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
Spandau Prison families were at first limited to one page every month, talking with fellow prisoners was prohibited, newspapers were banned, diaries and memoirs were forbidden, visits by families were limited to one of fifteen minutes every two months, and lights were flashed into the prisoners' cells every fifteen minutes during the night as a form of suicide watch. A considerable portion of the stricter regulations was either later revised toward the more lenient, or deliberately ignored by prison staff. The directors and guards of the Western powers (France, Britain and the United States) repeatedly voiced opposition to many of the stricter