officials believed Hess must have known in 1941 that an attack on their country was imminent. In 1967, Wolf Rüdiger Hess began a campaign to win his father's release, garnering support from politicians such as Geoffrey Lawrence in the UK and Willy Brandt in West Germany, but to no avail, in spite of the prisoner's advanced age and deteriorating health. In 1967, Wolf Hess founded a society that by September had collected 700 signatures on a petition calling for Hess's release. By 1974, 350,000 people had signed the petition. The American historian Norman Goda wrote that those who campaigned to free Hess routinely exaggerated the harshness of his imprisonment. Goda states that Wolf Hess's efforts to free his father ultimately backfired as he conflated the question of whether his father deserved release on humanitarian grounds with the question of whether his father was guilty. Wolf argued that his father was unjustly imprisoned to hide the UK's "war guilt", arguing that millions of lives could have been saved if only Churchill had accepted Hess's peace offer in May 1941. In 1973, the Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban charged that Hess was not being treated as badly as his champions claimed and that he should serve his full sentence. In September 1979, medical tests showed that Hess was suffering from potentially fatal prostate cancer. In a letter dated 8 September 1979, Hess announced that he would refuse treatment unless released, saying he deserved freedom as an "unjustly convicted man" and that if he were to die, his death would be on the consciences of the leaders of the UK, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Cyrus Vance wrote: "Far from representing the beginning of irrationality, Hess's well considered attempt is to use his medical condition to 'force' his release". The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, appealed for Hess's release, but Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko refused on the grounds that Hess had never "shown even a shadow of repentance" and was still claiming innocence. Gromyko also said that many people would take Hess's release as confirmation of a wrongful conviction. Hess's appeal to neo-Nazi groups in West Germany further increased the Soviet unwillingness to consider his release. Hess continued to be an unapologetic Nazi and anti-Semite; this was usually ignored by those championing his release, who portrayed him as a harmless old man. Hess further hindered efforts to get himself