Stars and Stripes in German Intelligence: What Nazi Analysts Found in the U.S. Army Newspaper

Name: Stars and Stripes in German Intelligence: What Nazi Analysts Found in the U.S. Army Newspaper
Uploaded: 2026-09-30T14:06:37+00:00
Duration: 47 min 58 s
Channel: WW2 Dossier

00:00On October 30, 1944, in cloud over western Germany, the wing came off Hubert Zemke's Mustang.

00:07He had flown into a thunderhead. The turbulence inside it was violent enough to tear the airplane

00:13apart around him. And it did. Zemke got out, his parachute opened, and the American who had built

00:20the most feared fighter group in the 8th Air Force came down in a field belonging to the people he

00:25had spent two years hunting. He was 34. 17 and three-quarter victories, 154 combat sorties.

00:34Two months earlier, he had handed over the 56th fighter group, the Wolfpack, and taken command

00:40of the 479th. The Luftwaffe had known his name for a long time. Within days, he was at Oboeusel,

00:48a few miles north of Frankfurt. Before the war, the place had been a small agricultural school.

00:54By that autumn, it was Auswertestelle West, Evaluation Center West, and almost every allied

01:01airman brought down in the west passed through it before he ever saw a prison camp.

01:06The German who came to talk to him was a Hauptgefreiter, in American terms, roughly a corporal.

01:13His name was Hans Schaff, and he did not shout, and he did not threaten. He walked Zemke through

01:20the woods. He brought food. He asked after the injuries from the bailout. And at some point,

01:27he opened a folder and let the American colonel look inside.

01:31The folder held newspaper clippings about the 56th fighter group and the 479th. It held names,

01:39squadron commanders, the men Zemke had eaten breakfast with. It held details of the airfields

01:46in England. And on the desk, in a room in Nazi Germany, where an American colonel sat as a

01:52prisoner of war, there were copies of the Stars and Stripes that were three days old.

01:58Three days. That was Zemke's own newspaper. The soldier's paper. The one printed for him

02:06and for every other American in the theater. Written not by the War Department, not by generals,

02:12but by enlisted men, privates, corporals, and sergeants who had been newspaper men before the

02:17army got them. Zemke never worked out what Scharf took from him. There was no doubt in his mind that

02:24the German had extracted something. He had not the slightest idea what. Scharf, he said, reminded him

02:31of an American insurance salesman who gets his foot in a door and leaves you holding a $10,000 policy.

02:39Before we go further, if you want more stories about what American soldiers and airmen

02:44actually came up against in this war, hit like and subscribe. It takes a second and it helps this

02:50channel. Now hold on to one thing because it comes back later and it matters more than anything else in

02:56this story. Nobody at Oberuzel stole that newspaper. Nobody broke a code to get it. The Germans obtained

03:05the Stars and Stripes through neutral embassies, the way you would order a subscription. And they read it

03:11the way an intelligence officer reads anything, line by line, with a pencil. So let me show you what was

03:19actually on those pages. Take one issue. The Mediterranean edition, July 15th, 1944. An ordinary

03:28day, an ordinary paper. On those pages you would find the 100th Battalion, the Hawaiian unit of the

03:34442nd Regimental Combat Team, named outright. You would find the 34th Division, 5th Army, the

03:43Mississina River, Leghorn. You would find Major Herschel H. Green, described as the top ace in the

03:51Mediterranean, from Mayfield, Kentucky. Lieutenant Paul Kerner of Pontiac, Illinois, up in a tank.

03:59Corporal Harold Myers of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, photographed somewhere in Normandy. Now read that

04:06again the way a man in Frankfurt read it. Name, rank, hometown, unit, sector, four lines of newsprint,

04:15and there is another card for the file. That was one issue. There was an issue the next day, and

04:21the

04:22day after that, and the day after that, all the way from the spring of 1942 to the end. Somewhere

04:29in a

04:29filing room north of Frankfurt, that stack was becoming something. Not a rumor, not a guess, a record.

04:38And this was not some mimeographed sheet passed around a headquarters. By January of 1945, the Stars

04:45and Stripes was printing more than 1,200,000 copies a day, out of as many as 25 locations at

04:51once,

04:51following the armies across France and Belgium and into Germany. Sit with that number for a second.

