Spandau Phoenix

The next few minutes were a blur of action that both men would try to remember clearly for the rest of their lives—plundering the corpse for ammunition, searching the car, double-checking the drop tanks of the aircraft, donning their parachutes, firing the twin Daimler-Benz engines, turning the plane on the old cracked concrete—both men instinctively carrying out tasks they had rehearsed a thousand times in their heads, the tension compounded by the knowledge that an armed patrol might arrive from Aalborg at any moment.

Before boarding the plane, they exchanged personal effects. Hess quickly but carefully removed the validating items that had been agreed upon: three compasses, a Leica camera, his wristwatch, some photographs, a box of strange and varied drugs, and finally the fine gold identification chain worn by all members of Hitler’s inner circle. He handed them to the captain with a short word of explanation for each: “Mine, my wife’s, mine, my wife and son …” The man receiving these items already knew their history, but he kept silent. Perhaps, he thought, the Reichminister speaks in farewell to all the familiar things he might lose tonight. The captain understood that feeling well.

Even this strange and poignant ceremony merged into the mind-numbing rush of fear and adrenaline that accompanied takeoff, and neither man spoke again until they found themselves forty miles over the North Sea, arrowing toward their target. As the plan dictated, Hess had yielded the controls to the captain. Hess now sat in the radio operator’s seat, facing the twin tail fins of the fighter. The two men used no names—only ranks—and limited their conversation to the mechanics of the mission.

“Range?” the captain asked, tilting his head back toward the rear-facing seat.

“Twelve hundred and fifty miles with the nine-hundred-liter tanks,” Hess replied.

“I meant range to target.”

“The island or the castle?”

“The island.”

“Six hundred and seventy miles.”

The captain asked no more questions for the next hour. He stared down at the steadily darkening sea and thought of his family. Hess studied a sheaf of papers in his lap: maps, photographs, and mini-biographies secretly copied from SS files in the basement of the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse. Ceaselessly, he went over each detail, visualizing the contingencies he could face upon landing. A hundred miles off the English coast, he began drilling the pilot in his duties.

“How much did they tell you, Hauptmann?”

“A lot. Too much, I think.”

“You see the extra radio to your right?”

“Yes.”

“You can operate it?”

“Yes.”

“If all goes well, you have only a few things to remember. First, the drop tanks. Whatever happens, you ditch them into the sea. Same with the extra radio. After my time is up, of course. Forty minutes is the time limit, remember that. Forty minutes.”

“Forty minutes I wait.”

“If you have not received my message within that time, the mission has failed. In that case—”

There was a sharp intake of breath from the pilot, quiet but audible. Hess knew what caused that sound—the unbanishable fear of death. He felt it too. But for him it was different. He knew the stakes of the mission, the inestimable strategic gain that dwarfed the possible loss of two human lives. Like the man in the pilot’s seat, Hess too had a family—a wife and young son. But for a man in his position—a man so close to the Führer—such things were luxuries one knew might be lost at any moment. For him death was simply an obstacle to success that must be avoided at all costs. But for the man in the pilot’s chair …

“Hauptmann?” Hess said, almost gently.

“Sir?”

“I know what frightens you now. I really do. But there are worse things than death. Do you understand me? Far worse.”

The pilot’s reply was a hoarse, hollow gurgle. Hearing it, Hess decided that empathy was not the proper motivator for this man. When he next spoke, his voice brimmed with confidence. “Dwelling on that is of no use whatsoever, Hauptmann. The plan is flawless. The important thing is, have you been studying?”

“Have I been studying!” The captain was obviously relieved to be talking about something else. “My God, some iron-assed SS Brigadeführer grilled me for two days straight.”

“Probably Schellenberg.”

“Who?”

“Never mind, Hauptmann. Better that you don’t know.”

Silence filled the cockpit as the pilot’s mind drifted back to the fate that awaited him should his special passenger fail. “Herr Reichminister?” he asked at length.

“Yes?”

“How do you rate your chances of success?”

