Nuremberg Interpreter Recalls Historic Trials

the following program was produced by the United States courts thank you very much for this kind introduction it's very fortunate that my presence here coincides with a mission that brought me to Washington during this week I'm coordinating and accompanying a group of 15 scholars from China from the People's Republic of China were doing an intensive exploration of the United States beginning in Washington this week and then going on to Boston San Francisco and finally talked to the host state and city in Honolulu I was asked to speak to you briefly about the origins and challenges of simultaneous interpreting relating to my experience as the Nuremberg trials you heard from sabe also some of my background but let me just thought from an autobiographical point of view just say briefly how I got to nürnberg and what what brought me there and what made it possible for me to to actually stay there for four years from the beginning of during the pre-trial phase the trial itself the big international trial and the 12 subsequent proceedings in other words four years from 1945 to 1949 now the fact that I'm able to stand here and speak to you about this in a way also has to do with my age at that time because my contemporaries at that time are no longer with us in fact the main actors the chief actors at Nuremberg whether they are the judges or the prosecutors or the defense counsel or the defendants themselves are no longer alive because at that time as you can imagine they were mean we're talking about an event that took place 60 years ago then those people at that time when their 40s and 50s but in my case what happened was that I was unusually young when I was as young as 20 to 22 years old that time I'm right now 86 but that was 22 then and it's quite amazing that I was employed I would not have employed myself at that time but but let me let me come to that as you heard I lived in London I mean I was born in Vienna then I my studies and my life in London was was you know was interrupted by World War two stayed in London during the Blitz and as the tides of the war changed in favor of the Allies towards the end of World War two and the advance into Germany there was need for linguists too especially in the case of helping the US troops of having linguists available with logistics with disarmament issues and so on so I was attached to actually 1/9 US air force battalion that was advancing into Germany to help them with their logistics with a battalion dealing with the Germans dealing with requisitions dealing with logistics also dealing with interrogations and collection of materials that would be sent to a central screening agency for their significance for the Allies and in doing that this was early I was closed came close actually we were at the university city called Erlangen in Germany very close to two nürnberg and it was just that the void just ended and I really heard rumors that the heads of state the Chiefs of crucially leading positions in Germany had been arrested and were awaiting trial at Nuremberg I took I went to nürnberg to acquire about this talked to the adjutant general and was told they heard about my background was told I was really needed I I won't go into detail because it sometime but it so happened that the colonel of the battalion who was in fact my superior with that battalion had no interest whatsoever in nürnberg and said there's nothing doing you stay here and I won't I won't let you go so literally I described that in my autobiography which has just been published I realized that there's nothing I could do but when I received orders to return to London I made a decision and it was a decision that influenced the rest of my life and it is not to obey these orders to go to a Frankfurt airbase and return to London because I knew that once I returned to London the situation right at the end of the war in Germany was so chaotic the channels of command was so confused in a way that would never be able to get back so I made a decision not to obey these orders and simply go to Nuremberg myself without getting on that aeroplane by that time I had lost my Jeep and and driver and I had to get out to the Autobahn really to to hitchhike a ride to nürnberg presented myself to the adjutant general and then from that time on I was immediately immersed in the first of all in the pre-trial phase settings doing all of the necessary preparations for the for the trial itself you may ask what happened to my a more standard absent without leave well it so happened that about there was a military police detachment I think it was a sergeant and a military police captain who caught up with me and Nuremberg but I had no problems because the Novik had a top priority in the European theater at that time and they smooth the way for me and there was no problem well let me say first before we getting into the simultaneous issues something about the printer interrogations which you consult conducted on a consecutive level where the accused and some key witnesses were brought into interrogations rooms and there was a number of prosecutors and lawyers who would actually prepare that both the testimony and the documentary evidence which would be the basis of of the trials sometimes when I'm asked what most impressed me about my career at Nuremberg the noumic trials I will often say it was these pretrial interrogations without eglee exactly and why am I saying that it was because this was an experience of history in the raw raw history what I mean by that is this was an occasion where the leaders of a nation that had been totally defeated with the infrastructure that nation was totally destroyed and those leaders of the nations were given an opportunity to articulate and express themselves during that pre-trial phase very often very anxious