HE HAS almost been cropped from the photograph, and his name is a blank in the key. An interpreter’s lot, perhaps. But there on the extreme left, legs crossed, with his long, intent nose and his immature moustache (he is 22, young for such work), sits Richard Sonnenfeldt. His fingers are hooked softly round the table-end, like a cat about to pounce.
The setting is Room Number One in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, the time the summer of 1945. Beside him, past the stenographer, is Colonel John Amen, the chief pre-trial interrogator for the tribunal that will put Hitler’s henchmen on trial for war crimes. Opposite him, placed directly in the window light, is Rudolf Hess. Hess, who flew an abortive “peace mission” to Britain in 1941, is already “the original lunatic” to Mr Sonnenfeldt. The pockets of his greatcoat are filled with scraps of food brought from England, the proof, he says, that the British tried to poison him. He is playing the amnesiac, remembering nothing of his career. But Mr Sonnenfeldt will catch Hess out when he uses Kladde, a student word for a folder, and then quickly says he doesn’t know why. Teenage slang, said Mr Sonnenfeldt firmly, “could hardly be the vocabulary word of an amnesiac.”
For three months of evidence-gathering before the Nuremberg trials began, Mr Sonnenfeldt’s official label was chief interpreter. Less officially, but with permission, his job was to startle, harry and trick the accused into admitting what they had done. Translation inevitably slowed the questions, allowing the accused to develop their denials. But Mr Sonnenfeldt’s sharpness made up, in part, for that. Was it true, he asked Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall, that he had boasted to Hitler that he had torched the Reichstag himself in 1933? “Just one of my jokes,” said Goering. “Tell me another joke you told Hitler,” said Mr Sonnenfeldt. Goering did not reply.
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His German was native, from a childhood spent in Gardelegen in north-west Germany until, at 15, his Jewish parents sent him to England for safety. He was alert to the “platitudinous babble” of von Ribbentrop, the star-struck love-words of Hitler’s secretary and the coarseness, laced with Franconian intonations, of Julius Streicher, publisher of the vilely anti-Jewish Der Stürmer. He could put Goering down, in a second, by calling the flabby ex-field-marshal Herr Gering, a little nothing.
His English, though, was equally impressive: learned in Kent, spiced up in India (where he was dropped after being wrongly deported to Australia, in 1940, as an enemy alien) and polished in Baltimore, otherwise Bawlmer, where he lived for two years before joining the American army. He had worked hard, with every motive in the world, to scrub his German accent away, and that fluency eventually promoted him from armoured-car-greasing to translation. Mr Sonnenfeldt was contemptuous of other interpreters at Nuremberg who, through a thick lard of Swabian consonants or Polish syntax, could fuddle questioner and questioned alike. He was so good that he could deal in subtlety.
He was also a Jew, facing—and faithfully interpreting—men who had wished to obliterate everyone like him. He had seen the results for himself in the camp at Dachau, which he was one of the first to enter after liberation. Among the stiff stacks of unburied corpses and the ghostlike, disbelieving living, he had been able only to think how lucky he was. The spectre of himself as he might have been was sometimes beside him as he probed through obfuscations for the details of appalling crimes. He felt it tugging at his sleeve.
Goering’s wink
He found he did not hate the Germans, who now scratched for food in bombed-out Nuremberg and fought for the cigarette-ends he threw out of his jeep. Nor did he hate the Nazis individually, except for Streicher. What chilled him was the ordinariness of these men. When he served them their indictments on October 20th 1945, going from cell to cell, he noticed how clean the hands were that took the papers from him. These men were not evidently monsters. They also knew good from bad, right from wrong. When he asked Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, whether he was ever tempted to enrich himself from the inmates, Hoess replied: “What kind of man do you think I am?”
Most of his hours of interpreting were spent with Goering. After an early altercation, when Mr Sonnenfeldt slapped down an interruption (saying that, if Goering preferred to have no interpreter, he would merely listen and correct his English), they became almost friends. Goering took his side when disputes arose about translation and, in the trial itself, often winked at him. Mr Sonnenfeldt, who passionately defended the integrity and usefulness of the Nuremberg trials and processes like them, was disappointed that the judges failed to nail Goering for ordering the Holocaust. The Reichsmarschall had admitted this to him in one of their sessions. But the judges did not know how to draw out Goering as Mr Sonnenfeldt could.
