CHAPTER 7: Tibetan Wisdom Meets German Folly

Our meeting had hardly begun when my Storm Troopers -- as they became from that day forth -- attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves upon the enemy in packs of eight and ten. How many of these men I never really knew until that day. And at their head was gallant Rudolf, my personal secretary, Hess. -- Hitler, Mein Kampf

Rudolf Hess has been painted by historians as weak and indecisive, characterless, passive, putty in the hands of a stronger man, eager to be rid of his personal identity, to give up his freedom to think and feel for himself to a totalitarian cause -- in short, the perfect disciple loyal and obedient to the death. As Hitler's deputy, he must have enjoyed his dependency on the Fuhrer.

Like Hitler, Hess had a penchant for occultism, having been steeped in it from his birth in Egypt. Born on April 26, 1896, to a prosperous Bavarian wholesaler and exporter who had transplanted himself to Alexandria, Rudolf lived with his family until his fourteenth year and then was sent to school in Germany.

As soon as World War I started, he volunteered, and was placed in the 1st Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, named the List Regiment, after its original commander. He was an officer in the same regiment as Hitler, who was a dispatch runner, but they never met then.

The List Regiment was in the thick of the fighting at the front. According to a letter which Hitler wrote to his old Munich landlord, they lost 2,900 men in four days. Hess was wounded twice.

When the war ended, Hess was twenty-two. He went back to Munich and joined the Thule Society. He was one of the hundreds of veterans smuggled out of Munich by Sebottendorff, along with money and arms, to join the Free Corps. Despite his hangdog look, he had a reputation for being a scrappy street fighter. He participated wholeheartedly with the Free Corps in ridding Munich of the leftist revolutionaries.

Hess was in the audience when Hitler came to German Workers' party meetings to deliver his grandiose plans for the future of the movement, predicting that the day would come "when the banner of our movement will fly over the Reichstag, over the Castle in Berlin, yes, over every German house."

Seeing the small audience and the pale, gesticulating speaker, Hess wondered, as he later reported, Was this thundering orator foolish or was he the Messiah? Soon, his mind was made up.

As a student at the University of Munich, he was eligible to apply for a prize which a wealthy South American had endowed. Competitors were to write a theme that posed the question "How Must the Man Be Constituted Who Will Lead Germany Back to Her Old Heights?"

Delirious with the Messianic hope of the time, Hess won. Drawing a word portrait of Hitler, he wrote:

Profound knowledge in all areas of political life and history, the capacity to draw the right lessons from this knowledge, belief in the purity of his own cause and in ultimate victory, and enormous power of will give him the power of thrilling oratory which evokes joyful enthusiasm from the masses. Where the salvation of the nation is in question, he does not disdain utilizing the weapons of the adversary, demagogy, slogans, processions, etc. Where all authority has vanished, only a man of the people can establish authority. This was shown in the case of Mussolini. The deeper the dictator was originally rooted in the broad masses, the better he understands how to treat them psychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the more supporters he will win among these most energetic ranks of the people. He himself has nothing in common with the masses; he is all personality, like every great man.

If necessity commands it, he does not shrink from shedding blood. Great questions are always decided by blood and iron. And the question at stake is: Shall we rise or be destroyed?

Parliament may go babbling, or not -- the man acts. It transpires that despite his many speeches, he knows how to keep silent. Perhaps his own supporters are the most keenly disappointed.... In order to reach his goal, he is prepared to trample on his closest friends.... For the sake of the great ultimate goal, he must even be willing temporarily to appear a traitor against the nation in the eyes of the majority. The lawgiver proceeds with terrible hardness.... He knows the people and their influential individuals. As the need arises, he can trample them with the boots of a grenadier, or with cautious and sensitive fingers spin threads reaching as far as the Pacific Ocean. . . . In either case, the treaties of enslavement will fall. One day we shall have our new, Greater Germany, embracing all those who are of German blood. . . .

Thus we have the portrait of the dictator: keen of mind, clear and true, passionate and then again controlled, cold and bold, scrupulous in decision, fearless in rapid execution of his acts, ruthless toward himself and others, mercilessly hard and then again soft in his love for his people, tireless in work, with a steel fist in a velvet glove, capable ultimately of overcoming even himself.

We still do not know when he will intervene to save us -- this "man." But millions feel that he is coming.

