Editing Spandau Prison (section)

==Life in the prison==

===Prison regulations===
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-60485-0028, Berlin, Raeder mit Ehefrau.jpg|thumb|upright=0.75|[[Erich Raeder]] released from Spandau Prison, 26 September 1955, with his wife at the Bürger-Hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg]]

Every facet of life in the prison was strictly set out by an intricate prison regulation scheme designed before the prisoners' arrival by the Four Powers – [[France]], [[United Kingdom |Britain]], the [[Soviet Union]], and the [[United States]]. Compared with other established prison regulations at the time, Spandau's rules were quite strict. The prisoners' outgoing letters to families were at first limited to one page every month, talking with fellow prisoners was prohibited, newspapers were banned, diaries and [[memoir]]s were forbidden, visits by families were limited to 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 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 between 10 and 19 million civilian deaths<ref name=obrien>{{cite web |url=http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob62.html |author=O'Brien, Joseph V |title=World War II: Combatants and Casualties |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101225004221/http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob62.html |archive-date=25 December 2010 |url-status=dead }}</ref> 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]], which housed hundreds of former officers and other lower-ranking Nazi men who were under a comparatively lax regime. However, a more contemporary consideration was that the continued incarceration of even one Nazi (i.e. Hess) in Spandau ensured a conduit that guaranteed the Soviets access to West Berlin would remain open, and Western commentators frequently accused the Russians of keeping Spandau prison in operation chiefly as a centre for Soviet espionage operations. It was one of the three places in west Berlin where Soviet troops were allowed. The other two are the [[Soviet War Memorial (Tiergarten)|Soviet Memorial in Tiergarten]] and the [[Berlin Air Safety Center]]

===Daily life===
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Every day, prisoners were ordered to rise at 6 a.m., wash, clean their cells and the corridor together, eat breakfast, stay in the garden until lunch-time at noon (weather permitting), have a post-lunch rest in their cells, and then return to the garden. Dinner followed at 5 p.m., after which the prisoners returned to their cells. Lights out was at 10 p.m. Prisoners received a shave and a haircut, if necessary, on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays; they did their own laundry every Monday. This routine, except the time allowed in the garden, changed very little throughout the years, although each of the controlling nations made their own interpretation of the prison regulations.

Within a few years of their arrival at the prison, all sorts of illicit lines of communication with the outside world were opened for the inmates by sympathetic staff. These supplementary lines were free of the censorship placed on authorised communications, and were also virtually unlimited in volume, ordinarily occurring on either Sundays or Thursdays (except during times of total lock-down of exchanges). Every piece of paper given to the prisoners was recorded and tracked, so secret notes were most often written by other means, where the supply went officially unmonitored for the entire duration of the prison's existence. Many inmates took full advantage of this. Albert Speer, after having his official request to write his memoirs denied, finally began setting down his experiences and perspectives of his time with the Nazi regime, which were smuggled out and later released as a bestselling book, ''[[Inside the Third Reich]]''. Dönitz wrote letters to his former deputy regarding the protection of his prestige in the outside world. When his release was near, he gave instructions to his wife on how best she could help ease his transition back into politics, which he intended, but never actually accomplished.{{cn|date=May 2022}} [[Walther Funk]] managed to obtain a seemingly constant supply of [[Cognac (drink)|cognac]] (all alcohol was banned) and other treats that he would share with other prisoners on special occasions.