Talk:Spandau Prison

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A picture of the prison, anyone? abelson June 28, 2005 17:18 (UTC)

Did it myself. abelson June 29, 2005 09:18 (UTC)

Hess injected by distilled water? I'm pretty sure that would be harmful. I suppose it was a saline solution.

[edit] Good article

I enjoyed reading it. Good prose, too. Kudos to those who worked on it. Junes 16:27, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The term "Spandau ballet"

I've read two versions for the origin of this term, which led to the band's name. I'd like to know if there's any truth in any of those, because the sources were far from official or remotely reliable.

The one usually associated to the band is that the Nazi would use the term to describe (and most possibly mock) the death contortions of men thrown into the gas chambers of this prison. However, this text doesn't mention gas chambers, which, I believe, would be a crucial part of the description. IMHO, this brings more doubt to the band's 'mythology' than to the text.

The other story has it that those machine-guns mentioned in the text were so powerful (a particular type? specially-designed?) that, when a man tried to escape and the guards had to shoot him, the heavy fire would usually stick the prisoner to a wall and lift his body a few inches, causing the limbs and, eventually, other parts to "shake" in such a way that someone (other prisoners? the guards?) named it "the Spandau ballet".

Anyway, the term existed previously to the band and it'd be interesting to know where it came from, mostly if associated to the prison (and not the borough, type of gun or else). (Anonymous, Brazil, April 2006).

[edit] Communication via Morse Code Unlikely

In the article there's a claim that prisoners were separated by empty cells to prevent communication via Morse Code. That doesn't sound right. From what I've read and heard, prisoners use what's known as Tap Code. That's because Morse code requires the ability to distinguish dashes (longer period of noise) from dots (shorter period of noise) from interword gaps (longer period of silence) from interletter gaps (shorter period of silence), while prisoners usually only have a pipe or wall to bang on, and bangings or tappings don't have different lengths of noisiness. Although the Wikipedia article says it was invented in 1965, other sources mention tap codes used by Russians as far back as 1924, or even earlier, so I wouldn't take the 1965 date too seriously. 70.19.33.244 (talk) 15:02, 20 February 2008 (UTC)