When one of the prisoners’ wives arrives at Spandau, she rings a bell and announces herself through a tiny grilled opening in the metal door at the front entrance. She is admitted by one of the interior guards, checked, searched, then led across an open area to the jail. From the warden’s office, a guard escorts her into another room where she meets her husband. The meeting is limited to fifteen minutes and is anything but private. Representatives from Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States gather in the room. All understand German. All take shorthand notes on the conversation.
On Saturdays, a French pastor, an army chaplain, comes to Spandau to perform religious services. He works without salary. Six out of seven of the prisoners congregate in the narrow prison chapel. Hess alone refuses to attend. “I want nothing to do with religion any more,” he recently told the pastor. During the Protestant services, five sing hymns while Funk accompanies them on the organ. The prisoners are permitted visits from the pastor during the week, but only von Neurath takes advantage of this.
All legal German holidays are recognized inside Spandau, but the biggest holiday is Christmas. This coming Christmas, their third in Spandau, the seven will sing carols in the cell which is their chapel and will have slices of cake in addition to potato stew and bread.
“But don’t let that pathetic picture of those seven lousy bums get your sympathy,” one Spandau administrator growled to me. “Just remember some of the other Christmases they celebrated, shooting defenseless GI’s in the snow during the Battle of the Bulge, building bonfires out of screaming old women and little children in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I wonder how many lonely widows and frightened orphans there are, who won’t sing carols this Christmas, because of them. Walther Funk likes to whine that he was only a banker. Sure. He’s the guy who kept those gold fillings, from the teeth of murdered Frenchmen, Englishmen, Russians, in the vaults of the Reichsbank. Von Neurath makes like he’s just a pleasant old diplomat. Says he. Like when he was Protector of Czechoslovakia. Have the folks back home forgotten Lidice already? And Hess. Just an addled old boy. But he’s the one who took down Mein Kampf when Hitler dictated it, and he’s the one who personally broke the heads of Jewish kids in Munich. Millions dead, maimed, miserable this Christmas because of those seven and their buddies. Sure, we should let them eat cake this Christmas, but we should also show them some movies. A triple feature. Dachau. Belsen. Buchenwald. I say let ‘em rot here, those dirty bastards.”
How long will they rot in Spandau? Insiders feel that only Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach may survive their sentences to emerge free men in seventeen years. As for the others, they are aging and ailing. Von Neurath is on his last legs. Erich Raeder has been seriously ill. When he feared strangulation from a twenty-year-old hernia, the Americans, who were in charge of Spandau at the time, suggested moving him to the American Army Hospital. The Russians said no. So one room of the prison was converted into a makeshift hospital by German workmen (among the first Germans admitted inside Spandau), and there Raeder successfully underwent surgery lasting thirty minutes. Funk had one attack of bleeding hemorrhoids, but was pulled through when British exterior guards donated their blood.
The Egyptian-born Rudolf Hess, who twice before Nuremberg tried to kill himself, is the sickest of the seven, mentally. Nine psychiatrists have examined him, and agree that has has a split personality with delusions of persecution. He still cannot believe Germany lost the war. He thinks that his jailers are trying to poison him. According to Douglas M. Kelley, who spent five months interviewing and testing Hess, “Diagrammatically, if one considers the street as sanity and the sidewalk as insanity, then Hess spends the greater part of his time on the curb…Hess will continue to live always in the borderlands of insanity.”
When I passed on these psychiatric reports to an American who sees Hess daily, the American laughed. “Tell those psychiatrists they’re twice as nuts as Hess. Believe me, he’s saner than any of us.” Despite this, the professional evaluations are probably the more accurate.
Meantime, agitation continues inside Berlin for a smaller, more economical prison. The German government feels that the seven Nazis should be committed to an ordinary Berlin jail along with hundreds of other felons. The four-power directors are against this, because they worry that fellow convicts might either slaughter the seven or assist them in escaping. But, driven by fear that their costly organization may one day create a scandal, the four powers insist they are constantly searching for a more economical prison. To date, they have not found one. And, since Soviet Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States must all again agree on the jail, it is unlikely that they will ever find another. So Spandau remains, a gigantic $252,000 Red Castle for seven mass murderers, per capita the most expensive, per setup the most incredible, perhaps the most secret, and positively the most strongly guarded man-made prison in all the world.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…
I had been fascinated by the world’s strangest maximum-security prison, and by its unusual administration and unique prisoners, from the first moment I had heard a few details concerning it. When I realized that no major story had been written about Spandau, I suggested such a story to the editors of Collier’s magazine. They were enthusiastic. In September, 1949, I traveled by train from Paris to Berlin—the train sealed during the East Germany portion of the journey—and was housed for two weeks in a suburb of Berlin by the United States Army Press Center.