to express themselves when this was done before the testimony was filtered by defense counsel or by defense strategy it was prior to any kind of strategy was very much spontaneous and extremely interesting but then as the preparations for the trials advanced the questions came up on how to deal with the language issues in the language barriers it was evident that the languages that were needed obviously were German was delayed the language of the defendants of the accused of defense counsel and so on and then when it came to the international judges and the prosecution we had the US prosecution team the British prosecution French prosecution and Soviet at that time we called it Soviet rather than rather than Russian so it was important that the proceedings be understood by all not only by all of the participants at Nuremberg in the noumic trials but in a sense by the world because this was an occasion for media from all over the world you know to come to Nuremberg in a sense was one of the most important media events at the end of World War two and they were reporting on the trials to their respective communities in their respective countries and they needed to do that obviously in their own languages and they needed to understand what was going on so now how to deal with this dilemma because if we had to do it consecutively it would have just I mean you couldn't conceive on how cumbersome it would be how boring you'll be and how difficult it would be just it was just not acceptable so you know the English proverb English saying necessity is the mother of invention so if something is really necessary there is some ingenious way to deal with it in fact it's very hard to pinpoint the originator of the the notion the theme of simultaneous interpreting but I think a key person was a man called Leon das das ter who was a colonel in the US Army but of French origin of brought up in France and was bilingual in French and English had also served as an interpreter to General Eisenhower himself and he was one of the key persons you know with with that vision with that ideas so that during the pre-trial phase that during that phase before the International trial we had a relatively short time no more than I would say three or four months to to make those preparations and there were two aspects to it one was the human aspect of course there was the key aspect to choosing the people who were able to do that and dealing with the criteria for these kinds of choices and I'll come to that in a moment but then there was also the technical aspect of how how technically do that nowaday now in throughout the world we are so technically able that we don't really think of these things we know that that things can be can be electronically handled very efficiently but keep in mind now we're dealing with 1945 keep in mind that at that time even the tape that we now use had not yet been used or invented so recording was done through a wire wire recording so at that an IBM had already existed and helped with the technical setup of dealing with a simultaneous system letting you let me go back to the to the choice of personnel we started out with the language division at Nuremberg in other words with some of the people who were already involved in the translation of documents who were document translators in order to see whether they could be used in the courtroom on the microphone you know to be dealing simultaneously and we found that there was a very very difficult thing to do we set up a system of sort of mock trials in preparation to test people to see if they're able to respond immediately to language stimuli and handle that and in many cases they were not in many cases these were people who were outstanding linguists scholars would translated books and so on but were not able to handle this notion of dealing with the language stimulus in such a way that it could be useful for simultaneous interpreting however some in fact what the stumbling block for some of those very learning people was is that they were perfectionists and it is good to be perfectionist you know when you have the time and you're translating a book or a journal but you can't be a perfectionist when you have to respond to an immediate stay so in other words it called for the ability to think of the second-best word instantly or even the third best world because you could not afford to stop if you stopped there's a breakdown in what you're doing so it required that kind of language agility which we found out turned out to be rather rare and not as easy to find but anyway we managed to bring a team together actually we needed a team of 12 aged 3 teams about 36 people when I say 12 and I'm sure many of you are not familiar with that we would essentially have an English booth so the English class booth would be Germany into English which by the way was my function I was on the English microphone listening listening to German and speaking English so the English booth would have German into English French into English and Russian into English and they they would share one one booth in essence one microphone and then there would be the German booth English into German French into German Russian into German and they would be on the German microphone the same would be true for Russian and the same the same would be would be do for French and to coordinate all of that there would also be a monitor who was sitting by the side that later on and the subsequent proceedings was often my position would sort of turn the dial and listen to all of them you know to deal with with possible breakdowns and so on so so we we had these two these teams where the procedure was something like this there would be in the courtroom much longer than we do it you usually know for about an hour and a half or two hours sitting on that on that microphone of course