Apparently the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel exhumed the body of Rudolph Hess last Wednesday. They even took down his tombstone with the words, “I have dared!” His family is supposed to have his remains cremated and buried at sea.

The reason? Neo-Nazis visited the grave site in 2008 carrying flags and wearing jackets indicating that they were members of the National Socialist Party. Even though Wunsiedel was the town where Hess used to vacation as a boy and is the town where his parents are buried and even though Hess himself in his will specified that he should be buried there, the town doesn’t like attracting notoreity.

Hess was the deputy that Hitler sent to Britain to try to make peace with the British in secret. He supposedly parachuted in. To this day his visit is shrouded in mystery. No one knows for sure what his message to the British was.

But it shows a terrible ambivalence toward Britain. The Nazis never could make up their minds about it. It shows in the almost fifty years Hess was imprisoned first in Britain and then in the Spandau prison in Berlin where he committed suicide on August 17, 1987.