by Helen Fry
I always feel that I should awake from a deep sleep. Thank you again for all your love. Our intimate greetings your Ly T. and Berthold.’
PART 3
NUREMBERG PRISON
SEVEN
LIFE BEHIND BARS
WITH THE KNOWLEDGE of the contents of his mother’s last letter, Sergeant Howard Triest arrived at Nuremberg Prison on 25 September 1945. For him, there was no sense that he was about to witness history in the making or that the Nuremberg Trials would become one of the most defining moments of history. For this euphoric twenty-two year old American soldier arriving as part of the Allied forces, Nuremberg was significant only for the present. It represented justice for millions of victims including himself who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis. By the time he arrived there, he had lost any trace of a German accent. Little did he know that he was about to make his most important contribution to the American forces and one where his original German background would prove essential.
The imposing red-brick three-storey building which housed the prison and courtroom was to be the focus of international justice for twelve months. The heavy security presence and armoured vehicles surrounding the prison meant the Allies were taking no chances with those detained behind its bars. It also served as a stark warning to Nuremburg’s population eking out an existence in the bombed-out city that a new era of occupation had dawned for the sins the German people had allowed their leaders to commit. Incarcerated in the cells were the twenty-two surviving leaders of the former Nazi government awaiting trial for crimes against humanity on an unprecedented scale and horror.
As Howard checked in with the security guards, he suddenly felt a growing sense that justice may now be done. Although he had no idea of his previse role there, he was to head for the office of the American Commandant of the prison, situated in the main building behind the courthouse, separate from the buildings which housed the jail cells. Colonel Burton Andrus was not only the commandant, but head of 6850th Internal Security Detachment under the International Military Tribunal, in charge of the defendants at the jail. Howard was about to join Andrus’s team.
COLONEL ANDRUS
Howard vividly remembers his first day at Nuremberg – of knocking on the door of Andrus’s office and entering to find the 53-year old Colonel sitting at his desk engrossed in paperwork.
‘Reporting for duty, Colonel,’ said Howard, standing to attention in his dark green army uniform.
Through black round-rimmed glasses, Andrus made penetrating eye contact. ‘Good day Sergeant Triest,’ he said. ‘I will waste no time in getting to the point. You are here to act as interpreter to the American psychiatrist, Dr Kelley, who is working with the defendants. As a fluent German speaker and bi-lingual, your role is to accompany him into the cells on a daily basis. This will surely be your most important contribution to the American forces so far.’
Howard concealed any reaction to Andrus’s last comment. Granted that he hoped justice would be done, but how could the work in the prison be more important than landing with troops on Omaha Beach? Than defeating Nazi Germany?
Before dismissing him, Andrus added a warning: ‘This is a tight establishment, Sergeant. There is to be no fraternization with the defendants. They are criminals, not prisoners of war.’
Howard left the office with a lump in his throat. It suddenly dawned on him that he would be coming face-to-face with Hitler’s former leaders: Julius Streicher, the biggest Jew-baiter in the Nazi regime; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s one-time deputy who walked the fine curb between sanity and madness, and Hermann Goering whose exalted self-importance and flamboyant extravagance defined him as the most arrogant of them all. Howard knew that few people would come so physically close to the men who once ran Nazi Germany. Now Howard would be able to assess for himself. Were they different from other men? How would they react to a German-Jewish refugee coming into their cell? In answer to the latter, they would never know. Howard’s past would never be revealed. It would remain a closely guarded secret and something respected by the other prison staff.
Howard was there to do a job and could not let the blind prejudice of the defendants interfere with the process. This silence about his past was to have the most unexpected outcome. The subject of whom or what constituted a Jew or a German would ironically be played out in front of Howard by the defendants and lead to an unforeseen question of trust, particularly with Julius Streicher.
THE PSYCHIATRISTS
Leaving Colonel Andrus’s office, Howard headed straight for Dr Kelley’s office. Kelley shared a large office with American psychologist Dr Gustav Gilbert who was there to carry out his own analysis of the defendants. Gilbert largely kept himself to himself and rarely socialized with Howard or Dr Kelley. Able to speak fluent German, Gilbert conducted his own interviews in the cells and kept copious notes from the very beginning with the express aim of writing a book after the trial. His extensive diary has been published as Nuremberg Diary. Gilbert, Kelley and Howard were in a unique position in that they were issued with special security passes enabling them access to the prison twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Howard and Kelley’s job was made easier because the strict solitary conditions at Mondorf in Luxembourg, codenamed “Ashcan”, where all the defendants, except Speer and Schacht, had been held for three months before Nuremberg, meant that the defendants had rarely communicated with anyone.
‘Consequently,’ comments Howard, ‘when the defendants arrived at Nuremberg they were only too ready to talk to us.’
There was no question in anyone’s mind of the importance of Kelley and Howard’s work. The psychiatric team at Nuremberg was there to observe the defendants on a daily basis, to ensure they were mentally fit to stand trial and not about to commit suicide. The last thing the legal teams wanted was to have their power to execute justice thwarted by a suicide or a diagnosis of insanity.
