NAZI POW Camp Near Washington DC


Memories of a POW camp outside Washington, D.C.
CBS NEWS September 21, 2014, 9:54 AM

"P.O. BOX 1142" . . . an ordinary-sounding address for a place that played an extraordinary role during the Second World War. Seth Doane has been digging into its past:

It may seem hard to believe, but an open field in Alexandria, Va. -- a mere 13 miles from Washington, D.C. -- was once a top-secret military site.

Now all that is left are some stories and old pieces of cinderblock.

"It was pretty intentionally wiped clean and gotten rid of," said Brandon Bies, a history buff and National Park Service Ranger, who has spent the last eight years trying to uncover the hidden history of this place.

It's a journey that led him into the past -- and to 94-year-old Rudy Pins.

Doane asked Pins, "How was it to live with a secret like that?"

"Well, you get used to it," he replied. "Your fellow soldiers had the same secret."

Today, Pins is finally free to talk about his time as a U.S. Army intelligence officer at this prisoner-of-war camp during World War II.

"It was a secret installation for the interrogation of POWs -- Japanese, Italian and German, but mainly German," he said. He did no idea beforehand that it existed. Very few knew of the classified camp, code-named "P.O. Box 1142," located in Alexandria, even though 3,400 high-ranking prisoners of war were interrogated there between 1942 and 1945.

After the war, buildings were bulldozed, records were sealed, and those who knew anything about P.O. Box 1142 were sworn to secrecy -- including the German-born, Jewish Rudy Pins.

Doane asked, "What did the Nazis, what did Hitler do to your family?"

"Destroyed it. Humiliated it," he replied.

His parents were executed in the Holocaust.

On his balcony overlooking Honolulu, Pins showed Doane pictures of his brother and the family he left when he fled Germany in 1934. As a 14-year-old refugee, he was raised by American foster parents in Ohio.

"It was sad, but I don't know whether I had the full grasp and meaning of it -- and maybe that was good," Pins said.

His first-hand knowledge of Germany and its language made him an ideal recruit for U.S. Army Intelligence. At age 24 he started interrogating German POW's at the camp -- a secret part of Fort Hunt.

"I used to sit across from enemy soldiers who in combat would've killed me, and I probably would've killed them," he said. "My job was to get as much useful information as possible."

"You were face-to-face with the forces that destroyed your family?"

"They were the enemy. They were treated as the enemy. But you can't let your emotions get away from you. You also have a job to do."

Ranger Bies said, "It's an amazing story to try and think about what was going through the minds of these German-born Jewish American interrogators as they were sitting face-to-face, with someone who might have been responsible for interning relatives of theirs in a concentration camp.

Bies' quest to uncover what happened here all started with a chance encounter in 2006. A fellow Ranger had given a tour of the old military base Fort Hunt, and referenced some sort of secret activities that the Park Service thought had happened on these grounds.

"Someone raised their hand and said, 'My next-door neighbor used to be an interrogator here at Fort Hunt, and I'm sure he'd love to talk to you,'" said Bies.

But the veteran wouldn't reveal anything until the Pentagon gave him clearance to talk about what he'd learned.

"Then he began to tell the stories of top secret items that I never thought we would hear about: German rocket programs, atomic bombs, things that seemed like they were straight out of a movie or a sci-fi novel, if you will," said Bies.

Interrogations revealed details about the then-superior German U-Boat technology. That helped the U.S. Navy effectively target the subs and neutralize the U-Boat threat.

The U.S. also learned about the construction of German V-1 and V-2 rockets that rained down on London. The information gathered here helped guide U.S. airstrikes on those Nazi facilities.

Pins said, "You don't get people to talk by beating 'em or waterboarding or anything of that nature."

"Did you ever use coercive measures?" asked Doane.

"Never physical. Psychological? Yes."

If a POW wouldn't talk, he could be taken to an old ammunition depot where he might face a soldier dressed up as a Russian officer.

"It was basically the World War II version of 'good cop bad cop,'" said Bies. "And the American interrogator would say. 'This is your last chance; you can tell me the information that we are looking for, or we're going to send you off with these Russian officers.'"

Those stories were never written down. The ones that were -- and have since been declassified -- are housed at the National Archives.

Amid the reams of typewriter-smudged documents are photographs, secrecy agreements, and original interrogation notes.

Among the questions Rudy Pins asked were about "attitude towards Hitler and regime."

Those questioned at P.O. Box 1142 included high-ranking generals, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, and more than a hundred German scientists.

Doane said to Pins, "In one of those interrogation notes you wrote, 'So-and-so is a very stupid Nazi.'"

"He probably was!" laughed Pins.

