by Guy Stern
“Yes, but for only a very short time.”
I thought von der Heyde would burst his collar button. “I used every moment we had to get my troops in shape. I knew my job!”
I maintained my barrage of insults, quoting a Hitler speech that a German soldier never surrendered, and ended my conversation by saying that I respected his right not to disclose any military information. He was mollified. Unaware that my sarcastic remarks had provoked him into a total disclosure of his latest operation, he answered, “I appreciate that, Captain.” Years after the war I learned that von der Heyde had become a member of the law faculty of the University of Würzburg. I pitied his students.
And then there was the report we wrote for general amusement, all fiction, in which we claimed to have captured Hitler’s latrine orderly. If only one humorless captain had not taken our ludicrous story seriously! I need to tell that story from the beginning. Although not the chief perpetrator, Captain Kann was the catalyst of a gigantic hoax. Soon after the Allies repelled the German counterattack during the Battle of the Bulge, Captain Kann called Sergeant Hecht (of New York City) and me to his command tent. He was grinning from ear to ear. “I want to show you something,” he said. In his hand he held a copy of the daily Canadian intelligence report. The Canucks on our Northern flank, like us now freed from German encirclement, were expressing their relief in fun and games at our expense, having satirized the form and flavor of our reports. Picking as an easy target, they had begun by throwing a particularly envenomed dart at Sergeant X, our master of rich, but not-so-beautiful prose.
The standard format for our report prescribed a short preamble, assessing the credibility and character of the informant, such as “the POW’s statement is confirmed by other prisoners.” In a bizarre non sequitur, Sergeant X had prefaced one of his reports: “POW is a tenor. That says everything.” Combining X’s idiosyncrasies with parody, the Canadians quipped: “POW is a bariturn [sic]. Does that say anything?”
“Fellows,” Captain Kann followed up, “we could also use some comic relief.” He handed us the Canadian funny paper on which he had scribbled, “Hecht and Stern, get up something funny like this!”
In short, it was humor on command. We left the command tent, looking blankly and unsmilingly at each other. How were we to amuse the captain or, for that matter, the forty-odd headquarters who routinely received our intelligence reports, with something very funny? To put it mildly, this was no joke.
But inspiration was just twenty-five steps away, though a less likely muse would be hard to imagine. It took the form of one Obergefreiter (Corporal) Joachimstaler, dancing from one foot to the other in front of my tent, waiting to be interrogated. Everything about him was diminutive; he could have posed for George Baker’s famous cartoon character “Sad Sack,” the epitome of the put-upon US foot soldier. Joachimstaler had served as company clerk and sometimes important documents passed across the desks of such functionaries. But certainly not across his desk!
A few questions and I knew that Obergefreiter Joachimstaler, if asked, would be unable to tell his elbow from another part of his anatomy. But that part now explained his dance in front of my tent. He interrupted my final question with the desperate request, obsequiously advanced, as to whether he might “of course with all due respect and only briefly” please be excused “in order to answer nature’s call.”
My friend Hecht and I smiled at the bureaucratic quaintness of his question, so different from the parlance of soldiers in battle. But we hastily dismissed him. As Joachimstaler unbuckled his belt on his way to the straddle trench, to bring about his relief and to depart from our lives, an idea suddenly occurred to Hecht: “I’ve got it! We make out that Joachimstaler was Hitler’s latrine orderly!”
Questions tumbled over and across each other. Where had he served Hitler in that important capacity? How and why did he find himself in the frontlines, liable to be captured? Need we fear a rescue party to liberate this holder of such unvarnished secrets? And, most important of all, what secrets had we extracted from Hitler’s “Privy Counselor” during an imaginary intense interrogation? I came up with the answer to that one: “He frequently observed that the Führer had a shriveled scrotum.”
