Getting Out of Germany

Turned Away then Drafted

Military Intelligence Training

Passover in Shreveport

Interrogation Methods

Preparing for War in Europe

Omaha Beach

Interrogating Enemy POWs

Awarded the Bronze Star

From Interrogator to Writer

Interrogating a Former Neighbor

The End of the War

SS Tattoos and Postwar Return to Europe

Searching for Family

Knight of the French Legion of Honor

Most Memorable Interrogations

What the War Means

Capturing Hitler’s Latrine Orderly

Annotation

Guy Stern was born Guenther Stern in Hildesheim, Germany in January 1922. He lived in Hildesheim until he left for the United States at age 15. Hitler [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] made it impossible to stay there. Stern's father was a merchant and prior to the Nazis, it was a pleasant life. They got along well with their Christian neighbors. The first indication of the coming trouble was 31 January 1933 when Hitler took charge of Germany [Annotator's Note: German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor on 30 January 1933]. The restrictions came slowly but steadily after that. His parents told the children that they all had to get out and since Stern was the oldest, he would go first. His father was beaten very badly by Brown Shirts [Annotator's Note: Braunhemden; Sturmbteilung, or SA, Storm Detachment; Nazi Party's original paramilitary] when he went out to mail some letters. In school, Stern was isolated at first and shunned by his fellow students. Two fellow students and he were mauled after being taken to a bulletin board where there was a newspaper on display that read "Jews want to kill Adolf Hitler." It got worse from there and became unbearable. His father took him out school about six months before he was to leave and had a tutor to teach him English. The other kids, including one very close friend, turned on him. This friend went from being a defender of the Jews, to their worst enemy. Stern was very optimistic about being able to help get his family out of Germany once he got to America. It was tough leaving them, but it did not seem to be hopeless at the time. His uncle and aunt lived in St. Louis, Missouri already. His uncle had worked with some Jewish women who had set themselves a goal of getting 1,000 Jewish children out of Germany and Austria. Stern's father and mother went with him to Bremerhaven, Germany where he boarded a ship with other children. This was the last time he ever saw his parents. He was able to find a job in America, which was hard due to the Depression. He met a man who said he could get the necessary papers to bring his family over. The pro bono lawyer involved would not allow the benefactor to be the guarantor for the necessary papers because he admitted he was a professional gambler. Stern says that was the moment his family died. He had almost succeeded in saving them but was thwarted by the pettiness of one person.

Annotation

Guy Stern had come to Saint Louis, Missouri in 1937 when he was 15 years old to escape Nazi Germany. He tried, but failed, to secure the means to get his family to America as well. He was able to correspond with his family in Germany until 1942 when they were deported. The newspapers did not carry much news about Germany after they invaded Poland. He did not know the full extent of the horror until he was back overseas. Stern arrived at his job at the Bevo Mill restaurant when the owner told him they were closed because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He and a friend found a radio to listen to the news of the attack on. Stern was now almost 19 years old and he tried to join the military. He had graduated from high school and he worked across the street from Saint Louis University where he now attended classes. There were large signs in the hallways at school recruiting for US Naval Intelligence. The Navy wanted people who had foreign language skills as well as cultural knowledge of America's enemies. Because he had an accent and was not native-born, he was not accepted into that Navy program. Six months later he was drafted into the Army. He was sworn in at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1943.

Annotation

Guy Stern went to Camp Barkley, Texas for basic training. This was the training ground for medical administration. High school teachers were the instructors there. There was a lot of physical training as well. Just before he would have finished basic, the camp newspaper said that non-citizens should report to company headquarters to be inducted as a US Citizens. He was sent to Abilene, Texas to the District Court and sworn in during a mass ceremony. He changed his name from Guenther to Guy. He was then called to company headquarters where he was told he was shipping out, but the destination was secret. He was allowed to open his secret orders after he had traveled for three hours on a particular train. He discovered then he was going to Camp Ritchie in Maryland, to the Military Intelligence Training Center. He and his fellow soldiers renamed it the Military Institution of Total Confusion. [Annotator's Note: Stern laughs.] The training at Camp Ritchie was tougher than getting his PhD after the war. They learned everything from Morse code to shooting an M1 rifle [Annotator's Note: .30 caliber M1 rifle, also known as the M1 Garand], interrogating prisoners, and interpreting documents in nine weeks. They also had to learn German equipment, uniforms, military decorations, ranks, and more. German veterans from the war in Africa had been shipped to Camp Ritchie as test subjects. Their final exam was to properly identify 50 items that had been strewn over a large meadow. He does not recall anyone correctly identifying all 50. [Annotator's Note: Stern laughs.]

