And i dont know why because i didnt know any lawyers. But somehow i always wanted to be a lawyer. Was there interest in sfllaw . I was interested in crime prevention. I had no interest in tax or corporate law. So i was immediately involved in criminal law and did very well. I won a scholarship on that at my first exam at harvard, and then i went to work under one of these student aid programs for a professor of criminal law and criminal administration, professor shelton who was the leading authority in the field of juvenile crime, and that had an important influence on pmy later career. When you were in college, the war had started. No, the war started when i was in law school. I recall the december 7th, when pearl harbor. Im talking about the United States involvement in the war. The war was on in europe, but the United States involvement began when i was at harvard. And i remember the day when everybody went down to enlist. Were you conscious of national socialism, what it was doing in germany . Oh, yes, i was very much so. But there was then a large movement to stay out of the war during the early years. Antiwar protest movement, and i think i was more inclined to be sim pa threat eck to that movement than to anything else. There was a general awareness of the persecution of the jews, for example. And i remember a protest rally, which took place in Madison Square garden. I think my parents went down there to protest and call for a boycott against germany for the persecution of the jews. So we were aware of that. But it was only when i got into harvard that this professor began to receive reports of the atrocities in poland, because he been invited by what was then called the United Nations war crimes commission. It had nothing to do with the United Nations as we know it today, to be the american member of that. So he funneled all those reports to me and was very much aware of what was happening to the jews in poland, beginning in 1939. And these are very detailed reports . They were quite detailed in terms of the size of the massacres. We didnt have such details as pulling out gold teeth and, you know, making mattresses out of the hair, but we knew that jews were being rounded up and september to casent to camps. Were you familiar with the einsatzgruppen . No, i hadnt heard that until much later. When did you enlist . Theres another story there. I assumed that i would go into the army immediately when the war broke out, and i tried to get into different branches. I first allied for military intelligence. I knew french. And i thought that would be helpful, and i knew other languages, some hungarian and yiddish, but my parents hadnt been citizens for 15 years. So i was disqualified. And then i tried to get into the air force. And first, i was too short to be a pilot. And then i tried to be a navigator. Then they changed the rules. They were altered a bit, and i reapplied. Then i failed on one of my eyes, missed two letters on the 20 20 line. Then i tried to take training exercises, and while all this was going on, i was still in school. And theres a very strange story that pie wimy wife tells, someb watching over me. I tried every branch without any success. I went back to law school. I got ahold of my draft board. The clerk came out to see me and told him i had not been called up. Whats going on here . And he had received a letter from the dean, and i think it was dean landers in the middle of my first year, saying it would take another month or two before i finished the first year, and they should give me a deferment until the end of the year. And i thought i would go in. But this member of the draft board came up to me afterwards and said how did you do in law school . And i was very puzzled by that question. And he told me he been a student at the Yale Law School in the First World War and had been wounded and never able to go back to law school and his life had been ruined. And he wanted to protect me from that kind of experience. So it was just a strange fluke. I never saw the man before, and i never saw him again, but he reached his hand out. Why did you want, why did you want to enlist so badly when prior to this you well, i felt, i could have, i could have stayed out of the war. In fact one of the first doctors who examined me, i just about made the height requirement, and i was having trouble with my stomach. I always had a nervous stomach, and he said well, you wont qualify, and i said why not . And he said we cant meet your dietary needs and so on, i always felt like i didnt want to ask anybody else to go and die for me. So i was trying to get in. Where were you first assigned . Beg your pardon . . Where did you first go . The army immediately recognized my talent. They made me a buck private in the artillery. And i was in the supply room as a typist. I couldnt type, of course. And as a matter of fact, they really did recognize my talent, but in 30 days, they made me a private first class. So i figured out at that rate in 18 months i would be a general, of course three years later i was still a corporal. Leave it to the army. I didnt like the army at all. Why . I hated the regimentation always. I felt the army, all armies, the nothing particularly directed at the american or german army. But its the dehumanizing process that takes place in an army, whereas part of the training, the first thing you do is take human beings and make robots out of them, and i refused to become a robot. And that caused me endless grief in the army, because i was always