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Play MovieSection below transcribed Lucy K (2008), edited by Joseph Werhan (intern). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.
I think we should just find out what happened when you arrested Goering, and then there is about half a year before you went to Nuremberg.
At least.
During that time you're in Austria?
We finished in Austria then I was pulled back and I was stationed near Ulm and I was in charge of two or three counties around Ulm.
Is this on the map anywhere?
It's just about there.
So you backtracked?
Yes, Austria was considered to be semi-enemy country. The Nazis had taken over Austria in 1938 and the Austrians—as soon as we moved in—said, "Oh, you liberated us!"—which is BS because they were very, very good little Nazis—but at that point all of a sudden nobody was a Nazi anymore. All of a sudden they were Hitler's first victims. Yes, you should live so long.
We stayed in the Austrian area for two or three weeks only and then we were pulled back to take care of occupation duties. The war was finished and we then had to set up occupation stuff. First, there was a little town of Heidenheim. I was there for a couple weeks. As soon as we pulled back in there we went into the town and checked all the records to see who were the Nazis. Who were the outed out leaders of the bunch, and if they hadn't been caught or killed we arrested them and shipped them someplace. I have no idea where they went, there were central concentration camps—or camps for concentrating them—they were not concentration camps, difference. We tried to make sure that the German civil authorities could take over and run their operation, and we had to make sure that the ones that were put into positions were not Nazis. Everybody that got a job in the city hall—from janitor to mayor—we had to screen and check out and make sure that they were okay. We got this fragebogen—questionnaire—eight long pages of all sorts of stuff that nobody cared about. Somebody had come up with this questionnaire, so everybody had to fill out the questionnaire. Every place that needed a mayor or a police chief or a fire chief or whatever it is, every one of these people had to go through the process, which meant we were pretty busy interrogating people and saying, "Yes it's okay, you can get a job," "No, you can be a fireman, but not the fire chief"—all sorts of things. We were pretty powerful at that point, we could run the town. We could ruin peoples' lives, or we could make them.
People were trying to start theater groups again, people were trying to start concert halls, concert series, the whole city structures. The place had come totally apart, and all of a sudden—in this major civilized society—you start fresh. Somebody had to give you an okay saying "Here's a signature, you can go ahead and do this job." There were people in all the various towns who were doing this. Unfortunately—this happens in most situations—three-quarters of the people who were doing this weren't qualified to do this. They didn't speak German, they didn't really know anything about German society, et cetera. Then there were obviously all sorts of Czechs, Poles, Russians, Italians, that had been captured in Germany during that time who all of a sudden were now free, and were trying to get their piece of the action. We had to check them to make sure that they—because many of the Russians had worked with the Nazis—or the Poles or whatever—so we had to check those out. All this time we're trying to stay ahead of the game a little bit.
Is that basically what you did in different towns?
Yes, I did that first down in Austria, in Spoke, Kitzbühel, then we pulled back to Nellingen in southern Germany. Then we pulled back to Ulm, or just outside—we were in Ulm, but I had a house just outside of Ulm—which was again a lovely one. Nellingen is the place where Field Marshall Rommel came from, and so the first thing we did when we got into town was we looked up his house. He had just been killed by the Nazis. His son was there—who was eighteen or nineteen years old—who many years later—forty to fifty years later—turned out to be the mayor of Stuttgart. Very solid, very good guy. First thing we had to do is find ourselves a place to stay. My partner and I, we were in charge of this county. First we got to find an office, then we got to find a place to stay, and then we got to find somebody that can take care of cooking for us, take care of cleaning the house and doing that. The easiest way was to find yourself a nice villa, kick out the people who live there, and take it over. We were lucky—this happened to be a Nazi architect whom we were going to arrest anyway—so it wasn't too difficult to kick him out. He had a very, very good housekeeper who was his wife's sister, and she was very interested in making sure that we didn't ruin his house. We had a housekeeper that really took good care of us, because she took care of the house more than us. It was very nice, she was a good cook. We provided all the food, she cooked. She probably snuck a little bit of the extra food away because they weren't having much food. They were living pretty tight at the time. They also had a beautiful, beautiful German Shepard.
What was its name?
