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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

13. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy

Rudolf Hess was at Hitler’s side during the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and joined him in prison, where he helped him write Mein Kampf. For his loyalty, Hess was made Hitler’s deputy Fuhrer after the Nazis came to power in 1933, and he played an instrumental role in drafting the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Germany’s Jews of citizenship and civil rights. In 1941, Hess sensed that his influence over Hitler was waning, so he hatched a harebrained scheme to fly solo to Britain, and try to broker a peace. It came to nothing, and after the war, he was tried and convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison, which lasted until he committed suicide in 1987.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.