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, Adolf Hitler's deputy and an experienced pilot, undertook a secret solo flight in a modified Messerschmitt Bf 110 from Germany to Scotland.
Hess's mission was to personally deliver a peace proposal to the Duke of Hamilton, whom he mistakenly believed he had met previously and who could facilitate a separate peace between Britain and Germany.
Despite a masterfully navigated flight, Hess crashed after bailing out and was captured; his peace offer was rejected, and he was subsequently tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life imprisonment.

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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.