Rudolf Hess of course was Deputy Furher and 3rd in line of succession under Hitler up until he apparently just went kooky and flew to England in 1941 attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with Churchill without Hitler’s knowledge because he understood Nazi Germany couldn’t win a two front war against the Soviet Union and England at once. He wound up being imprisoned in England for war crimes and eventually transferred to Spandau Prison in Germany where he remained until dying in the 1980s. (No need to nitpick I’m doing this entirely from memory and details don’t matter to the question at hand)
Now, we have had so many alternative history books, movies, board games, tv shows, video games, online fan fictions about Nazi Victory in World War 2. I was curious if any of them address what would have happened to Hess in these scenarios or in general. Would England have handed him over in the event of a sepert peace victory for Germany? If Germany invaded England and made it a puppet, would Hess be liberated but then be tried as a traitor? Or would they have liberated him and just let him back in their ranks but as a super low level party functionary?
My guess is that he would have been released from captivity and repatriated, but he had been such an embarrassment to the regime he would have been quietly retired and tucked away somewhere in return for past services to the Party.
It would ultimately be up to Goebbels how to mitigate the damage that had been done, and Hitler usually took his advice when it came to propaganda.
I doubt if there would have been any question of his being handed over by British authorities. The victorious occupying forces (or rather, the SS/Gestapo advance guard) would just have taken him. Either he would have been “suicided”, or “succumbed to [some illness or other] caused by the conditions while a captive of the British”, straight away. Or he might have been shipped off, ostensibly to a mental hospital, where the same fate would have occurred after a while. Either way, he would simply be forgotten about thereafter.
I always wondered about that. So many prominent Nazis who’d been actively working with Hitler for the entire war were let out within a few years, if they were lucky enough to be imprisoned and not executed. Hess wasn’t there for the majority of the war but he’s kept in prison for decades. It just seemed weird.
He was held in Berlin under the joint authority of the occupying powers. Eventually, he was the last one left, but the Soviets simply wouldn’t agree to let him go. Whether that was specific to him (because they saw his trip to Britain as part of the planning for the invasion of the USSR? His conviction at Nuremberg, IIRC, was for planning aggressive war), or because it gave the Red Army regular turns in West Berlin to guard Spandau, I don’t know, maybe both.
To go back to the OP, I don’t know of any alt.history works that touch on this relative side issue: but we do know that in the 1940 planning for the invasion of Britain, there was a list of a couple of thousand VIPs who were to be arrested immediately. And of course there were plenty of examples of the ruthless elimination of anyone who fell foul of Hitler, even on his own side. Though in his case there might have been a cover story, as with others who were taken.
I understood that they saw it as an attempt to get Britain to cease hostilities so that the entire forces of the German military could be directed to the USSR. Since it was a direct threat to the USSR, they would never agree to let him be freed.
I doubt Hess would have been handed over to the People’s Court and executed openly. He had served the Party too well in the pre-war era to have been branded a traitor.
Hitler and Goebbels would have stuck to the original story that he had either become deranged or simply lost his nerve. If they wanted to liquidate him, it would probably have been handled the same way Rommel’s treason was. Quietly and hushed up.
I don’t think the “Peace Mission” was ever officially authorized. Hitler reportedly went nuclear when he read the letter Hess left for him, and the regime did whatever it could to make it look like the Deputy Fuehrer was unbalanced.
When it came to Hitler’s successor, it wasn’t until after.Hess’s flight and capture that Goering was named the heir apparent.
Authoritarian governments are quite skilled at rewriting History. Goebbels could easily frame it as an example of how Germany HAD to invade Britain because it rebuffed their peace efforts. The narrative in Germany was already that if not for the war-mongering Churchill, Britain should, by all rights, be fighting beside them against the threat of international communism and “Jewish Bolshevism”. As to what happens to Hess personally after his heroic rescue from Churchill’s secret police torture chambers? That can all be written with or without Hess’s cooperation.
Hess’s flight was a half-baked plan to overthrow Churchill and replace him with a “pro-German” government led by a fascist-friendly one led by the likes of Lord Halifax and the Duke of Windsor. After conquering Britain, why not give that plan an official stamp to emphasize that the Nazi’s disagreement was with Churchill and not the British people?
In the examples that come to mind (the Farthing trilogy by Walton for example), Hess is in fine shape, because Germany wins the war by Hess’ peace overtures working.
Yes, and all the evidence points to Hess having come up with it himself. It was never officially authorized, and his rapid capture and incarceration showed what a stupid idea it was. Not even Goebbels could come up with a rational explanation for Hess’s actions, and Hitler completely disavowed them.
At the time, Hitler was working to maintain good relations with Moscow as a smokescreen for the impending invasion of the Soviet Union. The last thing he needed was for Stalin to have grounds for suspecting a double-cross with a “Peace Mission” to Britain.
No, no, no. Hitler and Goebbels just wanted Churchill’s interrogators to think Hess was crazy and that none of the intelligence he provided was valid. You underestimate what the Nazis considered a rational explanation.