Inside Nuremberg Prison: Hitler's Henchmen Behind Bars

by Helen Fry

  Again, Howard witnessed Ley pleading with Kelley to shoot him. Neither realized the mental deterioration of this man so desperate to avoid the trial. Ley stood with his back against the cell wall, his arms outspread, begging to be shot. When Kelley again refused, Ley seemed to be calm for a moment as he quietly replied to Howard: “All well and good. You are the victors, but why should I be brought before a tribunal like a c…c…c…c…” At this point, he stammered so severely he was unable to continue. When Howard supplied the word “criminal”, Ley added: “That’s it. I cannot even get that word out.”

  Ley struggled more than most of the defendants over Germany’s defeat. He held on to his unshakeable belief that Hitler would win the war so the disappointment for him was immense.

  ‘As we sat with him in the cell, he had to face the fact that Germany’s defeat was absolute,’ explains Howard. ‘Much of his disappointment soon turned into an angry rage against the Jews. Of course he did not know that I was Jewish.’

  Howard and Kelley listened as Ley told them that he would have handled ‘the Jewish problem’ differently. He would not have killed them but forced them to emigrate by denying them homes and jobs. As leader of the Labour Front, he would have solved the problem for Hitler given the chance. With thoughts of suicide racing through his mind, Ley clutched at anything at the last minute to change the situation. In a moment of desperation and misplaced judgment, he tried to strike a bargain with Kelley. Through Howard as interpreter, he told Kelley that he hoped Kelley could unite with him to bring about a German-American Alliance and the rebirth of Nazism. Ley was deluded because there was no possibility of that happening.

  The day before Ley hanged himself, Howard entered the cell with both Dr Kelley and psychologist Dr Gilbert. The defendant was still in an extremely agitated state and launched into another tirade of anger. No one suspected even now that he was on the verge of taking his own life.

  SUICIDE

  The following day, 25 October 1945, Ley was found hanging from the toilet pipe in his cell. He had taken an army towel, made a noose by tying strips of the towel together and stuffed rags into his mouth to suppress any scream at the last moment of strangulation. It was a slow and painful death. Ley knew that, but was determined to avoid the trial at any cost.

  It was clear that Colonel Andrus and other prison staff suffered total shock at the turn of events. Ley had succeeded in committing suicide even before the trial had opened. The only reference to Ley during the trial occurred during the first day of speeches in which it was acknowledged that Ley had ‘succeeded in accomplishing his exit from the court of judgment and from the world of living men.’

  Ley’s unexpected suicide had ramifications for the whole prison regime. Colonel Andrus’s first reaction was to allocate one guard to each cell, rather than a guard to every four cells. He was taking no chances on further suicides. Secondly, he did not circulate details of exactly how Ley died to avoid copy-cat cases. It did not prevent the defendants discussing his death at mealtimes. Goering was the most vocal and responded with some pleasure, saying he doubted Ley could have performed well at the trial. Only Streicher seemed disturbed and upset by it.

  Every effort was made to ensure they did not replicate Ley’s fate. All defendants were on 24-hour surveillance. The single light in their cell was kept on constantly, except it was dimmed at night to allow them to sleep. The cells were searched more thoroughly and they were not allowed belts, string or rope. The defendants were given regular body searches and had to sleep on their backs at night so the guards could see their head and hands at all times.

  When the defendants left their cells to take meals together, daily exercise or attend the trial, they were under constant close observation. In the short period they spent together over meals, they could be heard planning their defence with Goering always assuming leadership.

  Now that Ley was dead, Kelley was keen to undertake a post mortem of the brain to give a precise diagnosis and complete his study. Medical and psychological examinations while Ley was alive indicated some kind of organic brain damage, but Kelley was eager to verify further. Colonel Andrus granted Kelley’s request. Kelley summarized his findings as: ‘brain damage of the deteriorating type in the front lobe area, verifying the diagnosis and accounting for Ley’s peculiar behaviour as Labour Leader of the Reich.’

