Document

JOHN DOLIBOIS May 11, 2000 Beginning Tape One

Q: Good morning, Ambassador Dolibois, it's a very nice to have you here in Washington.

A: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.

Q: Tell me, what was your full name at birth.

A: Well, actually, it was Jean, J-e-a-n. Jean Ernest Dolibois, pronounced Dolibois in Luxembourg because it is a -- a French name. My father is Parisian -- Parisian ancestry, so in -- in Europe it's Dolibois. But Dolibois like Illinois in the United States, it makes it a lot easier, so that's just a -- but a -- when I became naturalized, I paid a dollar extra for the naturalization fee, to change the Jean, J-e-a-n, which would be pronounced Jean, to John, J-o-h-n. So at least my first name is still a -- Americanized.

Q: And tell me what year you were born and where in Luxembourg you were born.

A: I was born in Luxembourg City, actually a s-s -- the suburb Bonava, of Luxembourg City, on the avenue -- on the Rue de Chicago, predestination apparently. And the -- I was born on December fourth, 1918. My -- was immediately after -- shortly after the signing of the armistice and I was born the youngest of eight children. Unfortunately my mother died 10 days later. So my oldest sister Marie had to step in and -- and play the role of my mother. And she actually raised me. In fact, up until the day she died, I called her mom, you know, she was -- al-although she was my sister.

Q: That's interesting.

A: But she actually is involved in my coming to the United States as an immigrant. I don't know if you want to hear that --

Q: Yeah, I do, I do, yes, I kn --

A: -- romantic story, because it is that. Well after World War I, we did have American occupation troops in Luxembourg because the United States -- the Americans had liberated Luxembourg from four years of occupation by the Germans. So there were American troops stationed in Luxembourg and some Americans were billeted in our home. And as things would happen, my sister was 19 years old, fell in love with one of the Americans, and they planned to get married, if -- when he got out of the service. But then I was born, my mother died, and my sister had to take care of the rest of the family and play the role of mother. So the American came back empty handed, but they corresponded with each other for 10 years. He came back in 1929 and married her and brought her to the United States, to Akron. Meanwhile my brothers and si -- brothers and sisters had all grown up and married, and my father and I were all alone.

So my father, who had pretty good political sense, and could look across the Mosselle river and see what was happening in Germany, and he didn't see much of a future for -- for me, at least, in Luxembourg, and he thought history could repeat itself, so he decided we ought to get out, come to the United States and take advantage of the land of opportunity. And so my father and I came to the States in 1931 --

Q: Let me ask you --

A: -- and joined my sister now.

Q: Uh-huh. It's quite a story about your sister --

A: Yeah.

Q: -- I must say, 10 years of correspondence that --

A: Right.

Q: -- I'm sure is a rare -- rare story. I -- 1 -- I understand from your autobiography that your -- your dad and you were quite different and your interest in education did not match his interest, is that true? Was that difficult?

A: Yeah, my -- my father, who was a -- a very loving father and I respected him greatly, and -- and love him dearly, but he was not what we think of as a dad in the United States, there. There was no such thing as going to a ballgame or even going on vacation. I don't remember my father ever taking me on a vacation trip or anything. He worked -- he worked hard, he was in the construction business. But we had eight children, I was the -- the youngest of the eight and my father had been quite successful in business. All of my brothers, with one exception, all worked for my father. They all went into the building trade, plastering and bricklaying and carpentry, and each one of them had a specialty and they worked in my father's company. And naturally that's what was in store for me. Well, for some reason or other I had different ideas, I'm -- I had ambitions. So when we came to the United States my father resisted my interest in having an education, and he -- he liked to point out that he never went to college, and he never even went to high school, and he was a success in life, why did I want to waste my time? And he had peculiar ideas, and -- you know. Don't read so much, you" ll ge -- you" lI ruin your eyes. And he didn't even want me to have a bicycle because he said it was a useless article, y-you pump your legs off to give your rear end a ride, you know. But he had very narrow views about that sort of thing.

But strangely enough, when I insisted and followed my own path, he was the first one to step up front and point with pride. And he did really enjoy whatever success I had in school. He -- he took upon himself to let everybody know that -- when I became a valedictorian in high school, he -- he patted himself on the back, too, it's -- it's a --

Q: Do you think he was frightened in some way of the difference that -- how you were different from --

A: Of -- that's absolute -- that's absolutely right, he -- he -- he never adapted. And he made the sacrifice, coming to the United States, for my sake. And I've always given him credit for that.

But he never assimilated. He never wanted to be part of the -- he -- he didn't even bother to learn the language. He wanted to just remain what -- what he was. And proud of it. But -- and so I didn't fit that pattern, right, I created a pattern of my own. And naturally, with his old fashioned, basically European viewpoint, he just didn't -- didn't see that. He couldn't agree with that. I mean, we didn't have any arguments about it, but he would just pooh pooh the idea, na -- da -- you don't need to do that, I never did it, look at me. And --

Q: And did your sister support your -- your doing what --

A: Oh yeah, she -- as much as poss -- but I had to be pretty much on my own, because I -- I was - - made perfectly clear that I wasn't going to sponge off of my sister and her family. She had her - - her own child, she had one daughter, Madeline. And -- so it was still possible to do it in the United States --

Q: Yeah.

A: -- the land of opportunity, and for me it was.

Q: Did your dad work when he came over here, or did he stop working?

A: Well, he wa -- he was really -- he stopped working as far as following his trade was concerned. But he did work around the neighborhood. He would, you know, repair things for -- for people and do some small building jobs and that sort of thing, and -- but we sold our family homestead -- our family home, and my father could pretty much live on that. He -- he was up in years, he was a --

Q: Yeah.

A: -- see, well it's the 50 -- he was born in 1972 -- a -- 1872 rather.

Q: 1872. Right, so he wasn't such a young --

A: So, he was retired.

Q: Yeah.

A: And so. But he did manage to keep busy around the neighborhood and -- in Akron and earn some pocket money and so forth, but there was never a -- never any want, I mean --

Q: So he never learned English?

A: No, no.

Q: Interesting.

A: He -- oh, he never [indecipherable]

Q: He never learned English?

A: No, no, it -- he could -- he'd read the paper, at least he pretended to read, and he kept pretty much informed of what's going on. But there was a German church in -- in Akron that he went to. At least one sermon was preached in German in Saint Bernard church, I recall. So he kept up his contacts that way, and he subscribed to a -- a Luxembourg paper and a German paper. He could read German. Although he was born in f -- in France, his French was not very good. He was primarily Germanic because his family had moved from Paris to the Saar Basin, at the time that Saar was still a part of France.

Q: Right.

A: Of course, the Saar went back and forth and one time German, then it was independent, and then it was again part of France. So in the Saar almost everybody spoke French and German, too.

Q: Right.

A: But my father primarily spoke the Saar dialect, which is very close to the Luxembourg patois.

Q: Did you like -- did you like the idea of coming to the United States? Were you happy about that?

A: Well, I think -- you know, I wa -- I was -- the only movies I saw at Luxembourg were American movies and they were cowboy movies, Tom Mix and Hoot Gibson. And the idea of cowboys and Indians appealed to me. There's an author that every boy in -- in Luxembourg, and for that matter, I think in western Europe reads as a boy and those are a series of novels about the American Indians and cowboys, written by Karl May. And everybody has read Karl May, as I did. And so I fantasized, I had ideas of what life was like in United States. That part appealed to me very much, but I was 12 years old, going on 13, and the idea of also leaving all my friends, and the culture that I was used to in Luxembourg, that created some problems, so I had a conflict. I was excited in one way, and another way a -- I could hardly wait to have it happen.

Q: Right.

A: Yet, I -- I was afraid of it. So the -- I didn't want to leave, so --

Q: Wh-When you came here in "31, it's two years prior to the Nazis taking over in Germany.

When they take over in Germany, does that impact you at all? I mean, you're still European in some way, so the consciousness of what's going on in Europe --

A: Oh, I think I was too young to be aware of -- of really what was going on. I don't think that I became particularly interested in what was happening. Wa -- once we got to the States, I did, I think, what I now think every immigrant should do. First of all concentrate on learning the language, and I -- I couldn't speak a word of English, so I had work pretty hard, because I went to school, public school, and they immediately sent me back two years. I should have been in the eighth grade, and I ended up in the sixth grade, but before that I -- they put me in kindergarten.

And here I am 13 years old, and I'm in kindergarten, the biggest boy in class, but that was the only advantage. But I had to learn English from the bottom up, and I spent th-three months in kindergarten and then a couple of more months in the third grade. And then moved me up to, finally, the sixth grade, and I went on from there. But I think I concentrated on becoming a Boy Scout, and becoming Americanized, and I -- I loved the Boy Scout experience. That contributed a great deal to my Americanization. And learning the language was -- was a challenge. And as I say, assimilating, which I -- I think is essential to become a part of the American scene, you know, you should. So I didn't -- I really sort of forgot all about Luxembourg and -- to the point where even corresponding with my friends became secondary and I didn't do much of it any more. That all came back later, see.

Q: Right. But all of your brothers and sisters, except for Marie, are -- are in Luxembourg.

A: One more brother had come to Chicago.

Q: Uh-huh.

A: [had a brother in Chicago, my brother Ted. And my sister Marie in Akron. All the others were -- were back in Luxembourg.

Q: So was there some concern then, when the war started in "39 --

A: Very much so, and of course, after the war started, there was no communication, and no mail, we couldn't get any. After the -- the Germans occupied Luxembourg, mail service to the United States was just unheard of. The only way -- I think once or twice we did get some communication from one of my brothers, because somebody who was going to another country, mailed a letter for him, I -- I do recall my -- my father getting a letter once from my brother Heinrich that way. But there was no communication. N-No such thing as transatlantic telephone

calls, and -- and the mail service was nonexistent. But there th -- there's definitely a -- a cessation of communication. There was just no -- no way of being in touch, so --

Q: So when did you gra -- you graduated high school when, in "38, deg39?

A: 1938.

Q: 738?

A: Yes. Akron -- Akron North High School. That --

Q: So then the question is w-well now what? Because now you have to pave the way for the next step [indecipherable]

A: Well, I had -- as I say, I had pretty much made up my mind, and -- and -- and this is a -- again, the -- the a -- the hero worship that we're all guilty of in our youth, and I had picked my hero. He was a scout executive, a camp director. My favorite place in the United States as a boy was the scout camp, Camp Manatoc in Akron, Ohio, that I attended regularly. In fact, I remember my junior year in high school, I spent more nights at camp than I did in my own bed at home. But I loved Camp Manatoc, an -- an -- an ideal boy scout camp, and the man who was camp director of it, was just the -- he was my idol. He was the kind of man I wanted to be in every way. Tall, and handsome and -- and a beautiful singing voice, a speaking voice. A lot of personality and that is what I wanted to be like. And I decided I would be a professional scout executive so I could be like Mr. Josselle and follow in that -- that pattern. So naturally that meant an education and going to college, and my ambition was to get a college degree and go into professional scouting. And I had the audacity at that time to write to the chief scout executive, Dr. James E. West, I recall at that time, professional scout executive. And they answered my letter, and we started up a correspondence. He s -- sort of became my -- my mentor by mail, encouraging me on what to study in high school and college and preparing myself for a

professional career in scouting. So that was my idea. Well, at scout camp I met some of the younger leaders, who were students at Miami University. And there was also one who was a -- a graduate of Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania. And both of these interests, they started recruiting me for their particular institution. And I did get a scholarship at Washington and Jefferson. And it was worth a lot more financially than another scholarship I had at Miami University, so I decided to go to Washington and Jefferson. And I would graduate and then go to the Schiff scout reservation and become a professional scout executive. That was my ambition. Then I fell in love and -- during the summer of 1938, I met the young lady whom I subsequently married. And we decided during our summer romance that we would go to college together. And that meant going to a co-educational school. So --

Q: You switched.

A: Washington and Jefferson was a male school, all male. So I ended up taking the scholarship from Miami University because then we can go together.

Q: Right.

A: That wasn't the only reason. Miami also had a good reputation, was a good school and there were a lot of alumni who influenced me at scout camp. So we made a very happy choice. And we both enrolled at Miami University and went all through college together, four years.

Q: And what were you studying there?

A: Oh, I majored in psychology, again at Dr. West's suggestion. As a scout executive he thought psychology ought to be my major because it's working with people, understanding people, and working with scouts and the whole leadership concept, so I majored in psychology for that particular reason, so --

Q: Which became very fortuitous for you later on when [indecipherable]

A: Yeah, came -- s-served me -- it served me very well --

Q: Right.

A: -- later on too, see, Particular at -- it tied in as part of my pattern of circles into what eventually did happen during the war and --

Q: Right.

A: -- my career in the military and afterwards, so --

Q: Now, by the time you're at the university, you're a young man, you're in love and having a rela -- a relationship. Are you now much more conscious of the war in -- in an everyday way?

A: Oh yes, th-the -- the minute wore broke out we became very conscious of it.

Q: Yes.

A: And of course we were in school, we were in -- you know, in an education institution and I was taking a lot of courses that involved current events and development in Europe. And then because of my European connection, I really went into that as a -- I became an avid follower of the news, of what was happening in -- in -- in Luxembourg particularly after the Germans invaded Luxembourg. You know, after all, they were invading my homeland. Now I became very much concermed and followed it very closely. And I think what -- what added to the -- the stimulus there was not being able to communicate with anybody in Luxembourg, and that sort of added an extra challenge, or pizzazz to the whole relationship.

Q: Right.

A: But I was very conscious of what was going on in Europe by then, so --

Q: Were there courses on the rise of Nazism, on th-the kind of society, or -- or was it too soon for that sort of thing?

A: Much too soon.

Q: Much too soon.

A: Actually, a -- an-and this is something that -- that really struck me during the war and after the war and now, in retrospect, how very little we knew about what was going on in Germany. We really -- from the in -- the military intelligence standpoint and the political intelligence standpoint, we had no idea what Nazism was all about, I mean the headlines, nothing in depth.

And much of what we did learn, scratchy as it was -- sketchy as it was, was written off as propaganda.

Q: Uh-huh.

A: You know, it's the sort of thing we -- we said about the Germans in World War I. And you know, there were the America [indecipherable] who were very active in the early stage, 1939 - 1940, before Pearl Harbor and before we got involved. And there was this feeling of this is not our war, this is none of our business, and -- so what little we did know that could be introduced in a history class or political science class was either propaganda or as I say, was on the surface, nothing really in depth. And it wasn't, until we got involved in the war, and began to make personal contact with prisoners of war, and with German government officials, that we began to become aware of what Nazism is all about. And this is what made my own assignment such a big challenge. We were pioneering in military intelligence work.

Q: So tell me, when -- le-let me just go back a little bit, although I'm trying to figure out how old you were. In 1938, when Kristallnacht happens in Germany and there's all these riots and 30,000 pe -- Jews are put into -- arrested, do you hear about this?

A: No.

Q: You don't?

A: What -- what we did here, as I say, was -- was very sketchy. Remember now, we were no longer allowing refugees to come to United States.

Q: Right.

A: We actually turned them away, as you know, which I think is one of the -- the dark sides in American history. But no German immigrants came to the United States after the -- the war began. And -- and after Nazism, when the Germans starting working on a final solution. So the information we had, as I say, was -- was very incomplete and a lot of it was written off as -- as propaganda.

Q: Right, right.

A: We -- we really didn't know -- Kristallnacht, that could be a perfectly good propaganda story.

Q: Uh-huh.

A: A-And so what? So they were going around breaking windows, who cared? We -- we didn't really take any of that seriously, unfortunately.

Q: Did you hear about the Nazi Olympics in "36, and the issue of should Jewish boys go -- go over and participate, or not?

A: D-During the 1936 --

Q: 1936.

A: -- Olympic?

Q: Yes, yes.

A: Oh yes, well of course, we were very excited about our own Jesse Owens --

Q: Right.

A: -- and -- and proud of that.

Q: Right.

A: But that was -- that really had nothing to do with the politics of it as far as we as young people are concerned --

Q: Right, right.

A: -- in other words, gee, our boy won --

Q: Right.

A: -- and so one of our -- one of our guys made it. And we didn't relate that to the philosophy of Nazism versus democracy or -- or anything else, no, no.

Q: So tell me, you --

A: We were quite naive.

Q: Yeah.

A: Yeah.

Q: You both -- you graduated and got married in 1942, is that right?

A: We -- we got married first.

Q: First.

A: Which -- you know, Miami University, like many other institutions, Miami University is a state institution and very strict regulations. I remember when we started going to college, my freshman year boys and girls didn't even sit together at a football game.

Q: Really?

A: I mean, we had a woman's section and a men's section. And that changed during the course of my freshman year. But there was a lot of strict regulation. Girls had to be in at 11 o'clock at night on Fridays, 10 o'clock during the week. No telephone calls after 10 o'clock, or before three o'clock in the afternoon. It was very rigid. The idea of two students being married to each other and going to school at Miami University was -- that just didn't exist. Well, then came Pearl

Harbor, in December "40 -- 1941, and I -- I felt -- I -- I really felt that I wanted -- not only would get involved, but wanted to get involved. And so I signed up for the navy, a special [indecipherable] program. I was going to go in the navy and get -- when I graduated, and through [indecipherable] program I could go to a special training school and graduate as an ensign in the navy and that would be the natural thing for me to do. So we knew that was going to happen, and if that's the case, then we wanted to get married before I left. So the university had, meanwhile, changed the rules after Pearl Harbor and many of the students who wanted to get married, could.

Now we were the first to sign up. So in January 17", 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, a little over, we got married on the weekend in Oxford. I remember our classes were dismissed. Our professors came to our wedding. We still have a -- a film of a -- of our wedding that my father- in-law took, and -- of all my professors coming to our wedding, including the president of the university and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Upham. And they gave us special permission to get married. And we started it and then of course there were others who did the same thing. Well, as it turned out, I didn't get that navy program because I hadn't been a naturalized citizen long enough. You -- you -- and I don't know if the navy still has that rule, but you could not become an officer in the navy, air force or marines, unless you'd been a American citizen 10 years. You could be an officer in the army, but not in the other branches. So I had gone through all the procedures of joining this [indecipherable] program when they decided I hadn't been a citizen long enough and didn't qualify. So I just continued my course. Then the draft board got me.

Naturally, and we expected that.

Q: Right.

A: And they put me in one B. That was a -- one A were drafted immediately, one B you were postponed because you were in school, or -- and I had a slight vision problem in my left eye,

which I didn't even know about. So they classified me one B, which meant we could get married -- we could graduate. We were married, we could graduate. So we actually graduated in June of 1942. And meanwhile I got a job with Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati, and we set up housekeeping in Cincinnati. And then in November of "42, one B number came up and my postponement -- postponement had ended. So on November 13", 1942, I got the word, you know, you're now in the army. So that changed everything, so we were ready to go. We anticipated it all along, just a matter of time, you know. And believe it or not, you know, I was drafted, but I really was eager to go. I felt I'd benefited so much and -- and I don't have a false sense of patriotism, it's very genuine. I really thought I wanted to serve and at the same time there was a relationship with -- I wanted to help liberate Luxembourg, so there's a little bit of that entered into it as well, so it was a -- a mutual, satisfying agreement.

Q: So do you go first to basic training?

A: Oh yes, yes.

Q: Yes.

A: Basic training.

Q: How basic was it?

A: Well, th-that, of course, is a -- you know, every once in awhile I ma -- I'm making a speech and -- and I have a lot of fun explaining how I actually ended up where I eventually did. But I know when I was inducted at Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and a -- a -- a young personnel officer, I think was a corporal or a PFC asked me what I could do, and I told him I could speak German fluently and I'd like to get into -- into military intelligence. And his answer, "Well did you ever drive a truck?" I said, "No, but I can speak German fluently." I wasn't going to give up so easily.

But he wanted to know if I could drive a bus or a tractor, or -- or plow with something heavy,

with air brakes, and -- and no | didn't qualify for any of that. But by that time my minute and a half was over, and I ended up being sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky to be a tank driver. That's what they needed that particular day. So I started my career in the army being trained to be a tank driver. I was in the armored force, armored force replacement training center at Fort Knox. So I learn how to drive a heavy vehicle in the armored force, even a motorcycle, which I hated. But the big trucks and armored cars and tanks; fired every weapon from a revolver on up to the big Howitzers and, you know, it's kind of exciting, right? I -- I -- I kind of liked it. So, after I finished my basic training, I did have a college degree, the army decided I was officer material.

So I became one of those 90 day wonders. I went to officer's candidate school and after 90 days at Fort Knox, I got a commission as a second lieutenant. And incidentally got my commission from General George S. Patton, Jr. General Patton was the commencement speaker when I -- I graduated. And my commission was in mechanized cavalry, and since Patton was a cavalry general, he pinned a cavalry insignia on the -- the members of my class who were taken into the mechanized cavalry, there were 10 of us -- 10 of us. So I thought that was a -- a good beginning of my career. Course Patton wasn't as famous then as -- as he subsequently became, but --

Q: Can you explain what mechanized cavalry is?

A: Well, you know, the horse cavalry.

Q: Right.

A: Well, during World War II, we're -- we're now --

Q: [indecipherable] horses.

A: -- mechanized cavalry, and the mechanized cavalry is light -- light tanks and fast moving vehicles, Jeeps, light tanks and light armored cars, half tracks, actually. And the mechanized cavalry is used for reconnaissance. They're in the forefront, they're reconnoitering th-the terrain

and enemy strength. So reconnaissance is the -- the spearhead of an armored division, and armored division, of course, are your heavy guns and your heavy tanks, and you have your c- cavalry reconnaissance for the lead, to explore the territory ahead, so -- and that was the purpose of the mechanized cavalry. I was assigned to the 23" cavalry reconnaissance squadron of the 16" armored division, Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. So after I got my commission, that was my first military assignment, in Arkansas, 16" armored division, so -- then, months later, the army found out I could speak German.

Q: It finally got to them.

A: And that ties into what -- what I said earlier. We were ready to invade North Africa and we were going to begin to make our first eyeball to eyeball contact with the enemy and it suddenly occurred to somebody here in Washington that gee, you know, what are we going to talk to them about? And who's going to do the talking? We hadn't thought of setting up ike -- IPW teams, or counterintelligence teams, or -- we hadn't even thought of military government, in case we won the war. So all of a sudden the lights went on and they decided we got to round up all the people who can speak German. So regardless of where you belonged, or regardless of what your background was, if you spoke German, you -- you got yanked into military intelligence. And just a -- acry went out, order went out, cooks, bakers, quartermasters, even some medical personnel, all put in the military intelligence.

Q: Hm.

A: And we were sent to Camp Richie, Camp Richie, Maryland, which is the Maryland National Guard camp, about 90 miles north of Washington. And that became the secret training center for military intelligence personnel. And that's where I ended up on very short notice, from Arkansas

to Camp Richie, Maryland. So I was transferred from the armored force to military intelligence.

And my specialty then wa-was interrogating prisoners of war. That's what I was trained to do.

Q: How many of you were sent there [indecipherable] Richie, Maryland, do you think?

A: Oho, that is a -- you know, i-if I were younger and had the ambition, I'd write another book and I -- I would just write about Camp Richie, because that was the most fascinating place. You could -- there was a poem that a very intelligent military intelligence officer wrote, and it starts out, was you ever at Camp Richie, the [indecipherable] of all, where the sun comes up like [indecipherable] recorded bugle call. And that's the way the poem starts out. You could hear every language under the sun spoken at Camp Richie, Maryland. And they brought in people -- not just German speaking, French, Italian, Arabic, everything. You -- you -- we had a conglomeration of people. And quite a few, including quite a few Jewish refugees who had come to the United States earlier, who had been taken into the army, they were all sent to Camp Richie because they were the only ones who could speak fluent German still. And they were the ideal military government and military intelligence personnel. Their -- their f -- their German was fluent. There were very few a -- a that type of German speaking military personnel available. So most of the others were people who had studied German in school, or majored in German in college, or had German parents who spoke German at home. But the real fluent German speaker -- and a lot of our intelligent officers were -- were Jewish. My colleagues at -- that I lived with were all refugee families who had come to these United States early, in the 30's, with their families. So all these people were thrown together and they had different sections, there were eight sections all together, and I was in section five, that was the IPW section. But there were the CIC, the counter-intelligence, there was the photo interpretation, the photo intelligence, people who studied aerial photos and -- and could make sense out of -- out of that particular effort. And

th-there were the OSS people, and ha-hand to hand combat people who worked behind the lines, the forerunner of the CIA. We -- we trained them in everything, and we had regular German prisoners of war, the very first who had been taken in North Africa were brought to Camp Richie. And the -- we -- you know, we had a chance to practice first hand --

Q: I was going to --

A: -- with real German prisoners. So it was a -- a very exciting place. What we taught then was German army organization, which we knew nothing about. National Socialism, which we knew very little about. All the paramilitary organizations under the Hitler regime, we didn't know what the NSKK was, or the NSFK, the National Socialist Flying Corps, National Socialist Motor Corps. This was the paramilitary that the Hitler regime had organized. These people were getting subtle military training by belonging to the truck driver's corps, or the flying corps, but they were being prepared for military. So there were a lot of those. Germany was limited to a hundred thousand man army, but bor -- by the time Hitler was ready to invade Poland, he had more than a hundred thousand men, I mean, well trained from the Hitler youth on up. We didn't know that.