“It’s not in my hands, Hauptmann, so I would be foolish to guess. It’s up to the British now.” My advice is to prepare for the worst, Hess thought bitterly. The Führer’s bankers have been since January. “Just concentrate on your part of the mission,” he said. “And for God’s sake, be sure to jump from a high enough altitude to destroy the plane. It’s nothing the British haven’t seen before, but there’s no need to make them a present of it. Once you’ve gotten my message, just jump and wait until I can get you released. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. If you don’t get the message—”

Verdammt! Hess cursed silently. There’s just no avoiding it. His next words cut with the brittle edge of command. “If you don’t get my message, Hauptmann, you know what must be done.”

“Jawohl,” the pilot murmured, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. He was sickeningly aware of the small, sticky cyanide capsule taped against his chest. He wondered if he could possibly go through with this thing that everyone but him seemed to consider simply business as usual.

“Listen to me, Hauptmann,” Hess said earnestly. “You know why your participation is necessary. British Intelligence knows I am coming to England …”

Hess kept talking, trying to fill the emptiness that would give the pilot too much time to think. Up here, with Germany falling far behind, the concept of duty seemed much more abstract than it did when one was surrounded by the reinforcing order of the army and the SS. The captain seemed sound—and Heydrich had vouched for him—but given enough time to consider his position, he might do anything. After all, what sane man wanted to die?

“Cut your speed!” Hess ordered, his voice quickening. “Hold at 180.”

The miles had melted away before the Messerschmitt’s nose. They were a mere sixty miles off the Scottish coast. On a clear evening like this, the RAF radar stations would begin to pick up reflections from the fighter at any moment. Hess tightened his parachute harness, then set aside his maps and leaned backward.

“Stay high and clear!” he shouted to the canopy lid. “Make sure they see us coming in!”

“Where are you going out?”

“We should make landfall over a place called Holy Island. I’ll jump there. Stay high over the mainland for a few miles, then dive and run like hell! They’ll probably scramble a whole squadron once they realize what you’re flying!”

“Jawohl,” the pilot acknowledged. “Herr Reichminister?”

“What is it?”

“Have you ever parachuted before?”

“Nein. Never.”

An ironic laugh cut through the drone of the twin engines.

“What’s so funny, Hauptmann?”

“I’ve never jumped either! That’s a pretty significant fact to have overlooked in the planning of this mission, don’t you think?”

Hess permitted himself a wry smile. “Perhaps that fact was taken into account, Hauptmann. Some people might even be counting on it.”

“Oh … my God.”

“It’s too late to worry about that now. We don’t have the fuel to make it back to Germany even if we wanted to!”

“What?” the pilot exclaimed. “But the drop tanks—”

“Are empty!” Hess finished. “Or soon will be!”

The pilot felt his stomach turn a somersault. But before he could puzzle out his passenger’s meaning, he spied land below.

“Herr Reichminister! The island! I see it!”

From sixty-five hundred feet Holy Island was a tiny speck, only distinguishable by the small, bright ribbon separating it from the mainland. “And … a flare. I see a flare!”

“Green or red?” Hess asked, his face taut.

“Red!”

“The canopy, Hauptmann! Move!”

Together the two men struggled to slide back the heavy glass. Parachuting from a Messerschmitt was not common practice—strictly an emergency measure—and quite a few aviators had died attempting it.

“Push!” the pilot yelled.

With all their strength the two men heaved their bodies against the transparent lid of the cockpit. Their straining muscles quivered in agony until all at once the frame gave way and locked in the open position. The noise in the cockpit was deafening now, the engines roaring, the wind a screaming, living thing that struggled to pluck the men from their tiny tube of steel. Above it all, the pilot shouted, “We’re over the gap now, Herr Reichminister! Go! Go!”

Suddenly Hess looked into his lap. Empty. He had forgotten to ditch his papers! No sign of them in the cockpit; they must have been sucked out the moment the canopy opened. He prayed they had found their way down to the sea, and not to the island below.

“Jump, Herr Reichminister!”

Hess struggled into a crouch and faced the lethal tail fins of the Zerstörer. The time for niceties had passed. He reached behind him and jerked the pilot’s head back.

