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Witness to Nuremberg

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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.

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.

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!

This is a memoir of a man who has had a varied, distinguished life. He is a survivor from Nazi Germany, WW11 veteran, chief interpreter at the Nuremberg Trial of 1945, inventor, entrepreneur, successful business man, and devoted family man. He escaped from Germany in 1940 at age 17. His odyssey took him from England, to Australia, India, and finally to the U.S. Most remarkably, as chief interpreter at the Nuremberg trial he provides us with valuable insight into the participants of the trial. This especially valued as the verdict in the trial of Saddam Hussein has just been rendered and contrasts and similarities are so evident. At the end of the book, Richard describes his reception upon his return to Gardelegen, the German town where he was born. The exchanges between the townspeople and Richard are poignant. A remarkable man and book!!

I saw Mr. Sonnenfeld interviewed on Charlie Rose last year and had this book on my wish list. I finally got around to ordering it and dived into it the day it arrived. I was disappointed to find that only the first quarter of the book (if even that) dealt with Mr. Sonnenfeld's translating work at the Nuremberg Trials, i.e. "Witness to Nuremberg". The remainder of the book is autobiography, from childhood to the present. Granted, it is an interesting life to read about, but for those seeking a book dedicated to the "Nuremberg experience" you will be disappointed, as I was. I could have gone on reading more about Nuremberg. Nonetheless, it is a well written interesting read.

Mr. Sonnenfeldt has led an incredible life and has an important story to tell, but he has been ill-served by his publisher and editor, to the extent that this book is almost useless for a serious reader/scholar.

Just a few examples: The book includes long "direct" and revealing quotations from the Nazis he interviewed, their answers to his questions--this is especially true for Goering. Yet, there are no citations: When were these things said? Did Mr. Sonnenfeldt take notes, was he consulting his private notes, or what sources did he have access to in writing his memoirs after all these years? An index would also have been useful.

I quit reading the book when Zyklon b, the poison used in the gas chambers, was referred to as cyclone b. This in my thinking was unforgiveable, and a result of shoddy proof-reading. But combined with the lack of citations and sources called the whole book into question for me. Mr. Sonnenfeldt's important story deserved more careful attention from his publisher and editor.

I greatly enjoyed this fascinating account of a Jewish lad's escape from Nazi Germany and his life beyond. His depiction of the stark contrast between life in a rural German town before and after the Nazi takeover reminded me that happy endings for the Jewish minority were rare indeed -- in fact, miraculous. The first part of the book concerns the author's services in the cause of justice at the Nuremberg trials. His story should remind us all that we must be eternally vigilant against the forces of fascism. It can happen anywhere.

This is an interesting and well-written account of the young man who was the Chief Interpreter at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis.

But the aforementioned is only half the story, because the author also tells us about his life in Germany both before the Nazis too power and after. His tales of escape from Germany are so amazing and remind me of a children's book I read as a child called "When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit" a fictional account of becoming a Jewish refugee in the 1940's. Who knew that fiction could be beaten by true-life!

I found this book very compelling and a great yarn. Truly, after seeing the author on Charlie Rose I became interested in reading the book. I was not disappointed. I am sure you won't be either.

By the way, his accounts of the Nazis he interviews are very compelling! Truly, as has been said before that evil is so often banal!

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

Richard Sonnenfeldt let's the reader in on a very interesting life. you learn about things happening during the nazi's regime that our history books didn't tell us. a very excellent read if you are a history buff.