We had to learn about all these things. We learned about the characteristics and the personalities of the high ranking Nazis; we knew nothing about them. If you've heard of the film, "Triumph des Willens", that was our -- our text -- o-our textbook, I should say. Every Thursday I recall, all the classes -- the German classes were brought together in a theater at -- at Camp Richie, and we showed Leni Riefenstahl's, "Triumph des Willens," a three hour documentary of a Nuremberg rally. And that was the only documentary film, and the only photographic evidence we had of the Nazi leaders, like Hess, and Goering, and Stryker, and Lie, and seeing them perform in this, "Triumph des Willens," in this film, was the only way that our -- our trainees could learn anything about what these Nazis even looked like. That was the beginning of it, and that's all we

had to go on. So our training was somewhat primitive. We had limited intelligence, really, because we hadn't done much over there in the way of gathering information, so --

Q: So who were -- who were the teachers? Were they historians, or were they mil -- another set of military intelligence people?

A: They were -- they were people like me. For instance, the course lasted two months, and during that time you learned or-order battle and German army, all the things that I mentioned.

Then you were sent overseas as a member of an IPW team, which consisted of two officers and three or four enlisted men, all trained at Richie. And you would go overseas and be assigned to a division, or -- or a regiment, or even an army group, or an army, as interrogator and when those units advanced and took prisoners, the IPW team interrogated them. So Camp Richie was feeding all these interrogators and other intel-telligence personnel to the different divisions as fast as we could produce them. Well, every once in awhile there'd be a graduate like me, who also had pretty good training -- [phone ringing]

Q: Excuse me [indecipherable] stop? Are we okay? I'm sorry, I didn't unplug the phone. They should know when to call back here.

A: Changing film?

Q: No, there was a f -- the f -- the -- the telephone rang, for some reason.

A: Oh, oh.

Q: Can you find the plug? That's -- you're having trouble [indecipherable]. All right, we're back from our little interruptions. You were talking about --

A: Yeah, well, there were people like me --

Q: Right.

A: -- with -- with a -- a college education, and particularly a psychology major, which was exactly the sort of thing they wanted. To interrogate prisoners of war you kind of have to have a little bit of a psychological background -- the -- from the technique of it. And then the German language. But th-the military training I had gave me an advantage over those who came from the quartermaster corps, or the cooks and bakers school, and -- or some other branch of the service which was not as military as technical. So I became a teacher. And I started training others, instead of going overseas as a member of an IPW team, I became one of the -- the staff members in section five. Our commanding officer was the colonel, Colonel Warndorf, and the -- the other teachers in that section, in the German section were graduates of the Richie school who had been picked because they had specific background that made good teachers of them. So they were the ones who were teaching others. By then we were also getting not just people that we were training in interrogation, but we were also getting general officers and field grade officers from military divisions in the country and also some from units already overseas, who were brought back to get some special training in military intelligence, particularly aerial photos and interrogation and -- and order of battle, German army organization, that sort of thing. So our students were not only in a German section IPW members, they were also what we call the $2 and G2 officers of different divisions. So I was a second lieutenant and a lot of my students were general officers, who were the G2 of their divisions, who came for their special training course at Camp Richie. It was a very exciting, a very interesting time. And our staff sergeant at the -- in section five, for instance, was Walter Schneider. Walter Schneider was an assistant manager the Waldorf-Astoria. Our chef in the mess hall a-at Camp Richie was a chef from one of the leading -- I forget which -- hotel of -- of New York or Boston, but he was a super chef and the food was superb. It was served on metal trays, but it was wonderful. It was gourmet food. The food was

superb because the people we brought in to Richie, we -- were special -- specialists in different fields, including cooks and bakers. So -- so we had the best.

Q: Wow.

A: Cu -- they could also speak German, so that helped also.

Q: Tell me, in th -- in the training, in your courses, when -- when you were being taught, were people talking about the Holocaust at all, about the murder of Jews?

A: No.

Q: None?

A: No, no, very --

Q: So it was the structure of National Socialism, and the structure of the military, etcetera?

A: Yeah, it -- mostly military based, because that's what we were interested in getting information about.

Q: I see.

A: They -- the Holocaust and the atrocities as-associated with the Nazi regime was not part of the military.

Q: Right.

A: Wi -- we really didn't know too much about it. A lot of that didn't begin to develop until we started invading Germany and liberating camps and saw what was going on.

Q: Now the Jewish boy, I ga -- these are all men in the -- in Camp Richie, yes? The -- the Jewish fellows that you met, who had experience with the Nazis --

A: Right.

Q: -- did you talk to them and find out things?

A: Oh yeah, yes, now that was -- but that was not part of the training.

Q: I understand.

A: That would be a personal relationship.

Q: Right.

A: And frankly, you take a lot of that with a grain of salt, and you say, well, you know, that sounds like propaganda. That's supposed to make us hate the Germans. Is it really true? And you had to really get to know the people and once you had their -- they had your confidence, then you began to realize there's something to this. But that came much later, really. I know oh, golly, names like Watson, Landauer, Daniels, Verna Daniels, Viel. These are all Jewish colleagues of mine, and much of what they knew is hearsay, second hand information. So that was not part of the official development or training at all. That was -- that was talk. You know, was just somebody re -- reciting a story that he had heard from somebody else, about somebody. Ya -- ya -- you know, as I say, we -- we had no refugees. Nobody who had been in a concentration camp came to Germany -- I mean, came from Germany to the United States, not at that time.

Q: Right.

A: I mean, that -- that's all post-war.

Q: Right.

A: So we really were, as I say, very naive. Probably no one was more surprised -- and I speak first hand knowledge -- at the atrocities or the things that they saw than some of our commanding generals, like Eisenhower and -- and Bradley, as our units advanced, and the advancing troops would liberate a camp and then generals like Eisenhower and -- and others would come and see for the first time. And that's the first time they heard of some of these things.

Q: Or, what you're saying is that they heard of them, and they thought it was propaganda.

A: That -- yeah, didn't believe it, it -- it was, you know, we went back to first World War, and the Germans were mutilating nuns and that kind of stories you heard.

Q: Right, right.

A: See, but that's necessary in war. You have to -- you have to make propaganda in order to make you hate the enemy and fight him. So it was taken with a grain of salt.

Q: So you saw the w -- the war -- I don't want to say it was sort of a natural war, but it was -- it was just a war. These were the enemy --

A: That's right.

Q: -- and they happened to be a big enemy.

A: They were -- we're looking at it fr --

Q: They're just a --

A: -- yeah, we're looking at strictly from the military standpoint --

Q: Right.

A: -- you know? We just -- the rest of it really was -- came much later --

Q: Yeah.

A: -- much to our surprise.

Q: Right. So how long do you stay in Camp Richie? This i -- til ni -- yeah, how long are you there? You go there when?

A: Yeah, the training course is two months.

Q: Right.

A: And then you were immediately shipped out.

Q: Right. But you weren't.

A: But -- but I stayed another 10 months beyond that. Meanwhile, we had -- when I was assigned to the 16" armored division at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, that was a brand new division, and I was a cavalry officer, in other words I -- we were training people for that division. So I knew I would be in Arkansas at least two years before I go overseas. So we decided now is the time to have a family. Then when my wife was nine months pregnant, one week before our firstborn child was due, I was transferred to military intelligence. Boom. And that -- that was a big surprise. Now everything changed. Well, Winnie, my wife, decided I at least had -- had to see the baby. So a week before Johnny Mike was due, she got permission from her doctor in Arkansas to make the trip and she came from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Blueridge Summit, Pennsylvania by train, on a troop train. Arrived on a Monday, and our Mike was born the Sunday of that week, Mother's day, 56 years ago this Sunday. He was born in Blueridge Summit, Pennsylvania, so -- and we had to decide whether Mike would be -- whether Winnie would be taken to the hospital in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, which is near Blueridge Summit, or Hagerstown. And the doctor on Sunday morning decided Waynesboro, so our Mike was born north of the Mason-Dixon line.

But if Dr. Bridges had decided to go to Hagerstown, we'd have had a southerner in our family.

Q: Right.

A: Cause Blueridge Summit is right on the Mason-Dixon line, so -- so -- but -- so now we had a baby and I was at Richie for 10 months, so I was able to see our child at least up til the age of -- of 10 months.

Q: So did Winnie then come and live with you in Camp Richie?

A: No.

Q: No.

A: Well, she came to Camp Richie, yes, an-and that's where --

Q: Right.

A: -- we lived in Blueridge Summit --

Q: Uh-huh.

A: Camp Richie was --

Q: I see.

A: -- right about a mile from Blueridge Summit, and we lived in Blueridge Summit, Pennsylvania, it's right on the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania. And when -- and then when I was shipped overseas, she went home to Akron with the baby, you know --

Q: Uh-huh.

A: -- and lived with her sister who also had a husband in the army, so the two sisters kept house.

Q: [indecipherable] right. So you're shipped out of the United States in April of 1945, is that right?

A: Right, right.

Q: And do you know your destination?

A: No, that was all -- that was top secret. I had no idea what I was going to do or where I was going. We left out of Camp Kilmer, New York on a troop train -- troop -- on the troop ship. That was the -- the Ile de France, a luxury liner which had been converted into a -- a troop ship. And we went from New York then to Greenark, Scotland and from there by train all the way south to Southampton, England. And then by ferry boat, actually, ferry steamer across the channel into Le Havre and then by troop train from Le Havre, eventually to Paris after doing a lot of zigzag-ing because somebody gotten our orders messed up, we were -- ended up in the wrong place, and the ship back to Paris. Then I was in Paris about five days, in La Vaisame, which was the temporary headquarters of military intelligence in Paris at that particular point. And then I was assigned to

the 6824 DIC. 6824 detailed interrogation center. Now here I have to distinguish between the regular IPW team that I mentioned earlier. Their function was to get tactical information.

Tactical meaning what's going on across the river, or what unit is our unit facing. When are they planning to attack, how strong are they. That's t-tactics. We were also interested now, at this late stage of the game in strategic information. Again, we want to know more about do the Germans have the atom bomb? What's this V1 and V2 business? Chemical bacterial warfare. All of those things we knew nothing about. That was strategic information, and we call that detailed interrogation. So we had a center in the Ardens in northern France, [indecipherable] way up the point where the Mers river goes into Belgium and then comes back down, we were there in a hunting lodge. And we'd taken over this little town of Revan. We were billeted in private homes and -- and used a hunting lodge for our working area. And we brought prisoners who had strategic information, like general officers, members of the German generals staff. Chemists, scientists, physicists, working on the V1, V2. Anybody who had information at a strategic, high political level, we would bring to this -- taken prisoner along the battlefields anywhere, we would bring to this detailed interrogation center for strategic information. Some of them we would find would have such valuable information that we bring them to the States. Now we had a very secret place, whose name I still don't know, right here in Washington, where we brought German prisoners of war who knew inside information on a very high ranking -- well, anyhow, my assignment was a really exciting one. I was given a Jeep and a driver, and orders by command of General Eisenhower, I could go anywhere I wanted to go. And my job was to go wherever there were prisoners, which was now everywhere.

Q: Right.

A: And screen prisoners that we thought might have this kind of strategic information. A lot of German generals put on enlisted men's uniforms and were taken prisoner as ordinary corporals and privates, but they were really general officers. So we had to find that kind of people, and those who were scientists and -- and had this kind of information we wanted. If they did, I would arrange to have them shipped back to Revan for detailed interrogation. So my job was to travel all along the front wi -- as we were advancing toward the end of the war, and talk to interrogation officers who thought they had a prisoner who --

Q: Who would fit this.

A: -- who -- who will fit that category, and then I would interrogate him and if he did, then I bring him back to Revan, to 6824DIC. So that was my job. So, I could go wherever I wanted, which opened up a lot of adventures, you know, like the Lipizzaner horses that I mention in my book.

Q: Right, right.

A: [happened to be at the right place at the right time. Or the liberation of Dachau.

Q: Right.

A: L arrived there the day after Dachau was liberated. Or, going back in my own unit, I found out where the 16" armored division that I had trained with in Arkansas, I found out where it was, so I could say, okay, let's go there. So even up to Czechoslovakia, and the 16" armored division was going into Pilsen, and so I saw some of my old colleagues again, friends that I had trained with in Arkansas, pattern of circles. I met them just outside of Pilsen, Czechoslovakia during the end of the war. And that's where we had the Lipizzaner horse adventure, and that's when -- where the war ended. That's where I happened to be when it all came to an end, so -- so --

Q: Right. Well, the -- the tape is running out --

A: Right.

Q: -- so we're going to change tapes and get back to some of these stories.

A: Okay.

End of Tape One

Beginning Tape Two

Q: Tell me about your arrival in Dachau the day after it was liberated, that must have been some experience for you.

A: [had never heard of Dachau before, I didn't know anything about it. All I knew was that I wanted to go into Munich to look for a place to sleep, really. During the war when we were traveling like this, and there were just my driver and I, and we were just try to find a military unit, one of ours, that was billeted in some hotel, and -- or whenever we advanced, they would find a public building, like a hotel, and just confiscate it and say this is the headquarters. And this is where the division officers would -- would sleep and they would just take over the hotel. So with my orders, which were really marvelous because I was traveling by command of General Eisenhower, I could get a room or a free meal almost anyplace I went. So we were always looking for some place like that, and I was heading toward Munich when I -- I don't know whether -- whether my driver, or whether we were getting directions from someone, toward Dachau just outside of Munich and -- and -- and so we went over that way. And then came -- just to see what -- what was going on there. We had heard in getting the directions that this was a special camp that the -- the Germans had operated. So we made a little detour on our way to Munich. Actually, it was on the way, and then came upon Dachau. Then I found that it was just the day after the liberation -- the -- the day -- actually, it was two days after, because the day after the liberation, the grand duke of Luxembourg, the Prince Felix -- not the grand duke, but the Prince Consort of the Grand Duchess had been there to greet and liberate, or -- or be present for the liberation of Luxembourgers who had been at the Dachau concentration camp. So if I had been there one day earlier, I would have had the opportunity to meet the -- th-the Prince Consort, Prince Felix. So we got there, and -- and that's how we came upon the camp. Even then, I don't

think it made an impact on me that it has in retrospect, looking back on it, having learned so much more about the Holocaust and the atrocities, all I know is this was a horrible place. But I thought it was -- my first interpretation without anybody telling me -- we really didn't know. I say -- we honestly were very naive. Concentration camp per se didn't mean a thing to me. I thought this was a -- a prison camp where people who committed crimes were put. And so I didn't really get the feel for this, except the hu -- the humanity aspect of it. Even a -- a prisoner who committed murder shouldn't be treated the way these people had been treated, the way they looked. And Dachau you know, was not a -- a death camp, Dachau was just -- but these people were starving, and -- and had starved. I m-mean, the -- the corpses we saw. And it just didn't register until long after, as I found out more and more about it, and I could say, I was there, I saw this and didn't realize what it was.

Q: So you didn't know what you were seeing.

A: Yeah, I -- I didn't realize, I thought it was a prison camp where the prisoners were just not properly treated.

Q: So tell me, did you walk around, or you just --

A: No.

Q: -- you just looked from your Jeep?

A: No, frankly, I couldn't. I -- I'm -- I have a weak stomach. I -- I really -- you know, for a long time, I -- I -- I still have difficulty -- "Schindler's List," was the first movie I ever saw in which a concentration camp was depicted that I -- that I could tolerate, because I -- I thought it was very tastefully done. Was excellently -- and yed -- you know, he didn't dwell on -- he just showed enough to realize the horror of it without going into the detail that some of the films do. But I -- I don't -- I don't like to read books that have a lot of graphic murder scenes in it, I -- I -- | have a

weak stomach. That probably isn't the best way to say a we -- weak stomach, I -- I just -- "m just softy, I'm a softy, I don't like to see people suffer. I don't -- I don't li-like to see animals suffer, I certainly don't like to see people suffer. So I'm afraid I'm like a lot of other people, you know, if you don't know what you're seeing, you'd just rather not look at it anyway, if you don't have to.

Q: Were you frightened? When you wa -- when you came to that place?

A: No, more -- more shocked. The -- the idea of, you know, inhumanity that was evident there.

And as I say, I thought this was just a prison camp, where -- where prisoners were kept. Under those circumstances, how could they treat people like that? Even if they deserved rough treatment, they shouldn't be treated -- that was my reaction. And --

Q: And how long did you stay --

A: Oh not more -- we were just couple of hour -- not even couple of hours, we just --

Q: Did your driver walk --

A: -- going through.

Q: -- or did your driver stay with you?

A: Oh ya -- you -- just walked -- walked in and ge -- and the wooden gate was there.

Q: Right.

A: And I saw -- I actually saw one person die. He was too weak to even -- a man who was just too weak to even talk. And that -- that was devastating to me. I had -- I didn't want to see much more of it. I saw corpses. I saw one building that had obviously been torched with people having been locked in the building, and then tried to dig their way out underneath it. That w -- that was it, that was the -- the worst of it all. So beyond that I didn't want to see any more. And I -- I just - - I saw enough to realize how horrible it was.

Q: Did you talk to the American troops who were there? Were they finding guards that you might have interrogated, or did you just want to get out of there as fast as you could?

A: No, I didn't see a single German --

Q: You didn't see a single German?

A: -- at -- at my [indecipherable] I mean, a single German soldier --

Q: Right.

A: -- at that point. They had already rounded up -- what happened at -- at -- and this is second hand information -- at -- at Buchenwald, for instance, the guards took off. I mean, they -- they weren't equipped to fight the advancing an -- German -- so when -- when the am -- advancing American. When the Americans advanced, they just all ran away. And Buchenwald, the inmates liberated Buchenwald, and that story I know first hand because we eventually come to it because there were Luxembourgers involved in the Buchenwald camp. I actually -- by then I knew quite a bit about it, and so the Buchenwald story I know more about, even though I hadn't been there, of how it was liberated and so forth.

Q: Well why don't you get into that and then we can go back to the -- the horse story.

A: Yeah.

Q: Why don't you --

A: Well, th-the Buchenwald thing actually didn't come to my attention until the trials and then Buchenwald was just a name of other camps that had been there. But it became personally close to me during my embassy days, 40 years later. In Luxembourg there is an Amicale de Buchenwald, and these are Luxembourgers, some Jewish, non-Jews, some were deserters of the army, some were the parents of Luxembourgers who had been forced into the German army, who deserted and then the parents were thrown into the concentration camp, so we had a -- a

mix. There were about si -- I think at that pra -- point, 74 Luxembourgers in Buchenwald who 40 years later still made up what they call the Amicale de Buchenwald, the alumni of Buchenwald.

They were liberated, or actually they saw the first the Americans at 11:30 on the 11" of April, 1945. They had sent an SOS on their homemade -- secretly homemade radios, giving away their location where they were. They could hear the gunfire, and they could hear even the -- the motors of the tanks of the sixth armored division advancing. The Nazi guards took off, the -- the SS people took off, and -- and the liberators caught a few of them, and -- I mean, not the liberator -- the inmates caught a few of the Nazi guards before the liberators came and -- and took care of them. But most of them I -- were gone. The -- the whole leadership of the camp was gone. So by the time the Americans arrived, they were met with open arms by the inmates who had liberated them. Well among them were these Luxembourgers. From that time on, when they got back to Luxembourg, they organized their reunion group, their amicale. There are a lot of these in Luxembourg, resistance groups who have organized alumni of this particular -- they call the LPL, the League Patiotigue Luxembourgoise. The LPL, that was the Luxembourg underground, which worked with the FFI. Well, they all have alumni clubs, and they have luncheons and -- and i-it's really a -- a very moving experience to be with those people. Well, the Amicale de Buchenwald for 40 years, and still today, at 11:30 on the 11" of April, every year, meet at the American military cemetery and place a wreath at the tomb of General Patton, whose third army liberated the camp. And then they have a -- a little prayer cer-ceremony and a little reminiscing and then they all go and have lunch together and -- and reminisce, and -- and renew their friendships. Well they invited the American ambassador to participate naturally, and so I took them up on it. And so I became part of the activity and it got to the point where after the first year they asked me to give a talk, and I would talk to them, and -- and so that they made me an

honorary member of the Amicale de Buchenwald. In 1945, the -- I received a letter from the sixth armored division, a veteran's group, it's the sixth armored association, they're called the Super Sixes. And a bunch of them are coming back to Europe to celebrate the 40" anniversary of the end of the war and the liberation. And they want to come to Luxembourg, and they asked me if I would speak to them at the cemetery. A lot of these veteran's groups did that. During a 10 month period of celebrating the end of the war and the liberation of Luxembourg, I was at that cemetery 69 times in 10 months, officially, not counting times when I would take a visit or two, to visit. A Colonel Reed from Louisville, Kentucky, he wrote to me and -- and said that he was bringing a group of veterans and would I speak to them at the cemetery and of -- I said of course I would. But could you arrange to make your visit at a time when we could also have the Amicale de Buchenwald at the same time. I -- I mention this incident in my book, because it -- it was one of the highlights I think of my embassy career. When I arrived there -- it was all -- always arranged for the ambassador to be the last one to arrive, when everybody's -- ev -- everything is in place. American flag on the fender, and ambassador flag, and -- and a lot of whoop-de-doo. And I arrived, and was quite a shocking experience because there were two groups standing at General Patton's grave, and then 5,000 white marble crosses and Stars of David behind them. It's -- it's a memorable scene every time. You don't visit that cemetery without getting a lump in your throat. Every one of these people buried there died during the Battle of the Bulge, at the military cemetery in Luxembourg. And then General Patton's grave is right at the front of it. I arrived there, and here were the -- the Americans on one group and -- and the Amicale de Buchenwald, Luxembourgers in the other group, just looking at each other.

Nobody knew what to do, or what to say, because you know, you could -- the atmosphere was so heavy you could -- you c -- cut it. And I thought, oh what have I wrought here, you know, I've

brought these people together, how am I going to break this -- break the ice here. And just as I walked up -- and I knew the Luxembourgers of course, and -- and just as I walked up I heard one of the Luxembourg women say to one of the Americans, "I think I remember you, isn't your name Buddy?" And it was, and these two got together and hugged each other, and -- and that broke the ice, I didn't have to do anything. Th-They s-started mingling then an-and introducing themselves to each other, and -- and that was just a -- a moving experience. The leader of the Amicale de Buchenwald, or the president of it was the mayor -- at that time the mayor of a little town called Beaufort where there is a very historic and romantic castle ruin in Luxembourg.

There are quite a few castles in Luxembourg, 74 of them to be exact, and Beaufort is one of the - - the most romantic because the ruin is fairly well preserved and you can tour it and imagine you can still see the dungeon and -- and the torture chamber and everything else. So it's a big tourist attraction, and the mayor, of course, is responsible for the community and the chateau which belongs to the community. He invited the entire sixth armored division bunch to come to Beaufort as his guests and sure the -- the buses loaded up and they spent the rest of the day -- they changed their whole itinerary. They spent the rest of the day at this site and having their dinner in Beaufort, and mingling with the people and -- and they were just a very warm experience. And to this day, and every time we've gone back now since our embassy days, we always go to Beaufort, look up the mayor and -- and reminisce about the days. They published a book about Buchenwald and it tells the whole story of the liberation and -- and the inmates and what -- what it was like, the condition. And it ends with pictures of this reunion group at the 40" anniversary. It's -- a-and this might well be a book that ought to be in -- in the museum library, too, I -- P'll -- "ll see to that, yeah. But I learned more about Buchenwald from those people, associating with them than I did Dachau because as I say, i-it's a real emotional challenge, more

than I could cope with. I'm -- I'm not -- you have to really have a strong stomach. People who don't believe the Holocaust ever happened ought to make a visit. Not now, should have been there, see the real thing. The -- they'd find out it happened, yeah.

Q: Let's go to a -- a more -- a happier story --

A: Yeah.

Q: -- although it's still involved in this time period, where you got to save the Lipizzaner horses.

Let's talk about that.

A: Well, yeah I -- I don't -- I don't think -- well, maybe -- maybe I'm -- I'm the savior of the -- the mares anyway, not the stallion. There are two stories about the Lipizzaner horses and they always get mixed up. Walt Disney got them all -- got it all mixed up in his, "Miracle of the White Stallion." But I'm in that movie.

Q: Really?

