If anyone was going to “cause trouble on the flight to Nuremberg,” Dolibois explains, Colonel Andrus was worried that Ernst Kaltenbrunner might. “Special precautions needed to be taken.” Kaltenbrunner would be handcuffed to Dolibois’s left wrist. “If he starts to run or goes for the door,” Colonel Andrus told Dolibois, “shoot!” Colonel Andrus wished John Dolibois “good luck” during the flight and said that he would see him once they landed in Nuremberg. Colonel Andrus would be traveling in a different airplane.
During the flight Kaltenbrunner did not run for the door. Instead, he wanted to talk. He told Dolibois that he desired for the young interrogator to understand that he, Kaltenbrunner, was not responsible for war crimes. “He felt the need to explain about the Jews,” Dolibois recalled, with Kaltenbrunner saying, “admittedly, he hated them, but he said that he had not been involved in their treatment in concentration camps. In fact, he claimed to have remonstrated with Hitler on the treatment of the Jews.” As the airplane prepared to land in Nuremberg, Kaltenbrunner said what so many Nazis repeated after the war. “I am a soldier and I only obeyed orders,” he told Dolibois.
“I didn’t argue with him, I just listened,” Dolibois said. “Kaltenbrunner was a ruthless killer determined to save his own skin. His soft talk did not change my mind about him, but it helped pass the time.” When the aircraft finally touched the ground, Dolibois felt a huge wave of relief. The prisoners were unloaded, and Colonel Andrus assumed control of them once again. Without looking back, Dolibois hurried on to the transport plane. The plane taxied down the runway and took flight. Dolibois sat alone in the empty airplane. The weeks of interrogating the Nazi high command were over. The Nazis he had just flown with would now be tried for war crimes at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. A majority of them would be hanged.
Back at Ashcan, when Dolibois returned to his quarters to pack his bags, he came across a strange sight. Standing by the edge of the perimeter fence, not far from where Dolibois had first pulled up to this place in an army jeep three months before, he spotted a middle-aged man, apparently a local, with his hands in his pockets and a beret on his head. The man just stood there, shouting out in the direction of the Palace Hotel. Dolibois took a moment to pause and listen so he could make out what the man was saying.
“Hallo Meier! Hallo Meier!” the man shouted, again and again. “Wie gehts in Berlin?”
It took a moment for the significance of what the man was doing to register with Dolibois. The phrase translated into English as “Hello, Meier! Hello, Meier! So, how’s it going in Berlin?” The beauty of the moment dawned on him. In the early days of the war, Hermann G?ring was so confident the Third Reich would win the war that he’d famously bragged to the German people, “If the British and the Americans ever bomb Berlin, my name is Meier.”
The image of the middle-aged Luxembourger taunting G?ring was a perfect end to this chapter in John Dolibois’s life. The man was enjoying himself so much Dolibois felt no need to tell him that G?ring was gone. Besides, Hermann G?ring was never coming back.