The Nuremberg Trials - One Man's Journey

 

The Nuremberg Trials

Friday, 20 November 2020, is the 75th anniversary of the start of the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, usually called the Nuremberg Trials. These were so important to the future of Europe that I want to tell the story of one man.

Birth

Just over 27 years before this, in 1918, a boy was born in Alexandria, Egypt. His parents were Irish and Romanian by birth.

His father’s family had come from rural Ireland in Queen’s County (now County Laois), migrating over generations to County Westmeath from where great uncles fled the Great Hunger (known as the Irish Potato Famine) to the USA, to County Carlow, and finally to Dublin where his father was born. His father became a lieutenant in the Egypt Labour Corps (ELC) where he met his future wife in Alexandria through one of her brothers who was also an officer in the ELC.

His mother’s family had come from Romania where they were originally of Ashkenazi Jewish extraction. Her father had been baptised a Christian while retaining his Jewish faith (making him a Jewish Believer in Yehuah), and was working as a missionary in Jerusalem, part of the Ottoman Empire at the time, where she and her 5 siblings were born in the 1890s. The family moved to Alexandria in Egypt, governed by both the Ottoman Empire and the British, in 1912.

Childhood

During WWI his parents married in Alexandria, and he was born 13 months later. By 1919, his baby sister was on the way, but his father left to return to England leaving his mother to bring up a new born girl and a toddler in Egypt. Within a few years the task proved too much for her and the boy was brought up in his grandfather’s family from then onward.

Interwar Alexandria was a melting pot of Egyptian and European cultures, religions, and nationalities all living side by side: Russian refugees as tram drivers, Italians as motorcycle police, French as the language of culture, and English as the language of commerce. Despite his grandparents’ family speaking English at home, he was sent to a French school and taught in French, at least until the Catholic zeal of the school grated against his grandfather’s Protestantism.

We now know that this peace was not destined to last.

Tension Mounts

By 1936 his grandparents had both died and he was bringing himself up watched over by one of his uncles, with financial assistance from his other aunts and uncles who were, by then, variously living in England, USA, and Alexandria. His guardian uncle brought him to England where he became a student at King’s College, London.

His studies were interrupted by rising tensions across Europe, and in 1939 he enlisted in a Territorial Army infantry regiment, the Royal Fusiliers. This regiment was called up just before the start of WWII in 1939. But as he was only 5’8” tall, it was felt he was too small for active service in the infantry, so he was sent instead to Intelligence School in 1941 and then transferred to the Intelligence Corps. This was to prove to be the deciding factor of the rest of the war for him.

His mother’s Italian partner was shortly interned in Egypt as an enemy alien, never to be heard of again.

War Service

Having lived in Egypt for most of his life he was considered to be a natural choice to be posted to The Gambia for much of the remaining duration of the war. Nothing much happened there, so he had a quiet time, selling his cigarette ration to other soldiers, and keeping chickens in order to sell the eggs.

As 1944 unfolded he returned from West Africa and was assigned to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). This led to his taking part in the Normandy Landings before being based at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Versailles. Over the following months he progressed across Europe with the Allied Forces, at one point being at Bergen Belsen which disgusted and traumatised him with the stench of death drifting on the wind.

Now we get to the point. In 1945 he was assigned to the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, the Nuremberg Trials, charged with sending daily reports to Churchill, where each day he watched Goering, Ribbentrop, Bormann, Hess, and others on trial. The upset he had foreseen in Europe in the later 1930s had now come full circle and he was there to see it happen as well as take part. He was still just 27 years old.

Peace again

Finally demobbed in 1946, he returned to continue the studies at King’s College that had been so unwelcomely interrupted 8 years before.

He was my father.

 

The Tree Sleuths, 2020. The Tree Sleuths website.