Former U.S. Director of Spandau Believes Hess Should Be Released

Eugene K. Bird, the former American director of Spandau prison in Berlin, believes that its last remaining inmate, former No. 2 Nazi Rudolf Hess, now 82, should be released. Hess should be freed not only on humanitarian grounds but because prison costs about $415,000 a year to run as many as 105 people may be on duty each day–to take care of one prisoner. It is a ridiculous figure,” Bird said in an interview with “To The Point International,” an English-language magazine published fortnightly in Antwerp, Belgium.

Bird contended that Spandau remains “a symbol of Soviet hate, revenge and terror” and claimed it is only at the insistence of the Soviet Union that Hess remains in prison. He said he expressed his views in a recent letter to the West German Justice Minister, Jurgen Baumann. He took strong exception to Baumann’s response that he “would not stand up for the freedom of Rudolf Hess.”

Bird said he spent hundreds of hours in Hess’ cell talking to the one-time Deputy Fuehrer who defected to England early in World War II. “We talked about his flight to England, his relationship to Hitler and his place in world history,” Bird told “To The Point International” in its latest issue. He said he found Hess “intelligent but he seemed to live in a fantasy world of his own. He often told me that he was ‘a dedicated German’; but he regretted what happened to the Jews.”

Bird believes that Hess, who is reportedly ill, has suffered enough and pointed out that he was not sentenced to life imprisonment as a war criminal but rather because he had helped carry out a war of aggression. “I have no sympathy for the Nazi past, nor do I plead the case of an old Nazi. It is more important for us than for Hess that he should be freed. Should he die in prison, he would become a monument for the neo-Nazis.” Bird told the magazine.