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“By the time I saw Dachau I had no illusions,” said 83-year-old Richard Sonnenfeldt, a German Jew who, after fleeing his native country, surveyed the destruction the Nazis left in their wake and helped prosecute them as chief interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials.
As a fourth grader in the small German town of Gardelegen - which, in the 1930s, had a population of 9,000 of whom 27 were Jewish - Sonnenfeldt was taught to march as a soldier with a stick on his shoulder. Gradually, Adolf Hitler’s name began to echo louder and louder throughout the country.
“Long before Hitler demanded total obedience,” Sonnenfeldt wrote in his book “Witness to Nuremberg,” “Germans were loath to stand up against anyone in authority…”
Before long, the young Sonnenfeldt was made to leave the classroom while his teacher led students in the Nazi salute.
“The Germans enabled Hitler to do all he did but they didn’t know what the hell they were enabling him for,” Sonnenfeldt said at his home in Port Washington, New York.
The Germans drove Sonnenfeldt’s parents to consider a family suicide when the Roosevelt administration suspended all immigration of German Jews and the two saw their means of survival dwindling.
“My mother sat me down and asked me how I’d feel about a family suicide,” Sonnenfeldt recalled, his lips forming a tiny smile of disbelief. “I was 14 years old and I said ‘no.’ And what I don’t know, of course, is what would’ve happened if I’d said ‘yes.’”
Before Kristallnacht in November of 1938, Sonnenfeldt and his younger brother Helmut left Germany for England after their mother miraculously obtained boarding school scholarships for them. A year and a half later, however, Sonnenfeldt was rounded up along with other males with German passports over the age of 16 and sent to an internment camp, presumably, Sonnenfeldt explained, to protect England from Nazi sympathizers.
Soon, Sonnenfeldt was on a ship to Australia with other internees, separated from Nazi prisoners by a wall of barbed wire and rocked by repeated torpedo fire.
Upon learning that Sonnenfeldt was Jewish, flabbergasted Australian guards transferred him to a small town where he became the “gun boy” for a commandant, accompanying him on trips to hunt wallabies.
Sonnenfeldt’s new role was short lived, however, and the 17-year-old was soon aboard another ship, this time to Bombay, India.
Circuitously, Sonnenfeldt made his way to the U.S.
“By now I had twitted Nazis, who were as scared as I was of dying in a floating coffin; I had coped with British captors; and I had run a small factory in Bombay where, as a white man, I had been respected though perhaps not loved,” Sonnenfeldt wrote of his maturity through such a unique trajectory.
Drafted into the U.S. army, Sonnenfeldt rode reconnaissance during the conquest of Germany before being plucked from his platoon for his proficiency in English and German; a 22-year-old Jew from small-town Prussia had suddenly become American General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s interpreter.
Having survived torpedo-infested seas, a wave of euphoria overcame Sonnenfeldt, who suddenly believed he “would live to do important things.” Now was his chance; but the experiences to come were sobering.
“To walk into a place like Dachau and to see 100 bodies piled up and to see people who were too weak to survive after they were liberated…” Sonnenfeldt said softly as he recalled witnessing first-hand the devastation Hitler’s henchman had caused.
“In Dachau if I had seen any of the guards I would have gladly shot them, but they were gone,” Sonnenfeldt said, explaining that thousands of those liberated from concentration camps still perished, despite the best medical attention.
“They couldn’t be saved. They were too far gone,” he said.
The images of such weak, tortured human beings stuck with Sonnenfeldt throughout his time at Nuremberg, where he spent countless hours interviewing and interrogating Hermann Gring and the other major Nazi defendants.
“Had I not escaped in time I would’ve been one of his victims,” Sonnenfeldt said matter-of-factly, wondering aloud if he would have fallen under Hitler’s spell had the German dictator not been an anti-Semite.
