Latchmere House, London, 1941
"In the interrogation room, MI6 officer Major Frank Foley and Captain Short sat at a table with the chief interrogator, Lt-Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens in his Gurkha uniform and monocle. Hess in his Luftwaffe uniform was brought in, limping on his right leg.
“Can I have a chair, sir? My ankle is hurting,” Hess complained.
“Hauptmann Horn, you are in a British Secret Service prison at the present time," said Stephens, glaring at the prisoner. "You are a prisoner of war. You will remain standing. It is our job to determine who you are, be it Hauptmann Horn, Rudolf Hess, or just some bad actor. Verstehen Sie?”
An officer came in and handed a message to Stephens.
“Wo sind Ihre Papiere? Where are your papers?”
“I lost them, sir.”
“Keinen Ausweis, Herr Horn? No identity card, no Nazi party membership card, no passport. Well, if you pretend to be the Deputy Reichsminister, you must remember your party card number?”
“I forget.”
“I thought Hess was an early member of the party?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Could it be number 24 or maybe number 16?”
Hess looked truly stumped by the question and scratched his head."
From the bestselling author of An Absolute Secret, Shipwrecked Lives, Remembrance Man and White Slaves comes this brilliantly imagined novel about one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War. After parachuting into Scotland in 1941, the German Reichsminister Rudolf Hess was revealed to be an imposter. A team of MI5 intelligence officers led by Paul Cummings and his German wife Claudia were sent to Camp Z to investigate the Hess double. The team soon started to uncover the imposter’s secrets including the shadowy Herr Oberst and his training by the SS. But the British government decided to bury the truth with the Official Secrets Act and it was only in 1973 that a British doctor confirmed the fraud during a medical examination in Berlin.
An imposter and espionage thriller involving MI5, German spies and the Nuremberg trials.
Kinsey’s fast-paced historical novel is meticulously crafted and richly evocative. It is based on the true story of Hess’ incarceration in Britain, his faked amnesia and his bombshell revelation at Nuremberg. It is a story about wartime Britain with its POW camps, spy interrogations, secret codes, NKVD assassins and Russian political intervention. It explores the Anglo-German relationship with refreshing candour and takes the reader on an unforgettable voyage from London during the Blitz to the Welsh town of Abergavenny, from the Nuremberg war crimes trials to Berlin during the Cold War, and to a small town in the Oberallgäu in Southern Germany.
Reader reviews:
Makes history come alive like a thriller.
"Perhaps I'm a history fan - and definitely a lover of intelligent thrillers - so "Playing Rudolf Hess" captures both my likes. What's best is that it is a very enjoyable read, one that gets you inside the story/history without bogging down as many such books do. Instead, you are caught up in the drama that was real-life life or death for Britain, with author Nicholas Kinsey intelligently filling in those gaps where only some speculation can find room (since the historical records have kept so much of it in the dark)." Amazon review.
Was he an imposter?
"Interesting, fast-moving and leaves one wondering." Amazon
"Hess looks crazy now. The sickest man one ever saw. Born to burn at any stake for any cause that happens to come along. He has a round, bald patch like a monk's on the top of his head. I gazed into those enormous black pupils, the eyes of a fanatic, cavernous in that emaciated, grey-white face." Journalist, Nuremberg 1946.
