That was the moment I decided it was time for me to quit. I had been one of the main interpreters during the ‘big trial’ and then Chief Interpreter at the Subsequent Proceedings (SP) for thirteen more months – I had heard enough about atrocities, mass murder, war crimes, extermination camps and genocide.
I was also thinking of a passage covering the sentencing at Nuremberg in R.W. Cooper’s book The Nuremberg Trial: ‘Tod durch den Strang! – Death by the Rope! – The words came to them in German through the headphones as each prisoner was brought up alone into the vast emptiness of the dock – the identical words pronounced by the Nazi People’s Court upon the perpetrators of the July plot.[6] They were uttered in translation by Captain Wolfe Frank, himself of German origin, who before departing from his country had watched the torchlight procession in Munich that hailed Hitler’s coming to power. A strange turn of the wheel that he was now to utter the words that set the seal on Hitler’s little day’.
I was remembering too a meeting I had had with Lord Mount Temple,[7] the pre-war Chairman of the Anglo/German Fellowship, who I went see at his castle near Winchester just four years after that torchlight procession of January 1933. I had gone there to ask his help in getting my first wife’s passport restored to her. It had been confiscated to stop her from joining me in England. His Lordship didn’t trust my account of the events which had gone before, but he promised to help – and did so by interceding with his friend Joachim von Ribbentrop,[8] the then German Ambassador in London. The passport was returned. It was not valid for journeys abroad.
‘Silly of you to get into trouble over there in Germany,’ said Lord Mount Temple. ‘Hitler’s a great man, he’ll change the world for the better.’
I disagreed, rather heatedly. ‘He’ll change the world alright,’ I said, ‘he’s preparing for war, anybody can see that. I could while I still lived there until just a few months ago. And the concentration camps…’
I was firmly interrupted, ‘I think it is best for you to leave now,’ said his Lordship. ‘I will see what I can do for your wife. Good-bye!’
Some two and-a-half-years later I was walking past one of the clubs in London’s Pall Mall when I was hailed by the same Lord Mount Temple. ‘I say, young man,’ said the Lord from the top of the club’s steps.
I walked up to him. ‘You came to see me some time ago,’ he said sternly, ‘we, err, had a bit of an argument. I don’t like having to admit this to a young whippersnapper like you – I was wrong – good day!’
He, and many people with him, had been wrong then. They could be wrong again, I reflected, as I walked away from Dr Aschenauer on that November day in 1947 – as Judge Musmanno had been in his assessment of Aschenauer’s motives. There was clearly nothing I could do.
1. EARLY LIFE AND FORMATIVE YEARS
THERE IS, IN THIS OPENING CHAPTER, a considerable lack of the kind of details usually reported at the beginning of a biographical tale.
I never had the slightest interest in ancestry and family trees, but it seems clear, on the strength of sketchy documentation, that my grandfather[1] was a Jew and his wife was not.
I knew my father[2] only as an atheist who paid taxes to the local church and had dual British/German nationality. No evidence now exists of either, and my attempts to trace his British citizenship ended in failure – I only have his word for it. He was, at one time, a wealthy industrialist but he died, a suicide, without leaving any assets worth mentioning.
Mother[3] was totally angelic, very beautiful in her younger days and very superstitious. Consequently, she apparently managed to persuade the local registrar to record my birth[4] in 1913 as being in the early morning of Saturday, 14 February when, in reality, I had appeared during the closing hours of Friday 13th! I cannot, of course, judge whether my mother’s white lie brought me luck, but it certainly brought me many Valentine’s cards!
My school years[5] did not produce any remarkable achievements or events. They were lived at Villa Frank in the small village of Beierfeld, Saxony, where I was born, and later in Berlin and they were, generally, happy years.
Sex, in those days, was a closed book of mysterious, hidden things that we could not imagine.
When one of my playmates, who was two years older than the rest of my group, had his first brush with sex he claimed that, ‘It is nowhere near as nice as you imagine when you masturbate’, we were, all of us, very disappointed and we decided to put things off until the distant future.
I had a shattering clash with reality, however, when I was about fifteen years old. A voluptuous soprano, in her mid-thirties, of the Munich Opera, kidnapped me to her apartment and performed fellatio upon me as I was standing before an upright piano playing airs. I was terribly shocked and enjoyed none of it, simply because I had no clue as to what it was all about.
A little later, my father became involved in a serious affair with his secretary (which lasted until his death in 1933). I remember going to a musical revue in Berlin during that period – it must have been around 1929, so I would have been sixteen. My best school friend and I had heard that there were girls dancing topless. They were indeed, but we found the sight uninteresting.
