Hess and the Soviets

There was a widespread feeling in Germany that Hess was being used by the Russians as a pawn in East-West relations. The governments of Britain, the USA, and France would have preferred to free Hess but they were not willing to make an international issue over his release with the Russians. By the Gorbachev era of the 1980s, Stalin had fallen out of favor so revealing unflattering information about him would not have been his big a deal. In January of 1987, Wolf Hess wrote to the Soviet embassy in Bonn, West Germany for the first time in 20 years of writing them. They told him to contact the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin to discuss his father's situation. He arranged