Flight From Reality: Rudolf Hess and his mission to Scotland 1941

Shortly after 11 pm on 10 May 1941, a Scottish ploughman spotted a parachutist floating to the ground in a field at Floors Farm, a dozen miles south of Glasgow. He ran out to find a burning twin-engine Messerschmitt Bf 110 bomber and an injured officer wearing the uniform of a captain of the German air force.

The aviator identified himself as Captain Albert Horn and asked to be taken to see the Duke of Hamilton for whom, he claimed, he was carrying an important message. In reality, ‘Captain Horn’ was none other than Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer and right-hand man of Adolf Hitler. Arrested and interrogated by various government officials, it soon emerged that Hess was seeking to negotiate a peace deal between Britain and Germany. Held as a prisoner of war for the next four years, he was convicted of conspiracy and crimes against peace at the Nuremberg Trials and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hess’s flight to Britain has remained one of the most bizarre and mysterious chapters in the history of the Second World War and has created a multitude of colourful conspiracy theories. Some have claimed that Hess came as an emissary of Hitler or that his mission was engineered by British Intelligence; others that Hitler’s deputy had died in a plane crash while flying with the Duke of Kent in 1942 and that a double went to trial in Nuremberg.

In Flight from Reality, editor David Stafford has assembled an international team of experts on this episode, including Hugh Trevor-Roper, John Erickson, Warren Kimball and Len Deighton. The result is the definitive account of Hess’s mission that separates fact from fiction and sheds new light on its significance in the history of the Second World War.

Praise for Flight from Reality:
‘Fascinating ... far more intriguing than the wildest conspiracy theory’ - Scotland on Sunday

David Stafford is the author or editor of several books on intelligence history, including Britain and European Resistance, Churchill and Secret Service, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets and Secret Agent: The True Story of the Special Operations Executive. He is Project Director at the Centre for Second World War Studies in the Department of History at the University of Edinburgh.