The Sunday Gentleman (62 page)

Most of the other five devote their nights to reading. An extra empty cell has been converted into a miniature library, with several shelves of carefully chosen books (public library discards) and quiet, cold, old-maidish Admiral Raeder is librarian. All of the volumes, which are in German, are either classical fiction or unprovocative nonfiction. There are volumes by Goethe, Shakespeare, Schiller, Mark Twain. There is nothing that discusses modern war or European politics. Once, by accident, a history of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, which dramatized Russia’s crushing defeat, found its way into the library. Before any of the Nazis could borrow it, the Soviets discovered the volume and destroyed it.

Speer tries to read everything related to architecture, von Neurath reads and rereads anything dealing with mineralogy, and Doenitz favors English poetry. Von Schirach is the confirmed bookworm. He prefers such French authors as poet Francis Jammes. Once, in an expansive mood, von Schirach told a prison psychiatrist that reading had warped him, and now he hoped that it would straighten him out. He claimed that reading articles in Henry Ford’s newspaper about the “Eternal Jew” and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his youth had helped make an anti-Semite and a Nazi out of him, and it was not until Nuremberg that he learned Ford had long before backtracked on his stand and that the “Protocols” were a long-discredited forgery.

None of the prisoners is permitted access to either German or foreign newspapers and magazines, or to radios. The only periodical they read is a weekly religious paper, printed in German, which the French pastor distributes on Saturdays. No news whatsoever of the outside world is supposed to enter Spandau. Yet one afternoon, von Schirach turned to his guard and inquired, “Tell me, how long is the airlift to Berlin going to continue?” On another occasion, a French guard was quitting to return to Paris. During his last morning, each prisoner solemnly shook hands with him and said good-bye. How did von Schirach know about the airlift? How did all seven know about the Frenchman’s departure? Probably by overhearing the four-power guards gossip in German outside the cells at night.

Each prisoner is allowed to write one letter a month not exceeding four pages in length. This letter is closely censored by all four powers. Only one incoming letter a month is permitted, but usually extra business letters from family or lawyers, discussing liquidation of property or local trials, are let through. Last year, Hess’s attorney wrote him that he was going to attempt to reverse his client’s sentence (on the grounds that the Japanese war criminal trials proved that war activity before 1939 was not a crime). Sometimes, gift packages arrive. One prisoner’s family sent him a box of cookies, tobacco, and soap. The directors threw away the cookies, but allowed the tobacco and soap to remain in the supply room until the next ration of these was due. Then the prisoner received his family’s tobacco and soap instead of the prison’s routine supply.

Although the Russians strongly opposed it, each prisoner is permitted one visitor every two months. The visitor may be an old friend, relative, or attorney. In the case of immediate family, one visitor can mean several members of one family. All seven Nazis have living relatives. Von Schirach has a wife, Henny Hoffman, the daughter of Hitler’s photographer, and he also has three young sons; Raeder has a wife who just fled from the Russians; Hess has a forty-nine-year-old wife, Ilse, who was just cleared by a denazification court in Munich, even while telling the judges that Himmler was a “good” man.

When one of the prisoners’ wives arrives at Spandau, she rings a bell and announces herself through a tiny grilled opening in the metal door at the front entrance. She is admitted by one of the interior guards, checked, searched, then led across an open area to the jail. From the warden’s office, a guard escorts her into another room where she meets her husband. The meeting is limited to fifteen minutes and is anything but private. Representatives from Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States gather in the room. All understand German. All take shorthand notes on the conversation.

On Saturdays, a French pastor, an army chaplain, comes to Spandau to perform religious services. He works without salary. Six out of seven of the prisoners congregate in the narrow prison chapel. Hess alone refuses to attend. “I want nothing to do with religion any more,” he recently told the pastor. During the Protestant services, five sing hymns while Funk accompanies them on the organ. The prisoners are permitted visits from the pastor during the week, but only von Neurath takes advantage of this.

