Sentenced to long prison sentences at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg, seven of Adolf Hitler's closest associates - Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Walther Funk, Konstantin von Neurath, and Baldur von Schirach - were to have become forgotten men at Berlin's Spandau Prison. Instead they became the focus of a bitter four decade tug-of-war between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies - a dispute on the fault line of the Cold War itself which drew in heads-of-state, military strategists, powerful businessmen, vocal church leaders, old-world aristocrats, international spies, and neo-Nazis. Drawing on long-secret records from four countries, Norman J. W. Goda provides an exciting new perspective on the terrifying shadow thrown by Nazi Germany on the Cold War years, and how that shadow helped to influence the Cold War itself.
Norman J. W. Goda is a Professor of History at Ohio University. He is the author of Tomorrow the World: Hitler, Northwest Africa and the Path to America and co-author of US Intelligence and the Nazis.
1. A tomb for the living; 2. An enduring institution; 3. Von Neurath's ashes: the battle over memory; 4. Hitler's successor: a tale of two admirals; 5. The foiled escape: Albert Speer's twenty years; 6. 'I regret nothing': the problem of Rudolf Hess.
"In Tales from Spandau Norman Goda demonstrates convincingly that the conditions of punishment at Spandau Prison for those convicted at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had inevitable and divisive political repercussions. Supported by diligent research and imagination, Goda's work casts new light on diverse issues such as the Nuremberg trial, memory of the Nazi regime, and even the Cold War. It is also a fine read." -Richard Breitman, American University