‘The closest I have ever felt to real evil’ – minister recalls Nazi’s suicide cell

Young officer in The Black Watch was on guard after Rudolf Hess killed himself at Spandau Prison

Staring into the room where Adolf Hitler’s deputy killed himself is the “closest I have ever felt to real evil”, a Church of Scotland minister has revealed.

The Rev Peter Sutton was a young officer in The Black Watch, responsible for guarding Berlin’s Spandau Prison where Rudolf Hess was imprisoned.

He was on duty the day after the Nazi, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1946, committed suicide.

Mr Sutton, originally of Fife and now the new minister at St Cuthbert’s Parish Church in Edinburgh, said it 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.”

The day following Hess’s suicide, Mr Sutton and another officer walked through the huge gardens.

They approached a glass-fronted cabin – Hess’s summerhouse.

Inside was a rocking chair, books and an oxygen cylinder. And Mr Sutton “could see the noose that he used to hang himself”.

Mr 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”.

“Standing in the place where the last 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 connecting to such horrors and evil is what grabbed me most.”

Mr Sutton was aware of Hess because he always wanted to be a soldier and grew up on a diet of Second World War films and comics.

“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.”

Mr Sutton, a married father of five, was an elder in The Black Watch Kirk Session connected to the Presbytery of Perth, and ordained in 1993.

Standing in the place where the last Nazi had killed himself the day before was very eerie and chilling.

THE REV PETER SUTTON

Pictures: Church of Scotland. Rudolf Hess in his cell at Spandau Prison, where he was sentenced to life. Top left: Mr Sutton as a young Black Watch officer and, top right, he is the new minister at St Cuthbert’s Parish Church in Edinburgh.