Rudolph Hess & mystical plots

 

While reading an article on The Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries of WW2 I came across a few interesting tidbits that could lead to some missions either in Britain, or in Germany; both leading to the downfall of Rudolph Hess, Hitler's second in command.

In the real world, Hess was Hitler's Deputy Fuhrer, the two of them working together for years before the war. In 1941 Hess took a plane from Germany and flew, on his own, to Scotland where he attempted to persuade local forces to either defect, or help him arrange peace between Germany and Britain. Obviously this didn't work and he spent the rest of his life in prison for war crimes. He was mentally unstable and by the time he got to trial, he had a hard time remembering key parts of his life.

There are numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the journey and what happened when he arrived; I'm more interested in some of the really odd theories surrounding his life before he left Germany. He'd been known to be ill and had started consulting hypnotists, astrologers and other occult groups. There were even tales of him being Hitler's private astrologer at one point.

Two of my favourite conspiracies are both perpetrated by one Ian Flemming and his occult friends Aleister Crowley, Vanessa Hoffman, Ellic Howe and Dennis Whealey.

The first one is fairly tame and involved feeding Hess fake astrological predictions to make him feel that flying to Scotland was a great plan and that Britain would ally with Germany against the Russians.

The other, more fun one, involves something called Operation Mistletoe. Aleister Crowley and Fleming (amongst others, including Maxwell Knight, Tom Driberg and Louis de Wohl) were said to have performed ceremonies in Ashdown Forest using a throned effigy of Hess in order to influence him into defecting.

Both of these could be interesting sub-plots based upon real theories, but we can also expand on this with a few mythos based theories of our own.

We know the Germans in the Achtung! Cthulhu universe are exploring the Dreamlands as well as other Mythos based summonings. As a high ranking occultist and a member of the Thule society before it was banned, Hess would have been well placed to be involved in  either the planning or execution of these plans. Given the fragile state of mind that he was in upon landing in Scotland we can only assume that he'd witnessed more than a few things he wished he hadn't. Maybe his defection was actually bringing some top secret documents on these German occult experiments in order to prevent Hitler from awakening one of the Old Ones and unleashing hell on earth?

The rumours of Crowley and other occultists being involved in his debriefing/interrogations also lends some credence to this as Section D would want to have him debriefed by someone with an understanding of the issues at hand. Any number of missions can spin out of Hess' defection; it just acts as a neat catalyst for Section D expanding their Mythos investigations and locating lots of potential targets around the world.