friend of the Haushofers, was intercepted and passed to MI5, who initially suspected Hamilton and the intermediary might be German spies and began an investigation.

By November 1940 they had realised this was not the case and spent some months considering whether or not to send Hamilton, a serving RAF officer, to Lisbon to meet Haushofer.

The plan was eventually discarded as too dangerous but the letter's very existence has always fuelled the allegation at the heart of the conspiracy theories -- that British intelligence lured Hess to Britain.

Conspiracy theories are easily dismissed but if MI6 was aware that someone so close to power had put out feelers to the British establishment, it would be bound to consider meeting them.

If the approach was from opposition forces, they would be useful allies. If it came from someone with Hitler's backing, it would have provided invaluable intelligence.

The dates for Foley's visit to Lisbon were midway between the letter's interception and Hess's arrival in Britain. They looked right.

Only MI6 could say for sure what Foley was doing in Lisbon. The service still refuses to release any of its own files, but it does retain a number of "old boys" as historians to look after them.

Their immediate response was that Foley must have gone to Lisbon to look at a potential double-cross operation, a reference to the highly successful system whereby the vast majority of Nazi spies sent to Britain were "turned" by British intelligence to provide false information to the Germans.

Although Foley did eventually take over as head of the MI6 Double-Cross section, this did not happen until 15 months later (the diary fixes the date as April 16, 1942).

Told this, the MI6 historian went back and checked the files. What he found was the answer to the mystery that has puzzled historians for more than half a century.

Much of the MI6 archive on Hess has been destroyed. But in the files there was a single, more recent reference that spoke of MI6 plans for "a sting operation" in response to the Haushofer letter.

The MI6 historian also has access to oral histories from former officers and, where they are still alive, the officers themselves. By delving into this "folk memory", he discovered that Foley had flown to Lisbon to see whether it was possible to use a meeting with Haushofer to set up a sting operation.

Foley was accompanied by his secretary, Margaret Reid, who was presumably there not just to take notes but also to provide cover -- a middle-aged gentleman and his "niece" spending two weeks away from the austerity of wartime Britain.

There is, frustratingly, no information on what Foley and Reid actually did in Lisbon. But the only effective way of checking out the viability of a sting operation would have been to respond to the letter and to arrange to meet either Haushofer or another intermediary in the Portuguese capital.

In an account written for Hitler after Hess flew to Britain, Haushofer said: "I did not learn whether the letter reached the addressee. The possibilities of it having being lost en route from Lisbon to England are not small after all."

But he could scarcely have admitted having had contacts with the British secret service. After Hess flew to Britain, Haushofer was treated with a great deal of suspicion by the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi party's security service. It interrogated him and placed his flat and office under surveillance. At any event, whatever Foley and Reid did in Lisbon, it took a full two weeks. They arrived back in England with bad news.

Foley had decided that the sting was too risky and, understandably, Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6, took the advice of his top expert on Germany, frustrating Hess in his attempts to put out peace feelers to the British aristocracy.

As with most of the events that become the subject of conspiracy theories, the truth about Hess has turned out to be much more mundane. Haushofer had always warned Hess that the attempt to go through Hamilton was likely to fail and that it might be necessary to send "a neutral intermediary" to Britain.

When it did fail, the deputy führer clearly decided that he could not afford to leave such an important task to someone else and simply came himself.

David Irving comments:

THERE is nothing dramatically new in this story which Michael Smith did not learn from reading my 1987 book Rudolf Hess, The Missing Years (Macmillan, London).
It was always known that Haushofer had written a letter to the Duke of Hamilton, addressed initially to a Mrs Wilson in Lisbon (who turned out to be an MI6 agent); the MI6 intercepted the letter and it is in Ministry of Information (letter censorship) archives.
MI6 told Eduard Benes of their plot to lure Hess over. I found that in the papers of Benes' secretary Taborsky in Stanford University.
And we knew that Frank Foley was Hess's chief interlocutor at Mytchett House, southern England,for a year after his arrival in 1941. I published his photo in the book. Most of the transcripts of the recorded conversations have long been released.
Isn't it amazing how an author (Smith) can write an entire article on the subject without mentioning by name the book that contains all these facts, published nearly twenty years ago?

http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General...ley_diary.html

[GreenHeart]

The following is an interesting article about Hess' flight to Britain to try to establish peace.


Rudolf Hess | The Truth Behind His Flight to Britain

The bizarre arrival of Rudolf Hess by parachute near Glasgow on the night of 10 May 1941 has given rise to more outlandish myths and legends than any other single event during the Second World War. Since 1946, more than twenty books dealing with the Deputy Fuhrer's mysterious 'peace mission' have appeared in print, spawning a thriving worldwide Hess conspiracy industry to rival those surrounding Jack the Ripper and the Kennedy assassination. Among the many contentious issues are whether Hitler approved of the ill-starred plan, whether Hess was expected by a well-connected peace lobby in Britain, or else lured to Britain as part of an elaborate intelligence sting, whether the Allies replaced Hess with a double, and whether he was murdered at Spandau Prison in 1987, or died by his own hand. Although few if any of these questions are likely to be resolved to the satisfaction of every Hess investigator, some of the more outlandish theories can today be safely dismissed.

