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  • Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War
  • David Stafford
Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War. By Norman J. W. Goda. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-521-86720-7. Photographs. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 390. $34.95.

What happened to the top Nazi war criminals who escaped the hangman at Nuremberg and were sent to Spandau prison in west Berlin? The answer could remain a footnote to the past. But by placing the subject in its full historical context Norman Goda has made a significant contribution to Cold War studies.

Spandau’s tight security regulations were intended to make the inmates forgotten men, as if both to obliterate the memory of Nazism and ensure it was buried for all time. Amongst them were both Hitler’s chosen successor, Admiral Karl Doenitz, and his uberloyal party deputy, Rudolf Hess. Neither showed any contrition, and both nurtured hopes of some return to power.

Even without the Cold War, the public curiosity about villains would have guaranteed endless leaks and headlines. But the breakdown of relations between East and West, and the location of the prison on the world’s major political fault line, ensured that their fate remained in the spotlight. I know this personally. In the late 1960s, by which time Hess was the only prisoner left in Spandau, I was a junior officer in the British Diplomatic Service, where part of my remit was to answer a growing public campaign for his release. The West would have accepted this but the Soviets were adamant he should stay, and as the fate of the Nazi prisoners was a Four-Power power affair - as was the future of Berlin itself - the situation was deadlocked by Moscow’s veto. Some of the demand for the release of Hess was undeniably humanitarian. But much was politically-motivated. By pressing for a release they knew was impossible, critics hoped to embarrass the then Labour government of Harold Wilson by portraying him as weak in the face of the Soviets.

Of all the disputes amongst the four powers over the prisoners, none caused more friction than what should happen when they died. Should they be returned to their families? Should their bodies be cremated (as had those who were executed after the trials, whose ashes had then been secretly disposed of)? Or should they be buried in a special graveyard inside the prison? All four powers were terrified that the men would become martyrs, yet every solution raised a potentially explosive problem. In the end, the dilemma was solved by releasing early those who became seriously sick - von Neurath, Raeder, and Funk - who then died in relative obscurity. After 1966, Hess remained the sole problem. But when he committed suicide in the prison in 1987, four decades had passed since the end of the Third Reich, and the Cold War was almost over. So the sting had been removed from the poison. Probably only hard line neo-Nazis now know, or care, where Hess is buried.

The book also carries an important lesson for the future. If war crimes trials are to become a fixture in international life, then it must be accepted that prisoners will inevitably become political footballs - and that the game could go on for decades. [End Page 977]

David Stafford
Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars
University of Edinburgh, Scotland
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