when the verbatim language was a given language was you show German or whatever it was you would here forbade him through the earphones in other words there was no need for somebody interpreting into German you know when a German witness was speaking and that would have been done verbatim we would then after as we was as he was speaking court reporters would take down the testimony both the testimony as it came through verbatim directly but also especially but the testimony that was coming through the earphones so there would be a group of French court reporters German court reporters English court reporters and Russian court reporters and the court reporters would go into the courtroom and do takes of 15 or 20 minutes in the courtroom they would use the steno type or sometimes stenograph and then it would go back into their offices and would would transcribe and without going into details let me just tell you that and I think it was a quite a feat that at the end of a working day of the trials there was a transcript that was ready in four languages in English French Russian and German now it was not a polished transcript for example what I had to do when I was safe for ninety minutes in the courtroom I would then go to my office and I would have in front of me through wire recording the verbatim version of what was what was said and I had I had my translator and I was able to do make a quick review and since we are dealing really with life-and-death matters we had to be careful that no no mistakes were done but there was not enough time to really polish it to have it a polished version but enough attention was paid that we were sure that it be accurate and it was possible for this for for the lawyers for the sakura-san for defense counsel and for judges to review what had been done we face the great many challenges we face challenges of specialty terminology military terminology for example in the medical trial in one of the subsequent proceedings there was a great deal of medical terminology and all of that presented great challenges to the to the court interpreters to dissolute it meant that we needed to some extent possible to have preparation for these these challenges for example to request in advance to know what would be happening in the courtroom and what kinds of things we need to be prepared for we also had one and many of you are interpreters in the room which would relate to this there is a difference between free spontaneous talk and then and in written written language in other words if a witness or a prosecutor defense counsel was reading a document in the courtroom and if that document was not also available to the interpreter it caused a tremendous problem it sometimes almost as difficult as being even able to do that so we made very sure that everyone active in this proceedings knew that the interpreters had had to have this material in front front of them but there were many challenges are mentioned medical terminology to give you an example on medical terminology we know that most of the medical terms have Latin roots so sometimes the only difference between one language and another language or medical terminology was the pronunciation that would fit that particular language and though very often the interpreters themselves did not understand the technical as they were able to use that system to make it intelligible to those people you know who in the audience you needed who needed to know ideally we realized when the simultaneous interpreting system worked well the person in the courtroom whether it was a visitor in the spectators gallery or counsel or judges and so on were not really conscious of the presence of an interpreter they were just listening to the proceedings as though they were hearing the actors you know speak themselves in that language and then that's when it worked very smoothly we developed a system of traffic lights where we had orange light and orange light go on which is a warning signal which meant that counsel was speaking too quickly and at that point the judges would caution whoever was on the microphone to speak slowly or situations where the actors in the courtroom were very agitated and trying to speak at the same time and when they were doing that obviously the simultaneous interpreting system did not work so we had the cooperation of the Justice who were very conscious of the fact that we faced difficult challenges and but tried to be as helpful as possible and I think they are particularly of the president know of the of the International Military Tribunal Sir Geoffrey Laurence the British who was very very careful about helping the interpreters at that time in order to meet those those challenges we also had some issues dealing with what some of us described as so-called Nazi German or or official national socialist policy German that was used in the court and by that we mean you meant that very often where there were several translations possible perhaps once one version would be innocuous and another version would be quite incriminatory one could choose one or the other let me give you an example because it's difficult to describe that without an example there was a this happened in my case and it it put myself into an interesting role the testimony said that the certain number of the population in in eastern Ukraine for example in Russia was seized and gotten ready for the deportation to other parts of Ukraine and so on so I had to deal with that verb that population was seized now when you take that verb translated to the German you have dominated from German into English I used the term seized which fit the context perfectly so far as I was concerned however that particular verb could also be translated that that population was registered now the difference between season ready that sees has an aggressive connotation