Annotation

In his advanced training, Guy Stern had to interrogate prisoners. They were taught four or five methods and were given different potential rewards. They went on maneuvers in Louisiana where they interrogated fellow Americans. This training was two-fold as it also taught the American soldiers how to resist interrogation. In Louisiana, they slept in pup tents and dealt with wild pigs, mosquitos, and mud. One graduate had come from a very wealthy family and he wired his father to send him a hammock. Everyone was jealous of him. One morning this trainee went to headquarters for the day. Stern and some of his fellow soldiers buried garbage under his tent. When night came, so did the pigs and they chased him out of his hammock. Passover came around when they were on maneuvers and the Jewish soldiers were allowed to stop training and go into Shreveport, Louisiana. Some people from the community were standing on the stairs of the synagogue as they left the service and invited them all to come with them to have Passover dinner. Their lieutenant told them that for that night there were no officers or enlisted men; they were all just Jewish men observing Passover. The soldiers began to like their lieutenant a little more after that.

Annotation

Guy Stern was in Louisiana on maneuvers about a month or less. While on maneuvers they had an MP [Annotator's Note: military police] company guarding "prisoners" for their interrogation training. Once they returned to Camp Ritchie [Annotator's Note: in Maryland], Stern was promoted to Staff Sergeant. There were taught five methods of interrogation. One was that they were bound by the Geneva Convention and to never touch a prisoner being interrogated. Another was just to let the prisoner talk and see where the conversation led. Playing to common interests was another which Stern used a lot later in the field. He was a soccer fan and knew the German leagues well. He was interrogating a prisoner during the war and needed to find some information on an industrial complex in Dusseldorf, Germany. He related some information about the prisoner's team to him. Ultimately the prisoner led him to the information he was seeking. Stern would also open some food and start eating if he knew a prisoner had been hungry before caught. He would also light a cigarette, etc. and would exchange these things for information. Another method would be to play on the fears of the prisoners. The German prisoners largest fear was to be captured by, or turned over to, the Russians. Stern or his partner would often dress as Russian soldiers and would wear German souvenir military decorations. He had signs on his tent in three languages including Russian. One of them would play the soft-hearted American followed by an enraged "Russian" officer. They broke many prisoners that way. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer relates current interrogation methodology in Afghanistan.]

Annotation

In 1944, Guy Stern and his unit were broken into six-man intelligence teams. They were on an Australian fruit boat, the RMS Rangitata. They had to stand guard at night on submarine watch. They landed in Birmingham, England. They then went to Broadway, England for further training. A British officer taught them while there. They then prepared for the invasion of Europe. Their team was divided further into forwards and backwards units. The forwards were sent from Southampton, England to Normandy, France on D plus 1 [Annotator's Note: 7 June 1944, one day after the Allied invasion of Normandy]. Stern was assigned to a backward unit and went ashore at Normandy on D plus 3. They had left Fort Hamilton, New York for England and on the ship over, Stern felt fear and apprehension that was exacerbated by the fact that he and his colleagues were Jewish. Some of his friends who got captured were shot on the spot, and some were treated as other prisoners of war were. It all depended on the commandant of the particular camp they ended up at. Stern had no idea of what had happened to his family who were still in Europe except for one letter he received from them when they had been deported to Warsaw, Poland. He did not know it was a ghetto. The soldiers did know of the concentration camps and this reinforced why Stern was there to take part in the war.

Annotation

Guy Stern had landed on Omaha Beach, Normandy, France, three days after the invasion [Annotator's Note: 9 June 1944, three days after the Normandy landings 6 June 1944, also known as D-Day]. He had received additional intelligence training in Broadway, England and was given an assignment to Bristol, England as part of Team 41 (IPW) [Annotator's Note: Interrogation of Prisoners of War Team 41]. They had taken over a British school. There they had planned for the invasion. General Bradley [Annotator's Note: US Army General Omar Nelson Bradley] was in charge. Stern was on a PT boat [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boat] and he was scared. He was a German Jew, but he was also very squeamish. He was worried about seeing the battle scenes of the invasion landing. When he reached shore, he did encounter some awful sights but was not as bothered by it as the thought he would be. Stern was not posted to a regiment and was attached to 1st Army Headquarters under General Hodges [Annotator's Note: US Army General Courtney Hicks Hodges]. Prisoners would be filtered down to Stern and his team if it was thought they had strategic information. Most of what they got when they landed though was tactical information. As they got further onshore, it became strategic.

