So I’m just getting out of my US History 2 class where we talked about Rudolf Hess and WW2. My professor brought up some views that Rudolf Hess changed from his flight in 1940 when he crashed in the UK saying “there’s 4 possibilities all of which point to a body double” saying how Hess was either a Soviet spy, a British double, Hess’s actual body double, or a brain washed individual who looked like Hess and sympathized with the Nazi party. My professor used facts such as the planes tail numbers form when it took off in Germany were different then the one found in Scotland, he also said that Hess was shot in the lung in WW1 and sometime in the 60’s a doctor found no trace of any scar or wound.
I feel like my professor is telling us a conspiracy theory, as he did not provide us any facts, articles, evidences to prove his theory. He just talked about this subject for 30 minutes. Also heavily talked about the “Hess files” within the British archive.
My question is does my professors saying have any true basis in reality, is what he told the class even possibly true and if it is could someone help provide me with evidence to either support or deny his claims. Thank you sorry for the weird post, on mobile.
This is a minor point, but note how the professor in question has only admitted 4 possibilities. There's another obvious possibility here: the plane number bit is wrong in some way (maybe based on wrong records, maybe based on something else), and the lung issue is wrong in some way (maybe the diagnosis was wrong, maybe it healed, maybe it never happened, maybe the doctor looked at the wrong corpse, whatever).
When weighing evidence, one approach is to look for the simplest explanation (Occam's razor). Contrary to popular opinion, that is not necessarily the most likely to be the true (conspiracies of any sort often develop complex plans that mitigate against simplicity, and "simplicity" is often in the eye of the beholder anyway), but it's still worth noting. What's more likely — that there's some sort of extraordinarily complicated body double situation (to what end?), or that the professor (or their source) is wrong about the other information (which are easy to get wrong either accidentally or intentionally)? Without having other evidence (or a willingness to investigate this, to be honest), the body double idea seems bizarre — it's not clear to me at all what the advantage of such a scheme was, and why everyone would play along with it for over 40 years (when so many other secrets had gotten stale enough to release).
For me, the two "smell tests" for whether a conspiracy is even remotely possible is "to what end?" and "how many people would have to be in on it for how long?" question. In this case, the "to what end?" question looms high — what would the point be, and how would it persist for so long? It really doesn't pass that one for me. (Whereas, for example, to use /u/itsallfolklore 's example, the JFK assassination theories often do meet the "to what end?" challenge: the FBI, the CIA, and the mafia all had deep-seated resentments and animosities about JFK, and so you can see what it would "get them" to either arrange or look the other way on an assassination, and the total number people required to be "in" on the conspiracy doesn't have to be unfathomably large. That doesn't mean any particular conspiracy allegation is true. It just means I don't think it can be ruled out on the basis of total implausibility/improbability alone.)
A fascinating question - but I will address only a small slice of it, namely the way you have framed part of the question: "I feel like my professor is telling us a conspiracy theory" - apparently presented with the implication that all conspiracy theories are matters of folklore and therefore false. This can be addressed in two ways. The first is that not all conspiracies are matters of popular imagination and therefore to be dismissed.
Lincoln was killed as a result of a conspiracy that targeted at least three individuals. The size of that conspiracy was a matter of investigation at the time, and it is possible that some innocent people were arrested and convicted. Much later, a conspiracy theory was advanced that implicated people in Lincoln's government. I have heard that dismissed over the years as a "wacky" theory. As far as I know, that idea has not infiltrated in any significant way into popular folklore. I also have no way to evaluate this idea. There was a conspiracy - Booth was not a solitary, independent player - so it is a reasonable historical exercise to evaluate all the possibilities.
Regarding the JFK assassination: this if often cited as one of the more popular conspiracy theories, and many experts have dismissed it as "folklore." The irony with this is that there does appear to have been something of a conspiracy that embraced the assassination, namely leadership of one or more agency - the FBI and/or the CIA - was apparently interested in covering up intelligence failures to identify that Oswald was a threat. I have felt that this whiff of cover-up - and the implication of an after-the-fact conspiracy - contributed to the popular idea that these same agencies were involved in the actual assassination. Without opening that kettle of rotting fish, the point here is that there was something of a conspiracy - at the very least to cover up failure - and we cannot in this case dismiss the word "conspiracy" as a matter of folklore and therefore false.
And finally, the very idea that folklore is a false portrait of the world and its past is in itself false. People tell stories about relatives visiting from the grave, of saints performing miracles, and of all sorts of things that involve a belief in an afterlife and/or powers that are beyond our everyday grasp. I may conclude that ghosts and divine miracles don't exist and are merely matters of popular imagination, but I don't have proof of that, and any assumption along that line are matters of belief in a negative.
The point here is that folklorists don't assess what is real, and we cannot automatically say that anything that is popular described in a way that we might understand to be folklore is automatically false. Sometimes people tell stories that may be based on truth.
A lot of things were going on the WWII - some of which we might call conspiracies, and that doesn't make them false. Wasn't there, after all, a conspiracy to deceive the Nazis into thinking the 1944 invasion would be at Calais? Your professor may have been describing a conspiracy theory, but that doesn't make it wrong.