December 3, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Henry G. Plitt returned from WWII as a hero to many Americans, and his story carried special meaning for Jewish American soldiers in WWII who understood exactly what he had been fighting against. He was among the first men to land in Holland during Operation Market Garden and had already jumped into Normandy as a parachuting pathfinder. His wartime record became even more significant when he captured Julius Streicher, the founder of Der Stürmer, whose propaganda had fueled anti-Jewish hatred long before the war began.
Here, the late Major Henry G. Plitt reflects on his service. We thank the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection for preserving and sharing this audio.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Henry G.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Plitt returned from World War II a hero not just
to everyday Americans, but especially to Jewish Americans. He had
been one of the first soldiers on the ground in
Holland during Operation Market Garden and in Normandy as a
parachuting pathfinder, and he later captured Julius Striker, the founder
(00:43):
of the anti Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer, who had been
advocating for the extermination of Jews as early as nineteen
thirty three. Here's the late Brigadier general with the story
of his service, and we'd like to credit the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection deserving and publishing this audio.
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I was in law school in Saint Lawrence University, Brooklyn,
and at this time I was getting close to nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I was in thirty eight thirty.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Nine and my family managed, through an organization called Hyas,
to bring into this country some of my relatives who
were in the German occupied areas and when I heard
their story, I just made up my mind that all
(01:44):
this was one man was responsible for all this, and
his name was Hitler, and somehow or other, I wanted
to kill him. Now that sounds terrible in the light
of today's world, but at that time, when you heard
those horror stories, you couldn't do anything but want to
destroy this person who was responsible for it. So I
(02:05):
switched my allegiance in the army to parachute troops because
at that time parachute troops were trained to blow up bridges,
blow up planes, dropped behind the lines, assassinated, execute and
all this kind of thing. But during our period of training,
it was very strange. Many many people came into parachute troops,
(02:29):
and before the training was over, we suddenly had ourselves
a regiment of men, and now the tactics were not
going to be the same. The regiment incidentally grew into divisions,
and by the time we jumped to Normandy, there were
three divisions that went in.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So you can see that.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
The idea of jumping behind the lines and killing it
it was a long way from potential fruition.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It just couldn't happen that way.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
But the only reason, the only reason that I I
ended up with the first group to jump in Normandy
is the man that we had selected as our pathfinder
the day before, during the period Eisenhower delayed for twenty
four hours. We had a chance to go up and
see what he had done, and we.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Were very dissatisfied with it.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And my colonel said to me on the way back Plat,
I want you to go in, take the pathfind a
detachment in and I'll meet you on the ground and
put a DSc on your neck.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So I didn't have any choice anyway.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
But the point is that that put me among that
we had three airplane loads going in the pathfinders, a
total of eighteen people per plane for a total of
fifty four people. Now, the actual flight itself over England
was nothing, but when we got to the English Channel
we went down on the deck and there was some
(03:52):
very exciting moments when the ships at sea were flashing
the VF A victory sign to us.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Right over ahead. And then when we got to Cherburg.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
We pulled up to five hundred feet imagine up to
five hundred feet and we went along the line the
road that we had all been briefed so carefully on
and studied so long, running from Montberg to Bologne, from
Cherburg to Montburgh to Bologne on down to Saint Mary
Glees and Karantan and so on. And when we got
(04:24):
over our drop zone, boom.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
There it is now.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
If you want to know what went through my mind,
I was just as scared as any human being could be.
Here I was jumping into festuing Europa, which was a
Nazi dominated France. German soldiers at that time the army
put your religion on your dog tags, and they did
it only so that if you need last rites or
(04:51):
what have you, they know what you are and what
you aren't. And they only had three categories. There was
P for Protestant, C for Catholic, and h FV Hebrew
or Jewish. And I had an H on my dog tag.
And so there I was all alone in France, German occupied,
but I was able to pick up one hundred and
(05:14):
one men. Strangely enough, we were one hundred first Air one.
