Rudolf Hess.

Clara Münch and Fritz Hess, a prosperous German merchant, had a son on April 26, 1894, in Alexandria. They named him Rudolf Walter Richard Hess. He attended a German-speaking school in Egypt before moving to Germany for further education. At Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, his studies were interrupted by World War I, where he served as an infantryman and later a pilot. After the war, he joined the Nazi Party, drawn to Hitler’s nationalist and anti-communist rhetoric.

Hess joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and quickly rose, becoming Hitler’s private secretary. In 1923, he participated in the Beer Hall Putsch and was imprisoned with Hitler, where he assisted in writing Mein Kampf. Appointed Deputy Führer in 1933, Hess oversaw party affairs and helped draft the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. On May 10, 1941, he flew a Messerschmitt Bf 110 to Scotland, parachuting into Renfrewshire to meet the Duke of Hamilton and broker peace. British authorities arrested him, and he remained a prisoner for the rest of the war.

Hess married Ilse Pröhl on December 20, 1927, and they had one son, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, born in 1937. His imprisonment deeply affected his family; his wife remained loyal and advocated for his release. After the war, he had limited contact with his brother Alfred, a businessman. During decades in Spandau Prison, Hess became increasingly reclusive and paranoid, refusing family visits for long periods.

Hess remains controversial, remembered primarily for his bizarre solo flight to Scotland, which fueled conspiracy theories about secret peace negotiations. At Nuremberg, he was the highest-ranking Nazi acquitted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but still convicted of crimes against peace. His life sentence in Spandau, where he was the sole inmate after 1966, attracted international attention. His death in 1987, ruled a suicide by electrical cord, has been disputed by his family. Historians most often remember him as Hitler’s erratic deputy whose desperate mission failed.