Nazis

“The Catcher Was a Spy” Moe Berg, OSS, A Swing, and a Miss

Like most Special Forces guys, especially of my generation, I can’t get enough of OSS (Office of Strategic Services) from World War II. OSS was the “Greatest Generation” version of both CIA and the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets) as both sprang forth from the extraordinary organization that General William “Wild Bill” Donovan built from scratch. With the help of the British, and learning on the fly, the United States had, for the first time, a professional intelligence organization and a military force that was expert in the art of Unconventional Warfare.

Donovan attracted all types of people, making OSS quite the eclectic organization. He was looking for “PhDs who can win a bar fight.” Moe Berg fit the bill to a tee. A professional athlete, Berg, although far from a star, played major league baseball for 15 seasons as a catcher, no mean feat, as well as being one of the few Jewish players in MLB. He was also a brilliant scholar and could speak 10 languages, seven fluently and graduated from both Princeton and the Sorbonne and studied law at Columbia at a time when Jews didn’t attend in large numbers.

The story of Berg who spied for America before Pearl Harbor on a “goodwill” tour of Japan with other major league ballplayers in the 1930s and joined OSS during the war is well known among the avid readers within the intelligence and SOF communities. But to many, he was an unknown. This film that came out this summer, changed that to a degree.

Director Ben Lewin, based his film off of the bio of Berg, Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994, The Catcher Was a Spy. He assembled a great cast featuring two of my favorite actors, Paul Rudd, who is fantastic as always as Berg, Mark Strong, and a very good supporting cast with Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Connie Nielsen, Paul Giamatti, Tom Wilkinson, who I had the pleasure of working with on a Mossad film (The Debt) and Giancarlo Giannini.

I wanted to like this film, no…I wanted to love this film, as anyone who loves seeing anything about OSS in print or film does. But it doesn’t ever reach that level. In baseball parlance, unfortunately, the film is a “can of corn.”

The film goes out of its way to portray Berg as the enigma that he was. He was an introvert, a scholar and a Jew in the world of professional baseball where those traits were in short supply. But the film takes his solitary life a step farther. Lewin depicts Berg as a closet homosexual, although there has never been any evidence that Berg was.

However, the stretch isn’t too far between being a catcher in the MLB and a spy. After all, catchers are always trying to hide their signals to the pitcher from prying eyes by putting them down between their legs. And if anyone watches games closely, they’ll put down multiple signs to throw off anyone stealing them, in a simplistic but effective code.

Berg, excellently played by Rudd, is finishing up his career with the Red Sox and is ready to go into coaching when the winds of war start to blow before WWII. Touring Japan with other big leaguers, Berg snuck on top of a hospital and filmed the harbor and naval shipyards after reading about the Japanese Empire expanding. His prewar footage of Japan’s military facilities, put him on the radar of Donovan, played by Jeff Daniels. Berg is brought into OSS in early 1943.

After doing deskwork, Berg was assigned to the Special Operations Branch (SO). He was a paramilitary operations officer in OSS that would today be part of the CIA Special Activities Division.

Later he was placed in the OSS Secret Intelligence branch (SI) on the Balkans desk. Berg parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia to evaluate the various resistance groups operating against the Nazis. He met both Draža Mihailović and Josef Tito.

In the film, they touch on his next assignment. While the US is rushing forth with the Manhattan Project, the government is worried about the Nazis getting the bomb first. Werner Heisenberg (Strong), is one of the leading scientists in Germany’s quest for the bomb. While the threat is significant enough, there is some doubt about how close the Germans are. So, if they are close, Berg’s mission is to assassinate him.

He travels with another scientist (Giamatti) and a military escort (Pearce) to Zurich where Heisenberg is and he has to make a determination whether or not to kill him

Miller is cast as Berg’s long-time girlfriend, whom he keeps, like everyone else at arm’s distance. When asked point blank by Daniels if he is “queer”, Rudd/Berg answers, “I’m good at keeping secrets.”

When Berg finally meets Heisenberg, the two dance around in a nicely crafted scene where neither is willing to give much. Berg is looking for anything to confirm that the Nazis are ready to construct the atomic bomb and he’ll be tasked with killing him. While a great scene and expertly played, the film lacks the suspense we’d normally see in a spy film.