Fleshed out with some howlers by our friend Sergeant Fred Howard, our account was appended to our main report that same afternoon, albeit with the warning that “contents may already be compromised.” Soon afterward, approving calls from headquarters up and down the line were flooding our field telephone. Lots of chortles, guffaws, and long-distance back-slapping. One item, an attached appendix, struck our readers as particularly comical. Pursuing once more our penchant for deflating Nazi pomposity and pretext, we had devised, with the help of our master forger Connie, a page ostensibly ripped from the latrine orderly’s paybook. Upon that document the activities of honest Joachimstaler, the toiler in night soil, had been thoroughly sanitized, nay glorified. He now emerged as “Gefreiter Joachim Joachimstaler”:
Sanitärer Unteroffizier und zuständiger Beaufsichtiger für Stoffwechselprobleme im Führer-Hauptquartier: or in plain English: “Sanitary noncom and duly qualified supervisor and observer of metabolic concerns in the headquarters of the Führer.” Latrine orderly Joachimstaler, had he existed, would have been proud.
The applause showered on our report went to our heads. Vaingloriously, Hecht and I had visions of becoming gag writers for Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny, the leading comics of our generation, or of writing for the New Yorker. Our visions were of short duration. Shortly after midnight the field telephone in the command tent rang for me. I happened to have night duty. “Guy, this is Billy,” the voice on the line said. Billy Galanis was a fellow student from Saint Louis University and was now, small world, a communication clerk at army headquarters. Whenever we got news from town or gown in Saint Louis, we would get on the line, ignoring the prohibitions against private use of field telephones, and share news from home.
But this time Billy sounded ominous. “Guy, listen, that funny report of yours? Half an hour ago Captain A.—you know he is the liaison officer from OSS—returned from his leave in Paris, read your report, and now the fat is in the fire! That dumb ass believed that entire craziness! He just phoned his headquarters in Washington. Think of it. He wants an expert on Hitler from Washington to fly over and ask your ‘latrine orderly’ some more questions.”
In a crisis like this you try first to protect your own backside. (Hecht and I were more blunt in advising each other of this.) We took a shovel, looked for an easily retraceable hiding place, and buried the Canadian report with Captain Kann’s scribbled note. We feared that a wild goose chase across the Atlantic by a high-ranking officer as a result of our hoax would unleash a court martial against its perpetrators, us. But we figured that the note by our CO, when disinterred, could serve as exculpatory evidence; it would show that we had invented the Joachimstaler tale on orders. And then, still seriously worried, we woke up Captain Kann. He appeared no less concerned. He himself got on the field telephone and woke up Lieutenant Colonel Specht, his immediate superior at army headquarters. “I’ll take care of it,” Specht tersely told Kann.
What happened next we learned in bits and pieces from Billy. Specht had run, not walked, to A.’s sleeping quarters, awakened him, and a few minutes later, Billy had been told to place another call to Washington. “That fool A. has withdrawn his request for ‘reinforcements by an expert,’” Billy reported triumphantly.
And so the humoresque of Obergefreiter Joachimstaler could, it would seem, be laid to rest. We had done our job and produced humor on request. But Gefreiter Joachimstaler, in spirit if not in body, re-entered my life decades later.
Please fast forward to the year 1990. The war is long behind us; the GI with chutzpah, Sergeant Stern, has long ago become a staid professor at Wayne State University and is writing a scholarly article on intelligence work during World War II. He has brought home a formidable stack of books on the subject. Just before supper his wife Judy comes
home and sees said professor absolutely convulsed with laughter. “You usually don’t find research so hilarious,” she drily observes. The professor points to a book in front of him. It is by two British scholars, Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, entitled America’s Secret Army: The Untold Story of the Counter Intelligence Corps.
The wife, all too frequently exposed to wartime stories, knows all about Joachimstaler. But now her husband reads to her the findings of the British colleagues, obviously gleaned from a copy of the “Joachimstaler Report” in the National Archives:
The news of the defection of Hitler’s lavatory attendant was broadcast by Radio Luxembourg, now in Allied hands. When Hitler heard it, he was said to have fallen into one of his periodic depressions. As it was believed that Sergeant Johannisberg [sic] was in possession of information that could prove extremely embarrassing to the Führer, the order was given for the defector to be found and repatriated as soon as possible before he revealed all.
