School of War - Ep 157: Frank Cohn—Veterans Day Special

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Watch this episode on YouTube. Frank Cohn joins the show to talk about his life: fleeing Hitler’s Germany, his return as a U.S. soldier tasked with hunting Nazi’s, his service in Vietnam, and more. ▪️ Times      •      01:55 Introduction      •      02:15 A Nazi in the classroom     •      05:47 Martin and Ruth     •     17:35 Leaving Germany     •      19:22 New York City     •      22:50 Pearl Harbor     •      30:47 Back to Europe      •      35:30 Nazi Hunter      •      39:48 POW for a moment      •      42:32 The Dutch lady     •      50:40 Camps     •      52:30 Crossing the Elbe      •      59:20 Interrogations     •      01:05:40 Paying back the country      •      01:08:51 Paula      •      01:14:50 Military Police and Vietnam     •      01:18:40 Angus      •      01:21:12 Lessons Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

This episode is personal for me. I very much hope that you find it valuable and enjoyable. My dad, Angus McLean, fought in the Second World War. I was a very late arrival in his life. And growing up, I was surrounded by his old army buddies, most of them World War II veterans and also veterans who had gone on to have careers as Cold War Army officers. There was Uncle Jim and Uncle Jack and Uncle Frank, Frank Cohen, who is 99 years old today. and this interview is with him. Frank fled Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee weeks before Kristlnacht in 1938. He spent some teenage years in New York City and then went back into the Army where he became a literal Nazi hunter, working as an intelligence agent for Omar Bradley's army group in France, Belgium, and Germany, assessing Nazi individuals in sites for their intelligence value.

He stayed in the Army because he felt he had to give back. He stayed in for around 30 years. He joined the Military Police Hall of Fame in his retirement. It's an incredible conversation with an incredible man. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1921, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of it.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who are not these buildings. We shall bite down the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War.

I am delighted to be joined today by Colonel Frank Cohn, United States Army, retired. Frank, this is very personal for me. I grew up with you, and I'm delighted to spend time with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, we know each other a long time. We have, we have. You were a little boy when I got to know you. I was. I was. Maybe we can talk about that as we go on, but I want to start at the start with you.

You weren't born in the United States, despite your U.S. Army career. Where were you born? How did you grow up? Well, I was born in Breslau, Germany, and you can't find that on the map anymore, because this became Polish territory after World War II, and it's now called Ratzlaw. Anyway, we were a well-to-do middle-class family, Jewish, of course, and as the 1930s approached, the anti-Semitism became more and more pronounced. I still recall a very nice childhood, but when I was about five or six years old, I heard that my uncle, who lived in Kemnit, at different city, was accosted by stormtroopers because the Nazis started to get into power. And this is before Hitler, mind you. And when they confirmed that he was Jewish, they killed him. And this was a conversation among the adults. I wasn't included, but the kids hears and forms its own opinions. And I could understand that Nazis were something to be scared of.

And that was reinforced a year or so later, and this is still before Hitler. When I looked down out of the window, across the diagonally across the street, there was a finance office, and that seemed to pull demonstrators. And I saw two groups fighting each other, and I asked my parents, and they did explain to me that these were the communists and the Nazis who didn't like each other, and we didn't like either one of them. Anyway, it confirmed that Nazis were going to be something that you had to be worried about. And then I started school in 1932. First grade teacher, I don't recall, he was too old. He was in its 50s, mind you. But the second grad teacher, he came in and he was an energetic young fellow, and I loved him.

He was wonderful. and when I heard he was coming back in the third grade to teach us as well, I was all excited. But when he came in, he came in full Nazi uniform. This is now after Hitler, of course. And my heart just dropped because here I was adoring him, and suddenly he was in the midst of my enemies. Now, he was always correct with me, I will say that. because he wanted to keep order in the class, and he wouldn't let anybody pick on me per se.

But when they sang their Hitler songs, everybody had to get up except me. I was the only Jewish kid in the class, and I had to stay seated. Now, of course, the kid who's seated is not going to be very popular when everybody else is standing. So I was sort of an outcast right then and there.

and then after school there was an incident where they started to chase me yelling Jew boy, Jew boy, and I was a pretty good runner and I evaded him. I told my parents, and that's when they took action and transferred me from the public school into a Jewish private school. Can I ask you about your parents? Martin and Ruth's, correct? Martin and Ruth. What were they like?

Oh, well, there were about 14 years of, part, so my father was considerably older than my mother, and it was an arranged marriage, so it wasn't the most loving type of arrangement, but they always got together well enough. There were no big fights or anything of that sort, but there was some degree of estrangement, I guess, and I noticed that as I grew up, and I came closer to my mother than to my father. And your father, as the 30s go on, he leaves for the United States. What was behind that decision? What were his objectives for that trip?

Well, that was a slow process. As I indicated, they were well-to-do. They had a sporting goods store. And when 1933 came along with Hitler taking power, There were stormtroopers in front of the store demonstrating don't buy from Jews. And my father understood that this was going to be a losing proposition, so he sold the store as quickly as it could. And that seemed to be like a catastrophe in a way. But it was a blessing in disguise because the store was no longer an anchor.

and when 1938 came across along, that was my 13th birthday, that was my Bar Mitzvah. And I had a wonderful festive affair. I got all kinds of presents among a BMW bicycle. I really loved that, yeah. And goodness, I don't know how many pen and pencil sets I got. People don't know what else to give you. Anyway, as soon as that. was over, he turned to me and he said, I have lost the ability to earn enough for a living,

for the family, we have to do something else, and I'm going to go to the states to see if I can find some distant relatives who are in the United States to see if they can give me an affidavit. An affidavit is a document that says that you are to be, to come into the country, but you will never be a burden to the government. So they had to have money. Well, he took off on a visitor's visa and he found his relatives, but because of the depression,

they were not in a condition to give us an affidavit. Now, again, this seemed like a catastrophe, but again, a blessing in disguise because he had to stay longer to see if he could find somebody. And when he stayed longer, he evaded the Gestapo, that came to our door looking for him.

And my mother told him that he was on a business trip overseas, and she was instructed to tell him to report to Gestapo headquarters the minute he came back. Now, that raised red lights both in my mothers and in my head because we remembered a business acquaintance of ours by the name of Michaelis, who was asked to report to Gestapo, or headquarters, and they found him a few hours later on the sidewalk and front, he had either

been pushed or jumped out of the third-story window, and he was dead. And that came to mind. So my mother immediately told my father to stay where he is. And then she went to the consulate, the American consulate in Breslau, and got herself a visitor's visa. Now, that was possible. because they didn't have computers, and they didn't realize that my father was already in country. And then completely out of character, she went back the next day and bribed somebody to put me on that visa as well. And it was easy because I was on my mother's passport. So she indicated, oh, one other thing that happened after the Gestapo had come. Two days later, a British lady appeared at our door.

and she had a document from the government that instructed us to provide her with a bedroom. She was obviously a Gestapo informant, and my mother told me, be careful what do you say in the apartment if we have something important to say we have to go for a walk. Well, after she had gotten her visas, she turned to me and said, let's go for a walk. And I knew this was going to be something earth-shaking. And she said, I have a visa for the two of us, a visitor's visa, to the United States. And I've made arrangements to have first-class passage on a Holland America line.

