A Glibertarians Exclusive: Blood and Gold, Part I
16 August 1987 – Spandau Prison
He was known as Prisoner Number Seven to the guards and administrators at Spandau Prison. He was known to the world as Rudolf Hess, Nazi war criminal. He was likewise known as Rudolf Hess, husband and father, to his wife, Ilse, and his son, Wolf.
Only the man who thought of himself merely as Hess knew the truth.
I have had enough of this, Hess thought to himself one cloudy afternoon. He thought briefly of his family, the second he had known in his life. But Ilse was eighty-seven, and Wolf a grown man; they would be well off enough without him. His first family, Anna, Felix and Elsa, were still dearer to him, though they had all been dead for many years – indeed, many centuries.
I was merely human then, he reminded himself, and still capable of feeling.
He was, by German record, ninety-three years old. With the ability to force his will upon his flesh to a certain degree, he looked ninety-three, even as he had looked younger in 1920, when he had first encountered Adolf Hitler in Munich.
He was in fact nearly five hundred years old. But no one other than Hess knew that. His wife, his son, his fellow Nazis and all the Allied captors thought him to be only a mortal man.
Regardless of age, he was a tall man, grown thin over the years, with a shock of white hair, a narrow, gaunt face, long hands and strong yellow teeth. Along with age he had, over the years, cultivated the appearance and demeanor of frailty, although he knew the opposite to be true.
And yet he was still paying the price for the worst miscalculation of his long, long life.
August of 1917 was when it all started. When the Great War had begun, Hess attached himself to a Bavarian infantry regiment, attracted by all the opportunities war brought to one such as him. At that time he had gone by “Rutger” Hess, and along the way befriended Feldwebel Rudolf Hess, who shared not only Hess’s name but also his lean frame; indeed the two could have been brothers. Hess was wounded at Verdun, taking a bullet through the shoulder. His friend of convenience, Rudolf Hess, was killed, decisively so, by a bullet through the brain.
Too many people knew that his background as Rutger Hess was clouded, so by the simple expedient of switching identity disks and papers, he became Rudolf Hess. “Rutger” Hess went into a grave, and the newly minted Rudolf went on to hospital in Alexandersbad. So adept was he at assuming young Rudolf’s appearance, and so attentive had he been to the Bavarian’s stories, that he even fooled the man’s family, spending that Christmas holiday with them.
Then the war ended, a disaster for Germany. And Hess had a front seat for the rise of Hitler.
Centuries of experience in human affairs told him that one such as Hitler would arise following the defeat and the catastrophic Treaty of Versailles. When he met Hitler, Hess thought him a blowhard and a fool, but recognized the man’s gift for polemics. I though I could control him, he often thought in later years. I thought I could rule Germany through him. And when I realized I could not, I tried to make peace with Britain. Much good it did me. And so Germany knew defeat, twice in one century.
And worse, Hess had been drawn into an unspeakable evil, one that shocked and dismayed even him, after his actions of the last five centuries: Feeding being one thing, but industrial-scale murder quite another. Worse still, his position had forced him to express public support for the actions of thugs like Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich and the like. His acting had been convincing enough that the Nazis never suspected the nature of the ancient monster that walked among them.
Spandau Prison
Walking that path had led him to where he was now, in Spandau Prison.
And Hess was starving.
Oh, the Allies had always given him enough common fare. But his unique metabolism needed more than the prison rations. He needed… other than that, sustenance he had been denied for almost fifty years, and at times his hunger made him teeter on the edge of sanity. He could have easily cut a swath through the guards and escaped, but then his true nature would have been known.
Hess could not abide that. If he had learned one thing from the debacle around the Second World War, it was that his continued longevity required anonymity.
So he waited. And planned. And practiced new arts, in the privacy of his cell. It was nearly time.
The next night, Hess went to the small reading room that had been set up in the prison’s garden, the Allies having not denied him certain comforts after all the years he had spent there. He pulled the extension cord off a reading lamp, wrapped one end around a window latch, and the other around his neck. He slumped to the floor. Concentrating, as he had taught himself, he slowed his breathing and heartbeat until they were undetectable, let his body cool to room temperature, and ‘died.’
After he was discovered, moved into a wooden coffin and left for the night, he revived himself. The guard rotation was Russian that evening. One of the roving guards was a man Hess recognized, one Anton Denisovich Kozlov, an ill-tempered brute but one who happened to be about Hess’s size. Hess waited in ambush, caught Kozlov rounding a corner and tore out his throat.
At last! Hess drank the big man dry in moments. Then he swapped clothes with the guard, placed his body in the coffin and simply walked out of the gate.