A: Yes, but now identified -- the role in -- in that movie actually did happen that way and -- and I was involved in it. I had arrived there with my driver on a search for -- actually I was looking for Heisenberg, you know, Heisenberg the physicist Nobel prize winner. And our Manhattan project people were convinced that Germany was working on an atom bomb. And they wanted to know what Friedisch and Weisecker, and what Heisenberg had done and how far they had gotten. And the truth of it all is that the Germans really were not working on an atomic bomb. They weren't, but we didn't know that, so we were looking for people who knew something about Heisenberg, and von Weisecker and atomic research and if nothing else it gave me an excuse to go hither and yon, and go everywhere. So anyhow, that's who I was supposedly looking for and it -- and I managed to be where the 16" armored division was, near Hofe and [indecipherable] Germany, right near the Czech border. I was the only one at -- and there was a s -- a second armored

cavalry regiment which was heading in that particular sector. And the colonel who was in -- in charge of that particular battalion couldn't speak German. But one evening I was playing cards with somebody and they need an interpreter and the colonel sent for me and I went over to interpret for him, the reason being that a German captain had voluntarily surrendered and was brought before the colonel to be interrogated and he -- the colonel couldn't talk to him because he couldn't speak German, so I was called in to be the interpreter and Disney does have that scene in the movie. The colonel is actually eating his dinner and when the prisoner is brought in and I do the interrogating. In the movie the prisoner tells the colonel about a horse farm, but that didn't -- that -- that wasn't the case at all. He was telling the colonel about dienst stella ost, service station east, translation. Which is a military intelligence unit, German military intelligence unit, very much like ours, detailed interrogation. This was a German intelligence unit gathering information about the Soviet Union. And they were in a hunting lodge in the Bohemian forest, just halfway between the border and Pilgrin, and they were interrogating German -- I mean, Russian PW, who had information of a strategic nature, like we were doing on our side.

This unit had been in existence for five years and they had maps of every airport in the Soviet Union, of every bridge, of every installation, every weapon, anything you wanted to know about the Soviet army, they had it. The Soviets were about five miles to the east of them, the Americans about five miles to the west of them, they were in the middle. Now what should they do? Do nothing, Soviets might get there first. If they find out what the Germans had been doing there, it'd be their heads. They could just destroy everything they had and take to the woods, but that wouldn't be German. They're not going to destroy anything they've been gathering for five years. So their third option was to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets would get there.

So this captain voluntarily came to our unit and surrendered and told my colonel all about his

dienst stella ost. They wanted to surrender to us and turn over to us all of the documentation and all of the interrogation reports, maps and everything they had about the Soviet Union. So they needed a German speaking officer and I was the only one there, so the colonel said, you know, "Doli, your -- you go in, we'll arrange this." So we had a two and a half ton truck and driver and enlisted man guard and then the sergeant and I in the Jeep -- and sergeant [indecipherable] the truck and I in my Jeep with my driver and we drove into this hunting lodge. It was an air force colonel -- Luftwaffe colonel, a lieutenant colonel, actually, who was the commander of this unit, Holters was his name and he made a big show, a very formal first wor -- World War I general staff officer, with a surrender s -- the whole thing. We loaded all the stuff on the trucks and there were just a few officers and enlisted men and they got on the truck with the documents and the colonel got in the Jeep with me and then we drove back to our place. The whole thing didn't take more than about 20 minutes. But on the way Colonel Holters told me -- asked me if I knew anything about horses. And I didn't know a thing about horses. Well, particularly he wanted to know if I knew anything about the Lipizzaner horses. And I didn't know anything about them either. So he proceeded to tell me about Spanish riding school, and the history of the Lipizzaner, very fascinating. And then I found out the purpose of it all was to tell me that there was a -- a gut -- stut -- stud -- stud farm under the German department of agriculture, which had been brought to this place -- I forget the name of the owner of the estate now, Arco whatever it was, located just in Czechoslovakia, sort of a equivalent to a bluegrass region, which particularly fertile grass and particularly good region to breed horses. And the German Department of Agriculture had brought these mares and some stallions and other horses of a different breed, Caucasians and some were from the Russian steppes. About 200 horses, but primarily Lipizzaners for breeding purposes to this stud farm. And they were just about two miles south of where w -- two

kilometers south of where we were. And he told me all about this, so when he explained the Spanish riding school to me, I -- I just felt well, we ought to get involved here. So we took a detour. I sent a sergeant and a truck with the other prisoners, and documents and everything on, and we took a little detour and this how we came upon this stud farm. And th-the -- they -- there were all the lipi -- my first look at Lipizzaner horses, a beautiful sight. This is in May, and the meadow was in bloom and everything else is just beautiful. And I had learned enough about the horses to really appreciate this. There were some young horses who were frolicking in -- in the meadow and doing things that is officially described as airs above the ground, which are the things that we train the stallions to do -- I mean we -- they trained the stallions to do at the Spanish riding school and wherever they have Lipizzaner horses, there are two farms here in the United States where they train lipid -- breed and train Lipizzaners. Anyhow, these foals -- th- these horses we-were -- were doing these things naturally. The trick is to teach them to do it on command. And that was the beauty of this development that I saw. Anyhow, the point was that I had the opportunity to -- to meet Colonel Potisky, who was the leader of the Spanish riding school, who happened to be there at that particular time. Well, to make a long story short, from the stud farm, once I saw it, I took some pictures and I went on back then, reported to Colonel Reed what I had seen. He had a brother who -- who had performed an e -- an eques -- equestrian of the Olympics. And he went riding a horse that was named Potisky in honor of Colonel Potisky of the Spanish riding school. So he knew all about them. And I said, "Well, there's a stud farm." Here we are and -- so he took over. And we had German PW and a lot of Polish DPs who were in the area, who then helped some of our American forces move the horses back into Germany because the fear was that the ri -- Soviets would get there first, and they would eat them, because the rumor, and it's -- I guess it was true, too, there was a Spanish riding school in Budapest, and

the Soviets tried to get those horses to use them to pull wagons and the Lipizzaners wouldn't respond, so they ji -- but-butchered them. And so they were afraid this what would happen to the Lipizzaner. Plus the fact that the Polish DPs didn't like the Germans, and they would take care of the Lipizzaners also if they got a chance. So we rescued them, we -- we brought them. Some of the stallions were there, but mostly they were the -- the mares and the foals and some of the other horses. And we moved them across into a sector of -- of Germany, Schwartzburg, which is in the command of the second armored cavalry regiment. That's the story that I was involved in.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, General Walker of the 20" corps came into Austria to St.

Martin in -- in Crise, and came to an estate there which they set up as their headquarters, where the stallions of the Spanish riding school from Vienna had been brought by Colonel Potisky. And colonel -- General Walker was quite impressed and knowing that Patton was a horse lover and cavalryman, notified Patton, who was at that time I think in -- in Frankfort. And Patton and the deputy secretary of war, who was visiting the front at that time, got into Patton's plane and they flew to Saint Martin's and the stallions from the Spanish riding school put on a show for Patton -

Q: Really?

A: -- with the result that Patton put the Lipizzaners under the protection of the United States army, all Lipizzaners, which included the ones from the stud farm, who were included in that general order. Nobody could touch the Lipizzaner horses who were under the protection of the United States army, because Patton was quite impressed with them. And it turned out that he had wid -- ridden in the Olympics in 1912 against Colonel Potisky. And the most famous quote to me, a Patton quote is -- I don't have the exact quote, but he was quite peevishly concerned that why the Austrians used 57 healthy, well-trained men to teach horses how to dance, when they

should be at the front fighting. I mean, that was the gist of it. Imagine these guys teaching horses to dance instead of fighting for their country. But nevertheless he -- he did protect the horses, and -- so Patton really is the liberator of the Lipizzaners. And that's the Disney story. Now Disney had the whole thing --

Q: Together.

A: -- brought together, you know, and there was fighting and -- and that -- there was resistance, and -- but not really, it was a very peaceful operation, but a great adventure. And the sequel was that my pattern of circles again, is that 50 years later, my wife and I were in Vienna, were going to Vienna and wanted to go to the Spanish riding school, to see a performance there. And we had our youngest son Brian with us. And we couldn't get any tickets. It was the opening performance, September 12" and they were all sold out. Nobody could get me any tickets. And consequently, I had a photograph and I brought some of the photographs with me of Colonel Potisky and myself shaking hands, with a Lipizzaner standing next to us. So I -- very brash, I wrote a letter to Colonel Potisky, commandant of the Spanish riding school in Vienna, Austria and I included that picture. And told him, you know, this is me, and [indecipherable] the incident of our -- our -- our visit and said that I was trying to get tickets for the opening performance and if he could possibly help me I would appreciate it, etcetera. I didn't hear from him until about a week before we left for Europe on our vacation trip. I got a letter from the Spanish riding school, not from Colonel Potisky, saying that he had retired, he's on a trip around the world, my letter had caught up with him in Paris. And they had tickets for the three of us to come to the Spanish riding school performance, and I should pick them up in the -- before 11 o'clock on the performance on that day. And sure enough, we stayed at the Sarka hotel, and that morning I went to -- I had this -- the whole [indecipherable] where the school performs, there's a big line of

people standing in line to buy tickets for standing room only because they're sold out. But you could buy tickets on the day of the performance to stand. Well, only -- only time in my life I've ever crashed a line. I went to the front, got a lot of dirty looks, but I presented the letter from colonel -- from that Spanish riding school and sure enough they had tickets for me. Had to pay for them, they weren't free. I paid for the tickets, went back hotel, got Winnie and our -- our son, and then at 11 o'clock we went back for the performance. And as we came in there to present our tickets, the usher looked at the tickets and held up his hand and motioned to somebody who took us in a direction different from where everybody else was going. And I thought there's a mistake made, and we -- our tickets aren't any good. But instead they took us to the royal box, and we had the perf -- we sat in there, in the royal box of the Spanish riding school. That was a big, big thrill.

Q: Right.

A: And when the horses came in in the opening, they all come in single file, 16 of them, and they come right toward the royal box, and they -- simultaneously the riders tip their hats. And everybody thought we must be somebody very important. That was a thrilling moment.

Q: I bet it was.

A: And that was -- and that's 50 years after this particular incident, so it had a special meaning.

That -- that's the Lipizzaner story.

Q: Okay. Your next assignment, I gather, is to go to the Palace Hotel in Mondorf, yes?

A: The war is over, in fact the war ended, unbeknownst to me at the time, this unit of the dienst stella ost, Colonel Holters and two of his officers -- we decided to send them to Augsburg, and then from Augsburg to our special service sta -- our own detailed interrogation center, our own service station in the Ardenst, in Revan. And meanwhile my driver and I headed back to Revan,

and I continued on that particular project for about a week or so in Revan, of Colonel Holters and -- and his staff. And it was a wonderful time because we got back the day the war ended, got back into Revan. And the next day we had a victory parade, full dress uniform, just my unit, 6824DIC, we had a drummer who played the drum, no -- no band, orchestra, and an American flag, and we got all dressed up, officers and enlisted men, and we had a parade right through Revan, and th-the French people cheering us on, viva l'Amerique. And it was a great -- a great victory. And the next week or two I had a wonderful time going down to Rans for the opera, and interrogating -- finishing the job of Colonel Holters. Then we ran into trouble cause our war department wasn't interested in having that information about Soviet Union, cause that was our - - they were our allies. And so there was a resistance. And then the fact my commanding officer was -- supposedly I heard, reprimanded for either -- either -- for even gathering this information.

But you probably know the name Bob Lovitt, and Bob Lovitt was a deputy secretary of state, I believe at the time. And he used his influence and eventually Colonel Holters, the two officers, and all the documents we -- we captured in the Bohemian forest were brought to this secret location here in Washington. And that's the end of that relationship, that's all I knew about. My commanding officer called me in and said I had a new assignment, and our detailed interrogation center was going to be dissolved and I was going to go to a place that he had never heard of before, and that's Mondorf, Luxembourg. Meanwhile, I had made one trip to Luxembourg on a special assignment to go back and see if I could locate any of my family. So this transfer to Luxembourg came as a real surprise. In fact, I had -- I had no idea there were even Americans stationed in Luxembourg. I assumed, of course, but I hadn't pursued that. So that was a real assignment, to get back into Luxembourg. And that assignment was to the central prisoner of war enclosure number 32, which was also coded in our orders as Ashcan. That was the code word

that they used, send us to the place. And that's all I knew about it. I had no idea what the place was, what it was used for or what I'd be doing. All I know is I was transferred. The good news was that my best friend and colleague, Malcolm Hilkey, with whom I had been at -- at-at -- in Vienna, and -- and in Paris, and also at Revan, was going to the same place. And my commanding officer would be Captain Sensnik, whom I had met at Camp Richie, Maryland. So I would be with old friends and -- and ready for whatever they had in store for me. So I arrived in Luxembourg, my second visit, this time on official assignment. There was a lot of talk when the war ended that we were now going to go to the far east in military intelligence, and I anticipated that that's probably what would happen to me. But instead I was sent to Luxembourg, which to me was a miracle, and which shouldn't have happened that way, but I didn't question it. So I arrived in Mondorf. I knew Mondorf because I had gone there with my brother Heinrich who is married, when I was still in Luxembourg as a boy. And he and his wife had taken me to Mondorf on occasion. There was a little train called the Jongelly that went from Luxembourg city to Mondorf, for people who went there, this resort, Mondorf was a -- a spa, mineral water and health resort health spa. And I knew the place that I was assigned to, that was the palace hotel.

Four story hotel casino, with gambling tables and the works. And guest rooms, and all of the facilities for casino for -- for a health resort. So I reported there and then I found it -- it had changed quite a lot from what I remember as a boy. A fence around it, Klieg lights overheard, camouflage material, and [indecipherable] hanging, you know, you couldn't see what was going on inside. There were machine gun towers on each of the four corners of this fenced in area. And there was a roving guard, a Jeep, military police riding around, I think, constantly. And all I knew is I been transferred to CCPW number 32, I didn't know what was -- what was going on inside there. So I asked the sergeant of the guard in the Jeep, say what's going on here? And hi --

his answer is very typical of sergeant of the guard, he said, th-the -- "Well," he said, "I've been here three weeks," he said. "I've never been inside. All I know is to get in here you have to have a pass signed by God, and somebody has to verify the signature." So that aroused my curiosity, but I had the right papers, and they let me in, they -- I was expected. There was a noncommissioned officer in the lobby of the hotel when I walked in, and he read my orders, and signed me to my room. He said, "This is where you're going to live, and that's also where you're going to work." And I asked him, "What kind of a place is this?" And he said, "Well, it's an interrogation center, it's a wa -- interrogating prisoners of war." So I assumed this is continuation of what we've been doing at the -- at Revan, at DIC. So as I was in -- in the process of unpacking my belongings in my room, which was rather sparsely furnished, but comfortable. And I heard a knock on the door, and I thought this is one of other officers coming in to introduce himself. So I opened the door, and before me stood none other than Herman Goering, the Reichsmarshall of the Third Reich. So I was the most surprised person in the world, and stood there with my mouth open. He clicked his heels and says, "Goering, Reichsmarshall." So I asked him to step inside.

He was carrying a pair of trousers and he said, "This an extra pair of trousers." I couldn't understand this, but he, in a smirking fashion -- he had a way of delivering his lines with a smirk on his face. He said, "Well, I wanted to be a model prisoner, and several days ago we were declassified. We are now ordinary prisoners of war. And we only permitted a certain amount of clothing. And I overlooked this particular pair of trousers. I didn't want to get in trouble, so I want to turn them in to you." Well, I -- I wasn't quite in tune with what he was leading up to, and then it suddenly dawned on me that he needed an excuse to come and see me and I think he was sacrificing an extra pair of trousers for an excuse. I didn't know anything about the operation yet, but it ma -- was made clear to me later on. What he wanted to know is he wanted to know who I

was. He fancied himself the -- the leader of the group that was imprisoned. And I didn't know who they were, but I knew now that one of them was Goering. So it was his business to find out who the newcomers, who the arrivals were. And he had seen me coming in through the gate, so he followed procedure and came to see me, using the trousers as an excuse. And then he asked me, "What is your particular assignment here? You're a young man, what are you doing here?" I was 26 at the time. And before I could answer him, he said, "Are you by any chance the welfare officer, who would see to it that we all get treated properly, in accordance with the rules of Geneva convention?" So I was just going to say no, I'm an interrogation officer, but when he suggested I might be the welfare officer, I said, "Oh yeah, I'm going to see to it that you get treated properly," and he was satisfied. So he then started a list of complaints. And he was unhappy with the way he was brought here, that he was --

Q: Wa -- wa -- can we wait just one moment? Is that [indecipherable]. Okay, I'm sorry.

A: Well he had -- he had decided then -- well, I had decided, rather, that I would see to it that they would all get a square deal. And he lodged his cam -- ki -- campaign of complaints about he was supposed to go to -- go into exile. He had brought with him 11 suitcases, with all of his uniforms and decorations and his Reichsmarshall baton, all his belongings. And he, after all, was the head of the German state, successor to Hitler and he was going to go to -- into exile like Napoleon or any head of state. Instead they brought him to this very meager hotel, with a folding army cot, straw mattress, and he was very unhappy with that whole arrangement. And I said well I knew nothing about that. And that ended our conversation, he clicked his heels and bowed and left. That evening at five o'clock, I was to report to my commanding officer, to Captain Sensnik.

And I was a first lieutenant at that time. And I reported to Captain Sensnik and I told him that I had a visitor. I told him of this particular visit from Goering. And Captain Sensnik, "That's

great," he said, "that's your cover." He said, "Every one of us needs a cover, and by the way, use a different name, don't use your name. You still have relatives in Europe, brothers and sisters, and we don't know what's ahead, but most of us are using different names, so pick a name." Well, I picked a n -- a name of a -- a good Luxembourg name, Gellen. Said, "Okay, I'll be John Gellen." He said, "Okay, that's your name from now on. All your orders, everything you get will be in the name of John Gellen. And you pretend to be the welfare officer. You visit all the prisoners, listen to what they have to say, keep a file of what you hear, and we'll coordinate that with our interrogation reports. So yi -- ni -- that's your job from now on, that's your cover." Then he explained to me that all the prisoners were on the third and fourth floor, some two in a room, some single rooms. The second floor was a buffer zone, nothing was happening on that floor. The first floor, where we were -- we were billeted in our sleeping rooms and also our working offices, but we were trying to find private billets outside of the compound so we could go home at night after work, so we wouldn't be in the same building with the prisoners. The ground floor was a dining room, where the prisoners would eat, a lounge where they could read, under supervision. If they wore glasses, their glasses were kept on the rack in the lounge, they weren't allowed to take their glasses upstairs. Danger of suicide. They might break their glasses and cut their wrists, as some of them had tried to do. There was a veranda around the front of the hotel where they could sit and sunbathe. They could actually walk in the garden, a nice little garden. But they had to stay within a barb wire enclosure and there's an electric -- electric wire. I had a picture of that, by the way, of the electric wire, with a German sign warning high voltage so they wouldn't beyond that. And of course there was a machine gun tower. Now I have my own theory of why we had this heavy guard around the place. None of these people is going to s -- going to escape. W-We didn't have to worry about that. We had to worry about the people on

the outside who might want to get at them. So they were more defense, and guard were more to protect them from the outside and keep them alive and in good shape for the trials, than otherwise. Each room was equipped with a folding army cot, straw mattress, two or three GI blankets, a four legged stool and a bucket of water, and a cake of Lifebuoy soap. The --

Q: Lifebuoy?

A: Lifebuoy, the original Lifebuoy. The kind your mother put in your mouth when you used a dirty word. That was the offi -- the official issue, a deodorant soap. There were no doorknobs on the doors because they could use the screws to -- use the sc -- the sharp end of a screw if they wanted to hurt themselves. The flush toilet were the kind with the tank above and the chain, that was removed. The chain was removed cause they might use the chain. They were not pu -- permitted to wear belts, neckties, shoestrings -- which was a real problem. How to keep them in their shoes if they wore hightops without shoestrings. We had to get special permission and they were allowed four inch shoestrings so they could at least tie the top two holes together. It's kind of humorous and they made much of that when they exercised a little -- a little sense of humor.

They had absolute freedom to move within the hotel. This is how Goering came to my room. He could see who was going where and follow and knock on the door. This was by design. This -- this helped to stimulate communication. It allowed them to visit each other, they could go to each other's rooms and get involved in discussions and arguments, and get mad at each other and we benefited from that. That was part of our technique of gathering information. What did one prisoner say about the other prisoner, especially if he was mad at him. This --

Q: Did -- did you walk around a lot so you could watch what the socialization was, and --

A: Yes -- we --

Q: -- and see how they were interacting?

A: -- we -- we -- we -- we took advantage of their mutual -- of their -- the way they communicated with I -- who spoke to whom, and who snubbed whom, because we would then play that guy off with a -- against the other one and -- and get information out of him.

Q: Right.

A: It was very effective. We -- we did -- we didn't use any what we now consider modern interrogation [indecipherable] like recordings. There were no secret tapes, definitely no torture devises, I mean we didn't -- thumbscrews or any kind of torture device. We didn't need it. They were all willing to talk, a-and they're quite willing to talk.

Q: Why do you think that was so, that they were so willing to talk?

A: First of all, the more they were interrogated, the more important they were, because if -- if you had a lot of interrogations, in the eyes of the other prisoners, the enemy considered you a decision maker, you were obviously one of the top men. If you were not interrogated at all, which was true of some of the people, I don't know why we had them, I mean, they shouldn't have been there. Nobody knew who they were. But they had a uniform on and they happened to be at the wrong place at the right time and were taken prisoner, cause they had a title, or they were with somebody, if they were in the presence of Goering. Like his -- his adjutant, or his aid.

They were all taken prisoner, unfortunately because they happened to be Goering's aid, but they had no intelligence value, and they were not permitted to continue to be his aid. They just became ordinary prisoners of war. So we -- we had prisoners who -- who -- who just -- we didn't know why they were there, and they didn't know why they were there, and they wanted to be interrogated so they could -- they could at least feel that they were important. That was one thing. The other thing was none of these prisoners presented themselves as a unit, a -- a -- none of them worked as part of a team, a united effort to protect each other. They were all protecting

only themselves. Not a single one ever thought in terms of protecting the German general's staff, or protecting the -- the Nazi element, or the bureaucracy, the bureaucrats whom we had. And those were the three categories that automatically they divided themselves into. The general's staff pretty much stuck together socially in the prison, in their -- their discussion groups and their cliques. Excuse me. When they sat on the veranda or in the lounge, or when they ate together, they pretty much stuck together, and the Nazis pretty much stuck together. And the same thing with the statesmen or the ministers and some of those. So each one was out to save his own neck.

And they had grievances that went back to Hitler's time, back to 1934 - 35. If Goering snubbed this particular general, this general now had an opportunity to spill the beans about Goering.

Petty stuff, but this is exactly what we wanted -- w-we wanted to hear. So the socializing with each other and visiting with each other was all part of a interrogation scheme. We had a conflict of our own, cause on one hand, there were five of us, five interrogators. And we belonged to the Richie crowd, we were the trained military intelligence personnel. We had nothing to do with the operation of the prison, of how the prisoners were fed, or how they were housed or anything else.

That was under the command of the -- of Colonel Andrews, Burton C. Andrews, of the 391deg anti-tank battalion -- were his personnel. Andrews actually was brought into this job in charge of this detention center from a -- a prisoner of war -- not a prisoner of war enclosure, but a regular prison -- what do you call it? A prison camp. For military prison camp, American prisoners. He was in charge of -- of a prison camp. So he was a trained military warden, and he was in charge of this prison. We had f -- about 40 or so ordinary German soldiers who were ordinary prisoners of war. They were the cadre, the work cadre. They we -- they did the manual labor. The prisoners didn't do their own cooking or serving of the food or cleaning up, except their rooms, they had to clean their own rooms. But they didn't run the sweepers, or -- or do the dusting or anything in

the public rooms. So we had German soldiers who were carpenters, electricians, cooks, bakers, even the chaplain, a doctor. Most anything we needed to run a prison. But these were ordinary German prisoners who were now in a position to be associated with the -- what they called the bunsin, the big animals who had run the -- the dictatorship under Hitler's regime. Was quite a -- that interplay was very interesting to watch. Well then we had the prison guards, the Americans, who supervised all of this, who directed the German PW, who were the work cadre. And they were responsible for the security and -- and everything else. Now Colonel Andrews came from a regular detention center, from a prison. We had difficulty convincing him that these were not people who were being punished. They were people who were being interrogated in preparation for a trial. And that we needed them in pretty good physical condition and good mental condition in order to get their cooperation while we interrogated them. But he looked upon them as criminals. And he was the -- the prison warden. So if they didn't exactly behave as he thought they should, like if they didn't have their room very clean, then he would put them in solitary confinement. They'd stay in a basement for 24 hours, or maybe two days if their shoes weren't shined properly. And we'd say that doesn't help our interrogation, because if they get mad and resentful, then they won't cooperate with us. So we had that interplay, so -- and we finally had to go pretty high up, as high as Wild Bill Donovan, the commanding general of the -- what was then the OSS, who was our mentor. He is the one who coached us on how to get information out of the prisoners, he was a -- an expert in that kind of thing. And Donovan then had to use his general rank to get Colonel Andrews to cooperate with the idea that this was a -- a processing center, not a center for punishment.

Q: We're going to have to stop the tape now --

A: Right.

Q: -- because we're running out.

End of Tape Two

Beginning Tape Three

Q: We -- when we completed the last tape, you were talking about the problem with Colonel Andrews --

A: Andrews, yeah.

Q: -- and his view of the prisoners versus -- or were these prisoners, were these criminals, who were these people?

A: Well, he treat -- as far as he was concerned, they were prisoners of war. And one of my jobs -- Andrews took a personal liking to me, primarily because I knew my way around Luxembourg.

