The day I came face to face with Goering - Stourbridge war veteran's role in the Nuremberg trials
For years, Joachim von Ribbentrop had portrayed himself as the respectable face of Nazi Germany.
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The suave diplomat, fluent in several languages, who travelled the world as Hitler's personal envoy.
That's not how John Haddock remembers him. The 102-year-old war veteran from Stourbridge came face to face with the Nazi war veteran during the Nuremberg trials, and recalls how captivity and criminal charges appeared to have given the famously pompous Nazi foreign minister a reality check.
"He was pretty impassive, stony-faced," recalls John, one of the last living people to have witnessed the historic hearings in the aftermath of the Second World War.
"He was not very animated at all. Everything had to be said in German, and translated into English, so it was a long, drawn-out process."
It was the same with Karl Doenitz, Hitler's successor and the last president of Nazi Germany. He also saw Rudolf Hess, Hitler's dutiful deputy who was disowned by the regime following his bizarre peace mission to Scotland in 1941.
But it was Hermann Goering who proved the biggest draw - in more ways than one.
"Goering was the main one," he says. "He was an important man, he was second-in-command to Hitler.
"He was a big man, and he didn't move much. He just got fatter and fatter as the trial went on, he just sat there."