04:59The army was printing more copies of that newspaper every single day than there were men in the entire

05:058th Air Force. And every page of it, every one, went past an American censor before it went to press.

05:13That is the part that stops you. This was not a leak, and it was not sloppiness. The rules existed,

05:20and they were specific. A fresh division could not be named until the enemy already knew it had

05:25arrived. Which means somebody in an American uniform read the page about Major Green of Mayfield,

05:32Kentucky, and looked at it, and stamped it, and let it go. So the question underneath this whole story

05:39is not how German intelligence got hold of the paper. That part turns out to be easy. The question is

05:46why the United States Army, which understood perfectly well what a newspaper is worth to

05:51an enemy, went on printing one that its own privates wrote, and that Frankfurt could read

05:57inside 72 hours. There was an answer to that. It came from the top, from the one man in Europe

06:05with the authority to shut the paper down in a single afternoon. And it was one sentence long.

06:11The man was Dwight Eisenhower. And the sentence was this.

06:15Stars and stripes is the soldier's paper, and we won't interfere. He said those words to a general

06:22who was trying to have the paper thrown out of his army's area altogether. We will get to that

06:27argument, because it happened in a headquarters in Luxembourg, and it is one of the strangest

06:32confrontations of the entire war. But the position behind the sentence was in place long before

06:38anyone said it out loud in a room. Censorship of the stars and stripes was limited to security.

06:44Not tone. Not embarrassment. Not the dignity of officers. Security.

06:51So the American command knew what it was doing. It had decided that a soldier's newspaper was worth

06:57a certain amount of risk. And we have already seen the invoice for that risk, sitting on a desk in

07:03a

07:03converted agricultural school outside Frankfurt. To understand why they thought it was worth it,

07:08you have to see the paper the way the men who filled it saw it. So let me put you

07:12in an airplane.

07:14On February 26, 1943, a private named Andy Rooney was sitting in the nose of a B-17 over Wilhelmshaven.

07:23He was one of eight reporters cleared to fly a combat mission over Germany.

07:28He had been given a week of training. That was the entire preparation. The flak found them.

07:35The plexiglass in the nose was shot away, and at 17,000 feet, the air that came through the hole

07:41was 50 degrees below zero. The bombardier tried to plug it, and his hands froze. Rooney got on a gun.

07:49He helped with a wounded man. He was a private in the United States Army,

07:54with a notebook in his pocket, and he came home and wrote it down. It ran the next morning,

08:00February 27, 1943, under the headline, How it Feels to Bomb Germany.

08:06Now here is the thing I want you to notice, and it is not sentiment. That story was true.

08:12Not approximately true. Not true in the way a communique is true. It was written by a man who

08:19had been in the airplane, and who had no rank to protect, and no career riding on how it read.

08:25Every soldier who picked up that paper could tell the difference. And so could every intelligence

08:30officer in Germany.

08:32That is the trap at the center of this story, and I want you to hold onto it.

08:37The very thing that made the stars and stripes worth reading to an American private

08:41is exactly what made it worth reading to a German analyst. Accuracy does not care who is holding the

08:49page. It cuts both ways, and it cut both ways every single day. And it went further than battle reports.

08:58The paper carried a column called the B-Bag, which was where enlisted men sent their complaints.

09:04Food, passes, officers who ate better, rear area men with clean uniforms and better odds.

09:11The editor did not soften them, and he answered back. A soldier in Germany wrote home in October

09:17of 1944 that the B-Bag was the part he read first, because the man running it had guts and

09:23came right

09:24back at them. So now put yourself at the other end of the pipeline. You are an intelligence officer

09:31north of Frankfurt, and every few days a bundle arrives through a neutral embassy,

09:36and inside it is a million-copy newspaper in which the American soldier tells you, in his own words,

09:42what he has, where he is, who leads him, and what is wearing him down.

09:49By 1944, Oberözel was not a small operation. The staff ran to more than 300 people. The intelligence

09:57branch alone had 50 officers and 100 enlisted men, and 60 of the staff were specialists in one thing

10:07only—interrogation. In late 1943, the place was handling 1,000 prisoners a month. Through 1944,

10:15the average was 2,000. In July of 1944, the peak month, more than 3,000 Allied airmen and paratroopers

10:23came through the gate. The men doing the talking were chosen for three things. English. Real English,

10:30the kind you get from living somewhere, not from a classroom. Scharf had spent seven years in South

10:35Africa. His deputy, Sergeant Otto Engelhardt, had spent years in Canada and was known around the center

10:42as Canadian Wild Bill. Lieutenant Ulrich Hausmann, who handled bomber crews, had been a professor of

10:49English literature. Second, a manner. Several of the best interrogators at Oberözel were so friendly

10:57toward prisoners, so obviously concerned for their welfare, that the Gestapo began to wonder whether

11:03they were working for the other side. And third, memory. They took no notes while they talked. Not one.

