How Soviet ‘Laurel and Hardy’ punished Hess

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How Soviet ‘Laurel and Hardy’ punished Hess

Michael Evans

The daily regime faced by Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, during his two decades as the sole prisoner in Spandau Jail in Berlin was made as harsh as possible by two Soviet officials described as a “sinister Laurel and Hardy team”, newly declassified files have revealed.

The Soviet-nominated governor and chief warder at Spandau refused to relax the restrictions imposed on Hess, despite appeals from the United States, Britain and France, the other wartime allies responsible for guarding him. They decided he should “drink the last drop of punishment” for his crimes in the Second World War, one Foreign and Commonweath Office file reports.

Yesterday the most detailed files on the lifestyle of Hess during the 40 years he spent in Spandau prison, 21 of which were in solitary confinement, were released by the National Archives in Kew. Minutes of angry and frustrated meetings between the four governors representing each of the Allies highlight how the Soviet officials were determined to maintain their own Cold War inside Spandau, even though at the time, in the 1970s, there was supposed to be a new era of detente between the Soviet Union and the West.

Hess, known as Prisoner No 7, had been sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials in 1945 after being found guilty of conspiracy to wage aggressive war and crimes against peace. With six other prisoners, he was sent to Spandau Allied Military Prison on July 18, 1947. Hess had spent the last four years of the Second World War in a cell in the Tower of London after parachuting from a Messerschmitt near Edinburgh in 1941 on a secret mission to seek a peace deal with Britain.

The four allies took turns, a month at a time, to guard Hess. Whenever attempts were made to improve his conditions or allow him more personal items on compassionate grounds, the two Soviet officials refused.
In one Foreign Office file, Bob de Burlet, the British governor at Spandau, wrote in May 1974: “The Soviet governor, Voitov, short, fat and roly-poly, and his chief henchman, Fedorov, thin and sallow, are a couple of sneaky and mean individuals who are perfectly cast in their villainous roles as a sort of sinister Laurel and Hardy team.”

Against the wishes of the three other governors, they insisted on removing Hess’s spectacles at 10pm every night so that he could not read, refused to let him have winter socks, obstructed attempts to have his run-down cell refurbished, and demanded that every notebook he had filled with his thoughts be destroyed.

In February 1974, as Hess approached his 80th birthday, the British governor wrote: “We are having a very tough time indeed with them [the Russians] over every aspect of the running of the prison. For some time now they have been trying by every possible means to turn the clock back and to tighten up Hess’s routine and to toughen his conditions of confinement.”

The governor added: “Of course it is Soviet required observance to hate Hess. However, the Spandau cold war is directed as much at the Allies as at Hess. I believe that in Spandau, which is controlled on the Russian side by the military rather than the diplomatic establishment, we see behind the mask of detente. In this environment the velvet glove is off and the mailed fist and the venom are all too plain to see.”
Hess got into trouble when Voitov ordered him to stand up whenever he entered his cell. To remind him, Hess put a notice on his wall that read: “Stand up when Soviet governor appears.” Voitov thought this was an insubordinate breach of regulations.

Underlining his determination to make Hess suffer, on one occasion Voitov removed three of the 13 family photographs in his cell, insisting that the regulations allowed him to have only ten.

The Soviet officials also wanted to censor all Hess’s letters to his wife, stoppinghim from writing about such things as painting and the space programme. The rules, they said, stated that he was allowed to write only about personal, health and legal matters.
De Burlet wrote in January 1974: “The prisoner’s only form of intellectual exercise was by means of his letters to his wife. If he was to be restricted to writing about the holes in his socks or his sore fingers, this would deprive him of his only intellectual outlet . . . It’s a form of mental torture.

“Whatever horrors Germany had perpetrated in their concentration camps, I did not want it to be said that we were following their example.”
Hess died in 1987 at the age of 93.

How Soviet ‘Laurel and Hardy’ punished Hess - Times Online