IT’S exactly 80 years ago today (Wednesday, October 8) that Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess finally left Maindiff Court to be flown to Nuremberg to stand trial alongside the other Nazis.

Hess, who had flown himself to Britain in a bizarre peace mission in May 1941, escaped the hangman’s noose but spent the rest of his life behind bars at Berlin’s Spandau Prison.

Life in the jail was totally different to the three-and-a-quarter years ‘The Kaiser of Abergavenny’ spent under comfortable house arrest at Maindiff, from June 26, 1942, to October 8, 1945.

The relaxed regime included a chauffeur-driven car, walks on the Sugar Loaf and Skirrid, trips to White Castle near Llantilio Crossenny, pints in local hostelries like the Angel and Walnut Tree, and – it’s been claimed – dinner with Lord Tredegar at Tredegar House.

But that all ended 80 years ago this week, when he was spirited 20 miles north to Madley RAF base west of Hereford and flown to Nuremberg, to be incarcerated in spartan conditions during the 11-month-long ‘Trial of the Century’ of Germany’s surviving Nazis, alongside Goering, von Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl and Speer.

Half of the Maindiff former mental hospital was reportedly given over to Hess and his guards during his stay here, while the other half looked after wounded soldiers.

But Hess went on to spend the next 41 years behind the towering walls of Spandau, the last 20 as the jail’s only inmate – perhaps imagining himself strolling on the green hills around Abergavenny – before taking his own life, aged 93, on August 17, 1987.

His deluded ‘peace mission in a Messerschmitt 110 in May 1941, ending with a crash landing in a Scottish field, was one of the stranger episodes of WWII, but it saved him from hanging as he took no part in the major war crimes.

Joe Clifford, who guarded him at Maindiff and later went on to settle in Abergavenny, told the Chronicle shortly before his death in 2012 that Hitler’s former right-hand man saw them more like servants.

“Hess was treated as an officer. Whatever the officers had, he had the same sort of meals, he dined with them,” he recalled.

“He dressed in a blue sports coat and grey flannel trousers and in the summer he’d have brown sandals on. He didn’t wear a hat, and in the winter he wore a long blue coat.

"Now and again he’d dress up in his uniform — the uniform he’d flown over in from Germany.

“He had a personal driver and a Morris shooting brake... that was his personal car as dictated by the Geneva Convention.

"He used to draw and write, otherwise he was very quiet. He could speak English, but very rarely spoke it.

“The Sugar Loaf and White Castle were his favourite places and he’d visit the Walnut Tree Inn when it was quiet.

“Ninety per cent of the time he was quiet," said Joe. “But now and again he’d rave and shout and stamp his feet and on one occasion stabbed himself in a suicide attempt.

”When he got bad news, such as the Allied victory in Europe, Hess wasn't very happy. “