The House of Rumour A Novel

20

judgement





‘In order that I may be allowed to continue to attend my trial and to hear its judgement alongside the others, and in order not to be declared unfit to plead, I submit the following declaration to the court.’

He stared directly at the judges and prosecutors as he spoke, carefully unfolding the scrap of notepaper he had taken from his pocket. Then he looked up to the press box beyond, pausing to allow for the delay as the translation was relayed through their headphones.

‘My memory has returned,’ he went on, ‘and is once more at the disposal of the outside world. The reasons for simulating loss of memory were of a tactical nature.’

He continued with his prepared statement but already the courtroom was stirred into commotion, the time-lapse of comprehension adding to the drama. Gasps of shock and anger from the court officials, a wave of laughter breaking out along the gallery. He declared his willingness to accept responsibility for his actions while insisting on the incompetence of the tribunal. He referred to the good faith of his defence counsel who had been taken in by his antic disposition, but already the chamber was in uproar. He smiled, savouring this moment, this great coup de théâtre. As the president of the court rapped his gavel for silence and called for an adjournment, there was yet another clamour as the reporters rushed to their telephones.

Oh yes, there is an art to forgetting.

The day before, the defendants had been shown a documentary film of concentration camps made by US troops in the final stages of the war. Darkness in the court but for the fluorescent strip lights built into the edges of the dock that underlit the faces of the accused. The flicker of the projector pulsing out its ghostly parade. Hess’s attention was caught at once, rapt with wonder, his sunken features hollowed in white-face, a gaunt pierrot caught in the footlights. On the screen the grounds of a slave labour camp: a harvest of corpses, the bodies starkly exposed as if broken out of the earth like the dead on Judgement Day.

‘I don’t believe it!’ he called out.



Earthbound oblivion, then a rush of wind, a blast of moon, a violent spasm wrenching his shoulders. He was dragged out of his blackout by the parachute that pulled him across the field in spastic convulsions of flight. Like a trapped bird. He rolled onto his back and tried to unbuckle his harness. There was somebody there, calling out, grabbing at the cords, taking the strain so that he could free himself. Hess crawled a few paces, tried to stand. His right foot gave way. The other man reached out and held him.

‘Are you German?’

A civilian. A farmer or farmworker. Hess tried to catch his breath.

‘Yes,’ he panted, his English halting but precise. ‘Please. Take me to Dungavel House. It must be close by. It is most important I speak with the Duke of Hamilton. I have an important message for him.’

But he never reached his intended destination. The man fetched the Home Guard. Hess was taken into custody, handed over to the regular army. By the next morning he was in a barracks hospital in Glasgow. Hamilton finally arrived but did not acknowledge all the intricate overtures for peace that had been set in motion. He claimed to know nothing of the contacts in Lisbon, the letters from Albrecht Haushofer. When Hess asked the duke to assemble members of his party to discuss peace proposals, Hamilton replied that there was only one party in the country now. Hess continued to outline what German terms might be but Hamilton told him that any kind of agreement was unlikely.

He wondered, was this some kind of ploy in the negotiations? He asked the duke to request parole for him from the King. He had come unarmed and in good faith yet they treated him as their prisoner.

They took him to London. To the Tower. This gave him some hope. He was under the protection of the King. The guards that paraded outside his window were merely ceremonial. The peace talks might soon begin.

But already the airwaves buzzed with announcements, communiqués. He was running out of time. His mission relied on discretion. All could be lost to rumour, disinformation, propaganda.

The Reich issued a statement. He had suggested in the letter that he left behind that if his quest seemed doomed to failure, they might declare him insane and they took him at his word. The report spoke of his mental disturbance, declaring that he was the victim of hallucinations, under the influence of mesmerists and astrologers. In this deranged condition, it went on, he may have been lured into a trap. Of course this would have to be the official line. To be branded a fool. Yes, but a pure fool. The Parsifal.

His horoscope had been clear enough: it had given him the precise moment to make his flight. But other readings had indicated a dangerous change in the fortunes of Germany. They had to strike the East but secure the West also. Perhaps for now he would be a trump card ready to be played at a later stage. Once the Russians had been defeated, Britain would be forced to make terms.

