Dad’s tips for breaking into Spandau

 

While helping my mom clean out her basement, I found this 1976 newspaper clipping about the notorious SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who apparently used to boast that he would be willing and able to spring Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and Baldur von Schirach out of Spandau prison for a tidy sum.

 

The columnist, Don Lewis, consulted my father, James Spires (1933-2012), about this issue because he had been a guard at Spandau with the US Army in the late 1950s. The entire column appears below as a jpeg, but in case it’s hard for anyone to enlarge and read, I’ve typed out my Dad’s impressively detailed tips for how to break into the prison. Given that the place has been demolished and the Nazi war criminals in question are dead, it seems safe to put this out there:

Col. Spires said he believes that if Skorzeny decided to come out of retirement and attack Spandau, the aging pirate would have found the prison “a pretty tough nut to crack.”

Spires said while rescuers could have flown a helicopter into the courtyard, the open space was small and dominated by soldiers in the four guard towers at each corner of the compound.

“Even if they did get one in, with a small courtyard like this, they would have had to have some way of knocking out all these towers because the guards all had a clear shot,” Spires recalled. “They could have shot the prisoners,” he said. “They could have shot the helicopter up. So it would have been tough to get out.”

“To get them out of the prison itself, the logical way to attack it would have been to go into the civilian housing around the prison and set up snipers there. Then, on a prearranged signal, which would probably be geared to the movement of a roving two-man patrol outside on the perimeter of the electrified fence – when these guys got to where they could be hit from these houses, you would attack the gate with 12 to 15 men.”

Col. Spires said the attackers, using some sort of explosive device, would blow up the main gate – a heavy oak barrier reinforced with iron bands – kill the guard at the peephole, the officer of the guard and the warden.

“Then you could get into the cellblocks and possibly get these guys out,” Col. Spires said. “In the meantime, you’d have to keep the tower guards pinned down by fire. But you would only have a maximum of five minutes before other soldiers arrived on the scene from our guardhouse. And then, in another 10 minutes or so, you’d have had people coming from the British barracks a block and a half away. So it would have been a split second operation. It would have been very difficult.”

So there you go: a “very difficult” job and quite bloody. Good thing no one ever tried it, or I might not be here.