being reprimanded and sent on kp and i refused to march. And i said that was the dumbest thing i ever heard of. I explained to my First Sergeant, that the reason people march is they went back to roman times when the soldiers had to carry their shields on the right side or the left side or over their head, and march in formation, because they were being attacked by spears from the hills, and if they didnt move in formation, the spears could penetrate and kill them. Therefore it was very important that they moved as a you knowivity and i said that was very important. I said if we are going to attack any romans with spears on a heal, thats the way we should march, but if were facing a guy with a machine gun and you march in formation, hell kill you all you have to run, dig a hole and run the opposite direction. Okay, wise guy, in the kitchen. Off i went to the slop pits. And i cleaned more latrines and slop pits than anyone else in the army. Which was very good training for later in life. Didnt change you one bit . No, it made my resentment greater, and i think the notion of training a human being to kill a button that will result in killing 100,000 people and thinking nothing about it is a horrendous thing to do. And incidentally, thats exactly what the germans did to the concentration inmates. The first thing they did was dough humanize them. Shave off their hair, give them a number on their arm, lose their identity as a people, break the human spirit, and it works, but it didnt work with me. How long did you stay in this drn whe where were you assigned, first . First you went to basic training in carolina. You do all those absolutely ridiculous things that you do. And i kept on saying, theres a war going on . Isnt there nothing more important i can do than march up and down here and clean out the slop pits . Okay, wise guy, back again to the kitchen. So it was a form of torture. I felt the United States army was directing its torture at me personally. It was a terrible time. And i had applied for officer candidate school. The major at that time or colonel on the examining board had been my classmate at har regard that sat next to me and said what are you doing here, benny . Im applying for officer candidate school, of course, of course. I had no problem passing it, but i was never called. And when we were getting ready to go overseas, my First Sergeant called my, said you want to be an officer, heres your application, he threw it up in my face and threw in the trash can, and my Commanding Officers felt the same way. I tried every means to get out of that outfit, i applied for the infantry, paratroopers and everybody. And they threatened to courtmartial me for disrespect for the regiment i was in. I was in the wrong outfit. What then happened . Well, we went, we were being trained for the invasion of france. And we didnt know then, but for wherever the landing would take place. And there was 115th aaa battalion, and there was 116th. And again, when, you know, we werent on the first wave, but we supposed to go in very soon to shoot down the highflying aircraft, the barrage balloons would take care of the lowflying aircraft. And when dday came around, and i was at the lands end in england, waiting fort invasion. My outfit went over. It was a couple days after dday when they had enough beach landed to justify it. And my captain, there was a new captain on that job, came, and said you stay here. And again, it was one of those times when somebody reached out. And i was left. And off they went. And it was several days later, a week or so later before i went across and rejoined my outfit. By that time, the germans had retreated from the beach, and i was perched on top of a hill and manning a machine gun to make sure we didnt get any attack from the rear. But from there on in, it was just chasing the germans all across germany, general patton was the commanding general, and his tactic was to per puursue a chase. Sometimes i thought it was a dangerous counterattack. We had no way of repelling them. So off we went. Then of course i was with the outfit all across france and luxembourg and belgium and i found out when i was finally discharged i had been in five campaigns, and it was every campaign in europe from the battle of the beaches of normandy to the battle of the bulge. But it wasnt necessary for me to be shooting people through the head during that time. You didnt shoot no. I mean, the outfit was pursuing. We were fired upon. I was under artillery fire very frequently and tank fire, but we did shoot down a lot of planes. Hugely american planes. We didnt call it friendly fire then. Which was a nice euphemism we came up with later, but the american planes had a gadget called identification friend or faux which w foe, which was supposed to give off a signal. And either they had forgotten the signal or it was off or damaged. In any case, we shot them down, and we had to go out and pick up american fliers and hope we could find a bit of a finger to identify them. And the fireworks on antiaircraft fire looked very nice on 4th of july, but i dont go to 4th of july celebrations. I dont like fireworks. I was in an outfit, which was commanded by antisemites. Most of the, man ey of the peop, let me say, were carry overs from people from the First World War, who couldnt get a job in civilian life, or rednecks and i was called jew boy. And i was told youre a harvard boy, jew boy, do it again, and they put me through again and again, sweeping the floor, and it was never clean enough, no