The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 160

The Age 10 September 1988 Saturday Extra 7 Behind the mask of prisoner NOo 7 After 47 years in captivity for his war crimes, Rudolf Hess committed suicide last year. That was the official story. But was the dead man murdered and was he really Hess? PAUL MANSFIELD reports. 1 and are then leant on in every conceivable fashion what it does to my own particular character is make me dig my heels in and be quite determined to set at the full truth. "And the more they try and hush me up, the more determined I become to say exactly what I find." Thomas thinks that British reluctance to come clean concerns reputations still at stake "although most of the people who made the original decisions in 1941 are now "But there's a knock-on effect Most of the people who are now in power want their own reputations kept in the future in turn.

Ever since the secret service started in Britain we've had this problem, where secrecy would prevail, reputations would be kept at all costs." And never more so than in Mrs Thatcher's secrecy-obsessed administration. Thomas has been threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act several times. "They're becoming more savage. The Foreign Office talks that I have are now almost pure hysteria. And they're becoming very bitter in what they say, as they're gradually dragged out I've had a fairly rough time behind the scenes." But he has gained some unlikely friends as a result "What's happened as a result of this investigation is most bizarre.

This has opened up a new experience, in that most of the intelligence hierarchy in Britain, and in other countries as well, have found their way to my door to give me their gripes. It's opened up a whole intelligence world I never knew existed." By Thomas's account those with most to loose from the Hess revelations are not professional intelligence officers, but that clique in the British establishment that sought peace for reasons of its own. "If those people did what they did in terms of patriotism," says Thomas, "then I would back their right to do it But it wasn't that It was for financial reasons. All these people were involved deeply in running the establishment They had total control of the nation's wealth. And they were making peace with the aim of trying to secure their fortunes and their Empire.

So I'm quite glad that they're now becoming exposed. I don't give a tuppeny damn about the people in Britain I upset" And he has, naturally, upset a good many. "It's gaining ground," says Thomas. "The post-mortems have proved that I was correct More historians are now starting to back me, although some of them only in private, not in public. All we want now is a few people with testicular material between their legs prepared to stand by what they say, and we'll be home and dry." In which case, the lonely ordeal of Allied Prisoner No.

7 may yet be properly acknowledged. 'Hess: A Tale of Two Murders', by Hugh Thomas, is published by Hodder Stoughton. IN SEPTEMBER 1973, Hugh Thomas, a consultant surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps, attended a medical examination of Rudolf Hess, the last inmate of Spandau Prison in Berlin. One of Thomas's duties was to look after the health of "Allied prisoner No. sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg 26 years earlier and he had already made a strange discovery.

Hess, he learned, had been wounded in action in the First World War by a rifle bullet which passed through his left lung and out his back. But none of the existing medical reports on Prisoner No. 7 had made any mention of the scars this kind of wound (authenticated by military records and by Hsss's own letters) would certainly have left. Thomas, an international expert in gunshot wounds, was curious to see for himself. When Thomas confronted the prisoner "What happened to your war wounds? Not even skin deep?" the effect was instantaneous.

He turned chalk-white and began to shake so violently that Thomas was afraid he might have a heart attack. And all he would reply was "zu spat, zu spat" late, too X-rays confirmed the absence of any internal damage, leading Thomas to a momentous conclusion: "That Spandau's prisoner No. 7, who bore no wound scars at all, was not Rudolf Hess. I should emphasise that this is not a matter of personal opinion, but of straightforward medical fact." For Thomas, now consultant surgeon at Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, it was the beginning of an extraordinary 15 years of detective work. His first book, 'The Murder of Rudolf Hess', caused a sensation when it was published in 1979.

After the apparent suicide of Prisoner No. 7 in Spandau last year, Thomas uncovered new and startling evidence now incorporated into a revised edition of the book. A cheerful, combative Welshman of 52, Thomas is the first to admit that the true story of Rudolf Hess is far more complex than anyone had previously imagined. "Unfortunately, this whole damn business is utterly bizarre, from the time it started to the time it's eventually going to finish." RUDOLF HESS was supposedly captured by the British in May 1941 when he arrived in Scotland on a solo flight from Germany on a peace mission undertaken without Hitler's consent. According to Hugh Thomas who proved in his first book that a flight of this length was impossible, and also that two different planes began and ended the journey the man who arrived in Scot-Ian was an imposter, Hess's doppelgdng-er, sent in on a plane from Denmark.

This plan had been devised by Himm-ler, Hitler's second-in-command, who had been watching Hess's peace manoeuvres and who sent in a double with the aim of negotiating peace on his own terms. The real Hess, en route to Stockholm, was shot down over the English channel by his own fighters. Once in England, "Hess" posed a problem for the British. Although they soon discovered that he was an impostor, the whereabouts of the real Hess and the nature of the plot left them baffled. A substantial number of the British aristocracy had been involved in secret peace negotiations with Germany.

soon," says Thomas, "we should be able to prove that Britain was going to pull out of the war, damn Churchill, through the auspices of several prominent With all the uncertainty it was decided to let "Hess" remain, closely guarded and shielded from anyone who might expose him as a fraud. He was deemed mentally unstable. And, says Thomas, he was threatened with death if he exposed the charade. In this way he Far left: Hess at a meeting of the Hitler Youth in Berlin, 1940. Left: Hugh Thomas.