I picked up one hundred and one men and we
attacked the gun position, which was the division mission. Now,
the reason we did that is that we were supposed
to be on the ground for thirty minutes, and after that,
hearing our own planes come in.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
We would put the lights on. That's what we jumped for.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
The pathliners put the lights on and guide the rest
of the units in. For a long time, it got
to be very thin and tight, and for a long
time I thought maybe Eisenhower's canceled again, in which case
we got to stay here for twenty four more hours
and sweat it out. Or and before the ore really
had a chance to take hold, we could hear the
(05:56):
drone of aeroplanes coming over the first part of the mission,
the pathfind the mission was worthless because these were new
pilots who had never flown in combat before. And when
they anti aircraft started coming up at him, they broke
from formation. They dropped troops in the channel. They dropped
(06:17):
them all the way north to Sherburg and all the
way south of karent Tan. And so that part of
the mission was just was.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
And you've been listening to Henry g. Plipp tell one
heck of a story about his service to his country
and also as a Jewish man a unique perspective. And
imagine having on your dog tag the H letter as
you're parachuted into Nazi Germany, knowing what he knew from
his German relatives. It's why he left law school and
(06:48):
wanted to, as he put it, kill Hitler.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
And he was not alone.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Lots of Jews and non Jews alike were at that
task and at that effort, including, by the way, my
mother's brother, her only brother, who had parachuted into France
as well and didn't make it. He is buried in
Saint Laurent Cemetery in France. When we come back, more
of this remarkable soldier's story. The soldier who captured Germany's
(07:16):
most anti Semitic writer continues here on Now American Stories.
Leehabib Here, as we approach our nation's two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary, I'd like to remind you that all the
history stories you hear on this show brought to you
by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't
(07:39):
just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend,
but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their
series on Communism is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
go to Hillsdale dot edu. And sign up for their
free and terrific online courses. And we returned to our
(08:10):
American stories with Brigadier General Henry g. Plitz's story, and
we learned that the early airborne units were designed to
operate behind enemy lines, conducting the kinds of special ops
that drew men like him to the parachute infantry in
the first place. It was truly dangerous work. While the
(08:30):
tactics evolved, he would still get his chance to capture
Nazis as the war progressed, including one of Germany's leading
anti Semites, Julius Stryker. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Maybe ten days before the eighth of May, I saw
people walking on the road wearing a pajama looking thing
with a blue and a gray and I.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Said, what the hell is this?
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I got another army here we don't know about but
I had never seen that before. And how and why
they were out I can't tell you.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
But they were out.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
There and not with a guard, because the guard would
have been a German would have shot him.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Had no idea.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
As you got into areas like Munich and what have you,
I knew of the horror things that had happened through
the cousins of mine that came back from there in
nineteen forty and thirty nine. But they didn't describe concentration camps.
They didn't know anything about that. What they could describe
was how a store window would be broken, a person
(09:35):
would be taken off the street. If you were a doctor,
you couldn't practice. If you were a teacher, you couldn't teach.
If you wrote a book, it wouldn't be published. Those
things I knew. I didn't know anything about these camps.
As we got in there, it was a horrible site.
Everything was horrible, the huts they lived in, the furnaces
(09:57):
that they.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Burned in.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
And as we got there, moving up into this area,
one of the men I was with said, look at
those crematoriums, and another officer standing next to them said, no,
it's crematoria. That's the plural for crematoriums. I'll never forget that,
because that whole moment was just unbelievable. These people were
(10:28):
sitting on stoops and porches and on the ground. Their
bodies were totally emaciated, their legs were swollen. It was
an unbelievable time. It changed my life dramatically right then
because I wanted to capture as many of these bastards
(10:49):
as I possibly could. Now how to go about it?
We had an arrangement with the bergamises of the various
cities that if they had any known what would later
become termed as war criminals in their area, they were
to notify us. If they intended to hold their job
as bergamys did, they'd better do it. And so we
(11:11):
got a call one night, I don't know who was
on the board, got a call from a bergamister telling
us about this man that was living in a certain building.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
We went to the building and he was in bed,
and the minute we came in the door, he reached
for a pill on his night table.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
One of my boys knocked it out of his hand,
and then he said he didn't know why.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
We were bothering him. He was a professor, a teacher.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
His name was Disselbruger, and he claimed to have he
never was a Nazi, knew nothing about Nazism and so on.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Now I have to take you back for a moment.
