Post by Admin on Aug 21, 2015 20:27:56 GMT
Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy, Sr.
(September 6, 1888 – November 18, 1969)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
was an American businessman, investor, and government official. Kennedy was the husband of Rose Kennedy. Their children included President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968), and longtime Senator Ted Kennedy (1932–2009). He was a leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community. He was the inaugural Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later directed the Maritime Commission. Kennedy served as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 until late 1940, including the early part of World War II.
Born to a political family in East Boston, Massachusetts, Kennedy embarked on a career in business and investing, first making a large fortune as a stock market and commodity investor and later rolled over the profits by investing in real estate and a wide range of business industries across the United States. During World War I, he was an assistant general manager of a Boston area Bethlehem Steel shipyard, through which he developed a friendship with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In the 1920s Kennedy made huge profits from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios, ultimately merging several acquisitions into Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) studios.
Investments in film studios, liquor importing, and real estate:
Kennedy made huge profits from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios. Film production in the U.S. was much more decentralized than it is today, with many different movie studios producing film product. One small studio was Film Booking Offices of America (or FBO), which specialized in Westerns produced cheaply. Its owner was in financial trouble and asked Kennedy to help find a new owner. Kennedy formed his own group of investors and bought it for $1.5 million (about $20.2 million today).
Kennedy moved to Hollywood in March 1926 to focus on running the studio. Movie studios were then permitted to own exhibition companies which were necessary to get their films on local screens. With that in mind, in a hostile buyout, he acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation (KAO), which had more than 700 vaudeville theaters across the United States which had begun showing movies. He later purchased another production studio called Pathe Exchange, and merged those two entities with Cecil B. DeMille's Producers Distributing Corporation in March 1927.
Joe Kennedy, along with fifteen others, signed a telegram warning that the release of Sadie Thompson (c.1928) starring ***Gloria Swanson*** would jeopardize the ability of the movie industry to censor itself. Swanson needed financing for her movie production company, and Kennedy began a three-year affair when he met her for lunch in New York after the film's release.
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In August 1928, he unsuccessfully tried to run First National Pictures. In October 1928, he formally merged his film companies FBO and KAO to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) and made a large amount of money in the process. Then, keen to buy the Pantages Theatre chain, which had 63 profitable theaters, Kennedy made an offer of $8 million ($110 million today). It was declined. He then stopped distributing his movies to Pantages. Still, Alexander Pantages declined to sell. However, when Pantages was later charged and tried for rape, his reputation took a battering and he accepted Kennedy's revised offer of $3.5 million ($48.1 million today). Pantages, who claimed that Kennedy had "set him up", was later found not guilty at a second trial.
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After Prohibition of alcohol ended in 1933, Kennedy consolidated an even larger fortune when he traveled to Scotland with Roosevelt's son James to buy distribution rights for Scotch whisky. At the start of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, Kennedy and Congressman James Roosevelt II founded Somerset Importers, an entity that acted as the exclusive American agent for Haig & Haig Scotch, Gordon's Dry Gin and Dewar's Scotch. His company, Somerset Importers, became the exclusive American agent for Gordon's Gin and Dewar's Scotch. In addition, Kennedy purchased spirits-importation rights from Schenley Industries, a firm in Canada. He owned the largest office building in the country, Chicago's Merchandise Mart, giving his family an important base in that city and an alliance with the Irish-American political leadership there.
Kennedy's first major involvement in a national political campaign was his support in 1932 for Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for the Presidency. He donated, loaned, and raised a substantial amount of money for the campaign. Roosevelt rewarded him with an appointment as the inaugural Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Kennedy had hoped for a Cabinet post, such as Secretary of the Treasury. After Franklin Roosevelt called Joe to Washington, D.C. to clean up the securities industry, somebody asked FDR why he had tapped such a crook. "Takes one to catch one," replied Roosevelt.
Kennedy's reforming work as SEC Chairman was widely praised on all sides, as investors realized the SEC was protecting their interests. His knowledge of the financial markets equipped him to identify areas requiring the attention of regulators. One of the crucial reforms was the requirement for companies to regularly file financial statements with the SEC, which broke what some saw as an information monopoly maintained by the Morgan banking family. He left the SEC in 1935 to take over the Maritime Commission, which built on his wartime experience in running a major shipyard.
Father Charles Coughlin was an Irish-Canadian priest near Detroit, who became perhaps the most prominent Roman Catholic spokesman on political and financial issues in the 1930s, with a radio audience that reached millions every week. A strong supporter of Roosevelt in 1932, Coughlin in 1934 broke with the president, who became a bitter opponent of Coughlin's weekly, anti-communist, anti-Semitic, anti–Federal Reserve and isolationist radio talks. Roosevelt sent Kennedy and other prominent Irish Catholics to try to tone down Coughlin.
Coughlin swung his support to Huey Long in 1935 and then to William Lemke's Union Party in 1936. Kennedy strongly supported the New Deal and believed as early as 1933 that Coughlin was "becoming a very dangerous proposition" as an opponent of Roosevelt and "an out and out demagogue". In 1936, Kennedy worked with Roosevelt, Bishop Francis Spellman and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) to shut Coughlin down. When Coughlin returned to the air in 1940, Kennedy continued to battle against his influence among Irish Americans.
His term as ambassador and his political ambitions ended abruptly during the Battle of Britain in November 1940, with the publishing of his controversial remarks suggesting that "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here, in the US." Kennedy resigned under pressure shortly afterwards.
In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (the United Kingdom) in London. Kennedy hugely enjoyed his leadership position in London high society, which stood in stark contrast to his relative outsider status in Boston. On May 6, 1944, his daughter Kathleen married William "Billy" Cavendish, the eldest son of Edward Cavendish, who was the head of one of England's grandest aristocratic families.
Kennedy rejected the warnings of the prominent Member of Parliament Winston Churchill that any compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible. Instead, Kennedy supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's apparent policy of appeasement. Throughout 1938, while the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and Austria intensified, Kennedy attempted to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Shortly before the Nazi aerial bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy once again sought a personal meeting with Hitler, again without the approval of the Department of State, "to bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany". It has been surmised that Kennedy also had personal reasons for wanting to avoid war; "He feared for the lives of his three eldest sons, Joe, Jack, and Bobby, all of whom were or soon would be eligible to serve."
Kennedy also argued strongly against giving military and economic aid to the United Kingdom. "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here," he stated in the Boston Sunday Globe of November 10, 1940. With Nazi German troops having overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, and with bombs falling daily on Great Britain, Kennedy unambiguously and repeatedly stated his belief that this war was not about saving democracy from National Socialism (Nazism) or from Fascism. In an interview with two newspaper journalists, Louis M. Lyons, of The Boston Globe, and Ralph Coghlan, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kennedy said:
It's all a question of what we do with the next six months. The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time ... As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn't that Britain is fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. She's fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us..... I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it's up to me to see that the country gets it.
His views were becoming inconsistent and increasingly isolationist; British MP Josiah Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood, who had himself opposed the British Government's earlier appeasement policy, said of Kennedy:
We have a rich man, untrained in diplomacy, unlearned in history and politics, who is a great publicity seeker and who apparently is ambitious to be the first Catholic president of the U.S.
