Spandau jail in West Berlin was adapted to accommodate them. It was a fitting choice. Built in the late 19th century like a red-brick fortress with castellated towers and walls, it had been used during the Nazi period as a collecting point for political prisoners before despatch to concentration camps. It had also served for executions, one of several prisons in Berlin equipped with a newly designed guillotine and sloping, tiled floor to drain blood, and a beam with hooks for the simultaneous strangulation of eight persons by hanging. This apparatus was removed during the refit to accommodate the Nuremberg prisoners.
The small single cells in which they were to live were modified to prevent suicide, and outside a high, barbed-wire fence was erected beyond the red-brick boundary wall, together with an electric fence carrying a 4,000-volt charge. This was designed to prevent rescue attempts. Timber watchtowers were built at intervals atop the wall from which floodlights could be played over the entire perimeter.
At the end of the war Germany had been occupied by the victorious Allies – the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France – and divided into sectors, each controlled by one of the occupying powers; Berlin, although inside the Soviet sector, was similarly divided. Spandau jail stood in the British sector, but was run jointly by the four powers, each providing a director, a deputy director and 32 soldiers for external guard duty for one month in four in a continuous cycle. Besides the external guards there were some eighteen internal guards or warders in control of the prisoners, and a number of ancillary staff.
Not until July 1947 were the modifications to the building complete; then the seven prisoners were flown from Nuremberg to Berlin and bussed at speed through the still-ruined city to the jail, each handcuffed individually to guards. The handcuffs were removed once the main gates had closed behind them, and they were shepherded over a cobbled yard to the main cell block. There, in the chief warder’s room, they were made to strip and don rough blue-grey convict uniform that had come from a concentration camp. Each set was stencilled with a different number; the prisoners would be known by these numbers for their whole time inside. Hess, gaunt and pale, his once-luxuriant dark hair now touched with grey, became ‘Number Seven’.
The cell to which he was led was almost nine feet by seven-and-a-half and just twelve feet high to the curved ceiling. Judging from Albert Speer’s description, the bare walls were painted a muddy yellow with white above. Opposite the door was a small, high window, its glass replaced by brownish celluloid, barred outside; below it against the left wall stood a narrow iron bed with grey blankets. Otherwise there was only a small, chipped, brown-varnished table, an upright wooden chair, an open cupboard with a single shelf on the wall above, and in the corner by the door a flush lavatory bowl with a black seat.1
* * *
While still in Nuremberg after the sentences had been handed down Hess had escaped into a fantasy world in which the Western powers had released him to lead a new Germany to counteract the ‘Bolshevisation’ of Europe that he had predicted in Britain. Now the danger was obvious: Churchill had spoken of the ‘iron curtain’ that had fallen across the continent. The vision had been so real to him he had spent the months before his transfer to Spandau typing press releases about his new government on a typewriter allowed him by the authorities. He had also composed his first speech to the Reichstag, beginning with a eulogy for the dead, and ‘above all of the one among the dead, the originator and leader of the National-Socialist Reich, Adolf Hitler’.2
The state Hess imagined himself leading had been scarcely distinguishable from Hitler’s Führer state, but without the excesses: the Jews, for instance, might ask to go to protective camps ‘to save themselves from the rage of the German people’, and in these camps conditions were to be ‘as humane as possible’.3 He was not insane: Dönitz was occupying himself with much the same fantasy of being called to head a new German regime.
Spandau brought Hess, Dönitz and their fellow prisoners down to cold reality. Reduced to the anonymity of numbers, they were not allowed to speak to one another during their supervised times together or during their 30-minute exercise period circling an old linden tree in the prison yard, hands clasped behind their backs, wood-soled prison shoes clomping the hard ground. The guards held aloof in the early months, visiting on them the hatred accumulated by the Nazi regime. The meals they ate from tin trays alone in their cells were so meagre they lost weight steadily, and soon the prison clothes hung shapelessly on their bony figures.