matter what. And they just thought that was great. And they absolutely resented any effort of mine to get out of the outfit or to become an officer or anything of that kind. So there was a lot of antagonism between me and the military. Was this typical . I think it was well, i cant really talk about typical of other outfits. It was typical of this outfit, it didnt apply to all officers, but it certainly applied to my First Sergeant. Who did cook outfit when we got to the shooting, because im sure somebody would have shot him. When did you get involved with the War Crimes Team . I was in, i think it was before we reached luxembourg, because i recall working on adolf hitler, i was called out of the outfit one time and told you were being transferred out, which was a great shock and surprise to me, because i tried to get out in the worse way and couldnt. And i had been warned i would be shipped out in a box and they would send me front line infantry and make sure i got qui killed and so on. Then i arrived at third army head kwarer ters at the judge advocacy section. I was told i had been recommended for transfer from washington, and the unit had been directed to set up a War Crimes Branch in the army. And the colonel said your names been given to us. And whats a war crime . And that was literally true. He had no idea what was meant by a war crime. A nice enough colonel, but he had no such experience. And i said sit down, colonel, youre about to get an education. He sat down, and i explained to him. Because by that time i was quite an authority on war crimes. I had done all the research for a book by this harvard professor. And i had Read Everything that had been written about war crimes, the First World War and way back. And my job was to make summaries of everything that had been written, all the articles and all the books, and i had a very retentive mind, and i was the only one who knew anything about it. So thats how that began. What was the next stage . What did that mean . Well, they had five colonels, and i was the own enlisted man, who were assigned to that outfit. The five colonels were people who were shellshocked. Mostly tank officers. I dont recall at that time that any of them were lawyers. They certainly had no idea whatsoever about war crimes. Some of them i never saw, so, but some of them were obviously shellshocked. And i said, you know, to the colonel, look, we need help. Weve got to start, were beginning to get reports of various crimes against american fliers who had been shot down, places that had been liberated and mass graves and different places. And within a few days, the first reenforcement arrived. And that was a fellow that wasnt much bigger than me, and by the name of jack nowits. And he had been busy building a bridge when they pulled him out because of his knowledge of languages and being a lawyer, he was could haved with mud. He absolutsaluted to me. I said im just a corporal. And thats how it began. We began to bring some more people in. But originally, it was the two of us, with a few others added. A few innocent menlisted men, m. What did you do . The early investigation would be we had a report, for example, of american flyers, parachuters who had been shot down and killed by the populist down below. And wed received a report from somebody in the field and had come through military intelligence down through the war crimes unit. And what i would do then was get into a jeep. And take off for the location. And very often by myself. Or id have a jeep driver. And id arrive at the site, and go to the nearest authority, whether its A Berger Meister or police chief and say we have a report of war crimes here, do you know anything about this . Of course i know nothing about it. Sit down and write out an affidavit and describe everything you know. And if you lie, youll be shot. And i want you to arrest everybody within the next 500 yards of this place and bring them in here and sit down and have them write statements, explain to them. I would find somebody who spoke german. I learned german after a while, but at that time, my german was very broken and was yiddish mostly, but i managed to make myself understood enough to get the job done. I would say get somebody who knows english and german, and are the translator. You explain to these people. Arrest maybe 50 or 75 people and say all of them, sit down and write out exactly what happened. Anybody who lies will be shot. And they would stand at attention and tremble and sit down and write. And separately, you know, keep them all apart. Then id collect the statements and say now read them to me. And they would read them to me. And pretty soon, if you raidead of them, you get 40 that say the same thing. I could write, you know, that on this and this date, allied plane was shot down, two american fliers were captured. Brought to the middle of the town, they were beaten by the populist or they were taken to the guess tau poe headquarters, and in many such cases. And i would go to the ga saw poe headquarters and see if they could catch the man who fled. Then i would try to find the bodies and dig them up. Sometimes id dig them up myself, sometimes id call the Graves Registration and have them send in a crew or the germans and say start digging. And id unearth the bodies, call in camera crew, signal corps, wash them down, take pictures and issue an order to arrest soandso and soandso. So that kind of an investigation i could do by myself. And i did. And eventually, people were caught. Eventually