registered has a totally innocuous connotation I used the term seized on the microphone why because it fit the context perfectly weather however defense counsel called it among the defense counsel there were quite a number of them who spoke English quite well and who were usually following the procedure with one part of the earphone on to the translation and one to the original and they raised an objection saying that that should have been translated as registered and not not deceased now how that affected me in an interesting and humorous ways that for the next 15 minutes or so on the microphone I was involved in interpreting a discussion about my interpretations which sort of way we went back and forth on until finally the chief justice Lawrence did something that he often had to do and judges have to do and saying is we will end this this discussion and the tribunal would take it into consideration and deal with it when the time comes so that just gives you gives you an idea as I mentioned I stayed with no let me just before I do that let me talk about another challenge I think that may resonate with you and that has to do with translation from German into English those of you who have studied German and know something about German or those or German speakers amongst you know that in the subordinate clause the verb comes at the very end of a subordinate clause so in other words you have various adjectives and adverbs and so on preceding preceding the Riverland finally you have the verb at the end now that presented a great challenge to the interpreter because when you speak English the verb anchors the sentence in other words you need it you need it immediately so that you could not afford to wait until you heard the verb at the end of the clause in order to use it because by that time whoever was speaking had already gone on beyond that and there would be a would be a breakdown so we developed a system of dealing with that through language segments and taking the adverbial clause that preceded the verb and making a short sentence out of it until the verbs and then have the verb include everything that had preceded it now as I explained it now that sounds awfully complicated and very difficult but actually it is not once you get a hang of that system you know it worked very well and allowed us to keep pace during the trials as you know and doing all simultaneous interpreting it requires a great deal of focus and a great deal of concentration and also something becoming to being in tune to some extent with how the person is speaking and and engaging that in advance once you capture that then there's a flow and then you just go with the flow and it tends to to work pretty well there's another interesting aspect to that process to give you an example in my case from time to time I would be spending an hour to in front of the microphone then there would be recess that go outside to the corridor outside of the courtroom and people who had not been spectating were interested in what was going on and they would ask me what what happened here and what happened there and I was unable to respond and why was I unable to respond because in some ways when you have that kind of a focus in that concentration you're in almost in a trance-like situation you're doing it correctly but you it's a quayside trance and then you come out and it's very difficult to reconstruct what had gone on and what had gone on previously i'm very often asked you see keep in mind that you know at that time as i mentioned i was a very young fellow i was 22 23 years old i was asked very often in a mouse now what was what was your reaction to the to the trials in terms of the war crimes and the crimes against humanity and the things that happened later with the Holocaust and so on and how did you react how did you feel about all of these all of that kind of a testimony that was coming across at that time and then I I would say I had to say that I was so focused on the linguistic on the language challenges and I was in a sense too young to really deal with the full impact in international law for example of the Nuremberg trials but my concern was really basically doing a good job linguistically and preparing myself well enough that I could handle the job however as later 10 20 years later my later career my later work I became more and more interested in the impact of the trial in the legal implications and since then I've lectured about it and I've written about it it's not the theme of this conference here but it is something that that I've been doing and I'm still required to do I've just written that some of you have it something to be available here after my talk I've written an autobiography book of memoirs which is entitled nürnberg and Beyond now in that book I do deal not only with some of the challenges in simultaneous interpreting that I've just enumerated but also with the impact of the trial with the legal implications with the role of the trials preceding the Tokyo trials we followed a year later the trials at The Hague that has been going on what is happening in Cambodia and so on in other words nürnberg set the stage for a phase in international law which is still going on today let me say something about the interpreters at Nuremberg the kind of people who were gathered there and it was an interesting mix of people there at age groups were represented I mean very few as young as I am but some of them are coming from academia some of them actually had already had experience as interpreters in Geneva solar so it was a very mixed group and we also formed a social group and formed friendships unfortunately most of them are not no longer alive but I did keep in touch with quite quite a number of them and then we had also close connections with the court reporters for example as a linguist at Nuremberg