Berlin had changed much in the years Hess had spent in Spandau Prison. Nearly every building was new; Hess had seen the photos of the ruin Berlin had been in 1945. The guards in Spandau in 1945 and 1946 took great delight in showing such things to Hess and his fellow prisoners. With no money and no identification, Hess was reduced to sleeping in an alley his first day on the loose, sheltered under an overhang the blocked the sun; he could tolerate sunlight for a time, but it was… uncomfortable.
For several days, Hess watched the Berlin newspapers, expecting news of his murder of the guard and the escape to warn him he was being hunted, but no such news appeared. Of course, he realized at last. How like the Allies, to not want to admit than an old, old man turned the tables on a young, healthy Russian guard and escaped.
For the first time in decades, Hess was free. Now he needed resources. He had only the few marks the Russian soldier had in his pockets, and nothing more.
But he knew of several caches of Nazi gold, mostly planted by the rapacious Goering and the greedy Bormann. The Allies no doubt had found most of the stolen gold, but Hess knew of a few caches that may well have escaped notice.
The nearest of those was in Alsace, in Strasbourg. Hess made the trip from Berlin to Strasbourg in two nights, moving swiftly in the ground-devouring lope he hadn’t used in years. He arrived in Strasbourg just before sunrise on the second night, with just enough cash left in his pockets for a cheap room. That evening he set out, walking along the banks of the Ill, looking for anything familiar, when a voice came out of the darkness.
“Old man,” the voice said, sounding strangely familiar. A figure stepped into the moonlight from the shelter of a small boathouse on the banks of the Ill.
Hess was genuinely surprised by the man who stood before him, wearing the uniform of a Colonel in the British Army. He didn’t show it. Belos Ionescu, he reminded himself. You’ve come a long way to find me after all this time. Mehmet’s Ottomans couldn’t kill you, so no surprise the Germans couldn’t, either.
“Belos,” Hess said. “Son.” It had often amused Hess to refer to those he had converted as his ‘children.’
“Father,” Belos said, his face showing no amusement.
“Is it still Belos?” Hess asked.
“I go by Braxton now. Braxton Iocca.” His English accent was impeccable; he had obviously practiced.
“Braxton Iocca. As good a pseudonym as any, I suppose. You may call me Jurgen. Jurgen Hess. How did you find me here, then?”
“There was a rumor going around about a mystery surrounding the death of the infamous Rudolf Hess. I found it curious. I thought you might try to leave Germany, if what I suspected was true – and clearly it was – and this seemed a logical place to intercept you.”
“You have gained some wisdom in all these years,” Hess admitted.
‘Iocca’ inclined his head. “Thank you. What are you doing here, in Strasbourg?”
“Seeking resources,” Hess replied. “What else?”
Oh, this could be fun… of course I’m thinking of moments from other vampiric lore… Claudia…. that U-boat episode of Angel… Pie’s daily posts….
We’ll see if he gets tired of Europe, heads for America and hangs out at the Denny’s.
Kidding aside… nice read as usual, Animal. Thank you.
Angel was hit or miss compared to Buffy, but the U-boat episode was excellent.
Love it.
Nice. This will be fun.
Thanks Animal, love biographies. Great start to a good story.
Interesting beginnings, I like how you accounted for Hess’s mental issues.
I’m 100% in. I love this sort of stuff.
This looks to be very fun.
If we’re lucky it’ll also nudge UCS to write more about his vampire.
I need to write something.
The text hasn’t moved much in a few weeks.
Maybe a change of story project will help.
I can give you some topics to shoot down, if it helps.
Sure. As long as you don’t take anything personally.
Hess was looking for gold?
No, my child, this is not my desire
From dead thread:
“creech on August 7, 2023 at 10:23 am
When did “old religions” keep the societies well behaved?” For example, uber religious U.S.A. exterminated most of the American Indian population.”
I don’t think that is true. Disease exterminated most native Americans, certainly wars and forced removals didn’t help things, but, for the most part, I don’t think it was an attempted extermination. Perhaps to the extent it wasn’t, that can be blamed on religion, though we cannot say with any certainty.
“exterminated”
The pre-1490 population estimates north of the Rio Grande are all over the place. As low as 900k and high as 11 million.
Current estimate is 5.2 million – so extermination as a whole didn’t happen. (Tribe by tribe results varied).
“Only good Indian is a dead Indian” was a widespread view. Or let’s take the religious wars of Europe of the “kill them all and let God sort them out” variety.
But given the power disparity between natives and the US in particular, if the US really wanted to, there wasn’t much stopping them from successfully exterminating all the native Americans, instead of just some. So there had to be something limiting what was clearly an objective of some people in society from doing so, no?
If so, what was that?
‘Of course he lost’: Ron DeSantis rejects Trump’s 2020 election claims
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday rejected Donald Trump’s claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election in his most forceful comments to date on the matter.
“Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on Jan. 20 every four years is the winner,” DeSantis told NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns in his first broadcast network interview since he launched his presidential campaign.
DeSantis continued to discuss all the ways he believed the previous presidential election was not perfect. But pressed further, he clearly stated that Trump lost.
“But respectfully, you did not clearly answer that question,” Burns said. “And if you can’t give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on whether or not he lost —”
“No, of course he lost,” DeSantis said, adding, “Joe Biden’s the president.”
Give him credit for not getting gulled into saying Biden won legitimately.
I will not.
Fair.
I think it should be a cage match to see who swears in on the bible and becomes President.
And thus fulfilling the prophecy of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
‘Barbie’ makes history with $1 billion at the box office
“Barbie” has answered the billion-dollar question with a resounding “yes.” Barely three weeks into its run, writer-director Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster has raked in an astounding $1.03 billion at the global box office, according to official Warner Bros. estimates. This makes Gerwig the first solo female director with a billion-dollar movie.
Good to know that misandry is a box office winner. I look forward to the next batch of movies starring plastic dolls that fight the patriarchy while looking good in heels.
From what I’ve seen, the movie is just re-heated third wave feminism from the 90’s. People probably find that to be nostalgic these days.
So just a re-release Legally Blonde?
Legally Blonde was funny
“I look forward to the next batch of movies starring plastic dolls that fight the patriarchy while looking good in heels.”
La Femme Nikita is getting another remake? Alias?
Dollhouse, obs.
A gender-switched version of Child’s Play.
You mean M3gan?
Good to know that misandry is a box office winner. I look forward to the next batch of movies starring plastic dolls that fight the patriarchy while looking good in heels.
Weaponized femininity, FTW!
We may have gotten ahead of ourselves
Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said Monday that the company needs to slow down its rollout of new products after booking 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in costs due to quality issues at its wind turbine unit.
The Siemens Gamesa board is currently undergoing a review of the quality issues, which some analysts have suggested could turn out to be pervasive across the industry.
“The quality problems really result from the past, but I think we have too fast rolled out platforms into the market,” Bruch told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.
“That is not a cost issue per se, that is really a quality issue in terms of going too fast with new products into the market. The other thing is obviously now stabilizing the business in terms of ramping up new factories.”
Needs more magic hat.
That’s sad, I’m sure there were people looking forward to another big long thing with Siemens on it.
Nah, too many submarines as it is.
Now there’s some wordsmithing. Everything that has been manufactured already is “from the past.”
The question is whether they’ve solved the quality issue, which by the sounds of it, they have not.
Our design sucked . . .
And we put a bunch out in the field . . .
And we may or may not have fixed that . . . .
But don’t hold it against us . . . .
Because we were just going with the flow
I assumed he was just blaming prior management.
*checks*
Yep, appointed CEO at the end of 2022.
“That last guy screwed everything up”
This was his last shot. Usually you get about two quarters of honeymoon and kitchen sink charges that you get to blame on the other guy.
The two envelope gambit.
First envelope: “Blame the last guy.”
2nd Envelope: “Make 2 envelopes.”
Nice. A tie-in to your second Crider novel.
I see the new Nova Roma book is coming out soon.
Fun stuff, thanks.
Kinda self explanatory:
Nudists spot plenty of great tits as they strip off for sponsored bird walk
I didn’t see photos of tits of any variety. For which, I suppose, I should be grateful, given the photos they did print.
It’s never the ones you want to get naked who end up getting naked.
/zips pants back up
*Takes off Gimp mask, puts on shirt
And we put a bunch out in the field . . .
How/where else would you test them?
“The Power of Christ compels you!”
William Friedkin, Acclaimed Director of ‘The French Connection’ and ‘The Exorcist,’ Dies at 87
Damn. He was one of the good ones.
Sad, but at least it was 87.
I like this.
Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match
Detroit’s finest took 11 hours to process her and get $100k bail.
It’s Detroit so I’m sure everything that happened is both Trump and the Republican’s fault.
I hope she hits the redneck lottery.
Well, the Detroit police chief is White isn’t he?
Yes, but he’s certainly not white.
Your name is appropriate.
Our disgraced former president appointed Judge Cannon AS HE WAS ALLEGEDLY CONSPIRING TO ATTEMPT A COUP.
Her judgement will always be suspect.
Judge Cannon must recuse
As has been noted, if there were a mechanism to just put Trump against a wall and try him in court at a later time, they would do it in a heartbeat.
I want off of this ride
Fuck Duckie.
Who? Is he the guy from Blues Traveler?
John Cryer was Charlie Sheen’s parasite.
He has as much fat between his ears as John Popper has on his ass.
Ooh, this is gonna be good.