The aloofness and repressed part of his supposed homosexuality is the basis for Lewin’s assertion of proof of Berg’s bona fides as a spy. The scene where he sings the Battle Hymn of the Republic was a good one, Berg, despite his closeted personal life, is a patriot and that explains part of his motivation.

But overall, the film was too thin and it could have been much, much better. Especially with the outstanding cast that they surrounded the director with.

Berg was an intriguing character. He was intensely personal and tried to go to work for CIA after the war, but then only getting one contractor type of assignment. He never married and lived with his brother for several years before he was asked to leave, He then moved in with his sister, where he stayed until passing away at the age of 70 in 1972.

He was described as moody and snappish by his family. After WWII, he felt he lost the ability to follow his calling for his second career in the CIA. He was quoted however that, “I’d rather be a ballplayer than a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court” when someone accused him of wasting his talents on baseball.

He was awarded the Medal of Freedom for his service in OSS, but he turned it down. His sister eventually accepted it on his behalf.

He was cremated after his death and had his ashes scattered over a mountain in Israel. His baseball card is on display at CIA Headquarters.

Photos: Wikipedia/IFC Films

On This Date in 1962, Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann Hanged in Israel

Adolf Eichmann was a member of the Nazi Party, the SS, and the SD during Hitler’s reign of terror during the 1930s and 1940s. He was an SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. He was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during World War II.

After the war, Eichmann escaped prosecution and fled to Argentina where he lived until 1960. There, he was discovered by members of the Israeli Mossad and arrested and smuggled out of the country to Israel where he stood trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1961. He was found guilty and was hanged in an Israeli prison on May 30, 1962.

Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany on March 19, 1906, and soon afterward moved to Austria. He was an indifferent student and never finished his studies. He drifted from job to job in the late 20s and early 1930s before he joined the Nazi Party and shortly after the SS.

In 1934, with the rank of SS-Scharführer (Sergeant) Eichmann joined the Security Service Main Office (Sicherheitsdienst (SD) working on surveillance of Jewish organizations. In 1937, he took an inspection trip to Palestine and Egypt for the purposes of facilitating a Zionist emigration of German Jews to Palestine.

He personally oversaw the forced emigration of Austrian Jews after Hitler took over. His system was deemed so “worthy” by the Nazi hierarchy that it was deemed a template for the Nazis to use elsewhere. Once Germany overtook Czechoslovakia, Eichmann oversaw the forced deportation of Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and created a further Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, on the pattern of his Viennese model.

Once World War II began Eichmann began to not only continue with the forced emigration of Jews from Germany and occupied territories, but the forced movement of Jews to the death camps. Eichmann during this time was responsible for the movement of nearly 1.5 million Jews to the death camps located in Poland and later parts of the occupied Soviet Union.

By the autumn of 1941, Eichmann had been promoted SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and the chief of Reich Security Office (RSHA) which, took part in the planning of the annihilation of the European Jews. Since Eichmann was to be in charge of transporting Jews from all over Europe to the death camps, RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich asked Eichmann to prepare a presentation for the Wannsee Conference. At the conference, RSHA officials advised the appropriate government and Nazi Party agencies on the implementation of the “Final Solution” to what the Nazis called the “Jewish Question.” Eichmann also relayed these plans to his network of officials who would help him to carry out deportation efforts in German-occupied areas and in Germany’s Axis allies in the murder of the Jews.

Eichmann and his underlings organized the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium. In 1943 and 1944 they deported the Jews of Greece, northern Italy, and Hungary. It was in Hungary where Eichmann involved himself directly in the deportation of the Jews. From late April 1944, six weeks after Germany occupied Hungary, until early July, Eichmann and his aides deported some 440,000 Hungarian Jews. Of these 75-90 percent were murdered in the gas chambers immediately after arriving in the death camps.

At the end of World War II, Eichmann changed his name to “Otto Eckmann” and had forged papers as such to avoid detection. He was captured by the Americans but when they found out his true identity, he escaped and with the help of the Catholic Church eventually made his way to Argentina.

But Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal learned he along with the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele were in the South American country. The Israelis dispatched intelligence gathering teams from the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services and they confirmed Eichmann’s location. Under the supervision of Mossad agent Isser Harel, the Mossad kidnapped Eichmann and smuggled him out of Buenos Aires to Israel to stand trial. Harel’s tale was eventually written into a fine book on the capture, “The House on Garibaldi Street” which is highly recommended.

The Mossad knew his routine and planned on abducting him when he passed an open field near his home after getting off a bus in his town. As he approached the field, a Mossad agent spoke to him in Spanish but Eichmann sensed danger and quickly two other Mossad agents jumped him as a well and the three subdued him as the agents whisked him to a Mossad safe house where he was held for nine days until they snuck him out via a flight from Buenos Aires to Jerusalem via Dakar, Senegal.

Eichmann protested his innocence and used the well-worn “following orders” alibi which was discounted at the Nuremberg Trials. “There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders”, Eichmann said. “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.”

Eichmann’s trial before a special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court began on April 11, 1961. The legal basis of the charges against Eichmann was the 1950 Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, under which he was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organization.

The Nazis were meticulous in their record keeping and this was part of the reason that so many Nazis were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann was no exception to this rule. His own words were the most-damning toward his case when the prosecution brought forth a statement he made in 1945 that the Nazis had been responsible for over 5 million dead Jews. “I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction”

Any hope the defense had of receiving clemency from the Israeli courts were quickly extinguished over this statement. Eichmann tried to say that he was speaking about the Russians and enemies of the Reich but later admitted that he was speaking about the Jews.

The verdict was read on December 12, 1961. The judges declared him not guilty of personally killing anyone and not guilty of overseeing and controlling the activities of the Einsatzgruppen (SS Mobile Extermination Units). He was found responsible for the deplorable conditions on board the deportation trains on which the Jews were transported to the death camps. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes against not only the Jews but the Poles, Slovenes, and Gypsies. He was also found guilty of membership in three organizations that had been deemed criminal at the Nuremberg trials: the Gestapo, the SD, and the SS.

When considering the sentence, the judges concluded that Eichmann hadn’t been just following orders, but believed in the Nazi cause wholeheartedly and had been a key perpetrator of the genocide of the Jewish people. On 15 December 1961, Eichmann was sentenced to death by hanging.

Eichmann appealed his sentence but on May 31, 1962, the judges rejected his appeal. He was put to death several hours later around midnight on May 31-June 1, 1962.

His final words were about one would expect:

Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We’ll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.

After his death, his body was immediately cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean outside of Israel’s territorial waters.

Photos: Wikipedia

Wannsee Conference Outlines Nazi Plans for the “Jewish Question”

In January 1942, the leaders of the Nazi Third Reich gathered in Wannsee, Germany, a suburb of Berlin to implement their plans and policies for what they termed the “Jewish Question.” The meeting was called and chaired by Reich Main Security Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.

The Nazi’s plan, the “Final Solution” to the Jewish question was for the SS (Schutzstaffel) to oversee the obliteration of all of the Jews in Europe. Heydrich’s plan, where he laid out a proposal to force all of the Jews in Europe to Nazi-occupied Poland where they would be exterminated.

Discrimination Begins WIth Nazi Rise to Power:
As soon as Hitler and the Nazis came to power, the discrimination of the Jews began to take place. The Jews were gradually stripped of their rights as German citizens, their shops were vandalized and looted and they were encouraged to emigrate out of the country while leaving nearly all of their money and property of course.

Laws were passed to keep Jews from civil service careers. Then additional laws were enacted that would keep the Jews from practicing in any of the skilled professions such as doctors and lawyers, etc.

The in 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws which forbade Jews from marrying anyone of Germanic extraction. The Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of their German citizenship. Even those hardy souls who had lived through many of the pogroms that plagued Europe, this one is too much. As a result by 1939, more than half of Germany’s 500,000 Jews had emigrated to the United States, Britain, or Palestine.

With the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis were putting their plans into action. Einsatzgruppen (Special Task Forces) began the hunting and killing of Jewish civilians. SS and regular Wehrmacht troops murdered civilians as well.

