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

Wolfe joined a small Swiss electronics company and was sent to the Orient on business. As he departed his new wife gave him permission to sleep with local women if he felt he needed to. ‘I resolved to obey orders,’ he recalls, ‘it was easy in Bangkok because there is a temple of sex where gorgeous long haired beauties were competing for the attention of the stray male in exchange for a minute contribution to their cash resources.’ He records similar experiences in Hong Kong and Tokyo where he was invited by a surgeon friend to sit in and watch him carry out breast implant operations.

On his return Wolfe was tracked down by Cornfeld and asked to deal with the French and Swiss authorities in matters that were being investigated. Without becoming involved in the business, Frank accepted, in return for $300,000 per annum, a generous expense allowance and accommodation in Geneva. Susie split her time between the Geneva penthouse and their other home in Davos whilst Frank handled some delicate matters with French government ministers and officials and Swiss financiers. Unlike most of the others associated with IOS, he was greatly respected in both countries and when he was shown irrefutable evidence that ISO had been trading illegally he quit immediately and moved to New York to resurrect the financial skills he had acquired in the MFI. This led him back to Germany and Switzerland.

As Wolfe moved into a new decade he took stock of his situation: ‘The year was 1970. I was fifty-seven years old. A computer read-out might have looked something like this:

Marriages: four (three divorces, one on the rocks, like a dry martini).

Children: one son (official) one daughter (unofficial).

Assets: one house, three cars, $20,000 cash and securities.

Health: outstanding.

Spirit: undaunted.

Future: nebulous.

Past: extremely varied, mostly satisfying.

Its components: politically praiseworthy, morally open to argument, professionally successful if only in sales.

‘With all this in mind there was only one thing anyone could do – open a restaurant!’

That is exactly what he did, and he did it on his own, Susi having left him ‘for the nth time.’ (Wolfe and Susi had a very ‘open’ relationship. They each had extramarital affairs, there were many bitter arguments and they parted often, sometimes for lengthy periods, during what was clearly a stormy time together. Yet there were also many periods of contentment and it was a union that lasted fifteen years, the longest of any of his marriages).

Throughout his adult life Wolfe’s culinary skills had been much admired and he decided to put them to good use by opening a restaurant called La Reja (meaning iron grill outside a window) which was, ‘located in a famous tourist spot amongst the snow white houses of Mijas’, a coastal village in the Spanish region of Malaga (see Plate 20).

The venture proved to be less than successful. Staff, customers and suppliers all took advantage of Frank’s lack of knowledge and naivety and his trusting nature. There was a temporary respite to the losses Wolfe was incurring when Susi arrived some months later. She kicked out Wolfe’s then current mistress and took charge of the management of La Reja . Soon they were at each other’s throats again and Wolfe records, ‘this time it knew no pause and went on to the end, but it raged for nearly five more years’.

As a diversion, ‘to fill an emotional vacuum Susi had created’ and appalled at the Spaniards widespread cruelty to animals – about which he is scathing – Wolfe set up his own unofficial animal refuge.

Things reached the lowest ebb over one Christmas period. After a heavy drinking session, and a particularly hurtful outburst by Susi, Wolfe attempted to take his own life (this was the second time he had tried to end it all). He records in his memoirs:

‘These lines would obviously not have been written if I had done things properly. Would-be-suicides please note that you must make sure you take the right dose. I took too much, namely: thirty sleeping tablets, thirty-six tranquilizers and twenty suppositories, plus a few odds and ends.’

Believing him to be suffering from a hangover, and even though a cat died after having licked the saliva trickling from his mouth, Susi left Wolfe to sleep it off – for thirty hours! It was eventually the maid who raised the alarm and, close to death, he was rushed to a private clinic in Malaga, where he eventually came round some fifty hours later and was released after five days. Following this Wolfe comments: ‘We never again returned to anything resembling the old-fashioned concept of marriage. We had sex occasionally, “to release glandular pressure,” as I was fond of saying.’

Soon after this incident things got even worse for Wolfe. He was arrested for a motoring offence he had committed some years earlier in Ibiza, and was chained to other prisoners ‘in full view of gaping tourists’ and marched through the busy streets of Malaga to be incarcerated in the local jail. There he spent a week ‘scared witless’ alongside some 500 inmates, including murderers, rapists, bank-robbers, drug dealers, addicts, drunks and embezzlers, until Susi was able to get him bail. ‘I had been in jail for seven days, four hours, and thirty-nine minutes,’ said a relieved Frank. On his return some months later for the court case Wolfe, after having been submitted to what he considered to be a doubtful hearing, was convicted of dangerous driving, given a six months suspended prison sentence and ordered to hand in his driving licence: ‘I sent them the licence they had recorded during the trial and went on driving using one of my other licences, being careful not to be caught, and I stayed away from trouble during my “parole”. I also decided that I had had enough of Spain and resolved to get out very rapidly.’

‘Under the weight of intolerable and unresolved conflagration between Susi and me,’ Wolfe departed for Andorra in the company of ‘an American enchantress named Caroline’, where his old friend Hermann Hemmeter (the Garden Dwarf) had settled. After further periods in Davos – to settle his affairs there – and Paris to take part in a number of orgies (graphically described) Wolfe’s notes tell us that he purchased some land in Andorra, sold his business in Spain and moved with his ‘sixteen cats and six dogs’ to a mountain retreat of Soldeu in Andorra where, on 4 February 1974, he opened a new restaurant, bar and disco complex called El Duc (the owl).

For two winters the business was a success. However, ‘thereafter the decline was staggering and summer number two was a disaster– simply tourism in Andorra was down, in fact, almost out.’ El Duc also suffered from ‘freezing pipes, collapsing power cable supports, landslides, cracking walls, moving floors and a disintegrating roof.’ There was also the old problem of untrustworthy staff and suppliers as well as problems with bankers and local authorities.

Wolfe had one other major problem. Susi was back on the scene and had pointed out to him her vulnerability should he die (he was then approaching sixty-five years of age). She explained: ‘No Andorran court would assume jurisdiction for a will, left by a British subject, married in Switzerland to a, then, German, and now British subject, both of whom held no more than a temporary permit to reside in Andorra.’ Subsequent to this the restaurant, land and other buildings were registered in Susi’s name. This in turn led to the rather sad final breakdown of the marriage and perhaps explains how in the final chapter of Wolfe’s story life was to become such a struggle for him. Without bitterness, however, he records:

‘This made it relatively simple for me to, finally, walk out on her: she now had everything I owned –and owed. (Over a number of years, she divested herself of it all, asserting that debts exceeded assets by far and that she had been terribly wronged. She never attempted to run the business, being a firm subscriber to the theory that men had a duty to look after her, and work was not her beer – surely the wrong philosophy for a lady restaurateur). So I departed, fortunately with somewhere to go – the Common Market, also known as the European Economic Community (EEC), in Brussels as an interpreter.’