Last Ballet at Spandau Prison

Auf Wiedersehen, Motherfucker

Ask me to name a song by English pop band Spandau Ballet and I’ll tell you true. I mean “True.” The song came out in 1983 when I was fifteen; local radio played it endlessly, and I hated it. I enjoy plenty of pop music from that era, just not that song. The band’s name originates from Berlin’s infamous Spandau Prison. The story behind it is fucking dark.

Dark, but not terribly accurate.

Spandau Ballet, which formed in 1979 and sold over 25 million albums, picked the name because it refers to when Nazis were hanged at Spandau Prison after World War II, and they would kick and twitch in their final moments. The “Ballet” is in reference to fucking Nazis doing their death dance. Cool, right?

Except no. Nazis weren’t executed at Spandau. Drag. But please bear with me, as there is a happy ending to this tale. Continues below …

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The origin of the phrase might not even refer to hanging, as the World War I German Machine Gun MG 08, which was manufactured in Spandau, and resulted in Allies in both World Wars referring to German machine guns as “Spandaus,” might have caused the term to come into being as it often made Allied soldiers dance about—a Spandau ballet—as it riddled them with bullets.

The MG 08

The Berlin prison where mass executions were taking place, including via hanging, was about four miles east of Spandau, at Plötzensee Prison. Most of the people executed there during the war were those opposed to Hitler. Not Nazis, but people who said fuck those Nazis and paid the ultimate price for their courageous resistance.

Spandau Prison didn’t execute Nazis, it imprisoned them. The Nuremberg Trials that took place after the war did result in some Nazis getting hanged, but they did the long drop at the end of a short rope at Nuremberg Prison. Not all were executed, however. Seven fucking Nazis were sentenced to prison terms ranging from ten years, to life. And the place they were sent to serve their sentences was Spandau.

The most notorious of the seven was Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer to Adolf Asswipe Hitler himself. It’s worth noting that Hess only held that role until 1941, when he stupidly flew to Scotland in an effort to negotiate peace with Britain so Hitler could focus on depopulating the Soviet Union. The Brits said fuck you and fuck all Nazis and threw Rudy’s ass in prison.

This is where it gets fucking stupid. In the summer of 1947, at the age of fifty-three, Hess was sent to Spandau to spend the rest of his miserable days. He lived there for another forty years. For twenty-one of those years, he was the only inmate in a prison built to house 600. By 1966, all the other prisoners save Hess were either released, or dead.

By the time Hess was in his nineties, he was blind in one eye, he dragged his left leg because of a couple of strokes, and his prostate was so enlarged taking a piss was a twenty-minute workout. Zero sympathy for that fascist fuckwipe, but it’s ridiculous that such a feeble old man was surrounded by an electrified fence and a hundred heavily armed soldiers until he breathed his last. I don’t think he was capable of making a break for it.

Speaking of breathing his last, I promised a happy ending. His final breaths were choking gasps. On August 17, 1987, Hess hanged himself using an electrical extension cord. Considering how decrepit he was, I expect his final ballet was rather pathetic to behold.

Immediately after Hess went off to Nazi hell, the 111-year-old prison was demolished, the land used for a shopping mall to prevent it becoming some kind of stupid shrine for dipshit neo-Nazis to worship at.

Get my book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.

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