Richard W. Sonnenfeldt - Witness to Nuremberg: The Many Lives of the Man who Translated at the Nazi War Trials

T HE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE and the Academy of the Evangelical Church (the largest German Christian denomination) sponsored me to speak in 2002 at a principal cathedral in Berlin. To my astonishment, the German national press and broadcast media reported prominently my youth in Nazi Germany, my adventures as a teen all over the world, my personal conversations with Nazi defendants and witnesses at the Nuremberg trials, my life in America, my sailing adventures, and my visits to Gardelegen. In December of that year, I was invited to return to Nuremberg. A new museum and educational center, the Dokumentationszentrum, tracing the rise and fall of Hitlers Germany, had just been dedicated by Germanys president, Johannes Rau. I was honored to be its first speaker.

To refresh my memory I had asked to visit the courtroom before my speech. It was 5 P.M., April 24, 2002, in Nuremberg, sixty-one years less two days after I had arrived in America.

My escort opened the massive wooden door, shoved his hand under my elbow, and pushed me gently forward into Saal 600, the scene of the Nuremberg trials.

Why is it so dark in here? I asked.

I heard muffled voices but saw no faces. Suddenly camera flashes and video lights blinded me. Someone opened the curtains, and I saw reporters with pencils poised over notebooks, audio engineers with microphones on booms marching toward me.

Surprise!

Instead of the quiet visit to the courtroom of Nuremberg that I had requested, unbeknownst to me, my hosts had arranged a press conference!

You were the chief interpreter of the American prosecution at the trials here of major Nazis in 1945? someone shouted.

Yes, I said.

Show us where the Nazis were sitting? Where were the judges, the prosecutors? Where were you? The questions tumbled over each other.

Every detail of the 1945 courtroom was etched in my memory, but now the rooms layout was different. There, at the left side of the room, the defendants had sat in two rows, and standing behind and around the defendants had been young American military police in gleaming white helmets, with white gloves and belts, trying to look alert and immobile at the same time.

I pointed to the spot where Justice Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, had stood as he said, We must also be prepared that this court may find some of the defendants not guilty. Otherwise we might just as well hang them all now!

Gone was the glass cage up there by the back wall where the court interpreters had strained to catch every word. I explained,

I was the chief interpreter and an interrogator for the American prosecution, and I spent hundreds of hours with defendants and witnesses in secluded interrogation rooms. But I was not a court interpreter, who had to listen to the defendants for months right over there but never had the opportunity to talk to them, face to face, one to one, as I did.

And what was your job later, in the courtroom?

To verify that witnesses and defendants made the same statements in court as those they made in pretrial examinations.

Someone asked, What did the trials accomplish?

For crimes they committed in the name of hate, race, and rabid nationalism, eleven of the most senior Nazi leaders were sentenced to hang by the neck. Seven others went to prison, and three were exonerated. But something even more important than punishment of the guilty was accomplished. The Nazis trickery in assuming total government power, their killing and torturing of Germans who opposed them, the killing of Jews, and the ruination and enslavement of the nations they attacked were all documented with their own papers, signed by their own hands, and the testimony of their subordinates. SS killers testified how they had murdered tens of thousands, a few at a time, before the ovens of Auschwitz made such retail killings obsolete. The world would never have known the full and terrible extent of the Holocaust without the record of these trials, or have seen proof of the incredible duplicity and unbounded egotism of the Fhrer for whom millions of Germans died. The history of the Thousand Year Reich, which lasted just twelve years, was written in the Nuremberg trials, making it impossible forever to deny or explain away this dreadful chapter of the German past.