Atlanta Journal Constitution | May 8, 2005

DOCUMENTING NUREMBERG: Doctors from Hell

Interview by Richard Halicks

Q. You recorded testimony about unspeakable experiments. As you catalog them in the book, chapter after chapter, each of them somehow seems to be worse than the one that preceded it.

A. It was very, very difficult. When we got to the 112 Jews who were selected for the skeleton collection of the University of Strasbourg in France --- under Nazi occupation --- when the American prosecutor first uttered the word "defleshed," it sent a chill through that courtroom. That was the description of how it was done, what was to be done with them.

I do not have pictures [in the book] of all of the experiments, but the bin of legs taken off at the hip tells the whole story of the bone, muscle and nerve regeneration experiments.

And the woman on the back cover of the book, describing her wounds for the judges. It was one of the worst [episodes] that I describe in the book. They would take a hammer and smash the leg to break the bone, and then they would cut out pieces of bone, pieces of muscle and nerve and sew the wound back up. She underwent six separate procedures, and she resisted so hard that the SS men threw her down in the bunker --- not in the hospital section --- to be cut into. She survived and was able to come to Nuremberg and testify to what they did to her.

Q. Could you describe the court and the conduct of the trials? Everyone was wearing headphones for translation, for one thing, and the court was obviously struggling to ensure that the proceedings were fair. What was it like to be in that room?

A. When I first walked from the court reporters' office to the big double doors of the courtroom, and presented my security pass to the American military police officer, and I walked in, past the defendants on the left in the dock, two rows, past the German defense counsel in front of the dock. On the right were the prosecutors and all their staff, the lawyers. And I walked up to the court reporter's station at a long desk attached to the front of the judge's desk. I turned around and sat down.

And I looked at the defendants: I started on the second row on the right and just scanned from right to left. Then on the first row, from right to left, until I got to the No. 1 defendant, Dr. Karl Brandt, who was Hitler's personal physician and the chief architect of this whole program of medical experimentation. And when I looked at him, he seemed to be the only doctor who paid any attention to me. I didn't catch the eye of any of the others until I got to him. His eyes were boring into me with such evil intensity that it sent a chill down my spine. I just lowered my head to break the gaze and prepared to start writing.

Q. This was the first time you walked into the room?

A. The first time I walked into the room. Now General [Telford] Taylor, the U.S. prosecutor, noticed it. He said later that he thought it was because I was tall, blonde and blue-eyed --- his Aryan, Nordic person. And I had to walk past him, within two feet, going in and out of that courtroom every time, and I could feel his eyes boring into me each time I walked by him up to the reporter's desk. So that was the first shock that I had. I mean, it was chilling to me. The evil, the evil that I was going to see in those faces.

Q. And they carried out the most monstrous "experiments." And there you were looking at them, walking within two feet of them every day.

A. I was half-German and pretty proud of my German heritage. I very early on developed a hatred for the Germans. I could not ---

Q. You mean as a culture, or for these men?

A. As a culture. The more testimony I took, I could see --- and I learned later, of course --- that it was not just these men, but it was the German population that had to do with tolerating what had happened. We had a section in the courtroom, as I mentioned, a mezzanine for visitors, and the Germans were invited to come and sit in that section to see and hear the testimony of those people who did this to their country. And the attorneys said they refused to come because they considered this trial a sham, a fake, and all the photographs were faked.

Q. Can you tell me about the overall demeanor of these defendants as they sat in the dock? Were they sullen? Were they superior? How did they act?

A. They were sullen, superior, arrogant, resentful. They defended what they were doing. Everyone was just taking orders. But they were not all defending themselves with that statement. They were proud of what they were doing. They were building the thousand-year Super Reich of pure-blooded Aryans, and they were going to get rid of all these subcultures: the Jews, the Gypsies, the Slavs. They were resentful. At the end of the trial, to show their mind-set, and their attitudes, I quote their final sentence or two.

Q. They were unrepentant?

A. Totally, totally. There was not one scintilla of any kind of remorse shown on the part of any one of these.

Q. The story of Karl Hoellenrainer in the courtroom was remarkable. He was a Gypsy on whom the Nazis had experimented and, when asked to identify one of his tormentors, he pulled a knife and actually dived into the dock to try to kill the Luftwaffe doctor who had nearly killed him. Describe how that felt from your perspective. What did you see, and what did you think when that happened?

