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

Wolfe moved on to San Francisco and over lunch with an old friend was offered a job in the UK with an electronics company called Ampex. He would be given four months training before he departed, and he was loaned a luxury flat. At a house-warming party he held in the flat he was propositioned by three young ladies – which led to him seeing them, on a rota basis, for the period he remained in San Francisco, as he records: ‘The order of appearance had also been settled during a prolonged visit to my bathroom (actually, the apartment was so elegant, it was a powder room) – Tuesday: Lois, dark hair, Hedy Lamarr type, schoolteacher, twenty-two years old, from Houston, Texas. Thursday: Martine, short-cropped hair, tiny, highly intelligent, interviewer at an employment agency, age not announced. Saturday: Jean. Very tall, not at all pretty but with a tremendous sense of humour, Swedish descent – the best teller of dirty stories with a Swedish accent I ever knew.’

Arriving in London in 1954, as a newly trained electronics engineer, Wolfe was assigned to man the Ampex stand at the Vienna Trade Fair where his companions were ‘seven beautiful Viennese model hostesses.’ Wolfe’s own words describe what happened next:

‘When the Fair finished I packed my gadgets into the station wagon and was all set to leave. Only, when I got into the car I found I had a passenger: Vilma [one of the hostesses], lovely, stacked and determined, at seventeen, to get away from home. Her arguments were sound and she even had a letter from her mother, stating that she had permission to go to England to learn the language.

‘Vilma explained that her one and only desire was to look after me, my household and my needs, which, she thought, we might usefully and jointly satisfy. I was then at an age where one does not necessarily recognize the attraction of so young a playmate. I preferred experience and sophistication. Vilma, I hasten to say, soon put me straight. She was of Czechoslovakian descent and she had inexhaustible physical and mental reserves that later made her the owner of a successful import-export business in Vienna, a souped-up Porsche and a staggering collection of fur coats. I know she did it all herself, and out of bed.

‘I had a small cottage in London and Vilma took over as mistress, hostess and language student. In bed, she was insatiable. She would turn into a wild animal at the critical moment, baring her teeth, eyes turned back and her body shaking with orgasm after orgasm’.

Wolfe and Vilma stayed together for some time until one day he was ‘unforgivably destructive’ in a comment he made about her cooking. ‘She left the next day and it was only when she had gone that I realized what I had lost, or thrown away’.

Perhaps on the rebound, and with his defences down, Wolfe was soon to meet and fall in love with a woman ‘of Eastern European origin’ who was to become his third wife – Galina Verbeek (or Halpern, or Harden). She was in her twenties, claimed to be a model, and was ‘as beautiful without make-up as any woman could be.’

Wolfe became ‘mesmerized and love-stricken’ and against the advice of many friends he married Galina at Caxton Hall in the autumn of 1955. ‘Immediately the knot had been tied however, her whole attitude changed from that of a demure young damsel into a fiery sex symbol and she became a snarling, hostile, argumentative, hellcat. Then mail started to arrive from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, there were telephone conversations in a strange tongue and finally applications for British citizenship’.

Realizing he had been taken for a ride, Wolfe refused to sign her documents. ‘With fluttering eyelids’ however ‘she persuaded a doctor, a banker and a local clergyman to sign the necessary forms with each declaring they had known her for over five years and could vouch for her in every way.’

The relationship turned physically violent with both parties sustaining bruising, following which Galina visited Wolfe’s boss to show him hers. This led to Wolfe being dismissed from Ampex and to him willingly paying for Galina’s one-way ticket out of the UK – and his life. He immediately started divorce proceedings, however it would be many years before he could catch up with her to serve the papers. Soon after her departure Wolfe was pulled in by Scotland Yard and was questioned at length by the intelligence services about how he brought the woman into the country, her phone calls, her letters, her movements, who she had met, where she’d been. Frank’s own background was investigated and although he was eventually cleared it was apparent the intelligence services believed Galina, who was known under a number of aliases, was a Russian spy and that Wolfe had been used merely to allow her into the country and to enable her to claim UK citizenship.

Wolfe was not alone and out of work for long. He took on translation and interpreting commissions and after a number of casual affairs met and set up home with a German lady, Helma Scheidt: ‘Who occupies the uncontested first place on the list of women I ought to have married.’ Helma was from one of the wealthiest families in Germany and this led to Wolfe being offered a position selling products for the Controls Company of America.

Wolfe and Helma stayed together for three years and they had a house built for them in Davos, which they moved into on Frank’s forty-fifth birthday in 1958. This turned out to be a mistake. Many of Helma’s circle of friends were wealthy Nazi sympathizers and now, living close to the German border, they visited frequently and expected Frank to adopt their ways and their beliefs. Remembering so many of his own friends, his half-sister and her mother (his father’s first wife) who had perished in concentration camps and his years of involvement at Nuremberg, he found it impossible to change in order to be accepted by Helma’s friends, and ‘a Teutonic cloud had begun to darken our relationship.’ Once again he moved on, even though that meant leaving the dream home situated in his favourite location.

By the early 1960s Wolfe had moved to Dusseldorf, where he rented a penthouse and he had become a very successful businessman earning in excess of $80,000 per year (then about £32,000).

This brought him into contact with an old friend who headhunted him for a company called Investors Overseas Services (IOS), which was involved in the Mutual Fund Industry (MFI) – companies that pool money from many investors to purchase securities. IOS was run by Bernard Cornfeld, a flamboyant financier, and Frank was hired to head up the German operation. This proved to be both an uplifting (initially) and then a traumatic (eventually) experience for Frank and was another major watershed in his life. Over the coming few years he helped build IOS into a company that at its peak raised US$2.5 billion and employed 25,000 salesmen who sold MFI products door-to-door, especially in Germany, to small investors. After years of success the company overtraded, made a public share offering, diversified too widely and created a cash shortage. The company was eventually put into liquidation leaving millions of small investors out of pocket. Fraud charges were brought against Cornfeld and he spent almost a year in a Swiss jail awaiting trial. However, when the case did eventually come before the courts he was acquitted.

None of this was apparent of course to Wolfe at the time he joined the business and when he did realize what was going on he was one of the first to depart. Of his association with IOS Wolfe comments: ‘If there is anything Cornfeld and his fellow freaks deserve, then it is to be forgotten, except for the fact that they, with their total lack of honesty and morality have been responsible for much misery, even death, for those they hoodwinked.’

Entering a new decade Wolfe started a new relationship with the bisexual wife of a friend. Her name was Susi Alberti and she became the fourth Mrs Frank (1960-1975). They were married at Davos on 12 November 1960 (see Plate 20), ‘and thus started,’ records Wolfe, ‘a battle that would last for fifteen years and included every conceivable type of row, parting and reunion in the book – and it left very little time for interludes of happiness or passages of time that were not stormy.’