The Only Woman Journalist Inside Camp Ashcan: Erika Mann Face to Face with Nazi War Criminals

In mid-August 1945, Erika Mann drove through the night from Paris to Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, to see the fifty-two most wanted men in the world. She was a few weeks shy of forty, commissioned by London's Evening Standard, and she would become the only woman journalist to enter the prison camp where the surviving Nazi leadership was held.

Mann was unusually qualified for the assignment. The eldest daughter of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, she had staged the anti-Nazi cabaret Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill) in Munich in 1933, broadcast for the BBC since 1940, and covered the Spanish Civil War in 1938 for the New York–based Neue Volks-Zeitung. She had lived in exile since 1933, when her family fled to Zurich, and in 1935 the Nazi regime stripped the Manns of their German citizenship.

Her destination, a former spa hotel, had been renamed Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure number 32 — "Camp Ashcan," the American counterpart to the British-run "Camp Dustbin" in Frankfurt. As Mann wrote in her unpublished memoir, "Alien Homeland," "Germany's big 52 were being held here, that crop of leading Nazi war criminals from which the Nuremberg prosecution was to pick its defendants."

Who was behind the barbed wire?

The roll call included Wilhelm Keitel and Karl Dönitz, chiefs of the Wehrmacht and Navy high commands; Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland; Fritz Sauckel and Robert Ley, both central to Nazi slave labor; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar of the occupied Netherlands; and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich foreign minister. Above all, "prisoner number one": Hermann Göring.

Göring's record went far beyond commanding the Luftwaffe. Since 1938 he had run Nazi "Jewish policy," and in July 1941, acting as Hitler's second in command, he instructed Reinhard Heydrich to implement the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question."

How did Mann get in?

Not easily. Colonel Burton C. Andrus of the US Army, who ran the camp, was dissatisfied with her paperwork and sent her on a 300-mile round trip to Frankfurt for new documents. She was then escorted in, though explicitly forbidden to interview the prisoners, who had "proved only too anxious to plead their case without a jury for publication."

What does this change for Mann as a reporter? It turned her into an observer, not an interviewer — and she used that constraint. "No spookier adventure could be imagined," she wrote to her mother, Katia Mann, describing the journey through the double stockade. Inside, she watched through a half-open door as "some twenty of them, reading aimlessly, writing, or doing nothing at all." Some prisoners wrote letters to President Truman and General Eisenhower protesting their fate. To Mann, the place did not seem like a prison at all, but "a veritable insane asylum."

The detail she captured is unsparing:

• The men wore unmarked uniforms or fatigues stamped PW (prisoner of war); no shoelaces or neckties were allowed.
• Hans Frank, "the Butcher of Poland," who had overseen at least 4 million murders, had attempted suicide with four wounds and survived — "allergic to suicide," Mann dryly noted.
• Robert Ley was composing his memoirs; he would soon hang himself.
• Cyanide had been found sewn into clothes and, in Göring's case, hidden in a tin of Nescafé.

Frank, converting to Catholicism, shared a room with Ribbentrop. "The Butcher of Poland was reading the Bible to the ex–champagne salesman," Mann wrote in her first Evening Standard piece.

Göring at breakfast

Mann found Göring in bed, incapacitated by withdrawal from a two-decade opioid addiction. After losing thirty pounds, she reported in Liberty magazine, he was "in better physical condition than he has been for years." His "greenish eyes, normally protruding, now bulge like those of a carp." He insisted on wearing his hat during meals — "Since you can't kill yourself with your hat, as you can with your tie, Göring's request was not considered excessive." The camp's first psychiatrist, Major Douglas Kelley, called Göring an "acute narcissist."

Mann could not speak to the prisoners, but she asked interrogators to tell them who she was after she left. The reactions she got back: Ley screamed "Assez!"; Rosenberg muttered "Pfui Diable!"; Streicher lamented, "Du Lieber Gott and to think that that woman has been in my room!" Göring claimed that, had he handled the Mann case, "a German of the stature of T[homas] M[ann] could have been adapted to the Third Reich."

The source omits one scene from her published piece: Streicher exposing himself — "Ha! So you've come to gaze at all the wild beasts in the zoo!" Mann, unbothered, flicked ash from her cigarillo and walked to the next room.

The road to Nuremberg

The prisoners left on August 12 — thirty-seven to Dulag Luft near Frankfurt, fifteen to Nuremberg — and Mann's Evening Standard piece ran the next day. She then headed to London, where the legal framework was being finalized. The London Charter, signed on August 8, 1945, incorporated legal theorist Hersch Lauterpacht's concept of "crimes against humanity" across its thirty articles, and established that acting under orders did not remove responsibility.

The defendants — "perplexingly low" in number, fifteen to forty — would also answer for six indicted organizations, including the SS, whose membership neared two million. For Mann, this mattered: it compensated for the few personal indictments and established wider complicity.

Overworked and voiceless, she abandoned a lecture tour. "I may cover the Nuremberg trials," she wrote home — a trial she called "immeasurably important to the future of mankind." She never returned to Mondorf. The Palace Hotel was demolished in 1988, and the spa that stands there today makes no mention of Göring, Ribbentrop, Frank, or the others.

The account appears in The Nuremberg Women by Natalie Livingstone, published by St. Martin's Press, Copyright © 2026.