THE UNINVITED ENVOY (249 pp.)—James Leaser—McGraw-Hill ($5.95).
He is nearly 70 now—a dark, brooding, badger-faced man living in near-total oblivion in the enormous stone pile that is Spandau prison. But in May 1941, when Rudolf Hess suddenly landed in a cow pasture in Scotland and asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich was full of high hope.
At a time when German armies, already masters of Europe and most of North Africa, stood poised for a thrust into Russia, Hess brought an offer of peace. Hitler, he said, would guarantee the integrity of the British Empire if England would recognize Germany's dominance in Europe. Drawing for the first time on all the old and new information about Hess's strange, ill-fated mission, Journalist-Historian James Leaser (The Red Fort, The Plague and the Fire) has produced an absorbing footnote to history.
Painstakingly the author follows Hess through every stage of his secret preparation. As an ex-World War I pilot and the No. 3 man in Nazi Germany, Hess easily managed to finagle the use for "practice flights" of an experimental Messerschmidt 110 with extra gas tanks. Aides surreptitiously collected weather charts. Though Leaser's attempt to weld such details into a tale of step-by-step suspense is not entirely successful, his account has some touching vignettes of Hess—playing with his four-year-old son for the last time; standing uncertainly in the door of his wife's room on the day of the flight, unable to confide his secret, but wearing, as a covert gesture of affectionate farewell, a blue shirt that she had given him and that he hated. Ironically, one of the most dramatic chapters concerns not Hess but his faithful aide Major Karlheinz Pintsch. Assigned by Hess to break the news to Hitler, Pintsch journeyed apprehensively to Berchtesgaden, his romantic belief in the heroic flight dwindling as he neared the Führer's presence. Hitler invited him to lunch, had him arrested after the dessert.
Sane but Psychotic. Was Hess mad? Was his mission an insane gamble? Author Leaser thinks not. He does not gloss over any of Hess's strange behavior (Hess once had magnets fixed around his bed to draw harmful influences from his body). But like the panel of psychiatrists who found Hess "psychotic but sane'' before the Nürnberg trials (where Hess got a life sentence as a Nazi war criminal). Leasor sees Hess as an unbalanced man obsessed by a childish—and thoroughly Germanic —dream of performing one great convulsive act of patriotism.