sometimes a matter of weeks, months. We did set up war crimes trials in the dachau concentration camp. And thats where we began as act of poetic justice. The first war crimes trials, long before ner emberg on the basis of evidence collected by me and a few other guys who went out into the field and collected the evidence. Thats before we ran into the concentration camps. Thats a bigger operation. How many military trials did you have . I dont though because i left. The trials were already on when i was there, but i left and were still going on when i came back a long time later. Of was prosecuting at nurm berg. To give you some idea of the flavor of those trials, which i thought they were terrible. They bore very little resemblance to due process of law. And i cons sefess i was partly blame for that behavior. If i had an ss man in my custody and insisted on lying and saying he wasnt there when i had 20 witnesses saying he was there, he usually ended up with a confession. It was not that i had to shoot him through the head in order to get it, but he certainly was of the impression that if he continued lying i would. And under those circumstances, i would always bring in an officer and tell them to go and get that confession again because the one, the original one would probably not stand up to close scrutiny. But the trials themselves at dachau were, the judges were officers with no legal training, usually, no better assignment. The procedures were very informal. Im not suggesting that we tried, punished innocent people. On the contrary. They were all guilty as hell. Otherwise we wouldnt have tried them in the first place. We had too many guilty ones we let loose. So i was not very impressed o wi with the quality of the law work being done at dachau. In some of my letters i wrote home, i said this is a disgrace. That we have forgotten our ideals and all that. So it was a difficult time. And most of minor interesting times, really, were in and rehenning some of these relatively minor criminals or collecting the evidence of these smaller crimes. There were also some massacres of civilians in different towns, mass graves, things of that kind, but nothing near like the concentration camps themselves. Before we get on to that. Were you frightened when you went out to investigate . No. No. I was mad. I dont recall ever having any sense of fear. There was some sense of outrage. It was not a sense of vengeance. I was not, that was not one of my emotions. But i was quite determined and it was a job that, you know, i realized had to be done. And i was so engrossed in getting the job done that there was no teime for fear, nor was there any real fear. I dont know that emotion. Did you actually have authority to go into a place and say im arresting you 75 . Or was this something that you made up on the spot so you could get what you wanted . According to my rank, i had no authority whatsoever, and i was aware of that, but i had more authority than anybody else, because nobody else knew or cared what i was doing. And in order to give myself that authority, i had written out an authorization request from the commanding general, who was patton, saying that all units are requested to give all assistance to t5, technician fifth grade, otherwise known as corporal for ens who is conducting war crimes investigations on behalf of this headquarters and all assistance should be given to him. And using that i could go in to a colonel and say look her, im pa part of a war crimes investigation, and i want you to send some troops to hold this area or seal it or whatever. Sometimes the colonel would say oh, no. Id say listen, do you want me to call patton directly . If you do, i will, and hell straighten you out. And i had no respect whatsoever for military authority. I had nothing but contempt. The higher the rank, the more contempt. And it invariably worked very well, so i had no difficulty in, because i wore no insignia of any kind. And i refused to wear an insignia. When my colonel was promoted he called me in with great pride and said i realized this is done as a result of your efforts, and to show you my appreciation i want to give you these stripes and he made me a sergeant. So i took the stripes and threw them right in his trab can, and i said this will ents fear with my work, i cant go around as a sergeant and do what im doing, because i cannot command the authority that i need to do the job. So youll excuse me if i dont wear them, and he was of course very insulted by that. And i think the final act that he did before he was transferred out before i think colonel bill densen came in was to leave instructions to have me reduced to private. He was going to make me a sergeant with three stripes, but i couldnt do my job as a sergeant either. So i refused to wear the stripes. All of my war pictures, youll never find any insignia on me. Was this your real reason for not wanting the stripes, because in fact you couldnt do your job . Oh, yes, absolutely, absolutely. To go back to your first question, what authority did i have . A private, a corporal has no authority to do this, but the job had to be done. And i got the job done. And i didnt pay any attention about the absence of military rank, about which i cared not one bit. They wanted to promote me to sergeant long before, and i refused. Somebody else, a buddy of mine, i said give it to him. I dont want it. When you left dachau trials, where did you go . You went to the concentration camps and . Well, i described to you the earliest war