EU — European Union
Fuehrer — (or Führer) Leader
Gestapo — Gehelme Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)
HM — His Majesty
Holocaust — Second World War genocide that saw the Nazis kill some six million Jews and other persecuted peoples
IBM — International Business Machines
IMT — International Military Tribunal
IOS — Investors Overseas Services
IRA — Irish Republican Army
IS — Infantry Support
Justizpalast — Palace of Justice
Luftwaffe — German Air Force
Machtergreifung — Seizure of power
Mein Kampf — My Fight
MFI — Mutual Fund Industry
MI — Military Intelligence
MO — Medical Officer
MPC — Military Pioneer Corps
MTO — Military Testing Officer
Nacht und Nebel — Night and Fog
Nazi Party — Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party)
NBC — National Broadcasting Company
NCO — Non-Commissioned Officer
Nicht-arisch — Non-Aryan
NMT — Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals
NSDAP — Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) – the Nazi Party
NYHT — New York Herald Tribune
Obergefreiter — Senior Lance Corporal
Obergruppenfuehrer — General
OCCWC — Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes
OCTU — Officer Cadet Training Unit
OKW — Oberkommando der Wehrmacht – High Command of the Armed Forces
OR — Other Rank – personnel who are not commissioned officers
OSS — Office of Strategic Services
PC — Pioneer Corps
Plenipotentiary — Having full power to action on behalf of a Government
PoW — Prisoner of War
PR — Public Relations
Prima facie — Accepted as being correct until proved otherwise
PT — Physical Training
PX — Post Exchange – a shop on an American Army Base
RAC — Royal Armoured Corps or Royal Automobile Club
RAF — Royal Air Force
RASC — Royal Army Service Corps
Rassenschande — Racial shame
Reich — Realm
Reichsfuehrer — Commander
Reichsjaegermeister — A person who goes to the cinema
Reichsmarschall — Marshal of the Reich – the highest rank in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany
RMC — Royal Military College
RPM — Revolutions Per Minute
RSHA — Reichssicherheitshauptamt (The Reich Main Security Office)
RuSHA — Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (the Race and Settlement Main Office)
SA — Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment)
Saujuden — Jewish swine
Schwarze — The Black Curse
Schmach, die Seigneur — A dignified or aristocratic man
SI — Simultaneous Interpretation
SP or ST — Subsequent Proceedings or Subsequent Trials (formally The Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals)
Sperrmarks — Blocked marks
SS — Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron)
Strafkompagnie — Punitive Unit (penal work)
Trifurcate — Divide into three branches or forks
UK — United Kingdom
UN — United Nations
UNESCO — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
Ungezieferbekampfung — Pest control/removal
US/USA — United States/United States of America
VE — Victory in Europe
WC — Water Closet (toilet)
Waffen-SS — The armed wing of the SS
Wehrmacht — Defence Force – the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany
WOSB — War Office Selection Board
ZI — Zone of the Interior (being sent home)
Zyklon B — (Cyclone B), A cyanide-based pesticide
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate 1 — Wolfe Frank at Nuremberg 1945/6.
Plate 2 — Interrogation of General Karl Wolff (1946).
Plate 3 — The Frankonia factory, Beierfeld (c. 1898).
Plate 4 — Albert, Bertha, Ferdinand and Ida Frank.
Plate 5 — Wolfe Frank (c. 1915).
Plate 6 — Villa Frank, Beierfeld.
Plate 7 — Wolfe Frank and his half-sister Olly (c. 1915).
Plate 8 — Top: Advertisement showing the Albert Frank range of lamps.
Bottom: Announcement of the floatation of Frankonia as a public company.
Plate 9 — Top: Hermann Goering in the witness box at Nuremberg.
Bottom: Wolfe Frank in the interpreters’ booth.
Plate 10 — Courtroom Layout for the International Military Tribunal.
Plate 11 — Key to the Courtroom.
Plate 12 — Annotated illustration showing the defendants at Nuremberg and their sentences.
Plates 13/14 — Details of the defendants on trial.
Plate 15 — Table showing Counts, Verdicts and Sentences.
Plate 16 — Top: Interpreters awaiting their turn to go into the courtroom.
Bottom: Defendants Von Papen, Schacht and Fritzsche following their acquittal.
Plate 17 — Volume of paperwork.
Plate 18 — Top: Translators and interpreters behind the scenes.
Bottom: Wolfe Frank relaxing between interpreting sessions.
Plate 19 — Top: Wolfe Frank’s second marriage – to the actress Maxine Cooper.
Bottom: Maxine in the arms of Ralph Meeker in the film noir Kiss Me, Deadly.
Plate 20 — Top: Wolfe Frank’s fourth wedding to Susi Alberti.
Bottom: Wolfe and Susi Frank’s restaurant La Reja in Mijas, Malaga.
Plate 21 — Wolfe and Maxine Frank at Davos c. 1946.
Plate 22 — Top left: Captain Wolfe Frank of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers.
Top right: the actress Patricia Leonard – one of Wolfe Frank’s great pre-war loves.
Bottom: Illustration of Frank translating the death sentence to von Ribbentrop.