In British government circles during the Blitz, Kennedy was widely disparaged as a defeatist. He retreated to the countryside during the bombings of London by German aircraft, at a time when the British Royal Family, Prime Minister, government ministers, and other ambassadors chose to stay in London. (This prompted a member of Britain's Foreign Office to say, "I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.")
When the American public and Roosevelt Administration officials read his quotes on democracy being "finished", and his belief that the Battle of Britain was not about "fighting for democracy", all of it being just "bunk", they realized that Kennedy could not be trusted to represent the United States. In the face of national public outcry, and pressure from the Roosevelt Department of State, which no longer wanted him, Kennedy submitted his resignation late in November 1940.
Reduced influence:
Throughout the rest of the war, relations between Kennedy and the Roosevelt Administration remained tense (especially when Joe, Jr. vocally opposed President Roosevelt's unprecedented nomination for a third term, which began in 1941). Kennedy may have wanted to run for president himself in 1940 or later. Having effectively removed himself from the national stage, Joe Sr sat out World War II on the sidelines. Kennedy stayed active in the smaller venues of rallying Irish-American and Roman Catholic Democrats to vote for Roosevelt's re-election for a fourth term in 1944. Former Ambassador Kennedy claimed to be eager to help the war effort, but as a result of his previous gaffes, he was neither trusted nor invited to do so.
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Joe Kennedy Sr. allowed surgeons to perform a lobotomy (one of the earliest in the U.S.) on his eldest daughter Rosemary in 1941. Various reasons for the operation have been given, but it left her permanently incapacitated. Rosemary has since been deemed "mentally retarded," and she may have been "mentally ill" (for which no treatment other than incarceration was considered to exist in the 1940s). She died in 2005 at age 86. Rosemary's name "was never mentioned in the house".
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On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, in London, who claimed upon his return to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. Kennedy himself fully understood our Jewish policy." Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern that he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.
By August 1940, Kennedy worried that a third term as the President for Roosevelt would mean war. As Leamer reports, "Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews, and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon." Nevertheless, Kennedy supported Roosevelt's third term in return for Roosevelt's promise to support Joseph Kennedy, Jr., in a run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1942. However, even during the darkest months of World War II, Kennedy remained "more wary of" prominent American Jews, such as Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, than he was of Hitler.
Kennedy told the reporter Joe Dinneen:
It is true that I have a low opinion of some Jews in public office and in private life. That does not mean that I..... believe they should be wiped off the face of the Earth..... Jews who take an unfair advantage of the fact that theirs is a persecuted race do not help much..... Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.
A political conservative (John F. Kennedy once described his father as being to "the right of Herbert Hoover"), Kennedy supported Richard Nixon, who had entered Congress with John in 1947. In 1960 Kennedy approached Nixon, praised his anti-Communism, and said "Dick, if my boy can't make it, I'm for you" for the presidential election that year.
When Senator Joseph McCarthy became a dominant voice of anti-Communism starting in 1950, Kennedy contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters.
Kennedy was consigned to the political shadows after his remarks during World War II ("Democracy is finished"), and he remained an intensely controversial figure among U.S. citizens because of his suspect business credentials, his Roman Catholicism, his opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy, and his support for Joseph McCarthy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
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Rudolf Hess: Deputy Fuhrer of the NSDAP for Hitler:
21 April 1933 – 12 May 1941
Rudolf Hess was the third most-powerful man in Germany, behind only Hitler and Hermann Göring. In addition to appearing on Hitler's behalf at speaking engagements and rallies, Hess signed into law much of the legislation, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, that stripped the Jews of Germany of their rights in the lead-up to the Holocaust. Hess was interested in aviation, learning to fly the more advanced aircraft that were coming into development at the start of World War II.
As the war progressed, Hess became increasingly sidelined from the affairs of the nation and from Hitler's attention; Bormann had successfully supplanted Hess in many of his duties and usurped his position at Hitler's side. Also concerned that Germany would face a war on two fronts as plans progressed for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union scheduled to take place in spring 1941, Hess decided to boldly attempt to bring Britain to the negotiating table by travelling there himself to seek meetings with the British government.
He asked the advice of Albrecht Haushofer, who suggested several potential contacts in Britain. Hess settled on fellow aviator Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had never met. On Hess's instructions, Haushofer wrote to Hamilton in September 1940, but the letter was intercepted by MI5 and Hamilton did not see it until March 1941. Hamilton was chosen in the mistaken belief that he was one of the leaders of an opposition party opposed to war with Germany, and because he was a friend of Albrecht.
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McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing thirty years later, it produced a number of well-known commercial and military aircraft such as the DC-10 airliner and F-15 Eagle air-superiority fighter.
The corporation was based at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport near St. Louis, Missouri, while the headquarters for its subsidiary, the McDonnell Douglas Technical Services Company (MDTSC), were established in unincorporated St. Louis County, Missouri.
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A letter Hess wrote to his wife dated 4 November 1940 shows that in spite of not receiving a reply from Hamilton, he intended to proceed with his plan.
He asked for a radio compass, modifications to the oxygen delivery system, and large long-range fuel tanks to be installed on this plane, and these requests were granted by March 1941.
After a final check of the weather reports for Germany and the North Sea, Hess took off at 17:45 on 10 May 1941 from the airfield at Augsburg-Haunstetten in his specially prepared aircraft. It was the last of several attempts to depart on his mission; previous efforts had to be called off due to mechanical problems or poor weather. Wearing a leather flying suit bearing the rank of captain, he brought along a supply of money and toiletries, a torch, a camera, maps and charts, and a collection of 28 different medicines, as well as dextrose tablets to help ward off fatigue and an assortment of homeopathic remedies.
Initially setting a course towards Bonn, Hess used landmarks on the ground to orient himself and make minor course corrections. When he reached the coast near the Frisian Islands, he turned and flew in an easterly direction for some twenty minutes to stay out of range of British radar.
at 22:08, the British Chain Home station at Ottercops Moss near Newcastle upon Tyne detected his presence and passed along this information to the Filter Room at Bentley Priory. Soon he had been detected by several other stations, and the aircraft was designated as "Raid 42".
Hess was nearly out of fuel, so he climbed to 6,000 feet (1,800 m) and parachuted out of the plane at 23:06. He injured his foot, either while exiting the aircraft or when he hit the ground. The aircraft crashed at 23:09, about 12 miles (19 km) west of Dungavel House. He would have been closer to his destination had he not had trouble exiting the aircraft. Hess considered this achievement to be the proudest moment of his life.
Before his departure from Germany, Hess had given his adjutant, Karlheinz Pintsch, a letter addressed to Hitler that detailed his intentions to open peace negotiations with the British. Pintsch delivered the letter to Hitler at the Berghof around noon on 11 May. Albert Speer later said Hitler described Hess's departure as one of the worst personal blows of his life, as he considered it a personal betrayal.
Hitler worried that his allies, Italy and Japan, would perceive Hess's act as an attempt by Hitler to secretly open peace negotiations with the British. For this reason, Hitler ordered that the German press should characterise Hess as a madman who made the decision to fly to Scotland entirely on his own, without Hitler's knowledge or authority. Some members of the government, including Göring and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, believed this only made matters worse, because if Hess truly were mentally ill, he should not have been holding an important government position.