Annotation

Guy Stern's fellow interrogator and friend, Kurt Jasen, was nearby on Omaha Beach and called for Stern to come over and help out because there were so many prisoners. Stern's first encounter was a pretty battle-scarred, German artillery soldier. Stern asked him a question and the German recited the Geneva Convention. Stern thought he was going to fail miserably at his job. A shell came over and they both dove for cover. Stern got up quickly, but the German soldier remained down. Stern thinks the soldier thought he must have been a devil. From that moment on, the German was afraid of Stern. Captain Melvin Rust from Brownsville, Texas, was Stern's commander. He told Stern he felt that he could figure out what kind of a person a prisoner is very well and assigned him to the screening team. Stern would size up the prisoners to fit the agendas of the interrogators. For the first few months this is all that he did, and he got bored with this duty. Stern knew Spanish as well as German and English. There were three Spanish Civil War veterans who the Germans had taken as prisoners. The Germans had sent these men, who were also engineers, to the British Channel Islands to improve the fortifications there. Stern was assigned to interrogate these men. They were easy because they were anti-fascist to begin with. They asked for large sheets of paper and then drew a map of every gun and artillery emplacement on the two islands of Jersey and Guernsey. Stern brought the results in and Captain Rust took him off screening and put him in charge of the survey section. He then started providing information for all kinds of units like transportation routes, diseases of epidemic potential, and more. One of his men was a display specialist and made drawings for the team to accompany their reports. Through this they discovered that the Germans had prefabricated railroad tracks and rolling stock which is how they were able to repair the train systems quickly after being bombed by the Allies.

Annotation

Guy Stern received the Bronze Star when the war ended. The citation was for his developing a method of mass interrogation. Stern says that near the end of the war, the Germans drafted every male that could still move for the Volkssturm [Annotator's Note: the "people's storm" was a national militia established by the Nazi Party on order of Adolf Hitler on 6 October 1944]. They took men of all ages, including very young boys and very old men. The G-1 [Annotator's Note: personnel officer] wanted to know more about these troops for battle planning. Stern knew he had to come up with a way to find that out. As these men who had been captured came into the camps, Stern had them line up by their units. He would then ask questions of the groups of men to gain a broader understanding. Another issue that the G-1 and G-2 [Annotator's Note: intelligence officer] were concerned about was the possible use of chemical weapons by Germany. It was a real fear at the time. Stern asked the groups of men how many carried protective clothing into battle as well as had been trained in gas chambers. From their answers, Stern deduced that Germany was not developing gas warfare for use. He was then told to report to headquarters the next morning and was told he would begin training in statistics. This would change his life.

Annotation

Guy Stern had a commanding officer at First Army Headquarters named Major Shepard Stone [Annotator's Note: US Army Major Shepard Stone was an American journalist and foundation administrator who served as Director of Public Affairs for Occupied Germany from 1949-1952]. Stone was the Sunday supplement editor of the New York Times in his civilian life. He had found out that Stern was interested in becoming a journalist. Major Stone visited Stern and gave him a flattering letter of recommendation to the city editor of the New York Times, a Mr. Joseph. Stern moved from Saint Louis, Missouri to New York and became part of a circle of exiled German authors. A writer, Hertha Pauli [Annotator's Note: Hertha Ernestine Pauli was an Austrian journalist, author, and actress], ran a monthly meeting of refugees in her circle. Stern got invited once. He knew Paul who had a dog who had whelped some puppies. Stern was working as a waiter and had gotten the good meat scraps to bring as gift. This got him in the group. [Annotator's Note: Stern laughs.] He ultimately became a professor of literature and not a journalist.