The established facts of the Hess affair run as follows. At 5.45 pm on Saturday 10 May Hess, a pilot for more than twenty years, took off from the Messerschmitt works airfield at Augsburg, Bavaria, in a twin-engined Bf 110 fighter-bomber. After a journey of almost 1,000 miles lasting four hours, Hess crossed the British coast over Ainwick in Northumberland, then flew on towards his objective, Dungavel House, eventually baling out at 11 pm to land near the village of Eaglesham. Detained by the local Home Guard, Hess gave his name as 'Alfred Horn' and asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, then a serving RAF officer. After being transferred into army custody Hess was unmasked, and explained to various interrogators that the purpose of his flying visit was to seek peace between Britain and Germany. In this he failed magnificently: Hitler quickly issued a statement which alleged that Hess was mentally disordered and 'a victim of hallucinations', while Hess was detained in Britain as a prisoner of state until his conviction for conspiracy and crimes against peace at Nuremberg in 1946. Thereafter Hess was held as a Prisoner No. 7 at Spandau Prison in Berlin, always denied parole, and died on 17 August 1987 at the age of ninety-three.

Myth and falsehood surround his epic flight even before Hess set foot on British soil. In his controversial account The Murder of Rudolf Hess (1979), Dr Hugh Thomas reproduced a series of photographs said to record Hess departing from Augsburg on 10 May. The Bf 110 shown was not equipped with long range drop-tanks, leading Thomas (and others) to surmise that the aircraft lacked sufficient fuel to reach Glasgow, and would therefore have had to land to refuel en route, or that two aircraft were involved. According to Thomas, Hess was shot down by the Luftwaffe, and replaced by a double for the flight to Scotland. However these various suppositions are based on careless research. Hess flew to Scotland in a Bf 110E, which with drop-tanks boasted a more than adequate range of 1,560 miles, and which bore the works number 3869 and the radio code VJ+OQ. The machine shown in the photographs carries the works number 3526, while Thomas managed to misquote the radio code as NJ+OQ. Although reports that a drop-tank was later recovered from the Clyde have never been verified, the simple fact is that the photographs were taken on one of the twenty-odd training flights Hess made from Augsburg before 10 May, using a completely different machine.

Some accounts offer that Hess must have landed and refuelled at an intermediate airfield such as Schiphol or Aalborg, but this would not have been necessary. Nor is it true that Hess flew from Calais, as reported from Sweden in 1943, or that for part of his flight Hess was escorted by no less a dignitary than the future SS Reichsprotektor of Bohemia, Reinhard Heydrich, in a Bf 109 fighter. A postwar claim by the Luftwaffe fighter ace Adolf Galland should also be treated with caution. In his memoir The First and the Last (1955), Galland claimed that 'early in the evening' of 10 May he received an agitated call from Goring, ordering his entire group into the air to bring down the Deputy Fuhrer. A dubious Galland responded by sending up a token force. However, the claim is only credible if Goring and others had advance knowledge of the Hess flight, and opposed it, which raises the question of why Hess was allowed to take off from Augsburg in the first place. In the same vein, some have claimed that it would not have been possible for Hess to have flown over German territory without prior authorisation, but this is convincingly countered by Roy Nesbit and Georges Van Acker in their book The Flight of Rudolf Hess (1999). Suggestions by Richard Deacon that the Bf 110 flown by Hess was fitted with American parts are plainly nonsensical.

The account given by Hess of his route to Scotland is also suspect. Hess was said to have been very proud of his achievement in flying from Augsburg to Eaglesham, a distance of almost 1,000 miles, the last 400 over water and enemy territory. On a map drawn by Hess on 8 August 1941 (click here to see enlarged map), while a prisoner, he claimed to have flown north-west from Augsburg to Den Helder in Holland, then north-east for 70 miles, and then north-west again to a point above the middle of the North Sea. Here, at 8.52 pm, he made another 90 degree turn to port in order to approach the British coastline from the east. Hess claimed he then realised he had an hour to kill, since at this more northerly latitude the sun set later than in southern Germany, whereas he wished to fly overland at dusk, and as a result executed several complicated zig-zag manoeuvres to kill time. But as Picknett, Prince and Prior argued in their highly detailed study Double Standards (2001), there is good reason to doubt this account. When Hess left Augsburg he was observed heading north, not north-west, while a part of his later zig-zag manoeuvres were carried out within range of British Chain Home radar, who instead recorded Hess (designated Raid 42J) as flying straight in from the east. Hess, at bottom an amateur pilot, claimed to have been navigating alone, which makes it highly unlikely that he could have followed such a complicated course over open water, yet still managed to land just eleven miles from his intended destination, Dungavel House. Given that Hess had been considering his mission since at least September 1940, and may have made several previous abortive attempts, it is unlikely he would have overlooked the fact that dusk fell later in the north. Instead, the authors of Double Standards guess that Hess made use of a then-secret German radio-navigational system, broadcast from the station at Kalundborg on the west coast of Zeeland in Denmark. Kalundborg lies precisely due north of Augsburg, and due east of Alnwick and Dungavel House, thus making Hess's journey far more simple, but 250 miles - and one tell-tale hour - longer.

It is abundantly clear from the timing of his flight that the Hess mission was closely linked to the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union, which was launched just six weeks later, on 22 June 1941. This much was confirmed by Lord Beaverbrook on several occasions after the war. The conquest of Russia by Germany, never viable under any circumstances, would certainly be made harder by fighting a war on two fronts. The Russian factor would also explain why Hitler might deny all knowledge of the mission if it failed, assuming he was privy to the plan from the outset. Had Stalin discovered that Germany wished to make peace with Britain, he would have deduced immediately that an attack on Russia was close at hand. Instead, Germany sought to lull her notional Soviet ally into a false sense of security by continuing to threaten Operation Sealion, the seaborne invasion of Britain. Furthermore Hitler might not have wanted his Axis partners, chiefly Mussolini, to think that he was negotiating behind their backs. While this hypothesis does nothing to prove Hitler knew and approved of the Hess peace mission, it does show that he would hardly have admitted so even if he did.

