'Operation Mincemeat'

 

[The musical Operation Mincemeat premièred at the New Diorama Theatre (near Regent’s Park in London) on 14 May 2019 and ran until 15 June. The cast featured writers Natasha Hodgson, David Cumming, and Zoë Roberts (book, music, and lyrics) with Jak Malone and Rory Furey-King. 

[It then played on The Little stage at London’s Southwark Playhouse from 4 to 11 January 2020. A run on The Large stage began on 23 July 2021, where it was originally due to run until 7 August, however due to popular demand it was extended to 18 September. The musical ran for a final time at Southwark Playhouse from 14 January to 19 February 2022.

[Operation Mincemeat's final Off-West End run opened at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, from 28 April to 23 July 2022.

[The musical transferred to London’s West End, opening on 9 May 2023 at the Fortune Theatre. Originally scheduled to close after 9 July 2023, the production has been extended multiple times after receiving favorable reviews. It’s still running; after winning several awards for the Off-West End stagings, Operation Mincemeat, dubbed the best received show in the West End, won the 2024 Best New Musical Laurence Olivier Award (London’s counterpart of a Tony).

[The musical transferred to Broadway in 2025 for an originally slated 16-week limited run. Previews began on 15 February at the Golden Theatre and the show officially opened on 20 March to generally positive reviews. The original London cast reprised their roles on Broadway, and days after its first preview, the show announced an extended run due to popular demand, subsequently extended multiple times, and is still running. It was nominated for the 2025 Best Musical Tony Award, but didn’t win.

[There have been two feature-length movies based on the same material as the musical. The Man Who Never Was is a 1956 British espionage thriller film directed by Ronald Neame, based on the book of the same title (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954) by Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Operation Mincemeat is a 2021 war drama film directed by John Madden based on Ben Macintyre’s 2010 book (Bloomsbury) of the same name.

[Among the 80-odd characters portrayed by the five-actor cast, is, as David Gordon of TheaterMania describes him, “one of the most surprisingly real figures from this espionage mission: Ian Fleming, an eccentric intelligence officer in a black tux who’s writing a novel about a British secret agent with a penchant for martinis shaken, not stirred,” played by one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts.  (Says Gordon: she “kills it.”)] 

“HIS SPY SCHEMES CAME TO LIFE”
by Thomas Maier

[This article, which is more about Ian Fleming, his James Bond novels, and his real-life spy colleagues than it is about the London and Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat, ran in the New York Times of 24 August 2025 in the “Arts & Leisure” section.  It was posted as “How Ian Fleming and His Spy Scheme Inspired a Broadway Show” on the Times website on the same date.]

Even before 007, Ian Fleming concocted creative plots that aided wartime victories.

The James Bond spy novels dreamed up by Ian Fleming [British; 1908-64] were rooted in his World War II experiences as a British intelligence officer. In one instance, Fleming had an idea that was so wild it’s still hard to believe it actually worked. To misdirect the Nazis, he suggested outfitting a corpse with fake military plans and strategically placing it off the coast of Spain.

Because truth can be stranger than fiction, that scheme is now the subject of the rollicking Broadway musical “Operation Mincemeat.” The show, a hit in England before arriving in New York last spring, gets big laughs from this absurd tale of deception. In a rousing number, “God That’s Brilliant,” the conspiring spies sing rapturously as they plot to kill Hitler. (Fleming paints a picture of a martini-drinking, tuxedo-wearing assassin who “kills the guards, snogs the girl and says something cool.”)

[Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the Austrian-born German politician who became dictator of Germany in the Nazi era, from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader (Führer) of the Nazi Party, elected Chancellor (Kanzler; prime minister) of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. (Reich, as in Third Reich among other uses, in German means ‘empire,’ ‘kingdom,’ 'realm,' or ‘nation.’)

[Historians have identified at least 42 assassination plots on Hitler, starting before he held office. (There are probably more as some cases may be undocumented.) One was the famous 20 July plot, in which Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944; regarded as one of the ablest tank commanders of the war; known as the Desert Fox) was at least a supporter if not an active participant.

[This is the 1944 plot to overthrow Hitler’s government and replace it, and the weapon was a briefcase bomb that exploded at a conference of high-ranking members of that government at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) in East Prussia. The bomb went off, killing 4 and injuring 20, but only wounding the Führer slightly.

[Only one planned assassination attempt was hatched in the U.K.: Operation Foxley. This was a top-secret Allied plan by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in mid-1944 to kill Hitler at his Berghof retreat in the Bavarian Alps. The SOE considered various scenarios, including sniper attacks, poisoning the water supply on the Führer‘s private train, or a direct commando raid. The operation was meticulously planned but ultimately never executed, as intelligence revealed Hitler had relocated to Berlin and rarely visited the Berghof again after late 1944.

[Ian Fleming did not consult on any assassination plot against Hitler. As far as anyone has revealed.]

Though the show presents him as a sort of bumbling genius, the Fleming character helps to establish the complex story as a spy caper. He “is so respected and revered and made a huge contribution to British culture,” said one of the show’s creators, Zoë Roberts [b. 1985], who also plays Fleming and other characters. “It seemed like a huge opportunity to have a little bit of fun and poke a little fun at him.”

But the musical provides only a glimpse of Fleming’s life as a spy.

In reality, Fleming was a clever and sophisticated British intelligence officer, who worked on both sides of the Atlantic and gained a wealth of insider knowledge that he later transformed into colorful, action-packed fiction with his Bond novels. “Never say ‘no’ to adventures — always say ‘yes,’” he explained. “Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”

The Operation Mincemeat ruse originated in 1939 — shortly after Britain declared war on Hitler’s Nazi Germany [3 September 1939] — with a lengthy memo by Fleming’s boss, Adm. John Godfrey [1888-1970], the director of naval intelligence. “It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it bore all the hallmarks of his personal assistant Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming,” concluded the historian Ben Macintyre [b. 1963], who has written about the wartime caper and Fleming’s fictional character, the suave MI6 agent James Bond, a.k.a. 007, who was portrayed in a string of popular films by a series of actors.

[MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6) is the British Secret Intelligence Service, roughly equivalent to the CIA in the United States. (The Military Intelligence designation is a hold-over from its origin during World War I when espionage and intelligence were the province of the war ministry.) It handles foreign intelligence, covert operations, and international espionage outside the United Kingdom. and answers to the Foreign Secretary.

[It shouldn’t be confused with its sister agency, MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5), the Security Service, which handles domestic intelligence and security, focusing on counter-terrorism and counter-espionage within the U.K. It answers to the Home Secretary and is the approximate counterpart to our FBI—except that MI5 has no law-enforcement responsibility and no power to make arrests.

[The third leg of the British intelligence structure is GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters. It serves as the UK's signals intelligence, cybersecurity, and cryptanalysis agency, the direct equivalent of the NSA in the U.S.]

Though the schemes appeared to be implausible, the memo advised, “the more you examine them, the less fantastic they seem.” No. 28 envisioned that “a corpse dressed as an airman, with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.”

Fleming’s idea was later put into action by the British naval intelligence officers Charles Cholmondeley [1917-82] and Ewen Montagu [1901-85]. (Both are leading characters in the musical, and properly given credit for their heroics. In 1953, Montagu published a book about it called “The Man Who Never Was.”) According to Macintyre, Fleming was “at least tangentially involved” in launching the plan, though these other spies carried it out.

Found on the corpse were documents identifying him as Capt. (Acting Major) William Martin [“b. 1907” (fictional)] — he was actually a vagrant named Glyndwr Michael [1907-43] who had died after ingesting rat poison — and paperwork that in time convinced Nazi forces that a 1943 Allied invasion of Italy through Sicily would instead take place at Sardinia. The deception helped make the Allies’ eventual victory in Italy easier and less bloody than expected.

Under Prime Minister Winston Churchill [1874-1965; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1940-45 and 1951-55], an advocate of espionage, sabotage and “ungentlemanly warfare,” Fleming was sent to Manhattan to join the spies working to persuade the United States to join the war. For several months before the Americans entered the war, in December 1941, the British Security Coordination (B.S.C. [part of MI6]), based on the 36th floor of the International Building at Rockefeller Center, used propaganda, political influence and media manipulation to secretly combat isolationists and the Nazi threat inside America.

