by Guy Stern
And the interrogated German “Landsers” (privates) admitted that they held on to a safe-passage leaflet signed by General Eisenhower. They displayed their typically German faith in printed assurances. However, they immediately discarded several leaflets because they didn’t understand them. We in the survey section suspected that these latter ones had been composed by some of the most rarified brains of academics serving now as composers of propaganda leaflets.
Three months into our war, the activities of the survey section spread out in new directions. The arrival of a replacement set off fireworks. Fred Howard, born in Silesia, raised in Berlin, known at birth as Fritz Ehrlich, arrived in our midst with a barracks bag full of ideas, most of them, with a bit of toning down, radically and erratically useful. On the day of his arrival, I was writing a response to yet another questionnaire about the routing of German supplies, such as fuel, ammunition, and food from the homefront to the front lines. The information was solid; what it lacked were graphics to make the complicated routes, interchanges, and rest stops more quickly comprehensible. As we broke for lunch, I asked Fred whether he could draw worth a damn. “Well, in civilian life I was a designer,” he replied to my delight. With his illustrations added, I could reduce my expository remarks. The old bromide that a picture was worth a thousand words was validated. For example, when German equipment had to be transferred from one train station to another, the process was complex and hard to explain in words; Fred’s detailed drawings made things crystal clear.
We soon found out that we complimented each other: Fred wildly creative, I more disciplined; Fred with an overabundance of chutzpah [gall], I a little bit better under control. (Fred failed his driving test the first time because he didn’t stay within the prescribed routine, but rather showed off with a spectacular maneuver, unappreciated by his driving examiner.) With rare exceptions we could come up with outrageous ideas and actions while steering clear of reprimands. Later in this chapter, I will tell of how Fred would abduct the famous movie star, Marlene Dietrich, from a USO performance to our prisoner of war enclosure about twenty-five miles away. For him the fact that we had no authority to either transport her in our jeep or bring her to an army enclosure, classified as restricted, only added to his zest for adventure.
We talked shop during meals. As the last arrival, Fred had drawn the most onerous task. He was to satisfy the constantly increasing requests by our air force for important targets. Captain Rust decided to initiate a second special section, labeled simply but accurately “Targets.” Determined to lay waste to German supplies, the leaders of our flying boys wanted us to pinpoint exact locations. Their questionnaires were straightforward. “Supply us with the coordinates of the ball-bearing factory, the one near Schweinfurt! What are significant landmarks leading us to that target? Is the factory rail connected to the main railroad system?” Another: “We hit the Juncker works in February. Aerial photography does not show the extent of the damage. Can you find out?” Or another: “The optical factory in Remscheidt has apparently relocated. The new coordinates, please!” And yet another: “A new plant opened in Wanne-Eickel. What’s the product?”
Of course Fred, as well as anyone, had learned subtle interrogation methods at Ritchie. But how could you disguise a question dealing with the landmarks pointing to that Schweinfurt factory? The moment you asked even the dumbest, densest, or most deranged German soldier a question like that, he would know that we planned to bomb the hell out of that plant. And for good reason, he would clam up or invoke the Geneva Convention, which obliged him only to reveal his name, rank, and serial number. The reasons for security-mindedness differed from one POW to the other, but all were compelling: A POW’s parents or his sweetheart might be working at a potential target. Or he himself had been a peacetime employee there. From that vantage point, he might know that Germany, bleeding already from loss of equipment, would lose the war for want of vital war machinery. One POW had an even better reason: the factory we were inquiring about belonged to his father.
“How do you break such a prisoner?” Fred started to lament after a frustrating, futile interrogation. I recited the well-rehearsed Ritchie categories. Fred greeted each but the last one with an expletive borrowed from animal husbandry. “OK, fear,” he repeated after me. “What scares those SOBs most, in your experience?”
