Five hours after taking off from Germany, Adolph Hitler's deputy führer was staring down the pitchfork tines of a pissed-off Scottish farm worker

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 2008 again. U.S. troops are at full strength in Iraq and Afghanistan, drones are buzzing around the skies over Pakistan and Yemen, and the all-powerful U.S. military remains on high alert for the whereabouts of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Then suddenly, one of bin Laden’s top deputies, Ayman al-Zawahiri, spontaneously turns up in rural Oklahoma.

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“I have come to save humanity,” al-Zawahiri tells the shocked rural sheriff that has come to pick him up, as the terrorist leader pledges to singlehandedly mend relations between the United States and the forces of Islamic extremism.

The preceding scenario never happened, of course. But it offers some insight into just how weird it was when, 75 years ago this month, Adolph Hitler’s Number Two dropped from the sky over Scotland.

“The first impression is undoubtedly of a schizoid psychopath,” wrote the British psychiatrist who was among the first to examine Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess , who had just turned up in Scotland.

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“The face is bestial, ape or wolf, that was at one time or might have been quite charming as a youth.”

After secretly taking flying lessons for months, Hess had absconded from Bavaria in a Messerschmitt Bf 110 bomber. Equipped with external tanks for extra range, he sped north on a five-hour course to the United Kingdom.

Hess could not have picked a worse time to fly a German airplane into the skies above Great Britain. May 10 was one of the worst nights of the Blitz, when an all-out Luftwaffe raid killed nearly 1,500 people in London and wreaked significant damage on the House of Commons.

But despite being spotted, he kept low to the ground and evaded pursuit until, dangerously low on fuel, he bailed out over Scotland. As his plane crashed nearby, Hess came to rest at Floors Farm, where the top Nazi soon found himself facing the pitchfork tines of Scottish foreman David McLean.

Being in the Home Guard during the Second World War could be a surprisingly boring job, but that night, the men of East Renfrewshire could take credit for nabbing Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man.

Hess’ idea, it would soon be revealed, had been to pay a visit to the Scottish home of Duke of Hamilton, a British aviator with whom Hess’ had had some contact at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

The Duke has been publicly lukewarm over war with Germany as late as 1939, and Hess assumed that he and Hamilton could work out some kind of Anglo-Nazi pact.

The full details of Hess’ subsequent interrogation remain classified by the British government until 2041 , but there has been speculation that the mentally unstable Nazi had been tricked into his quixotic mission by crafty British intelligence sources.

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But regardless, Hamilton wasn’t home and if the Duke’s Battle of Britain service with the RAF was any indication, he had become decidedly anti-Nazi in the interim months.

And while Hess would indeed claim that he had “come to save humanity,” his freelance peace mission was met by both Germany and the U.K. with a decided “meh.”

When British Prime Minister Winston Churchill heard that the German Number Two was on his way to the Tower of London, he refused to cancel his movie plans . “Well, Hess or no Hess, I’m going to see the Marx Brothers,” he said.

Back in Germany, propagandists would quickly circulate the word that Hess was an unstable maniac prone to hallucinations — despite the uneasiness this inspired in a German citizenry knowing that such a man had been only a heartbeat away from the dictator’s chair.

As Life magazine would note a few days later , the whole scenario was eerily reminiscent of a whimsical 1940 book in which Hitler parachuted into England and wandered around aimlessly for a few days.

“At a costume ball into which he stumbles he makes a speech and wins prize for impersonating Hitler,” read a caption to one of the book’s illustrations.

It might be tempting to portray Hess as a “good Nazi.” A National Socialist who ditched the Third Reich before its darkest horrors took hold, and who tried to end the war while the death toll was still in the mere hundreds of thousands.

That’s indeed the vision of Hess preferred by Europe’s Neo-Nazis, who have turned the late Deputy Fuhrer into a German martyr.

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Hess was one of the only top Nazis given a traditional burial when he was interred at his family’s plot in Wunsiedel, Germany. But when the graveyard became a pilgrimage site for white supremacist, in 2011 local authorities were ultimately forced to dig up his bones, cremate them and scatter them at sea.

The reality of Hess’ bizarre journey is that he did not cross the English Channel as a sudden peacenik.

The Deputy Fuhrer was well known for his obsessive devotion to Hitler, and if anything, his Hail Mary Messerschmitt flight to the U.K. was a daring bid to impress his thin-moustached mentor.

The Nazis had an intense admiration of the British Empire, and the war plan all along had been to crush France and ink a quick and generous armistice with the Brits before turning east to pillage Poland, Russia and the Ukraine.

Hess, who helped Hitler pen his autobiography Mein Kampf, has been credited as inventing the Nazi conception of Lebensraum; the idea that central Europe needed to be seized, depopulated and resettled with racially pure Germans.

The Deputy Fuhrer would have known that Operation Barbarossa — the surprise German assault on the Soviet Union — was only weeks away. Ultimately, he was merely trying to pacify England and hold off any future threat of a D-Day.

And even after the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, Hess was unrepentant about being instrumental at putting genocidal thugs in charge of one of the world’s most industrialized countries.

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While incarcerated after the war in Germany’s Spandau prison, he said that if given a second chance, “I believe I would travel the same route; end up here again in Spandau prison.”

“I wanted to give Germany back its old pride and its old fame,” he told the American director of Spandau prison, according to the 2010 book Talking to Rudolph Hess.

Nevertheless, sitting out the last four years of the Second World War allowed Hess to dodge the gallows at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials, and come out instead with a life sentence. Annoyingly, the former Deputy Fuhrer then proceeded to stay alive for the next 41 years; more than three times longer than the 12-year lifespan of Hitler’s supposed Thousand Year Reich.

Hess became one of the most resource-intensive prisoners since Napoleon Bonaparte. Spandau’s other prisoners had been released in the early 1960s, leaving Hess as the prison’s only occupant.

And under the delicate terms drawn up by the four-power occupation forces of postwar Germany, Spandau needed to be staffed

“Thus, the prison had four of every official; four wardens, four cooks, four sets of guards, etc.,” noted one online post

Germany had been divided and the Cold War had turned the U.S. and the Soviets into bitter enemies. But throughout, the effort to keep Hess behind bars remained a bizarre time capsule of the WWII alliance.

An apocryphal story from Spandau’s guards goes that there was a line on the grounds at which they were ordered to shoot Hess if he stepped across. Repeatedly, the stooped, melancholy old man would walk right up to the line and stand there, seemingly contemplated whether he wanted to end it.

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Hess was found dead on August 17, 1987 — only 26 months shy of the day the Berlin Wall would come down.

The British report found that the 93-year-old Hess had used the extension cord from a reading lamp to hang himself from a window latch.

As is the case with almost everything about Hess, however, his death has attracted no shortage of conspiracy theories — many of them sprouting from Neo-Nazi circles wishing to cast Hess as a martyred victim of the Soviets.

Despite its role as a proto-concentration camp in the early days of the Nazi regime, Spandau Prison had been a relatively nice building.

Built by the Kaiser in 1876, the red brick building had turrets, arrow loops and the other flourishes of a contemporary castle; a perfect location for luxury lofts or a museum.

Spandau was a relic of the golden era before Germany kept trying to kill everyone; when the country’s name inspired thoughts of Brahms or Schopenhauer rather than the jackboot.

But Hess ruined Spandau. The nonagenarian Nazi was barely in the ground before British officials demolished the century-old prison, smashed the rubble into dust and scattered its remnants in the North Sea.