No operation had been necessary. The wound had been a clean through-shot from a small-calibre rifle which left minor scarring, in a different location to that suggested by Thomas. No amount of minor quibbling about ancillary details can hide the fact that Thomas had based his entire hypothesis on incorrect information. Furthermore his claim that he possesses a copy of a letter from Lord Willingdon to William Mackenzie, the Canadian Prime Minister, discussing Hess and 'the problem we have with the double' cannot be verified since Thomas claims that the Official Secrets Act precludes him from publishing it. His wife Use described the double allegation as 'ridiculous', while fellow prisoner Albert Speer dismissed it as 'utter nonsense.' And why on earth would Hess's double accept an uncomfortable term of life imprisonment without disclosing his true identity? The notion is simply preposterous.

Yet another fanciful story emerged from Germany in 1987. According to the German historian Werner Maser, Hess was temporarily released from his cell on the night of 17/18 March 1952, during a Russian tour of duty at Spandau. Without the knowledge of the western powers, Hess was taken to a secret location where he met senior officials from the German Democratic Republic. On the instructions of Stalin he was offered his freedom and a leading position in East Germany, on condition he declared himself to be a socialist. Hess. however, is said to have remained loyal to Hitler and turned down the proposal. The Russians in turn warned Hess to reveal nothing of his outing, and that he would remain in Spandau until his death. The story seems somewhat far-fetched.

In the second version of his book, Hess: A Tale of Two Murders, Dr Hugh Thomas put forward the proposition that the double who died in Spandau on the afternoon of 17 August 1987 was murdered. The official version holds that Hess hanged himself in a garden shed in the grounds of the prison, by looping the electrical cord of a reading lamp around his neck and suspending this from a window latch. After attempts were made to revive him in situ he was rushed to the British Military Hospital, where, after further unsuccessful attempts at resuscitation, he was pronounced dead at 4.10 pm. A suicide note addressed to his family was found in his jacket pocket, and the initial autopsy performed on 19 August found that death had resulted from asphyxia, caused by compression of the neck due to suspension. It is worth recording here that Hess had attempted to take his own life on several previous occasions. In June 1941 he threw himself over a balcony at Mytchett Place near AIdershot. breaking his left leg, and stabbed his own chest with a breadknife in February 1945. Even as late as 1977. at the age of eighty-three, Hess tried to cut his wrists with a table knife.

Thomas argues that the neck injuries were consistent with throttling, that the suicide note was forged, and that the Hess double was murdered by SAS personnel on the orders of the British government, to whom Hess and/or his double had been an embarrassment since 1941. His son Wolf Hess also believes that his father was murdered, but dismisses the doppelgdnger theory. Quite why the authorities waited until 1987 to murder Hess is not explained. while some of the additional evidence cited by Thomas is flawed. He notes that neither of the autopsies carried out in August 1987 noted the 'massive' gunshot wounds dating from 1917, although as we have already seen this theory would be comprehensively demolished in 1989 when his complete medical file was unearthed in Munich. Thomas also found it suspicious that the corpse measured a height of 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 metres), whereas Hess was said to have been a tall man who stood about 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 metres). Again, his original medical file reveals the truth, which is that Hess was 5 feet 10 inches tall (1.77 metres), and that a reduction of 2 cm in height as a result of stooping in old age is quite normal.

In 1989 the murder theory gained some support from the testimony of a Tunisian medical orderly, Abdallah Melaouhi, who had acted as Hess's nurse since 1982. Melaouhi claimed that on the day in question he was delayed by guards, and that when he finally arrived at the garden summerhouse (in fact an elderly Portakabin) there were two unfamiliar men present dressed in American uniforms. He also stated that furniture had been thrown about, as if during a struggle, and that there was no cord around Hess's neck, the electrical flex still being attached to the lamp and plugged in. Melaouhi was also of the opinion that Hess was so debilitated and arthritic that he was unable even to tie his own shoelaces, let alone knot a cord around his neck. He even stated that at the British Military Hospital the British, French and American directors later toasted the passing of Hess with champagne.

This evidence was largely contradicted by Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Le Tissier, the British Governor at Spandau. In his book Farewell to Spandau, Le Tissier pointed out that the only delay in Melaouhi's arrival was caused by difficulty in locating him, eventually in the mess, and that even then the log at the main gate showed there was little delay before he arrived at the summerhouse. There were four reading lamps in the Portakabin, and therefore more than one cord. The two men in American uniform were medics who had been called to assist with the resuscitation, and in fact continued in these attempts with the help of Melaouhi. The furniture had been pushed aside in the course of their previous efforts to revive Hess. As for his medical condition, Hess wore a truss and probably found bending to tie his shoelaces problematic, but he could write legibly and thus tie a knot.

Probably the last great Hess conspiracy theory emerged in 2001, again in Double Standards by Picknett, Prince and Prior. As well as postulating that the reception committee at Dungavel included the Duke of Kent, brother of King George VI, the authors also surmise that the Duke's death in a flying accident in August 1942 was an assassination, in which the real Rudolf Hess also perished. For reasons of space it is not possible to explore this theory fully here, but in summary it runs as follows. The Duke of Kent remained in favour of a negotiated peace, and with others continued to work toward this end after Hess arrived in May 1941. Although Hess was officially held first at Mytchett Place, and then Maindiff Court in Wales, he was also confined at several locations in Scotland, including Braemore Lodge near Loch More. Beyond doubt is the fact that on 25 August 1942 the Duke took off from Invergordon in a Short Sunderland flying boat. Officially he was on a morale-boosting visit to RAF personnel stationed in Iceland, although the memorial erected by his widow indicated that the Duke was engaged in an unspecified 'special mission'. About 60 miles after take-off the Sunderiand crashed into a remote hilltop near Caithness, some ten miles off course, killing everyone on board bar the rear gunner. Various explanations have been offered through the years, including pilot error, drunkenness, magnetic rocks, faked German radio messages, and a cover-up to hide the fact that the Duke himself was at the controls.

The authors of Double Standards present a convincing case that there were sixteen men on board the Sunderland, rather than the fifteen listed in official reports. However, the rest of their hypothesis is harder to credit. This suggests that the extra man was Hess, picked up by the Duke's flying boat from Loch More, and en route to Sweden. Rather than meeting with an accident, the aircraft was sabotaged in the same fashion as the B24 Liberator in which the Polish leader General Sikorski would perish in July 1943. Beyond the fact that the evidence presented in support of this theory is circumstantial in the extreme, there are at least two major flaws in the assassination plot. First, it scarcely seems credible that Hess could have been collected or snatched by the Duke without the aid of a small private army. Second, if Hess was indeed on board the doomed aircraft, then it raises the spectre of the fantastical doppelgdnger theory and the almost total suspension of disbelief which that entails. Instead, the likely explanation is that the crash was simply a tragic accident caused by poor or impaired navigation, whoever may have been at the controls.

Today few would disagree that Rudolf Hess was kept far too long in captivity, a hapless pawn in a prolonged game of chess between former Allies turned Cold War adversaries. However, it is important to remember that the underlying purpose of the Hess peace mission, the last serious attempt to reach an Anglo-German detente, was in no way humanitarian. Hess was a staunch Nazi, and like Hitler desired a peace which would allow Germany to continue the war in the east, leaving the Reich free to initiate the Holocaust unhindered. Against this background it matters little that the original point of the war, the liberation of Poland from foreign occupation, was never achieved. Therefore it would be quite wrong to conclude that Hess should be admired for his efforts, or that Churchill should be criticised for rejecting his proposals out of hand. rather than putting them before his Cabinet or the Commons.