James C. Roberts: Front row at Nuremberg

Lt. John Dolibois sat in the courtroom at Nuremberg, Germany, 60 years ago watching Herman Goering testify in the war crimes trials. Much of the world was transfixed by the proceedings, but Lt. Dolibois, an Army intelligence officer, felt strangely indifferent.

"I just wanted to go home," he said. "I had had enough of the Nazis."

On trial were 22 high-ranking Nazis charged with crimes against humanity. Lt. Dolibois is the man who knew them the best -- their records, their strengths and weaknesses, their psychological profiles, their fears, obsessions, family situations, food preferences -- the result of close interaction with them over six months.

In May 1945, Lt. Dolibois' commanding officer informed him that he was being assigned to a facility called the Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 32 in Mondorf, Luxembourg. The facility was nicknamed "Ashcan."

The Luxembourgian native had migrated to the United States in 1931 with his widowed father and two siblings. He was fluent in French and German, and it was his German skills that had earned him the assignment.

Arriving in Mondorf, Lt. Dolibois drove to the Palace Hotel, a well-known spa he had visited as a boy.

"I was shocked to see how altered it was," he said. "We stopped at a huge gate that was part of a barbed-wire fence 15 feet high. Two strands of the fence were electrified. The gate stretched around the main building and surrounding gardens and on each corner of the fence were guard towers occupied by sentries with machine guns. ... It was the most heavily fortified [prisoner of war] facility I had seen." ...