11:11A man writing things down reminds a prisoner that he is being interrogated. So they carried whole

11:17conversations in their heads for hours and wrote the report afterward. None of that would have worked

11:22without the folder. The folder was the weapon. And the folder was built, in large part, out of the

11:28newspaper that American privates wrote. Because what the Germans were really assembling at Oberözel

11:34was not a list of facts. It was an illusion. And it was aimed at one specific weakness in a

11:41man who has

11:41just been shot down. It worked so well that at least one exhausted American crewman, sitting

11:48across from a corporal who seemed to know everything already, said something about how his bomber could

11:53be attacked. What he said in that room changed the way German fighters came at American formations.

12:00And he almost certainly never knew he had said it. Start with what actually happened to an American

12:06airman when the gate closed behind him. Because the folder was only the second half of the process.

12:12The first half was the cell. Solitary. Four or five days was normal. 30 was available as punishment.

12:21The cells could be run hot until a man could not think straight. Cigarettes were taken away,

12:27and toilet articles, and Red Cross parcels. Interrogators told bomber crews they were murderers of

12:33children. Some were told they would be handed to the Gestapo unless they talked about their aircraft.

12:39One American captain, William N. Schwartz, was held in that place for 45 days. An American

12:47intelligence report written after the war put it in one line. No amount of calculated mental depression,

12:54privation, and psychological blackmail was considered excessive. Before the door opened,

13:01there was usually a piece of paper. It looked like a Red Cross form. At the top, it asked for

13:06name,

13:06rank, and serial number, which is exactly what the Geneva Convention requires a prisoner to give.

13:13Underneath were other lines. Home address, civilian occupation, unit, commanding officer.

13:20Most Americans sought for what it was and refused. And here is the part that tells you how good these

13:26people were at their work. The refusal helped them, too. A man who refuses has confirmed that he

13:33understands what is being asked, and he walks into the interview already convinced that the Germans have

13:38a system. Then the door opens, and a man walks in with cigarettes and a friendly face and asks how

13:45you

13:45were feeling. And then comes the folder. Inside it, the names of the men in his squadron, the location of

13:53his airfield,

13:53what his group had been doing and for how long, the name of his commanding officer, and, this is the

14:01detail that broke men, the name of the pub his squadron drank in. Stop on that one for a second.

14:08A pub in an English village. There is no radio intercept that gives you a pub. There is no aerial

14:15photograph

14:16of a pub. That detail exists in a German folder because somewhere, somehow, that information had

14:23been written down in a language they could read. And one of the places American units and American lives

14:30got written down, week after week, was the newspaper. One American who went through it said afterward that

14:37he felt shocked and sickened. That it was obvious somebody inside his own unit was feeding the Germans.

14:45Nobody was. That was the whole point. The method worked like this. Scharf would open with a question

14:52he already knew the answer to. Then he would answer it himself. Then another. And answer that one too,

15:00until the American sitting across from him stopped believing there was anything left worth protecting.

15:05And then, somewhere in the middle of an easy conversation, would come the one question

15:10the Germans could not answer. And the man would answer it. Because what difference could it possibly

15:16make? Here is what that difference looked like. A bomber crewman told an interrogator which attack

15:24his crew feared most. High, and from the front. Because against a fighter coming in from 12 o'clock high,

15:31only the two guns of the B-17's top turret could be brought to bear. That went up the line.

15:37And the

15:38head-on pass became the way German fighters came at American formations. And there was worse. A captured

15:46Thunderbolt pilot, in what felt like ordinary conversation, gave away the range of the new P-47 drop tanks.

15:53Not a document. Not a blueprint. A number. In a chat. With that number, the German Home Defense Command

16:02could sit down with a map and calculate the exact point at which American escort fighters would have

16:07to turn for home. Think about what that means in the air. It means the Germans were not guessing anymore.

