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Claims that Rudolf Hess was murdered under orders from the British to stop him revealing wartime secrets have been revealed in a police report which has only just seen the light of day after 25 years.
According to the documents, a doctor who was treating the NS Party deputy leader supplied Scotland Yard with the names of two British agents who were suspected of the murder, but the force was advised to stop its investigations. The report by Detective Chief Superintendent Howard Jones, which has now been released under the Freedom of Information Act, provides details on the inquiry into surgeon Hugh Thomas's claims.
It was written two years after Hess's death in 1987 after the force was called in following claims by Mr Thomas that the man sent to Spandau Prison in then-West Berlin was not Hess but an imposter sent by the National Socialists in 1941.
Allied authorities said Hess hanged himself with an electrical cord in Spandau jail on August 17, 1987, at the age of 93.
But Mr Thomas said the real Hess was in fact killed by two British agents dressed as members of the U.S. forces amid speculation he was about to be released due to a veto by the Soviet Union, The Independent has reported.
The report cites how Mr Thomas 'confidentially imparted' the names of the two alleged suspects which he had received from a former member of the SAS.
Mr Jones wrote: '[Mr Thomas] had received information that two assassins had been ordered on behalf of the British Government to kill Hess in order that he should not be released and free to expose secrets concerning the plot to overthrow the Churchill government.'
Despite not finding 'much substance' to the murder allegations, Mr Jones ordered an investigation.
According to The Independent, the Crown Prosecution Service received a copy of the report in 1989. Within six months the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, Sir Allan Green, advised the investigation should not continue.
Hess was an early confidant of Hitler, who dictated much of Mein Kampf to him while imprisoned during the 1920s.
He eventually rose to become deputy NS leader, and was captured in 1941 during a solo flight to Scotland on an apparently unauthorised peace mission.
He was later convicted in the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War ended.
At the Nuremberg trials after the war, Hess was found innocent of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity", but sentenced to life imprisonment for "crimes against peace and conspiracy to commit crimes against peace". His appearance in Britain in 1941 has been the subject of much debate over the years.
In March last year a declassified report revealed for the first time the stark scene in which Hess was said to have killed himself and his alleged suicide note. But the report of the investigation into Hess's death, released last year under Freedom of Information, only deepened the mystery surrounding his final moments.
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