Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy, commits suicide in prison

August 17: On this day in 1987, Nazi deputy leader Rudolf Hess committed suicide in prison, his fourth suicide attempt in 46 years of captivity.

The 93-year-old, who was captured in 1941 after flying alone to Britain to talk peace during World War II, hanged himself in Spandau Prison in West Berlin.

He spent 21 years as the sole prisoner in this notorious prison for war criminals after all other Nazi leaders imprisoned there had been released by 1966.

The Soviet Union, which jointly controlled the prison with the US, Britain and France, refused to release Hess because it wanted to maintain its presence in West Berlin.

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Hess, who was one of the first to join the Nazi Party in 1920 and became Deputy Führer after the Nazi election victory in 1933, was extremely devoted to Adolf Hitler.

His career as a high-ranking member of the Fascist Party flourished after he was imprisoned along with the leader in 1923 following the failed Munich Putsch to seize power.

Hitler dedicated his 1925 book Mein Kampf – which is German for “My Struggle” and in which he outlined his nefarious plans – to Hess after he helped him write it in prison.

However, despite serving as Hitler’s deputy, at the beginning of World War II Hess lost influence to other members of the Nazi Party.

As a result, the former World War I pilot, who was later diagnosed with a mental illness, made the surprising decision to fly alone to Scotland without consulting Hitler.

He crashed his Messerschmitt 12 miles from Dungavel House, where he had hoped to meet the Duke of Hamilton, who he believed would be willing to help him.

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Instead, he was captured by a farmer, arrested and – after appealing to Britain to stop fighting – forced to spend the rest of the war in Britain.

British Pathé newsreels reveal the astonishment people felt at the sight of “the shadow of nature’s worst mistake” daring to go out to meet his enemies in wartime.

Hitler disowned him when news of his escape reached Germany.

Doubts about Hess’s sanity were raised both during his internment in Britain and at his trial at Nuremberg, when he repeatedly claimed that his food had been poisoned.

He was found guilty of crimes against peace and of conspiring with other leaders to commit crimes – but not war crimes, allowing him to avoid the death penalty.

While in Spandau, where he was given prisoner number 7, he was not allowed to speak to other high-ranking Nazis and was not allowed to visit his family until 1969.

Most other leading politicians, including Karl Dönitz, who served as Führer in the final days of the Reich after Hitler’s suicide, were dismissed in the 1950s.

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After the 1966 release of Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and a Nazi famous for his apologies, Hess was left alone in a prison of 600 cells.

Despite greater freedom – including having a garden and access to films – he became increasingly depressed after repeated requests for his release were rejected.

He ended his life by hanging himself with a lamp extension cord that was stretched across the latch of a window in a gazebo he had built for himself in the garden.

His grave in the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel was a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis until his remains were exhumed and cremated in 2011.