The Spandau story was almost as difficult to penetrate as Spandau prison itself. There had been some sketchy newspaper accounts in several languages, and I had read them. But firsthand information appeared impossible to acquire. When I went by taxi to 23 Wilhelmstrasse to see Spandau for myself, I was almost arrested, and my camera film was taken from me, as I have related in my account of the adventure. However, my unexpected reception at the prison, instigated by the Russians, had its good result, and this was what really opened up the story for me. A day or two later, a high-ranking United States Army officer connected with Spandau found me at the Press Center, apologized for the rough treatment I had received, returned my camera film, and said that he was sympathetic to my assignment. He felt that the American taxpayers who were supporting Spandau should know something about it. Through this high-ranking officer I made other contacts, one of which was with a former guard in Spandau, another with an attorney connected with the legal division of the prison (a man I had known in my own army years), and from these three I acquired much inside knowledge of the red-bricked fortress.
There were other sources, German and French, but these three Americans were the principal ones.
After returning to Paris, I wrote “The Seven Secret Prison Cells,” encouraged and elated by the realization that I had an exclusive story containing material as yet untouched by the international press. In October, 1949, Collier’s magazine purchased my story. With rising excitement, I waited for my story to appear in print. I waited and I waited, and it never appeared. What had happened was that, a month after acquiring my story, and even as they were preparing to go to press with it, the editors of Collier’s were dismayed (as was I) to learn that a rival publication was publishing a Spandau story of its own. When the rival periodical’s Spandau account appeared, it proved to be a thin memoir written by an American doctor who had been in and out of Spandau, and was now capitalizing on his experience by selling it to a magazine. Since Collier’s felt that my own story was far more thorough, the editors decided to go ahead with its publication. But, for some reason, they never did so.
Recently, when I reread my story, I realized that I could publish it at last, because—even after the passage of sixteen years—it would still stand as the most complete account of Spandau yet to appear in print. In investigating the prison, its administration, its guards, its prisoners today, I found that little had been altered since 1949. There had been some minor modifications of the rules, there had been some minor intrigues, but the only significant difference was tha
t the huge Teutonic Bastille now held three Nazi war criminals instead of seven.
After sixteen years, the administration of Spandau Prison remains unchanged. Small disagreements among the representatives of the four controlling powers continue, but they are rarely serious. If anything, the Russians are said to be more tractable than ever. The only important area of altercation is a basic one: The United States, France, and England, supported by West Germany, want to close down Spandau and transfer the surviving prisoners to any other German prison, preferably a small one, such as a specific one that exists about a mile from Spandau; Russia refuses to close down Spandau as long as one Nazi war criminal breathes within its walls. Otherwise, as an American foreign correspondent reported recently, Spandau stands as “a model of harmonious East-West cooperation.”
In 1949, I was told that it was costing the four powers and West Germany $252,000 every year to maintain Spandau. By 1956, numerous economies had been introduced, and the operating cost had dropped to $107,000 annually. Today, it requires a budget of $66,000 a year to run the prison. However, as the West German government has pointed out, if the three remaining prisoners could be moved to an ordinary German prison, the total cost for housing and guarding them would be only $800 a year.
Other changes are infinitesimal. When I was in Berlin, each of the four powers was allowed to provide eight guards inside the prison. Now, each power provides five guards. When I was in Berlin, each imprisoned Nazi was allowed one outside visitor a month for fifteen minutes, and each was permitted to write and receive one letter of no more than four pages in length once a month. In 1952, this was liberalized, and today each prisoner may have one visitor a month for thirty minutes instead of fifteen, and each may receive four letters a month instead of one.
I learned that Spandau is still a maximum-security prison, still inhabited by nearly three hundred military and civilian personnel controlled by the four powers, still heavily guarded and fortified, still impenetrable and secret. This vigilance continues because all four of the controlling powers, but largely and most persistently the Russians, continue to fear that one day some outside political group may try to rescue one of the Nazi prisoners by force. For the Russians, this fear seems to be a permanent obsession.
From what little I could observe and learn during recent visits to West Germany, this fear seems to be groundless. There are fanatical bands of former Nazis, to be sure, old men who dream of the old glories—and there are young men who would like to restore to Germany the philosophy espoused by Hitler—but I doubt if enough of these zealots are willing to give their lives to liberate one decrepit historical figure from Spandau, especially since two of the three left in the prison will soon be legally released. Rudolf Hess, serving life, would then be the only captive they could rescue, and in his present mental condition he is hardly worth such drastic action.
However, the Russians may be completely right in fearing a rescue plot. Occasionally in the last sixteen years, evidence has appeared, and rumors have been heard, that such a rescue operation was in the making. In the late 1950’s, there was said to have been a plot instigated by the onetime SS strongman, General Otto Skorzeny, who so dramatically rescued Benito Mussolini from the Allies in Italy. The plot was that Skorzeny would lead an armed, lightning-fast task force into Spandau by air. He was to land two helicopters in the Spandau prison yard at the exact moment that Rudolf Hess was puttering in his potato garden. While one helicopter would disgorge fanatics with automatic hand weapons to hold off the Spandau guards, the raiders in the other helicopter would grab Hess and waft him away to a secret hideout, from which he could be held up as a living inspiration for the faithful. Apparently, this plot—if it ever truly existed—was uncovered by the four-power intelligence agents, and several conspirators were arrested. From time to time since, there has been a rumor that a group of diehard Nazis, in heavy tanks, was planning to appear out of the night, ram and batter down a Spandau wall, and bring Hess to freedom. These rumors have never materialized into fact.
