Processing evil

At his first examination by US army doctors following his arrest, Hermann Göring was discovered to have painted his fingernails and toenails bright red. He was addicted to morphine. After he sobered up to present his defence, the highest-ranking Nazi to stand trial at Nuremberg was gloating, manipulative, unrepentant. He often seemed to come out ahead in cross-examinations. When the prosecution screened footage of Nazi ceremonies and rallies, Göring visibly preened at the sight of himself. Rebecca West, who covered the trials for The New Yorker, wrote « when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel. » 

The Nuremberg trials (1945-6) were the first draft of historical judgement on the devastation of World War II. Yet it is probably Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem that became the defining legal reckoning with the Holocaust in popular memory. Perhaps this is because Eichmann’s trial was later and televised, or because, thanks to Hannah Arendt, we have come to find the figure of the impersonal bureaucrat more grimly appropriate to the vast industrial scale of death. But if the Jerusalem trial (and Arendt’s assessment of it) have since shaped how we think about perpetrators, it is certainly not because Nuremberg lacked the more compelling villain. Where Eichmann embodied the banality of evil, Göring stood for something like its virtuosity.

By the time the trials began, the Allies had already lost two prisoners to suicide. To prevent further losses, the commandant of Nuremberg prison introduced new protocols: daily searches, a 24-hour watch; custom-built tables designed to buckle under a man’s weight; as they slept, prisoners were instructed to lie with their hands outside their blankets so that nothing could be concealed. 

Nuremberg had been one of the sites targeted via aerial bombing with explosive and incendiary bombs deliberately combined to ignite a firestorm. In the gleeful language of the British press at the time, it had been Rotterdamned; it had been Hamburgered. The streets smelled of death. As the British deputy chief prosecutor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe recalled in his memoirs, « people peeped at us from bunkers under partly shattered houses, apathetic and wretched. » The rubble heaped at the sides of the roads buried so many corpses that it was feared they would contaminate the water supply.

The eightieth anniversary has seen renewed interest in the trials. Harvard Law School made their archive of 750.000 pages of trial documents fully searchable for the first time. 2025 saw the release of Nuremberg, a film starring Russell Crowe as Göring and Rami Malek as the army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, trying to understand the Nazi mind. And a travelling exhibition called One Trial, Four Languages, dedicated to Nuremberg’s interpreters and the birth of simultaneous translation, is still moving from city to city in the US, South America and Europe — showing in Leipzig and Barcelona later this year. The most urgent contemporary resonance for this trial conducted amid the wreckage of a devastated city, may come from the dead lying trapped among the rubble in Gaza. Eighty years on from Nuremberg, it is the state of Israel that’s facing charges of genocide in the International Court of Justice. 

That charge was not actually among those levelled against the defendants at Nuremberg: it would be codified only later, in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Here, the defendants were charged with crimes against peace, with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit the above. Of these, the charge of crimes against humanity was the legal breakthrough: for the first time, a state would be held liable for actions against its own civilians. Not everyone liked the idea. The trial had to strike a precarious balance, satisfying the competing aims of each Allied victor: the Soviets wanted reparations; the British sought a quick trial; the Americans, conscious that their own Black citizens lived under a legally enforced system of racial segregation, were uneasy about prosecuting a state for the treatment of its own people; the French insisted on the charge. Finally, there were worries that a trial conducted in four separate languages would drag on. This required a linguistic innovation. In order to cut the required time of the trial from four years to one, Nuremberg would be the premiere of the new system of simultaneous interpretation.

The work of these translators is visible in many images of the trials: the defendants wear headphones, listening to the voices of the translators (in some images, they’ve got sunglasses too, manufactured by Polaroid Corporation to shield their eyes from the glare of press photography). But it’s only more recently that exhibitions like One Trial, Four Languages have taken a closer look at the men and women behind those voices: who they were, what they heard day after day, what became of them, and how, under the pressure of humanity’s greatest crime, they built a method the world still relies on.

