The Sunday Gentleman (63 page)

From what little I could observe and learn during recent visits to West Germany, this fear seems to be groundless. There are fanatical bands of former Nazis, to be sure, old men who dream of the old glories—and there are young men who would like to restore to Germany the philosophy espoused by Hitler—but I doubt if enough of these zealots are willing to give their lives to liberate one decrepit historical figure from Spandau, especially since two of the three left in the prison will soon be legally released. Rudolf Hess, serving life, would then be the only captive they could rescue, and in his present mental condition he is hardly worth such drastic action.

However, the Russians may be completely right in fearing a rescue plot. Occasionally in the last sixteen years, evidence has appeared, and rumors have been heard, that such a rescue operation was in the making. In the late 1950’s, there was said to have been a plot instigated by the onetime SS strongman, General Otto Skorzeny, who so dramatically rescued Benito Mussolini from the Allies in Italy. The plot was that Skorzeny would lead an armed, lightning-fast task force into Spandau by air. He was to land two helicopters in the Spandau prison yard at the exact moment that Rudolf Hess was puttering in his potato garden. While one helicopter would disgorge fanatics with automatic hand weapons to hold off the Spandau guards, the raiders in the other helicopter would grab Hess and waft him away to a secret hideout, from which he could be held up as a living inspiration for the faithful. Apparently, this plot—if it ever truly existed—was uncovered by the four-power intelligence agents, and several conspirators were arrested. From time to time since, there has been a rumor that a group of diehard Nazis, in heavy tanks, was planning to appear out of the night, ram and batter down a Spandau wall, and bring Hess to freedom. These rumors have never materialized into fact.

In Berlin during 1949, I was told that it was Baldur von Schirach, the former Nazi youth leader, who might be the object of any such rescue attempt. He alone, it was felt, represented the hope of a militant Germany Resurrected to the German youth. In 1962, the weekly newspaper. The National Observer, discounted von Schirach as being of any value, because he had “deteriorated mentally,” but cited Albert Speer as “a possible danger.” However, today, all sources regard Rudolf Hess as Spandau’s only property of value to fanatics.

The first of the seven to gain release and freedom was Hitler’s onetime Foreign Minister, the elderly, ailing Constantin von Neurath. It is alleged that his family, which in earlier days had maintained a close friendship with the British royal family (von Neurath himself had once been ambassador to England), appealed constantly to their high-placed English cousins. They pleaded that the old man, no longer a threat to anyone, be paroled so that he might receive proper medical care, and eventually be buried in the family plot instead of an unmarked grave.

These appeals on von Neurath’s behalf at last reached Winston Churchill, and the seventy-nine-year-old Churchill, personally conscious of the infirmities that go with advancing years, went before the House of Commons one day in 1954 to plead for a fallen foe: “I certainly have felt tor several years that the conditions in Spandau were very hard and inhumane, and in this case we are dealing with a man of eighty-one years which, I can tell you, is quite a lot, and who is suffering from illness.”

The four powers controlling Spandau heard Churchill, and respected his wish. Late in 1954, Contantin von Neurath, who had served almost half of his fifteen-year sentence, became the first of the seven to walk out of Spandau, to return to his family, his family doctor’s care, and at last to burial in the historic family cemetery plot at Enzweihingen in August, 1956.

And now there were six.

Admiral Erich Raeder, in his eighties, and banker Walther Funk, in his sixties, were both almost as ill as von Neurath had been. The four powers met and agreed to parole Raeder and Funk from Spandau because of “age and illness.” Both Raeder, who was released in 1955, and Funk, who was released two years later, died in 1960.

And now there were four.