"Do you think the information you got at P.O. Box 1142 helped turn the tide of the war? Did it make a difference?"

"I would hope so," Pins said. "But, you know, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. You need all the pieces to get the picture, and we got some of the pieces."

Bies and the National Park Service are still trying to piece together the history.

A storeroom holds what one day could sit in a museum: pictures of high level POWS, or a charred book rescued from a burning U-Boat.

"The documents are fantastic," said Bies, "but unless you have the history and voices behind those documents -- and there is so much that isn't written down -- the human element, to talk to the veterans is the only reason we know what we know."

More than three-quarters of the veterans Bies interviewed have since died. If he hadn't uncovered their stories, they could have stayed hidden forever.





“'They were the enemy. They were treated as the enemy. But you can't let your emotions get away from you. You also have a job to do.'... Ranger Bies said, 'It's an amazing story to try and think about what was going through the minds of these German-born Jewish American interrogators as they were sitting face-to-face, with someone who might have been responsible for interning relatives of theirs in a concentration camp.'... Pins said, 'You don't get people to talk by beating 'em or waterboarding or anything of that nature.' 'Did you ever use coercive measures?' asked Doane. 'Never physical. Psychological? Yes.' If a POW wouldn't talk, he could be taken to an old ammunition depot where he might face a soldier dressed up as a Russian officer. It was basically the World War II version of 'good cop bad cop,'" said Bies.'... Those questioned at P.O. Box 1142 included high-ranking generals, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, and more than a hundred German scientists.... Bies and the National Park Service are still trying to piece together the history. 'The documents are fantastic,' said Bies, 'but unless you have the history and voices behind those documents -- and there is so much that isn't written down -- the human element, to talk to the veterans is the only reason we know what we know.'"

I lived twenty years in Washington DC during the 1970s and 80s, and I always had an eye open to history and the central importance of the area to the US government. I went through the White House and the Capitol, as far as we were allowed to go, and drank in the older buildings in some parts of the city. Other interesting places in the area are the downtown area of Alexandria – the streets are paved with cobblestones and the buildings go back to the earliest days of the our country – which has a ghost tour that is well worth taking, and a guided tour into many of the beautiful old homes there. There is also Monticello, Mount Vernon, Manassas Park, and some others, but I had never heard of Fort Hunt, and certainly didn't know that such activities as breaking the POWs to get their information happened there.

I wondered in reading this article why only Jewish people were employed to question the enemies, but it is very possible that only Jewish Germans could be trusted by our government at that time. An older friend of mine who remembered living in Pennsylvania at the time of WWII said that she and others of German origin were afraid of harassment or worse at the hand of their neighbors or the police, and of course the Japanese Americans were put into internment camps, which has become a national scandal now. It was a traumatic time of extreme patriotism and a good deal of fear in America, as we now have again after the events of 9/11. Bies' should write a book about his researches. See the following article for more information.




http://www.concordmonitor.com/article/world-war-ii-nazi-interrogators-break-their-silence

VIRGINIA
World War II Nazi interrogators break their silence
Immigrant Jews tapped to learn German secrets
By PETULA DVORAK
The Washington Post
Monday, August 21, 2006

For more than 60 years, they kept their military secrets locked deep inside and lived quiet lives as account executives, college professors, business consultants and the like.

The brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 enjoyed no homecoming parades, no VFW reunions, no embroidered ball caps and no regaling of wartime stories to grandchildren sitting on their knees.

Almost no one, not even their wives, in many cases, knew the place in history held by the men of Fort Hunt, alluded to during World War II only by a mailing address that was its code name.

But the declassification of thousands of military documents and the dogged persistence of Brandon Bies, a bookish park ranger determined to record this furtive piece of history, is bringing the men of P.O. Box 1142 out of the shadows.

One by one, some of the surviving 100 or so military intelligence interrogators who questioned Third Reich scientists, submariners and soldiers at one of the United States's most secretive prisoner camps are, in the twilight of their lives, spilling tales they had dared not whisper before.

'It's good. Very good to talk about all this, at last,' Fred Michel said last week, steadying himself on his cane as he looked over the rolling, green land along the Potomac River in Fairfax County, Va., that once was home to prison cells and interrogation rooms embedded with hidden microphones.

Michel, 85, slowly lowered himself onto a picnic table bench next to his old friend, George Mandel, 82. Although they have lived just a few miles apart for most of six decades, they had not spoken since their discharge Dec. 13, 1945. So hush-hush was their work for P.O. Box 1142 that the men recruited for it were ordered to never mention it. To this day, some have refused to speak to the park ranger gathering their oral histories, believing that the oath they took more than 60 years ago can never be broken.

