Guy’s new partnership with Fred had taught him that imagination could be an interrogator’s most important asset. While their training at Camp Ritchie served as a solid foundation, there were times in the field when it was best to throw away the book, and this went beyond their creation of Commissar Krukov. For instance, after difficulties with German officers who were flat-out unwilling to be questioned by any enlisted men, Guy, Fred, and the other interrogators—the majority of them sergeants or a lower enlisted rank—simply reached into their collection of donated officer insignias and snapped the appropriate one onto their collar to make themselves at least equal to the Offizier they were about to face. Elsewhere in the army, an enlisted man impersonating an officer would be subject to a court-martial, but for the interrogators, such a ploy that worked to get information was considered fair game.
Some interrogators served as screeners, their role being to quickly determine which prisoners might possess worthwhile information. One morning, a screener brought Guy a diminutive twenty-four-year-old German prisoner named Karl Laun. He was an Austrian draftee who had served in a Wehrmacht antiaircraft artillery unit until deserting to U.S. troops near the Rhine River. Laun was carrying a diary of his last months on the front lines. It was one hundred pages long, and he had written it in shorthand. Laun and his diary were brought to Guy because he was the only interrogator around who could read German shorthand. While Laun said he was willing to read the diary aloud, no one at headquarters was comfortable using such information without someone confirming the entries. As soon as he opened it and began reading, Guy knew they had stumbled upon a bounty of classified information, including assessments of German morale, equipment, personnel, and armaments. The diary had details on troop, artillery, and armor movements, and other tactical insights. Laun also complained in the diary about Nazi ideology, which he said he had long disavowed for religious reasons. And he wrote unsparingly about evidence he had seen of an atrocity committed by Germans in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge:
20 Dec 1944
With dawn I return to our positions. Our bivouac area is punctured by artillery craters. Without warning a monstrous, abhorrent picture presents itself to me. Its horror slaps me in the face. Corpses of murdered soldiers. Soldiers who after an honest fight had surrendered to our paratroopers. They were then turned over to the SS, who organized them for the purpose of the slaughter. Who of these SS bastards has even the slightest inkling of international law, or, for that matter, of humanity? Nothing, absolutely nothing, is sacred to them. There they lie, those U.S. soldiers, without weapons or helmets, evidently shot from behind, mute witnesses against a system of murder. They are the witnesses, but where is the prosecutor and the judge? I know up above there is a higher tribunal, and I’m certain if we down here don’t punish them that a just Lord will do it unfailingly.
Guy worked with Laun to translate into English the complete diary, with Laun explaining abbreviations and other cryptic references. They turned it into a twenty-four-part series, “From the Bulge to the Rhine: Diary of an Austrian Anti-Nazi.” Each installment was attached to Guy’s daily intelligence report that went to various commands, where the serialization acquired a loyal readership. In fact, after the last segment was distributed, one senior officer asked for more. “But isn’t there any sex?” Guy mentioned the request to Laun, who had a wife and child at home in Vienna, where he had been a university student before the war. Laun confirmed there hadn’t been much of that to write about, but he could make up some juicy parts for the brass. He and Guy dashed out an erotic sequel that became a must-read at headquarters and other commands.
