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

He lost!

Having shaken hands on our bet, we went off to court and the long reading of the judgement began.

The four members of the Tribunal read it in turn. It was for me to read the German translation when it was Lord Justice Lawrence and Mr Francis Biddle’s [1] Francis Biddle was the US Member of the IMT. turn, and I continued on the following morning when the judges dealt with their individual judgement on the accused Nazi leaders.

Then I was called out of the booth and told that in the afternoon I was to be the ‘Voice of Doom’ – translating to the defendants the sentences meted out by the International Military Tribunal.

I still did not know, and would not learn until their pronouncement, what those sentences were going to be. My nerves began their reverberations anew, in full rhythm, as had been the case on the very first day.

The scene of that afternoon has been the subject of so much coverage that I will confine myself to my own role in it. I was the only interpreter in the German booth, of course.

Punctually at 14.00 hours the tribunal entered the courtroom, to commence its last session. The sliding door at the back of the dock opened and Goering stepped out of the lift. He reached for his earphones and Lord Lawrence, looking at him fixedly, began:

‘Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Goering, on the counts…’

I began to interpret.

Goering shrugged his shoulders, pointed at his earphones and indicated that he had not heard!

It was incredible, unbelievable, but at that very moment of utmost tension, the installation had broken down! There was considerable activity around the amplifiers in the rear of the room. I went right on shaking. A technician made a sign towards me.

‘I began to count, ‘ Eins, zwei, drei – koennen ie mich hoeren (can you hear me?)’ and Goering smiled, yes he actually smiled, nodded in my direction, [2] In conversations with linguists in later years Wolfe Frank went into a little more detail concerning the moment he translated the sentence, including Frances Calder who wrote: ‘Just as Wolfe was pronouncing sentence, Goering turned round towards him, and gave him the thumbs-up sign to indicate that he could now hear him. Wolfe said it was a moment of irony that he was never able to forget.’ and Lawrence began anew:

‘Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Goering, on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.’

This, then, was the formula of the sentence. And, as my eyes were riveted on Goering’s face, totally expressionless but growing deadly white, I spoke as if hypnotised, into the microphone before me. ‘ Tod durch erhaengen (death by hanging),’ instead of saying, ‘ Tod durch den Strang (death by the rope) – which is the accepted formula in German. When I realised my error Goering had already dropped his earphones, turned and was stepping back into the lift. Almost, but not quite noiselessly, the door slid shut. The first man to learn his punishment through me had gone from sight.

Within one hour, Lord Justice Lawrence spoke those words ten more times, ten more times did I repeat them, now correctly, to ten of those men who could never pay for their monstrous crimes.

Now, so long after that hour in the courtroom, the memories of the trial have faded. The faces of the condemned men have not – I memorised them too well while I spoke the fatal words to them. Let me quote from R.W. Cooper’s [3] The Nuremberg Trial, R.W. Cooper, Penguin Books. book once more:

‘Death by the rope!’ The words came to them in German through the headphones as each prisoner was brought up alone into the vast emptiness of the dock – the identical words pronounced by the Nazi People’s Court upon the perpetrators of the July plot. They were uttered in translation by Captain Wolfe Frank, himself of German origin, who before departing from his country had watched the torchlight procession in Munich that hailed Hitler’s coming to power. A strange turn of the wheel that he was now to utter the words that set the seal on Hitler’s little day.’

The tensest hour of my life was over, an hour when history was indeed written indelibly, justly and rightfully. I remember the last, final adjournment of the Tribunal, the judges filing from the bench into their chamber, the departure of counsel, the press, the spectators and the last view of the empty courtroom, as I was making my way out of the booth – to which I did not, as it happens, ever return. I do not remember anything else about that day – the drama had been too powerful.

There was one last, very final chapter to come, of course: the executions.

THE CONDEMNED MEN WERE HANGED during the night of 16 October; all but Goering, the man with that incredible smile I saw at the moment of his sentencing.

Some comment is called for in connection with his remarkable feat of committing suicide, because I may have missed a clue to his scheme for escaping the noose the day I talked to him in his cell.

The non-hero of the story is Colonel Burton C. Andrus, Commandant of the Nuremberg prison. I had first seen him during a pre-trial press conference when he assured the members of the press that he had designed and organised a suicide-proof prison. Andrus was a fairly short, or short-seeming, man who looked every inch the professional, intellectually stunted officer. I remember him as being devoid of any sense of humour or imagination. His men, I was told, saw in him an intolerable disciplinarian. It is certainly true that he had them keep up their highly polished appearance all the way through the trial and they did their stuff persistently, standing behind the dock, wearing white gloves and white painted helmets, pouncing like trained seals upon a prisoner leaning forward in the dock to whisper to a colleague.

It was a pity that the Americans did not handpick these soldiers in order to avoid such incidents as, for instance, that of a guard addressing the President of the Court as, ‘Hey, you,’ when Sir Geoffrey Lawrence had slipped through some control point without showing his pass, but, most of all, so that Colonel Andrus’s dream of a suicide-proof jail could come true. As it was, there was Dr Ley, committing suicide by hanging himself with a towel, torn into strips, on the water pipe of the WC in his cell. There was also a witness who managed to jump from an upper landing of the jail. Then, as the grand finale, there was Goering’s dramatically timed suicide.

Could a professional jailer, a trained prison warden have prevented it? Probably, yes. At least, some members of the press corps at Nuremberg must have thought so. Every year they sent a cable to Andrus on the anniversary of Goering’s suicide ‘fondly remembering’ Andrus and his successful performance as Commandant of the Nuremberg War Crimes Jail.

How Goering had managed to kill himself has been the subject of conjecture and discussions ever since. It has not been resolved. I think Tom Ready, sometime afterwards, at the Press Camp at Schloss Stein, [1] During the Nuremberg Trials, reporters were housed in Castle Schloss Stein. supplied the first step of my own reasoning when, before the beginning of the trial, I called on Goering at his prison cell, I observed that he had failed to insert his dentures. However, as Ready quite rightly said, ‘Goering didn’t need to wear dentures and his slurred speech was a fake.’ He was, it seems, concealing something in his mouth and because I had not seen his medical history sheet, I fell for the trick.