Camp Confidential: America's Secret Nazis

I think... We're good? All righty.

I'm gonna give a brief introduction, and we'll go ahead and get started.

We're here at the home of Dr. Henry Kolm.

We are here interviewing Mr. Alfred Bomberg.

We are interviewing Ambassador John Gunther Dean,

a veteran who served at PO Box 1142.

I don't know to what extent it is still classified.

After all, this was a wartime situation.

I took it very seriously, and I just didn't talk about it.

Certainly not to my family.

We had to swear,

"Don't tell anybody where you are or what you're doing."

"Not even your wife or your parents."

"The life of the nation depended on you holding to that secrecy."

The first memory that I have is when we were told

that we were going to be taken to what turned out to be 1142.

And they put us into a bus.

All the windows were covered with wood.

You couldn't see a blasted thing.

They suddenly said,

"We're going to send you to an assignment which is classified."

Everybody expected to go to Europe,

but we were pulled out, and nobody knew where we were going to go.

We start south of Washington.

And I figure, "What's going on here?"

I mean, everything was as if they were trying

to keep the information away from me.

So we're going along,

and I began to see an opening in the trees.

And there was a... I think there was a dirt road, actually.

You know, what's... Where are they taking me?

And then we got off the main parkway

and came to a small

military installation.

We finally got to this place, and the commander said,

"This is it, guys. You're not going overseas."

"You're staying right here."

One of our guys leaned out the window to the MP and said,

"What's the name of this place?"

And the MP came back with "Nothing!"

I am not so sure that the people who set up this program

that they knew what the hell we were doing.

There was no precedent for this kind of shit. Was there?

Okay, we're gonna go ahead and get started here this morning.

And, George, if you could just start off with the most basic of basic information.

Could you give us your full name and your place of birth?

My name is George Weidinger.

I was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1923

and escaped to the United States

on the last ship out of Europe in December of 1939.

It certainly was very, very frightening to me.

Every synagogue in Vienna was burned.

Many, many were sent to concentration camps.

It was Hitler's idea to exterminate the Jews.

Completely get rid of us.

As soon as I came to this country,

I put in an application for becoming a citizen,

which qualifies you to join the Army.

There were hundreds of us there.

Jews who had just been called into the Army.

And the first question they would ask,

"Are you prepared to fight for your new country, for America?"

And then you would say, "Yes, Your Honor!"

And I was all on the side of those

who were gonna beat the shit out of the Germans.

An eye for an eye.

I don't think anybody had any better reason

to join the Army than I had,

who knew what we were fighting about.

We finished our training.

Everybody's name was called except my name.

One step forward.

Turn left.

And all they marched off...

And I was the only guy left on... on that field.

So the colonel called me in.

Weiss, say something in German.

So I gave them a famous poem by Goethe.

"Who rides so late through the night and wind?"

"It is the father..."

He said, "Okay. Enough."

"You're going to 1142."

The bus stopped.

And the first thing that I saw, it was not a very military camp.

It looked like a club.

There was a swimming pool and tennis courts.

I would say it didn't seem real somehow.

We didn't know what the hell it was.

I was immediately told,

"Here you have no rank, no titles."

"You can't tell anybody what you do."

This was a very big secret operation.

This was actually a prison camp. Right?

Well, uh... if you wanna call it that.

They certainly didn't call it. They called it PO Box 1142.

It took quite a few weeks for us

to be told that all these people were gonna be there, these Nazis.

At that time, a Nazi was a Nazi.

A German was a Nazi, and to bring them here, I mean, good God.

I mean, you shouldn't, after you captured some German officers,

bring them to the United States.

I mean, you know, what's going on here?

These soldiers came from all branches.

Artillery, Infantry, SS.

A lot of them were transferred directly from the front where they were captured,

and without a change of clothes, they arrived at 1142.

It was not the most comfortable feeling.

Some of them were real Nazis,

and they might have killed you on the spot if they could.

You know, I'm Jewish. And they knew it too.

What were you told that your role was going to be there,

your job was gonna be?

Getting intelligence, which will help the United States.

German rocketry was at its peak.

And the major risk, of course, was that Hitler would develop

a rocket powerful enough to reach New York or Washington.

That would have changed the whole course of the war.

We were told to use our German to interrogate the German prisoners.

Orders were,

"If anybody ever mentions rockets, get everything they're saying."

What's your name?

Buller.

Tell me where the V-2s are hidden.

Up my ass!

I remember this one interrogation from September '44.

This prisoner says...

"I can't talk!"

"I'm an officer in the German Army."

"All I need to give you is name and serial number."

Then I said,

"I happen to be a German Jew who was pushed out of Germany."

"And if you don't talk,

we have methods of doing things to you and your family."

As a Jewish refugee from Europe,

that's just about as bizarre an assignment as you could get.

On one occasion, there was a Waffen-SS guy who wouldn't talk.

Rolf said, "I'll make him talk."

He put this guy in an ambulance

and drove him around the base for about an hour.

"Are you ready to talk now?"

"Because if you're not, we're gonna gas you."

But he didn't talk. So they rammed the door shut,

and Rolf said, "Ivan, more gas."

Turned on a vacuum cleaner and blew dust through the vent hole,

and he thought he was being gassed because that's what the Germans did.

Rolf let him out after a while and said,

"Well, are you ready to talk to us now?"

And he talked.

One of the great achievements of PO Box 1142

was the fact that we discovered a site

where Hitler was building the V-2 rockets.

Wernher von Braun and his crew of scientists

operated from a secret underground factory

called "Peenemünde."

So we scanned the aerial photographs and interrogated prisoners,

and they told us all about it.

Having found Peenemünde

created the bombing of the site.

I felt very good knowing that that is one of the achievements

of PO Box 1142.

The sequence of events, just to keep the chronology straight,

is that General Bissell called us together at the Pentagon

and said, "Gentleman, I need to... to take some action

which is illegal and might wind me up in jail."

"There are hundreds of German scientists,

and if we don't bring them into this country,

we will lose all of that technology."

So they weren't on the books or registered or anything?

They were enemy aliens

who were not allowed to come in in time of war.

General Bissell said, "We will take over an island in Boston harbor,

and we will import these scientists illegally

and take them to the island

before the immigration people see the boat. "

So these people came over on troopships.

We imported several hundred people illegally to the island.

I distinctly remember the time we picked up Wernher von Braun

and the first of his 300-people crew from Peenemünde. There was a storm.

In the pouring rain and the howling gale,

they were lowered on the ladder in a storm that was too bad for the pilot boat.

They got off the ship , and they came to the island.

Everybody stared at these funny-looking guys

with the leather coats and their funny-looking hats.

If you wanna see the stereotype of the Prussian,

tall, blonde hair, blue-eyes, goddamn it, it was Wernher von Braun!

They were an echelon of people that we thought well of,

and I don't know how far advanced we were, but from what I understand,

we had very little information about rocketry.

There was no doubt about it.

Rocket scientists

who were essential to the Nazi war effort,

now becoming essential to our war effort.

All of a sudden,

this whole aspect of what I was to do changed,

and then we got into, what I think, the real purpose

of my being there was,

sort of an escort, public relations guy.

Make it comfortable for these people.

A decision was made to make me the morale officer,

which is a ridiculous title to have.