16:14They could hold their fighters back, watch the escorts peel away at the minute they had calculated,

16:21and hit a bomber formation at the moment it was alone. Men died over Germany because of a friendly

16:28conversation in a room with no notebook in it. So where did all of it come from? Not from spies.

16:37Every wrecked Allied aircraft was gone through for papers, letters, photographs,

16:42and for the operations orders that crews were not supposed to be carrying and carried anyway.

16:48Those became the squadron and group books. German women, who spoke fluent English,

16:54sat at receivers all day, listening to American units talk. And by the end of 1943,

17:00the Luftwaffe had a remarkably accurate order of battle for the American air forces in Britain,

17:06complete with stations and call signs. But every one of those sources

17:11has the same defect. They go stale. A letter is from last month. A wreck tells you about a crew

17:19that is already dead. An order of battle drifts out of date the moment a group moves,

17:24a commander is promoted, a squadron is re-equipped. And that is the first real answer to what German

17:31intelligence found in the newspaper that American privates wrote. It was not secrets. It was the clock.

17:37It was the thing that kept the folder current. Which raises the question that turns this whole story

17:44around. If the paper was that useful to the Luftwaffe, the German army was reading it too. And for something

17:51bigger than airfields. In the autumn of 1944, German intelligence went looking in the stars and stripes

17:59for something no card index can hold. They went looking for what was happening inside the American

18:05soldier's head. And they found it, in a column written by privates, printed with the army's permission. And what

18:12they concluded from it may have been the single most expensive misreading of the entire war.

18:17Put yourself back at that desk north of Frankfurt, with the bundle of newspapers, and turn to the

18:23b-bag. You are a German officer. You have been raised inside a system where the thing you are reading

18:29is a crime. I mean that literally. Under the German wartime penal code, signed in August of 1938,

18:37there was an offence called Wehrkraftzersetzung, the undermining of military strength. It was written

18:44so loosely that it covered everything from grumbling about the quality of the food, to an unflattering

18:50remark about an officer. Roughly a fifth of all the death sentences handed down by Wehrmacht courts

18:57were for that offence. At least 5,000 German soldiers were sentenced to die for it.

19:04Now look at the page in your hands. American privates, in print, under their own names,

19:11complaining about their officers. About the food. About the men in the rear with the clean uniforms

19:18and the better odds. And an editor answering them back. In a newspaper, the American army pays to print

19:24a million copies a day. There is only one conclusion available to a man reading that through German eyes.

19:32This army is coming apart at the seams. And its own command is so weak, it cannot even stop the

19:38men

19:38from saying so. You do not need a German staff document to know they reached that conclusion.

19:44You can read it backwards, out of what they broadcast, and what they printed, and where they aimed it.

19:51German radio to American troops did not talk about tanks. It talked about the girl back home,

19:57and the 4F who was taking her out while you sat in the mud. It talked about the officers who

20:03ate

20:03better than you did. It talked about how reasonable it would be to stop. That is not a message aimed

20:09at

20:10soldiers. That is a message aimed at the exact grievances printed in an American newspaper,

20:16read, filed, and handed to the propaganda staff.

20:19They fired it at the American line as well. Leaflets loaded a hundred at a time into special artillery

20:25shells and shot over American positions in the Ardennes. And then, on December 16, 1944,

20:33Germany bet the last of its armor on the same idea. The Ardennes offensive was not really a plan to

20:39take

20:40ground. It was a plan to break something, to hit the Western alliance hard enough at the seam that it

20:46would

20:46come apart, and to take Antwerp while the Americans and the British argued about whose fault it was.

20:52The whole thing rested on a judgment about the character of the enemy. On the belief that this

20:58was an army you could crack. And they took the study of Americans seriously. Otto Skorzenny put together

21:05a unit of English-speaking Germans, dressed them in American uniforms, and set up what his men called

21:12The School for Americans. They were drilled two hours a day on English. They watched American films

21:19and newsreels for the accent and the idiom. They were taught to eat the American way. Knife down,

21:24fork switch to the right hand. They were taught not to snap to attention when an officer walks in,

21:30because Americans don't, and to slouch, because Americans do. Here is the number that gives the game

21:36away. Out of everyone they screened, they found ten men with genuinely perfect English, and real

21:43command of American idiom. Thirty or forty more spoke English well, but had no slang at all. 120 to 150

21:52were moderate. 200 had schoolroom English. Ten men. That was the entire pool of Germans who could

22:01actually pass as American in conversation. So ask yourself where the other half of that problem gets

22:07solved. If you are trying to teach a German soldier how a current American soldier talks, in Germany,

22:14in 1944, what document do you have? Films are Hollywood and two years old. Textbooks are British.

