Spandau Prison - History

History

The prison was built in 1876 on Wilhelmstraße (Spandau). It initially served as a military detention center. From 1919 it was also used for civilian inmates. It held up to 600 inmates at that time.

In the aftermath of the Reichstag Fire of 1933, opponents of Hitler and journalists such as Egon Kisch and Carl von Ossietzky were held there in so-called protective custody. Spandau Prison became a sort of predecessor of the Nazi concentration camps. While it was formally operated by the Prussian Ministry of Justice, the Gestapo tortured and abused its inmates, as Egon Erwin Kisch recalls in his memories of Spandau Prison. By the end of 1933 the first Nazi concentration camps had been erected (at Dachau, Osthofen, Oranienburg, Sonnenburg, Lichtenburg and the marshland camps around Esterwegen); all remaining prisoners who had been held in so-called protective custody in state prisons were transferred to these concentration camps.

After World War II it was operated by the Four-Power Authorities to house the Nazi war criminals sentenced to imprisonment at the Nuremberg Trials.

Only seven prisoners were finally imprisoned there. Arriving from Nuremberg on 18 July 1947, they were:

Of the seven, only four fully served their sentences; the remaining three, Neurath, Raeder, and Funk, having been released earlier due to ill health. Between 1966 and 1987, Rudolf Hess was the only inmate in Spandau Prison. His only companion was the warden, Eugene K. Bird, who became a close friend. Bird wrote a book about Hess's imprisonment entitled The Loneliest Man in the World.

Spandau was one of only two Four-Power organizations to continue to operate after the breakdown of the Allied Control Council; the other being the Berlin Air Safety Center. The four occupying powers of Berlin would alternate control of the prison on a monthly basis, each having the responsibility for a total of three months out of the year. Observing the Four-Power flags that flew at the Allied Control Authority building could determine who controlled the prison.

The prison was demolished in 1987, largely to prevent it from becoming a Neo-Nazi shrine, after the death of its final remaining prisoner, Rudolf Hess, who had been the prison's sole occupant after the release of Speer and von Schirach in 1966. To further ensure its erasure, the site was made into a parking facility and a NAAFI shopping center, named The Britannia Centre Spandau and nicknamed Hessco's after a British supermarket chain of a similar name. All materials from the demolished prison were ground to powder and dispersed in the North Sea or buried at the former RAF Gatow airbase.

As of 2006, a Kaiser's Supermarket, ALDI, and a Media Markt consumer electronics store occupied the former prison grounds. In late 2008, Media Markt left the main shopping complex. The space lies now abandoned. In 2011 the new owner, a development company applied for permission to demolish the cinema complex of the Britannia Centre, which is used by ALDI. The contracts for both, the cinema complex and the shopping complex, with Kaiser's, were terminated.