After the conclusion of the IMT, and under this directive, the US held a series of twelve SP trials[2] within the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, between December 1946 and April 1949, at which other Germans, including politicians, industrialists, high ranking military personnel, physicians and jurists, were charged with war crimes.
General Telford Taylor,[3] who was one of the US assistant prosecutors under Mr Justice Jackson at the IMT, was appointed Chief Prosecutor and Wolfe Frank was appointed Chief Interpreter of the SP, and the courts were set up to, ‘Try and punish persons charged with offences recognized as crimes in Article II of the Control Council Law No. 10.’
Since the IMT had already established the criminality of war crimes, aggressive war, and crimes against humanity, these trials were for the purpose of determining the guilt of lower-level Nazis accused of those crimes. In total the United States held twelve trials under SP and indicted 183 defendants. These resulted in twelve imposed death sentences, eight life sentences and seventy-seven terms of imprisonment. Other defendants were acquitted. The judges and prosecutors were all American and the proceedings were conducted in German and English only.
FOLLOWING A SHORT PERIOD OF READJUSTMENT after the IMT, I was persuaded to stay on in Nuremberg for three reasons.
Firstly, I was offered, and then accepted, the position of Chief Interpreter of the Subsequent Proceedings under General Telford Taylor.
Secondly, I had no specific job to go to back in England.
Thirdly, I had decided to ask the CATS entertainer I had met the night before my performance as the Voice of Doom, to marry me. She was touring Europe in a play called My Sister Eileen and needed yet to be told her fate.
Her name was Maxine Cooper.[4] Her father was a Chicago businessman and she had studied at the Pasadena Playhouse[5] and also under Joshua Logan in New York. That was the sum total of what I knew about her, plus what the eye had seen, which was that she was beautiful and radiated human warmth more than anyone I had ever met. It must be stated for the record that my $500 bet with Joe von Zastro did not enter into my considerations.
We met again and matters advanced, naturally and enchantingly, to the point where I popped the question and obtained consent. Maxine returned to Chicago in November to tell her family and to get ready for the wedding, which we set for February.
The Plans for the Subsequent Proceedings called for the trials of such men, or groups as Alfried Krupp, Friedrich Flick, the industrialist, a group of doctors who had carried out criminal medical experiments, members of the Administration of Concentration Camps, Otto Ohlendorf, mass murderer in eastern occupied territories and others not covered by the record written by the IMT.
Six trials were to run simultaneously, and the languages involved were, of course, only English and German. Following my appointment as Chief Interpreter, I had to find three teams of two interpreters for each trial, multiplied by six, that meant fifty-six such people, plus two spares were needed. They didn’t exist, not where I was looking. Fortunately, the security services gave me the green light for hiring carefully vetted German nationals – indigenous personnel, as they were called – and this move produced some of the finest linguists I could hope to find for the German booth.
The English team was another kettle of goldfish (interpreters in their glass-containers were often called goldfish). I found a few amongst US personnel but we were hopelessly short of the necessary total. I went to London on a recruiting trip and called on the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and the War Office. I found no one. However, as luck would have it, I was having drinks with Tim Holland Bennett, who had covered the IMT for the Radio Newsreel programme of the BBC. I had done some serious drinking with him at ‘Stalag Stein’, as the Press camp, installed in the castle of Stein, had been labelled.
I had also found, as a souvenir for Tim, a pair of sheets from Hitler’s large apartment in the Prizregentenstrasse in Munich. They were the genuine article with ‘A-H’ embroidered upon them. I had obtained them from an old pre-war friend who was now black-marketing everything from petrol to currency, booze to diamonds and coffee to automobiles. He had presented me with the sheets in exchange for a long-distance call to Teheran, that he made from my office telephone in Nuremberg in order to obtain urgently needed ‘carpets, Persian, US Army personnel, for the use of’, as army lingo would have put it.
