Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War | Norman J. W. Goda

Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War | Norman J. W. Goda | Historical gem

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Tales from Spandau...

	Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War Norman J. W. Goda Cambridge University Press, 2008 - 404 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Sentenced to long prison terms 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.

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A great book

This is a new book about the Spandauprison. Before this I had only read the Spandau diaries by Albert Speer.
So there were many things I didn't know about Spandau. The new books tells about the regulations for the prisoners and their daily life in the prison.
It also tells about the efforts to release at first Von Neurath, later Raeder and Funk. I had never read the details of those releases before.
There were also efforts on behalf of Dönitz, who only got 10 years. Same goes for Albert Speer, who himself was very active to obtain his own release.
"Tales from Spandau" also tells about the many efforts to free Rudolf Hess. He could have been a free man in the late sixties, had the russians not said no all the time.
The book also tells about his death. The author claims it was suicide, while others have hinted it was murder.
But all in all a very entertaining book. when I finished it, I became restless and had to get Speers Spandaadiarees one more time from the library to read more about the subject.

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Historical gem

This book gives you an insight that is rarely found in other books, about the lives of those imprisoned and the relationships between the Allied Powers at the time. If you are into WWII history, this is a gem!

A Labor of Loathing

Through groundbreaking archival work, Goda has given us the first thorough look at the incarceration of major Nazi war criminals in Spandau Prison after the Nuremberg tribunal. Because the prison was located in the British sector of West Berlin but was run by all 4 major powers, its postwar history was interwoven with that of the Cold War in a way that results in a tale of substantial historical interest.

Despite the author's meticulous research, this book is marred by his relentless detestation for the prisoners. No opportunity is missed to assert that they deserved much worse than they got, to impute to their every action the worst possible motive, and to snark about those on the outside who showed the slightest human concern for them. Yes, the book does follow through on its promise to tell us how these prisoners got caught in an international tug-of-war, but it is the prisoners who Goda faults for not being willing pawns. In particular, Goda roundly criticizes Speer for selfishly being reluctant to be held hostage in furtherance of the Western powers' claim to a right to a presence in Berlin.

These men were war criminals; we get it. Must we be subjected to the author's incessant spleen-venting about them?

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