CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD relives an extraordinary encounter

“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather advised me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the faculty of the nearby University of Puget Sound, joined us for lunch. This was Tacoma, Washington, about twenty miles south of Seattle in America’s Pacific Northwest, in mid-August 1975 (I was visiting from Cambridge) and thus about ten weeks before John Cleese immortalised the phrase in ‘The Germans’ episode of Fawlty Towers, which I see was first broadcast on 24 October that year. Among other distinctions my grandfather ended up as the US’s oldest active full-time professor, but that aside he was always a man ahead of his time, and I think would have enjoyed the happy coincidence of this use of the line that entered into the shared folklore of my generation of Brits.

Our guest that day in Tacoma was Colonel Burton C. Andrus (US Army, Ret), and, true to his military calling, he arrived with us precisely on time. Or, to be more literally true, he didn’t. About fifteen minutes before the appointed hour, my grandfather called me over to the front window and, with an amused smile, pointed to a large-finned old Cadillac parked directly across the street. I could see a bespectacled, grey-haired man sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper. My grandfather and I then stood waiting for the hands of the living-room clock to reach exactly 12.30pm. During these minutes, the figure in the car continued reading the paper, as though he were in fact sitting unobserved in a chair in his own home, and not parked immediately opposite our front door, ten yards away. Then, precisely at 12.30pm, the man got out of the car, walked briskly to the door, and rang the bell. “Ah, Colonel,” my grandfather greeted him. “Punctual as ever.”

Colonel Andrus was then 83, and it was immediately apparent that he retained his decisive, soldierly approach to life. An October 1946 issue of Time, which I’d read in my grandfather’s scrapbook the previous evening, gave a rather unflattering account of our guest. It described him as “a pompous, unimaginative, if thoroughly likeable officer who wasn’t up to his job … Every morning his plump little figure, looking like an inflated pouter pigeon, moved majestically around, impeccably garbed in his uniform and highly shellacked helmet.” Now, thirty years later, Andrus retained the same crispness of dress – I seem to remember a funereally dark suit and tie – but there was little about him that was plump or inflated. He was, if anything, a trim, wiry figure who could have passed for twenty years younger than his real age (and, incidentally, nothing like the actor John Slattery, who impersonated him in the recent film Nuremberg), and I could immediately see how formidable, in fact frightening, a character he once must have been.

When introduced, the colonel eschewed the traditional handshake and instead seized my arm near the elbow for a second in a grip of steel, as if making a sudden arrest. He then gazed fiercely around the room, which he remarked, rightly, if a shade caustically, had ‘a lot of possessions’ in it. His relentlessly critical eye had been trained over the decades to spot weakness, and he could still be abrupt in noting any blemishes or other details that failed to meet his exacting standards. I was glad that I had had a haircut the day before.

Born about 300 miles away in Spokane, Washington, in 1892, Andrus had a successful early career working for Standard Oil. He volunteered for the army on America’s entry into the First World War, and an officer’s report on him even in this youthful period praised both his “iron self-will” and “ability to inspire the fighting man which endear[ed] him to their hearts.” Although not posted overseas, Andrus was to foreshadow his later career when in July 1919 he was promoted and sent to the Presidio in Monterey, California, where he served as Prison and Intelligence Officer. Various staff and administrative posts followed in the inter-war years. In September 1941, then Lt-Col Andrus was sent to Great Britain to study its air-ground operations, and did a “thoroughly conscientious” job there, as even Time acknowledged. His was a world of briefing notes, technical manuals, dockets, manifests and fussily annotated guidelines on military procedure – a gift for detail that did not diminish with age. Andrus returned to Britain in January 1944 to serve as Commanding Officer of the 10^th Traffic Regulation Group in the run-up to D-Day. In December of that year, he transferred to Allied field headquarters in liberated France as a Combat Observer. In May 1945, Col. Andrus was appointed governor of the Mondorf-les-Bains facility in Luxemburg, an interrogation centre for Nazi war criminals popularly known by its code name ASHCAN. When the inmates were moved to a new prison built at the back of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, Andrus joined them there as their Commandant.

Notwithstanding my grandfather’s proverbial words of warning, Col. Andrus, once settled in a chair and fortified by a dynamite-strength martini, positively enjoyed talking about the war. And talk he did. Thrillingly. At length. In a dry, crisp voice he told us how military discipline and morale among the staff on his arrival at Nuremberg had been “a joke”, and that one night early on in his tenure a fellow officer had announced that he was leaving the post with the 200 men of his battalion, as he felt they could be of more service to the Allied cause elsewhere. At that, Col. Andrus quick-marched down to the motor-pool. “I posted guards overlooking it and I said: ‘The first man to drive out of that pool tonight – shoot him.’ No one moved. That particular officer soon found himself transferred out of Nuremberg, and sent to a less desirable posting than he might have wished,”  the Colonel smiled. The two hundred men of his unit remained behind to become the nucleus of the prison staff.