So whenever we had a VIP visitor like General Eisenhower, or -- or any one of the higher officials who came to visit, I would be ap -- appointed tour guide. So that became one of my functions. In addition to what I had to do, I would take them around Luxembourg and show them places. Well, Andrews enjoyed that part of it himself because he would always go along and -- and I'd on a couple of occasions invited Prince Felix, who liked American bourbon. And bourbon was just not available anywhere, except as we got it in our liquor ration in Mondorf. So every once in awhile, on Saturday nights, the few of us officers would get together and have a little party, and we invited Prince Felix to a couple of these affairs, which impressed Colonel Andrews very much. So we finally got around to the point of where he saw our viewpoint in addition to the official persuasion he got from above. You know, we can't treat these people like convicted criminals serving their sentences. We have to try them first, and before we can try them, we had to interrogate them, and -- and that public relations effort helped considerably. It also resulted in my being at Nuremberg when I had done everything possible to avoid going to Nuremberg, cause I was tired of the whole thing. But once I arrived there on temporary duty, Andrews snagged me and he wouldn't let me go because he wanted me back on his staff again.

So it had its -- its pluses and minuses. But he used me also to translate his messages to the -- the prisoners whenever -- for instance, when Streicher arrived, Doenitz refused on behalf of the other prisoners, to eat in the same dining room with Streicher. Well then Andrews wrote a message to be delivered to them, and I -- of course I translated that and read the message to the prisoners and -- which we told them it -- you have no choice. I mean, he's your boy and you're going to eat with him whether you like it or not, cause you're all alike. We're not looking at you as a grand admiral, or you as a Reichsmarshall. We're looking at you as a declassified prisoner of war, and that's what Streicher is, and you're going to eat in the same dining room, and that was it. That -- that's the kind of message that Andrews enjoyed delivering and -- and always -- he had a riding crop that he carried all the time. High polished boots, polished helmet, he was sort of a spittin" image of General Patton when it came to dress and bearing and he loved to play the commanding officer, which sometimes the Nazis u-used against all of us in a humorous sense. For instance, one general, I forget what his name was, had not -- Andrews came walking into the room and -- and the general didn't stand up and click his heels, so he was punished and he was put in the basement room which Andrews kept for solitary confinement. And then he wrote an order that whenever he walked into a room they were to stand up at attention and -- and salute him. Well, they carried it to the other extreme so whenever any one of us entered the room they did the same thing. And it got to be sort of humorous, here I was a first lieutenant and if they were all sitting on the vera -- veranda in the afternoon, about 30 or 40 of these guys, and I would come back from lunch and walk it up -- they would all stand up and click their heels and bow, and say good afternoon Herr [indecipherable] you know. And it got to be a joke until they got tired of it, but we had a -- light moments with them too. But we did convince Andrews finally to let us do our -- our thing, as long as the prisoners didn't violate any of the rules he'd go along with it, but

that was one of the challenges. Other than that, our interrogation technique, as I said, was one of -- in my particular case I was the welfare -- I pretended to be the welfare officer. Well, I was the welfare officer because I made the rounds. I would go from room to room and I would ask the prisoner how -- how are you today, and at first they were very busy writing letters to General Eisenhower, to President Truman, to -- you know, they were heads of state, or former heads of state. And they were complaining about their treatment and making demands. And our job was to translate those letters, send them -- send them out through channels. And we never got any replies, I assume they're still going through channels. But -- so if they had a letter that they wanted to write to someone, they would give it to me to translate for them, and send it on. Or if they wanted to locate their family. You know, I -- I don't know where my wife is, could you try to find out where she is? And we would, which is very simple thing because for instance, a lot of them lived -- th-the Nazi -- I always refer to them as the bunsin, the big -- the big boys -- a lot of the Nazi leaders, they had a tendency to cluster. Ma-Many of them had their villas at Tegernsee in Bavaria. So if Kesserling wanted to locate his wife the last time he heard from her, we could contact a military unit of ours stationed near Tegernsee and ask them to investigate. And we got to the point where we could sometimes forward letters. And that helped tremendously in getting their cooperation and telling me things that -- that we wanted to hear. So I would make the rounds and -- and somebody would say, I don't have any toothpaste, could you get me a -- an extra ration of toothpaste, shampoo, or I have a dandruff problem. Goering had a skin problem and he always -- he wanted special lotions and special soaps, which we couldn't furnish, but at least I listened to his complaints and -- and by listening and sympathizing with him, that -- that helped pave the way. What happened then was that every one of us had a specialty. I really specialized in the German general's staff. The history of the German general's staff, and so forth.

So a lot of my interrogations were of the high ranking generals, based on military strategies and organization and so forth. With the result that each one of the five of us would have only a certain number of prisoners under their jurisdiction and they wouldn't get to know anything about any of the others. Well, I was the welfare officer, so I got to meet a lot of them, even though I never interrogated them. But I would g-go in and chat with them, ho-how are you doing, how do you feel? And I would end up getting a lot of information that helped my performance, because I kept this gossip file about one s -- prisoner said about the other. But one in particular stands out, was old Papa Schwartz, Franz Xavier Schwartz, was called Papa Schwartz. He was the Nazi party treasurer. Simple, kind old guy, really. He didn't know what the score was. But he was a very popular politician in Bavaria and Hitler used him to collect the dues. If you belong to the Nazi party, you paid yo-your party dues. And that's all Schwartz did, he collected dues. And now you think Nazi party treasurer would have been a very important guy, who certainly would have a lot to do with buying property and -- and receiving big contributions. That wasn't Schwartz's job, that was somebody else's responsibility. That was Funk, and to a certain extent at first, Schacht. So Schwartz, I don't even know why we -- we brou -- he was never interrogated. He really served no particular purpose. And his son, Franz Xavier Schwartz, jr. was the president of German breweries, which really had no particular connection, but he did have a - - a paramilitary rank in th -- either the SS or the SA. A lot of people, if you made a big contribution financially, if you were an industrialist, you would got a -- get a rank like a sturmbondfuhrer in the SS, which was nothing more than an honorary title, and i -- and you could -- got to wear a uniform. So if you were president of the breweries, you could wear a uniform as a brigadier general in the SS, but you really had nothing to do in the SS. But it did put him in the automatic arrest category, because everybody who was an SS officer was

automatically arrested by us. So we ended up with a lot of these deadbeats. Well, Schwartz looked very much like my father, physical image. My father had sort of a white mustache, little [indecipherable] like Hindenburg. And Schwartz looked like my father and the first time I went in to see Schwartz, I was taken aback because it looked almost like my own papa sitting there.

And he noticed that and wanted to know what -- you know, what made you -- he said -- upshraken was the German word, la -- what made you pull back. And just in a moment of candor I said, "W-Well, because you look very much like my father." And then I showed him a picture of my father. And he -- he started to cry, he got -- he -- he got very emotional about that. He th -- he thought that was just a wonderful coincidence. He's -- he's a Roman Catholic, he was very devout, and he thought surely that God had ordained for this to happen. Well, I -- I had to take advantage of that because all the other prisoners kind of looked upon ov -- Schwartz as almost a father confessor. And they would go to Papa Schwartz and tell him things that they didn't tell anybody else, especially after an -- an interrogation. They were going to Papa Schwartz and say, well they asked me about this, but I told them that, but the truth of the matter is. Well then, after I showed -- after wa -- won the confidence of Papa Schwartz, I could go to him, he'd say, don't trust so and so. And he would -- he would tell me things about what the prisoner had said to him.

And it was that kind of play that -- that resulted in our getting more information than we really knew how to cope with, in addition to our official interrogation. We worked for the Nazi war crimes commission, which was headed by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was to be our prosecutor for the United States. And they were located in Paris. And -- and this was his staff, th-the general, General Telford Taylor, and Colonel Amon and others who were the assistant prosecutors. And they would make up questionnaires, what they wanted to know about a certain prisoner. They were preparing the case for the prosecution against, say Karl Doenitz,

Grand Admiral Doenitz. So they had questions about him. Was he present when this particular treaty was signed? Was he there when -- at the Wannsee conference when the final solution was decided on? And then we would get those questionnaires, and then we would have a staff meeting. And Captain Sensnik would say, okay, we have a questionnaire on Doenitz, Dolibois, you -- you handle that one. And then I would -- I would get that questionnaire and then I would prepare my interrogation of Doenitz, the intent being to get the answers to those questions, but -- but building it around a autobiographical sketch sort of thing. And these were very fascinating because the prisoner would brag about his accomplishments, what he had done and everything.

And in the course of that you could work in the pas -- specific questions that colonel -- Justice Jackson wanted answered for his staff. And this is what made the -- it's kind of a -- a -- an interesting challenge, an interrogation. Well that was the job of each interrogator. We'd interrogate and sometimes it would go on for a week, you'd do nothing but interrogate one prisoner, then spend the afternoon writing up your report.

Q: L-L-Let me ask you just specifically, were you taking hand notes --

A: No.

Q: -- or was there someone there taking notes, not --

A: That's the wor -- no, that's the worst thing you could do.

Q: Because they would [indecipherable]

A: Psychologically you would -- they would freeze up, ooh, he's writing that down. I'm not going to tell him that, that's going to go on a record. Conversation is what they really wanted to know. And -- and they would just -- a -- this meant -- this is why I said it'd go on for a week, because you'd interrogate maybe for an hour, and then you spend two or three hours putting together what you -- you had. Part of our training was to pick out pertinent facts to remember, to

put down in our -- in our reports. Sometimes we'd take a break and then quickly jot down the things that I want to remember and then continue the interrogation, and then from the jotted notes later. But if you sat there with a pencil and asked questions, they freeze, and they would -- but if they could just go on and -- and ex -- expound on what they had accomplished, and I did this and I did that and thanks to me this was done. And that's the sort of thing we were encouraging.

Q: Now tell me, were they not suspicious of you five guys walking around talking with them?

A: Well, they knew it -- first of all, they didn't believe if they were anything but prisoners of war. To tell them, you're going to have a trial, and you're going to be tried, that is something that -- that was ri -- in the book. There's nothing in the Geneva Convention or the Warsaw Treaty that says if you lose the war and you're arrested and you become a prisoner, you might be tried for your crimes. I mean, what -- what is a war crime? That had never been decided until the Nuremberg trial. And then it isn't quite clear. Look what we're doing now. I mean, nobody really knows what a war crime is. This -- this business in The Hague going on now with international criminal court, they haven't defined a war crime as yet. When somebody in Bosnia, a Serb, rapes a -- a Muslim woman, is that a war crime? Or is it a crime against humanity? What international court is going to try that per -- well, these are the -- the philosophical, legal things that hadn't come up. So these people didn't expect to be tried. They were prisoners of war, special prisoners of war because of their high rank in -- in the government, or -- and therefore sometimes they would tell you things that they wished they hadn't told you when they finally went to trial. The trial in itself really wasn't decided, the specifics of it, until an agreement was reached I think sometime in July or August of 1945. Back in May when we were beginning to interrogate these

men, nobody knew that there was going to be a trial, per se. We knew that something was going to happen.

Q: But you didn't know what.

A: But we had to get a lot more information before that decision could be reached. And that was really the function of the detention center Ashcan in Luxembourg, to sort of gather information to assist the prosecuting staff in developing a case --

Q: Right.

A: -- which then would be s -- like a grand jury, yes? A crime has been committed, so now this person is going to be tried for it. A-And that is the -- the function. And we were the investigators for the so-called grand jury, the war crimes commission. Now in my case, in addition to getting these interrogation, I would -- I would go around and -- and collect gossip of what [indecipherable] and do them little favors, you know, if -- if the shoestring broke, I'd get them another shoestring. Just little simple things, little toothpaste, a -- or if they had a problem, you know, I've a got a toothache, I'd arrange for the dentist to see them, and -- and in that way they - - they just started talking. Never -- no, I shouldn't say never, seldom, about themselves, when it came to I'm guilty of this, or I'm guilty of that, or -- I knew about concentration camps, for instance. But they would say, oh, Dachau, yeah, there was a place like -- ask so and so. He was involved in that, a-and -- you know, this was the kind of leads that would help us in our interrogation. So our summer travail -- travails in -- in Luxembourg was primarily to get to know the prisoners, their character, their personalities, which would help the prosecutors in developing their approach when they tried them, and also for historical purposes. We had a lot of historic war cri -- war department commissioned historians who wanted to interrogate these prisoners. So many times we would have a -- a professor from the Hoover Institute or some other think tank,

who was working on a particular aspect of the war history that would come and we would interrogate on their behalf, they would sit in on it, but they couldn't speak German. And we would interrogate the prisoner, and get the information they wanted for their historical prese --

Q: And how would you explain that visit to the prisoner, just --

A: We tell them the truth. Say this man is an historian --

Q: And then when --

A: -- and he's writing the history of the tank --

Q: Uh-huh.

A: -- as used by the German command. A-And the -- the tactics that Rommel used in -- in Africa, or Goodarian in his tank warfare. And oh yes, they"! tell you all about that.

Q: Because this made them --

A: Yeah, because it -- it -- they could -- this is how they were important. They could build up their own importance. It's -- you get that once in awhile in a crime that is committed where the criminal is willing to brag about how many people he has killed, or how many banks he has robbed, because this is the way he builds up his own ego.

Q: Give -- within the context -- I mean, in your autobiography you clearly name so many of the people. Could you just give whoever's watching this 0 -- some list of the names of these pri -- there were --

A: Oh yeah.

Q: -- 51 people at the -- at the height of the --

A: Yeah, at -- we had, altogether I think, total, we -- we kept a -- a daily roster of the newcomers arrivals. Gains -- gains and losses we called them. And the -- and the total number of German prisoners who came through this process at nur -- at Luxembourg was 86. That just about

encompasses everybody who was anybody in the Nazi regime. They would stay with us maybe a few weeks. We had another place near Wiesbaden, it was called Dustbin. And somebody had a good sense of humor, between Ashcan and Dustbin, I like to say we all got a lot of trash between Ashcan and Dustbin. So somebody at -- at Wiesbaden would -- would want to interrogate a certain prisoner we had in Mondorf and we -- that prisoner would be with us, and then we'd se -- Albert Speer, for instance, Speer was traveling all over Europe because people in Paris wanted to interrogate him and then he was up in Wiesbaden and then he went somewhere else, some other installation. Wherever we had a military unit working on something particularly interesting for that prisoner, we'd move him out. So, nevertheless, the prisoners were divided into three distinct categories. We had members of the German general's staff. A field marshall -- a generale fieldmarshall, General Fieldmarshall Keitel, the chief of the armed forces high command, the equivalent to Colin Powell as the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, in that position. He was undoubtedly the highest ranking of the Nazi generals. And I call him a Nazi general because he was a member of the general's staff who was a Nazi. He wouldn't have been the ch -- with his limited ability, he would never have been the chairman or the -- not chairman, but the -- the commander in chief of the armed forces high command if he hadn't been a Nazi and ardent Hitler supporter. So we had Keitel. His deputy, Jodl, generale august Jodl, Alfred Jodl, was the chief of operations. Under Jod1 it was Warlimont, Walter Warlimont, who was my special project when I worked on the history of that German general staff. He was very cooperative. He was Colonel Geito, who commanded the [indecipherable] during the Spanish revolution when the German -- German army was in -- a German military was supporting Franco in -- in Spain.

He was a very interesting guy, spoke English fluently, had married an American girl whom he had met when he was attendin -- attending our army war college in 1928, and he -- he was a very

helpful individual. He was present at the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20", deg44, and was seriously wounded, a brain injury. So he had a medical discharge, which saved him from becoming one of the people -- probably he would have been tried at Nuremberg. But he got a medical discharge and he was out of it after July 20", "44. So a lot of the things that happened later on during the war, the -- the real war crimes, the violations of -- of the Warsaw Treaty and Geneva Convention, u -- Warlimont was out of it. Now he was very cooperative and he helped us in -- in many ways, and I mention in my book an expedition I made with him to get an connection with the history of the general's staff, and -- and Warlimont was -- was a big help to me in gathering information. And he was never tried. And in fact, he was rele -- re -- released after a couple of months at Nuremberg and wasn't even around when the trials started. Well, then there was General Blaskowitz, and there was von Woonstadt, leader of the Battle of the Bulge, von Blumberg, a former chief of staff. These were members of the German general staff, career, high ranking, elite. In some cases men of principle because they belonged to the highest social class you but -- you could belong to in Germany, the ger -- genralshtapper, that was it. But with a few exceptions, they were not necessarily in sympathy with the Nazi way of doing things, at least as far as we could tell. I don't think we could ever link von Blumberg, who was a victim of -- of Hitler's doings -- von Blumberg was kicked out on a manufactured story and Keitel took his place because Keitel polished the apple and did what Hitler wanted. You couldn't hold those guys responsible for the atrocities because they really were not a part of that. [indecipherable] wouldn't have been tried under those circumstances. So they were very cooperative in working with us, and if you did come to a point where you were discussing war crimes, or tried to weave them into the atrocity aspect, their answer was always, hey, I was just a soldier. I -- I followed command. Keitel is the guy who was the -- the chief of the armed forces high command, talk to

him. The admirals, Grand Admiral Doenitz, who was the successor to Hitler and Grand Admiral Raeder, commander in chief the German navy, were part of this, they were members of the German general's staff, and they were in that category. In the second group we had what I call the real Nazi trash. The leader of which, of course, would be Julius Streicher, the Jew baiter, who prided himself of being a racist. And he, to the very end he was beating his chest with pride, I'm -- I'm the leading racist, I'm -- I'm a [indecipherable] he called himself a [indecipherable] minister. Hasa, the word -- German for hate, and rasa, the word for race, of course, y-you could just see that in -- in Streicher right from the beginning. Streicher, gaolighter Franconia, publisher, editor, pornographic anti-Semitic newspaper, Der Sturmer. Robert Ley, Labor front leader, who succeeded in strangling himself before the trials began. Leader of the arbeitsfront, the German labor front. You couldn't get a job in Germany without belonging to the labor front. Fritz Sauckel, who was the procurement officer for bringing in slave labor to work in Albert Speer's factories and mines and munitions industries and to build up the war machine and maintain it during the war. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who betrayed Austria, later became the military governor of the Netherlands. Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler youth leader. Hans Frank, the butcher of Poland, governor general of Poland, who was willing to admit that he signed the documents responsible for the execution of more than two and a half million Jews in -- in Auschwitz and Birkenau and the other camps in Poland, for which he had the responsibility. And in this particular case, confessed it, admitted it. Let's see, in that category were men like Kaltenbrunner, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the successor to the hangman Heydrich, who had -- was assassinated in Czechoslovakia as you know. I mentioned Hans Frank --

Q: Rosenberg --

A: -- some others come --

Q: Rosenberg, was that --

A: Oh yeah, wi -- Alfred Rosenberg, of course, the Nazi philosopher. Hess would have been in that category, but of course he sat in prison in England and didn't join us until Nuremberg. But he would have been in that particular group as well. These were the ultercamfer, the old fighters who helped Hitler come to power, who were with him during the putsch in 1923. And he reordered them with the positions of -- that had the power of life and death, the gaolighters who could send people to the concentration camp without trial, send them off. They were the people who had limited intelligence. Streicher had the lowest IQ.

Q: Really?

A: Julius Streicher had the IQ of 106, the lowest IQ of the 22 Nazis tried in the first session of tribunal. Lot of them had -- lacked even a sound education. Sauckel never went beyond the fifth grade, but they had the power of life and death. They were the -- the Hitler henchmen who had helped -- helped Hitler in the rise of the party. In the third category were the -- the bureaucrats, Meisner, Lamers, Schterlein, Selter, von Popham, Admiral [indecipherable] of Hungary. These were the ministers and secretaries who ran the German government. Some of them were active during the Kaiser's regime in World War I. They changed their political affiliation during the Weimar republic and kept their cushioned jobs. When Hitler came along, they became Nazis and kept their government jobs. Probably if they'd been there long enough for Stalin to come along, they'd have become communists.

Q: So they were opportunists?

A: They were opportunists. They went with whatever political wind was blowing. So when you take all these people, put them under one roof, you get a real mix, and y-you -- you tend to have a cliquish development, where they just set off in groups by themselves. And that, from the

psychology of interrogation was very much in our favor, because we just played one off against the other. We wanted to know about the generals, they told us all they knew about the Nazis.

And if we wanted to know about the Nazis we asked the -- the statesmen, or vice versa, we could -- and in that respect they were more cooperative than we wanted them to be because it just made us work that much harder. I mean, the more information we got, the harder we had to work in writing it all up. So --

Q: After you're there for a couple of weeks doing this, is -- does this wear on you, having to talk with these folks?

A: Definite -- definitely so. And it got to the point where just living in the same building with them was a real hardship and soon, within three or four weeks after I got there, we moved out.

And we would just come to work in the morning, do our interrogation, and our -- our write-ups and do our office work and then at five o'clock go home, and -- unless we had a visitor that we had an evening interrogation with a special commission coming up. A-And -- and that was necessary for your own state of mind because frankly, you got -- you got tired of the smell of it all. It was -- even in -- in what used to be a luxury hotel, it had a prison smell, most of all because sanitary conditions weren't such that these guys could take a shower every morning, and they didn't have fresh clothing to put on. You know, they were wearing, a lot of times, the clothes that they were taken prisoner in, and months later they're still wearing the same clothes.

Now we did try to -- we had a prison laundry, but the laundry service wasn't exactly a resort hotel style. That whole atmosphere, you never really had the privacy. You couldn't just walk from my office in room 32, I couldn't just walk down a hall and go to Captain Sensnik's office without meeting one of the prisoners maybe along the way who wanted to gripe about something, or had a question about something, or who wanted something. And you kind of got

tired of seeing them. They're under foot all the time. So we needed to get away. That definitely was -- was necessary. And in my case, personally, because I was playing this role of welfare officer, I was seeing more of them than the other officers were. Consequently, you had the wearing -- wearing thin happened a lot quicker with me, probably, than it did with the others. But we all had the same feeling. If I never see another Nazi again I'll be perfectly happy. That was sort of the -- the slogan we all adopted there.

Q: But you also had to appear kind of sympathetic. You were not just asking questions and trying to get answers. You were creating an atmosphere so that they would trust you. That puts you in a -- almost a schizophrenic situation, that's --

A: Yes. Yeah, that wa -- that was the other as -- especially in cases where families who were involved. Now I did visit -- I didn't begin to visit, actually, families, until we moved out of Luxembourg and went to Oberhausen. And a part of the group went to Oberhausen, mostly the general officers and then others went directly to Nuremberg. Then I went from Oberhausen to -- excuse me, to Nuremberg. But during that period, when I started seeing families with children, even Edda Goering and -- and Herman Goering would write a letter to his daughter, and I would read his letter to his daughter sitting on my lap, and that had to get to me, and -- but the difficulty -- and I think this is where our training at Richie was emphatic, on this don't get personally involved. Don't show sympathy, don't show understanding even in body language. And we were trying not to agree, not to nod your head when they made one of their profound statements which might make them think, he agrees with me. He would have done the same thing if he were in my shoes. You had to avoid giving them an opportunity to transfer their doings to you -- their -- their philosophy. In other words, yeah, he may be the enemy, but he agrees with me, cause I saw him nod his head, or I saw him smile when I said that. So we had to learn to be very impersonal and

stone faced, and not to let ourselves be moved by -- by what they -- they said, or what they sometimes did. So body language is very important in talking to them, especially someone -- I -- I -- I like to move my hands when I'm talking so it was very difficult to -- to sort of sit still and -- and -- and just listen. Little things, like Herr Streicher, a man who couldn't talk for five minutes - - oh, two minutes, without becoming anti-Semitic. Every conversation would lead into his hatred of the Jews. Whether he thought that sometimes you felt like giving him a real argument, or even punching him in the mouth, because his conversation could rub you the wrong way. He was a foul mouth to begin with, a-and his -- his language was just uncouth. So that was difficult to just tolerate. But that same man, when his wife Adele came to the prison, and I told him -- your wife -- now, they couldn't have visitors, and this happened in Nuremberg, not -- not in Luxembourg, but I take that out of sequence here. I told him, your wife is here, what do you want me to tell her? And our purpose for being -- for playing this role was to get information. We wanted to know more about th-the prisoner, about his family. Sometimes the wife would tell us -- tell us things about his activities that he hadn't revealed, just through a short, 10 minute visit. When I told him his wife was there, and that's the only time she came to visit, he gave me a message for her, telling me she should visit hospitals and visit the sick and do whatever she could to help any orphan children. Well, he was obviously playing up to me. I don't --

Q: This was Streicher?

A: Streicher.

Q: Yes.

A: 1-- I can't believe that he really was that concerned, because if -- if you read my report on him, he's not the kind of a guy who would worry about orphans. But then he suddenly walked up to me, and he put his arm on my -- my -- his hand on my arm right here. And he just held it there

for a moment and I didn't know what to make of this because we had no physical contact, we never shook hands, and we never addressed them by their -- their titles, it was always Herr Streicher. And they very seldom knew our names, even so that they couldn't call us by name, unless they specifically asked, then you told them your name, but we used false names anyhow.