Soon, the United States created its first spy agency — the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S. [1942-45]), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency [formed 1947] — with the help of Fleming, who impressed officials with his advice about espionage and his willingness to take chances. “The British are many things, but cowards they are not,” Ernest Cuneo [1905-88], a top O.S.S. official [1942-45], said after working with Fleming.

Ghastly but ingenious, Fleming’s Mincemeat plan — itself inspired by a detective book on his shelf involving a corpse with forged papers [Basil Thomson (1861-1939; British colonial administrator, prison governor, and novelist), The Milliner’s Hat Mystery (Eldon Press [London], 1937)] — wasn’t his only creative idea. “Fleming could always laugh when some stratagem misfired — he had plenty more to choose from,” observed John Pearson [1930-2021; English novelist and biographer], whose Fleming biography [The Life of Ian Fleming (Jonathan Cape [London], 1966)] appeared two years after Fleming’s death, in 1964 at the age of 56.

One of Pearson’s favorite stories was how Fleming and William Stephenson [1897-1989; Canadian soldier, fighter pilot, businessman, and spymaster; codename: Intrepid], overseer of Churchill’s spies in Manhattan, broke into the Japanese consul general’s office, located below the B.S.C. headquarters in Rockefeller Center. Stephenson, Fleming and two other spies entered the closed offices at 3 a.m. Fleming acted as a lookout. They picked a safe’s locks and “borrowed” the Japanese code book and other confidential documents. They ran upstairs to their own offices to microfilm the important material.

Then they returned the papers, leaving them in the same order they were found. “To Stephenson, it was a straightforward operation,” Pearson recounted in Life magazine, “to Fleming a great and gleeful adventure.”

[Japan’s Consul General in New York City from 1939 to 1942 was Morito Morishima (1896-1975; traditional Japanese name order: Morishima Morito). The office that Stephenson, Fleming, and the British agents broke into was Morishima’s. The exact date of the raid is hard to verify because, for one reason, it’s possible it never actually happened.

[The story of the safe-cracking raid was popularized after the war by William Stephenson’s biographers. According to Stephenson, the raid was real, Fleming was the lookout, and the stolen codes successfully helped the Allies track Japanese and German maritime movements.

[Many of Ian Fleming’s official biographers and modern intelligence historians argue that the Rockefeller Center break-in may have been a “tall tale” or a piece of post-war bravado. They note that while Fleming certainly met with Stephenson in June 1941, there’s no mention of a physical break-in in British Naval Intelligence logs.

[Fun Fact: Whether the New York incursion was actual or not, the idea of cracking open Morishima’s safe ultimately inspired Fleming to pen Casino Royale (1953), the first Bond novel. In the book, Bond remembers his first kill and recounts that it happened in the Japanese Consulate in Rockefeller Center, New York. (See below.) Lest we forget, the “double-oh” in Bond’s code number is a “license to kill,” given to the agents of the “British Secret Service” who are authorized to use lethal force.]

Fleming told Godfrey, his former boss, about the successful break-in, hoping the story would reach the appreciative ears of Churchill, whose approval mattered to Fleming on a personal level. Churchill had been friendly with Fleming’s father, Valentine [1882-1917], a fellow Conservative in Parliament, who was killed by German shellfire in World War I when Fleming was only 9.

Years later, Fleming turned this spy scheme in Manhattan into fiction. In his first novel, “Casino Royale,” he introduced the assassin James Bond, who tracks down a Japanese cipher expert who was cracking British coded messages inside Rockefeller Center. Stationed in another building and equipped with a Remington rifle that had telescopic sights and silencer, Bond takes aim and shoots the Japanese agent. “It was a pretty sound job,” Bond summarized. “Nice and clean too.”

After the war, Fleming had felt at a loss, craving the intrigue and intensity of his spy work. “We almost suffered emotional ‘bends’ the day the war ended — tension went out like a power line turned off,” recalled Cuneo, who later ran a small newspaper syndicate with Fleming. “Aside from its horrors, you missed the frightful challenge of war. I think Fleming missed it as much as most; he seemed both grumpy and disconsolate.”

[In March 1951, Cuneo and a small group of investors purchased the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). In addition, Cuneo and the Bell Syndicate-North American Newspaper Alliance group acquired the McClure Newspaper Syndicate in September 1952. Cuneo acquired full control over NANA in the mid-1950s and served as president until 1963 when he sold it, though he remained with NANA as a columnist and military analyst from 1963 to 1980.

[Because of Cuneo’s association with former members of American and British intelligence, including Fleming and Ivar Bryce (1906-85), and because some writers in the Cuneo era had alleged links to the CIA, critics have suggested that NANA under his tenure was a front for espionage. Cuneo, a staunch anti-communist, was involved with the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba, an anti-Castro organization formed in 1963.]

By January 1952, Fleming had turned most of his attention to writing spy novels. He modeled Bond on various real-life figures — notably Stephenson for his bold moves, inventive killing gadgets and coolheaded fearlessness. This fictional secret agent would have a boss called “M” — modeled after his own Royal Navy superior Admiral Godfrey. And Fleming dedicated his “Thunderball” novel [1961] to his American spy pal Cuneo.

The author amused himself by slightly changing the names and identities of his spy friends: Cuneo, for example, became Ernie Cureo, a taxi driver and secret C.I.A. informant, in “Diamonds Are Forever” [1956]. And the American spy Felix Leiter [C.I.A. agent], a recurring character who appears in “Live and Let Die” [1954] and “Goldfinger” [1958], gets his first name “Felix” from the actual middle name of Fleming’s childhood friend, the British spy Ivar Bryce.

[Personal Comment: I didn’t read the Bond novels until the 1960s, when I was a teenager. At the same time, my family moved to Europe when my father joined USIA and was assigned to Germany (see “An American Teen in Germany, Part 1” [9 March 2013] and “Part 2” [12 March 2013]) and I went to school in Geneva, Switzerland.

[As I was attending school in a French-speaking town, I read a couple of things in French just to see if I could. One was the translation of Thunderball—Opération Tonnerre (‘Operation thunder’) in French, published in 1962. (At this same time, I also remember watching the French-dubbed version of From Russia with Love, the 1963 Bond film. In French, it’s called Bons Baisers de Russie, which is a common idiom frequently written or printed on vacation post cards that means “Greetings from Russia,” “Best wishes from Russia,” or, as the movie has it, “With love from Russia.”  The phrase literally means “Good kisses from Russia.”)]

One of Fleming’s most enthusiastic readers was President John F. Kennedy [1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63]. They met at a Washington dinner party the Kennedys were hosting in the spring of 1960, months before the election [8 November]. Kennedy was already a fan of the 007 novels. After dinner, he asked Fleming how he might handle Fidel Castro’s Communist takeover of Cuba.

[Castro (1926-2016), the Cuban revolutionary, was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008.  He overthrew right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901-73; President of Cuba: 1940-44 and 1952-59) on 1 January 1959 and assumed military and political power as Cuba's prime minister.

[Castro served as prime minister from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976 to 2008. A Marxist–Leninist and Cuban nationalist, Castro also served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from 1965 until 2011.]

“Ridicule, chiefly,” Fleming replied wryly. He then outlined several Bond-like spy techniques that could “deflate” Castro’s reputation. Kennedy seemed amused by Fleming’s far-fetched suggestions. One called for American scientists shooting off a rocket intended to form a fiery cross in the sky, which might be interpreted as a heavenly sign that Castro should be replaced.

Apprised of Kennedy’s dinner conversation, the C.I.A. director Allen Dulles [1893-1969; lawyer who was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence (DCI – 1953-61)] later directed scientists in the agency to see if Bond’s fictional gadgets and high-tech killing devices could be adopted.

Fleming’s novels — already moderately successful — soared in popularity with a public endorsement by the new president. In March 1961, Life magazine listed Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” [1957] as one of Kennedy’s favorite books. The Kennedys later hosted a private screening of the Bond movie “Dr. No” [novel: 1958; film: 1962; first Bond film] at the White House.

[Kennedy watched Dr. No at the White House on 28 November 1962; the movie wasn’t released in the U.S. until 29 May 1963, though it had premièred in the U.K. on 5 October 1962. (Almost a year later, on 23 October 1963, the Kennedys returned to the White House Family Theater to watch From Russia With Love, making it one of the very last movies the president ever saw. The Kennedys flew to Dallas on 21 November, arriving just after 11 p.m. He was shot at 12:30 p.m. on the 23rd and declared dead a half hour later.)]

