Part I

One of the important details to understand the condition and release of the inmates held in Spandau were not like other figures incarcerated for Nazi crimes. The emerging Cold War and collapse of Allied unity led what had started as an international process into a national one; the Nuremberg International Military Tribunals (IMT) were followed up by each of the occupying power conducting their own tribunals, often termed National Military Tribunals (NMT- and this is simplifying the process quite a bit, justice varied by zone). The NMT convicted defendants thus ended up as the responsibility of the Allied occupying power, which in turn meant that later amnesties became a bilateral between the respective Allied High Commissioner and the FRG government. US HICOG chief General John McCloy set the tone for the later "amnesty fever" after considerable pressure from the Adenauer government and pardoned some 29 convicted war criminals from Landsberg in 1951. IMT defendants were a different matter as a four-power consensus was needed to alter the IMT sentence for early release or parole. Such a consensus was not forthcoming in Cold War milieu outside of cases of extreme ill-health. Thus Spandau's prisoners tended to serve their full terms. Hess himself was the ultimate example of how the Cold War made Spandau an anomaly for German war criminals. A unique constellation of factors led to this somewhat absurd situation where a large prison complex held only one inmate.

The Soviets were the main reason why any move for Hess's or his fellow inmates parole was vetoed. Keeping Spandau open meant that the Soviets could keep their foothold in West Berlin. Once Spandau had closed, then the facility would revert back to the control of West Berlin government. The four powers had initially anticipated a much larger roster of inmates when the four powers agreed to the collective running of Spandau. but the breakdown in Allied unity meant that it had only an anemic number of prisoners. Thus, paroles meant that the site would become irrelevant. Keeping Spandau open had value to the Soviets both for intelligence purposes as well as symbolic importance. In the former, Spandau was a window into West Berlin, and thus was an asset. But arguably more important than its intelligence value, keeping Spandau's inmates was a way to score a moral victory over the West. Unlike the FRG, the GDR did not have an equivalent amnesty-fever and many former Nazis did not creep back into public positions of authority in the SED state like Hans Globke or Hanns Martin Schleyer did in the FRG. Both the Soviets and the GDR made frequent mention of how Western officials like McCloy were more than willing to forget Nazi war crimes if their perpetrators proved useful. Keeping Spandau open due to a very public Soviet intransigence was a way to transform this talking point into concrete reality. While various Westerners advocated for pardons, the Eastern bloc made sure it publicly stood for Nazi criminals receiving their just deserts.

The GDR press's treatment of Karl Dönitz exemplified how the GDR politicized the issue of parole and release. Although there was little commentary in the GDR press on the Admiral after his sentencing, Dönitz swiftly became the subject of hand-wringing in the press as soon as he had served his term. Three days after his 1 October 1956 release, the GDR's main newspapers were carrying stories how the war criminal was now receiving a pension from Bonn. One year later, the 17 August edition of Berliner Zeitung had a front-page article, "Italy Outraged over the Insolence of Hitler's Generals," in which Dönitz along with other convicted and pardoned war criminals sent a telegram to the Italian government pleading for clemency for Walter Reder, who was a Waffen-SS commander responsible for a massacre of Italian civilians in September 1944 . The 5 February 1963 issue of BZ had a front-page commentary on how Dönitz lectured a gymnasium in Schleswig-Holstein on the Second World War. As BZ tartly noted:

On the lesson plan of the 300 pupils was history: the Second World War. For this subject, the director of the gymnasium in Geesthacht facilitated the reappearance as an expert and a guest teacher, Mr. Karl Dönitz.

No. This was not a mistake. In fact, it was the successor of the greatest warlord of all times, Adolf Hitler, who appointed him, the Grand Admiral of the Fascist Kriegsmarine, five minutes after noon on May 2, 1945 to form a new Reich government in Schleswig-Holstein. Later he was arrested and judged a war criminal.

The BZ article further asserts that a convicted war criminal lecturing FRG children was not an anomaly for the West, but was a reflection of Bonn's indifference to the Nazi past and moves towards revanchism. "Thus Dönitz can be sure to be in harmony with other Bonn prominents," BZ notes,"which makes one's head throb with anger as with other cases of 'coping with the past.'" Nor did the warming of inter-German relations during the period of detente lead to a lessening of the invective against Dönitz and his warm reception in quarters of the FRG government. The 17 September 1976 issue of Neues Deutschland had a small article "Bundeswehr Officers honor Hitler's Successor Dönitz," reporting that the Admiral was received warmly by a number of Bundesmarine officers in uniform and this was a sign that many former Nazis were mingling with the newer generation of Bundeswehr officers through organizations like the reestablished Deutscher Marinebund(German Navy League). The GDR press made passing reference to Dönitz after his death noting that the pomp and ceremony of his funeral not only underscored the hypocrisy of Bonn, but that neo-Nazis now needed new blood. Yet the damage wrought by men Dönitz was done, since "the Bundeswehr maintains the old brown traditions," as 31 January 1981 issue of BZ asserted.

