Quirky little story
The grave holding the remains of Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess has been destroyed to stop it being used as a pilgrimage site by neo-Nazis.
Hess's bones were exhumed at the graveyard in the town of Wunsiedel, southern Germany, early on Wednesday.
The remains will be cremated and then scattered at sea.
Hess was captured after flying to Britain in 1941 and sentenced to life in prison. He killed himself in a Berlin jail in 1987 at the age of 93.
Shortly after he committed suicide the prison where he was held [Spandau] was knocked down. I suppose now we can say that the erasure is complete.
Not that it changes history one iota like the dumping of Bin Laden but the symbolism is pretty much they same.
Hess was a pretty strange cup of tea all things considered after declaring for quite awhile "The party is Hitler and Hitler is Germany", he then flew to Scotland in 1941 to "negotiate" peace.
He had studied economics under under Karl Haushofer who argued that the state was like a biological organism with strong states consuming the weak. Where he then wrote an essay entitled “How must the man be constructed who will lead Germany back to her old heights?" a bit of a historically rhetorical question since Adolf Hitler was madly scribbling "Mein Kampf" around the same time. Goebbels thought of him as the "conscience of the party", yikes.
In his early years he questioned "Was this man a fool or was he the man who would save all Germany." Well both of them turned out to be fools and Germany was saved by others from their evil grasp.
A fitting end all in all; scattered to the four winds. History hasn't been changed but perhaps a German village will be left in peace each year.