Around that time, Dulles received a copy of Fleming’s “From Russia With Love” from the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, with the inscription, “Here is a book you should have, Mr. Director.”

[Operation Mincemeat had at least one unexpected consequence.  In 1951, journalist, writer, and editor of books about theater Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. (1918-2001), who was fascinated by the Mincemeat deception, pitched an idea at a cocktail party to master suspense filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) about a civilian traveling and accidentally being mistaken for a fake intelligence agent, getting saddled with a dangerous identity.

[Hitchcock bought Guernsey’s treatment and, along with screenwriter and film producer Ernest Lehman (1915-2005), used that premise of a non-existent agent to create the 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest—one of my all-time favorite flicks.  

[In the film, Cary Grant’s (1904-86) character, ordinary advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (his initials, seen on his cufflinks on the train with Eva Marie Saint [b. 1924], are “ROT,” my nickname for this blog) is mistaken for George Kaplan—a government agent who doesn’t actually exist. (Thornhill appears to have answered a page for Kaplan in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.)

[Just as in Mincemeat, British intelligence used a fabricated marine officer to misguide the Germans, the American agents in North by Northwest intentionally perpetuate the illusion of Kaplan to protect a real double agent (Saint’s character) and trap enemy operatives.

[Thomas Maier is the author of The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II (Hanover Square Press [Toronto], 2025).]

FSB: Field Station Berlin

 

[Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will know that I was a Military Intelligence Special Agent in the army and was stationed in Berlin from July 1971 to February 1974.  I was a nine-triple-six (my Military Occupation Specialty was 9666, Counterintelligence Officer; the enlisted agents were 97B’s), and assigned to Berlin Station of the 66th Military Intelligence Group, a unit of the U.S. Army, Europe.  

[Our offices were in the main Berlin Brigade compound on Clayallee in Zehlendorf, the same compound where the U.S. Commander, Berlin, a two-star general, and the Commanding Officer of the Berlin Brigade, a one-star general, both had their headquarters.  Also in the former Luftwaffe headquarters complex was the U.S. Mission to Berlin, the post of the highest-ranking American diplomat in the occupied city.

[On the first day I reported to Berlin Station, I noticed two black Russian sedans, Volgas or Moskviches, parked, one by each exit from the compound.  Aside from being black, the Soviet vehicles were very recognizable because they looked like stylistic throw-backs to the early ’50s. 

[I asked about them, and the agent who was assigned to help me get acclimated told me that the cars with their GRU-agent occupants (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye – Главное Разведывательное Управление; Main Intelligence Directorate, the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency) were almost always there, just watching, taking notes, and probably photos—and that within an hour of my arrival, the Soviets knew my name, rank, and assignment.   

[Berlin Station’s offices, low profile but not covert, were right at the front of the main building.  Next to us, in an unmarked office, was the positive intelligence unit, the agents who ran intelligence-gathering operations.  It was staffed by officers with the MOS of 9668, Area Intelligence Officer, and the enlisted counterpart, 97C.  They were covert; we could communicate, when we had to talk face-to-face, via a locked iron gate between the two 66 MI sections located in the basement.

[We were both spooks, trip-sixes and six-eights.  That’s what we and others called those of us in the intelligence racket.

[Berlin was also home to another facility of the military intelligence field.  This post is about that strange and super-spooky place.  It was not a facility about which much was known, even to other intel personnel like me, but pretty much everyone knew of its existence because . . . well, it was impossible not to.  I’ll let you read why that was so.

[And remember: everything you’re about to read is the emes, the truth—to the best of my knowledge.  I’m not joking and I’m not trying to spoof you.

[Now, a quick précis of pertinent history.  World War II in Europe ended with Germany’s surrender on 8 May 1945 (Victory in Europe, or VE, Day).  Combat changed to occupation and the three wartime allies, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, became the administrators of what had been the Third Reich.

[Agreements made among the three national leaders at the Yalta Conference (4-11 February 1945), attended by Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945), and General Secretary Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), and at the Potsdam Conference (17 July-2 August 1945), with Churchill, Stalin, and President Harry Truman (1884-1972), who succeeded Roosevelt upon the latter’s sudden death in April, divided Germany into three occupation zones and made special provisions for Berlin (geographically inside the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany) to be administered separately by the three victors.

[At the conferences, the Soviets had rejected an equal share in the Occupation for France, so the U.S. and Britain agreed that French zones of Germany and Berlin would be ceded from their zones.  Berlin was therefore divided into four occupation sectors: the Soviet Sector, commonly known as East Berlin, was approximately one-third of the former German capital city, with about a million inhabitants, and the British, U.S., and French Sectors, consolidated as West Berlin, together were about two-thirds of the city with approximately 2½ million people. 

[Because there hadn’t been a peace treaty to end World War II, Berlin was still under occupation until 1990, when a formal peace was finally negotiated.  While the Western Allies had relinquished political responsibility for what became the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, in 1949, Berlin remained occupied territory. 

[The Federal Republic was declared on 23 May 1949 and the Soviets followed with the declaration of the German Democratic Republic on 7 October.  The East Germans established East Berlin as their capital (West Germany made Bonn its provisional capital, pending the return of Berlin to freedom), but the city remained occupied territory for 45 years. 

[The British, American, and French forces turned the civil administration of the city over to the Berliners and there was a functioning elected municipal government, but the three sector commanders—a major general in the case of the U.S. Commander, Berlin (USCOB)—still had almost unchecked authority of not only the military and official civilian personnel under their control, but the ordinary civilians who lived in or visited Berlin.  When push came to shove, what the generals wanted, they got.

[The Berlin Wall that divided the city for 28 years appeared early on 13 August 1961 when the GDR threw up a temporary barrier of barbed wire and trenches along the boundary between the Soviet Sector and the three Western sectors and around the western border with East Germany.  For about a year from 18 August, the GDR constructed a permanent wall of concrete blocks, topped with barbed wire.  The Wall was pulled down by energized Berliners starting on 9 November 1989 (see “Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009).

[I’ve written frequently on ROT about my life in MI and West Berlin, Spy Central in Europe during the Cold War.  Among the posts touching on or derived from that experience are “Berlin Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009, “Top Secret America,” 17 September 2010; “Berlin Memoir,” 16 December 2016, 20 January, 9 and 19 February, 11 and 29 March, and 13 April 2017; “Who’s Who in CIA: A Cold War Relic,” 8 May 2018, “‘Ritchie Boys: The Secret U.S. Unit Bolstered by German-Born Jews that Helped the Allies Beat Hitler’” reported by Jon Wertheim, 19 May 2021, and “Open source intelligence combats disinformation on Russia’s war against Ukraine” by Miles O'Brien and Will Toubman, 17 April 2022.]

In the 1950 Twentieth Century-Fox movie The Big Lift (see my post on Rick On Theater, 31 August 2017), there are several scenes of Berliners shoveling debris into wheelbarrows.  The movie was made on location in Berlin starting in May 1949, just after the end of the Soviet blockade (June 1948 to May 1949) and only five years after the end of World War II in Europe. 

The wartime destruction had to be cleared by hand because the deprivations of Germany after the war, especially in Berlin due to the blockade, made gasoline-powered machinery unavailable.  In addition, the post-war unemployment was so great that hiring out-of-work Berliners to clear the rubble served a benefit.  

With the male population decimated by the war, it was Berlin’s women (such as the war widow in The Big Lift played by Cornell Borchers with whom Montgomery Clift’s character falls in love) who cleaned up the rubble.  These debris-collectors were called Trümmerfrauen or ‘rubble women.’

What the movie doesn’t show is that most of that debris was taken to a site in the borough of Wilmersdorf in the southwest of the city, near the Grunewald (‘greenwood’), Berlin’s forested “Central Park.”  The debris was piled into a mountain named Teufelsberg (‘devil’s mountain’), the highest spot in the city at about 365 feet above sea level (and 265 feet above the surrounding terrain).              

Undated photograph (ca. 1950s) of trucks dumping wartime rubble on 

the growing Teufelsberg in Wilmersdorf, West Berlin. Ullstein Bild

Teufelsberg—the name was taken from the mound’s proximity (about a half mile south) to a small lake in the Grunewald called Teufelssee (‘devil’s lake’), a place of legend and folklore since ancient times—was used as a dump site for debris through the 1950s and was finally landscaped in 1972.  Some 98 million cubic yards of debris from West Berlin—the Soviets disposed of the rubble in their sector in their own way, much of it deposited outside the city—was collected to create the artificial mountain.  That’s the approximate equivalent of the remains of 400,000 bombed buildings. 

