English: Ernst Hess owed his survival to the personal intervention of Adolf Hitler.

The Fuhrer ordered his SS thugs to leave the Jewish judge alone because Hess had been his commanding officer during the First World War. Hitler looked back on his time on the Western Front with great pride and fondness so, while some six million Jews perished in the Holocaust set in motion by Hitler, Hess was allowed to live on the Fuhrer's whim. His remarkable story was told by his daughter Ursula, 86, after a newspaper unearthed the letter sent on the orders of Hitler insisting that Hess was not to be 'persecuted or deported'. A file kept by the Dusseldorf Gestapo on him includes the letter from the head of the Gestapo and the SS, Heinrich Himmler, dated August 27, 1940, saying Hess must receive 'relief and protection as per the Fuhrer's wishes'. Himmler made a point of informing all relevant authorities and officials that the judge was 'not to be inopportuned in any way whatsoever'. Ironically, Hess told his daughter that he and his old comrades from the trenches hardly remembered Hitler – by then a well-known figure in German politics – when they met at reunions in the 1920s and 30s. He told her that the future dictator rarely spoke and had few friends among the troops. Historians have in recent years poured scorn on the Nazi myth of the heroic Corporal Hitler running messages from one frontline trench to another. In fact, other soldiers regarded him as a 'rear area pig', taking his messages between HQs a few miles behind the front. Ernst Moritz Hess, born in 1890, had joined the 2nd Royal Bavarian Reserve Infantry as an officer at the beginning of the First World War, the same regiment that Austrian-born Hitler volunteered for. Both men were deployed to the Flanders front in autumn 1914, serving in what was known as the List Regiment until 1918.

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