7 Questions GIs Used to Catch Germans Posing as Americans

A jeep pulls up to an American checkpoint at Aywaille, Belgium, in the freezing dark of December 1944. Three men in American uniforms, with American rifles and American papers carrying American names. Everything a sentry is trained to look at says these are GIs. Then he asks for the password, and they do not have it. Under the olive drab they were wearing German field gray. Within days, sentries across the Ardennes were stopping everyone with seven questions about baseball, movie stars and geography, and some of the men those questions caught were American generals. This is the story of Operation Greif, Otto Skorzeny's plan to put Germans in American uniforms behind the lines during the Battle of the Bulge, and of the strange quiz that grew up to stop them. The disguise was the easy part. Captured uniforms, real jeeps, real rifles. The hard part was the men inside them. When Skorzeny's people screened volunteers out of an army of millions, they found only about ten who spoke perfect English with a feel for how Americans talk. The papers said Charles W. Lawrence, Clarence van der Wert and George Sensenbach. The real names were Gunther Billing, Manfred Pernass and Wilhelm Schmidt, all in their early twenties. And under questioning, one of them mentioned Eisenhower. There is no solid evidence that plan ever existed. It did not matter. Eisenhower spent Christmas 1944 boxed in by his own guards. What we go through: The Aywaille checkpoint, ten miles south of Liege, deep behind American lines Skorzeny, the Mussolini raid, and Panzer Brigade 150 The order for English speakers that leaked before training even began Einheit Stielau, American films, GI slang, and visits to prisoner of war camps Question one, the password, and why it failed in a breakthrough The capital of Illinois and where a guard lines up on a football team General Omar Bradley, stopped three times and losing an argument to his own sentry Who was Betty Grable married to General Bruce Clarke, St. Vith, and the Chicago Cubs Wreath, writhe, wealth, and the trap hidden in the word Chicago What an airmail stamp cost, and why a German had no reason to know The firing squad at Henri-Chapelle and Skorzeny's acquittal at Dachau Said plainly on the record: even the date of the Aywaille capture is blurred, with some records saying December 17 and others December 18. The Eisenhower plot came from interrogation, and nothing solid shows it was ever real. The Clarke story is told in many histories of the battle and is reported, not proven. Bradley's three stops come from his own memoir. There is no secret weapon in any of this. Germany could capture jeeps and strip uniforms off prisoners. What it could not produce was a childhood spent arguing about baseball. The American answer key lived in the head of whichever young private held the rifle that night, and that cut both ways. It caught Germans. It also caught Americans whose answers did not match his. Tell me in the comments where you are watching from. And tell me this: which of the seven questions would you have failed? #BattleOfTheBulge #OperationGreif #OttoSkorzeny #WW2 #WW2History #Ardennes #OmarBradley #Eisenhower #MilitaryHistory #HistoryDocumentary #WorldWarTwo #1944 #Spies #Belgium #SecondWorldWar