A CHURCH of Scotland minister who, as a young soldier, served in the German military prison where leading Nazi Rudolf Hess was held has told of his experiences.
The Rev Peter Sutton was a Black Watch officer and was respons- ible for guarding Spandau Prison in Berlin where Hess was an inmate.
He was on duty the day after the Nazi, who had been Adolf Hitler’s deputy, committed suicide in 1987 at the age of 93.
Sutton said staring into the room where Hess killed himself was the “closest I have ever felt to real evil”.
Sutton, the new minister at St Cuthbert’s Parish Church in Edinburgh, said the day would be forever etched into his memory.
“Most of the senior Nazis after the Nuremberg trials, who were not executed, were sent to Spandau and Hess was the last one there,” he said. “The British, Americans, French and Russians took it in turns to guard the perimeter of Spandau Prison.
“The day after he killed himself, another officer and I were able to walk through the huge gardens because the German wardens had gone. We approached a white cabin and the front of it was all glass.
“This was Hess’s summer house and inside, as I remember it, there was a rocking chair, books, an oxygen cylinder on a trolley and I could see the noose that he used to hang himself. It appeared to be an electrical cable pulled from the wall. My fellow officer and I just stopped talking and for some reason we just had to get out of there as fast as we could. I will never forget it.”
Hess was deputy fuhrer of Nazi Germany from 1933 until 1941 when he was famously captured near Eaglesham in East Renfrewshire after his Messerschmitt crash landed. He had been on his way to hold peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton.
Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 for crimes against peace. He was taken with six other Nazis to Spandau allied military prison in the British sector of Berlin. Sutton, a 19-year-old second lieutenant at the time, never met Hess personally but described him as a man with the “weight of history and his conscience on his shoulders”.
Sutton added: “I got this amazing insight that very few people got by being able to get into the garden before it became a restricted area. Standing in the place where the Nazi had killed himself the day before was very eerie and chilling, it was the closest I have ever felt to real evil.
“It was almost tangible. It surrounded you. It was a tranquil and peaceful garden but its connection to such horrors and evil is what grabbed me most.”
SUTTON, who attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, said he was very aware of Hess from a young age because he always wanted to be a soldier and grew up on a diet of Second World War films and Commando comics.
“Being stationed in Berlin for a summer and studying theology at university in London at the time, I had a much bigger understanding of what happened, particularly to Jewish people, during the Second World War.”
“That set it into a much more realistic context than a comic book. So to be actually guarding Hess, it suddenly became very serious.
“In many ways with Hess dying, that was the last full stop in the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last chapter of the Second World War because he was the last member of Hitler’s hierarchy to die.”
Spandau Prison was demolished shortly afterwards.
Sutton, who is married and has five children, said: “The authorities were wary that it would become a shrine for a Nazi revival so the building was pulverised and a British Army supermarket, the Naffi, was put in its place.”
The minister served in the Black Watch until 1994, rising to the rank of captain.
He was an elder in the Black Watch Kirk Session, which was connected to the Presbytery of Perth at the time, and ordained while serving as Oper-ations Officer in Hong Kong in 1993.
Sutton later served as a chaplain at Loretto School in Musselburgh and Gordonstoun School in Moray.
He was headmaster of Ardvreck School in Crieff from 2008-11 and took up his first charge at St Cuthbert’s Parish Church in June.
While at the Crieff school, Sutton set up an exchange link with the British School in Berlin and enjoyed showing his pupils around the city he once patrolled before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
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