Hitler stripped Hess of all of his party and state offices, and secretly ordered him shot on sight if he ever returned to Germany. He abolished the post of Deputy Führer, assigning Hess's former duties to Bormann, with the title of Head of the Party Chancellery. Hitler initiated Aktion Hess, a flurry of hundreds of arrests of astrologers, faith healers and occultists that took place around 9 June. The campaign was part of a propaganda effort by Goebbels and others to denigrate Hess and to make scapegoats of occult practitioners.
American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, who had met both Hitler and Hess, speculated that Hitler had sent Hess to deliver a message informing Winston Churchill of the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and offering a negotiated peace or even an anti-Bolshevik partnership. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin believed that Hess's flight had been engineered by the British. Stalin persisted in this belief as late as 1944, when he mentioned the matter to Churchill, who insisted that they had no advance knowledge of the flight.
Hess landed at Floors Farm, Eaglesham, south of Glasgow, where he was discovered still struggling with his parachute by local ploughman David McLean. Identifying himself as "Hauptmann Alfred Horn", Hess said he had an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. McLean helped Hess to his nearby cottage and contacted the local Home Guard unit, who escorted the captive to their headquarters in Busby, East Renfrewshire. He was next taken to the police station at Giffnock, arriving sometime after midnight; he was searched and his possessions confiscated. Hess repeatedly requested to meet with the Duke of Hamilton during questioning undertaken with the aid of an interpreter by Major Graham Donald, the area commandant of Royal Observer Corps. After the interview Hess was taken under guard to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where his injuries were treated. By this time some of his captors suspected Hess's true identity, though he continued to insist his name was Horn.
After examining Hess's effects the next morning, Hamilton met alone with the prisoner. Hess immediately admitted his true identity and outlined the reason for his flight. Hamilton told Hess that he hoped to continue the conversation with the aid of an interpreter; Hess could speak English well, but was having trouble understanding Hamilton. After the meeting, Hamilton examined the remains of the Messerschmitt in the company of an intelligence officer, then returned to Turnhouse, where he made arrangements through the Foreign Office to meet with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was at Ditchley for the weekend. They had some preliminary talks that night, and Hamilton accompanied Churchill back to London the next day, where they both met with members of the War Cabinet.
Churchill sent Hamilton with foreign affairs expert Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had met Hess previously, to positively identify the prisoner, who had been moved to Buchanan Castle overnight. Hess, who had prepared extensive notes to use during this meeting, spoke to them at length about Hitler's expansionary plans and the need for Britain, in exchange for being allowed to keep their overseas possessions, to let the Nazis have free rein in Europe. Kirkpatrick held two more meetings with Hess over the course of the next few days, while Hamilton returned to his duties. Hess, in addition to being disappointed at the apparent failure of his mission, began claiming that his medical treatment was inadequate and that there was a plot afoot to poison him.
Hess's flight, but not his destination or fate, was first announced by Munich Radio in Germany on the evening of 12 May. On 13 May Hitler sent Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to give the news in person to Mussolini, and the British press was permitted to release full information about events that same day. On 14 May Ilse Hess finally learned that her husband had survived the trip when news of his fate was broadcast on German radio.
From Buchanan Castle, Hess was transferred briefly to the Tower of London and then to Mytchett Place in Surrey, a fortified mansion, designated "Camp Z", where he stayed for the next thirteen months. Churchill issued orders that Hess was to be treated well, though he was not allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio. Three intelligence officers were stationed onsite and 150 soldiers were placed on guard. By early June, Hess was allowed to write to his family. He also prepared a letter to the Duke of Hamilton, but it was never delivered, and his repeated requests for further meetings were turned down. Major Frank Foley, the leading German expert in MI6 and former British Passport Control Officer in Berlin, took charge of a year-long abortive debriefing of Hess, according to Foreign Office files released to the National Archives. Dr Henry V. Dicks and Dr John Rawlings Rees, psychiatrists who treated Hess during this period, note that while he was not insane, he was mentally unstable, with tendencies toward hypochondria and paranoia.
In the early morning hours of 16 June, Hess rushed his guards and attempted suicide by jumping over the railing of the staircase at Mytchett Place. He fell onto the stone floor below, fracturing the femur of his left leg. Captain Munro Johnson of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who assessed Hess, noted that another suicide attempt was likely to occur in the near future. Hess began around this time to complain of amnesia. This symptom and some of his increasingly erratic behaviour may have in part been a ruse, because if he were declared mentally ill, he could be repatriated under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May 1945. Hess, facing charges as a war criminal, was ordered to appear before the International Military Tribunal and was transported to Nuremberg on 10 October 1945.
The Allies of World War II held a series of military tribunals and trials, beginning with a trial of the major war criminals from November 1945 to October 1946. Hess was tried with this first group of twenty-three defendants, all of whom were charged with four counts—conspiracy to commit crimes, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, in violation of international laws governing warfare.
On his arrival in Nuremberg, Hess was reluctant to give up some of his possessions, including samples of food he claimed had been poisoned by the British; he proposed to use these for his defence during the trial. The commandant of the facility, Colonel Burton C. Andrus of the United States Army, advised him that he would be allowed no special treatment; the samples were sealed and confiscated. Hess's diaries indicate that he did not acknowledge the validity of the court and felt the outcome was a foregone conclusion. He was thin when he arrived, weighing 65 kilograms (143 lb), and had a poor appetite, but was deemed to be in good health. As one defendant, Robert Ley, had managed to hang himself in his cell on 24 October, the remaining prisoners were monitored around the clock. Because of his previous suicide attempts, Hess was handcuffed to a guard whenever he was out of his cell.
Almost immediately after his arrival, Hess began exhibiting amnesia, which may have been feigned in the hope of avoiding the death sentence. Medical personnel who examined Hess reported he was not insane and was fit to stand trial. At least two examiners, the British doctor and the Russian one, noted their belief that Hess's amnesia might be fake. Efforts were made to trigger his memory, including bringing in his former secretaries and showing old newsreels, but he persisted in showing no response to these stimuli. When Hess was allowed to make a statement to the tribunal on 30 November, he admitted that he had faked memory loss as a tactic. He spoke to the tribunal again on 31 August 1946, the last day of closing statements.
Hess was convicted of crimes against peace and conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes and was transferred to Spandau Prison in 1947, where he served a life sentence. Repeated attempts by family members and prominent politicians to win him early release were blocked by the Soviet Union. Still in custody in Spandau, he died by suicide in 1987 at the age of 93.
Spandau was placed under the control of the Allied Control Council, the governing body in charge of the military occupation of Germany. It consisted of representatives from four member states: Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each country supplied guards for the prison for a month at a time on a rotating basis. After the inmates were given medical examinations—Hess refused his body search, and had to be held down—they were provided with prison garb and assigned the numbers by which they would be addressed throughout their stay. Hess was Number 7. The prison had a small library, and inmates were allowed to file special requests for additional reading material. Writing materials were limited; each inmate would be allowed four pieces of paper per month for letters. The prisoners were not allowed to speak to one another without permission and were expected to work in the facility, helping with cleaning and gardening chores. The inmates were taken for outdoor walks around the prison grounds for an hour each day, separated about 10 yards (9 m) apart. Some of the rules became more relaxed as time went on.