That night however we spotted my father in the front row, holding hands with a blonde – who was not his mistress. I felt fairly confused because he had already inflicted much suffering on my mother when he took up with his secretary. Now here he was clearly working on yet another alternative. Father was home when I returned, and he began to berate me for being out late without his permission. ‘I was at the Admiralspalast,’ I said. He never assaulted me again with disciplinary action, but he still managed to make some most uncomfortable contributions to my upbringing. He refused to let me study engineering when I left school, but sent me to a large factory for ‘practical technical training’. For nine months I had to rise at 04.30 hours, travel for an hour and-a-half and return at 18.00 hours. My ‘technical training’ was later continued in a municipal training workshop[6] – but it was never finished, because I ran away from home when I was 18-years-old.
I had one last terrible clash with father over his mistress whom I hated passionately, mostly out of love for my mother. In a fit of rage, I stuffed all her belongings – she was living with us by then – into suitcases and cardboard boxes and threw them into the street. Father decreed, ‘Commitment to a home for wayward boys’ but I didn’t wait around. I hurriedly left Berlin for Munich and went ‘underground’ as an apprentice in the BMW Motor Works where love came into my life for the first time. However, the lady was snatched away by my best and much older friend and this resulted in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
6
On 20 July 1944, a plot by senior German military officials to murder Adolf Hitler and take control of his government failed when a bomb planted in a briefcase went off but did not kill the Nazi leader. Hundreds of people thought to be involved in the conspiracy were arrested and brought before the Nazi People’s Court – around 200 were executed.
7
Lord Mount Temple was Chairman of The Anglo-German Fellowship, an organisation which existed from 1935 to 1939, and which aimed to build up friendship between the United Kingdom and Germany. Having publicly stated that membership of the Society did not assume support for Nazism or anti-Semitism, Lord Mount Temple resigned in November 1938 because of the Nazis treatment of German Jews.
8
Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946), more commonly known as Joachim von Ribbentrop, was Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany from 1938 until 1945, having served as German Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1936. Ribbentrop was tried at Nuremberg and convicted for his role in starting the Second World War and enabling the Holocaust. Ironically, after having assisted Wolfe Frank to get his wife’s passport back, it was Frank who interrogated him, interpreted at his trial and announced to him the sentence of the court. On 16 October 1946 Joachim von Ribbentrop became the first of the Nazi war criminals to be hanged.
1
Albert Frank (1835–1894), Wolfe’s grandfather, was an industrialist and head of the metal-ware company of the same name. The company was well known for the manufacture of parts for automobiles and bicycles and a wide range of lanterns that bore the company’s well-known ‘Muncher Kindl’ (Munich Child-Angel) logo.
2
Wolfe’s father, Ferdinand Frank (1866–1933), was the son of Albert Frank and his wife Bertha (née Pappenheimer). He took over as head of the family business following his father’s death and floated it on the Berlin Stock Exchange in 1914 under the name Frankonia AG on the expectation of large military orders (see photographs of Frank family and the Frankonia factory at Plates 3–5). The company had factories in Beierfeld, Berlin-Adleshof and Elbing. Prior to his marriage to Wolfe’s mother (Ida) Ferdinand had been married to, and divorced from, Alice Frank (née Rosenbaum) who later died in a concentration camp. The couple had two children Maria, who also died in a concentration camp, and Olly. Busts of these two children were carved in the home that Ferdinand had designed – possibly by the famous German architect Erich Mendelsohn – and built in Beierfeld (see Plate 6).
3
Wolfe’s mother, Ida Therese Frank (née Hennig), was born in 1879 in Leipzig. She was the daughter of a retired Gas Inspector. Ferdinand and Ida were married at the Register Office, Hackney, London, on 9 April 1908. At the time of the marriage Ferdinand was residing at the Cecil Hotel in the Strand and Ida at 10 Portland Road, Finsbury Park. A fortnight later, on 24 April, the couple were also married in Munich.
4
Wolfe was originally named Johann Wolfgang Frank, and then Hans Wolfgang Frank. He later became Hugh Wolfe Frank – the name under which he was granted British passports and, in 1948, British citizenship – however he preferred to be known as Wolfe Hugh Frank or just plain Wolfe Frank.
5
Wolfe attended an elementary school in Beierfeld and Grunewald Gymnasium in Berlin, a grammar and boarding school for boys, until ‘Mittlere Reife’ (pre-college examination).