On being informed of the Hess flight, Hitler is reported by some (including Albert Speer) to have flown into a paroxysm of rage, although other accounts (Hess adjutant Karl-Heinz Pintsch) relate that he received the news calmly. Some are of the opinion that what followed was part of a German strategy of plausible denial. Surprisingly, the first public announcement about the affair came not from London but Berlin, in the form of a radio bulletin broadcast on 12 May at 8 pm:

A letter which he left behind unfortunately shows by its distractedness traces of a mental disorder, and it is feared he was a victim of hallucinations. The Fuhrer at once ordered the arrest of the adjutants of party member Hess, who alone had any cognizance of these flights, and did not, contrary to the Fuhrer's orders, of which they were fully aware, either prevent or report the flight. In these circumstances, it must be considered that party member Hess either jumped out of his plane or has met with an accident.

While it is true that his driver, bodyguard and two adjutants were arrested, little punitive action was taken against others close to Hess. Karl and Albrecht Haushofer, his trusted geopolitical advisors, were arrested and detained, but neither was ill-treated and both were released without penalty. The aircraft designer Dr Willi Messerschmitt was merely rebuked by Goring, and no action at all taken against his chief test pilot Helmut Kaden (who had given Hess intensive instruction), or against Ernst Bohle, the chief of Hess's own foreign intelligence bureau, the Auslandorganisation. His wife Use and son Wolf were allowed to remain in their villa in the Munich suburb of Harlaching, and awarded a pension. Had Hess really acted alone, and against the express wishes of Hitler and the party in general, one might have expected the outcome to have been very different.

It has often been claimed that Hess was deliberately lured to Britain as part of an elaborate intelligence sting. This theory has spawned a number of books in recent years, including Hess: Flight for the Fuhrer by Peter Padfleld (1991), Ten Days That Saved the West by John Costello (also 1991), Churchill's Deception by Louis Kilzer (1994) and Hess: The British Conspiracy by John Harris and M.J. Trow (1999). Certainly this chimes with the theory favoured by Stalin, who initially believed that Britain was in league with Germany to destroy the Soviet Union, and that the Hess mission was engineered by British intelligence with the Duke of Hamilton as a go-between. Moreover the Russians had some difficulty in understanding why Hess was not immediately prosecuted as a war criminal, and instead detained in comfortable quarters to await a postwar trial. In October 1942 the party newspaper Pravda (Truth) declared:

It is no coincidence that Hess's wife has asked certain British representatives if she could join her husband. This could mean that she does not see her husband as a prisoner. It is high time we knew whether Hess is either a criminal or a plenipotentiary who represents the Nazi government in England.

Several days later Pravda published a photograph of 'Mrs Hess' giving a piano recital in London. However this turned out to be Myra Hess, the well-known pianist who boosted wartime morale in London by playing lunchtime concerts to packed houses at the National Gallery. Indeed Churchill and Stalin argued over the point when they met for the Moscow conference in October 1944. Churchill recorded in a later memorandum:

The Russians are very suspicious of the Hess episode and I have had a lengthy argument with Marshal Stalin about it at Moscow in October, he steadfastly maintaining that Hess had been invited over by our Secret Service. It is not in the public interest that the whole of this affair should be stirred at the present moment.

The intelligence sting theory is superficially attractive, if only because it would explain the dense veil of official secrecy which still surrounds much of the Hess affair. According to Padfield and Costello, MI5's Double Cross Committee masterminded the affair, while Harris and Trow favour the Special Operations Executive. Anthony Cave Brown concluded that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was behind the trap, while it has been suggested by Philip Knightley that MI6 induced Hess to come to Britain as they too favoured a negotiated peace with Germany. According to KGB sources, the traitor Kim Philby later revealed that SIS lured Hess to Britain by means of forged letters from the Duke of Hamilton, although Philby made no mention of this in his memoir My Secret War.

The greatest problem with the sting theory is that it is not supported by the conduct of the British authorities after Hess landed at Eaglesham. Had Hess been expected by the intelligence services, and by extension the military, it seems unlikely he would have been detained in a number of scout huts by the Home Guard for four hours until transferred to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow. Even if the confusion on the ground in Scotland is explicable in the fog of war, the fact remains that Britain did nothing to exploit the windfall as a political and propaganda coup, or announce to the world that Hitler was suing for peace. Instead the flight of the Deputy Fuhrer to Scotland was announced to the world by Berlin, and only afterwards admitted by the British authorities on the most neutral terms. Far from being paraded before the world media, Hess was kept under close confinement for the next five years, and not seen in public until Nuremberg. If any photographs of Hess were taken between May 1941 and October 1945, not a single one has been released into the public domain. Even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, expressed his bafflement. Moreover Hess himself seems never to have indicated that he was lured to Britain.

