Potsdam-based contemporary historian Manfred Görtemaker has been working on this meticulously researched biography for almost 20 years. For the first time, he was able to analyse around 4100 letters and 50,000 pages of correspondence from the Hess estate in the Federal Archives in Bern, received special dispensation to view the papers of Lord Selkirk of Douglas, to whose home in Scotland Hess fled, and drew on an impressive number of previously unexamined archival documents. The result is an unusually vivid biography of the man who, right from the start, was by Hitler’s side through thick and thin, who managed his growing power like an alter ego and whose influence over the ‘boss’ no rival was left in any doubt about.

• ‘I regret nothing.’ - Hess in his closing remarks at the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals in 1946

• Manfred Görtemaker is the first to analyse letters and texts from Rudolf Hess’s estate

• A meticulous biographical reconstruction of Hitler’s most faithful paladin

• An exemplary study of how someone becomes a Nazi