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black & black 1/2 cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in near fine cond. corner clipped, 1 cm tear on front, rubbing, couple of old price stickers on front flap inside. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (Pu1974 & NAP). ix+270p. glossy b&w photo illustrations. appendix. biography. world history. world war ii. nazi germany. third reich. ~ 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 Rudolf 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 Spandau, all top Nazis, but by 1966 only Hess remained. For this book, Rudolf 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. We find that Hess had believed he would walk away from Nuremberg and, with the full cooperation of the Allies, become the new Fuhrer of Germany. So far as he was concerned, he tells Bird, it was the Versailles Treaty that started World War II. It was he who tried to stop it. It is now only the Russians who still insist he must live out his sentence. ("They think I knew a great deal more than I did," Hess says. "That is why I am still here.") Prisoner #7 makes for unusual, compelling reading. Without trying to wash clean the hands of Hess, Eugene Bird has covered an important gap in history. He has gotten authentic answers to some of the most perplexing questions of the Second World War and has personally introduced us to a figure who may well be the loneliest man in the world.
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