By November 8, 1923, "this man" had made his presence known to all Germany. Hitler had already seized control of the Nazi party and now planned to seize control of the Bavarian government as well. Hess, intoxicated with his newly discovered Messiah, marched along with Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Despite its dramatic effect, the Putsch was a fiasco. When police opened fire on the marching Storm Troopers, Hitler was the first to flee. He did not mention this in Mein Kampf, but said of the meeting: "my Storm Troopers -- as they became from that day forth -- attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves upon the enemy in packs of eight and ten. How many of these men I never really knew until that day. And at their head was gallant Rudolf, my personal secretary, Hess."

Hess escaped across the border into Austria over a mountain pass. Hitler was imprisoned at Landsberg, a town just west of Munich. The punishment was very mild, lasting less than nine months, and Hitler spoke of it afterward as a much-needed vacation.

Hess proved his devotion to Hitler by coming back from Austria, giving himself up, and joining Hitler in prison, in room No. 7. So steadfast was that devotion, in fact, that Ernst Hanfstaengl hints at an unnatural relationship: "It is probably not true to say there was a physical homosexual relationship between the two, but in a passive way the attraction was there. I certainly did not trust the manhood of either...."

Shared prison life served to bind the two men together until a later fiasco severed the bond. Hess became Hitler's secretary and helped him with Mein Kampf. Hess did more than take dictation and type the manuscript. As the best educated of Hitler's disciples, he was able to provide Hitler with useful information, particularly on a new study which was called geopolitics. He introduced Hitler to the professor (and ex-general) from whom he had learned about geopolitics, and, in fact, the professor was a frequent visitor to Landsberg prison. Some people, indeed, believe that the professor, Karl Haushofer, was Hitler's guiding brain.

Writing in Current History and Forum in June 1941, Frederic Sondern, Jr., who had personal knowledge of the subject, reported:

Dr. Haushofer and his men dominate Hitler's thinking. That domination began 17 years ago when the World War general flattered the ex-corporal by paying him visits in prison. Haushofer saw possibilities in the hysterical agitator who had launched an unsuccessful beer- hall revolution. The prison visits became frequent; the distinguished soldier-scientist fascinated Hitler, then finally made him a disciple. The ascendancy has grown as Dr. Haushofer again and again has proved the accuracy of his knowledge and the wisdom of his advice....

It was Haushofer who taught the hysterical, planless agitator in a Munich jail to think in terms of continents and empires. Haushofer virtually dictated the famous Chapter XVI of Mein Kampf which outlined the foreign policy Hitler has since followed to the letter.

Haushofer's Lebensraum ("living space") theory sought to justify Germany's world conquest by claiming that it was necessary to insure the German people room to preserve and expand their racial community. He developed an intelligence-gathering organization which became the envy and model for all others. He was called everything from "Hitler's idea man" to "the man who will in the end take the Fuhrer's place," yet he seems to have kept a very low profile. But there is apparently much more to Haushofer than the geopolitician.

A love affair with the Orient began in 1908, when, as a field artillery officer in the Bavarian army, he was sent to Tokyo to study the Japanese army and to advise it as an artillery instructor. The assignment changed the course of his life. He traveled extensively in the Far East, and added the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages to his repertoire of English, French, and Russian. He could not be accused -- as other leading Nazis were -- of having a provincial background.

His four-year sojourn in the Far East also changed the course of German history. Haushofer was able to make the acquaintance of influential Japanese and to develop a rapport for the culture which helped account later for the German-Japanese alliance. When he returned to Germany in 1912, he had no reason at all to know that the Chinese proverb of which he was so fond, "He who rides a tiger cannot get off," would one day have particular relevance for him.

Haushofer was introduced to Oriental teachings during his stay in the Far East. He had been a devout student of Schopenhauer, and now he could drink directly from the source. He became sufficiently conversant in Sanskrit to translate several Hindu and Buddhist texts, and according to Ravenscroft, he was "an authority on Oriental mysticism ... concealing the other side of his nature and activities as a leader of a secret community of Initiates, and an authority on every aspect of the 'Secret Doctrine. ' [He was] in the esoteric stream of satanism through which he sought to raise Germany to the pinnacle of world power."

(The king of Satanists in America today is Anton LaVey, a former circus lion-tamer who greatly admires the Nazis. LaVey's book, The Satanic Bible, published in 1969, is dedicated to a puzzling mixture of people, with one entry reading: "To Karl Haushofer, a teacher without a classroom.")

