Unraveling Rudolf Hess’ Grand Delusion

His wartime mission veered from derring-do to farce.

Peter Garrison

Wednesday, November 11, 2026 at 08:00 AM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Travis Tingle

Efforts to determine whether Rudolf Hess was sane or not kept multiple psychiatrists busy for years. [Credit: Dave Weaver/Gemini AI]

Key Takeaways:

In May 1941, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy and a pilot, undertook an unauthorized solo peace mission, flying a modified Messerschmitt Bf 110D to Scotland to propose a separate peace with Britain.
Despite a skillfully navigated flight and evasion of British radar, Hess crashed after bailing out near his target, the Duke of Hamilton's estate, and was captured by a local farmer.
Hess's peace overtures were rejected by the British, leading to his long-term imprisonment, a life sentence at the Nuremberg trials due to his mental state, and his eventual death in prison in 1987.

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Pilots are naturally inclined to assign high importance to the aerial component of any war. Not everyone does. I was surprised to find that the article on World War I in my 1958 Encyclopedia Britannica (Volume 23, VASE to ZYGO) gave only the briefest mention to the “tumult in the clouds.” Its effect, the author suggested, was principally psychological.

I experienced a similar disappointment recently when, reading Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, I found that author passing swiftly by the Battle of Britain (even though, as Winston Churchill had famously intoned, “never in the field of human conflict was so much been owed by so many to so few”), and then glancing back several hundred pages later only to briefly remark that the Luftwaffe had been “roughly handled” there.