One suspects, by all accounts, that it is not freedom from Spandau alone that these two will enjoy, but freedom from the oppressive daily presence of the erratic—and for them, unbearable—Rudolf Hess.
From all that I could learn, Hess today is much like the Hess I learned about in 1949, only more so in every respect. By now, at the age of seventy-one, he has been in one jail or another for twenty-four consecutive years, and over eighteen of those years have been spent in Spandau. Physically, he is a gray-haired, hollow-eyed, wrinkled, hunched and bony scarecrow. As an American officer in Spandau told the Associated Press in 1964: “He looks a strange sight as he shambles around in an old German army ski-cap and a long military overcoat that flaps around his ankles. His mental state has not improved with the years. Some nights he howls like a wolf in his cell.”
Prison psychiatrists consider Rudolf Hess still psychotic but not insane. Recently, Dr. Maurice N. Walsh, a psychiatrist associated with the University of California at Los Angeles, admitted that he had examined Hess in the presence of fifteen witnesses during 1948, but had been told to keep his diagnosis secret, for fear of irritating the Russians during the tense days of the Berlin airlift. According to Dr. Walsh, “I determined that he was a latent schizophrenic, a man in and out of psychosis. But I found him in no immediate danger of suicide.”
Today, Hess’s condition remains unchanged. His hypochondria has deepened, and he weeps over imaginary ills. He begs his guards to break rules to extend him special favors, and when a softhearted one complies, Hess informs on the guard to his superiors. Sometimes when guards hear him screaming, they will scream back at him. Often they will find him stretched out on his cell floor, in a partial trance, babbling to himself.
Hess’s interests are few. He looks forward to his daily session of gardening. He enjoys writing his regular letters to his wife, Ilse, who manages a resort lodge near Munich, and to his twenty-six-year-old blond son, Wolf-Ruediger (a graduate of the University of Munich and an engineer), who is loyal to the memory, of his father. However, Hess has never once permitted his wife or son to visit him at Spandau. According to his wife, “He could not stand for us to see him living like a caged animal.”
Just after New Year’s Day, 1965, Hess received the first visitor that he had even invited to call upon him inside Spandau. At that time, he summoned his attorney, Alfred Seidel, and the two men spent most of their half hour together drafting the terms of Hess’s will. Later, Seidel told the press that Hess did not want him to fight for a pardon, that he hoped to be paroled when von Schirach and Speer were freed, and that he wished no further visitors, not even members of his immediate family. According to Seidel, Hess is anything but insane. “His memory functions superbly. Hess especially wanted to know how his family lives. He is worried about the economic existence of his wife and son.”
His one unflagging interest is his nostalgia for the Nazi past, when he was Hitler’s deputy Fuehrer and third in command. More often than before, the guards of the four nations can observe him goose-stepping in his tiny jail cell. And sometimes they hear him singing, in a cracked voice, the “Horst Wessel” song. His memory, fairly clear about events that happened up to May of 1941, frequently seems to have been arrested at that date. That was the period when Hess—knowing that England was in desperate straits, knowing that his Fuehrer wanted to make peace with England before striking at Russia but could not reach Churchill with a peace offer—determined to take matters into his own hands. Although it meant defecting from Germany, Hess flew a Messerschmitt to England, landed in a cow pasture, and eagerly offered to present a peace plan to the Duke of Hamilton and others. He never had a chance to discuss his offer. He was clapped into an English jail where he languished until Germany was defeated. Even though Hitler declared Hess insane at the time of his defection, and tried to obliterate his name from records of the Third Reich, there are scholars who now believe that Hitler was aware in advance of Hess’s flight, and even encouraged it. Hitler disowned Hess, and disavowed knowledge of the flight, only because the mission proved a dismal failure.
But all of that is in the past, where Rudolf Hess spends so many of his hours and days, a past more agreeable to him than his present situation in Spandau. When von Schirach and Speer are gone, Hess will be alone in Spandau, and one doubts that he will be unhappier, since he always resented their repudiation of Hitler, their judging Hitler as a lunatic, their sharing of Hess’s privileges as a martyr of the Third Reich.
And so, with the other two gone, there will be only one.
Incredibly, there will be three hundred specialists, from four powerful governments, guarding one deranged old man, the relic of a political regime that no longer exists, in a burdensome German St. Helena.