Under the direction of Leon Dostert — a French-born scholar who served as Eisenhower’s personal interpreter before becoming Chief of the Translation Division — a new technique was developed to work in real time, providing immediate translations for the prosecution (in English, for example), the defence in German, and the judges listening in Russian and French. And this all needed to happen almost instantly. Translators were trained never to fall more than eight seconds behind their speaker. Say, a Russian witness was giving evidence about the siege of Leningrad. As they spoke, their testimony would be played back to interpreters sitting in glass booths off to one side, who would immediately translate. The entire courtroom would then listen in through IBM headphones over five channels. Channel one would play the original audio; channel two was English; three Russian (which, if the speaker was Russian, would take the original audio); channel four carried French; five, German. IBM provided the machinery, but this was a human system requiring exceptionally specialised translators. 

The fullest account of their training can be found in Francesca Gaiba’s The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation (1998), and the details she provides are extraordinary. The interpreters’ vocabulary would have to be broad enough to allow them to become the voice of train operators, resistance fighters, industrial magnates, concentration camp survivors, the Nazi leaders themselves. To test their fluency, candidates were asked to name ten trees, ten automobile parts and ten agricultural implements in two languages — many failed the task in their mother tongue. Months of training determined that the best translators were between 35 and 45 years old; younger applicants didn’t have the vocabulary, older people couldn’t keep up. Men were preferred to women, not because they did a better job, but because the trials showed that listeners were prejudiced in favour of a male voice. Even among the translators who made it through the gruelling application process, many froze up when the trial began and had to be reassigned to menial tasks. Among the translators, this became known as being sent to Siberia.

IBM installed yellow and red lightbulbs in three places around the courtroom: in front of the presiding judge, at the speaker’s rostrum and at the witness stand. These lights are another clue someone watching the archive footage of the trials might have of the presence of the translators. Each light supplied a different message. A yellow flash indicated the witness was speaking too fast and signalled for them to slow down. The red light was used in two ways: a short flash meant the translator had missed something, the witness should stop and repeat the last few sentences; a longer illumination meant that a break was needed, the translator could not continue, perhaps because they were coughing, or weeping.

Contemporary artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan recreated this apparatus in a 2021 work called the Witness-Machine Complex. With his team, Abu Hamdan searched through the trial film looking for moments when these lights were activated. If the bulbs were out of frame, they looked for their glow leaking onto the clothes and skin of those nearby, or listened for the click they made as they ignited. Abu Hamdan found seven places where the testimony being given at the trials was altered or impacted by this system of translation.

French resistance fighter Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier had been at Auschwitz. As she gives her testimony the yellow light flashes, signalling that her translator is finding it difficult to maintain pace and that she should slow down her speech. What comes next is spoken in an unusually slow, mechanical, precise manner, every word pronounced carefully and deliberately for the record.

Vaillant-Couturier says:

The translators had to maintain a regular speed: somewhere around 130 words a minute. The very best of them could continue to translate at peaks of two hundred words, but the mental strain was intense. They worked shifts of ninety minutes at a time, during which they couldn’t cough, couldn’t sneeze, couldn’t stop to wipe their nose. Peter Less was one of the translators working from German to English. His entire family had been killed in the camps. Reflecting in a 2008 video interview on how it felt to give voice to the men who had carried out that mass murder, he said: « You have to disassociate your feelings from your job. You can’t just get up and say liar, liar. You have to translate these lies with a straight face. It’s not easy, but you have to leave your feelings at home and become a machine. » Not all the translators were able to detach. Several reported nightmares featuring scenes from the trial, or images from films they had been shown. One interpreter was released from his duty because of the guilt he felt at having been a member of the German armed forces: « I cannot go on. They are talking about the Warsaw ghetto, the uprising, the massacre. I was one of the German troops who had to do this, » Francesca Gaiba records in The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation. Another candidate, a young Jewish girl who had performed well in all the pre-trial tests, suddenly found herself crying and unable to speak in the courtroom. « Because of those men, twelve of the fourteen men in my family are dead. »

Foreign staff were forbidden to eat at German restaurants. The only shop they could access was the PX, or post exchange — a military store inside the courthouse itself, stocked with American goods and accepting the special occupation dollars in which staff were paid. On Fridays, in addition to their salary, interpreters received a weekly PX allocation of chocolate, stockings, soap, cigarettes and razor blades, goods which had vanished from German shelves and were in high demand among the local population. 

