Inside Nuremberg Prison: Hitler's Henchmen Behind Bars

by Helen Fry

  GOERING - THE PARADOX

  Howard felt no pity for the man who had arrived at Nuremberg as a serious drug addict. An obese Goering, who weighed around 200 pounds in his early days in the prison, was a great orator but also a paradox. On the one hand, he was a huge collector of art who could be a brash, confident, self-centered man who loved his wife and could organize a great show at a party; on the other he was capable of sending millions to their deaths with no remorse.

  Being a big showman tied in with Goering’s whole life. He was always the bragger type in full uniform and regalia, a great hunter and opulent in everything he did. ‘In the glimpses I had of him in parades in Nazi Germany in the 1930s,’ says Howard, ‘he was always decked in gold and jewels. Even in his prison cell when he wore a plain uniform devoid of all insignia, he was still the big show man; the man that had to be No.1. It was fortunate for him that Hitler was dead and now he could play No.1, which he did very well.’

  This showman, unaccustomed as he was to defeat, had to face the total collapse of Nazi Germany and the world around him. It was not long before he started to explain the reasons for Hitler’s defeat. He became very open with Howard and Kelley about the disagreements which had emerged between him and the Führer at the end of the war, telling them that only he of all the members in the Nazi hierarchy had dared to argue with the Führer. That led to a fundamental mistrust between him and Hitler. Howard and Kelley then heard firsthand Goering’s own version of the events of the last days.

  After Hitler had told his mistress, Eva Braun, and commander-in-chief, General Jodl, of his intended suicide, he had sent word to Goering that the end was near and that he, Hitler, intended to stay in the bunker in Berlin until the fight was over. Behind closed doors, Goering prepared to take over the reins of government and waited for notification of Hitler’s death. But things went drastically wrong for Goering when a telegram which he sent to Jodl was shown to Hitler. Hitler believed that Goering was trying to seize power and ordered his arrest. On 23 April 1945, Goering answered a knock on the door to find his home surrounded by SS troops who immediately put him under house arrest.

  On the evening of 29 April 1945, the day before Hitler’s suicide, a telegram signed by Martin Bormann arrived with orders for the SS to kill Goering and his staff. Kaltenbrunner, one-time Gestapo Chief and another defendant being held a few cells away from Goering at Nuremberg, refused to carry out the death warrant without Hitler’s signature on it. The execution was never carried out and Goering lived.

  Now behind bars, Goering had hours a day in isolation to think about what had happened to Germany and where it had all gone wrong. What did he make of Hitler’s suicide? He told Howard and Kelley that Hitler could not possibly have faced trial before a foreign court and preferred suicide to that. He admitted that Hitler had chosen the right course in taking his own life.

  On the issue of war crimes, Goering was in complete denial. He was quite happy for the other defendants to be found guilty if it meant he walked free. Howard is blunt today when he recalls:

  ‘We found Goering distancing himself from war crimes, denying any guilt, but in reality clearly at the heart of the extermination program. He felt he had done nothing wrong and that his actions were acceptable. He objected to the use of the term ‘war crimes’ and corrected Kelley by calling the atrocities “brilliant strategy”. Neither did he recognize the legal jurisdiction of the Nuremberg courtroom and told Kelley so, but that would not stop Goering ultimately using the courtroom as an international stage to promote himself.’

  Leaving Cell One that first day, Howard could not quite believe he had been so close to Goering. It would take a few more visits for reality to sink in.

  In the coming days, Howard entered the cells of the other defendants for the first time. He and Kelley steadily built up a picture of the defendants and gradually became familiar with their idiosyncrasies. They did not visit every defendant every day, only those selected by Kelley. In the period immediately after the indictment was read by Airey Neave, they found Goering quite gloomy, but it didn’t last long. Goering remained anything but defeated. He looked directly at Kelley during one visit, almost momentarily unaware of Howard’s presence in the cell, and said, ‘this is just like going into battle.’ With this belligerent attitude, he faced the charges of war crimes. He reiterated to them that he was not a war criminal but a fiercely loyal German patriot.