And when Hess dies, or is murdered, there will be none. And at last, the seven secret cells will be empty, and the warders will go home with their stories, and Spandau will belong to the historians—and the makers of fiction.
17
The Man Who Loved
Hitler
The tall, blond clerk at Fritzes, Stockholm’s leading bookstore, did not think that I should see Dr. Sven Hedin for a possible magazine story. “He is our national disgrace,” said the clerk.
But as far as I could observe. Dr. Hedin’s disgrace—he had embarrassed the neutral Swedes by supporting Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and Germany had lost—was not often discussed in public. In a small land, where great international names are few—Swedenborg, Strindberg, Nobel, Lagerlöf, a handful more, also dead—they do not relinquish their heroes easily or prematurely. At the age of eighty-one, Dr. Sven Hedin was still well-known throughout the world, and so any ostracism by his countrymen was both occasional and reluctant. However, for the great majority of Swedes (only a small minority had been as pro-Nazi as Dr. Hedin), their hero stood as an uncomfortable reminder that their nation had traded with Hitler’s Germany throughout the Second World War.
Dr. Hedin’s numerous thick books on his explorations of Inner Mongolia and Tibet, printed in Swedish, German, and English, crowded the shelves of all Stockholm’s many bookstores, including Fritzes. As explorer, hydrographer, cartographer, and travel writer, Dr. Hedin had visited the Forbidden City of Lhasa in 1896, and had returned to Tibet in 1906. From 1927 to 1935, traveling out of Peking, he had led a caravan of twenty-seven men and three hundred camels on the greatest expedition ever attempted into Central Asia. As a result of these adventures, he had become Sweden’s best-known explorer. I found him listed in a recent government publication as one of Sweden’s twenty great scientists of the preceding three hundred years, and he was given more space than any other living Swede. And only the week before I arrived in Stockholm, he had dined with Count Folke Bernadotte, the busy nephew to the king.
Clearly, despite a certain amount of antagonism toward him by a variety of Swedish citizens I had met, Dr. Sven Hedin was not to be counted out. My curiosity about Dr. Hedin mounted. I wondered what had happened to a member of that unclassified species, the neutral-nation Nazi, after the war was over. To satisfy my curiosity, I sent Dr. Hedin a note. Promptly, he replied to it with an invitation to tea.
The two modern apartments which he kept, one above the other, were located on the Norr Mälarstrand, overlooking the quiet canal waters and white ferryboats of the Mälaren. Dr. Hedin met me at his door, a quick, shrewd-eyed gnome of a man, wearing thick spectacles, gray scrub mustache, stiff winged collar, and pin-striped suit. He grasped my hand in both of his. How good to see me! Ah, he had not been to America since 1932, when he had supervised construction of a replica of Jehol’s Golden Pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair. An electric land, America. He had lunched with Henry Ford. Good man. Ford, even though Ford had refused to back a Hedin expedition into China, and was interested only ,in new roads for American automobiles in Russia. Did I know that Dr. Hedin had a letter from the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Oh yes, yes indeed.
Talking steadily. Dr. Hedin guided me into a narrow room, with
built-in files on both sides, the files jammed with the correspondence of sixty years. He began opening files. The Roosevelt letter, the letter, ah, here, from the White House, Washington, D.C., 1933, a polite thank-you for some Chinese stamps and an invitation to drop in sometime.
We went into the parlor for tea. Dr. Hedin introduced me to his elderly sister, Alma, a tall, wary, watery woman in blue. She collected stamps, had founded the Flower Fund (“It’s barbaric to waste flowers on the dead at funerals, so I make our people spend the same money on apartment houses for old folks”), and was now writing her autobiography. She had published one book, My Brother Sven, and it had been brought out in Germany recently.
Next, Dr. Hedin introduced me to his niece, Ann Maria Wetterlind, a compact blonde who spoke British English. She had been traveling these last years as Uncle Sven’s secretary, and she had adored Berlin most of all. Those good times in Berlin, those parties, those wonderful people Emmy and Hermann, and Adolf’s marvelous anecdotes. They were all such gentlemen, except Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Front, he alone repelled her.
Ann Maria was now occupied taking care of eighteen refugees from Poland and Estonia. There were 98,000 refugees in all, in Sweden, and many were very ill. They had suffered horribly in concentration camps. Mentioning the last, Ann Maria did not hide her confusion. These refugees claimed Emmy and Hermann and Adolf had put them there, in those camps, and yet Arm Maria had met Emmy and Hermann and Adolf and found them charming. Where was the lie?