Horst. It's a German first name.
Does it mean anything?
Doesn't mean anything, it's just a name.
Were there any other important people that you interrogated after or during the war?
Yes, before Nuremberg, I'll come to that in a minute. As we were moving along obviously a good number of major German military personnel that we captured, or that surrendered. Again, I've got some pictures of some of them. When we were down in Southern Bavaria, a farmer came in and told us that they had been to the ski hut and somebody was hiding out in the ski hut. He thought it wasn't kosher—it wasn't good—so why don't we see if we can get out. He and I and two or three other guys from the division went up because we didn't know what the hell was up there. We didn't know what kind of weapons or anything. This was Hitler's adjutant. You may remember that somewhere shortly before the end of the war there was an attempt to kill Hitler while he was at the Eastern Headquarters. A bomb went off under the big conference table and Hitler and his adjutant were standing next to each other there and the briefcase with the bomb was between them, so Hitler got hurt on one side and this guy was hurt on the other side. We caught him. I think there is a picture of him in the book.
Schaub. Eulias Shaubt. Shaub seems like a sleazy character but I can understand that he'd been hiding up in this mountain cabin unshaven, probably hasn't taken a shower for three weeks. He was hiding out, no resistance. When we got up to the hut he came out—"I give up"—finished. By that time they weren't fighting anymore. They had enough. They just wanted to get something to eat and get into a place that was warm.
Within a week or two at the end of the war we're in Southern Bavaria and we're told that Heydrich was living there and had a house. Heydrich was Himmler's chief deputy, SS. He had organized many of the concentration camps and was one of the really bad guys. He had been in Italy with one of the SS military divisions and we had heard that he had escaped from Italy and come back home. So two of us went in—we knew where his wife was living, Mrs. Heydrich—so we went to see if he was there. Two women—Mrs. Heydrich and Mrs. Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner was the head of the Secret Police. The two sisters—very tall, very blond, very Brunhilder kind of Valkyrian ladies. They received us very graciously and showed us all over the house to prove that the boys weren't there, and they weren't. I do remember very clearly going all the way down into the cellar, checking it out. They had this beautifully furnished wine cellar with cubby holes. Al who was with me—as he was down in this wine cellar with this full load of wines stacked up—under his breath said, "I bet they don't have any good scotch." Mrs. Heydrich reaches up to the top shelf and pulls out a bottle of very old, very good scotch. They had everything they wanted.
They were just tired of...
Yes, at that point they were finished. These ladies were still dedicated Nazis, no question. They were among the top tier. They were the aristocracy of the Nazi party.
Did your being a Jew ever come up when you were encountering these—
No, not particularly. I didn't make a particular point of it. It never really came up. Later on during occupation—when I got to deal with city councils and citizens—it did come up occasionally. I didn't make a particular point of it. I was there as an American soldier. I think I mentioned when I was sitting on top of the aircraft carrier, my job was not to seek personal revenge but to do my job.
After nine months, the war has been over for a while. What brought you to Nuremberg?
The trials were going and this was sort of parallel to the first major trials, the Goering, Himmler et cetera trials. There were thousands of people who were going through trial systems. They didn't have enough people there that knew enough to interrogate people to be witnesses. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there that had been captured to be witnesses against some of the major criminals. They were sitting in prison waiting for somebody to find out what they could tell. Somebody finally figured out, “Why don't we call a bunch of people in from the field who speak German, who know something about what is going on, and have them go through and interrogate these people to see if they're worth keeping?” There were five thousand people sitting in these prisons in Nuremberg waiting to be interrogated. Within three weeks, five of us went through almost five thousand people and screened them just to see if it was worth keeping them, if it was worth waiting for them to say something.
How many of them ended up staying?
I can't remember. When it came down to it probably not that terribly many. You only needed a half a dozen good witnesses. There was enough dirt on these guys. You didn't need to have to pile it up.
How much of the trial did you get to experience?
I just went in one day when we had a break in these interviews just to see what was going on. I must have stayed two or three hours.
Who was on trial?
The first major group—Goering and Himmler and you know—not Himmler, he killed himself—Ribenntrop. If you saw the movie Nuremberg Trials, that whole bunch.