  ‘I did what I did for the sake of a greater Germany,’ he told Kelley in German through Howard, ‘I know I shall hang. You know I shall hang. I am ready.’

  Kelley later wrote that Goering ‘still possessed all the forcefulness, brutality, ruthlessness and lack of conscience which made him the ideal executive for Adolf Hitler.’

  Goering became so trusting of Howard and Kelley that he confessed one day to having helped a Jewish family leave Nazi Germany. Goering told how he had maintained contact with a Jewish nurse who had helped him when he was wounded during the Munich Putsch of 1923. Because of her kindness, he personally aided her family with papers to leave Germany for England. Goering was keen to remind Howard and Kelley that if it wasn’t for him, the nurse would have died in a concentration camp, but he was also quick to add that this was strictly a personal matter for him. Helping one Jewish family certainly did not change his overall view towards Jews.

  Occasionally, Howard went into the cells on his own to interview the defendants. As the guard locked the door behind him, he faced them alone. There was no third person to take the pressure off the intimate setting. For Howard, it was initially an intimidating and isolating experience, but he hid his unease and nerves. He chose one such moment to ask Goering to sign a book that he had requisitioned from the library at Erlangen. That day, as usual, Goering was sitting on the edge of his bed, leaning forward deep in thought.

  He looked up when Howard walked in and greeted him in his usual manner: ‘Good day Mr Translator. So you have come to see me.’ He noticed Howard was clutching a copy of his Aufbau einer Nation, a book which ran to over 200 pages.

  Howard was not sure how Goering would react to signing it. In typical Goering style, he was flattered by the attention. From his point of view, Howard was an American soldier who was showing an interest in him as a person. It confirmed and reinforced his fundamental belief in his own self-importance and place in the history of Germany. As he was signing the book, he paused momentarily, looked up at Howard and proudly declared: ‘I wrote this book over a weekend. That is quite an achievement, isn’t it?’

  He handed back the book. The inscription simply read: “Nuremberg 1946, Hermann Goering”.

  As Howard tucked the book under his arm, Goering nodded in acknowledgement and was particularly thoughtful. After an exchange of trivial pleasantries, Howard left the cell.

  Walking back down the line of guards outside the cells, Howard reflected how Goering was the same man then as the start of his imprisonment: ‘Never once did he portray to me or the psychiatrists the picture of a broken man. He was always the great Hermann Goering.’

  CENSORING MAIL

  During spare time between visits to the cells, Howard was given the job of censoring the defendants’ mail. All their incoming and outgoing mail was written in German. Not speaking fluent German, Andrus needed to know what was being said in the correspondence and passed it to Howard.

  What seemed an ordinary task could sometimes produce some unexpected humorous happenings. One day a particular packet arrived for Goering. There was the most awful smell of fish as Howard opened it to check its contents. Howard recalls:

  ‘The “gift” sent to Goering that day was a dead herring. This for the man who had once boasted “if enemy planes ever fly over Berlin I will eat a dead herring”. We never established who sent it, but it brought so much laughter to our office.’

  Over the course of the trial, sack loads of mail arrived at the prison from members of the public, some of it from people deemed to be crazy by the prison authorities. Howard recalls tha
t fan mail was never passed on. Colonel Andrus wanted in no way to given any of the defendants a sense that they were heroes or attracting publicity, however negative.

  Goering again became an anomaly. His letters to his wife were exceptionally tender and loving and revealed the paradox that was Goering. ‘He had the ability for great love,’ says Howard, ‘and yet he was the highest-ranking war criminal we had in the jail. He frequently complained to me that letters from his wife were all too infrequent.’

  GOERING ON TRIAL

  On the afternoon of 13 March 1946, Goering took the stand in the courtroom and represented himself. Taking centre stage, he milked the attention whilst in the stand. He made lengthy speeches to justify his position. By the third day, he had spoken for a total of twelve hours, all testimony from his perspective. The prosecutors fired questions at him about the planned extermination program of Jews. Howard recalls: ‘In his defence, Goering argued that neither he nor Hitler knew anything about the plan to exterminate Jews. It leaves one wondering who he thought was responsible for the murder of six million Jews.’