In February 1955, a 79-foot-long ski jump opened on the mound, then a larger one opened in March 1962, with room for 5,000 spectators.  Ski jumping stopped in 1969 because the civilian recreation was incompatible with the super-secret military activities going on above.  The jumps fell into decay from lack of maintenance and were removed in 1999 because they allegedly interfered with that activity (discussion of which is coming up).

For a brief time in the ’70s and ’80s, the district of Wilmersdorf produced wine on the southern slope of mountain.  Up to 120 liters (a little less than 32 gallons) of Wilmersdorfer Teufelströpfchen (Wilmersdorf devil’s droplets) were bottled per year.

It wasn’t just what the mountain was made of or how it was created that’s a curiosity. however; there were many such artificial mounds in bomb-damaged cities all over Germany and much of Europe after the war.  It was what was under the mountain.

Buried beneath Teufelsberg are the remains of a uncompleted Nazi military-technical college designed by Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer (1905-81).  Only the shell of the compound was finished, but the construction was so sturdy that all the Allies’ attempts to demolish it, even with aid of explosives, failed.  

The Occupation forces decided, therefore, to entomb it under war debris instead.  The Wehrtechnische Fakultät (faculty of defense technology), planned as a department of the reconceived Technical University in Berlin, is down there still today, buried under about 63 million tons of rubble.

 

Teufelsberg Cross-Section (2013) by Brendan Jamison, coloured plastic blocks, 50 x 67 x 2 cms. The grey structure at the bottom represents the buried Faculty of Defense Technology. Photography: © Tony Corey for Jamison Sculpture Studio.

At the peak of Teufelsberg, the U.S. Army Security Agency, the military counterpart to the National Security Agency formed in 1945, built an elaborate “listening station” called Field Station Berlin, the most secret place in Berlin.  FSB was one of the West’s largest spy stations, arguably the most important of the Cold War era. 

The military unit of the ASA to which personnel who staffed FSB were assigned changed designations a few times over the lifetime of the listening station.  (The NSA had some of its own analysts, researchers, and linguists based at Teufelsberg.)  In 1976, two years after I left Berlin, USASA was folded into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Branch, the combat support branch in which I was commissioned, to form the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM).

Construction of FSB was begun in 1963 (a mobile listening station was installed on Teufelsberg in 1961, the year the Berlin Wall went up, restricting access to East Berlin), so it didn’t exist when The Big Lift was filmed.  Even if it did, the filmmakers probably wouldn’t have been allowed to mention that that’s where all the rubble was heading.  Now, of course, Teufelsberg’s all over the ’Net—a sci-fi ghost town!

Usually just called Teufelsberg by Berliners, the listening facility, known to insiders simply as “The Hill” (and as “America’s Big Ear” to the East Germans and Soviets) was located in the occupied city’s British Sector even though it was a U.S. site.  The Brits had one building on the spy site, but essentially we just shared whatever poop we got with them and the French.

Everyone knew FSB was there—you could see the bulbous towers and antennas, resembling some futuristic city, from many parts of Berlin; with the facility’s large and distinctive structures, and the huge antenna field, low visibility was just not possible or practical.  

The listening station had three immense globes, two radomes (radar domes) perched on top of three-story-high towers and another soaring six stories higher.  Each radome globe contained huge, 40-foot satellite antennas and the most up-to-date listening technology, allowing the U.S. and its allies to intercept satellite signals, radio waves, microwave links, and other transmissions before translating, interpreting, and analyzing the findings.

                    Teufelsberg Field Station Berlin, ca 1985. Photograph courtesy of John Evans.

The radomes, which look like gigantic, teed-up golf balls, had no radar equipment despite their name.  The Allied forces already had radar surveillance covered with installations at Berlin’s airports: Tempelhof in the American sector, Tegel in the French sector, and Gatow in the British sector.  (Teufelsberg was used briefly for air traffic control on civilian flights in 1994.)

The people who worked at The Hill had a saying, very popular apparently—a sort of unofficial motto: “In God we trust, all others we monitor.”

Very few who didn’t work there, however, knew what went on.  I knew about FSB, of course, but even as an intel officer, I was never on the site in my 2½ years in West Berlin.  I was my unit’s resident Russian linguist, so I got info copies of transcripts of telephone conversations from the Soviet military headquarters in Potsdam; they came from FSB.  The “Big Ear” was a major target of Soviet espionage both because of its extreme sensitivity and because it was aimed at them.

As a Military Intelligence Special Agent, I had security clearances for which you’d need clearances just to know what the initials stood for.  (That’s not a joke or hyperbole.)  One of my former classmates from the Russian language program was assigned to FSB’s sister listening station in Helmstedt, on the border between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic. 

I took the Duty Train over from Berlin one weekend to visit him, and despite my clearances, he couldn’t tell me what he did, aside from the obvious: listening in on (and, should hostilities break out, disrupting) Russian, East German, and Warsaw Pact communications. 

Even today, 20 years after FSB ceased operations, many of its operations are still classified and former staffers are prohibited from talking about what they did there.  Documents pertaining to the spy site that are still secret are due for declassification soon; some, in fact, may have been released in the past couple of years.

I was a counterintelligence officer, engaged in “human intelligence,” or HUMINT—that’s spies and counterspies, “sources,” and “subjects”—and “electronic intelligence,” or ELINT, more familiar as bugs, taps, and electronic eavesdropping.  

Since I was in counterintelligence, my responsibility was the defense against these things, rather than gathering actionable intelligence to use against our opponents.  FSB had a positive intelligence mission—as did our sister unit whose covert base was next door to our “low profile” offices.  We trip-sixes had a brass sign at the front door and a number—just one, though (it was 9666, the same number as our CO’s staff car license plate)—listed in the Berlin Brigade phone book. 

We got “phone-ins” and “walk-ins”—people, mostly Germans, who presented themselves to the German Labor Force guards at the compound’s front gate and asked for the OSS or CIC (Office of Strategic Services, World War II forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the Counter Intelligence Corps, WWII predecessor of the army’s MI Branch) if they were old enough, or the CIA, if they were younger. 

The guards would call us and we’d send an agent out to escort them to our interview room and hear their stories (some of which I recount in “Berlin Station, Part 2,” posted on 22 July 2009, “Berlin Memoir, Part 3,” 20 January 2017, and “Berlin Memoir, Part 4,” 9 February 2017).

The six-eights next door had none of that; you wouldn’t know they were there unless you were supposed to.

ELINT and SIGINT, or “signals intelligence,” intercepting over-air communications like radio, microwave, and now wifi, was the bailiwick of the ASA and, therefore, FSB.  As you might imagine, Berlin was an especially important location for a listening post during the Cold War, situated, as it was, 110 miles east of the Iron Curtain inside Warsaw Pact territory.

Being up on Teufelsberg gave the listening station clear reception for a large swath of Soviet controlled Eastern Europe.  The State of Brandenburg, which includes Berlin, is extremely flat terrain so there are few obstructions to interfere with radio and microwave transmissions.

Bristling with antennas, domes, spheres, and silos, The Hill looked like a set from the space opera Star Trek (or Raumschiff Enterprise, as it was entitled on German TV).  There were enough microwave transmitters and receivers on top of the complex to zap all the “Grunie pigs,” the wild boar that roamed the Grunewald, into roast pork!

The power of the tech at FSB convinced most Berliners and many East Germans that all the microwave communications inside the GDR were probably recorded.  Satellite transmissions and radio communications were all intercepted and analyzed.  Wireless communication systems in West Berlin were also monitored, and the wire-based communication were tapped by other installations.  

Everyone believed that even small radio-transmitted bugs installed in any room in the city were picked up by FSB’s state-of-the-art antenna systems.  Some of this was true—probably unbeknownst to the rumor-mongers—but much of it was just uninformed scuttlebutt.

There were always rumors about this super-secret place.  Most of them were ridiculous, but sometimes, odd things did occur.  A couple of the false rumors concerned a tunnel Berliners believed the ASA GI’s dug into the mound and all the way down to the Wehrtechnische Fakultät.  Two reasons for the tunnel were proposed: one was that it was an escape route in case of emergency; the other was that it was a means of access to a secret subterranean submarine base beneath the mountain.