A number of unsupported theories about Haushofer's occult connections are all rejected by his son Heinz. Haushofer is known to have had a reputation for precognition, and a belief in astrology. Johannes Tautz adds to these the belief that he belonged to George Gurdjieff's esoteric circle, which was as well versed in the difficult exercises of the Order of Bektashi Dervishes as Sebotlendorff was, and that he was also a secret member of the Thule Society. List's publishing house made a German translation of Gurdjieff's biography. Gurdjieff traveled extensively through Asia, and may have met Haushofer there. A former disciple of Gurdjieff, Louis Pauwels, believes that Haushofer was a member of "one of the most important secret Buddhist societies" and was on a mission to restore the Indo-Germanic race, which he believed had originated in Central Asia, to its former greatness. If he failed in the mission, he would commit suicide in the traditional Japanese manner.

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was born in 1872 in the Caucasus region of Russia, of Russian, Greek, and Armenian ancestry. Like Madame Blavatsky, he claimed to have met members of a Hidden Brotherhood while traveling in Asia, and they imparted to him the occult tradition. He started a school, first in Moscow and then in France, where disciples could open up higher levels of consciousness.

An enigmatic figure, he may have been sent to Tibet as a Russian secret agent. He is believed by some people to have been known there as Dorjieff, the name of the man who taught the Dalai Lama. I have been told that there is a striking similarity in early photographs of both men. J. H. Brennan, a writer on occultism, believes that it was in Tibet that Haushofer made Gurdjieff's acquaintance. In any case, whether Haushofer knew him or not, it is clear that Gurdjieff was never a Nazi sympathizer. He and a group of disciples were in Berlin during the height of Nazi power and watched a street parade, which he proceeded to satirize. He was about to be hauled off to prison, but was dismissed as a madman.

All the same, Haushofer may very well have been imbued with the spirit of Gurdjieff's teaching, which held that men are asleep and that great effort is needed for some of them to awaken and become, in effect, supermen. Gurdjieff believed in the legend of Masters of Wisdom, superhuman intelligences who keep a careful watch over the destiny of mankind and intervene whenever human affairs get out of hand. Though this legend is common in Central Asia and the Near East, it is likely that Gurdjieff derived it from the Order of Bektashi Dervishes. As we will see, it recurred in Nazi mythology.

Gurdjieff also believed that he himself was a source of higher energy from which his disciples could draw. He hinted that he was in direct communication with a higher source, through which "the work for which he was responsible would be able to spread and gain strength in the world," and that "an organization of a higher order was being established in the world which would be able to accept only those who had reached such a stage of spiritual development that they were able to generate higher energies." He believed that his work was evolutionary, because it was "against the stream of life," that is to say, "against nature and against God."

Gurdjieff was far from being a Satanist or a racist, but neither was he bound by traditional ideas of morality. There was an air of the trickster about him and he could often play the cruel despot, which would appeal to the totalitarian mentality.

Pauwels, Brennan, and Tautz have linked Haushofer's name with another esoteric group, the Vril Society, or Luminous Lodge, a secret community of occultists in pre-Nazi Berlin. "Vril" derives from the novel The Coming Race, which has prophetic overtones. It was written by an English occultist who is better known as the author of The Last Days of Pompeii: Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Written in the nineteenth century, The Coming Race details a superhuman subterranean race of beings living in huge caves in the bowels of the earth, who have developed a kind of psychic energy -- vril -- with which they are made the equals of the gods. They plan, one day, to take control of the earth and bring about a mutation among the existing human elite, subjugating, of course, the rest of slavish humanity.

Baron Lytton himself presumably believed that he was a storer of vril. [?] He practiced ceremonial magic and was claimed by Madame Blavatsky to be a Theosophist. Although he had examined mesmerism, he denied that vril had anything to do with animal magnetism. It was electricity whose properties were the same as "the one great fluid" with which all of life was pervaded. His "Vril people" accumulated it through mental and physical exercises resembling yoga.

The Vril Society in Berlin apparently sought connection with the supernatural beings in the center of the world, and practiced the techniques which would eventually strengthen their mastery of the divine energy, so that they would have power over others and over events. They believed that this attempt at mastery was the only thing which gave purpose to existence. Any other activity was meaningless. One day, when the world was transformed, the beings in the center of the earth would emerge and form an alliance with those initiates who had succeeded in adequately preparing themselves.

The Berlin Vril Society was in close contact with an English group known as the Golden Dawn Society, which was, for a time, headed by the Satanist Aleister Crowley, and counted among its members such illustrious people as the poet William Butler Yeats.

The Golden Dawn Society created an even more exclusive inner group than its competitors, the Theosophists, with admission by invitation only, rule by secret chiefs who were discarnate spirits existing only in the astral plane, the practice of ritual magic, and the use of meeting rooms unknown to outer-order members. Such elitism made it the prototype of other magical groups throughout the continent.

