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Returning for Victory

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Returning for Victory Returning for Victory Interviewer: Matthew Graves Interviewee: Arnold H. Weiss Instructor: Alex Haight February 17, 2009 Table of Contents Interview Release Forms Pg. 2 Statement of Purpose Pg. 3 Biography of Arnold Weiss Pg. 4 Historical Contextualization Paper Pg. 6 Interview Transcription Pg. 22 Audio Time Indexing Log Pg. 35 Interview Analysis Pg. 37 Appendix Pg. 40 Works Consulted Pg. 42 Statement of Purpose The oral history interview with Mr. Weiss provided us with an in depth understanding of the training and operations of the OSS at the end of WWII. Escaping a Jewish orphanage months before the beginning of the Holocaust he returned to Germany as a young intelligence officer. Mr. Weiss’ first hand accounts of his operation behind enemy lines and the interrogations he conducted provide clarity of the intelligence efforts at the end of the war. Mr. Weiss gives us a unique perspective of a Jewish man escaping Germany who then returned to his home to interrogate German officers. Biography Arnold H. Weiss was born on July 25, 1924 in Nuremberg, Germany. He lived in Germany as a Jewish German in the time before the Holocaust and World War II. During his childhood, especially close to WWII, some of the other student taunted and would throw rocks at him. Luckily, before the Nazi’s put him into a concentration camp, he was saved and taken to the United States. He completed his high school education and turned 18 he joined the US army. The US army sent Mr. Weiss into the army air core. Mr. Weiss was then transferred to Wimbledon, Utah where his group was put into 17 squadrons. After that he was involved in a plane crash because the plane’s landing gear didn’t function. After he rested in the hospital for a number of months the US army sent him to Pittsburg, Texas where he served as a crew chief in a bombardier navigator camp. Because of his fluency in German he was sent to Washington to join the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in 1944. Mr. Weiss was then sent to Camp Richey, in Maryland, where he went to the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps) and learned the art of interrogation for four months. There were a variety of field survival tests he went through. After that the US army sent him to the University of Pennsylvania where he brushed up on his German. After his training was complete the army had him flown over to CIC Paris. He worked primarily in finding stay behind agents and bringing the Nazi’s and their assets to war trials for the war crimes they had committed. His most significant contribution to the war was when the OSS put Mr. Weiss in a group of operatives sent to find out what had happened to Hitler. The US army then sent him into the Third Reich where he found Hitler’s last will and testament [Appendix 2]. He also worked for Secretary of State James Bryan as one of his security officers [Appendix 1]. His last assignment was in Czechoslovakia where he was sent down the U.S. embassy there to discover any stay behind agents left behind by the Russians. After that Mr. Weiss felt his clandestine work was over for him so after 4 and a half years of serving he went into the army reserves for 15 years as an intelligence JAG. He got his Bachelor’s Degree at the University of Wisconsin. He had earned a Bronze Star, an Army Commendation Medal, and the WWII Theater Medal. After he left the military he worked as a lawyer and had two boys with Artemis Weiss who passed away in 2006. Clandestine Times Winston S. Churchill said, “ In the high ranges of the Secret Service work the actual facts in many cases were in every respect equal to the most fantastic inventions of romance and melodrama. Tangle within tangle, plot and counter-plot, ruse and treachery, cross and double-cross, true agent, false agent, double agent, gold and steel, the bomb, the dagger and the firing party, were interwoven in many texture so intricate as to be incredible and yet true.” This is an avid definition of how the OSS, the early CIA, began. To understand the OSS one must examine Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain’s Intelligence Agencies, and American involvement in World War II as well as gain a first-hand perspective from someone who was there. Franklin D. Roosevelt began his creation of an early intelligence cell in March 17, 1913 when he was appointed by Woodrow Wilson as the assistant secretary of the Navy. He became very interested in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). In ONI’s thirty-first year when FDR came to the department it was a small, elite sub-empire, one that had planted naval attaches in all significant world capitals of