And we have hotel reservations for two weeks in an upgraded hotel because there was nothing else we can do with our money. and hopefully we'll be able to stay, but there's no guarantee. But we're going to sneak out tomorrow morning. Well, I had one more soccer game to play, and I went and I played, and I was distracted, and I helped them lose the game. Anyway, at the end, I said, well, see you next time. But I knew there was no next time.

And I actually never heard or found out anything about these kids again. because this was pretty late in the game. It's 1938, and if they hadn't made some arrangements by then, the chances of them getting out were getting slimmer and slimmer. So I would suspect that most of them did not survive. Anyway, we snuck out at five in the morning and evaded Mrs. Griffith. Oh, by the way, she was British and she had given me two lessons in English. And that was useful. Of course, I didn't realize it at the time how useful that was. Anyway, we snuck out and went to Berlin on a train, and she said goodbye to her father, who died in a concentration camp a couple of years later.

And to her mother, excuse me, not her mother, her mother was dead. She said goodbye to her oldest sister, and they saved themselves because they're two of their kids were already in Australia, and they were able to get to Australia and saved themselves. But she never saw them either because Australia was just too far. And when we left, we didn't have any money anymore. Anyway, we had a wonderful, at least I had a wonderful trip on the Staten Dam. And I almost was the ping pong champion, but somebody beat me at the end. Anyway, my mother, though, didn't have a good time.

She was worried what would happen when we get to New York because of Alice Island, because if they find out in Ellis Island that we are coming in as visitors, but my father is already in country, then that means we were refugees and we'd be put on the boat next to go back. Anyway, we ended up in New York on the 30th of October, 19th. And we, I was all excited coming into the port of New York because my gym teacher had told me about the skyscrapers, the statue of liberty, told me what the statue meant. And I was up in front and watch as we approached and I saw the skyscrapers and I saw the statue of liberty and was just wonderful. And then a wonderful message came over with a loudspeaker that said,

first-class passengers are invited to go through customs and immediately onto the duck. Everybody else had to go to Alice Island. And my mother was elated, of course, because she felt we were saved here, at least to start with. And while we had a wonderful reunion with my father, but then he said, we're not all cleared either because we're at the mercy of the relief organizations, the Jewish relief organizations, and they said, the minute I have an affidavit, I have to return to Germany and wait there, that they could not support us for that period of time, because they'd always took a couple of years, really. Well, as I indicated, we had landed on the 30th

of October on the nights of November was Crystal Night. That was a Nazi pre-planned action against the Jews, a prognome against the Jews. And it was initiated because a Polish student had assassinated a member of the Paris German embassy. And they took that as the excuse to implement that program now. It was a terrible thing for the Jews, and we were very anxious about all our relatives back in Germany. But for us, personally, it became a saving because President Roosevelt issued an executive order that indicated that nobody in country would be forced to return to Germany, and that was what saved us. You talk about your classmates' on the soccer team, assume the team from your Jewish school.

Yes. And how it's unlikely that many of them survived. Your family and your father and your mother's initiative and bravery is more the exception than the rule. Why do you think they decided to go and why do you think so many decided to stay? Of course, the economic situation tip the scales. And that's what my father realized he just couldn't stay and earn a living in Germany. That's what did it. And some of the other relatives, either they were old and living on whatever income they had had amassed

or they still had something going that earned them some money. But in the end, we lost 11 of our relatives, six on my mother. side and five on my father's side, they were uncles and aunts and cousins. And we really never found out exactly what happened to them. Among them was, of course, my grandfather as well. I mean, it's hard to overstate the boldness of what your parents did. I'm trying to imagine you at 13 years old, you and your mother, you've had this middle-class, comfortable life, successful business that your father owns. You pack one suitcase. You've spent a lot of money on tickets, which in the end was a brilliant thing to do, as you described. And that's it. That's what you've

got. Do you remember as you packed that suitcase or as you were headed off to the train to Berlin what you were thinking? Well, I was hoping to take my bicycle in the suitcase, but that of course didn't work. Anyway, I will say one thing. It was probably the best decision I ever made my life. When my mother said, should we go? And she asked me, should we go? I said, let's go, even though I had all my friends, and I had all my relatives there, and I had a comfortable life even at that time. But I was smart enough to realize that I was not wanted in that country. And when we were outside of our group, we realized that we couldn't go to a restaurant, because there were signs that said Jews not desired or Jews not allowed, depending on the degree of the restaurant.

Anyway, that was probably the smartest thing I ever did because a certain year old kid who doesn't want to go can really put a problem onto my mother. And God knows what could have happened if I had tried to stymie her. Well, you know your mother, if you had said no, what do you think your mother would have done? I have no idea what she would have done then. But I have to say she was the heroine because she was the one who said, I'm going to leave everything that I own behind and take one suitcase that I'm allowed. And she just walked out, and that was it with me.

So winter of 1938, 39, you're in New York City. You're 13 years old. You've had two English lessons. That's right. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough. Where'd you guys move in? Where'd you live? What was it like? Okay. We first got in a room. My father had arranged it with a Greek family. Sub-led one bedroom with kitchen privileges. So the three of us were sleeping in one bedroom. And, well, I guess it worked out. Well, as a kid, you can accommodate yourself very easily. I'm sure my parents had a much more difficult time. accommodate, but I accommodated, but I was always an outcast in a way. Now, they had three kids.

The two were about my age, a boy and a girl, and a younger kid. And the only one who would play with me was the younger kid, because I couldn't speak the language well enough. Anyway, I was placed into a seventh grade class. I had left seventh grade, so this was a good arrangement. But even on the first day, I knew I was in trouble because the teacher didn't realize I didn't speak the language well enough. And she said, Frank, take this waste paper basket around and collect the trash. I had no idea what she was talking about. But she had looked at the window. And ah, she wants me to open the window. Of course, everybody laughed. Well, the kid doesn't want to be laughed at and I knew I had to learn English as quickly as possible. And what I did was I listened to the

radio, but the radio was very difficult because you couldn't understand what the thing was all about. But I got the intonations and I was able to evade the German accent. Right. Because I knew that right immediately. I didn't want that German accent. Now, what did help more was the movies. because the movies you could see what was going on, you could understand what the plot was all about, and when they started to talk, you started to associate the words with what the plot was. So they really helped me. And the teachers helped too. They got me magazines and annotated the names of the various things that were the pictures in the magazines displayed.