But he put his hand right here on my arm and for a moment I didn't know what to make of this, and he held it there. And then he stepped back and he said, "When you see my wife, tell her to put her hand in the same place on your arm, so we can be -- so we can be close to each other." Now, that sort of thing haunts you because it comes from a man who you've already decided, hard-hearted, cold, the originator of the Nuremberg Laws, his pornographic, anti-Semitic newspaper. But then a gesture like that catches you completely unawares. And -- and there were incidents like that in their correspondence or their conversation where you -- you had to really steel yourself to avoid being sympathetic or giving the impression that yeah, I think you have a point. I agree with you. So --

Q: Wow.

A: Right.

Q: At -- at what point in the -- in the work at Ashcan -- which is such a great name for where you were, did you really understand about the genocides? About the sort of factory-like killing of Jews, and the mobile killing operations, and the concentration camp system. Was that very quick?

A: Well actually, that aspect of it, to me personally, didn't come to light -- now, two of my colleagues were Jewish, two of about five officers. And one of them had lost his -- his parents at Auschwitz. He knew, he -- he knew the sa -- a-and -- and the -- the tales he -- but his knowledge of it was limited to his own family experience. He had no idea of what --

Q: Of the scope of it.

A: -- the big scope, the big picture of this was. That really did -- didn't begin develop until I got to Nuremberg and began to see some of the evidence --

Q: I see.

A: -- the films. German films.

Q: Right.

A: Their own films captured, and began to see some of the documents, i -- which -- which came to our intention in the course of an interrogation because questions that were given to us were based on the documents that we were asked to -- the existence of which we were asked to verify, the signatures which we wanted to authenticate and make -- verify as well. That's when I began to -- to learn the atrocities. Then after the trials began, I did have the opportunity, after I left Nuremberg a-at my strong, urgent request -- but I did go back to Nuremberg time to time to finish a project with a particular general officer, of the generale staff. And I would attend a session and I would hear the evidence. For instance, this man Herse, I heard his testimony. And I think that was one of the first times I really realized how vast this thing was, it -- it wasn't just one individual's doings that led to a certain crime, or an atrocity, this is really a machine, a -- a whole -- this was a government action. Thi -- this weren't just isolated incidents. And it wasn't until really the trials began that -- that that came to my -- to my attention. There's a -- a -- a very serious incident I mention in -- in my book, one I've had first hand, for the very first time, outside of that brief exposure to Dachau, I d -- I didn't see any more evidence of the atrocities until we met a convoy and one particular incident, a convoy of seven two and a half ton trucks loaded with bodies being shifted from one mass grave to another. I think I point to that particular incident even more so than my first visit to Dachau as the -- the turning point. I realized that this

was more than just one crime by one man, or one adventure that one or two people participated in, this -- this is mass -- mass production.

Q: I -- I want to ask you about some of these particular men that you were talking with in Mondorf but -- but let me ask you something. When -- when you would do your rounds, you obviously couldn't see everybody each day --

A: Oh no, no.

Q: -- right?

A: No.

Q: So you would pick --

A: Oh yeah.

Q: -- I would suppose --

A: Yeah, just a --

Q: -- a group of people.

A: Mm-hm.

Q: And how long would you spend with each of these folks? Would it vary? Would it be 10 minutes sometimes --

A: No.

Q: -- an hour another time?

A: It -- it would depend on the individual.

Q: Uh-huh.

A: If he was an interesting person I'd want to be -- spend more time with him.

Q: Right.

A: Frankly, von Ribbentrop, I found him very a -- very repulsive, very annoying. He wa -- he was a -- 1-- i -- he was a nervous wreck. He was -- annoying is a good way to put -- he got -- he gots on your nerves, you -- you've met people who get on your nerves?

Q: Yes, yes.

A: Well, von Ribbentrop was that way. So if I went to see von Ribbentrop, it would be very brief. And I didn't go see him regularly at all, and maybe I -- I talked to him five or six times in the course of that summer --

Q: Right.

A: -- because he didn't interest me. Rosenberg was another one like that, he was a - a nervous twitcher, he always had -- had something he had to fiddle with, and -- and he had all these nervous facial gestures. And -- and he was again somebody whose company you didn't particularly enjoy or find interesting. So those people you -- you avoided, I -- I would spend more time with somebody like Papa Schwartz or Warlimont. Keitel intrigued me because he was such a pompous idiot that I sort of always felt superior when I talked to Keitel. Yet, he was a general field marshall, you know, five star general, I was just a first lieutenant, but -- [tape break, music] -- very painful it was, how he hadn't been able to sleep a wink. And I said why didn't you tell the guard, we had a guard, all he had to do was call th -- call the guard. He could walk out of his room and tell the guard in the hall that he wanted to see the doctor. Well, he was a general field marshall, he wasn't going to tell an ordinary enlisted man that he had a boil on his neck.

He'd rather suffer all night long and wait until an officer came, so he could say officer to officer.

Well, my reaction to that was, good, I hope the boil really gave you a pain. S-So that was a different kind of a visitor. And then there were -- Streicher fascinated me because it was like going to a zoo and -- and watching a particularly strange animal because he's repugnant in one

sense, but you can't take your eyes off him. I liked to spend time with Streicher, just to see him - - hear him rant and rave until I got bored, and then I -- I would leave him. Ley was another comedian.

Q: Comedian?

A: Comedian. Ley was -- well, first of all, he stammered. He stammered -- he -- he stuttered occasionally only on a letter. Like, my name is ho -- h-ho -- ho -- [tape break, ad for USN] -- look at -- h-he would say, if I could have some of that good American whiskey, it would [speaks German here] it would loosen my tongue.

Q: Loosen my tongue.

A: Yeah, it -- make a smooth talker out of him.

Q: But you also said in your book that he was never sensible, he didn't -- there was no sensible conversation out of him.

A: No, you couldn't. That's why I say he was a comedian. He -- he would just -- you would end up laughing, he would amuse you, without trying to amuse you, because he took himself very seriously. He felt that he -- he really was a creator, he had big ideas, and he did, but he didn't have the ability to carry them out. He could fantasize and he was going to reconstruct Germany and bring in all the Jews that had left Germany and bring them back and make up to the Jews the persecution and the atrocities that we had enforced on them. And give them a chance to help reorganize a-and reconstruct Germany with himself in charge. And he'd be willing to do it out of his prison cell in Nuremberg.

Q: Oh really?

A: Course, he'd like to have it fixed up a little bit so it'd be more comfortable, but -- but he'd be perfectly willing to --

Q: To do that.

A: -- to direct the whole thing. But this sort of nonsense, he was good at. When we finally told him point blank that the allied -- allied authorities were not about to accept his master plan for the reconstruction of Germany, he became suicidal. And that's when we put a 24 hour guard on his cell. And this is in Nuremberg now.

Q: Right.

A: But he fooled the guard and -- and he did strangle himself. And I was on duty that night. I had the questionable pleasure of -- of cutting him down and calling for help, and -- and h-he had succeeded in ripping the strong edge of a towel, out of which he made a noose. And then he tore parts of his underwear, which he stuffed in his mou -- keeping in mind he's under guard, somebody's watching him, with a spotlight on him all night long. And he put the -- the fragments of his underwear in his mouth so he wouldn't gag, put the noose around his neck, then went to the toilet. And when he sat on the toilet, only his feet would show far -- from the viewpoint of the guard outside his door. Then he looped that noose over the flushpipe, stand pipe with a button on it to flush the toilet, came about yay high, and he put the noose over, and then literally forced himself forward and strangled himself. When the guard gave the alarm because he'd been sitting on the toilet too long, I was the duty officer that night and I had the key to the cell. And when I opened it up, it was too late already, he was dead. Of course then we got the doctors and everything else. Dr. -- a Swiss -- Zukli, a Swiss doctor performed an autopsy on him and found a -- a damaged brain. Part of his brain was damaged, and that was the result of an -- he was a navigator in airplane in the Luftwaffe in World War I, which crashed. And that really is what resulted in his stuttering, stammer, and also probably is -- the way his mind functioned, he just wasn't quite the same, so -- but -- but he was an interesting person to talk to from that standpoint,

cause you didn't know what he was going to come up with next to get -- to provide a little levity in the -- the day's operations.

Q: Can I go back to Streicher a few minutes?

A: But di -- he --

Q: When he -- when -- when Streicher came into the Palace hotel, t-to Ashcan, and Doenitz comes up to you and says we da -- you know, we're not eating with this guy, he's not coming into the dining room, right.

A: No, no.

Q: You -- you all end up -- you put him on another floor.

A: Yes.

Q: On a separate [indecipherable]

A: Nobody wanted to room with him.

Q: Right.

A: But Ley was willing to -- we called them the Bobbsey Twins.

Q: Really?

A: Ley was the only one who was sympathetic to Streicher. So Ley said that he would -- he would be willing to room with Streicher. But we put Streicher at first into -- into -- on the second floor where there were no other prisoners, because nobody wanted to room with him and we didn't have any more room upstairs. And then Streicher indicate -- Ley indicated that he'd be willing to room with Streicher, so we put the two together, cause as I say, we had a purpose for wanting them to relate to each other, conversation-wise and everything else. Ley was very much taken with Streicher, he admired him. But that feeling wasn't particularly returned on Streicher's part. He -- he didn't -- Streicher didn't particularly care for Ley, he -- he thought he was a

weakling. He -- he wasn't match -- a masochist like Streicher was. Streicher was all muscle and - - and show off masochist. But Ley was just a direct opposite, he was a wimp. And so Streicher had this tendency to look down on Ley. But that was the only one -- the only two who -- who were willing to be together. And the dining room -- course they had to eat together, but they had difficulty finding somebody to -- to sit with them, unless there was no place, and they -- they had to sit with them. But there was very little conversation between Streicher -- everybody despised him. I mean, they -- they just didn't care for him, especially Goering, who was the one that filed charges against him, and brought him before the court, the Nazi court, which is -- Walter Buch, who was another one of our prisoners that I didn't mention. He was the chief justice of the -- of the Nazi court, you know, the -- when a Nazi committed a crime against another Nazi, he was not tried in a criminal court, he was tried in a Nazi court, and Walter Buch was the superior judge of this -- this Nazi court. Buch, incidentally, was the father-in-law of Martin Bormann, who was Hitler's adjutant and the guy that pretty much spoke for Hitler and signed a lot of orders that are still today being questioned as to the authenticity, did they come from Bormann or Hitler. So Bormann was a very important guy, you know, he -- unfortunately we didn't have him with us. And Buch was the father-in-law of this man, too. Another one that I didn't mention who was part of that Nazi trash [indecipherable] was Wilhelm Frick, who'd been sec -- Minister of the Interior and was really the guy who wrote the -- the original Nuremberg laws. The -- the law -- the legal --

Q: Right.

A: -- phrase -- phrases themselves, so --

Q: Let's stop the tape now since it's going to run out soon, and go to the next tape.

End of Tape Three

Beginning Tape Four

Q: -- to start talking about Wilhelm Frick --

A: Mm-hm.

Q: -- and your experience with him, what kind of a person was he, and what was your experience in talking with him?

A: He was a nonentity, I would say. And even the Nazis considered him a -- a nobody. He was powerful because, you know, the Minister of the Interior in Germany, even today in -- in many European governments, is in charge of the police force, and has a lot more power than the Secretary of the Interior does in -- in -- comparatively in the United States. So the Minister of the Interior was truly a -- an important position. But once Hitler became the fuehrer, when he was -- you know, Hitler held three jobs. He was the fuehrer, that's the leader of the Nazi party, that was really the title fuehrer, and the one that he preferred, which incidentally Streicher gave him.

When they first met, in a beer hall in -- in Munich, and Streicher, who was the leader of an anti- Semitic faction in Nuremberg, heard about this labor party group in Munich, which was headed by Hitler. And he went to Munich to hear this man Hitler, about whom he had heard, speak. And he describes in his testimony, he thought he actually saw a halo around his head, he thought this is the Messiah, this is the man who is going to ser -- s-save Germany, whereupon he went to Hitler, and said, "You are my fuehrer. I will follow you, and everything I have is yours." In his famous words. And Streicher was one of the few members of the inner party who could dootz Hitler, address him in the familiar German du. Streicher was one of the few who cou -- even Goering didn't have that power, but Streicher could -- could do that. And Hitler liked that fuehrer business, and it was Streicher, at their first meeting, who suggested it to him. And it was the union of those two parties from Nuremberg and from Munich that made the -- the dare -- day ap

-- the deutsche arbeit party of Munich a national deutsche arbeit party, because the two communities merged, thanks to Streicher, which was why Streicher was particularly dear to Hitler, and considered him very close, and vice versa. Well, Frick was important at -- at the beginning, and he was a -- I think he wanted to be the police, or he was the police commissioner in -- in Munich at the time of the putsch. And he was active in Hitler's political endeavors, and of course became one of the followers. And then he was elected to the Reichstag and Hitler became chancellor and named him Minister of the Interior. But then when Himmler came into the play, and took over the Gestapo and the -- the -- the SS and all -- all the police duties and the security services went to Himmler and Frick really had nothing to do. He -- his position was strictly a -- up until beyond 1935, he -- he was really nobody. He really did -- didn't have much of a -- a role, and colorless, sort of a -- a gray aura about him. His whole appearance, gray hair, gray face and gray clothes, he -- he was just -- in a bunch of people, he would never stand out.

Even if there were only two people in a room, he wouldn't stand out.

Q: Did he admit to being a racist?

A: He wa --

Q: Did he admit to being a racist?

A: Well, ya --

Q: Do you remember?

A: Yeah, well, yeah -- yes --

Q: Yes.

A: -- but it was legal. You see, i-it was -- everything he did was legal. He -- he was the -- a legal interpretation. And yes, of course the Jews had to be done away with because that was the law, and the Nuremberg laws, and no question about it. Now, if you say, did you have anything to do

with the concentration camp -- which incidentally was not a question we -- I don't remember -- I don't think I ever asked it of anybody, cause I really didn't know. I -- I just -- wasn't in my -- I think with Streicher, it -- it had to come up, as I recall, o-of his -- of his own volition. Where he would bring it up, but never the details, as far as people being abused or starved. The concentration camp, as Streicher explained it to me, is very simple. Here were these communists, and these communists were causing a lot of problems -- I'm giving Streicher's explanation. And so when the big election came along, at which time Hitler was to be the plebiscite, when Hitler was to be the supreme being, the fuehrer of the political party and then the chancellor of the German Reich, which ran the government, and then the president of the German Reich, after Hindenburg. So he was president, chancellor and fuehrer. Political, organizational and ceremonial. So he really had three jobs under the title of fuehrer. Well, when all of this came into being, the communists had to be concentrated out of sight so that they couldn't cause any problems. They were having demonstrations and disrupting political meetings, and the communists were causing problems. So they were put into school buildings and even some abandoned factories, as a temporary measure to concentrate them out of sight where we could concentrate -- keep our eyes on them. Then, after the election, and Hitler came to power, it was just convenient to keep them there. It turned out that many of the communists were Jews, so it was natural for those communists, and those Jews to end up in the concentration camps. But you couldn't keep them in these temporary facilities, so he had to build facilities for them. And this is how Dachau came into being a concentration camp, to bring these people together from the school building and factories where they were tentatively kept, and put them into one camp. That of course was the beginning. The ultimate solution, of course was, as the camps grew bigger and more and more people ended up in them, and the problem of feeding them, and they could no

longer buy their way out of Germany by surrendering their property to the German regime, they had to come up with a final solution, the final solution was extermination. And that, of course is when Birkenau and -- and Auschwitz and the others came in -- into being. And that was the whole pattern. Now Streicher took responsibility only up to when the camps were built, like Dachau. And then points out that he actually at Christmastime, as a Christmas gift, a humane gesture on his part, to prove what a big heart he had, he actually arranged for the release of some of these people from concentration camps. Communists, never Jews. He never arranged for a Jew. And this -- I'm quoting him now, how proud he was, "Nobody could ever accuse me of letting a Jew out of a concentration camp." That had to be put in. That was part of his -- his make-up. But he had a Christmas party and he would invite the families of these people that he was releasing from the concentration camp. And they didn't know it, the families didn't know what was going to happen, neither did the prisoners. They were suddenly whisked away to some gym, or some public building, then the doors would be opened, and the families, and the -- the inmates would come together. And you know, nine out of 10 of those would become members of the Nazi party in appreciation. And this is why he did it, because he was the goodwill -- a lot of these communists became Nazis after he released them from the concentration camp.

Q: That's what he told you.

A: That was one of his accomplishments and -- and that was really his motivation, but he never let Jews out. That was his kins -- his principles. Well, Fr-Frick, as I said, his role in all of this was that he merely -- his job was to write the laws, interpret the laws as Minister of the Interior, and to follow those laws. And nothing he did was ever illegal, according to him, he always followed the law. So he did not -- couldn't understand why he was being put in with all these

other people who were -- who -- who went beyond the law, obviously, because that resulted in all the atrocities.

Q: How about Herman Goering? Let -- let me quote -- quote you from your autobiography, you said he was the easiest Nazi to interrogate. He was able, shrewd manager, brilliant and brave, tuthless and grasping. At times almost a pleasure to be with, at other times a pain in the ass.

A: Exactly.

Q: But it was always interesting to be with him.

A: Yup, well that --

Q: How about [indecipherable]

A: -- that -- that is it in -- and I've saved that characterization because it -- it still fits in retrospect, looking back on it. And first of all, Goering did not fit any of the three categories that I mentioned. Nor was he accepted in those three categories. Now, he was president of the Reichstag, which would put him in with the bureaucracy, wouldn't it? With the government, the secretaries and the ministers. Well, they didn't accept him. They didn't want him. He was not really one of them. So he was shut out of that group, von Popham, and -- and Meisner, Selta, those, they wanted nothing to do with him. First of all, because he was promoted over their heads. They were the men with experience and everything else, and here he -- overnight, he became the president of the Reichstag, he wasn't really one of them. Military man, yes, seven star general, Reichsmarshall, the highest military rank ever attained by anybody in history, except Hannibal maybe. But he wasn't mem -- a member of the German general's staff. He -- he was never considered the -- the red stripe of the generale's staff. So they didn't accept him, none of the generals wanted anything to do with him. I mean, imagine a guy who, you know, who comes from the rank of a -- a lieutenant in the riktorfin squadron suddenly becomes a seven star

Reichsmarshall of the Reich. And so there was jealousy and there was lack of respect and they never took him seriously. And incompetence. Goering was not a very competent man in a sense of organization and -- he -- he could talk a big show, but he could never deliver the goods. He really wasn't a producer. So he was resented by the military and he wasn't accepted. And he didn't really fit into the Nazi element because he was above them all. He was strutting in his uniforms and make -- making himself super rich by his acquisitions of art and [indecipherable] and special train. And then of course the -- the four year plan and the Herman Goering werker.

So he's also an industrialist, in addition to being the huntmaster of Germany, in addition to being the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe. So the other Nazis never considered him part of their group, even though he had participated in the putsch. So he's pretty much isolated. He really wasn't accepted. Plus, the conflict between Doenitz and Goering. Hitler in his last will and testament specified that Doenitz, Grand Admiral Doenitz was to be -- to take his place and become the president or whatever, of the Reich, of the fourth Reich. But as far as Goering was concerned, he was designated to be Hitler's successor, and it was only because Bormann either misinterpreted or withheld Goering's last message to Hitler from the [indecipherable] Salzburg to Berlin, which resulted in Hitler condemning Goering and supposedly sentencing him to death, to be assassinated by the -- by -- executed by the SS. That really wasn't Hitler's doing, that was Bormann, who intercepted the letters and acted not on Hitler's behalf, but on his own behalf. So as far as Goering was concerned, he was still the president of the class. And this group photo I have, who sits in the middle? The president of the class. Who is the successor, Doenitz? He's in the back row. Well, those two fought each other all the time, never face to face, but to us they say, well Goering did this wrong, he did that wrong, and he's a nobody and then of course, Doenitz didn't do this and didn't do that right. So that contest was going on all the time,

competing for each other for the crown under those circumstances, which was amusing. Now Goering personally then, to be with him was -- was -- the nice part was, when you left Goering, if you got bored with his pomposity and his braggadocio, you could just say, well Herr Goering, I -- [have to leave now, I have another appointment. And as far as he was concerned, that's okay, I let you go now, I'm giving you permission to leave. He was always condescending. He never -- he never acted like he was a prisoner in -- he was always in charge. When you went to interrogate him, you were visiting him. It wasn't interrogation. Or when he came to your room for an interrogation. Sometimes an interrogation was done out in the gar -- on the garden. We'd go for a walk together in the hotel gardens and talk. But it was always, I'm free to talk to you now, you can come and see me. Or I'll give you an appointment at one o'clock this afternoon for a visit to your room. So he dismissed you and welcomed you always as the Reichsmarshall on [indecipherable]. Secondly, you -- you had to take that with a grain of salt and that's part of the game. Secondly, he had a terrific sense of humor, he really did. And he enjoyed himself tremendously, h-his own jokes. He could laugh harder at his own jokes than anybody I knew.

And I think I mentioned in my book that he had a collection of jokes being told about him in the underground, which he collected, he had written up in a little ba -- joke book. And occasionally, if he was in the mood, he would produce his little book and that reminded him of a story, and he would tell you a joke out of his -- his little book. Sometimes off-color jokes, but always with himself as the butt of the joke. If you were caught telling a joke like that in Germany, that was good for six months in a concentration camp. But he collected the joke and -- and save it. He was able to laugh at himself, which is a strange thing to say about a man who took himself very, very seriously, and who spent every living moment making sure that you knew that he was really the leading Nazi and he was really in charge. And he did this and did that, and he was one of the few

who admitted building this and building that, and this was really his responsibility. He accomplished that; I, Herman Goering. Yet, he could tell jokes about himself if he was in the mood. He had to be in the mood; he was a very moody person. Part of which was due to the fact he's a drug addict. He took paracodeine tablets -- well, the numbers differ. Some writers say a hundred tablets a day. I would say that was a little bit much. But he -- he chewed them like M&M's. And he had a pocket full. He actually arrived with -- with a box. I think he confiscated all the paracodeine in Germany before he was taken prisoner. And these were tablets that he just chewed. One individual tablet probably very weak, but four or five would have the effect of a Valium, and he would take a handful and just chew on them, and then maybe a half an hour later, take another handful. And we guessed that he consumed -- by Dr. Flicker, who was the German doctor, and we had an American doctor as well, estimated that he was taking between 60 and 80 a day of -- of these little paracodeine tablets, about the size of M&Ms. They broke him of the habit, with his cooperation, by reducing the dosage. At first he didn't realize they were doing it, and then gradually he participated, and then willingly, and almost proudly, to the extent that he lost weight, he lost 80 pounds while in prison, and actually began to feel pretty good. As he would say, prison life was good for my health, and -- because he lost weight and said that physically he felt better after six months in Mondorf and Nuremberg than he had ever in his adult life, ever since the time of the putsch when he became morphine addicted, so -- but all the time that he was in the Reich, he was, of course, was a morphine addict, and went into the tank from time to time to be dried out and to take the cure. And this paracodeine was a way of -- of setting that. And when they broke him of the habit, he really -- by the time the trials began, he was in pretty good shape, compared to the flab that he was when he first was taken prisoner. Now, other times, if he was in a bad mood, we just stayed away from him because he wouldn't cooperate, he

wouldn't talk. He would just say, "I don't feel like talk -- talking today, and -- I'm not interested, I don't want to talk to you today." And that was it, nothing you could do about it. He was afraid of thunder and lightning.

Q: Yes, I read that.

A: Yeah.

Q: He was --

A: Yeah that, I think Hasenclever or somebody else, another author has mentioned that. But I -- I actually went in his cell one time during a thunderstorm, and he was hiding under the -- under the cot. Literally shrunk under the cot, because of the -- the terrific thunder storm and lightning, and he was frightened. And this was early in Mondorf. And I think part of that was the -- the drug mentality. I wa -- being generous in saying that, I -- he was not a coward, cause he was an -- an ace in World War I, so it wasn't on that basis. It had to be part of his mental outlook, or -- or his mental condition at -- at that particular time.

Q: Unless -- I -- I was just -- I wondered as I was reading it in your book and I read it somewhere else, that unless the sounds reminded him of something during a -- the war, or -- World War I and that it wasn't thunderstorms so much, but something else.

A: That could be it too, yeah, I'm not -- I don't -- no, that wa -- I didn't mention that --

Q: Yeah.

A: -- but that -- that's a good point. That could be it, too. I-It -- but it definitely was a --

Q: It was so extreme [indecipherable] so extreme --

A: -- was sa -- it was an extreme, yeah, for a man, it was kind of humorous.

Q: Like an animal, a dog, or a cat --

A: And like -- yeah, it just -- cowed.

Q: Yeah.