Were they in the room when you were there?
They were there in the prison dock. There were the British judges and the American judges and the Russian judges and the French judges and the American prosecutor and etc. They all were going and this was all being done in God knows how many languages.
What else did you do while you were in Nurenburg? What did you do on your free time?
Who had free time?
The key is really, when we're talking Nurenburg trials, it's generally focused on the one that the Nurenburg trial movie was made on. Spencer Tracy being prosecutor - I think - or the judge. This was the big trial of the first key ten/twelve/fifteen big Nazis. The Nurenburg trials went on for three/four/five years. A whole bunch of trials of a whole bunch of people who were all different levels. Many of them were sentenced to death, many for life in prison, many were sent home. Nurenburg trials is a very large piece of the action, if you will.
Were the people you were interrogating generally willing to be witnesses in these trials?
At that point, who had a choice? If you want to eat, talk. The one thing that struck me more than anything else about - and I hate to do this because I really ahte to talk about a peoples' character - but there is something about the German's phsyche that, if you're the boss, you're the boss, and they will do what they're told. We were down in Southern Bavaria in one of the little villages and I'm the city hall - the town hall - have an office up in a little turret and they're bringing in a bunch of young kids, fifteen/sixteen/seventeen from the Hitler Youth who had been captured. By that time they had gotten in to the army and were all armed and they were going to fight. They weren't going to give up. Well, they had been captured. I started interrogating one of the kids, and he says, "We just did what we were told. They were the bosses." I said, "And now I'm the boss, right?" -"Yes sir." -"ANd you'll have to do what I tell you." -"Yes sir." I went to open the window, this is three stories up. I said, "Jump out." He walked right up to the window. I stopped him, but he would have jumped out without any question. We can't imagine that. You tell that to a GI, he'd tell you, "Go kiss my ass." We don't do that. It's a totally different psyche. That's why the ideal of the kind of camps, the kind of treatments, the kind of incomprehensible treatments are so difficult for us to understand, to comprehend. It's so out of our frame of reference. Just to get political, I am concerned that we are moving in to somewhat the same direction all too often. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo ????, etc. It's too easy to move into that if we don't watch it.
Could you give us a basic outline of what you did before you went back to America?
I should point out I was basically stationed outside of Frankfurt doing my job in my county. I was pulled to Nurenburg only to help out grinding through some of the thousands of interrogations. Otherwise, I had no business in Nurenburg. It was fascinating, but that's it. Ended up in Buttumbok, screened people for public jobs, and you name it. Had a pretty good time actually. By that time, things were settled down, we were living a pretty good life.
When did you go back to America?
Actually, it was suggested to me that - at that time I was still a staff sargeant - Mr. Monasch. Big deal. They wanted to keep me over there so they offered me a commission. By that time, I was tired of the army. I said, "Thank you, no." Then they offered me a civillian job - a real civilian, not the phony civilian that I'd been all those years. At that point I wanted to come home, so in the spring of '46 I came home. At that point, the GI bill was available. I had a high school degree and nothing else. I had taken some college courses, but not formally. I ended up going to college. ???? my life.
You talk about being over in Germany towards the end of the war and immediately afer the war and it sounds like you're free agents, you know what I mean? What were your orders? How did you know where to go? Talk about that a little bit.
We had no orders. It was the most unusual army experience that you could have. Yes, I am sure that there was some commanding officer somewhere who was responsible to somebody else and who made reports to somebody else. We were free agents. Nobody knew where the hell we were going. Little example: my best friend, who was in the quartermaster corps, ended up somewhere near Berlin. He is originally from Berlin, so he ended up there. He spent some time in Paris, met this girl in Paris, who originally came from Berlin, and fell in love and he was going to get married. He called me one day and said, "Hey, do you want to come to my wedding?" "Where?" "In Paris.' "Okay, Why not." "Can you get some cigarettes?" "Sure." So, I got, I think, about five, six cartons of cigarettes which was like gold and hopped on a train to Paris and went to Paris for his wedding—spent a week in Paris. Nobody signed me out. Nobody signed me off. I got no permission to go any place. Nobody knew where I was, even when I was on my job, most of the time. Again, it was so totally unmilitary. I was a civilian.