So overall, I was in junior high school. seventh, eighth, ninth, and twelfth grade. When I went to high school, I was doing fine, and I started to integrate, and I was no longer an outcast. Well, you know, you're only two years younger than Henry Kissinger, and actually the shape of your early lives, your two lives are very similar. He also comes over, I think, as a teenager. And, of course, famously, is this thick, impenetrable German accent.

You're a better English linguist than Henry Kissinger by a long shot. There's hardly any trace of it. He liked to keep his accent. I think that was premeditated. He wanted to be the foreigner who accommodated himself. And I didn't want to be that. I wanted to integrate. I want to be an American.

So 39 Hitler invades Poland. And then 41, obviously the Japanese attack. And Hitler declares war in the United States. You're in high school through... I'm 16 years old. Right. Well, actually, let's talk about Pearl Harbor. Do you remember where you were?

Yes, it was a beautiful Sunday morning, but cold. Anyway, I was outside of my house where we lived, and some kid came up running on the street. I was with a group of other kids, and he yelled, The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor, what's Pearl Harbor? Nobody knew what Pearl Harbor was. So finally somebody explained that it was Hawaii, and we understood how we were at war.

And of course, the next day the Germans declared war. And I was happy to hear that because I knew when the Americans were going to face the Germans, there's no question as to who was going to win the war. I knew that. But 16 years old, it didn't really affect me personally. Well, it didn't take too long before I really. I realized, whoops, it does affect me personally, because as I neared 18 years old, I was going to get drafted. And sure enough, I was 18 in August in 1943, and in September I was drafted in the Army.

And you went to Fort Benning, correct? No. First, I went to the reception center at Fort Dix. Okay. Now, you're supposed to be in the reception center for about three days, where they're. They process you, give you shots and all that, and you even go on KP. And they wake you up at 4 in the morning, and they were in their kitchen until 8 o'clock at night, and I knew that's not what I would like to have when I was in the Army.

In retrospect, I did pretty good. I only had KP three times in my Army career, because I always volunteered for guard duty. And people had always told me, don't volunteer for anything. I didn't listen to that. I volunteered for guard duty and I evaded KP. Well, anyway, I was there for three days and everybody got there orders except me. Why didn't I get no orders? I went to see my sergeant there and they said, well, let me check and see.

He came back and said, well, you were an enemy alien. I said, I'm an animal alien. Yes. You came in on a visitor's visa. You never got naturalized. And your birth certificate is German. Your passport, the last one was German, even though it was invalidated and declared Nullen Boyd.

And the Germans are the enemy. Is you an enemy alien? The FBI asked her investigator. And I thought, oh, my God, KP for the... God knows how long I'm going to be at Fort Dix. I said, Sergeant, I'm not completely estranged from the Army. I had high school ROTC, and I had one course of RRTC in the summer course of college,

so I know the closer on a drill, I know some of the tactics, I know some of the history and all that. So I'm glad you told me that. I'm going to make you an acting gadget. What's an acting gadget? Well, here's a armband. You're going to put that on, and it has corporal stripes. So when all those new recruits come,

now you're already seasoned for three days. You form them up and you march him to see the two movies that you saw when you came in. I thought, wonderful, I can do that. And I got the next group, and I formed them up, and I showed them how to march in formation, and we marched off to the theater, and I saw why we fight,

which was a very good film. Knappra. Explaining the reasons why we're in the war, and how to avoid venereal diseases. I saw that movie more than anybody else in the United States are. The expert. So did the FBI investigate? What happened?

How did you eventually move on to Benning? Well, it took about three months, and so three months of KP avoided. That was a pretty good deal. Okay. And so I didn't mind those movies. Anyway, I got orders for basic training. there's another reason why I got those orders come to think of it, because the class I was in for basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia,

was designed for people who had had some college. And after basic training, we were going to go back to college and get our degree and become an officer. Well, this was ridiculous, because it would have taken me until 46 to, finished college and the war would have been over one year. Of course, we didn't know that per se, but somebody did understand the rationale there and said, no, no, no, we don't need more officers. We need infantry because we're facing the invasion. We'll have losses. We have to have infantry replacements. So instead of going back to college, I went to the 87th Infantry Division

in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And, well, that was a rough division because it had all these people who had expected college and didn't get it, and it had the people who washed out to become aviators. They went to the 87th Infantry Division, so they had a morale problem in that division, and they knew that.

So they were going to send a general up, who was a person who was going to try to get your morale up. And we were at practice to say when he asked, how do you feel then? We were to say, rough, tough, and ready for combat. Well, when it came, he asked a question, and there was a weak voice up in front, rough, tough, and ready for combat.

Much louder in the back. Piss poor and praying. We were restricted for two weekends. And somewhere in the midst of all of this, having started your army career, under suspicion as an enemy alien, being investigated before you're allowed to go to training, by the point we are now at it in the story, it's been forgotten that you speak German, your fluent German speaker, of court. Well, it was, that was one of the problems because I was in the wrong basic training class. Had I been a regular basic training class, they were to recognize that I spoke German and I would have gone. to Camp Ritchie, where they had a lot of the refugees or anybody who spoke German were trained for about, I don't remember how many weeks, but to become a intelligence agent. Oh, I forgot one

thing to tell you. When I went into basic training, about three weeks after that, they took me to Columbus, Georgia, and I became a U.S. citizen. And I patted myself on the back because nobody else was there to do it because now I was no longer an enemy alien. I was as good as everybody else, and I was really happy, and I was living it up. I was a United States citizen. Well, anyway. Your parents were citizens yet at this point? No, my parents were not.

As a matter of fact, probably about a year or two later on, they had to go to Canada for one day and then immigrated technically back into the United States. And that's when it started that they could wait for five years to become a citizen. Me, I became a citizen, and it was just about five years come to think of it. Yeah. When do you go to Europe? Well, that was another story. In the 87th Infantry Division, I was incorporated into a training class on

on poisoned gas because the Germans used it during World War I. And I had my gas mask on, and the instructor wanted to liven it up a bit, and he drew what he thought was a smoke grenade. When he threw it, it ended up being white phosphorus. So I was lucky having the gas mask on because the instructor got it right in his face. I got it on my ears. I got it on my wrist. And my hands, my backpack caught fire.

I got rid of that, and I dashed to the dispensary. They didn't know what it was at first, but when the instructor came in, he realized what it was. He said, white phosphorus. So they got a bucket of water for me and stuck my hands into the bucket and applied wet compresses on my ears. And I was in the hospital for about three, well, it was about more. Over a month anyway. When I came back, they had progressed from a five-mile full field march to 25 miles, and about 15 miles there to take me back with a Jeep because I was about to pass out.

