Times Obituary - Arnold Weiss OSS

Discussion in 'Special Forces' started by Jedburgh22, Jan 13, 2011.

  1. Jedburgh22

    Jedburgh22 Very Senior Member

    Arnold Weiss


    Weiss: his job was to hunt down members of the Nazi regime on the run




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      Weiss: his job was to hunt down members of the Nazi regime on the run



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    American intelligence agent who helped the historian and MI6 member Hugh Trevor-Roper to establish Hitler’s suicidal fate
    Difficult as it may be to credit now, for months after the end of the Second World War in Europe Adolf Hitler’s fate was a mystery. It was widely believed that he was dead, but only the Soviet authorities — who had found and secretly appropriated his charred corpse — knew this to be true for certain.
    Rumours that the Führer was alive began to swirl, spread not least by the Russians, and his name was even included in early lists of those to be tried at Nuremberg. It became increasingly important to the Western powers that they confirm his death, a process in which a young US intelligence officer, Arnold Weiss, was to find himself playing an important part.
    In the autumn of 1945 the task of investigating Hitler’s last days was assigned to the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, then 31, who had spent the war with MI6. By the start of November, having interviewed many of those who had been in the Berlin bunker, he had concluded that Hitler had indeed committed suicide. Having reported this to his superiors, he returned to his studies in Oxford, only to be summoned back to Germany two weeks later by news of the discovery of what was thought to be Hitler’s will.
    This had been found sewn into the lining of a coat belonging to Heinz Lorenz, a former official in the Propaganda Ministry. It consisted of a final personal and a political testament, in which Hitler appointed Admiral Doenitz as his heir and expelled Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler from the Nazi Party for having countenanced surrender to the Allies. There was also a note from Josef Goebbels expressing his intention to die with his leader.
    If the authenticity of the documents could be proven, then they would establish beyond doubt that Hitler had taken his own life. Lorenz claimed that he had been charged with taking them to the party’s archives in Munich, and that he had left Berlin as it fell with two other messengers bearing similar copies. The best corroboration of his story would be finding these, and this Trevor-Roper made his priority.
    One of the men, Major Willi Johannmeier, was swiftly tracked down, but convinced his interrogator — a Czech-born British officer now calling himself Robert Maxwell (later the press baron) — that he had never had the papers. It therefore became vital to locate the other potential witness, an SS colonel and chief adviser to Martin Bormann, Wilhelm Zander.
    Weiss, then aged 21, was stationed in Munich with the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), the US Army’s security agency. A German-born Jewish refugee from the Nazis, he was appointed to hunt down any members of the regime on the run in Bavaria, one of whom was thought to be Zander.
    By the time that Trevor-Roper arrived at Weiss’s office on Christmas Eve, having exhausted his leads elsewhere, the CIC suspected that Zander was living under a false name close to the town of Vilshofen, near the Austrian border.
    The gangly, bespectacled don and the short, stocky Weiss made an improbable team, and their accounts of the next few days are not consistent in every detail. Even so, it is certain that early one morning over the Christmas period they surrounded the house where Zander was thought to be, which was owned by Bormann’s secretary.
    As they entered it, recalled Weiss, a gun went off, and afterwards Trevor-Roper was persuaded to part with his sidearm. “He was pretty much legally blind,” joked Weiss, “and I was more afraid of getting shot by him than by Zander.”

    Quizzed by Trevor-Roper, with Weiss’s aid as translator, their suspect eventually confessed to being Zander. He said that he had been ordered to try to reach Doenitz in Flensburg, but this had proved impossible. To the surprise of Weiss, who may not have known what Zander’s significance was, he then offered to produce the “papers” he assumed they were seeking. Hidden in a suitcase at the bottom of a dry well were the two testaments, and the marriage certificate of Hitler and Eva Braun.
    Trevor-Roper at once informed the head of the US Third Army, General Lucian Truscott, of his discovery, and at a press conference the same day Truscott revealed this definitive proof of Hitler’s death. The news went around the world, and faced with it Johannmeier yielded, digging up from a bottle buried in his garden the last copy of the Führer’s will. For his role in apprehending Zander and resolving the mystery, Weiss was later awarded the Army Commendation Ribbon.
    Weiss was born Hans Arnold Wangersheim in Nuremberg in 1924. His father was a sports reporter for the local newspaper, but when Hans was 6 his parents were divorced. His mother’s earnings as a book-keeper were not enough to provide for him and his two sisters, and a year later he was deposited in an orphanage for Jews at Fürth.
    During his walks to school — where Henry Kissinger was a classmate — he ran the gauntlet of bullies from the Hitler Youth. Then in 1938, aged 13, he was selected for resettlement in America. He arrived in New York speaking not a word of English and with $5 in his pocket. No one met him at Chicago as arranged, so he jumped on a train to Milwaukee, where he knew German was spoken, and lived rough until being taken in by foster parents in Wisconsin. His mother and sisters later escaped to the US, but his grandmother perished in Auschwitz, and though his father survived Dachau they never met again.
    In 1942, having taken the surname Weiss from a local college football player, he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. He trained as a tail gunner for B17 bombers, but broke both legs in an accident, and while recuperating was recruited for intelligence work because of his fluent German.
    He served in Paris, at the Battle of the Bulge, and was present at the liberation of Dachau. Weiss afterwards admitted that their experiences there persuaded some in CIC to hand over any low-ranking guards they caught to former prisoners for summary justice.
    Weiss worked as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, which aroused an interest in the law. He stayed in Germany until 1947, recovering Nazi assets for the US Treasury and setting up agent networks to operate in the Eastern bloc. Then he took advantage of the GI Bill to earn degrees in politics, economics and law from the University of Wisconsin.
    Arnold Weiss had a strong sense of right and wrong, formed largely by his early life, which guided his choice of career. He joined the Treasury as a lawyer in 1952, leaving it in 1959 to help to set up the Inter-American Development Bank, whose charter he drafted and of whose work funding projects in the world’s poorer regions he was proud.
    He became a partner in a Washington law firm in 1978, and then from 1992 until his retirement in 2006, aged 81, was vice-president and general counsel of EMP, a private equity firm specialising in infrastructure deals in developing countries.
    He was married, in 1956, to Artemis Lychos. She died in 2005, and he is survived by their two sons.

    Arnold Weiss, lawyer, banker and wartime intelligence officer, was born on July 25, 1924. He died on December 7, 2010, aged 86


    http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2873909.ece
     
  2. Smudger Jnr

    Smudger Jnr Our Man in Berlin

    :poppy: Arnold Weiss R.I.P. :poppy:

    Tom
     
  3. Ron Goldstein

    Ron Goldstein WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    Lest we forget !

    RIP Arnold.

    Ron
     
  4. Ron Goldstein

    Ron Goldstein WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    In today's Times

    :poppy: Leo Cooper R.I.P :poppy:

    Famous publisher of military books.

    Married for many years to the delightful Jilly Cooper

    Ron
     
  5. Ron Goldstein

    Ron Goldstein WW2 Veteran WW2 Veteran

    In today's Times

    :poppy: Saul Kagan R.I.P :poppy:

    Ceaseless campaigner for Holocaust reparations.

    Joined the US Air Force at the age of 18 and was (as an intelligence officer in Normandy ) flown in on D-Day+1.

    Ron
     

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