Nazi politician Rudolph Hess believed 'Jews had hypnotised Churchill'

London, Apr 8 (ANI): Rudolph Hess believed that the Jews had hypnotised Winston Curchill into taking a negative stance towards Nazi Germany, the Deputy Nazi leader's recently discovered psychiatric records have revealed.

Notes written by Henry Dicks, one of the Army psychiatrists who monitored Hess while he was a prisoner in Britain, detail his bizarre convictions.

Hess believed Churchill had been "mesmerised" by evil forces who were trying to kill him because he was the "only person who knew of their secret psychic powers"

Daniel Pick, a historian and psychoanalyst from Birkbeck College, University of London, studied Dicks' notes for a new book 'The pursuit of the Nazi mind - Hitler, Hess and the Analysts', which will be released in June.

"When people told him about the concentration camps, for example, Hess was reported to have argued that if atrocities existed it must be because the Jews had hypnotised the Germans to make them behave so cruelly," the Daily Mail quoted pick as telling the Daily Telegraph.

Hess is said to have worshipped Hitler and was made his deputy in 1933.

Like Goebbels, he was privately distressed by the war with the United Kingdom and secretly hoped that Britain would accept Germany as an ally.

He was captured and spoke to Churchill at Ditchley Park.

Churchill initially sent him to the Tower of London, making him the last prisoner to be held in the 900-year-old fortress. Hess was detained by the British for the remainder of the war.

After the end of the war, he was tried at Nuremberg alongside other Nazi leaders and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against peace.

He famously told the tribunal, "I regret nothing."

Hitler viewed Hess's flight to England as an act of treachery and privately ordered he should be shot on sight should he ever return to Germany.

In his book 'The Second World War', Winston Churchill highlighted Hess's frail mental state.

"Whatever may be the moral guilt of a German who stood near to Hitler, Hess had, in my view, atoned for this by his completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence," Churchill wrote.

"He came to us of his own free will, and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy. He was a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded," he wrote.

Following the release in 1966 of Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer, Hess was the sole remaining inmate of Spandau Prison, partly at the insistence of the Soviets.

On 17 August 1987, Hess died at the age of 93. He was found in a summer house in a garden located in a secure area of the prison with an electrical cord wrapped around his neck.

His death was controversially ruled a suicide by asphyxiation. Spandau Prison was subsequently demolished to prevent it from becoming a shrine. He was the last surviving member of Hitler's cabinet. (ANI)