22:22There was one source in the Reich that carried this month's American slang, written by American enlisted

22:27men, dated, in bulk. It did not save them. On the morning of December 17, 1944, three men in American

22:36uniform drove up to the little bridge at Ewaal in Belgium. Guarding the bridge was a mixed group of

22:42American military police and black American service troops, and one of them asked for the password.

22:48The answer was wrong. Unteroffizier Manfred Pernas, Oberfenrich Günther Billing, Gefreiter Wilhelm

22:57Schmidt. They were tried, convicted, and shot by firing squad on December 23. Under interrogation,

23:05they said their mission had been to reach Paris, gather at the Café de la Paix, and take or kill

23:11Eisenhower. And then the Americans did something no study of American manners could have prepared them

23:17for. The G's started quizzing each other. Not on passwords. On the things they assumed only an American

23:24could know. State capitals. Baseball scores. The name of Mickey Mouse's girlfriend. It got out of hand. And gloriously so.

23:34General Omar Bradley was stopped at a checkpoint and asked for the capital of Illinois. He said

23:40Springfield. He was correct. He was held anyway, because the military policeman was sure it was

23:46Chicago. Hold that image, because it is the whole misreading in one picture. The Germans had spent

23:53months learning how an American holds a fork, and had read his complaints and concluded he was breaking.

23:59And the men who caught them were privates, the same privates whose grievances were printed every

24:05morning at army expense. Which brings us back to the room at Oberösel, and to a question the

24:11Germans never managed to answer. Because by the end of the war, American intelligence went back over

24:16what that center had actually extracted from thousands of American prisoners. The finding is one sentence long,

24:23and it is not the sentence you would expect. After the war, American intelligence went back through

24:28Oberösel. The staff, the methods, the files, the results. And the judgment they reached about the

24:35thousands of American airmen who had passed through that place came down to a single line. Most of them

24:40withstood it. And they yielded no important military information other than name, rank, and serial number.

24:46And one more finding, which the Americans could have left out and did not. Reviewed in November of 1945,

24:54the German system at that center was judged to have stayed broadly within the Geneva Convention.

24:59There was slapping. There were threats. They were the exception. And the center's own commanders did not

25:06condone them. Sit with that for a moment, because it is doing two things at once. It is a verdict

25:13on the

25:13Germans. It is also a verdict on the Americans. And it raises a question that is much more interesting

25:19than the one we started with. If the folder was that good, if the illusion was that complete,

25:24why did it not work? Start with the man. Hans Scharf did not train for that job and did not

25:31want it.

25:32He had come out of a panzer unit into an interpreter's company. In the spring of 1943, he made a

25:38joke to an

25:39adjutant about spending the war punching holes in paper as a clerk, and was sent to the interrogation

25:44center at Oberösel, one of only three men allowed in that year. Two senior interrogators had just been

25:51killed in an aircraft accident. That is the entire reason the most effective interrogator of the Second

25:57World War ended up in the chair. He never rose above Hauptgefleiter, a corporal, sitting across the

26:04table from American colonels, running rings around them. Now here is what happened when that man met

26:10Francis Gabreski. On July 20, 1944, Gabreski was finished. 193 combat missions, 28 German aircraft

26:21shot out of the sky, more than any other American fighter pilot in Europe. His bags were packed,

26:27and he was waiting for the aeroplane home. He went up one more time.

26:33Low over an airfield near Bossenheim, strafing, he let the thunderbolt get a few inches too low,

26:39and the tips of the propeller blades touched the ground. The airplane started to shake itself apart.

26:45He put it down on its belly, climbed out, and ran. He was loose in Germany for five days.

26:53Then they caught him, and he went to Oberurzel, and Hans Scharf opened a folder in front of the

26:58leading American ace in Europe. And got nothing. Gabreski is one of the very few men who went

27:06through that room and gave the Germans nothing they could use. He spent the rest of the war in Stalag

27:13Luft 1 at Barth on the Baltic until April of 1945. And now go back to Zemke, three months later,

27:22in the same building. Scharf gave him the full treatment. When Zemke came in hurt from the bailout,

27:29Scharf walked him personally to the hospital the Luftwaffe had taken over nearby.

