7 Things German POWs Found Strange About American Interrogators

Go and picture a department store counter in Washington, D.C. A few German men in leather jackets and Tyrolean felt caps are buying women's underwear, and one of them pulls out a slide rule to turn centimeters into inches. They are not tourists. They are enemy prisoners of war, and the young American soldier escorting them is a Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis. Then the military police arrive and arrest everyone, including him. At the camp those men came from, this barely counted as strange. On paper it was Fort Hunt, an old Army post on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, on land that once belonged to George Washington's estate. In practice it was one of the most secret intelligence operations in America, and it went only by its mailing address: P.O. Box 1142. By the site's own history, 3,451 German prisoners were questioned there between 1942 and 1945. They were not random riflemen. U-boat crews, airmen, scientists and senior officers were picked out and shipped there because their heads held torpedo designs, radar secrets and unit locations. Every one of them walked in ready to give name, rank and number and nothing more. Arno Mayer was out of that arrest in about half an hour. He had a phone number, and he knew exactly whom to call. Years later he called the whole scene unreal. What we go through: The interrogators who spoke the prisoners' own German, slang and hometowns included John Gunther Dean, John Kluge, and the refugees Hitler drove out of Europe Softball, swimming, movies, a camp dog named Rigor Mortis, and cigarettes everywhere Lunches in Alexandria and shopping trips into Washington for gifts for wives back home The stool pigeon planted with prisoners who knew about atomic research Hidden microphones in the cells and the men who listened from morning into the night Prisoners staging mock interrogations for the microphones they knew were there Fake Red Cross workers and a man dressed as a Russian officer U-boat commander Werner Henke, the Mountie costume, and the only escape attempt Why the questioning did not stop when Germany surrendered Reinhard Gehlen, Heinz Schlicke, and the scientists who came through after the war The order to burn the records, and the veterans who kept quiet for more than sixty years Said plainly on the hard parts: the comfort at Fort Hunt was a method, not charity, and it rested on fear held in reserve. The threat to hand men to the Russians was empty, but the prisoners had no way of knowing that. The claim that Henke ordered survivors of the Ceramic machine-gunned was never proven. And prisoners were often held for days or weeks before the Red Cross was told, which did not comply with the Geneva Conventions. None of this was secret because it was shameful. It was secret because it worked. When the National Park Service brought the veterans together in October 2007, the country was arguing over harsh interrogation in a new war, and a congressional resolution noted that Fort Hunt never relied on methods like sleep deprivation. Today Fort Hunt is a park. People bring picnic baskets and kids to the place where the windowless buses used to unload. Tell me in the comments if anyone in your family served in intelligence or guarded prisoners in the Second World War. And tell me this: would a cigarette and a softball game have loosened your tongue faster than a threat? #FortHunt #WW2 #WorldWar2 #WW2History #GermanPOWs #POWCamp #POBox1142 #Interrogation #MilitaryIntelligence #UBoat #WernerHenke #RitchieBoys #SecretHistory #VirginiaHistory #HistoryDocumentary