The Life and Death of My Father, Rudolf Hess

A Son's Struggle for His Father's Honor

The Life and Death of My Father, Rudolf Hess

Wolf Rüdiger Hess

(Presented by videotape at the Eleventh IHR Conference, 1992)

When my father flew to Scotland on May 10, 1941, I was three-and-a-half years old. As a result, I have only very few personal memories of him in freedom. One of them is a memory of him pulling me out of the garden pond. On another occasion, when I was screaming because a bat had somehow gotten into the house. I can still recall his comforting voice as he carried it to the window and released it into the night.

In the years that followed, I learned who my father was, and about his role in history, only bit by bit. Slowly, I came to understand the martyrdom he ured as a prisoner in the Allied Military Prison in Berlin-Spandau for 40 long years--half a life-time.

Growing Up in Egypt and Germany

My father was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on April 26, 1894, the first son of Fritz Hess, a respected and well-to-do merchant. The Hess family personified the prosperity, standing and self-assurance of the German Reich of that period. They also personified all those things that aroused envy, fear and a combative spirit on the part of Britain and other great powers.

Fritz Hess owned an imposing house with a beautiful garden on the Mediterranean coast. His family, which came from Wunsiedel in the Fichtelgebirge region of Germany, owned another house in Reicholdsgr_n, in Bavaria, where they regularly spent their summer holidays. The source of this wealth was a trading firm, Hess & Co., that Fritz Hess had inherited from his father, and which he managed with considerable success.

His eldest son, Rudolf, was a pupil at the German Protestant School in Alexandria. His future appeared to be determined by both family tradition and his father's strong hand: he would inherit the property and the firm, and would, accordingly, become a merchant. Young Rudolf, though, was not very inclined toward this kind of life.

Instead, he felt drawn toward the sciences, above all physics and mathematics. His abilities in these fields became obvious as a student at the Bad Godesberg Educational Institute, a boarding school for boys in Germany that he atted between September 15, 1908, and Easter, 1911. In spite of this, his father insisted that he complete his secondary school education by passing an examination that would permit him to enter the _cole Sup_rieur de Commerce at Neuch_tel in Switzerland, after which he became an apprentice in a Hamburg trading company.

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