William H. Glenny guarded notorius prisoners such as Hermann Goering and Ernst Karltenbrunner.
William H. Glenny was a prison guard at Nuremberg when he was 19. He is shown here in his Granby living room with photos of the trial, pictures of him at the Arena where Hitler gave speeches, and autographs of all the Nuremberg defendants.
GRANBY – After World War II ended, the first international military trials in history were conducted in Nuremberg, Germany.
The defendants – all among Adolph Hitler’s conspirators in his Nazi regime – had not just ordered the deaths of men in combat, but had also engineered the systematic, state-sponsored murder of approximately 6 million Jews in what is now called the Holocaust.
The world wondered: What kind of person would do that?
William H. Glenny was 18, a graduate of Precious Blood School and the vocational high school in Holyoke, when he saw the answer first-hand.
Glenny entered the Army in 1946. He could have been assigned to play in the military band at Westover Field, now Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee. But, he was young and wanted to go overseas, where the action was.
He wound up guarding the prison cells of some of the most notorious men in history, Nazi officers whose images he had seen in newspapers.
Standing next to Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command, and feeling his glare was “something you never forget, believe me,” recalled Glenny recently.
He is 83 now and has lived in Granby for about 50 years. Memories of that terrible time in world history still flow, and remain vivid, Glenny says.
On April 2 at 10 a.m., Glenny will speak about his experiences as a prison guard at Nuremberg, when Social Connection Over 50 meets at Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Hadley. Cost is $5 and includes lunch. Reservations must be made by March 30.
When Glenny first saw Goering in his cell, sitting on a cot, reading and smoking a Meersham pipe, he commented to another guard that he didn’t look like such a big man.
What Glenny didn’t know was that Goering spoke perfect English. From then on, he glared at the young American every opportunity he got, Glenny said.
“Once, he was taken out of his cell and had to go by me, and as he came by, he slowed down and gave me a dirty look. He starts with my shoes and comes up slow. I could swear the hair on my head was coming up,” said Glenny.
Each cell had only a bolted cot, a chair and a table that was collapsible. No shoes, no belts, no conversation. Prisoners had to face the door at all times, said Glenny.
A bright light was aimed through a small square in the cell door at night. In spite of all that, Goering still managed to commit suicide before the death sentence imposed by the military tribunal at Nuremberg could be carried out. Hitler had also escaped execution by killing himself as the Allies had closed in on his bunker in Berlin as the war drew to a close in 1945.
The Nuremberg trial defendants put on a good show in the courtroom, but it was different in the cells, said Glenny.
Ernst Karltenbrunner, for instance, who was 6 feet 7 inches tall and the highest ranking SS officer to face trial, used to weep copiously in his cell. He was later hanged after his conviction on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
When Glenny arrived in Germany, it had been bombed beyond recognition. “There were no lights,” he recalls, “just little floodlights. No electricity, no water, no food. No money. No jobs. People would live in their cellars.
“No men except kids and old men. The young men were all dead or prisoners of war,” Glenny said. “You were told not to go out alone, because soldiers were being murdered. There was no law, nothing going on. You thought: How the heck did these people live?”
Amazingly, a year later the wounds of war had started to heal. “By the time I left, all the combat troops were gone, and there were just greenhorns like myself,” said Glenny. “I had no bitterness.”
Even the war criminals turned out to be human beings, in Glenny’s mind, and were not monsters with horns on their heads.
In 1947, Glenny came home. He married wife Claire, had three kids, worked as a toolmaker.
But Nuremberg never left him.
One prisoner, Nazi field marshal Wilhelm Keitel, had been writing a book in his cell, and Glenny wanted to read it, to come to some conclusion. He read other books about the war. He waited for five years, 10 years. Finally, Keitel’s book came out after 20 years.
After reading it, Glenny was convinced that the Nuremberg trials had been fair and just.
“There’s a limit,” he said, “to how far a soldier can go in carrying out orders.”