crimes investigations which were killing of hostages in france, in belgium, shoot being down of of allied fliers, and then we ran into buchenwald. I had never heard that name. We didnt know those names. We knew there was a concentration camp. A report would come in to Third Army Headquarters that soandso Tank Division is approaching an area in which they believe has a concentration camp or has just overrun an area in which there is a concentration camp and the conditions are horrible, et cetera, and that will come to me. That report would come to me, and id say, im going out into the field to investigate that. Later on, we had others who would go out into the field. But i was very eager to go out, and because i was the most experienced man in the outfit and nobody else knew what to do in fact, i would go out. And going out meant id get there as fast as i possibly could, usually on a jeep. Find out which unit was going in or had just entered and go in to the camp. And what i would do immediately would be to secure the records. There was in every camp an office. Id go into and immediately seize, id seize the office and everything in it. Nobody in or out. All records are confiscated and secured. For example, in buchenwald, i seized the death books, which were the registries of the People Killed in buchenwald. They were long, big, black books. Bound, they were not the looseleaf folders, but there they recorded the names of always inmates as they were killed. And they would put down next to it the date, the name, the date of birth if they had it and his number of course, and then the reason for his death. And they were all so obviously fictitious. Shot while trying to escape, or typhoid. Or other diseases. And those books then became the basic evidence for what had happened in the camp and who was there. And then i would follow that up by bringing in witnesses from this survivors, to take statements from then describing what happened in the camp. And by the time i got through, and it usually took two or three days, not usually more, i had a complete picture, and on the basis of that i could go back to headquarters, write a report and issue arrest warrants for everybody connected to it. Lets talk again about buchenwald. You said there was a pressner there who had been burying some material that you wanted to talk to. Im not sure it was bukin wald. I should perhaps mention that i was moving very quickly from one camp to the next. As soon as i secured the evidence in the camp and i heard there was another camp someplace else i raiced off. Because if you didnt do that, it was deasteroid. The American Army would destroy everything they could. And i was moving from one camp to another. Buchenwald. We took pictures at ordrauf. There were many of them. So i would go from one camp to the next. Flossen berg. These are names that i recall and that come to mind. Sometimes i knew it at the time. Usually i didnt. I just knew it was a concentration camp. And in one of those camps. It may have been bukin wald, but i dont think so. I think it was eden say or flossenburg. One of the inmates in the office came to me as soon as i came in. He said ive been waiting for you. And i said what for . And he said come with me, and he took a shovel and out of the room which was their office, and we walked away into the camp, next to the electric fence which was part of the surrounding barbed wire. And there he dug a hole, and i remember it was right near the post of a fence, and he dug a hole with a shovel and took out a bundle. It was a box wrapped in, looked like rags. And he said lets go back to the office. And i went back to the office, and he opened this. Well, apparently, in that particular camp, the ss had their own sort of social club where they went for drinking at night. And membership in the club was evidenced by a little identity card, two sides folded together. Inside were their photograph and checkoff how many times they attended the club and had the name of the man and the date of birth and other identifying things as well as the membership. And when the stamps were filled on that club, on that card, he got another card, and this inmate had to type up the new one and destroyed old ones. Instead of destroying the old ones, he saved them. Every time he did that, he ran the risk of being killed for disobeying orders, but he saved them. And he put them all together and buried them, knowing that one day, there would be a day of retribution. And for him to have risked his life every day and yet retained the hope that there would be freedom for him some day, i thought was a marvelous thing and was a tremendous piece of evidence. Because i had the record and photograph and identification of every ss man who had gone through that camp in that period of time. What was it like for you to go into these camps . What did you see . Well, im sure that everybody by this time has seen the photographs of what the camp looked like. And bodies lying in the dust, naked, lily tttle item of cloth on. Many of them not moving. Some of them stirring. Mostly bones. Human being, you know, men weighing 50, 60 pounds. The medical troops came in at the same time. People being hosed down with a hose, held up with one hand, and ive done that, too. Hose them with a hold, held in one hand, and hold up a man in the other hand who weighs about 40 or 50 pounds and is nothing but bones. And then of course the piles of bodies in front of the crematorium stacked up like cord wood. And on the carts dragging them to the