By Annie Blachley

Down by the water, there is an orderly collection of houses, some large, some cottage-like, brushed by gentle bay breezes. Just steps from the tranquility of Long Island Sound, this neighborhood feels peaceful. Secure. Safe.

One would never guess that in another time, near more chaotic shores, one massive evil was ripped out of the darkness, illuminated, and punished, in large part by the genial, silver-haired retiree now living in one of these Port Washington homes. His name is Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, and he is the only person still alive who had lengthy conversations with those top Nazis who survived Adolf Hitler just after the end of World War II.

A German Jew by birth, Sonnenfeldt escaped from pre-World War II Europe, embracing America as a citizen and soldier during the war. And then, suddenly, he was hand-picked as the American prosecution team’s chief interpreter and a key interrogator of history’s most monstrous prisoners of war, during the pretrial questioning of witnesses, before the 1945 Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals took place.

Sonnenfeldt helped cement justice for those who had ordered and carried out what was known as “the final solution to the Jewish question.” That solution, documented in earlier orders signed by the witnesses, held that only through racial superiority would Germany emerge from its economic and military devastation. The Jews had become Hitler’s main scapegoat and he called for their removal from German society. He accomplished this in gradual, devious ways that brought about the Holocaust, the murder of nearly 6 million Jews.

Sonnenfeldt, now 83, speaks with a self-assured clarity, attention and kindness born of deep intelligence and high regard for the triumph of good over evil. And even though his voice is fading, his mind is fresh. This deceptively gentle, modest senior citizen will never forget just what those captured Nazis were like. He pauses to contemplate the autumn blaze of color outside his study window, then speaks.

“They were full of venom and hate,” Sonnenfeldt declares.

The story of how he helped bring down Hitler’s henchmen was recently published in his memoir, Witness to Nuremberg. The book also tells how as a young man, he witnessed the Nazis destroying his homeland and other countries, just as he was embarking on his own tumultuous life journey.

SURVIVOR

Since childhood, Sonnenfeldt’s years have been saturated with seemingly inexplicable jags and switchbacks. But he has always refused to let the worst stop him. Even as a young boy, he believed that there was something special in store for him, a conviction that gave him survival skills. As he says, “I’ve always looked forward.”

He was born in the small town of Gardelegen, Germany, in 1923, when the country’s unemployment rate was more than twice that of America during its Great Depression. By the time he was 10, the Nazi regime was building: Shop window signs sprang up saying, “Jews Not Wanted Here,” and Sonnenfeldt’s parents, who were both physicians, saw their Gentile friends turn away from them and their two sons, out of fear that their livelihoods and social standing would be jeopardized if they associated with Jews.

In school, a teacher demanded that each student raise one hand in the Nazi salute. Playmates called him “a smelly, stealing pervert.” His non-Jewish classmates joined the Hitler Youth, learning gunnery and self-defense. Chillingly, he still remembers one song they sang, “Und wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt” (“When Jewish Blood Spurts From My Knife”), a cheerful fast march.

Between 1933 and 1935, he felt completely isolated from playmates. Yet this potentially damaging situation brought out a talent that would last his whole life.
“With no friends,” he says, “I developed hobbies like building radios for my family.”

Hitler was running roughshod over a weakened, desperate citizenry: As German chancellor, the consummate politician infused his speeches with charisma, rounded up and imprisoned dissidents, and aggressively pursued electoral and military maneuverings. April 1, 1933, when Hitler ordered a nationwide boycott of Jewish stores, was a major turning point.

Sonnenfeldt writes in his book: “Until that day, I had been a German boy…the smartest in my class, a natural and popular leader of kids around me. Suddenly I was denigrated as a member of an allegedly odious race to which were impuned heinous crimes against Germany.”

The German people somehow believed for several years that the Nazi government would be temporary and that Hitler’s power would be restrained. Instead, Jewish judges and teachers were dismissed, Jewish doctors were excluded from hospitals, and in 1935, Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Goering, proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws, which terminated the civil rights of Jews in Germany.

Sonnenfeldt’s parents, fearing for their children’s safety, enrolled them in a boarding school in England in 1938. Most teenagers would have worried about leaving their family during political upheaval, but Sonnenfeldt seized the opportunity to perfect his English and lose his German accent. His childhood interest in things mechanical bore fruit when the school’s faculty asked the self-taught 16-year-old tinkerer to install electricity in a school building. The wiring he installed in 1939 is still working today, he notes with delight.