In Berlin during 1949, I was told that it was Baldur von Schirach, the former Nazi youth leader, who might be the object of any such rescue attempt. He alone, it was felt, represented the hope of a militant Germany Resurrected to the German youth. In 1962, the weekly newspaper. The National Observer, discounted von Schirach as being of any value, because he had “deteriorated mentally,” but cited Albert Speer as “a possible danger.” However, today, all sources regard Rudolf Hess as Spandau’s only property of value to fanatics.
The first of the seven to gain release and freedom was Hitler’s onetime Foreign Minister, the elderly, ailing Constantin von Neurath. It is alleged that his family, which in earlier days had maintained a close friendship with the British royal family (von Neurath himself had once been ambassador to England), appealed constantly to their high-placed English cousins. They pleaded that the old man, no longer a threat to anyone, be paroled so that he might receive proper medical care, and eventually be buried in the family plot instead of an unmarked grave.
These appeals on von Neurath’s behalf at last reached Winston Churchill, and the seventy-nine-year-old Churchill, personally conscious of the infirmities that go with advancing years, went before the House of Commons one day in 1954 to plead for a fallen foe: “I certainly have felt tor several years that the conditions in Spandau were very hard and inhumane, and in this case we are dealing with a man of eighty-one years which, I can tell you, is quite a lot, and who is suffering from illness.”
The four powers controlling Spandau heard Churchill, and respected his wish. Late in 1954, Contantin von Neurath, who had served almost half of his fifteen-year sentence, became the first of the seven to walk out of Spandau, to return to his family, his family doctor’s care, and at last to burial in the historic family cemetery plot at Enzweihingen in August, 1956.
And now there were six.
Admiral Erich Raeder, in his eighties, and banker Walther Funk, in his sixties, were both almost as ill as von Neurath had been. The four powers met and agreed to parole Raeder and Funk from Spandau because of “age and illness.” Both Raeder, who was released in 1955, and Funk, who was released two years later, died in 1960.
And now there were four.
Admiral Karl Doenitz, who had ruled Germany for one week after Hitler’s death, had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. All but one year of this sentence was served in Spandau, which he detested more strongly than did any of his colleagues. He survived his sentence in relatively good health, and received his release in October, 1956. Spandau definitely did not break him. Shortly after gaining freedom, Doenitz was invited to lecture to the student body of a school outside Hamburg. He accepted, and in his speech he defended the Nazi party and its military conquests with pride, and he bitterly attacked the Allied prosecution of Nazi war criminals. His speech generated such a mixed storm of protest and acclaim, and consequent embarrassment for the West German government, that the professor who had invited Doenitz to speak promptly committed suicide. Doenitz himself went into retirement, devoting himself to writing his memoirs, which were published in 1959 under the title Memoirs: 10 Years and 20 Days. He also offered an occasional public utterance. His last one, made in 1964, criticized the Allies’ demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II. Doenitz told the Associated Press, “The demand for unconditional surrender was a grave political mistake of the Western allies and led to a senseless prolongation of the war. In addition to the Germans, the entire free world suffers today from this mistake.” Doenitz was severely castigated for his statement until, later in that same year, ex-President Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly agreed with him. No doubt there were those connected with Spandau who regretted ever having permitted Doenitz’s release.
And now there are three.
By 1965, two of these three, fifty-eight-year-old Albert Speer and fifty-eight-year-old Baldur von Schirach, had served nineteen years of their twenty-year sentences, eighteen of those years inside Spanda
u. Von Schirach’s life has altered little in the sixteen years since I wrote about him. True, his wife, Henny Hoffman, divorced him, retaining custody of their children. But one of his sons visits him every month. Otherwise, von Schirach has devoted himself to intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, perusing more French novels, studying music, memorizing poetry, and constantly disowning Nazism and Hitler. Early in 1965, von Schirach, for the second time in three years, was removed to a British military hospital outside Spandau’s walls, this time to have the detached retina in his right eye corrected. The operation was reported as “not too successful,” but nevertheless, the patient was returned to his Spandau cell, where he is now planning his autobiography which he expects to write upon his release.
With even more determination than von Schirach, Albert Speer has refused to let Spandau destroy him. Instead of brooding or indulging in self-pity, Speer has concentrated upon developing himself as an architect. Year after year, Speer has kept himself abreast, within the reading limitations imposed by Spandau, with architectural advances, and he has produced hundreds of original designs.
Both von Schirach and Speer will have completed their twenty-year sentences in 1966, and after that, they will enjoy freedom. It is unlikely that either one will suffer any financial difficulties. Von Schirach has told guards that he has inherited a considerable sum of money from a deceased American relative, and that this will maintain him in comfort.
Speer will be reunited with the six children he hardly knows any longer, one of them a daughter who was educated and raised by an American family in Westchester County, New York. There is little doubt that Speer will prosper in some West German firm of architects.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 49