A CHURCH of Scotland minister has revealed what made him feel the closest he has ever felt to real evil.
Rev Peter Sutton, who was recently appointed the minister at at St Cuthbert’s Parish Church in Edinburgh said the moment occurred when he stared into the room where Adolf Hitler's deputy killed himself.
Rev Sutton was a young officer in the Black Watch which was responsible for guarding Spandau Prison in Berlin, Germany where Hitler's deputy Rudolph Hess was held.
He was on duty the day after the Nazi, who was famously captured near Eaglesham in East Renfrewshire in 1941 after his Messerschmitt crash landed, committed suicide thirty years ago at the age of 93.
Mr Sutton 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...
“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."
Mr Sutton, who was a 19-year-old Second Lieutenant at the time, said he never met Hess personally but described him as a man with the “weight of history and his conscience on his shoulders”.
Mr Sutton at Checkpoint Charlie
“It is a very vivid memory and 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 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.”
Hess was Deputy Führer of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his doomed flight to Scotland in 1941 to hold peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 for crimes against peace and taken with six other Nazis to Spandau allied military prison in the British sector of Berlin.
Mr Sutton, who attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, said he was very aware of Rudolph Hess from a young age because he always wanted to be a soldier and grew up on a diet of Second World War films like Where Eagles Dare, the Guns of Navarone 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,” he added.
“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.
Mr Sutton, a married father of 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, NAFFI, was put in its place.”
The minister, whose mother was a GP in Kirkcaldy for 25 years, served in the Black Watch until 1994, rising to the rank of captain.
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