Probably the most outlandish variation on this theme is the proposition that Hess was lured to Britain by bogus astrology. This fantastical notion was a favourite of spy writer Richard Deacon (alias Donald McCormick), who developed it at considerable length in books such as British Secret Service and 17F: The Life of lan Fleming, despite the fact that there is no verifiable (or even circumstantial) evidence to support it. According to Deacon, the luring of Hess was 'a brilliant coup' for which Fleming, the creator of James Bond, deserved full credit:

Hess, however, presented a somewhat easier target. Vanessa Hoffman's information convinced Fleming that while Canaris could not be won over by any faked horoscopes, Hess might well be exploited in this way . . . There was everything to be gained and nothing to be lost by planting faked horoscopes on Hess. Fleming had discovered through various of his occultist friends such as Aleister Crowley and Ellic Howe that Hess regularly consulted astrologers, and that one of these was Karl Ernst Krafft. . . Exactly how the bogus horoscopes were worded, or the advice they gave to Hess, remains a mystery.

According to Deacon, Fleming, in wartime a serving officer in the Naval Intelligence Division, was acquainted with infamous occultist Aleister Crowley, and with Dennis Wheatley became involved in a 'very hush-hush' assignment called Operation Mistletoe. This in turn involved nocturnal occult rituals staged in the Ashdown Forest, involving 'a dummy dressed in a Nazi uniform, sat on a throne-like chair', with the object of influencing Hess. Deacon also stated that after Hess arrived, Fleming suggested he be questioned by Crowley. Others have cited the involvement of Maxwell Knight, Tom Driberg and Louis de Wohl in this same astrological plot. Deacon quoted with approval a claim by Nicholas Campion, cited as 'one of the founders of the Institute for the Study of Cycles in World Affairs and a leading astrologer', who in 1984 advised Deacon that he had:

Cast the horoscope for the time at which Hess took off from Germany. It was most inauspicious. It transpires that this is a most evil horoscope in any traditional sense, largely because six planets were in the house of death and two other points were strong: the fixed star Algol (which leads one to lose one's head) and the evil degree Serpentis, so called 'the accursed degree of the accursed sign.'

Aspects of this farrago of nonsense are repeated in books such as The Man Who Was M (Anthony Masters, 1984) and The Occult Conspiracy (Michael Howard, 1989). Yet in his own introduction Deacon had warned his readers that this tale of the luring of Rudolf Hess was 'far removed from reality' and 'totally bizarre'. In truth, the only contemporary references to Hess and astrology appeared in newspapers in London and Berlin on the same day. 14 May 1941. According to an article in the Volkischer Beobachter:

As is well-known in Party circles, Rudolf Hess was in poor health for many years and latterly increasingly had recourse to hypnotists, astrologers and so on. The extent to which these people are responsible for the mental confusion that led him to his present step has still to be clarified.

In London The Times published some highly speculative information supposedly received from a correspondent in Switzerland:

Certain of Hess's closest friends have thrown an interesting light on the affair. They say that Hess has always been Hitler's astrologer in secret. Up to last March he had consistently predicted good fortune and had always been right. Since then, notwithstanding the victories Germany has won, he has declared that the stars showed that Hitler's meteoric career was approaching its climax.

The detail disclosed by The Times was almost certainly official disinformation, with both newspaper reports intended to discredit Hess as deluded or mentally unstable. Hitler's motive for a policy of plausible denial in relation to the Hess peace mission have already been discussed. In Britain, however, very different reasons may lie behind the official policy of silence and secrecy surrounding Hess.

There is a strong body of evidence, not all of it circumstantial, that Rudolf Hess came to Britain expecting to conclude ongoing peace negotiations with senior officials, and then to fly back to Germany from Dungavel. In their minutely researched account Double Standards, Picknett, Prince and Prior offer the following facts in support of this argument. By May 1941 Britain was losing the war: Greece had fallen. Rommel was winning in North Africa. U-boats were sinking a colossal tonnage of Allied shipping, and Britain's cities were being heavily bombed from the air. At this time Churchill was by no means as popular as postwar myth suggests, having endured a vote of confidence on 7 May. In Britain there remained a strong peace lobby which included Lloyd George, Lord Halifax, Rab Butler, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Nevile Henderson and Sir Samuel Hoare. It is also possible that senior figures within MI6, including Sir Stewart Menzies, favoured peace. Moreover other senior establishment figures had been pre-war members of the Anglo—German Fellowship, including the Duke of Hamilton. Hamilton later denied this, just as he denied meeting Hess at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but in fact his own archives betray his membership of the Fellowship in 1936, while there is ample evidence of the meeting in Berlin from Henry Channon, Kenneth Lindsay and even Churchill. Hitler too wished to end the war in the west, as is clear from his 'last appeal to reason' of 19 July 1940, since the occupation and administration of Britain and the Empire would be a complicated task, and deplete those resources required for the planned attack on Russia. Against this background it seems more than likely that Hitler knew of, and endorsed, the Hess mission.

According to the authors of Double Standards, their research suggests that the proposed terms of the armistice included a 25-year alliance between Britain and Germany, and the adoption by Britain of an attitude of 'benevolent neutrality' towards Germany's forthcoming war on the Soviet Union. Britain would continue to rule her Empire, while Germany would govern Europe. It is also suggested that there were detailed proposals regarding other issues, such as a reduction in strength of the Royal Navy and RAF. The main obstacle to the plan was the staunchly anti-Nazi Churchill, as the prime minister himself admitted to the Commons on 27 January 1942:

When Rudolf Hess flew over here some months ago, he firmly believed that he had only to gain access to certain circles in this country for what he described as 'the Churchill clique' to be thrown out of power and for a government to be set up with which Hitler could negotiate a magnanimous peace.

