Shortly after 11pm on 10 May 1941, a Scottish ploughman spotted a parachutist floating to the ground on a field at Floors Farm, just a dozen miles south of Glasgow. He ran out to find a burning twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110 bomber and an injured officer wearing the uniform of a Captain of the German Air Force.
The aviator identified himself as Captain Albert Horn and asked to be taken to see the Duke of Hamilton for whom, he claimed, he was carrying an important message. In reality, "Captain Horn" was none other than Rudolf Hess, Deputy Fuhrer and right-hand man of Adolf Hitler.
Arrested and interrogated by various government officials, it soon emerged that Hess had not come as Hitler's emissary but was acting alone in seeking to negotiate a peace deal between Britain and Germany. Held as a prisoner of war for the next four years, convicted as a war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials and sentenced to life imprisonment, Hess spent the rest of his life in a high-security prison in Berlin-Spandau where he committed suicide in 1987, aged 93.
Hess's flight to Britain has remained one of the most bizarre and mysterious chapters in the history of the Second World War and has created a multitude of colourful conspiracy theories. Some have claimed that Hess's mission was engineered by MI5; others that Hitler's deputy had died in a plane crash while flying with the Duke of Kent in 1942 and that a double went to trial in Nuremberg; and Hess's son believes that he was killed in 1987 by the British Secret Service.
In 'Flight From Reality' David Stafford has assembled an international team of experts on this episode, including Lothar Kettenacher, John Erickson, Warren Kimball and Len Deighton. The result is the definitive account of Hess's mission that separates fact from fiction and sheds new light on its significance in the history of the Second World War.