When V Day.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Came around, which was May the eighth, my particular unit
of one hundred and first Airborn was in an area
occupied by thirteen thousand SS troops. Now there we were
two thousand now in charge of these people had surrendered.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
And when May eighth came around.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
My commanding officer, Full colonel, my commanding officer told me
I couldn't use any.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Of our men to go out on patrol.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
And the reason, he said, was the war's over now,
and I can't write a letter to somebody's mother and
father telling them their son was killed on the tenth,
the eleventh to twelfth May. I just can't do it.
The war's over for us. Here they get killed, it
have to be in a traffic accident, so he said,
But I don't object to your continuing to do your
scouting and patrolling if you will, but you're going to
(12:49):
have to do it.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
With the SS troops that we have under our command.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
So there I was driving through the Alps narrow littles
in a Volkswagen instead of an American jeep, and I
got a German driver SS and in those days to
make it even more precarious than the height and what
have you, the rumor among the SSS was they're all
going to be executed for being in the SS. So
(13:18):
they really had very little steak at just turning the
wheel a little bit, and off the Alps we went.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
But in my headquarters there was a full.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Colonel Nazi, and when I walked in with Disselbruger, he clicked.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
His heels pupped to attention and said.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Hile, how the hell can the school teacher have a
full colonel do this? So I called the Vision headquarters
and I said, I'm sending this guy up to you,
and I did, and he turned out to be Robert Lay,
the Minister of Labor.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
During these trips.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
With the SS, I managed to get the president of Vienna.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
His name was del Bruger.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I found Jules Oberg, who was the butcher of Paris,
roaming around in a twentieth armored stockade in an enlisted
man's coat suit. We just spent days and days and
days looking for these people. But Strich him that was
a more solitary role because I got in by myself.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
We got a tip that there was a.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
High ranking Nazi living in the town of Widering in Austria.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Is his name? We didn't know.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
I thought it was Henri Himmler from the description, but
I didn't have a jeep of my own. I didn't
have an interpreter of my own at the time, so
I borrowed another guy's jeep and his driver. The three
of us went up the hill to this house, chalet, chateau,
whatever you want to call it, and I ended my
(14:57):
forty five in hand, and I went upstairs.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
There was a man.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Sitting on a chair with an easel to his right,
painting the opposite out.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And I asked him his name.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And he reached right and back and he pulled out
an identification paper made out to the name of Joseph Sailor.
Now it didn't hit me quite that fast that this
was Julius Striker. And I began asking him things about
Himmler because I thought I had.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
The wrong guy.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
And he said he knew nothing about politics. He was
a painter. He knew nothing about anything that had to
do with what I was interested in. And then I
don't know why, I said, and what about Julia Striker?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And he said, yeah, dare Binisch.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Now I got that only from the JS on his
work papers.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Joseph Sailor was Julius Striker, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Dare Binish, which when translated into English reads, yeah, that's
who I am. In the car in the jeep had
my gun right and his ribs, so nothing was going
to happen there. He was going to jump out or
commit suicide or anything.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I said to him, this is the only interrogation he
got from me.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I said to him, zince zi dare stryker bus BArch
gegon dane euden, which one translated means I used the
striker who was against the Jews. And he very calmly said, yeah,
deare benich, which meant yeah, that's who I am. But
he might just as well have said so what I mean.
He was arrogant to the very end. When we got
(16:32):
to purchase garden, as he was getting out of the jeep,
I booted him a little bit so to accelerate his departure.
And the place was loaded with reporters and this, that
and the other. And one reporter came up to me
and he said, you know, you just killed the greatest
story of the war.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
I said, how.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
He said, can you imagine if a guy named Kohne
or Goldberg or Levy had captured this arch anti Semi?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
What a great story? I said why? He said, because
a Jew would be doing this.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And I told him I'm Jewish and That's when the
microphones came into my face and the camera started clicking away,
and things started to happen to changed the rest of
my life.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
With Lay, I just felt it was a part of
my job.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
With Striker, there was a very personal feeling about the
whole thing. I contelled myself not killing him from time
to time when I had the opportunity, But I had
two other people in the jeep and.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
War and not War.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
You just don't kill people who surrendered. So that's the
story of Jennie's writing.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
War or Not.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
You don't kill people who surrendered, The story of the
Jewish soldier who captured Germany's most anti Semitic writer, the
story of Brigadier General Henry G.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Plitt. Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Henry G.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
Plitt returned from World War II a hero not just
to everyday Americans, but especially to Jewish Americans. He had
been one of the first soldiers on the ground in
Holland during Operation Market Garden and in Normandy as a
parachuting pathfinder, and he later captured Julius Striker, the founder
(00:43):
of the anti Semitic newspaper Der Sturmer, who had been
advocating for the extermination of Jews as early as nineteen
thirty three. Here's the late Brigadier general with the story
of his service, and we'd like to credit the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection deserving and publishing this audio.
