Reliving Nuremberg’s Horror

For 40 years Vivien Spitz tried to put the horror out of her mind.

It was only when others started trying to put it out of their minds that she was willing to relive the Nazi atrocities that had riveted her as a participant during the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Spitz was a stenographer assigned in 1946 to write down every word of a yearlong trial of 20 German doctors and three medical assistants accused of torturing hundreds of concentration camp prisoners with inhumane medical experiments during the war.

The testimony and the photographic evidence were so vivid and disturbing that Spitz cried through much of the trial as she recorded it in shorthand. For three years afterward, she struggled with nightmares that kept the horrors alive.

So in 1985--when a history teacher at a public school near her Denver home suggested to students that the Holocaust should be called “the holohoax”--Spitz was incredulous.

Opening boxes of Nuremberg trial materials she had saved, Spitz sorted through documents and photographs and set out on a one-woman crusade to set the record straight.

Today, Spitz, 74, is in Long Beach, where she will reveal what she experienced in Nuremberg to professional stenographers who belong to the Deposition Reporters Assn. of California.

Association leaders conducting a three-day conference for the 1,200-member group hope that Spitz can help teach deposition reporters how to remain dispassionate observers, no matter how personally revolting a legal case may seem to them.

Spitz hopes to help convert her audience into a new generation of those determined to keep memories of the Nazi atrocities alive.

Most of those who experienced the Nuremberg trials in person are gone--only four of the 30 court reporters assigned to take down word-by-word testimony during the 13 separate trials that made up the proceedings are still living, according to Spitz.

One of them, Julian Schwab, lives in Los Angeles and plans to attend today’s conference, according to Lois Ludwig, a Toluca Lake deposition reporter who helps lead the association.

Spitz was one of the youngest stenographers hired by the United States government to work at the trials. She had been eager to go to Nuremberg.

“I’m Catholic and half-German, and I was proud of my mother’s German heritage,” Spitz recalled Friday. “We’d all seen the newsreels that showed the concentration camps. But I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe Germans were capable of doing anything like that.”

Details of a dozen horrific medical experiments performed on prisoners in such concentration camps as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrueck, Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler convinced her otherwise.

Eighty-five survivors and witnesses told of victims being locked in airtight decompression chambers that simulated a 68,000-foot altitude with no oxygen. Of being placed for hours at a time in tanks of ice water. Of forced inhalation of mustard gas and injections of malaria, typhus and jaundice. Of bone, muscle, nerve and limb transplants between living subjects. Of forced ingestion of seawater by experimenters trying to see how drinkable it was.

Ever the perfectionists, the Nazis recorded every detail of the experiments with sequential photography.

“I would put my head down on the table and cry,” Spitz said. “We worked in 15-minute shifts and then went out and transcribed our work and came back in.

“Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, was on trial. He stared at me. His eyes bored right into me and sent a chill down my spine.”

Trial workers toiled five days a week at the Palace of Justice, one of the few buildings in Nuremberg, Germany, that hadn’t been destroyed during the war. They stayed at the Grand Hotel, which had also survived Allied bombing.

Nazi sympathizers roamed through catacombs beneath the city. One night several of them tossed bombs into the hotel dining room moments before Spitz and another stenographer arrived for dinner.

The trials of the physicians were part of a larger series of trials involving 200 leading German military and governmental officials, 37 of whom were sentenced to death.

Seven of those ordered to die by hanging were defendants in Spitz’s courtroom. Five other defendants in that court were sent to prison for life and four received sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years.

Seven were acquitted and released.

“That was another shock,” Spitz said.

After the trial Spitz married a U.S. Army captain assigned to guard the defendants in another courtroom. Then came the years of nightmares of the atrocities after she returned to the United States.

“I was always tunneling through concentration camp barbed wire, trying to keep kids quiet,” Spitz said.

She has returned to Germany several times since the trial but has never revisited Nuremberg, Spitz said.

“Friends tell me Germany has changed. But to this day I have a lot of trouble with older Germans who say they didn’t know what was going on in the war. They knew,” she said.

And Spitz knows too. The 18 volumes of Nuremberg testimony she helped produce prove it.

“Those 18 volumes are going to be the only thing to refute the Holocaust deniers after we and the victims are gone,” she said.