Inside Nuremberg Prison: Hitler's Henchmen Behind Bars Read online

  Inside Nuremberg

  Prison

  Hitler’s Henchmen

  Behind Bars & the

  German Jew

  Helen Fry

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © Helen Fry 2015

  This edition published in 2015 by:

  Thistle Publishing

  36 Great Smith Street

  London

  SW1P 3BU

  www.thistlepublishing.co.uk

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Lina and Berthold Triest

  who perished in Auschwitz

  “If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there had been no war, there were no slain, there has been no crime.”

  US Chief Justice Jackson, Nuremberg Trial, 1946

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  PART 1: A MATTER OF JUSTICE

  PREFACE The Letter

  ONE Nuremberg Prison

  PART 2: HOWARD’S STORY

  TWO Munich & the Hitler Years

  THREE Kristallnacht

  FOUR Freedom and America

  FIVE Fighting Back

  SIX Dear Treasure

  PART 3: NUREMBERG PRISON

  SEVEN Life Behind Bars

  EIGHT Cell 1: Herman Goering

  NINE Cell 9: Robert Ley

  TEN Cell 25: Julius Streicher

  ELEVEN Rudolf Hess

  TWELVE Political Men

  THIRTEEN Beasts of Poland

  FOURTEEN Military Men & Nazi witnesses

  FIFTEEN Nuremberg: the Verdict

  SIXTEEN Post-War Munich

  SEVENTEEN A Life in the shadow of Nuremberg

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a book about life in Nuremberg Prison at the end of the Second World War and the drama that unfolded with the top Nazi leaders during their year behind bars during the trial itself. It is told primarily through the eyes Howard Triest, originally a German Jew who, in an unexpected twist of fate, fought on the frontline as an American soldier and became the only German-Jewish translator to the psychiatrists in prison. His true identity remained hidden from the defendants and led to an extraordinary turn of events.

  During the course of my work, I have interviewed many veterans in Howard Triest’s situation – refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria who fought for the Allies in the war. Most have coped with the trauma by building a wall of silence around the past and never speaking of it to their families. The silence protected them from having to confront intense trauma and deep emotional pain. It soon becomes apparent that Howard is one of those veterans who has always readily talked about the past. His openness makes the interviewing process easier.

  He seems unoffended by the very direct personal questions and displays a relaxed approach to the whole experience, although offering a conscious and proud perspective of his unique role at Nuremberg. Today, there is a certain pride for him that he succeeded without breaking down in front of the defendants. In a cheerful manner, he explains that the Allies had just won the war and he was assigned to Nuremberg in the full knowledge that he was part of the victorious forces. He was entering the prison cells with his freedom, while the defendants sat behind bars. He knew, and so did they, that they would hang for their crimes. Howard had his life ahead of him; the defendants were effectively at the end of theirs.

  I find myself compelled by Howard’s story. Here is a man who got as close as one possibly could to the surviving leaders of the Nazi government on a daily basis and yet bore no bitterness or desire for revenge. I wanted to hear his anger, feel his hatred but it is surprisingly not there. There is no outpouring of trauma and hate. For him it is as simple now as it was then: justice would have to be done if Germany was to be rebuilt. I find it hard to believe it is this simple. How can he be so forgiving? I am driven to find answers to deep questions and to understand what makes him tick.

  Much of Howard’s life was narrated in a logical and detached way, and that comes across in the book. Stories were often shot through with frank humour. The emotion lay buried deep and never once surfaced in the interviews. One question remained unanswered for me: had Howard ever been able to grieve the loss of his parents? Or had he buried the emotion so deep to protect his sanity? His initial response is to say that it is a complicated one. Then after a pause, he replied: ‘every time I step inside a shower… which is every day… I think of the showers in Auschwitz, the showers that killed my parents.’

  Inside Nuremberg Prison provides a unique eye-witness account of those days out of the public eye whilst the world waited for justice to be played out in the courtroom.

  PART 1

  A MATTER OF JUSTICE

  PREFACE

  THE LETTER

  August 1942, Vichy France

  IN THE UNBEARABLY hot, cramped carriage of the freight train the attractive but now frail forty-three year old Lina Triest squeezed through the Jewish prisoners towards the window. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out an envelope, stood on tiptoe and tossed it through the small opening at the top of a window. The summer breeze briefly caressed her fingertips. Her terrified, desolate eyes strained to see the envelope land at the side of the track. What hope had she of it reaching her ‘go-between’ in Switzerland? The round-up six months earlier of foreign Jews living in France seemed a distant memory.