Sir Patrick Dollan, a former editor of the Glasgow Daily Herald and the then Lord Provost of Glasgow, seems to have been privy to inside information which he felt strongly should be made public. During a series of lectures given around the city in June 1941, Dollan made revelations which were summarised by the Bulletin and Scots Pictorial on 20 June, clearly having been missed by the censor:

Hess came here an unrepentant Nazi. He believed he could remain in Scotland for two days, discuss his peace proposals and be given petrol and maps to return to Germany.

The precise identity of those within the 'certain circles' to which Churchill alluded remains the subject of fierce debate, and is unlikely now to be established with any certainty. A wide-ranging study of pro-peace groupings in Britain before and during the Second World War can be found in Profits of Peace by Scott Newton, published in 1996. Some were pro-Hitler, but most appeasers simply wished to avoid another European war which would have a devastating effect on economic and social stability.

It is clear from a letter which the Duke of Hamilton published in The Times of 6 October 1939 that he too remained pro-peace even after the outbreak of war. The Hess affair caused the Duke of Hamilton a great deal of personal embarrassment, and led to his uttering a number of libel writs against journalists and Hess commentators until his death in 1973. It is only since then that historians have been able to publish detailed research. According to the authors of Double Standards, there is reason to believe that a reception committee awaited Hess at Dungavel House, which may have included the Duke of Kent and a Polish contingent, and that the mission went awry only after Hess failed to locate his destination and instead baled out over Eaglesham. Hamilton, then a serving Wing Commander stationed at RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh, remained a Privy Councillor and a Keeper of the Royal Household. A former member of the Anglo-German Fellowship who had hoped to avoid war, he was also a friend and sponsor of Albrecht Haushofer, a close political advisor to Hess who had been privy to the flight from its inception.

On landing Hess asked to be taken to Hamilton, and although the official version holds that the Duke slept through the night and did not see 'Alfred Horn' until about 10 am the following day, at Maryhill Barracks, the evidence of his widow supports the theory that Hamilton in fact left his bed and went to meet Hess while the latter was being escorted to Maryhill. Indeed this was reported as fact by the Glasgow Herald on 16 May 1941, who added that 'representatives of the Intelligence Service and the Foreign Office were present'. Some have claimed that it would not have been possible for Hess to have landed his Bf 110 on the small grass airfield at Dungavel, but the strip was a designated Emergency Landing Ground and there is evidence that a comparable Bristol Beaufighter set down safely there the previous month.

What had initially been promoted as a crack in the Nazi regime was in danger of being recognised as a crack in the British hierarchy. Indeed rumours of collusion between Hess and people in high places, and whispers that Hamilton was a Quisling, quickly entered into circulation in Britain, raising the dread spectre of a Hidden Hand or fifth column. Although Churchill subsequently dismissed the Hess mission as merely an 'escapade', in truth he must have recognised it as a potential turning point in the war. In May 1941 the defeat of Germany hinged on two main factors: America joining the conflict, and Germany invading the Soviet Union, so that Stalin too would become a British ally. Little was revealed to the press about Hess, and Churchill made no statement to the Commons until January 1942. Rather than exploit Hess's arrival as propaganda for short-term gain, Churchill instead reversed the crisis to further his own ends. By accident or design, the truth slipped into print in America later in 1941, in the somewhat mystic book That Day Alone by the Canadian commentator Pierre van Paassen. According to van Paassen, Churchill pretended to negotiate with Hess in order to ensure that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, to strengthen British ties with America, and to bring about the end of the Blitz. The book was published in abridged form in Britain in 1943, but with this passage deleted. It seems unlikely that van Paassen was privy to inside information. Nonetheless, the devastating night attack on London by 520 bombers on 10 May 1941 was the last significant German raid on the capital until the so-called Little Blitz early in 1944, which again suggests the complicity of Hitler in the Hess peace plan. In short. Churchill ruthlessly exploited the Hess affair to stifle the peace lobby, and those who wished to remove him from power.

Another persistent Hess legend is that the RAF did little or nothing to intercept Raid 42J, which in turn is offered as proof that Hess was expected and protected. Here the evidence is confusing. Three Spitfires from 72 Squadron based at Acklington attempted to intercept the Bf 110 as it crossed the Northumberland coast, and as it approached Glasgow an airborne Defiant night fighter from 141 Squadron at Ayr was alerted, although not scrambled as some accounts suggest. In Ten Days That Saved the West (1991), John Costello claimed that the Duke of Hamilton refused to allow fighters to attack Hess, and that anti-aircraft defences in the areas he overflew were ordered not to open fire. Both statements are incorrect.

The sectors over which Hess passed were Ouston and Ayr, rather than Turnhouse, and both tried to shoot down the intruder. Moreover, for obvious reasons it was common practice for AA batteries to refrain from firing on enemy targets which were being pursued by the RAF, since this carried the risk of bringing down friendly aircraft. In 1999 it was claimed that two Czech Hurricane pilots from 245 Squadron, Vaclav Bauman and Leopold Srom, had been closing on Hess when their attack was inexplicably called off. Soon after returning to their base at Aldergrove in Northern Ireland, the two men were subjected to an intensive interrogation by several senior RAP officers who arrived in an Avro Anson. Their story possibly tallies with an article published in the American Mercury in May 1943, which stated that 'two Hurricanes took off to trail the mystery plane with orders to force it down but under no conditions to shoot at it'. However, there is no record of Srom having flown that day in the Operations Record Book for 245 Squadron, while the convoy patrol undertaken by Bauman between 9.35 and 10.40 pm would not have taken him anywhere near Hess. In all likelihood the various other RAF pilots who claimed to have been scrambled to intercept Hess on 10 May were simply mistaken.