Were you trained to be independent?
No. We just took it over. We just did it. It's like being a high school senior. In order to do our job, we winged it. Half the time people didn't know where we were chasing somebody, if we were chasing somebody, or if we were shacked up some place.
You said that you didn't even have radio communications.
We had no radio.
How did you know how to report back or where to bring these people? Who reported back?
I arrested people and sent them to prison camp.
What happened to them later?
I don't know. I think I filled in some forms that went with them as they were sent in. I can't remember.
You were like rogue vigilantes? You could just wander around?
We were—in a sense—rogue vigilantes. As long as we were keeping the prison line filled out, nobody seemed to worry about it. And many of the prisoners probably—there's a German saying ???????. You get caught together, you get hanged together. I'm quite sure there were a lot of people who were caught in the flow of prisoners that had no business being there, but when we got there we got a list of automatic arrests. Anybody that was beyond a sergeant in the army was automatically to be arrested. If you were less than that, only if we found some dirt on you. It's easy to find dirt. And if you're not sure, arrest them. Let somebody else worry about it. If you were in the party, you're in. If you're in the SS, you're obviously in. So you go through some of this and actually there were a few of us—who knew enough about what was going on— that there were some people who were on the automatic arrest category who had no business on it. Quite often, some of us let them go—and certified and gave them papers that would explain why.
There was a guy near Trier in the Rhineland. He was brought into my office. He was an SS major. Now that's a given arrest—bad guy. I started interviewing him. He was a doctor. He'd never been in the party. He was a horse fancier. He liked dressage, training horses to hop nicely and do all this stuff. That was his life, training horse and treating people. [In] 1938, '39, the SS was interested in having a horse troop. So, they went to him and wanted his horses and he said, "You can't have my horses." They said, "We're going to take your horses"—"Well, if you're going to take my horses, you got to take me because I'm going to go with my horses; I'm want to take care of them." So he became an SS major. A doctor, who likes horses. Obviously he was brought in. We screened him. I checked it out very carefully. I found it was true. So, I sent him home. Be a doctor, enjoy. Most people would have just sent him to a prison camp, forget it. But somewhere you got to try and make sense out of it. We shouldn't be the same as they were. We shouldn't be doing what we fought against. There were a few other situations like this. I found an SS sergeant who was a clarinetist, a concert clarinetist. The SS had created a band. He was in the band. He played music. He ended up being one of the world class clarinet soloists. He was brought in, obviously eligible to be arrested. I sent him home. Go play music.
Telling His Story
How have all your experiences throughout the war and throughout your interrogations—finding people out to be Nazis or still believe in what the Nazis believed in—changed how you live your life and your opinions on wars in general?
Coming back to a couple of the things I just recently talked about, I hope I learned—one, to question orders—just because something is so, doesn't necessarily mean it is. Sometimes it's important to look behind what people are and who they are and what they do—good and bad. I think I learned to look at what are people's motives and why do they do things the way they do. I ended up eventually being a city planner. Why do people want to build what they want to build? Why do they want to live the way they want to live? How much is it my job to control what they do and how they live. Whether that's in the military service, or whether that's in living in a community—How do we find a balance between control and freedom.
How do we let people be who they are while keeping them from interfering with other people's right to be who they are. We are different. We have different upbringings. We have different traditions. We have different national characters. We have different religious patterns of behavior. How do we learn to live with each other that way. I hate the word tolerant because when you tolerate somebody, you put up with them. You recognize their flaws. You can overlook there flaws. That's not enough. We need to respect them, their behaviors. That's not tolerant. That's respecting. We don't have to agree with them, but we have to recognize where they come from knowing that we come from many different things. I come from a tradition that was very—the German Jewish tradition—that was very German, very Teutonic if you will—discipline, strict behavior patterns and so on. Much more than so then you would find in the general Jewish community and certainly different from the broad range of American communities. You walk into a German school room, it's different from walking into an American schoolroom—very different. But, If you've learned to understand that—and work within it and work with it—, neither is necessarily right, or wrong. They're just different. All too often, we see things as being right and wrong. If it's our way, it's right and if it's their way, it's wrong. Maybe so, but maybe not.