At night their sleep was interrupted constantly by warders turning up the cell lights to ‘inspect’ them. The Russian warders made a point of doing this up to four times an hour, according to a report on the ‘mental torture’ of the prisoners made by the French prison chaplain in 1950.4 The one letter they were allowed to write home each month was censored to eliminate references to the Third Reich or its personalities, Nuremberg, or contemporary politics, as was the one incoming letter permitted each month.
Books were the chief escape from utter tedium and loneliness. Another escape was the garden. On arrival this consisted mainly of nut trees and lilac bushes amid a wilderness of waist-high weeds and grasses. The first summer they dug in the weeds and planted vegetables under the direction of von Neurath, the only one among them who knew anything of gardening. Albert Speer used his architectural talents to draw up plans for landscaping the area. ‘How we sweated!’ Hess wrote home describing their labour creating the new garden.5 He was not writing about himself. He refused all work on the twin principles that he had not been sentenced to hard labour, and in any case the trial had been invalid. When summoned by the warders for some task, he pretended stomach cramps, and moaned and groaned, establishing a pattern of non-cooperation from the start. Sometimes he refused to get up in the morning and lay groaning until the warders tipped him out. On one occasion when it was raining, Speer recorded, he refused to go outside for the exercise period.
‘Seven!’ a warder called out, ‘You’ll be put in the punishment cell.’
Hess rose and walked into the punishment cell himself.6 He spent much time there in solitary confinement.
The attention he attracted to himself from the prison staff by his eccentricity and prickliness distanced him from the other prisoners. Yet, difficult, pathetic and at times peremptory, as if assuming his former role as Deputy Führer, he remained consistent in his attitude to the Nuremberg trial, refusing to recognise its legality, refusing to repent, refusing to allow his counsel, Dr Seidl, to enter a plea for mercy7 – desperately though he wanted to be free with Ilse and his growing son – refusing to allow his family to visit him in prison since it would be dishonourable for him to meet them under such conditions with witnesses listening to every word in case the forbidden topics were mentioned. He rejoiced when Ilse wrote to say she understood his reasons: it showed that she, too, considered their ‘own and German honour higher than personal wishes and feelings’.8
* * *
After some two-and-a-half years in Spandau Hess’s amnesia returned. The rule of silence had been relaxed by this time. He pointed to the British prison director making his rounds in the garden, which he did every day, and asked Speer who that stranger was.9 He had played the trick so often he could hardly have expected to be taken wholly seriously. Nor could he have expected to gain release. No doubt it was a ploy to gain attention and defeat monotony. As Speer recorded later, the days were so numbing in their evenness and emptiness, he could not find words to convey ‘the forever unchanging sameness’.10
Hess regained his memory within four months, proving it with an outburst of esoteric information on history and literature. He then began experiencing crippling stomach cramps, and wailed and moaned at night. The eerie lament proved so distressing to his fellow prisoners that the current director ordered his mattress and blankets removed to prevent him lying in bed wailing all morning as well; he wailed from his chair instead.11 The two admirals, contemptuous of
his lack of self-control and bearing, virtually broke off relations with him.12
All the other cranky or paranoiac patterns he had displayed in captivity in Britain returned in cycles: the obsession with poison in his food, black depressions when he refused to eat, stomach pains for which the doctors could find no organic cause. Like the recurrent periods of amnesia he experienced, these were surely symptoms of despair.
In November 1954 von Neurath was released on grounds of age and ill health after serving only nine of the fifteen years to which he had been sentenced. Hess, who had perhaps hoped that he, too, might be allowed home on compassionate grounds, suffered badly afterwards, scarcely eating, complaining of unbearable pains and wailing again at night. The following year Raeder was freed and after him Dönitz; and in May 1957 Funk, who was serving life, was released on grounds of ill health, leaving only Hess and the two younger men, Speer and von Schirach, inside.
