Rudolf Hess and Spandau Prison: The Fortress That Ended Up Holding Just Him
Updated: Aug 17
By the mid-1980s, Spandau Prison in West Berlin had room for six hundred inmates and exactly one. That one man, Rudolf Hess, cost the West German government close to a million dollars a year to guard, fed by four nations who couldn't agree on almost anything else during the Cold War. When he finally died in 1987, the demolition crews moved in almost immediately. The plan to knock the place down had actually been agreed five years earlier, in secret, long before anyone knew exactly when it would be needed.
That's the strange thing about Spandau. It's usually told as a story about one lonely old Nazi pacing a garden. It's really a story about what four countries that hated each other were still willing to do together, and how far they'd go to make sure a building never became a shrine.
Quick answers
Who was held at Spandau Prison? Seven senior Nazi officials sentenced at Nuremberg in 1946: Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach, Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Walther Funk and Konstantin von Neurath. Hess was the only one who never got out.
Why was Spandau Prison demolished? To stop it becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis after Hess's death in 1987. The demolition had actually been agreed by the four occupying powers back in 1982.
From imperial barracks to Gestapo holding pen
The prison was built in 1876 on Wilhelmstraße as a military detention centre for the Prussian Army, all narrow cells and regimented discipline. After Germany's defeat in the First World War it started taking civilian prisoners too, and by the early Weimar years it could hold up to 600 people.
Everything changed after the Reichstag fire in February 1933. Hitler used the fire to justify mass arrests of political opponents, and Spandau became one of the first places the Nazis used for what they called Schutzhaft, or protective custody, meaning people could be locked up with no charge and no trial. Journalist Egon Kisch and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize while still in custody, both passed through Spandau in this period, and Kisch later described Gestapo officials beating and tormenting inmates with total impunity.
What most retellings leave out is that a guillotine from the Nazi era stayed inside the prison for years afterward. An American legal adviser who helped oversee Spandau in the 1960s later recalled there was still an old guillotine in the building, left over from when the prison had its own execution facility under Nazi rule. It's a detail that undercuts the idea that Spandau was purely a place of waiting rather than one that had also been a place of killing.
Seven men, one fortress built for six hundred
After the Nuremberg trials sentenced twelve senior Nazis to death and several more to prison, the seven men given custodial terms rather than the gallows were sent to Spandau, arriving on 18 July 1947. They were Rudolf Hess (Hitler's deputy, sentenced to life), Albert Speer (Hitler's chief architect and armaments minister, 20 years), Baldur von Schirach (head of the Hitler Youth, 20 years), Karl Dönitz (briefly Hitler's successor as head of state, 10 years), Erich Raeder (Grand Admiral of the navy, life, released 1955 on health grounds), Walther Funk (Reichsbank president, life, released 1957 on health grounds) and Konstantin von Neurath (former foreign minister, 15 years).
Every cell was roughly three metres by two and a half, and alternate cells were kept deliberately empty so the inmates couldn't tap out Morse code to each other through the walls. Spare cells became a chapel, a library, a tool store. Six machine gun towers were manned around the clock by around sixty soldiers at a time.
Rudolf Hess – Hitler’s deputy and the only inmate to serve a life sentence in full. He became the sole remaining prisoner for over two decades. 
Albert Speer – Hitler’s chief architect and Minister of Armaments. Released in 1966 after completing a 20-year sentence. 
Baldur von Schirach – Head of the Hitler Youth and Gauleiter of Vienna. Served a 20-year sentence; released on 30 September 1966. 
Karl Dönitz (Centre in dark coat)– Admiral of the Kriegsmarine and briefly Hitler’s successor. Released in 1956 after 10 years. 
Erich Raeder – Grand Admiral of the Navy. Sentenced to life but released in 1955 due to ill health. 
Walther Funk – Economic minister and Reichsbank president. Also sentenced to life but released in 1957 due to poor health.
A prison run by committee
Spandau was jointly administered by the four wartime Allies: Britain, America, France and the Soviet Union. Each power took control for one calendar month at a time, rotating the flag, the guards and the rules. The Western powers generally pushed for more humane conditions. The Soviets pushed back hard, insisting on strict conditions as a form of ongoing retribution, and had an effective veto over anything the other three wanted to soften.
Early on that meant one letter a month, fifteen-minute family visits every two months, no newspapers, no memoirs, guards shining torches into the cells every fifteen minutes through the night to check nobody had tried to kill themselves. Conditions eased slowly over the decades under Western pressure, but every improvement had to survive four separate vetoes to actually happen.
The garden, the feuds and the smuggled manuscript
The prison's walled garden became an odd little theatre of its own. Dönitz grew beans, Funk grew tomatoes, and Speer, an architect by training, eventually redesigned the whole thing into an elaborate network of paths and rockeries once he had the time and the other men had gone. The old rivalries of the Third Reich simply carried on inside the walls. Raeder and Dönitz, two admirals with opposing views on naval strategy, kept up their argument for years and made themselves mock insignia, Raeder as self-appointed chief librarian, Dönitz as his assistant. Speer was frozen out by the others for admitting guilt at Nuremberg, while Dönitz wrongly believed Speer had lobbied Hitler to name him as successor instead.
Speer used the isolation productively in a way none of the others managed. He wrote the bulk of his memoirs secretly on scraps of toilet paper and smuggled them out through sympathetic staff, and they were eventually published as Inside the Third Reich, one of the most widely read insider accounts of the Nazi leadership ever written.
The loneliest man in the world
Speer and von Schirach were released in September 1966, leaving Hess alone in a building meant for six hundred. He stayed that way for the next twenty-one years. Hess was paranoid and hypochondriac, convinced for long stretches that his food was being poisoned, and he refused to see his own wife and son for more than two decades before finally agreeing to a visit in 1969.
