THE BOOK FAIR

Christiane Kohl

The Witness House

Review:

The Witness House, a small villa in Novalisstrassa, outside of Nuremburg, Germany, was assigned by American officials to house both German war criminals and the victims of the Nazi barbarity who would testify at the Nuremburg Trials, following WW II.  The house, originally owned by Elise Krulle, would be managed during the trials by Ingeborg Countess Kalnoky, a beautiful, popular, flamboyant woman, and later by Annemarie von Kleist, the wife of Bernard von Kleist, an interpreter at the trials.

 

Christiane Kohl, after speaking with Bernard von Kleist, in 1980, decided to research the events of the Witness House that took place in the latter 1940’s.  The author tracked down Countess Kalnoky, and Robert Kempner, the German-American prosecutor at Nuremburg, to obtain their stories and views of the time.  Using public records, eye witness reports, the records of interrogation of witnesses, and her conversations with witnesses, Kohl pieced together her account of the goings on in Witness House.

 

The author describes in detail, the encounters between the Nazi witnesses, those that testified against the regime, and those that defended the regime and denied wrongdoing.  Kohl also describes situations in which the testifying Nazis and the concentration camp victims met within the house.  Particular witnesses provided a wealth of information, the information without which, the prosecutors would have not been able to proceed or convict.  The prosecutors knew of the atrocities committed but lacked direct evidence of planning and collusion in the higher ranks.  The documents of the Wannsee Conference, which convened in January 1942, and was the place the Nazis decided on the Final Solution for the Jews, however, the documents did not fall into prosecutorial hands until March 1947.

 

Particularly helpful witnesses were Eugene Kogan, a journalist and anti-Nazi activist who spent years in Buchenwald and Rudolf Diels, one time head of the Gestapo and protégé of Hermann Goring, who found the lies his compatriots told disturbing.  Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s personal photographer, found his memory in continual lapse however, during the war years, Hoffman became a multi-millionaire, and praised Hitler, as did Hermann Goring, to the end.  The non-fiction work is an interesting and informative, although disturbing, compilation of historical facts and records, complete with pictures and documentation.