Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War (review)

In May 1945, the twelve-year reign of the Thousand-Year Reich came to an end. The victorious Allies who had defeated Germany now had to determine how to mete out justice to the vanquished. One solution was to put major Nazi war criminals on trial before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, where defendants were charged with conspiring to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, initiating a criminal war, and carrying out crimes against civilian populations. For nearly a year—from November 1945 to October 1946—American, Soviet, British, and French judges reviewed the cases of twenty-two defendants, generating mountains of evidence that may have "bored many journalists to tears" (pp. 13–14) but ever since have provided an extraordinary source for anyone interested in the history of Nazi Germany. In the introduction to this riveting monograph, Norman Goda writes: "Perhaps British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was right—it is far easier to shoot the perpetrators summarily than to risk the possible embarrassments and failures that accompany such an immense legal undertaking" (p. 8). The Allies accepted the consequences of going to court rather than circumventing legal proceedings in favor of quick summary justice and the execution of Nazi criminals. In this fine book, the legacies of that decision are what interest Goda.

At Nuremberg, twelve defendants were sentenced to death and three were acquitted. The remaining seven received jail terms, some for life, others for up to twenty years. For the next four decades, the Allies would be jailers, watching over these convicted criminals who were incarcerated in the Spandau Military Prison located in the zone of Berlin occupied by the British after the war. The last prisoner in Spandau—for twenty years its sole inmate—Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler's chief assistants, turned ninety-three in jail. On August 17, 1987, Hess ended the speculation about how long he would hold on by hanging himself. Within a month the prison had literally been leveled.

Goda uses the forty-year history of Spandau to tell a complex tale of four-power control in Berlin, the divided city's place in the geopolitical history of the Cold War, West German responses to the "victors' justice," and the very different assessments of the National Socialist past offered by each of the Allies. The history of Spandau becomes a lens through which to glimpse how Germans and many others continued to come to terms with the past of the Nazi state over the first forty or so years after the end of the Second World War, as well as an illustrative example of the ways in which "trials of international criminals cannot help but be political and thus necessarily have political repercussions" (p. 10).

Nothing was easy about determining the dimensions of postwar justice, and Goda describes Allied disagreements over appropriate sentences at Nuremberg and the treatment of those consigned to Spandau. Four-power negotiations determined all particulars of the prisoners' daily routines—from how much they got to eat to what would become of the remains of those who died before their sentences ended. It is astonishing to see how much time and effort diplomatic and military leaders devoted to negotiating the fates of individual prisoners. Even during the Soviet blockade of Berlin from June 1948 until May 1949, even after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961, Spandau remained under four-power control, "the sole remnant of the grand alliance that had defeated Nazism," an "odd institution that survived and cemented itself into the landscape of the Cold War" (p. 55).

Much of Goda's book is devoted to accounts of each prisoner's history—both the circumstances that landed him in Spandau and his experience once in prison—and the ways in which each was perceived by West German politicians, the German public, and Allied officials. In addition to Hess, the seven incarcerated included Baldur von Schirach, Karl...