Spandau Prison Spandau Prison Spandau Prison was located in the borough of Spandau in western Berlin. It was constructed in 1876 and demolished in 1987 after the death of its last prisoner, Rudolf Hess, to prevent it from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. The site was later rebuilt as a shopping centre for the British forces stationed in Germany. Spandau Prison was built in 1876 on Wilhelmstraße. It initially served as a military detention center. From 1919 it was also used for civilian inmates. It held up to 600 inmates at that time. In the aftermath of the Reichstag fire of 1933, opponents
Spandau Prison measures and made near-constant protest about them to their superiors throughout the prison's existence, but they were invariably vetoed by the Soviet Union, which favored a tougher approach. The Soviet Union, which suffered 19 million civilian deaths during the war and had pressed at the Nuremberg trials for the execution of all the current inmates, was unwilling to compromise with the Western powers in this regard, both because of the harsher punishment that they felt was justified, and to stress the Communist propaganda line that the capitalist powers had supposedly never been serious about denazification. This contrasted with Werl Prison,