  With the brain removed, Ley’s body was taken from the prison for burial by German undertakers. It was transported to an undisclosed cemetery in an open box lined with butcher’s paper. In the cemetery and exposed to the elements, the open box rested next to a newly dug grave until two elderly gravediggers turned up to bury him. With no remnant of respect left for Ley, even in death, the gravediggers unceremoniously tipped his body out of the box into the deep grave. Ley’s body fell with a thump into the wet earth face down, a piece of the butcher’s paper stuck to his back. The precise location of his body has never been disclosed. Today few people, except historians of Nuremberg, have heard of Robert Ley or know who he was.

  Back at the prison, day to day life there in the autumn of 1945 lacked the drama of the first two weeks of October 1945. Colonel Andrus continued to blame himself for Ley’s death for failing to station a sufficient watch guard over the defendants. In spite of implementing strict procedures and measures, it would not later prevent a determined Hermann Goering from taking a cyanide pill just hours before his scheduled execution the following autumn.

  TEN

  CELL 25: JULIUS STREICHER

  AS HITLER’S DIRECTOR of Propaganda, Julius Streicher was arguably the most anti-Semitic of all the defendants. At Nuremberg, he made a lasting impression on Howard Triest. Streicher hated Jews with an unnatural viciousness and vengeance. The contents of his vehemently anti-Semitic propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer portrayed stereotypical cartoons of how to recognize a Jew by their facial features. These cartoons were reinforced with anti-Semitic rhetoric. As a young boy Howard had seen the newspaper displayed in noticeboards behind glass on street corners everywhere in Munich. It served as a visual reminder, as if he needed it, of how bad things were becoming for Germany’s Jews.

  In Cell 25, Streicher was as obsessed by anti-Semitism as in the early years of the regime. Total defeat of Nazism had done nothing to change that. When Howard entered the cell with Dr Kelley for the first time, Streicher was sat on his bed reading the Bible. The balding, stocky man from Bavaria was not reading this holy text out of any religious motives but because he wanted to show how the Jews’ own scriptures had already condemned them. Howard and Kelley soon discovered that he knew the Bible thoroughly.

  Streicher put the book down and waited for Kelley to speak. Kelley began his questioning and Howard translated. Streicher soon veered off the questions and onto his lengthy explanations of ‘the Jewish problem’. It was soon apparent that he was entirely consumed by it. Little realizing that Howard was Jewish, Streicher explained how the true danger still lay with the Jews.

  Dr Kelley quickly picked up that Streicher was displaying a different reaction to their questioning than the other defendants. Streicher was found to be exclusively driven by emotion, which was why Howard and Kelley concentrated on his case and visited him so frequently. There was something different about the defendant in cell 25 that was not just down to instability. Howard and Kelley listened patiently as Streicher explained how in the early days of the Nazi Party he had realized the true danger of Jews and joined along with others to fight the Jews. Howard recalls:

  ‘We found Streicher polite, but irrational, often fiery-tempered but sometimes uncouth and abrasive in his tone. Everything he believed about Jews was based on emotion, not fact. He raved on to us about the destructive power of Jews in society, in government and on the international stage. From what I witnessed of him, and we got to know him very well, he was more anti-Semitic and fanatical than Adolf Hitler.’

  Streicher argued irrationally that Germany’s defeat was not down to Hitler but international Jewry. He also believed
that the Nuremberg Trial was brought about by propaganda from the Jewish Press. The eyes of the world were on the trial with massive media coverage, and that for him was the result of Jewish influence. Streicher said he knew this. The trial was, for him, a platform in which he could convince the world that international Jewry was the real threat.

  In another interview, he enlarged on the theme that he was being sacrificed. ‘The entire history of the world has proven,’ he ranted, ‘that the bearers of truth and understanding are always a minority. I am one of that small group. The knowledge of belonging among the pioneers of the truth gives me the inner strength to survive all hardships of these trying times.’

  THE ‘ARYAN’ FRIEND

  Perhaps the most extraordinary part of Howard’s story is the personal relationship that developed over twelve months between him and Streicher. The sixty-one year old war criminal with pinched moustache, who had demanded representation only from a non-Jewish lawyer, boasted to Howard:

  ‘I can smell a Jew a mile away. I can see it in their face, their eyes, their hair, from the way they walk, even the way they sit. And I know you are a pure Aryan and your people must have come from a Nordic country.’