But soon the fear of real madness began to stalk him. All this talk of being duped, of being hypnotised. Now his mission would have to change its nature. The Chariot card he had been given signified an inner journey as much as an outer one.

He was taken to a stately home in the country. It was designated Camp Z; he was designated Prisoner Z. It was run by the Secret Service. Churchill’s clique of warmongers were hiding him away and trying to get information from him. He thought that they might try to poison him, or fake his suicide. He asked one of the officers guarding him to get in touch with the Duke of Hamilton and request that the duke arrange an audience for him with the King. If he would do it, Hess assured the man, he would receive the thanks of the monarch for a great service to humanity. He was told this was impossible.

At times he felt quite strange. A warmth rising over the nape of the neck into the head; feelings of extraordinary contentment, energy and optimism followed by awful despair and a harrowing fatigue of the brain. He was being drugged, he was sure of it; he was being deliberately disturbed at night by noises and lights that flashed into his room. Some of his guardians would suddenly adopt peculiar facial expressions and glassy-eyed stares. Were they trying to hypnotise him? Were they hypnotised themselves? Had he been surrounded by mesmerised lunatics who would drive him insane?

He could not bear the thought of going mad. Early one morning he dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform and charged out of his room. He threw himself down the stairs but the banisters broke his fall. A week later Germany invaded the Soviet Union. ‘So, they have started after all,’ he said to the officer who told him the news. History had already left him behind.

So his inner journey began. In the words of Goethe that he cherished: according to eternal, iron, great laws must we all complete the cycles of our being. They tried to undermine his self-esteem, question his long-held beliefs. And strange drugs they used. Brain poison, he called it. He’d heard of a Mexican herbal extract that induced hallucinations and delirium.

They were intent on sending him insane but he was determined to control his own madness, to keep them guessing. This would be his interior campaign of psychological warfare. He soon found that the wilful loss of memory was the most perplexing stratagem he could use against his captors. It would undermine them on a subliminal level – no one likes to be forgotten, after all, while he could assume an air of indifference, a charmed cocoon of unconsciousness, free of history or future. Free of time itself. Then he would stage miraculous recoveries to perturb them further. It started as a game. Once he had taken a glass of wine and claimed to an astonished British officer that it had completely restored his faculty of recollection. He watched the horrified and confused face that witnessed this eucharistic act of anamnesis. The sacred loss of forgetfulness in a sacrifice recalled. Do this in memory of me, the redeemer implored. An ancient idea: that all knowledge is remembrance.

The war was being fought in his head. There could be times of lucidity: the great triumphs of Operation Barbarossa. Then anxiety and depression: a winter that froze out the advance on Moscow, the shocking Russian counter-attack. The Japanese dragged the Americans into the fray and all that his mission had been intended to prevent came to pass. This was now a global war with Germany caught in the maw of its two hemispheres: an immense economic and industrial power to the west; a barbaric vastness of space, people and resources to the east. This ran contrary to the great Weltanschauung he had learnt from Professor Haushofer. And now a world-view was compressed into confinement, occupying the prison of his consciousness, the soul of his tortured body. The great destructive forces that were ranged across oceans and continents battled in his brain for meaning.

It was the Jews who were behind it all, of course. He knew that clearly, though he had to be careful what he said. They would be listening, after all. When the question came up he would refer to the Madagascar Plan. All the Jews in Europe could be settled on that large island to the east of Africa. It was under French colonial control; all it needed was for the British fleet to collaborate in the massive immigration to this Gross-Getto. There was documentation of this proposal in the Foreign Ministry and the German Admiralty, though he knew from his conversations with Rosenberg on the day of his flight that the Reich had abandoned the idea. The war in the East was now a matter of extermination. But he could always hide behind the fanciful notion that if his peace plan had worked, Madagascar could have been an option.

Manic episodes punctuated his growing depression. The success of the Africa Korps in the Western Desert; the Sixth Army sweeping through the Caucasus; fanfares on the radio as Berlin announced another U-boat victory. But all the time he was struggling to outwit those around him.

