Rudolf Hess: 1894-1987: The Inmate of Spandau’s Last Wish

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, the old man was pronounced dead at 4:10 p.m. An autopsy showed that he had died of asphyxiation.

Two days later authorities revealed that a farewell note in a trouser pocket had confirmed what many had already surmised: Rudolph Hess, the last surviving member of Nazi Germany’s high command, had finally escaped his captors by taking his own life at the age of 93.

The manner of Hess’s death stirred shock and suspicion. An obvious suicide risk, Hess had tried to kill himself on at least four occasions, including a 1977 attempt in which he used a blunt dinner knife to gouge his wrists, foot and elbow. His son, Wolf Rudiger Hess, 49, a Munich civil engineer, complained about “too many mysterious circumstances” surrounding his father’s death, while Alfred Seidl, the old man’s lawyer, argued that it would have been physically impossible for Hess, frail and nearly blind, to have throttled himself. The suicide was a particular embarrassment to the U.S., which for 40 years had taken monthly turns guarding the prisoner with former World War II Allies Britain, France and the Soviet Union. American soldiers were responsible for minding Hess at the time of his death.

The 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 in 1966.

Only the Soviets had thought Hess was worth guarding like a latter-day Count of Monte Cristo. British, French and U.S. authorities had long been willing to release him on humanitarian grounds. Keeping the 109-year-old prison open for one inmate was also extremely costly: West Berlin and the Bonn government spent some $1 million annually in salaries and expenses to maintain a staff of 35 wardens, cooks and maintenance men. But the Soviets were adamant, insisting that, as their late leader Leonid Brezhnev put it, “to release Rudolf Hess would be an insult to the Soviet people.”

Moscow’s stubbornness was hard to fathom. Though Hess had been an early Nazi zealot, he had never wielded any real power, and he was already behind bars in England when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Ironically, his friendship with Hitler had developed in jail: the two men met in Landsberg Prison after the aborted Nazi putsch in 1923. There Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to Hess. Though Hitler later made Hess his deputy, he never took him seriously or delegated authority to him. At Nuremberg, the judges found Hess not guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity but sentenced him to life imprisonment for “crimes against peace.”

Hess appeared briefly on the world’s center stage in May 1941, when he made a quixotic flight to Scotland. Dressed in the uniform of a Luftwaffe captain, the No. 2 ranking Nazi flew a Messerschmitt fighter from Germany and parachuted into an area near the estate of the Duke of Hamilton. He was promptly captured by an astonished farmer. Hess believed he was obeying supernatural powers and explained that he had come on a mission to end the war. Apprised of Hess’s flight, Hitler declared that his deputy should be clapped in a madhouse or shot. The British jailed Hess, who spent part of his confinement in the Tower of London. After that he never knew a moment of freedom.

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 a fan of Dallas and Dynasty, but he was always banned from watching news programs.

For half an hour every month, even as his health declined and he suffered from dizzy spells, Hess met with his wife Ilse, now 87, or his son. No touching was permitted, and a chest-high partition separated the prisoner from his family. “I would never again put a bird in a cage,” Hess once wrote his wife. “Only now do I fully understand why the Chinese and Japanese, when fate is especially kind to them, buy a bird, open the door of the cage and let him fly away. One day I will do this too.”

In 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.