A most memorable and bizarre duty came soon after my meeting with Goering. The peace of my duty-free Sunday was interrupted by a call from the courthouse. The authorities had finally completed the list of German lawyers who were considered eligible to defend the other top men in Hitler’s Reich. As far as I could ascertain, they were lawyers who would not have to go before a German De-Nazification Court and could therefore be considered available. Presumably, they had been asked if they were prepared to go on the list from which the defendants could choose the counsel. They were living all over Germany and I had not heard of any of them. My orders on that Sunday were to present the list of lawyers to the future defendants and to have each of them settle on a counsel who was then to be contacted in order to obtain his consent.
The meetings were to be arranged in an interrogation room and I was to be accompanied by an officer of the tribunal.
My first customer on that Sunday in Nuremberg jail was Dr Robert Ley, Hitler’s labour leader. He was brought to an interrogation room and I found him to be excessively nervous. In fact, he had difficulty in speaking. I put the list of lawyers before him but he began to talk, disjointedly, of the possibility of handling his own defence – he didn’t however pursue this line for long. He looked at the list, absentmindedly, and then said: ‘I have given much thought to being defended by a Hebrew lawyer, I mean, a Jew,’ and he said something about it being a ‘just turn of fate’ if he were to be defended by such a person. I could not offer such a choice from the list for reasons that hardly require elucidation. He finally selected a name from the list but the services of this counsel were not required; Ley hanged himself in his cell soon afterwards.
Rudolf Hess was next. He looked terrible. His cheeks were deeply sunken, his burning eyes had an insane look to them, his mouth was only a slit and he remained defiant, if not belligerent, throughout our conversation. He had no intention of defending himself he declared at one moment and then announced that he would defend himself. I explained patiently that he would not know how to do this in the face of the unfamiliar rules of procedure.
‘Das ist mir gleichguelting (I couldn’t care less),’ snarled Hess and that was his answer to any other argument I put forward. The interview ended inconclusively. Later, Hess was defended by Dr Alfred Seidl, one of the most intelligent, tenacious and vociferous lawyers before the Tribunal, who put up an excellent fight for his client (and did so afterwards during Hess’ imprisonment in Berlin).
Then a truly memorable discussion arose with Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Head of the infamous Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA – the Reich’s security department – from which had come every one of the orders to detain citizens in the concentration camps. All the orders were signed ‘Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Security Police’. Yet he claimed, during the trial, that this was done by means of a facsimile – a rubber stamp – and without his knowledge of its existence or function.
Kaltenbrunner looked very tall and monster-like when he entered the room late that evening. Only a desk lamp with a green glass shade was lighting the room and as he walked up to my desk, wearing heavy flying boots and a somewhat shapeless set of clothing, part Austrian costume, part uniform, the resemblance to Boris Karloff as Frankenstein was impressive.
He sat down and surprised me with a soft, cultured voice and he spoke with a pleasant Austrian accent. However, his eyes were small, watery and beady and I felt an intense wave of revulsion sweep over me. I knew nothing of his crimes or the role he had been playing at that time; the feeling was completely intuitive. (Some of Kaltenbrunner’s stories, told in his defence when his turn came, were simply ridiculous. He was found guilty of the host of crimes with which he was charged, including executions which he ordered personally during a trip to the concentration camp at Mauthausen).
However, the Kaltenbrunner sitting opposite me that day was accusing his captors of considerable unkindness. He complained about the glaringly bright light shining into his cell at night, spoiling his sleep, and of the lack of notepaper and pencil on which to write his memoirs, or letters to his ‘beloved wife and family from whom he had been separated for so long and who he was missing terribly’. (He had been captured in the house of his mistress who was now living with an American in Nuremberg and spilling the beans). I was totally dumbfounded when, in fact, he produced tears at that point of his monologue.
As far as a defence counsel was concerned, none of the names before him appealed to him. He wanted, so he explained, to be defended by a colleague from the days of his studies in Vienna, Dr Gustav von Scanzoni. This was a famous name. Scanzoni was an expert on international law who had been forced to leave Germany for political reasons when the Nazis came to power. He was known to be living in Zurich.
I aimed to give Dr Kaltenbrunner the perfect service and picked up the telephone.
Through an excellent performance by the US Signal Corps, Scanzoni was on the line within five minutes. It was against the rules to allow Kaltenbrunner to talk to him, so I conducted the conversation for him. I still vividly remember what was said:
‘This is Captain Frank, British Army, speaking from Nuremberg, Dr von Scanzoni. I have been instructed by the International Military Tribunal to help the future defendants in selecting their defence counsel. May I ask whether you are familiar with the subject of the proposed trial?’
‘Natuerlich (of course)’ came the answer and the tone of his voice did not seem too friendly. I went on: ‘I am now with Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner, your former fellow student. He says you will certainly remember him. He wishes me to ask you if you are willing to handle his defence before the Tribunal.’
The lengthy answer was neither complimentary to Kaltenbrunner nor couched in terms as one would expect to hear from a man of such superior intellect. Nor was there any interrupting the outburst. In fact, before I had completed my piece of polite acknowledgement, the famous jurist had hung up on me.
Kaltenbrunner settled on somebody else. Before he was taken away to his cell I said something to him that was certainly a breach of the regulations: ‘Kaltenbrunner, you have provided a most pleasant memory for me – I saw you cry!’
Nothing unusual occurred during my conversations with the other top Nazis when each of them picked their defence counsel from the names on the list.
29. REHEARSALS
AT THIS POINT WE MUST TRIFURCATE MY ACCOUNT because there are three aspects to this chapter in my life which deserve to be related: (a) the interpreting story; (b) the trial and the men involved; and (c) my own life in the middle of it all.
Having been an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials of the Major War Criminals, Goering et al., is an unfailing conversation piece and as such seems to arouse as much interest as ever.
To have been labelled ‘The Voice of Doom’ in the international press after I announced to the defendants the verdicts – their actual sentences – entitles me to a minor degree of immortality, I suppose.
Towards the end of October 1945, all of Dostert’s bilinguals had arrived, none of whom, including me, had ever interpreted simultaneously. We would all have welcomed the opportunity to practice the art. Could one really, we were wondering, listen to earphones and deliver speech into a microphone clearly, loudly and quickly enough to do the trick? We had to wait for the answer.
The IBM equipment had been duly shipped to Bremerhaven where a truck was to pick it up and deliver it to Nuremberg. However, perhaps predictably, the load went astray and ended up in Genoa, Italy, where some signal officer of the US Army was feeling at quite a loss as to what to do with it. Fortunately, he stumbled across a bill of loading from which he deduced the equipment’s destination. Better still, he had heard about the trials and, knowing they were just about to start, sent a signal to his counterpart in Nuremberg, one Major Evans, whose technicians were waiting to install it all. The major roared off to Genoa and brought back the consignment.