Every life has the “moment.” If you are unlucky, you will not recognize it has occurred until it is too late to construct your life around the moment’s significance and meaning. Even more unlucky, you might never know it was your true moment to shine and be lifted up. It comes. And then it goes as a phantom.
Peter Less had more than a moment. He had that one year in his life.
But Peter Less is a lucky man. Even he says so. Indeed, he’s had many good years.
He is 91. He is healthy and fit, both of mind and body.
And when he sat at the plain wooden desk with the large microphone bolted at its exact middle 66 years ago, he knew exactly where he was, and what it meant. There would be no mistake and no argument.
He was only 25 then but he was in the middle of history that he was about to shape with his skill and mind. He knew what he was doing. People would know this history.
He would translate a trial. He would listen to the men sitting across from him and tell their story just as they told it. They would answer his questions. German into English. English into German. Though there would be evidence – vast piles of documents and human testimony – the words would always be his. Forever. The official record was his record.
And, thus, as Peter Less sat across the plain wooden desk and looked into the cool, blue eyes of the man who had built the machine of state that murdered his entire family, all he had to do was still his soul, and be as cool as those blue eyes were.
The world had been drenched in its own blood for a decade. Seventy million were dead. There had to be an end to it.
The entire world was watching the Nuremberg Trial.
A man at home
The two-story, three-bedroom brick house on Old Glenview Road in Wilmette is prim, though today the inside is not as neat as Peter Less usually prefers. Thick, tall foliage guards the front door from easy street view.
Inside, the dining room table is heaped with papers from his legal practice in downtown Chicago. Custody cases. Deadbeat dads, Adoptions. Depositions. Reports. Pleadings from the banal to the boisterous. He’s always had affection for being on the right side of fairness and honesty. He’s been a lawyer for 60 years.
The desks nearby his soft couch are gorged with magazines, mostly French and German language news publications. “I like to know what’s going on,” he says.
This is a house where a man of letters lives. A precise man. He lives alone. “ ‘Batching’ it,” he says with a smile that curves softly into a hint of wishful melancholy.
He’s lived here for decades although he’s been alone for only two of those years. His dearest friend, partner and wife, Meta, died two years ago. The loss leaves a silent emptiness that had been filled with joy for 64 years. Her portrait reveals a graceful, beautiful creature. She was a good match for his intellectual intensity.
He will never see 5-foot-10 or 150 pounds. But he mows his own yard and drives. He is wiry and unexpectedly strong the way Russell terriers are. “I am fit and healthy,” he says with some astonishment and pride. “Everything works. I can still do pushups.”
He and Meta had three daughters who were raised in this house – Yvonne, Jeannette and Jacqueline. They visit regularly and phone often to make sure he is secure.
Near him are all the inanimate objects that fill his life with remembrance and love. Meta’s pastels and watercolor art are arrayed around the room at eye level. Mostly small landscapes, they are warm and beautiful. Like her, he almost says without needing the words.
His accent is clearly, carefully phrased but not obvious. His perfectly accented English is tinged with a dash of German and French inflection. The French is not a Parisian varietal. It’s the more cool Swiss vintage.
The law practice is coming to an end soon. “Winding down” he says. He does not want his 91 years to make anyone think he is giving less than his exceptional mind should offer. But 91 is just a number to him, not a statement of human fitness.
“I have muddled through,” he says with a smile.
He has lived what anyone would call a full, meaningful life which seems a cliché until you meet a person who actually has lived that life.
It is full even without his “moment.” You would easily think him exceptional, which he is. You would have no reason to think him famous.
But he is that, as well.
He had the “moment,” and he did not waste it.
The coming storm
History of the largest kind was staring down on Peter Less’ life. The two forces would come crashing together in 1938.
He was 17 and the scion of a prosperous family in Königsberg , the 700-year-old German capital of Prussia. His father, Siegfried, was an acclaimed lawyer in the city of 2.2 million, and his mother and aunt ran the family’s chic department store downtown. His grandmother was close at hand, as was his sister.
They were “intellectuals.” Dad had been among the last there to produce his doctoral dissertation in Latin.
But Adolf Hitler had claimed the country’s soul, and the Third Reich sent waves of hate and fear in all directions. Even Peter Less felt the unease of it, though he could not foretell that his beloved city would not exist within eight years. Soviet artillery would crush his hometown, and Stalin would confiscate the broken city as a prize of war. It is called Kaliningrad now. It is a Russian city. Wholly owned and labeled, and virtually no one of German descent even lives there.
