by Professor Revilo P. Oliver
(Liberty Bell, June 1985)
A WELL-KNOWN writer who wishes to be anonymous has suggested a possible explanation of the mystery surrounding the victim of Anglo-American cruelty now imprisoned, at enormous expense and with preposterous precautions to prevent escape, in Spandau. Having read my article in the April issue of Liberty Bell and accepted the findings of Dr. Thomas that the prisoner is not Rudolf Hess, the writer has sketched the following hypothesis.
The British Secret Service, which is known to have been in contact with the infamous Admiral Canaris in Germany, collaborated with him in an ingenious plot to make the Jews victorious in 1941, when a year and a half of warfare had proved that the united power of Britain and France could not save them from defeat in the war they had forced on Germany. The plot called for two principal operations. In the first, Hess was to be assassinated while on one of the solo flights he made from time to time for recreation, and replaced by a ‘double,’ the prisoner now in Spandau, precisely as happened according to Dr. Thomas. At the same time, Hitler was to be murdered, perhaps by the method used by German traitors when they, in collaboration with Canaris, almost succeeded in killing him in July 1944 and failed by the merest chance. At the death of Hitler, Hess would have automatically become the Fuehrer of the German Reich, and the pseudo-Hess in Scotland would promptly have negotiated a peace that would have saved the Jews’ stooges from catastrophic defeat. The British might even have been able to salvage the Empire they were destroying to please their alien masters.
It was the second and crucial part of this plot that failed. The attempted assassination in 1944 failed because Hitler just happened to have moved far enough from the planted bomb to escape death when it exploded. An earlier plot in 1941 may have failed just because the bomb failed to explode and Hitler was saved, just as the British Parliament was saved in 1948 when the bomb planted by the Jews failed to explode. After that failure, caused by some chance malfunctioning of the apparatus that was to detonate the bomb at the right moment, the Jews decided not to make a second attempt, and their plot would have remained unknown, had it not been described by the Jewish murderer, Avener, Memoirs of an Assassin (London, Blond, 1959; New York, Pyramid, 1960). The secret of the failure in Germany in 1941 was better kept. We probably should never have known of the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, if the bomb had failed to explode and Colonel von Stauffenberg had carried away his unopened briefcase at the end of the conference.
Since Hitler was not assassinated in 1941, the presence in Britain of the man who impersonated Hess was only an embarrassment to the British Secret Service and improvised efforts to cover-up the whole operation account for the unexplained fumbling and bumbling that followed.
All this, of course, is sheer hypothesis, speculation with not even a scintilla of circumstantial evidence to support it. A minute examination of the records of Hitler’s movements on 10 May 1941 and two or three days thereafter, and particular scrutiny of the lists of persons who were admitted to his presence, might disclose circumstances in which such an aborted attempt to assassinate him could have been made, but, as the author of the hypothesis carefully points out, there could be no evidence that such an attempt was actually made. The only confirmation of his hypothesis now possible would be a confession by the prisoner in Spandau, who must have known that such a murder was planned, although it is unlikely that he was told how it would be carried out.
I repeat with emphasis–because the distinction is one that escapes many “right-wingers”–that the foregoing is merely an hypothesis that has not been, and cannot be, tested in any way. The man who suggested it, however, is right about one thing. The chances are that if our race escapes obliteration by the Jews, Prisoner No. 7 in Spandau will become, like the Man in the Iron Mask, the subject of innumerable efforts to solve an historical mystery of which the secret has been lost forever. (1)
(1. Most historians today favor the candidacy of either an obscure Italian, Count Mattioli, or an even more obscure servant, Eustache Dauger, for the dubious honor of having been the object of Louis XIV’s implacable vengeance. What they cannot explain is why either of these individuals should have been thought worthy of the elaborate precautions taken to conceal the prisoner’s identity and particularly the mask of black velvet that concealed his features, which must have been so well known that he would have been recognized by influential Frenchmen, had he been seen without it. As a point of methodological interest, it may be noted that Voltaire’s sensational theory (the prisoner was an illegitimate son of Louis XIV) has never been disproven, because you cannot demonstrate the falsity of an hypothesis without either proving that it presupposes some event or condition that was physically impossible or providing an explanation that is indubitably correct. A hypothetical explanation of a mystery cannot be proved wrong by a lack of evidence to confirm it. That is sad, and makes many an historian gnash his teeth, but it is unfortunately true. For every mystery, there is a multiplicity of hypothetical solutions, and all we can do is weigh probabilities, but there are some historical mysteries, such as that of the “Iron” Mask, for which the circumstantial evidence is so exiguous or confused that no hypothesis is sufficiently probable to be weighed. Historians of the future (if there are any) will at least have in Dr. Thomas’s book evidence that will have a tantalizingly high degree of probability, whatever happens, and if the prisoner is not examined by disinterested physicians of indubitable probity, will accept it as virtual certainty. That, however, will not prevent ingenious individuals from formulating alternative hypotheses more congenial to their own predilections (e.g., Hess was a traitor who took refuge in Britain to escape exposure, or Hitler was assassinated and replaced by a ‘double’ who disavowed Hess’s secret negotiations so that he could contrive the eventual defeat of Germany; et cetera ad infinitum.)