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Octavo, black cloth (hardcover), gilt lettering, viii, 270 pp. Very Good, in a Very Good dust jacket. Form dust jacket: At a top-security red-brick fortress in West Berlin, originally planned to house six hundred inmates, exists the strangest penal arrangement in the world: nearly two hundred men rotated from four different countries have the sole task of guarding one prisoner, an eighty-year-old man who has lived in virtual solitary confinement for more than a quarter-century. The jail is Spandau Prison. The inmate is Rudolph Hess. Once the number-two man in Hitler's Third Reich, he startled the world on May 10, 1941, when he borrowed a leather flying-suit and a Messerschmidt plane and flew alone to England to announce he was ready to negotiate peace terms with the British Prime Minister. Four years later, with the war finally at an end, he was taken to Nuremberg to stand trial with his fellow Nazis. It was expected that there the inside story of Hess's incomprehensible flight would come out. Had he been on a secret mission for the Fuhrer to whom he was so blindly devoted, or had he taken it upon himself to end a war he felt no one could win? The answers were not forthcoming. Hess refused to defend himself, giving only a rambling dissertation on "secret forces" and "evil influences" being used to destroy him in prison, and lending credence to the rumors that he was mad. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Originally he had six fellow prisoners at Sapndau, all top Nazis, but by 1966 only Hess remained. For this book, Rudolph Hess has given, for the first time, his own account of his time in history to Eugene K. Bird, the former American director of Spandau and the only living person Hess has taken into his confidence since 1941. Bird asked, "If you were released, Hess, would you write your memoirs? Do you think it is your responsibility to history to write them?" Hess nodded. "Yes, I suppose it is," he said. "I was the one who tried to get freedom for the world." Prisoner #7 is the result of their "strange association" at Spandau. Together they review Hess's record from his days as a Nazi minister to his life as the German prisoner of Russia, England, France, and the United States. Military History, POW, Nazi Germany, Military Leadership, Political Science, World War II, WWII, Second World War bslic.
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