All legal German holidays are recognized inside Spandau, but the biggest holiday is Christmas. This coming Christmas, their third in Spandau, the seven will sing carols in the cell which is their chapel and will have slices of cake in addition to potato stew and bread.

“But don’t let that pathetic picture of those seven lousy bums get your sympathy,” one Spandau administrator growled to me. “Just remember some of the other Christmases they celebrated, shooting defenseless GI’s in the snow during the Battle of the Bulge, building bonfires out of screaming old women and little children in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I wonder how many lonely widows and frightened orphans there are, who won’t sing carols this Christmas, because of them. Walther Funk likes to whine that he was only a banker. Sure. He’s the guy who kept those gold fillings, from the teeth of murdered Frenchmen, Englishmen, Russians, in the vaults of the Reichsbank. Von Neurath makes like he’s just a pleasant old diplomat. Says he. Like when he was Protector of Czechoslovakia. Have the folks back home forgotten Lidice already? And Hess. Just an addled old boy. But he’s the one who took down
Mein Kampf
when Hitler dictated it, and he’s the one who personally broke the heads of Jewish kids in Munich. Millions dead, maimed, miserable this Christmas because of those seven and their buddies. Sure, we should let them eat cake this Christmas, but we should also show them some movies. A triple feature. Dachau. Belsen. Buchenwald. I say let ‘em rot here, those dirty bastards.”

How long will they rot in Spandau? Insiders feel that only Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach may survive their sentences to emerge free men in seventeen years. As for the others, they are aging and ailing. Von Neurath is on his last legs. Erich Raeder has been seriously ill. When he feared strangulation from a twenty-year-old hernia, the Americans, who were in charge of Spandau at the time, suggested moving him to the American Army Hospital. The Russians said no. So one room of the prison was converted into a makeshift hospital by German workmen (among the first Germans admitted inside Spandau), and there Raeder successfully underwent surgery lasting thirty minutes. Funk had one attack of bleeding hemorrhoids, but was pulled through when British exterior guards donated their blood.

The Egyptian-born Rudolf Hess, who twice before Nuremberg tried to kill himself, is the sickest of the seven, mentally. Nine psychiatrists have examined him, and agree that has has a split personality with delusions of persecution. He still cannot believe Germany lost the war. He thinks that his jailers are trying to poison him. According to Douglas M. Kelley, who spent five months interviewing and testing Hess, “Diagrammatically, if one considers the street as sanity and the sidewalk as insanity, then Hess spends the greater part of his time on the curb…Hess will continue to live always in the borderlands of insanity.”

When I passed on these psychiatric reports to an American who sees Hess daily, the American laughed. “Tell those psychiatrists they’re twice as nuts as Hess. Believe me, he’s saner than any of us.” Despite this, the professional evaluations are probably the more accurate.

Meantime, agitation continues inside Berlin for a smaller, more economical prison. The German government feels that the seven Nazis should be committed to an ordinary Berlin jail along with hundreds of other felons. The four-power directors are against this, because they worry that fellow convicts might either slaughter the seven or assist them in escaping. But, driven by fear that their costly organization may one day create a scandal, the four powers insist they are constantly searching for a more economical prison. To date, they have not found one. And, since Soviet Russia, Great Britain, France, and the United States must all again agree on the jail, it is unlikely that they will ever find another. So Spandau remains, a gigantic $252,000 Red Castle for seven mass murderers, per capita the most expensive, per setup the most incredible, perhaps the most secret, and positively the most strongly guarded man-made prison in all the world.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

I had been fascinated by the world’s strangest maximum-security prison, and by its unusual administration and unique prisoners, from the first moment I had heard a few details concerning it. When I realized that no major story had been written about Spandau, I suggested such a story to the editors of
Collier’s
magazine. They were enthusiastic. In September, 1949, I traveled by train from Paris to Berlin—the train sealed during the East Germany portion of the journey—and was housed for two weeks in a suburb of Berlin by the United States Army Press Center.