Annotation

Guy Stern rarely interrogated civilians during the war. His partner, Kurt Jasen did interrogate some German businessmen, but Stern mostly questioned military personnel. Stern says that he failed to get useful information about 20 percent of the time. His team followed the front line as it moved through Germany. He feels it is difficult to assess what the most significant information that he got through interrogation was. One was not very useful but was a surprising encounter for him. Racing through France, the First Army had a chance to encircle the German Army at the Battles of Falaise and Argentan [Annotator's Note: Falaise Pocket or Battle of the Falaise Pocket or Falaise-Argentan; Battle of Normandy, 12 to 21 August 1944]. A lot of Germans slipped through, but the American Army got an enormous number of German prisoners then. Captain Edgar Kann said there was no way to screen that many prisoners. The guards were ordered to gather the prisoners pay books, which were then divided equally among the interrogation teams. A name stuck out to Stern, Gunther Halm. Stern had known someone by that name, a boy who had been in his athletic club as a youth in Germany. The club had come to his apartment to awkwardly tell him and his parents that, as a Jew, he could no longer be a member of the club. This prisoner, Halm, had been awarded the Knight's Cross [Annotator's Note: the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, German: Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes highest awards in the military and paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany]. Stern decided to interrogate him. Since he could not reveal his identity to Halm, he waited until after midnight and put him in a tent with no light other than what was shining on him. Halm became very agitated by the amount of information about him that was known. Stern never revealed himself to Halm.

Annotation

Guy Stern was present in April 1945 when the allies liberated the German army prison at Torgau [Annotator's Note: Stalag IV-D in Torgau, Saxony, Germany]. They were still working in Bad Hersfeld, Germany when news came that the war had ended. They released their German trustees who lifted Stern and his men up on their shoulders in celebration. Once the Germans surrendered, Stern's team [Annotator's Note: Interrogation of Prisoners of War Team 41] was split up and he was assigned to a CIC [Annotator's Note: US Army Counterintelligence Corps] unit. [Annotator's Note: Stern hesitates to tell this story.] There was an officer in charge of the Counter Intelligence Unit. There were fears of resistance groups forming, so Stern was assigned to interrogate civilians. They got news of an arms stash in Bruchsal, Germany, which was near Karlsruhe where they were. The commander ordered a unit to go check it out. When they got there and started questioning the civilians, a woman offered some information. Stern's partner decided to not follow the lead and said the commander wanted all of the men to be present at a noon meal. The commander had commandeered a Belgian chef to cook for them. They returned to a villa in Karlsruhe where they had a great meal. This did not fit with Stern's idea of fighting the war and he asked to be transferred out of the unit. He was then assigned to military government. Stern arrested a high-ranking Nazi party official. Two days later Stern saw the same man out walking around. When he inquired as to why, he was told the man was the head of the waterworks and so he had been released to do that job. This did not go over well with Stern either. He then went out to watch the interdivisional baseball leagues. One of the teams had an actual major league player from the Philadelphia Phillies on their team.

Annotation

Guy Stern and his fellow intelligence staff were assigned the dismissing of prisoners that seemed to be harmless and would not join the Werewolfs [Annotator's Note: the 1944 Nazi plan to create a resistance force operating behind Allied lines in Germany]. He was in Koblenz, Germany. When Stern was assisting in this, he discovered that the elite Nazis, the SS [Annotator's Note: Schutzstaffel, the German paramilitary organization], had their blood type tattooed under their armpit. This was the absolute sign they were SS. Once Stern got to New York, he found his potential job at the New York Times looked pretty hopeless so he returned to college. He was in the US Army Reserve for six months. He started studying German literature at Columbia University, New York City, and then went to work at a liberal arts college in Ohio. He became department head and graduate dean at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, and ultimately senior vice president at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The last contact he had with any Army was the French Army when he was invited to revisit Normandy, France through a colleague who had a summer house there. There was an exhibit on the Ritchie Boys [Annotator's Note: the US special military intelligence officers and enlisted men who had trained at Camp Ritchie, Maryland] and the curator phoned Stern and informed him that they were going to open the show at the US Air Force Museum site in Normandy. The curator invited Stern to be the opening speaker and he accepted. He got cold feet afterwards. He was told he was to address the crowd in French, so he had to brush up on his language skills. A count who had a huge castle in Foucarville [Annotator's Note: now Sainte-Mère-Église, France] heard of the address and called him and asked him to come give the same address to another audience. The count asked him to tell more of his own achievements, but he was not sure of what was still classified as "Secret." When he had been in Bristol, England helping plan the invasion of Europe, security had been airtight. The intelligence team's ratings were "Above Top Secret" which was called BIGOT [Annotator's Note: the BIGOT list was the list of personnel cleared to know details of Operation Overlord, the Allied plan to invade Europe]. There were many layers of armed security there that he would have to go through every day. [Annotator's Note: Stern and the interviewer discuss a documentary on the Ritchie Boys.]

