The several hundred Germans working at the camp were called the ‘indigenous personnel’. They had been security checked carefully and had to show their passes to the military guards when entering and leaving the compound. The check point was directly outside my office window. It took me very little time to realize that our German help included a very high percentage of attractive Frauleins. Such happy statistics, the result of the war, were nation wide and continued for quite a few years.
As I was watching this procession of slim and neat German girlhood going by, I ceased being the good soldier who should have looked the other way and began to design the sinister plot to infringe upon General Eisenhower’s[1] no-fraternisation rule for the benefit of my brave troops. My ‘you-only-live-once’ humanitarian instinct won out.
Three officers were sharing my villa with me and we agreed on immediate action. We drew post-card sized maps showing the location of our villa at the far side of the camp, and right by the fence. On the map it said ‘Goethe Strasse 9’ (marked by a cross) ‘A party here next Thursday at 20.00 hours. You are invited. Hole-in-fence HERE (marked with a cross).’ I then enlisted a young German, who hastened to help in exchange for a carton of cigarettes, and we stationed him just outside the gate where he could see me at my office window. Every time I raised my arm he gave one of our maps to a young lady who was passing him and he thus got rid of fifteen cards in three minutes flat. No chorus line has ever been selected faster and with greater success for the quality of the chosen candidates.
It must be said in our honour that we actually did arrange a party for Thursday night. We pooled our liquor rations, sent our batman home and made sandwiches. We had flashlights to guide our guests through the hole in the fence, and we had music.
Six ladies turned up between 20.00 and 20.03 with true German punctuality. They didn’t know each other which, I think, helped. They were all very pretty, very young, very shy and very hungry. We took care of the last two problems very quickly – our sandwiches vanished. The first corks popped. The effect of the booze was staggering. These girls – the oldest was twenty-three and the youngest nineteen – had not tasted alcohol for years, if ever.
Shyness disappeared and the numbers problem – six girls, four boys – ceased to matter. I think we were years ahead of the rest in the field of Anglo-German ‘rapprochement’, language crash courses and, in a nice, embarrassed sort-of way, group sex.
My own conquest was beautiful Lorelei. She had long blonde hair, was twenty-two years of age and a schoolteacher. After the two ladies who had enhanced my days in Paris she seemed inhibited at first, but some more Moselle melted the ice and I became the beneficiary of that shortage of males in Germany – which meant that a German girl had to be very good if she wanted to hang on to a play-mate.
I was so entranced by her that I hung on to my schoolteacher for the rest of my stay in Bad Oeynhausen. So did my mates to their friends, only they had five for the price of three, whilst I was busy being a one-woman lover. I also recovered some sanity in my feelings about Germans in the process. It helped a lot during the grisly days of Nuremberg. The memory of the beautiful, slender body of my first post war German girlfriend detracted from many horrific impressions that were waiting for me.
24. BECOMING AN INTERROGATOR
I WAS ASSIGNED TO A FIELD SECURITY SECTION, the equivalent of the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). It was engaged in rounding up, interrogating and jailing the active Nazis of the town of Munster. Most of this work was being carried out by a black-bereted sergeant, who became known as ‘die Schwarze Schmach’ – the Black Curse.
Hundreds of printed postcards were mailed to various functionaries of the Nazi Party, ordering them to report to us at a certain time. They were all in the ‘automatic arrest’ category because of their rank in the party or an affiliated organisation.
It became known that no-one ever returned from a visit to our pleasant little suburban villa where the entire card filing system of the Nazi Party, the SA, the SS and the Gestapo had been left intact by those organisations who had had to get out in a hurry.
The Black Curse only sent for those men in the files who were due for immediate arrest. In this he was, of course, infallible, thanks to the files.
So, at 09.00 hours each morning the two benches arranged outside the house would be occupied by dejected looking men who, invariably, carried a battered briefcase, the contents of which were always the same – long underwear, shirt, collar, shaving kit, soap, bread, some apples and a family photograph. Oddly enough, our ‘customers’ in the photos they showed us were never in uniform.
One by one they would then file into the sergeant’s office, where I spent many hours attending these sessions. The Black Curse would look at each man before him in a friendly sort of way and say:
‘Your name is Schultz?’
‘Jawohl, Herr Obergefreiter,’ and the German then invariably stood stiffly to attention.
‘You held the rank of Blockleiter in the Nazi Party?’
There then always followed the same story. The rank was purely nominal. The man had not carried out any functions for years. He had only refrained from resigning from the party because that would have been too dangerous in Germany. Instead, he had done everything in his power to help people who had got into trouble with the Nazis.
Sometimes the Black Curse picked up a letter from the huge pile on his desk. It was one of hundreds of anonymous denunciations that we received daily. He would then read part of the letter to his visitor. It usually accused him of ill-treating Jews or being brutal to non-Nazis. The man would then display an expression of complete consternation and re-iterate his innocence, or his long-standing anti-Nazi activities.
At this point the Black Curse usually produced the file card – kept up-to-date until very recently – complete with the man’s photograph.
‘This would not, by any chance, be you?’ he used to say. The Herr Blockleiter would then turn pale and shrug his shoulders in a gesture of defeat.
‘Take him away’ said the sergeant – and another Nazi would be on his way to an internment camp.
To see the way these men behaved was the most sickening display of bad lying and cowardice imaginable. I thought at the time it had to be unique. I was wrong. Later, during the Nuremberg trials, such performances were surpassed by the leaders of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’.[1]
My first experience as an interpreter at an interrogation came whilst I was still at Oeynhausen. I had met Colonel Gerald Draper in the officer’s mess. He was clearly very sick (he had tuberculosis, I later discovered) and he had the air of a man who had something to take care of before it was too late.
Draper, who had been a barrister before the war, belonged to the Judge Advocate’s Office and had been assigned to the case of one Dr Bruno Tesch, now in custody, who had been one of the two owners of a Company called Tesch & Stabenow in Hamburg. They were manufacturers of a gas called ‘Zyklon B’ (or Cyclone B) – which was used to exterminate the inmates of Hitler’s death camps. Tesch was to be tried for his contribution to this, the most heinous crime in modern history. However, there was another side to our investigation. The Russians had requested Tesch’s extradition and had filed a prima facie case.
1
Dwight David ‘Ike’ Eisenhower (1890–1969) was the 34th President of the USA (from 1953 until 1961). During The Second World War he was a five-star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe.
1
In June 1934 Adolf Hitler stated to a British journalist: ‘At the risk of appearing to talk nonsense I tell you that the National Socialist movement will go on for 1,000 years! Don’t forget how people laughed at me 15 years ago when I declared that one day I would govern Germany.’ At the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in September of the same year the Fuehrer also declared: ‘It is our will this state will endure for a thousand years!’ In fact it endured for just twelve years. However Hans Frank, one of the defendants tried, found guilty and executed at Nuremberg, declared at the IMT: ‘A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased’.