Not defending Hess - he was, after all, a war criminal - but it's worth remembering that he had flown to Scotland in May 1941, just before Barbarossa started in June that year, to try to open peace negotiations with Britain, and spent the rest of the war as a POW. (His reasons weren't altrusitic - he didn't think Germany could survive a battle on two fronts).
The Jews were having a pretty shitty time of it already, but systematic mass shootings started after Barbarossa started later in 1941, and the 'final solution' was formulated in January 1942.
So conceivably the reason the UK, the US and France were all in favour of his release is because they didn't hold him responsible for the Holocaust.
Hess's problem was that he did not know enough about rockets to be valuable enough to the US, and was not as posh as Speer, so didn't get a soft sentence.
Not defending Hess - he was, after all, a war criminal - but it's worth remembering that he had flown to Scotland in May 1941, just before Barbarossa started in June that year, to try to open peace negotiations with Britain, and spent the rest of the war as a POW. (His reasons weren't altrusitic - he didn't think Germany could survive a battle on two fronts).
The Jews were having a pretty shitty time of it already, but systematic mass shootings started after Barbarossa started later in 1941, and the 'final solution' was formulated in January 1942.
So conceivably the reason the UK, the US and France were all in favour of his release is because they didn't hold him responsible for the Holocaust.