The Seventh Secret (34 page)

"I wish I knew more about Spandau Prison. I know nothing about it except that the seven leading Nazis who escaped the death penalty at the Nuremberg Trials were sentenced to Spandau in West Berlin and checked in to serve their sentences in July of 1947. I hate to go anywhere so uninformed."

"You don't have to be uninformed," Emily had said. "If you want to read up on Spandau, go and see my friend Peter Nitz at the
Morgenpost
."

And that Foster had done. Nitz had received him at his editorial desk in the Axel Springer Verlag building, had scurried off to the newspaper's archive room be-hind the main lobby, and had returned with a bulging folder of clippings for Foster.

Foster had read steadily until the time had come for him to set out for his appointment with Major George Elford in Spandau.

Now, reclining in the back of a taxi, Foster was being driven into the British sector at the outskirts of West Berlin where that strangest of all prisons, Spandau, was located.

As they rode along, Foster reviewed what he had absorbed from the clippings he had scanned in the newspaper's Spandau file.

By now, Foster had a slight fix on it and felt more comfortable. Spandau was an old prison, built in 1881. When the Nazis claimed it, after coming to power in 1933, they nicknamed it The Red Castle. Shortly, it became the place where they detained the Reich's political prisoners before sending them off to concentration camps. It had been a prison with 132 cells for 132 prisoners, but at the time the four Allies took it over in 1947 to incarcerate the seven Nazi war criminals, Spandau was jammed with 600 prisoners. The Allies moved them all out, remodeled the dank site to assure supersecurity, and then moved in their seven war criminals.

The control of Spandau had been a four-power operation from the start. A board of four directors—one each from the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union—ran the prison and met weekly. There were permanent prison guards representing all four powers inside the prison. The outside guards, thirty soldiers from each of the powers, rotated turns in protecting it on a monthly basis.

On July 18, 1947, the seven condemned Nazis entered Spandau. Foster tried to remember their names: Rudolf Hess, Hitler's second deputy; Albert Speer, Hitler's principal architect and also minister of armaments; Erich Raeder, the Nazi admiral; Karl Döinitz, head of the Nazi navy and ruler of fallen Germany in the week following Hitler's death; Walther Funk, who ran the Reichsbank; Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth; Constantin von Neurath, onetime Nazi foreign minister.

Raeder, Funk, and von Neurath had been paroled early because of their advanced years and growing infirmities, Foster recalled. Dönitz had served out his ten-year sentence and been released. Then, Speer and von Schirach, completing their twenty-year sentences, had been freed.

That left one prisoner, Rudolf Hess, serving a life-time sentence. The entire four-power apparatus was kept up to look after one unrepentant ninety-one-year-old Nazi.

Foster's taxi was rattling over a narrow street, and in moments it had drawn up before Wilhelmstrasse 23, which was Spandau Prison.

Leaving the taxi, paying the driver, Foster turned around slowly to survey the scene of his appointment. The drizzle had ceased, but the red brick prison still glistened from the rain.

The square compound was surrounded by both a wire fence and a high red brick wall. The solid double entrance gate and the brick facade had a medieval look to them. Inside the brick wall were concrete watchtowers manned by armed soldiers equipped with giant spotlights. The wire fence bore a sign in German and English: WARNING—DANGER—DO NOT APPROACH. GUARDS HAVE ORDERS TO SHOOT.

Foster could make out the upper portion of what appeared to be a three-story prison beyond the one-story sentry house.

Mildly intimidated, Foster crossed the sidewalk to the main gate and pressed a buzzer. A grilled wicket opened. Foster gave his name and stated his business. After a few seconds, the gate came slowly open and Foster entered. A warden and two American soldiers, blue-uniformed, machine guns slung over their shoulders, were waiting for him. He was asked to show some identification. He showed his passport. He was quickly searched. He was told to sign in. Finally he was turned over to a soldier who would take him to Major George Elford.

Following the soldier, Foster passed through an enclosed courtyard and entered the administration building of the prison. The soldier spun to the left and pointed. "The prison director's office, sir." Foster rapped, a muffled voice answered, and Foster was shown into the room.

The director's office was plain, undecorated, and Major George Elford was standing beside a golf bag that was propped against the wall. A wiry, leathery-faced man in his forties, Elford dropped his putter into the bag, came forward, pumped Foster's hand and indicated a wooden chair. He pulled another wooden chair opposite Foster and sat down.

Foster pointed toward the window. "I'm astonished by the amount of security you've got out there."

Elford gave an embarrassed shrug. "I'm not sure it's justified anymore. Maybe it was in 1947 when they locked up those seven Nazis. The four powers stuck them in this old prison facility to keep them out of sight of the German population who might have viewed them as martyrs. There were threats at that time that some of the fanatical Nazis still around might try to rescue them, and that went on through the years."

"Actual threats?"

"You bet. Our Allied intelligence uncovered a plot—I think it was back in 1955—that the Nazi Colonel Otto Skorzeny hoped to rescue several of the war criminals. He was good at that sort of thing. He's the one who rescued Mussolini from our troops in Italy. Skorzeny wanted to drop two helicopters into this prison's exercise yard when the inmates were out there. One planeful of Nazi fanatics was to try to fend off the Spandau guards, while the other plane was picking up the inmates and whisking them off. Fortunately, this plot was uncovered and our security was increased. The rescue attempt never came off. But this goes on all the time. As recently as 1981, five incurable Nazis in Karlsruhe were caught building up a cache of explosives to break into Spandau and pull out Hess. All five were arrested."

"It must be easier, in 1985, with only Hess to guard in this huge place."