  The court heard in Goering’s own words his attempt to explain the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 as ‘a clear separation of the races’ and ‘to do away with the notion of persons of mixed blood.’ The fact that the trial was taking place in the city where these laws were promulgated was not lost on those listening in the courtroom. Not once did Goering admit the slightest guilt for the crimes for which he was standing trial.

  With the exception of Schirach, Funk, Speer and Doenitz, Goering even publicly denied knowing the other defendants before being with them at the trial. Distancing himself from the others would not fool the trial or make any difference to his sentence. For the duration of the trial, nothing changed Goering’s belief that he would go down in the annals of German history as one of the country’s greatest men. But now he was, as Goldensohn once commented, ‘a Führer without a country, army or air force and on trial for war crimes.’

  By May 1946 Goering, who was being visited frequently by Howard and Dr Goldensohn, became depressed. In his notes, Goldensohn recorded how Goering sat in his cell:

  ‘smoking his long Bavarian hunting pipe and looking rather depressed when I entered with Mr Triest. He smiled forcibly in an attempt to appear cheerful and invited us to sit down.’

  During this particular interview, Goering was still preoccupied with the defeat of Hitler which he continued to explain as a betrayal by those closest to the leader. He sat on the edge of his bed and bent over, staring at the floor. ‘Then he suddenly sat upright,’ says Howard. ‘I could see he was concentrating hard on the questions I was translating from Goldensohn. Goering began to analyze the essential difference between himself and Hitler.’

  ‘Let me explain,’ Goering told Howard and Goldensohn, ‘in one word the German people called him my Führer. They addressed me as Hermann. I was always closer to the hearts of the people than Hitler, but he was a great leader and I subscribed to his program completely. Naturally there are differences, which I am trying to get across to you and to the world, in that Hitler was a great man who was betrayed by some of his subordinates like Goebbels. Finally Hitler didn’t know his real friends from his false ones. It was a great betrayal. The National Socialist program, in which I played no mean part, was a great reform movement which would have benefited Germany if the enemies of Hitler had not betrayed him.’

  Goering was asked at what point he thought Germany had lost the war. Naturally, he had an opinion. In typical belligerent style, he declared that Germany’s demise began with the Ardennes Campaign. He did not see the invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943 or the Normandy landings in June 1944 as the beginning of the end.

  In later interviews during May 1946, Goering’s mood had changed and he welcomed company from Howard and Goldensohn. They broached the subject of Goering’s childhood which he always maintained was irrelevant to his current fate. He was happy to discuss with them diverse subjects from the arts to philosophy and seemed pleased that the conversation had veered away from his guilt and war crimes. Howard recalls, ‘Goering prided himself in being a man of culture. He undoubtedly saw himself as extremely refined in art, music and theatre.’

  Goering had spent more than a decade plundering art from Europe. The walls of Carinhall, his country retreat not far from Berlin, displayed some of the finest paintings and masterpieces. Amongst those stolen by Goering were two works by Matisse: his Still Life with Sleeping Women and Pianist and the Checker Players, and Van Gogh’s famous Portrait of Dr Gachet. As Allied forces pushed towards Germany at the end of the war, Goering moved stolen art by privately-hired trains to the Austrian border but the trains were intercepted. Some were hidden in salt mines in Austria and recovered in special missions by the Allies. The art was sent to Munich to be catalogued. Six decades later, much of it is thought to have been reclaimed by the original families and heirs or legitimately acquired by museums and galleries.

  Towards the end of the trial, when Howard and Goldensohn went into Goering’s cell, it was clear that he had accepted his fate. He knew then, as he did when Kelley was interviewing him nine months earlier, that he would be found guilty and hanged, but he was not revealing what was going through his mind.