Hess fell into a cycle of deep depressions, refusing food, suffering stomach cramps and wailing, which culminated in the morning of 26 November 1959 with an apparent suicide attempt. While the other two prisoners were in the garden with the duty warder he broke a lens of his glasses and used the jagged edge to open a large vein in his wrist. The warder found him shortly after noon, curled up in bed with blood seeping through the blanket and sheet. After his wrist had been stitched Hess appeared much calmer, as often happened after his outbursts, and he began eating heartily. The warder did not consider the incident a genuine suicide attempt, merely one of Hess’s ways of drawing attention to himself;13 Speer had the impression of a child who had just carried off a prank.14
On the 25th anniversary of his flight to Scotland, 10 May 1966, Hess remained in his cell all day, according to Speer sitting bolt upright at his table, staring at the wall.15 He had by now far surpassed the normal span for a life sentence in Western penal systems; moreover, he knew that his two remaining compatriots were due to be released in less than six months’ time. Any hope that he might be allowed out with them was extinguished two weeks later with the arrival of a motor lawnmower for the warders to use to keep the garden going for him when the working prisoners left.
That day arrived on 1 October. Hess was left sole inmate of the prison designed originally for 600. The establishment of directors, guards and warders was left unchanged, rotating by nationality on a monthly basis as before. Hess appeared to accept it philosophically. He had recently allowed his lawyer, Dr Seidl, to appeal on his behalf, and when Seidl visited him to tell him of a letter he had addressed to the heads of state of the four occupying powers requesting a review of his case, he said he did not want a plea for mercy based on his mental condition; there was nothing wrong with him mentally.16
His son, Wolf Rüdiger, whom he had not seen since he was three-and-a-half years old, had formed a ‘Freedom for Rudolf Hess’ association with Ilse, other family members and Dr Seidl, and had already addressed innumerable appeals to the governments of the four powers, human rights organisations and religious leaders. These had received wide international support, and Western governments had accepted the case for mercy. The Russians had remained unmoved. They had lost twenty million dead in the ‘great patriotic war’; they believed Hess had flown to Scotland specifically to gain British acquiescence in Hitler’s assault on their country; besides, it was unimaginable that the last living symbol of the highest echelons of the Nazi regime should be released.17 And without Russian agreement the Western powers had declared themselves unable to act.
Wolf Rüdiger believed that the Western powers, especially Britain, were using the Russian veto as an excuse to ensure that Hess never left Spandau alive. The files remain closed, so the question cannot be resolved.18 It seems likely, however, that Hess was a pawn in the Cold War. The Western powers needed to maintain the four-power status of Berlin to preserve their rights of access to West Berlin, and since Spandau was one of only two remaining four-power institutions, they feared a quarrel over its continuing use. Spandau also served the Russians as a useful listening post in the western sector of the city.
In addition, Hess refused to express repentance or accept the validity of the Nuremberg trial; Seidl reinforced his conviction that the trial lacked legal validity and made the political mistake of using this argument in his submissions to the four powers.19 Hess, caught in a three-way bind between the visceral enmity of the Russians, the tensions of the Cold War and the blind refusal of his own supporters to accept the legitimacy of his trial, seemed destined to spend the rest of his life in Spandau.
THE DIRECTOR AND THE PASTOR
It is often said of Hess that he was kept in captivity because of what he might divulge if released. Yet if he had explosive secrets to reveal there were plenty of opportunities to make them known while still inside. He could have told Dr Seidl – when at length he agreed to see him. He could have told Albert Speer, probably closer to him than the others in the cell block, or any of his fellow prisoners, who could have released them to the outside world when they were freed. Their silence is evidence that he did not do so. Speer, who wrote of life in Spandau and of his experiences in the Third Reich,20 would certainly have used any revelations from Hess to boost sales.