A. It was just momentary shock and confusion in that courtroom. I watched him as he stood up and then he was asked if he could take his earphones off and go to the prisoners' dock and identify the doctor who performed all these experiments on him. And he flew out of that witness chair over to the dock, with his arm stretched high, reaching for Dr. [Wilhelm] Beiglboeck. We were just all kind of shocked momentarily. [Beiglboeck had subjected Hoellenrainer and others to experiments at Dachau in which the subjects were denied food and fresh water and forced to ingest nothing but salt water for five to nine days.]

Q. You cried when the judge found Hoellenrainer in contempt and ordered him jailed for 90 days. The punishment seemed harsh then and it really still does. What did you think about that?

A. I thought it was awful. It was another situation that brought tears to my eyes. He was brought back by the MPs who grabbed him before he got to Beiglboeck, and placed back in the witness chair. And then this distinguished jurist, the chief judge, sentenced him to 90 days in the Nuremberg prison for contempt of court. I couldn't believe it.

Q. You wrote that once you finally got home, the nightmares began. They were truly chilling. Would you describe them?

A. I got back to New York and I was really upset because it seemed that nobody was aware that a terrible war had ended just three years before, and that the Nuremberg trials were going on over there, and what they were about. And I started having nightmares. I was always trying to escape from a concentration camp, in a tunnel under the barbed-wire fence. And for some reason I had four or five little children with me, trying to keep them quiet, to keep the Nazi guard from hearing them as he marched back and forth along the barbed-wire fence overhead with his bayoneted rifle.

Q. And this was recurring?

A. It recurred --- the same nightmare for three years. And then I realized how badly affected I had been by all of this. And it made me realize that I had to stuff all that into the back of my mind and try to forget and see if I could get out of these nightmares. Which is exactly what I did for 40 years.

Q. You said that you managed to, I guess essentially repress these memories for 40 years. What happened at the 40-year mark?

A. I had not done any speaking about this. But in 1987, in Aurora, in a high school there, a woman teacher with a German name had referred to the Holocaust as the Holohoax. And the press jumped on it. The editorialists just blasted the school board for not firing her immediately. She threatened to sue. This went on for nearly two years. The school board did not fire her.

And that made me livid. It was at that point that I decided that I had to get out all of the material that I had brought from Nuremberg --- transcripts, photographs, all of the information that I had --- and put together a lecture.

Q. How much material did you have?

A. I had a lot of photographs that I had brought home. And I had some transcripts. And my memory --- someone else mentioned this to me --- I can remember everything in Nuremberg. It was just burned into my memory. I had no problem remembering names and people and everything that went on there.

So I started developing a lecture. I was able to smooth it out, refine it as the years went by. Especially, the Jewish community in Denver --- I'm not Jewish --- called on me to speak to middle schools and high schools because of the way I developed my lecture --- about basic human rights, and the dignity of life, and the difference between good and evil, and indifference to evil. I mean, it burns my mind that the German population just turned and looked the other way when all of their Jewish neighbors were being rounded up.

Q. And then comes this book.

A. Each year I was requested to do more speaking. And that's kept me pretty busy all these years, an average of 15 out-of-state speeches each year. And then in 1995 the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation had me interviewed here in Denver on all of this. Three hours of videotape for the archive. They categorized me as a "witness to history."

At that time I decided I had to start writing this book. I had the transcript. The original court reporters transcript in archives in D.C. is 11,538 pages long. Only scholars are going to go there to read that. The lawyers at the trial and their staff condensed the doctors trial down to 1,300 pages of the most important parts. I condensed it further to 315 pages with what I felt were the most important parts for the general public and the students. It took me 10 years.

Q. You mentioned that, as part of your presentation, you would flash up a picture of Adolf Hitler and that a kid once stopped you to ask a surprising question.

A. All of these years, speaking to middle schools and high schools here in Denver and other cities --- I never did identify Hitler. I would say, "This is the person responsible for all of this horror." And then this senior boy here in a suburb of Denver raised his hand and said, "Who is that man?"

I was shocked. The teacher called me the next day and apologized and said, "We are just not teaching history the way we should."

The Atlanta Journal Constitution
May 2005