The Paper Trail of Rudolf Hess – Missing Files and Secrecy

Rudolf Hess 1941 flight to Scotland is one of World War II’s most enduring enigmas. Yet, beneath the headlines of that night, a deeper Rudolf Hess archive persists. A trail of missing WWII records suggests a deliberate effort to obscure historical truth.

On 10 May 1941, a German aircraft landed in a Scottish field. Within a month, the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain was sitting in a Surrey safe house under a false name, accepting typed peace terms from the pilot.

The same government was publicly calling him delusional.

The Missing Giffnock Police Intake Records

Hess’s aircraft was a Messerschmitt Bf 110. Departing Augsburg at 17:45 on 10 May 1941, he flew alone, navigating by paper chart. His target was a blue-pencilled circle on a map sitting over Dungavel Castle, the Duke of Hamilton’s estate in Lanarkshire.

That target was missed by a few miles. At around 23:00, out of fuel, he bailed out and landed at Floors Farm, near Eaglesham. A local worker named David McLean confronted him with a pitchfork, and he identified himself as ‘Captain Alfred Horn’.

Then the paperwork started.

Hess was taken to the Busby Home Guard headquarters, then to the local police station at Giffnock, arriving shortly after midnight on 11 May 1941. Standard British police procedure required a duty sergeant to fill out a property intake form, listing every item taken off the prisoner. This is the ordinary paperwork of any civilian arrest.

The original Giffnock intake form is not in the Scottish regional archives.

What survives is a list compiled later, from secondary histories and contemporary press reporting. He was carrying a leather flying suit marked with the rank of captain, a gold wrist watch, a gold compass, a Leica camera, maps, money, a torch, photographs of himself and his young son, and a collection of 28 different medicines including dextrose tablets and homeopathic remedies. Every item on that list comes from accounts written after the police paperwork should have done the work first.

Before the military arrived to take control, a Royal Observer Corps officer named Major Graham Donald conducted his own interview at the station. No transcript of that conversation appears in any public archive.

A police station in Scotland in 1941 didn’t generally lose its own intake forms by accident. The missing receipt sits exactly at the point where local police custody ends, and military intelligence begins.

Most likely, intelligence officers collected the paperwork from Giffnock on 11 May 1941 and absorbed it into the military chain. The original receipt has not since reappeared in either the Scottish records or the National Archives catalogue.

The Lord Chancellor and the ‘Disordered Mind’

The public story began on 13 May 1941. Three days after the landing, Winston Churchill briefed the House of Commons on the German visitor in Scotland. Churchill’s first public framing of Hess was dismissive.

Behind the dismissal, the British psychiatric service moved in fast. Dr J R Rees and colleagues examined Hess and labelled him mentally unstable, and their assessments were leaked to the press. By mid-May, the public was reading about a man with a long history of delusion.

Then came the swerve.

On 9 June 1941, Lord Simon, the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain and the most senior legal officer in the government, travelled to Camp Z in Surrey under the cover name ‘Dr Guthrie’. Beside him was Ivone Kirkpatrick, the Foreign Office’s leading expert on Nazi Germany, using the name ‘Dr Mackenzie’. Together they sat down with Hess, who handed them a typed document containing peace proposals he had initialled multiple times.

That same day, after reading the transcripts of the interrogation, Churchill wrote a private memo describing Hess as comparable to a ‘mentally defective child’.

It was not in his 13 May briefing to the Commons. The memo was written in private on 9 June 1941, the very day Lord Simon was in Surrey accepting Hess’s typed peace terms under a pseudonym.

Calling Hess delusional did not survive contact with the flight itself. Hess had flown a twin-engined fighter-bomber alone, at night, across the North Sea, evading British radar, and reached his target zone within walking distance of Dungavel Castle. On the available evidence, the Ministry of Information built the disordered-mind framing to neutralise the peace terms in front of a public still being bombed.

That typed protocol is now a problem. An auction-house description records that Hess initialled the document multiple times. The original is not in the public PREM 3 registry, attested only by a commercial sale lot record.

Hidden MI5 Hess Files and Diplomatic Silos

Records of the Hess affair did not sit in one drawer. They sat in three.

The Foreign Office held its set under the catalogue prefix FO 371. Ivone Kirkpatrick filed his diplomatic reports there, along with the analysis of the peace terms and the geopolitical fallout across Europe. To the Foreign Office, Hess was a problem of statecraft.