27:33There were meals. There were walks in the woods, on the American's word of honor that he would not run.

27:40And there was the folder. The clippings on the 56th and the 479th. The names. The airfields.

27:48But this time something was different. And I do not think Scharf realized what he had done.

27:54Because he also put the stars and stripes on the table. Three days old.

28:00Every other American who saw that folder was looking at the same terrible question.

28:05Who talked? Zemke was looking at the answer, in newsprint, right next to it.

28:13This is the thing about the whole system that nobody at Oboozol seems to have thought all the way through.

28:19The folder only works if the prisoner cannot account for it. Its power is not the information. Its power is

28:27the impossibility of the information. The sense that the Germans have got inside. That somebody has

28:33talked. That resistance is already pointless because the wall has already been breached.

28:39But a man who has been reading his own army's newspaper for two years has seen it before. He has

28:45seen his division named and his commander named. He has seen a boy from his own town,

28:51with his hometown printed after his name, photographed in Normandy. So the folder does not read as

28:59German penetration. It reads as a scrapbook. And the moment an American works that out,

29:06the machinery stops turning. Because the only thing holding it together was the illusion.

29:12Zemke never claimed he had beaten the man. He said there was no doubt Scharf had got something out of

29:17him. And that he had no idea what it was. Which is the honest version. And it is why the

29:23American

29:23report matters more than any single story. It does not say the Americans outwitted the Germans. It says

29:30that most of them, most of the time, held. Not because they were braver than other men. Because the

29:37currency the Germans were spending, the sense of being uniquely exposed, uniquely known, had been devalued at

29:44home. On purpose. By an army that had decided its soldiers could be trusted with the truth about

29:49themselves. Which brings us to March of 1945, and to the most serious threat the Stars and Stripes faced

29:57in the entire war. It did not come from Oberursel. It did not come from the Luftwaffe. It came from

30:04an

30:04American, wearing four stars, commanding an American army in the field. And unlike every German who had read

30:11that newspaper, he had the power to stop it. He had already threatened to throw it out of his army's

30:16area. And he had summoned the sergeant he blamed to his headquarters in Luxembourg, alone, to explain

30:22himself. In March of 1945, a sergeant drove 36 hours in an open jeep across liberated Europe to be shouted

30:29at by a four-star general. The sergeant was Bill Malden. He was 23 years old, he had a purple

30:36heart, and he

30:37drew two filthy, exhausted, unshaven infantrymen called Willie and Joe for the Stars and Stripes.

30:44He had come up through the 45th Division, and he drew the war the way an infantryman saw it.

30:49Every soldier in the European theater knew those two men. That was the problem. The general was George

30:56Patton, and he wanted the cartoons stopped. He believed they were destroying discipline. He believed

31:02that men who could shave were going around unshaven on purpose, to look like Malden's characters.

31:08And he had made two specific threats. He would bar the Stars and Stripes from the Third Army's area.

31:15And if Malden came into that area again, he would put him in jail for 30 days.

31:20Stop and measure that against everything we have covered. German intelligence had been reading this

31:25newspaper for three years and had never once been able to touch it. Not one German who read it could

31:31stop a single line of it. An American general could shut it down inside his own army with a sentence.

31:38It was Eisenhower's naval aide, Captain Harry Butcher, who suggested the two of them meet and

31:43clear the air. Patton agreed. And so, a 23-year-old sergeant was ordered to the headquarters of the

31:50Third United States Army in Luxembourg, alone. He turned up scrubbed, shaved, and saluting.

31:57What followed lasted about 45 minutes, and almost all of it was Patton talking.

32:03Malden got less than two minutes of it. Patton went at him about the pictures he drew of,

32:08and this is Patton's own phrasing, those god-awful things you call soldiers. He told him the cartoons

32:15were an invitation to mutiny. And then he made an argument that goes to the exact heart of this

32:20story, so listen to it carefully. The Bolsheviks, Patton said, made their officers dress like soldiers,

32:27eat with soldiers, no saluting, everybody calling everybody comrade. And where did it get them?

32:33While they ran an army like that, they couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag.

