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

Dostert had put all this to the powers that be and the reaction had been something like, ‘for heaven’s sake, solve it,’ and he did.

Simultaneous interpretation is now being used so widely that few people need information on it, but when the Nuremberg Trials started, no one knew about it. Thus, we read in the Press that: ‘For simultaneous interpretation, an installation involving earphones, microphones and selector switches is required. The original statement, such as testimony before the court, is delivered into a microphone that is connected, by cable, to the earphones of an interpreter. As he listens to the speaker, the interpreter will deliver, simultaneously, a spoken translation into a microphone in his booth, or cabin. A cable connects his microphone as well as those of other interpreters, seated in other booths, to a selector switch, installed at every seat in the auditorium where a listener can dial that channel which carries the language he wishes to hear, such as, for instance, Channel 1 for English, Channel 2 for French, Channel 3 for Russian and Channel 4 for German’.

This was the system which Dostert was planning to install in the Nuremberg court room. He solved the problem of the installation easily, and Tom Watson, the head of IBM, agreed to have it built and shipped to Nuremberg before the trial began.

The second component of the scheme was not so easy to arrange; this was the interpreters, an indispensable item on the agenda, and they had to be found – if, indeed, they existed.

As far as Dostert was concerned, he needed truly bi-lingual people. They had to know, to all intents and purposes, every word they were going to hear during the trial in one language and know its counterpart in the language into which they were going to interpret. They had to know the psychology, the character, the intellect (or lack thereof), the history, and background, of the people whose mother tongue they were to interpret into their, the interpreter’s language. In actual fact, they had to have lived in ‘the other’ country, or at least extensively among its people.

To achieve the total accuracy Dostert wanted for the trial, he would therefore need three interpreters for each booth – one for each of the languages from which the booth was working. For example: in the English booth he required one interpreter to work from French, one from German and one from Russian. This meant twelve interpreters were needed for the team, but one team could not have worked uninterrupted. Dostert decided, quite correctly, that he needed three teams, or thirty-six bi-linguists.

Having found a handful in the US, he ran out of candidates. He discovered a few more in Geneva and still didn’t have enough. So he obtained carte blanche from a suitably high-ranking source to search all the personnel files anywhere in Germany that might lead to suitable candidates. His staff went to the US personnel office in Frankfurt and British Army Headquarters. Naturally, they researched personnel files in Nuremberg and that’s how he discovered me.

During our first meeting Dostert grilled me for two hours about my background, education, topical subjects, hobbies, contacts, references and my Army career. When we finished, he requested (ordered would have been more accurate) my transfer from Turrell’s minions to his own staff.

The CO was upset. Here was the worst officer he had, getting the best job. He even put up some resistance and got himself into everybody’s bad books, but I bequeathed my stack of un-translated documents to Leslie Hill, pulled up stakes and departed towards the camp of the interpreting staff-to-be.

THERE THEN FOLLOWED A FASCINATING PERIOD when, before the arrival of my colleagues and the equipment from IBM, I was assigned to pre-trial interrogations of the defendants-to-be and the innumerable witnesses whom teams of investigators had been rounding up on the orders of the prosecuting teams.

There were hundreds of these pre-trial interrogations and a series of small interrogation rooms had been constructed, most of them wired for sound recording, where the prosecution teams were busy piecing together the story of the Third Reich. Simultaneously, defence counsels were consulting with their clients; they, obviously, did not need interpreters.

The subject matter of these interrogations was often trivial such as the identification of a document or a minor clarification of a man’s background, but there were also some enormously dramatic moments. An outstanding example was an interrogation of Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel who was known as ‘ Lakeitel ’ to the Germans, meaning ‘The little lackey’ because of his total subservience to the Fuehrer, in connection with the shooting of a number of British RAF officers. They had escaped from a PoW camp near Breslau. Most of them had been recaptured and, contrary to the rules, transferred into the custody of the Gestapo. Himmler reported the incident to Hitler who went into a rage. ‘An example had to be made of the escape,’ he declared. However, he refused to deprive Goering of the jurisdiction over these men, which he held since they were prisoners of the Luftwaffe. Hitler ordered that Goering appear at his estate in Berchtesgaden, however Goering heard of this before the order reached him and he went into hiding.

Keitel had to take Goering’s place and Hitler ordered the execution of the RAF officers. Keitel’s meek objections regarding the pertinent conventions were quashed by a screaming Fuehrer and the Field Marshal had to slink off to the nearest telephone to order the murders. He did so by contacting the top Gestapo man in Breslau, a man named Müller, who stood the victims against the wall and machine-gunned them to death. They had been in the hands of the Gestapo for nearly three days. Subsequently Ribbentrop, on Hitler’s orders, concocted the official reply to an enquiry by the International Red Cross: ‘The prisoners had been shot whilst trying to escape.’

When we, the interrogators, started unravelling the story, we were desperately short of facts. But Rudolf Diels reconstructed the channels of command for us and, working backwards from Müller’s underlings (he was dead by now) we traced the events back to Keitel, mostly by conjecture. We now needed Keitel’s admission of guilt for what had been one of the most incriminating deeds of his career. The interrogator was Colonel Williams of the US Army. He was brilliant. For three whole days he spun his net and finally Hitler’s top officer was caught in it and admitted responsibility. He filled in the gaps in the record for us and claimed he was only obeying superior orders in mitigation. He was then left alone with me, and the two guards. I saw an excellent chance for an off-the-record chat.

‘Herr Keitel,’ (we weren’t using ranks or titles) I said, ‘you have had a long career as a German general officer. You must have known by heart every international convention on land warfare ever signed by Germany. You were obviously aware of the criminal aspect of this execution order when you handed it down. Am I right in thinking that you did so simply because you were still believing in a German victory and could not imagine, by any stretch of the imagination, that you could ever be held to account for this crime and the many others you have committed?’ Keitel’s face had turned purple whilst I was speaking. He rose from his chair and spoke past me, almost inaudibly, with his strong Saxon accent being very noticeable.

‘I was with the Fuehrer when the bomb exploded in the Bürgerbräukeller . [1] The Bürgerbräukeller was a large beer hall in Munich where, on 8 November 1933, an assassination attempt was made on Hitler’s life. I would give anything to have been killed by his side then.’ With that, Germany’s highest-ranking military figure clicked his heels and was marched off to his cell.