“That’s easy,” I answered. “‘Sieg oder Sibirien’ (victory or Siberia),” as innumerable placards warned them. “They are scared shitless of the Russians. To be taken prisoner by the Soviets and to be sent to one of their prison camps, perhaps one located in Siberia, they think is a fate worse than death.”
“OK,” Fred perked up, “then let’s import a Ruskie!” As usual I dampened Fred’s off-the-wall suggestion.
“But how about one of us turning into one?,” I ventured. In that heady, charged moment, Kommissar Krukow was conceived.
First thing the next morning, we went to see Captain Edgar Kann, the second-ranking officer of our unit. He was put in charge when Captain Rust was given a new assignment at G-2, First Army Headquarters. Younger than Rust and a storm-tossed refugee like us, he was a bit more adventurous than his predecessor. “Hell, why not try it?” he enthused.
Fred and I worked out the details. Kommissar Krukow’s gestation took just one week. Going against typecasting, I was to become the irascible Russian. I had learned to fake a Russian accent in my native German pronunciation. My model? While I was at the home of my aunt and uncle in Saint Louis, we all clustered around the radio each Sunday evening when Eddie Cantor’s comedy show went on the air. One of the recurring minor roles was that of the “mad Russian.” I could imitate his stereotypical impersonations of a demented Russian. I just needed a credible uniform. We went to some recently liberated Russian prisoners and traded our worn-out fatigues for parts of their uniforms. Then we asked our MPs who regularly searched our POWs to “confiscate” their trophies, whole assemblages of Russian medals, looted by the Germans from Russian captives. Kommissar Krukow was born and baptized with the name that would accompany him henceforth. It was the invention of Sergeant Johnny Kirsners, our Russian expert. (Only during my years as a language professor would I learn that wry Johnny had dubbed me with the Russian equivalent of “Kommissar Hook.”)
A few stage props were still missing. Johnny devised a trilingual sign that identified my interrogation tent as belonging to a Russian liaison officer. Johnny also found a portrait of Comrade Stalin, which the ruler of the entire Soviet Union had dedicated to his friend, Kommissar Krukow. Johnny signed a fervent, nay fulsome dedication to the good Kommissar, to which Stalin might have pointed with pride for its rhetoric.
When the next air force questionnaire landed on Fred’s desk, the interrogation-by-duo received its trial. Fred’s very first prisoner, when asked about his hometown industries, hid behind the Geneva Convention. As we had rehearsed, Fred put on his most sorrowful mien. “I understand your position. But please understand mine. Last month we received orders from high up that we must turn uncooperative prisoners over to our Russian allies. I don’t like it,” he added in a voice resurrected from the grave, “but please come with me now.”
Off he marched with his charge to the tent with the ominous inscription. He solemnly greeted me. “Here is a prisoner and the transfer papers.” At that moment the mad Russian had an attack of apoplexy, and the following carefully rehearsed dialogue ensued.
Kommissar K: Sergeant, what kind of sorry specimen are you bringing me here!? That Nazi won’t even survive the transport to the salt mines!
Fred: Kommissar, I must ask you to respect my uniform and don’t shout at me or I will take this prisoner right back to my tent!
Kommissar: You can’t do that! This tent is Russian soil!
Fred, having introduced the beast, me, wordlessly walked the prisoner back. Oozing sympathy for his captive, he confided to the prisoner that he could not square it with his conscience to leave him at the mercy of that unspeakable Russian. “I feel so sor
ry for you,” muttered Fred, “you are still so young and from all I hear you are probably throwing your life away.” Mental anguish already written all over his face, the prisoner now faced one more confrontation with my alter ego. I picked up my telephone before ranting at Fred that he was provoking an international incident between allies by his sympathy for a German enemy. When my rage had reached a crescendo, I turned once more on the hapless prisoner.
“What have you done to that naïve American? You don’t have to answer that! I’m having orders cut to send you to the so-called prison camp of the living dead in Siberia.” It now looked as though Fred and I were going to come to blows. Fred grabbed the prisoner and led him back once more to the interrogation tent, as though rescuing him. Within minutes this particular prisoner was telling Fred all he knew about his hometown and its industries.