No tunnel has ever been found, but there’s one story that was actually true: every year in late July and early August, the reception of radio signals from stations far to the east were stronger than during the rest of the year.  No one could figure out why at first, until someone noticed that the heightened reception coincided with the annual German-American Folk Festival in Zehlendorf, the district where the U.S. Army headquarters was (and, incidentally, where my quarters were).  

Every year at the end of July and the beginning of August, the American forces sponsored the German-American Volksfest on a vacant plot behind the main PX on Clayallee (which was right across the street from my Berlin Station).  Each year, the festival spotlighted some aspect of American culture; in the three Volksfests I attended, it was The Wild West, Hawaii, and Las Vegas.

The Volksfest had entertainment drawn from the talents of GI’s from all over USAREUR, street-fair food and games, a beer tent (natch), and carnival rides.  (We had a Hawaiian noncom in the unit when I arrived, and when the 1972 Volksfest came around, he taught us some Hawaiian words and expressions.  One was “Suck ’em up!” which isn’t actually Hawaiian, but it’s the island version of “Down the hatch!”  Another was the Hawaiian word for ice cream, which was being sold all over the fairgrounds: aikalima.)  

The signal-booster, it turned out, was the Ferris wheel.  So, every year after determining that, the Berlin Brigade commander held the wheel over for a few extra weeks after the Volksfest closed.

No escape tunnel was ever found after the FSB site was vacated by the ASA and explored by urban explorers and the construction workers of the new private owners.  Something else wasn’t found on the grounds of the listening station: a protective bunker for the GI’s and civilian spooks assigned there. 

It’s curious that at a place in the sights of all the missile-guidance systems of the Soviet Union, there was no bunker.  The spooks on The Hill had all the materiel needed to destroy classified documents and tech, plus some small arms, but no place to take refuge.  Explanation: they were expendable—and they knew it.

No bunker could withstand the type of targeted attack the Soviets would have launched at FSB, something they’d have been planning for since the place was built.  It would have been a waste of time and money to build one, the FSB analysts understood.  The Soviet tanks would overrun the city within hours of a conventional attack, and The Hill would have been a priority target.

This was something the spooks at Berlin Station also contemplated.  Think about this: West Berlin, with an American military force amounting to an oversized brigade with maybe a score of tanks (an enhanced company), a smaller contingent of British and French soldiers, no German troops (except for the police, who received infantry training), was surrounded by a Soviet tank army.  That’s about 300,000 soldiers and anywhere from 500 to 1,000 tanks.  

And that doesn’t count the East German forces, or any other Warsaw Pact troops stationed in the GDR. What the hell were we going to do if the Soviets decided to launch the balloon?  Fight?  Whom?  All the Russians would have to do, we reminded ourselves, was roll up to Checkpoints Charlie and Bravo, post a few guards—we were already surrounded by a wall—and put up a sign, “Berlin POW Camp,” and then go around the city without firing a shot—though they’d probably want to lob a few rounds at The Hill. 

The ASA soldiers on The Hill knew this, too.  They had another saying: “First to know, first to glow.”  (They anticipated a nuclear attack, we didn’t.)

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent reunification of Germany, FSB became obsolete; it was decommissioned in 1992 and stripped of its sensitive equipment.  There didn’t seem to be anyone to listen to anymore—though I suspect that since Vladimir Putin and his kleptocrats and oligarchs came to power in Russia, some in the Pentagon and at Fort Meade wish they’d had the foresight to hold onto it against that eventuality. 

The 11½-acre site was turned over to the city of Berlin, then sold to private developers in 1996.  The firm, which paid 5.2 million Deutschmarks (about $350,000 then, about $640,000 today) for the former FSB, wanted to build luxury apartments, a hotel and restaurant, and a spy museum on the grounds.  Costs soared beyond profitability, however, and the plans were abandoned.

Struggles over what to do with it stalled other development plans, and then a building boom after the reunification made the plans redundant and unprofitable.  The site’s now covered with graffiti (among the most popular words scrawled on the buildings are, unsurprisingly, ‘ALIEN’ or ‘ALIENS’) and street art, and is disintegrating into ruin, but it’s still a draw for lookie-loos, urban explorers, graffiti artists, and adrenalin junkies even though it’s under 24-hour guard. 

     2018 photos showing current state of the former FSB at Teufelsberg.  

        Photo by Michael Hodgson.

                         

The spy complex was an immediate attraction for tourists looking for an off-beat place to explore as soon as it closed and the ASA left the building.  At first it was by surreptitious entry—there weren’t any security guards at first, just a fence—but then the new owners hired sentries and started charging for tours (or, for a lower fee, simple admission if you just wanted to wander around on your own).  This isn’t officially available anymore, but people still come to see the weirdest ghost town on Earth.

There’s no electricity or running water; at least one multi-story elevator shaft is open and empty, a real safety hazard; there’s little light in some locations; the whole place is littered with construction debris, broken glass, rusty metal, spent spray cans, abandoned (and heavily graffitied) cars, and garbage.  And yet the urban spelunkers come.

It’s “spooky” in two ways now: one, because it’s where spooks—intel agents like me—used to work: and two, because it’s silent, empty, and decaying, like a non-lethal Chernobyl.

The site’s prospects are in limbo; no one seems to know what to do with it.  Plans have been proposed, including the repurchase of the former spy station by the city of Berlin, but none have gone beyond the talking stage, often due to cost. 

One proposed deal in 2008, involving filmmaker David Lynch, was for building something called a “Vedic Peace University,” focusing on yoga and transcendental meditation and featuring a 12-story, 164-foot-high “Tower of Invincibility” to house 1,000 students. The city turned down the proposal.

Over the years since The Hill closed as a USASA station, Teufelsberg has been a location for several movies and television programs, including one espionage cable series, Berlin Station, that aired on Epix from 2016 to 2019.  Berlin Station was the name of my actual CI unit of the 66th MI Group (part of U.S. Army, Europe) from 1971 to 1974.

FSB had also been the subject or setting for many books, both memoirs and novels.  Two of the latter are Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2008) and Reunification: A Monterey Mary Returns to Berlin (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).  Both books are by T. H. E. Hill, which is a pseudonym (get it?) for a 74-year-old retired ASA linguist who served at FSB in the mid-‘70s.  (A “Monterey Mary” is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.  I went there in 1970 and ’71 and, curiously, I never heard the term before.)

There’s a movement, especially among the Teufelsberg veterans, to preserve FSB as a memorial.  In 2006, the area was legally declared woodland, ending any development plans, and in 2018, it was given Denkmalschutz (‘monument protection’), a designation similar to landmark status in the U.S., for its historical importance as a Cold War site.  This designation eliminated the possibility of new building on the site.

Today, guided tours and paid admission to the late FSB or not, Teufelsberg is popular with mountain bikers, hikers, and paragliders.  In the summer, visitors can enjoy 360-degree panoramic views of the whole city and beautiful sunsets there, and in the winter, the mountain’s small ski slope and the cross-country ski trail are popular.

But what to do with the abandoned FSB is still a conundrum.

Latter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees

 

[Thursday, 8 April, was Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah.  Officially known in Israel, where it’s a national holiday, as Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah (Hebrew: יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה‎, literally ’Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day’), it’s traditionally observed on the 27th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, usually corresponding to the Gregorian calendar date of sundown on 7 April to sundown on 8 April. 

[Elsewhere, especially in Jewish communities, Yom HaShoah is recognized as a day of commemoration for the Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust and for the Jewish resistance who fought against Nazi oppression during World War II.  Both religious and civil ceremonies are conducted in observance of Yom HaShoah, both to honor and mourn those lost in the holocaust and to celebrate those who struggled against Nazi tyranny.  (Shoah, pronounced show-uh, is the Hebrew word for ‘catastrophe’ and haShoah is the word used for ‘the [Nazi] Holocaust.’)

[Coincidentally, March is recognized as Women’s History Month in the United States.  8 March is celebrated as International Women’s Day. 

[Over the last month-and-a-half, several news outlets have published articles on Jewish women who took up the fight for freedom from the Nazi occupation of Europe, risking their own lives and even eschewing escape for themselves, to help save others.  NY1, the proprietary news channel of Charter Spectrum cable system in New York City, reported on a New York University film professor, Enid Zentelis, who researched her grandmother.  The grandmother, Isabelle Vital-Tihanyi (1916-88), known as Bella,  was a Hungarian Jew who spied for the British against the Nazi occupiers of Hungary. 

