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Spandau Prison

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Spandau Prison was a prison situated in the borough of Spandau in western Berlin, constructed in 1876 and demolished in 1987 after the death of its last prisoner, Rudolf Hess, to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. The prison was near, though not part of, the Renaissance Spandau Citadel fortress.

History

After World War II it was operated by the Four-Power Authorities to house the Nazi war criminals sentenced to imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials.

Only seven prisoners were finally imprisoned there:

Of the seven, only four fully served out their sentences, with the remaining three, Neurath, Raeder, and Funk, having been released partway into their sentences due to ill health. Between 1966 and 1987, Rudolf Hess was the only prisoner in Spandau Prison. His only companion was the warden, Eugene K. Bird, who became a close friend. Bird wrote a book entitled The Loneliest Man in the World about Hess's imprisonment.

Of note, Spandau was one of only two Four-Power organizations to continue to operate after the breakdown of the Allied Control Council; the other being the Berlin Air Safety Center. The four occupying powers of Berlin would alternate control of the prison monthly, each having the responsibility for a total of three months out of the year. Observing the Four-Power flags that flew at the Allied Control Authority building could determine control of the prison.

In 1987, the prison was demolished, largely to prevent it from becoming a Neo-Nazi shrine, after the death of its final remaining prisoner, Rudolf Hess, who had been the prison's sole occupant for more than twenty years after the release of Speer and von Schirach in 1966. To further ensure its erasure, the site was made into a parking facility and a NAAFI shopping center, and all materials from the demolished prison were ground to powder and dispersed into the North Sea.

As of 2006 a Kaiser's Supermarket and a Media Markt consumer electronics store occupy the former prison grounds.

The prison

The prison, initially designed for a prison population in the hundreds, was an old brick building enclosed by one wall of 15 feet in height, another of 30 feet, a 10 feet high wall of electrified wire, followed by a wall of barbed wire. In addition, some of the sixty strong soldiers on guard duty manned nine machine-gun armed guard’s towers twenty-four hours a day. Due to the superfluous number of cells available, an empty cell was left between the prisoners' cells, to avoid the possibility of prisoners communicating in Morse Code. Other remaining cells in the wing were designated for other purposes, with one being used for the prison library and another for a chapel. The cells were approximately 3 meters long by 2.7 meters wide and 4 meters high.1

Garden

The highlight of the prison, from the prisoners' perspective, was the prison garden. Very spacious given the small number of prisoners using it, the garden space was initially divided into small personal plots that were used by each prisoner in many ways, usually for the growing of vegetables. Dönitz favored growing beans, Funk tomatoes, and Speer flowers, although the Soviet director subsequently banned flowers for a time. By regulation, all of the produce was to be put toward use in the prison kitchen, but prisoners and guards alike often skirted this rule and indulged in the garden's offerings. Later, as prison regulations slackened in this regard and as other prisoners became either apathetic or too ill to maintain their plots, the garden was consolidated into one large workable area. This suited the former architect Speer, who, being one of the youngest and liveliest of the prisoners, later took up the task of refashioning the entire plot of land into a large complex garden, complete with walking paths, rock gardens, and flower displays. On days without access to the garden, as when it was raining for instance, the prisoners occupied their time making envelopes together in the main corridor.

Controversy

Before the Allied powers requisitioned the prison in November 1946, expecting a hundred or more war criminals, it housed more than 600 prisoners. Besides the sixty or so soldiers on duty in or around the prison at any given time, there were teams of professional civilian warders from each of the four countries, four prison directors and their deputies, four army medical officers, cooks, translators, waiters, porters and others. This was perceived as a drastic misallocation of resource and became a serious point of contention among the prison directors, politicians from their respective countries, and, especially, the government of West Berlin, who were left to foot the bill and suffer from the lack of valuable prison space. The debate surrounding the imprisonment of the seven war criminals in such a large prison with such a large and expensive complementary staff was only heightened as time went on and prisoners were released. This reached its peak after the release of Speer and Schirach in 1966, when only one prisoner, Rudolf Hess, was left remaining in an otherwise unutilized prison. Various proposals were made to remedy this situation throughout, ranging from moving the prisoners to an appropriately sized wing of another larger, occupied prison, to releasing the men from prison entirely or instead putting them under house arrest. Nevertheless, the prison remained as one exclusively for the housing of the seven war criminals for the rest of its existence, and was demolished in 1987 after the death of Hess.