Several sources have claimed that Hess was the target of an assassination attempt while at Mytchett Place. According to a former army intelligence officer named John McCowen, the three would-be killers were German and arrived by parachute near Luton Hoo on the night of 28 May 1941. After being captured and interrogated, the trio revealed that they had expected to find Hess at the London Cage at Cockfosters, and to obtain help from Abwehr agents already in Britain. They were later executed without trial at the Tower of London. Predictably there is no record of any such agents being captured in 1941, or executed, and the facts seem highly unlikely. In June 1942 Hess was moved from Mytchett to Maindiff Court near Abergavenny, apparently because it was feared that a group of Poles were planning to break into the camp, kidnap Hess, and beat or kill him by way of revenge for Nazi atrocities in Poland. Indeed in an MI5 file released by the PRO in 1999 there is an odd reference to a reported gun battle between Polish soldiers and guards at Mytchett, although no precise details are given. However, as with so many aspects of the Hess affair, the whole truth is never likely to emerge.

More imaginative even than the occult explanation of the Hess mission is the theory that the real Rudolf Hess was replaced with a double, and that the man who died at Spandau in 1987 was not the Deputy Fuhrer at all. The most celebrated proponent of the so-called doppelganger theory is Dr Hugh Thomas, a former army surgeon who examined Hess in September 1973 while attached to the British Military Hospital in Berlin. The publication of his book The Murder of Rudolf Hess in 1979 prompted questions in the House of Commons and the Bundestag, and generated further controversy in 1988 when it appeared in revised form under the title Hess: A Tale of Two Murders. Thomas relied on his own medical expertise. During the First World War Hess was known to have been wounded twice: once by shrapnel in June 1916, followed by a more serious chest wound caused by a rifle bullet on the Romanian front in July 1917. According to Thomas, the 'major scars on his chest and back' caused by both wounds should have been highly visible even after 60 years, yet were not recorded by any one of the 58 doctors who examined Hess after 1941. Thomas was unable to locate any detailed contemporary medical notes, but made a number of assumptions which hypothesised extensive tissue damage and a large exit wound on the back. Thomas also accepted muddled assertions that Hess had been treated by the renowned chest surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch, whose technique for treating gunshot wounds usually entailed the partial removal of a rib. The fact that Hess refused to see his wife and son until 1969 was also cited as further evidence...cont.

After concluding that the man he had examined in Spandau in 1973 was not the real Hess, Thomas suggested a plot far stranger than fiction. By this version, Hess took off from Augsburg in a Bf 110 intending to fly to Sweden, but was shot down on the orders of rival Nazi leaders who opposed the peace plan. A second Bf 110 coded NJ+OQ with an imposter at the controls was then dispatched from Aalborg in Denmark, although quite what the substitution was meant to achieve remains obscure. A no less convoluted version was offered by Professor Peter Waddell in 1999, in which Hess was kidnapped from Sweden by SOE agents. In order to prevent reprisals against British prisoners of war, an SOE agent impersonating Hess was made to bale out of an aircraft over Scotland. The real Hess was later executed in Scotland in 1942 on the direct orders of Churchill.

All of which is quite simply fantastic. It is abundantly clear from contemporary photographs, as well as from the wreckage on public display at the Imperial War Museum, that Hess's aircraft was coded VJ+OQ, and that the Bf 110 in which he flew from Augsburg to Scotland had the necessary range. The most damaging evidence against the doppelgdnger theory was unearthed in 1989, when a BBC journalist named Roy McHardy located a copy of the original Hess medical file in the Bavarian State Archives. The file included several reports on the bullet wound sustained in 1917, including the following description from December of the same year:

Three fingers above the left armpit, a pea-sized, bluish-coloured, non-reactive scar from an entry wound. On the back, at the height of the fourth dorsal [thoracic] vertebra, two fingers from the spine, a non-reactive exit gunshot wound the size of a cherry stone.

No operation had been necessary. The wound had been a clean through-shot from a small-calibre rifle which left minor scarring, in a different location to that suggested by Thomas. No amount of minor quibbling about ancillary details can hide the fact that Thomas had based his entire hypothesis on incorrect information. Furthermore his claim that he possesses a copy of a letter from Lord Willingdon to William Mackenzie, the Canadian Prime Minister, discussing Hess and 'the problem we have with the double' cannot be verified since Thomas claims that the Official Secrets Act precludes him from publishing it. His wife Use described the double allegation as 'ridiculous', while fellow prisoner Albert Speer dismissed it as 'utter nonsense.' And why on earth would Hess's double accept an uncomfortable term of life imprisonment without disclosing his true identity? The notion is simply preposterous.

Yet another fanciful story emerged from Germany in 1987. According to the German historian Werner Maser, Hess was temporarily released from his cell on the night of 17/18 March 1952, during a Russian tour of duty at Spandau. Without the knowledge of the western powers, Hess was taken to a secret location where he met senior officials from the German Democratic Republic. On the instructions of Stalin he was offered his freedom and a leading position in East Germany, on condition he declared himself to be a socialist. Hess. however, is said to have remained loyal to Hitler and turned down the proposal. The Russians in turn warned Hess to reveal nothing of his outing, and that he would remain in Spandau until his death. The story seems somewhat far-fetched.

