On This Day: August 17, 1987 — The Last Nazi Died Alone in a Prison Built for 600

The garden cottage at Spandau Prison was small and unremarkable — a simple summerhouse built to give an old man somewhere to sit. On the afternoon of August 17, 1987, a British guard stepped away briefly and returned minutes later to find the prison’s sole inmate slumped forward, an electrical lamp cord twisted tightly around his neck.

Rudolf Hess was 93 years old. He had been imprisoned for 46 years. He was the last living member of Hitler’s inner circle. And now he was dead.

From the Führer’s Right Hand to a Garden Shed

At the height of his power, Rudolf Hess was one of the most dangerous men in Europe. Born in 1894 in Alexandria, Egypt, he fought in World War I, joined the fledgling Nazi Party in 1920, and took part in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. While both men were imprisoned afterward, Hess served as Hitler’s personal secretary — reportedly taking dictation for Mein Kampf. When the Nazis seized power, he rose with them. By 1933 he was Deputy Führer of the Third Reich, second only to Hitler in the party hierarchy.

Then, on May 10, 1941 — in one of history’s strangest solo missions — Hess climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110, flew alone across the North Sea, bailed out over Scotland, and landed with a broken ankle in a farmer’s field near Glasgow. His stated goal: negotiate peace with Britain before Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union. He asked to meet the Duke of Hamilton. The British locked him up instead.

The flight itself was remarkable. Hess navigated roughly 900 miles alone, flying low over the North Sea to stay below radar, wearing a Luftwaffe flying suit and carrying dietary supplements and horoscopes he believed would protect him. He parachuted out near Eaglesham, Scotland, after his fuel ran out — the plane continued pilotless and crashed a short distance away. A local farmer found him lying in a field, introducing himself as Captain Alfred Horn and asking to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton, a Scottish aristocrat he had briefly met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. British intelligence interrogated him extensively over the following months. The transcripts of those sessions remain partially classified — a detail that has kept conspiracy theorists busy for decades.

Hitler publicly declared him insane. The mission was an embarrassment to the Nazi high command and an intelligence windfall for Britain. Hess spent the rest of the war in British custody, and when Allied victory came in 1945, he stood trial at Nuremberg.

Nuremberg: Life, Not Death

The Nuremberg Tribunal found Hess guilty of crimes against peace and conspiracy — but not guilty of crimes against humanity or war crimes. That distinction saved his life. While Hermann Göring and nine others were sentenced to death, Hess received a life sentence. On July 18, 1947, he arrived at Spandau Prison in West Berlin alongside six other convicted Nazi war criminals: Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Walther Funk, Baldur von Schirach, Erich Raeder, and Konstantin von Neurath.

Spandau was a massive red-brick fortress — originally a Prussian military prison built in 1876, with over 600 cells in the British sector of West Berlin. The Four Allied Powers — the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — jointly operated it, rotating monthly command responsibility. Americans ran it in December. The food changed with each rotation: steak and chicken during American months, Russian rations during Soviet months.

Between 1954 and 1966, the other six prisoners were either released early on humanitarian grounds or completed their sentences. Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach, the last two, walked out the gates on October 1, 1966.

Rudolf Hess was left alone.

One Man. 600 Cells. 21 Years.

What followed was one of the Cold War’s most absurd arrangements. For 21 years, a single elderly man occupied a fortress built for hundreds. The Four Powers were treaty-bound to maintain full prison operations — soldiers, officers, cooks, medical personnel — all rotating monthly to keep watch over one increasingly frail prisoner in an otherwise empty building.

The cost ran to millions annually. Requests to release Hess on humanitarian grounds — given his extreme age and deteriorating health — were vetoed repeatedly. Britain, France, and the United States were willing to consider it. The Soviet Union refused every time. Their official position: his crimes were too severe for early release. The geopolitical reality was simpler: Spandau Prison was the last functioning symbol of Four Power cooperation in Berlin, and the Soviets had little interest in surrendering that foothold.

West Germany’s government appealed for his release repeatedly. Former Nuremberg prosecutor and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas argued publicly that four decades of imprisonment was disproportionate to the specific charges Hess had been convicted of. British Prime Ministers raised the question at the diplomatic level. None of it moved Moscow. Inside Spandau, Hess was prisoner number 7 — the only prisoner — monitored by rules drafted for a full population that no longer existed. A chaplain rotated through. A doctor visited regularly. His books were catalogued and scrutinized.

Inside, Hess read books, watched television, and tended a small garden. By the 1980s, guards reported he moved slowly but remained mentally alert. He received family visits. He complained frequently about his health. British and Soviet doctors disagreed over his diagnoses — another small theater of Cold War friction playing out over one old man.

Outside the walls, neo-Nazi groups held vigils in his honor, calling him a political prisoner and a martyr.

The Death — and the Doubt

On August 17, 1987, a guard stepped outside briefly and returned to find Hess in the summerhouse with an extension cord from a table lamp wound around his neck. He was rushed to the nearby British Military Hospital and pronounced dead at 4:10 p.m. A note addressed to his family was found in his pocket — widely described in press reports as a farewell letter.

The official verdict came the following month: suicide by asphyxiation. Case closed.

His son, Wolf-Rüdiger Hess, immediately rejected it.

In the years that followed, Wolf-Rüdiger argued that his father’s hands were so severely crippled by arthritis that he could not have tied the knot himself. He pointed to bruising and physical evidence he said was inconsistent with self-strangulation. More provocatively, he raised a geopolitical motive: under Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist leadership, the Soviet Union had been softening its position on Hess. There were signals that a Four Power agreement to release him was becoming possible for the first time in decades.

If Hess walked free, he could speak. About the 1941 peace mission. About what Churchill’s government really knew. About any quiet channels that may have existed between Nazi Germany and Britain in the darkest year of the war. To some, Western intelligence services had every reason to keep those secrets buried permanently.

A second autopsy, requested by the family and conducted by an independent British forensic pathologist, ultimately supported the official suicide conclusion. But the conspiracy theory never died. It lives on in documentary films, history forums, and the annual neo-Nazi commemorations that German authorities continue to ban — marches that have drawn thousands of far-right participants and remain one of Germany’s most closely monitored political flashpoints.

What Hess actually revealed during those British interrogations has never been fully disclosed. Declassified British intelligence files released in the 1990s showed he provided detailed assessments of German military dispositions and Hitler’s plans for the Eastern Front — information that proved valuable as Operation Barbarossa unfolded just weeks after his capture. Whether he came with any genuine authorisation from elements within the Nazi government, or was acting entirely on his own messianic impulse, remained an open question even among historians who have studied the declassified record. That ambiguity is part of why Spandau remained a live political issue long after the other Nuremberg defendants had either died or been released.

The Prison Vanishes

The British moved fast. On September 3, 1987 — just 17 days after Hess died — demolition crews began tearing down Spandau Prison. The official reason: to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. Every brick was carted away under police supervision. The debris was reportedly dumped in the North Sea so that no relics could surface and be sold or venerated.

What rose in the prison’s place was almost comically mundane: a British military shopping center called The Britannia Centre Spandau. A fortress that had held the architects of the Second World War was replaced with a place to buy groceries and household goods.

The last Cold War monument to Nuremberg was erased. And the last prisoner of the Third Reich — a 93-year-old man who had spent more than four decades behind bars, outliving all of his co-defendants, outliving the ideology he served, outliving almost everyone who remembered his power — was finally out of cells to fill.