Tim remembered my good offices in regard to his linen cupboard and offered to reciprocate. Having advanced to the position of Casting Director at BBC Television, he arranged for me to appear before the cameras on a programme called Picture Page, the forerunner of today’s splendid BBC news coverage.
The interviewer would be Richard Dimbleby, a truly outstanding BBC commentator, and I was to appear, four days later, as the Nuremberg Interpreter who had become known as the ‘Voice of Doom’.
A scriptwriter was assigned to me and we put the outline of the fifteen-minute interview on paper. It was scheduled to go out on a Thursday. However, on the Wednesday morning I received an agitated call from the BBC asking me to go on the air that same afternoon. I had had no time to learn the script but was asked to rush off to Alexandra Palace, where the BBC television studios were in those days.
I arrived at 14.00 hours. The programme was scheduled for 18.00 hours. Someone conducted me to an enormous, brightly-lit dressing room and, thoughtfully, stood a full bottle of Ballantine’s whisky on the table before me. I felt lonely and rather nervous, and as the clock on the wall advanced, I was staring at the script and absentmindedly sipping the golden liquid. Unfortunately, I had not had time to eat lunch and when, finally, the producer called on me I had absorbed more whisky than script and felt no pain at all, or nerves.
Then I was on the air, after a run-through, where I was sitting down with Dimbleby. For the real thing, however, I was standing up and I am afraid I was swaying slightly, from front to rear, and the cameraman had quite a job keeping me in focus.
Having got the ‘Voice of Doom’ bit out of the way, Dimbleby asked me what I was doing in London. My commercial went something like this: ‘I am recruiting interpreters for the trials of war criminals which the American Government is preparing at Nuremberg.’
Dimbleby: ‘What sort of people are you looking for?’
Frank: ‘Bi-lingual linguists – people who know English and German equally well.’
Dimbleby: ‘How are you doing this?’
Frank: ‘I have been loaned offices at Berkeley Square by the Air Ministry; a suite of rooms on the second floor. I am testing people thoroughly. If they pass they will be offered a job at Nuremberg with the Americans, on very advantageous terms. Good pay, you know, excellent accommodation and PX privileges, all that. And the job is fascinating.’
Dimbleby: ‘Where, did you say, you’re doing this?’
Frank: ‘At Berkeley Square on the second floor.’
Dimbleby: ‘Thank you, Mr Frank,’ followed by ‘that was Wolfe Frank the Voice of Doom and Chief Interpreter at the next Nuremberg trial. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have with us the most amazing flea circus ever to come out of Liechtenstein.’
Over sixty applicants flooded the offices in Berkeley Square during the next three days. Seven or eight never got a word out – they simply dried up at the crucial moment. Some produced every twentieth or thirtieth word. Others gave a translation that had nothing to do with the original text. However, I did manage to sign up the best people and fill the required number and I had somehow got together a very fine group of people including a deputy, Sigi Rammler, Austrian by birth, who succeeded me when I departed Nuremberg in November 1947, before the SP were over.
2
The Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (Subsequent Proceedings) were as follows:
3
Telford Taylor (1908-1998) was an assistant to Chief Counsel Robert Jackson at the IMT. In October 1946 he was promoted to Brigadier General and appointed Chief Counsel for the Subsequent Proceedings.
4
Maxine Cooper (1924-2009) was born in Chicago and studied theatre arts at the Pasadena Playhouse. She travelled to Europe in 1946 to entertain US military troops, during which time she met and married Wolfe Frank. She stayed in Europe for five years working in the theatre and television and during this period, as her private letters attest, she and Wolfe were devoted to each other. The couple moved to the US in the early 1950s but divorced in 1952. Maxine continued to perform in the theatre and for US television and made her film debut in 1955 starring alongside Ralph Meeker in the film noir
5
A school of theatre arts was established at the Pasadena Playhouse in California in the 1920s and it had become an accredited college by 1937. Amongst its most notable alumni and players the Playhouse lists such names as Raymond Burr, Victor Mature, Eleanor Parker, Tyrone Power, Robert Young, Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman and Maxine Cooper Gomberg.