[The New York Times and then PBS NewsHour ran stories on Judy Batalion’s book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, the result of a research project that developed somewhat by happenstance.  Looking for material on strong Jewish women, the multi-hyphenate whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vogue, the Forward, Salon, the Jerusalem Post, came across a record in Yiddish (she speaks English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew) of women who fought with the resistance in German-occupied Europe.

[It occurred to me that now is a perfect moment to republish these remarkable stories—not least because we are besieged with efforts by forces, across the globe and right here at home, taking malicious aim at people because of their skin color, national heritage, gender, religious belief, or choice of romantic partner.  One wonders what the women whose stories are recounted here might have elected to do in the face of this current enemy.  I think they’d shout out “Never again!” and take up arms once more.]

“NYU FILM PROFESSOR LEARNS HER GRANDMOTHER

WAS A SPY FIGHTING THE NAZIS DURING WWII”

by Stephanie Simon 

[The following report was aired on Spectrum News NY1 on Thursday morning, 25 March 2021.  In re: the reference to Spyscape, the espionage museum, reporter Stephanie Simon makes just below, see my republication of “A Place to Come In From the Cold” by William L. Hamilton in my post “Spy vs. Spy” on Rick On Theatre on 9 August 2019.]

Walking through Spyscape, the museum of espionage in Midtown, filmmaker Enid Zentelis is intrigued by the collection of spy artifacts, but she’s on her own mission to learn the truth about her late grandmother, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor – and a spy.

“I was going through her things and found myself staring at a letter that I had seen in childhood and I didn’t really understand. It had to do with some sort of covert work she had done for the British,” said Zentelis.

And so Zentelis spent four years unraveling the secret life of her grandmother Isabelle, which unfolds like a classic spy thriller in a new six-part podcast called “How My Grandmother Won World War II” [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-my-grandmother-won-wwii/id1550511220].

Zentelis determined that her grandmother was in fact a covert operative working in Hungary for the British, during World War II.

“It was her brother Zoltan that got her involved in covert work,” said Zentelis.

Zoltan was a telegraph operator at the post office – a  position that gave him access to crucial information like Nazi troop movements, which he then passed on to his sister. Exploring the artifacts at Spyscape, the famous enigma code breaking machines hold special significance to Zentelis.

“When my great uncle started working at the post office, they decided to use their childhood code and maybe further develop it to encrypt the information that they intercepted at the post office so that when my grandmother carried it to the British legation in Budapest -- if she were to be discovered, it would be in code,” said Zentelis.

Isabelle was arrested later, not for espionage, but for being Jewish. Using her guile once again, she escaped. After the war she was a refugee with young children who lost her husband.

She eventually settled in Corsica. She died in 1988. Her daughter – Enid’s Mom, came to America and lived in Queens.

Zentelis, an NYU film professor, pieced together her grandmother’s story by tracking down distant relatives and sifting through declassified records in Britain’s national archives.

“And I did find proof that she absolutely contributed to helping the Red [i.e., Soviet] Army prevail in Hungary [March 1945], which was a critical, critical point to winning World War II. It’s one of the proudest moments of my life finding this,” said Zentelis.

Enid is passionate about sharing her grandmother’s story but also raising awareness that so many women like her have been lost to history.

She also hopes that sharing her grandmother’s story will change the stereotype of female spies using their sexuality, rather than like her grandmother – their bravery, guile and intelligence.

“My grandmother like her brother, and like many other women, you will never hear about was willing to risk their lives to do what was right, to make this a better world,” said Zentelis.

It’s a story that’s now being told thanks to an intriguing old letter, and a very determined granddaughter.

[Stephanie Simon, Spectrum News arts reporter, covers art and culture in all its many forms across the five boroughs of New York City, including the visual arts, jazz, the New York Philharmonic, New York history, and everything in between.  Beginning as a television and radio reporter in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, Simon began at NY1 as a features producer in 1998.] 

*  *  *  *

“THE NAZI-FIGHTING WOMEN OF THE JEWISH RESISTANCE”

by Judy Batalion 

[The following opinion article appeared in the New York Times of 21 March 2021 in section SR (“Sunday Review”).  The title above was used on the front page of the section, which was a full-page promotional preview of Judy Batalion’s essay; the inside headline read: “The Women of the Jewish Resistance.”

[Dr. Batalion is the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors; her mother was born on the way back to Poland in 1945 in the aftermath of wartime displacement.  Batalion was born and grew up in Montreal and earned her bachelor’s degree in the history of science at Harvard and a Ph.D. in contemporary art from the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art.  Suffering from what she calls “career promiscuity,” she’s worked as a museum curator, researcher, editor, university lecturer, MC, script-reader, dramaturg, performer, actor, producer, translator, muffin-server, and office temp.  Dr. Batalion also does stand-up comedy.]

They flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines and flirted with Nazis, then killed them. Why hadn’t I heard their stories?

In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair.

She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied. She found a physician’s coat, entered the hospital where the injured man was being treated, and killed both the Nazi and the police officer who had been guarding him.

“Little Wanda With the Braids,” as she was nicknamed on every Gestapo most-wanted list, was one of many young Jewish women who, with supreme cunning and daring, fought the Nazis in Poland. And yet, as I discovered over several years of research on these resisters, their stories have largely been overlooked in the broader history of Jewish resistance in World War II.

In 2007, when I was living in London and grappling with my Jewish identity, I decided to write about strong Jewish women. Hannah Senesh [anglicized from Szenes; 1921-44] jumped immediately to mind. As I’d learned in fifth grade, Hannah was a young World War II resistance paratrooper. She left her native Hungary for Palestine in 1939, but later returned to Europe to fight for the Allied cause; she was caught and was said to have looked her killers directly in their eyes as they shot her.

That tale of audacity was exhilarating to me. I was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who had escaped from Poland; in my family, flight meant life. I had grown up to be a runner in relationships, careers and countries. But Hannah had returned to fight. I wanted to grasp what had motivated her boldness.

I went to the British Library, looked her up in the catalog and ordered the few books listed under her name. One, I noticed, was unusual, bound in worn blue fabric with gold lettering and yellowing edges — “Freuen in di Ghettos” [Pioneer Women’s Organization, 1946], Yiddish for “Women in the Ghettos.” I opened it and found 180 sheets of tiny script, all in Yiddish, a language I was fluent in. To my surprise, only a few pages mentioned Hannah Senesh; the rest relayed tales of dozens of other young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, many of whom had the chance to leave Nazi-occupied Poland but didn’t; some even voluntarily returned.

All this was a revelation to me. Where I had expected mourning and gloom, I found guns, grenades and espionage. This was a Yiddish thriller, telling the stories of Polish-Jewish “ghetto girls” who paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flirted with Nazis and then killed them. They distributed underground bulletins, flung Molotov cocktails, bombed train lines, organized soup kitchens, and bore the truth about what was happening to the Jews.

I was stunned. I was raised in a community of Holocaust survivors and had earned a doctorate in women’s history. Why had I never heard these stories?

“Freuen” was compiled for Yiddish-speaking American Jews in 1946 in an attempt to share this stunning history as widely as possible. But in the years that followed, these resistance narratives, like many historical contributions made by women, were sidelined or ignored for a variety of political and personal reasons.

Many women who told their stories in their own communities after the war were met with disbelief; others were accused by relatives of abandoning their families to fight; still others were charged with sleeping their way to safety. Sometimes, family members feared that opening old wounds would tear them apart. And many fighters suffered from survivors’ guilt — they’d “had it easy,” they felt, compared with others — and so in later years they remained mostly silent about their experiences.

Several other factors in postwar decades may have contributed to the relative obscurity of this history. In the 1950s, some say, many Jews had trauma fatigue; in the 1960s, the emerging horrors of Auschwitz and other camps became the predominant subject; in the “hippyish” 1970s, stories of violent rebellion were out of fashion; and in the 1980s, a flood of Holocaust books in the United States overshadowed many earlier tales.

My quest to learn more about these women turned into a dozen years of research across Poland, Israel and North America; in archives and living rooms, memorial monuments and the streets of former ghettos. I learned of the scope of Jewish rebellion: More than 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units. Approximately 30,000 European Jews joined the partisans. Rescue networks supported about 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. All this alongside daily acts of resilience — smuggling food, writing diaries, telling jokes to relieve fear, hugging a barrack mate to keep her warm. Women, aged 16 to 25, were at the helm of many of these efforts. I learned their names: Tosia Altman, Gusta Davidson, Frumka Plotnicka. Hundreds of others[.]