I hadn't recovered enough. So I wasn't their best infantry guy. So when they were assessed replacements to move out from the division as infantry replacements because they needed them overseas after the invasion, I was picked. And off I went from the 87th into the infantry replacement stream. So we went from New York into England, and you would think they need us immediately, but things went slow in the replacement process. We were three weeks in England, and then we went to France, and we were sometime in France,

and then into Belgium, and in Belgium I even got a pass to visit the town. It was Malady come to think of it. And I met some girls there. They took me to their home, and I saw the pictures in the home. Their fathers were in the German army. I was in the house of the enemy. Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

But anyway, it was in Belgium that they found out, spoke German. So they weren't going to send me back to Richie in the States, but they had a course that they sort of sewed together in the Vesanania, Paris, and I went back there. It was just a two-week course extracting some of the things that they taught at Cambridgesie. Well, after two weeks, I was going to be an intelligent agent, fully trained, of course. That's right. Well, it got worse than that. One week after I got there, they needed me so badly. They took me out, but I was still a full trained, intelligent agent. And I went into a team of six people called Interrogator Prison of War Team, number 66.

That was composed of two officers and two interpreters, a driver and an inquisional in charge. Now, the officers and the interpreters didn't wear any robes. rank. We were U.S., U.S., U.S. on my lapel and my hat, and I took off my PFC stripe, and I was now indistinguishable between the officers and my other interpreter who was a staff sergeant. And the team then moved to Luxembourg, where we joined up with an intelligence unit called T-Force, Task Force, 12th Army group, right on General Bradley. And we operated then in the First and Third Army area. And our mission was going to be to move into the big cities behind the infantry.

And we had personality and building targets. Building targets, anything that was going to be of use to the occupying force and personality targets were going to be the war criminal. and also in the building targets, anything that was in support of the prosecution of war criminals would be one of the building targets. In other words, you were a Nazi hunter? Yes.

I was an intelligence agent. Anyway, we moved back into, the T-Force moved into Belgium. We were in Belgium, and my other interpreter was also a refugee, He was a staff sergeant, and he was a linguist, but he had a heavy German accent. Right. And I didn't.

So when the captain wanted an interpreter, he never took flow. He took me. So the timing of all of this is such that you get to Luxembourg, basically as you arrive at long last, through this long process that the army puts you through, long and convoluted process, you get to the battlefield basically just in time for the bulge, right? Is that your first major experience of an operation? That's right. We moved back into Belgium,

and I think it was about the 10th of December, 1944. And on the 16th of December, the bulge happened. And the first night was a really scary one, because not so much because of any danger per se, but because of the rumors that were going around, paratroopers, and they was shooting all around. There was no reason to shoot, but they were shooting at this point.

God knows what they were shooting at. Anyway, I was placed on a route, a little access route, going into the CP, and told, don't let any Germans come in. Here's your rifle and here's your flashlight. And that was it. So I got on that road, and I stood there and defunded first vehicle that came, I said,

halt, halt, and the driver said, what the hell you're doing? I said, I'm stopping you and make sure you're not German. If I were German, you'd be dead. Get in a ditch over there. Well, that's not a bad idea. So I got in a ditch, and I'm yelling as the next vehicle

came around, halt, halt, they don't give me, they go right back. I'm not doing my job. So I'm back and forth. I don't know what to have to do. Anyway, about midnight, They called me back, thank goodness, and we were going to take a blackout move towards Antwerp. And Antwerp, we didn't know Antwerp was our target, but so was the German breakthrough was headed towards Antwerp.

But the Germans never got to Antwerp, and we never got to Antwerp. We got to Namur, and in Amir, we got orders that they had observed some Germans in American. uniforms, getting through our lines, the four in a jeep, and they were creating havoc in back of our lines. They were blowing things up, and they were switching sides around, and God knows what they were doing. So we had to patrol through Belgium to see if we could intercept any of them. Now, that sounds like an easy enough job, but it was just miserable because of the weather. Right. The weather was just horror. It was either snowing or sleeting or freezing rain.

And when you drive with a Jeep, even at 25 miles per hour with the windshield down, you can't shoot through the windshield. So a windshield is down, and that blast comes through. Now, in one sense, I was lucky a PFC. I was in the back seat behind the captain. And I was able to have the captain take... much of the brunt of the blast. Leadership.

But I was still getting enough blast that I was freezing and miserable. And when your feet got wet, they never got dried. So the whole thing was miserable for at least a whole week. Now, you want me to tell you about one incident? I would love to. Okay. This is a story you told me when I was a kid about becoming an American prisoner of war. That's right.

What happened is we're moving through Belgium, and we could see that the captain didn't know where we were because he was looking the map, he was looking around, looking the map. And as chance would have it, we were passing a little infantry unit that had deployed on a hillside, and we said to the cabin, let's stop here and find out where we are. He didn't want to do it, but we finally convinced him. And he said, Colin, come with me.

So we trudged up the hill. There was a lieutenant who had drugged a table out of a farmhouse, and he had it out in the open, even though there was drizzle, and he had maps displayed. It was the easiest thing. All the captain had to say was, oh, Lieutenant, where are we? Well, no, he didn't want to do that. He introduces himself to the lieutenant said,

Captain Rebel, military intelligence. Give me a briefing of the situation. Lieutenant was too impressed. He said, well, let's see your intelligence identification. Well, we don't carry those around in case we get captured. We don't carry them. I got my dog tags. He said, anybody can get dog tags.

Anyway, let's see, what's the fifth general order? Captain didn't know. I knew, but they didn't ask me. I knew my 12th general orders. And they said, okay, who won the World Series? Captain looked at me. I looked at the captain. I didn't know. He didn't know. He said, all right, recite the Star-Spangled Banner. He starts off, Jose, can you see by the dog's early night? And he gets stuck. He's not singing it.

More and more people are gathering around. And the other interpreter of flow, he realizes something's wrong when he wants to come up. And he comes up and poured arms saying, What goes on here with that German accent? That's all that was needed. An M1 in my belly, an M1 in the captain's belly, and M1 in Flo's belly, and they run down and get the driver, and we're prisoners of war of the Americans.

It took seven hours for them to finally validate that we were for real, and the lieutenant said, get the hell out of here. And the captain says, I don't want anyone and say one word about this to anyone. No, sir. The minute we got to the CP, they had heard all about it. We could never leave.

Could not live it down. So after the bulge, you go on to participate in the Rhineland campaign, the Central European campaign. Tell me about those operations. What was work like? What was the kind of German that you interrogated? Were you an interpreter for these interrogations? Did you do much questioning of your own? Just give us, paint us a picture.