  Lina turned away from the window and made her way back to her husband. Berthold looked desperately ill. She clutched his hand, wondering if he would survive the journey. The train carrying its human cargo sped on through the French countryside, heading from Les Milles in the south towards Camp Drancy in the north on the outskirts of Paris. Nothing was going to protect Lina and Berthold from the fate that awaited Europe’s Jews…

  Nearly three years later, in April 1945, and a world away, the American 5th Corps was stationed in Germany having fought its way from the Normandy beaches through Belgium and Holland. Lina and Berthold’s twenty-two year old son, Sergeant Howard Triest, had been with the Military Intelligence Interpretation team of 5th Corps for ten months. He was part of the mighty war machine that was on the verge of defeating the Third Reich. Howard was back on German soil for the first time in six years since forced to flee Munich on the very eve of the war. For him, it felt like pay-back time on a massive scale. The final defeat was just days away. Nazi forces were collapsing all over Germany and the Russians were heading for Berlin. The last time he stood on European soil was in 1940 as a seventeen year old emigrating to the safety of America. Howard was confident he would see his father, mother and sister, Margot, again in a matter of weeks.

  Growing up in Munich, Howard had seen enough to know that they, like all Jews, were in danger but not enough to understand that Adolf Hitler would stop at nothing to expand the borders of the Third Reich. The anti-Jewish laws and persecutions of 1930s Germany, and 1938 Austria, set Germany on a path towards the Final Solution – the annihilation of six million Jews and five million others. But who could have known in 1940 as Howard left for America that within two years Hitler would give his orders for the total destruction of European Jews? Churchill, Roosevelt and even Stalin hadn’t thought it would come to that.

  Now with the Third Reich on the verge of collapse, Howard received orders that he was being transferred to Nuremberg, a posting that would bring him into daily contact with Hitler’s henchmen in their prison cells. How would this German Jew react to being so close to pure evil, including the men who sent his own parents to the gas chambers of Auschwitz? Was reconciliat
ion with Germany possible in the light of such nationwide complicity?

  Seventy years later, Howard is the only surviving witness to those prison interviews. The psychiatric team in the prison, Dr Kelley, Dr Gilbert and Dr Goldensohn, and the prison commandant Colonel Andrus have all since died. Now living in Florida and in his nineties, not a day goes by when he does not think about the past. But is not with melancholic sadness or acrimony. Over seven decades, he has reflected on his time at Nuremberg and his own personal loss. Having worked with the psychiatrists for so long, he became conscious then of his own need to deal with deep psychological scars. The result of this self-awareness is a man who lacks bitterness or resentment. His story is chilling, yet emotional, and one which reveals a man of great dignity.

  ONE

  NUREMBERG PRISON

  “The only right way to punish these twenty-one defendants was to put them into the death camps and subject them to the same treatment they gave millions of others. But we couldn’t do that as civilized people.” Howard Triest.

  AT THE END of the Second World War, twenty-two surviving members of Hitler’s government were behind bars in Nuremberg Prison, awaiting trial for their part in the most heinous crimes in history. The accused were Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Robert Ley, Field Marshal Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Admiral Raeder, Wilhelm Frick, Baldur von Schirach, Franz von Papen, Fritz Sauckel, Artur Seyss-Inquart, Baron von Neurath, Hans Fritzsche, Walther Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Albert Speer, Admiral Doenitz and General Jodl. The latter three were arrested in the enclave of Flensburg, the final seat of Nazi government on the German-Danish border.

  The trial was scheduled to open in the third week of November. Before it did, the prison would witness much drama and unpredictability from the defendants. While the prosecution team carefully assembled and prepared the evidence, there was little doubt in the minds of the staff at the prison that few, if any, of the accused would walk out of the jail as free men. Strict controls were in place for Allied personnel entering and leaving the premises.

  The choice of the city of Nuremberg was deliberate and symbolic. Once the scene of mass rallies and displays of Nazi strength during the 1930s, this was the end game for a regime that Adolf Hitler believed would last for a thousand years. The trial was taking place a just a short distance from the vast stadium of their halcyon Nuremberg Rallies. This was also the city of the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that deprived Jews of their civil liberties. It now stood in the American sector of Allied-occupied Germany as a test to international justice. Nuremberg was about to deliver the final deathblow to the Nazi regime.

  Beyond the walls of Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice where the trial was about to convene, Allied occupying forces were getting on with the task of restoring democracy to a country that had lived for thirteen years under Nazi tyranny and brutality. While physical structures were being rebuilt, democracy reinstated to German media and all traces of Nazi ideology removed from every aspect of post-war institutions and civic life, the world was about to hold to account those responsible for crimes against humanity on a scale never witnessed before.

  The indictment, the crimes for which the defendants were being tried, was read in German to each of the defendants in their cells. That task fell to British officer, Major Airey Neave of MI9, a branch of the British Secret Service. Neave had been the first escapee from the security prison Colditz, having been captured in action during the war. Neave wrote in his memoirs that he felt intense anger when so physically close to these men of men and admits that he would not have been an ideal candidate as a translator to enter the cells every day with the psychiatrists.