This treatment of Dönitz was emblematic of how the Eastern politicized and exploited the issue of the Spandau prisoners. A 26 November 1965 Neue Zeit article “The Plague has Escaped: The ‘Führer’ of the ‘Fourth Reich’ Has Drawn No Lessons from the Nuremberg Process” noted that Dönitz had used his release to advocate for the clemency of the remaining Spandau inmates Speer, Schirach, and Hess. The article further reported that the remaining inmates were the subject of a PR campaign by the European right, noting that the right-wing FRG magazine Nation Europa had claimed in 1954 that Hess’s freedom was a moral imperative for all of Europe. A 9 December 1965 BZ piece sarcastically entitled “The Spirit of Nazism under the Christmas Tree” noted the trend of Nation Europa publishing books written by apologists and defenders of Nazi war criminals, including Ilse Hess’s * Gefangener des Friedens* (Prisoner of Peace). On 31 December 1968, BZ drew a connection between Bonn’s CDU-CSU faction pushing for an end to the extension of the statute of limitations for prosecuting Nazi crimes and clemency for Spandau’s remaining prisoner. The article noted that the state prosecutor Max Güde, who was opposed to the extension (and in reality his position was more complicated), had earlier in the spring signed a clemency appeal for Hess. BZ noted that such a position was hypocritical since Güde shortly after signing the clemency called for a ban of the Socialist German Student Union. Pravda likewise drew a connection between clemency and the current actions and policies of the West. Ina January 1970 issue answering the calls for clemency, the Soviet propaganda organ noted that:

Imperialism is always merciful against criminals, whether they be fascists or racists, because the its politics of international piracy and aggression, neocolonialism and racial intolerance is itself criminal. …The answer to [the question of clemency] has already been given in the burning of the South Vietnamese village of Son My- the site of a bloody butcher’s bill by American invaders against its peaceful inhabitants. The answer to this question is also in the ruins of many an Arab settlement bombed by Israeli pilots and destroyed by rockets. The answer is also found in the speeches and slogans publicly stated at the meetings of West German revanchists and neo-Nazis.

From the Soviet’s public position, so long as the West pursued policies it portrayed as little different from fascism, then there was no room for clemency.

While the Soviet veto was a major factor in preventing Hess’s parole, there were other factors at play that ensured that the other three powers did not press for Hess’s release with much vigor. Unlike military men like Raeder or Dönitz, Hess lacked a large and organized network of pressure groups in the FRG to consistently advocate for his release. Military veterans groups were one of the main organizers of the FRG’s amnesty fever for NMT defendants and as the GDR’s press would often point out, were also advocates for war criminals serving terms in Western European countries like Italy. Hess’s constituency was much more centered on his son, Wolf Rüdiger. Hess’s son was able to gain some prominent Western Europeans to his cause such as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, but this was a much looser network than veterans lobbies or the conservative-Christian circles affiliated with Baldur von Schirach. As Norman Goda noted in his study of the Spandau prisoners, most of Hess’s advocates already had axes to grind against the system and saw their partisanship as furthering their cause. Taylor, for example, was a notorious gadfly and by arguing Hess had done nothing wrong, he furthered his own thesis that the Nuremberg trials were a flawed process that distorted the historical record about the outbreak of the war.

Counter question, which other Nazis were given life sentences?

I'd like to ask a further question about Hess, I hope this is allowed. Wasn't he arrested after flying to England pre-battle of Britain to broker peace with them? I understand he was held as a prisoner of war during the war, but why would he be held afterwards? It seems to me he couldn't have been implicated in war crimes if he was arrested so early and spent almost the whole war in captivity in England?

TL;DR I geuss this is the same question, what did they get him on? He was already in captivity for most of the war.

A followup (or maybe pre-question question), why were those given life sentences released by the 60s?

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I remember well the controversy over Hess during the 1980's, and followed the news stories closely.

The four major WWII allies (Britain, France, the USA, and the Soviet Union) were in charge of Hess's incarceration. The first three Allies were in favor of Hess's release on humanitarian grounds, and proposed it several times during the 1980s. However it was the Soviet Union that consistently opposed any commutation of his sentence, and vetoed any decision the other three Allied powers made.

As for why the Russians alone opposed Hess's release: at the time the news reports stated that the Russians considered Hess an unrepentant Nazi. I remember also the Russians accusing the other allies of "forgetting about World War II".