Okay, good question. Well, first of all, we did find one team in the bulge of Germans that had been wiped out and an infantry roadblock. They had taken a bazooker and they killed the four and the Jeep was destroyed and we searched them and all they had was dog tags and they had explosives, they had maps and all that, but nothing of intelligence to evaluate. except that we knew it was a legitimate target. Anyway, we had to wait for about three months in a small village

until the army was ready to move back into Germany. They had captured one town of Aachen before the bulge, and then it took a while to get back through Aachen, and then the first big city was Cologne. And Cologne was our first target city. And then, well, when we got into Cologne, we realized there were no personality targets because all of the Nazis had gone on the other side of the river. The Rhine River divided Cologne and no Nazis were left on the west side of the Rhine River. We had a concern as a military concern as one of our first priority targets.

When we went there, we got into the building, and you could see that Germans had evacuated in a hurry because there was all kind of destroyed paperwork and whatnot in all ways. And the only living thing we found was a canary bird, and we stood around admiring the bird, seeing if we need to give them something, but the Germans had fed them, give them water, and then suddenly a mortar route came. they must have seen our Jeep when we came in. We dashed down and got in the Jeep and moved out, and the second round came in.

It was short, luckily, and sure enough, the third round for effect was right there where the Jeep had been parked. And that changed my attitude because this was not informal artillery fire where they're not looking at me. I was just one of the people along there. They were trying to kill me personally.

So I received a lot of respect there. The other one thing in Cologne that I remember, now I had my U.S. on, and my driver was a Tech Five specialist he wore his stripes. And he outranked me because I was the PFC, but he didn't know that. And I was able to order him around. And because there was no personnel target, we had lots of time. and were told to assist in the enforcement of the curfew. So we are out there, and do we see a figure in the distance,

and I tell the driver, give chase. And he's very good. He did do that, and he got the person against the wall with the Jeep in front. And I get out, and it's a young German girl, and I'm starting to talk in perfect German, which intimidated her even more. And I said, what are you doing out here after curfew?

And she said, well, we're hungry. And we have meat. I said, what do you mean? We say, well, there's this Dutch lady and there are two girls. And we're living there with, well, we had a ration card. And when the Americans approached, the rations went out of the window because all the officials went to the other side of the river, and our black market, which we used to accommodate us,

that dried up too, so we haven't eaten in three days. I said, well, this doesn't sound right. What are you talking about? Three people, one ration card, black market, what's going on here? And she said, well, she was hesitant, and she said, well, this Dutch lady, she sort of harbored us, two girls. What do you mean the harbor? We're Jewish. Hamos fell down. How did you survive? Well, she's been helping us for two years. She kept us in the house, and with the black market,

we were at enough food, and she protected us. I said, get in the Jeep. Where is it? I still remember the address. Forty-nine Stadwoldgirtle in Kolo. And we went there, And I can't remember the names of any of these people except the girl. Our name was Allent. I don't know her last name, but it was Allot. And she was a cute little girl, I'm not in fact of her. Anyway, she introduced us to the Dutch lady, and the Dutch lady was wonderful that you Americans were coming. I know we haven't eaten for three days, but I have cancer, and I didn't know if I were to be disabled,

what would happen to the two girls? I met the other girl. And I said, don't worry about the food. I had some rations. I got them out of the Jeep, and they ate them immediately. They were really starving. Anyway, I said, I'll take care of it. And I went back to the CP, and I saw Lieutenant Levy, who was Jewish,

and I told them about these two Jewish girls, and the Dutch lady, he said, I'll take care of it, don't worry about it. A couple of days later. I wanted to tell Show Flo, introduce them to the girls, and I liked Alan anyway. So we went back and there's a big

off-limit sign in front of the building. So the two of us decide, well, we better go see Lieutenant Levy, see what's going on. We got back to Lieutenant Levy and I said to Lieutenant Levy, well, what did you do? Why did you put the North Limit side?

I don't know what you're talking about. Let's go there. We hopped in our Jeep. We went back and passed the sign, went into the house, and we greeted like the great liberators that we were. And the lieutenant

asked a Dutch lady, I had met them before when he had given him a truck with rations. And the Dutch lady said, well, you did too good a job. What do you mean, I did too good a job? Well, he said,

she said, apparently the word came out that there was this Dutch lady that saved these two little Jewish girls and they were hungry and after you got your truck with all the food which I put in the basement another truck came

with food which I put in the basement and then another truck and then another truck my basement is full of food I didn't know what to do I went outside and I saw an infantry unit next block I saw the captain there I said help me how can

can I stop these trucks? He said, I'll take care of it. And that's how we add that off-limits side. I thought that's a pretty good story. I love how throughout this entire story you're mostly concerned by how cute Ellen is. Is it the 19-year-old infantrymen, is the 19-year-old infantrymen, no matter what you do with them. You obviously were better informed than most of the GIs you were serving with about the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and how dangers it was for Jews, When did you first become aware of the full scope of the Holocaust of the camp system? How did that start to dawn on you as you came into Germany? Or did you already have some semblance of knowledge of what it was like?

Well, you know, I never got the full brunt of it while I was overseas. I never got to a concentration camp. The only thing we liberated was a Polish labor camp. And it wasn't Polish, excuse me, Ukrainian. They were Ukrainians. And this was in Wiesbaden. And the problem there, we recognized immediately that half of the people in that camp had volunteered to work for the Germans

because they hated the Russians. And the other half were really forced laborers. And we were trying to distinguish between the two. It was a hopeless affair because they only spoke broken German. You couldn't tell who was lying. and everybody was pointing the finger at the other person. They were the volunteers, but they themselves were the forced laborers. And we finally gave up and declared everybody forced laborer.

I found out later that after the war, some of them went back to Russia, and the Russians declared it in the other direction. They decided all of them had been volunteered. They shaved the hair of all the girls, and they imprisoned the men, And one girl managed to get back to Wiesbaden and told them what happened. And of course, nobody went back to Russia anymore after that. And even though there was a Russian mission

that was trying to get them to go back to Russia in Wiesbaden, but they were unable to get any assistance now way. And among the many amazing details of your own story is that you were among the first Americans to encounter Red Army troops on the Elb as the war comes to its conclusion. Tell me about that. Well, it was even more when we went into Disseldof. We had gone over the Ludendorf Bridge that was bombed out but still retained.

We were in a reception center and then finally got the word that we would go across. and the war was very unrecognizable as to what was happening. And the captain told Flo and me to go in there and make sure that we can get into Dissledorf. We approached Dissledorf, and in the distance we saw the white sheets of people who wanted to give up hanging from the windows. And then there was a roadblock across, and we could see people working on it. and if we looked a little bit closer, we could see that they weren't trying to build up the roadblock. They were trying to disestablish it. They were trying to take the stuff away.

