ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, May 13, 1996 TAG: 9605130125
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
AS BOSNIAN WAR CRIMES TRIALS BEGIN, a Botetourt County official remembers the trials of Nazi criminals a half-century ago.
Hermann Goering was fat, John Shiflett remembers.
Stuffed into his trademark double-breasted uniform, the head of the German Luftwaffe sat on the front row to the right of Rudolph Hess during the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Shiflett remembers that location well.
"I could not believe the unemotion of the defendants," says Shiflett, who now serves as Botetourt County's Buchanan District supervisor. "They sat there with no emotion. Their expressions never changed."
But Shiflett - then a reluctant 19-year-old enlisted aide to Hugo Black, a Franklin Roosevelt appointee to the Supreme Court and one of the judges for the trials - could not help but be moved by the evidence of Nazi atrocities: medical experiments that subjected concentration camp prisoners to high-altitude experiments that imploded their lungs.
The shrunken head of a Polish worker that was used as a paper weight.
Lampshades, handbags and ladies' slippers made from human skin.
"It left your body kindly limp," Shiflett says. "You'd say, `Well, I've seen just about everything,' and then they'd bring in something else and it would kind of take the air out of you."
Fifty years after the trials - and just as the Bosnian war crimes trials that many are comparing to the trials of Nazi war criminals are starting - the things he saw and heard in Germany in 1946 still linger in Shiflett's mind, along with the lessons that accompanied them.
It was a tough time for a twice-wounded paratrooper from Roanoke, Ala., who already had been through the Normandy invasion with the 82nd Airborne Division.
"I'd been in war, but it didn't make it any easier," Shiflett says. "I just had a difficult time understanding the importance of this."
Besides, he didn't want to be there in the first place.
Shiflett, a horse trainer all his life, wanted to join a horse platoon stationed in Berlin after the war. Instead, he wound up living in a mansion with Black and his staff in Nuremberg, the city that had been the scene of numerous Nazi rallies, the city where Adolph Hitler's anti-Jewish laws were announced. Shiflett figures he got the job only because he was an Alabama boy like Black.
"My friends were out making parachute jumps and riding horses, and I was way down in this courthouse with all these old men. ... It was prestigious, but, by God, it wasn't no fun."
Shiflett's job, much of the time, was getting Black copies of the transcripts of the trials that were cranked out with amazing speed in the basement of the Palace of Justice.
Dozens of workers, their hands black with ink from rows of mimeograph machines, copied and collated the transcripts each day in several languages, Shiflett says. Black wanted copies in all languages so interpreters could check to see if any nuances of testimony were lost in translation.
He remembers Black as "a concerned man about the Constitution."
Black recognized that he had not, like many others, witnessed the horrors the defendants were accused of, Shiflett says, but the judge was uneasy whether other jurists who had witnessed them would keep the trials "on a level playing field."
"Our people were more concerned about individual justice," Shiflett says.
Black was all business in court, but at home, he became more like a father to his staff.
"We were kind of like his family," Shiflett says. "He'd tell us to take the car and go out and have a good time."
Shiflett did. A lively social scene thrived in Nuremberg.
One scholar, Robert E. Conot, notes in his book "Justice at Nuremberg" that the city "had a special flavor since ... it was the only German town with a sizable contingent of Allied women, many of them highly attractive."
Shiflett says he had "a big time" hitting the night clubs around Nuremberg. In particular, he remembers running across an American staff sergeant who always had a black briefcase with him. The sergeant chewed tobacco all the time, and could hit a small spittoon from several yards away.
Shiflett never knew what was in the briefcase until he saw the man open it in the Stork Club one night to show off its contents.
The man pulled out a perfectly coiled and knotted noose.
He turned out to be one of several hangmen in Nuremberg to carry out the death sentences numerous Nazis received. Goering, the most famous defendant, escaped the gallows by crushing a cyanide capsule between his teeth the night before he was to die.
The gallows were dark, Shiflett remembers.
"All you saw was the noose, the man and the snap."
The proceedings ended in October 1946. Shiflett stayed in the military for another 20 years, achieving the rank of major while on active duty. He corresponded with Black for about a year, but lost touch with him after that.
He has little memorabilia left from those Nuremberg days, except a winged pin he wears on his jacket as a reminder of his role in the 82nd Airborne. Most of his mementos burned in fires at his house and at his parents' house in Alabama.
But Shiflett retains this lesson from Nuremberg:
"I heard testimony from people who suffered during the war and after. We just can't afford another war like that, not in money, or in human suffering."
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. John Shiflett's only war momentosby CNBare his gold Army ring and a service lapel pin.