Customer Reviews

Hess: The Missing Years

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Irving does it again--well written and masterfully researched account of the barbaristic mind torture inflicted by the British against a civilian detainee. What Hess went through made 'The Prisoner' seem tame. Those who prefer fairy tale history will disapprove, but then again few of those ilk will have gotten this far.

This is a yet another excellent work of history by the world's foremost expert on the Nazi hierarchy, and one that needed to be written, but it must be said that it can be a bit dry and repetitive. That's no criticism of the author, but of his subject matter- after all, Hess' "missing years" consisted mainly of a naive, confused and possibly insane man sitting in one British prison or another. There are certainly a good number of interesting tidbits, but way too many pages of Hess' daily routine, his diet, his ailments and his mental difficulties, real or feigned. As I said, that kind of detail was completely necessary, but the reader should know what he is in for. Irving doesn't speculate on rumors of a Hess impersonator in Spandau but does mention a few discrepancies which one could interpret in that direction. All in all, this is another excellent piece of scholarship by Irving.