And when they saw the Jeep, they took off. They ran off. So we got there and there was a gap already. We went through the gap and the tire got blown up. So we limped into what was a nearby ESO station. and I got the owner to help change the tires, put the spare ride, spare on. He did that for us.

And we asked him, did you see any Americans? He said, no, you're the first Americans. So Flo turned to me and said, we're not supposed to liberate the Dissildorf. We better go back and tell the captain, we have to wait another day or so, and that's what we did. Anyway, we finally, we had our dossiers for

Dursseldorf, for Cologne Derseldorf, and then Ziegann was another town in the rural valley, and then Frankfurt, and then there was Castle, and when we got to Castle, we got the word Skip Castle, go immediately to Magdeburg. Magdeburg was on the Alba, and to go there because the Russians had already reached the Alba on the other side, and we have to have a presence on our side. So we moved to Magdeburg, and in our move, we realized the war was over for us because the Germans on both sides of the Ata Band were coming towards us, trying to give themselves up. They wanted to eat. They were hungry, and we had to wave them off because we had a different mission. But we knew for us the war was over.

And we got into Magdeburg, and of course there was still lots of fighting going on in Berlin on the other side of the Alba River. The Alba River was designed as the demarcation line by General Eisenhower so that the Russian forces, the Soviet forces, moving westward, would not intermingle with the American-British forces moving eastward, and the Alba was the stopping line. Now, the captain received a top-secret map, which showed the occupation, zones. And it showed that Magdeburg and areas even further to the west to Helmstadt were all

part of the Soviet occupation zone. And he must have gotten word to go across and talk to the Russians and tell them, don't move across the river until we are ready to pull back. And that might be in a couple of months or so. And he's looking for somebody who spoke, Russian couldn't find anyone. when he turns to me, he says, you're my interpreter. Come with me. I said, I'm trying to get out of this. I don't speak any Russian. I know one word, Tovaris. That's it, a friend. And I can't help you. He said, carry them out. He and I commanded a German boatman to take us across, and halfway across, he gets up to make sure the Russians see that he's an American. And sure enough, we get there, you can't imagine the reception we received. They hugged us, they kissed us, they carried us around. They plied us with vodka. I'm 19 years old. I never had a sip of vodka in my life. I took one sip and I knew I better be careful with that stuff. I had some cigarettes to compensate and to offer it to them. Well, they had to take the captain in the back. I couldn't

help him at all. They only spoke Russian and no, not even broken German, so I couldn't help him at all. And apparently they took care of him in the back. They must have gotten him interpreter. And he came back at about an hour or two later while I was sitting at the river edge of the Elba trying to communicate with the Russians. And some NCO took a shine on me. said, me, Moscow. I said, me, New York. You come Moscow. I said, you'll come New York. And that's how we communicated. Anyway, the captain was happy.

And we went back and we said we had this wonderful reception. But then you forget about it. But one, maybe months later, I woke up from one my sleep, and it suddenly dawned at me. Why did we get such a reception? Well, it was actually obvious, and I should have realized that much earlier. When the Germans moved into Poland against the Russians, against the Soviet, they mistreated the Russians very badly. So when the title battle turned and the Russians started to advance,

the Russians were taken their revenge, and the Germans knew that they didn't want to be taken prisoner by the Russians. So they fought every inch of the way and they finally got to the Alba River fighting all the way up to the Alba and when they finally saw an American in front of them, they were assured there were no more Germans in front of them and they had survived the war and they were happy celebrating their survival. That's why we got such a restriction. Yeah, the war was over for them too. The war was over for them, even though there was fighting in Berlin. So you stay on in the occupation. What was the level of Nazi resistance after Vigida? What was the nature of your work? Were you developing evidence for prosecutions? What was that work like? Yeah, well, our dossiers, of course,

helped us get some information when we got a Gestapo headquarters or a Nazi headquarters, documentation, we always got the documentation safeties and turned them in for later analysis by military government. Now, our, and even on the personality targets when we got some of these Nazis, ours was not to interrogate them completely. Ours was initial interrogation to see

if they had intelligence value or if they could be put into a POW camp straight without any worry. So we had to assort them and label those with intelligence value on one side and the rest of them we don't have to worry about. So all this was being done. And that's how we found out a little bit about what they were doing in the concentration camps and such. But I didn't get a full briefing of it.

and I didn't get the full value as to the millions that had been burned. And these, well, while they had concentration camp, they also had these killing centers, which were concentration camps, but that's where when the people came from the trains, they would be placed right into the gas chambers, and then the evidence would be burned in the crematoriums. But all that came to light much later on when I got back to the States. That's when I found out that 11 members of my family had been perished in the concentration camps. Anyway, the one thing I had was in the occupation. My mother wrote me that if I had a chance to get to Berlin to check on one of her sisters,

The sister of the person who was killed in Chemnitz, that was the wife. She was still alive the last time my mother had checked, but that was during the war. And she didn't know what to happen to her. So I had gotten a chance to get to Berlin, to deliver some documents to the Berlin's. Center in the occupation, and I went and I took some, the chief of documents gave me two crates to bring to the document center in Berlin. And he said, but there's a corporal, and by then I was a sergeant. I got up to Stavs, and he said, but this corporal fair, he's going to be in charge of this thing. He's got ten crates also.

Well, we started towards Berlin. I put my two crates on top of his, and we get halfway to getting in. I said, well, we'll stay overnight, and let's see. I will take turns garden to documents. And fares at documents? Yeah, well, I got two crates of documents,

and you've got 12 crates here. And I don't have documents. I got coffee and cigarettes and all kinds of black markets. stuff. So, God, what am I getting into? Well, when we got to Berlin, just drop me at the document center. I don't want to see you until you will finish and we'll see in the hotel. And sure enough, I delivered my documents. I waited and he came to the hotel and I said, you got rid of all your stuff. So, oh, sure, look at this. He had a little sack and he put it

on a bed who was full of diamonds. He had turned it into diamonds. You asked me, do you have any cigarettes? I said, yeah, I brought two cartons because I'm trying to find out about my hand, and I had gotten information from the Red Cross that my hand had first been placed into Theresstadt, which was supposedly the concentration camp that was to be looked at by the Red Cross. But then she had gotten orders into Auschwitz, so she was evacuated into Auschwitz, and then they had no lists of survivors of the Auschwitz. They had lists, but she was not on the list of the survivors of the Auschwitz. So she had died in Auschwitz.

I found that out. Well, anyway, Corporal said, give me those two cartons. And he came back with $300 in, we didn't get dollars. we got the script. So this was $300 in script. But I was able to send back to my parents any money in the amount that was paid to me. So the script was valuable, $300.

