Word: spandau
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nearly every day for four decades, the prisoner took a stroll through a tiny garden inside West Berlin's forbidding Spandau fortress. He was never without a keeper and his gait had slowed to a shuffle over the years, but he rarely missed the opportunity for fresh air. Last Monday a guard left him alone briefly in a small cottage at the garden's edge. A few minutes later the guard returned to find the sole inmate of Spandau slumped over, an electrical cord wound tightly around his neck. Rushed to the nearby British Military Hospital...
...controversy that followed Hess's death seemed a fitting end to his enigmatic life. As Adolf Hitler's closest friend and the former deputy to the Fuhrer of the Third Reich, Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He remained Spandau's only inhabitant for more than two decades, after the last of his fellow Nazis was released from the 147-cell red-brick fortress...
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...
...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...