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

Humphrey Hugh Sykes, born in 1907, was to become a very important figure in Wolfe Frank’s life. He was the son of Major Herbert Rushton Sykes and Hon. Constance Harriet Georgina Skeffington. He married, firstly, Grizel Sophie, daughter of Air Vice-Marshal Sir Norman Duckworth Kerr MacEwen, in 1936, from whom he was divorced in 1948. He married, secondly, Muriel Hooper, daughter of Colonel John Charles Hooper, in 1958. He was educated at Rugby School and gained the rank of Major in the service of the 9th Lancers. He died in 1991 after having travelled from Scotland to the home of Mike Dilliway in Dorset in search of Wolfe Frank’s manuscript and other documents.

The Canaveral Land Corporation of Cocoa, Florida.

Dr Violet Randall.

Ace Sand & Gravel Company Ltd of West Malling, Kent.

A duelling scar or ‘bragging scar’ was seen amongst upper-class Germans and Austrians, especially those involved in academic fencing, as being a ‘badge of honour’ that emphasized one’s class and status in society. German military laws permitted men to wage duels of honour until World War I, and in 1933 the Nazis legalized the practice once more.

John Clotworthy Talbot Foster Whyte-Melville-Skeffington, 13th Viscount Massereene and 6th Viscount Ferrard (1914–1992) was a politician and landowner. He succeeded his father in 1956 and regularly attended the House of Lords.

The Lansdowne Club is a private London club that was established in 1935. It is located in Berkeley Square.

Patricia Leonard was born in Fulham on 9 November 1914. Her father, Theodore, was an actor from South Africa and her mother, Elena, was a well-known opera singer from Australia. Patricia was a starlet at seventeen and became a leading lady in many West End productions in the 1930s and during the war years including Hi Diddle Diddle (1935), Red Peppers (1938), A ship at Bay (1939), The Little Dog Laughed (1939), Scoop (1942) and I See a Dark Stranger (1946). Soon after the war she married the noted American philanthropist Francis Francis, heir to the Standard Oil fortune. The couple purchased Bird Cay, one of the Berry Islands, and transformed it into ‘one of the most developed islands of the Bahamas’. They also had a home on Lake Geneva. Patricia retired from the stage in the late 1940s to raise a family and devoted much of her time to animal and children’s charities. She died in 2008, aged ninety-three, at her son’s home in Switzerland (see photograph at Plate 22).

Dolphin Square is a block of luxury flats, favoured by members of both Houses of Parliament and the Gentry, which were built between 1935-1937 near the River Thames in Pimlico.

Hugo Henry Rignold (1905–1976) was an English conductor and violinist, who is best remembered as having been Musical Director of the Royal Ballet and conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Known during the Second World War as ‘The Blackout Girl’, Inga Andersen was a Canadian actress and singer who entertained troops in Italy and was known as ‘Hildegarde of England’. She was also a record-holding speed skater, and an accomplished violinist.

Born Ferdinand Philip Mayer-Hocrckel in Mainz in 1916, Ferdy Mayne appeared in over 230 films and countless West End productions.

The German occupation of Czechoslovakia began in 1938 with the invasion of the Sudetenland, the former German-Austria border regions.

Davos, an Alpine town in Switzerland, was Wolfe Frank’s favourite place. He loved skiing and visited Davos often over much of his lifetime. He eventually had homes there and hoped that would be where his ashes would be scattered.

Aliens Tribunals were set up in September 1939 to make certain that no one who ought to be interned remained free. They also dealt with the proper disposal of all aliens whose activities, status, general character and disposition towards this country were investigated.

A fifth column is a clandestine group of people whose objectives are to undermine a larger group from within.

Officially numbered 402a or C19, the PoW Camp at Southampton was one of hundreds set up throughout the UK during the Second World War.

Warth Mill Internment Camp, Bury, Lancashire, eventually became a PoW camp. However, it was originally a camp for enemy aliens where the conditions were every bit as harsh as Wolfe Frank describes them.

Several alien civilian internment camps were set up on the Isle of Man during the First World War and they were used for that purpose again during the Second World War. The one at Knockaloe, near Peel, was a small, self-contained, township that accommodated male internees only.

Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, was an MP and pre-war member of the Cabinet. During the war he held the rank of major and was appointed secretary of several Government departments, then Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. In 1955 he succeeded Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. Eden was in fact Secretary of State for War from May to December 1940 – the period his brother, Sir Timothy Calvert Eden (attached to the War Office) was an officer and Wolfe Frank was an internee at Peel Camp – and it was during that period that new regulations were brought in granting some aliens their freedom and their right to join the British Army. (Editor: Is it possible therefore that Wolfe Frank’s continual representations as Camp Leader at Peel – which demanded the above rights – somehow reached the notice of the Secretary of State for War via his brother and that those representations came into Anthony Eden’s thinking when he was considering changing the Government’s position on aliens?).

Kurt Alois Schuschnigg was Chancellor of Austria from 1934-1938.

Franz von Papen was Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and Vice-Chancellor under Hitler from 1933-1934. He was one of the defendants at Nuremberg who Wolfe Frank later interrogated and for whom he interpreted.

Members of the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps performed a wide variety of tasks in all theatres of war ranging from handling all types of stores, laying prefabricated track on beaches and stretcher-bearing. They also worked on the construction of harbours, laid pipes under the ocean, constructed airfields and roads and erected bridges. In 1940 the Corps’ name was changed to the Pioneer Corps and, following the war, King George VI designated it to be the Royal Pioneer Corps.

Referred to as the Christmas Blitz, 365 people were killed in Liverpool between 20 and 22 December 1940.

In the British Army a blouse was a short jacket made of wool serge that buttoned to the outside of high-waisted wool serge trousers.

Catterick is the largest British Army garrison in the world.

A Nissen hut is a prefabricated steel structure, made from a half-cylindrical skin of corrugated steel. Invented by Major Peter Nissen, the huts were used extensively during the Second World War.