When my father flew to Scotland on May 10, 1941, I was three-and-a-half years old. As a result, I have only very few personal memories of him in freedom. One of them is a memory of him pulling me out of the garden pond. On another occasion, when I was screaming because a bat had somehow gotten into the house. I can still recall his comforting voice as he carried it to the window and released it into the night.

In the years that followed, I learned who my father was, and about his role in history, only bit by bit. Slowly, I came to understand the martyrdom he ured as a prisoner in the Allied Military Prison in Berlin-Spandau for 40 long years -- half a life-time.

What really happened between June 1940 and May 10, 1941, the day my father took off in a Messerschmitt 110 to Scotland, is known only in outline because the relevant British documents still remain classified. The Hess papers that were released in Britain with great fanfare in June 1992 proved to be disappointing. Among these approximately two thousand pages was absolutely nothing of real substance about the secret contacts that existed between Britain and Germany, about the British peace group (which included members of the royal family) and its peace feelers to Germany, or about the role played by the British secret service prior to the flight. In short, these papers contained nothing that would show why my father seriously hoped that his mission might well turn out successfully.

The same government, which tried to make him a scapegoat for its crimes, and which for almost half a century resolutely sought to suppress the truth of the Hess affair, finally did not shrink from murder to silence him. My father's murder was not only a crime against a frail and elderly man, but a crime against historical truth. It was a logical final act of an official British conspiracy that began in 1941, at the outset of the Hess affair.

But I can assure them, and you, that this conspiracy will not succeed. The murder of my father will not, as they hope, forever close the book on the Hess file.

I am convinced that history and justice will absolve my father. His courage in risking his life for peace, the long injustice he ured, and his martyrdom, will not be forgotten. He will be vindicated, and his final words at the Nuremberg trial, "I regret nothing!," will stand forever.