Almost all accounts of Nuremberg feature the same details: horror and boredom in the courtroom, the devastated old town, and a widespread atmosphere of sexual opportunism. The Allied occupation force was given the nickname of the « government of interpreters and mistresses ». The main site of nighttime activity was the Grand Hotel. In the lobby, American bands played jazz, banned under the Nazis, but now performed by, as Gaiba quotes one of the US judges, « thin, overpainted, half-starved German girls, » who sang in heavily accented English. In a letter home, US prosecutor Thomas J. Dodd wrote: « The girls were theater stars before the surrender. All of them work all day cleaning up debris — they live in cellars, etc., at night, as does the rest of the population. The people look sullen to me. I do not trust them. » In 1947, during one of the follow-up trials, someone threw a grenade into the hotel lobby.

Wolfe Frank was one of the star interpreters at the trials. His father, a wealthy half-Jewish Bavarian industrialist, took his own life as the Nazis came to power. Frank himself, with one fully Jewish grandparent, would have been classified under the Nuremberg Laws as a Mischling and barred from employment. After he fled to England, he learned English so well that he became one of the few interpreters at the trials whose mastery of both languages meant he could translate in either direction. Frank was stationed in the suburb of Zirndorf. His rank of captain meant that once the evening’s entertainments were over, he was supposed to travel back in a standard army truck that set off just five minutes after the dance hall closed. Frank didn’t like this arrangement, which, as he wrote in his memoirs, « precluded any extracurricular activities, such as sex… I needed a car. » With the help of the Grand Hotel barman, he found one, trading food and medicine to a sick local woman in exchange. Now Frank could stay out longer, enjoy the company of girls, and explore the city in his Opel Olympia.

Occasionally, the individual personalities of the translators could impact court proceedings. Virginia von Schon was a well-educated German-American from New York. Interpreting testimony about the « humane » conditions of a concentration camp, she relayed to the court that the facility was equipped with a library, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, even… she stalled, unwilling to go on. Another member of the team had to lean over to her microphone and provide the absent word: « They had a brothel, your honour. » 

Such discretion could cost a translator their job. One interpreter was let go when she softened the language of a concentration camp guard, providing « you just had to ignore the Jews » as a translation of « auf die Juden pissen »: you had to piss on them.

Of all the defendants, Göring was the most adept at manipulating the system of translation for his own purposes. First, he tried to emphasise its absurdities. After a long, complicated question, full of careful quotation and exact technical terms, he would state that the translation was unclear: could the question be repeated? Another tactic was to use his English. He spoke the language well and would listen carefully as his answers were translated before fiercely pointing out errors, using every opportunity to call the process into question. Accused of having suppressed a penal sentence, he remarked that the word in question was niederschlagen. A better translation, he said, was: « suspend » — and was that not perfectly legal? 

This performance of superiority carried on throughout Göring’s trial. Shortly before it opened, he began to micro-manage his defence, providing his counsel with long written instructions that detailed exactly which questions he should be asked and in what order. This allowed Göring to deliver rehearsed statements in complex formal language with lots of run-on clauses. Since German regularly defers the crucial verb in a sentence until the end, this meant his translators had to supply important items of meaning before they had actually appeared. Wolfe Frank wrote of the need to « tune into » the speaker, to anticipate what they were going to say before they said it. The trial became like something between a duel or a pact between the translator and the witness. Some translators broke down during Göring’s testimony, wrecked by the unbearable pressure. When this happened, the Nazi leader would openly gloat, triumphantly compelling them to repeat long statements about the faultiness of their own performance.¹

The courtroom relied on 36 interpreters working across four languages. But the Russian and French teams were chronically understaffed, and when the Americans eventually realised that a gap in any single language could slow the entire proceedings, they began seconding their own multilingual staff to other delegations to fill the gaps. Of all of these, Wolfe Frank was chosen to translate the court’s final judgment.

