Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Irving David
Title : Hess The Missing Years 1941-1945
Year : 1987

Link download : Irving_David_-_Hess_The_Missing_Years_1941-1945.zip

A Prisoner of Mankind. Semi-blind, his memory gone, he languished for forty-six years in prison, and spent over half of that time in solitary confinement. At first he was detained in cells with blackened windows, sentinels flashing torches on his face all night at half-hour intervals; and later in conditions only marginally more humane. Occasionally, mankind remembered that he was there: at a time when “political prisoners” were being released as a token of humanity, the world knew that he was still in Spandau, and timid souls felt somehow the safer for it. In 1987 the news emerged that somebody had recently stolen the prisoner’s 1940s flying helmet, goggles and fur-lined boots - and fevered minds imagined that these, his hallowed relics of 1941, might be used in some way to power a Nazi revival. The prisoner himself had long forgotten what those relics had ever meant to him. The dark-red brick of Spandau prison in West Berlin was crumbling and decaying around him, and the windows were cracked or falling out of mouldering frames. He was the only prisoner left - alone, outliving all his fellows, his brain perhaps a last uncertain repository of names and promises and places, grim secrets that the victorious Four Powers might have expected him to take to the grave long before. The prisoner was Rudolf Hess, the last of the “war criminals.” In May 1941 he had flown single-handedly to Scotland on a reckless parachute mission to end the bloodshed and bombing. Put on trial by the victors, he had been condemned to imprisonment in perpetuity for “Crimes against the Peace.” The Four Powers had expected him to die and thus seal off the wells of speculation about him, but this stubborn old man with the haunting eyes had by his very longevity thwarted them. Few questions remained about the other Nazis. Hitler’s jawbone was preserved in a Soviet glass jar; Ley’s brain was in Massachusetts; Bormann’s skeleton was found beneath the Berlin cobblestones; Mengele’s mortal remains were disinterred and reinterred; Speer had joined the Greatest Architect. Dead too were Hess’s judges and prosecutors. Hess himself was the last living Nazi giant, the last enigma, unable to communicate with the outside world, forbidden to talk with his son about political events, his diary taken away from him each day to be destroyed, his letters censored and scissored to excise illicit content. The macabre Four Powers statute - ignored, in the event - ordained that upon his death the body was to be reduced to ashes in the crematorium at Dachau concentration camp. The bulldozers were already standing by to wreck Spandau jail within hours of his decease, so that no place of Nazi pilgrimage remained. ...