the world. ONI’s chief, Captain James Oliver Harrison unhappily observed Roosevelt’s own secret intelligence cell as interfering with his own professionals. (RSW 6-7) Roosevelt’s early interest in espionage was a big factor in the creation of the CIA later when he became president. In April 1917, Harrison was then replaced by Captain Roger Welles. Welles commissioned FDR’s intelligence cell into ONI. This growth continued with ONI hiring hundreds of new investigators and expanding more with new threats appearing. On July 9, 1918 FDR boarded the USS Dyer where it took him to view the war in Europe. There he met Britain’s Naval Intelligence Admiral Sir Redinald Han who created room 40, the Royal Navy’s code breaking arm, and it was in Room 40 that the Zimmerman telegram was decoded. (RSW 8) This early experience with a more experienced intelligence cell led to FDR seeing the importance of them. At his inauguration on March 4, 1933 FDR was alarmed by Japans belligerence by the mid-thirties. In 1937, Japanese planes had sunk the American gunboat Panay in Chinese waters. Within a year, a militarist regime, led by Prince Fummimaro Konoye, took power. Japan, as it had since 1932, continued to bite off pieces of China. By the end of 1938, the Japanese would occupy Nanking, Canton and Hankow. Japan would quit the League of Nations and demand the United States to recognize its “New Order” in East Asia.(RSW 11) FDR had a problem investing any money in spy games with the Great Depression looming. Never the less FDR made attempts to gain information on what was happening in the world. The Friedman team, which had been attacking the Japanese diplomatic cipher designated red for years, had finally broken the code by 1936. (RSW 13) This meant that FDR would have foreign diplomatic cables delivered directly to his desk. FDR started to see the importance of having a good spy cell. If not for the president backing the early CIA would not have been able to be created. As the president begins to look over at Europe he observes that the situation is getting much worse. Unknown to the WWI Allies, Adolf Hitler, by 1937, had already declared his intentions to his inner circle. At a secret Berlin meeting held on November 5th, he had gathered Nazi leaders, led by his heir apparent, Hermann Goring, to proclaim Germanys destiny. Within a year Hitler has annexed his native Austria, seized one slice of Czechoslovakia, and by March 1939, had swallowed the rest. (RSW 14) Germany began a espionage campaign against America to gain information on its new technology. Du Pont sold information on explosives to German munitions makers. Sperry Gyroscope licensed a German company to manufacture instruments enabling aircraft to fly blind. Pratt & Whitney sold the Germans aircraft engines. The U.S. industry was willingly helping bring the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to a state of readiness, making the efforts of German agents almost redundant. (RSW 14) Roosevelt’s old group of friends served him well in his early establishment of a intelligence cell called the Club but more importantly it showed to FDR that Vincent Astor would make a great chief of a future American intelligence service. (RSW 16) On June 26, 1939, two months before the war erupted in Europe, FDR ordered the heads of the FBI, MID, and ONI to start synchronizing their actions. He handed responsibility for this thankless task to the assistant secretary of state for administration, Gerorge S. Messersmith. (RSW 17) the problem was that the three departments were all against each other in order to become the best group. But this led to problems between them and information wasn’t getting everywhere it needed to be. This was a big problem for FDR because not having the right information can lead to disaster. On May 10, 1940, when Churchill moved into 10 Downing Street, replacing Chamberlain. The day before, Hitler had declared, “The decisive hour has come for the fight today decides the fate of all German nation for the next 1000 years.” (RSW 20) On May 20, 1940 in London officers from MI5, the domestic military intelligence service, and secretary of the American embassy. (RSW 19) They had found that Tyler Kent had taken 1,929 embassy documents of conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill that would jeopardize America’s presumed neutrality in the European war. If this information had been leaked to the public isolationists in American would have used it against FDR possibly preventing him from his third term and allowing Germany to possibly take over most of Europe. Tyler Ken was tried in secret in the Old Bailey on October 23, 1940, charged with violating Britain’s Official Secrets Act and the Larceny Act for stealing documents.
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