The man put in charge of this delicate task of retrieval was, inevitably, SS Colonel Skorzeny. In the presence of none less than Heinrich Himmler and General Sepp Dietrich, Skorzeny briefed the man he had placed in charge of this mission, Captain Franz Erich von Missenhofer, a resourceful young officer who spoke fluent English. Missenhofer’s unenviable task was to cross into the American lines, enter the prison camp where the defected sanitary sergeant was held captive, and return with him back to the German lines.
The spurious report goes on for several pages more, all copied or extrapolated from our phantasmagoria. Corporal Joachimstaler, via his inspiring bowel movement, has thus gained immortality. Greatness had been thrust upon him.
It may seem that we were all of a sudden a particularly humorous group of soldiers, but it must be said that comic relief is a necessity in wartime, a means to cope with almost daily tragedy. It was only after the war that I came to this conclusion. In the meanwhile I was a witness, no a participant, even if a day later, in the liberation of Paris.
We had established our latest PW Enclosure within sight of Paris. From that point forward our ranking noncom and my close friend, Kurt Jasen, took over our fate. By flashing our identity cards as intelligence personnel, he got us into Paris; we were among the first US soldiers to enter after the liberation. He had also spread out a magnificent lunch before the three of his teammates at a prestigious restaurant and, as a seasoned man of the world, he had secured four single bedrooms at a reasonably prized hotel for himself and us. No small feat in overcrowded Paris!
But that afternoon was no time to spend indoors. Paris, the City of Lights, was aglow. Its citizens had taken to the streets, singing, dancing, embracing and kissing total strangers, overwhelmed by freedom restored, paradise regained. Toward evening Kurt introduced us to his favorite bar. A singer was standing on a slightly raised platform, giving her all as her salutation to “Paree Libre.” The love songs of Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf enveloped us, spelling out unalloyed bliss.
I was carried away, all the more so because I am a rather disciplined person. “I’ve got to get some air,” I said to my comrades-in-arms. They were similarly gripped. I walked fewer than two blocks—and saw her. She resembled the girl of my dreams. I, the young man from provincial Hildesheim, walked up to her and simply said: “Un jour magnifique!” She seemed utterly delighted to find an American with whom she could share her feelings in her own language. But in that evening of feelings, exploding like fireworks, few words were needed. Our arms interlinked.
“Je suis Guy,” I said, pronouncing my name the French way. “Dorette.” she said simply. And then a torrent of words, after all. She was a year older than I and was engaged. With liberation at hand, she rejoiced, she could now continue her studies. They had been interrupted by the hated German occupation. She had to earn a living; her preoccupation with Greek Antiquity had to yield to cooking in a Greek-styled restaurant.
“But now we all have a new start,” she exalted. “C’est un jour de fete,” I agreed, bursting forth with a Piaf signature song I had heard moments ago in the bar. “Not a bad voice,” she applauded. Our steps had taken us close to my hotel. There was no demurrer on her part. We found ourselves in my small room. In a spirit of exuberance she took off her red hat and tossed it ceilingward. She began taking off garments. I lagged behind; awkwardness had taken me in its grip. She laughed—and helped. “You are my first woman,” I whispered. She did not respond. All of a sudden the lights gave out. Our room, all of Paris was bathed in darkness. But I was prepared. I had confiscated an ever-ready flashlight from one of our prisoners, for use at nighttime interrogations. I successfully groped for it in my musette bag. I turned the small wheel that operated it. A soft light suffused the room. I turned it on her, I gasped at beauty.
Then we were lying side by side. “I am so happy that I am your first woman—on this night of all nights.” Unlike me, she did not whisper, but audibly proclaimed her response. I could say it was a night of utter fulfillment, but that would not describe this apogee of emotions. The feelings of all that had happened on this day-and-a-half, the ecstasy of an entire city lived in us as body met body.
In the morning she was dressed before me. She bent over and kissed me and softly closed the door after her. Still half asleep my reaction was far too slow to stop her. I never saw her again. I passed up a chance of returning to Paris after V-E Day. I knew no visit would equal that night. In the course of time I looked up the meaning of her name. Dorette, I learned, is derived from the Greek and means “a gift.”
