Adolf Hitler made a personal intervention to spare a Jew from the Holocaust, according to a letter unearthed in the files of the Gestapo.
Hitler made the dramatic intervention to protect Ernst Hess, his old company commander from the trenches of the First World War, who had risen to be a judge in Germany.
In a letter dated August 27, 1941 to the Dusseldorf Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, one of the architects of the Final Solution, instructed the secret police to grant Hess "the relief and the protection as per the Fuhrer's wishes". Himmler also instructed all authorities that Hitler's old comrade in arms was not "to be in-opportuned in any way whatsoever".
The letter was found in a Gestapo file on Hess by Susanne Mauss, editor of the newspaper Jewish Voice from Germany.
Hess was christened a Protestant, but had a Jewish mother. Under Nazi race laws, that made him "a full-blooded Jew" and a prime target for persecution and eventual destruction.
Before the letter, Hess, a decorated war hero, had been beaten up by a Nazi gang in 1936 and forced to flee to Italy for a number of years. Although Hitler would later relent, the letter protected Hess at a time when Germany's Jews were beginning to feel the full wrath of a regime bent on their destruction.
Hess's ties to Hitler were replicated in continuing good relations with other comrades-in-arms. Fritz Wiedemann, a former member of his unit, was Hitler's personal adjutant from 1934 to 1939.
Through Wiedemann, it appears that Hess managed to get Hitler to allow him to transfer his pension to Italy and free himself from a Nazi law that forced Jews to carry the name Israel. His high-level Nazi contacts also helped him to a get a new passport in March 1939 that made no note of his Jewish classification.
He returned to Germany in 1940, but historians believe that the Hilter link lost its use by 1942. He was later sent to the Milbertshofen concentration camp near Munich.
As Jews were beginning to be sent to death camps in ever greater numbers, Hess escaped deportation only through his marriage to a German Protestant.
It appears that members of his family became over-confident that their link to Hilter would keep them alive.
Berta, his sister, had told people she "enjoyed the special protection of the Nazi party" but Adolf Eichmann, the logistical mastermind of the Holocaust, personally signed her deportation order. She died in Auschwitz. Hess's mother, Elizabeth was also deported but survived.
Hess survived the war and worked for the German federal railways authority. He died in Frankfurt in 1983.
Speaking to the Jewish Voice, his daughter Ursula, now 86, said her father had few memories of Hitler other than that he had no friends in the regiment.
