Seven Nazi criminals, an oversized prison, and more than one hundred guards from four countries in divided Berlin—the history of the Spandau Prison is replete with absurdities. Norman J. W. Goda has written the history of a remarkable judicial oversight: the judges at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg issued seven unexpected prison terms without specifying how the sentences should be implemented. They thus tossed an explosive problem into the lap of the Allies at a moment when their wartime alliance was rapidly disintegrating.

Spandau was an improvised solution that soon froze into an unbeloved permanent arrangement. Along with the Berlin Air Safety Center, it was one of the two remaining Four Power institutions that survived the collapse of Allied cooperation. The ménage was sticky indeed. All decisions had to be unanimous, and oversight of the prison and the guards changed on a monthly basis; Spandau thus had its rotating American, British, Soviet, and French months. Each detail of the prisoners' daily routine—food, letters, visitors, work—needed to be thrashed out in protracted negotiations, absorbing more diplomatic energy than the fate of a mere seven inmates might deserve. But these men—Baldur von Schirach, Karl Dönitz, Konstantin von Neurath, Erich Raeder, Albert Speer, Walther Funk, and Rudolf Hess—were no ordinary prisoners. They embodied the Allied victory over Nazism and stood for the integrity of the judicial experiment of the century.

Each of the powers had different reasons to uphold such an impractical arrangement. For the Soviets, Spandau meant continued access to the Western part of the city. Being one of the guardian powers of Nazi war criminals was also a cornerstone in the official Soviet memory of the Second World War as “a war of liberation against an imperialist and murderous invader” (p. 6). The Western Powers, along with West Germany, came to appreciate the prison as a guarantee for their own presence in Berlin. As long as Spandau was governed by all Four Powers, so, too, was Berlin. As Goda convincingly argues, the significance of this old Prussian military prison went far beyond incarcerating the Nuremberg criminals. As early as the Airlift in 1948/49 it had turned into an assurance of West Berlin's very existence.

In Spandau's everyday administration, one of the most vexing issues was the possible death of an inmate. The Four Powers were resolved to prevent the emergence of any Nazi martyrs, but in their zeal to do so, they almost did just that. The morbid discussion about remains began when former Foreign Minister von Neurath was withering away in the early 1950s. The Soviets demanded cremation to ensure oblivion, the ashes to be stored in the Spandau prison safe. An eventual Soviet concession was a burial in the prison yard. The Western Allies, however, could no longer afford to ignore West German clamoring. The Federal Republic was ascending to the rank of a military partner in the Western alliance, and Neurath's family, supported by Chancellor Adenauer, lobbied heavily for the old man's release. The Western Powers thus proposed to hand the body over to the next of kin for burial and, in case of Soviet protest, to do so “by means short of shooting” (p. 119). A Third World War over a dead body? The crisis was defused when the Soviets, after Neurath's near death in his cell, agreed to his release. He died at home in 1956.

Goda skillfully uses the battles over each inmate's fate as a window onto the place of Nazism in postwar memory. The portrait of Albert Speer and his continued work on his own myth is particularly disturbing. Goda adds to the increasingly detailed knowledge on Speer that, beginning with Gitta Sereny's work, chipped away at this Nazi's self-promoted image as the contrite but ultimately innocent technocrat who accepted some responsibility at Nuremberg and consequently served his sentence stoically. On the contrary, Speer smuggled precise instructions to friends and family, bossing them around to lobby for his release. He pressed former companions into contributing money to cover legal expenses and tried to place his case above the fate of West Berlin during the Khrushchev crisis of 1959. He had no scruple to abuse the trust of his daughter who, torn between her historical knowledge and allegiance to her father, was sent on countless humiliating missions to diplomats and politicians. That “Speer was a liar” in about everything he ever said is Goda's unambiguous verdict (p. 177). In the end, Speer served his full twenty years and drew his family and co-perpetrators into serving it with him.

The story of Spandau prison resonates in today's debates about war criminals and criminal justice. Goda stops short of arguing that the execution of all defendants at Nuremberg would have been the best long-term solution (p. 273). Such an outcome would have undermined the credibility of the tribunal, yet Goda points out that those war criminals whose ashes were dumped into the Isar River were soon consigned to history. The Spandau prisoners, however, remained very much on the public agenda. Instead of turning them into forgotten men, the tight regulations at Spandau generated sympathy at home and abroad. Instead of being remembered for their crimes, they were remembered for the Allied punishment. In that sense, Spandau was a failure.

The end came with a bang and shattered the meticulous preparations for the last prisoner's demise. At age 93, Rudolf Hess seized an unguarded moment to commit suicide. The same concerns that had governed arguments over the death arrangements for the prisoners now applied to the prison itself. The building was immediately demolished in 1987. Its bricks were smashed and mixed with other debris to dilute its provenance, the furniture was burned, and the site turned into a shopping mall. In no way should it become a tourist attraction, let alone a neo-Nazi shrine.

Spandau's files shared the fate of the building. The originals were destroyed, and had it not been for the last-minute decision to microfilm them, this book would not have been written. The author, formerly a consultant to the Interagency Working Group that implemented the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act at the National Archives, had the unique opportunity to probe newly released documents that he supplemented with an impressive array of material from Germany, Great Britain, and France. The outcome of such diligent work is more than the portrait of an obscure Cold War skirmish, it is a lesson in transitional justice and postwar history alike.