Camp Z: The Secret Life of Rudolf Hess

On May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess, then the deputy führer, parachuted over Renfrewshire in Scotland on a mission to meet with the Duke of Hamilton, ostensibly to broker a peace deal with the British government. After being held in the Tower of London, he was transferred to Mytchett Place near Aldershot. The house was fitted with microphones and sound recording equipment, guarded by a battalion of soldiers and code-named Camp Z. Churchill’s instructions were that Hess should be strictly isolated, and that every effort should be taken to get information out of him. During the ensuing thirteen months, a psychological battle was waged between intelligence officers using the new Freudian techniques of “dynamic psychologies” and the man who had been a heartbeat away from Hitler.

Stephen McGinty uses new documentation and contemporaneous reports, diaries, letters and memos to piece together a riveting account of the claustrophobia, paranoia and highstakes gamesmanship being played out in an English country house. Camp Z is a locked-room mystery in which the locked room is a man’s head, and no one is certain whether the mind within it, which holds information that could help change the course of the Second World War, is sane or insane.