32:37Now they've learned their lesson. They put uniforms back on their officers.

32:42That is a serious argument, made by a serious soldier, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

32:49Patton's position was that discipline is the thing that keeps men alive,

32:53and that anything corroding it, including a cartoon, including a complaints column,

32:58is a threat to the men themselves. Malden's answer, in the couple of minutes he was given,

33:04was simpler. The men had real grievances. The grievances existed whether or not anybody printed

33:10them. And a grievance with somewhere to go is not the same thing as a grievance with nowhere to go.

33:17The argument went up to Eisenhower, and Eisenhower ruled against Patton. Leave the cartoonist alone.

33:23The drawings gave the soldiers an outlet for what they were feeling, and the outlet was worth having.

33:29Stars and Stripes is the soldier's paper, and we won't interfere. That is the sentence we started with.

33:36Now you know where it was said, and what it cost to say it. Now understand what that decision actually

33:42was. Because it was not sentimentality, and it was not a general being kind. Eisenhower had all the

33:49same information the Germans had. He knew what a newspaper is. His own censors were the ones stamping

33:55the pages with the unit names and the hometowns on them. Somewhere in his headquarters there were men

34:00whose whole job was worrying about what an enemy could take from open sources. He knew the paper

34:06crossed the line. He may not have known it crossed in 72 hours, but he knew. And he decided, in

34:13effect,

34:13that the intelligence the Germans could extract from an American soldier's newspaper was a smaller thing

34:19than what the American army would lose by taking it away. That is a bet. It is a real bet,

34:24with a real price,

34:25and we have already seen some of that price paid over Germany by bomber crews who ran into fighters

34:31that knew exactly when their escort would have to turn for home. Eisenhower made it anyway. As for

34:38Patton, on April 11, 1945, Harry Butcher wrote one line in his diary about it, and you can hear him

34:45enjoying himself. It looks to me that General Patton may now admit he has lost the Battle of Malden.

34:52Two months later, Malden, still a sergeant, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The army had not

34:59protected him because he was safe. It had protected him because he was right about the men.

35:05And here is where the German side of this story and the American side finally meet. Because a German

35:11intelligence officer reading the Stars and Stripes was not only collecting airfields and hometowns,

35:17he was looking, every single day, at proof of something his own system could not produce. He was

35:24reading an army that argued with itself in public, in wartime, at government expense, and did not fall

35:30apart. That was the real intelligence in that newspaper. It was on every page. It was free. And it was

35:38the

35:38one thing German intelligence could neither use, nor copy, nor report honestly up its own chain of command.

35:46In the next part, I want to show you what that cost them. Because there was a German colonel whose

35:52entire

35:52job was to tell the German high command the truth about the American and British armies.

35:57He is the man who should have been able to read that newspaper properly.

36:02Eighteen days before Hube Zemka's wing came off over Germany, his own government hanged him. His name was

36:08Alexis von Röhne. He was a colonel, born in 1903, and his job was as important as any in the

36:16German war

36:17effort. He ran Fremdeheere West, Foreign Armies West, the branch responsible for telling the German high

36:25command the truth about the British and American armies. Order of battle, capability, intention.

36:33Every day, his section produced bulletins built out of prisoner interrogation, aerial reconnaissance,

36:40radio intercept, and press analysis. That last one is our newspaper. Everything we have followed in

36:48this story eventually flowed into von Röhne's office. And from 1943 onward, the man in that office was

36:55deliberately lying. Von Röhne consistently inflated the Allied order of battle. He overstated the strength

37:02of the British and American armies, on purpose, to mislead Hitler. And it worked. His numbers helped

37:08convince the German command that the invasion force was far larger than it was, and that there was still

37:13another army waiting to land somewhere else. Now hold both halves of this in your head at once, because it

37:20is the whole German intelligence problem in one man. At the bottom of that system, a corporal at Oberösel

37:27was assembling a folder of extraordinary accuracy out of an American newspaper and getting individual

37:33facts exactly right. At the top of that system, the officer whose job was to turn all of it into

37:40a picture

37:40of the enemy was handing his own leader numbers he knew were false. Three weeks before the 20th of July,

37:481944, von Röhne learned that officers around Klaus von Stauffenberg intended to kill Hitler.

37:55He approved of it. He took no active part in it. And he did not report it. That was enough.