When all the good news from the outside world began to peter out he retreated into a mental oblivion. He told the doctors who examined him that a fog had descended, obliterating past events, people, ideas. He claimed to have forgotten his childhood in Egypt, his schooldays in Germany, his service in the Great War, the leading role he had played in the early years of the party. He could no longer recall the names of visitors or sometimes even the orderlies and officers who guarded him.

He reluctantly agreed to drug therapy, feeling that this might prepare him for greater tests that lay ahead. They were desperate to prove whether or not his amnesia was real. They injected him with a truth serum and conducted an interrogation. It took all his will to remain conscious while miming unconsciousness, to maintain his antic disposition. But as he passed this stage of inquisition he knew that one day a greater trial would come. There was already much talk about war crimes and tribunals. In the meantime he prepared his own judgement on a mad world.

One morning in February 1945 he woke early and called for a doctor, announcing to him that his memory had been restored and that he had something important to tell the world. He had composed a list of all the people who had been hypnotised by the Jews and he wanted it forwarded to Churchill. Churchill, of course, was named: hypnotism had changed him from anti-Bolshevik to pro-Soviet. The Jews, Hess explained, had a secret drug that could put people in a trance during which they would act in an abnormal way. The king of Italy, von Stauffenberg and the others who had plotted to kill the Führer, General von Paulus, Anthony Eden, the Bulgarian government – the catalogue went on. The doctor remarked that even the name Rudolf Hess appeared on the list. Oh yes, Hess replied; once at a state banquet in Italy he had been very rude to his hosts and the only explanation he had for his behaviour was that he must have been under the influence of this Jewish drug.

That night he took a bread-knife from the kitchen. He dressed in his Luftwaffe uniform, leaving the tunic open. He stabbed himself in the chest. He thought that he had aimed for the heart but when they came for him they found the wound to be quite shallow and wide of the mark.

The Russians had swept through Poland and were now inside Germany. The British and the Americans were ready to cross the Rhine. And the bombing of the cities became ever more intense: now Dresden had been incinerated in a firestorm. The air war he had dreaded. He had flown for peace, to end this battle in the heavens.

Newspapers carried haunting photographs, terrible accounts of atrocities as the advancing Allies entered the concentration camps. Fearful apparitions of a horror he refused to face. This was the dementia of history, he decided. He would wilfully forget such things. So instead he concentrated on composing an account of his own captivity, noting that for four years he had been guarded by people with a mental condition caused by a secret chemical hitherto unknown to the world.

When out walking in the grounds he found a small key, for a desk drawer or a cabinet perhaps. He kept it as a talisman. Berlin was besieged; he was surrounded on all sides now. He retreated further within.

He developed a ritual: dropping the key on a book or his pile of papers and watching where it landed. Divination of some obscure miracle that might save him. He had to divert his mind from the constant reports of an impending German surrender. He must not give in. He continued to write his statement.

He was adamant that he must not allow them to see his true grief and despair. He said nothing when he heard that Hitler had killed himself. The man he had loved with such mystical fervour. He dropped the little key and watched where it landed.

He was flown back to Germany to stand trial. His plane circled the ruins of Nuremberg; parts of the city were a flattened moonscape but the Palace of Justice was still standing. They took him there and put him in a small stone cell. The Americans had their own ideas about how to provoke his memory. They showed him ancient newsreels and documentaries of all the old party rallies. Of course he didn’t recognise himself. He had been a different man then. Then they brought in people he had known. Goering hated being forgotten: such an affront to his monstrous ego.

‘Listen, Hess,’ he boomed indignantly. ‘I was the Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe and you flew to England in one of my planes! Don’t you remember? First I was a field marshal and later a Reichsmarchall, don’t you remember?’

Hess looked at him blankly.

‘No.’

The old bully looked so crestfallen, it was hard not to laugh. But when they confronted him with Professor Haushofer he had to restrain all his emotions.

‘Rudolf, don’t you recognise me any more?’ his old teacher pleaded.

Hess maintained his performance of incomprehension with a cold precision even as his friend and mentor gave Hess news of his wife and son.

