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

Unfortunately, her arrival in Nuremberg coincided with a terribly dreary phase of the trial: the Russians were submitting documentary evidence for days on end and insisted on reading these documents into the record, voices without inflection droning on endlessly. It was also intolerably hot and Clare, when she emerged from the visitors-gallery, was not gracious and grateful but bored, hot and bothered. The Concorde had become an Anson, figuratively speaking. Something had to be done to create excitement.

‘Would you like to meet Goering?’ I asked over a terrible cafeteria lunch.

‘You must be joking,’ came the rather acid reply from the lovely Captain.

‘You will tomorrow,’ I announced nonchalantly, and went to work.

I produced an ‘interrogation slip’ – something to be completed by those with authority (not including interpreters) to question anyone in the jail, including the defendants, for legitimate reasons, not including wolfish projects. I filled in the details: Name: Defendant Goering. Purpose: document identification. Time: the next day; 17.30 hours (after the session’s adjournment). I handed the slip to a friend in the right place, secured an ‘Observer Pass’ for Clare and, from the documentation centre, I obtained a copy of some totally unimportant letter from Goering’s adjutant, General Koller, to the Reichsmarshall. I clipped an ‘identification slip’ to it.

At the proper moment, Clare and I were taken to an interrogation room, I sat down at the desk, looking mighty important, and she was shown to a chair, which stood at the side of the small room.

Goering was brought in punctually and I invited him to sit down.

‘Herr Goering,’ I said. ‘I have here a letter purportedly signed by General Koller. Would you please identify the signature?’ and I handed the two bits of paper to him. He glanced at them.

‘But I have already identified the signature on this letter,’ he announced.

‘Have you really?’ I said in utter faked amazement, ‘then the slip must have got lost. Please sign again on this one.’

He nodded and signed with much authority.

‘Thank you, that will be all,’ I declared, and rose.

So did Goering, he nodded briefly and headed for the door, preceded and followed by the two MPs. When he was level with Clare’s chair, he suddenly stopped and turned to face her. ‘ Gnaediges Fraulein ,’ he said, ‘no doubt I owe this little interlude to your presence in Nuremberg. I hope you have enjoyed it also.’

Then he bowed politely, turned and left for his cell. Clare had, indeed, met Goering and she had the interrogation slip with his autograph to prove it. He must have remembered this highly irregular performance of mine when he asked to be put on Tiny’s menu.

IN SPITE OF THE SEVERAL REPRIMANDS I had received I was still on the microphone when, at the end of nine long months, the Tribunal adjourned to write its findings. A date was set for them to be read in court and we were given two weeks leave. When I returned from London we heard that the judges, closeted and heavily guarded, were reaching the end of their enormous task. They were, of course, running late. It was therefore no surprise when, about six days before the court was to reconvene, a team of translators, including the German-speaking interpreters, were rounded up and whisked away to carry out the marathon job of translating the judgement – which was being written in English – into German. Elsewhere, the French and Russians were preparing to do the same.

Extremely strict security precautions had been arranged for our (the German translators) team. There had been intelligence reports about growing opposition to the Trials in Germany and rumours included everything from planned abduction of the prisoners to armed attacks on the courthouse and the assassinations of key figures among the trial staff. Other measures involved total secrecy for the judgement – the findings – until it was read out in court. This, naturally, included sequestering the translators in a heavily guarded building, which was a schoolhouse some way from Nuremberg.

There were eight of us. We were loaded onto buses and driven off to our then unknown destination, heavily protected by armoured cars – machine-guns at the ready. Each translator was equipped with a typewriter.

When we arrived, there were four German typists, mountains of plain paper, but no judgement. The manuscripts began to arrive at 02.00 hours, a few pages at a time, and we set to work. The text had to be translated, translations corrected, the terminology compared and re-adjusted, the texts rewritten, reviewed, edited, finalised, assembled, typed, re-assembled and put onto stencils.

Since the original text kept arriving in dribs and drabs, we were either working frantically or twiddling our thumbs, but as always in cases of such extreme urgency, the job got done.

We returned to our billets at 04.30 hours on the morning of 30 September 1946 and the reading of the judgement was set for that afternoon. I would be on the German microphone. I knew the contents of the judgement – in other words, I knew who, amongst the defendants, had been found guilty and on which counts. I also knew that von Papen, Schacht and Fritzsche had been acquitted. I did not know, nor did anybody else except the judges, what the sentences were going to be. Nor did I know who would be interpreting them into German. There was a great deal of speculation everywhere, but particularly among the interpreters, about that sentence. Was it going to be hanging, the guillotine, shooting, prison or banishment? – No one knew!

HAVING RETURNED TO BILLET from the translating marathon, I caught some sleep, stood under lots of hot and cold showers and departed to the Palace of Justice for lunch. I went through numerous security checks, got my briefing from the monitor and descended to the cafeteria. It was unusually packed – everybody who had the right to be there was hanging around the courthouse and there was tremendous tension – an almost unreal anticipation of the sudden, it seemed, end to the toil of history-writing which in our respective capacities we had performed for nine long months. My nerves were taut. My colleagues were on edge. Most of us were dead tired after the sleepless nights of translating the judgement. We were constantly accosted by people trying to pump information out of us. It was an eerie, unpleasant, seemingly endless period of waiting for the great scene to come.

My brooding however was interrupted by the arrival, at my table, of some totally unexpected visitors in the form of four extremely pretty American girls dressed in a uniform I had not seen before. They turned out to be CATS. No not feline friends, but Civilian Actress Technicians.

I hauled myself out of my state of nervous tension by conversing with this most welcome group. I will need to go into the subsequent events in considerable detail at a later point. For the moment however, suffice to say, that after lunch, and on my way to the courtroom, I encountered our monitor, Captain Joe von Zastrow, to whom I said, ‘I have just met the girl I am going to marry.’

‘I bet you won’t,’ said Joe.

‘How much?’ said I.

‘$500’ (Joe was not the talkative type, which was why he was a monitor, not an interpreter).