Witness to Nuremberg [Hardcover]

Richard W. Sonnenfeldt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 11, 2006

In this gripping memoir by the chief American interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, Richard Sonnenfeldt recounts a remarkable life. By the time he was 18, Sonnenfeldt had grown up in Germany, escaped to England, been deported to Australia as a "German enemy alien", arrived in the U.S., and joined the U.S. army. By age 22 he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, when he was appointed chief interpreter for the American prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials. During his service, he spent pretrial time with Hermann Goering as well as other top Nazi leaders like von Ribbentrop, Rudolph Hoess, and Julius Streicher, the infamous editor of the anti-Semitic Der Sturmer. An engineer in later life, he was a principal developer of color TV and computer technology and a key player in NASA's preparation of the first moon shot.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Richard Sonnenfeldt lives in Port Washington, NY.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 236 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; First edition (October 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559708166
• ISBN-13: 978-1559708166
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #940,741 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful & Exciting, November 14, 2006

By 

J. Arker (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Witness to Nuremberg (Hardcover)

I bought Witness to Nuremberg after reading the other "Amazon" reviews and I was not disappointed. I could not put the book down! I want to comment on the writing. Sonnenfeldt's story of incredible adventure is told in a most captivating way with flashes of humor and never a boring moment!

There emerges a teen and later, a man who turns adversity to his advantage, who always looks forward. Just 22 at Nuremberg, after a solo trek through five continents, he is the chief interpreter for the American prosecution who becomes a star interrogator to unmask the groveling and miserable personalities of the Nazi defendants. He tells us who ordered the Holocaust and why we did not know its true dimension until eleven months after the war ended. Even more remarkable is his return to Germany, fifty years after the Nuremberg trials, where he became a media celebrity as he related his conversations with the Nazis. This book is a worthy companion to the many books of Holocaust survivors. You must read it.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important, Captivating Memoir, November 9, 2006

By 

John Q. Barrett (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Witness to Nuremberg (Hardcover)

During 1945-46, Richard Sonnenfeldt, age 22, was the chief interpreter on the U.S. prosecution team at Nuremberg. In this role, he served U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor, and his interrogation team as the lead interpreter in the pre-indictment interrogations of many imprisoned Nazis, including all 22 who became Nuremberg defendants.

Sonnenfeldt actually was much more than the U.S. prosecution's lead interpreter at Nuremberg. Because of his German and English language skills, his smarts and maturity, and his surprising rapport with and control over many of the prisoners, Sonnenfeldt actually became a de facto senior interrogator. His work and successes as interpreter and interrogator are recorded in the many thousands of pages of interrogation reports that are central parts of the Nuremberg trial and historical record. At the end of the Nuremberg trial year, Justice Jackson saw to it personally that Sonnenfeldt received a military decoration for his work.

But that's actually not the half of it. In outline form, this is Richard Sonnenfeldt's quite amazing life story:
* born Jewish, son of two physicians, in Gardelegen, a town in north central Germany, in 1923;
* happy, assimilated boyhood until Nazism and Nuremberg laws change everything, including shutting down his parents' work;
* getting out of Germany, along with his younger brother, to a boarding school in England;
* being interned in England as an enemy alien once active war with Germany started in 1940;
* being shipped with other internees and German POWs from England to Australia;
* being paroled from Australia to India, and making it on his own there;
* getting passage from India to the U.S. (His parents, in a separate miracle, had made it from Germany to Sweden and from there to Baltimore);
* becoming, as his ship docked in New York, a media event because he was an unsupervised boy who had survived all of these "adventures";
* working, while still a teenager, as an electrician in Baltimore and entering Johns Hopkins night college;
* being drafted into the U.S. Army, becoming a U.S. citizen, and fighting in Europe as a combat soldier;
* entering the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945;
* in May 1945, being called out of a motor pool in Austria, because of his bilingual skills, to serve as General William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan's OSS interpreter;
* moving with Donovan into the Justice Jackson/war crimes project that became Nuremberg;
* serving as the principal and preferred interpreter of each prisoner, including Hermann Goering;
* playing a significant role in interrogating and studying each of them;
* being half of the 2-man team that served the October 1945 indictment on each Nuremberg defendant;
* working for the U.S. prosecution throughout the trial;
* returning to Baltimore and succeeding as a Johns Hopkins engineering student;
* becoming a distinguished engineer with RCA, where he was part of the team that invented color television;
* working on NASA projects;
* working as an executive at NBC;
* obtaining patents on numerous inventions;
* becoming a husband and very proud father;
* sailing three times across the Atlantic; and
* never talking much about his past until his grandchildren started to interview him for school projects and papers.

Richard Sonnenfeldt's life is an extraordinary true story, and he has written it modestly and well. His book deserves to reach a very large general audience, and I am confident that any reader, from children through seniors, will find it to be relevant, exciting and inspiring.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrific "read.", November 8, 2006

By 

Barbie Schlang "Barbie" (Roslyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Witness to Nuremberg (Hardcover)

Barbara Schlang's review.....Richard W. Sonnenfeldt's just published book (Witness to Nuremberg) reveals personal conversations with the top Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials, shedding a merciless light on their criminality, but it is also a tale of adventure never told before. He was just twenty-two when he became Chief Interpreter for the American prosecution at the War Crimes trials of 1945-46.
Born into a Jewish family in Germany, he fled to attend school in England in 1938, to escape the Nazi terror. But when the Germans conquered France two years later, his erstwhile hosts interned him as a German national and deported him in a prison ship, that was torpedoed by a German U-boat, but made it to Australia. The British then realized their mistake and ordered him back to England to be freed, but now his boat was diverted to in Bombay, India. Instead of returning to England he managed to go to the United States, all solo, at age seventeen. On arrival in New York he became a media celebrity in April 1941. Two and a half years later he was an American citizen and combat soldier who fought in France, Germany and Austria. He was one of the first to see the concentration camp of Dachau and its prisoners, too stunned amid mountains of corpses to grasp that freedom was theirs.

General "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of OSS (predecessor to the CIA) who was organizing the American prosecution for the Nuremberg trial then picked up him as his interpreter.
At Nuremberg, directing a staff of fifty, he produced over 10,000 pages of sworn testimony, interpreting and later himself conducting interrogations of the twenty top surviving Nazis. He had Goering, the No.2 Nazi, acknowledge his signature on the order of July 1941 to organize the holocaust. He extracted from Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, a detailed statement how three and one half hapless victims were exterminated at Auschwitz, at a rate over 20,000 a day.
After the verdicts, which punished ten of the defendants by hanging them, he returned to America, served on the team that created color TV and became a noted executive. To celebrate his fiftieth year in business he crossed the Atlantic in his sailboat, also celebrating his 75th birthday.
He was invited to return to the small German town where he grew up and his reports of interaction with the citizens there are no less interesting than his recollections of Nuremberg. He was then invited to speak at a principal cathedral in Berlin, and at Hitler's erstwhile Nazi headquarters in Nuremberg. Soon he was feted by the German national press and became a sought after personality on German television and radio.
His book "Witness to Nuremberg" published by Arcade Press, follows his German bestseller "Mehr als ein Leben." I could not put the book down. It is full of many thrilling and some dangerous adventures, but most of all it is a tale of the zest of life and it is all true!