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

At times ‘Dostert broke his shift system to take advantage of Frank’s outstanding qualities as an interpreter’ (Ann and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial ). It seems also that on occasions, and because he was the best, the BBC requested that the Tribunal use Frank for the more important broadcasts and in his memoirs Dostert makes it clear that Frank was the only interpreter who could be used in both the English and the German booths.

Sir Hartley Shawcross KC, MP, HM Attorney-General was the Chief British Prosecutor at the IMT.

Klieg lights are powerful lights used in filming and photography.

Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) was an Austrian playwright and novelist known for his psychological dramas that dissect turn-of-the-century Viennese bourgeois life.

Francis Biddle was the US Member of the IMT.

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.’

The Nuremberg Trial, R.W. Cooper, Penguin Books.

During the Nuremberg Trials, reporters were housed in Castle Schloss Stein.

Nuremberg Trials Final Report Appendix D: Control Council Law No. 10 , by Telford Taylor.

The Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (Subsequent Proceedings) were as follows:

Telford Taylor (1908-1998) was an assistant to Chief Counsel Robert Jackson at the IMT. In October 1946 he was promoted to Brigadier General and appointed Chief Counsel for the Subsequent Proceedings.

Maxine Cooper (1924-2009) was born in Chicago and studied theatre arts at the Pasadena Playhouse. She travelled to Europe in 1946 to entertain US military troops, during which time she met and married Wolfe Frank. She stayed in Europe for five years working in the theatre and television and during this period, as her private letters attest, she and Wolfe were devoted to each other. The couple moved to the US in the early 1950s but divorced in 1952. Maxine continued to perform in the theatre and for US television and made her film debut in 1955 starring alongside Ralph Meeker in the film noir Kiss Me, Deadly (see photograph on Plate 19). She later appeared in another movie classic of the period, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In 1957 she married Sy Gomberg, a screenwriter and producer, and retired from the acting profession in the early 1960s to raise a family. The couple remained married until Sy Gomberg’s death in 2001. Maxine became well known as a photographer and as a Hollywood activist standing up for minority groups in the theatre and human rights and against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. Maxine Cooper died, aged eighty-four, in 2009.

A school of theatre arts was established at the Pasadena Playhouse in California in the 1920s and it had become an accredited college by 1937. Amongst its most notable alumni and players the Playhouse lists such names as Raymond Burr, Victor Mature, Eleanor Parker, Tyrone Power, Robert Young, Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman and Maxine Cooper Gomberg.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Act 3, scene 2).

Frank appeared twice-weekly on the Dispatches programme, Newsreel and on the German Service for the BBC and World Report for NBC.

The Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish people.

Alfred G. Steer, Interesting Times: Memoir of Service in U.S. Navy, 1941-47.

Alfred G. Steer in a letter to Francesca Gaiba.

It is thought Steer was referring to a report that noted that on one day in March 1945: ‘203 people had died at regular intervals of heart attacks and in alphabetical order.’ Ann and John Tusa The Nuremberg Trial Macmillan, 1983.

Francesca Gaiba The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation , University of Ottawa Press, 1998.

Photograph with inscription from the Wolfe Frank records reproduced as Plate 2.

Wolf Frank, as the Voice of Doom, can be heard delivering those sentences to Goering et al. by going to YouTube and clicking on the following link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9C2JhKdxlU

Alfred ‘Fredy’ Stoll was a ski jumper born in Berchtesgaden who became the German champion in 1934. On that occasion he was awarded an engraved cup by Hermann Goering as a special prize for the furthest jump of the day. He was described as being ‘a daredevil without fear, who not only jumps further than anybody else, but, by testimony of a friend, would also make a good race car driver and motorbike racer.’

The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Programme) was an American initiative. Named after US Secretary of State George Marshall, the Plan gave $13 billion in aid to help rebuild Western European economies after the Second World War.

Following the war many German owned properties and estates were seized by the British Property Control Board and handed over to reliable Germans or were held by the Board until the Control Council decided how to dispose of them in the interests of peace.