A: Li-Literally cowed by it, yeah. One amusing anecdote, which is part of my pattern of circles, I -- [ tell in my book and is worth repeating, because it's quite significant. As I said, Goering was pretty much isolated by the others, with the result that most frequently he would eat by himself, sometimes by choice because all the -- all the other guys were eating there, but here is where the Reichsmarshall eats. When he did eat with somebody else, it would usually be because he wanted to discuss some important matter that came to mind. Then he would actually make an appointment for lunch with -- or -- or dinner with -- with the people. Well, we took turns, the duty officer on occasion, like the meal times. And I happened to be duty officer, you know, during a dinner -- lunch time, once. And as I said, we had ordinary German prisoners who delivered -- who prepared the food and -- and serve it. And this German -- ex-German corporal, I think he was, who was a regular prisoner of war, worked in the kitchen, served -- came in. And I happened to be standing near Goering's table when he sat down and this man brought plate of stew, set it before Goering on a heavy porcelain dish, no knives or forks permitted, they -- they ate with spoo -- they ate with the spoons and all the food that was prepared was spoonable. They didn't need a knife to cut their food, there were stews and things of that nature. 1600 calories a day, no more. That was prescribed by the Geneva Convention. This man set the plate of stew before Goering and Goering looked at it and smelled it, then he pushed it aside. And then he growled at this PW, he said, "Take that slop away. I fed my dog much better than that back home." And this PW took the plate of stew, and stepped back and he clicked his heels and bowed, and he said, "In that case, Herr Reichsmarshall, your dog ate much better than we German soldiers did." Made an about face and walked out. Well, that was quite a memorable occasion. Forty years later, "m the ambassador in Luxembourg and the city of Mondorf decided

to make me an honorary citizen of Mondorf, which is quite an honor over there, because the -- I don't know what -- what you get for it. I think you don't get arrested if you speed, or you can park any place you want to. Whatever, I've never taken advantage of it, but they have a street named for me, which -- which is great, I think that's a real thrill because every day somebody is mentioning my name. They've got to -- you know, if they're arrested, or have groceries shipped to them, or apply for a driver's license, where do you live? They've got to name me and so that's a -- that's an everlasting honor that's going to be there as long as the street is. But I became an honorary citizen, they had a big ceremony, the mayor, and the town council and the boy scouts and girl scouts and the village band, everybody was out. And Winnie and I arrived in the embas - - embassy car with the American flag, embassy flag. One of those nice ego trips, of which we had many. And we stepped out and they played the national anthems of both countries and -- and then the mayor, with his red, white and blue sash, his symbol of rank. And we had a [indecipherable] there. And then we met some -- met some of the other guests, including a man who was very Germanic in his approach, you know, the stiff legged, head bowing. And he introduced himself as Rudolf Diebenbush from Koblenz, and he was a special guest because he had asked to be invited to this occasion because he had read in the paper that the American ambassador was a former interrogator and was being honored in Mondorf as an honorary citizen.

And since he had been a PW at the installation at that particular time, he was sure that he knew the ambassador, although Dolibois didn't mean anything to him, he knew me as Gillen. So then he came -- then when he saw my face, he began to put two and two together and says, that -- that -- that was Lieutenant Gillen, Oberloitman Gillen. So he was pleased to meet me and -- and made a big show of who he was and so forth. Well, I was pleased to meet him too, and we started to make -- compare some notes. Then he tapped me on the shoulder, and he said, "Mr.

Ambassador, Herr [indecipherable]," he said, "do you remember the incident when a soldier served a plate of stew to Goering?" And said, "That was me, Rudolf Diebenbush from Koblenz." It's the same. I didn't recognize him because he's 40 years older. But that was Rudolf Diebenbush from Koblenz. P-Pattern of circles.

Q: And what did Goering do when he did that? Did he just -- he didn't say -- did he say anything, or --

A: Well, it -- it is -- I -- I was in the back -- back of the --

Q: Oh.

A: -- so I didn't -- couldn't see his facial expression, and he -- there nothing he could say, but in my own mind, that man would have lost his head if that had happened six months earlier, you know.

Q: Right.

A: The tables had been turned. I classify that as one of my ironic experiences.

Q: I -- Lunderstand when you were talking with Goering about German atrocities, he would mention the atrocities committed by other countries.

A: Oh yes, very quickly, beginning with the atom bomb, who dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And who is the -- who's the real war criminal. By comparison how many did you kill, compared to the numbers you accuse us of killing? That was one of his favorite lines.

Concentration camps? We learn about concentration camps from the Russians. And of course he -- he didn't bring up the -- the massacre in Poland and he --

Q: [indecipherable] Polish --

A: -- he had all of that very ca -- yeah.

Q: -- the Polish [indecipherable]

A: And he -- he had -- he had all the history. He -- he knew -- and he could go back to concentration camps of long, long time ago. You know, he never -- he was not anti-Semitic according to him. It all depended who the Jew was. If he was an eastern Jew from Czechoslovakia or Poland, that's different, we don't want them, get them out of Germany, get rid of them. Now don't kill them. He didn't believe in killing them, but he believed in getting rid of them by hook or by crook, just get rid of them. Don't torture them, don't kill them. That was not his idea, he says. Now, if he was a German Jew, and had not committed any crime against the government, he very frequently said that he protected them. In fact, there was some good -- some people in his household who were Jewish. Even his successor, Milch, was part Jewish, and he succeeded him as commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, and he claimed that he was criticized for that because Milch is part Jew. But in Germany, I say who is a Jew and who isn't a Jew. That was one of his bylines. So, he was an interesting character, no matter how you -- how you sliced it, no matter what mood he was in.

Q: But at one point in -- in your autobiography, you said it wasn't difficult to get them to talk, but what was really difficult was to try to figure out what the truth was.

A: What the truth was, yes. And -- and what was deliberate gossip. They were -- they were just gossiping, or -- or were they really telling the truth. The challenge in that was for us to try to learn as much -- what -- I can only speak for myself, to learn as much about the German general's staff before I interrogated somebody about the staff, so that I could tell when -- you know, when he was pulling my leg, or when he was just stretching a point. Which meant doing homework before you even begin an interrogation. And that was difficult because we knew very little. We knew more about Frederick the Great and the German general's staff back in the 18" century, but we didn't know anything about the relationship of the German general's staff to the

rise of Hitler, the role that they played in his coming to power, or the role that they played in execution and planning of the war. And this is what we needed to learn, we -- that's what our homework is all about. And that is where this man Warlimont proved very valuable to me. It got to the point where if I had a sp-specific interrogation report about the general's staff to ask of Doenitz, for instance -- Jodl -- I never interrogated Jodl cause he was very uncooperative, yes or no. Everything was yes or no. And -- and he -- he just -- you never got much out of him. I don't know who -- I don't know of anybody of the other interrogators ever got anything out of him. He was a very strict soldier, name, rank and serial number, and he played that for all he was worth.

And as far as he was concerned, the prisoner of war and you didn't have a right to try him. So, if I would interrogate Kesselring, or Blaskowitz, or one of those guys, I go to Warlimont first and ask him the same questions, by way of doing homework. And then doing the interrogation and verifying what Warlimont had given me in relationship to the answers to the questions I was getting from the prisoner.

Q: So what has hap -- obviously before the Nuremberg trial, there must be a huge number of people looking over all the confiscated papers, the documents. Now, is Jackson and some of the people working for him coming down to Mondorf and talking with you folks?

A: No.

Q: No, so you don't -- you're not getting that --

A: That didn't --

Q: -- that information.

A: -- we didn't -- we didn't -- they separated legal staff and the military intelligence staff completely. We were -- it is just like a private investigator working on a crime, and giving his information to the prosecutor. But the -- the investigator then doesn't become part of the -- the

process. And that's pretty much the role we play. We were investigating the character and -- and the people and the incidents and verifying. A lot of our stuff was, do you recognize this document, do you know what it means? Is that your signature, or is that Goering's signature as you know it? That's -- that type of thing. Then after we got to Nuremberg -- I did no interrogating at Nuremberg. At -- at Nuremberg I was strictly -- first sent there to get the information that Ley had, who claimed that he had some important information that he would give only to me -- in a letter he sent to Lieutenant Gillen. So I was sent to Nuremberg on -- on temporary assignment for six days to -- to get that from Ley. And after that I was to come back home. But meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Colonel Andrews pulled strings to keep me in Nuremberg because I guess -- well, because it was comfortable to have -- have me around, cause I brought back his days of power in -- in Luxembourg. In Nuremberg Andrews didn't have much clout because Jackson was in charge. And except for guarding the prison, Andrews really had nothing to do with the prisoners. For that matter, I don't think he ever -- he -- he didn't see the prisoners day by day, face -- eyeball to eyeball like he did in Luxembourg. And he missed that, and he -- he really was a figurehead in -- in Nuremberg. So he wanted his old team back, so he tried to keep me there. And that was -- but he had to find something for me to do. So I became special assistant to -- to him, to carry out his orders. Well, he had no orders, he really had none, except let him know -- if you talk to these guys, let me know if they're committing suici -- trying to commit suicide, or if they're doing something unusual. Like one guy who was -- who had been Himmler's chauffeur, who listened to the radio all the time, putting his ear to the [indecipherable] dial, I mean that kind of stuff, and Andrews liked him, then it -- so then, in order to have something to do -- meanwhile, I was pulling strings to get out of Nuremberg. I was fed up with the whole operation, I didn't want any more of it. And Andrews is trying to keep me,

and we finally made a deal. If I got somebody to succeed me, then I could go, and then he would stop trying to hold onto me; cause he needed me. And that is when we got Gustav Gilbert. I went through the Richie crowd, and Gilbert had been an interrogator, I think at Wiesbaden, so that when he came to Nuremberg -- he was a psychologist professionally and he got -- he had book written all over him before he came, and he was ready to go. He had his book planned. And -- and so Gilbert began to take over this visiting each prisoner in his cell. And up to that point, the Rorschach analysis test came into play in that -- Major Douglas, Douglas Kelly was the prison psychiatrist. He was a professional psychiatrist, whose job it was to test these prisoners, you get their IQ, their personality quirks, their state of mind. Anything else that the inkblot test reveals.

A lot of these people were self-appointed. Back in those days, really, for those first six months or so after the war, you could pretty much do what you wanted to do, and write your own orders cause everyb -- everybody's in turmoil. And if you could just get somebody to say, okay, I'm appointing Lieutenant Dolibois chairman of the zoo, and I'd be chairman of the zoo. So this guy Gilbert arrived -- Douglas arrives on the scene, and he's a prison psychiatrist, a-and he's primarily working for some institute, I think it was the Drexel Institute, to test these prisoners.

But the information would also be useful to the tribunal because it would help them understand.

So he became very important, prison psychiat -- except he couldn't speak German. So then they found out that I had majored in psychology in college, so I knew -- I knew that -- the terms, with the result I became the interpreter for the Rorschach analys -- which I loved, it was a lot of fun.

Q: Why?

A: And -- I just -- he gave the questions and I interpret -- translated and gave the answers. And -- and then he would ask me to write what I thought after an interroga -- after an -- an interview, what'd you think of this? And then I would write my layman's report of what I think the prisoner

was like. And then he combined that with his technological -- his -- his scientific analysis, and it made for a pretty intelligent report. The layman could read his report, whereas if it had been all scientific, probably nothing would have -- not much would have come of -- and this is my first meeting with Hess, I had not interrogated Hess before, because he was in England. So was my -- my meeting with Hess is strictly for the Rorschach analysis test. And that was interesting, and of course on Goering and -- and Rosenberg. And that opened up a whole new avenue of getting to know them from -- from that side, see?

Q: What did you learn that was different from doing these Rorschach tests than what you already knew, do you think?

A: Well, our interrogation before was based on the questionnaires. We were merely getting answers to what we were asked to get informa -- then, mine was supplemented by -- by me, when my -- my inquiring about their welfare, and how many children you have, and how is your wife, and where is your wife now, and where did you live. What did you do before you became this. That kind of gossip information.

Q: Min-hm, right.

A: And then the personality -- as I said, the gossip, who was sleeping with whom. Who was having an affair with whose wife. Bormann's thigh bones were actually abnormally short, did you know that?

Q: No.

A: Well, see now Buch told me that, I would never have known, that Bormann seldom appeared in public and seldom appeared in movies because he really was a little bit abnormal in his shorter thigh bone. And Bormann also was quite an adulterer. And Bormann had also made his wife into such a Nazi that she became estranged from her father and didn't speak to her father for decades.

Had absolutely nothing more to do with her father; that was Walter Buch. And -- thanks to Bormann. But that kind of gossip. But that had nothing to do with the trial, that merely gave us a picture. Now the Rorschach test then, gave us a complete characterization of the prisoners. First of all, the IQ. The highest IQ was Hjalmar Schacht, who was close to genius. Second highest Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Third highest was Herman Goering. He was a very intelligent man. And then it went down on the line, all the way to the lowest IQ, was Julius Streicher with 106. And so that -- that -- that was an interesting statistic. Racial attitudes, Rosenberg, for instance, who was a -- a latvi -- you know, born in the Balkans -- in -- in Baltics.

Q: Baltics [indecipherable]

A: You're not -- he was not a German. Hess was born in Egypt, and never came to Germany til he was 15 years of old -- of age. Hitler, to Hess, was a father image. Hess, we learned -- this is the Rorschach test now, nobody told us these things, Hess was a man who was completely dependent on somebody else, he was not a man of his own, not a leader certainly, a follower.

Always a good second in command, as long as somebody else told him what to do, he -- he was - - he was effective as a flunkie. Keitel was in the same kind of a personality. No leader, but -- but a -- a -- a good follower. Hess was a flake, physically. He had every ail -- ailment. If he read an article about some disease, he ended up having it. He saw every doctor, every quack in Germany about all the different ailments he had. He took more pills, more medicines during his life -- he's a vegetarian. When he was invited to dinner with Hitler he brought his own food, until Hitler finally forbade it, and wouldn't allow it any more because Hess, when I invite you to dinner, you eat the food I -- Hitler was a vegetarian too, but Hess was more of a vegetarian than Hitler, so he brought his own meal, his own food to a dinner at Hitler's home. Well, that kind of information all revealed itself in the course of the Rorschach test. Hess saw things in -- in the inkblots that

other people never saw. He -- he saw blood where somebody else saw valentines. He -- it was all very fascinating. Rosenberg -- I had a copy of Rosenberg's book out of the prison library. His myth [indecipherable] the myth of -- "Myth of the Twentieth Century." Not the mythos, mythis. I wanted him to autograph it for me, and I asked him to autograph it for me, and I -- this is one of those memories -- memorable moments that stick out. And he grabbed the book and actually put it behind his back, and says, "I can't let you have this." Well, this is very amusing, and I said, "Why not?" And he said, "Well, because when I wrote this book, I was looking for a new faith, a new belief, and I found it in writing the book. And I'm afraid if you read this book -- and I found out that you're a good American officer, and you're a good Christian. You'll read my book and you'll give up your faith and you'll give up your spirit of democracy, and you" ll accept my concepts of -- of the world, and I'll have that on my conscience." Which -- thinking pretty much of his book. But I promised that I would never read it, if he would just autograph it I'd have it as a souvenir. So he did autograph it for me. He didn't inscribe it, just A. Rosenberg. I mentioned this to Hess. I asked Hess if he had ever written a book. "No, why do you ask?" And I said, "Well, because I'm collecting books with autographs and I thought if you had one, I would look for it, and get your autograph." And I told him about Rosenberg. And his -- Hess said -- oh, I'm sorry, not he -- not Hess, Schacht -- Schirach, the you -- the youth leader, said that Rosenberg's book is the only bestseller that nobody has ever read, because it's a mish mosh of anti- Catholicism, anti-Christianity, anti-Semitism, anti everything that's decent [indecipherable] respect. So that was von Schirach's answer to that particular incident. He had never written a book either, Schirach.

Q: Let me ask you something, where did you -- wha -- why did you get this idea of asking people for autographs, did you have a --

A: Yeah, th-tha -- there was a reason -- there was a reason for that. I came through Rass on the day Jodl signed a surrender document, and -- surrendering unconditionally, and his signature was strictly Jodl, J-o-d-1. And then under that, Generaloberst. That was all. But someone who was there, an at -- an historian, Colonel Hale, University of Virginia, mentioned this to me, and I thought, gee that's -- you know, I could have stopped in Rass and I could have seen Jodl.

Imagine -- I would have liked to have a -- see what the guy looked like. This is before Luxembourg, so I didn't know I was going to end up in Luxembourg and actually live in the same building with Jodl for -- for months. So when Jodl showed up in Luxembourg and everything, I thought, well here's -- I -- I'll get his autograph. So I went to Jodl with a three by five card, and I asked him if he would sign this for me, like he signed the surrender. And her accommodated me, Jodl, Generaloberst. Then it occurred to me that I -- I had Jodl's, and I should have Keitel's, who signed the surrender on the eastern front, then I would have two. And I had visions I'd frame it, have -- these are the signatures that appeared on the surrender that ended the war. So I got Keitel's. Well, apparently Keitel or Jodl told some of the other prisoners that I had asked them for an autograph. I don't know why -- because when we were getting ready to move them from Luxembourg to Nuremberg, five or six of them came to me and said they'd like to give me their autograph. Doenitz was one of them. So they gave me their autograph on a piece of paper, and so forth. So I became known as an autograph collector, and I really didn't have that in mind at all. When I was sent [indecipherable] my commanding officer was Colonel Phelp, and on the occasion one time was having lunch with Colonel Phelp, and I told him about this. I said, "Would you want to see the names of the -- the guys who signed the surrender document?" And I showed them to Colonel Phelp. He says, "Hey," he said, "that gives me an idea." He said, "Why don't you get me the signatures of all those guys when you go to

Nuremberg, next time you go to Nuremberg? Get all their signatures and their photographs." And he said, "I'Il make up a scrapbook, I'm going to give it to Eisenhower." A scrapbook, a picture of each one of the high ranking Nazis and their autographs. And I said okay, and that gave me an idea, I thought, well in that case, I'll get two autographs, I'll keep one for myself, and ["ll have a complete collection. So that was my idea. So that was my -- when I went to Nuremberg then to get -- to -- to talk to Ley about his master plan for the reconstruction of Germany, I had autographs in mind. And I willingly got them, at least half a dozen others, but some refused to sign. Hess, for instance, refused to sign his. So I made up a certificate, mimeographed, [speaks German here]. I certify herewith that this is my official signature. Then I went to them, I said, you know, in relation to documents in a trial, we want to have your official signature on record. And I got their autographs, two copies; one for me and one for the -- the scrapbook for General Eisenhower. The sequel to that is that I had this collection, my own. I didn't have any photographs, we weren't allowed to take pictures. But I met a Navy officer, a Navy officer in Nuremberg, American, and -- in the Panther Pit, that's the bar at the Grand Hotel where a lot of us were billeted. And we happened to sit at the bar together and I said, you know, what's the Navy doing in Nuremberg? You know, there are no Navy ships here, and -- and he said well he'd been -- he was naval intelligence, and he was assigned to -- in the photo -- business of photo intelligence, identification of documents and so forth. And he said, you know, funny thing, Hitler's official photographer was just brought in a couple of days ago, and he had a whole suitcase full of pictures of all the -- the high ranking Nazis and where they lived and all that kind of stuff. So here was my boy, and I told him that I was trying to get some photographs, could he -- he get me some copies. So he very obligingly made copies of some of the photographs of all of the -- the Nazis that were in -- in Hoffman, the photographer's collection.

He gave them to me. I mean, we met a few days later, I got copy. So I had photographs and -- and autographs and I gave a set to Colonel Phelp. There's a sequel to that, very recent one. I told you earlier, I was not a souvenir collector, and there was a time a few years ago when -- when it was just -- at least in my part of the world, where having Nazi souvenirs sort of made you stand out if you showed them to anybody, as a Nazi sympathizer. And I'm thinking of Marge Schott, who was even mentioned in the newspapers because she had a swastika armband -- in a negative way. None of my grandchildren were interested in any of this stuff, so I found somebody who was interested, who said that he would give these to a museum connected with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in California. And I gave them to him, the autographs and the pictures. Gave them to him. A month ago I got a book in the mail, by a man named John K. Latimer, M.D., doctor, who was a doctor at Nuremberg, off and on. One of these guys who could -- I want to go see what it's like at Nuremberg, so he went there, and he went to Nuremberg. And actually, as a doctor, could interview some of the prisoners, which he did. And just a month ago, his book came out, and the title of the book is, "Hitler's Fatal Disease, and Other Anecdotes." He knew me, because I had interpreted for him a couple of times. So it's inscribed to -- he read my book, inscribed to Ambassador Dolibois and in parentheses, our Lieutenant Gillen from Nuremberg.

And he wrote this book, it just came out a month ago, and he sent me a complimentary copy, cause he had read my book, and reminded me, in a letter that I sent to him thanking him, I said, "How did you get my name?" And he said, "About five years ago I wrote to you about your book and you sent me a complimentary copy and I'm returning the favor." And I'd completely -- I don't remember it at all. I had sent him a copy of my book with my autograph, because we met as a -- a -- a fellow -- a colleague or something, a fellow Nuremberger, cause I had interpreted for him. Now his book comes out, on "Hitler's Fatal Disease," explaining why Hitler did the

things he did and also some stories about some of the others. Some of the stories based on my book. And he credits me, he -- he does say, according to Lieutenant Dolibois, or Lieutenant Gillen at that point, so and so said what. And then accompanying each one of these articles was their photograph and their autograph. So I wrote to him, and I said where did you get those pictures, because some of the ata -- autograph have my own handwriting on them, where I write the -- the titles in, like generale fieldmarshall Keitel. And he said he bought them from a collector, he didn't remember his name, but he paid a pretty good price for them. So my photograph collection, and autographs are in the possession of Dr. John K. Latimer, who is a medical doctor and has written a book about Hitler's fatal disease. Do you know what the fatal disease is?

Q: Tell me. Tell me.

A: Parkinson's disease. Hitler had Parkinson's disease, and this man analyzes this based on what other doctors who had interviewed Hitler, or people whom he interviewed who knew Hitler, and a series of photographs in the book, which is a feature. Toward the end of his years, every photograph you see of Hitler, he is either clasping his belt with his left hand, or has his left hand in his pocket, or is -- is holding an umbrella or a staff or cane or something in his left hand, to prevent his showing the -- the Parkinson's disease symptoms. And this Dr. Latimer has concluded on the basis -- on the interviews, and his medical observation and other tests, that Hitler suffered from Parkinson's disease and many of the decisions that Hitler made, like the invasion of the Soviet Union, were due to the fact that he knew he didn't much time left before his disease would be publicly known and he would lose his effectiveness with the German people, and he would no longer be able to fulfill all of his dreams. So he made many fatal decisions based on the knowledge that he -- that he had a fatal disease of which he was going to

die. And that's the title of this book, just came out a month ago. "Hitler's Fatal Disease, and Other Anecdotes," or stories about other Nazis. And my pictures are in there.

Q: But how did he get these photographs if you donated the --

A: He bought them from a collector. And the --

Q: But you donated them to the ba -- the Wiesenthal Center.

A: I gave them to an individual who was going to give them to the Wiesenthal Center.

Q: I see, right, so he lied to you.

A: I sold my epaulets to that same individual, and for that I got paid, but he didn't say anything that he didn't -- he didn't say anything about selling the photographs. All he said was I'm going to give these to the museum at the Wiesenthal Center. And he had --

Q: And the epaulet was from Goering?

A: The epaulets were Goering's epaulet --

Q: Goering's, right.

A: -- which Goering gave to me.

Q: Right. Okay.

A: But that's what happened to autographs.

Q: Okay, let's stop this tape.

End of Tape Four

Beginning Tape Five

Q: Okay. I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions that are not necessarily in order --

A: Fine.

Q: -- since you've been so good chronologically, but I thought I would like to get some impressions from you. You told the story about a woman spy in your book, a woman named Gail Wichell?

A: Vitchell, mm-hm.

Q: Vitchell. And how she got --

A: Yup.

Q: -- sa -- it's very -- it's sort of funny in a [indecipherable] a little bit. She's the only woman --

A: Yup, yup.

Q: -- in the story, so I thought maybe it would be interesting for you to retell that.

A: Yeah, that -- there was several other women in the story, but very -- very briefly, one of them being Jodl's wife --

Q: Uh-huh.

A: -- and -- that I -- that I mentioned, and Streicher's wife --

Q: Right.

A: -- Adele. But this Guyon Vitchell was -- she was a professional spy. And she apparently had some relationship, whether a love -- whether it was a love relationship, but she knew one of the generals that we had in a prison da -- now we had in Nuremberg -- this is in Nuremberg now, not in Luxembourg, we didn't have any women in Luxembourg, but in Nuremberg, the top floor, one side of the top floor of the prison where all the Nazis were kept was reserved for women. And Himmler's -- Himmler's secretary, and Ribbentrop's secretary were among the prisoners, mostly

as witnesses, not because they were charged with any crimes, or intended to be. And this Vitchell apparently, I don't know why she was taken prisoner, cause there were a lot of spies, and -- and some of them we even knew about. But this one, I think because she had the connection with this general -- and we thought that was the -- the spy on the higher rank, because the relationship -- and they were exchanging notes with each other. And we -- our curiosity was aroused by how -- how she could write a note and end up -- ends up in his cell. So obviously one of our guards was delivering messages from one prisoner to another. And that was strictly verboten, that wa -- that was not allowed at all. So this was one of my functions, that -- that Colonel Andrews delegated to me when I became his special assistant. So I was to find out how this note business was going about. And wi -- the -- the whole incident was that I -- I went -- went to her cell, naturally. And the guards were not allowed in the cells at all. They were -- they had to stand outside the cell.