I sent it back to my mother. I thought I earned this scare I had going into Berlin. The day before they had blocked everything coming into Berlin. and had checked everything out, I found out. And I don't know what they would have done with these crates marked top secret. But who would have believed that I didn't know anything about what's in those 10 crates? A very promising Army career would have been cut off.

That would have been shorted. So after all these relatively friendly relations with the Soviets, of course, you go on to have a long career in the Army in the Cold War, essentially prosecuting different elements of the Cold War against Congress. amongst other challenges. Why did you stay in the Army? Well, you know, to this day, I owe the country. There's payback that has to be done. And I tried to do that even to this day. And this was all part of it. I thought I owed the country something I should work. And I decided to stay in the Army. I knew I had to go back to college.

That was a lesson I got in Dessledorf. We had the Stahlhof, and I was married up with a CIC officer who was an economist. And now I had, my education was seventh grade in Germany, and I had one summer course in college, so I never had economics. And in this interrogation, he started to use language that I didn't understand in English, and I didn't know in German. I couldn't help him translate that stuff because I didn't understand it. And he understood what my problem was, and he modified the questions so I could understand and translate. But that showed me I needed to have a college education. And sure enough, when I got back to the States, I went back to college.

And at the end of college, I also had gone into ROTC, and I was offered a regular Army Commission and I decided this is what I'm going to do this is good payback I'll be an army officer and I did and I had three more tours in Germany as a matter of fact always going back there because I spoke German and in a way I evaded the Korean War that way we were all on orders to Germany and they changed the orders to Korea for most of the people but they didn't change my orders because I spoke German. When I got to Korea, the war was over. I did go to Vietnam during the war. I had Vietnam, but three tours in Germany, and I thought I did some good in those things. I certainly improved German-American relations. Now, a couple of things were

in Toronto, yeah. First of all, I never admitted that I was born in Germany. When I, in California, in counted the Germans, and they knew I spoke German perfectly, I said, well, I was born in the States, but my parents were born in Germany, and we spoke German at home. Now, I don't know if they believed me or not, but I didn't care. I didn't want to get into any confrontation about my own land and my owing the whole land because I was born there and whatnot. As a matter of fact, when I teach about the Holocaust to kids, one of the questions they asked, well, how do you feel about your homeland in Germany? And I tell him, wait a second, that's not my homeland.

I might have been born there, but my home is the United States. And I wanted to avoid that, and I did avoid that. Well, I want to ask you a few questions about your military police career and about Vietnam. But before I do, when did you meet Paula, woman you were married to for 72 years. Tell me about Paula. Well, that's important. Yes. Well, I got introduced to Paula before I went into the Army. I was in high school and it was a boys high school. So we didn't have any communication with girls. So a friend of mine, I told him, why don't we go to the junior a high school that's right in the block where I'm living after school, and we'll play ping pong.

And sure enough, we went in, and there were two girls, and we challenged them to ping pong, then we called one girl ping and the other one, Pong. I like Pong. Anyway, well, I was pretty shy about girls. I didn't know what to handle her, but somehow I got nerve enough to ask her, she was a couple of years younger than me to go to a movie and we went to a movie and so forth and then I was drafted.

Now, one thing that is unforgivable and you never can repair it is when you goof up. And here I goofed up, I never wrote to Paula. I should have. I remembered even her phone number, Academy 2-44-2. Wow, to this day. But I never wrote her.

I wrote some other girls, and then I had another girl that I knew. Her name was Julie, and I put the Julie on the Jeep as my Jeep, but not Paula. Well, anyway, when I got back out of the Army and went back to college to CCNY, who do I meet in CCNY? Paula. By now she had caught up with me on a grade level. She was in college and I was in college And she lived right around a block from me

So we established contact And she forgave me that I didn't write her Anyway, where in New York is this? Is the west side? Where did you guys live? I lived 108th Street and she lived 101 7th Street On the west side in Manhattan And well, pretty soon Anyway, I met the family

I was a nice Jewish boy, it was fine but then when they realized I became serious and I was going to be an army officer, suddenly I was persona and grat. They didn't want me to be serious, but I was serious and I talked to Paula and I finally gave her an engagement ring and she accepted it,

but she had to wear it on a chain underneath a blouse because she couldn't tell her parents or her sisters even. Why? Because you were going into the army? Why? Why didn't her parents want her to marry you? Well, because they knew going in the army, she would leave New York. Of course. God knows where we would be, but certainly not in New York. Yeah.

And so that was it. Well, finally, I convinced her, this is ridiculous, we've got to get married. So one fine day, I arranged it. Two of my friends, one brought his girlfriend along. So we went to the, in the subway, Paula, me, and the three witnesses, more or less, to see Judge Ringel. Judge Ringel was a lieutenant colonel in the reserve, and I was in the reserve. He was my commanding officer. And I thought, well, Judge Ringel will marry us. So we get to his office, and I had made sure that he was in his office. We got there and I said, Judge, would you marry us? And he said, I'm sorry. I'm a magistrate.

I don't have the ability to marry you. I don't have that authorization. And oh, God, what are we doing now? Well, let's go home, Paula said, no, no, no, no. So we went into the phone and I found a rabbi in Queens. I called him and he was willing to marry us. So we all take off on the subway to Queens. We get to the rabbi's office, and I give him the $2 or whatever it was, and he married us, and we're now married, and where do we go?

Well, we don't have a place to live because there's a housing shortage, and I had not been able to find a place. So Paula went home to her home. I went home to my home, and we didn't say a word about being married until about a month later. found a place where we could. It was a terrible place. But it was a bedroom with kitchen privileges, and it was good enough as far as I was concerned, and Paula wasn't too happy with it, but she said, okay, and the bathroom was shared with somebody else. It was just horrible. Anyway, it was our place. So we went home and told we're married, and well, my mother was congratulated. me, but she was sorry that she wasn't with us,

that she would have loved to have been with us when I told I couldn't do it when Paula couldn't tell her mother. And of course, Paula left the house, and they were all in agitation there for 24 hours, and her mother finally came over to our house the next day, and everything was hunky-dory from then on. And we lived 72 years happy. It's amazing. It's amazing. 35 years in the Army, as a military police officer, why the MP Corps, and was it, did that involve a lot of intelligence work like you did as an enlisted soldier? That's a good question.

It was a straight police work. Well, when I graduated from high school and accepted a regular Army commission, intelligence was still a reserve unit, not a regular Army unit. And here I wanted my regular Army commission, so I had to find a different branch. And I thought the closely related one was military police. And I selected military police. It was about three years later that intelligence became a regular Army branch, which was a dumb thing. They should have done that a long time before.

