Spandau Citadel, built in 1594, the 1848 St. Marien am Behnitz Catholic church designed by August Soller, and Spandau arsenal, Germany's arms development center until 1919, now a museum. That arsenal's Spandau machine gun inspired the slang "Spandau Ballet" to describe dying soldiers on barbed wire during the First World War, and later was applied to the appearance of Nazi war criminals hanged at Spandau Prison. The notorious prison, built in 1876, held Nazi war criminals after World War II until 1987, when it was demolished after the death of the last surviving prisoner, Rudolf Hess. In 1979, the English New
Hiroshi Abe (war criminal) Hiroshi Abe (war criminal) Hiroshi Abe (born ca. 1922) is a former Japanese soldier and a repented war criminal. As a first lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, he supervised construction of the Burma Railway at Songkrai. Over twelve thousand Allied prisoners of war died under his supervision. Abe was sentenced to death as a B/C class war criminal and imprisoned in Changi Prison. In 1948, his sentence was commuted to 15 years. He was released in 1957."The construction of the railway was in itself a war crime. For my part in it, I am a