Ex-Nazi Hess Near Death, Son Asserts
The son of Rudolf Hess, the imprisoned former deputy to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, says the 92-year-old is near death, a newspaper reported Sunday.
“It’s coming to an end, I’m afraid,” Wolf-Ruediger Hess, a Munich businessman, told the Bild newspaper.
Rudolf Hess is suffering from pneumonia in a British military hospital in Berlin. His son visited him there last week and said his condition appears to be worsening.
Officials of the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union, which administer the prison where Hess has been held since 1947, declined comment.
Bild said Hess wrote to his son in January, complaining about the treatment he was receiving from Allied authorities.
Hess was sentenced to life in prison at the Nuremberg war crimes trial in 1946. He has been the only inmate in Berlin’s Spandau Prison since 1966.
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