CCPWE No. 32 was filled with Nazi “Bonzen,” the big wheels, as Dolibois and the other interrogators called them. Hans Frank, the “Jew-Butcher of Cracow,” arrived at Ashcan on a stretcher, in silk pajamas drenched in blood. He had tried to kill himself by slashing his own throat. Frank was captured with his thirty-eight-volume diary, written during the war, a damning confession of many crimes he was guilty of. “Dark-eyed and balding,” noted Ashcan’s commandant, Colonel Burton Andrus, Frank had “pale hairy hands.” Other prisoners included members of the former German General Staff: Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or Armed Forces High Command; General Alfred Jodl, Keitel’s chief of operations; Grand Admiral Karl D?nitz, commander of submarines and commander in chief of the German navy; Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, former chief of Armed Forces Italy and later Supreme Commander West; Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister; and Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production. These were the men who personally helped Hitler plan and execute World War II and the Holocaust—those who hadn’t escaped, perished, or committed suicide.
“In a second circle, or clique, there were the real Nazi gangsters,” Dolibois explained, “the old fighters—who had been with Hitler at the beginning of his rise to power.” Among this group were Robert Ley, Labor Front leader; Julius Streicher, editor of the anti-Semitic newspaper and propaganda tool Der Stürmer; Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi philosopher; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the man who betrayed Austria and became Reichskommissar of Holland; and Wilhelm Frick, former minister of the interior and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia.
Stripped of their power, small details spoke volumes to Dolibois. G?ring was terrified of thunderstorms. Keitel was obsessed with sunbathing and staring at his reflection in Ashcan’s only mirror, in its entrance hall. Robert Ley was repeatedly reprimanded for masturbating in the bathtub. Joachim von Ribbentrop, named by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda as the best-dressed man in Germany for nine consecutive years, was a lazy slob. Day in and day out, John Dolibois interviewed them.
“Almost all the men at Ashcan were eager to talk,” Dolibois recalls. “They felt neglected if they hadn’t been interrogated by someone for several days.… Their favorite pastime was casting blame.” The greatest challenge for Dolibois and his fellow interrogators was determining, or trying to determine, who was lying and who was telling the truth. “Cross-examination. Playing one prisoner off the other,” according to Dolibois, was a tactic that worked best.
“Often, I was taken into their confidence when they needed a shoulder to cry on,” Dolibois explains. “At Mondorf, they still couldn’t believe they would be tried for their crimes.”
CHAPTER NINE
Hitler’s Chemists