Transcript of Letter from Katherine Fite to Mr. and Mrs. Emerson Fite

26, Nuremberg, Sunday, Dec. 16 Dearest Mother and Daddy, Letters are certainly getting irregular and unpredict- able. Your last came in eight days, one took seventeen. I suspect some come boat. No, I didn't have dysentery. They got it at the Press Camp where I dine dined with no ill effects last week and which I described to you in my last letter. I am still up in the air about what I811 do Xmas, being still up in the air about whether I'll leave for home this week. They want me to stay - a month or a month and a half - to release the men. I can't affoed to do it that way under the terms of my State Department detail - and if pressed shall insist on sending another cable to State. Morale is very low - as they have let peo- ple go with no system whatsoever and most of the good people have gone or are going. All really because a most incompetent man has been put second in com- mand by the Justice. The Justice himself has not taken an active enough part in things. So I may go to Paris and return - I might just possibly go to Lon- don and return. I might go either place en route home. I might stay here. I might go to Berchtesgaden which I am crazy to see - but don't know anybody going. Shall have to make up my mind in the next few days. Our case comes on Tuesday - the Cabinet Acanned speech will be deliv- ered by the above-mentioned incompetent who hasn&t even discussed the case with us yet. We will sit and hand papers to him and be prepared to write him AN answers to any questions the Court may ask. So there's nothing but work to write about and that is dull. RONATIONAL John I don't think I wrote you last week about seeing Arsenic and Old The opera house is cold as a barn - you wear heavy coats and carry blankets. I did appreciate what the USO means to relieve tedium. It was really a good performance by Broadway people. We sat in Hitler's box. The Court House now displays the flags of the four nations. The hammer and sickle flaps around right under our windows and occasionally a GI has to climb out our window to unwrap it from around the pole. There are lots of Russies here here but they keep to themselves. Lauguage difficulties I think mostly - plus their own suspicious nature. I suppose they feel very alien in our more or less Americanized and certainly bourgeois society. I was talking this evening with an officer. I suppose he is typical of many and rather frightening. He is a young man from Ithaca - not dumb by a long shot - rather coarse and certainly bound for a career in the American Legion. He's only a first lieutenant but he knows his way around. He has only just arrived but got himself billeted at this hotel when he isn't supposed to be here. Has a radio and an electric heater and a good stock of liquor and cigars. Gripes about the people in Paris and Marseilles who wouldn't give him special billets because he knew the right people. Despises the French and the English and the Belgians and the DP's. Ad mires the Krauts - only people on the ball in Europe - only people who know how to do things. Yes, he saw Buch- enwald the day after it was liberated and stacks and stacks of human corpses. But - you must remember- they were pretty lowdown people the Germans had in the camps anyway, perverts, etc. And, God help me, he hopes to get into pol- i is within a few years. On one point I agree with him - the American people are wrecking things by demanding that the boys come home immediately.