Let's get into the story.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I was in law school in Saint Lawrence University, Brooklyn,
and at this time I was getting close to nineteen forty.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
I was in thirty eight thirty.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Nine and my family managed, through an organization called Hyas,
to bring into this country some of my relatives who
were in the German occupied areas and when I heard
their story, I just made up my mind that all
(01:44):
this was one man was responsible for all this, and
his name was Hitler, and somehow or other, I wanted
to kill him. Now that sounds terrible in the light
of today's world, but at that time, when you heard
those horror stories, you couldn't do anything but want to
destroy this person who was responsible for it. So I
(02:05):
switched my allegiance in the army to parachute troops because
at that time parachute troops were trained to blow up bridges,
blow up planes, dropped behind the lines, assassinated, execute and
all this kind of thing. But during our period of training,
it was very strange. Many many people came into parachute troops,
(02:29):
and before the training was over, we suddenly had ourselves
a regiment of men, and now the tactics were not
going to be the same. The regiment incidentally grew into divisions,
and by the time we jumped to Normandy, there were
three divisions that went in.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So you can see that.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
The idea of jumping behind the lines and killing it
it was a long way from potential fruition.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
It just couldn't happen that way.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
But the only reason, the only reason that I I
ended up with the first group to jump in Normandy
is the man that we had selected as our pathfinder
the day before, during the period Eisenhower delayed for twenty
four hours. We had a chance to go up and
see what he had done, and we.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Were very dissatisfied with it.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And my colonel said to me on the way back Plat,
I want you to go in, take the pathfind a
detachment in and I'll meet you on the ground and
put a DSc on your neck.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
So I didn't have any choice anyway.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
But the point is that that put me among that
we had three airplane loads going in the pathfinders, a
total of eighteen people per plane for a total of
fifty four people. Now, the actual flight itself over England
was nothing, but when we got to the English Channel
we went down on the deck and there was some
(03:52):
very exciting moments when the ships at sea were flashing
the VF A victory sign to us.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Right over ahead. And then when we got to Cherburg.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
We pulled up to five hundred feet imagine up to
five hundred feet and we went along the line the
road that we had all been briefed so carefully on
and studied so long, running from Montberg to Bologne, from
Cherburg to Montburgh to Bologne on down to Saint Mary
Glees and Karantan and so on. And when we got
(04:24):
over our drop zone, boom.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
There it is now.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
If you want to know what went through my mind,
I was just as scared as any human being could be.
Here I was jumping into festuing Europa, which was a
Nazi dominated France. German soldiers at that time the army
put your religion on your dog tags, and they did
it only so that if you need last rites or
(04:51):
what have you, they know what you are and what
you aren't. And they only had three categories. There was
P for Protestant, C for Catholic, and h FV Hebrew
or Jewish. And I had an H on my dog tag.
And so there I was all alone in France, German occupied,
but I was able to pick up one hundred and
(05:14):
one men. Strangely enough, we were one hundred first Air one.