We sat around a large, low coffee table, and with the first ceremonious pouring of tea. Dr. Sven Hedin took over. He seemed faintly concerned that I did not know enough about his importance in Sweden. Did I know that he was a Nobel Prize judge, and the only judge to vote annually on three of the four categories that Sweden controlled? I had not known, and was impressed, and showed it.
Feeling surer now. Dr. Hedin proceeded to elaborate upon his Nobel Prize connections. He had, he said, been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science since 1905, and every year since then had voted for the laureates in physics and chemistry. In fact, in 1924, because of seniority, he had been president of the Academy of Science. During his membership, Dr. Albert Michelson, Dr. Guglielmo Marconi, Dr. Max Planck (“Five years ago, when he was eighty-five, he wrote me he had climbed the Jungfrau, up and down, in a single day”). Dr. Albert Einstein had been honored in physics, and Dr. Ernest Rutherford, Dr. Marie Curie, Dr. Irving Langmuir, Dr. Otto Hahn had been honored in chemistry.
Back in 1913, Dr. Hedin continued, he had been elected to fill a vacancy among the eighteen who composed the Swedish Academy, and thus, as one of the august eighteen, he had also become a judge to vote on the annual Nobel Prize for literature. Today, he was one of the three eldest of the eighteen. Oh, he went back a long way. He had personally known Alfred Nobel himself. “Knew him quite well. A nice man, and kind, but not like other men. An eccentric. Very definite in his ideas and opinions. His famous last will was scratched out on a half sheet of paper, because he had torn off the blank bottom half to save for other writing. He backed an early expedition of mine.”
Dr. Hedin discussed some of the Nobel literary awards for which he had been, at least in part, responsible. Since he had become a literary judge, Romain Rolland, Knut Hamsun, Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Eugene O’Neill had all received the prize. Dr. Hedin explained that he and Selma Lagerlöf had been jointly responsible for swinging the Nobel award to America’s Pearl Buck in 1938. Oh yes, it was a fact. He had admired Pearl Buck’s work, her interest in China, and he and Selma had opposed and overcome the resistance of their fellow judges. “Pearl Buck and her husband published my last book, a biography of Chiang Kai-shek. They gave me too little money for it, and to think how I got her the Nobel Prize!” Not many days before, Dr. Hedin had heard from Pearl Buck’s husband, who published under the John Day imprint, recommending Lin Yutang, one of his authors, for the next Nobel Prize. Dr. Hedin was doubtful about Lin Yutang (“His work is not broad enough”), but he would read more of his books and reconsider.
I asked Dr. Hedin how a relatively unknown writer, like Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet, who had won the Nobel Prize the year before, had gained a majority vote. “Well, that was interesting,” said Dr. Hedin. “One of our judges, Hjalmar Gullberg, a very great poet here, had read Miss Mistral’s poetry in the original Spanish and was enthusiastic. He nominated her, as did someone from South America. She had never been translated into Swedish or English, so none of us knew her work. To convince us. Professor Gullberg went to work translating Miss Mistral’s best verse into Swedish. He had it published, and sent all of the judges a copy. It was a beautiful translation, and we voted her to be the laureate for 1945. But do not have the wrong impression. There are no politics in the awards.”
I asked Dr. Hedin why certain prominent authors had not been honored. I named names, and Dr. Hedin had an explanation for each rejection. Maxim Gorki had died too soon. “His name came in second several times, and he would have got the prize eventually.” H. G. Wells had been considered. “Too minor and journalistic.” W. Somerset Maugham had also been considered. “Too popular and undistinguished.” And James Joyce? Dr. Hedin seemed puzzled. “Who is he?”
By now, confident of my interest in him, Dr. Hedin turned to what he regarded as a more important topic of conversation—world politics. Germany was in a terrible condition, he said. Germans had no place to live. Their homes had been destroyed by American bombers. Germans were starving. They would die in droves this postwar winter. Field Marshall Milch’s wife had written him a pathetic letter begging for food packages. Dr. Hedin regarded me hopefully. Surely, I would tell America of this. Surely, America would help. After all, in the next war, a democratic United States of Germany would be America’s best ally. The German people were one people, and no artificial zones could ever divide them. Had not Walter Lippmann written that today the Germans were the strongest people in Europe? Did I not think William Bullitt was America’s most intelligent man?
