BERLIN -- Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's former deputy, celebrated his 90th birthday in good spirits today at Spandau jail, his son said.
'I have never seen him in such good humor and so full of beans,' Wolf Ruediger Hess, 56, told reporters outside the jail after visiting his father for an hour. 'I think he was especially proud that he has managed to reach four score and ten despite being locked up all these years.'
The younger Hess is a Munich architect.
An allied captive since 1941, Hess was the last of the top Nazis sent to the four-power Spandau war crimes prison in the British sector of Berlin by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
American, British, French and Soviet judges on Oct. 1, 1946, sentenced Hess to life imprisonment. He has been alone at the jail since the last two Nazis were released in 1966.
Hess was the deputy chief of the National Socialist German Workers Party -- the official name of Hitler's party that came to power in Germany in 1933 and in six years exterminated millions of people.
Witnesses said about 50 well-wishers gathered outside the red-brick building Thursday and sent Hess roses. A woman handed prison guards a bunch of carnations to give to Hess.
Hess' son said he decided not to take his three children into the jail to visit his father with him because officials had limited the number of visitors allowed in the cell at one time.
'We would have had to take turns,' he said. 'My father wanted to hug and play with them but in the prison visiting room it would not have been allowed.'
Wolf Ruediger earlier told Quick magazine his father told him, 'When I have 90 behind me, I'll go for 100.'
The allied countries of France, Britain and the United States on many occasions have sought to secure Hess' release from the jail. The Soviet Union recently rejected a West German proposal to free him.
That proposal was approved by the three powers, who with the Soviet Union administer the jail that once housed top Nazi war criminals convicted in the war-crimes trials at Nuremberg in 1946.
The West German Press Office released a statement saying the three Western countries sought Hess' release for humanitarian reasons.
The statement said West Germany had not forgotten the Nazi war crimes and the suffering they caused the Soviet Union, but said that Hess was an old and sick man.
West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher also called for his release Thursday in an interview with the newspaper Bild.
'An act of humanity is now necessary,' he said. 'More so because Hess was not convicted of any war crime. The West German parliament in December 1982 unanimously urged the government to work for the release of Rudolf Hess and that we will continue to do.'
The Soviet news agency Tass defended Moscow's veto last week, saying that freeing Hess would provide a symbol for West German neo-Nazis to rally around.
'Nazi war criminals are not subject to amnesty and the Hitlerite past can not be rehabilitated,' Tass said.
