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

So he did as he had been told, and spun from question to question. There emerged the yarn of Goering’s achievements during the Third Reich, his vindication of the acts he had committed, his attempted justification of what he had done, and his message to the German people, and I quote: ‘I did not want war, nor did I bring it about. I did everything to prevent it by negotiation. After it had broken out I did everything to assure victory. The only motive which guided me was my ardent love of my people, its fortunes, its freedoms, its life – and for this I call on the Almighty and my German people as witness.’

No easy stuff to interpret, this, and Goering’s German was intricate and with full sentences so intertwined that many verbs failed to appear.

It is necessary to anticipate the verbs, which come at the end of the German sentence, when working into English. Most of the time, one gets away with it, particularly when one has tuned into a speaker, has got to know his mentality and can foresee what he wants to say. In the case of these ‘entwined sentences’ ( Schachtelsatz is the German word) the interpreter has to supply the verb, as I did, many times during Goering’s sojourn in the witness box. One day, I passed close to him on my way out of the courtroom. Nobody, I fancied, could hear me. ‘You owe me 248 verbs,’ I whispered to him, and was overheard, unfortunately, by a member of the Press.

‘Goering owes interpreter 248 verbs,’ was the headline I had to discover in an English daily on the following morning and there followed a conjectured but accurate account of the interpreter’s trials and tribulations.

For this I was given a formal reprimand by an officer of the Tribunal and another one by Dostert, delivered with a broad grin; and I was still clutching the English microphone when defendant Goering left the witness stand!

There were two other memorable off-the-record chats with the accused that need to be recorded.

One concerned the Reichmarschall and my dog, Tiny, who accompanied me everywhere at Nuremberg – except in the courtroom of course.

I first met Tiny in the company of an American officer who was about to be ‘zee-eyed’, spelled ZI-ed, which was short for ‘being returned to the Zone of the Interior,’ or simply ‘going home’ to you and me. The major had purchased Tiny from a German kennel for a sizeable sum but had failed to obtain his pedigree. Without that document Tiny was of no value in the USA. He was a Harlequin Great Dane, was already fully-grown and required substantial amounts of food. He weighed some 70k and was eighteen months old (he was over 80 kilos when he left me eighteen months later). Tiny was the greatest Great Dane I had ever met and I fell for him instantly. The major was happy and relieved to find a sucker and Tiny trotted off with me happily, recognising me for the animal lover that I am. I was at the time in a third floor room of the Grand Hotel, overlooking the station square, not an ideal location for this huge dog.

A number of obstacles had to be removed before Tiny and I could settle into a reasonable routine. There was some limited opposition on the part of the hotel commandant (who later married the passionate haystack) but Tiny had an infallible way of wagging people over to his side. I then arranged for food supplies from the hotel kitchen (scraps against Lucky Strike cigarettes) and my driver Alois, known as Beethoven whom he resembled, brought off a deal at the slaughterhouse for a bucket of ‘condemned’ meat (unfit for human consumption) to be picked up twice weekly on a barter basis.

Next, I obtained a courthouse pass for Tiny from Major Tom Hodges who was in charge of security. Tom had some experience in such matters since, earlier on, he had tested the alertness of the guards at the entrance to the Palace of Justice by substituting the photograph of his German Shepherd dog for his own on his pass. It took three days before somebody stopped him and all the guards who had let him through were court martialled.

I made one attempt to leave Tiny alone in my hotel room. He howled the place down and was seen trying to commit suicide by jumping out of the window. So he accompanied me wherever I went and, in the process, was immortalised by Rebecca West, in an article on Nuremberg written for the New Yorker in September 1946 in which we read:

‘The corridors of the Palace of Justice itself are paced by an image of Eros – a dog, marbled in black and white, its jowls quivering, as it follows its Master, a Viennese [ sic ] interpreter who carries off the situation with the gay complacency of a Schnitzler [1] Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was an Austrian playwright and novelist known for his psychological dramas that dissect turn-of-the-century Viennese bourgeois life. here. When the interpreter has to go into a part of the building reserved for humanity, he opens the door of the nearest office and, to the surprise of anyone who may be present, throws in the dog. It is not in the heart of man to leave another man’s dog alone, but, disregarding all the wooing, it looks around wildly. When it realises that the beloved has, indeed gone, it stretches out its front legs stiff on the floor and props its muzzle between them with a gesture of inconsolable widowhood, while its rear end, lowers itself slowly and funereally. So it remains, insensible to caresses, till the beloved returns. It shoots up with a whimper that informs him it thought he was dead, and lurches after him, out into the corridor, repeating with its ear and tail something out of Euripides beginning, “Oh, Love, Love, though that from thine eyes diffuses yearning and on the soul sweet grace inducest”.’

The office into which Tiny was so frequently thrown was 606 (Plate 16) in which we sat and listened when not in court. Before and after the lunch break the room was very briefly cut off from the rest of the building because the defendants were served their lunch in a small dining room directly across from a door behind the dock. The short passage across the main corridor was roped off and heavily guarded by white-helmeted US soldiers for as long as it took the prisoners to cross over. Sometimes Tiny and I didn’t make it out of 606 and away for our lunch before the ropes went up and there we stood, watching the defendants file by. Goering always made some approving sound or gesture when he saw Tiny.

Then one day, when I stood near him in the courtroom, I heard him say to me out of the corner of his mouth ‘I wish you’d feed me to that dog of yours instead of hanging me,’ and I just had time to whisper back ‘It won’t work – he’s fussy about his food,’ before a guard bore down on me to see if I had broken the rule and talked to an accused.

This palsy-walsy relationship between Hermann and me stemmed from another, somewhat unorthodox meeting I had had with him.

I was wooing a lovely member of His Majesty’s Forces, Captain Clare McCririck, whenever I was in London on leave from Nuremberg. It seemed that fulfilment of my dream depended on something special I would have to add to dinners and flowers – so I offered her a trip to Nuremberg and the trial, something which, today, would rate on a par with, for instance, a Concorde flight with Prince Charles. I knew how it would be done. A very good friend in the US Army would provide travel orders for her, and the twice weekly British VIP flight would transport her there and back in something resembling an aeroplane and called an Anson.

All worked according to plan except the happy ending, because in Nuremberg she was assigned accommodation in ‘Girls Town’ (ladies only) and I could not smuggle her into the Grand Hotel. (This must have upset her terribly because she got married as soon as she returned to London).