Wolf Rüdiger Hess (''Heß'' in German script; 18 November 1937 – 24 October 2001) was a German architect, the only son of

Rudolf Hess Rudolf Walter Richard Hess (Heß in German; 26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987) was a German politician, Nuremberg trials, convicted war criminal and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer ( ...

and Ilse Hess (née Pröhl).

Early life

Born in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

, Hess lived with his parents until his father's flight to Scotland on 14 May 1941. After that, his father was denounced by the Nazi government as "mentally ill", and this led his mother to leave Munich and take her son to live at the family's house in the country, at Bad Oberdorf, a small spa village in the

Allgäu Alps The Allgäu Alps () are a mountain range in the Northern Limestone Alps, located on the Austria–Germany border, which covers parts of the Germany, German states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg and the Austrian states of Tyrol (state), Tyrol an ...

. There, young Wolf Rüdiger gained the lifelong nickname of "Buz". On 3 June 1947, Hess's mother was arrested by Allied forces, together with all the wives of the other Germans convicted at Nuremberg, and she was interned at Augsburg-Göggingen camp. Hess then lived with an aunt until his mother's release in March 1948. He began to attend a local high school in 1947 and then from the mid-1950s studied architecture, qualifying as an architect in 1961. Tania Crasnianski, ''Children of Nazis: The Sons and Daughters of Himmler, Göring, Hess, Mengele, and Others — Living with a Father's Monstrous Legacy'' (Simon and Schuster, 2018), pp. 70–78

Campaigns

Hess gained prominence for criticising an investigation into his father's alleged suicide while serving a life sentence in

Spandau Prison Spandau Prison was a former military prison located in the Spandau borough of West Berlin (present-day Berlin, Germany). Built in 1876, it became a proto-concentration camp under Nazi Germany. After the Second World War, it held seven top Nazi l ...

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

. Hess maintained that the investigation was a cover-up, and that the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had murdered him. He believed that they had done this to prevent his father's

parole Parole, also known as provisional release, supervised release, or being on paper, is a form of early release of a prisoner, prison inmate where the prisoner agrees to abide by behavioral conditions, including checking-in with their designated ...

– which he believed to be imminent – because the British government was afraid that he would reveal embarrassing information about British actions during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. Wolf Rüdiger Hess and his father's lawyer, Alfred Seidl, arranged their own autopsy.British Sympathy for Jailed Nazi on the BBC
/ref> Hess wrote three books: My Father Rudolf Hess (1986), Who Murdered My Father, Rudolf Hess? (1989) and Rudolf Hess: I regret nothing (1994/1998). Hess was head of the ''Rudolf-Heß-Gesellschaft e.V.'' before his death. At the age of 63, Wolf Rüdiger Hess suffered a stroke and was taken to a Munich hospital, where he died. He left a widow and three children. Little is known about his children apart from his son Wolf Andreas Hess, who Wolf Rüdiger Hess was immensely pleased was born on April 20th, Hitler's birthday. Wolf Andreas Hess, a computer programmer, planned to create a website dedicated to his grandfather, Rudolf Hess. However, he never finished this after he was fined in Germany in 2002 for denying the existence of gas chambers at Dachau on the Internet.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hess, Wolf Rudiger 1937 births 2001 deaths German neo-Nazis Rudolf Hess 20th-century German architects Architects from Munich