  After the indictment was read, Hermann Goering became particularly gloomy, though the charges were not totally unexpected for him. Rudolf Hess wanted to defend himself, but was advised against it. For someone so unbalanced and displaying odd behaviour in custody, Hess certainly appeared to understand the indictment.

  THE OPENING OF THE TRIAL

  On 20 November 1945, twenty-one defendants flanked by US guards were brought along the covered walkway from the prison cells, up the stairs, through a door behind the prisoners’ box and into the courtroom. There was no escaping their fate. If any of them had tried to make it beyond the prison walls, the German people were in no mood to harbour these war criminals. The grotesqueness of their crimes was still unfolding to a horrified and scarred surviving people. Suicide was the only way to avoid justice and that seemed unlikely given the close twenty-four hour guard over each defendant. However, the tight security did not prevent defendant, Robert Ley from taking his own life before the trial even began.

  British barrister and politician, Sir Hartley Shawcross, led the British prosecution team; Chief Justice Jackson the American team. The courtroom in the Palace of Justice had already been extended to accommodate the large dock, visitors’ gallery and a separate area for the international press. Prisoners were led into the dock and seated in two rows. Hermann Goering, who had assumed leadership of the others, took the first seat at the end of the front row of prisoners; behind stood guards of the US forces. The accused shuffled in their seats, put on headphones to be able to hear the whole proceedings in translation as a hush descended on the packed courtroom. There was not a single empty seat in the visitors’ gallery; and the specially constructed press box filled with journalists and reporters who would bring to the world the full extent of the evil for which the defendants were standing trial.

  In the coming months, the world would hear and see for the first time graphic images of atrocities committed in the concentration camps flashed on screens in the courtroom. It would cause universal shock. In Howard’s experience of living through the trial, he could see that nothing could prepare the world for the unrelenting genocide that was revealed by the prosecuting team. The little evidence that had been reported throughout the war seemed to have been largely dismissed as exaggerated Allied propaganda. Now the world would see the incontrovertible evidence.

  The trial was a first and a test for international law and co-operation. Four charges never tried before in a court of law were being brought before the defendants:

  •Count One – The Common Plan or Conspiracy: conspiracy to commit crimes alleged in other accounts.

  •Count Two – Crimes against Peace: planning to wage war

  •Count Three – War Crimes: ill-treatment and murder of civilians and prisoners of any country before or during the war.

  •Count Four – Crimes against Humanity: murder, extermination, racial and political persecution or enslavement before or during the war.

  Twenty-four defendants were indicted, only twenty-one made an appearance in court. Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann was tried in absentia. Robert Ley had already committed suicide in his prison cell. Industrialist Gustav Krupp, who had built a large fuse factory at Auschwitz where Jews were worked to exhaustion and then sent to their deaths in the gas chambers, was declared physically unfit to stand trial. Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were already dead, and Adolf Eichmann and Dr Josef Mengele had fled to places unknown, presumed to be somewhere in South America. The defendants all pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the charges laid before them. Goering was the first to do so. The others followed suit.

  On 21 November 1945, the day after the trial opened, US prosecutor Chief Justice Jackson gave his four-hour defining opening address in which he said:

  ‘The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The crimes which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. The four great nations, flush with victory and stunned with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the bar in one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason… We have no purp
ose here to incriminate the whole German people. Hitler did not achieve power by a majority vote but seized it by an evil alliance of revolutionaries, reactionaries and militarists. You will hear today and in the days ahead of the enormity and horror of their acts. The prosecution will give you undeniable proofs of these incredible events – and I count myself as one who received during the war most atrocity tales with suspicion or scepticism.’

  The existence of this trial had by no means been certain during the war. Although the four Allied powers of Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union were united in agreeing that mistakes made at the end of the First World War should be avoided at all cost, they disagreed on how it should be achieved. They acknowledged that forcing Germany to pay huge reparations by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 had led to a humiliated country on the brink of economic collapse. High inflation had paved the way for Adolf Hitler to come to power in 1933. However, the powers disagreed on the existence of an international trial for war criminals.

  As early as October 1943, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had suggested that the Nazi leader should be subjected to war crimes trials. The Russians were disappointed that Britain, who had held Rudolf Hess from 1941, had been unwilling during the war itself to bring him immediately to trial but instead decided to focus all efforts on winning the war.

  On 1 November 1943, the Allies agreed in principle in the Moscow Declaration that that major war criminals would face war crimes but no outline given on whether there would be a special trial or executions. At the Tehran Conference in late November, early December 1943, Stalin suggested to British Prime Minister Churchill and US President Roosevelt that around 50,000 of Germany’s armed forces should be arrested and executed with the express aim of breaking the military might of the Third Reich. Churchill objected to the scale of the proposed mass executions. Later that evening, Stalin said he was only joking, but even so he had planted a seed that mass executions were an option.