Between 1964 and 1969 at the Greenfield, Indiana, laboratories of Eli Lilly & Co., I worked with a man named Donald Richbourg who claimed to have been a member of the guard detail at the Nürnberg war crime trials. His reminiscences about his clients, as I recall, included these two items.
1. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was a big sumbitch.
2. And Julius Streicher used to wash his face in the toilet.
Near the end of our chilly month-long tour of Europe last November-December, Jacob and I visited Nurnberg and the Nazi War Crimes courtroom, which is still being used as part of the Bavarian criminal court system but open for tourist visits,with a very fine, authoritative diorama of the trial, including information about all of its subjects, and the reaction to it in Germany and the rest of the world in 1945-6. We also took a midnight visit to what remains of the Nuremberg stadium where Triumph of the Will was filmed and where the annual Nazi Party congresses took place. We stood on Hitler’s old podium, a about the only thing that remains standing except for the bleachers behind it, and the door (& maybe the plumbing?) of a toilet (“Herren”) below. The vast expanse of what had been the stadium has been left as polluted ground by the German government, never to be developed, covered over, or forgotten, where “the lone and level [weeds] [will] stretch far away” forever. Then, two days after almost stumbling over the “Shoes Along the Danube” memorial to slaughtered Hungarian Jews in Budapest, we ended our month with a 6-hour guided tour of Auschwitz-Birikenau. We saw the actual house of Commandant Hoess that had to be reproduced for “The Zone of Interest” (because someone lives in it!) and the gallows at Auschwitz where Hoess was excecuted in 1947 after he was captured in Germany and returned to face trial for crimes against humanity in Poland. His was the last public hanging in Poland.