Among the Eagles
Dallas, 2007
On the way out of a restaurant after Sunday brunch with Marianne in 2007 we passed an elderly man I’d noticed earlier because he glanced at our table from time to time. As we neared his table he began struggling to his feet. Thinking he was about to fall, I extended a hand for support. He took my hand, but said nothing. I wondered if he was confused or if he needed help to the restroom, which was near the exit. But when I made to escort him toward the men’s room, he resisted. I turned to see why, and saw the group at his table looking at us with big smiles—this was something they’d seen before. He pointed to the miniature US military paratrooper badge I regularly wear in my lapel, a memento of my time in the US Army with the 101st Airborne Division. “You know,” he said, “I used to do that.” A few hurried questions revealed that in WWII he had been a jungle warrior with the incomparable Merrill’s Marauders in the Burmese Theater.
Equally interesting were two earlier encounters with an unusual common thread—the post-war interrogation of Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolph Hitler’s second in command during WWII.
The first occurred in July 1995 when I was one of a group of Harvard Business School alumni on a cruise aboard a small barge on the waterways of Burgundy. Aboard as guest speaker was John Dolibois, President Reagan’s ambassador to Luxembourg from 1981–85, whose task was to conduct seminars about how US embassies assist US businesses abroad. Events, however, conspired to side-rail business talk.
As is my habit I wore my 101st Airborne hat, which he recognized immediately and asked me about my military service. One thing led to another and for the remainder of the trip he enthralled us with stories of his service in WWII. Later he came to Dallas for a speaking engagement and I met with him again. The whole of his life is so interesting that for those who want the full story, I recommend his book Pattern of Circles. We don’t have room here for more than his interactions with Goering.
Dolibois was born in Luxembourg, where German is the native language. His family fled to the US after Hitler came to power, and he became an officer in the US Army after the war broke out—General George S. Patton pinned on his Second Lieutenant bars while visiting Ft. Knox.
In typical Army fashion, his linguistic talent was overlooked and he was assigned to a transportation company. However, as the Third Reich collapsed a call went out for anyone who could speak German, a much-needed skill for the occupation that followed the war. Among his first adventures was a mad dash to rescue the famed Lipizzaner Stallions, which has been seized in Austria by the Nazis and transported to Germany. Shortly thereafter he was assigned to the military detail at Nuremberg, where the war crimes trials were convening. Nuremberg was chosen for the trials of senior Nazi political figures because of its symbolic value—Julius Streicher, Nazi Jew-baiter number one, was from Nuremberg. And imprisoned at Nuremberg was Hermann Goering.
One of the more interesting things Dolibois told us was that, alone among the Allies, the Americans interrogated prisoners using native speakers as interrogators, whereas France, Britain, and Russia used professional interrogators who had their questions relayed by translators. It was Dolibois’s opinion that the Americans were hands down the most successful inquisitors.
Dolibois, by accident of fate, became the “welfare officer” for Goering and his comrades of the Nazi high command. Goering demanded of his captors that a servant be provided, to which the Americans were only too happy to accede. Dolibois, acting under an assumed name, ingratiated himself with Goering’s coterie and dutifully reported every scrap of conversation. Eventually, a rapport developed and Dolibois began to query Goering effectively. “He considered me his friend,” Dolibois said.
Goering gained fame in WWI as a fighter pilot and successor in command to Manfred von Richthofen, the famed Red Baron. Between wars he rose rapidly as a member of Hitler’s inner circle, ultimately becoming commander of the German air force and Hitler’s designated successor. Arrogant, imperious, and vain, Goering believed that he would be accorded a chivalrous retirement as a vanquished foe. Instead, he was found guilty by the tribunal and sentenced to hang. He requested, and was denied, the opportunity to die an officer’s honorable death before a firing squad.
Goering committed suicide the night before he was to be executed. Somehow he managed to get a cyanide capsule reserved for just such an occasion. How this happened remains a matter of speculation, but Dolibois has a well-informed opinion based on his experience and personal investigations after the war. Dolibois believes Goering bribed the supply room sergeant to send him a jar of his personal face cream from his belongings. A brass capsule and a jar of face cream were found near his body. And after the war, the sergeant turned up with Goering’s gold watch.
Then in 1998, we took another in a series of trips to Greece and Turkey. We were in Turkey amid the ruins of ancient Ephesus, one of our favorite sites, where the Apostle Paul may have written some of his Letters, and which was home in Roman times to the magnificent Library of Celsus. I spent as much time as I could admiring the library, which had not been resurrected at the time of our first trip twenty years earlier.
But it was difficult to enjoy the experience because of the heat—I later learned it was officially 113° F—so, silently cursing my vanity for having chosen to wear that old, very hot, black 101st Airborne hat, I retreated to the shadow of a massive column. Other tourists had the same idea.
“Were you really in the 101st Airborne,” a voice inquired. I turned to meet a man about ten years my senior, who spoke very good English but with a slight, but unrecognizable accent.
“Yes, I was. First of the 501st Geronimos,” I said, using an “in group” code, so to speak, commonly used by veterans to refer to their units. It was a very deliberate way of authenticating my bona fides—I’ve learned over the years that some veterans, especially those from WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam, are suspicious of pretenders because of the many instances in which people pass themselves off as veterans, when in fact they are not.
He was still leery, and asked a few more questions with the precision of a lawyer, which he turned out to be. After I passed muster by giving good answers, he relaxed and we began to talk.
“I made a jump once in WWII,” he said and went on to describe the circumstances. He, too, spoke fluent German—I can’t recall how this came to be—and was in the US Army in Europe far behind the line of battle. At the end of the war, about the time John Dolibois was rescuing the Lipizzaner Stallions, this guy was called by his commander and given orders to rush to a site where important Nazis were being held.
“Have you ever made a parachute jump,” the commander inquired.
“No,” our hero said.
“Well, you’re about to make your first,” was the rejoinder. The commander said that the roads were so jammed, the need so great, and the distance so far, that they were going to deliver him by parachute.
I inquired about training—I made my first jump after two weeks of intense training.
“Nothing like that,” he said. “They told me the impact was like jumping off the back of a deuce and a half,” he added, referring to the standard 2 ½ ton trucks still in wide use in the US military. So they strapped a ‘chute on his back, he jumped off the back of a truck a few times and that was it.
The next day they flew him over the destination and out the door he went. He landed without incident to learn that he was assigned to interrogate senior Nazi political figures, one of which was Hermann Goering. Seldom has the world seemed so small. I told him of my experience with John Dolibois three years earlier and we had a grand time talking. The picture he painted of Goering was the same one I’d heard from Dolibois, but he added a few details of the type Dolibois was so good at capturing. The name Dolibois meant nothing to him, which did not surprise me. Dolibois came later to “Ashcan”, the code word for the Nazi’s prison, and used a “cover” name to protect his identity from possible reprisal by Nazi fanatics after the tribunal dissolved. The records of the tribunal and much of the history of those times is missing Dolibois’s name because of the ruse.
As we parted we exchanged cards and I learned he had prospered in international trade in Mexico and was retired there, but maintained his US citizenship.
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