But anyway, I wasn't going to switch at that point. And I stayed in the military police. Tell me about Vietnam. What was your work like there? Well, there are two types of duties in Vietnam. One duty was in the boom docks, and they had a very rough time. The other duty was with the headquarters, and I was in the U-Servi headquarters,

where I had an air-conditioned hooch that I lived in, an air-conditioned sedan that took me to the air-conditioned messal that took me from there to the air-conditioned office and from there back to the air-conditioned hooch so that was my tour of duty and i was the operations officer for military police in vietnam and when i came in general brandenburg who was a excellent officer and he was much maligned because a person before him had gotten into the PX a tailor. And it turned out that that Taylor was a Chinese agent. But that was found out later when that general officer left and Brandenburg took over. And in his round, they found out that, that, that,

the PX was, which he had to have some supervision over in regards to security. They had this Chinese intelligence officer in there, and he got blamed for it, even though he was blameless, really. There was no way he could have realized what he had. Anyway, General Brandenburg said, Frank, most of the people come over will have a state job maybe for six months and some command for the other six months. You're going to come and be my operations officer and you're going to stay there for a whole year. So forget about any other assignment. Okay. And to get you informed as to what's going on, I'm going to give you a helicopter and you go around the country for about two weeks and get acquainted with what we have. And sure enough,

I switched around and saw all over the place. I remember coming into one place. They had a VC attack during the night, and everything was still a mess. The ammunition depot was blowing up, and there were VC dead in the fence line, and I could see what the heck was going on and what they were living in.

And boy, was I happy, I was in the headquarters. And so it was on one. of these tours, I want to ask you a very self-interesting question that you met my father, Angus McLean, another military police officer. What do you remember about Angus? Or about meeting Angus? Oh, yes. We went in Vietnam together. He was with the brigade, and I was in the headquarters, so we didn't have any direct relationship, and he surely outranked me. He was an older colonel, and I was still a lieutenant colonel, but on a little bit of a little. to become a colonel.

But we liked each other. And we had lots of lunches together, and we yak-yak-together, and he bemoaned all the things he had to do, and I didn't have any bemoaning to do. I said, I'm living like a king here. I have no complaints whatsoever. Well, sure enough, we got clobbered a few times

with a VC trying to come in and bombing us a little bit, but I recall it was an attack on the headquarters. And we went up on the roof of the headquarters, and it was like being at Fort Benning, seeing a trading exercise, where the enemy was being taken care of by the American side with bombardment. You almost felt sorry for the enemy, because you could see what they were suffering. But suddenly, zing, there was some rifle fire that came towards us

and we took off and went back into our headquarters, and saved offices. That was my experience in the war of Vietnam. And your father, too. Oh, he wasn't under a roof with us. He was down there trying to fight off the enemy. Let me ask you, you've had this remarkable career in a remarkable life, and you probably are not surprised to hear when I tell you that there's a lot of isolationism, a lot of anti-Semitism in the national conversation today, a shocking amount that I attribute to the lack of recollection of the middle of the 20th century and the kind of things that you live through. When you go to these classes and you talk to students, you talk to young people who they don't know anything about World War II, they may know the Holocaust happened, they don't know much about it or why it happened, they don't really know anything about the Cold War either.

I mean, the 20th century is just a blank space for them. What are the main lessons that you want to get across to these young people? Well, first of all, the people that I go to talk to, they have received some instruction before. because they know that it's impossible to bring somebody in to talk about the Holocaust if they don't know the basics about World War II and how the Holocaust was developed and so forth. So the people that I talk to are not the ones that really need the instructions. That's the pity of it all because most of the kids, just like you said, they don't know anything about World War II,

and they surely don't know what this Holocaust is all about, and they don't associate it with the anti-Semitism. And the other problem with the anti-Semitism is that it's sometimes hidden in terms of anti-Zionism. And Zionism, of course, is the idea of a Jewish homeland for the Jews. and most Jews are in favor, although they have some that are not, or most are in favor of having a homeland for the Jews. The Arabs have, God knows how many countries that are Muslim on the Christian side.

You've got lots of countries that the Christendom was the center of religion for them. And here we have one country for the Jews, and we like to have one country for the Jews. So most Jews agree with that. So there's Zionists and they're talked against Zionists because Israel is trying to defend itself against the tax that they had. And this is a war that's going on over there in Hamas.

And war is miserable. What we did when in our war, we killed a lot of people. We didn't try to kill them. It wasn't the idea of killing all the Germans and wiping out all the Germans. The Germans were the, many times, the innocent victims, the civilians who got killed along with all the combatants that we were aiming at. And that's what's happening in war in Israel, where they're killing a heck of a lot of people who don't have to be killed, but they get killed because they're the innocent bystanders, because they were, integrated with the people that have to be killed, the ones who are trying to cause the war.

And all that gets mushed up, and it ends up as anti-Semitism. And impossible to get rid of it either. Yeah, it's persistent. Well, I just, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. And I want to say something also personal. when I was growing up with my dad, you were around a lot, and there was a whole group of you who were all, for the most part, retired Army, military police colonels. Most of you had served in World War II. So there was Angus, my father, Uncle Frank. There was Uncle Jack, Jack Hyde.

Jack Hyde, yeah. There was Uncle Jim, Jim O'Donnell. And he was a little younger, but Uncle Roger, Roger Hoth. Of course, none of these guys were my real uncles, but I called them all, I called them all uncle, and of course their wives were all, there was, there was an Elstith on Tommy and all the wives as well, and this was my family, and I admired you guys so much. As far as I was concerned, once upon a time, there had been this really bad guy, Hitler. This is the five-year-old Aaron understanding of the world, and he had tried, Hitler had tried to kill all the Jews and take over the world and Angus and Uncle Frank and Uncle Jack and Uncle Jim they stopped him they stopped him and that story acquired nuance and detail as I got older but it was basically true and you guys were my

heroes you are my hero and any debt that you thought you owed the United States of America you repaid with great interests and I think it is on all of us to follow in your footsteps and to live up to the standard that you set. And so I'm thankful to you for talking to me today, but I'm mostly just thankful for you, Frank. Well, thank you very much. And I remember I admired you too, believe it or not. You were on a radio program.

You probably remembered that program. You were trying to get, I think it was a better allowance. Yeah. And you were frustrated because you didn't get it, and you were complaining about that on radio. And I was listening to this. And I said, Paula, Paula, come here. You have to listen to this. And we admired your spunk.

About the same age that you were packing a bag to flee Germany, my dad insisted on depositing some of my allowance every week in the bank. And this was deeply offensive to me because I thought this was my money. So there was a financial advice show on WM. Yes, it was. WM, I can't remember the host name. And I called in. You called in. I knew it was a bad call when I heard an intro.

He said, after the break, we're going to come back, come back. And we're going to talk to a young man whose father is absolutely genius. And at that moment, I knew. I knew this wasn't going to go well for me. But I'm horrified that you remember that. I'll never forget it. Frank, thank you so much. Well, I'm.

was a pleasure. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.