The following morning, I attacked. I went to see Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, head of the British contingent, whom I knew well, and I told him all. He listened to me and managed a frown. I had, he said, been foolish and indiscreet.
‘Be that as it may,’ I said, ‘however, the Americans had been guilty of appalling behaviour towards an Englishman. Towards, in fact, the British delegation at the trial.’
Sir David saw my point and said he would take it up with General Leroy Watson the US CO at Nuremberg. He too saw things our way and went straight into action by calling the CO at the Intelligence School and suggesting Benny Schaefer should be sent home forthwith. A couple of days later I was called in to Sir David’s office. The small group assembled there included, in rank order: General Watson, a major, Lieutenant Benny boy, and an agitated US Congressman, whose eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. He, it turned out, was Benny’s dad and he had rushed across the Atlantic, at US taxpayers’ expense, to get his offspring off the hook.
Apologies were delivered. Benny was allowed to stay in Europe and I got much more fun out of it than I had anticipated.
33. TRANSLATING FOR GOERING
BACK AT THE TRIBUNAL I gave a marathon performance in the English booth when Goering took the stand. The BBC had wanted me to interpret as much of his testimony as I could manage since they preferred my voice and delivery to that of my colleagues.
My interpretation would be going out over every English-speaking network around the world – Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the rest – amounting to several hundred million listeners. Dostert had given his blessing and the other two German-English interpreters had no objections.
I stayed on microphone for the whole of the first morning of Goering’s direct examination by his counsel, Dr Stahmer, a total of three hours, worked for the first half of the afternoon and then continued on the following morning. In total I did nearly nine of the thirteen hours of Goering’s testimony.
His performance was fascinating, indeed. The contents have been so thoroughly analysed, commented upon and criticised that I need not add to them here. However, the account, given to me by one of Dr Stahmer’s colleagues, of how Goering set the scene, might be of interest.
It seems that the little lawyer from Hamburg was in a state of panic because twenty-four hours before Goering was to take the stand he had not yet consulted his counsel regarding the details of his testimony. Then, at the last moment, he sent for Stahmer. Cutting short any of the doctor’s queries or suggestions, the former Reichsmarschall dictated several hundred questions, and ordered his despairing legal adviser to ask those questions, in that order, once he, Goering, had taken the stand. No ifs, no buts – this is an order. Stahmer tried in vain to discover the story line which would link them but time was too short and the subject too vast.
So he did as he had been told, and spun from question to question. There emerged the yarn of Goering’s achievements during the Third Reich, his vindication of the acts he had committed, his attempted justification of what he had done, and his message to the German people, and I quote: ‘I did not want war, nor did I bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiation. After it had broken out I did everything to assure victory. The only motive which guided me was my ardent love of my people, its fortunes, its freedoms, its life – and for this I call on the Almighty and my German people as witness.’
No easy stuff to interpret, this, and Goering’s German was intricate and with full sentences so intertwined that many verbs failed to appear.
It is necessary to anticipate the verbs, which come at the end of the German sentence, when working into English. Most of the time, one gets away with it, particularly when one has tuned into a speaker, has got to know his mentality and can foresee what he wants to say. In the case of these ‘entwined sentences’ (Schachtelsatz is the German word) the interpreter has to supply the verb, as I did, many times during Goering’s sojourn in the witness box. One day, I passed close to him on my way out of the courtroom. Nobody, I fancied, could hear me. ‘You owe me 248 verbs,’ I whispered to him, and was overheard, unfortunately, by a member of the Press.
‘Goering owes interpreter 248 verbs,’ was the headline I had to discover in an English daily on the following morning and there followed a conjectured but accurate account of the interpreter’s trials and tribulations.
For this I was given a formal reprimand by an officer of the Tribunal and another one by Dostert, delivered with a broad grin; and I was still clutching the English microphone when defendant Goering left the witness stand!
There were two other memorable off-the-record chats with the accused that need to be recorded.
One concerned the Reichmarschall and my dog, Tiny, who accompanied me everywhere at Nuremberg – except in the courtroom of course.
I first met Tiny in the company of an American officer who was about to be ‘zee-eyed’, spelled ZI-ed, which was short for ‘being returned to the Zone of the Interior,’ or simply ‘going home’ to you and me. The major had purchased Tiny from a German kennel for a sizeable sum but had failed to obtain his pedigree. Without that document Tiny was of no value in the USA. He was a Harlequin Great Dane, was already fully-grown and required substantial amounts of food. He weighed some 70k and was eighteen months old (he was over 80 kilos when he left me eighteen months later). Tiny was the greatest Great Dane I had ever met and I fell for him instantly. The major was happy and relieved to find a sucker and Tiny trotted off with me happily, recognising me for the animal lover that I am. I was at the time in a third floor room of the Grand Hotel, overlooking the station square, not an ideal location for this huge dog.
A number of obstacles had to be removed before Tiny and I could settle into a reasonable routine. There was some limited opposition on the part of the hotel commandant (who later married the passionate haystack) but Tiny had an infallible way of wagging people over to his side. I then arranged for food supplies from the hotel kitchen (scraps against Lucky Strike cigarettes) and my driver Alois, known as Beethoven whom he resembled, brought off a deal at the slaughterhouse for a bucket of ‘condemned’ meat (unfit for human consumption) to be picked up twice weekly on a barter basis.
Next, I obtained a courthouse pass for Tiny from Major Tom Hodges who was in charge of security. Tom had some experience in such matters since, earlier on, he had tested the alertness of the guards at the entrance to the Palace of Justice by substituting the photograph of his German Shepherd dog for his own on his pass. It took three days before somebody stopped him and all the guards who had let him through were court martialled.
I made one attempt to leave Tiny alone in my hotel room. He howled the place down and was seen trying to commit suicide by jumping out of the window. So he accompanied me wherever I went and, in the process, was immortalised by Rebecca West, in an article on Nuremberg written for the New Yorker in September 1946 in which we read:
‘The corridors of the Palace of Justice itself are paced by an image of Eros – a dog, marbled in black and white, its jowls quivering, as it follows its Master, a Viennese [sic] interpreter who carries off the situation with the gay complacency of a Schnitzler[1] here. When the interpreter has to go into a part of the building reserved for humanity, he opens the door of the nearest office and, to the surprise of anyone who may be present, throws in the dog. It is not in the heart of man to leave another man’s dog alone, but, disregarding all the wooing, it looks around wildly. When it realises that the beloved has, indeed gone, it stretches out its front legs stiff on the floor and props its muzzle between them with a gesture of inconsolable widowhood, while its rear end, lowers itself slowly and funereally. So it remains, insensible to caresses, till the beloved returns. It shoots up with a whimper that informs him it thought he was dead, and lurches after him, out into the corridor, repeating with its ear and tail something out of Euripides beginning, “Oh, Love, Love, though that from thine eyes diffuses yearning and on the soul sweet grace inducest”.’
1
Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was an Austrian playwright and novelist known for his psychological dramas that dissect turn-of-the-century Viennese bourgeois life.