One the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they quickly began rounding up and exterminating Jews as the Final Solution had been in effect for some time.

The Meeting By the Lake in Wannsee:
The conference was attended by fifteen of the Nazi’s top leaders or the deputies of those leaders. The attendees besides Heydrich were:
Gauleiter Dr. Alfred Mayer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
Reichsamtleiter Dr. Georg Leibbrandt (ditto)
Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Reich Ministry for the Interior)
Dr. Erich Neumann (Head of the Four Years Plan Office)
Dr. Roland Freisler (Reich Ministry of Justice)
Dr. Josef Bühler (Director General of the Generalgouvernement)
Dr. Martin Luther (Foreign Office)
SS-Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer (NSDAP Chancellery)
Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery)
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann (Race and Settlement Main Office)
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller (Reich Main Security Office/Gestapo)
SS-Obersturmbannf Adolf Eichmann (Reich Main Security Office)
SS-Oberführer Dr.Karl Eberhard Schöngarth (Commander SD / SIPO Krakow)
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Lange (Commander SD Latvia)

The purpose of the meeting Heydrich said was to discuss the plan of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question and would entail rounding up all of the Jews of Europe. It was decided that the SS under Heinrich Himmler were to be in charge of the operation to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The Jews would be transported eastward to Poland and organized into large labor gangs. Work and living conditions would be extremely brutal, with little food, so that they could kill large numbers by natural reduction. Any survivors would be treated accordingly. Treated accordingly was the alternative term for extermination.

As would be later noted during the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, not one of the 15 men there would object to the planned extermination of an entire race of people. A bigger bone of contention among the Nazis attending the conference was, how to define what exactly makes one Jewish? Himmler, always a believer in quack-science, foolishly hoped that a simple blood test could be developed that could differentiate between Jews and non-Jews. When that proved useless, the Nazis decided to go back two generations. If there was a Jewish grandparent in the last two generations, then that person was a Jew. But in their ardor to destroy the race, it ended up simply being if a Nazi party member thought you were a Jew, you were.

The minutes of the meeting never mentioned extermination but just a few months later, gas chambers were being introduced into the six Nazi death camps in Poland, Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. This did not bother the attendees at all, once again because in their minds, Jews were Untermensch or subhuman.

A copy of the minutes survived the War and was furnished at the Nuremberg trials. In one of the paragraphs it broke down how the approximate 5 million Jews of the USSR were employed:

The breakdown of Jews residing in the European part of the USSR according to trades was approximate as follows:

    Agriculture                                       9.1 %
    Urban workers                                    14.8 %
    In trade                                         20.0 %
    Employed by the state                            23.4 %
    In private occupations such as
    medical profession, press, theater, etc.         32. 7%
Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

In the course of the practical execution of the final solution, Europe will be combed through from west to east. Germany proper, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, will have to be handled first due to the housing problem and additional social and political necessities.

The evacuated Jews will first be sent, group by group, to so-called transit ghettos, from which they will be transported to the East.

The entire meeting lasted only 90 minutes. Heydrich instructed Eichmann to sanitize the minutes, (protocols in German) to sanitize them as nothing too explicit was to be put in there. All of the attendees were given a copy of the minutes after they were carefully scrutinized by Heydrich. At the end of the war, most of the copies were burned as the Nazis tried to cover their tracks in the last days of the Reich.

Heydrich was quite pleased with the meeting. No one opposed his absolute rule over the Jewish question and in fact, rather than oppose him, many at the conference pledged their support to him on the matter.

But for the Jews of Germany and the rest of Europe, the nightmare of the Holocaust was only going to get worse.

Photos: Wikipedia

Harvey Bringing Out the Real America, Not What We’ve Seen Recently

OPINION: Everywhere in the past few weeks, we’ve been inundated with scenes of violence that have spread around the country via the media like wildfire. Protests in Charlottesville, VA, Berkeley, CA and to a lesser extent in Boston has many people lamenting “What is Wrong With Our Country?” People on the fringe of our society got more than their share of publicity recently and their message of hate has had its 15 minutes. In a melting pot such as this Republic, there always has been and always will be the haters, the losers who are bent on destroying the fabric of what has always made this country great. Perfect? No. But great nevertheless. What’s Wrong With America? Nothing. Look to Houston.