And up at that section I think was one guard for the whole corridor, we only had five or six women prisoners. But I noticed that Vitchell, who was a rather striking looking woman, and when -- when I entered, she was dressed in a robe that came all the way to her feet. And -- which I thought was unusual prison garb, but they weren't really being held as -- as criminals, so I didn't pay too much attention to it. But I was asking her questions, and I forget how the sequel went, because I didn't attach that much importance to it, but I did notice that she had a good stack of American cigaret -- cigarettes brand -- American brand cigarettes, loosely, not in a pack, but i-in a tray on her table in -- in the prison. And in the course of questioning, she -- I asked her where she got those cigarettes and she had no hesitancy at all in answering by just opening her robe. And I found out she was abs -- absolutely stark naked underneath the robe. Which was unusual prison garb also. And then I put two and two together and I said, "Let me see if I have this figured right. You get those cigarettes," because they were not prison issue, "you get those

cigarettes from the guard. And you give him peep show and he tosses in a cigarette," through the opening where we pass their food. And she said I had that absolutely right. Well, I don't know whether the guard was listening on the outside, which I think he was, and there really wasn't anything I could do about it, and it really wasn't that much of an issue. But obviously one of the guards who was willing to carry the messages was giving extra cigarettes and doing her that favor, which -- it struck my sense of humor. I don't think it was a criminal offense, I didn't want to -- but I knew if I reported this to Colonel Andrews, somebody would end up in the -- in the brig, and somebody would be severely punished. So I -- [had a little fun, I came out of the cell, and the guard was standing in there, and just by looking at him, I could tell that he -- he knew what I -- what the conversation was, cause he's all red in the face, and -- and being extra polite and standing at rigid attention, almost like a statue. So I just went up to him right face to face and looked at him and said, if you won't tell, I won't tell, or something to that effect, and walked away. And he said, "Thank you, sir." And he clicked his heels. And I became very popular with the guards cause the word got around very quickly. But I reported this to Colonel Andrews, who had no sense of humor at all. And Colonel Andrews would occasionally repeat the same story, but he had it all mixed up. And he was giving a -- I think it was Ribbentrop's secretary or one of -- one of those people's secretaries" credit for being the -- the person that exposed herself. And that particular person was extremely ugly, and -- and nobody would give up a cigarette to look at her in the nude or even dressed. So that made it good, but I never corrected the colonel cause he - - he enjoyed his story so much, but he did have it all screwed up. He had one other joke that he had to tell every newcomer, saying that -- he said, hell, I always -- I thought -- I -- God's last name was damn. When he grew up he thought God's last name was damn, and that was an hilarious story, when he though -- he thought that was just great until he found out otherwise.

But he had no sense of humor, compared to Reichsmarshall Goering, who had a pretty good sense of humor.

Q: [indecipherable]. Tell me why it was that you visited the wives -- I guess at least three, right?

Goering's wife, Kesselring, and Selta. Why was it that you -- that you went --

A: I -- I visited Kesselring and Selta's wife when I went to Tegernsee with Warlimont to get those documents a -- I don't know if you want to go into that story, but it's kind of humorous and interesting, too. But Warlimont -- mind you now, he's general of the artillery, a three star general, came to me one day in Oberoszul and told me that he had a proposition, that he would like to visit his wife and his children, he had three children, two daughters and a son, at Tegernsee where -- where they lived on -- in Bavaria and that if I would take him there so he could visit his family, he would in turn make available to me, all the minutes of all the meetings of the German general's staff, bound in volumes all the way back to 1792 or "32, when the general's staff was founded. Not only that but he would also have some other books and documents, manuscripts, he'd make them available to me, on the history of the German general's staff. Well, that was extremely valuable, but the idea of my taking that prisoner to visit his family was just so ridiculous that I had repeat it as a joke to my commanding officer, I said to him, "Colonel, you -- you won't believe this," and -- and I told him. And he thought it over, and he smiled a little bit, and made no other comment. But the next day he called me in and said he had been thinking it over, and that I ought to just go ahead and take Warlimont, but we just keep quiet about it. We wouldn't make this an o-official record, he would just give me the travel orders, by order of the commanding officer, and authorize me to go to Tegernsee, and be accompanied by PW W. Warlimont. But we wouldn't talk to anybody about it, because we -- obviously wasn't going to be allowed by anyone higher up. So | arranged a week later to take

Warlimont on a tour in a Jeep and I had my 45 caliber gun, and he was dressed in civilian clothes anyway, because he was no longer active in the army when he surrendered to us. No problem, but I passed him off as my interpreter and my driver. The first problem we had was when we stopped in Stuttgart at a military mess to get lunch. And the mess sergeant of course saw my orders, which I presented to him, and sure enough sir, you can eat and all the courtesy and everything else, he said, but the Kraut isn't going to get any food. And I had convinced the sergeant that the Kraut was a pretty nice guy and he was my interpreter and give him a big sales talk and finally the sergeant relented and allowed the Kraut to get some food in the kitchen, but I heard him give a -- General Warlimont orders about washing his mess kit afterwards and cleaning it -- cleaning up after him, and he used a four -- a few selective phrases. I wondered what he would have done if he had known he was talking to a three star German general, ordering him to wash his own mess kit. Well, that story became interesting as we got to Tegernsee. It seemed that Warlimont lived right next door to his in-laws. His wife's mother and father, his ma -- wife's father was an opera singer, and the wife's mother was a native American, had been born in United States, related to the Anheuser-Busch family, a distant relative of the Anheuser-Busch family. And he had met their daughter in the United States. He wa -- the opera singer Baron von Cleidorf was his name, had tour -- was touring the United States when he met this girl, whom he then married in 1903, and they had a daughter, and that daughter became the wife of General Warlimont. So now Baron and Baroness von Cleid -- Cleidorf lived next door to the Warlimonts. I stayed with them, and the general stayed with his wife and his three children.

They had a very happy family reunion. And we visited for three days and during that visit -- I then took off in my Jeep and went to visit Kesselring's wife and Selta's wife, and brought them news. They had not heard of their husbands, where they were, if they were even alive. So I was

really the harbinger of joy. And as a result of that visit, as a gift to me in the course of conversation, they developed an interest in my family. And I pointed out that I had a little son at home, and so I ended up with a pair of lederhosen as a special gift from Mrs. Selta for my son.

And those are authentic lederhosen, they're the real McCoy. So I was very proud and happy to have them. But it was on that occasion I visited those two wives. And --

Q: But -- go ahead.

A: Go ahead, yeah.

Q: No, no, go ahead.

A: No. Well, the -- the whole purpose of that visit -- and that was fully understood -- in fact, I had orders. Remember, there was a non-fraternization law, and American personnel were not permitted to fraternize with Germans. You could get in real trouble just by seeing -- seeing -- by being seen talking to a German. So I had a special set of orders, as to -- that I was a member of military intelligence, and was authorized to enter German homes, and also authorized to interrogate, investigate whatever mission Id -- I decided on. But I had official authorization.

And this was on my -- on my orders, which I always carried with me, because like an instance, like if anybody, military police had seen me going into a German home, I could have gotten in real trouble if I wasn't authorized. Course, there was a lot of fraternization going on throughout Germany, but it was one of those rules that was a little bit ridiculous because in my [indecipherable] here was our opportunity with an army of occupation to really do some brainwashing of the Germans, and convince them that our system is far superior to the Nazi system. And we could have organized the German youth into basketball teams and soccer teams and football teams and tell them about American sportsmanship. Instead, we weren't allowed to talk to them, which to me seemed a little silly. We -- we missed a wonderful opportunity, which

was reversed when the Marshall plan went into effect and we then did what we should have done immediately after the war. But this fraternization policy was ridiculous. One more secret to the story of Warlimont is that on our way home -- and I did get the documents. And I don't know what happened to all of the documents, but I do know that years later I purchased a book from my library written by John Wheeler Bennett, which was the -- the mc -- "Nemesis of Power; A History of the German General's Staff." And I know that a lot of the research and documentation that appeared in John Wheeler Bennett's book had to come from the documents that we recovered through General Warlimont on this visit -- il-illegal visit to his family. On the way home I didn't travel the Autobahn, I took the side roads, because just in case of an accident or something, I still would have trouble explaining what I was doing traveling with a three star German general who was really a prisoner of war. So I took the side roads pretty much. And we were right near the Bavarian headquarters of General Patton, who had been appointed the military governor of Bavaria. And we were traveling along this somewhat isolated country road, heading back toward Oberoszul when there was a commotion ahead of us, and obviously some kind of a traffic disturbance. And I pulled my Jeep over to side of the road and got out and stood by the road to see what was coming my way, and when they reached me with the sirens going, it was a Jeep with a flasher and siren, full blast, and then a staff car with license plate and four stars. And in the back seat was no less a person than General Patton and his dog. And of course I threw a fancy salute and General Patton acknowledged it by raising his riding crop, which he had in his hand, and passed on. And a fantastic thought that occurred to me was that if I had only had enough nerve to stop the -- that particular convoy, and introduced General Patton to the German general, who had arranged all of the offensive and defensive maneuvers, including the invasion of Normandy, and say, "This is the guy who tried to stop you, general. And this general is the

man who -- whom you couldn't stop." It would have been quite a meeting, but I would have had an awful time explaining what I was doing illegally with -- traveling with this important PW. So that was the whole story of that. Visiting Mrs. Goering was part of the same scheme, th-the agreement was -- and our military intelligence was that any way we could gather information be useful, and visiting their families was not only a gesture that opened up and loosened tongues, but it also gave us a chance to get another viewpoint as I -- I mentioned earlier. So I went to -- went to visit Mrs. Goering. The housekeeper answered the door and saw my American uniform and all but slammed the door in my face, she would have nothing to do with me. So I went back and I told Goering that I tried to see his wife. He knew that -- where I was going, I said I'm -- I was going on a trip and I was coming near where his wife was. I think was one of the -- one of the chateaus that had once belonged to him, she was living in part of it. He then gave me a -- a picture of himself and Emmy and their little daughter Edda, and wrote on the back of it that Oberloitman Gillen has my confidence and -- and trust, and signed Hermann Goering, and the date, August eighth, I remember, 1945. It was August -- yeah, I think it's August eighth.

Anyhow, I went back there several weeks later on another business trip and stopped there, and this time I showed the housekeeper the photo and she took it into Mrs. [indecipherable] Miss [indecipherable] -- Mrs. Goering, and she herself came to the door and invited me in. I only stayed a few minutes, just small talk and -- and talking to her a little bit. I promised that I would come back, because I had someone else in the car with me as I recall, and I didn't want to make too much of a -- a visit out of it, other than my just delivering a letter, and so I promised to come back. And I went back again a couple of weeks later with a letter to the little girl from her father.

And Mrs. Goering was in prison, she'd been arrested by military government -- government for the art treasures, and she certainly was involved in s-some of that art confiscation. And the little

girl was in a children's home. So I went to visit her and actually held her on my lap and read her father's letter to her, which was a kind of an emotional experience that I wasn't soliciting. But that was the occasion of -- of that partis -- personal visit. Others were -- wives visiting Nuremberg during the time that I was working for Colonel Andrews directly, as sort of an assistant prison public relations officer. And when they had visitors like that, I know Mrs. Jodl came, and Streicher's wife, and oh, two or three others that -- oh, von Ribbentrop's wife, who incidentally is a very ugly woman, personally di -- but she was a -- an heir to the Henkle champagne people. In this case -- and he was a salesman for the champagne line, I think it was Henkle [indecipherable] Henkle or one of the others. Anyhow, he married the boss's daughter and this is how he -- how he got ahead. Von Ribbentrop, incidentally, I don't know if you knew that he was not really a von. No, he -- h-he was born Ribbentrop, but there was an aunt who was married -- his mother's sister who was married to von Ribbentrop -- the other way around, brother, who was knighted, and he had the right to the title von Ribbentrop. And at age 32, von Ribbentrop himself, the foreign minister, Joachim, arranged for his aunt, Mrs. von Ribbentrop to adopt him at age 32, so that he would become Joachim von Ribbentrop. Which helped him tremendously because it helped sell him to Hitler, who was impressed by the von idea, plus the fact that von Ribbentrop could speak English and -- and other things. But she was another one who came to visit in a relationship with families.

Q: I-I -- I understand that justice Jackson came and gave a seminar [indecipherable] international military tribune -- was this in Mondorf?

A: In Nuremberg.

Q: In Nuremberg.

A: No this is -- by the time the trials were ready to begin.

Q: So he gave the seminar to whom?

A: To the staff, the American officers who were assigned, both the guard element and people like me, a-and the prison psychiatrist and anybody else involved in the trial procedure. There were the -- the -- there was a tremendous judicial staff, lawyers and -- and others who were acting as the -- well, assistants to the prosecuting staff. The prosecuting staff had, I think -- well, Colonel Amon was the deputy to Justice Jackson, Telford Taylor were the only two I ever had any relationship with. I -- I interpreted for Amon on a few occasions, particularly the Ley episode where Ley was presenting his master plan, and -- and I'm -- I'm the one who took -- I took Ley's document to Colonel Amon and then he and Jackson ruled on insignificance of it and ordered me to -- to tell Ley that it wasn't any good. So Amon and -- and Telford Taylor are the only two I had any connections with. Justice Jackson decided he could give a talk, a seminar to all of the people connected with the prison. And the purpose of the seminar was to explain the international tribunal, because again, none of us knew what we were really doing -- what this was all about, why we were having a tribunal and who was going to participate. The organization of the tribunal. The fact that we were having four judges and assistant judges from each of the major nations participating. And the prosecuting staff of each of the four nations. And the conduct of the whole trial, and -- and what we were doing. And even the -- the redesign -- not th -- the rebuilding of the Palace of Justice, which had been heavily bombed. And we had SS men who were doing the hard labor on -- who -- building the tribunal room, which was ironic again, I thought, because their high ranking leaders were going to be tried in the courtroom that they were repairing, in the building that they were reconstructing for this purpose. So Jackson's purpose was to explain this to us, and that was the first detailed account I ever received, the only one for that matter, of what the purpose of the trial was, and what we were doing and had been

doing and why -- why we had been doing it. And I was quite impressed with Justice Jackson, I thought he was quite a -- an outstanding person.

Q: And what did you think of his explanation?

A: Well, [had my own questions about it, but again, that's from the standpoint of a then 27 year old, rather naive person. Question number one was, we had Soviet judges sitting at trial, for the kind of crimes that the Soviet Union had also committed. Somehow here is the kettle calling the pot black, you know. And I knew that if I were preparing a defense and it were allowed, I would certainly raise that question in a courtroom. You know, you are accusing us and finding us guilty of crimes that one of the judges up here represents a country which committed the same crimes.

That of course, was one of the first questions. Next question was strictly out of naivete. The moral position we were taking on the dropping of the atom bombs, for instance. While I, even to this day say I think we did the right thing in dropping it, but from the standpoint of civilians being killed who really were not involved, and we were killing civilians too, weren't we, with that bomb? I'd say do it again if we had to under the same circumstances, but it still raised the question in my mind. It also made me think again about the very serious questions that Goering himself, and Doenitz, and two or three other of the more intelligent of the high ranking personnel that we had in captivity raised. They said -- not a question, but prediction they made, the day will come when you wish Germany were on yo -- were on your side and helping you against the Soviet Union. That was only a year before the Cold War broke out. Their prediction was true.

Billions that we have spent in creating a bulwark between western democracy and Soviet communism [indecipherable] Germany. And what we did in building up the -- the Marshall plan to begin with, in rebuilding Germany, to the point where I've asked myself, who won the war?

And that question certainly came up in this discussion. So while it was very informative from the

standpoint of the mechanics, from the standpoint of the philosophy of the trials, I had to ask myself that question -- those questions. That was my -- not a reply to Jackson cause I wouldn't dare have stood up and asked those questions, but they came to mind, where th -- I still maintain to this day that the trial was fair, it was justice, I'm proud to have been a part of it, and my only concern now is as -- as I'm approach old age, is the imitation of the Nuremberg trials that's going on around the world. And I think they take away from what the Nuremberg trials really tried to accomplish; that is to make it illegal to invade another country and enslave its people. To make crimes against the peace, violation of treaties and non-aggression pacts an international crime. To punish those who -- who practice crimes against humanity. Thou shalt not kill.

Nothing original about that, that goes back thousands of years, thou shalt not kill. And people who do kill, whether they do it on behalf of their government or not, should be tried and punished. And thirdly, if you have an agreement on how to conduct a war, war crimes, define what the rules are, and if you break those rules, you're guilty of war crimes. Don't mix apples and oranges. Don't mix crimes against humanity with war crimes or crimes against the peace.

And these imitation international tribunals going on now in certain places, are -- th-they're not real, they're imitations. They're not the real thing. They don't have the same objective, they don't have the same basis for operation, or for being. And we're -- we're opening doors there we might be sorry about someday. And --

Q: Why do you call them imita -- in what sense are they im -- imitate --

A: The ha -- well, The Hague, the international --

Q: No, I understand what -- to what you're referring, but why are you calling them an im -- imitation, and clearly you think they're a pale imitation, so why?

A: Well, bec -- because they are taking an individual Serb, who is responsible for 12 women being raped, and they're saying he committed the war crime. But there's never been a war declared. There -- there's never been -- the war crimes don't apply in that particular case. It's a crime against humanity. It's a violation of -- of a -- a law. Rape is immoral, it's illegal, it's wrong. That man should be punished for rape. He shouldn't be punished for a war crime. That --

Q: Are you saying that in Bosnia there was no war? There was a war.

A: Yeah, there w -- there was a war, but who established it to be a war? The Croats were fighting with the Germans against the Serbs, who were on our side in World War II, right? I mean, the Serbs were on the American side. The Croats and the Muslims were on the German side.

Q: Well, the mu --

A: Yeah. And they committed crimes against the Serbs, crimes against humanity. I mean, they -- they did the Nazi's bidding in Yugoslavia, and they committed crimes that were quite horrendous. Now the tables are turned, Tito is gone and Milosevic comes into power. Now Milosevic is committing the same crimes that the s -- that the Croats and the Muslims committed against him. Now which one of them is the war criminal? They both committed the same crimes.

Q: But you -- you're -- you're talking about two different time periods. You can't only say that World War II is the only time that war crimes or crimes against humanity have been committed.

A: No, I -- I maintain that an international tribunal --

Q: Mmn-hm.

A: -- ought to be an international court -- it ought to be established the same way the Nuremberg trials were established. I don't think that any nation can suddenly say we're going to have an international trial and -- and set it up -- it won't work -- it --

Q: Do you think there should be a permanent international tribunal?

A: No, I don't think so.

Q: You don't.

A: I -- [really -- because it -- it can get out of hand, like The Hague is going to get out of hand.

You know who is going to be tried next? The United States. For war crimes. You know -- you remember the North Korean -- the South Koreans, 300 of them, civilians who were massacred by American troops, who were told that North Koreans are invading and were under the impression that under that bridge were North Koreans who were pretending to be South Koreans, and so they killed them. And there are -- now people are saying that was a war crime. The Americans killed those innocent civilians. When we invaded Panama to capture Noriega, some civilians were killed. We hadn't declared war on Panama. We just invaded Panama to catch Noriega. And we killed some civilians. There are now Panamanians who want restitution, and they want the United States to be tried for war crimes, because we invaded their country and killed civilians.

Q: But you certainly wouldn't maintain that en -- if there is such a thing as a war crime --

A: It should be punished --

Q: It should be punished --

A: -- oh by -- oh yeah, oh -- oh -- oh, no, I do -- I'm sorry, I gave that im -- no, no --

Q: -- it should -- no, no, I'm sure that you would --

A: -- I -- I'm saying -- all I'm saying is it should be on a sound foundation. I feel that the Nuremberg international war crimes tribunal, which was signed by 23 nations who had been very directly, and some indirectly involved --

Q: Right.

A: -- and suffered by the Nazi regime, and they signed an accord, an agreement, an authorization, that a trial should be established, and these people should be indicted for crimes against the

peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity. Admitting that the crimes against the peace charge is -- was novel at the time, because it -- it had not yet been established that violation of a treaty was an international crime. It takes a court process --

Q: Right.

A: -- to make that into law, so that was necessary. And there wasn't a country in the world which objected to the international tribunal at Nuremberg, but how many people are objecting to what's going on in The Hague, or even in Geneva, or in some of these other international cour -- you don't have a really international court if you don't have the agreement of the international community in support of it. Now that -- that's my whole point. So when these people say -- and this is largely in the media, the -- the trials in The Hague where so and so from Serbia is going to be tried for war crimes, similar to the war crimes committed by the Nazis in Nuremberg, I think it takes away from the Nuremberg trials. It demeans them, because th -- it's not the same thing.

There's no comparison. Now, if -- who voted for the establishment of the inter -- international criminal's court? United Nations. The majority vote of the members of the United Nations. All right. If you had a vote today against United States, do you think -- do you believe the majority of the members of the United Nations would vote for, or -- in support of or against the United States?

Q: Ihave no idea.

A: Well, I have the feeling we don't have the support in the United Nations that we would need in order to objectively meet a tribunal of that court.

Q: So let me go -- let me go back to the [indecipherable] Jackson for a second. Did anybody ask him any questions? You didn't raise those questions with Justice Jackson?

A: At that time?

Q: At that time.

A: Oh, no, no I wouldn't.

Q: Did -- did everybody just sit there and ju -- they took what he said and [indecipherable]

A: That's right, yeah, well that's what I say, I -- I wouldn't have had the nerve. In fact, I'm -- I'm talking in -- in hindsight now, you know, hindsight is --

Q: Yeah, it's -- it's very --

A: -- and I -- [have a lot of hindsight at this point.

Q: Right, right.

A: -- a lot of points that I'm making now, of course, I had no -- no reasons for raising back in those days, and I was just a -- a kid listening to what was going on. But in my own mind, I did have the questions that I had mentioned earlier, you know --

Q: Now when you --

A: -- what is the Soviet role in this, and -- and the rest of it.

Q: -- when you sat in on some of the Nuremberg -- did you see the subsequent Nuremberg trials, or only the Nuremberg trials, the first trials?

A: No.

Q: The major trials.

A: The major trial, yeah.

Q: The major trial.

A: Iwas home by the time --

Q: You were.

A: -- actually, I -- I was home by the time the trials ended.

Q: Ended.

A: I -- I was just there the early part of 1946.

Q: So given -- given that in many ways you were getting pieces of information, even though you were interrogating all these top Nazis, you didn't have the whole picture.

A: Oh no, no.

Q: And you began to see it when you walked into these trials and listened [indecipherable]

A: Yeah, and I'm still learning.

Q: And you're still learning. It's a very complicated story.

A: Yeah. There's still an awful lot that hasn't been revealed yet, and this is why I -- I'm very supportive of the efforts, for instance, of the Holocaust museum, and your oral history idea of getting some of the story told. As I say, I do a lot of public speaking, and it depresses me when I talk to young people who have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm talking about high school and college students, and I mention names like Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Streicher, Ley, and they get a blank look on their face. You know, who is he talking about? Who are these people?

And they don't know anything about the Nuremberg trials.

Q: Right.

A: And the minute you talk international war crimes tribunal to a great majority of the young people, they're immediately talking about oh yeah, that -- that's in Bosnia, they're getting those Serbs for raping somebody, and that's what the international war crimes tribunal is about. And that is my -- what I'm saying. I -- I don't think there's a comparison. They're not in the same level, they're not the same operation. So I think it's important for survivors to tell their story. I think it's important for anybody whose had a connection, even -- o-or maybe especially, this very new idea that this Dr. Latimer brings out in a book just -- just out, that Hitler was a victim

of Parkinson's disease. Not a victim of, but had Parkinson's disease, and that influenced many of the decisions he made. I -- I think that's a -- an interesting line to follow and -- and pursue, yeah.

Q: When -- when you think back on those months -- actually, it's more than months, it's more than a year that you spent with these Nazis and doing interrogations.

A: Yeah. All together, yeah, sure.

Q: What effect do you think it had on you?

A: On me personally?

Q: Yeah.

A: You know, I've -- I've been asked that question before. It contributes substantially to, I think, my maturity, to a certain amount of cynicism I have now. I just don't trust everybody just because he has a title. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's always right. In fact, it taught me also that no matter how important you are, you still put your pants on one leg at a time. And I've seen men whose faces were on the cover of Time magazine, and Life magazine, full blown, in color, who begged me for an extra tube of toothpaste, or even a stick of chewing gum, or a pack of cigarettes. And they were four star generals. They were ministers and -- and heads of state. And so I -- when I then came into the -- the commercial world and started working for a living, I didn't swoon when the corporate executive -- when I called on the corporate executive to ask for a major contribution to the Miami University foundation, because, you know, I -- I actually had under my control people who were much more important than he was. I don't mean by that to -- to demean the person, but all I'm saying is it's -- it stopped me from being in awe of everybody who has a title, or a position. And in turn, it taught me to respect the person rather than the title.

