Did Rudolf Hess Really Commit Suicide?

“My father was murdered… The British had the most to lose from my father’s potential release from Spandau… It was to prevent the truth emerging about the real reasons for his peace flight in 1941.”
Wolf Rüdiger Hess, in his book ‘My Father Rudolf Hess’

The news, when it finally came on August 17th 1987, felt like the closing of a long-overdue account.

Rudolf Hess, Prisoner No. 7, the last of the Spandau Seven, was dead.

He was 93 years old, a relic from a previous, terrifying age, a man who had been a heartbeat away from Adolf Hitler and who had outlived the monstrous regime he had helped build by more than four decades. He had been found in a small summer house in the prison garden, a length of electrical cord used as a lamp extension wrapped around his neck.

For the world at large, the story seemed simple.

An old, forgotten Nazi, finally succumbing to despair, had taken his own life. The prison, a hulking 19th-century fortress in the British sector of West Berlin, was now empty.

The Four Powers – the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union – could finally shut its doors. Within weeks, the bulldozers moved in, grinding the red-brick walls and watchtowers to dust, a deliberate act to prevent the site from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

But for a small circle of individuals – his family, his lawyer, his last nurse, and a cadre of historians and conspiracy theorists – the official report was not an ending but the beginning of a furious debate.

The idea that Hess, a man crippled by arthritis, barely able to lift his arms above his head, could have overpowered his guard and skillfully hanged himself seemed preposterous. The farewell note found in his pocket was, his family claimed, written twenty years earlier during a previous bout of depression.