Perhaps surprisingly, it was not Howard or Kelley’s job to take down evidence of atrocities from the former leaders of the Nazi Regime. Their role was ask particular questions and record the responses to seek an answer to the question on everyone’s mind: why are these men so different from ordinary people and able to give orders to kill millions of people?
‘In the end,’ says Howard, ‘I’m not sure we found an adequate response or that these questions were ever really answered. All too often the pitiful defendants ranted for hours about the defeat of Hitler and how Germany had lost the war. None admitted guilt or showed any remorse, with the possible exception of Hans Frank.
But how would Howard, a former German-Jewish refugee, react to being so close to the perpetrators of such horrendous crimes? Crimes which he himself had witnessed in Buchenwald? To those who had effectively signed the death warrants for his parents? These questions will be answered as the story of his time in Nuremberg unfolds.
In spite of Colonel Andrus’s warning that the accused were to be treated as war criminals, an unprompted ‘rapport’ developed with some of them and one with the most unexpected outcome. Not heeding Andrus’s words, psychiatrist Dr Kelley treated the defendants professionally – as patients rather than war criminals. This kind of interaction was bound to change Howard and Kelley’s experience of Nuremberg. Howard’s story now moves into extraordinary terrain and the heart of his experience at Nuremberg. In no time at all, Howard and Kelley began to walk a tightrope between professional distance and fraternization. Did they befriend the defendants? Howard is absolutely clear that they did not. Did the defendants befriend them? In some cases, most definitely yes.
As a result, Howard would later leave Nuremberg with 22 books signed by the defendants, each with a personal inscription. The most anti-Semitic of them all, Julius Streicher, saw Howard as an ally because, with Howard’s blond hair and blue eyes, Streicher thought him a true Aryan. In his blind prejudice, Streicher trusted Howard and frequently referred to him as his ‘my Aryan friend’, even to the other staff. It was always going to be a one-way relati
onship though. Ironically, Streicher died on the gallows giving the Hitler salute, never knowing that his ‘Aryan friend’ was a German Jew whom he would have willingly exterminated during the Final Solution.
Initially, Howard speaks only in very broad general terms about his work in the jail; about how he and Kelley spent up to eight hours a day interviewing the defendants, frequently well into the evening. He speaks about how they spent more time, day and night, with the defendants than any of the judges or Defense Counsel in the court itself. They allowed the defendants to ramble on at leisure which resulted in them being told things matters which did not necessarily relate to the prisoners’ political actions or crimes. They learnt about the prisoners’ basic human anxieties.
Kelley always believed it was important to gauge the defendants’ reactions to certain happenings in the court and try to understand what made them tick. Nothing the defendants ever said in the cells made any difference to the outcome of the trial. The legal procedures were all based on their record before they were captured. The judges had to work strictly on the documentary evidence alongside statements by both Counsel and testimony from witnesses.
Kelley’s brief was not to interrogate the defendants or seek confessions, but to understand what their motives had been in running the Third Reich and how they could have committed such horrendous atrocities. Howard recalls: ‘Kelley told me that we were there to see if we could dissect pure evil.’ Kelley summarized the work in his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg:
‘As a scientist, I regarded my duty in the jail to be not only to guard the health of men facing trial for war crimes but also to study them as a researcher in a laboratory… I took it upon myself to examine the personality patterns of these men and, to a degree, the techniques they employed to win and hold power.’
Through Howard as translator, Kelley asked his questions of the defendants and received their answers. Nothing was confrontational. These were strictly interviews where the prisoners talked about what was on their mind, which gave them an opportunity to pour out their hearts. On occasion, they mentioned mundane matters, like the food in the prison or how they were missing their families. From time to time, they were very open about the pain of not seeing their families. ‘It certainly affected them as it would most human beings,’ comments Howard. ‘We sometimes expect war criminals to be immune from ordinary emotions because of the nature of their crimes, but that was not the case.’
ENCOUNTERING THE ACCUSED
Over seven decades later, Howard talks in a relaxed, though detached way, about his encounter with the accused. The weight of evidence against them was so insurmountable as to make their guilt indisputable, and yet, as he discovered within days of arriving in the prison that (with the possible exception of Hans Frank) none of them saw themselves guilty of any evil. It was the predominant theme running through what they told him every day. They resolutely clung to their anti-Semitic ideology and showed no remorse for their crimes. In his soft accent which is hard to place, neither German nor American, Howard explains:
‘All of a sudden we didn’t have bad people in the prison cells. They believed they were doing good things for Germany! They saw themselves as innocent of any wrong-doing. Hans Frank was the only one who became very religious and showed us some remorse. It is one thing to show remorse later in the prison cell when you know it’s a matter of going to the gallows but we never knew if it was all show or genuine feeling.’
Many months of interesting work lay ahead, but it was an emotionally draining time. Howard entered the cells of all former members of the Nazi government and spent significant periods of time with them. The sense of euphoria at the Allied victory was often tempered by the knowledge that he was as close as anyone could be to those who had committed unprecedented evil against humanity, including his own family. Remaining calm and emotionally detached when conversing with the defendants would be a constant challenge. Being shrewd enough not to mention his Jewish background, he and Kelley secured more out of them. Howard’s civility towards the defendants served a singular purpose and enabled him to carry out his job effectively.