‘I can only assure you that the doctors tell me my memory will come back and then I will recognise you again. I am terribly sorry.’

‘Your son is very well,’ Haushofer whispered. ‘I saw him. He is a fine boy, and I said goodbye to him under the oak, the one that bears your name, the one you chose at Hartschimmelhof, where you were so many times.’

Hess shook his head. The professor’s eyes brimmed with tears.

‘Don’t you remember Albrecht, who served you so faithfully? My eldest son. He is dead now.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything to me.’

It was even harder with Hildegard Fath, his former secretary. She was so loyal, so innocent. She had a photograph of his son. She burst into tears when he turned his face away.

An American psychologist tried the Rorschach Technique, a projective test using ten inkblot cards where the subject is encouraged to interpret a series of ambiguous designs and then assessed in terms of personality and emotional functioning.

‘This one.’ Hess pointed at the second card. ‘I see a monster, yes, a human monster. There’s its mouth and this is its eyes, these red parts. It could be a negro with a big mouth, red lips and red eyes.’

‘Two men are talking about a crime,’ he deduced from another image. ‘Blood is on their minds.’

The Nuremberg Trials had already begun and there was still argument among the prosecutors as to whether Hess was fit to stand. Four commissions of international experts had submitted reports: psychology professors from Moscow, neurologists from London, psychoanalysts from Paris, neuro-psychiatrists from Chicago. Evidence was given of hysterical amnesia, paranoid delusions, schizoid personality with obsessive components, culturally conditioned paranoia, auto-suggestion, pseudo-dementia, neurotic manifestations, habitual behaviour patterns, psychopathic tendencies, psychotic episodes. There was no agreement over the status of his sanity but a consensus was forming, despite strong Soviet objections, that his competence was impaired, his amnesia manifest enough that he would neither be able to follow proceedings nor challenge witnesses. The court was on the verge of deciding that he would be tried in absentia.

It was then that he made his spectacular announcement. Once more conjuring a miraculous anamnesis, this time on a very public stage. To the astonished court he ceremonially relinquished his forgetfulness and admitted his deception. His performance was a triumph of absurdity. And it presented a baffling paradox: if he was indeed sound of mind why had he insisted that he remain on trial at the very point that he might have been acquitted? This declaration of sanity was clearly the action of a madman. A wilful lunatic. But the pure fool had fooled the world.

Throughout the rest of the hearings he refused to concentrate. He would read a novel or stare off into space, rock backwards and forwards, double up in feigned stomach cramps. He deliberately ignored the entire tribunal, denied it his consciousness or memory. He was aloof, indifferent, utterly detached from reality. This was his own judgement on the court.

He did not testify in his own defence. Instead he prepared his final statement. He assured his fellow defendants that there was to be a great revelation, that what lay before them was an illusion, an apparition that might at any moment disappear. But when the time came for him to speak he found it hard to explain to the court the nature of the sinister forces that had caused so much bloodshed. He tried to make them see that these were show trials, just like political trials in other countries. The accused here had made false statements and incriminated themselves in astonishing ways because they had been put into an abnormal state of mind. This could explain the atrocities in the camps and elsewhere, and the actions of those who gave the orders. The whole world had been put into an abnormal state of mind. He did not name the culprits because he knew that they were in control here.

He concluded by saying that he was happy to have done his duty, to his people and as a loyal follower of the Führer. He regretted nothing.

‘No matter what other human beings do, some day I shall stand before the judgement of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent.’

He was found guilty of conspiracy and crimes against peace; not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He dwelt within his theatre of oblivion to the last, neglecting to put his headphones on as they passed sentence, looking away as they passed their verdict. He expected Death.

They gave him Life.

What could that mean?

They hanged Frank, Frick, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, von Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Seyss-Inquart and Streicher. Goering took poison on the eve of his execution. Hess learnt that Professor Haushofer and his wife had committed suicide. ‘No form of state or church funeral, no obituary, epitaph or identification on my grave,’ his note demanded, ‘I want to be forgotten and forgotten.’ His son Albrecht had been shot by the SS for his involvement with the German resistance. A collection of poems were found on his body. One called ‘The Father’ ended with the lines:



My father broke the seal

He did not see the rising breath of evil

He let the demon escape into the world.



