He has almost been cropped from the photograph, and his name is a blank in the key. An interpreter's lot, perhaps. But there on the extreme left, legs crossed, with his long, intent nose and his immature moustache (he is 22, young for such work), sits Richard Sonnenfeldt. His fingers are hooked softly round the table-end, like a cat about to pounce.

The setting is Room Number One in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, the time the summer of 1945. Beside him, past the stenographer, is Colonel John Amen, the chief pre-trial interrogator for the tribunal that will put Hitler's henchmen on trial for war crimes. Opposite him, placed directly in the window light, is Rudolf Hess. Hess, who flew an abortive "peace mission" to England in 1941, is already "the original lunatic" to Mr Sonnenfeldt. The pockets of his greatcoat are filled with scraps of food brought from England, the proof, he says, that the British tried to poison him. He is playing the amnesiac, remembering nothing of his career. But Mr Sonnenfeldt will catch Hess out when he uses Kladde, a student word for a folder, and then quickly says he doesn't know why. Teenage slang, said Mr Sonnenfeldt firmly, "could hardly be the vocabulary word of an amnesiac."

For three months of evidence-gathering before the Nuremberg trials began, Mr Sonnenfeldt's official label was chief interpreter. Less officially, but with permission, his job was to startle, harry and trick the accused into admitting what they had done. Translation inevitably slowed the questions, allowing the accused to develop their denials. But Mr Sonnenfeldt's sharpness made up, in part, for that. Was it true, he asked Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall, that he had boasted to Hitler that he had torched the Reichstag himself in 1933? "Just one of my jokes," said Goering. "Tell me another joke you told Hitler," said Mr Sonnenfeldt. Goering did not reply.

... contd.