Visits to Spandau of half an hour per month were allowed, but Hess forbade his family to visit until December 1969, when he was a patient at the British Military Hospital in West Berlin for a perforated ulcer. By this time Wolf Rüdiger Hess was 32 years old and Ilse 69; they had not seen Hess since his departure from Germany in 1941. After this illness, he allowed his family to visit regularly. His daughter-in-law Andrea, who often brought photos and films of his grandchildren, became a particularly welcome visitor. Hess's health problems, both mental and physical, were ongoing during his captivity. He cried out in the night, claiming he had stomach pains. He continued to suspect that his food was being poisoned and complained of amnesia. A psychiatrist who examined him in 1957 deemed he was not ill enough to be transferred to a mental hospital. Another unsuccessful suicide attempt took place in 1977.
Other than his stays in hospital, Hess spent the rest of his life in Spandau Prison. His fellow inmates Konstantin von Neurath, Walther Funk and Erich Raeder were released because of poor health in the 1950s; Karl Dönitz, Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer served their time and were released, Dönitz in 1956, Schirach and Speer in 1966. The 600-cell prison continued to be maintained for its lone prisoner from Speer and Schirach's release until Hess's death in 1987, at an estimated cost of DM 800,000. Conditions were far more pleasant in the 1980s than in the early years; Hess was allowed to move more freely around the cell block, setting his own routine and choosing his own activities, which included television, films, reading and gardening. A lift was installed so he could more readily access the garden, and he was provided with a medical orderly from 1982 onward.
Numerous appeals for Hess's release were launched by his lawyer, Dr Seidl, beginning as early as 1947. These were denied, mainly because the Soviets repeatedly vetoed the proposal. Spandau was located in West Berlin, and its existence gave the Soviets a foothold in that sector of the city. Additionally, Soviet officials believed Hess must have known in 1941 that an attack on their country was imminent. In 1967 Wolf Rüdiger Hess began a campaign to win his father's release, garnering support from notable politicians such as Geoffrey Lawrence, 1st Baron Oakseya in Britain and Willy Brandt in Germany, but to no avail, in spite of the prisoner's advanced age and deteriorating health.
Death and aftermath:
Hess died on 17 August 1987 at the age of 93 in a summer house that had been set up in the prison garden as a reading room. He took an extension cord from one of the lamps, strung it over a window latch, and hanged himself. Death occurred by asphyxiation. A short note to his family, thanking them for all they had done, was found in his pocket. The Four Powers released a statement on 17 September ruling the death a suicide. Initially buried at a secret location to avoid media attention or demonstrations by Nazi sympathizers
Spandau Prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a Nazi shrine.
His lawyer, Dr Seidl, felt Hess was too old and frail to have managed to kill himself. Wolf Rüdiger Hess repeatedly claimed that his father had been murdered by the British Secret Intelligence Service to prevent him from revealing information about British misconduct during the war. Abdallah Melaouhi, who served as Hess's medical orderly from 1982 to 1987, was dismissed from his position at his local district parliament's Immigration and Integration Advisory Council after he wrote a self-published book on a similar theme. According to an investigation by the British government in 1989, the available evidence did not back up the claim that Hess was murdered, and Solicitor General Sir Nicholas Lyell saw no grounds for further investigation. Moreover, the autopsy results support the conclusion that Hess had killed himself. A report released in 2012 again raised the question of whether Hess was murdered. Historian Peter Padfield claims the suicide note found on the body appears to have been written when Hess was hospitalised in 1969.
After the town of Wunsiedel became the scene of pilgrimages and neo-Nazi demonstrations every August on the date of Hess's death, the parish council decided not to allow an extension on the grave site's lease when it expired in 2011. With the consent of his family, Hess's grave was re-opened on 20 July 2011 and his remains exhumed, then cremated. His ashes were scattered at sea by family members; the gravestone, which bore the epitaph "Ich hab's gewagt" ("I have dared"), was destroyed.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess
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Rose Kennedy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
Joe Kennedy Sr. allowed surgeons to perform a lobotomy (one of the earliest in the U.S.) on his eldest daughter Rosemary in 1941. Various reasons for the operation have been given, but it left her permanently incapacitated. Rosemary has since been deemed "mentally retarded," and she may have been "mentally ill" (for which no treatment other than incarceration was considered to exist in the 1940s). She died in 2005 at age 86. Rosemary's name "was never mentioned in the house".
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Kennedy Family Tragedies Timeline:
www.infoplease.com/spot/kennedytimeline.html
by Beth Rowen
Read about the many tragedies that have struck the Kennedy family.
1941
Rosemary Kennedy, who is mentally ill, is institutionalized following a failed lobotomy. She is the eldest Kennedy daughter of Joseph and Rose.
1944
Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., the oldest Kennedy son, dies in a plane crash over the English Channel during World War II. The pilot was 29 at the time of his death.
1948
Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish dies in a plane crash in France at age 28. Her husband, William John Robert Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, died in World War II.
1963
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the second son of President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, dies on August 7, two days after he was born almost six weeks premature.
President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on Nov. 22 in Dallas. He was 46.
1964
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest Kennedy child, escapes death in a plane crash that claims an aide, Edward Moss.
1968
Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated on June 5 in Los Angeles. The 42 year old had just won California's Democratic presidential primary election.
1969
Edward M. Kennedy, drives off a bridge on his way home from a party on Massachusetts' Chappaquiddick Island. Mary Jo Kopechne, an aide who was in the car with him, dies in the accident.
1973
Edward M. Kennedy, the senator's son, loses his right leg to cancer.
Joseph P. Kennedy 2d, the son of Robert and Ethel, is the driver in a car accident on Cape Cod that leaves one passenger permanently paralyzed.
1984
David A. Kennedy, son of Robert, dies of a drug overdose in a Palm Beach, Florida, hotel. He was 28.
1986
Patrick Kennedy, the teenage son of Sen. Edward Kennedy, undergoes treatment for cocaine addiction.
1991
William Kennedy Smith, the son of Jean Kennedy Smith, is accused of raping a woman at the family's Palm Beach, Florida, vacation home. He is tried and acquitted.
1997
Michael Kennedy, the son of Robert, dies in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado. He was 39. Prior to the accident, Michael made headlines for allegedly having a long-term affair with his children's babysitter.
1999
John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, die when their plane crashes in the waters off Martha's Vineyard, Ma. Kennedy was flying the Piper Saratoga plane that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean.
2002
Michael Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was found guilty in June by a Connecticut jury of the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley. Skakel was 15 when Moxley, also 15, was found bludgeoned to death outside her Greenwich, Conn., home. Skakel was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison in August.
2005
Rosemary Kennedy dies on January 7 in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, at age 86.
2008
Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor on May 20.
2009
Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy dies on August 25. His sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died two weeks earlier, on August 11.
2011
Kara Kennedy, the daughter of Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy dies on September 16 of a heart attack. She was 51. Kennedy was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002.
2012
Mary Richardson Kennedy, the 52-year-old estranged wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is found dead in the barn of her Bedford, N.Y., home. She died of an apparent suicide.
www.infoplease.com/spot/kennedytimeline.html
(September 6, 1888 – November 18, 1969)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
was an American businessman, investor, and government official. Kennedy was the husband of Rose Kennedy. Their children included President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968), and longtime Senator Ted Kennedy (1932–2009). He was a leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community. He was the inaugural Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later directed the Maritime Commission. Kennedy served as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 until late 1940, including the early part of World War II.
