Did you personally interrogate Goering?
No.
I didn't want to personally interrogate him. A Greek captain interrogated
him and gave him champagne, and we let that be known and they broke
this Greek captain. He had no business serving champagne to Goering
when he came in.
Did you have the opportunity to interrogate
Baldur von Schirach
?
Yes,
I interrogated
Baldur von Schirach.
I interrogated the entire German staff as you can see in the book with
their pictures. I showed them the pictures that I took in Buchenwald
so that they could see what was done by the Germans. They were all
prisoners.
Why didn't you want to be the one?
It
wasn't my field. I was not in Gestapo. A friend of mine was in Gestapo.
He warned Mrs. von Kohler. He said, "tomorrow, you're going to
be interviewed by our most severe interviewer." She came with
all perfumed with silk stockings and she tried a big décolleté.
She was very apprehensive; she didn't know what I was going to do to
her. She was sent to me because of Romania. Very few people had been
in Romania and the American army, and so they gave me—Mrs. Von
Kohler was assigned to me as a prisoner. But for other things like
Gestapo, there were specialists that would speak to her about the Gestapo
and what she knew about it. Other interrogators had other specialties.
What was the most significant piece of information
that you picked up as an interrogator that you passed on?
I
had one prisoner who told me that the head of the SD—that was the Sicherheitsdienst,
the chief of police in Prague, German-imposed chief of police—was
walking around in a village at the border, and I took him with me in
the Jeep and then we captured the man, and I took him into camp. I
was very excited to have found him. Himmler had just killed himself.
I don't know if you know enough about the war, but the high officials
had cyanide pills in their mouths, so that if they were captured and
they wanted to, they could bite on the pill and die. That's what Himmler
did. When I captured this guy and I opened up his jaw, he says, "I
don't have the courage to use the pill." He knew why I was doing
it. This man, under false papers—the prisoner had told me that
he was walking around in plain clothes, in this village. When I captured
him and brought him in, I forgot to sign him in. Because if we had
500 prisoners, they were all signed into a book.
I
had about five days or so to interrogate him, and my phone rang and they said, "Your points are up and you can go home." Here
I was with this enormous guy, and I knew that we were not going do—as Americans—very much to him, in the long run. So I called up the
Czechs and it was right at the border. In five minutes they were there,
and I gave them over to them. I said, "Here, my gift to you." They
took him away, they probably strung him up on the first tree that—I
don't know. I never heard what happened to him, but I got rid of him
because I had not registered him in. I could let him go because he
wasn't missing. That was really my own personal revenge—my own
personal war on the Germans. They took away the guy, and were very
happy and thanked me a lot. That was the end of it. It was at the time
that it was all very free. The war had just ended, and these prisoners,
we had them by the thousands. In the end, many of them were reinstated
by the American occupation government.
In
Iraq, we didn't do this. In Germany, we used the Germans. They administrated
right away the country. Here in Iraq, we didn't do that and look what
happened. We are not a nation that is able to take revenge, we are
very kind people, very friendly, and we are not looking to harm anybody.
When this feeling of American indulgence into—there was no feeling
of revenge in the American army, including the highest professionals.
General Patton had a German girlfriend in the end, that was really
his undoing. None of you have asked me ever what happened to him.
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