On 24 October, 1986 a sudden explosion shattered a one-floor administration building in Berlin-Spandau. It was the second bomb attack in West Berlin that year. But even though the first one - a horrific explosion at the popular disco “La Belle” in Berlin-Friedenau (with three dead and 250 injured) - was far more tragic as it caused far more casualties, the second one was important in its own way.
On the night from Wednesday to Thursday, some time after midnight a self-declared far-right group detonated explosives planted inside the building. Their reason? They wished to free the only prisoner held at an old military prison in Wilhelmstadt. The Prisoner Number 7.
A man you know only too well.
Until 1941 he could do no wrong. So much as, that his boss - a man not exactly known for sympathy, inner warmth or trust in his fellow human beings - seemed to have stood behind him come hell or high water.
Showered with titles and positions (even if some of these were in a name only), he and his superior enjoyed a level of confidence that led many unkind souls to suspect foul play - or, rather, a kind of play which German Paragraph 175 banned under a threat of imprisonment1. It would not be surprising, had rumours of his alleged visits to Berlin’s and Munich’s gay bars and cabarets been true - after all, they are said to have earned him the nickname Schwarze Berta (Black Bertha).
But eventually, like Icarus, he flew too high. Or rather, too far: in May 1941 he boarded a Messerschmitt machine to Scotland, parachuted himself to the ground and claimed to have arrived to talk peace. This was the downfall of Rudolf Hess.
Whether he acted upon some secret order from his beloved Führer - a man he deified and blindly followed; or whether he acted upon a call from some even higher powers (Hess was also an occultist and believer in horoscopes and prophecies), we will never know. The truth, though, might be more mundane - according to many experts who studied the man’s past, Rudolf Hess might have simply lost his brown marbles.
Something that became much clearer long before the war ended, and the ardent Nazi and even more ardent antisemite, as well as Hitler’s former Nazi-party deputy and confidant, was given a life sentence by the Nuremberg tribunal. The Brits who had kept him captive in Great Britain ever since his mad landing in Scotland, had long been convinced that Rudolf Hess was not exactly compos mentis.
Still, punishment he deserved, punishment was he to get: on July 18, 1946 Hess had his second big landing. This time no parachuting was necessary: the machine from Nuremberg carrying him and six other sentenced Nazi criminals safely landed in Berlin-Gatow. From there the group of seven inmates was transported straight to the old military prison in Spandau.
After Karl Dönitz, Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach (the youngest among them was the former head of the Hitlerjugend), Walter Funk, Erich Raeder (next to Dönitz, another admiral on the bill) and Konstantin von Neurath (the Nazi finance expert and former “Protector of Bohemia and Moravia”), Hess was officially registered as “Prisoner No. 7”. And so “The Spandau Seven” were complete.
Even though three of them got life, while the others could look forward to between 10 and 20 years behind very lonely bars, by the end of 1966 Hess was the only one left - he became the sole inmate at the Spandau facility.
With up to 40 people - Allied Forces guards and prison administration employees - responsible for overlooking his stay, Rudolf Hess was among the best-guarded prisoners of the modern era. And the loneliest. Unlike the others - who were not particularly fond of “His Imprisoned Lordship”2 anyway (especially Dönitz, who - by the by - considered himself the rightful head of the German state in the whole ten years of his imprisonment, and who openly despised Hess) - he did not see his wife (ardent Nazi and even more ardent antisemite herself) or his son until 1969.
Not because they did not want to - he refused to see them while in prison. In 1969 Hess had to be temporarily hospitalised and it was only then that he kindly consented to a short family reunion.
By 1986 Rudolf Hess was a 92-year-old symbol of horrific crime and lengthy punishment. Held in Spandau as a shrivelling, hypochondriac, brown relic of a hellish era that was best forgotten (something that both East and West Germany would have been only too happy to do), this literal incarnation of “the banality of evil” spent his days wallowing in bitter memories of his and his Führer’s grandeur. Half-forgotten is not all forgotten, though.
Just by the virtue of his very existence and the prominent status due to his solitude (drama!) and imprisonment (even more drama plus justice! - a stuff that reality shows are made of), Rudolf Hess mutated to a figurehead of the restitution movement. He became the hero for both the old and the new Nazis. Like Horst Wessel in his own days - a non-entity cynically elevated to the status of a spiritual leader and paragon of virtue - Hess suddenly found his face (not literally, though) on the cover of their new party book.
So much so that in 1977 a new group which called itself Aktionsgemeinschaft Nationales Europa (by now you might have guessed their political leaning) put forward the Spandau “Prisoner No. 7” as their candidate in European Parliament election.
The was no doubt as to their motivation: it would not have been the first time that their likes would be abusing a democratic mechanism in a cheap trick to force an eventually undemocratic outcome. They wanted the Allied Forces to release their man. The fact that he was a convicted Nazi criminal doing a legitimately pronounced life sentence was of no importance to their kin. Luckily, it didn’t work3.
Hess remained behind bars, the loneliest prisoner on Earth, still refusing to do any work or get involved in anything remotely close to social. Was he aware of his cult-status slowly raising its ugly head outside the thick nineteenth-century prison walls? He might have.
But how much did he care or understand by the time the so-called Befreiungskommando Rudolf Hess (Rudolf Hess Liberation Commando sounds suspiciously like something from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”) decided to turn words into action? We will never know. The terrorist act failed, Hess stayed safe behind the Spandau bars, and less than a year later - at 93, the alleged schizophrenic put an end to his miserable life.
To make sure that the Befreiungskommandos of the Republic and their likes do not use the Spandau Prison site for their brown pilgrimages, the Allies did what they promised to do back in 1946. As soon as the last prisoner of the seven convicted in Nuremberg had left the gaol - regardless of how they departed, by completing their sentence or by going to meet their angry maker - the old prison would be demolished. And in a way that not one stone would be left on top another.
And that is exactly what happened. In September 1987 - a month after Rudolf Hess checked out of the facility - the Spandau Prison was demolished. Pulverised, one could say, as the stones it was built of were literally ground and scattered (partly in to the Berlin lakes, or so the legend). Instead, British Occupation Forces saw a new construction project: a brand-new shopping centre - the “British-Centre” - with a generously sized car park.
It did not take long for Berliners to come up with a new, improved name for the British shopping temple. They promptly christened it “Hessco’s”.
Thank you for reading Berlin Companion - if you enjoyed the story, please comment and share. You can also support my work by subscribing to the Substack - paid subscriptions (price of a large coffee per month) are the best way to keep us going. You can, of course, also buy me a coffee here:
Paragraphs 175 and 175a penalized male homosexuality: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/paragraph-175-and-the-nazi-campaign-against-homosexuality
Hess, a patent hypochondriac and egomaniac, regularly refused to perform any kind of work, claiming his top-rank position and his poor health do not allow him to stoop that low.
However, it should be said that two years later they put another bloody criminal on their candidate list: an infamous, murderous Nazi concentration camp guard from Ravensbrück, Majdanek and Auschwitz, Hildegard Lächert, better known as “Bloody Brigitte”; she was sentenced for her crimes in Poland for, among others, setting guard dogs at a pregnant young woman (she was mauled to death), beating a prisoner with a lead-weight cable (killing him and bashing beyond recognition), and drowning two young Greek women in a cesspit).
Wow! I really like your style and your irony - sometimes sarcasm. Sorry for not saying anything material, but I had to tell you.
I remember being shocked on arriving in West Berlin in 1985, and staying in Gatow, at finding out who our famous neighbour was. I remember the Labelle explosion but not the attempt to free Hess. Thanks for this great piece of writing! Your essays are always so informative.