  NINE

  CELL 9: ROBERT LEY

  WITHIN TWO WEEKS of Howard arriving at Nuremberg, high drama broke out on the ground floor of the prison when defendant Robert Ley was found hanging in his cell. Ley, Hitler’s chief of Labour Front, had managed to commit suicide even before the trial had opened. A bald, stocky short man, Ley had deputized for Hitler in the early days of Nazism when Hitler was unable to give particular speeches. Ley’s last commission had been to organize the Hitler Free Corps to carry out guerrilla warfare against the advancing Allied forces.

  In Nuremberg prison, Ley had given no cause for concern. Although he had made three minor suicide attempts immediately after capture by US forces, he had made no further attempts in his cell at Nuremberg. He was found to be intelligent with a good memory but unstable and fanatical. Instability was nothing unusual or unexpected amongst the accused. Kelley was able to carry out the Rorschach Ink Blot Test on Ley and concluded that he had physiological degeneration of the frontal lobes of the brain. That may have accounted for his behaviour in the cell. Neither Kelley nor Howard picked up the seriousness of Ley’s increased agitation at the forthcoming trial. They were used to the accused ‘letting off steam’. It was to be a sobering lesson.

  Howard and Dr Kelley entered Cell 9 several times in the days immediately before the suicide. They found Ley unable to conduct a coherent conversation without gesticulating and ranting on. Ley noticeably lacked judgment which led Kelley to refer to him as an ‘uninhibited rabble rouser’. Such a trait had enabled Ley to rally the masses to work for the greater good of the Third Reich and increase the labour forces several fold. Kelley suggested to Ley that he should write a short exposition to pass the time in the cell. The result was to be very revealing.

  During one of Howard and Kelley’s visits, Ley handed Kelley a copy of the finished piece which he called Life or Fame? A Political Analysis. The first half gives unqualified adoration for Hitler, in spite of the total defeat of the regime and all that had happened in the concentration camps. For Ley, Hitler’s fame was ‘unassailable.’ He clung to a deluded adoration for Adolf Hitler and idolized his dead Führer almost as a god-like figure.

  ‘The highest fame belongs to him,’ wrote Ley, ‘and he will appear to posterity as the shining hero of this period.’ Of course, Ley was deluded and Hitler was not hailed a national hero.

  Again, it was Major Airey Neave who entered Ley’s cell to read the indictment, the crimes for which he was going to be tried. In it, he was accused of ‘the abuse of human beings for labour in the conduct of aggressive wars.’

  Neave advised Ley to seek a defence lawyer for the trial, as he had advised all the defendants. Ley barely looked at the indictment after it was handed to him. Other thoughts
were running through his mind. Within a short time, he became extremely agitated and violently disturbed.

  LEY BECOMES UNSTABLE

  When Howard and Dr Kelley entered his cell on the day of the indictment, Ley was ranting and raving. What they did not foresee was that the prospect of the trial was becoming too much for him. Ley protested his innocence, as he did every time they entered his cell. He screamed that he had never killed anyone. Staring at Howard and Kelley with bloodshot eyes, he shouted that he was a patriotic German, not a war criminal. He shrieked in German, through Howard, that he would never stand trial. Neither Howard nor Kelley had seen Ley like this before. ‘We thought he was just letting off steam and would eventually calm down,’ says Howard, ‘but the disturbance went far deeper.’

  Dr Kelley recorded that day’s events in his memoir, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: ‘In the middle of this tirade, he [Ley] marched dramatically to the far end of his cell, placed his back against the window, flung out his arms, and cried, “Shoot me! Now as a German! Don’t try me as a common criminal”.’

  When Howard and Kelley visited again a few days later, Ley was asked how preparations for his defense were coming along.

  Ley berated them: ‘How can I prepare a defense? Am I supposed to defend myself against all these crimes which I knew nothing about? Hitler and I were only working for the good of the people. If, after all this bloodshed, some more sacrifices are needed to satisfy the vengeance of the victors, all well and good.’