Free Republic

The Nazis attempted to broker a peace offering with Britain—if they were allowed a free path to attack the USSR, a new book has revealed. Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain during World War Two to sign a peace deal ordered by Adolf Hitler has long been recorded as a bizarre one-man mission to try and reconcile warring West Europe and the Nazis. … But historian Peter Padfield has discovered evidence he claims proves that the deputy Führer held a detailed peace treaty. It proposed that the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over a planned...

French anti-war campaigners have desecrated a statue of Winston Churchill in central Paris on the anniversary of the city's liberation from Nazi rule. The night time attack saw the bronze hands of the £250,000 statue daubed in red paint. The initials RH were also daubed on the statue, perhaps a reference to Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy, who flew to Britain at the height of the Second World War to allegedly try and make peace. Instead, Churchill had him thrown in prison in 1941, and the war continued for a further four years. After the war, Hess was tried at...

German mail company Deutsche Post has inadvertently issued stamps bearing the image of Adolf Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, the company said on Wednesday. Deutsche Post printed 20 stamps with Hess next to a bouquet of flowers as part of a service which allows clients to order custom-made envelopes, a company spokesman said. "It is very unfortunate. But it happened," the spokesman said. "I presume it came from the far-right scene. But those 20 envelopes won't shake up German democracy." The stamps would be offensive to Jewish groups and embarrassing to Germans anxious to live down the country's Nazi past....

MI5 uncovered a secret Polish plot to assassinate Rudolf Hess after his landing by parachute in Scotland during the Second World War, according to newly disclosed evidence. The arrival of Hitler’s deputy near the Duke of Hamilton’s Lanarkshire estate in 1941 raised the question of whether British intelligence or members of the aristocracy were trying to broker a secret peace deal with the Nazis. Although such conspiracy theories subsequently proved unfounded, some British-based Polish soldiers feared Hess’s arrival showed their country was being sold down the river. After Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, many soldiers escaped to Britain and...

It was one of the most bizarre episodes of the Second World War. When Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, landed by parachute in 1941 near the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in Lanarkshire, it raised the question of whether British intelligence or members of the aristocracy were trying to broker a secret peace deal with the Nazis. But recently declassified MI5 files shed more light on Hess’s mysterious flight to Scotland, and finally prove the conspiracy theories to be unfounded, according to the duke’s son, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the Lothians MSP. The Conservative peer said yesterday that the new MI5...

BERLIN (AP) — About 2,500 neo-Nazis attended a rally Saturday in memory of Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess in the southern German town where he is buried, police said. The rally in the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel passed without violence, police said, despite the presence of about 500 counter-demonstrators. A total of 34 people were detained for weapons offenses and displaying symbols banned in Germany, such as the Nazi swastika. Police said they had 1,000 officers on duty to keep the two sides apart. The far-right gathering took place after a state court overturned a ban by local authorities —...