In the second version of his book, Hess: A Tale of Two Murders, Dr Hugh Thomas put forward the proposition that the double who died in Spandau on the afternoon of 17 August 1987 was murdered. The official version holds that Hess hanged himself in a garden shed in the grounds of the prison, by looping the electrical cord of a reading lamp around his neck and suspending this from a window latch. After attempts were made to revive him in situ he was rushed to the British Military Hospital, where, after further unsuccessful attempts at resuscitation, he was pronounced dead at 4.10 pm. A suicide note addressed to his family was found in his jacket pocket, and the initial autopsy performed on 19 August found that death had resulted from asphyxia, caused by compression of the neck due to suspension. It is worth recording here that Hess had attempted to take his own life on several previous occasions. In June 1941 he threw himself over a balcony at Mytchett Place near AIdershot. breaking his left leg, and stabbed his own chest with a breadknife in February 1945. Even as late as 1977. at the age of eighty-three, Hess tried to cut his wrists with a table knife.

Thomas argues that the neck injuries were consistent with throttling, that the suicide note was forged, and that the Hess double was murdered by SAS personnel on the orders of the British government, to whom Hess and/or his double had been an embarrassment since 1941. His son Wolf Hess also believes that his father was murdered, but dismisses the doppelgdnger theory. Quite why the authorities waited until 1987 to murder Hess is not explained. while some of the additional evidence cited by Thomas is flawed. He notes that neither of the autopsies carried out in August 1987 noted the 'massive' gunshot wounds dating from 1917, although as we have already seen this theory would be comprehensively demolished in 1989 when his complete medical file was unearthed in Munich. Thomas also found it suspicious that the corpse measured a height of 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 metres), whereas Hess was said to have been a tall man who stood about 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 metres). Again, his original medical file reveals the truth, which is that Hess was 5 feet 10 inches tall (1.77 metres), and that a reduction of 2 cm in height as a result of stooping in old age is quite normal.

In 1989 the murder theory gained some support from the testimony of a Tunisian medical orderly, Abdallah Melaouhi, who had acted as Hess's nurse since 1982. Melaouhi claimed that on the day in question he was delayed by guards, and that when he finally arrived at the garden summerhouse (in fact an elderly Portakabin) there were two unfamiliar men present dressed in American uniforms. He also stated that furniture had been thrown about, as if during a struggle, and that there was no cord around Hess's neck, the electrical flex still being attached to the lamp and plugged in. Melaouhi was also of the opinion that Hess was so debilitated and arthritic that he was unable even to tie his own shoelaces, let alone knot a cord around his neck. He even stated that at the British Military Hospital the British, French and American directors later toasted the passing of Hess with champagne.

This evidence was largely contradicted by Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Le Tissier, the British Governor at Spandau. In his book Farewell to Spandau, Le Tissier pointed out that the only delay in Melaouhi's arrival was caused by difficulty in locating him, eventually in the mess, and that even then the log at the main gate showed there was little delay before he arrived at the summerhouse. There were four reading lamps in the Portakabin, and therefore more than one cord. The two men in American uniform were medics who had been called to assist with the resuscitation, and in fact continued in these attempts with the help of Melaouhi. The furniture had been pushed aside in the course of their previous efforts to revive Hess. As for his medical condition, Hess wore a truss and probably found bending to tie his shoelaces problematic, but he could write legibly and thus tie a knot.

Probably the last great Hess conspiracy theory emerged in 2001, again in Double Standards by Picknett, Prince and Prior. As well as postulating that the reception committee at Dungavel included the Duke of Kent, brother of King George VI, the authors also surmise that the Duke's death in a flying accident in August 1942 was an assassination, in which the real Rudolf Hess also perished. For reasons of space it is not possible to explore this theory fully here, but in summary it runs as follows. The Duke of Kent remained in favour of a negotiated peace, and with others continued to work toward this end after Hess arrived in May 1941. Although Hess was officially held first at Mytchett Place, and then Maindiff Court in Wales, he was also confined at several locations in Scotland, including Braemore Lodge near Loch More. Beyond doubt is the fact that on 25 August 1942 the Duke took off from Invergordon in a Short Sunderland flying boat. Officially he was on a morale-boosting visit to RAF personnel stationed in Iceland, although the memorial erected by his widow indicated that the Duke was engaged in an unspecified 'special mission'. About 60 miles after take-off the Sunderiand crashed into a remote hilltop near Caithness, some ten miles off course, killing everyone on board bar the rear gunner. Various explanations have been offered through the years, including pilot error, drunkenness, magnetic rocks, faked German radio messages, and a cover-up to hide the fact that the Duke himself was at the controls.

The authors of Double Standards present a convincing case that there were sixteen men on board the Sunderland, rather than the fifteen listed in official reports. However, the rest of their hypothesis is harder to credit. This suggests that the extra man was Hess, picked up by the Duke's flying boat from Loch More, and en route to Sweden. Rather than meeting with an accident, the aircraft was sabotaged in the same fashion as the B24 Liberator in which the Polish leader General Sikorski would perish in July 1943. Beyond the fact that the evidence presented in support of this theory is circumstantial in the extreme, there are at least two major flaws in the assassination plot. First, it scarcely seems credible that Hess could have been collected or snatched by the Duke without the aid of a small private army. Second, if Hess was indeed on board the doomed aircraft, then it raises the spectre of the fantastical doppelgdnger theory and the almost total suspension of disbelief which that entails. Instead, the likely explanation is that the crash was simply a tragic accident caused by poor or impaired navigation, whoever may have been at the controls.