Plate 23 — Top: Wolfe Frank c. 1985.
Bottom: The Old Ship Inn and The Malt House, Mere.
Page 194 — New York Herald Tribune flyer announcing Wolfe Frank’s Hangover After Hitler series of articles.
Henry and Peter Goyert: Plates 3, 4, 6, 7, 8.
Nuremberg City Archives: Plate 17.
United States National Archives: Plates 9, 16 (top), 18 (top).
United States Library of Congress: Plate 12.
United Artists: Plate 19 (bottom).
PROLOGUE
‘AN EXCELLENT JURIST, THIS MAN ASCHENAUER,’ Judge Michael Musmanno[1] pronounced after the session of the Einsatzgruppen Military Tribunal[2] on that grey November day in 1947 in Nuremberg; ‘a pity, his motion will cost us weeks in time.’
‘And, you know as well as I do, Mr Frank, a late verdict means a mild verdict for my client,’ said German defence counsel Dr Aschenauer[3] to me during a brief conversation in the corridors of the Palace of Justice five minutes later.
We had reached a late stage in the so-called ‘Subsequent Proceedings’[4] instituted by the United States of America against Nazi war criminals, a phase during which political considerations were beginning to influence the attitude of the Allies towards the German people and, consequently, the meting-out of justice at Nuremberg. We had meted it out with a golden ladle during the International Military Trial (IMT) of Goering et al.[5] at which a lot of people had been condemned to death, and hanged, for crimes which were now drawing prison sentences – soon to be shortened, or even remitted, in the wake of the Western World’s awakening to the true Russia and the resulting warming of feelings towards the fast-developing new Germany.
1
Rear Admiral Michael Angelo Musmanno (1897-1968) was the Presiding Judge at the Einsatzgruppen Trial (see Plate 2). He had served in the military justice system of the US Navy during the Second World War and then as a governor of an occupied district of Italy before becoming a trial judge at Nuremberg. In the judgement of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, Judge Musmanno wrote: ‘One reads and reads these accounts of which here we can give only a few excerpts and yet there remains the instinct to disbelieve, to question, to doubt. There is less of a mental barrier in accepting the weirdest stories of supernatural phenomena, as for instance, water running up hill and trees with roots reaching toward the sky, than in taking at face value these narratives which go beyond the frontiers of human cruelty and savagery. Only the fact that the reports from which we have quoted came from the pens of men within the accused organizations can the human mind be assured that all this actually happened. The reports and the statements of the defendants themselves verify what otherwise would be dismissed as the product of a disordered imagination.’
2
The Einsatzgruppen Trial (officially, The United States of America v Otto Ohlendorf, et al.) was the ninth of the twelve SP trials. The Einsatzgruppen (task forces) were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of the Nazis. They were responsible for the murder of much of the intelligentsia, including members of the priesthood, and they played an integral role in the implementation of the so-called ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. In the opening statement of the trial the prosecution stated: ‘The judgement of the IMT declared 2 million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and other units of the Security Police. The defendants in the dock were the cruel executioners, whose terror wrote the blackest page in human history. Death was their tool and life their toy. If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning and man must live in fear.’
3
Rudolf Aschenauer (1913-1983) was a German lawyer who became known as a ‘criminal defendant in war crimes and Nazi trials’. Aschenauer represented hundreds of accused war criminals, including Otto Ohlendorf in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. The address to which Judge Musmanno was referring (in note 4 above) and which caused Wolfe Frank to consider and then resign his position as Chief Interpreter was no doubt Aschenauer’s opening statement on behalf of Otto Ohlendorf (the defendant whose boasts and admissions under his interrogation Frank had found to be perhaps the most harrowing of all he heard and translated at the Nuremberg Trials). ‘Mr President! High Tribunal!’ Aschenauer had begun, ‘after submission of the documents on the part of the prosecution in the Case of the United States versus Ohlendorf et aI. it will be the task of the defence to make their comments concerning the documents themselves. The defence will be able to point out errors, to make clear to the Tribunal points which are contradictions in themselves, thus destroying in some cases the value the documents possess as evidence, as well as reducing the value of the entire evidence brought forth by the prosecution’. Aschenauer’s plea may have delayed proceedings, however in the end it made no difference in Ohlendorf’s case, he was convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the Second World War. He was sentenced to death and hanged at the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria on 7 June 1951.
4
The ‘Subsequent Trials’ (ST) or more commonly ‘Subsequent Proceedings’ (SP) – formally the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals – were a series of twelve US military tribunals for war crimes against members of the leadership of Nazi Germany other than those tried by the IMT (Note 5). The SP, like the IMT, were also held in the Palace of Justice.
5
The Nuremberg Trials were the military tribunals held by the Allied forces after the Second World War. The trials were the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes. They were held within the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. The first and most high profile of the trials were those of the major war criminals (Goering and other leading Nazis). Held before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), they were described as being ‘the greatest trial in history’ by Norman Birkett, one of the British judges who presided over them. Held between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946 the IMT tried twenty-four of the most important political and military leaders of the Third Reich.