Karl Laun soon began doing valuable work inside the cage, listening to what the new prisoners said among themselves. He and several other prisoners became the interrogators’ “trusties,” all of them proven anti-fascists. They would spend time in the cage, then tip off the interrogators as to which prisoners were worthy of further questioning. A prisoner who returned from his initial screening boasting of having fooled the Americans, for example, would be targeted for more intense interrogation. The trusties did so at great personal risk, as prisoners were beaten up inside the cage by other prisoners—usually devoted Nazis—for far less, such as speaking ill of Hitler. Eventually, when it became too risky to keep putting Laun back inside the cage, he was assigned to Guy as a stenographer. Laun sat in with Guy during interrogations, taking notes in shorthand, which Guy later referred to when writing his reports. The two men became close, and Guy came to appreciate Laun for his enthusiasm and sense of humor. One day, Guy was addressing a group of newly arrived prisoners, telling them their war was over and ordering them to fall in line for questioning. One tough German sergeant refused to do so. He spun around and barked to the others that the war was not over, and to keep quiet and remember that they were still proud German fighting men. From where he had been standing by Guy’s side, Laun went over to the sergeant, who towered about a foot over him, reached up, and yanked down the visor on the sergeant’s field cap so it half obscured his face. “Look at the big clown who thinks he’s still fighting the war!” Laun announced in German. All the prisoners laughed. His resistance broken by that public act of disrespect, the sergeant stepped meekly back and the Germans all fell into line.
Guy came to appreciate that although there were many fanatic Nazis fighting for Hitler—he estimated about half of those he interrogated were fervent Nazis and 20 percent were willing followers who had bought into the Nazi ideology until they started losing—there were also decent men like Karl Laun in the Wehrmacht.
One morning in February 1945, a message came down from headquarters. Fred saw it first and hurried to Guy with the news: Marlene Dietrich was performing her USO show the next day, twenty miles from Huy. Fred already had a plan. “Let’s get over there, Guy!”
Dietrich had left Germany in the early 1930s for Hollywood, where she made six films over the next five years as Paramount Pictures presented her as a German answer to MGM’s Swedish sensation, Greta Garbo. In 1937, when she was performing in London, several Nazi Party officials approached her offering lucrative contracts if she returned home as the Third Reich’s leading film star. Even though her mother and sister still lived in Berlin, Dietrich, a staunch anti-Nazi and strongly opposed to Hitler, refused their offer and that year applied for U.S. citizenship, which she received in 1939. She had started a fund with several other Germans working in Hollywood to help Jews and dissidents escape from Nazi Germany. When the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, she became one of the first celebrities to go on a war bond tour, and was reported to have sold more than any other Hollywood star. Since then, she had gone on several USO tours, performing for Allied troops in Algeria, Italy, Britain, France, and Belgium.
Taking a jeep the next morning, Fred and Guy drove to the rural inn where she was scheduled to appear. The inn’s large catering hall was already packed with soldiers when they arrived. There were no chairs, only hundreds of GIs on the floor sitting atop their steel helmets. Guy and Fred squeezed into the middle and perched on their helmets like everyone else. The stage, only a few feet above floor level, was bare except for a wooden chair in the middle and off to one side an upright piano with a stool. Everyone waited expectantly. After about fifteen minutes, a man came out and sat at the piano. Then the room hushed completely when the Berlin-born blonde strolled out, smiling and waving at the troops. What were often billed as the “loveliest legs in Hollywood” were covered in GI fatigues just like the ones the soldiers wore. She cracked a few jokes critical of the chow and accommodations, which drew boisterous laughs from the GIs. She then told the men she had once had her heart set on becoming a classical musician but her cabaret and film career had left her with little time to practice. So she had taken up a different kind of instrument.
Movie star Marlene Dietrich having chow with GIs during a USO tour. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)
“Would you like to hear me play my musical saw, boys?”
Marl
ene’s saw was famous, and the men cheered their approval. She plopped in the chair and grabbed a wood saw and violin bow. Gripping the saw’s handle between her knees, she bent the blade from the top down with one hand, and began strumming the bow on the jagged teeth to create a high-pitched tune they all knew: “Lili Marleen.”
She next sang a song that raised a thunderous cheer because they all would have loved to order a round of drinks: “Go See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have,” from her role as a saloon girl in the 1939 Western-comedy in which she costarred with James Stewart, Destry Rides Again.
When she finished her set, the whistles and applause were deafening. She returned for three encores, then blew kisses and waved farewell.
“Let’s go backstage and meet her,” hollered Fred. He jumped up and pushed his way through the crowd, with a dubious Guy following, wondering what they could possibly say that would be of interest to this movie star.