Dr. Hedin told me that he had studied in Germany in 1889. It had always been his second homeland. He had been recognized there, feted, fussed over. The Kaiser and von Hindenburg had been his dearest friends. (Of course, he added, Pope Pius XI, King George V, Czar Nicholas, Emperor Meiji, Theodore Roosevelt had also been his friends.) And his books had always sold better in Germany than in the United States or Great Britain.
In 1927, Dr. Hedin went on. Dr. Junkers, the German airplane manufacturer, had sent him to Central Asia to see about establishing an air route from Berlin to Peking. The Chinese government had refused permission for such an airline. The expedition had then been refinanced and redirected by Dr. Hedin’s friend. King Gustav of Sweden, with a strictly scientific objective. When Hedin’s Swedish funds had run out, the Chinese took over his project and converted it into a pioneer highway-mapping enterprise. Dr. Hedin’s explorations in Central Asia had consumed eight years. On returning to Sweden, Dr. Hedin had undertaken to produce an encyclopedic series of books on his findings in Central Asia. Thirty-one volumes had already been published in Stockholm, and Dr. Hedin was in the midst of collaborating on the twenty-five remaining books in the series. He expected this would leave him little time for any more exploring in the future.
He had also written, he added proudly, about 500 manuscript pages of another book, one that had nothing to do with his exploring. “I will call it ‘Germany’s Last Years,’” he said. Instantly, his sister protested. “They were not Germany’s last years. Germany is not dead, Sven.” Dr. Hedin blinked behind his thick lenses. “Alma, I mean it will tell about Germany’s recent years.” It would relate the entire story, he said, of his countless visits with the Nazi leaders. Although himself one-quarter Jewish, Dr. Hedin had been extremely friendly with Hitler and Goebbels, and whenever he dined and chatted with them, he would, upon leaving their presence, scurry back to his suite in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin and transcribe every word he had heard. He felt that h
is position, as an unbiased listener from a neutral country, had been unique, and he had been then, even as now, possessed of an acute sense of history.
I wondered exactly how friendly he had been with Adolf Hitler. In reply. Dr. Hedin nodded to his sister, who rose, disappeared, and then returned with a large red velvet box. She opened it with care. “We keep it hidden now,” she said softly. Deep inside the box, embedded in solid silver, the silver etched around with miniature swastikas, reposed a full-length picture of Hitler, a photograph affectionately autographed to Dr. Hedin.
After removing the framed picture, sister, Alma, extracted an oversized envelope. Dr. Hedin opened the envelope, pulled out a letter, typewritten, three pages long, dated “Oct. 27, 1942,” signed by Hitler. There was a story about this letter. Dr. Hedin had published, in Leipzig, a book entitled Amerika im Kampf der Kontinente. Hitler, who rarely had time to read books himself, retained a man to read books for him, and then recount them in oral synopsis to him at bedtime. Yet, Hitler had found the time and been impelled to pick up Dr. Hedin’s book one evening at nine o’clock, and read straight through it until three o’clock in the morning. He had then dictated this affectionate letter to the author, discussing the book, and passing along the tidbit that he had attacked the Soviet Union only because he had learned the Bolsheviks were making secret preparations against him.
I asked Dr. Hedin about the others in Hitler’s inner circle. Dr. Hedin recalled that he had attended Goering’s fiftieth birthday stag party, and enjoyed it. He considered Goering a sweet, overgrown child. He reminded me that Goering’s first wife had been Swedish, and that had she lived, she would never have permitted him the outrageous vanity of flaunting all those medals. Dr. Hedin said that Himmler had been a kind, inoffensive person. Once, Dr. Hedin had got into a violent political argument with Himmler. To conclude it, Himmler had remarked, “Sven, your Sweden is no problem for us. A nation that has had no war for a hundred and thirty years is weak.” Dr. Hedin remembered how this had infuriated him, and how he had snapped at Himmler, “We are not weak but civilized. We have in our museums more flags and standards taken from other nations in victorious battle than you have in all Germany and Austria. We have four thousand captured trophies in one museum alone!” The argument ended, said Dr. Hedin, when he quoted the Fuehrer’s statement that Germany’s aim and goal was peace, something that Sweden had already achieved. After that, Himmler had fallen into silence.
The Sunday Gentleman Page 50