His main human contact came from Eugene K. Bird, the American commandant who befriended him and quietly recorded years of their conversations for a book. When Bird's superiors found out he'd been secretly compiling material for what became The Loneliest Man in the World, he was interrogated, placed under house arrest and forced to resign, effectively ending his military career. He published the book anyway in 1974 and spent the rest of his life campaigning for Hess's release.
What it actually cost to guard one old man
By the 1980s the absurdity of the arrangement was hard to ignore. West Germany was spending close to a million dollars a year to keep roughly 35 wardens, cooks, doctors and maintenance staff on hand for a single prisoner in his nineties, on top of dozens of rotating soldiers. Britain, America and France had all quietly pushed to release Hess on humanitarian grounds for years. Only the Soviets refused, with "to release Rudolf Hess would be an insult to the Soviet people," as Leonid Brezhnev reportedly put it. Because Spandau operated on unanimous agreement between all four powers, one government's stubbornness was enough to keep the whole machine running.
Not his first attempt
Hess had tried to kill himself at least four times before he finally succeeded, including a 1977 attempt where he gouged at his wrists, foot and elbow with a blunt dinner knife smuggled into his cell, only for Soviet guards to overpower him before he could finish. It's part of why the 1982 planning session wasn't as morbid or premature as it sounds. Authorities had watched a suicidal, hypochondriac man in his late eighties for years and had every reason to expect they'd need a plan sooner rather than later.
A death planned five years in advance
Here's the part that rarely makes it into the story. Officials had already worked out what would happen after Hess died years before it actually happened. In October 1982, when Hess was 88, the four powers secretly agreed that on his death his body would be autopsied and quietly flown to his family in Bavaria, a real concession from the Soviets, who had spent decades refusing to let any Spandau inmate's remains leave Allied custody in case it created a rallying point for sympathisers. As part of the same 1982 agreement, the four powers also settled on demolishing the prison itself as soon as possible afterward, specifically to stop it becoming a pilgrimage site.
Hess was found dead in a garden summer house on 17 August 1987, having apparently hanged himself with an electrical cord at the age of 93. A note in his pocket to his son Wolf, whom he'd left behind as a three-year-old when he flew to Britain in 1941, was found alongside him. His lawyer and son both later argued he was too frail to have managed it and suggested British intelligence had killed him to prevent him revealing wartime secrets. A separate and even stranger theory, put forward in a 1979 book by British physician Hugh Thomas, claimed the real Hess had actually died back in 1941 and that Spandau had spent four decades imprisoning a body double instead. A 1989 British government investigation found no evidence to support the murder claim, and the official verdict of suicide has stood since, with the double theory never gaining serious traction among historians.
Demolition, and a myth in a nightclub bathroom
Once Hess was dead, the five-year-old plan clicked into motion almost immediately. Bulldozers reduced the entire complex to rubble, and the debris was deliberately pulverised and scattered into the North Sea or buried at a British airbase so nothing recognisable would remain. A shopping centre went up on the site instead, nicknamed Hessco's by British troops stationed nearby, a pun on the supermarket chain Tesco.
Autopsy photo of Rudolf Hess The body of Rudolf Hess with his son.
Spandau had one more strange afterlife left in it. The British new wave band Spandau Ballet took their name from graffiti a friend of the group spotted on a Berlin nightclub wall reading Rudolf Hess, all alone, dancing the Spandau Ballet. What the phrase actually referred to is genuinely disputed. Some say it's a grim First World War soldiers' term for the way bodies convulsed under fire from the German Spandau machine gun. Others tie it more directly to executions at the prison itself. Either way, nobody involved in naming the band seems to have fully understood the phrase before they adopted it, just that it sounded suitably dark and European for 1979.
Sources
Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training: 134 Cells, One Inmate, the Closure of Spandau Prison: https://adst.org/2016/06/134-cells-one-inmate-closure-spandau-prison/
The Guardian: Nazi War Criminals in Spandau Prison Could Not Sleep Due to Searchlights: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/29/nazi-war-criminals-spandau-prison-west-germany-national-archives
TIME: Rudolf Hess, 1894 to 1987, the Inmate of Spandau's Last Wish: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,965331,00.html
The Washington Post: Hess, 82, Spandau's Last Nazi, Said to Attempt Suicide 2d Time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/02/26/hess-82-spandaus-last-nazi-said-to-attempt-suicide-2d-time/b4a9687d-f80c-41db-904f-c8c52fd7c837/
Warfare History Network: Was Rudolf Hess Murdered?: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/was-rudolf-hess-murdered/
The Christian Science Monitor: In Spandau Prison, Rudolph Hess Leads a Spartan Life: https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0617/ohess.html
Cambridge University Press: excerpt from Norman J. W. Goda, Tales from Spandau: https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/67207/excerpt/9780521867207_excerpt.pdf
Military Wiki: Eugene K. Bird biography and career history: https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Eugene_K._Bird
Far Out Magazine: What Does Spandau Ballet Mean?: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/what-does-spandau-ballet-mean/
Shapers of the 80s: When Two Bands Went by the Name of Spandau Ballet: https://shapersofthe80s.com/2018/05/01/2018-➤-spooky-or-what-when-two-bands-went-by-the-name-of-spandau-ballet/
spandau-prison.com: A Soviet Warder Tells His Story: https://spandau-prison.com/en/
You might also like
For more on the men who sat in judgement over the Nazi leadership before Spandau's seven inmates ever arrived, read about Dr Douglas Kelley at Nuremberg, the psychiatrist tasked with getting inside the heads of Göring and the other defendants.
And for another story touching on the Nazi guillotine that stayed in Spandau's walls, see our piece on Sophie Scholl, executed by the same method for leading a student resistance movement against Hitler.