crematorium, these open carts loaded with bodies, hands and arms hanging out on all sides. I remember all of that very vividly, of course. But what struck me, i think, as most appalling of all were the human beings who had been so dehumanized that in their appearance, they looked like rodents. They would go on all fours, hands turned to claws, looking for some potato peels, like rats, trying to find some bit of fo food quickly, and looking furtively around like you would expect any animal. And these were human beings who had been dehumanized by this terrible process to which they had been subjected. And i always marvelled in later years, who i didnt recognize, and i knew theyd been through that, and they seemed to be quite normal. I knew think couldnt be quite normal. But if you touch some spark, you know, some spot the crack shows. But this whole process of what happened to human beings struck me as more terrible than people who are on the verge of death, who are dying out of starvation or disease and so on. Other camps like matt hausen. It was a very big camp, and i got in very early. And it was a terrible, you know where they were killing people by throwing them off the cliff into the quarry down below. Guzen one and guzen two and of course the mass graves everywhere. And i, it was tie fuss in the camp and i couldnt spend the night there. I had to get out of the camp as fast as i could. I did my work and got out of there. I wouldnt spend the night there. And dysentery. People lying around in their own filth and exkrement, one on tomorrow of the other, three, four, five people in the bunk, everybody sick, throwing up, blowing at both ends, and the stench and the disease and the despair, and somebody holding up a hand for a glass of water or a drink or Something Like that. So its really, you know, quite unimaginable to a normal mind and that people could subject other people to that kind of treatment is something i will never recover from. Go on with your questions. Did you have to leave when you would go into a kanlen f ca while to get out . Not to get away from the scene. The job was so overwhelming, i never faltered. I never thought that i had to stop because i couldnt carry on. I carried on very well. It was as though i just built a wall to cut it out, you know, and to just go ahead and do what had to be done, and dont let it impact on your emotional response to it. So i left the camps, because the conditions were such that, you know, it was dangerous to stay. But only after id done what i had to do. Were these prisoners ever in any condition so that they could be talked to . I mean, did you take names . Oh, yes, oh, yes. There were many of them who were. And in fact, thats where i used, those are the ones from whom i collected statements immediately. You know, some of them were in fairly good shape. They were in such good shape that they went chasing after the ss. I described in one of my letters the scene of an ss trying to escape by the prisoners who were chasing him, and he wanted me to take him prisoner. And he had a civilian jacket on in an attempt to escape. And he just jumped on the jeep and said please take me prisoner. I dont remember if he was speaking german or english. Probably german. I said show me your papers, and i could see he was an ss man. They were not his, they were some other papers that he picked up somewhere. And i said i dont take civilian prisoners and pushed him off. At that point, these two, looked like russian, inmates came across the hill on a bicycle with rifles strapped over their back, and they took their rifle out and he saw them coming. He ran in front of my jeep, there were troops moving up to the front, trucks and so on, and just as he ran in front of the jeep, one of the men, the inmates shot him in the back, and he fell in front of this truck which sehit him and sent m flying across the road. And the g. I. Jumped out and said i dont know what happened . I said just keep going. I said go on. And we rolled him into the ditch. So there was an upsurge of the prisoners themselves. A rampage. As soon as those gates were opened, they went on a rampage. And any german who was within reach rued the day. They stripped their homes, burned their houses down, raped the women. There were many who were quite capable of still working and thinking and talking. And those would seem to be, you know, knowledgeable and better educated i tried to catch them immediately and have them give me a statement, what had happened, where they came from, describe who was in the camp. Describe the torture mechanisms, chains and walls against which they shot people and people were thrown on wires and all that. So there was an ample field tor credible, reliable testimony from the inmates themselves, and i collected them wherever i could. Was this revenge rather common . Because some people have said there was very little revenge, no revenge. The jews didnt go after well, depends on how weak they were. A person who could hardly lift their head had no feeling of revenge. These two, i think they were soviet p. O. W. S in the camp. They were not that weak. They wanted to kill as many germans as they could get ahold of, and they did. And ive seen them beating inmates to death, burning them alive. You know, it was a very gory business. You mean not being inmates but no, beating guards. They caught guard, the camp commandant, beat them up, not to kill them, they wanted to burn them alive, and they did. And i suppose as a soldier, i might have tried to stop them, but i