Born to a political family in East Boston, Massachusetts, Kennedy embarked on a career in business and investing, first making a large fortune as a stock market and commodity investor and later rolled over the profits by investing in real estate and a wide range of business industries across the United States. During World War I, he was an assistant general manager of a Boston area Bethlehem Steel shipyard, through which he developed a friendship with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. In the 1920s Kennedy made huge profits from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios, ultimately merging several acquisitions into Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) studios.
Investments in film studios, liquor importing, and real estate:
Kennedy made huge profits from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood studios. Film production in the U.S. was much more decentralized than it is today, with many different movie studios producing film product. One small studio was Film Booking Offices of America (or FBO), which specialized in Westerns produced cheaply. Its owner was in financial trouble and asked Kennedy to help find a new owner. Kennedy formed his own group of investors and bought it for $1.5 million (about $20.2 million today).
Kennedy moved to Hollywood in March 1926 to focus on running the studio. Movie studios were then permitted to own exhibition companies which were necessary to get their films on local screens. With that in mind, in a hostile buyout, he acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation (KAO), which had more than 700 vaudeville theaters across the United States which had begun showing movies. He later purchased another production studio called Pathe Exchange, and merged those two entities with Cecil B. DeMille's Producers Distributing Corporation in March 1927.
Joe Kennedy, along with fifteen others, signed a telegram warning that the release of Sadie Thompson (c.1928) starring ***Gloria Swanson*** would jeopardize the ability of the movie industry to censor itself. Swanson needed financing for her movie production company, and Kennedy began a three-year affair when he met her for lunch in New York after the film's release.
***
In August 1928, he unsuccessfully tried to run First National Pictures. In October 1928, he formally merged his film companies FBO and KAO to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) and made a large amount of money in the process. Then, keen to buy the Pantages Theatre chain, which had 63 profitable theaters, Kennedy made an offer of $8 million ($110 million today). It was declined. He then stopped distributing his movies to Pantages. Still, Alexander Pantages declined to sell. However, when Pantages was later charged and tried for rape, his reputation took a battering and he accepted Kennedy's revised offer of $3.5 million ($48.1 million today). Pantages, who claimed that Kennedy had "set him up", was later found not guilty at a second trial.
***
After Prohibition of alcohol ended in 1933, Kennedy consolidated an even larger fortune when he traveled to Scotland with Roosevelt's son James to buy distribution rights for Scotch whisky. At the start of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, Kennedy and Congressman James Roosevelt II founded Somerset Importers, an entity that acted as the exclusive American agent for Haig & Haig Scotch, Gordon's Dry Gin and Dewar's Scotch. His company, Somerset Importers, became the exclusive American agent for Gordon's Gin and Dewar's Scotch. In addition, Kennedy purchased spirits-importation rights from Schenley Industries, a firm in Canada. He owned the largest office building in the country, Chicago's Merchandise Mart, giving his family an important base in that city and an alliance with the Irish-American political leadership there.
Kennedy's first major involvement in a national political campaign was his support in 1932 for Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for the Presidency. He donated, loaned, and raised a substantial amount of money for the campaign. Roosevelt rewarded him with an appointment as the inaugural Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Kennedy had hoped for a Cabinet post, such as Secretary of the Treasury. After Franklin Roosevelt called Joe to Washington, D.C. to clean up the securities industry, somebody asked FDR why he had tapped such a crook. "Takes one to catch one," replied Roosevelt.
Kennedy's reforming work as SEC Chairman was widely praised on all sides, as investors realized the SEC was protecting their interests. His knowledge of the financial markets equipped him to identify areas requiring the attention of regulators. One of the crucial reforms was the requirement for companies to regularly file financial statements with the SEC, which broke what some saw as an information monopoly maintained by the Morgan banking family. He left the SEC in 1935 to take over the Maritime Commission, which built on his wartime experience in running a major shipyard.
Father Charles Coughlin was an Irish-Canadian priest near Detroit, who became perhaps the most prominent Roman Catholic spokesman on political and financial issues in the 1930s, with a radio audience that reached millions every week. A strong supporter of Roosevelt in 1932, Coughlin in 1934 broke with the president, who became a bitter opponent of Coughlin's weekly, anti-communist, anti-Semitic, anti–Federal Reserve and isolationist radio talks. Roosevelt sent Kennedy and other prominent Irish Catholics to try to tone down Coughlin.
Coughlin swung his support to Huey Long in 1935 and then to William Lemke's Union Party in 1936. Kennedy strongly supported the New Deal and believed as early as 1933 that Coughlin was "becoming a very dangerous proposition" as an opponent of Roosevelt and "an out and out demagogue". In 1936, Kennedy worked with Roosevelt, Bishop Francis Spellman and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) to shut Coughlin down. When Coughlin returned to the air in 1940, Kennedy continued to battle against his influence among Irish Americans.
His term as ambassador and his political ambitions ended abruptly during the Battle of Britain in November 1940, with the publishing of his controversial remarks suggesting that "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here, in the US." Kennedy resigned under pressure shortly afterwards.
In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as the United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (the United Kingdom) in London. Kennedy hugely enjoyed his leadership position in London high society, which stood in stark contrast to his relative outsider status in Boston. On May 6, 1944, his daughter Kathleen married William "Billy" Cavendish, the eldest son of Edward Cavendish, who was the head of one of England's grandest aristocratic families.
Kennedy rejected the warnings of the prominent Member of Parliament Winston Churchill that any compromise with Nazi Germany was impossible. Instead, Kennedy supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's apparent policy of appeasement. Throughout 1938, while the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany and Austria intensified, Kennedy attempted to arrange a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Shortly before the Nazi aerial bombing of British cities began in September 1940, Kennedy once again sought a personal meeting with Hitler, again without the approval of the Department of State, "to bring about a better understanding between the United States and Germany". It has been surmised that Kennedy also had personal reasons for wanting to avoid war; "He feared for the lives of his three eldest sons, Joe, Jack, and Bobby, all of whom were or soon would be eligible to serve."
Kennedy also argued strongly against giving military and economic aid to the United Kingdom. "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here," he stated in the Boston Sunday Globe of November 10, 1940. With Nazi German troops having overrun Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, and with bombs falling daily on Great Britain, Kennedy unambiguously and repeatedly stated his belief that this war was not about saving democracy from National Socialism (Nazism) or from Fascism. In an interview with two newspaper journalists, Louis M. Lyons, of The Boston Globe, and Ralph Coghlan, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kennedy said:
It's all a question of what we do with the next six months. The whole reason for aiding England is to give us time ... As long as she is in there, we have time to prepare. It isn't that Britain is fighting for democracy. That's the bunk. She's fighting for self-preservation, just as we will if it comes to us..... I know more about the European situation than anybody else, and it's up to me to see that the country gets it.
His views were becoming inconsistent and increasingly isolationist; British MP Josiah Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood, who had himself opposed the British Government's earlier appeasement policy, said of Kennedy:
We have a rich man, untrained in diplomacy, unlearned in history and politics, who is a great publicity seeker and who apparently is ambitious to be the first Catholic president of the U.S.
