Word: hesse
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...Hess appeared briefly on the world's center stage in May 1941, when he made a quixotic flight to Scotland. Dressed in the uniform of a Luftwaffe captain, the No. 2 ranking Nazi flew a Messerschmitt fighter from Germany and parachuted into an area near the estate of the Duke of Hamilton. He was promptly captured by an astonished farmer. Hess believed he was obeying supernatural powers and explained that he had come on a mission to end the war. Apprised of Hess's flight, Hitler declared that his deputy should be clapped in a madhouse or shot. The British...
Before his incarceration in Spandau, Hess spent 21 months in a Nuremberg prison, where he reportedly wrote prodigiously about the Nazis and the war. He believed the Third Reich to be a "legitimate" aspiration of the German people and was convinced that he would be drafted to play a leading role someday in a "Fourth Reich." Even after his transfer to Spandau in 1947, Hess's loyalty to Hitler endured. He initially goose-stepped along the prison corridors, snapping the Nazi salute...
Given at first to rages and bouts of persecution mania, Hess settled into a routine of numbing regularity. Awakening at 6 a.m., the prisoner would limber % up with calisthenics until he was escorted to the lavatory an hour later. After breakfast, he would walk in the Spandau prison garden, head lowered, hands clasped behind his back, invariably marching 215 paces in one direction and 215 in the other. After lunch, he would study the moon and space charts that covered the walls of his cell, watch television or read books on space exploration. In later years Hess became...
...half an hour every month, even as his health declined and he suffered from dizzy spells, Hess met with his wife Ilse, now 87, or his son. No touching was permitted, and a chest-high partition separated the prisoner from his family. "I would never again put a bird in a cage," Hess once wrote his wife. "Only now do I fully understand why the Chinese and Japanese, when fate is especially kind to them, buy a bird, open the door of the cage and let him fly away. One day I will do this...
...Hess's case, the cage will also vanish. The four wartime Allies announced last week that Spandau would be demolished to keep it from becoming a shrine for Nazi sympathizers. Britain, which administers the sector of West Berlin that includes Spandau, plans to build a supermarket and an entertainment center on the site. The new facilities will cater to the 4,000 British service members and their families whose presence in West Berlin remains one of the legacies of Hitler's thousand-year Third Reich...