Was it Rudolph Hess who died in Spandu prison or a double?

Answer 1

I suppose no one will ever be able to say definitively. There are some puzzling circumstances in the case, such as the elapsed flight time when Hess arrived in the UK, said to be an hour and a half longer than an ME 110 could remain airborne without refueling.

Some years ago there was a book published authored by a British physician, who as a member of the British Army's medical corps treated Hess in Spandau Prison every fourth months, when it was the turn of the British to mount guard there for the single prisoner remaining in the facility. The real Hess had been shot through the lung leading an attack in World War One, which wound cost him most of the lung. When a person is shot through the body with a high velocity jacketed rifle bullet, the path of the bullet through the body remains visible for the rest of that person's life on X-rays, as a "soft tissue displacement track". The individual in Spandau displayed no scars on the chest from an entrance wound, nor on the back from an exit wound, and there was no "soft tissue displacement track" on the chest x-rays of that person, meaning that the person in Spandau was definitely not ever at any time in his life shot through the chest, if you can believe the story of this British doctor. The doctor wrote that he puzzled over these matters for four months, having made this discovery, before it was again his turn at the prison, and, when he saw "Hess", attempted to raise the issue with him, having concluded that whoever this person was, he could not, on the medical evidence, be Hess. This frightened the prisoner greatly, and he said "Too late! Too late!" before lapsing into sullen silence and refusing to speak further. Evidently the prisoner was still in fear of someone or something at this time, which I believe was in the 1970s.

This prisoner refused all visits from relatives for eighteen months while in Germany for his trial after the war was over. He did eventually begin to reply to the letters from relatives, but cleverly only repeated back things that had been written to him by the relatives of Hess, and displayed no knowledge of any additional family matters, beyond what had already been written to him. He acted crazy, and the other Nuremburg defendants, who were mostly men he should have known well before he left Germany, for the most part ignored him and tried to disassociate themselves from him. Eventually he did receive a visit from relatives of Hess, who apparently accepted him as the genuine but crazed person.