US Congressman Demands Release of Nazi Soldier?

The speech we reprint here was given in the US House of Representatives Friday, July 31, 1981 by Georgia congressman, Larry McDonald.  Who was congressman Larry McDonald?  Though elected as a Democrat, McDonald was simultaneously the head of the Americanist John Birch Society and was shot down by the Russian air-force September 1, 1983 on Korean Air Lines flight 007.

We highly recommend this powerful speech given about the congressman at his memorial service:

This takes us to why a sitting US Congressman and head of a national organization dedicated to exposing tyranny and defending liberty in the tradition of the Founding Fathers stand before congress defending and demanding the release of a “Nazi war criminal”?

Mr. McDONALD. Mr. Speaker, there has been throughout the Free World a growing concern for and appreciation of human rights and justice. There is a mounting awareness of the dangers of excessive political power. There is one case, however, that cries out for justice in a voice stronger than all the rest. That is the case of prisoner No. 7 in Spandau Prison, Rudolf Hess.

A review of the Hess case must be read without prejudice, for only the dispassionate mind can follow this tale of world barbarism in a climate saturated with propaganda. Honorable men in America, England, and Europe have expressed the view that Rudolf Hess should be released from prison so that he may live out his life with his family. This release, they feel, is not only humane but just.

It should be pointed out in passing that periodically in Germany today much is made in the news media over activities of neo-Nazi groups. In Germany, such groups are as small as they are comical, with their occasional paramilitary exercises. Such groups have their counterparts in the United States; they are equally comical and have a miniscule impact upon American society and Government. Yet such silly little neo-Nazi groups play a major role with certain elements of the news media.

In the skilled hands of certain media types, these extremist groups are used to smear the legitimate concerns of honorable men and women. That is, the fact that these tiny groups favor the release of Hess is used to imply that anyone who wishes to see justice done in the Hess case is a secret neo-Nazi. That is untrue.

Those whose minds are clouded by propaganda and whose knowledge of 19273 history is dependent upon old World War II movies on the television late shows need not read further. None is so blind as he who will not see. This is true in the amazing story of Rudolf Hess, a story of monumental injustice. Can it be that this injustice is being continued to protect certain high-level
wartime leaders? Is Hess a prisoner of the treason of diplomats-a treason against civilization?

Unless death intervenes, October 1, 1981, will mark completion of Rudolf Hess’ 15th year as the sole inmate of Spandau Prison in Berlin. These 15 years of solitude lie heavily upon the previous 25 years of imprisonment. On May 10 of this year, Hess had endured 40 continuous years of captivity. He is now 87 years old.

The U.S. Government participates in this protracted torment of a very old man. Our Government’s explanation is that we can not help ourselves, because the Soviet Government wishes to continue the torment as long as possible.

Surely this is an excuse unworthy of
a great nation.

Few Americans have even an inaccu-
rate notion of who Rudolf Hess is, and
virtually none have any accurate
notion of why he has been imprisoned
all this time, much less why the U.S.
Army must still detail American
troops to prevent his release.

Rudolf Hess was born in Alexandria,
Egypt, on April 26, 1894. His father
was a prosperous German merchant,
his upbringing comfortably middle
class, his education directed toward
having him follow a career in com-
merce. Before his basic dislike of this
prospect could cause family problems,
World War I intervened; Hess volun-
teered. After being repeatedly wound-
ed in ground combat, he was commis-
sioned and assigned to the flying
corps. After the war, as a veteran in a Ger-
many crushed by military def eat com-
pounded by the notorious Versailles
Treaty and by determined Bolshevik
efforts to exploit the condition of the
nation, Hess returned to his studies.
Abandoning commerce, he studied his-
tory, economics, and political science
at Munich University. The professor
who was to influence him most pro-
foundly was Karl Haushofer, a world
renowned geographer and exponent of
broad geopolitical theories.

At the same time, many veterans,
Hess was appalled at what was hap-
pening to his country, and sought out
groups which offered some way out of
the imposed poverty, humiliation, and
disorder which afflicted Germany.
In 1923, Hess encountered Adolph
Hitler at one such meeting, and fell
under his charismatic spell, believing
that Hitler was the type of man neces-
sary to restore Germany to its previ-
ously respected status, Hess became a devoted follower, and participated in
the so-called Beer-Hall Putsch in
Munich on November 8, 1923.