In spite of being given his mother’s last letter by Margot, there was still no definite proof that their parents were dead. Howard did not give up the search, even though deep down he suspected the terrible truth. He clung to the unrealistic hope that somehow they might have escaped, be suffering from amnesia and living back in Munich. He lived this paradox for the whole year that he was in the Nuremberg Prison.
In the coming months, Howard paid several visits to the city of his birth, only two and a half hours drive from Nuremberg. Saving up his army pay, he purchased an old American army jeep to drive regularly to Munich to visit his surviving grandmother and continue the search for his parents. By this time, most concentration camp survivors and those in Displaced Person Camps had made contact with their relatives even if they had not yet returned home. There had been no such news from Lina or Berthold Triest. Howard’s hopes were unrealistic, but a necessary part of his own psychological survival.
A VERY PERSONAL JOB
In late November 1945, Howard’s papers came through to be demobbed from American forces and sent back to the United States. Before his shift duty one morning, Colonel Andrus called him into his office. Andrus looked at him with the same steely gaze as the first day Howard had arrived at Nuremberg two months earlier.
‘I know you are about to be demobbed, but I need you to stay on as interpreter to Kelley,’ he said, unsure of Howard’s response. Andrus understood the difficulty given his original background. He cleared his throat and continued: ‘Would you be willing to continue your work here, but in a civilian capacity? It is a just formality on paper but if you agree, you are needed until the end of the trial.’
Howard needed no time to think over the proposal. ‘Yes sir. I would be pleased to serve further under your command.’
‘Good, then that is decided,’ said Andrus.
What was Howard’s motivation for agreeing to Andrus’s request? It was a sense that not many personnel would come as close to the defendants as Howard and the psychiatrists. The trial was only a few weeks in. ‘It was a feeling of needing to see this through to its conclusion,’ he says in a measured way.
‘Having been so closely tied to prison life, I realized that this was an opportunity that was part of history in the making. I knew that. And I could be part of it. There was something fascinating, albeit difficult, but compelling about the work. But more than that, I wanted to see justice done. I felt a sense of duty to do what I could, however small, in the process of ensuring these men paid for their crimes.’
Having agreed to stay on, he could not foresee the extraordinary rapport that would emerge between him and the defendants in the coming months. He recounts again, with a hint of amusement: ‘I found myself in an unusual situation because my original Jewish background was never discovered by any of the defendants and in some cases I became their trusted American friend.’
The formalities of the discharge and reengagement as a civilian needed to be carried out. Howard travelled to the city of Bamberg, the birthplace of his father, not far from Nuremberg. It was there on 6th November 1945 he was formally discharged from the US forces. In a twist of fate, he found himself demobbed in the same army barracks as his father had been inducted into the German army in the First World War. In the garrison that day, it was a time for reflection. Howard remembered how proud his father had been to fight for Germany, how his father had shown him photographs of himself in German uniform and talked about the Iron Cross he had been awarded for bravery. Howard reflects: ‘my father loved Germany. It was his homeland until the Nazis forced him and our family out.’
Reporting back to Andrus at the prison, Howard was re-assigned to the War Department as a civilian employee with officer status equivalent to Captain. Now instead of wearing a uniform with officer’s insignia, his officer’s clothing had sewn onto each jacket lapel a small triangle cloth patch with the le
tters “US” in the middle. Since civilian army protocol prevented him from living in army barracks, Andrus instructed him to find a suitable apartment in the city and requisition it for special use. Howard carried out his instructions and found a district on the outskirts of Nuremberg that had not suffered such heavy bombing. There, he shared an apartment with another American colleague, Britt Bailey, who was also working in the prison. They became good friends. Transport to the prison was provided every day by the motor-pool of the courthouse and, although Howard was permitted to wear civilian clothes, he chose not to because in enemy country it was still not advisable. For lunch meals he, Britt and other prison staff took a ten minute walk from the prison complex to the Grand Hotel where many dignitaries connected to the trial were staying. Work with Dr Kelley continued exactly as it had before, however, it would prove impossible to remain unaffected by the personal contact with the accused.
THE BOOK SIGNINGS
In the autumn of 1945, Howard accompanied Dr Kelley on brief business to the small town of Erlangen, not far from Nuremberg. While Howard no longer remembers the reason for their trip, one memory stands out. Here, they visited the university library and found all Nazi books had been confiscated by the Allied occupying forces as part of the denazification process. Amongst the piles of books waiting to be removed, Howard noticed some written by the key defendants being held at Nuremberg.
In that moment, he had an idea to take copies back to the prison and get the defendants to sign them. He pulled out relevant books and made his own pile. It included a special leather-bound, gold-edged Edition of Mein Kampf printed in 1939 to mark Hitler’s 50th birthday. Inside was stamped with a copy of Hitler’s signature. He loaded them all into the army truck and took them back to Nuremberg. Howard eventually returned to the United States in 1947 with twenty-two books signed at Nuremberg, twenty-one of them by the main defendants; the last signed by eight Field Marshals and Generals.