And that I could have more respect for a corporal than I could for a five star general, because I've seen five star generals that I wouldn't promote to corporal.

Q: Right.

A: See what I mean?

Q: Yes, I do.

A: A-And tha -- that's -- that's the lesson I learned. Cynicism to a certain extent, yes. But maybe it's made me a better citizen. I question things I hear now. I just don't take anything for granted because it comes from high above.

Q: Did it depress you about the human condition, about the capacity for human beings to be --

A: Yes, yes, very much so. And I was just going to say, that's the other thing I -- I worry my wife because I -- I let news developments depress me, because I can see -- I can draw comparisons. I can't help but feel -- and I've been asked this question many times when -- when I was on [indecipherable], what is a typical Nazi? Blonde, blue-eyed Aryan, six feet tall? Mm- mm. The typical Nazis, if there is such a thing, and there is, in my book, I knew some. He could be shorter than I am, he could be bald-headed. He could be fat, he could be skinny. He could be mistaken for an American if I met him on the street. There is no typical Nazi. You don't have to be a German to be a Nazi.

Q: Right.

A: You have to be a certain personality, a certain type to be a Nazi, and it's not a physical type.

It's a person who fits a -- a category that would -- wouldn't hesitate to shoot you if it benefited him. Or wouldn't hesitate to sell out his children if there was some benefit for him. A person without character. And I mentioned to you the quotation from fieldmarshall Kesselring. That left a tremendous impression on me, because I got so involved as a boy in the Boy Scouts, and the Boy Scouts of America is about building character. And that stuck with me, and here is a five star general, a fieldmarshall -- a general fieldmarshall, who tells me -- now I'm 27 years old, and

almost three times the age of the cub scout that I was, saying character is more important than anything else. More important than knowledge and ability. And I remember that as a Boy Scout, that's what I was taught. Character, integrity, telling the truth, being honest. Treating other people as you would like to be treated. That's all part of being character. When I see what's happening, and I give talks and people say, Nazism can happen only in Germany. I say, "You're wrong, Nazism can happen here in the United States." We have neo-Nazis in the United States.

Hatred, racism. I can see things repe -- I can see patterns repeating themselves, because there are people without character, who are doing the kind of things that the Nazis did in Germany. And they're doing the kind of things that enable them to come to power. And I see patterns in our country repeating what -- exactly what happened in Germany, during the 20's and the 30's. A lack of interest in supporting education at the local level. In Germany during the 30's, let Berlin take care of it. Let the government handle it. We don't want to support our local schools. So the local gover -- the national government takes over the school system, and they pay the teacher's salaries, and they pay for the schools. And then they also tell them what to teach, and they teach only Nazism. And you can't be a teacher in Germany during those days without belonging to the National Socialist Teacher's Association. I get a little bit worried when everybody has to belong to the NEA in the United States before they can teach. That bothers me. Maybe no problem. I get worried when I see nobody wants to be a scoutmaster any more. Nobody wants to volunteer for the YWCA, or the YMCA, or -- or the y-m-a -- y -- young men Hebrew asso -- the volunteer groups. People aren't interested. So what happens? Let the government organize a youth program. Then you have a Hitler youth, and a Baldur von Schirach, who organizes the boys and the girls, because the local leaders don't want to do it any more. A-And this -- you can keep on multiplying this. If you get a media that all sings the same tune, I get very depressed. When the

media becomes the voice for one party, who is going to speak for the other party? Whose going to express their viewpoint? The [indecipherable] publications in Germany released all the government news, and it was only news when -- the news was only what the Nazis wanted you to read. And then you had the Voelkischer Beobachter, and the -- and the -- the Der Stuemer, and all the Nazi newspapers, telling you exactly what the news is, their government news outlets. If I feel that all the news is controlled, and in support of only one concept, I draw a comparison, I worry a little bit. There are signs. I frankly worry about gun control. People say to me, why didn't the Jews defend themselves? Why didn't the Jews organize? I mean, they're -- they're smart. Not just the Jews, but the others too, minorities in other countries, in -- in Germany and countries that they occupy. What's the first thing Hitler did when he came to power after the burning of the Reichstag? Guns were illegal, confiscate all the guns. And the Gestapo had the right to come knocking at your door and search your home to see if you own a gun. I'm against gun control. I'm for gun registration. I think everybody owns a gun, like a car, ought to register that gun. If he has it legally, he shouldn't object to that. Waiting period is fine. Your picture on a gun license, that's fine with me. But don't take away my right to carry a weapon. We did that tha -- we -- they did that in Germany. Instead we say, why didn't the people up -- weren't they organize -- defend themselves? With what? Pocket knives? I think -- I interpret the Constitution and our founder's purpose along that particular line. Our founders, in creating the United States, and our Constitution were getting away from King George and the oppression, and the dictatorship of that royal family. And they created the revolution, and they -- they had their militia men, and their minute men, who defended themselves and we have a free country. What if we get a government that deprives us of all of our freedoms? How do we -- we've -- how do we organize a revolution in defense of our -- of free thinking and of free spirits? Well, that's

what it did to me. It makes me think about those things that -- and it depresses me if I am wrongly, or rightfully, I'm -- "m not saying I'm -- I'm right, I could be all wrong, but it still depresses me as I make the comparisons. That's a long answer to your question.

Q: You did some interviewing of German citizens before you left to go to the United States?

A: Yes. That was a very negative assignment. We had some of our officers -- this is during the non-fraternization period. And some of our people in military intelligence -- high up military intelligence, ask themselves what can we do to win these people over? I mean, the war is over, but the German people who -- they claim, look t -- to us as the liberators, those who were anti- Hitler, but woke up to that fact much too late to do anything about it. By the time the German people realized -- and I'm not talking about an unknown quantity of German people, by the time they realized they had lost any freedom, that they were now living under a very controlled malignant dictatorship, it's too late to do anything about it, because the fear psychosis had been so firmly established. You know, parents couldn't talk about any ideas or about the government in their home, because the children would tell the teachers what their parents said about the Hitler -- about the government, or whether they listened to BBC on the radio. And people were afraid to talk to their neighbors. The blocklighter might be listening. [speaks German here]. That could also be taken the other way, the find -- the enemy could be the government. When people woke up, it was much too late to do anything about that. So there are Germans who claimed, when the war was over, we look upon you Americans as having liberated us from this. But instead of liberating us, you have subjected us to a fra -- non-fraternization policy, you won't even talk to us. Our schools are closed, and they been closed for -- for months. In the Soviet Union, schools were opened a week after the war ended, with textbooks and everything already printed. Schools in Germany, West Germany, in the American zone, and the British zone, didn't

open for nine months after the war ended. And when they did open, we used outdated textbooks and untrained teachers. We could have used a lot of those G.I."s who were fraternizing with German frauleins as schoolteachers, as youth organizers, to teach them something about democracy. But we didn't, we missed that opportunity. And some of the people, older than I and more ma -- mature and wise, thought what did we do wrong, what are we doing wrong? Let's find out. Let's get an opinion of -- of the people, let's get a -- a reaction. So secretly, four of us were -- were selected. Selected only because we speak dialect. I -- I can speak the Zaar dialect because that's what we spoke at home, which is very much like the Luxembourg dialect. And we mingled among the German people, pretending to be German soldiers returning from PW camps, we'd just been released. And we actually had German uniform and -- and we just sit in bus stations and we talk to people. And you know, I've been a PW for the last two and a half years, and what's going on, you know, what's happening here? Wha -- what -- what happened in Germany? Why -- why is everything the way it is? Where did the -- the Third Reich fail? And got their reactions. And what about the Americans? What do you think of them? And then we put all of that together in a report, and then my commanding officer was severely reprimanded, because it was critical of the -- of the way we were doing things in Germany after the war. And so they ordered all the copies of this report destroyed, and nothing ever came of it.

Q: Did you keep a copy?

A: Yeah. But it was only confidential, it wasn't top secret.

Q: Right.

A: But I kept a copy of it, and I quote from it in my book. I mean, in my own quotes, my own opinion, because I brought it back from question. And we -- we talked to people who confessed, I was a Nazi, yes. Especially women, who continued to be very ardent Nazis and who gave their

opinion very freely. They were pining for the day when German troops come goose-stepping down the street again. And we thought that our authorities ought to know that there are people in Germany who think that way. And the higher ups who got our report said, oh, you know, you trying to tell us that the Germans are still Nazis, or -- that isn't so, we -- we've -- we've liberated them, we've done away with them, and they aren't Nazis. Well, there are Nazis in Germany still.

Even as a tourist you can -- I can -- I can ferret them out when I'm traveling. I -- I remember -- oh, this is -- should be off the record, but we -- we had organized the Miami alumni tour for instance, in Denmark [indecipherable] in Copenhagen. And -- a tour, and I was the -- the tour host, my wife and I organized the Miami alumni tour. And we came in -- one of the people in our group, a very good friend of mine, a Miami alumna, elderly woman, had hurt her knee very badly on the tour, she could hardly walk, she was in agony and pain. We came into this dining room in this hotel where we were staying. Came off the elevator and my -- my lady friend immediately went to the nearest table to the elevator and sat down, so she wouldn't have to walk with her painful knee. And this headwaiter came storming across the dining room. And before he even opened his mouth I could tell he was German. He was not -- no -- and not a Dane, he was a German, and with a very German accent, in English, he just told our friend, our fellow traveler, that she was not allowed to sit there, she had to go to the end of the dining room where this whole group is all eating together. You can't sit here, we will not serve you if you sit here. And he was just sounding so much like a Nazi, all I had to do was close my eyes and -- and -- and see the SS insignia. And I lost my cool; I never did that very often, but I just went over, in German, and I read him the riot act in -- i-in German, no uncertain terms, and what I thought of him, and the Nazis and that this lady was going to be served right at this table, right by the elevator because she couldn't walk very far. And that was it. He actually clicked his heels. He said yavolt,

and he served my lady friend at that -- and her companions, and she -- served at that table. The rest of the group ate at the end of the dining room, but this part of our group ate at that table.

Well, some of my friends couldn't get over that, said, "How did you know he was a Nazi?" And I could just tell he -- and he was, he was -- I'd swear he was a Nazi. [indecipherable]

Q: Well, we're close to the end of this tape, so I actually have one more question, but I can't ask it on this tape, so let's [indecipherable]

A: Maybe -- maybe it's something I can answer yes or no?

Q: No. But it's the last question I have.

End of Tape Five

Beginning Tape Six

Q: We could probably stay here all day and all night and your life has been a very rich one, and I'm sorry that we can't cover all of it.

A: Everything.

Q: Right. The last --

A: Well, it's probably a good thing [indecipherable]

Q: But people can certainly go and read your --

A: Yeah.

Q: -- your autobiography --

A: Yeah, yeah.

Q: -- pattern -- "Patterns of Circles."

A: Pattern -- well, actually, it's out of print, and it --

Q: It's out of print? [indecipherable] find it in a library.

A: -- yeah, but K -- Kent State University Press is doing a new printing, it will come out July first.

Q: Uh-huh.

A: And it'I be in not the hardcover, but not pocket book, it'Il be the same size book, but in a soft

Q: But soft. Oh good.

A: -- ina soft cover.

Q: That's good to know.

A: So -- but it's supposed to come out July first, which is the new fiscal year --

Q: Right.

A: -- for the university press.

Q: Okay.

A: So we're looking forward to that. It'll be the fourth printing, so it's --

Q: Oh, that's great.

A: -- doing pretty well, yeah.

Q: My last question has to do with this incident that happened in 1986. This was after you had completed your assignment as ambassador to Luxembourg and President Reagan was going to go to Bittburg, which caused a huge flurry, and he didn't change his plans. And you did something other, didn't you? So could you explain what you thought --

A: It was still during my embassy years --

Q: Oh, it was --

A: -- Iwas still ambassador, this 1980 -- this 1985 or "80 -- well it was the --

Q: I thought it was "86.

A: No, no, it's 1985, was the 40" anniversary of the end of the war.

Q: Oh no, you're right, yes.

A: Yeah. And President Reagan was coming to Europe to commemorate the 40" anniversary and also to attend the summit meeting -- I forget in which one of the countries. And Germany -- I -- Helmut Kohl in -- invited him to make an official state visit to Germany while he was in Europe.

And Reagan accepted, and was going to Europe -- was going to Germany while he was in Europe for the summit conference, and it would be a state visit. Now, in a state visit, the -- the way it usually works is the ambassador of the host country and his counterpart in the United States would get together and plan an agenda. And Helmut Kohl had requested of the German

ambassador to the United States that the president should accept an invitation for a state visit, and while there he ought to visit an American -- a -- a German military cemetery and lay a wreath to commemorate -- to -- to memorialize the -- the 40" anniversary and to commemorate the end of friction between Germany, a -- a gesture, a recognition of the bravery of those who fought, so forth, so forth. And Reagan, who was pretty easily ac -- accepting recommendation, accepted that he would -- he would do this. I was attending a birthday party for Arthur Burns, who was our ambassador to Germany, and Arthur Burns told me that Reagan was coming to Germany for an official visit. And he thought that he shouldn't visit the German military cemetery, that would cause a lot of friction. Arthur Burns knew what the score was. And I agreed with him. And then Arthur Burns said, "Why don't you make a counter-suggestion and have him come to the American cemetery in Luxembourg instead?" And I said, "Why don't you, Arthur?" And he said, "We're both passing the buck." And he said, "I'm the host ambassador and if I get involved it's really a violation of protocol. I -- I shouldn't do this, because I'm -- I'm supposed to go along with what the host government wants," and so forth. So I stuck my neck out and I sent a cable, and that was a mistake. There is such a thing as a White House signal, and that is a direct telephone line from an ambassador to a White House office, the president, vice president, and also the secure -- national security advisor. And you use that for really important messages. And I should have been brave enough to use the White House signal, be the only time I would have -- have used it. You'd use it if Luxembourg is planning to declare war on the United States or something like that. But I should have used it to call the president and tell him -- to invite him to come to Luxembourg, my proposal being that the helicopter, which is at his disposal would come from Bittburg where he was making an official visit to the military -- that was our biggest military base, and our most important -- 15 -- 15 minutes less than, he could be in Luxembourg.

He could land in a parking lot, I had it all described, and lay a wreath at General Patton's tomb.

Then go down 500 yards from the American cemetery, there's a German military cemetery where 11,000 Germans are buried. And he could lay a wreath there at the tomb of the unknown soldier. And they could play [indecipherable] and guaranteed no SS, Waffen SS is buried in that cemetery, the Luxembourgers would never stand for it. The whole thing would take 45 minutes, he could be back in Bittburg, no harm done, everybody would be happy, nobody would criticize.

But I made the mistake of s -- using a regular cablegram, which goes to the state department.

And the state department routinely routes this to the European director, who routes it to the president's office as a recommendation from an ambassador. And I think Michael Dever got it and f -- the gist of the cablegram I got back was in so many words, mind your own business. This is all settled. And that was the e-end of it. I should have had the courage to -- cause I'd corresponded with the president, and I had occasion to meet him on several occasions, after I became ambassador of course, but he knew who I was, and it was on Dear John basis. And I think I could have gotten through to him, and I've kicked myself ever since. But anyhow, Reagan came to Bittburg and he went to the cemetery where some Waffen SS were buried, I forget, 49 or some -- what the number was. Michael Dever had been there to inspect the site, but the cemetery was covered with snow, so he couldn't tell. Well, he could have gone to the registration office, any high school kid could have told him that there were SS men buried in the American military ceme -- Waffen SS. But he didn't [indecipherable] but that -- that was his problem, among others. Well, then I received an invitation from the Jewish community congregation in Luxembourg, that there was going to be sort of a protest ceremony at the same time that Reagan was in Bittburg at the cemetery, at the American cemetery in [indecipherable].

Would I accept to come? And my good friend, Mr. Ocks, who was the president of the

congregation was very surprised when I personally called him and said, "Of course, I'Il come, I'll be very happy to be there." He couldn't believe it, he said, "Oh," he said, "we're putting you on the spot." Beca -- I had a very good relationship with him, I used to give talks to a roomful of survivors from Luxembourg and -- and Rabbi Boltz is a -- a good personal friend, and used to invite him to our embassy, along with the Catholic Archbishop of Luxembourg. Was always a very in -- but they real good buddies, they were real good friends, h-had a very nice relationship.

Talk about freedom of religion, they really have it over there. The respect. Grand Duke and Grand Duchess would come to synagogue on many occasions, and it was just a wonderful relationship. Anyhow, when I accepted they were very much surprised, and I went. And that's where I met Rabbi Here, and also some other members of the Wiesenthal Center. And the second surprise was that I was willing to make a talk -- give a talk, and so I did. And I brought greetings from the president. And I was wise enough to at least notify the president that I was going to be there. Well, the media was there in force, and they really expected me to take off and either blast the president or make some comment. And -- and I didn't, all -- the only thing I said was I think President Reagan should be here instead of in Bittburg, because this where he could have devil -- deliver a really significant message. But he's not, and I'm here to represent him, and I bring you greetings and then I'm -- went into my spiel about how grateful we are those who sacrificed and we'll never forget them -- made the regular speech for the occasion, and everybody was happy, except the media, cause I really let them down, I didn't -- I didn't stick my neck out and jeopardize my job. But I was jeopardizing it because if Reagan had taken offense, or somebody else had wanted to take issue -- but Schulz was very understanding, and he complimented me.

And Weinberger complimented me and they all said fine, everything is great. And then Reagan's own speech -- that afternoon, we went -- Winnie and I went to Bittburg and -- and heard his

speech and -- and I've quoted his speech many times, and -- we can't undo what's been done, we can't bring back to life those who have died, but the one lessons we've been taught by World War II is that good much triumph over evil -- I'm quoting roughly, good must triumph over evil and freedom must triumph over totalitarianism. And a -- we should never forget the lessons learned because that"! help us make a better future than -- the gist of his [indecipherable] which he would build his speech. So everybody was okay, except the media, and the thi -- and people who got the idea from some media presentations, with which I disagree, that he was perfectly willing to go to that cemetery. Actually, at that point -- President Reagan was the kind of president who relied pretty much on his lieutenants. He -- he delegated, and he was a eight to five man, and some of that is good and some of it is bad. But he didn't get involved in details, he never did. Some presidents get too involved in details and that's wrong, too. And you do have a staff, you do have people around you and a cabinet, so take what you will of that. But -- but Reagan really didn't know -- I don't think ever -- anybody ever told him that there were Waffen SS buried there. And if they had, I don't think he'd have known the difference, unless somebody told him. I mean, how many people know the difference between the SS of the concentration camp type and the Waffen SS? There is a difference. And the Waffen SS, unfortunately, was sort of an elite military unit, and sort of like our Green Berets and -- but toward the end, the Waffen SS ended up with a lot of regular SS men in it, and they began to do a lot of the things that the -- the occupying forces, the atrocities against the civilian population, and of course the concentration camp, the thing [indecipherable] so there was a -- a definite mix, but the president wouldn't have known that. In fact, I don't think anybody in his staff would have particularly known this, unless somebody told them.

Q: Well, I want to thank you so much for being so gracious with your time --

A: Well, and --

Q: -- and your experience.

A: -- I've enjoyed -- it's brought back a lot of memories, and --

Q: Right.

A: -- and so --

Q: And what we're going to do is stop the camera now, and then come back and show a few photographs.

A: Okay, yeah.

Q: And you'll explain what they are. Okay. ... And who is this very attractive young lady?

A: That very attractive young lady was my wife. And that picture was taken on the last day in civilian clothes. She and I spent the day in our favorite park in Cincinnati, where we were living at the time. So Winnie and I were wandering around the park and visiting different places that were very dear to us, celebrating the last day in -- before I had to go into the army.

Q: And this picture?

A: And this is in Eden Park in Cincinnati. And this is the last picture taken of me in civilian clothes for four and half years. The following day I went into the army at Fort Thomas, Kentucky.

Q: And this one?

A: Now this is the other extreme, almost the last day in uniform. This picture was taken in Germany with my own Jeep, you'll notice that's Jeep number one, and the name on the -- the windshield is Johnny Mike, our first-born son. We had the privilege in those times of adding our own name, or any name we choose to our Jeeps and I named mine for our first-born son, Johnny Mike.

Q: Okay, and this picture?

A: This is the Palace Hotel in Mondorf, Luxembourg. It was the special detention center, code named Ashcan, where we kept the high ranking Nazis during the summer of 1945, in preparation for the Nuremberg trials. The 10 foot barbed wire fence completely around the compound, and a machine gun tower in each of the four corners, indicates the security being taken to keep the prisoners in, and any visitors who might want to take justice into their own hands, out. But that's the Palace Hotel --

Q: And this is not a legal --

A: -- nicknamed Ashcan.

Q: -- this is not a legal picture. This was taken clandestinely, yes?

A: That -- that's right, yeah.

Q: Yeah.

A: Actually taken clandestinely by a Luxembourger, who wasn't supposed to know what's going on inside there, but he did. And it was actually during our embassy years that he gave it to me, said it's the picture I took, along with several others. This is the Palace Hotel when it's still a Palace Hotel, also a casino in connection with the spa, the health resort, which makes up Mondorf and is the major industry in Mondorf. But when you put the fence around it, the machine gun towers, and the camouflage nets, then you have Ashcan. This is the peaceful Palace Hotel, which incidentally has since been torn down. And the Luxembourgs -- the Luxembourgers decided they needed a more modern casino, and they also felt that they din -- didn't want this to become a national shrine to which Germans could make pilgrimages, and pay tribute to the Nazis last home. So they tore it down, and bi --

Q: Okay, so who is this?

A: This is a group photograph that actually appeared in Time magazine in their November 1945 issue, after we open up our facility to the media. Time magazine took this picture, they called it the class of 1945, with the class president, Hermann Goering, the Reichsmarshall, occupying the most prominent place. The Reichsmarshall considered himself the -- the leader still, even though he had been defrocked, more or less, by Hitler.

Q: And whose that?

A: His competitor in this particular case was Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, who had been named by Hitler to be his successor, so that in this situation, both Goering and Doenitz competed with each other for leadership of the class of 1945.

Q: And this picture?

A: Now this is a close-up of a -- a section of the fence that completely surrounded the compound where Ashcan, the Palace Hotel was located. The bottom strand of wire, barbed wire, has a sign, [speaks German] because that was the electrified wire. If you stepped across that one, then you took your life in your hands. This is one of the machine gun towers. There were four of them on each -- one on each corner of the fence on the compound. A man with a 30 caliber machine gun and two armed guards. This is the entrance to the Palace Hotel. And the guest just being ushered in, carrying his own suitcase, is Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler youth leader and former gaolighter of Vienna. This is one of the rooms inside the Palace Hotel, which served as the barber shop and also as a first aid office for the doctor and a dentist who took care of the -- the inmates.

Q: And this room?

A: This is actually one of the rooms in the Palace Hotel. As a matter of fact, it happens to be Hermann Goering's room. Note that the complete furnishings are the folding army cot, which did

have a straw mattress on it, and then a rather shaky chair, and table, and a washstand. Iron bars on the window, plastic Plexiglas. And the view from that particular room of the approach, the gardens of the Palace Hotel is on this picture. We did allow the prisoners to walk in this particular area inside the barbed wire enclosure. By comparison, when the prisoners were moved from Luxembourg to Nuremberg, they were put into a Franconian state prison, and this is one of the cells in that Franconia state prison, where they spent their time all during the course of the Nuremberg trials, both before and during the trials, until they were sentenced to death, or moved to prison in Berlin. This is another view of the same cell with the window and a new paint job.

Q: Could you just go back up here so you can see that the to -- they were the toilets --

A: Note -- note the niche in that cell, that actually is where the ho -- the toilet is located with the stand pipe and a flush button at the top, which Robert Ley, the leader of the German labor front, the arbeitsfront, used to strangle himself with a piece of towel, by sitting on the toilet and putting force against the noose that he had manufactured and fastened to the pipe. When he was on the toilet he was out of sight of the 24 hour guard who was outside his door, checking on him.

Moved the spotlight over the door -- 0-over the -- the window in the door on the -- this is the dining room in the Palace Hotel in Mondorf where the prisoners ate their meals, served on porcelain plates with spoons only, no knives or forks permitted. The food was prepared by ordinary German prisoners, who also did the serving. [indecipherable] Ribbentrop eating -- this is at the mess facilities in Nuremberg, before they were being served in the individual cells. Note the mess kits, and the regular fare that prisoners -- prisoner of -- prisoners of war are consuming by rules of Geneva Convention, 1600 calories, no more, no less.

Q: Now what is this?

A: This is the pass, a very rare one, issued by the internal security detachment. If you had this pass, you were permitted in the war criminals wing of the Nuremberg prison, where only the 22 major Nazis were to be tried in the first session of the tribunal were being interned -- interred -- interned.

Q: Interned. In turn. And in turn. Now start -- what is this one?

A: Yeah, this is a -- the pass that admits you to the Palace of Justice, the -- the court session itself, and also the officers in the area. The other pass entitled you to the war criminals wing only. This pass also entitled you to visit the Nazis in another wing, who were not being tried at the first session tribunals.

Q: Okay.

End of Tape Six Conclusion of Interview