I picked up one hundred and one men and we
attacked the gun position, which was the division mission. Now,
the reason we did that is that we were supposed
to be on the ground for thirty minutes, and after that,
hearing our own planes come in.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
We would put the lights on. That's what we jumped for.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
The pathliners put the lights on and guide the rest
of the units in. For a long time, it got
to be very thin and tight, and for a long
time I thought maybe Eisenhower's canceled again, in which case
we got to stay here for twenty four more hours
and sweat it out. Or and before the ore really
had a chance to take hold, we could hear the
(05:56):
drone of aeroplanes coming over the first part of the mission,
the pathfind the mission was worthless because these were new
pilots who had never flown in combat before. And when
they anti aircraft started coming up at him, they broke
from formation. They dropped troops in the channel. They dropped
(06:17):
them all the way north to Sherburg and all the
way south of karent Tan. And so that part of
the mission was just was.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
And you've been listening to Henry g. Plipp tell one
heck of a story about his service to his country
and also as a Jewish man a unique perspective. And
imagine having on your dog tag the H letter as
you're parachuted into Nazi Germany, knowing what he knew from
his German relatives. It's why he left law school and
(06:48):
wanted to, as he put it, kill Hitler.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
And he was not alone.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Lots of Jews and non Jews alike were at that
task and at that effort, including, by the way, my
mother's brother, her only brother, who had parachuted into France
as well and didn't make it. He is buried in
Saint Laurent Cemetery in France. When we come back, more
of this remarkable soldier's story. The soldier who captured Germany's
(07:16):
most anti Semitic writer continues here on Now American Stories.
Leehabib Here, as we approach our nation's two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary, I'd like to remind you that all the
history stories you hear on this show brought to you
by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn't
(07:39):
just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend,
but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale dot edu
to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their
series on Communism is one of the finest I've ever seen. Again,
go to Hillsdale dot edu. And sign up for their
free and terrific online courses. And we returned to our
(08:10):
American stories with Brigadier General Henry g. Plitz's story, and
we learned that the early airborne units were designed to
operate behind enemy lines, conducting the kinds of special ops
that drew men like him to the parachute infantry in
the first place. It was truly dangerous work. While the
(08:30):
tactics evolved, he would still get his chance to capture
Nazis as the war progressed, including one of Germany's leading
anti Semites, Julius Stryker. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Maybe ten days before the eighth of May, I saw
people walking on the road wearing a pajama looking thing
with a blue and a gray and I.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Said, what the hell is this?
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I got another army here we don't know about but
I had never seen that before. And how and why
they were out I can't tell you.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
But they were out.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
There and not with a guard, because the guard would
have been a German would have shot him.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Had no idea.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
As you got into areas like Munich and what have you,
I knew of the horror things that had happened through
the cousins of mine that came back from there in
nineteen forty and thirty nine. But they didn't describe concentration camps.
They didn't know anything about that. What they could describe
was how a store window would be broken, a person
(09:35):
would be taken off the street. If you were a doctor,
you couldn't practice. If you were a teacher, you couldn't teach.
If you wrote a book, it wouldn't be published. Those
things I knew. I didn't know anything about these camps.
As we got in there, it was a horrible site.
Everything was horrible, the huts they lived in, the furnaces
(09:57):
that they.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Burned in.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
And as we got there, moving up into this area,
one of the men I was with said, look at
those crematoriums, and another officer standing next to them said, no,
it's crematoria. That's the plural for crematoriums. I'll never forget that,
because that whole moment was just unbelievable. These people were
(10:28):
sitting on stoops and porches and on the ground. Their
bodies were totally emaciated, their legs were swollen. It was
an unbelievable time. It changed my life dramatically right then
because I wanted to capture as many of these bastards
(10:49):
as I possibly could. Now how to go about it?
We had an arrangement with the bergamises of the various
cities that if they had any known what would later
become termed as war criminals in their area, they were
to notify us. If they intended to hold their job
as bergamys did, they'd better do it. And so we
(11:11):
got a call one night, I don't know who was
on the board, got a call from a bergamister telling
us about this man that was living in a certain building.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
We went to the building and he was in bed,
and the minute we came in the door, he reached
for a pill on his night table.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
One of my boys knocked it out of his hand,
and then he said he didn't know why.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
We were bothering him. He was a professor, a teacher.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
His name was Disselbruger, and he claimed to have he
never was a Nazi, knew nothing about Nazism and so on.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Now I have to take you back for a moment.