What Hess thought of this no one knows. He kept himself busy. As he sat in his cell awaiting transfer to Spandau prison, he composed a lengthy document outlining his plans for the time he would be released and appointed as a new leader for Germany. He mourned the loss of his fellow prisoners, adding that their appalling treatment was made all the worse since he was not able to convince them that their captors were insane. He issued bulletins to be published in the press under his direction: specific directives concerning labour, food distribution and liaison with Germany’s occupying powers. If the Jews request to save themselves from the rage of the German people and ask to go into protective camps, he said, their wish should be fulfilled. His tailor was to make a new uniform with flared breeches and adjustable seams since he would probably have put on weight by the time he was released.

He concluded by warning the West that World War III was already being prepared:



The real instrument of power is in the hands of the Jew and the Bolshevist. It is proved by the fact that for years a Jew has been at the head of the research department of the United States Atomic Power Organisation. Is anyone going to believe that this Jew, hitherto completely unknown among scientists, has suddenly been put in this high position where all the secrets relating to the future war must be available? The atom bomb will be the main weapon of the Jewish-Bolshevist war leadership in spite of the fact that it is also in British and American hands.

The Soviet Union will probably use it first and be able to destroy everything in the West. They have the best possible excuse for doing so because they can say that the West used it first. The Anglo-Saxon countries will be the first to go under – I, Rudolf Hess, have warned you!



Forty years later, it is a summer afternoon in the ruins of Speer’s garden. Ready to fly once more. The black American warder circled as he approached the summerhouse. Hess turned and smiled, trying to hide his disdain. He had explained many times to superior officers that he found it demeaning to be guarded by negroes. Another example of how the United States had failed. A precocious child of a nation, spoilt and degenerate, riddled with racial integration, drugs and sexual licence. The space programme had once seemed their only hope of aspiring to higher things. Hess had written to his son about this, quoting Kant’s reply when asked what he considered the greatest miracle: ‘the starry heavens above us, the prickling conscience within us’. But here too the Americans were found wanting. They had got as far as they had only because of German technology. Von Braun had wanted to go further, to Mars. Instead they stayed safely in orbit, firing off unmanned probes into the void.

The atomic war he had predicted never came. They had been spared the great Day of Judgement, but only just. He remembered, during the Missile Crisis, Speer talking up some idea of West Berlin being swapped for Cuba to balance things out. Spandau was in the British sector, a tiny polarity surrounded by opposing forces. The Four Powers divided up their time. After 1966, Hess was their only prisoner.

A hostage of the Cold War, he still indulged in the art of forgetting from time to time. It had become something of a habit, to keep them guessing. And forgetting had become something of a protocol.

Only the previous year, in 1986, it had been revealed that the new President of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, had lied about his war record. Whilst serving with the Wehrmacht, Waldheim had witnessed, and perhaps been complicit in, many more war crimes than Hess ever had. The Deputy pondered on this more with relish than indignation.

He had taught the world its gentle amnesia.

But he let no one judge him. He was still the pure fool.

He looked back again at the black guard. The man kept his distance. Perhaps there was a mutual sense of contempt. Hess entered the summerhouse unescorted.

He had heard strange rumours that the Cold War was coming to an end. A new Russian leader with a policy of openness. The Soviets had always refused to let him go. Until now.

He had regretted nothing, remained loyal until the very end. He closed the door of the summerhouse and went to sit by the window.

That spring there had been an article in a German newspaper claiming that the Russian premier was considering his release. The thought of it filled him with terror.

He looked out of the summerhouse. The Soviet warders would usually watch him through the window. He could see no one. An electrical extension lead for the reading lamp was tied to the latch.

He had always denied their right to try him. Ignored their verdicts and sentences. They had no power to grant him freedom now.

He carefully wound the cord around his neck, judging the distance he would have to fall. It was simple enough, to slip sideways off his chair. Yes. He was ready. Ready to pass the final judgement on himself. Ready to fly once more.