With older prisoners, Fred would deplore the likely possibility that the prisoner would never see his family again. The best he could do for him, Fred would say funereally, was to allow him to write a final letter before relinquishing him to the Russians. “The Russians,” he would sorrowfully explain, “do not recognize the Red Cross even for such humanitarian services as sending a letter.”
We didn’t break everyone. Some of our captives may have reflected on the impossibility of transporting prisoners across half a continent to face the feared Russians. But mostly the stratagem worked. Our highly pleased air force command caused a unit citation to be authorized and sent our way. Our success silenced any thought about the roughness of our method. I shared those sentiments one time with a battle-hardened MP officer. I said, “You know if someone believes he is actually writing his final farewell to the person he feels closest to, we are inflicting a trauma upon him.” The MP lieutenant looked at me and answered with an unmistakable touch of sarcasm, “Sergeant Stern, haven’t you learned the first lesson of warfare yet? War is hell!”
Literally hundreds of such battles of the mind followed, as we rushed through France, Belgium, and Germany, until we met the Russians at the Elbe River. In between came one major bloody hold up: a German counteroffensive in the Hürtgen Forest, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Everything might have ended for me during that battle, had our unit retreated through the Belgian town of Malmedy instead of through the city of Eupen. I would have been a victim of the massacre of American prisoners ordered by SS General Sepp Dietrich. Even closer to our nightmares, a lower-ranked Nazi officer had specifically ordered the killing of captured German Jews. Two Ritchie Boys, for example, having been identified as “Jews from Berlin,” were summarily shot by that officer. The news of that war crime went through our unit and prompted a promise to ourselves that we would from that moment on gather every bit of evidence against this officer if we captured him. We were totally successful. We even found the makeshift graves of our murdered comrades. I never forgot their names. Seventy years later I stood in front of those graves when I visited Normandy for the first time. I put my hand on both gravestones and then reached for my handkerchief.
During our retreat we were ordered to establish a temporary POW camp at the old fortress town of Huy. That short sojourn sticks in my memory because my routine duties were interrupted by two extraordinary events. One morning one of our screeners brought an average looking prisoner to me. “This Austrian noncom said that he brought a valuable diary along.” The prisoner, Sergeant Karl Laun, was sent to me after the screeners had discovered that this vaunted diary was written in German shorthand and that I was the only one of the Ritchie Boys at 1st Army Headquarters listed as “conversant with German shorthand.” That was owing to the foresight of my parents. They had insisted that I take a relevant course in addition to the standard high school curriculum in Hildesheim.
The prisoner appeared in my tent; his diary turned out to be a gold mine of overheard classified information and, equally important, an informed assessment of morale among German soldiers. Sometimes it reported the rude awakening of a disillusioned Nazi or, less frequently, an account of a long-nurtured rebelliousness against German rulers. In both cases I felt that their “rude awakening” in late 1943 had come a bit too late. Laun and I transcribed the diary. The material generated twenty-three issues of our daily report. I supplied a title, “From the Bulge to the Rhine.”
As we found out, it was widely read by various headquarters up and down the line. In fact after the last installment had been distributed, one officer asked for more: “Didn’t the talk of the German soldiers also center on sex?” My informant, Karl Laun who became my good Austrian friend after the war, had nothing in his diary to offer. “Well,” he said, “I can supply an erotic sequel with a bit of fiction thrown in.” This addition in collaboration with me also became a resounding hit with our readers. Did we have a knack for purple prose? We were never tested again. But Laun’s diary has a chance of immortality because a copy of it is now housed within the Truman Presidential Library.
