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

Shortly after I had my first encounter with Hermann Goering.

Intelligence reports had reached the security people in Nuremberg that all over Germany an unusual number of railway tickets were being purchased for Nuremberg. Unfounded rumours suggested that plans were afoot to kidnap Goering from jail. Security precautions in the courthouse had been dramatically increased and an order had been issued excluding him from the daily exercise period prisoners were allowed in the courtyard of the building. Goering could not, I was told, be brought to an interrogation room, so I would be taken to his cell to discuss with him his choice of counsel.

On that dark, rainy Sunday afternoon I came very close to making history – and I missed my chance! As the door of Goering’s cell was noisily unlocked, the former Reichmarshall rose from his cot where he had, obviously, been napping. Feeling rather nervous, I told him why I was there.

‘Ah,’ he said ‘ sehr schoen’ (splendid). He offered me a seat on his cot and proceeded to apologise for the lack of hospitality. ‘I have asked for some of my furniture from Carinhall [2] Carinhall, in the Schorfheide Forest north-east of Berlin, was Hermann Goering’s country residence. to be brought here,’ he declared, poker-faced. ‘It has still not arrived. I blame the management.’

Quite a sense of humour, I thought, looking at Goering for the first time, somewhat overawed by the occasion. I also noted that he was not using his dentures. He was lisping in the manner typical of the temporarily toothless. He had not bothered to put his trousers on either but had wrapped a blanket around his legs as he was sitting down next to me. He certainly looked very different from photographs I had seen. He was much slimmer and with a pasty complexion after several months in prison. He also had deep rings under his eyes, probably the effect of the drug withdrawal programme he had undergone, [3] Goering was injured in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and whilst receiving treatment for his injuries he developed an addiction to morphine, which persisted until the end of his life. Whilst awaiting trial at Nuremberg he was weaned off the drug and put on a strict diet, losing some 27k in weight, it has been said. but his eyes themselves were very alert and his intelligence was obvious.

We turned to the matter at hand – the choice of a defence counsel. He looked at the list I presented to him and ran a well-kept finger down the forty-odd names. ‘Thissh ish difficult,’ he lisped. ‘I don’t know any of theesh people. In the past, when I had a legal problem, I changed the law.’ But let me see…’ and he stopped at a name of Dr Otto Stahmer of Hamburg. ‘Ah, that’s a nice-sounding German name. I will have him’ – and he did.

Stahmer arrived in Nuremberg a few days later, totally overawed by the thought of his client and the assignment. He needn’t have been. Goering handled his own defence brilliantly as a strategist, tactician and performer par excellence. Stahmer was assigned his cues and, during Goering’s performance in the witness box Stahmer’s role was that of a prompter who asked hundreds of questions, all suitably arranged by his client in order to deliver a thirteen-hour speech in his, and the Third Reich’s, defence. The questions had been dictated to a bewildered Stahmer whose own questions had been impatiently waved aside. He didn’t really fathom the story line until he surfaced at the end of Goering’s testimony.

Some time after Goering’s suicide, I was relating the story of my Sunday visit to his cell to a friend, Tom Ready of Associated Press. Tom stared at me in amazement for a long time and then exploded ‘You stupid …,’ he screamed. ‘Didn’t you know Goering had perfect teeth?’

It took some time to sink in. If Goering had his own teeth, why was he talking like a toothless person? My God, I thought, because he was concealing something in his mouth… but more about that later.

A most memorable and bizarre duty came soon after my meeting with Goering. The peace of my duty-free Sunday was interrupted by a call from the courthouse. The authorities had finally completed the list of German lawyers who were considered eligible to defend the other top men in Hitler’s Reich. As far as I could ascertain, they were lawyers who would not have to go before a German De-Nazification Court and could therefore be considered available. Presumably, they had been asked if they were prepared to go on the list from which the defendants could choose the counsel. They were living all over Germany and I had not heard of any of them. My orders on that Sunday were to present the list of lawyers to the future defendants and to have each of them settle on a counsel who was then to be contacted in order to obtain his consent.

The meetings were to be arranged in an interrogation room and I was to be accompanied by an officer of the tribunal.

My first customer on that Sunday in Nuremberg jail was Dr Robert Ley, Hitler’s labour leader. He was brought to an interrogation room and I found him to be excessively nervous. In fact, he had difficulty in speaking. I put the list of lawyers before him but he began to talk, disjointedly, of the possibility of handling his own defence – he didn’t however pursue this line for long. He looked at the list, absentmindedly, and then said: ‘I have given much thought to being defended by a Hebrew lawyer, I mean, a Jew,’ and he said something about it being a ‘just turn of fate’ if he were to be defended by such a person. I could not offer such a choice from the list for reasons that hardly require elucidation. He finally selected a name from the list but the services of this counsel were not required; Ley hanged himself in his cell soon afterwards.

Rudolf Hess was next. He looked terrible. His cheeks were deeply sunken, his burning eyes had an insane look to them, his mouth was only a slit and he remained defiant, if not belligerent, throughout our conversation. He had no intention of defending himself he declared at one moment and then announced that he would defend himself. I explained patiently that he would not know how to do this in the face of the unfamiliar rules of procedure.

‘ Das ist mir gleichguelting (I couldn’t care less),’ snarled Hess and that was his answer to any other argument I put forward. The interview ended inconclusively. Later, Hess was defended by Dr Alfred Seidl, one of the most intelligent, tenacious and vociferous lawyers before the Tribunal, who put up an excellent fight for his client (and did so afterwards during Hess’ imprisonment in Berlin).

Then a truly memorable discussion arose with Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Head of the infamous Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA – the Reich’s security department – from which had come every one of the orders to detain citizens in the concentration camps. All the orders were signed ‘Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Security Police’. Yet he claimed, during the trial, that this was done by means of a facsimile – a rubber stamp – and without his knowledge of its existence or function.

Kaltenbrunner looked very tall and monster-like when he entered the room late that evening. Only a desk lamp with a green glass shade was lighting the room and as he walked up to my desk, wearing heavy flying boots and a somewhat shapeless set of clothing, part Austrian costume, part uniform, the resemblance to Boris Karloff as Frankenstein was impressive.

He sat down and surprised me with a soft, cultured voice and he spoke with a pleasant Austrian accent. However, his eyes were small, watery and beady and I felt an intense wave of revulsion sweep over me. I knew nothing of his crimes or the role he had been playing at that time; the feeling was completely intuitive. (Some of Kaltenbrunner’s stories, told in his defence when his turn came, were simply ridiculous. He was found guilty of the host of crimes with which he was charged, including executions which he ordered personally during a trip to the concentration camp at Mauthausen).