My Father Rudolf Hess

Gauch's narrator separates his father's abhorrent politics from his character, providing an affecting portrait of the struggle to reconcile the past."--Jacket.

There are and always have been ways of escaping one's own past. But there are some who have never had this chance: the children of prominent Nazis. On one hand they have the memories of the nice, kind man who was their father, on the other they are confronted with the facts of history: with the madness, the murders, the personal purgatory. The Leberts, father and son, spoke at an interval of forty years - 1959 and 1999 - to these men and women who bore a tainted name and were crushed by the burden of the past: Gudrun Himmler - 75, runs a network for old Nazis in Munich, denies her father did anything wrong; Martin Boorman (junior) - 70, believes his father was a monster; Etta Goring - 70, will hear no bad word about her father; Nicholas Frank (father was in charge of Auschwitz) believes his father was the incarnation of evil. The result is a series of snapshots of rare intensity and a demonstration of how these destinies have more to do with the twenty-first century than many would care to think.

On 10 May 1941, on a whim, Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess flew a Messerschmitt Bf 110 to Scotland in a bizarre effort to make peace with Britain; Göring sent fighters to stop him but he was long gone. Imprisoned and tried at Nuremberg, he would die by his own hand in 1987, aged 93. That's the accepted explanation. Ever since, conspiracy theories have swirled around the famous mission. How strong were Hess's connections with the British establishment, including royalty? Was the death of the king's brother, the Duke of Kent, associated with the Hess overture for peace? In the many books written about Hess, one obvious line of enquiry has been overlooked, until now: an analysis of the flight itself – the flight plan, equipment, data sheets, navigation system. Through their long investigation, authors John Harris and Richard Wilbourn have come to a startling conclusion: whilst the flight itself has been well recorded, the target destination has remained hidden. The implications are far reaching and lend credence to the theory that the British establishment has hidden the truth of the full extent of British/Nazi communications, in part to spare the reputations of senior members of the Royal Family. Using original photography, documentation and diagrams, Rudolf Hess sheds light on one of the most intriguing stories of the Second World War.

The Fascinating Story of Eight Children of Third Reich Leaders and their Journey from Descendants of Heroes to Descendants of Criminals In 1940, the German sons and daughters of great Nazi dignitaries Himmler, Göring, Hess, Frank, Bormann, Höss, Speer, and Mengele were children of privilege at four, five, or ten years old, surrounded by affectionate, all-powerful parents. Although innocent and unaware of what was happening at the time, they eventually discovered the extent of their father's occupations: These men—their fathers who were capable of loving their children and receiving love in return—were leaders of the Third Reich, and would later be convicted as monstrous war criminals. For these children, the German defeat was an earth-shattering source of family rupture, the end of opulence, and the jarring discovery of Hitler's atrocities. How did the offspring of these leaders deal with the aftermath of the war and the skeletons that would haunt them forever? Some chose to disown their past. Others did not. Some condemned their fathers; others worshiped them unconditionally to the end. In this enlightening book, which has been translated into eleven languages, Tania Crasnianski examines the responsibility of eight descendants of Nazi notables, caught somewhere between stigmatization, worship, and amnesia. By tracing the unique experiences of these children, she probes at the relationship between them and their fathers and examines the idea of how responsibility for the fault is continually borne by the descendants.

Rudolf Hess was Adolf Hitler’s Deputy Führer until, in 1941, he flew to Scotland, ostensibly to negotiate peace between Germany and Britain. Captured by the British, he was held for the rest of the war, before being convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.Desmond Zwar collaborated with Col. Burton C. Andrus, who was Commandant of Nuremberg Prison during the Trials, for his book The Infamous of Nuremberg, and with Col. Eugene K. Bird, US Governor of Spandau Prison (where Hess was held for over forty years), for The Loneliest Man in the World. For reasons of practicality, neither of these books told the full story, which is now revealed for the first time in Talking to Rudolf Hess.As well as his interviews with Hess and others, Zwar tells the incredible story of how this book came to be written, including how Hess hid proofs in his underpants, how Bird was sacked and how the CIA tried to recover the transcripts.