that? Hess was eccentric, yes. But mad? It was the men he left behind who were mad!”
“Hess could have written those papers himself,” she argued. “If Hess didn’t know Latin when he went into Spandau, he certainly could have learned it during his years of imprisonment.”
“True,” Natterman admitted. “But unlikely. Did you note the quote from Ovid? High-flying language for a self-taught student. But that’s verifiable, in any case.”
Ilse tasted her tea. It had gone cold. “Opa, you can’t really believe that the Allies kept the wrong man in prison all these years.”
“Why not? Ilse, you should understand something. These papers do not exist in a vacuum. They merely confirm a body of evidence which has been accumulating for decades. Circumstantial evidence, testimonial evidence, medical evidence—”
“What medical evidence?”
The professor smiled; he loved nothing more than a willing student. “Evidence unearthed by a British army surgeon who examined Number Seven while he was in Spandau. He’s the man who really cracked this case open. My God, he’ll be ecstatic when he finds out about these papers.”
“What evidence did he discover?”
“A war wound. Or a lack of one, I should say. This surgeon was one of Hess’s doctors in Spandau, and in the course of his duties he came across Hess’s First World War record. Hess was wounded three times in that war—the worst wound being a rifle bullet through the lung. Yet when the surgeon examined Number Seven, he found no scars on the chest or back where that wound should have been. And after looking into the matter further—examining the prisoner’s X rays—he found no radiographic evidence of such a wound. There should have been scarring of the lung, caused by the force of the bullet and other organic particles tearing through it. But the surgeon found none. He had quite a bit of experience with gunshot wounds, too. He’d done a tour of duty in Northern Ireland.”
Natterman chuckled at Ilse’s bewildered expression. “You’re surprised by my knowledge? You shouldn’t be. Any German or British historian could tell you as much.” He laughed. “I could give you twice as much speculation on who started the Reichstag fire!”
“But the details,” she said suspiciously. “Dates, medical evidence … It’s almost as if you were studying the case when I called you.”
The professor’s face grew grave. “My dear, you have obviously failed to grasp the monumental importance of this find. These papers could shake the world. The time period they describe—the forty-four days beginning with Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain and ending with Hitler’s invasion of Russia—represents the turning point of the entire Second World War, of the entire twentieth century. In the spring of 1941, Adolf Hitler held the future of the world in his hands. Of all Europe, only England still held out against him. The Americans were still a year from entering the war. German U-boats ruled the seas. If Hitler had pressed home the attack against England with all his forces, the British wouldn’t have stood a chance. The Americans would have been denied their staging post for a European invasion, and Hitler could have turned his full might against Russia with his flanks protected.” Natterman held up a long, crooked finger. “But he didn’t invade England. And no one knows why.”
The professor began pacing the kitchen, punctuating his questions by stabbing the air with his right forefinger. “In 1940 Hitler let the British Army escape at Dunkirk. Why? All through the fall of 1940 and the spring of ’41 he delayed invading Britain. Why? Operation Sea-Lion—the planned invasion of Britain—was a joke. Hitler’s best generals have admitted this. Churchill publicly taunted Hitler, yet still he delayed. Why? And then the core of the whole mad puzzle: On May tenth, Rudolf Hess flew to Britain on a secret mission. Scarcely a month later”—Natterman clapped his hands together with a crack—“Hitler threw his armies into the icy depths of Russia to be slaughtered. Ilse, that single decision doomed Nazi Germany. It gave Churchill the time he needed to rearm England and to draw Roosevelt into the war. It was military suicide, and Hitler knew it! For twenty years he had sworn he would never fight a two-front war. He had publicly proclaimed such a war unwinnable. So why did he do it?”
Ilse blinked. “Do you know?”
Natterman nodded sagely. “I think I do. There are dozens of complex theories, but I think the answer is painfully simple: Hitler had no choice. I don’t believe he ever intended to invade England. Russia was his target all along; his own writings confirm this. Hitler hated Churchill, but he had tremendous respect for the English as a people—fellow Nordics and all that. I think Hitler put off invading Britain because he believed—right up until it was too late—that England could be neutralized without firing a shot. I think certain elements of the British government were prepared to sign a peace treaty with Hitler, so that he would be free to destroy Communist Russia. And I believe Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s secret envoy to those Englishmen. The moment Hess’s presence in England was made public, Joseph Stalin accused the British of conspiring with Hitler. I think Stalin was right.”
The professor’s eyes blazed with fanatical conviction. “But neither Stalin, nor all his spies, nor a thousand scholars, nor I have ever been able to prove that! For nearly fifty years the truth has lain buried in the secret vaults of the British government. By law the relevant Hess files are to remain sealed until the year 2016. Some will never be opened. What are the British hiding? Whom are they protecting? A secret cabal of highly placed British Nazis? Were there powerful Englishmen—even members of the royal family—who were so afraid of communism that they were ready to climb into Hitler’s bed for protection, no matter how many Jews he slaughtered?” Natterman punched a fist into his palm. “By God, if these Spandau papers end up proving that, the walls of Parliament will be hard put to withstand the firestorm that follows!”
Ilse stared at her grandfather with astonishment. His passion had infected her, but it could not blot out the worry she felt for Hans. Yet somehow she couldn’t bring herself to confess her fears to the old man. At least debating the fine points of conspiracy theories helped to pass the time quickly.
“But if the prisoner was a double,” she said, “how could he fool his Allied captors? Even an actor couldn’t hold out under interrogation.”
Natterman snorted scornfully. “The British claim they never professionally interrogated him. And why should they? They knew Hess was a double from the beginning. They held him incommunicado in England for the first four years of his captivity, and they’ve been playing this ridiculous game ever since to cover up the real Hess’s mission. The American government supports Britain’s policy right down the line. And the French have never made a fuss about it. They have their own skeletons to hide.”
“But the Russians,” Ilse reminded him. “You said Stalin suspected a plot from the beginning.”
“Perhaps the double didn’t fool them,” Natterman suggested.
“Then why wouldn’t they expose him!”
Natterman frowned. “I don’t know. That’s the conundrum, isn’t it? It’s the key to this whole mystery. There are reasons that the Russians wouldn’t have talked in the early years. One is that certain alleged Anglo-Nazi intrigues—between Hess and the Duke of Windsor, for example—took place on Spanish and Portuguese soil. If such meetings did actually occur, Moscow would have known all about them”—Natterman grinned with glee—“because the MI-6 officer responsible for the Spanish desk at that time was none other than Kim Philby. What irony! The Russians couldn’t reveal the Windsor-Hess