Not long after that, Andrus went to deliver the formal indictments to the men in their cells. “They were a motley crew,” he remembered. “You looked at them and wondered how they could possibly have terrorised so many millions of people.” The colonel came to the conclusion that

…it was largely a matter of image. These gangsters had always strutted about with retinues of boot-licking aides. No one questioned them. They created an impression which, through newspapers, radio, and movie films, became a cult. This cult had to be lived up to. To increase their lustre, the men had to keep going forward – in the end, they so lost track of right and wrong that in prison they felt not guilt but a kind of indignation at their confinement.

The only one of the indicted men who had mildly impressed him was Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, until lately the Head of the German Armed Forces and de facto War Minister. “He at least snapped to attention when receiving the papers I handed him,” Andrus allowed.

Like other prisoners before and after them, some of the inmates at Nuremberg turned to the solace of religion. Hans Frank, the former Governor-General of Poland, and as such thought to be responsible for the deaths of up to two million Polish Jews, “used to pray at all hours of the day, and I have no doubt genuinely felt that the Church had relieved him of guilt,” Andrus said. Several others among the accused preferred the more secular consolation of the law. Keitel and his colleagues Field-Marshal Kesselring and Grand Admiral Doenitz all addressed letters to the Supreme Allied Commander that Andrus felt would almost have been comic but for the circumstances. Many quoted the Geneva Convention, and some asked that their former aides and orderlies be sent to join them in prison. Kesselring had wanted a more comfortable bed and bigger windows in his cell to alleviate his rheumatism, a request that Andrus had felt it within himself to refuse.

The prisoners themselves weren’t the only ones to suffer the particular stress of life at Nuremberg. To my surprise, Andrus told us that when he arrived,

…most of the rest of the jail was already occupied by German civilian prisoners. It would have been easy for any of them to infiltrate our wing, and the prospect kept me awake at night until I finally got permission to erect a barrier. For that matter, the security outside the compound wasn’t any better, and if some fanatical pro-Nazis had taken it on themselves to load a truck with TNT and send it speeding through the outer wall to the cell-block itself, we would all have been blown sky high.

Andrus had also been worried about the morale of the Nuremberg jailers, or ‘sentinels’ as he called them. “These men were often 19 or 20 years old, and they were to stand in shifts in dark concrete walkways watching the prisoners day and night. It wasn’t a job for sissies. Over my whole term of duty, I experienced a 600 per cent turnover in staff,” Andrus remarked, not bothering to hide a faint snort of derision. Adding to the sombre atmosphere, two of the Nuremberg inmates, the so-called Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti, and head of the Labour Front Robert Ley, committed suicide in captivity, while the Luftwaffe chief and Reichsstatthalter of Prussia (though he acquired offices of state almost at will) Hermann Goering later cheated the hangman by biting down on a cleverly concealed cyanide capsule only hours before his scheduled execution in October 1946.

But by far the most enigmatic – and troublesome – of Col. Andrus’s charges at Nuremberg was the former Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess. Hess was then 51, and had been in Allied hands since famously flying to Scotland in an apparent solo attempt to broker peace with the United Kingdom in May 1941. Was he mentally unhinged, as his bizarre flight, and subsequent real or feigned amnesia, seemed to suggest?
The colonel’s first encounter with “this beetle-browed little man who arrived in a grey suit and a crumpled felt hat” was far from promising. Hess was being marched down a corridor in the jail when he saw Goering and his guard coming towards him. “Conveniently forgetting to forget, he immediately snapped to attention and threw up his arm in the Nazi salute to greet his old comrade.” The black comedy of the scene struck me, and I asked the colonel what he had done. “I instructed Hess, ‘Do not raise your arm like that again. I consider it a vulgar gesture.’ ‘The Nazi salute is not a vulgar gesture,’ he said. ‘It is now,’ I told him.”

“I knew right away that he was faking it,” the colonel continued. When later questioned about his family, “Hess was able to answer in very great detail about events that had happened 40 years earlier. The fact that he was reading two highbrow books a day while in custody also told me that he must have retained some of the background of his education in order to understand them.” A US Army psychiatrist examined all the Nuremberg prisoners. His report found that Hess was “passive, suggestible and naïve … Like the typical hysterical personality, he was incapable of facing reality and escaped by developing a functional disorder” – in this case, selective amnesia. “I looked him in the eye and told him I knew he was a sham. Hess just glared at me. He was ‘mad’ all right, mad at me for disbelieving him,” the colonel said.

