May 10, 1941. Hess jumps, the Luftwaffe quits, Belgian workers walk.
On this day in 1941 Rudolph Hess, operating on his own initiative, took a German aircraft and flew himself to the UK with the expressed intent to broker a peace between Germany and the British Empire.
It's easy to sum up Hess as delusional, which he was. He was peculiar in other ways, however, which is saying something as the Nazi leadership was overall peculiar. He'd spent his youth in Egypt, where he was born of German parents, where he acquired an intense racism against non Europeans, rather than being broadened in his views as a person would suspect. He also, from that experience, came to admire the British. He'd served in World War One and emerged into an economy in which his family's business interests, of which it had been intended he'd be part of, had been badly damaged by the war, and in particular by the British seizing German interest in Egypt. He was a very early member of the Nazi Party. He became the Deputy Fuhrer of the party, an extremely high position in the German Nazi regime. Following the start of the war his antisemitism grew.
On this day in 1941 he flew a Bf110 to Scotland in the belief that he could establish contacts with friendly British interest and negotiate a peace with the UK. Based on the statement he intended to deliver at the Nuremburg Trial and again attempted to issue in written form in 1986, he actually believed that he'd be able to negotiate a peace and bring the UK into the war against the Soviet Union, something that was then on the near horizon in German planning.
Hess used a Bf110 for his mission, which was a substantial aircraft. He ran out of fuel near his target, a British estate that he mistakenly believed would house a sympathetic family, and bailed out, breaking his ankle and resulting in his capture by a Scottish farmer. He was placed in the Tower of London where he spent the rest of the war. The mission was hugely embarrassing to the Germans as Hess was a significant figure in the Nazi Party, and it was somewhat embarrassing to the British at it was both a reminder of there having been some significant members of British aristocracy who had sympathized with the Nazis before the war and because such a substantially sized aircraft had penetrated over Scotland without detection.
Following the war he was a defendant at the Nuremburg trials. Being convicted, he spent the rest of his life a prisoner at Spandau Prison in Berlin where he remained an unrepentant Nazi, and he remained a prisoner far longer than any other figure sentenced to prison. As he had very little in the way of a role after the war started, and served so many more years than any other German prisoner, there were fairly serious efforts to secure his release in later years, which tended to discount that his views had not changed at all. Neither had the Soviets, however, who vetoed any release as they firmly believed that he was aware of plans to invade the Soviet Union and, therefore, could have warned the British who would have warned them. At least according to one story, on a single occasion when the Soviets failed to veto his release, the British did. The prison was torn down following his death in order to avoid having it turned into a Nazi shrine. His grave did become one, however, so in 2011 the Lutheran church on whose grounds it was located had the remains removed and the tombstone destroyed.
On the same day that Hess flew to Scotland, the Luftwaffe bombed London again. You can read of both events here:
Today in World War II History—May 10, 1941
Huge raid on London
The London raid was the Luftwaffe's last largescale aircraft bombing raid on the city of the war. The Blitz was winding down and in fact the nighttime raid, which also covered the following morning, ended the campaign. German air raids over the UK would continue to the end of the war in a lesser capacity, but the largescale nighttime raids that had commenced after the German failure to win an aerial victory ended. The Germans lost the Battle of Britain and they'd lost the Blitz. They were not going to knock the UK out of the war through the air, and they gave up trying. Of course, they also had limited air assets and began to rededicate them to the planned campaign against the Soviets Union. Indeed, the termination of the campaign supported the British suspicion that the Soviet Union was next, something the British would attempt to warn the Soviets of.
While Hess went on his delusional mission, Belgian workers went out on strike. The strike was remarkable not only for the fact it occurred in occupied country, but that even the Belgian Communist Party supported it. At the time, the Communists everywhere were generally somewhat pro Nazi or at least not anti Nazi due to the non aggression pact that had been entered into between the Soviet Union and Germany still being in effect.
The strike lasted eight days and ended when the Germans agreed to a wage raise.