For others, the taboo has eroded as documents have been declassified in waves, starting in 1977 and continuing into the 1990s. Nevertheless, many of the activities of P.O. Box 1142 remain shrouded in mystery.

According to a history cobbled together by the National Park Service, the unit was conceived as an Army/Navy installation to gather information from prisoners who had been captured or surrendered and were brought to the United States for questioning. Germany had superior technology, particularly in rocketry and submarines, and the information that was gleaned from interrogations gave the United States an advantage going into the Cold War and the space age.

P.O. Box 1142 dealt with some of the most prominent scientists in Germany, many of whom surrendered and gave up information willingly, hoping to be allowed to stay in the United States. They were held incommunicado; when they had told everything they knew, they were transferred to regular POW camps elsewhere in the United States, and the Red Cross was then notified of their capture. After the war, some returned to Germany, and some stayed in the United States, slipping into the fabric of American life.

Michel and Mandel were German Jews who had immigrated to the United States before the war and were recruited to the unit. They and other interrogators said they obtained information about discoveries in microwaves, atomic and molecular studies, jets used in German planes and submarine technology, including a snorkel that allowed U-boats to stay underwater for long stretches. All they learned was put into top-secret reports that went straight to the Pentagon.

But at night, Michel and Mandel maintained an air of mystery with the dance-card girls, snapping back the reply of 'P.O. Box 1142, ma'am' when asked where they were stationed, they recalled.

Further explanation was forbidden. The more than 3,400 prisoners who stayed there were off the books, too, partly because operations at Fort Hunt were 'not exactly legal' according to the Geneva Conventions, the National Park Service said.

When it all ended, Michel and Mandel went their separate ways, kept apart by the code of silence. They raised families and had long careers, Mandel as a chemist in Bethesda, Md., Michel as a mechanical engineer in Alexandria, Va.

They met again last week at Fort Hunt after Bies found them.

Bies, 27, is a cultural resource specialist with the National Park Service, schooled in archaeology and obsessed with military history. The wide-brimmed Smokey Bear hat and crisp uniform of the park service suit him all right, but he is more comfortable in piles of documents in a National Archives research room than in the hills of Virginia.

Bies hopes to create a full archive of oral histories recorded from the interrogators. He envisions a visitors center that would display the stories, declassified reports and photos he has found.

He is now on a race against time to find the interrogators before they become too old to tell their stories or die.

'A lot of them, unfortunately, have passed away,' Bies said. 'They're very frail, and this is really the last chance that many of them get to tell their stories. One of them even died since we interviewed him.'

He and other Park Service rangers have sifted through reams of documents in the National Archives and have come up with a few names. Almost all of the interrogators were Jewish immigrants from Germany; some lost entire families in the Holocaust. They were recruited to P.O. Box 1142 for their language skills and, in the cases of Michel and Mandel, their scientific background.

Bies tracked down Michel in Kentucky after getting his name from a woman touring Fort Hunt. The former interrogator, who had immigrated from Landau, Germany, before the war, was overjoyed to talk about his time at P.O. Box 1142.

They spent hours talking about Nazi scientists who told Michel about microwave technology, U-boat engineering and other marvels that the young mechanical engineer coaxed out of them.

Michel also told Bies about his bunkmate, Mandel. One quick Google search turned up Mandel's smiling face. 'He was right there, near us all along, teaching at George Washington University,'Bies said of Mandel, who had immigrated from Berlin in 1937.

Mandel had kept his own family in the dark about his wartime exploits.

'I know my family wondered where the hell I was,' he said. 'I told them I was speaking to scientists, or something like that. They didn't know I was interrogating Nazis.'

His past revisited him once, at a scientific conference in Paris. In passing, he locked eyes with another scientist, a man he had interrogated in a cramped cell years ago.

'He looked at me, and I heard him say to someone in German: 'That was my prison warden,'' Mandel said. The two men shook hands. The exchange was respectful and friendly, he said.

Not everyone at Fort Hunt was an interrogator. Some, such as Wayne Spivey, 86, of Marietta, Ga., were brought in to manage the massive flow of information that interrogators such as Michel and Mandel were getting.

'My mouth was always dropping open when we heard them talking and when we saw the information they got and the sketches of atoms and molecules and whatnot,' Spivey said. 'I was just one of three Southern boys there, walking around hearing German and Russian and Japanese.'

So far, Bies has contacted about 15 veterans, and he tries to rush to their sides to capture their fading memories.

Bies hopes to stage a large reunion next year, with all of the veterans he can find. Then they can stand on the green fields of Fort Hunt, shake hands and embrace, as Michel and Mandel did last week and, at long last, talk.

By PETULA DVORAK
The Washington Post