Admiral Karl Doenitz, who had ruled Germany for one week after Hitler’s death, had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. All but one year of this sentence was served in Spandau, which he detested more strongly than did any of his colleagues. He survived his sentence in relatively good health, and received his release in October, 1956. Spandau definitely did not break him. Shortly after gaining freedom, Doenitz was invited to lecture to the student body of a school outside Hamburg. He accepted, and in his speech he defended the Nazi party and its military conquests with pride, and he bitterly attacked the Allied prosecution of Nazi war criminals. His speech generated such a mixed storm of protest and acclaim, and consequent embarrassment for the West German government, that the professor who had invited Doenitz to speak promptly committed suicide. Doenitz himself went into retirement, devoting himself to writing his memoirs, which were published in 1959 under the title
Memoirs: 10 Years and 20 Days
. He also offered an occasional public utterance. His last one, made in 1964, criticized the Allies’ demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II. Doenitz told the Associated Press, “The demand for unconditional surrender was a grave political mistake of the Western allies and led to a senseless prolongation of the war. In addition to the Germans, the entire free world suffers today from this mistake.” Doenitz was severely castigated for his statement until, later in that same year, ex-President Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly agreed with him. No doubt there were those connected with Spandau who regretted ever having permitted Doenitz’s release.

And now there are three.

By 1965, two of these three, fifty-eight-year-old Albert Speer and fifty-eight-year-old Baldur von Schirach, had served nineteen years of their twenty-year sentences, eighteen of those years inside Spandau. Von Schirach’s life has altered little in the sixteen years since I wrote about him. True, his wife, Henny Hoffman, divorced him, retaining custody of their children. But one of his sons visits him every month. Otherwise, von Schirach has devoted himself to intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, perusing more French novels, studying music, memorizing poetry, and constantly disowning Nazism and Hitler. Early in 1965, von Schirach, for the second time in three years, was removed to a British military hospital outside Spandau’s walls, this time to have the detached retina in his right eye corrected. The operation was reported as “not too successful,” but nevertheless, the patient was returned to his Spandau cell, where he is now planning his autobiography which he expects to write upon his release.

With even more determination than von Schirach, Albert Speer has refused to let Spandau destroy him. Instead of brooding or indulging in self-pity, Speer has concentrated upon developing himself as an architect. Year after year, Speer has kept himself abreast, within the reading limitations imposed by Spandau, with architectural advances, and he has produced hundreds of original designs.

Both von Schirach and Speer will have completed their twenty-year sentences in 1966, and after that, they will enjoy freedom. It is unlikely that either one will suffer any financial difficulties. Von Schirach has told guards that he has inherited a considerable sum of money from a deceased American relative, and that this will maintain him in comfort.

Speer will be reunited with the six children he hardly knows any longer, one of them a daughter who was educated and raised by an American family in Westchester County, New York. There is little doubt that Speer will prosper in some West German firm of architects.

One suspects, by all accounts, that it is not freedom from Spandau alone that these two will enjoy, but freedom from the oppressive daily presence of the erratic—and for them, unbearable—Rudolf Hess.

From all that I could learn, Hess today is much like the Hess I learned about in 1949, only more so in every respect. By now, at the age of seventy-one, he has been in one jail or another for twenty-four consecutive years, and over eighteen of those years have been spent in Spandau. Physically, he is a gray-haired, hollow-eyed, wrinkled, hunched and bony scarecrow. As an American officer in Spandau told the Associated Press in 1964: “He looks a strange sight as he shambles around in an old German army ski-cap and a long military overcoat that flaps around his ankles. His mental state has not improved with the years. Some nights he howls like a wolf in his cell.”

Prison psychiatrists consider Rudolf Hess still psychotic but not insane. Recently, Dr. Maurice N. Walsh, a psychiatrist associated with the University of California at Los Angeles, admitted that he had examined Hess in the presence of fifteen witnesses during 1948, but had been told to keep his diagnosis secret, for fear of irritating the Russians during the tense days of the Berlin airlift. According to Dr. Walsh, “I determined that he was a latent schizophrenic, a man in and out of psychosis. But I found him in no immediate danger of suicide.”

Today, Hess’s condition remains unchanged. His hypochondria has deepened, and he weeps over imaginary ills. He begs his guards to break rules to extend him special favors, and when a softhearted one complies, Hess informs on the guard to his superiors. Sometimes when guards hear him screaming, they will scream back at him. Often they will find him stretched out on his cell floor, in a partial trance, babbling to himself.

Hess’s interests are few. He looks forward to his daily session of gardening. He enjoys writing his regular letters to his wife, Ilse, who manages a resort lodge near Munich, and to his twenty-six-year-old blond son, Wolf-Ruediger (a graduate of the University of Munich and an engineer), who is loyal to the memory, of his father. However, Hess has never once permitted his wife or son to visit him at Spandau. According to his wife, “He could not stand for us to see him living like a caged animal.”