CHAPTER SIX
Postwar
My Life as a Student and Beyond
The medal that was bestowed on me by Courtney H. Hodges, Commanding General of the First Army at our last outpost in Germany, had a direct effect on my personal development. It removed some of the lingering doubts I had about my self-worth, which had been diminished as a result of my father’s admonition to resemble invisible ink. Ever since I was appointed to head the Survey Section, I felt competent to handle any set of questions posed to us. I was satisfied with the job I was doing. It was coupled with another recognition by one of my superior officers. My own returning self-esteem was reinforced by a highly ranked officer whom I greatly respected. The two testimonials, one officially bestowed on me by our commanding general, the other by a leading US journalist, who had been able to observe me closely throughout the war, reinforced my ambition to become a newspaper reporter.
I had met Major Shepard Stone upon several occasions during the war. I knew that in civilian life, he was the editor of the Sunday Supplement of the New York Times. Our exchanges had always been limited to line of duty. One day, however, when he came to our interrogation enclosure, he congratulated me on the medal and then to my surprise, asked me what I aspired to after the War. “I’d like to become a journalist,” I answered.
“That’s what I heard,” he said “I have written a letter on your behalf to David Joseph, city editor of the Times. Here’s a copy.” I have kept that letter all through my life and will immodestly share it here with my readers:
I was looking forward to my discharge with a sense of elation. Major Stone’s letter, apparently, was directly opening the door for me to the offices of the New York Times. A troop ship brought hundreds of GIs, my Ritchie buddies and me, to Newport News, Virginia. A small band greeted us, and a bevy of young Southern ladies had also apparently charged themselves with meeting incoming troop ships. One of the young ladies fell into a stimulating conversation with me, but finally I gave up because my German accent, incompatible with her Southern dialect, was preventing the more subtle parts of our remarks to be understood. Also, our encounter was brief. I was off that same afternoon to Saint Louis via a passenger train of the C&O Railroad.
When I arrived at my old home, after almost three years, my aunt and uncle were there to greet me. I bear hugged the couple that had seen me through my adolescence into adulthood. Gratitude overwhelmed me. Within their capacity, they had tried to truly be substitutes for the
parents I missed. Aunt Ethel was untiring in correcting both the English slang I’d picked up in our neighborhood and the antiquated English I’d learned in my German high school. Uncle Benno, in recalling his own childhood, reconnected me to the stays at my grandparents’ home. With those thoughts I went into my old bedroom; it seemed to have shrunk.
The next day I looked up all my former schoolmates, many of them still living in the same neighborhood, some of them also returned veterans. Several would never return. I stayed in Saint Louis less than a month. It wasn’t only that a feeling, condensed in a popular song echoed by returned veterans, affected me as well: “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?).” Also, Shepard Stone’s letter was burning in my breast pocket.
A telephone call to the venerated city editor of the New York Times assured me that Mr. Joseph would see me if I were to come to New York. Prior to taking that train ride east, I informed my buddy Fred Howard, still on active duty in Europe, of my plans. He wrote back that I could stay initially with his mother and stepfather, living right in the heart of Manhattan. Paula and her husband, Jim Erikson, night manager of a Manhattan hotel, proved to be most gracious hosts, and I finally got to meet Fred’s mother, our link to that fateful meeting with Marlene Dietrich.
Two weeks later I stood in an impressive office of the New York Times, convinced I would leave with a lifetime contract from my favorite newspaper. Mr. Joseph’s opening remarks did nothing to discourage me: “We have been expecting you. We consider you a good prospect. You see, Shep rarely writes such letters.” But then came a cold shower. “We are not hiring anyone at this time. In fact, we are double-staffed. Our correspondents are coming back from their wartime service and we don’t want to lay off the substitute staff that did such an able job during these war years.” Yet his final words returned some hope. “I would say stick around New York and come back about once a month.” That was a most generous offer, and it showed once again, the weight he was attaching to Shepard Stone’s letter. I ended up meeting with Mr. Joseph three or four times after our initial interview.