Annotation

A friend of Guy Stern's had some family in the north of Germany. A month or so after V-E Day [Annotator's Note: Victory in Europe Day, 8 May 1945], Stern asked their captain if the two of them could take a jeep and travel north. Stern wanted to have his friend drop him in his hometown of Hildesheim, Germany. The captain approved and cleared it with the British because they were occupying the town. Stern reported to the British commander who had a policeman accompany him around the town. Stern was looking for a person who had given his brother a job. This man told Stern that his parents had been deported to Warsaw, Poland, and he advised him to not get any false hopes. Stern's hometown had declared his family dead. Stern had not been optimistic that he would find them, as he had already learned that anyone who had been deported to Warsaw had ultimately been moved to Auschwitz and killed. His reunion with his non-Jewish friends who had tried to help them was emotional. Stern had a grandmother killed at Theresienstadt [Annotator's Note: the Theresienstadt transit camp and ghetto in Terezin, Czech Republic]. Every one of his father's family with the exception of one sister, were killed. The sister was able to emigrate to Israel. A cousin had been able to make his way to Argentina and another cousin had been hidden in Belgium with a Catholic family.

Annotation

Guy Stern returned to the United States in November 1945. A French count recommended him for a decoration by France. Three months before this interview, he was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor [Annotator's Note: the highest French Order of Merit; established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte]. There was a ceremony at the Holocaust Museum [Annotator's Note: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.] and the French will hold one on the Normandy coast on 4 July [Annotator's Note: 4 July 2017]. A French general will formally award him the medal at that ceremony. [Annotator's Note: The interviewer and Stern discuss speaking French.] Stern had been discharged from the Army at Newport News, Virginia in a mass ceremony. He had not given consideration to remaining in the military because he had a potential job with the New York Times. He wanted to return to college as well. The G.I. Bill was very important to him and Stern feels that the post-World War 2 flowering of America was due to the generosity of this Bill. He says the current budget cuts to education is a form of suicide for the country. The United States at one time had the best public-school education in the world and now ranks 24th. [Annotator's Note: Stern and the interviewer discuss taxes and budgets politically.]

Annotation

Guy Stern feels that calling something memorable can be both positive and negative. Getting to his hometown of Hildesheim, Germany and hearing the news of his family's murder in the concentration camps was memorable. There are so many impressions that overlay the brain during war times. [Annotator's Note: Stern pauses in thought.] The exposing of a major war criminal in 1945 was very memorable. Stern's job changed from interrogating prisoners to investigating and arresting war criminals later in, and after, the war. This man that was exposed was responsible for around 25,000 deaths. Time magazine ran a story in May 1945 about this called "Out of the Pit". Stern and his partner are not named in the story. He and his intelligence partner, Fred, worked out of a ceramic factory in Germany. The day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt died [Annotator's Note: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945], they were working very late. Fred was alerted by the MPs [Annotator's Note: military police] that a prisoner was claiming to be the nephew of Heinrich Himmler [Annotator's Note: Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Luitpold Himmler] and was carrying a picture of Himmler. Fred had the picture fastened to the lamp he used to interrogate prisoners. He also had a radio station tuned in to hear how the Nazis were broadcasting the news of Roosevelt's death. Around midnight, the last prisoner, Dr. Schuebbe, was brought in, saw the picture of Himmler and heard the German-language radio broadcast [Annotator’s Note: Gustav Wilhelm Schuebbe was a German doctor who Time magazine named as the head of the Nazi Annihilation Institute in Kievwhich was likely "T4", the Codename for a Euthanasia Program coordinated from Berlin at Tiergartenstrasse 4, authorized by Adolf Hitler, October 1939]. Schuebbe came in as if they knew who he was. The German trustee handed Fred a slip of paper that read "morphine." The German doctor had killed people with morphine injections and had become a morphine addict himself. He thought that he was in Gestapo headquarters at that moment and with some prompting started to legitimize and identify himself. Stern walked into the room dressed as a Russian officer and told Fred they should stop for the night. The doctor immediately recanted his testimony, but they broke him again the next day. The doctor was tried and acquitted at Nuremberg [Annotator's Note: the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, military tribunals Nuremberg, Germany, 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946]. Stern has since consulted a scholar on the German Euthanasia Program who told him there would be nothing written or documented as it was all secret. They never could find any evidence of what the doctor had told them of the program until they found an article in his hometown newspaper describing his fanaticism after the war ended. The article described the doctor giving a daily propaganda speech to his children who were driven nuts by it. The son ultimately killed the doctor, his father, and his mother with a shovel. Another war criminal they investigated had shot American prisoners. He was convicted and executed.

