Free Republic

Rudolph Hess believed the Jews had hypnotised Winston Curchill into taking a negative stance towards Nazi Germany, according to the Deputy Nazi leader's recently discovered psychiatric records. Notes written by Dr Henry Dicks, one of the Army psychiatrists who monitored Hess while he was a prisoner in Britain, detail his bizarre convictions. Hess believed Churchill had been 'mesmerised' by evil forces who were trying to kill him because he was the 'only person who knew of their secret psychic powers'. Professor Daniel Pick, a historian and psychoanalyst from Birkbeck College, University of London, studied Dr Dicks' notes for a new...

BERLIN — The bones of Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, have been exhumed and disposed of because his grave in the small Bavarian town of Wunsiedel had become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis, the town’s mayor said in an interview on Thursday. Karl-Willi Beck, 56, who has been mayor of Wunsiedel since 2002, said the cemetery administrators removed Hess’s remains and his gravestone early Wednesday. “It was the right thing to do,” Mr. Beck said. He added that the bones would be cremated and scattered over a lake, but he gave no other details.

The daily regime faced by Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, during his two decades as the sole prisoner in Spandau Jail in Berlin was made as harsh as possible by two Soviet officials described as a “sinister Laurel and Hardy team”, newly declassified files have revealed. The Soviet-nominated governor and chief warder at Spandau refused to relax the restrictions imposed on Hess, despite appeals from the United States, Britain and France, the other wartime allies responsible for guarding him. They decided he should “drink the last drop of punishment” for his crimes in the Second World War, one Foreign and...