Word: spandau
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Nearly two decades ago, seven men stepped hopelessly from a van in the red brick forecourt of Berlin's Spandau Prison. They were the senior survivors of the 22 Nazis brought to trial for major war crimes at Nürnberg. Their compatriots in crime-among them Luftwaffe Boss Hermann Göring and Wehrmacht Chief Wilhelrn Keitel-had escaped imprisonment by either suicide or the noose...
Today only three of Spandau's original postwar prisoners remain: Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, 59; Armaments Minister Albert Speer, 61; and that most mysterious of Hitler's odd coterie, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, 72. To keep this trio confined, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S still maintain a special four-power commission, and on a monthly rotation send 79 civilians, officers and men to run Spandau...
Thinking is about all that Hess does these days. Unlike Speer and Von Schirach, who busied themselves in the Spandau garden and read voluminously (Speer raised exemplary gladioli; Von Schirach memorized passages from Dante's Divine Comedy), Hess, for the most part, lies on the floor of his 7-by 10-ft. cell, clad in grey shirt, brown corduroys and wooden clogs, and practices yoga. During exercise periods, he marches listlessly about the yard in a black overcoat with a white numeral 7 stenciled on its back. Sometimes he reads the Frankfurter Allgemeine or the Communist Neues Deutschland...
Obviously, this revanchist fascist activity had to stop. Last week, as the latest escapee dog paddled his way to freedom across the Spandau ship canal, the Grepos machine-pistoled him down with seven slugs. Sinking in mid stream, he became the 58th victim -and the first dog - to die since 1961 while trying to enter West Berlin from the East German democratic workers' paradise...
From West Berlin's bleak Spandau Prison, an all but forgotten voice was heard. It belonged to Rudolf Hess, 70, who in May 1941, when he was Hitler's Deputy Führer, flew from Germany to Scotland on a bizarre mission. He begged the British to make peace, but all he did was force Hitler to denounce him as insane, and land himself in a British jail. Hess was sent to Spandau after being convicted of war crimes at Nürnberg, and over the years rumors of madness cropped up again, fed by his refusal...