We are told that the unhappy frame of mind of a new soldier is called ‘joining shock.’ Nobody has ever mentioned ‘demob shock’ but it certainly exists – only it is over much more rapidly – to be replaced by utter euphoria!
On the morning after my metamorphosis I went to see my tailors in Maddox Street. They had not seen me since delivering a set of tails to me in September 1939, worn only once during an ill-feted theatrical appearance. I was greeted as if I had not been away. I was wearing my uniform, now an illegal thing to do, in order to save them the shock of seeing me in my gratuitous demob outfit. I ordered four suits, one to be delivered forthwith, the others to be sent to Nuremberg. As I was departing the elderly gentleman who always looked after me, took me aside. ‘Would you mind, Sir,’ he whispered, ‘taking care of your last account, I mean the bill for the three suits we delivered to you in August and September 1939 – if it wouldn’t inconvenience you too much, Sir.’ They had never once sent me a reminder and I had completely forgotten that the account was unpaid. Those days have gone. But I am glad to say that I still have, and am still wearing, the suits.
32. WOLFE FRANK OF THE F.O.
PROUDLY WEARING MY NEW SUIT, I returned to Nuremberg under the auspices, of all things, the British Foreign Office; Dostert had demanded that I return after coming out of the Army and things had been arranged accordingly. I was no longer subject to Army discipline and regretted that this had not occurred before my friend Hugh Turrell had left – we could have had such a happy, frank exchange of views.
My pay, now called salary, was better, of course, and I was assigned back to my quarters at the Grand Hotel. I still had the Opel and was entitled to use all the US facilities available to Allied personnel involved in the trial.
My twenty-one ‘clients’ in the dock looked up with interest when I appeared in a new suit. There were even some barely concealed grins. Schacht, who sat nearest to the English booth, slowly nodded approval.
I went into the booth to interpret the testimony of Albert Speer, the man who has emerged as being the most remarkable of the top Nazis on trial; by virtue of the books he published after serving his twenty-year prison sentence and his rather dignified re-entry into human society.
As Hitler’s Minister for Armament and War Production Speer had created a sensation when he was recalled to the witness box to give an account of his attempt to assassinate Hitler, at the very end of the war, by introducing poison gas into the vents of the Fuehrer’s bunker in Berlin. This, and the considerable personal risk Speer had taken in sabotaging Hitler’s earlier orders for the total destruction of production facilities in occupied territories and Germany, had been considered as being mitigating circumstances by the Tribunal and explains the comparatively mild sentence he received.
Later, before he was sent to Spandau to serve this sentence, Speer was called, as a witness for the defence, to testify in the trial of Field Marshal Milch of the Luftwaffe (this was one of the first trials under the Subsequent Proceedings). I had once again gone into the English booth to interpret his testimony. When the mid-day recess was called, Speer asked permission to remain in the courtroom and expressed the hope that he would be allowed to talk to me if I were willing. Naturally, I was.
We sat down in a corner of the courtroom – much to the annoyance of the guards who had to go on hovering instead of playing cards somewhere – and Speer explained his somewhat unusual request for our cosy chat.
He had deduced from my strong tan that I was a skier. He was a keen skier himself, he said, and a mountaineer, and he had this need to talk to somebody about this hobby. It turned out that his forte was cross-country skiing in the mountains and he knew of many mountain huts in the Alps; we did, in fact, make some sort of an appointment to meet in such a refuge after his release, twenty years hence, during the first week of the following February. (As it turned out when he was freed from Spandau his eyesight had deteriorated so badly that he could not have kept our date).
We talked a lot about architecture, sports, travel, the theatre and many other subjects of that kind but not a word was said about the trial, his sentence, or that part of his life that had led to his imprisonment.
Albert Speer was the only one of all the guilty men I met before and during Nuremberg for whom I developed a liking; because here was an outstandingly intelligent man who conveyed, throughout our conversation, a very clear sense of guilt that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. There was none of the maudlin self-incrimination I had heard from the other Nazis – high ranking and low ranking – nor was an accusing finger pointed at the Fuehrer, or polemics put forward against the trial and the right of the victor to try the vanquished. It was clear that Speer had come to terms with the past, the present and the future – and himself.
‘Can twenty years imprisonment be termed future?’ I asked him.
‘The twenty years will pass,’ he replied wistfully, ‘survival is so much a question of one’s inner attitude, of willpower. Yes, I will survive that sentence, I am sure. I will write, and I will paint – I haven’t had time to paint. Now I will – landscapes. It will serve a double purpose. I will be occupied, and I will train my imagination to visualise the things I won’t be able to see – mountains, trees, the countryside, colours. Physically, I will be in a cell, but my mind won’t be.’
I nodded, without comment. ‘See you up there in that hut, in twenty years,’ I said as I was leaving. But the story ends here; neither of us could keep the appointment.
Soon after my return to Nuremberg I wore another of the new suits on an illicit outing run by the US Army in Feldafing. I decided to go not as an ex-British officer but as a heavily disguised, strongly accented civilian of un-definable origin. I spent hours at a theatrical hairdresser’s shop in Munich having a false beard constructed whisker by whisker and with added dark sunglasses I looked exactly like the Dr Morrison I professed to be.
I hadn’t been at the party long when a slightly drunk lieutenant got hold of me and said. ‘Some friends want to see you in the library – now!’
Three officers were waiting for me one of whom, a captain, was waving a service revolver in my face. He shoved me in a chair, rather brutally, and tore off my beard. These officers, so I was to discover, were attending the US Army Intelligence School. They were too sharp for words, had seen there was something sinister and were determined to unmask me. I was manhandled, and my credentials were declared to be forgeries. Fortunately, the colonel, who lived on the premises, knew me and came to my rescue. However, I was kicked out and told never to return by one Lieutenant Benny Schaefer, or Scheffer.
On my way back to Nuremberg I got my dander up. Yes, I had been out of line with my false beard and brand new suit, but the Americans involved were far more out of line: US officers on active duty fraternising with German girls; supporting a German ménage with US Army rations; providing US Army liquor for a German party; hobnobbing happily with a bunch of ex-Nazis I had seen in attendance; using threatening behaviour towards an only slightly disguised high ranking British civilian who was carrying proper identification. No, I will not stand for this, I thought.