Annotation

Guy Stern served out of the conviction that the cancer of Nazism must be eliminated. His life was change by accident. Major Shepard Stone [Annotator's Note: US Army Major Shepard Stone was an American journalist and foundation administrator who served as Director of Public Affairs for Occupied Germany from 1949 to 1952] was a superior who recommended him to be a journalist for the New York Times. This caused him to move to New York City after the war. He saw he could not become a journalist once there, so he went to college instead and started his current path. Receiving the French Legion of Honor [Annotator's Note: the highest French Order of Merit; established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte] put him on cloud nine, regarding his military service. To Stern, World War 2 continues to be a model of a just war which America had every interest to engage in. America's enemies in that war are an example of what can happen to a democracy. On 31 January 1933, Stern and his family were eating dinner in Germany. His father said that hard times will be coming, but it will not get too bad because Germany has a Constitution and a Parliament. Within six months the Constitution had been shredded and there was only one party in control. A democracy is a very delicate structure. Whenever there is an attack on the Constitution, we must be watchful. The National WWII Museum shows the distinction between a just war and war of caprice and randomness. The War can show that we can be the defenders of values. [Annotator's Note: Stern relates some current events regarding NATO and allies of the United States.]

Annotation

Guy Stern was given the duty of editing the interrogation reports they produced as investigators of war criminals after the war ended. These were distributed to the headquarters offices. One evening, an MP [Annotator's Note: military police] came in and said there was an Austrian deserter who had a diary of everything he had heard of morale, plans, and more and wanted to turn it over to them. Stern saw that it was in German shorthand and he was the only person in the outfit who knew it. It was very important information. Stern's commander, Captain Kann, received the outline and decided to publish it as an appendix to the reports. They gave it a name, "From the Bulge to the Rhine," and it ran for 27 reports. A copy of this diary is in the Truman Presidential Library [Annotator's Note: Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri] in Missouri. Kann related a satire on their report that had been created by their Canadian allies. [Annotator's Note: Stern gives a very funny, detailed example of how literal translations were often used in error. He would occasionally miss some of these and the Canadians had used them well in their satire.] This was just after the Battle of the Bulge. Kann thought the humor was needed and asked Stern and his interrogation partner, Hecht, to write their own satire to share. They went back to the interrogation tent to discover a prisoner there who was in need of a bathroom break. The prisoner did not speak as a soldier normally would and this gave the two the idea that their satire story would be about capturing Hitler's [Annotator's Note: German dictator Adolf Hitler] latrine orderly. [Annotator's Note: Stern gives great detail on the story and he thinks it was his best literary work.] Kann had them attach their satire to their daily report. Stern heard that even General Hodges [Annotator's Note: US Army General Courtney Hicks Hodges] thought it was very funny. A captain from First Army Headquarters who was the liaison to the OSS [Annotator's Note: Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA] got a copy of this satire, thought it was true, and requested that a specialist be brought in to interrogate the prisoner. Fortunately, a friend at headquarters overheard the request and immediately called Stern to warn him. Stern and Hecht ran to Captain Kann's tent and let him know. Kann called his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Specht and informed him, and then ordered the OSS captain to rescind the request. It all seemed to be fine. The OSS captain who had believed the story was the nephew of General Wainwright [Annotator's Note: US Army General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, IV] of the Bataan Death March. Wainwright [Annotator's Note: US Army Lieutenant Colonel Stuyvesant Wainwright, II, was a United States representative from the New York 1st congressional district from 1953 to 1960] was later in the House of Representatives. About ten or 20 years after the war, Stern was writing an article on military intelligence for a scholarly journal. In his research, he finds a British article that describes the intelligence coup the American CIC [Annotator's Note: Counterintelligence Corps] created when they captured Hitler's latrine orderly. [Annotator's Note: Stern laughs.]

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