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

Then the brother of a Jewish friend of mine was taken to Dachau concentration camp. He was released after nine months because his US Immigration Visa had come through. I saw him at his home soon after his release and did not recognize him. Once a fit man of thirty-five, he was now a white-haired skeleton and he looked sixty-years-old. Before his release he had been made to sign the customary oath stating that he would discuss his experiences in the camp with no one. Not knowing this at the time, I could only look at him in horror and then ask him, ‘My God, Alfred, what have they done to you?’ He covered his face with his hands and sobbed out the answer again and again: ‘Don’t ask me. I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you…’

Part of my question however was answered shortly afterwards by another man from Dachau. I was driving from Munich to Heidelberg when an SS man waved me to a stop. When an SS man flagged down a car in Germany in those days, one stopped. So I did. Fortunately, he only wanted a lift to Stuttgart and we became quite pally on that trip.

He was, he disclosed, one of the guards at Dachau. ‘The camp was full of Saujuden (Jewish swine)’ he told me. Throwing caution to the wind, I suggested, ‘No doubt they beat hell out of those Jews down there’. ‘Well’ he said, and then after extracting from me a promise not to tell anyone, ‘officially the only permissible punishment we can give is twenty-five strokes with a whip. But we are compelled to count out the strokes aloud. Now, if we make a mistake in counting, we can’t rectify such a mistake. We have to start again from the beginning. And, even if you find this hard to believe, only a few of us are any good at counting – ha, ha, ha! We get muddled when we’re in the twenties. There’s the Jew, naked, and bending down and we get to twenty-three and he thinks it’s nearly over. And then we say, twenty-two – no, twenty-three… alright, we made a mistake. One, two, three…’

There were other warnings. A young man I knew had joined the SS early. He had been promoted quickly. One day his superior officer sent for him, then told him, ‘You will have a new assignment from the first of next month; you will be adjutant to the Commandant of Dachau.’ The young man turned pale. He went home and thought the matter over. Then he wrote to his superior and asked permission to ‘Turn down the assignment’. He was told to report. ‘You can turn down that assignment,’ he was informed ‘but you will still go to Dachau – as an inmate!’ He accepted the assignment. One month later he was admitted to a Munich insane asylum.

These events occurred over a period of at least two years. At the time they did no more than convince me Nazism was evil and that I ought to leave Germany. I felt fear, but I was also aware that the Nazis had introduced considerable restrictions on the amount of money emigrants could take out of the country. I would have to leave with ten Marks (2.5 dollars) and my inheritance, already blocked until I was twenty-eight, would be lost. I kept postponing the decision.

Munich had been dubbed the ‘Birth Place of the Nazi Movement’, and to some extent it lived up to its new title. However, it did not lose any of its charm, and not for some time did the first unmistakable symptoms of life under the Nazis become noticeable. When they did, they were, nevertheless, very glaring. From the Röhn Putsch to the Kristallnacht [3] The name ‘ Kristallnacht ’ comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed. – when Jewish property was destroyed all over the city – there was noisy evidence of the new language the ‘master race’ was using to express itself. That language was loud and clear and it was quite impossible not to know what was going on, even if one was semi-blinded by the wishful thought that all this was a legitimate means to creating the new, great Germany.

There were the less blatant clues for those who wanted to hear and see. Jewish friends began to disappear in concentration camps or emigrated because they knew they had to. Mixed marriages became targets for blackmail and known political opponents of the Nazis were jailed, blacklisted, fired from their jobs and otherwise immobilized.

Years later – after the war and during the occupation days – in discussions with people I had known in the pre-war years, or who I had witnessed being interrogated, I became sick and tired of hearing the ‘but I knew nothing’ tale. (Probably the most outstanding performance in this respect was that of Ernst Kaltebrunner, Head of the notorious RSHA, the main Security Office, who claimed not to have known about the thousands of concentration camp detention orders bearing his signature).

I certainly heard and saw. There was the case of Dr Friedl Strauss, a Jewish customer of mine at the Adler Works and my lawyer. He had an Aryan girlfriend and made no attempt to hide her. He looked very Jewish and she very Teutonic. One night, Strauss was arrested and taken to the Dachau concentration camp. He had committed, so his mother was told, ‘ Rassenschand ’ [4] Rassenschande (racial shame) was a concept in Nazi Germany’s racial policy forbidding sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. the crime against the German race of a Jew having sexual relations with a German woman. When I came to work the following morning, his mother was waiting to see me. She begged me, as Friedl’s friend, to ask the help of the Adler boss Dr Meyer, who was an avowed Nazi from way back who often wore his so-called ‘Riding SS’ uniform to work.

We had sold several cars to Strauss and his mother hoped Dr Meyer, who had bought his title at some obscure Austrian university, would help to arrange Friedl’s release. Myer said he would try and two days later had instructions for me. The mother would, through Meyer, channel a very large donation to the widows’ and orphans’ fund of some part of the SS Organisation. A message would then be smuggled to her son in the camp, specifying the exact time and place where he could climb over the barbed wire of the Dachau camp and escape. There his mother was to wait for him, with his Adler convertible, bought of course from Dr Meyer, and he was then to get out of Germany.

The message obviously got through as, at the appointed time, Freidl ran to the fence and started to climb at the place indicated. Half way up, he was cut down by the burst from a machine-gun, not mounted in a watch tower but hidden somewhere, as his mother would later tell me.

In spite of this dreadful episode I stayed, mainly because, in spite of knowing subconsciously that I ought to be very concerned, I felt strangely outside events. I was also having too good a time in Munich to be very serious about anything.

MY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES fell into two very different groups. I was on the fringe of a set of people who included a very fine upright German from Cologne named Heinz Ickrath, who was considerably older than me and often took me flying in his private plane, and a remarkably brilliant woman who owned an antique shop in the fashionable Briennerstrasse. I also had friends who were actors, doctors and bankers with whom I would have coffee in the Carlton Tearooms, which were owned by Gabriele von Siebert. Hitler admired Gabriele and liked the Carlton Tearooms, which he continued to frequent after seizing power.

Whenever the Fuehrer was in Munich and had some time on his hands, he would arrive at the Carlton for coffee after his presumably vegetarian lunch. His arrival was signalled by a quickly gathering crowd outside and the shouts of ‘Heil Hitler’. I would get up as rapidly and as inconspicuously as possible and disappear into the washroom. The other guests would rise upon Hitler’s entry and would stand, facing his route of progress, with their arms raised until he had sat down. His party was usually small, perhaps four to six people and would invariably include his adjutant, Brückner, with whom I sometimes played tennis.