Could Hess have been dissuaded from talking by threats of dire consequences for his family? The system widely used in Nazi Germany would surely not have been contemplated by the British government or secret services. More likely, perhaps, in view of the notions of honour that prevented Hess from seeing his family in prison, he might have considered anything he had to say from a prison cell worthless or demeaning. This was his attitude towards making a public condemnation of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews – as will appear. Certainly, Ilse Hess thought that if he were allowed home he might open up.21
More profound questions concern the extent of his amnesia: how much he wanted to forget, how much he pretended to forget, how much he really had forgotten. This is illustrated by his replies to two men who had opportunity to probe him closely and who wrote books afterwards attempting to explain his mission and his character: the US director of Spandau, Colonel Eugene Bird, and after Bird retired, the French pastor, Charles Gabel. Several of Hess’s answers to Bird are plainly untrue: for instance, it is known from his own letters home and reports of his conversations in England that Karl Haushofer told him of a dream in which he had seen him striding through the halls of tapestried English castles; it is also known from his own letters and the German investigation into his flight that he consulted astrologers. Yet, tackled by Bird on both matters, he denied being especially interested in astrology, he had never asked an astrologer to read his horoscope, and he knew nothing about Haushofer’s dream.22
Relatively unimportant as they were, his denials suggest he had either lost all memory of the circumstances of his flight or was, as so often, playing games. On the important question of whether he had known about Operation ‘Barbarossa’, Hitler’s planned assault on Russia, when he flew to Scotland, he initially misled Bird. His first response was that he was sorry, he didn’t know; he couldn’t remember: ‘But in any case I did not fly to England for this reason. I only flew to make peace.’23 He continued to maintain this attitude whenever Bird pressed him on the subject, yet in the end, when he had to make a decision on the story that would appear in Bird’s book, he admitted, yes, he had known of Barbarossa.24
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Bird had been appointed US Director and Commandant of Spandau in 1964 when only Hess, Speer and von Schirach remained in the cells. He had soon decided to write a book to record the story of the secret institution for posterity, but almost inevitably the focus shifted to the prison’s most enigmatic inmate and his wartime peace mission to Britain. This was facilitated by Bird’s discovery of a cardboard carton that had arrived with Hess on his transfer to Spandau in 1947 and was filled with papers he had written in Nuremberg. They included diary notes, plans for his new German government and a full account of his
peace mission to Scotland. Allowing Hess to read them, Bird enlisted his co-operation in his own book, which became virtually a joint venture. Hess would read every page of Bird’s typescript and if he approved initial it.25
Bird did not find Hess an easy man to know, but persisted in his quest for the hidden truth week after week, attempting to draw out memories from what he soon recognised were depths to which they had been purposely consigned.26 He found him complex and intelligent, humorous and on occasion warm, far from the mad fantasist customarily portrayed, and formed a close relationship with him. But how far he succeeded in penetrating the shell of evasion and half-truth which Hess had grown to protect his Führer and, no doubt, his own self-respect from his wild miscalculation – the realisation, perhaps, that he had been gulled or had gulled himself into a fool’s flight – must be questionable.
In November 1969 Hess fell into a decline, refusing to eat, wash or shave and groaning so loudly it could be heard by guards on the perimeter wall. After a while it was discovered this was not one of his tactical ploys; he was seriously ill and needed to be examined in hospital. He refused to go. He had been confined for so long he feared to leave the prison, and pleaded for treatment in his cell. Told he must go, he called for Colonel Bird, and when he arrived implored him, weeping, to go with him and visit him every day in the hospital. Bird agreed, after which he was rushed to the British Military Hospital nearby.27
There it was found he had a perforated duodenal ulcer and peritonitis had set in. After treatment he remained dangerously ill, and eight days later, on 29 November, became convinced he was about to die28 – a fact which, as we have seen, was to acquire significance for the provenance of what was later presented as a suicide note. He demanded the attendance of a British and a German heart specialist, Dr Seidl and a German notary to witness a statement he wished to sign; he also asked that his son be informed.
Hess, Hitler and Churchill Page 38