Above: Hess in the grounds of Spandau Prison. clearly never been shot in the lung. More importantly, the second doctor recorded marks on the prisoner's neck that made it physically impossible that he had hanged himself: the inescapable conclusion was that he had been strangled. Despite this and despite accepting all Thomas's previous assertions about the prisoner Wolf Rudiger himself was unable to bring himself to accept that Prisoner No. 7 had not been his father.

"It's very sad," says Thomas. "I like the man personally: we're very good friends. But the fact is he can't quite make that extra jump on scientific terms. He's had the whole of his life to think that it was his father, and it's a hell of a jump to IN TRYING to tell the truth about Prisoner No. 7, Thomas found himself faced with a far-reaching cover-up.

"Someone's gone to an immense amount of trouble over this. Records have gone missing from provincial newspapers, from the Berlin Document Centre, from the Imperial War Museum There's even now a department, I'm told, in the Foreign Office, looking after my affairs He ascribes his determination to get to the bottom of the Hess case to a certain "When you find something out which is obvious, which obviously covers an untruth of some considerable extent, moment. There'd be an instant inquiry. It's an even more extraordinary situation when a man dies in a military prison and there's no inquiry. That's staggering." Instead, the British arranged a postmortem by a single army pathologist none other than Professor J.

M. Cameron, best known in Australia as the man whose evidence helped convict Lindy Chamberlain of murdering her daughter. Professor Cameron's post-mortem duly turned in some interesting findings. First, a "suicide note" was discovered in one of the dead man's pockets several days after he died. Thomas further alleges that Cameron failed to notice two superficial scars on the prisoner's chest recorded as far back as 1947.

Instead, he found one single scar a claim later seized upon by the Foreign Office as evidence of a gunshot wound. "What seems to escape the Foreign Office," says Thomas "is that if a rifle bullet had gone into Hess's chest at that point it would have hit his heart and killed him. Secondly, there was no exit wound on the body, nor any operation scar, yet the bullet never showed up on x-rays. Metal does not dissolve." By this stage, Rudolf Hess's son, Wolf Rudiger, had commissioned his own post-mortem and its verdict was unequivocal: the two superficial scars were clearly visible, otherwise the chest was unmarked. The dead man had passed five years of captivity, uncertain as to his fate, constantly tormented by the prospect of sudden death.

"Many warders have said that he often blew his cool, and said that he wasn't Hess," says Thomas. "But then what better way to prove that you're mad than to declare that you're not Hess? It was a Catch-22 situation for him, and the mental anguish must have been unspeakable." Why then did the man (of whose real identity Thomas is now almost certain) accept the job? "Accepting the job is easy," says Thomas wryly, "if it's the SS who want your services. Also the SS vigorously pursued the idea of the responsibility of kinship. What father would deliberately put his family at risk by declaring his innocence in that situation?" At the Nuremberg trials after the war, "Hess" was mocked by several of his supposed former colleagues, including Goering, who had been a party to the original plot. (He also failed to recognise former friends and members of his staff.) But a confession would have meant execution as a spy.

"He was faced with the choice of death, or uncertainty," Thomas says. "And he chose uncertainty. By that time he'd been in captivity four or five years. He didn't know what game the British were playing: was he going to be released? Were they going to admit it? Was it all some desperate British cha- rade? The man was a prisoner of conscience in more ways than one." As it is, "Hess" received a life sentence and was incarcerated in Spandau, where he deliberately avoided other Nazi war criminals, and refused to allow Hess's wife and son to visit the prison until 1969 27 years after the real Hess had last seen them, and when revelation of his real identity would be almost impossible. Finally, in August 1987, he died after 47 years in captivity and the circumstances of his death provided Hugh Thomas with his most explosive material yet.

Hess, said the official story, committed suicide by hanging himself by a length of flex in a garden shed. But Thomas says he was murdered. "During the last week of July 1987," he writes, "messages reaching the Foreign Office in London warned that one of the Soviet warders on duty had reported 'loose talk' by Prisoner No. 7. Although he had begun to speak frankly before, he had never done so to a Russian; and now, it seems, somebody decided that the risk of him surviving for another month of Soviet custody was too great.

Within three weeks of his outburst, his life had been brought to a sudden and brutal end." Thomas insists that, frail and decrepit as he was, Prisoner No. 7 could not possibly have committed suicide in the way suggested by the prison authorities. "No coroner in any civilised country would pass that death as suicide for a 1 iBfr fiIRa GALLERY ART AND DESIGN SHORT COURSES The University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne IE Grand C3 C3 C3 PRIVATE HOTEL Your Ideal Holiday destination Come aad ids Ike Vac Gmd aad etpericace the sxjk asd cfajn of a Gtaad Hotel firon last ceatory, wA all the BHdera comforts. Scdutcd the hem of QuecttctirT, oae of Vkctora's saost petvesqw seaside nfaajes, Ike Vie Crass) srii take jos back is laoe with its charts aad style. Directors' Choice An exhibition of works by Gallery Artists selected and sponsored by the Directors of City Gallery, William Mora Gallery, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 13 Verity Street.

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