“I knew then there was no future in Germany,” he says. A German passport would allow any citizen a free pass into Switzerland, and from that embarkation point, the family could go anywhere, even America. “It may seem as though I was so smart thinking all of this, but I wasn’t really. Just a dumb kid,” he says. “Maybe I was just intuitive. But every day Hitler was squeezing and squeezing the lifeblood out of the country. Nazis didn’t like people who thought for themselves. They didn’t like smart people. They liked people who got news from the radio and repeated it and mouthed it. Nazis liked people who just went along. My family knew enough to keep their mouths shut to survive.”
Less virtually begged his family to join him in Geneva, but his father dreaded having to start over at middle age, and besides, who could take a blowhard like Hitler seriously? “Father couldn’t figure out how to make a living there,” Less said. “A physician can go anywhere because the human body is the same everywhere. But a lawyer doesn’t know anything once they cross the boundary to another country. My father just didn’t think he could start over with school. Plus, they all thought the thing with Hitler would end. By spring the Social Democrats would be back in power … I told him if he was right, I’d be back. But if I was right, he and the family had to come.”
“I just had a feeling,” Less says now, “that something wasn’t right.”
So Less set about living in Geneva as a refugee alien. He was required to inhabit a “camp” but it was a Swiss camp which is to say it was more like camping. It was a mostly benign accommodation while Switzerland figured out what to do with him and others like him. He learned to be a barber. He learned to be a cook, a baker, a butcher. He learned French. He would be invited into the University of Geneva as a refugee, and later the École d’Interprètes to study the high art and science of linguistic interpretation. Switzerland turned out to be his friend.
His father sent a modest stipend to see him through. They wrote often.
He soon found Meta who worked for the Red Cross. He was deeply, permanently smitten. “I chased her for years,” he announces with a beaming smile. They were wed.
But, of course, the “Hitler thing” did not end.
By spring of 1939, World War II would start. Less was trapped in Switzerland.
He never saw his family again.
The trial of the century
Hyperbole deadens distinction. The nature of exaggeration diminishes all that falls outside its direct light. Thus, the murder trial of O.J. Simpson was the Trial of the Century, just as the Scopes Monkey Trial of Clarence Darrow fame had been. The prosecution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the Lindbergh baby abduction had been the Trial of the Century. The Sacco and Vanzetti “Red Menace” prosecution a decade earlier had the same place on the mantle.
Every few decades, a court case captures enough attention to win that description.
But there had never been anything quite so universal in its reach, or as historically traumatic, as the Nuremberg War Criminals Trial. Less knew how big it was.
This was not merely a trial to hold World War II’s strangely mediocre arch villains accountable for the incomprehensible pain of their rule; it also was civilization putting itself on trial. Measuring itself. Monstrous evil must be held accountable or else law, justice and the idea of human advancement have no meaning. Then the war had no deeper resonance beyond winners and losers. Then there was only pain and blood, and nothing more.
Thus the western Allies designed the International Military Tribunal to try the architects of Nazism for the crime of making bloody, relentless war on the entire planet. The right of a nation to indulge in bloodlust would be judged. “We knew the world was watching,” Less says.
The trial’s existence was a close call. The Soviets and England’s Winston Churchill had pressured President Roosevelt to issue arrest orders for the worst 2,000 of them, line them up and execute them. But Roosevelt prevailed.
Justice required the form of law to be observed. FDR would not budge and neither would Harry Truman when combat ended.
In fact, there was not just one Nuremberg Trial. There were 10, each aimed at a particular subspecies of the Nazi structure. One for doctors who tortured. One for military murderers. One for industrialists. One for those who specialized in murdering hostages. One for the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile murder squads who roamed occupied countries dealing death; another for judges who froze in Hitler’s glare and empowered the Final Solution for the Jews. The list of venal killers and willing accomplices seemed staggering. Nazism was a multi-headed, gruesome beast.
An entire culture, even its view of justice, had been subverted. The cinematic “Judgment at Nuremberg” is, in fact, the more nuanced morality tale of the Judicial Trial.
The trials started in the fall of 1945 and lasted until 1949. Without the art of live, simultaneous translation into multiple languages, the trials could have lasted more than a decade.
Interpreters suddenly were the hottest commodity in Europe. American soldiers came to Less’ class at the École d’Interprètes, the Rockefeller-funded department in Geneva that trained simultaneous interpreters, just as the trial’s massive logistics were being organized.
Among prosecutors, defense attorneys, researchers, interrogators, linguists, filmmakers, sound engineers, technicians, security forces, military managers and support forces, there would be a team of 600 to conduct the cases.