Now before everyone jumps all over this to remind me of the myriad of problems that we all still face in this country, no one is denying that or saying that because of a natural disaster that they all magically go away. Far from it, but in times like this is when the people of America put aside their petty differences and work towards lifting a hand toward those in need and giving them a hand up.

Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey has dropped a ridiculously, scary amount of rain in the Houston area in less than a week. Some areas are reporting up to 50 inches of rainfall. That is more than we receive here in the New England area in an entire year. To put that into perspective for the people that live in the North, if a storm like that hit say Boston or NYC in the winter time, how much snow would it cause? With an average of 10 inches of snow to an inch of rain, you’d be looking at nearly 42 feet of snow. That is the kind of devastation that the area of Texas is dealing with.

The scenes of the flooding were like a train wreck that you couldn’t take your eyes away from on the news. Areas flooded so quickly people were trapped in their homes, on the roads, and in their workplaces. Many people have died, and sadly that number will continue to rise as the rescue workers still have a very tough job to do and eventually many more unfortunate souls will be found. Perhaps the saddest was that of Houston police officer Sergeant Steve Perez, who tragically died just days short of his 61st birthday while trying to get to his duty station.

On Sunday at around 4 a.m., Sgt.Perez left his home amid torrential rains, his wife begged him not to go due to the danger. “We’ve got work to do,” he told her. After driving for two-and-a-half hours while trying to get to his duty station in downtown Houston, Perez called his commander to say he couldn’t make it in.

Perez then followed protocol and attempted to drive to the secondary station in Houston’s Kingwood neighborhood. When the police took roll call the next morning, he wasn’t there and calling his home, his wife said she hadn’t heard from him since he left the house on Sunday. A quick search found Perez’s body where he drowned in his vehicle after trying to negotiate a flooded underpass trying to get to his duty station.

Everywhere the scenes were the same, Houston’s normally crowded thoroughfares were packed with boats, not cars as rescuers of every ilk, in every conceivable mode of boat transportation rushed in to help their neighbors. Nobody cared if the people driving the boats were black, white, brown, yellow or zebra colored. And the people in the boats were helping their neighbors and many strangers without regard to their color or creed.

One of the more compelling scenes shown on television were that of two men in a large pickup truck towing a boat. In the pouring rain, they pulled under an overpass and began unstrapping their boat. The television reporters asked where they were going. The man stopped and simply said, “We going to save people.”

Indeed the scenes were too frequent to recount every one where civilians, police officers, and National Guard troops were out in the flooded areas and carrying people and many of their pets to safety. Perhaps my favorite image was that of a man on a jet ski that drove it into a woman’s house to rescue her. Kudos to both of them and here’s hoping that both are safe today.

President Trump stated that he didn’t want to visit too soon as to take away from the rescue efforts that were ongoing and will be for several more days. But not wanting to suffer the political fallout that President Bush did during Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, he flew down to assure the Governor of Texas that Federal aid would be forthcoming and to briefly praise the efforts of the many people working tirelessly in difficult circumstances. And despite an obsession by the media on what the First Lady was choosing as her footwear, he seemed to accomplish that. Trump will have to get Congress to stop the infighting and get some aid packages together for the people of Texas. The rebuild will take years from this disaster.

But this isn’t about politicians or state and government officials. And it isn’t about the mob mentality where hate that wears a white hood or a black mask is trying to tear down everything this country has built or tear us apart. Those losers are right where they need to be, pushed into the shadows where they belong. This about the real people. And those people dropping everything, risking everything to help one another.

That is the America that still exists despite what we’ve been subjected to recently. That is what America is about, not the hate-filled idiots who only want to destroy everything we’ve built in the past 241 years. Sometimes it takes a disaster, natural or man-made to remind us of who and what we are. We had a saying in the military, (and still do) that we don’t see color, only green. No one cared about what color the guy next to you was, you’d risk your life for his and vice versa. The same is going on in Texas right now. The people out there risking their lives to help their fellow Texans? That’s the America I want to live in. And it still exists.

Photos courtesy: Wikimedia