His sense of calm ceased in 1940, when he was roused out of bed and sent to a prison camp for enemy aliens. England sought, he says, to protect itself against Nazi sympathizers and saboteurs, so all German males 16 and over were incarcerated. With his swastika-bearing German passport, he ended up in internment camp.

With the Battle of Britain raging, Sonnenfeldt was stripped of all his possessions and deported to Canada aboard the prison ship HMT Dunnera, sharing passage with captured Nazi soldiers. The displaced teenager and other internees had no life vests and endured sadistic treatment by the guards in a floating ocean coffin, surrounded by excrement and disease. Inexplicably, though, a sensation of peace quieted his fears.

“There was no end to the disasters I imagined and no way I could see myself surviving if they [the disasters] struck,” he writes in his  book. “But paradoxically, within days, after I had worn myself out with fear and anxiety, I experienced an incredible feeling that I would live to do important things.”

The ship survived being torpedoed, changing course to arrive in Sydney, Australia. Somehow, the British government released Sonnenfeldt from internment and ordered that he be sent back to England. But in the hostile seas, his ship was diverted to Bombay. Ever industrious, the 17-year-old found work there, supervising 12 Hindus assembling simple two-tube radios, and getting paid quite nicely.

His parents had escaped from Germany to Baltimore, so he got a visa from the American consulate and landed in America in 1941, with $3 in his pocket. He was now a master electrician, and at 20, became an American citizen and U.S. Army soldier who fought in combat during World War II. After the war ended in 1945, he was working as an Army grease monkey, driver and occasional interpreter in Austria.

Several months later, with his hands slick with oil from working on a vehicle, Sonnenfeldt was paid a surprise visit by Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan. Donovan headed the Office of Secret Services (OSS)—the forerunner of the CIA—and told Sonnenfeldt that the young private’s English was better than that of any other interpreter. The 22-year-old was chosen to work for the OSS to interview witnesses in preparation for the upcoming war crimes trials.

As Sonnenfeldt notes in his book, “I had been spotted as a bilingual soldier in the exact right place and moment. I was being plucked from utter anonymity as a motor pool private to be thrust onto the main stage of postwar history: the trials of the Nazis.”

GAME OF WITS

To prepare for interrogations at the Palace of Nuremberg, Sonnenfeldt pored over stacks of damning documents that had been captured from the Nazis. Because earlier questioning by the military had not yielded the needed testimony, expert interpreters were needed to catch the criminals in deceptions.

“We had to be careful not to intimidate them. It was a game of wits. We never asked them a question to which we did not know the answer,” Sonnenfeldt remembers. If a witness would deny something, he would pull out the evidence.

“We had their own signed orders,” Sonnenfeldt declares, still delighted that his tactics worked so well. “Goering’s was copied and distributed throughout all the police districts. That launched the Holocaust.”

In those discovery proceedings, explains Sonnenfeldt, the individuals were not defendants, but witnesses. Because they were prisoners of war, it was not required that the defendants have their attorneys present. Interrogations were made under oath, so the results could be used later in trial, he adds. They had the right to remain silent—but, Sonnenfeldt explains, most had been in prison for three months.

“They were so anxious to exonerate themselves that they talked,” he says.

MEN WITHOUT CONSCIENCES

Sonnenfeldt and his OSS unit formed the interrogation division of the Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel, and reported directly to the U.S. Army’s commanding general in Europe. At first, when the unit became part of the American prosecution for the upcoming trials, Sonnenfeldt was the sole interpreter; soon, he was supervising a staff of 50.

He flew all over Germany, Austria, Warsaw and Prague, interviewing senior Nazi officers, prepping witnesses for the prosecution, interviewing both on and off the record. He was the interpreter during interrogation of Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Sonnenfeldt saw him as a “voluble windbag” who never made sense, and was baffled at how he had managed to become foreign minister.

Sonnenfeldt even interviewed Johanna Wolff, one of Hitler’s secretaries. She spoke reverently of how she would type Hitler’s rasping tirades as he dictated, and it was clear that had she been able, she would have done so again.

People have asked Sonnenfeldt if he hated the Nazis. While they were hated as a group, he never lost sight of the fact that his team had to find out what each person they questioned had actually done. “We were investigators,” he explains.

He maintained that professionalism even when speaking to prosecution witness Otto Ohlendorf, German army commander. Sonnenfeldt writes, “He explained how hard it had been for his men to kill 90,000 Jews, a few dozen at a time….they had modified trucks by routing the exhaust gas inside and driving the victims until they were dead…. Another method was to have the victims dig a trench and then stand them up and shoot them in the neck so that they tumbled into the grave they had fashioned for themselves. That [the emotional toll of having the victims dig trenches and then shooting them] had been even harder for his men to do day after day, he complained.”