"Yup, the deputy Führer, a ninety-one-year-old Hess. He's useless now. Except that he might make a good living symbol for neo-Nazi gangs. Anyway, I gather your main interest in Spandau Prison is Rudolf Hess."

"Not Hess himself, as you know," said Foster. "Rather it's the missing bunker plan he may have in his possession that I'm after. I promised to explain the whole thing to you. Now I will, as briefly as possible. And then I hope that you can help me."

Major Elford was biting off the tip of a cigar and lighting it. "Go ahead. I'm listening."

Quickly, Foster told the American officer about himself, his book project, and the one missing plan. "Then," Foster went on, "Zeidler recalled that he had once loaned the entire batch of seven plans to Speer, while Speer was still here in Spandau serving out his sentence. Apparently, Speer maintained his interest in architecture and hoped to write something about his work."

"True," Major Elford confirmed. "Speer was the only prisoner who kept his full sanity because he spent his free time reading and writing about architecture."

"Well," said Foster, "when Speer finished the last year of his sentence, he must have carried the plans out of prison with the rest of his effects. In fact, he returned all the bunker plans to Zeidler, or thought he had. Actually, he returned only six. We're guessing he may have left the seventh bunker plan behind here in Spandau."

"Why?"

"Zeidler surmised it was an oversight. Zeidler figured that, while trying to identify the location of each bunker, Speer had some trouble placing the seventh one. So while still here, Speer loaned it to Hess hoping that the old deputy Führer might remember Hitler's intentions for that bunker, where he had wanted it built or actually had it built. I suppose Hess was unable to help."

"You suppose correctly. Hess's mind has been shot for a long, long time."

"Anyway, Speer never took the seventh plan back from Hess." Foster paused. "Zeidler expects it may still be among Hess's effects. Zeidler was hoping I could recover it, for my book and his own archives. What do you think?"

Major Elford blew a cloud of smoke, and then stubbed out his cigar butt in a bronze ashtray. "If it's here, you can have it. We don't give a damn about any ancient blueprints."

"Where do we look? In Rudolf Hess's cell?"

"Christ, no, his cell is bare as a stripper's tit. He's got a cot, chair, table, TV set, a few pieces of clothing, little more in there. We cleaned out most unnecessary effects over a decade ago." Major Elford stood up. "If it is anywhere, it's in the prison library. Let's go have a look."

They left the prison director's office, walking past the chief guard's room and the infirmary.

"Straight ahead is the actual cell block," announced Elford, "and also the library."

They strode along the corridor until they reached the converted cell that housed the prisoners' books, and finally entered it.

Elford gestured toward the bookshelves. "The war criminals were each allowed to take out four books at a time -a Bible, a second religious volume, a dictionary, and one nonpolitical novel. Sometimes they were permitted to read history books, but nothing military. Once, by mistake, a history of the Japanese-Russian war of 1901 crept in here. That was the war in which the Japanese whomped the Russians. When the Russians had their month in charge here, they found the book and threw it out. Anyway, under the table, in those three cartons, is where we keep prisoner storage. Hardly anything from the six who got out. Almost all the stuff in there belongs to Rudolf Hess."

Major Elford knelt down and dragged the three cartons from under the table.

There was a sparse number of items in the cartons. Elford began unloading the first one. "Mostly the excess of Hess's outer space collection," said Elford. "That became his hobby after he saw a moon shot on TV. He asked us to write NASA in Texas for reading matter, and all those pamphlets and brochures were mailed from NASA to Hess. They also sent him four color posters of the moon, taken on the moon. They're still on the walls of Hess's double cell. Naw, not a thing in this first carton."

Foster helped the major refill it, and then they turned to the second carton. This seemed to contain wearing apparel. Elford took out a pair of the wooden-soled canvas shoes the prisoners had originally been forced to wear. "Tell you a funny thing," said Elford, examining the scuffed shoes. "Albert Speer designed these for concentration camp inmates when the Nazis were in power. Then, in Spandau, he had to wear them, and one day for exercise he had to run in them. After he had finished running, Speer groaned and said, 'If I had known I'd one day be forced to wear them, I would have put a little leather in them.'

Foster took a shabby blue cap, a dirty blue jacket, and a pair of trousers out of the box.

"And this?" Foster wondered.

"The prison outfit all the war criminals wore at first. That one was worn by Hess."

Foster was pulling some kind of leather military uniform out of the carton. "What's this?"

"A real historical item," said Elford. "Hess wanted us to hold onto it. It is the Luftwaffe uniform of a lieutenant colonel that Hess wore when he flew from Germany to Scotland in May, 1941. He came down to try to make peace with England. I suppose because he knew that Hitler would be turning against the Soviet Union and attacking it, and he hoped to arrange things so that Hitler would have to fight on only one front." Elford peered into the carton. "Doesn't look like there's any architectural roll in there."

"That folded paper on the bottom," said Foster.

Major Elford picked it up and carefully unfolded it. When it was partially open, an architectural blueprint could be seen, and it was clearly signed by Rudi Zeidler.

"The seventh bunker," said Elford. "I guess this is what you want."

"Exactly what I want," agreed Foster.

Elford came to his feet with a grunt. "Let's take it to my office and spread it out. Then you can have a good look."

After shoving the cartons back under the library table, they walked quickly back to the prison director's office.

Elford spread the blueprint open on his desk, with

Foster standing beside him, and they both examined it. "Not a bit of identification anywhere," said Foster. "Not a word," said Elford.

"Strange," said Foster, puzzled. "The other six—their locations were given. On this one nothing."