In British government circles during the Blitz, Kennedy was widely disparaged as a defeatist. He retreated to the countryside during the bombings of London by German aircraft, at a time when the British Royal Family, Prime Minister, government ministers, and other ambassadors chose to stay in London. (This prompted a member of Britain's Foreign Office to say, "I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.")
When the American public and Roosevelt Administration officials read his quotes on democracy being "finished", and his belief that the Battle of Britain was not about "fighting for democracy", all of it being just "bunk", they realized that Kennedy could not be trusted to represent the United States. In the face of national public outcry, and pressure from the Roosevelt Department of State, which no longer wanted him, Kennedy submitted his resignation late in November 1940.
Reduced influence:
Throughout the rest of the war, relations between Kennedy and the Roosevelt Administration remained tense (especially when Joe, Jr. vocally opposed President Roosevelt's unprecedented nomination for a third term, which began in 1941). Kennedy may have wanted to run for president himself in 1940 or later. Having effectively removed himself from the national stage, Joe Sr sat out World War II on the sidelines. Kennedy stayed active in the smaller venues of rallying Irish-American and Roman Catholic Democrats to vote for Roosevelt's re-election for a fourth term in 1944. Former Ambassador Kennedy claimed to be eager to help the war effort, but as a result of his previous gaffes, he was neither trusted nor invited to do so.
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Joe Kennedy Sr. allowed surgeons to perform a lobotomy (one of the earliest in the U.S.) on his eldest daughter Rosemary in 1941. Various reasons for the operation have been given, but it left her permanently incapacitated. Rosemary has since been deemed "mentally retarded," and she may have been "mentally ill" (for which no treatment other than incarceration was considered to exist in the 1940s). She died in 2005 at age 86. Rosemary's name "was never mentioned in the house".
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On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the United Kingdom, in London, who claimed upon his return to Berlin that Kennedy had told him that "it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. Kennedy himself fully understood our Jewish policy." Kennedy's main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern that he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.
By August 1940, Kennedy worried that a third term as the President for Roosevelt would mean war. As Leamer reports, "Joe believed that Roosevelt, Churchill, the Jews, and their allies would manipulate America into approaching Armageddon." Nevertheless, Kennedy supported Roosevelt's third term in return for Roosevelt's promise to support Joseph Kennedy, Jr., in a run for Governor of Massachusetts in 1942. However, even during the darkest months of World War II, Kennedy remained "more wary of" prominent American Jews, such as Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, than he was of Hitler.
Kennedy told the reporter Joe Dinneen:
It is true that I have a low opinion of some Jews in public office and in private life. That does not mean that I..... believe they should be wiped off the face of the Earth..... Jews who take an unfair advantage of the fact that theirs is a persecuted race do not help much..... Publicizing unjust attacks upon the Jews may help to cure the injustice, but continually publicizing the whole problem only serves to keep it alive in the public mind.
A political conservative (John F. Kennedy once described his father as being to "the right of Herbert Hoover"), Kennedy supported Richard Nixon, who had entered Congress with John in 1947. In 1960 Kennedy approached Nixon, praised his anti-Communism, and said "Dick, if my boy can't make it, I'm for you" for the presidential election that year.
When Senator Joseph McCarthy became a dominant voice of anti-Communism starting in 1950, Kennedy contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters.
Kennedy was consigned to the political shadows after his remarks during World War II ("Democracy is finished"), and he remained an intensely controversial figure among U.S. citizens because of his suspect business credentials, his Roman Catholicism, his opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy, and his support for Joseph McCarthy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
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Rudolf Hess: Deputy Fuhrer of the NSDAP for Hitler:
21 April 1933 – 12 May 1941
Rudolf Hess was the third most-powerful man in Germany, behind only Hitler and Hermann Göring. In addition to appearing on Hitler's behalf at speaking engagements and rallies, Hess signed into law much of the legislation, including the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, that stripped the Jews of Germany of their rights in the lead-up to the Holocaust. Hess was interested in aviation, learning to fly the more advanced aircraft that were coming into development at the start of World War II.
As the war progressed, Hess became increasingly sidelined from the affairs of the nation and from Hitler's attention; Bormann had successfully supplanted Hess in many of his duties and usurped his position at Hitler's side. Also concerned that Germany would face a war on two fronts as plans progressed for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union scheduled to take place in spring 1941, Hess decided to boldly attempt to bring Britain to the negotiating table by travelling there himself to seek meetings with the British government.
He asked the advice of Albrecht Haushofer, who suggested several potential contacts in Britain. Hess settled on fellow aviator Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had never met. On Hess's instructions, Haushofer wrote to Hamilton in September 1940, but the letter was intercepted by MI5 and Hamilton did not see it until March 1941. Hamilton was chosen in the mistaken belief that he was one of the leaders of an opposition party opposed to war with Germany, and because he was a friend of Albrecht.
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McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing thirty years later, it produced a number of well-known commercial and military aircraft such as the DC-10 airliner and F-15 Eagle air-superiority fighter.
The corporation was based at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport near St. Louis, Missouri, while the headquarters for its subsidiary, the McDonnell Douglas Technical Services Company (MDTSC), were established in unincorporated St. Louis County, Missouri.
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A letter Hess wrote to his wife dated 4 November 1940 shows that in spite of not receiving a reply from Hamilton, he intended to proceed with his plan.
He asked for a radio compass, modifications to the oxygen delivery system, and large long-range fuel tanks to be installed on this plane, and these requests were granted by March 1941.
After a final check of the weather reports for Germany and the North Sea, Hess took off at 17:45 on 10 May 1941 from the airfield at Augsburg-Haunstetten in his specially prepared aircraft. It was the last of several attempts to depart on his mission; previous efforts had to be called off due to mechanical problems or poor weather. Wearing a leather flying suit bearing the rank of captain, he brought along a supply of money and toiletries, a torch, a camera, maps and charts, and a collection of 28 different medicines, as well as dextrose tablets to help ward off fatigue and an assortment of homeopathic remedies.
Initially setting a course towards Bonn, Hess used landmarks on the ground to orient himself and make minor course corrections. When he reached the coast near the Frisian Islands, he turned and flew in an easterly direction for some twenty minutes to stay out of range of British radar.
at 22:08, the British Chain Home station at Ottercops Moss near Newcastle upon Tyne detected his presence and passed along this information to the Filter Room at Bentley Priory. Soon he had been detected by several other stations, and the aircraft was designated as "Raid 42".
Hess was nearly out of fuel, so he climbed to 6,000 feet (1,800 m) and parachuted out of the plane at 23:06. He injured his foot, either while exiting the aircraft or when he hit the ground. The aircraft crashed at 23:09, about 12 miles (19 km) west of Dungavel House. He would have been closer to his destination had he not had trouble exiting the aircraft. Hess considered this achievement to be the proudest moment of his life.
Before his departure from Germany, Hess had given his adjutant, Karlheinz Pintsch, a letter addressed to Hitler that detailed his intentions to open peace negotiations with the British. Pintsch delivered the letter to Hitler at the Berghof around noon on 11 May. Albert Speer later said Hitler described Hess's departure as one of the worst personal blows of his life, as he considered it a personal betrayal.
Hitler worried that his allies, Italy and Japan, would perceive Hess's act as an attempt by Hitler to secretly open peace negotiations with the British. For this reason, Hitler ordered that the German press should characterise Hess as a madman who made the decision to fly to Scotland entirely on his own, without Hitler's knowledge or authority. Some members of the government, including Göring and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, believed this only made matters worse, because if Hess truly were mentally ill, he should not have been holding an important government position.