Behind the stage, they predictably found Dietrich ringed by all ranks of army personnel. Fred cut through the torrent of plaudits by addressing her in German as Frau Dietrich. He said his mother, Frau Ehrlich, had been Dietrich’s masseuse on several occasions when she visited New York. She remembered Paula Ehrlich, said the movie star, who was clearly surprised to find a GI speaking flawless German. Now Fred had his opening. He introduced himself and Guy as interrogators at the First Army’s POW cage and asked if she had ever seen such an enclosure. She had not, and her curiosity was piqued. So Fred invited her to take a ride with them twenty miles back to Huy. After a quick word to her pianist and escorts—“I’ll be back in a couple of hours”—she followed Fred and Guy outside, leaving scores of disappointed and envious GIs in their wake, and piled into their jeep.
When they reached the Citadel, they drove right up the ramp to the cage. German officers were confined on one side of a narrow walkway, with enlisted men on the opposite side. As they walked down the center aisle, whatever curiosity Marlene had about seeing German POWs paled compared to their excitement at seeing her. The word spread rapidly in the cage: “Marlene Dietrich ist hier!” Hundreds of them pressed against the wire enclosures on both sides, trying to see her, speak to her, touch her. Dietrich initially waved to the men, but she was clearly taken aback by their sheer numbers. Although it was a friendly mob, it was still a mob of German soldiers rushing the fences and pressing against them all the way up the line, sticking their hands and arms through the wire.
“What the hell is going on?” said the MP captain of the unit in charge of guarding the prisoners. Before Fred or Guy could explain, the captain recognized Dietrich and said, “Get her out of here! Now! Or I’ll have a riot on my hands!”
Marlene seemed relieved to get away from the mass of prisoners, many of whom were still whistling and cheering as they drove off. Safely back in the jeep, Marlene told Fred and Guy that she wasn’t surprised the prisoners had taken such an interest in her because something similar had happened when she visited the border town of Stolberg, the first German city taken by the Americans. She had gone there with her U.S. Army escorts to gauge the reaction of her former countrymen to her voluntary exile.
“After all, I left Germany and came over to the American side,” she explained to Guy and Fred. “I thought there might be some very strong resentments.”
Nazi propaganda had termed her a traitor, but she had still gotten a warm reception in Stolberg. There were practically no men left in the town, parts of which had been leveled by American bombing and artillery fire. Walking down the street in her USO uniform with army escorts, she was immediately recognized by a Stolberg housewife and soon was surrounded by a crowd of admiring women and children. Some of the women went house to house collecting baking ingredients that were in short supply and made a simple cake, which they presented to her as she departed.
In telling the story to Fred and Guy, Marlene was moved to tears. She said that simple Stolberg pastry was more memorable than the gourmet petits fours served to her in the salons of Paris. It had made her believe that many Germans accepted and even supported her for what she had done in trading Nazi tyranny for freedom in America.
As they parted at the entrance to the catering hall, where her escorts, responsible for her safety, were relieved to see her again, Marlene thanked Fred and Guy for the adventure. She told them how meaningful the USO tours were for her, that they helped her feel she was doing her part in the war effort. She added with a wide smile, “There is no audience I have been more in tune with than you boys in the U.S. Army.”
The relief everyone was now feeling after the defeat of the Germans’ last major offensive of the war in the Ardennes led to another caper for Guy and Fred, suggested to them by Captain Kann. Showing them a “funny paper” put out by the headquarters of a Canadian command, he said, “Get up something funny like this for us so we can send it out attached to our daily intel report.” It was, Guy mused, humor on command, no easy task. They left the captain’s tent clueless as to how to amuse him, let alone the forty-odd headquarters who received their daily intelligence reports.