“Hauptmann!” he shouted. “Heydrich only ordered those drop tanks fitted to make sure you came this far! They are empty! No matter what happens, you cannot turn back! You have no choice but to follow orders! If I succeed, your actions really won’t matter! But if I fail, you cannot! You know the price of failure—Sippenhaft! Never forget that! Sippenhaft binds us both! Now climb! Give me some draft!”

The Messerschmitt’s nose pitched up, momentarily creating a small space shielded from the wind. With a defiant yell Hess hurled himself up and backward. A novice, he pulled the ripcord the moment he cleared the plane. The tight-folded silk tore open with a ripping sound, then quickly blossomed into a soft white mushroom that circled lazily down through the mist toward the Scottish earth below.

Cursing, the pilot struggled to secure the canopy. Without help it was twice as difficult, but Hess’s final words had chilled him to the core. Only a sheet of curved glass could now separate him from the terrifying destiny he had been ordered to face. With the desperate strength of a condemned man, he slammed it shut.

He dipped his left wing and glanced backward. There was the descending chute, soft and distant and peaceful. Barring a catastrophic landing, the Reichminister would at least begin his mission safely. It heartened the pilot to know that a novice could actually clear the plane, but something deeper in him recoiled in dread.

They had tricked him! The bastards had lured him into a suicidal mission by letting him think he would have a way out! After all his training, they hadn’t even trusted him to carry out his orders! Empty auxiliary tanks. The swine! They had known he would have sole control of the plane after Hess jumped, and they had made sure he wouldn’t have enough fuel to turn back if the mission went bad. And as if that weren’t enough … Hess had threatened him with Sippenhaft!

Sippenhaft! The word caused the pilot’s breath to come in quick gasps. He had heard tales of the Nazis’ ultimate penalty for betrayal, but he hadn’t really believed them. Sippenhaft dictated that not only a traitor’s life but the lives of his entire family became forfeit when judgment was rendered against him. Children, parents, the aged and infirm—none were spared. There was no appeal, and the sentence, once decreed, was swiftly executed.

With a guttural scream the pilot cursed God for giving him another man’s face. In that moment, he felt it was a surer death sentence than a cancer of the brain. Setting his mouth in a grim line, he hurled the plane into a screaming dive, not pulling up until the rocky Scottish earth seemed about to shatter the nose of his aircraft. Then—as Hess had suggested—he ran like hell, opening the Zerstörer up to 340 miles per hour over the low stone villages and patchwork fields. In other circumstances, the heart-stopping, ground-level flight might have been an exhilarating experience. Tonight it felt like a race against death.

It was. A patrolling Boulton Paul Defiant had answered a scramble call from the RAF plotting room at Inverness. The Messerschmitt pilot never even saw it. Oblivious, he stormed across the darkening island like a banshee, sixteen feet above the earth. With the twin-engined Messerschmitt’s tremendous speed advantage, the pursuing British fighter was outpaced like a sparrow behind a hunting hawk.

Dungavel Hill rose in the distance. Height: 458 meters: the information chattered into the pilot’s brain like a ticker tape. “There it is,” he muttered, spying the silhouette of Dungavel Castle. “My part of this insane mission.” The castle flashed beneath his fuselage. With one hand he checked the radio set near his right knee. Working. Please call, he thought. Please …

He heard nothing. Not even static. With shaking hands he touched the stick and hopped over a line of trees bisecting a sheep pasture. He saw fields … a road … more trees … then the town of Kilmarnock, sprawled dark across the road. He swept on. A patch of mist, then fog, the sea!

Like a black arrow he shot out over the western coast of Scotland, climbing fast. To his left he sighted his turning landmark, a giant rock jutting 120 meters into the sky, shining pale in the moonlight. As if drawn by a magnet, his eyes locked onto the tiny face of his newly acquired watch. Thirty minutes gone and no signal. Ten minutes from now his fate would be sealed. If you receive no signal in forty minutes, Hauptmann, you will turn out to sea and swallow your cyanide capsule … He wondered if he would be dead before his plane plowed into the icy depths of the North Atlantic.

