Abergavenny

As Pierre van Passen noted in That Day Alone (1941), Churchill publicly pretended to take Hess’s peace proposal seriously — in return Hitler de-intensified the Blitz and diverted his focus towards the Soviet Union. When the Wehrmacht’s tanks rolled into Russia in July 1941, Britain was no longer alone in the fight against Nazism. Henceforth it was unlikely to lose a war that only weeks before Hess’s flight had seemed unwinnable. There was, though, the problem of what to do with Hess. Initially, the ex-Deputy Fuhrer was imprisoned in the Tower of London, then at Mytchett Place, Surrey, then at Maindiff Court near Abergavenny in Wales. Confusingly, intelligence reports by Nazi Abwehr spies in Britain placed Hess in Scotland, in the western Highlands, at the same time he was in Wales. How could Hess be in two places at once? Either the Abwehr was mistaken — or, fantastically, there were two Rudolf Hesses. The Hess В«doppelgГ¤ngerВ» theory was given credence in 1979 in The Murder of Rudolf Hess by Dr Hugh Thomas, a military surgeon who had examined Hess in Spandau prison six years before ...»