The prison in Landsberg am Lech was built between 1905 and 1908 and was intended to hold around 500 inmates. According to the penal system at the time, political inmates were awarded ‘Festungshaft’ (imprisonment with easier prison conditions, where prisoners retained their full civil rights) as an ‘honorable’, privileged sentence but served it in the same building as they would have served a regular prison sentence. In 1920, Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, murderer of the first Bavarian State Premier Kurt Eisner, became the first inmate to enjoy this ‘honorable imprisonment’ at Landsberg. Adolf Hitler was remanded in custody in Landsberg on November 11, 1923 after the failure of his attempted putsch and remained in ‘Festungshaft’ (imprisonment with easier prison conditions, where prisoners retained their full civil rights) there until December 20, 1924. His fellow prisoners included Rudolf Hess and Julius Streicher. The lenient prison conditions allowed Hitler to write his book My Struggle, make multiple excursions into the town, and receive a steady stream of visits from admirers and supporters.
Some of the first inmates incarcerated in Dachau Concentration Camp in 1933 came from Landsberg prison. The most high-profile inmates during the Nazi era included the Jesuit priest Rupert Mayer, who was imprisoned in Landsberg in 1938. The prison was also a ‘sacred site’ for the Nazis: in 1937 and 1938, hundreds of Hitler Youth members undertook pilgrimages to the prison, where Hitler’s cell had been converted into a national shrine and large-scale rallies were held in the courtyard. The Nazis gave Landsberg the title of ‘City of Youth’.
The already wretched prison conditions deteriorated still further towards the end of the war, as is particularly evident from the rising number of deaths and burials in the prison cemetery, known as the ‘Spöttinger Friedhof’. Along with practical considerations such as the presence of large, undestroyed buildings and its geographical proximity to Dachau and Nuremberg, it was the prison’s immense symbolic value for Nazism that led to its designation as the American War Criminal Prison No. 1 after the war. Persons convicted during the Dachau trials and the Americans’ twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials – a few of whom were women – served their sentences there or were held there prior to their execution. The most notable inmates included SS Senior Leader Viktor Brack from the Chancellery of the Führer and SS Senior Group Leader, both of whom had played leading roles in the Nazi ‘euthanasia‘ program, head of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office Oswald Pohl, who was responsible for deploying concentration camp inmates as laborers, Paul Blobel, leader of Special Detachment 4a of Mobile Killing Unit C, organizer of the massacre in Babi Yar, near Kyiv, and head of Special Detachment 1005, who erased the traces of the massacre during the second half of the war by incinerating the corpses in mass graves, Erich Naumann and Otto Ohlendorf, heads of Mobile Killing Units B and D, and Hermann Giesler, whom Hitler appointed General Building Officer for the redesign of the ‘Capital of the Movement‘ and who had led a special task force for ‘Organisation Todt’.
In all, 252 executions took place in prisons between November 1945 and June 1951; moreover, several dozen persons who had been sentenced to death by US military courts for capital offenses committed after the end of the war were shot or hanged during the Allied occupation. Most of these were displaced persons from eastern Europe, i.e. stateless foreigners. The bodies of the executed prisoners were handed over to their relatives for burial or buried in Spöttinger Cemetery. Many of those originally sentenced to death had their sentences commuted to imprisonment and their prison sentences shortened. The last inmates sentenced during the American trials were released in 1958; these included Martin Sandberger, former head of Mobile Killing Squad 1a and commander of the Security Police and Security Service. The prison was then returned to the Bavarian judicial administration. Spöttinger Cemetery was deconsecrated in 2003 and the name plates on the crosses removed.