The failure of the attempt led Hess
to seek refuge with professor Hau-
shofer, where he was safe for a while.
Eventually, however, both Hess and
Hitler were sent to Landsberg Prison,
Hitler with a 5-year sentence, and
Hess with a sentence of 18 months.
It was here, of course , that Hitler
wrote Mein Kampf. Since he did not
type, Hess helped him in this and
other ways, and it was through Hess
that Professor Haushof er’s geopoliti-
cal theories entered the book, with
far-reaching consequences indeed for
Haushofer.

Both Hitler and Hess were released
early from Landsberg, in 1924. Hess
thus became first unofficial, then offi-
cial private secretary to Hitler , a title
which became ” personal adjutant” in
1929, and in 1933 he became officially
a deputy to Hitler and Reichsminister
without portfolio. He held these posi-
tions until the events of 1941.

Hess was close to Hitler as his trust-
ed deputy, of long-standing proven
loyalty. He did his best to do what
Hitler wanted him to do. He never
tried to escape any responsibility
through the plea of “only following
orders”, and his flight to England in
1941 was a startling exhibition of his
personal initiative. It was simply in
the nature of Hess’ relationship to
Hitler that he carried out policy to a
far larger degree than he helped to
formulate it .
His actions during the 1930’s were
later combed over thoroughly by in-
vestigators for the International Mili-
tary Tribunal at Nuremberg. Yet de-
tails of the charges of which he was
found guilty appear, in retrospect, re-
markably vague and even trivial. For
example, Hess was ponderously con-
victed of having signed Germany’s
draft law in 1935.
Rudolf Hess maintained his friend-
ship with Professor Haushofer and his
family ; he protected them from the
Gestapo, because Haushofer’s wife was
Jewish, and his son Albrecht was
rather outspokenly anti-Nazi, even
though he was employed in the
German Foreign Office under J oach-
im Von Ribbentrop. It was either par-
tially or entirely through the Hau-
shof er connection that Hess was
drawn to make the flight which was
the most dramatic and fateful move of
his career, the event which often con-
stitutes the sole reason why his name
is remembered.
The geographic and political posi-
tion of Germany, its placement be-
tween both strong powers which are
active or potential enemies, and weak
powers which can be used as pawns,
imparts a great complexity to its for-
eign affairs. The political basis of the
wars of Europe since Germany became
a strong, unified nation in the late
EXTENSIONS OF REMARKS
19th century will be addressed at an-
other time.
The bare facts of Rudolf Hess’ flight
to Britain on May 10, 1941, are that he
took a Messerschmitt 110 fighter,
which he had been privileged to fly,
and sought out the airstrip on the
estate of the Duke of Hamilton near
the west coast of Scotland. Hess could
not find the strip, but knew that he
was close, so he parachuted to ground;
he landed, with minor injuries, about
10 miles from his objective, and was
taken into custody.
The entire episode was thereafter at
the mercy of wartime security, censor-
ship, and propaganda efforts, so that
almost any aspect of it is, to the
present day, debatable in some way by
someone. There is general agreement
that Hess sought to prevent further
armed conflict between Britain and
Germany. We must stop short here,
because acrimony swirls about his pre-
sumed reasons for doing so.
Another question which probably
should be regarded as settled by now,
but which still arises from time to
time, is whether Hess made his flight
ori his own initiative, or whether
Hitler sent him. Not only does Hess
insist that he went on his own, but
Hitler certainly would not have dis-
patched a close aide with a head full
of state secrets to his enemies, without
a shred of diplomatic or any other pro-
tection. The clinching argument might
be that the Nazi propaganda organiza-
tion needed 3 full days in order to
come up with the least damaging
“party line” on the subject, which was
that he had been acting strange lately.
The matter of sanity, or lack there-
of, has been addressed primarily by
the British. The fact is that Hess is re-
markably sane, especially under the
circumstances. He has been the object
of the attention of nearly 200 psychia-
trists during his 40 years of captivity.
Some of these gentlemen were not
gentlemen, either. Hess developed the
feigning of amnesia to a fine art and
devised other defenses against the
mindbenders, and they do not like
being fooled.
It is wise to keep in mind that the
British, far from choosing to reveal
what Hess had to say when he landed,
have kept that information secret
since 1941, and the interrogation tran-
scripts remain officially sealed until
the year 2017.
Why? Which individual or individ-
uals are being protected? We should
remember that even the documents
confirming the Lusitania conspiracy
of 1914 were only sealed for 50 years,
so that we are only now seeing the evi-
dence of how Winston Churchill and