The talent scouts interviewed the top interpreters at the school and took three. It was the only such rigorous academy of its kind in existence. One of the selected three was Less. “They told us we’d be on a plane tomorrow. ‘You’re going to Nuremberg,’ ” he says.
Meta stayed behind for a few months. Nuremberg took precedence over their honeymoon.
A city of rubble
The Allies picked Nuremberg because it had been the spiritual center of Hitler’s most outlandish and extravagant public displays, the center ring of the Nazi circus. There he had paraded all the strutting grandeur of Nazi pomp for the world’s newsreel cameras. At the 1935 massed rally, Hitler ordered the legislature to convene at Nuremberg to pass the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws that stole German citizenship from all Jews. The Final Solution had begun.
It was the perfect symbolical stage on which to restate the meaning of justice.
And after Allied artillery and building-to-building combat leveled all but seven percent of Nuremberg, a few hotels were spared and the Hall of Justice was all but untouched. A single-file street, Fürtherstrasse 22, wound through pillars of rubble to the Hall of Justice and its adjoining prison.
After a few days of indoctrination, Less stepped through the front doors of Courtroom 600 on the second floor on Nov. 20, 1945. “It was like a courtroom from a movie,” Less recalls. It would have fit perfectly inside any Raymond Chandler script, and indeed murder trials are still held there. “The judges sat on a raised throne symbolically. There were rows for defendants and attorneys and translators. A big area for the press.”
Less had been warned to stay clear of journalists. Military police whisked him every night to a country villa billet where he lived, and then shuttled him back to court in the morning. “We were told the press would pay our weight in gold to get the verdict first,” he remembers. “Being court martialed by the Americas for that would not be fun.”
On his first day, Less translated the 24,000-word indictment into German as it was read. Though 30 or so interpreters would be arrayed throughout the trials, the Major War Criminal Trial was largely Less’ domain. There were 22 defendants. His “shift” was 90 minutes in the morning and 90 minutes in the afternoon. The physical and mental concentration required for three hours was exhausting.
Because the microphone was bolted to the middle of the interpreters’ table, Less had to sit at the very edge of his chair and lean far over the flat expanse to speak clearly into the device. All the while, his eyes had to scan left and right to find the faces of the two he was interpreting.
This would be the center of his working existence for a year.
In hindsight, American Supreme Justice Robert Jackson, the chief Allied prosecutor, and Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering were the natural stars of the trial. Jackson was careful, thorough and, at least in court, cool. Goering was the strutting self-proclaimed Teutonic war god. They were ice and flame.
For weeks they would battle with words, fighting over every definition and recollection and idea. Every phrase would be dissected for flaws. They would battle with Peter Less’ words.
When Goering listened, it was not to Jackson. It was to Peter Less.
When Jackson listened, it was not to Goering. It was to Peter Less.
“Goering was fat and arrogant,” Less recalled. “But smart. He was not a decent person. But he was powerful because people follow power and money. ”
History has translated Goering into something of a buffoon. But he had been a World War I ace, was Hitler’s de facto No. 2 and helped invent the secret police that made Hitler’s power impregnable. He was both a plunderer by preference and malicious social architect by opportunity. His signature on a document could mean death for a dozen, or for millions.
The Reich was as much Goering’s handiwork as anyone else’s, and the Gestapo’s power had flourished under his guidance. It was the same Gestapo that would murder all of Less’ family.
Less knew who all the defendants were. But he especially knew who Goering was. Goering was speaking for Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, all of whom had committed suicide months earlier. He was the last towering figure of the truncated 1,000-year empire. Goering wore fancy uniforms and yellow hunting boots. He had the cool, blue eyes.
“We sat as close as you and I are sitting,” Less said, measuring out about three or four feet. “Yes, it was emotional. But if you get emotionally involved, you cannot function. If they lie, you cannot get upset and shout ‘LIAR, LIAR, LIAR’! It’s not professional. You just have to boil inside. Yes, I boiled inside. They were consummate liars. In their view, nothing they had done was wrong, and they felt they were being punished because they lost the war. But I was a spokesman. I could not even note with facial expression that I did not believe the words …”
Jackson and Goering were a suitable fighting roosters. Both brilliant and dedicated and adamant. “Jackson was a fabulous attorney,” Less said. “Personally a very warm, honest man, a sharp man. But I think Europe was kind of unfathomable, a strange culture to him. I don’t think he was at home in the world. But he was a great American judge.”
“As for Goering, I believe he was honest,” Less says. “He actually believed what he was saying. He had a one-track mind.”