MI5 held its own set under the prefix KV 2, a National Archives catalogue series used for personal files on persons of security interest. Those records occupy KV 2/34 to KV 2/38.

These files contain the raw interrogation notes, the security assessments of Camp Z, and the file on the first civilian translator to speak to Hess, Roman Battaglia, at KV 2/35. To MI5, Hess was a domestic threat to manage.

The Prime Minister’s Office held its set under PREM 3/219. That file contains the high-level summaries that reached Churchill’s desk, including the notes from Lord Simon’s June interview. To the PM’s office, Hess was a political problem requiring selective briefing.

By the end of May 1941, the Ministry of Information, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 were all claiming jurisdiction over the same prisoner. Each department opened its own files. None opened a shared one.

No surviving inter-departmental file ties the three silos together. KV files sit under stricter access rules than either the FO or PREM series at the National Archives. A researcher today must clear three separate access regimes to read across the case, and there is no working index that maps one silo’s entries against the others.

The Eighteen-Day Delay and the Battaglia Interrogation

Battaglia was a Glasgow civilian. He spoke fluent German. On the night of 10 to 11 May 1941, while Hess was still at the Giffnock police station, Battaglia was brought in as the first interpreter and conducted the first in-depth conversation with the prisoner.

MI5’s first formal interrogation of Battaglia did not happen for another 18 days.

Lieutenant John Mair of MI5 sat down with Battaglia at Glasgow Police Headquarters on 29 May 1941. The typed record of that interview survives in the National Archives under reference KV 2/35. Mair’s main line of questioning was whether Hess had flown of his own volition, or under orders from the German government.

Our reading of the gap is that MI5 was working backwards, trying to establish what Hess had said in his first civilian hours before London’s intelligence machinery took over. That is the Pack’s analytical inference, not a stated MI5 objective recorded in the file.

What is documented is the timing. Eighteen days elapsed between Battaglia’s first contact with the prisoner and the formal MI5 record of what Battaglia knew. During those 18 days, Hess was moved to the Tower of London, then to Camp Z in Surrey, while the first interpreter went unheard at the official level.

KV 2/35 is a typed report that sits in the public file. No equivalent record exists for the corresponding period at Camp Z.

The 1945 Petrie Directive and the 2041 Seal

By 1945, MI5 was drowning in paper. Wartime had produced millions of pages of logs, intercepts, guard schedules and routine reports. David Petrie, the Director-General, ordered a clear-out.

That clear-out had a technical name. Weeding, in archival use, means the bureaucratic process of reviewing files and destroying ones judged to have no future operational use. It is sanctioned record destruction, signed off by archivists, and not the same thing as a leak or a cover-up.

Under Petrie’s 1945 directive, large volumes of MI5 working files were weeded out. Camp Z’s daily operational logs almost certainly went with them. Those logs would have named every officer, psychiatrist and politician who walked into the building on any given day during Hess’s captivity.

Without them, the granular chain of custody at Camp Z is gone.

For the records that did survive the 1945 cull, there is a second barrier. An unspecified volume of interrogation transcripts, psychiatric evaluations and diplomatic correspondence relating to Hess remains sealed under a 100-year statutory hold, a rule that keeps sensitive files closed for a century rather than the standard 30 years. Scheduled release date 2041.

Britain’s archival authorities have not published the specific reason for extending the seal that far.

Assessing the Cadogan Document Anomaly

On the question of deliberate alteration, the only substantive lead in the Hess files comes from a single piece of German academic analysis. In a 1994 paper published in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Rainer F Schmidt argued that Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, may have deleted or altered a clause in Ivone Kirkpatrick’s memorandum of 12 May 1941.

According to Schmidt, the deleted clause recorded a specific Hess condition that any peace proposal would only be considered if negotiated with an English government other than Churchill’s.

That allegation rests on Schmidt’s reading of the documentary record. Schmidt’s reading is not an established, audited fact in the British archives.

As of 2026, no archive in the public catalogue holds the original unedited Kirkpatrick draft.

Source

Sources include: ‘KV series: Files on Rudolf Hess, 1941’ and the ‘Spotlight On: Rudolf Hess’ video transcript from The National Archives; public policy records regarding archival weeding from MI5; the ‘Churchill at War: The Prime Minister’s Office Papers, 1940-1945 Author Index’ published by Cengage; the ‘List of sealed archives’ registry; and academic analysis from ‘Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte’ (1994).