Hitler stripped Hess of all of his party and state offices, and secretly ordered him shot on sight if he ever returned to Germany. He abolished the post of Deputy Führer, assigning Hess's former duties to Bormann, with the title of Head of the Party Chancellery. Hitler initiated Aktion Hess, a flurry of hundreds of arrests of astrologers, faith healers and occultists that took place around 9 June. The campaign was part of a propaganda effort by Goebbels and others to denigrate Hess and to make scapegoats of occult practitioners.
American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker, who had met both Hitler and Hess, speculated that Hitler had sent Hess to deliver a message informing Winston Churchill of the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and offering a negotiated peace or even an anti-Bolshevik partnership. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin believed that Hess's flight had been engineered by the British. Stalin persisted in this belief as late as 1944, when he mentioned the matter to Churchill, who insisted that they had no advance knowledge of the flight.
Hess landed at Floors Farm, Eaglesham, south of Glasgow, where he was discovered still struggling with his parachute by local ploughman David McLean. Identifying himself as "Hauptmann Alfred Horn", Hess said he had an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. McLean helped Hess to his nearby cottage and contacted the local Home Guard unit, who escorted the captive to their headquarters in Busby, East Renfrewshire. He was next taken to the police station at Giffnock, arriving sometime after midnight; he was searched and his possessions confiscated. Hess repeatedly requested to meet with the Duke of Hamilton during questioning undertaken with the aid of an interpreter by Major Graham Donald, the area commandant of Royal Observer Corps. After the interview Hess was taken under guard to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where his injuries were treated. By this time some of his captors suspected Hess's true identity, though he continued to insist his name was Horn.
After examining Hess's effects the next morning, Hamilton met alone with the prisoner. Hess immediately admitted his true identity and outlined the reason for his flight. Hamilton told Hess that he hoped to continue the conversation with the aid of an interpreter; Hess could speak English well, but was having trouble understanding Hamilton. After the meeting, Hamilton examined the remains of the Messerschmitt in the company of an intelligence officer, then returned to Turnhouse, where he made arrangements through the Foreign Office to meet with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was at Ditchley for the weekend. They had some preliminary talks that night, and Hamilton accompanied Churchill back to London the next day, where they both met with members of the War Cabinet.
Churchill sent Hamilton with foreign affairs expert Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had met Hess previously, to positively identify the prisoner, who had been moved to Buchanan Castle overnight. Hess, who had prepared extensive notes to use during this meeting, spoke to them at length about Hitler's expansionary plans and the need for Britain, in exchange for being allowed to keep their overseas possessions, to let the Nazis have free rein in Europe. Kirkpatrick held two more meetings with Hess over the course of the next few days, while Hamilton returned to his duties. Hess, in addition to being disappointed at the apparent failure of his mission, began claiming that his medical treatment was inadequate and that there was a plot afoot to poison him.
Hess's flight, but not his destination or fate, was first announced by Munich Radio in Germany on the evening of 12 May. On 13 May Hitler sent Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to give the news in person to Mussolini, and the British press was permitted to release full information about events that same day. On 14 May Ilse Hess finally learned that her husband had survived the trip when news of his fate was broadcast on German radio.
From Buchanan Castle, Hess was transferred briefly to the Tower of London and then to Mytchett Place in Surrey, a fortified mansion, designated "Camp Z", where he stayed for the next thirteen months. Churchill issued orders that Hess was to be treated well, though he was not allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio. Three intelligence officers were stationed onsite and 150 soldiers were placed on guard. By early June, Hess was allowed to write to his family. He also prepared a letter to the Duke of Hamilton, but it was never delivered, and his repeated requests for further meetings were turned down. Major Frank Foley, the leading German expert in MI6 and former British Passport Control Officer in Berlin, took charge of a year-long abortive debriefing of Hess, according to Foreign Office files released to the National Archives. Dr Henry V. Dicks and Dr John Rawlings Rees, psychiatrists who treated Hess during this period, note that while he was not insane, he was mentally unstable, with tendencies toward hypochondria and paranoia.
In the early morning hours of 16 June, Hess rushed his guards and attempted suicide by jumping over the railing of the staircase at Mytchett Place. He fell onto the stone floor below, fracturing the femur of his left leg. Captain Munro Johnson of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who assessed Hess, noted that another suicide attempt was likely to occur in the near future. Hess began around this time to complain of amnesia. This symptom and some of his increasingly erratic behaviour may have in part been a ruse, because if he were declared mentally ill, he could be repatriated under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May 1945. Hess, facing charges as a war criminal, was ordered to appear before the International Military Tribunal and was transported to Nuremberg on 10 October 1945.
The Allies of World War II held a series of military tribunals and trials, beginning with a trial of the major war criminals from November 1945 to October 1946. Hess was tried with this first group of twenty-three defendants, all of whom were charged with four counts—conspiracy to commit crimes, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, in violation of international laws governing warfare.
On his arrival in Nuremberg, Hess was reluctant to give up some of his possessions, including samples of food he claimed had been poisoned by the British; he proposed to use these for his defence during the trial. The commandant of the facility, Colonel Burton C. Andrus of the United States Army, advised him that he would be allowed no special treatment; the samples were sealed and confiscated. Hess's diaries indicate that he did not acknowledge the validity of the court and felt the outcome was a foregone conclusion. He was thin when he arrived, weighing 65 kilograms (143 lb), and had a poor appetite, but was deemed to be in good health. As one defendant, Robert Ley, had managed to hang himself in his cell on 24 October, the remaining prisoners were monitored around the clock. Because of his previous suicide attempts, Hess was handcuffed to a guard whenever he was out of his cell.
Almost immediately after his arrival, Hess began exhibiting amnesia, which may have been feigned in the hope of avoiding the death sentence. Medical personnel who examined Hess reported he was not insane and was fit to stand trial. At least two examiners, the British doctor and the Russian one, noted their belief that Hess's amnesia might be fake. Efforts were made to trigger his memory, including bringing in his former secretaries and showing old newsreels, but he persisted in showing no response to these stimuli. When Hess was allowed to make a statement to the tribunal on 30 November, he admitted that he had faked memory loss as a tactic. He spoke to the tribunal again on 31 August 1946, the last day of closing statements.
Hess was convicted of crimes against peace and conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes and was transferred to Spandau Prison in 1947, where he served a life sentence. Repeated attempts by family members and prominent politicians to win him early release were blocked by the Soviet Union. Still in custody in Spandau, he died by suicide in 1987 at the age of 93.
Spandau was placed under the control of the Allied Control Council, the governing body in charge of the military occupation of Germany. It consisted of representatives from four member states: Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each country supplied guards for the prison for a month at a time on a rotating basis. After the inmates were given medical examinations—Hess refused his body search, and had to be held down—they were provided with prison garb and assigned the numbers by which they would be addressed throughout their stay. Hess was Number 7. The prison had a small library, and inmates were allowed to file special requests for additional reading material. Writing materials were limited; each inmate would be allowed four pieces of paper per month for letters. The prisoners were not allowed to speak to one another without permission and were expected to work in the facility, helping with cleaning and gardening chores. The inmates were taken for outdoor walks around the prison grounds for an hour each day, separated about 10 yards (9 m) apart. Some of the rules became more relaxed as time went on.
