A Glibertarians Exclusive:  Blood and Gold, Part I

16 August 1987 – Spandau Prison

He was known as Prisoner Number Seven to the guards and administrators at Spandau Prison.  He was known to the world as Rudolf Hess, Nazi war criminal.  He was likewise known as Rudolf Hess, husband and father, to his wife, Ilse, and his son, Wolf.

Only the man who thought of himself merely as Hess knew the truth.

I have had enough of this, Hess thought to himself one cloudy afternoon.  He thought briefly of his family, the second he had known in his life.  But Ilse was eighty-seven, and Wolf a grown man; they would be well off enough without him.  His first family, Anna, Felix and Elsa, were still dearer to him, though they had all been dead for many years – indeed, many centuries.

I was merely human then, he reminded himself, and still capable of feeling.

He was, by German record, ninety-three years old.  With the ability to force his will upon his flesh to a certain degree, he looked ninety-three, even as he had looked younger in 1920, when he had first encountered Adolf Hitler in Munich.

He was in fact nearly five hundred years old.  But no one other than Hess knew that.  His wife, his son, his fellow Nazis and all the Allied captors thought him to be only a mortal man.

Regardless of age, he was a tall man, grown thin over the years, with a shock of white hair, a narrow, gaunt face, long hands and strong yellow teeth.  Along with age he had, over the years, cultivated the appearance and demeanor of frailty, although he knew the opposite to be true.

And yet he was still paying the price for the worst miscalculation of his long, long life.

August of 1917 was when it all started.  When the Great War had begun, Hess attached himself to a Bavarian infantry regiment, attracted by all the opportunities war brought to one such as him.  At that time he had gone by “Rutger” Hess, and along the way befriended Feldwebel Rudolf Hess, who shared not only Hess’s name but also his lean frame; indeed the two could have been brothers.  Hess was wounded at Verdun, taking a bullet through the shoulder.  His friend of convenience, Rudolf Hess, was killed, decisively so, by a bullet through the brain.

Too many people knew that his background as Rutger Hess was clouded, so by the simple expedient of switching identity disks and papers, he became Rudolf Hess.  “Rutger” Hess went into a grave, and the newly minted Rudolf went on to hospital in Alexandersbad.  So adept was he at assuming young Rudolf’s appearance, and so attentive had he been to the Bavarian’s stories, that he even fooled the man’s family, spending that Christmas holiday with them.

Then the war ended, a disaster for Germany.  And Hess had a front seat for the rise of Hitler.

Centuries of experience in human affairs told him that one such as Hitler would arise following the defeat and the catastrophic Treaty of Versailles.  When he met Hitler, Hess thought him a blowhard and a fool, but recognized the man’s gift for polemics.  I though I could control him, he often thought in later years.  I thought I could rule Germany through him.  And when I realized I could not, I tried to make peace with Britain.  Much good it did me.  And so Germany knew defeat, twice in one century. 

And worse, Hess had been drawn into an unspeakable evil, one that shocked and dismayed even him, after his actions of the last five centuries: Feeding being one thing, but industrial-scale murder quite another.  Worse still, his position had forced him to express public support for the actions of thugs like Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich and the like.  His acting had been convincing enough that the Nazis never suspected the nature of the ancient monster that walked among them.

Spandau Prison

Walking that path had led him to where he was now, in Spandau Prison.

And Hess was starving.

Oh, the Allies had always given him enough common fare.  But his unique metabolism needed more than the prison rations.  He needed…  other than that, sustenance he had been denied for almost fifty years, and at times his hunger made him teeter on the edge of sanity.  He could have easily cut a swath through the guards and escaped, but then his true nature would have been known.

Hess could not abide that.  If he had learned one thing from the debacle around the Second World War, it was that his continued longevity required anonymity.

So he waited.  And planned.  And practiced new arts, in the privacy of his cell.  It was nearly time.

The next night, Hess went to the small reading room that had been set up in the prison’s garden, the Allies having not denied him certain comforts after all the years he had spent there.  He pulled the extension cord off a reading lamp, wrapped one end around a window latch, and the other around his neck.  He slumped to the floor.  Concentrating, as he had taught himself, he slowed his breathing and heartbeat until they were undetectable, let his body cool to room temperature, and ‘died.’

After he was discovered, moved into a wooden coffin and left for the night, he revived himself.  The guard rotation was Russian that evening.  One of the roving guards was a man Hess recognized, one Anton Denisovich Kozlov, an ill-tempered brute but one who happened to be about Hess’s size.  Hess waited in ambush, caught Kozlov rounding a corner and tore out his throat.

At last!  Hess drank the big man dry in moments.  Then he swapped clothes with the guard, placed his body in the coffin and simply walked out of the gate.

Berlin had changed much in the years Hess had spent in Spandau Prison.  Nearly every building was new; Hess had seen the photos of the ruin Berlin had been in 1945.  The guards in Spandau in 1945 and 1946 took great delight in showing such things to Hess and his fellow prisoners.  With no money and no identification, Hess was reduced to sleeping in an alley his first day on the loose, sheltered under an overhang the blocked the sun; he could tolerate sunlight for a time, but it was… uncomfortable.

For several days, Hess watched the Berlin newspapers, expecting news of his murder of the guard and the escape to warn him he was being hunted, but no such news appeared.  Of course, he realized at last.  How like the Allies, to not want to admit than an old, old man turned the tables on a young, healthy Russian guard and escaped.

For the first time in decades, Hess was free.  Now he needed resources.  He had only the few marks the Russian soldier had in his pockets, and nothing more.

But he knew of several caches of Nazi gold, mostly planted by the rapacious Goering and the greedy Bormann.  The Allies no doubt had found most of the stolen gold, but Hess knew of a few caches that may well have escaped notice.

The nearest of those was in Alsace, in Strasbourg.  Hess made the trip from Berlin to Strasbourg in two nights, moving swiftly in the ground-devouring lope he hadn’t used in years. He arrived in Strasbourg just before sunrise on the second night, with just enough cash left in his pockets for a cheap room.  That evening he set out, walking along the banks of the Ill, looking for anything familiar, when a voice came out of the darkness.

“Old man,” the voice said, sounding strangely familiar.  A figure stepped into the moonlight from the shelter of a small boathouse on the banks of the Ill.

Hess was genuinely surprised by the man who stood before him, wearing the uniform of a Colonel in the British Army.  He didn’t show it.  Belos Ionescu, he reminded himself.  You’ve come a long way to find me after all this time.  Mehmet’s Ottomans couldn’t kill you, so no surprise the Germans couldn’t, either.

“Belos,” Hess said.  “Son.”  It had often amused Hess to refer to those he had converted as his ‘children.’

“Father,” Belos said, his face showing no amusement.

“Is it still Belos?” Hess asked.

“I go by Braxton now.  Braxton Iocca.”  His English accent was impeccable; he had obviously practiced.

“Braxton Iocca.  As good a pseudonym as any, I suppose.  You may call me Jurgen.  Jurgen Hess.  How did you find me here, then?”

“There was a rumor going around about a mystery surrounding the death of the infamous Rudolf Hess.  I found it curious.  I thought you might try to leave Germany, if what I suspected was true – and clearly it was – and this seemed a logical place to intercept you.”

“You have gained some wisdom in all these years,” Hess admitted.

‘Iocca’ inclined his head.  “Thank you.  What are you doing here, in Strasbourg?”

“Seeking resources,” Hess replied.  “What else?”