The Spandau story was almost as difficult to penetrate as Spandau prison itself. There had been some sketchy newspaper accounts in several languages, and I had read them. But firsthand information appeared impossible to acquire. When I went by taxi to 23 Wilhelmstrasse to see Spandau for myself, I was almost arrested, and my camera film was taken from me, as I have related in my account of the adventure. However, my unexpected reception at the prison, instigated by the Russians, had its good result, and this was what really opened up the story for me. A day or two later, a high-ranking United States Army officer connected with Spandau found me at the Press Center, apologized for the rough treatment I had received, returned my camera film, and said that he was sympathetic to my assignment. He felt that the American taxpayers who were supporting Spandau should know something about it. Through this high-ranking officer I made other contacts, one of which was with a former guard in Spandau, another with an attorney connected with the legal division of the prison (a man I had known in my own army years), and from these three I acquired much inside knowledge of the red-bricked fortress.

There were other sources, German and French, but these three Americans were the principal ones.

After returning to Paris, I wrote “The Seven Secret Prison Cells,” encouraged and elated by the realization that I had an exclusive story containing material as yet untouched by the international press. In October, 1949,
Collier’s
magazine purchased my story. With rising excitement, I waited for my story to appear in print. I waited and I waited, and it never appeared. What had happened was that, a month after acquiring my story, and even as they were preparing to go to press with it, the editors of
Collier’s
were dismayed (as was I) to learn that a rival publication was publishing a Spandau story of its own. When the rival periodical’s Spandau account appeared, it proved to be a thin memoir written by an American doctor who had been in and out of Spandau, and was now capitalizing on his experience by selling it to a magazine. Since
Collier’s
felt that my own story was far more thorough, the editors decided to go ahead with its publication. But, for some reason, they never did so.

Recently, when I reread my story, I realized that I could publish it at last, because—even after the passage of sixteen years—it would still stand as the most complete account of Spandau yet to appear in print. In investigating the prison, its administration, its guards, its prisoners today, I found that little had been altered since 1949. There had been some minor modifications of the rules, there had been some minor intrigues, but the only significant difference was that the huge Teutonic Bastille now held three Nazi war criminals instead of seven.

After sixteen years, the administration of Spandau Prison remains unchanged. Small disagreements among the representatives of the four controlling powers continue, but they are rarely serious. If anything, the Russians are said to be more tractable than ever. The only important area of altercation is a basic one: The United States, France, and England, supported by West Germany, want to close down Spandau and transfer the surviving prisoners to any other German prison, preferably a small one, such as a specific one that exists about a mile from Spandau; Russia refuses to close down Spandau as long as one Nazi war criminal breathes within its walls. Otherwise, as an American foreign correspondent reported recently, Spandau stands as “a model of harmonious East-West cooperation.”

In 1949, I was told that it was costing the four powers and West Germany $252,000 every year to maintain Spandau. By 1956, numerous economies had been introduced, and the operating cost had dropped to $107,000 annually. Today, it requires a budget of $66,000 a year to run the prison. However, as the West German government has pointed out, if the three remaining prisoners could be moved to an ordinary German prison, the total cost for housing and guarding them would be only $800 a year.

Other changes are infinitesimal. When I was in Berlin, each of the four powers was allowed to provide eight guards inside the prison. Now, each power provides five guards. When I was in Berlin, each imprisoned Nazi was allowed one outside visitor a month for fifteen minutes, and each was permitted to write and receive one letter of no more than four pages in length once a month. In 1952, this was liberalized, and today each prisoner may have one visitor a month for thirty minutes instead of fifteen, and each may receive four letters a month instead of one.

I learned that Spandau is still a maximum-security prison, still inhabited by nearly three hundred military and civilian personnel controlled by the four powers, still heavily guarded and fortified, still impenetrable and secret. This vigilance continues because all four of the controlling powers, but largely and most persistently the Russians, continue to fear that one day some outside political group may try to rescue one of the Nazi prisoners by force. For the Russians, this fear seems to be a permanent obsession.