Wolfe Frank - Nuremberg's Voice of Doom - The Autobiography of the Chief Interpreter at History's Greatest Trials

This period of introspection was terminated when Humphrey Sykes offered me a job. [1] The Canaveral Land Corporation of Cocoa, Florida. He had invested money – far too much – in a development scheme at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Materials needed to be sourced from England and Humphrey required a selection of contacts with suitable suppliers. I was hired to make those selections and having a job enabled me to move into a pleasant boarding house in Earls Court, London. From the sale of the Graham Page I had also been able to pay back the loans Humphrey had advanced to me.

I immediately purchased those items that I considered were necessary to distinguish myself as a business executive, such as an umbrella and briefcase, but I balked at the bowler hat – into which I am convinced one has to be born. At the same time, I bade an almost tearful farewell to certain rather colourful continental items of clothing that I could not possibly have worn around the City of London in 1937.

My disguise was convincing. Soon after acquiring my new attire I was returning by train from a weekend at Tidworth when two sedate looking young gentlemen boarded and entered my compartment. Having looked me over – most of me was hidden behind The Times – they decided that anything so British-looking would not understand a foreign language and they began speaking in German.

One of them was obviously Dutch, the other English. I found their conversation fascinating. They were homosexuals and they were reliving their lovely weekend in much detail. I got a touching picture of the technical and emotional aspects of their relationship, plus some interesting information on members of their sect who happened to live in Germany.

When we pulled into Waterloo station, I lowered The Times and asked, in German, for the best way to Piccadilly. One of them, the Dutchman, took off like a flash, the Englishman however walked along the platform with me. I had, he supposed, overheard their conversation? I had. I would not, he hoped, make any use of the names of their German friends? (Homosexuality was a crime in Nazi Germany, and German tennis ace, Gottfried von Cramm, was serving a year in jail at the time having been found guilty of such an offence.)

All the time I was learning – and I loved it – about British business and the men in it, about the people in the pubs and nightclubs, about British decency and neighbourliness, and about the greatest of British traits – the understatement!

I relate here a particularly good example of the last mentioned.

I spent a weekend with a friend at a flying-club. We drank a great deal of beer and I got to know the man who was the secretary of the club. One Sunday morning I took my hangover for a walk and ran into him. Would I like to do a little flying with him? I certainly would.

As we were walking towards a Tiger Moth, I asked him how much flying he had done? ‘Eighteen hours solo,’ he told me. Not much, I thought, but enough for a harmless circuit over the aerodrome. We had been flying for ten minutes when his voice came over the intercom: ‘I say, old boy, do you mind if I try a loop?’ We were 2,000 feet up, without a ladder. I gulped. ‘Of course not,’ I replied, ‘please do.’ For the next five minutes, while we climbed to 5,000 feet, my life passed before my eyes in the proverbial manner. Then I heard him say, ‘Here we go!’ We went. There was the sky where the earth ought to have been and ground where I expected to see clouds. He did half a dozen loops and a spin before making a perfect landing. The only thing that had been trying was the understatement.

Back in London, my boarding house, the Raeburn Club, turned out to be a winner. It was full of amusing people and was run by a man called Dudley Hodgeson who became a close friend during our joint pursuit of a lovely Swedish girl named Marianne Cornelius. She had been sent to the Raeburn by a friend of Dudley’s and loved the place, although she could have afforded to stay at the Savoy.

Dudley and I had simultaneously become infatuated with the lady. She wanted some excitement, so we took her night clubbing every night. Dudley and I always said goodnight to her at her bedroom door. Feeling more and more exhausted – physically and financially – and getting nowhere – except in each other’s way. Dudley, whose working hours were more regular than mine, finally conceded. The next night, Marianne and I went out alone, returning in the early hours. I was invited into her room.

I finally held her in my arms. Then the telephone rang. No, it wasn’t Dudley, it was Marianne’s mother calling from Sweden. When the call finished, everything that had risen to the occasion had irretrievably fallen down on the job. I slunk off to my lonely digs and the following night Dudley was ‘in’.

Soon afterwards however Marianne’s even more beautiful seventeen-year-old sister turned up and we four – Marianne with Dudley and me with Ulla – went to Paris for the weekend. The price was something like £13 for the round trip including the sleeper train and a night in a nice hotel. Unfortunately, Ulla became pregnant immediately and returned to Sweden for operational reasons, followed soon after by Marianne – Dudley and I were glad to be able to ‘rest up’.

My love life became intolerably dull, being limited, I don’t remember why, to a member of the Jewish faith who was married to someone in the garment trade. I was in love with Maditta. I met a well-known lady expert on contraception [2] Dr Violet Randall. at a cocktail party and asked her, as a poor conversation piece, about the safest method for preventing pregnancy. ‘Young man,’ she said, audible for miles, ‘you must wear a preservative and use one of my cubes. You must practice coitus interruptus and drink a glass of water.’ ‘A glass of water?’ I wanted to know ‘when? Before or after?’ ‘Instead, you fool, instead,’ she thundered as she left me standing there, looking every inch a fool and red in the face. I realised then that cocktail party conversations are an art.

EARLY IN 1938 HUMPHREY SYKES got stuck with a sandpit. It was the only tangible thing he managed to extract from the assets of a bankrupt cousin to whom he had lent money. A few days before Humphrey was due to leave for Cape Canaveral he handed me a map with a cross marking the location of the sandpit and said, ‘I think it isn’t much more than a hole in the ground. You had better find out if we ought to fill that in or dig deeper… and you had better become a director of the company’. [1] Ace Sand & Gravel Company Ltd of West Malling, Kent.

For the lack of something better to do I consulted an encyclopaedia. Under ‘sand’ I made a startling discovery – it was not only used for making mortar and pits in children’s playgrounds, it was also used for making glass. There was a glass industry in England, according to the encyclopaedia, which obtained its sand supplies from Belgium and Holland where the right kind of sand was lying about the beaches.

At that point I stopped reading and started thinking. If war came, and I was sure it would, those sand supplies from the continent would surely be cut off. If any of the sand in our hole in the ground could be used for glassmaking we were in business. An analysis proved that it could be used after some rather expensive treatment, so we started pestering the bottle makers for contracts. They told us to go home as the continental sand was much cheaper, and better. War? There wasn’t going to be one. However, we got into our stride and when things began to look black in 1939, our hole in the ground became quite a busy place.