Sonnenfeldt, still incredulous at his conclusion, has decided that the motivation for the Nazis’ evil was destructively simple: “There was no philosophy to understand: They were power crazy.” And they had fallen under a spell.

He explains that although Hitler was a great liar, “to them, he was totally charismatic. At Nuremberg, when they talked about him, their voices changed: They thought of him as a hero.” And that charisma had grand reach; as Sonnenfeldt says, “Other statesmen were absolutely bedazzled by him.”

He describes Goering as “a man with brains and no conscience.” Sonnenfeldt notes that Goering, a drug addict and head of the Gestapo named by Hitler himself as his successor before his suicide, was more familiarly known as “Der Dicke (Fatso).”

When Goering tried to confound his interrogator, Col. John Harlan Amen, Sonnenfeldt remembered Sir Winston Churchill describing Germans as being either at your throat or at your feet. The brash 22-year-old reduced Goering from cunning to cooperative by deliberately misprounouncing his name as “Herr Gering,” an insulting word meaning “little nothing” in German, to get his attention so he could instruct him firmly how to listen and when to keep quiet during questioning—and to remember that Sonnenfeldt was in command. The most senior surviving Nazi behaved from then on, even demanding that Sonnenfeldt be his interpreter.

Sonnenfeldt spent hours in pretrial conversations, many of them alone with Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hess. Sonnenfeldt observed that Hess was so undistinguished in appearance and ordinary in manner that he likely never had an original thought. Hess became angry when Sonnenfeldt asked him to verify exterminating more than 3 million human beings. Hess answered, “No. Only 2 1/2 million. The rest died of…illness, epidemics that we could not stop, and starvation.”

Sonnenfeldt interpreted Hess’ horrendous admission of guilt, in which the killer had guards tell the Auschwitz prisoners that they were going to shower rooms to wash before getting new clothes.

“They would have rioted had they known where they were going…So we made the gas chambers look modern and clean, with tiled floors and walls and shower heads…” The victims’ bodies were carted out by other inmates, who were then killed, Hess added.

Verdicts were handed down by the tribunal in 1946 to 22 defendants, with 11 condemned to death by hanging, three receiving acquittals, three life in prison, and four to be imprisoned from 10 to 20 years. Sonnenfeldt notes that Goering killed himself with a cyanide pill after receiving the death sentence.

After Nuremberg, Sonnenfeldt did not rest. He graduated first in his class at Johns Hopkins School of Engineering. He began working for RCA in Camden, N.J. in 1949.

“They were in a battle with CBS,” he recalls, at an exciting time. He forged ahead—“I got 35 patents in three years,” he says with glee, and became a principal developer of color TV, which would banish black-and-white sets forever. He also developed computers for the original NASA missions to the Moon, went on to become executive vice president of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), then served as a management consultant to global companies. Sonnenfeldt settled in Port Washington after going to work for an Albertson-based company that was pioneering data communications by developing the forerunner of the fax machine. He celebrated his 75th birthday in a gale on a sailboat, during his third trip across the Atlantic with a crew on his own boat.

Thinking back to the great evil that surrounded him during his formative years, he refers to countries such as Germany and Japan, which he says have struggled with power, triumphed and ultimately failed, and says he remains “very skeptical of countries that say that they have the final answer.” He believes, though, that the United States is different, because of its inherent system of checks and balances. “Our Constitution and Bill of Rights is unique, and so far, it’s always worked,” he fervently maintains.

Several years ago, he was invited to Germany and addressed audiences about his experiences. He describes a generation gap there between the young, who seek knowledge of the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust, and the older citizens, because the few still alive who lived through those horrors tell the young ones they will not talk about it.

Since retiring three years ago, Sonnenfeldt and his wife Barbara spend more time with their six children and 15 grandchildren living nearby. It was their questions to their grandfather that made him realize that he had to reveal his memories in a book. Today, in 2006, the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg verdicts, his study is littered with papers, copies of his book, crisp, shiny black-and-white photographs of him with Rudolf Hess, his swastika-stamped German passport, and more evidence of the important history he is compelled to share—so that today’s children may never forget.

He says simply that he offers his hand “to all who would be members of a human family with equal rights for everyone in a society, a nation, and a world that excludes only those who want to exclude themselves.”