  This turned out to be the biggest irony of all. Streicher himself did not have the pure Aryan look as defined by his own newspaper. Neither did it occur to him to question Howard’s Jewishness because Howard had blond hair and blue eyes. Howard’s “Aryan” looks were something which had saved him many times during the 1930s and had enabled him to walk unnoticed through the streets of Munich without being arrested.

  Now, of all the staff working at Nuremberg, the defendant in Cell 25 embraced Howard as his ‘Aryan friend’. In his blind prejudice, Streicher assumed the psychiatrists to be Jewish because they were serving in a ‘Jewish profession’, but not Howard. Of the psychiatric team in the prison, Kelley was not Jewish. The question ‘Are you Jewish?’ was never asked by Streicher of Howard. Streicher was fooled for a year.

  In an unexpected twist, Streicher turned to Howard as his new ‘Aryan friend’ and began to entrust things to him. Howard and Kelley entered the cell one day to find Streicher fretting over personal papers which he did not want to fall ‘into Jewish hands’. Streicher looked at Kelley directly and said that he had some notes on the ‘Jewish question’ which needed translating but he felt a Jew would falsify the translation. He instructed Kelley to find a good Aryan to translate it.

  ‘Then he paused,’ says Howard, ‘suddenly turned to me and passed me the papers and said, “Here – you do the translating. You’re a good German.”

  With some wry amusement, Howard left the cell that day, clutching Streicher’s treasured papers and handed them straight to Colonel Andrus. Howard did not feel it his place to read them, but the incident revealed the deep mistrust which Streicher had for Kelley whom he wrongly assumed him to be Jewish. Kelley wrote about the incident in his autobiography:

  ‘Streicher himself fanatically believed that one could tell a Jew by his physical characteristics. He couldn’t, of course. One of my top interpreters was a German refugee [Howard] who had escaped from Germany in 1939. Like many other German Jews, he was typically “Nordic” in appearance – blond hair, blue eyes, slender athletic body.’

  Colonel Andrus, too, found the relationship between Streicher and Howard important enough to mention in his autobiography when he wrote:

  ‘He [Streicher] was obsessed with anti-Semitism, even though he had gone through a temporary reformation. The tribunal had an interpreter, a pleasing little man – a Jew – who had, oddly, yellow hair and blue eyes. He was authorized to go to the cell-block to add to the knowledge the Allies were collecting on religious persecution. It was not for presentation in court but merely for the record. Streicher was delighted to see this man with the fair hair and expressed delight in him as a “perfect example of a German Nordic”. He trembled with rage as he mentioned Jews, while quietly this Jewish officer sat before him taking notes.’

  THE PAPER DOLL

  One particular female Lieutenant working in the prison continually taunted Streicher about his impending fate. She never entered his cell, but peered through the small open window in the cell door. Taking from her pocket a paper-cut-out doll with string around its neck, she dangled it in front of Streicher. ‘Each time she did so, it sent Streicher into an absolute rage,’ recalls Howard.

  Watching her do this one day, Howard believed it served no purpose to treat any of the defendants with contempt, in spite of what they had done to millions of innocent victims. It was not right to lower themselves to the same level as the Nazis. Howard knew how Streicher would react and that the Lieutenant’s action was inappropriate for a prison keeper.

  Streicher was not going to be beaten by her. The next time she dangled the paper doll, he turned around, pulled down his trousers and showed his rear end at her. When Howard visited Streicher that same day, he was still enraged by the incident and referred to the Lieutenant with disdain as ‘that Jew girl’. It is not known whether she was Jewish, but nevertheless Streicher claimed she was because, as he told Howard, ‘she has a large Jewish nose.’