Visits to Spandau of half an hour per month were allowed, but Hess forbade his family to visit until December 1969, when he was a patient at the British Military Hospital in West Berlin for a perforated ulcer. By this time Wolf Rüdiger Hess was 32 years old and Ilse 69; they had not seen Hess since his departure from Germany in 1941. After this illness, he allowed his family to visit regularly. His daughter-in-law Andrea, who often brought photos and films of his grandchildren, became a particularly welcome visitor. Hess's health problems, both mental and physical, were ongoing during his captivity. He cried out in the night, claiming he had stomach pains. He continued to suspect that his food was being poisoned and complained of amnesia. A psychiatrist who examined him in 1957 deemed he was not ill enough to be transferred to a mental hospital. Another unsuccessful suicide attempt took place in 1977.
Other than his stays in hospital, Hess spent the rest of his life in Spandau Prison. His fellow inmates Konstantin von Neurath, Walther Funk and Erich Raeder were released because of poor health in the 1950s; Karl Dönitz, Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer served their time and were released, Dönitz in 1956, Schirach and Speer in 1966. The 600-cell prison continued to be maintained for its lone prisoner from Speer and Schirach's release until Hess's death in 1987, at an estimated cost of DM 800,000. Conditions were far more pleasant in the 1980s than in the early years; Hess was allowed to move more freely around the cell block, setting his own routine and choosing his own activities, which included television, films, reading and gardening. A lift was installed so he could more readily access the garden, and he was provided with a medical orderly from 1982 onward.
Numerous appeals for Hess's release were launched by his lawyer, Dr Seidl, beginning as early as 1947. These were denied, mainly because the Soviets repeatedly vetoed the proposal. Spandau was located in West Berlin, and its existence gave the Soviets a foothold in that sector of the city. Additionally, Soviet officials believed Hess must have known in 1941 that an attack on their country was imminent. In 1967 Wolf Rüdiger Hess began a campaign to win his father's release, garnering support from notable politicians such as Geoffrey Lawrence, 1st Baron Oakseya in Britain and Willy Brandt in Germany, but to no avail, in spite of the prisoner's advanced age and deteriorating health.
Death and aftermath:
Hess died on 17 August 1987 at the age of 93 in a summer house that had been set up in the prison garden as a reading room. He took an extension cord from one of the lamps, strung it over a window latch, and hanged himself. Death occurred by asphyxiation. A short note to his family, thanking them for all they had done, was found in his pocket. The Four Powers released a statement on 17 September ruling the death a suicide. Initially buried at a secret location to avoid media attention or demonstrations by Nazi sympathizers
Spandau Prison was demolished to prevent it from becoming a Nazi shrine.
His lawyer, Dr Seidl, felt Hess was too old and frail to have managed to kill himself. Wolf Rüdiger Hess repeatedly claimed that his father had been murdered by the British Secret Intelligence Service to prevent him from revealing information about British misconduct during the war. Abdallah Melaouhi, who served as Hess's medical orderly from 1982 to 1987, was dismissed from his position at his local district parliament's Immigration and Integration Advisory Council after he wrote a self-published book on a similar theme. According to an investigation by the British government in 1989, the available evidence did not back up the claim that Hess was murdered, and Solicitor General Sir Nicholas Lyell saw no grounds for further investigation. Moreover, the autopsy results support the conclusion that Hess had killed himself. A report released in 2012 again raised the question of whether Hess was murdered. Historian Peter Padfield claims the suicide note found on the body appears to have been written when Hess was hospitalised in 1969.
After the town of Wunsiedel became the scene of pilgrimages and neo-Nazi demonstrations every August on the date of Hess's death, the parish council decided not to allow an extension on the grave site's lease when it expired in 2011. With the consent of his family, Hess's grave was re-opened on 20 July 2011 and his remains exhumed, then cremated. His ashes were scattered at sea by family members; the gravestone, which bore the epitaph "Ich hab's gewagt" ("I have dared"), was destroyed.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess
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Rose Kennedy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
Joe Kennedy Sr. allowed surgeons to perform a lobotomy (one of the earliest in the U.S.) on his eldest daughter Rosemary in 1941. Various reasons for the operation have been given, but it left her permanently incapacitated. Rosemary has since been deemed "mentally retarded," and she may have been "mentally ill" (for which no treatment other than incarceration was considered to exist in the 1940s). She died in 2005 at age 86. Rosemary's name "was never mentioned in the house".
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Kennedy Family Tragedies Timeline:
www.infoplease.com/spot/kennedytimeline.html
by Beth Rowen
Read about the many tragedies that have struck the Kennedy family.
1941
Rosemary Kennedy, who is mentally ill, is institutionalized following a failed lobotomy. She is the eldest Kennedy daughter of Joseph and Rose.
1944
Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., the oldest Kennedy son, dies in a plane crash over the English Channel during World War II. The pilot was 29 at the time of his death.
1948
Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish dies in a plane crash in France at age 28. Her husband, William John Robert Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, died in World War II.
1963
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the second son of President Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, dies on August 7, two days after he was born almost six weeks premature.
President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on Nov. 22 in Dallas. He was 46.
1964
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest Kennedy child, escapes death in a plane crash that claims an aide, Edward Moss.
1968
Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated on June 5 in Los Angeles. The 42 year old had just won California's Democratic presidential primary election.
1969
Edward M. Kennedy, drives off a bridge on his way home from a party on Massachusetts' Chappaquiddick Island. Mary Jo Kopechne, an aide who was in the car with him, dies in the accident.
1973
Edward M. Kennedy, the senator's son, loses his right leg to cancer.
Joseph P. Kennedy 2d, the son of Robert and Ethel, is the driver in a car accident on Cape Cod that leaves one passenger permanently paralyzed.
1984
David A. Kennedy, son of Robert, dies of a drug overdose in a Palm Beach, Florida, hotel. He was 28.
1986
Patrick Kennedy, the teenage son of Sen. Edward Kennedy, undergoes treatment for cocaine addiction.
1991
William Kennedy Smith, the son of Jean Kennedy Smith, is accused of raping a woman at the family's Palm Beach, Florida, vacation home. He is tried and acquitted.
1997
Michael Kennedy, the son of Robert, dies in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado. He was 39. Prior to the accident, Michael made headlines for allegedly having a long-term affair with his children's babysitter.
1999
John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, die when their plane crashes in the waters off Martha's Vineyard, Ma. Kennedy was flying the Piper Saratoga plane that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean.
2002
Michael Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was found guilty in June by a Connecticut jury of the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley. Skakel was 15 when Moxley, also 15, was found bludgeoned to death outside her Greenwich, Conn., home. Skakel was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison in August.
2005
Rosemary Kennedy dies on January 7 in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, at age 86.
2008
Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor on May 20.
2009
Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy dies on August 25. His sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died two weeks earlier, on August 11.
2011
Kara Kennedy, the daughter of Sen. Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy dies on September 16 of a heart attack. She was 51. Kennedy was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002.
2012
Mary Richardson Kennedy, the 52-year-old estranged wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is found dead in the barn of her Bedford, N.Y., home. She died of an apparent suicide.
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