28. INTERROGATIONS AND ASSISTING GOERING, ET AL.
THERE THEN FOLLOWED A FASCINATING PERIOD when, before the arrival of my colleagues and the equipment from IBM, I was assigned to pre-trial interrogations of the defendants-to-be and the innumerable witnesses whom teams of investigators had been rounding up on the orders of the prosecuting teams.
There were hundreds of these pre-trial interrogations and a series of small interrogation rooms had been constructed, most of them wired for sound recording, where the prosecution teams were busy piecing together the story of the Third Reich. Simultaneously, defence counsels were consulting with their clients; they, obviously, did not need interpreters.
The subject matter of these interrogations was often trivial such as the identification of a document or a minor clarification of a man’s background, but there were also some enormously dramatic moments. An outstanding example was an interrogation of Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel who was known as ‘Lakeitel’ to the Germans, meaning ‘The little lackey’ because of his total subservience to the Fuehrer, in connection with the shooting of a number of British RAF officers. They had escaped from a PoW camp near Breslau. Most of them had been recaptured and, contrary to the rules, transferred into the custody of the Gestapo. Himmler reported the incident to Hitler who went into a rage. ‘An example had to be made of the escape,’ he declared. However, he refused to deprive Goering of the jurisdiction over these men, which he held since they were prisoners of the Luftwaffe. Hitler ordered that Goering appear at his estate in Berchtesgaden, however Goering heard of this before the order reached him and he went into hiding.
Keitel had to take Goering’s place and Hitler ordered the execution of the RAF officers. Keitel’s meek objections regarding the pertinent conventions were quashed by a screaming Fuehrer and the Field Marshal had to slink off to the nearest telephone to order the murders. He did so by contacting the top Gestapo man in Breslau, a man named Müller, who stood the victims against the wall and machine-gunned them to death. They had been in the hands of the Gestapo for nearly three days. Subsequently Ribbentrop, on Hitler’s orders, concocted the official reply to an enquiry by the International Red Cross: ‘The prisoners had been shot whilst trying to escape.’
When we, the interrogators, started unravelling the story, we were desperately short of facts. But Rudolf Diels reconstructed the channels of command for us and, working backwards from Müller’s underlings (he was dead by now) we traced the events back to Keitel, mostly by conjecture. We now needed Keitel’s admission of guilt for what had been one of the most incriminating deeds of his career. The interrogator was Colonel Williams of the US Army. He was brilliant. For three whole days he spun his net and finally Hitler’s top officer was caught in it and admitted responsibility. He filled in the gaps in the record for us and claimed he was only obeying superior orders in mitigation. He was then left alone with me, and the two guards. I saw an excellent chance for an off-the-record chat.
‘Herr Keitel,’ (we weren’t using ranks or titles) I said, ‘you have had a long career as a German general officer. You must have known by heart every international convention on land warfare ever signed by Germany. You were obviously aware of the criminal aspect of this execution order when you handed it down. Am I right in thinking that you did so simply because you were still believing in a German victory and could not imagine, by any stretch of the imagination, that you could ever be held to account for this crime and the many others you have committed?’ Keitel’s face had turned purple whilst I was speaking. He rose from his chair and spoke past me, almost inaudibly, with his strong Saxon accent being very noticeable.
‘I was with the Fuehrer when the bomb exploded in the Bürgerbräukeller.[1] I would give anything to have been killed by his side then.’ With that, Germany’s highest-ranking military figure clicked his heels and was marched off to his cell.
Shortly after I had my first encounter with Hermann Goering.
Intelligence reports had reached the security people in Nuremberg that all over Germany an unusual number of railway tickets were being purchased for Nuremberg. Unfounded rumours suggested that plans were afoot to kidnap Goering from jail. Security precautions in the courthouse had been dramatically increased and an order had been issued excluding him from the daily exercise period prisoners were allowed in the courtyard of the building. Goering could not, I was told, be brought to an interrogation room, so I would be taken to his cell to discuss with him his choice of counsel.
On that dark, rainy Sunday afternoon I came very close to making history – and I missed my chance! As the door of Goering’s cell was noisily unlocked, the former Reichmarshall rose from his cot where he had, obviously, been napping. Feeling rather nervous, I told him why I was there.
‘Ah,’ he said ‘sehr schoen’ (splendid). He offered me a seat on his cot and proceeded to apologise for the lack of hospitality. ‘I have asked for some of my furniture from Carinhall[2] to be brought here,’ he declared, poker-faced. ‘It has still not arrived. I blame the management.’
Quite a sense of humour, I thought, looking at Goering for the first time, somewhat overawed by the occasion. I also noted that he was not using his dentures. He was lisping in the manner typical of the temporarily toothless. He had not bothered to put his trousers on either but had wrapped a blanket around his legs as he was sitting down next to me. He certainly looked very different from photographs I had seen. He was much slimmer and with a pasty complexion after several months in prison. He also had deep rings under his eyes, probably the effect of the drug withdrawal programme he had undergone,[3] but his eyes themselves were very alert and his intelligence was obvious.
We turned to the matter at hand – the choice of a defence counsel. He looked at the list I presented to him and ran a well-kept finger down the forty-odd names. ‘Thissh ish difficult,’ he lisped. ‘I don’t know any of theesh people. In the past, when I had a legal problem, I changed the law.’ But let me see…’ and he stopped at a name of Dr Otto Stahmer of Hamburg. ‘Ah, that’s a nice-sounding German name. I will have him’ – and he did.
Stahmer arrived in Nuremberg a few days later, totally overawed by the thought of his client and the assignment. He needn’t have been. Goering handled his own defence brilliantly as a strategist, tactician and performer par excellence. Stahmer was assigned his cues and, during Goering’s performance in the witness box Stahmer’s role was that of a prompter who asked hundreds of questions, all suitably arranged by his client in order to deliver a thirteen-hour speech in his, and the Third Reich’s, defence. The questions had been dictated to a bewildered Stahmer whose own questions had been impatiently waved aside. He didn’t really fathom the story line until he surfaced at the end of Goering’s testimony.
Some time after Goering’s suicide, I was relating the story of my Sunday visit to his cell to a friend, Tom Ready of Associated Press. Tom stared at me in amazement for a long time and then exploded ‘You stupid …,’ he screamed. ‘Didn’t you know Goering had perfect teeth?’
It took some time to sink in. If Goering had his own teeth, why was he talking like a toothless person? My God, I thought, because he was concealing something in his mouth… but more about that later.
1
The Bürgerbräukeller was a large beer hall in Munich where, on 8 November 1933, an assassination attempt was made on Hitler’s life.
2
Carinhall, in the Schorfheide Forest north-east of Berlin, was Hermann Goering’s country residence.
3
Goering was injured in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and whilst receiving treatment for his injuries he developed an addiction to morphine, which persisted until the end of his life. Whilst awaiting trial at Nuremberg he was weaned off the drug and put on a strict diet, losing some 27k in weight, it has been said.