Today few would disagree that Rudolf Hess was kept far too long in captivity, a hapless pawn in a prolonged game of chess between former Allies turned Cold War adversaries. However, it is important to remember that the underlying purpose of the Hess peace mission, the last serious attempt to reach an Anglo-German detente, was in no way humanitarian. Hess was a staunch Nazi, and like Hitler desired a peace which would allow Germany to continue the war in the east, leaving the Reich free to initiate the Holocaust unhindered. Against this background it matters little that the original point of the war, the liberation of Poland from foreign occupation, was never achieved. Therefore it would be quite wrong to conclude that Hess should be admired for his efforts, or that Churchill should be criticised for rejecting his proposals out of hand. rather than putting them before his Cabinet or the Commons.


Source: Myths and Legends of the Second World War

[SwordOfTheVistula]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070928/...in_rudolf_hess

Support for Hess' release went to the top of the U.S. administration. A memo from the British legal adviser to the prison noted that then-President Richard Nixon "shares the view that there are humanitarian reasons for releasing Hess."

Nixon assured his allies "that the U.S. government is ready to join in a further approach to the Soviet Union at any time there is an indication that such an approach holds a reasonable chance of success."

The Western allies eventually concluded that they could not overcome Soviet opposition to Hess' release. Hess hanged himself at the prison in 1987 at age 93.

Hess, deputy to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, was arrested in Britain in 1941 after parachuting into the country on a peace mission. He was sentenced to life in prison for war crimes at the postwar Nuremberg trials of senior Nazi officials.

From the mid-1960s, he was the only prisoner at Spandau prison, guarded by a team of warders from Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union.

The documents reveal almost constant disagreement among the countries over matters ranging from the length of family visits to whether Hess could have a new notebook and what time he was to take off his glasses at night.

A June 1974 letter from an American official to British and French authorities notes Soviet objection to "more relaxed procedures adopted informally ... whereby Hess is allowed to retain his spectacles if he wishes until 23.30."

"The Soviets now wish us to comply with the old regulation they follow, which required that the spectacles be removed at 22.00."

There also was friction among the Western allies. Minutes of a September 1974 meeting of prison governors include discussion of whether a British warder breached regulations by allowing Hess to collect some plums that had fallen off a tree and been pecked by birds.

[Dr. Solar Wolff]

Hess had connections to upper-crust Britain. Hess has some occult ideas that none of the great powers wanted to hear. Also, Nixon, being the pragmatic man he was, probably thought he could use Hess against both the Soviets and the Jews which hounded him.

[Nachtengel]

The Guardian (Britain)

In 1974 Richard Nixon, the US president, was ready to support the release on humanitarian grounds of prisoner number 7, but his efforts were thwarted by unwavering Soviet opposition. So Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, dubbed "the loneliest man in the world" as sole occupant of Spandau prison, remained locked up, according to secret documents released today by the National Archives at Kew. The files cover a period when there was an international campaign to free Hess as his 80th birthday approached. It included an application to the European commission of human rights by his wife, Ilse, and public demands by his son, Wolf.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007...ndworldwar.usa

[Nachtengel]

The Telegraph (Britain)

Rudolf Hess was lured to Britain in an elaborate MI6 sting, according to a new book that claims to solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the Second World War. The reason for Hitler's deputy making his solo flight to Scotland in May 1941 has kept conspiracy theorists busy for decades. He was arrested in Renfrewshire and spent the rest of his life in prison. Nearly 70 years on, a fresh theory has emerged. Author John Harris claims that Hess was lured to Britain in an MI6 plot led by Tancred Borenius, a Finnish art historian who was working as an agent for the British secret service.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-MI6-plot.html

[SaxonPagan]

I have also read recent reports about MI6 wanting to take the credit for this. As far as I’m concerned, if Hess was not allowed to give his side of the story during his lifetime then these kind of tales carry very little weight afterwards. Still, it’s further confirmation (if any were needed) that Hitler and NS Germany did not want a war with Britain.

Personally, I think it’s a pretty mean trick to lure someone to Britain under the pretence of wanting peace and then locking him up when he gets here, leaving him to rot in prison. Exploiting someone’s good faith in such a low, despicable manner is not the sort of act that one should boast about!

[Loyalist]

The demise of Rudolf Hess is shot through with unanswered questions and suspicious circumstances. Hess' own family, as well as his medical attendants, coroners, politicians, and legal figures have all asserted that Hess was murdered by British intelligence agents. The evidence is far from baseless. Hess was 93, crippled by arthritis, under near-total supervision, and facing imminent release with the changing tone of the USSR under Gorbachev. How, and why, would he commit suicide by hanging? It is interesting to note that no post-mortem examination supported suicide, ruling at best that the cause was inconclusive (the first autopsy concluded that Hess' neck wounds were inconsistent with suicide).

The efforts of Hess' son, Wolf Rüdiger, to prove that his father was murdered are well-known. His book, Who Murdered My Father, Rudolf Hess?, can be found HERE. In 2008, one of Hess' medical staff was dismissed from a low-level German government position after claiming Hess was murdered (story HERE).

If Hess was murdered, why were the involved parties trying silence him? Furthermore, of all Nazis tried after the war, why was Hess alone subject to such ridiculous efforts to keep him incarcerated and silenced indefinitely?

[Jeffcoat]

Evidence points towards "Yes" !
His soon to be released from Prison date would have created a stir in all corners of social political life!

Strange how many of our fallen and captured heroes of our struggle for our race seem to have a weird end right before they are released or become yet again a public figure others would look up to?!