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

We started from scratch.

Fortunately, my office could boast a long balcony on which I could spend most of my time gazing upon the carefree crowd passing by below. One of those corrugated rotundas, aptly named pissoir, [3] Public urinal. was situated below my balcony. Its roof was missing. I was able to make extensive and conclusive studies of man’s behaviour during the minute he spends in a pissoir, more or less alone. In the evenings, we were all over Paris. My French got a face-lift that could have been most beneficial to my machine-gun squad, which now seemed a matter from a far-distant past.

My constant companion was Captain Leslie Hill, who had been taken prisoner at Dunkirk. He had been drafted into BWCE as a linguist. Leslie’s German, which had an unbelievable English accent, was grammatically impeccable. His French was hopeless, but his Russian – self-taught during his imprisonment – was, someone told me, nearly perfect.

Having spent most of the war in a camp, and then his PoW leave with his mother, Leslie was ripe for some good old French amour, and there was no lack of opportunity. The Americans had been in Paris long enough to make us, the British, the most welcome of Allies. We were constantly having the most desirable of contacts with such people as restaurant owners, hotelkeepers and girls, girls, girls!

Unfortunately for Leslie, it took him so long to disentangle his French from his German and Russian that the damsel at whom it was being aimed had left to catch her last train before he could say, ‘voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’ (Do you want to sleep with me?). Fortunately for me, whilst my French was grammatically impossible it did have the benefit of a rapid-fire delivery. Consequently, and for the duration of our stay in Paris, I maintained a truly good relationship, or rather two of them, with a pretty blonde hairdresser, who worked until 21.00 hours, and a member of the world’s oldest profession who, obviously, worked nights.

I therefore needed to maintain three abodes: one, the Hotel Bedford, was my officer’s billet, one was a small hotel in Passy where I spent many nights having my hair done, and the third was the apartment of the Basque, dark haired, dark skinned and ‘fiery’ lady of the night.

Fortunately, I could claim the ‘ Nacht und Nebel ’ order as an alibi for some hours of respite during the day, during which time I rested up by watching my fellow men doing their stuff in the rotunda below.

Of course, none of this brought Goering any nearer to the gallows.

After a couple of weeks of case studies I was sent to Justice Jackson’s [4] Lord Justice Robert H. Jackson was the US Chief of Counsel at the IMT. headquarters in the Rue Presbourg where the Americans were sitting on, literally, mountains of German documents. Jackson was heading the US team at Nuremberg and he had been one of the architects of the London agreement between the Allies which produced the Charter setting up the International Military Tribunal.

The Americans had done an amazing job finding these documents, which were often poorly hidden, often of monumental impact on human history, and often quite absurd and comical. Knowing how serious I would have to be about all this in due course, I concentrated on the latter.

There was for instance, Frau Scholtz-Klink, [5] Gertrude Scholtz-Klink. later known as Maria Stuckebrock, was a Nazi Party member and leader of the National Socialist Women’s League. the German Women’s leader forever writing letters to Hitler’s philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, trying to sign him up for a speech to her women – and he was forever ducking out. In one such indignant letter she wrote, ‘German women have stood solid behind the Fuehrer in everything he has done. Their contribution to our war effort has been great and invaluable. They deserve recognition.’

Then there were some files from an SS court, trying wayward leaders. One of them had been looking after young boys. Whenever one of them had erred, the SS officer had him get up on a ladder and the lad was ordered to pull out a prescribed number of pubic hairs as punishment. Such ingenuity!

After three weeks of all this productive studying, we were ordered to Bad Oeynhausen, headquarters of the British Occupation Forces in Germany.

BAD OEYNHAUSEN, A CHARMING SMALL German health resort about 80km from Hanover, had quickly and justly earned an unpleasant reputation. For some reason the centre of the town had been surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Inside the Army lived and worked and the ban on fraternization was very much in force when we arrived.

As we approached Bad Oeynhausen (the ‘a’ in Bad is pronounced as in bath) we spotted an interesting sequence of Army signposts that read, successively, ‘Bad Curve’, ‘Bad Road’ and ‘Bad Oeynhausen’ – It was!

All the way across Germany I had tried to converse with Germans and failed. I was intensely curious about their frame of mind, of course. We had crossed the Rhine on a provisional bridge, which were few and far between. It was a one-way bridge and the line of vehicles and people crossing it was several miles long. Allied military traffic had priority and as we crept slowly towards the bridge I had studied the faces of the Germans who were watching us as we went by.

I hope that somebody has recorded these scenes and faces. ‘This,’ such a record would say, ‘is what a beaten nation looks like.’ There they were, men and women and children of all ages. They were standing in line for hours, pulling little hand-carts and every one of them in search of food or fuel.

It had taken them perhaps five hours to get across the bridge in the morning, all day to find a few potatoes, and as many hours to get back. They were mostly just staring into space, without expression. They looked totally, frighteningly hungry, desperate and downtrodden.

It was, to me, eerie and incomprehensible. I had not seen Germans in Germany for eight years and then they had been the master race, inspired by the thundering Fuehrer to deeds which history had recorded as being frightful, inhuman and often heroic. The swing of the pendulum was more than the eyewitness could comprehend and no imagination could have pictured any kind of tangible future for them.

Yet, a few days later, I saw them crawl out of their roofless ruins and go to church or for a Sunday walk among the ruins. Somehow, they had managed to get hold of a clean shirt and a reasonably decent suit of clothing.

I felt that I wanted to walk up to them and ask them hundreds of questions, but the orders were, ‘Only essential contacts with Germans.’ It was quite foolish. Obviously, we were there to stay and we would be talking to them eventually. Why not now? Would we not have been a great deal wiser today if we had been able to penetrate their minds then? Would we not have understood better what had made them serve Hitler to the terrible end in everything he demanded from them?

We retired behind the barbed wire instead, prepared for a resistance movement and acts of sabotage. The ‘book’ said that occupying forces would have to expect that from the beaten enemy, so our vehicles were equipped to cut wire barriers secretly strung across the roads, to trap Allied drivers. We were armed to the teeth and there was a strict curfew for Germans.

However, there was no sabotage and there was no ‘resistance.’

We had many hundreds of Germans working for us in the compound, as cooks, cleaners, drivers and office staff. Eighty per cent of them were women. They were young and many of them were very pretty.