German refugee who put war's horrors into words

Roger Bryan, 87, a German-born translator for the prosecution at the Nuremberg war-crime trials who moved to West Philadelphia after World War II and worked in the garment industry, died of heart disease Aug. 10 at Saunders House in Wynnewood.

Born Roger Britzmann in 1921 in Berlin, the son of a doctor, he studied photography as a young man. When Mr. Bryan was 18, six weeks before war broke out in Europe, he fled to England. He was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, and in 1940 he and 2,500 other Jews and refugees were shipped to Sidney, Australia, on the floating concentration camp, the Dunera. He was in a prisoner-of-war camp in Australia for several months before being returned to England.

Mr. Bryan wrote in a memoir that the British army had allowed him to volunteer in 1941 for the Pioneer Corps in Ilfracombe in North Devon, England.

The Pioneer Corps was made up mostly of refugees and former prisoners on the Dunera.

"The British needed every man they could get to fight," said his son, Jeffrey.

Mr. Bryan was stationed in Glasgow, Scotland, where he met Lore Konigshofer. They married in 1943.

Mr. Bryan joined the Royal Army Service Corps after being transferred to Oxford. He was encouraged to change his name to Bryan from Britzmann for "protection in case of capture." His wife worked in a British factory making combat planes.

In 1946, Mr. Bryan was sent to the former concentration camp at Neuengamme, near Hamburg, to interrogate and document German prisoners - mostly Nazi officials and soldiers.

Later that year, Mr. Bryan worked as a translator at the Nuremberg trials.

"I translated German terms and phrases for British prosecutors in the courtroom," he wrote in his memoir. "To see the whole rogues' gallery of defendants, not more than 20 feet in front of me, was overwhelming. Göring, with a derisive grin most of the time, Streicher, Rudolf Hess and other Nazi criminals. Hess was either a great actor or mentally disturbed."

A few months later, Mr. Bryan supervised the British Film and Documentation Unit, run by the Royal Air Force. That was an emotional job, he wrote.

"We had samples of tattooed human skin manufactured into lamp shades and gloves. Even more devastating was the collection of photographs taken by German soldiers. The most haunting one showed a trench the prisoners had dug before being shot at the edge of it. One of the victims looked like my mother. I had trouble sleeping for nights."

At the end of 1946, Mr. Bryan and his wife returned to Glasgow, where he and a partner founded a commercial photography studio.

In 1954, a relative in Ventnor, N.J., invited the couple, who by then had a baby girl, for a visit. After briefly returning to cold, damp Glasgow, they decided to move to the United States. They settled in West Philadelphia, where "the humid summers were like living in hot pea soup!"

My Bryan worked for his brother-in-law as a salesman in a sewing-thread business in Philadelphia, M. Kingshoff Co. Mr. Bryan eventually gave up his dream of supporting his family as a photographer.

In 1983, he founded Roger Bryan Inc., a small sewing-thread firm, where he worked until failing health forced him to slow down in 2003.

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Bryan is survived by a daughter, Carol, and three grandchildren.

Services were held Tuesday at Haym Salomon Memorial Park in Frazer.

Memorial donations may be sent to the Parkinson Alliance, Box 308, Kingston, N.J. 08528.