1935

Summary

1 MEMORANDUM BY BISHOP BELL, 20 SEPTEMBER 1935

INTERVIEW WITH RUDOLF HESS

Munich. Friday September 20th, 1935

Dr. Gerll drove us from Hinderlang to Munich - a beautiful drive under the Bavarian hills of some 120 miles or more. We drove in Hess’ car and with us was Hof Prediger Schairer, a retired old-fashioned Lutheran pastor of Wiesdbaden. We reached Hess’ private house, 48 Harthauserstrasse, about 4.15. There was an S.S. man in front of the small gate leading up a lane to the house - a nice house with a garden. We were received by Hess and his wife in the drawing room. He was a man of about 43, very dark and with a somewhat literary and student look about him. I had been told that he had an inferiority complex and this was represented by a certain shyness and diffidence, and there was also a touch of slight melancholy perhaps in his face. He looked anxious. His wife was about 5 years younger, a blonde, a nice straightforward-looking woman who spoke English. We all had tea together and the conversation soon turned to the Church question. I said that I had learnt a good deal at Hinderlang in different ways. I spoke about what I thought the unfairness of charging the Lutheran Church with being a political party to the extent that the Catholics were. I also said that I felt that Hitler's statement at Nuremberg on the church question, if given full reality on both sides, was a statement with much hope in it for a solution of the problems. The point on which foreign opinion was uncertain, and also friends of mine in the Confessional Church were uncertain, was, I said, whether Hitler wished to make the State absolute, bringing the Church right under the State, or was willing to give the Church a full place within its own frontiers in the life of the nation. Hess said that there was no doubt whatever that the answer was the latter. There was a very definite wish for the Christian religion and for giving the Churches a full place of their own in the nation.