was usually alone, and, you know, the troop, the tanks had come and gone and passed on ahead, and those who had been able to flee, the ss officers, they fled as fast as they could. But the guards who got kaults there, you know, they were seized by the inmates and taken care of, quick trial. Or some of the russians said to me, i met the russians outside, we came into buchenwald, one side, the russians were coming in on the other side. And i met the russian troops, and we were sort of fraternizing. And one of them said to me, whats the matter with you americans . What, are you crazy . You know what they did. Why do you can them ask them wh did. Kill them kill them and they did. We had a different approach to it at the time. Im not sure which one was right in the long run. Do you know whether americans were over there, whether american solders ever shot ss . I never saw that, no. No. Except perhaps in combat, i mean, if they were fired at when entering a camp, im sure they fired back. And im sure there were casualties in any such exchange, but just saying im going to kill you now, i never saw such an execution. Nor have i ever recall having heard of such an execution. Were there women prisoners . Oh, yes. Oh, yes. There were many women, and there were little children, which surprised me, too. There were young boys. The boys were usually abuse the by the ss guards, homosexuals. And little children born in the camps, somehow concealed bit mothers in different places. And in these slave labor camps surrounding the whole network right outside the main camp, different distances, whatever they were able to do by way of work, and sometimes there were small children put to work doing things, curling wires and doing things where a little and whand better than a big one. And it was remarkable that they survived. There were gypsies who survived and they were marked for extermination, i have soon you would see a gypsy and a horse which he had of course requisitioned somewhere, liberated, as they called it. So did you go into many camps and subcamps during this period . Yes, i d i moved from one camp to the next as fast as i could. It was important to get into the camps as quickly as possible. Otherwise the evidence was destroyed. The troops have a way of sell baiting liberation of anyplace by smashing everything in sight. That may be very good to relieve the tension, but its not very good tor collecting war crimes evidence. So by the time i got up to the eagles nest, the main window being looking out of this beautiful view, looking down on the alps, there wasnt a splinter of glass left. That was gone. And every file cabinet and every bathtub had been filled by a gi leaving his best regards to mr. Hittle hittler. It was all in berlin in the bunker and elsewhere. But did was very important to preserve the evidence to move in quickly, and this is a problem which im sure war crimes investigators are having today. So what then happened . You were gathering all this evidence, a by the way, where is jack nowits all this time . Hes doing the same thing someplace else. Wed meet at the office, where have you been . Ive been down soandso. Where have you been . Occasionally wided go out together and come back to our office so called. The office was the third army judge advocate headquarters which kept moving, as the front was moving up. It was in munich or someplace else, and we had a room and a desk and a typewriter. So i would get back there with whatever documents and notes i had and write up a report. And the reports would say, on certain date, u. S. Army troops entered the camp of x. Lets assume matt hausen for example. There the troops encountered the following scene. There were originally 50,000 inmates. 10,000 had been marched out the day before, there were so many bodies stacked in front of the crematorium. There are exhibits. The suspected persons responsible tor these crimes are soandso and soandso. Issue orders immediately to have them put on the central registry of war criminals and suspects. Have them distributed to all members of the u. S. Army, wherever p. O. W. S are, have this dissem natsed. My goal was to collect credible evidence admissible in a court of law which could be used to convict the persons responsible of a known crime under international law. That was the objective. And thats what we did. And there were very few of us doing it. Nowitz was one of them. But the total number was never half a dozen or a dozen who were competent to know what represented a war crime and to prepare a report, which would stand up in a court of law. That, then, became the basic materials for the prosecution to come in and say to the defendant, your name is listed on soandso. Soandso said soandso, what do you have to say . And thats the way it went. You folks are the War Crimes Teams. Were the War Crimes Team. There are a few officers around as decoration, because only officers could take a sworn statement. So when you had the sworn statement, you sent it to the officer and said you sign there. Its an affidavit. Okay, lieutenant soandso or captain soandso and that was it. And that was the evidence of war crimes. Isnt that funny . One of thing that comes to mind was the mayday celebration where they were celebrating liberation and mayday. It was organized by the communists who were in charge of most of the camps. They were the best organized. There was a big tribunal with roosevelt and churchill. But there was going to be a parade of the inmates, and they were broken down national groups