At the center of “Freuen” was a striking testimonial by a woman identified only as Renia K.; it was composed at the end of the war, when she was just 20 years old. Her writing was descriptive, even witty. “For them,” she wrote of the Nazi officers, “killing a person was easier than smoking a cigarette.” I found her file at the Israel State Archives and used the book she published in 1945 and additional testimonies to fill out her story.

Her full name was Renia Kukielka, and she was brought up in Poland in the 1930s in a world of sophisticated Yiddish theater and literature, and some 180 Jewish newspapers. After Hitler invaded Renia’s town, Jedrzejow, and locked her family in a ghetto, Renia escaped and fled through fields. She leapt off a moving train when she was recognized, bargained with the police and pretended to be Catholic. She got a job as a housemaid, nervously genuflecting at weekly church services. “I hadn’t even known that I was such a good actor,” Renia reflected in her memoir, “able to impersonate and imitate.”

Helped by a paid Polish smuggler, she joined her older sister in the town of Bedzin. Before the war, Bedzin had been a largely middle-class Jewish community and a hub for Jewish political parties, which had proliferated in response to the question of modern Jewish identity. A vast network of Jewish youth groups was affiliated with these parties. These groups had trained young Jewish men — and women — to feel pride, live collectively, be physically active and question, critique and plan. They trained them in the skills necessary for “staying.”

After Hitler’s conquest of Poland, the youth groups formed militias. When Renia arrived, Bedzin hosted a burgeoning cell of rebellion organized by secular, socialist-leaning Jewish teenagers and young adults. Those who were forced to labor in Nazi uniform factories slipped notes into the boots urging soldiers at the front to drop their weapons. They constructed workshops where they experimented with homemade explosives and designed elaborate underground bunkers. “Haganah!” was their rallying cry: Defense!

Women who were selected for undercover missions were required to look “good,” or passably “Aryan” or Catholic, with light hair, blue or green eyes, good posture and an assured gait. Renia was one of those chosen. Fueled by rage and a deep sense of justice, 18-year-old Renia became an underground operative, “a courier girl.”

I learned that “courier girls” connected the locked ghettos where Jews were imprisoned. Being caught on the Aryan side meant certain death; despite that, these young women dyed their hair blond, took off their Jewish-identifying armbands, put on fake smiles and secretly slipped in and out of ghettos, bringing Jews information and hope, bulletins and false identification papers, and linking youth resistance groups across the country. They smuggled pistols, bullets and grenades, hiding them in marmalade jars, sacks of potatoes and designer handbags.

As women, they were well positioned to do this work: Their brothers were circumcised and risked being found out in a “pants drop” test. Before the war, Jewish girls were more likely than Jewish boys to have studied at Polish public schools (many boys attended Jewish schools and yeshivas). They were, over all, more assimilated than Jewish boys and spoke Polish without the Yiddish accent, making them excellent spies.

They also took enormous risks. Bela Hazan got a job working as a translator and receptionist for the Gestapo; she stole their documents and delivered them to Jewish forgers. Vladka Meed smuggled dynamite into the Warsaw ghetto by passing bits of gunpowder through a hole in the wall of a basement that lined the ghetto border. She later supported Jews in hiding, secretly bringing them money, medical help and trusted photographers to take their pictures for fake IDs.

Hela Schupper, a beauty who’d studied commerce, dressed up as an affluent Polish woman attending an afternoon of theater, wearing clothes she’d borrowed from a non-Jewish friend’s mother. In 1942 she met a “Mr. X” from the Polish underground on a Warsaw street corner, followed him onto a train and into a safe house, stuffed her fashionable jute handbag, and brought five guns and clips of cartridges to Krakow’s “Fighting Pioneers,” who then bombed a Christmas week gathering at an upscale cafe frequented by Nazi officers, killing at least seven Germans and wounding more.

These women were so unlike me — they were the fight to my flight — and I was becoming increasingly obsessed with them.

Renia ran missions between Bedzin and Warsaw. She moved grenades, false passports and cash strapped to her body and hidden in her undergarments and shoes. She transported Jews from ghettos to hiding spots. She wore a red flower in her hair to identify her to underground contacts, met up with a black-market arms dealer in a cemetery, and slept in a cellar, wandering the city by day to gather information. She smiled coyly during searches on the train, and befriended one border guard to whom she “confessed” about smuggling food to distract him from the real contraband that was fastened to her torso with belts. “You had to be strong in your comportment, firm,” she wrote in her memoir. “You had to have an iron will.”

In Vilna, Ruzka Korczak found a Finnish pamphlet in a library on how to make bombs — it became the underground’s recipe book. Her comrade Vitka Kempner put a rudimentary explosive under her coat, slipped out of the ghetto, and blew up a German supply train in 1942. The Vilna resistance fled the ghetto to fight in the forests, where both women commanded units. Their comrade Zelda Treger completed 17 trips transporting hundreds of Jews out of ghettos and slave labor camps to the woods. In a different forest, a 19-year-old photographer named Faye Schulman joined the partisans, participated in combat missions and performed surgery — she was once forced to amputate a soldier’s wounded finger with her teeth. “When it was time to hug a boyfriend, I was hugging a rifle,” Faye said of her wartime adolescence in a documentary film.

Renia, through cunning and luck, managed to fend off prying Nazis and Poles who attempted to turn her in for a reward — until one border guard noticed her fabricated passport stamp. Imprisoned in Gestapo lockups that prided themselves on their medieval torture strategies, Renia was brutally beaten alongside Polish political prisoners. She masterminded an escape, helped by other courier girls who plied the guards with cigarettes and whiskey. Renia was able to slip away, change her clothes and run. Using an underground railroad set up by Jews, she crossed the Tatra Mountains by foot, then reached Hungary hidden in the locomotive of a freight train. The engineer expelled an extra puff of smoke to hide her departure from the engine.

Renia finally arrived in Palestine, where she was invited to lecture about her experience, and she published her memoir in Hebrew in 1945 — one of the first full-length accounts of the Holocaust. But in her life after the war, she remained mostly silent about it. For many female survivors, silence was a means of coping. They felt it was their duty to create a new generation of Jews. Women kept their pasts secret in a desperate desire to create a normal life for their children, and, for themselves. Renia’s family home after the war was not filled with stories of the resistance, but with music, art and tango nights; she was known for her fashionable tastes, and for her sharp sense of humor. Like so many refugees, the resisters wanted to start afresh, to blend into their new worlds.

Some 70 years after the war, I went to speak with Vitka Kempner’s son, Michael Kovner, on the outdoor terrace of a Jerusalem cafe. “She was someone who went toward danger,” he told me. “She didn’t care about the rules. She had true chutzpah.”

Researching these women, I’ve learned that my family’s narrative is not the sole option for confronting large and small dangers in the world. Running is sometimes necessary, but at other times I can stop and fight, or, at least, pause and discuss. Renia and her comrades were brave and powerful and paved the way for the generations that followed — not just the Ruth Bader Ginsburgs, but also women like me and my daughters. My children should know that their legacy includes not just fleeing, but also staying, and even running toward danger.

When I left the cafe, I found myself on a quiet side road. I looked up and saw the street sign with a name I would have never recognized a few years before: Haviva Reik Street. With Hannah Senesh, Haviva had joined the British Army as a paratrooper, helping thousands of Slovak Jews and rescuing Allied servicemen. Strong female legacies were all around us; if only we noticed, if only we knew their stories.

[Dr. Batalion is the author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos (William Morrow, 2020), from which this essay is adapted.  The book is also available as an e-book, as an audiobook, in a large-print edition, and in a young readers’ edition.

[A New York Times review of The Light of Days, “The ‘Ghetto Girls’ Who Fought the Nazis With Weapons and Wiles” by Sonia Purnell, was posted on the Times’ website at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/books/review/light-of-days-judy-batalion.html on 6 April.

[Deadline, the online entertainment-industry news site, announced that Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment is developing a film adaptation of The Light of Days, and Batalion along with playwright and screenwriter Michael Mitnick are writing the screenplay.] 

*  *  *  *

“NEW BOOK EXPLORES THE HEROIC 

WOMEN-RUN RESISTANCE INSIDE NAZI DEATH CAMPS”

by Malcolm Brabant

 

[The interview below was broadcast on PBS NewsHour on Holocaust Remembrance Day, 8 April 2021.  It covers the same new book the New York Times essay above discusses.]