  PRESERVATION OF JEWISH BOOKS

  The questions directed by Kelley at Streicher were diverse, designed to understand Streicher the man. He was asked about his famous collection of pornography which he boasted was the largest collection in the world and, apparently, all confiscated from Jews. His obsession with pornography disgusted the other defendants who petitioned the guards to allow them to eat their meals separately from him. Their request was denied. The anomaly was not lost on Howard. The other defendants, about to stand trial for unimaginable evil and genocide, were trying to display a hierarchy of morals in the prison. Even more bizarre was the revelation that Streicher had the largest collection of rare Jewish books in Germany.

  Whenever a synagogue had been desecrated or a rabbi’s home searched, Streicher had ordered the removal of the books to the library building of his newspaper Der Stürmer. From these confiscated books, he selected the rarest and best. Instead of burning them alongside other books of a ‘degenerate’ nature, they survived. The shelves of Streicher’s library which weighed heavy with Jewish literature were ironically kept in a building in Nuremberg that survived Allied bombing. How ironic, then, that the biggest Jew-baiter in Germany had, in effect, preserved for posterity a large share of the most famous and rarest literature of the German Jews.

  Trying to understand what made Streicher tick was never going to be easy. He applied the same obsessive behaviour towards anti-Semitism, Jewish literature and pornography as his own personal hygiene. In the jail, he was neurotically impeccable in his appearance. He kept himself meticulously clean in spite of the primitive prison conditions. Word filtered back from the guards to Howard and Kelley that Streicher rose in his cell around 6am every morning to wash in a bucket of cold water. This he did even in the midst of winter. It was noted that none of the other defendants paid such rigorous attention to their own personal cleanliness. Streicher’s behaviour caused Kelley to conclude that medically: ‘he, along with defendant Rudolf Hess, was unstable and suffered from the same sporadic paranoiac behaviour.’

  STREICHER’S FATE

  With the trial well underway, Streicher was under no illusion about his fate. He told Howard: ‘I expect to be found guilty, but I am glad that the court at least pretends to be fair, because I may have a chance to testify and reveal to the world the true structure of the International Jew and to warn the world of this outstanding menace.’ He explained to Howard and Kelley that his aim had been to rebuild Germany and it was he who was the vanguard of truth.

  Of Streicher, the British Prosecution said: ‘for twenty-five years he educated the German people in the philosophy of hate, of brutality, or murder. He incited and prepared them to support the Nazi policy, to accept and participate in the brutal persecution and slaughter of his fellow men.’

  Streicher was the first of the defendants to inscribe a book to
Howard. On 13 December 1945, Howard had gone into his cell alone, confident that Streicher would not object to his request – by now having gained his total trust. Armed with a copy of Hofjuden, he entered the cell. Streicher noticed the book immediately. Eying Howard as an ally, he gave a rare smile.

  ‘Would you sign it?’ Howard asked. Streicher didn’t even hesitate and reached for the book. Without a word, Howard passed it to him and watched as Streicher bent over scrawling inside the words: ‘Mr Howard Triest, in memory! Nuremberg 13.12.45, Julius Streicher.’

  The second book, Kampf dem Weltfeind, Streicher signed with the same inscription two months later, dated 3 February 1946. On both occasions, as Streicher handed back the books, he took the opportunity to ramble on about what was on his mind. Howard comments:

  ‘We talked together in a relaxed way. The only reason he talked freely to me was because he didn’t know I was Jewish. He had my full attention and launched into one of his anti-Semitic speeches. I just sat and listened. I had heard it all before. Every now and again he would look up at me to see if I was still paying attention. Streicher was one of the few who really didn’t change his anti-Semitic statements.’

  As the trial progressed, Streicher maintained his innocence and saw only the other defendants as culpable of war crimes. He was found guilty by the court and sentenced to death by hanging. On 16 October 1946, Streicher died on the gallows never knowing that his ‘Aryan friend’ at Nuremberg was a Jew he would readily have sent to the death camps.

  ELEVEN

  RUDOLF HESS: THE BORDERLANDS OF INSANITY

  HOWARD HAD ONLY been in the prison a few days when Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy prior to 1941, was brought to Nuremberg from England. It was 10 October 1945. The day is still vivid in his mind: