Historical Figure MBTIHistorical Figure MBTI
Historical Figure MBTIHistorical Figure MBTI
4 min read

#912 · 7-4-26 · The Rise of Fascism

Rudolf Hess

Deputy Führer · The Flight to Scotland

INFPNOTABLE

1894 — 1987

4 min read

Portrait of Rudolf Hess

Portrait of Rudolf Hess (Bundesarchiv)

The True Believer Who Flew Alone

Rudolf Hess was one of the earliest and most fanatically devoted of Hitler's inner circle — a founding-generation Nazi who was imprisoned with Hitler after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and transcribed the dictation that became Mein Kampf. Named Deputy Führer in 1933, Hess held a role that was largely ceremonial, symbolic of loyalty rather than built on real administrative power, and he seemed content with that: he was drawn to astrology, homeopathy, and Rudolf Steiner-adjacent mysticism, and his devotion to Hitler read as near-religious rather than strategic.

That devotion produced the single strangest act by any senior Nazi official: in May 1941, without authorization from Hitler or anyone else, Hess flew a plane solo to Scotland, hoping to personally broker a peace settlement between Germany and Britain. He was arrested within hours of landing and spent the rest of his life a prisoner — first of the British, then of the Nuremberg tribunal, then of Spandau Prison, where he died in 1987 as its last remaining inmate.

Rudolf Hess was an INFP whose dominant Fi convinced him that personal conviction alone could reshape a war, and who acted on that conviction almost entirely alone.
Fi

A Conviction Beyond Argument

Hess's dominant Fi is visible first in the sheer intensity and permanence of his personal loyalty to Hitler — a devotion that predated the party's rise to power, survived a prison sentence, and never wavered even after Hess himself had been discarded from any real influence. It was not built on ideological argument so much as an inward, almost sacred certainty about the rightness of the man and the cause, the hallmark of Fi rather than a more externally-oriented Fe loyalty built on visible consensus or social bonds.

That same inward certainty is what sent him to Scotland. Hess believed, with total private conviction, that he personally could negotiate a peace between Germany and Britain — a belief he held so firmly that he needed no committee, no authorization, and no contingency plan beyond his own sense that he was right. He trained himself to fly the distance, told almost no one, and departed on his own initiative. It is Fi at its most extreme: an interior moral and emotional certainty acted out in isolation, indifferent to whether the outside world was prepared to receive it.

Ne

A Mission Built on Possibility, Not Plan

Auxiliary Ne appears not as rigorous strategic planning but as an appetite for the improbable — Hess spun out a scenario in which a lone, unofficial emissary could reshape the geopolitics of a continental war, and found it plausible enough to act on. The same speculative, pattern-seeking mind that pulled him toward astrology and fringe esoteric theories is what generated the belief that a single dramatic gesture could unlock a diplomatic breakthrough no official channel had managed.

What Ne did not give him was the practical follow-through to test that idea against reality before committing to it. He arrived in Scotland with essentially no coordination, no authorization, and no real assurance the British were receptive — a gap between imaginative possibility and grounded planning that is characteristic of Ne running well ahead of the weaker judging functions behind it.

Why INFP Over INFJ

Why not INFJ?

An INFJ operating on Ni-Fe would have built the Scotland mission around calculated, socially-attuned persuasion — cultivating contacts, reading the political moment, working channels likely to actually receive the message. Hess did none of that. His flight was strikingly naive and unilateral, an interior conviction acted out with almost no external reality-testing or contingency planning, which is the signature of dominant Fi paired with Ne rather than a strategically patient Ni-Fe mind.

The gap between Hess's certainty and his preparation is the clearest evidence for the type: he was right enough about his own convictions to risk his life on them, and wrong enough about how the world would respond to spend the next forty-six years in captivity because of it.

Rudolf Hess was a true believer whose fanatical loyalty to Hitler helped build the Nazi Party from its earliest days, and whose one independent act was as reckless and self-defeating as the regime he served to the end.

Forty-Six Years a Prisoner

Hess's flight accomplished nothing he intended — Britain did not negotiate, the war continued for four more years, and Adolf Hitler publicly disowned him as mentally unstable. Hess was tried at Nuremberg alongside the regime's other surviving leaders and sentenced to life imprisonment, one of the few defendants spared execution — a sentence he served in full at Spandau Prison in Berlin, ultimately as its sole remaining inmate for the last two decades of his life.

His case remains one of the strangest footnotes of the war: a founding Nazi ideologue whose devotion was total, whose judgment about how to act on it was catastrophically poor, and whose decades of isolated imprisonment mirrored, in a smaller way, the isolation of the mission that put him there.

Connected Figures

Adolf HitlerINFJFührerCellmateThe leader Hess served from the earliest days of the party, imprisoned alongside him after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

Further Reading

  • Hess: Flight for the Führer — Peter PadfieldA detailed account of the Scotland flight and its context.
  • Hess: A Biography — Roger Manvell & Heinrich FraenkelA comprehensive biography covering Hess's full career and postwar imprisonment.

Sign up for monthly insights

Monthly insights into history's most influential figures — examined through psychology, context, and cognitive pattern. Less stereotype, more structure. History, but with a mind map.

Powered by Buttondown

|||Share