As for Goering himself, ‘he came to me as a 300-pound hophead,’ Andrus remarked, employing the terminology of the day. “He had sixteen suitcases, wore a Cartier watch, and his fingernails were painted bright red.” After several months of the colonel’s regimen, Goering was cured of his morphine addiction, and his weight was down to something approaching normal. Even so, the table in his cell was deliberately built so that it would have collapsed had he tried to use it to reach the small barred window with a sheet or towel as a possible means of suicide. Andrus admitted that he had found Goering “a cunning and not always disagreeable internee, whom you could never turn your back on.” One morning in March 1946, the Nuremberg prisoners were being taken out of their cells to be marched to the nearby courtroom. “Goering took the opportunity to reach out and strike the sentinel several times on his arm and shoulder. The soldier hit him back with his billy-club. Goering then went loco and started screaming in German, and using his hands with incredible speed to lash out at the man. It took four GIs to subdue him.” A few years later, I was uncomfortably reminded of this incident when I sat watching the scene of Hannibal Lecter maniacally attacking his guards in The Silence of the Lambs.

After being condemned to death, Goering had made a request to face a firing squad rather than the gallows. The Allied control commission rejected his petition. “In my mind, that was the moment he took the decision to kill himself,” Andrus said. The colonel would not be drawn on the rumour that a sympathetic GI had palmed the cyanide capsule to his prisoner, and rather stiffly repeated the formal conclusion of the enquiry that “Goering had the poison in his possession when apprehended”, that “he may have hidden it in an obscure recess in the inside of his toilet under the overhanging rim,” and that “no blame for dereliction of duty is ascribed to any prison guard.” The colonel repeated the words verbatim, and I could tell that the matter still rankled all these years later. To have lost three men at Nuremberg by their own hand was the one obvious regret of this proud and supremely capable soldier. Twenty years after the event, the colonel received a letter out of the blue from the National Archives in Washington, DC. It attached a photocopy of the suicide note Goering had personally addressed to him. This, too, concluded: “None of those charged with searching [for the cyanide] is to be blamed, for it was practically impossible to find it. It would have been pure accident. [The army psychiatrist] informed me that the control board has refused the petition to change the method of execution to shooting.”

Given our continued fascination both with the Nazis and with prison dramas, it’s hard to imagine anything that could make the events of the early hours of 16 October 1946 more morbidly compelling. The execution by hanging of ten condemned men at Nuremberg (Goering was to have been the eleventh) had it all: a long walk through a rainswept prison yard into a starkly lit gymnasium, where one by one the condemned men were escorted up the steps (there were thirteen) to the gallows. Colonel Andrus read the formal sentence to each one moments before the end, and even he admitted that “It was a terrible task.” The Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was the first to be dispatched and, like most of the others, he met his fate with a certain dignity. “My last wish is that Germany’s unity shall be preserved and that an understanding be reached between East and West,” he said. As the rope was then tightened around Ribbentrop’s neck, he turned to the army Lutheran chaplain at his side and whispered: “I’ll see you again.”

“The military men went to their deaths impeccably,” Col. Andrus said. When his turn came, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, formerly Chancellor of Austria and later Nazi commissar of the occupied Netherlands, remarked in a level voice: “I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, and I hope that out of this disaster wisdom will inspire the people, which will result in understanding between the nations and that peace on earth will be finally established. I believe in Germany.” Then he, too, was hanged. The only difficulty had come in the case of the former publisher of the rabidly antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher – a “very shapeless man in a baggy suit with a large bald head and short legs.” Once at the scaffold, Streicher had screamed “Heil Hitler!”, and then made some further unappreciative remarks about the Jews. As the executioner stepped forward to the lever, the condemned man had hissed at him through his black hood: “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!” After these blood-chilling events, Andrus insisted that the bodies, including Goering’s, had been taken to Dachau and cremated in the same concentration camp ovens where tens of thousands of Jews and others had met their end, although some historians doubt this detail. The ashes were secretly dispersed in a river. The colonel had nothing to say on the long-standing rumour that the executions had been botched, meaning that some of the men had fallen with insufficient force to snap their necks and had instead slowly suffocated to death.

I was then a remarkably vain and self-absorbed 18-year-old, but even so I like to think I realised how lucky I was to be included at the lunch table that day. The time seemed to fly by. Precisely at 2.30pm, Colonel Andrus stood up, thanked us for our hospitality, and announced that he would now go home for his scheduled nap and a walk. You saw again the rigid self-discipline, and remembered that this was a man who had lived his whole adult life in a world ruled by punctuality, professionalism and unswerving devotion to duty. As he left, the colonel seized my arm once more and looked me hard in the eye. “I hope I haven’t bored you too much,” he said. I assured him he hadn’t.

Colonel Burton Andrus died on 1 February 1977, at the age of 84. It’s said by his son that his last recorded thoughts were of Nuremberg. “I think that it haunted him … ‘Goering has committed suicide. I must report it to the Commission,’ he said. I told him it was the middle of the night, and it could wait until morning. Four hours later, my father died.”

Christopher Sandford

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD’s book The Cricketers of 1945: Rising From the Ashes of the Second World War (Pitch Publishing) is available now.