But at the crucial moment, the audio equipment failed. No sound came through. Frank began counting into the microphone: Eins, zwei, drei, to check whether the signal was being carried. Göring, listening through his headset, caught the interpreter’s eye and gave him the thumbs up. The greeting was met with a death sentence. « I spoke as if hypnotised, into the microphone before me, » Frank wrote of the moment. « Tod durch Erhängen — death by hanging — instead of Tod durch den Strang, death by the rope, which is the accepted formula in German. » 

But he wouldn’t hang. Throughout the proceedings, Göring had been concealing a cyanide capsule — where exactly it was hidden has never been established. On the eve of his execution, he took it, cheating the hangman — and the prison commandant’s anti-suicide protocols.

Once the International Military Tribunal had delivered its verdict, Frank was offered a new job: Chief Interpreter of the Subsequent Proceedings. Held between December 1946 and April 1949, these twelve further trials focused on the facilitators and profiteers of Nazism: the industrialists, physicians, jurists and military commanders who had made the machinery of the Third Reich run. But things were stalling. Disagreements between the Allies meant that the subsequent trials would not be carried out in four languages, only two: English and German. The Soviets and the French wanted to prosecute their prisoners their own way. An army lawyer named Telford Taylor took over as Chief Prosecutor, but there was growing pressure to wrap things up. Plans to try four hundred people were whittled down to 177.

 Of these 177 defendants, only twelve were sentenced to death. Crimes which would have seen defendants hang at the IMT were now drawing prison sentences; many got off with time served. The developing Cold War meant that the US had a new favourite enemy, and anti-Communist Germans were useful again. For translators like Wolfe Frank this meant sitting through day after day of horror without the anticipation of justice. Morning and afternoon sessions filled with reports of mobile gas chambers, work camps, fire pits. « There were days when I could not eat and I had to drown myself in alcohol before I could sleep, days when my reaction to anyone or anything remotely German was not normal. » 

Armand Jacoubovich was a member of the French translation team whose parents had been murdered in the Holocaust. In his granddaughter’s memoirs, she recalls how at the end of his life, he would not let nurses cut his hair and screamed at orderlies until he had to be sedated. A nurse reported to his family: « Sometimes he recites things… it sounds like legal language. Like a trial… I wouldn’t bother you with it, only sometimes it’s rather gruesome. » 

Before Wolfe Frank left Nuremberg, he crashed his Opel Olympia and killed someone, but there were few consequences. A representative from the insurance company contacted the family, who, Frank writes, « were really rather glad to get rid of the old man who was eating and not producing. » He handed over twenty cartons of cigarettes. « Not much to compensate for the loss of a life. » 

With the trials over, the simultaneous translators each went their own way. Leon Dostert, the head of the original team, started to collaborate with IBM in the pioneering field of Artificial Intelligence. In 1954, he would build an « artificial brain » — the 701 translator — the world’s first machine for automated translation. At its unveiling, a girl input a sentence in Russian and the machine spat out the English equivalent: We transmit thoughts by means of speech.

Late in his life, Wolfe Frank took up simultaneous translating again. This time he worked for the EEC in Brussels, but he quickly became frustrated by the officialdom. Here, there was no more « tuning in » to the speaker, but rather a lot of waiting while a phrase like « Thank you, Mr Chairman » was relayed across seven different languages.

On 10 March 1988, Frank drove from his home in rural Wiltshire to a farm road nearby. He climbed out of the driver’s seat, fixed a hose to the exhaust pipe, sealed the windows with masking tape and then waited inside as the chamber of his vehicle filled with toxic gas.

1. It is worth asking what account Hannah Arendt would have given of Nuremberg, with Göring as its central figure. Some of the contempt that Arendt finds for Eichmann centres on the idea that he is not a worthy adversary. Neither she nor the court in Jerusalem had expected to find such a non-entity; it seemed to diminish the reckoning. How could such a crime be committed by this mediocrity? Until he joined the Nazi party, Eich- mann had been a travelling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company. But Göring was a World War I flying ace and drug addict who, when he entertained aristocrats at his hunting lodge, liked to wear antlers and dress as the god of the hunt. Would this theatricality be more appropriate to measure against the crime, or less? ↩︎