Franklin D. Roosevelt were linked to
the sinking of the Lusitania to cause
well over 1,000 civilian casualties,
largely American, in order to incite a
surge of anti-German sentiment in
America. Churchill, of course, hoped
July 31, 1981
to bring America into the European
war on the British side.
After his arrival in Britain, Hess
never saw the Duke of Hamilton, but
became the guest of British intelli-
gence until October 1945. He was then
transferred to Germany to participate
involuntarily in the famous Nurem-
berg trials, the proceedings of the
four-power International Military Tri-
bunal.
World War II was a monument to
both duplicity and brutality. Yet
anyone anxious to parcel out blame
should hold short, while completing a
close reading of the preceding 100
years of European history, as well as
the history of the world at large since
1945.
Everybody committed atrocities. Ev-
erybody engaged in treachery . Britain
invented the concentration camp
during the Boer War. Stalin practiced
genocide more enthusiastically than
Hitler-not to speak of our newfound
friend in Southeast Asia, Pol Pot. The
list is endless, the cynicism boundless,
numbing to all sense of justice and
morality.
At Nuremberg, the victors invented
an ex post facto set of laws which
have had but one application ever, to
the losers of World War II. All of the
“crimes against the peace,” “war
crimes,” and “crimes against human-
ity,” the three classes of crime devised
for Nuremberg, have been committed
enthusiastically all over the world
since 1945-46, but there do not seem to
have been any further indictments.
Hess was charged with all three
classes of crime, and convicted only of
“crimes against the peace.” The specif-
ic actions included his signing of the
German draft law in 1935, and his
giving of a speech in support of the
Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939.
The fact that every participating
nation had a draft law, or that the
judge representing the Soviet Govern-
ment thus represented a cosigner, did
not seem to have any bearing upon
the proceedings. Of course, there is no
question but that Hess had carried out
Nazi Party policy up to the moment of
his May 10 flight.
Hess and his codefendants assumed,
rather reasonably, that the tribunal
would do with them as it wished, and
aside from being forced to attend,
they had no desire or even reason to
take part in the charade.
Hess was charged with the full array
of Nuremberg crimes. Yet it is vital to
note that, even in the charged atmos-
phere prevailing Hess was found inno-
cent of “war crimes” and “crimes
against humanity.”
Nevertheless, Hess expected the
death penalty. Life imprisonment , in
Western practice, offers some glim-
mering hope of freedom; in Stalinist
practice it did not, and to the heirs of
Stalin, evidently it does not.
enator Robert A. Taft, a strong
voice of American conservatism, in
1946, commented upon the Nuremberg
trials and executions as follows:
The trial of the vanquished by the victors
cannot be impartial no matter how it has
hedged about with the forms of justice. I
question whether the hanging of those who,
however despicable, were the leaders of the
German people, will ever discourage the
making of aggressive war, for no one makes
aggressive war unless he expects to win.
About this whole judgment there is the
spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom
justice. The hanging of the eleven men con-
victed will be a blot on the American record
which we shall long regret.
In these trials, we have accepted the Rus-
sian idea of the purpose of the trials-gov-
ernment policy and not justice-with little
relation to the Anglo-Saxon heritage. By
clothing policy in the forms of legal proce-
dure, we may discredit the whole idea of
justice.
Pope Pius XII, who knew a very
great deal about the intrigues of Eu-
rope’s two disastrous wars in this cen-
tury, stated that:
• • • the uninvolved party is shocked at
seeing how the victor sentences the van-
quished for war crimes after the cessation
of hostilities, while the victor has been
guilty of similar offenses against the van-
quished.
Between 1946 and 1966, almost noth-
ing was heard of the inmates of Span-
dau. The book “Prisoner No. 7: Rudolf
Hess,” Eugene K. Bird, who was for
several years the U.S. director of
Spandau, reveals the round of daily
life quite well. Prisoners and keepers,
in such small numbers, were inevitably
on rather familiar terms. In fact, they
grew old together, giving the impres-
sion to the reader of a home for indi-
gent men with higher authorities con-
stantly struggling to negate everyone’s
better nature, through the enforce-
ment of a prison regime.
Colonel Bird tried to make life as
bearable as possible for the solitary
old man who had been selected as a
kind of human sacrifice. He says that
he was also detailed to wrangle certain
items of information from him, which
he did, and after he had done so, his
own higher authorities belatedly dis-
covered his bending of the Soviet-style
rules and sacked him