Approaching his interrogation tent, Guy found a Wehrmacht corporal dancing from one foot to the other waiting to be interrogated. He was a skinny “Sad Sack” type who could have posed for George Baker’s popular GI cartoon character. It turned out Obergefreiter (Corporal) Joachimstaler had been a company clerk, and after only a few questions, it became clear he was a paper-pusher who knew nothing of any importance. When he urgently asked to be excused “in order to answer nature’s call”—a quaint saying compared to how soldiers normally spoke of bodily functions—Guy had a stroke of brilliance.
Hurrying to Fred’s tent, he said, “I’ve got it! We’ll make out that this guy Joachimstaler was Hitler’s latrine orderly.”
Questions tumbled out of Guy and Fred. Where had he served Hitler in such a capacity? How did he find himself at the front lines and liable to capture despite holding such an exhalted position? Answers to such questions, whether based on what they knew of the German army or just dressed up to sound good, came easily for the experienced interrogators. But they were left with one final one to figure out: What secrets had they been able to extract from Hitler’s privy?
Guy came up with the answer: “Corporal Joachimstaler frequently observed that the Führer has a shriveled scrotum.”
Their faux interrogation report, rapidly fleshed out by howlers from others on the IPW teams, was approved with delight by Kann and appended to their main intelligence report for distribution that day, with a subtle warning at the bottom: “Contents may already be compromised.”
The report drew rave reviews. Within hours, calls of approval came in from headquarters up and down the line, along with abundant chortles, guffaws, and back-slapping. But shortly after midnight, the field telephone rang in the command tent, where Guy, by a stroke of luck, was on night duty.
He answered the phone, “Sergeant Stern.”
“Guy, this is Billy,” said Bill Galanis, a communications clerk at army headquarters whom Guy had known as a fellow student at Saint Louis University. “Listen, that funny report of yours? The fat is in the fire. A liaison officer with the OSS in Paris read it and phoned Washington. He’s asked for a Hitler expert to fly over and question your latrine orderly.”
Certain that a wild-goose chase across the Atlantic by a high-ranking officer as a result of their hoax would unleash a court-martial for everyone involved, Guy rushed into the captain’s sleeping quarters and awakened him with the news. Kann was no less concerned. He got on the phone and woke up his immediate superior, a colonel at army headquarters, and explained what had happened. Luckily, the colonel had enjoyed the latrine orderly report and said he would take care of it. Within hours, the OSS liaison officer withdrew his request for a Hitler expert.
The mild-mannered little clerk, Obergefreiter Joachimstaler, was sent on to a POW camp not realizing that he had suddenly become a celebrity, and all because he had to make an urgent trip to the latrine.
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br /> On the night of January 18, 1945, a newly captured German soldier was brought to Guy, who was told that the prisoner wanted to report a war crime. Corporal Heinrich Kauter was a former communist who had been interned at Landsberg concentration camp as “unworthy to bear arms” prior to being drafted in 1942, when Germany was desperate for manpower. Guy knew the prison, fifty miles west of Munich, as the place where Hitler had been incarcerated after a failed coup attempt in 1924 and where he wrote his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf.
Kauter told Guy that he had been a member of the 293rd Regiment of the 18th Volksgrenadier Division and had taken part in the attack on Bleialf on December 16, 1944. Kauter was one of thirty Germans the Americans captured that day. He recalled being questioned that night by two German-speaking interrogators who divulged to their prisoners that they were “Jews from Berlin.” Kauter noted that with Bleialf surrounded, the Americans were unable to evacuate their POWs to the rear and instead kept them under guard in a farmhouse west of the town. When the Americans surrendered a few days later, the prisoners were freed, and German soldiers then took some three hundred American prisoners.
Kauter told Guy how when they reached the customs house near the Belgian-German border, some of these repatriated German prisoners pointed out the two Berlin Jews to an officer, who had them separated from the other Americans who were being evacuated to stalags deep inside Germany. He then ordered a detail of his men to take them down the road, where they were shot.
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