Eugene K. Bird
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Lieutenant Colonel Eugene K. Bird 11 March, 1926 Lambert, Montana – October 28, 2005, Berlin) was U.S. Director of the Spandau prison from 1964 to 1972 where deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess was housed.
Bird was born in Lambert, Montana. In 1944, Bird joined the U.S. Army. He was sent to Europe, where he fought against the Germans.
In 1947, he became the first American guard at the Spandau prison. Spandau was set up by the Allies to imprison those convicted of war crimes. In 1964, Bird was named prison director. By 1966, the only inmate in Spandau was Hess.
Bird and Hess developed a close relationship through the years. In 1974 Bird wrote a book about his relationship with Hess titled The Loneliest Man in the World: The Inside Story of the 30-Year Imprisonment of Rudolf Hess. Bird wrote the book while still governor of the Spandau. He freely admitted that he had consulted Hess secretly in his prison cell while working on the text. This admission shocked Allied authorities. According to Allied officials, his actions were a breach of prison regulations as the prisoner was kept in strict solitary confinement. But as Eugene Bird pointed out later in his book, Hess 'was not sentenced to that'.
Bird claimed his motivation for the book was a desire to preserve Hess' account of his action. According to Bird, Hess remained unrepentant of his actions. Hess reportedly told Bird: "I would travel the same route and end up here in Spandau. My sincere desire from the beginning was to bring Germany back to the old heights which it had attained before the First World War before the Versailles Diktat, which was wrong."
After writing the book, Bird lost his job as U.S Director at Spandau. It is reported that he was pursued about Berlin by CIA agents for some time afterwards.
Even after his forced resignation, Bird didn't regret his choice in recording Hess' story: "There have been speculations in newspapers and magazines in every language in the world of what is going on," he wrote in an appendix to the 1972 Secker&Warburg-published book. "They have said here is a madman being kept in chains and starved; or, here is a man living off the fat of the land. It has been speculation because nobody knew what was going on."
After losing his job at Spandau Prison, Bird campaigned intensively for the release of Rudolf Hess, calling his continued imprisonment 'a medieval act of cruelty', barbaric and a 'savage injustice.'
After Hess' death, Bird remained suspicious of the official account of suicide. "I was suspicious for several reasons," Bird told a Deutsche Presse-Agentur reporter. "After all, Hess who had been held in Spandau for almost 30 years was by then 93 years old and fragile. I doubted he had the strength to kill himself with a cord which was not attached at both ends to anything."
After retiring from the U.S. Army, Bird remained in Berlin, living in the city's outlying Zehlendorf district and operating a family business. Later in life Bird was active in the Association of June 17, 1953, a German group honoring the East German uprising that took place on that day. Bird died in his Berlin home on October 28, 2005. He was survived by his wife and two daughters, and was buried at the Walfriedhof cemetery in Berlin.