Jackson kept Less close at hand during the Major War Criminals Trial. He was the one interpreter who could not only repeat the words faithfully, he knew the soul of Germany. Less breakfasted with Jackson’s top aide, Gen. Telford Taylor, most mornings at the Grand Hotel. Less was always the youngest man at the table.
As Less notes, interpreting is not about the dictionary. A great interpreter translates a culture. “You put what one knows inside their head inside the head of someone else. All languages have idiom. You are translating culture as much as words.”
Later Jackson would reward Less by interceding with the State Department to extend Less’ immigration visa. “I had worked for years to get it, and it was going to run out. And I could not let that happen,” Less said. “I was going to swim the Atlantic Ocean to reach America if that’s what it took.”
As some of the most infamous men in the world paraded through their testimony, Less was struck by how ordinary they were. Some were simply killers. Many were functionaries who saw themselves as bookkeepers. “On the street, they would look like anybody else,” Less recalls. “They were not great people. But it was hard to read some minds, especially if they had a very small mind. Some were impossibly stupid. Others were intelligent.”
Hitler’s deputy Rudolph Hess, for example: “He was nuts. A very unstable mental case.”
Foreign Minister Wilhelm von Ribbentrop: “Spoke perfect English. Seemed to be very sharp as a person.”
There remains only one lingering though significant debate about the Trial. Was it fair? The laws under which it was conducted were largely cobbled together after the war by judges from the Allied countries.
“I think it was very just,” Less says. “Defendants got all the rights that that in America are granted to all defendants. This was not revenge. We didn’t hang them because they lost the war. We hung them because they committed crimes. It was one of the fairest trials I had ever heard of. We (the Allies) paid for the best German lawyers. They were brilliant. They were just on the wrong side of things.”
The trial reinforced two of Less’ principles: How the world is indeed a good place but it would be better without people who manipulate the world for their own desires; and how little religion has saved humanity from the pit. “We kill each other because my God is better than your God,” he says sadly.
As for the trial, it was a good moment for civilization. “We were just. It’s a glory to be just, rather than revengeful.”
The Final Act
The eyewitnesses are almost all gone now. There might be two or three of the interpreters scattered around the world, but no others who heard the entire testimony and saw the faces of those who testified are alive now. They were the last witnesses.
Because of his unique, intimate, and dominant role, Less stands alone.
For his part, he remains something of a revered icon among translators. He was honored in 2006 by his worldwide colleagues though he has done no interpreting since 1947. The honor conceded that Less’ one year at the Nuremberg table was a lifetime achievement likely never to be repeated by anyone.
As a new American – a status that even now makes him glow with pride – he had to make a living. The best he could do was teach a Berlitz language class for GI’s returning to Germany to serve in the occupation. The man who interpreted Hermann Goering taught GIs how to ask in German, “Where’s the best beer?” and “Do you know where the pretty girls are?”
Of those on trial that first year in Nuremberg, 11 were condemned to die, three were acquitted; the rest earned long prison terms.
Less would hold his breath all that day.
Goering escaped the gallows’ that stood 30 yards from the courtroom on the day before the executions by swallowing a cyanide pill that had been secreted to him. Cyanide provokes a violent, agonizing death. He died in blue silk pajamas.
In their turn in the early hours of Oct. 16, 1946, the prisoners were brought one by one to the cavernous, glaringly lighted gym. As they dangled from the rope, their bodies were brought down, laid on stretchers and carried out. Army blankets covered the faces. The next condemned men entered through the door with soldiers at his elbows.
Ribbentrop went first. Then Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Nazis’ security police; Alfred Rosenberg, arch-priest of Nazi culture in foreign lands; Hans Frank, overlord of Poland; Wilhem Frank, Nazi minister of the interior; Fritz Sauckel who organized slave labor; Colonel General Alfred Jodl; and Julius Streicher, who enforced the anti-Semitism of the Reich.
Some yelled epithets from the gallows platform when their time came, some saluted the Fuehrer; some called out to the God they had found in prison; others hailed the dead troops they had led to massacres or mourned Germany.
The last to ascend the 13 steps to the wooden eight-foot square platform was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who handed Austria to Hitler, murdered hostages, and sent thousands to death camps. He had been a joyous killer.
The gallows floor opened. He plummeted from sight. By 2:45 a.m., he was dead.
And so, after 70 million had perished before them, World War II ended.
Within days of the executions, Peter and Meta were on a plane bound for America and eventually the little brick house on Old Glenview Road.
There they both would learn the lesson of exceptional lives.
For some few, there is not one great moment in life. There are many.
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