Just after New Year’s Day, 1965, Hess received the first visitor that he had even invited to call upon him inside Spandau. At that time, he summoned his attorney, Alfred Seidel, and the two men spent most of their half hour together drafting the terms of Hess’s will. Later, Seidel told the press that Hess did not want him to fight for a pardon, that he hoped to be paroled when von Schirach and Speer were freed, and that he wished no further visitors, not even members of his immediate family. According to Seidel, Hess is anything but insane. “His memory functions superbly. Hess especially wanted to know how his family lives. He is worried about the economic existence of his wife and son.”

His one unflagging interest is his nostalgia for the Nazi past, when he was Hitler’s deputy Fuehrer and third in command. More often than before, the guards of the four nations can observe him goose-stepping in his tiny jail cell. And sometimes they hear him singing, in a cracked voice, the “Horst Wessel” song. His memory, fairly clear about events that happened up to May of 1941, frequently seems to have been arrested at that date. That was the period when Hess—knowing that England was in desperate straits, knowing that his Fuehrer wanted to make peace with England before striking at Russia but could not reach Churchill with a peace offer—determined to take matters into his own hands. Although it meant defecting from Germany, Hess flew a Messerschmitt to England, landed in a cow pasture, and eagerly offered to present a peace plan to the Duke of Hamilton and others. He never had a chance to discuss his offer. He was clapped into an English jail where he languished until Germany was defeated. Even though Hitler declared Hess insane at the time of his defection, and tried to obliterate his name from records of the Third Reich, there are scholars who now believe that Hitler was aware in advance of Hess’s flight, and even encouraged it. Hitler disowned Hess, and disavowed knowledge of the flight, only because the mission proved a dismal failure.

But all of that is in the past, where Rudolf Hess spends so many of his hours and days, a past more agreeable to him than his present situation in Spandau. When von Schirach and Speer are gone, Hess will be alone in Spandau, and one doubts that he will be unhappier, since he always resented their repudiation of Hitler, their judging Hitler as a lunatic, their sharing of Hess’s privileges as a martyr of the Third Reich.

And so, with the other two gone, there will be only one.

Incredibly, there will be three hundred specialists, from four powerful governments, guarding one deranged old man, the relic of a political regime that no longer exists, in a burdensome German St. Helena.

And when Hess dies, or is murdered, there will be none. And at last, the seven secret cells will be empty, and the warders will go home with their stories, and Spandau will belong to the historians—and the makers of fiction.

17

The Man Who Loved

Hitler

The tall, blond clerk at Fritzes, Stockholm’s leading bookstore, did not think that I should see Dr. Sven Hedin for a possible magazine story. “He is our national disgrace,” said the clerk.

But as far as I could observe. Dr. Hedin’s disgrace—he had embarrassed the neutral Swedes by supporting Nazi Germany in the Second World War, and Germany had lost—was not often discussed in public. In a small land, where great international names are few—Swedenborg, Strindberg, Nobel, Lagerlöf, a handful more, also dead—they do not relinquish their heroes easily or prematurely. At the age of eighty-one, Dr. Sven Hedin was still well-known throughout the world, and so any ostracism by his countrymen was both occasional and reluctant. However, for the great majority of Swedes (only a small minority had been as pro-Nazi as Dr. Hedin), their hero stood as an uncomfortable reminder that their nation had traded with Hitler’s Germany throughout the Second World War.

Dr. Hedin’s numerous thick books on his explorations of Inner Mongolia and Tibet, printed in Swedish, German, and English, crowded the shelves of all Stockholm’s many bookstores, including Fritzes. As explorer, hydrographer, cartographer, and travel writer, Dr. Hedin had visited the Forbidden City of Lhasa in 1896, and had returned to Tibet in 1906. From 1927 to 1935, traveling out of Peking, he had led a caravan of twenty-seven men and three hundred camels on the greatest expedition ever attempted into Central Asia. As a result of these adventures, he had become Sweden’s best-known explorer. I found him listed in a recent government publication as one of Sweden’s twenty great scientists of the preceding three hundred years, and he was given more space than any other living Swede. And only the week before I arrived in Stockholm, he had dined with Count Folke Bernadotte, the busy nephew to the king.