Word: spandau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Speer thought he saw in the Führer an alternative to the Weimar Republic's decadence. In Hitler's monumental designs, he hoped to escape such dreary projects as garage annexes and a house for his in-laws. In these memoirs, drafted in Spandau Prison while he was serving a 20-year sentence for war crimes, Speer recalls: "For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles...
Four years ago, Speer was released from Spandau, where only Rudolf Hess remains. Now 65, he lives in Heidelberg, a nearly forgotten figure who works as a management consultant and relaxes by walking in the country. When he writes that he will never be rid of his sin, he convinces, partly because he now has little to gain by such an admission. Speer is right when he says, "no apologies are possible...
...hrer Rudolf Hess has steadfastly refused to see his wife and son. It was beneath the dignity of a high official, he explained, to permit his family to see him in prison. Now 75 and suffering from a duodenal ulcer, Hess was transferred in November from Berlin's Spandau prison to a British military hospital. There, in a room with guards but no bars, Hess last week finally was reunited with his wife Use, who runs a tiny inn in the Bavarian Alps, and his son, Wolf-Rudiger, 32, a Hamburg engineer. The visit, limited by prison regulations...
...only other visitor has been his lawyer, was imprisoned by the Allies after he parachuted into a Scottish cow pasture in May 1941 on what he claimed was a mission to end the war. Later sentenced to life imprisonment at Nürnberg for "preparing aggressive war," he entered Spandau in 1947, and for the past three years has been its only inmate. The Western powers have long wanted to release him on humanitarian grounds. The Soviets have refused, largely because the four-power prison authority is one of Moscow's last official footholds in West Berlin...
Speer decided on the book when he was captured by the Allies. In Spandau, he wrote secretly in tight script on pieces of cardboard, tobacco paper, and even toilet tissue. A friendly jailer smuggled 1,400 pages of remembrances out for him. "I had all day to think in the garden," he recalls. "Then I could write every night until my hand just hurt too much." At Castle Wolfsbrunnenweg today, 36 filing cabinets hold paper scraps, letters, old files and 125 architect's sketches made by Hitler for the grand plan of Berlin...