Judy Batalion’s new book, “The Light of Days,” details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of eastern Europe - and even within the death camps. She documents how female couriers hand-carried crucial messages, weapons, and ammunition as part of the resistance in besieged Jewish ghettos. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant presents the report for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Judy Woodruff: Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, now 76 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe.

A new book out this week, “The Light of Days” by Judy Batalion, details acts of heroism by Jewish women in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, and even within the death camps, who risked their lives to challenge the Nazis.

She concentrates on female couriers who hand-carried crucial messages, weapons, and ammunition as part of the resistance in besieged Jewish ghettos.

Here’s special correspondent Malcolm Brabant.

Malcolm Brabant: Seventy-six years since the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated and its railhead of industrial slaughter neutralized, ghosts of the Holocaust are coming to life in new uplifting stories.

One of the wartime heroines portrayed in this book is Bela Hazan, seen here with her son Yoel on the right. Yoel, a brain scientist in Jerusalem, wants the world to know what his mother did in the war to compensate for the torrid reception she received in Israel after surviving Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Yoel Yaari: They used to say, you are sheep who went to the slaughter. And she was treated as such.

Why didn’t you resist? I mean, this was a question. What did you do you were not killed? Did you collaborate with the Nazis? Were you bartering sex for food? Were you a prostitute? I mean, these were questions that were put to her.

Malcolm Brabant: How angry does that make you that your mother’s first period in Israel was so awful?

Yoel Yaari: I’m extremely angry. And this is, of course, one of the reasons why I’m trying to tell her story.

Malcolm Brabant: This picture testifies to Bela Hazan’s courage. She’s between two other Jewish underground couriers.

What makes the photograph extraordinary is that it was taken by a Nazi at a Gestapo Christmas party. Bela worked as an interpreter for the Gestapo. The job gave her a great cover story, which enabled her to travel to cities like Vilnius in Lithuania, where the Jewish resistance operated.

Aged just 19 and masquerading as a Polish Catholic, she became a brilliant spy. Her luck ran out at this railway station in Poland. Despite being arrested, tortured and sent to Auschwitz, she never confessed her true identity.

Yoel Yaari: She interacted with the Gestapo people. What she did was to steal official papers, to put stamps, official stamps on these papers, and she delivered these materials together with information that she gathered when she was in that place. She delivered it all to the headquarters of the underground.

Judy Batalion: They were walking around with cash in their garter belts and dynamite in their underwear.

Malcolm Brabant: The bravery of women in Hitler’s ghettos was buried in an old Yiddish book that author Judy Batalion stumbled upon in the British Library in London.

She has spent 14 years researching women whose exploits have been neglected by history and who she believes should be revered.

Judy Batalion: When I first began this project, I too had a kind of subconscious understanding what they call of the myth of passivity and which is why, when I first found this material by accident, I was blown away.

And now I cannot look at the story of the Holocaust without seeing it as one of a constant battle of resistance and resilience.

Malcolm Brabant: Batalion’s book concentrates on couriers like Chasia Bielicka, eulogized by her granddaughter Hadas in Israel.

Hadas Yahav: You could see it in the Holocaust, of course, the way she wanted to save people and help people and help children. And she didn’t just want to survive. That wasn’t her mission. She wanted to do much more than that.

Malcolm Brabant: Chasia Bielicka’s ability to evade Nazi patrols and checkpoints made her a key player in the Jewish insurgency in Bialystok, these days an ultra-conservative town in Northeast Poland renowned for its hostility to gays.

Eighty years ago under the Nazis, it had a ghetto where Jews were corralled before being dispatched to death camps.

Hadas Yahav: The courier missions was to bring ammunition to the partisans. The partisans were fighting in the forest. They needed ammunition.

The women that she was with tried to find always places where they could steal ammunition, bring it to the forest or to the ghetto sometimes.

Judy Batalion: These women showed bravery and courage and cleverness and bravado, against all odds.

Malcolm Brabant: As long as they appeared sufficiently Aryan, women could move more freely around occupied Poland than men, who were supposed to be working during daylight hours. The couriers exploited a naive German belief that women were incapable of sabotage and subterfuge.

Judy Batalion: The biggest militaries in the world couldn’t defeat the German army, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the fight for justice and liberty.

Malcolm Brabant: Zivia Lubetkin left Poland when Germany invaded. She could have stayed outside the country, but came back

Judy Batalion: Zivia Lubetkin was ultimately a leader in the Warsaw ghetto. She helps get young Jews out of slave labor. She helps them find food. And she fought in two ghetto uprisings. She fought in the Warsaw uprising alongside the Polish resistance.

Malcolm Brabant: The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising lasted almost a month, as heavily outnumbered Jewish fighters kept crack German forces at bay. Ultimately, they were overwhelmed, and some partisans died by suicide, rather than surrendering.

Today, only a small portion of the ghetto wall remains, but Zivia Lubetkin’s deeds live on.

Judy Batalion: She escaped through sewers, sewage water up to her neck. And even after the ghetto was razed and she was in hiding, she helped administer rescue organizations that helped thousands of Jews in hiding in Warsaw.

Malcolm Brabant: Although most of the characters in Batalion’s book are couriers, she couldn’t resist telling the story of Anna Heilman, a member of the Auschwitz resistance.

How on earth do you resist in Auschwitz?

Judy Batalion: This is such an incredible story, again, one of those: How did I not know about this?

Malcolm Brabant: Only one crematorium remains at Auschwitz-Birkenau. All but one were destroyed by the Nazis as they fled from the advancing Soviet Red Army.

The other one was blown up by Anna Heilman’s co-conspirators in October 1944. She helped to steal gunpowder from a munitions factory two miles from Birkenau and smuggle it back in the hems of her clothes.

Judy Batalion: It was this very elaborate system, where the people that worked in the room where they packed the powder would take little bits and put it in a waste — the wastebasket on the side. Another round of women would collect that waste, go to the bathroom, take out the gunpowder and hide it in fabric.

Malcolm Brabant: And here is Anna Heilman, in her own words, in Canada in 1996.

Anna Heilman: They used this gunpowder and manufactured little hand grenades made out of metal around boxes of shoe polish with a wick and filled with gunpowder. And when you lit it, it exploded.

Malcolm Brabant: The crematorium was destroyed during a brief rebellion by so-called Sonderkommandos [‘special units’], Jews forced by the Nazis to dispose of bodies from the gas chambers.

Anna Heilman: All the Sonderkommando people were killed. But the crematorium was destroyed as well.

Malcolm Brabant: In retribution, Anna Heilman’s sister was executed.

Anna Heilman: I heard this collective groan, and I knew what happened. I didn’t witness it with my eyes, but I was there.

Malcolm Brabant: In Jerusalem, Bela Hazan’s son Yoel Yaari, is grateful that light is now being shone on this aspect of the Holocaust.

Yoel Yaari: I think it is extremely important, because the story of the couriers is almost unknown worldwide and also in Israel.

Malcolm Brabant: The new book may help elevate these women to their rightful place in history, especially as the author is now working on a screenplay for Steven Spielberg, Oscar-winning director of that legendary Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List.”

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Malcolm Brabant.

[Malcolm Brabant is a special correspondent for the PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *

[I have a personal motivation for republishing the reports above: my mother.

[Mom died at 92 in 2015—just about six years ago now.  She’s been on my mind prominently these days.  Most significantly, I’ve been working on a very long project based on the letters she and my future father exchanged for almost a year in 1945, from just after they first met on 1 January to my father’s return from the army and the end of World War II and his release from the military in December.

[In addition, 7 April would have been Mother’s 98th birthday and next month, on the 8th, is Mother’s Day, and I always used to try to spend one of those dates—or some time in between—with her either here in New York City or at her home in Washington, D.C.

[These stories, though, have made the absence of my mother just now particularly notable.  In particular, the account of Enid Zentelis’s grandmother, the Hungarian spy, because Mother’s family was a teensy bit Hungarian.  Her father’s family had come from Austria-Hungary in the mid- or early 19th century, and Mom used to point to the tip of her little finger and say she was “that much Hungarian”!

[Further, Judy Batalion’s history is compiled in a book.  Mom (whose name was also Judy, coincidentally) loved reading and would have delighted in stories of Jewish and female heroism, and I thought, what a wonderful birthday or Mother’s Day gift The Light of Days would’ve made for her.