I had one of my duties in addition to simultaneous interpreting from time to time to phases and it's you see me when you see photos of the Nuremberg trials you will often you might see my face underneath the tier of judges and in those on those occasions my job was to give information to the court reporters that they need it in order to transcribe for example they were unable to deal with German place names with names of military ranks of all kinds of proper nouns and proper words that were not in their experience and they would mean they would come to full stop in their transcribing so I would I would listen for all of these things and as the court reporter finished that take of 15 or 20 minutes I would hand them the sheet of paper where all of that was written so that when they did that transcription you know they could do it do it smoothly as I said at that time simultaneous interpreting had not yet been done but when we move fast forward to the 21st century right now it has become an aspect of the linguistic training every major university has a department that trains people in in simultaneous interpreting it has become something that is accepted everywhere whether as an international gathering and I would like to think that the skill and the ability to handle that also has grown quite quite a bit so that that it has not only become an accepted profession but also that the ability level you know has increased a great deal there's a great deal more to be said about translation and about simultaneous interpreting my life right now is not involved with that anymore you know I'm at the moment in a fellow at an adjunct fellow at the east-west Center which is a center that deals with the understanding of the asia-pacific region and in that obviously our deal primarily in English but to some extent I've used my language background in in the community in terms of working with various community groups in a variety of capacities on the ANA founder for example in Hawaii of the audience for cells that encouraged the French culture in my case I would describe myself as trilingual English French and German but in addition to that although I have not mastered that because my work takes me frequently to Asia so I'm very often in Japan and in the People's Republic of China other is it so I've picked up a smattering of those languages but I would only describe them as a street Chinese Street Street Japanese and have not really you know I'm not able to deal with it it's kind of curious because when I say something in Chinese or if I say something in Japanese because of my background as a linguist my pronunciation tends to be quite good so when I say something there's a flood that comes back to me in response and then I'm totally lost so so so that's one of the perils of having a good pronunciation but when you travel and you have a limited vocabulary and a good pronunciation that can get you into a lot of trouble let me let me conclude by saying that I am very glad to be here but there's a lot to be said about my subject but I would prefer to deal with your interest for particular interest that brings you here in any questions or if my remarks have stimulated any particular question that where you would like to have my comment so please feel free to express yourself in terms of of my talk as the years went on I would imagine that you created relationships within the courtroom with the different participants how did you that the interpreters and the rest of the group keep that relationship that you might have created from actually influencing and the knowledge you were gaining throughout the years from influencing the day-to-day hearings well I actually we were quite professional about that it it did not actually affect ourselves which visibly be the defendants we socially we had many different opportunities to get together among interpreters among linguists among reporters among journalists I in particular had many friendships among among the journalists that came because as I mentioned it was a big media event and we would would relate to one another we had many incidents you know in the medical trial I was very much involved with the medical trial from beginning to end and these were Nazi German doctors who were accused of doing experiments on concentration camp he made some prisoners of war all kinds of very cruel experiments like being exposed to salt water without anything else and till the point of death in order to I mean the very or injecting Polish women with gangrene in order to see what kind of that their their response in the endured offense which was not accepted as a defense was that this was all done in a spirit of medical science but in fact there was no progress in medical science as a result of these experiments but that that was their defense but apropos of incidents I remember once it was during the medical trial and I developed an irritation on my skin on my cheek that just wouldn't disappeared now remember that one of the defendants and those those doctors on in the doc some of them had international reputations and were renowned medical scholars and was still pursuing that well anyway one of those doctors beckoned me over and he looked at my skin irritation and he scribbled something which was a prescription and hadn't handed it to me and he said you know you can take that to a pharmacy and that irritation will disappear now just as curiosity Omega I did take it to a pharmacy and and the pharmacy said that this is a very popular sell for something and that it's perfectly okay there's nothing you need to worry about I mean this is just one anecdote of many I enjoyed particularly the French delegation we were billeted in nürnberg in the suburbs of Nuremberg in some cases in the university town of Erlangen and Dambach and we would very often get together you know for