As the author of this informative diary, Karl Laun became one of the earliest recruits for a rapidly growing roster of trustees. These were prisoners with particularly useful skills for our purposes and with a verifiably unblemished political past. They were given a multitude of tasks. For example, there was Private Korn, with decided Communist leanings, who had been a concentration camp inmate for the better part of a year. He was invaluable in procuring information gathered at night when we slipped him into the holding cage and he emerged with intelligence collected from our “guests,” especially those with a loose tongue. Then there was Konrad Modrach, who had talents as a forger and as a slight-of-hand magician. He showed his ingenuity, prior to being drafted, by bribing a Gestapo official. Through generous gifts of jewelry, he was able to gain the status of a “quarter-Jew,” instead of becoming an incarcerated “half-Jew,” which is what he really was. His father was Jewish, his mother was not. “Quarter-Jews,” often at the whim of the local party leader, had a chance of being spared deportation.
It was Karlie, as I called him in postwar years, who became our key helpmeet in my second extraordinary encounter during my duty as an interrogator: my direct confrontation (along with Fred Howard) with one of “Hitler’s willing executioners,” by the name of Dr. Gustav Wilhelm Schübbe. Of course, we were somewhat prepared or should have been, because even before we met this despicable and self-righteous ideologist, we saw and heard evidence of extirpation, even when it was not (yet) our assignment to uncover war crimes.
The unmasking of Dr. Schübbe was owing in equal parts to Fred’s interrogation skills and to the improbable concentration of fortuitous circumstances during one day in the spring of 1945. The precise date was April 12, 1945, the day President Roosevelt died. Earlier that day Fred had interrogated an unreconstructed Nazi who boasted that he was the nephew of the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The SS was selected for its unquestioning loyalty to the Nazi Party and its instant readiness to murder Jews and other “undesirables.” Our MPs, when searching Himmler’s nephew, found a photo of his infamous uncle. They turned it over to Fred. He took out a pair of scissors separating the photo from its background, put a string around Himmler’s neck and hung him up in effigy around his gooseneck lamp. He couldn’t know how that picture would become a most important prop in the drama of that day.
Fred had already worked considerably past midnight and had exchanged his uniform for some civvies. Weary, he turned to the two trustees at his side, Korn and Laun, and ordered the last selected prisoner, the aforementioned Dr. Schübbe, to be brought in. Fred was multitasking. While interrogating, he listened to a German radio station. How was the enemy going to exploit the death of Roosevelt propagandistically? He didn’t have to wait long. “The arch villain, the provoker of this war, is dead. Now our victory is in sight,” proclaimed the radio.
Schübbe, apparently taking in both the photo of Himmler and the German propaganda broadcast, greeted Fred with a smile and casually remarked, “Na, ich sehe, wir sind unter uns.” (Well, I see we are among ourselves.
) Fred was about to explode. But Korn was out of his seat, reached over to Fred and handed him a slip with a one-word message, “Opium!”
Fred caught on at once. In a skeptical voice he said, “I sure as hell know who we are, but who, do tell, are you?”
Schübbe became formal. “Please, if you look at your files there, you will find my name and position. I’m in command of the euthanasia station at Kiev.”
Now Fred didn’t let go anymore. “I need more details. Tell me more!” He egged Schübbe on; the complete confession of a war criminal was in progress. Karl Laun was rapidly taking down every word in shorthand. And then disaster struck. Fred passed his informant a cup of coffee to keep him going. The strong brew seemed to cut through Schübbe’s opium-induced delusion. The second disaster was that I, or rather Kommissar Krukow in full Soviet regalia, came in ready to tell Fred to call it a day. That sobered the doctor completely. He refused to say another word. A Russian officer was certainly not part of Schübbe’s imaginary scenario.
The next day we used a traditional method of interrogation, asking the same questions over and over again, assisted by Laun’s transcribed stenographic notes. And we succeeded. Herewith is some of the dialogue, when Schübbe “justified” his heinous deeds. I believe it is an accurate reflection of an executioner’s state of mind during his murder of handicapped civilian prisoners.
Fred: You surely are completely conscious of what your work meant for Germany, but you also certainly know that a large section of innocent people were annihilated through your institute in Kiev?