When V Day.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
Came around, which was May the eighth, my particular unit
of one hundred and first Airborn was in an area
occupied by thirteen thousand SS troops. Now there we were
two thousand now in charge of these people had surrendered.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
And when May eighth came around.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
My commanding officer, Full colonel, my commanding officer told me
I couldn't use any.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Of our men to go out on patrol.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
And the reason, he said, was the war's over now,
and I can't write a letter to somebody's mother and
father telling them their son was killed on the tenth,
the eleventh to twelfth May. I just can't do it.
The war's over for us. Here they get killed, it
have to be in a traffic accident, so he said,
But I don't object to your continuing to do your
scouting and patrolling if you will, but you're going to
(12:49):
have to do it.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
With the SS troops that we have under our command.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
So there I was driving through the Alps narrow littles
in a Volkswagen instead of an American jeep, and I
got a German driver SS and in those days to
make it even more precarious than the height and what
have you, the rumor among the SSS was they're all
going to be executed for being in the SS. So
(13:18):
they really had very little steak at just turning the
wheel a little bit, and off the Alps we went.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
But in my headquarters there was a full.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Colonel Nazi, and when I walked in with Disselbruger, he clicked.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
His heels pupped to attention and said.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Hile, how the hell can the school teacher have a
full colonel do this? So I called the Vision headquarters
and I said, I'm sending this guy up to you,
and I did, and he turned out to be Robert Lay,
the Minister of Labor.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
During these trips.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
With the SS, I managed to get the president of Vienna.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
His name was del Bruger.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I found Jules Oberg, who was the butcher of Paris,
roaming around in a twentieth armored stockade in an enlisted
man's coat suit. We just spent days and days and
days looking for these people. But Strich him that was
a more solitary role because I got in by myself.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
We got a tip that there was a.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
High ranking Nazi living in the town of Widering in Austria.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Is his name? We didn't know.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
I thought it was Henri Himmler from the description, but
I didn't have a jeep of my own. I didn't
have an interpreter of my own at the time, so
I borrowed another guy's jeep and his driver. The three
of us went up the hill to this house, chalet, chateau,
whatever you want to call it, and I ended my
(14:57):
forty five in hand, and I went upstairs.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
There was a man.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Sitting on a chair with an easel to his right,
painting the opposite out.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
And I asked him his name.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
And he reached right and back and he pulled out
an identification paper made out to the name of Joseph Sailor.
Now it didn't hit me quite that fast that this
was Julius Striker. And I began asking him things about
Himmler because I thought I had.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
The wrong guy.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
And he said he knew nothing about politics. He was
a painter. He knew nothing about anything that had to
do with what I was interested in. And then I
don't know why, I said, and what about Julia Striker?
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And he said, yeah, dare Binisch.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Now I got that only from the JS on his
work papers.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Joseph Sailor was Julius Striker, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Dare Binish, which when translated into English reads, yeah, that's
who I am. In the car in the jeep had
my gun right and his ribs, so nothing was going
to happen there. He was going to jump out or
commit suicide or anything.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I said to him, this is the only interrogation he
got from me.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
I said to him, zince zi dare stryker bus BArch
gegon dane euden, which one translated means I used the
striker who was against the Jews. And he very calmly said, yeah,
deare benich, which meant yeah, that's who I am. But
he might just as well have said so what I mean.
He was arrogant to the very end. When we got
(16:32):
to purchase garden, as he was getting out of the jeep,
I booted him a little bit so to accelerate his departure.
And the place was loaded with reporters and this, that
and the other. And one reporter came up to me
and he said, you know, you just killed the greatest
story of the war.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
I said, how.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
He said, can you imagine if a guy named Kohne
or Goldberg or Levy had captured this arch anti Semi?
Speaker 2 (16:58):
What a great story? I said why? He said, because
a Jew would be doing this.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And I told him I'm Jewish and That's when the
microphones came into my face and the camera started clicking away,
and things started to happen to changed the rest of
my life.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
With Lay, I just felt it was a part of
my job.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
With Striker, there was a very personal feeling about the
whole thing. I contelled myself not killing him from time
to time when I had the opportunity, But I had
two other people in the jeep and.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
War and not War.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
You just don't kill people who surrendered. So that's the
story of Jennie's writing.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
War or Not.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
You don't kill people who surrendered, The story of the
Jewish soldier who captured Germany's most anti Semitic writer, the
story of Brigadier General Henry G.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Plitt. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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