HE was once Deputy Fuhrer of Nazi Germany and next in line to Herman Goering as the chosen candidate to take on Hitler’s poisoned chalice and murderous mantle in the eventuality of the bloodthirsty dictator’s death.

The ardent and diehard Nazi Rudolph Hess, whose regular doctor in Germany thought ‘mildly psychopathic’, was even responsible for typing up Mein Kamp whilst being held in Bavaria’s Landsberg Prison alongside Hitler after the failed 1924 Munich Putsch.

Yet after a doomed flight to Britain embarked on by Hess on May 10, 1941, where he flew solo some 1,000 miles across the North Sea to Scotland in the hope of meeting the Duke of Hamilton to negotiate peace between Germany and Great Britain, Hess was forced to bail out by parachute near the village of Eaglesham, taken into army custody, and later transferred to Abergavenny’s Maindiff Court Hospital, where he became known by local people as simply the ‘Kaiser of Abergavenny’.

On May 16, 1941, not long after Hess had landed in Scotland and given his name to the local home guard as ‘Alfred Horn’, the Editor of the Abergavenny Chronicle wrote that Hitler must be a regular reader of the Chronicle as he’d sent the paper an advert for the agony column which, in the national interest he’d been unable to accept.

The message read, “Rudolf, return immediately and all will be forgiven - Adolf.”

Little did anyone in the sleepy market town of Abergavenny know that a key player in the Third Reich, who once quite ridiculously and in all earnestness stated that, “Adolf Hitler is simply pure reason incarnate,” would soon be living in the Gateway to Wales.

Hess was transferred from Mytchett Place to Maindiff Court on June 26, 1942, after Abergavenny was recommended as a quiet place where the leading Nazi could have more freedom.

Joe Clifford, who was one of Hess’s guards at Mytchett Place, was transferred with Hess to Maindiff Court and recalled, “Mytchett Place was a quiet country house with big grounds and was on the edge of Pirbright shooting range.

“There were over a hundred guards, not counting six RAMCS and the officers, trenches and barbed wire everywhere, and a sentry post.

“It was quite a surprise when we first got there to realise who we were responsible for guarding. I remember one of my first impressions of Hess was how tall he was, the arrogant manner in which he held himself, and the way in which he usually walked with a semi-goosestep, throwing his feet out. He seemed to be of the opinion that we were more his servants than his guards.”

Originally from Manchester, Joe was delighted with his new residence at Maindiff Court.

“I was born and bred in the heart of industrial Manchester, so to me, Abergavenny was such a beautiful part of the country to come and live.

“As for Maindiff Court, it is still much as it was. Hess was in a wing about 200 yards from the main road. As you went into the hospital, Hess and the people looking after him were on one side of the building, and wounded soldiers from Dunkirk on the other.”

Joe added, “Hess had the best of treatment and the best of food. He was not on rations and had all the finest stuff from places in town like Vin Sullivan. He had two rooms, a bedroom, and a sitting room. I would be stationed right outside his door, but I wasn’t allowed to go or look inside.

“His rooms opened onto a verandah and from there onto a garden area that had previously been a tennis court. There were railings all the way around the garden area, and there was a locked gate. He had a pleasant view from the garden and could see a fair distance.”

Joe recalls, “At night I would be posted outside his bedroom and sometimes Hess would come out of his bedroom and walk into the garden. I would walk behind him, but he would never talk to me. He was a rather haughty and aloof man and I think he felt the likes of me were beneath him.

“In fact even though he could speak English, he very rarely spoke, except to the officers who he sometimes dined with. He never talked to any of the guards.”

Joe, who would literally see Hess every day during his time at Maindiff told the Chronicle, “Most days Hess would sit on the verandah reading, writing and drawing. He would normally wear a blue sports coat, grey flannel trousers, and sandals in the summer, and in the winter a long blue overcoat. Now and again he would dress up in his uniform - the uniform he flew over in from Germany.

“He was quite often taken to various beauty spots around Abergavenny in the car for a walk around. The Sugarloaf and Whitecastle were his favourite places. He seemed quite taken with the Welsh countryside.

“Two RAMC blokes would be walking twenty yards behind him and an officer alongside him.

