Chatham Vet Reflects On Time As Nuremberg Guard

SOUTH CHATHAM – If you recently saw the feature film “Nuremberg,” what you might not know is that Russell Crowe did a perfect imitation of Hermann Goering. But at least one theatergoer knew.

 “He mimicked Goering’s English, he even got that down to a tee,” said 101-year-old John Zippo of South Chatham. “He turned it into a masterpiece. It was fantastic.”

 As part of his service with the U.S. Army’s famed First Infantry Division in World War II, Zippo found himself guarding some of the imprisoned architects of the Third Reich as they awaited trial at Nuremberg.

 When he was 16 or 17, Zippo worked the night shift in a plant that made submarine parts, when a friend of his decided he wanted to join the Army Air Forces as a flyer. 

 “I liked the way that sounded: thrilling,” he said. His father approved of his enlistment plans. “Mom didn’t say too much,” Zippo recalled. He trained at Camp Upton for four weeks before learning that he’d washed out of aviation school, partly because he hadn’t finished high school. Instead, the Army sent him to a nearby school that trained drill instructors, perhaps an odd choice for a young soldier who wasn’t physically imposing. 

 “I was a little guy, but I had a booming voice,” he said with a laugh.

 At various stateside assignments, “I did everything,” Zippo recalled, from teaching new recruits how to march to acting as a military policeman to guarding dangerous ammunition depots. He was eventually deployed to Europe, and his first sergeant asked him if he wanted to join the infantry.

 “I said, ‘Hell no. Why would I want to do that?’” he said. The answer was, not surprisingly, that he might as well join because he was about to be assigned as an infantryman. Following six weeks of grueling training, he found himself facing the enemy. He initially was named first scout in his unit, meaning that he would be at the very front of the column when looking for Germans. Happily, he was reassigned to different duty. 

 “The unfortunate thing is that the kid that was behind me, next in line, they made him first scout. First combat we had, he got killed. First one,” Zippo said. 

 Zippo had plenty of close calls, however. He was given bad instructions by his leader that prompted him to stray deep behind enemy lines at one point. 

 “It dawned on me that you should go where the shooting is, because you’re going to find two sides there: the enemy and us,” he said. He did, indeed, find American soldiers, and was reunited with his own unit the following day. “I was never so happy in my life,” he said.

 Near the end of the war, Zippo and his buddies were fighting in Czechoslovakia when he was nearly killed. 

 “I don’t know how I escaped death, to this day,” he said. “This German soldier had me pinpointed. He was only a few feet away from me, and he had a pistol in his hand.” Zippo stayed very still, and the German didn’t see him. Decades later, Zippo decided that he’d been allowed to live so he could grow old taking care of his son, who has special needs.

 But it was the war that brought Zippo together with Frieda, the woman who would become his wife. Fraternizing with Germans, even after the surrender, was strictly forbidden; talking to a German national would result in a $54 fine. “And in those days, we got paid $22 a month,” he said. He certainly couldn’t tell Frieda about his duties in the town next door: Nuremberg. It was an assignment that nearly didn’t happen.

 Zippo had earned all of the “points” needed for an honorable discharge and was literally on his way home when he learned that the number of points had been increased. He was turned around and sent back to Germany. With a handful of other men, Zippo was told to dress in his Class A uniform and report for duty in Nuremberg. They were ushered to a prison building and each one was assigned to a cell door along a long hallway. They were told to observe the prisoners inside, without fail, for hours at a time. The guards began to speculate that their wards were somehow special.

 An avid reader as a kid, Zippo liked the Daily News, and from the news photos, identified one of the prisoners as Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister.

 “I said, holy mackerel,” Zippo recalled. They identified another prisoner as Heinrich Himmler, the head of the S.S. and the principal architect of the Holocaust. “I then realized that I was going to be here for a while,” he said. 

 In the months leading up to and during the war crimes trial, Zippo and his fellow guards worked 24-hour shifts followed by 48 hours off, peering at the prisoners in their cells at all times. Naturally, any conversation with the prisoners was absolutely forbidden. But that didn’t stop some interaction, especially when Zippo spotted Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second in command and the head of the German military.

 “I wanted to get his autograph,” Zippo said. “Every time you were assigned to a new prisoner, you’d ask him for his autograph, and you’d have to give him a tailor-made cigarette,” he recalled. Most prisoners agreed, but not Goering.

 “He says, ‘Nein.’ I say, ‘Why?’ He says, ‘Two cigarettes,’” Zippo said with a laugh. “I got his autograph at least four different times.” (After the war, working as a postman and short on cash, he sold the autographs — against Frieda’s advice.)

 On Oct. 16, 1946, hours before he was set to be executed, Goering was found dead in his cell, having taken a cyanide tablet that was smuggled into his cell. Zippo and his fellow guards were grilled, one at a time, to try and determine who had provided the pill. “Everybody in the outfit denied it,” he said. While the guilty party was never proven, Zippo said he believes it was the Officer of the Day, whom he said was a German sympathizer.

 While the historical gravity of the Nuremberg trials was lost on Zippo (“I was just a kid,” he said), the sentencing and execution of top Nazi leaders certainly marked a turning point in his life, a corner that, once rounded, brought him closer to returning to civilian life.

 He and Frieda made a life together back in the States and raised a family, eventually coming to Chatham. 

 “We had 65 years of terrific harmony and bliss,” he said.