The swastika was a key symbol to Golden Dawn, as it had been to Madame Blavatsky. She had incorporated it into a mystical brooch which she wore. Aleister Crowley had written about it in a tract published in 1910, and he later claimed that the Nazis had stolen the sacred swastika from him.

Haushofer returned to his native country in 1912, and advanced to the rank of general in World War I. He developed a reputation for clairvoyance, predicting, according to Pauwels, "the hour when the enemy would attack, the places where shells would fall, storms and political changes in countries about which he knew nothing."

Rudolf Hess was made his aide-de-camp. It was to remain a lasting relationship. Hess often referred to his old commander as a Secret Chief.

Haushofer the geopolitician is a much more familiar and comprehensible figure than Haushofer the Secret Chief. With his Roman nose and patrician bearing, he made an imposing professor at war's end. He had already distinguished himself in formulating ideas which were well received by the nationalists and Pan-Germans. At the University of Munich, he taught that "war is the father of all things" and that Japan and Germany had a common destiny: to appropriate more "living space" from other nations. He moved quite easily from military affairs to geopolitical statecraft, making good use of his Far Eastern travels. Munich, the center of revolutionary conspiracies, was the perfect intellectual climate for the father of geopolitics. His disciples and pupils slavishly followed his theories and style, and evolved a strategy of German world conquest which presently had a unique opportunity of fulfillment.

His most famous disciple was Rudolf Hess. He followed Haushofer to the University of Munich and sat at his feet, ardently drinking in the pseudoscientific political theories. He was a frequent visitor to the Haushofer home. Mrs. Haushofer was kind enough to give him English lessons. But the professor described his pupil with merciless accuracy:

He was one student among others, not particularly gifted, of slow intellectual grasp and dull in his work. He was very dependent on emotions and passionately liked to pursue fantastic ideas. He was only influenced by arguments of no importance at the very limits of human knowledge and superstition; he also believed in the influence of the stars on his personal and political life.... I was always disconcerted by the expression of his clear eyes, which had something somnambulistic about it....

Presumably, the professor was able to effect a change in his student, because he later claimed that it was only Hess who really understood his theories.

On Haushofer's visits to Landsberg, his geopolitical theories were eagerly discussed by all three men, and incorporated into Mein Kampf. Hess always remained loyal to both masters.

As for Hitler, he was released first, and wailed to Hanfstaengl about Hess, "Ach, mein Rudi, mein Hesserl, isn't it appalling to think he's still there?"

The common experience at Landsberg may have sealed a mystical brotherhood between the two men. Both Hitler and Hess were practiced in occult exercises. In the relatively isolated conditions of their prison room, they could have surrendered to the Grand Work of calling forth untapped powers in themselves. Hanfstaengl believed that Hitler's mind had become "impregnated with the limited doctrines of the Hess-Haushofer coterie" and that Hess had contributed to his "gradual divorce from reality with the inception of the Fuhrer cult." Before the Putsch, Heil was just an old Austrian custom which the Nazis had appropriated as a way of saying "Good day." After the Putsch, party people "Heil Hitlered" as a sort of password.

Hess kept his job as secretary on his return from prison, only now it was secretary of the Nazi party. After 1932, when the Nazis came to power, he was made deputy leader, second in command under Hitler. He controlled the central political organization of the Party, supervised and coordinated policy throughout Germany, and was in charge of at least nineteen departments of the government. He was not popular with the other party people. Kurt Ludecke refers to him as a "notorious" homosexual, and claims he was known as "Fraulein Anna."

He had married at Hitler's suggestion, and according to Goebbels' wife, for years Frau Hess announced that they were about to have a child, because some prophet had foreseen it. They consulted cartomancers, astrologers, and other magicians, who urged on them combinations of drinks and potions, until in the end a son was born. To commemorate the occasion, all the district leaders were urged to make an offering of a sack of earth from their respective districts. The earth was poured under the baby's cradle, as a symbol of his beginnings on German soil. As district leader of Berlin, Goebbels speculated on whether he ought not to have sent a Berlin paving-stone.