Christ in Heaven! his mind screamed. What mad bastard dreamed this one up? But he knew—Reinhard Heydrich—the maddest bastard of them all. Steeling himself against panic, he banked wide to the south and flew parallel to the coast, praying that Hess’s signal would come. His eyes flicked across the instrument panel. Altimeter, airspeed, compass, fuel—the tanks! Without even looking down he jerked a lever next to his seat. Two auxiliary fuel tanks tumbled down through the darkness. One would be recovered from the Clyde estuary the next day by a British drifter, empty.

The radio stayed silent. He checked it again. Still working. His watch showed thirty-nine minutes gone. His throat went dry. Sixty seconds to zero hour. Sixty seconds to suicide. Here you are, sir, one cyanide cocktail for the glory of the Reich! For the last time the pilot looked longingly down upon the dark mirror of the sea. His left hand crept into his flying suit and touched the cyanide capsule taped against his breast. Then, with frightening clarity, an image of his wife and daughter came into his mind. “It’s not fair!” he shouted in desolation. “It’s the fucking nobodies who do the dying!”

In one violent flash of terror and outrage, the pilot jerked the stick to port and headed the roaring fighter back inland. His tear-filled eyes pierced the Scottish mist, searching out the landmarks he had studied so long in Denmark. With a shudder of hope, he spied the first—railroad tracks shining like quicksilver in the night. Maybe the signal will still come, he hoped desperately. But he knew it wouldn’t. His eyes scoured the earth for his second landmark—a small lake to the south of Dungavel Castle. There …

The Messerschmitt streaked across the water. Like a mirage the small village of Eaglesham appeared ahead. The fighter thundered across the rooftops, wheeling in a high, climbing circle over Dungavel Castle. He had done it! Like an intravenous blast of morphine, the pilot felt a sudden rush of exhilaration, a wild joy cascading through him. Ignited by the nearness of death, his survival instinct had thrown some switch deep within his brain. He had but one thought now—survive!

At sixty-five hundred feet the nightmare began. With no one to fly the plane while he jumped, the pilot decided to kill his engines as a safety measure. Only one engine cooperated. The other, its cylinders red-hot from the long flight from Aalborg, continued to ignite the fuel mixture. He throttled back hard until the engine died, losing precious seconds, then he wrestled the canopy open.

He could not get out of the cockpit! Like an invisible iron hand the wind pinned him to the back panel. Desperately he tried to loop the plane, hoping to drop out as it turned over, but centrifugal force, unforgiving, held him in his seat. When enough blood had rushed out of his brain, he blacked out.

Unaware of anything around him, the pilot roared toward oblivion. By the time he regained consciousness, the aircraft stood on its tail, hanging motionless in space. In a millisecond it would fall like two tons of scrap steel.

With one mighty flex of his knees, he jumped clear.

As he fell, his brain swirled with visions of the Reichminister’s chute billowing open in the dying light, floating peacefully toward a mission that by now had failed. His own chute snapped open with a jerk. In the distance he saw a shower of sparks; the Messerschmitt had found the earth.

He broke his left ankle when he hit the ground, but surging adrenaline shielded his mind against the pain. Shouts of alarm echoed from the darkness. Struggling to free himself from the harness, he surveyed by moonlight the small farm at the edge of the field in which he had landed. Before he could see much of anything, a man appeared out of the darkness. It was the head plowman of the farm, a man named David McLean. The Scotsman approached cautiously and asked the pilot his name. Struggling to clear his stunned brain, the pilot searched for his cover name. When it came to him, he almost laughed aloud. Confused, he gave the man his real name instead. What the hell? he thought. I don’t even exist anymore in Germany. Heydrich saw to that.

“Are you German?” the Scotsman asked.

“Yes,” the pilot answered in English.

Somewhere among the dark hills the Messerschmitt finally exploded, lighting the sky with a momentary flash.

“Are there any more with you?” the Scotsman asked nervously. “From the plane?”

The pilot blinked, trying to take in the enormity of what he had done—and what he had been ordered to do. The cyanide capsule still lay like a viper against his chest. “No,” he said firmly. “I flew alone.”

The Scotsman seemed to accept this readily.

