Like I said, we had no contact with the prisoners, we just guarded the wall around the compound. I seem to remember there were 16 towers. It was two hours on and four hours off, just like our regular guard duty back at the barracks. It was supposed to be for 24 hours at a stretch, but we were always short-handed in Berlin, so it was not unusual to be on guard duty for several days in a row. I pulled Spandau guard twice during my 30 months in Berlin, once for three days and once for five days. Our guard house was outside the wall, and they let us go down to the corner curry wurst stand during our four hours off. That was technically illegal, but so was pulling guard for more than 24 hours.
I don't know if the prisoners were kept in cells or not. I doubt that they had free run of the place, though, because it was "a 50-acre compound to imprison three lost souls". The prison was built to hold many more inmates than that, so somebody must have expected the Nuremburg trials to dish out more prison sentences than the seven that they did. By the time I got there, three of the original seven had completed their ten-year sentences and one of them had died, leaving Speer and Von Schirack whose 20 years were almost done, and Hess who was in for life. After Speer and Von Schirack were released, they still kept Spandau open for just Hess, almost till the day he died.
The procedures and policies at Spandau were originally instituted by the four allied powers, The U.S., Britain, France, and Russia. The way it was set up, nothing could be changed without the consent of all four powers, and the Russians never consented to anything. That's why they kept that big complex running for so few prisoners, and also why "they locked us in the towers".
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They're everywhere! They're everywhere!
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