Hess was a man hungry for faith and ready to place it in pseudosciences like astrology, homeopathy, and every manner of divination. His fate was ruled entirely by the stars, by the pronouncements of soothsayers, by animal magnetism, the swings of pendulums, and terrestrial radiations. Demons had a terrible reality for him. Hanfstaengl says that Hess was considered

highly peculiar and went in for vegetarianism, nature cures and other weird beliefs. It got to the point where he would not go to bed without testing with a divining-rod whether there were any subterranean watercourses which conflicted with the direction of his couch. His wife used to complain: "I have as much experience out of our marriage as a candidate for confirmation."

Himmler's Finnish physiotherapist, Dr. Felix Kersten, recalls finding Hess in bed under a huge magnet swinging over him from the ceiling. There were twelve other magnets under his bed, to draw harmful substances out of his body and restore his strength.

Still, Hess was a valuable man to the Party, probably for the reason stated in a character study published in Vas Reich; "Hess can be silent and keep secrets."

Meanwhile, Hess's original master, Haushofer the geopolitician, was soon transformed into elder statesman. He was made president of the German Academy and of the People's Organization for Germans Living Abroad, and became an important member of the Academy of German Law, which originated the legislation binding on conquered countries. Most impressive of all was his job as director of the Institut fur Geopolitik of the University of Munich. After Hitler came to power, he saw to it that Haushofer received unlimited funds for the expansion of his Institut. His was the head which conceived of the plan by which Germany was to conquer the world.

He had long believed that Germany would give birth to a leader who would rule the earth; and astrological predictions had convinced him that this leader would accomplish his mission in an alliance with Japan. He often had premonitions, upon which he acted. He convinced Hitler that the Institut must find out everything about its enemies: strengths, weaknesses, impending famine, religious sensibilities, the personalities and tastes of officials, the morals and corruptibility of even minor bureaucrats, the views of opinion makers. To collate, sift through, and interpret all this material on every country in the world, Haushofer enlisted a staff of more than a thousand students, historians, economists, statisticians, military strategists, psychologists, meteorologists, physicists, geographers, and other specialists, working in Germany and abroad.

The researches apparently paid off. When, in 1938, the General Staff was worried that France would mobilize if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Haushofer assured them that it neither could nor would. He turned out to be right. He argued that Poland could be conquered in eighteen days. The military disagreed. They feared their armored trucks would bog down in the Polish mud. Haushofer said it was not likely to rain. It did not. The General Staff didn't believe Germany should invade Norway. Haushofer prophesied that it would be easy. The military wanted to invade France when war first started. Haushofer urged that they wait until German propaganda had made its full impact on the people. He also dictated when the campaigns in Africa and the Balkans would begin. It was his idea that the Nazis make temporary friends with Russia, despite widespread anxiety about collaborating with the Communists. He wooed Latin America for its usefulness against America.

The Nazis tried to keep foreign investigators from finding out how elaborate their new geopolitical machine was. They deliberately led outsiders to believe that they were not themselves taking it seriously, and the deception worked. Deprecatory remarks were made about Haushofer's use of such phrases as the "demoniac beauty of geopolitics," the "Nordic Japanese," "the almost telepathic sensitivity of oceanic nations to foreign dangers. " Time called his theory "one of history's greatest hoaxes -- a vast nonesuch of propaganda for luring Germans to the idea of world domination.... Mysticisms, race theories, phony 'cultural' conceptions...." But some observers believed that Haushofer's thinking dominated Hitler's. Even American thought was influenced. Said Hans W. Weigert in Foreign Affairs, July 1942: " ... the highest eulogy a political writer could earn was to be called 'the American Haushofer' ... colleges all over the country hurried to organize 'Institutes of Geopolitics.'"

He became the geopolitical adviser to Japan, as well, and his house was the meeting-place for Japanese diplomats to come and talk over their alliance with German diplomats.

His eldest son, Albrecht, was also a geopolitician, and occupied the Chair of Political Geography at the University of Berlin. He worked closely with the Foreign Office, and was made Joachim von Ribbentrop's assistant.

Father and son kept up close contact with British members of the upper class-Golden Dawn people, according to Jean-Michel Angebert, a French writer on occultism. Once war broke out, though, there was no longer any way to communicate. The elder Haushofer used his influence with Hess to try to convince Hitler to make peace with England. The same mystical thinking which advised the German army to enlarge the living space of the Third Reich "by moving out from a powerful territorial hub and by accomplishing this conquest progressively, step by step, following the accelerating movement of a spiraling dextrogyre [clockwise rotation]" urged Hess, in the spring of 1941, to embark on an adventure which was to make him the most ridiculous figure in the Third Reich.

