Spandau Prison -  Hess's Lonely Dungeon - NYTimes.com
Spandau Prison: Hess's Lonely Dungeon
By WOLFGANG SAXON
Published: August 18, 1987
Spandau Prison, where Rudolf Hess spent the last four decades of his life, is a cheerless red-brick complex of four three-story buildings in West Berlin.
Spandau became the International War Crimes Prison in July 1947 with the arrival of the seven surviving principal Nazi defendants from the Nuremberg trials. Ten others had been hanged, and Field Marshal Hermann Goring committed suicide two hours before he was to meet the same fate.
The prison, built in 1871, has 134 cells with tiny, barred windows. Although the Spandau district, with its forests and parks, is a favored weekend resort for West Berliners, the jail squats in a corner of Spandau, just blocks from the tightly guarded East German border line.
Albert Speer, the wartime production chief, and Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth leader, were released in 1966 after serving their 20-year sentences. Thereafter, Spandau Prison served as the world's most expensive and best watched single-occupancy dungeon. Vestige of Allied Rule
It also was the last vestige of postwar four-power rule in Germany. Guard details of 100 soldiers each from Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States continued in monthly rotation even after the sickly, aged Rudolf Hess become the only occupant. Guards manned the towers and cellblock monitoring stations even during Hess's periodic hospital stays.
To make room for the original seven prisoners, some 600 common criminals were removed from the fortress-like structure in the British sector of Berlin. The only improvements since 1871 were then made to tighten security with an outside 15-foot, barbed-wire fence, guard towers and search-lights. The prison also received a fresh coat of paint.
Inside the fence was a 28-yard ''dead space'' in which even guards were forbidden to walk at will. Access to the prison was through a guardhouse, which itself formed part of a 15-foot inner brick wall, and the Spartan cells for the seven inmates were on a single floor, in the building behind the wall. A Severe Regimen
There also were two small yards that served as the prisoners' access to the light of day.
Glaring lights and an eerie silence, broken occasionally by birdsong or a plane's drone overhead, prevailed. The rules, at first Draconian, were relaxed slightly over Soviet protests in the 1950's to maintain the prisoners' health and sanity.
Even so, the regimen remained severe, with letters or visits few and far between, sparse and strictly limited reading matter, and no talk permitted among prisoners, or between them and the guards, except under special circumstances.
The prison at times has been confused with one of Spandau's main attractions, the Italianate 16th-century citadel with its 12th-century Julius Tower. As a town, Spandau dates to 1232, when it was chartered at the site of an earlier Slavic fortification at the confluence of the Havel and Spree Rivers. It became part of Berlin in 1920.
Photo of a guard on duty earlier this year outside Spandau Prison in West Berlin. (Agence France-Presse)