“He would go to the Walnut Tree Inn when it was very quiet in there and when nobody was about. Some people say he visited other Abergavenny pubs, but I don’t know anything about that.”

Interestingly enough Joe met a member of the Secret Service after the war, who told him they always used to keep an eye on Hess when he was out and about.

Joe explained, “Even though there was nothing in the local press everyone in Abergavenny knew Hess was staying in the town. People used to see him in the country going for a walk. He never had trouble nor was he shouted at or abused by any of the locals as far as I know.”

During his time in Maindiff Court Hess felt the tide of insanity lapping around his feet in the form of paranoid delusions and amnesia, A condition that seemed to be aggravated as more and more reports flooded in about Germany’s growing unlikelihood of winning the war.

Hess was also probably remotely aware on some level that he and the rest of the leading Nazis would probably be tried for their lives when the war ended.

Yet any indication of the Nazi’s bizarre behaviour went unnoticed by Joe. “Personally I never saw Hess behave in a strange way. I never observed him speaking to himself, or staring strangely.

“I do know that in February 1945 he made a suicide attempt by stabbing himself twice with a bread knife, but he only scratched himself with it.”

On October 8 of that year, Hess was flown to Germany to await the Nuremberg trials and Joe never saw the Abergavenny Kaiser again.

“Hess flew to Nuremberg from an airport this side of Hereford. We didn’t know he had gone until we found reporters outside the gate of Maindiff,” revealed Joe.

When Hess arrived at Nuremberg he was in the words of German historian Joachim Fest, “Far from his God (Adolf Hitler) and the dispensation of blessings, for which he had always been so avid, he was a mere ghost of himself. Those who met him again at Nuremberg saw a face burnt out by its former ecstasies and the torture of excommunication.”

Retired medical superintendent of Maindiff Court, Dr N. R. Phillips told the Chronicle in 1945, “In my experience, Hess’s strongest delusion was in regard to the Jews. He regarded them as responsible for all the troubles in the world. He thought they exercised a hypnotic influence over everyone and had a hand in everything unpleasant that happened, even to himself.

“Hess even blamed the Jews for his removal to Maindiff Court. Sometimes he would imagine his food was poisoned by the Jews and that the noises on the nearby railway line were made by Jews to annoy him.

“During his periods of insanity, Hess would appear to hear voices all around him and he would turn his head quickly and shout at some imaginary person.

“He would become irritable and autocratic and order people about in the true Nazi manner.”

Dr Phillips added, “Despite his periods of mental disturbance, Hess could argue coherently, interestingly, and intelligently, but it was palpable that his arguments were based on delusions and false premises which indicated his state of mind.

“However, he was able to appreciate the difference between right and wrong.”

After listening to horror after horror perpetrated by the Nazi regime during the Nuremberg trials, Hess’s final words to the court, as his eyes starred distantly into some private void, were, “It was granted to me for many years of my life to live and work under the greatest son whom my nation has produced in the thousand years of its history. Even if I could I would not expunge this period from my existence. I regret nothing.”

Meanwhile, back in Britain, Hess’s former guard Joe Clifford went to Preston to be demobbed after VE Day and returned to Abergavenny to marry his wife and local girl Muriel Clifford, with whom he had a son named David.

After the war, Joe got a job at Pen-y-Fal where he worked until he retired

Joe told the Chronicle, “I never missed Manchester at all and was so happy to settle in Abergavenny. It was where I met my wife and started a family. So in a funny old way, if it hadn’t been for Hess I may never have come to this neck of the woods and my life would have been completely different.”

As for Hess, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau Prison, where conditions were a lot harsher and the regime a lot stricter than Maindiff Court.

After the release of Hess’s fellow Nazis, such as Albert Speer in September 1966, the ageing Hess spent the remaining 21 years in solitary confinement as the sole prisoner of Spandau.

Hess finally took his own life on August 17, 1987, by hanging himself. Within days of his death, the demolition of Spandau commenced, for fear of it becoming a shrine to neo-Nazis.

Joe, said in conclusion, “I think that Hess must have always remembered Abergavenny because compared with other places, he was always well treated and had a lovely time here.”