The Haushofers had planned for some time a personal meeting between Hess and the Duke of Hamilton, a good friend of Albrecht's. The duke had the ear of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and King George VI. If he could be instrumental in passing on a German peace proposal, it would be worth risking a secret rendezvous. The elder Haushofer told Hess that he had two dreams on two separate occasions. In one, Hess flew a plane to an important destination. In another, Hess walked along the tartan-tapestried halls of a splendid castle (the Duke of Hamilton happened to be Scottish). Twenty-four years earlier, Haushofer's premonitions had been celebrated for their accuracy. Hess was now ready to fly whenever the stars were propitious.

He took off for Scotland alone on May 10, 1941, in a Messerschmitt that had been especially designed for him, with just a few possessions, including visiting cards from each of the Haushofers, an assortment of homeopathic pills, a small hypodermic syringe, and a letter addressed to the duke. Whether or not Hitler knew his plans, if not the specific date of his departure, is still a matter of hot debate.

Hess landed in Scotland, but that was the only part of the trip which went as he and the Haushofers would have expected. The British government did not leap at his peace offer. The German government had to denounce him as mentally deranged, which caused it quite a bit of embarrassment, since Hess had been in a position of authority, with no one questioning his sanity. Hess remained an uncomfortable subject in both countries. British cabinet ministers sealed their lips so tightly that one Londoner quipped: "Never has so much been kept from so many by so few."

The British would not allow Hess to go home, warning that he would be done in by his compatriots if he did. Hess sent Professor Haushofer a birthday greeting:

Do not worry over me. You, less than anyone, need do this. That my present situation is not exactly agreeable goes without saying. But, in time of war, we have to put up with many things that are not agreeable.

Let the waves like thunder break,
Be your very life at stake;
May you crash or may you land
E'er as your own pilot stand!

That I crashed is not to be denied, and it is equally certain that I was my own pilot! In this matter I have nothing with which to reproach myself. It was I who took the controls. You know as well as I do that the compass which guides our affairs is influenced by forces that are infallible --  even when we know them not.  May those forces be favorable to you in the years to come!

In the event, the "forces" proved no more favorable to Professor Haushofer than to Hess himself.

Not only were hospitals and streets named "Hess" ostentatiously changed after his unsuccessful attempt to end the war, but there was a wholesale routing of astrologers, seers, mediums, and nature therapists.

Hess, meanwhile, grew increasingly paranoid. He was being hypnotized by the Jews, he complained. Furthermore, so were Churchill, Secretary of State Anthony Eden, and the king of Italy.

Karl and Albrecht Haushofer fell from grace. A letter from Martin Bormann to Alfred Rosenberg dated June 17, 1942, suggests that the National Socialist Monthly gave the professor too much publicity, and that this should not happen in the future.

Albrecht Haushofer participated in a coup d'etat against Hitler on July 20, 1944. The Fuhrer escaped death. Karl Haushofer was sent to Dachau, Albrecht to Moabite prison. Before his execution, Albrecht composed eighty sonnets, entitled Sonnets from Moabite, some of which have become renowned. The collection was in his hands when he was shot on a street in Prussia. Sonnet 39 is called "Guilt":

I should have seen my duty sooner and should have dared with louder voice to name as evil the thing my judgment knew as evil but held too long unspoken.... I deceived my own conscience. I lied to myself and others. I early understood the whole sequence of the misery to come.

Sonnet 38 is called "The Father":

In Father's life, the die is cast.
Once it was in the power of his will
To push the demon back into his cell.
My father held the seal and broke it.
He did not sense the breath of evil
And out into the world he let the devil.

After the war, an American was sent to interrogate Karl Haushofer for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, and he confessed that Hess had been his favorite pupil. But Karl Haushofer never testified, for he committed suicide in the traditional Japanese manner.

Hess did testify at Nuremberg. The other leading Nazis believed his presence at the trial was a disgrace. He barely seemed to listen, and often dozed. It was as if he were operating on another level of reality.

From 1947, he has been Prisoner No.7 at Spandau in Berlin. He practices yoga regularly, and though he writes to his wife and son, he says he does not want to see them because it would make the rest of his life sentence too unbearable.

His wife keeps a room for him in a mountain chalet which she manages. "My husband's mouth is closed," she says. "He cannot utter the final word about his deed."

Though she has not seen him since the day he left for England, they are never apart. Says Mrs. Hess:

Telepathy, astrology and his letters keep us together. ... My husband and I are in constant telepathic contact. People frequently turn up here that I have not seen for years, and inevitably in Rudolf's next letter there are questions about these very visitors. My husband and I receive and send to each other in this way.

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