social occasions in a sense my life in Hawaii really has to do with you know it you know the expression in French and French when you read French books if you want to know why a male a man moves from one place to another it said chef Sheila farm let me look for the moment and if you if you find out where the woman goes you know the man may well follow well I married I met a court reporter of actually of Hawaiian descent was one of the first court reports from Hawaii in in in Europe and we got married in Paris and the fact that we got married really launched my career in Hawaii hadn't met her that that would not have happened on the outskirts of nürnberg there was a in which we dubbed the French club where many members of the French delegation would stay we would often meet there and gather there for social events there were many recesses court during the trials and we were in a privileged position where we would be able during a recess to to fly free of charge to other various destinations in Europe during during recess periods so so these were some of the social events that took place there was also a castle called - Stein castle outside of nürnberg where the press had stayed and very often we had functions and social gatherings in that castle in fact when I got married in Paris afterwards we had the reception right at that castle at the Stein Castle among the journalists some that may resonate amongst you some of you one of the journalists was a man who became very famous in the United States passed away now Walter Cronkite what Walter Cronkite was at that time not the television reporter but he wrote a print reporter he wrote for United Press and had duty and there were many others or two became quite well-known I think there's a question over there I'm curious during the time that the trials were going on without going into specifics did you consider that you were well paid as an interpreter or marginally paid or well by by the standards at that time it was okay was fairly well by standards of today it was pitifully small no I think if I can give you a figure I'm not really quite sure anymore but it was something to the equivalent of of three thousand or three thousand five dollars per year which which was not not very much but we didn't have many expenses actually this was a the the period read after World War two it just ended the German mark was worth nothing and you had sort of military notes as with other than Marx and people were paid in kind by Americans would buy coffee from the PX and then give it to some Germans and so on so there was a lot of part in a lot of exchange going on and for exam I case both my woman I was to marry later as a court reporter she was very busy in her profile and I was as an interpreter we were very busy but we had many facilities I mean we had a housekeeper you know to keep the house we had a driver in a car you know to go wherever we wanted so when you think about that it was unusual for young people a young couple in their 20s to have that that kind of support but but it kind of went with the job and it went with the conditions that at time but I think in some ways we were mature enough to realize that when the Nuremberg trials came to an end not only the major trial but all the subsequent proceeding we had some offers to stay on with the occupation in Germany in other related positions which at that time would have been quite well paid and secured with all kinds of service but we realized that it was nest this was not life as it should be led that one needed to take root somewhere and it didn't make sense you know to stay here and go from one job like that overseas to another so we decided you know we I hadn't finished my education I needed to do more graduate work my wife had other interests too so we we went to Hawaii our first idea was not to settle down in Hawaii but just to visit her family and her parents and then go back either to the United States or to England to do something else but then various positions and office opened up in Hawaii and I realized that Hawaii rather than an isolated place was really a bridge between the Asia Pacific region and the mainland United States and there were many opportunities there for me now became quite fascinated with the population with the way of life with the beauty of the country so we have never regretted the fact that we've settled down there there's this lady over there yes pronounced her as interpreters we emphasized a need to work in teams today and studies have been done about interpreter fatigue at the time that the Nuremberg trial took place obviously there was no protocol as to how interpreters would work or for how long and I imagine that there was an emotional toll on the interpreter also as you say when you describe when they were interpreting the medical experiments etc how did you divide the work up to prevent yourself from getting too tired yeah well I was involved in in this aspect of it towards the end of the subsequent proceedings in the final two years when I was there as mentioned I was there from 1945 to 49 but as of late 47 48 I was appointed chief of the interpreting branch or you know at the very young age and this is when I took these things into consideration as chief of the interpreting branch I still continued to be active on on the microphone but my main duty was really scheduling interpreters them and selecting them and making sure that they were not over scheduled or under schedule for that matter and and deal with those issues of potential fatigue you

Channel: United States Courts

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Keywords: Nuremberg, Trials, Interpreter, Siegfried, Ramler, Federal, Court, uscourts

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Length: 46min 14sec (2774 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2010