He did other things in his life later; as an electrical engineer, he helped to develop colour television and computers for the moon landings. He supposed, however, that he would be remembered only for his Nuremberg days. And that, he always said, was all right with him.
The setting is Room Number One in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, the time the summer of 1945. Beside him, past the stenographer, is Colonel John Amen, the chief pre-trial interrogator for the tribunal that will put Hitler’s henchmen on trial for war crimes. Opposite him, placed directly in the window light, is Rudolf Hess. Hess, who flew an abortive “peace mission” to Britain in 1941, is already “the original lunatic” to Mr Sonnenfeldt. The pockets of his greatcoat are filled with scraps of food brought from England, the proof, he says, that the British tried to poison him. He is playing the amnesiac, remembering nothing of his career. But Mr Sonnenfeldt will catch Hess out when he uses Kladde, a student word for a folder, and then quickly says he doesn’t know why. Teenage slang, said Mr Sonnenfeldt firmly, “could hardly be the vocabulary word of an amnesiac.”
For three months of evidence-gathering before the Nuremberg trials began, Mr Sonnenfeldt’s official label was chief interpreter. Less officially, but with permission, his job was to startle, harry and trick the accused into admitting what they had done. Translation inevitably slowed the questions, allowing the accused to develop their denials. But Mr Sonnenfeldt’s sharpness made up, in part, for that. Was it true, he asked Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall, that he had boasted to Hitler that he had torched the Reichstag himself in 1933? “Just one of my jokes,” said Goering. “Tell me another joke you told Hitler,” said Mr Sonnenfeldt. Goering did not reply.
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His German was native, from a childhood spent in Gardelegen in north-west Germany until, at 15, his Jewish parents sent him to England for safety. He was alert to the “platitudinous babble” of von Ribbentrop, the star-struck love-words of Hitler’s secretary and the coarseness, laced with Franconian intonations, of Julius Streicher, publisher of the vilely anti-Jewish Der Stürmer. He could put Goering down, in a second, by calling the flabby ex-field-marshal Herr Gering, a little nothing.
His English, though, was equally impressive: learned in Kent, spiced up in India (where he was dropped after being wrongly deported to Australia, in 1940, as an enemy alien) and polished in Baltimore, otherwise Bawlmer, where he lived for two years before joining the American army. He had worked hard, with every motive in the world, to scrub his German accent away, and that fluency eventually promoted him from armoured-car-greasing to translation. Mr Sonnenfeldt was contemptuous of other interpreters at Nuremberg who, through a thick lard of Swabian consonants or Polish syntax, could fuddle questioner and questioned alike. He was so good that he could deal in subtlety.
He was also a Jew, facing—and faithfully interpreting—men who had wished to obliterate everyone like him. He had seen the results for himself in the camp at Dachau, which he was one of the first to enter after liberation. Among the stiff stacks of unburied corpses and the ghostlike, disbelieving living, he had been able only to think how lucky he was. The spectre of himself as he might have been was sometimes beside him as he probed through obfuscations for the details of appalling crimes. He felt it tugging at his sleeve.
Goering’s wink
He found he did not hate the Germans, who now scratched for food in bombed-out Nuremberg and fought for the cigarette-ends he threw out of his jeep. Nor did he hate the Nazis individually, except for Streicher. What chilled him was the ordinariness of these men. When he served them their indictments on October 20th 1945, going from cell to cell, he noticed how clean the hands were that took the papers from him. These men were not evidently monsters. They also knew good from bad, right from wrong. When he asked Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, whether he was ever tempted to enrich himself from the inmates, Hoess replied: “What kind of man do you think I am?”
Most of his hours of interpreting were spent with Goering. After an early altercation, when Mr Sonnenfeldt slapped down an interruption (saying that, if Goering preferred to have no interpreter, he would merely listen and correct his English), they became almost friends. Goering took his side when disputes arose about translation and, in the trial itself, often winked at him. Mr Sonnenfeldt, who passionately defended the integrity and usefulness of the Nuremberg trials and processes like them, was disappointed that the judges failed to nail Goering for ordering the Holocaust. The Reichsmarschall had admitted this to him in one of their sessions. But the judges did not know how to draw out Goering as Mr Sonnenfeldt could.
He did other things in his life later; as an electrical engineer, he helped to develop colour television and computers for the moon landings. He supposed, however, that he would be remembered only for his Nuremberg days. And that, he always said, was all right with him.