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Originally Posted by banger
Yet they kept the entire prison open.... JUST FOR HIM....
Call me a skeptic.... but it seems they went to extraordinary measures that his story never gets told.
Consider, the only prisoner in an entire prison....
No one to speak share his story with.
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Let's see... he shared the prison with Konstantin von Neurath until 1954, Erich Raeder until 1955, Karl Donitz until 1956, alther Funk until 1957, and Albert Speer and Baldur von Shirach until 1966. While communications were limited between the prisoners at first (but never entirely forbidden), in time these rules were relaxed and the prisoners were allowed to interact.
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Constant rotation of guards and the nations of the guards...
No one to develop a bond with.
Seems like a lot to time, effort and money to keep a "nutbar" confined.
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The fact that the Soviets - who wanted him dead, not imprisoned - were not about to agree to his release is hardly surprising. And why, exactly, were they supposed to care one iota about 'all the effort' being expended by West Berlin authorities and the Four Powers in keeping Spandau open? What because the situation allowed Soviet military personnel regular access to somewhere beyond the Soviet zone of control (later, the DDR)? Actually, it makes completely sense in light of Soviet motivations that they were unwilling to allow Speer to be anywhere but Spandau.
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If he were in fact nothing but a "nut"....
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Well, I guess every authority in the Third Reich is 'in' on this vast conspiracy. Hess was a loyal follower of Hitler but not very smart. He was not an insider by the time the war started. He had rank and virtually no power - precisely because he wasn't of much use as anything but a sort of figurehead, one of the Old Fighters.
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Let he walk about freely. let people see what the leadership was really like.
Consider... Hess was captured early in the war..... 1941 to be exact...
Many of his contemporaries were executed.
Some like Reich minister Albert Speer were imprisoned and later released.
Acting Fuhrer Karl Donitz was even released from prison.
Yet this individual was kept in virtual solitary confinement for nearly 46 years.
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Again, that is not accurate. He had other prisoners with him at Spandau for 20 years. And conditions were hard exacting. Writing was forbidden in Spandau... yet things were so lax there that Speer - who had more contact with Hess than any of the other five prisoners - wrote a book. He had many thousands of pages of writing, notes, and letters smuggled out of Spandau. Yet Hess couldn't get any sort of revelatory missive spirited out if he had something to say? And Hess did develop a bond with someone else at Spandau - Eugene Bird, the US commandant of the prison in the 1960s and 1970s. Another opportunity for Hess to 'get his story out'. Or was Bird 'in on it', too? Bird's time at Spandau actually came to an end when military authorities discovered that he and Hess were secretly working on a book about Hess' experiences. So Bird was sacked... and then took great secrets to his gave? (he lived for many decades after his sacking)
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All I can do is suspect..... suspect he knew something the powers thought was rather important.
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Well, you're correct there. Hess' marginal position in the Nazi heirarchy makes it highly implausible that he knew even a fraction of what was known by people such as Speer, who spilled his guts. The situation at Spandau is such that if Hess did have something to say, he should have had abundant opportunity to do so, either to his fellow prisoners or to his family - in the same way Speer did. You can ignore prosaic explanations in favor of conspiracy theories which don't really make any sense, but that'll get you what those conspiracy theories usually get people - entertaining notions, but little if any substance.
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