The Cost of Incarceration

Something was dead in each of us,

And what was dead was Hope.

--Ballad of Reading Gaol

Nearly two decades ago, seven men stepped hopelessly from a van in the red brick forecourt of Berlin's Spandau Prison. They were the senior survivors of the 22 Nazis brought to trial for major war crimes at Nuernberg. Their compatriots in crime--among them Luftwaffe Boss Hermann Goering and Wehrmacht Chief Wilhelrn Keitel--had escaped imprisonment by either suicide or the noose.

Today only three of Spandau's original postwar prisoners remain: Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, 59; Armaments Minister Albert Speer, 61; and that most mysterious of Hitler's odd coterie, Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess, 72. To keep this trio confined, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S still maintain a special four-power commission, and on a monthly rotation send 79 civilians, officers and men to run Spandau.

The annual cost of operating the six-acre complex is $106,750--a tab that is picked up by the Bonn government as war reparations. That is a high price per man to pay for incarceration, but at midnight, Sept. 30, the cost will rise even higher when Speer and Von Schirach are released after completing their 20-year sentences. Only Lifer Hess will remain in the costly keep.

Happy to Try. Tall, hollow-eyed Rudolf Hess has been a prisoner ever since the night of May 10, 1941, when he shocked the world by parachuting from a Messerschmitt fighter onto the Duke of Hamilton's estate in Scotland. His mission, he claimed, was to end the war between "the great Nordic nations" Britain and Germany. Hess did not have the approval of Hitler for his peacemaking mission, and indeed was quickly denounced by the Fuehrer as "crazy." Hess remains convinced of the sacredness of his mission. "True, I achieved nothing," he wrote. "I could not save the people, but it makes me happy to think that I tried."

Thinking is about all that Hess does these days. Unlike Speer and Von Schirach, who busied themselves in the Spandau garden and read voluminously (Speer raised exemplary gladioli; Von Schirach memorized passages from Dante's Divine Comedy), Hess, for the most part, lies on the floor of his 7-by 10-ft. cell, clad in grey shirt, brown corduroys and wooden clogs, and practices yoga. During exercise periods, he marches listlessly about the yard in a black overcoat with a white numeral 7 stenciled on its back. Sometimes he reads the Frankfurter Allgemeine or the Communist Neues Deutschland.

Though allowed to see his family, Hess adamantly refuses to do so. He does, however, write a permitted 1,300 words a month to his family. "It is beneath our dignity to meet," he explained by letter to Wife Ilse, 66, who runs a small Gasthaus in Bavaria's Allgaeu Alps. Belatedly, Hess has become a freedom lover. "I would never again put a bird in a cage," he wrote to Ilse. "Only now do I fully understand why the Chinese and Japanese, when fate is especially kind to them, go to the market, buy a bird, open the door of the cage and let him fly away. One day I will do this too."

Not very likely. The Western Allies have proposed that Spandau be closed and Hess transferred to a less costly jail. But the Russians have a veto, and in their wariness toward the West are not likely to sympathize with moves to reduce the costs of incarceration.

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