“I want to go to Dungavel Castle,” the pilot said. Somehow, in his confusion, he could not—or would not—abandon his original mission. “I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton,” he added solemnly.

“Are you armed?” McLean’s voice was tentative.

“No. I have no weapon.”

The farmer simply stared. A shrill voice from the darkness finally broke the awkward silence. “What’s happened? Who’s out there?”

“A German’s landed!” McLean answered. “Go get some soldiers.”

Thus began a strange pageant of uncertain hospitality that would last for nearly thirty hours. From the McLeans’ humble living room—where the pilot was offered tea on the family’s best china—to the local Home Guard hut at Busby, he continued to give the name he had offered the plowman upon landing—his own. It was obvious that no one knew what to make of him. Somehow, somewhere, something had gone wrong. The pilot had expected to land inside a cordon of intelligence officers; instead he had been met by one confused farmer. Where were the stern-faced young operatives of MI5? Several times he repeated his request to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton, but from the bare room at Busby he was taken by army truck to Maryhill Barracks at Glasgow.

At Maryhill, the pain of his broken ankle finally burned through his shock. When he mentioned it to his captors, they transferred him to the military hospital at Buchanan Castle, about twenty miles south of Glasgow. It was there, nearly thirty hours after the unarmed Messerschmitt first crossed the Scottish coast, that the Duke of Hamilton finally arrived to confront the pilot.

Douglas Hamilton looked as young and dashing as the photograph in his SS file. The Premier Peer of Scotland, an RAF wing commander and famous aviator in his own right, Hamilton faced the tall German confidently, awaiting some explanation. The pilot stood nervously, preparing to throw himself on the mercy of the duke. Yet he hesitated. What would happen if he did that? It was possible that there had simply been a radio malfunction, that Hess was even now carrying out his secret mission, whatever it was. Heydrich might blame him if Hess’s mission failed. And then, of course, his family would die. He could probably save his family by committing suicide as ordered, but then his child would have no father. The pilot studied the duke’s face. Hamilton had met Rudolf Hess briefly at the Berlin Olympics, he knew. What did the duke see now? Fully expecting to be thrown into chains, the pilot requested that the officer accompanying the duke withdraw from the room. When he had gone, the pilot took a step toward Hamilton, but said nothing.

The duke stared, stupefied. Though his rational mind resisted it, the first seeds of recognition had been planted in his brain. The haughty bearing … the dark, heavy-browed patrician face … Hamilton could scarcely believe his eyes. And despite the duke’s attempt to conceal his astonishment, the pilot saw everything in an instant. The dizzying hope of a condemned man who has glimpsed deliverance surged through him. My God! he thought. It could still work! And why not? It’s what I have trained to do for five years!

The duke was waiting. Without further hesitation—and out of courage or cowardice, he would never know—the pilot stepped away from the iron discipline of a decade.

“I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess,” he said stiffly. “Deputy Führer of the German Reich, leader of the Nazi Party.”

With classic British reserve, the duke remained impassive. “I cannot be sure if that is true,” he said finally.

Hamilton had strained for skepticism, but in his eyes the pilot discerned a different reaction altogether—not disbelief, but shock. Shock that Adolf Hitler’s deputy—arguably the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany—stood before him now in a military hospital in the heart of Britain! That shock was the very sign of Hamilton’s acceptance!

I am Reichminister Rudolf Hess! With a single lungful of air the frightened pilot had transformed himself into the most important prisoner of war in England. His mind reeled, drunk with the reprieve. He no longer thought of the man who had parachuted from the Messerschmitt before him. Hess’s signal had not come, but no one else knew that. No one but Hess, and he was probably dead by now. The pilot could always claim he had received a garbled signal, then simply proceeded with his mission as ordered. No one could lay the failure of Hess’s mission at his door. The pilot closed his eyes in relief. Sippenhaft be damned! No one would kill his family without giving him a chance to explain.

By taking this gamble—the only chance he could see of survival—the desperate captain unknowingly precipitated the most bizarre conspiracy of the Second World War. And a hundred miles to the east, alive or dead, the real Rudolf Hess—a man with enough secrets in his head to unleash catastrophic civil war in England—disappeared from the face of the earth.