17 August
1987 · politics
Rudolf Hess died in Spandau prison
Hitler's former deputy had been the sole inmate of Spandau prison in West Berlin for more than twenty years, guarded in rotation by the four occupying powers. He died aged ninety-three, and the prison was demolished shortly afterwards so it could never become a shrine.
He had flown to Scotland in 1941 on a self-appointed peace mission and parachuted into a field in Renfrewshire, which remains one of the strangest episodes of the entire war.
“Which piece of wartime history were you most fascinated by as a child?”