Life in the prison

Prison regulation

Every facet of life in the prison was strictly set out by a bloated and intricate prison regulation scheme designed before the prisoners' arrival by the Four Powers — France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Compared with other established prison regulations at the time, Spandau's rules were quite strict. The prisoners' outgoing letters to family were at first limited to one page every month, talking with fellow prisoners was prohibited, newspapers were banned, diaries and memoirs were forbidden, visits with family were limited to one of fifteen minutes every two months, and lights were flashed into the prisoners' cells every fifteen minutes during the night as a form of suicide watch. A considerable portion of the stricter regulations was either later revised toward the more lenient or conveniently ignored by prison staff. The directors and guards of the Western powers (France, Britain, and the United States) repeatedly voiced opposition to many stricter measures and made near constant protest of them to their superiors throughout the prison's existence, but they were invariably vetoed by the Soviet Union, which favored a tougher approach. The Soviet Union, which suffered 19 million civilian deaths[1]during the war and pushed for execution of all who were imprisoned in Spandau, was unwilling to compromise with the Western powers in this regard, both because of the harsher punishment that they felt was justified, and as an extension of Cold War-era jockeying for power. This contrasted with Werl Prison, which housed hundreds of former officers and other lower ranking Nazi men who were under comparatively lax regulation.

Daily life

Every day, prisoners were ordered to rise at 06:00 hours, wash, clean their cells and the corridor together, eat breakfast, stay in the garden until lunch time at noon, weather permitting, have a post-lunch rest in their cells, then return to the garden. Supper followed at 17:00 hours and the prisoners were kept in their cells until lights out at 22:00 hours. Prisoners received a shave and a haircut, if necessary, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and did their own laundry every Monday. This routine, except the time allowed in the garden, changed very little throughout the years, although each of the controlling nations had their own varying interpretation of the prison regulations.

Within a few years of their arrival at the prison, all sorts of illicit lines of communication were opened for the prisoners by sympathetic prison staff. This supplementary line to the outside world was free of the censorship put over the official communications allowed to the prisoners and was also virtually unlimited in volume. Since every piece of paper given to the prisoners was recorded and tracked, the secret letters were most often written on toilet paper, whose supply went unmonitored for the entire duration of the prison's existence. Subsequently, many prisoners took full advantage of this illegal privilege. Albert Speer, after having his official request to write his memoirs denied, finally began setting down on paper his experiences and perspectives of his time with the Nazi regime, which would be systematically smuggled out and be later released as a bestselling book, Inside the Third Reich. Dönitz, among other things, wrote letters to his former deputy regarding the protection of his prestige in the outside world. When his release was near, Dönitz gave instructions to his wife on how best she could help ease his transition from a prisoner back into politics, which he intended to do, but never actually accomplished. Funk managed to obtain a seemingly constant stream of cognac (all alcohol was banned in the prison) and other treats that he would share with other prisoners on special occasions.

A great fear of the prisoners' was the month in which the Soviets took command, as they were much stricter in their enforcement of prison regulations and offered poorer quality meals. Each month, the nation in charge would bring its own cook and would, in the American, French, and British months, liberally allow food given to the prisoners to exceed the amount prescribed in established prison regulations, as for food energy and volume. The Soviets, until being swayed much later into the prison’s existence, would offer a daily unchanged diet of coffee, bread, soup, and potatoes, which the relatively luxurious food available during the Western months much eclipsed in quality. This was primarily because of the much loathed Soviet director, who perpetually enforced these measures and whom Russian and Western soldiers feared and despised alike. Until his sudden removal from this duty in the early 1960s, when another, more accommodating, director replaced him, the Soviet month was dreaded.

The Spandau Seven

The prisoners, still subject to the petty personal rivalries and battles for prestige that characterized the party politics of the Nazi regime, divided themselves up into a few groups: Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess were the loners, generally disliked by the others — the former for his admission of guilt and repudiation of Hitler at the Nuremberg trials, and the latter for his antisocial personality and perceived mental instability. The two former Grand Admirals, Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, stayed together as a matter of seniority, despite the heated dislike they shared for each other ever since Dönitz replaced Raeder as Commander in Chief of the Navy in 1943. Baldur von Schirach and Walther Funk were described as "inseparable"2, and Konstantin von Neurath was, being a former diplomat, amiable and amenable to all the others. Despite the time they spent with each other, remarkably little progress was made in the way of reconciliation between prisoners. A notable example was Dönitz's dislike of Speer being steadfastly maintained for his entire ten year sentence, with it only coming to a head during the last few days of his imprisonment.

Albert Speer

The prisoners were assigned numbers corresponding to the order in which they were first assigned cells and were, by regulation, referred to by their number only. Speer, number five, was the most ambitious of the prisoners, dedicating himself to a rigorous physical and mental work regime, then scheduling "vacations" of two weeks in length every few months where he relieved himself from his self-imposed routine. He secretly wrote two books, a draft of his memoirs entitled Inside the Third Reich and a collection of diary entries, The Spandau Diaries. Speer also kept busy with architectural works designing a Californian summer home for a guard.1 He would frequently go on "walking tours of the world" by ordering geography and travel books from the local library and walking laps in the prison garden visualizing his journey. Meticulously calculated, he traveled more than 24,000 km before his release.

Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz

"The Admiralty," as the other prisoners referred to Dönitz and Raeder, were often teamed together in various tasks. Raeder, with a liking for rigid systems and organization, designated himself as chief librarian of the prison library, with Dönitz as his assistant. Both men often withheld themselves from other prisoners, with Dönitz claiming for his entire ten years in prison that he was still the rightful head of the German state, and Raeder having contempt for the insolence and lack of discipline endemic in his nonmilitary prison-mates. After Dönitz's release in 1956 he wrote a pair of books, one on his early life, My Ever-Changing Life, and one on his time as an admiral, Ten Years and Twenty Days. Raeder, in failing health and seemingly close to death, was released in 1955 and died a few years later in 1960.

Rudolf Hess

Rudolf Hess, sentenced to life but without being released due to ill health like Raeder, Funk, or Neurath, served the longest sentence out of the seven and was by far the most demanding of the prisoners. Agreed on being the 'laziest man in Spandau', Hess avoided all forms of work that he deemed below his dignity, such as pulling weeds, and was the only one of the seven who almost never attended the prison's Sunday church service. A paranoid hypochondriac by nature, he repeatedly complained of all forms of illness, mostly stomach pains, and was suspicious of all food given to him, always taking the dish placed farthest away from him as a means to avoid poisoning. His stomach pains often caused wild and excessive moans and cries of pain throughout the day and night and their authenticity were repeatedly the subject of debate between the prisoners and the prison directors. Raeder, Dönitz, and Schirach were contemptuous of this behavior and viewed them as cries for attention or as means to avoid work, rather than out of pain. Speer and Funk, acutely aware of the likely psychosomatic nature of the illness, were accommodating to Hess. Speer, in a move that gained more of the ire of his fellow prisoners, would often tend to Hess's needs, bringing him his coat when he was cold and coming to his defense when a director or guard was attempting to coax Hess out of bed and into work. It is interesting that occasionally as Hess was wailing in pain, affecting the sleep of the other prisoners, the prison's medical officer would inject Hess with what was described as a "sedative" but was in actuality just distilled water, which succeeded in putting Hess to sleep. The fact that Hess repeatedly skirted duties the others had to bear and received other preferential treatments because of his illness was loathed by other prisoners and earned him the title of "His imprisoned Lordship" by the admirals.

Hess was also unique among the prisoners in that, as a matter of dignity, he refused all visitors for more than twenty years, finally accepting to see his long since adult son and wife in 1969 after suffering from a perforated ulcer that required his treatment at a hospital outside the prison. Fearing for his mental health, now that he was the sole remaining prisoner, and that his death was imminent, the prison directors after that agreed to slacken most of the remaining regulations, moving Hess to the more spacious former chapel space, giving him a water heater to allow the making of tea or coffee when he liked, and permanently unlocking his cell so that he could freely access the prison's bathing facilities and library. Hess was often moved from room to room every night for security reasons. Often with sickness he was also taken to BMH (British Military Hospital) not far from Spandau Prison where a full floor of the hospital was blocked for him.

Trivia

  • The famed commando Otto Skorzeny, who freed Benito Mussolini from his captors in 1943, claimed in an interview in 1953 that, given "a hundred reliable men and two planes", he could easily free all of the prisoners. This had a decidedly negative impact on the campaigns of those trying to free the prisoners at Spandau through appeal and legal means, as it suggested that the men were still of high value and that their release would be a boost to neo-Nazis.
  • Ronald Speirs, who is portrayed by Matthew Settle in the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, served as director of Spandau Prison in the late 1950s.
  • Comedian Bernard Manning served as an armed guard at the prison shortly after being called up to the British Army just after World War II.
  • A British Army soldier who served as an armed guard there in the 1980s was interviewed by Soldier Magazine in the late 1990s. He claimed that the Spandau was haunted and being on guard, alone, in the watch towers at night could be a harrowing experience. One soldier being found unconscious having fired his SLR at what he claimed was an apparition.

See also

Resources

Notes

  • Note 1: Fishman, Jack (1986). Long Knives and Short Memories: The Spandau Prison Story. Breakwater Books. ISBN 0-920911-00-5., pg. 22
  • Note 2: Speer, Albert (1976). The Spandau Diaries. Macmillan. ISBN 0-671-80843-5.

References

  • Fishman, Jack (1986). Long Knives and Short Memories: The Spandau Prison Story. Breakwater Books. ISBN 0-920911-00-5.
  • Speer, Albert (1976). The Spandau Diaries. Macmillan. ISBN 0-671-80843-5.

52°31′16″N 13°11′07″E / 52.52111°N 13.18528°E / 52.52111; 13.18528

  1. ^ O'Brien, Joseph V: "World War II: Combatants and Casualties." [1]
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