38:02He was tried in a show court and hanged at Pletzensee prison in Berlin on the 12th of October 1944.

38:0918 days later, Hub Zemke's wing came off over Germany. By the time Zemke was sitting in front

38:15of that folder, the man at the head of German assessment of the American army had been dead

38:20for two and a half weeks, killed by his own government. The folder at Oberösel was still

38:26growing. Nobody at the top was in any position to tell Berlin what it actually meant.

38:32So now put the two systems next to each other, and the answer to our question comes out on its

38:36own.

38:37In one system, a 23-year-old sergeant draws cartoons that a four-star general calls mutiny,

38:44and the supreme commander protects the sergeant. In the other system, the colonel responsible for

38:49describing that same army is hanged by his own state, and the intelligence apparatus goes on working

38:55around the hole where he used to be. And here is the part almost nobody knows, and it is the

39:01piece

39:01that finishes this. The complaints in that newspaper were not an accident the army tolerated. They were

39:07the visible edge of something the army had built on purpose. In October of 1941, before Pearl Harbor,

39:15the War Department set up a research branch inside its morale division. The idea was almost strange for

39:21an army. Ask enlisted men what they think about their conditions, then summarize their answers,

39:27and send them up the chain of command. Over the course of the war, Samuel Stouffer and his people

39:32surveyed more than half a million American soldiers. Promotions, rations, officers, what men believed

39:40about the enemy, what made a man keep going in combat. And the answers changed things. They shaped the

39:47awards system. They shaped the point system that decided which men went home first when it was over.

39:53And they shaped the content of the stars and stripes itself. So when a German officer opened the bee bag

40:01and read an American private complaining about his officers, he was not looking at an army falling apart.

40:07He was looking at a feedback system running normally. That is what German intelligence found in a newspaper

40:13that US privates wrote. Not a weakness. Not decay. A working part of a fighting army. They had the

40:22document in their hands. They read every line of it, and they could not see it because in their world,

40:28a soldier who wrote that letter could be shot for it. So the only meaning available to them was collapse.

40:36There is a letter I keep coming back to. In October of 1944, with the American army stalled on the

40:43German border in miserable weather, an American soldier wrote home about what he liked in the paper.

40:49Not the war news. The bee bag and the editorials. He said the man who ran that column got a

40:55mountain

40:56of complaints. And that he had guts. And that he came right back at them. That is a soldier in

41:02the

41:02middle of the hardest autumn of the war, taking pleasure in an argument. Not being managed. Not being

41:09handled. Arguing. And enjoying that somebody was arguing back. You cannot fake that. You cannot

41:17manufacture it in the propaganda company. And you certainly cannot extract it from a prisoner in a

41:23cell. However good you are. Which leaves one last thing to settle. And it is the strangest turn in the

41:30whole story. Because the war ended and the Americans went to Oboeuse. And they found the interrogation

41:36center burned and abandoned and its people scattered. They tracked down the commandant. They looked for the

41:43corporal who had run rings around their colonels. And what the United States did with Hans Schaff when

41:49they found him is not what you would expect. Within three years, he was standing in front of American

41:56officers. Invited. And what he ended up doing for the rest of his life is something you have almost

42:02certainly seen with your own eyes. They found the commandant, Oberstleutnant Erich Killinger,

42:08sitting in an ordinary army prisoner cage. The interrogation center itself was gone. Records

42:14burned or carted away. The staff scattered toward Nuremberg with whatever they could carry.

42:20The man who had run that place spent the end of the war being processed by the army,

42:24whose airmen he had processed for five years. And Hans Schaff, the corporal with the folder,

42:31was invited to the United States. In 1948, he came over to testify in the treason trial of an American

42:38who had gone to the other side. And then, the United States Army did something that tells you how

42:44seriously they took what had happened in that room at Oboeuse. They put him in front of their own

42:49intelligence officers at the Pentagon and asked him to explain how he did it. His methods went into

42:56the American interrogation school. Not the cell. Not the cold and the threats and the Gestapo talk.

43:03The American report had already found that most men withstood all of that and gave up nothing.

43:09What went into the curriculum was the other thing. The sympathetic listener. The walk in the woods.

43:16The oldest and least violent idea in the business. That a man who has just been through the worst hour

43:23of his life wants to talk to somebody. Scharf stayed. He became an American, and he spent the second half

43:31of his life making mosaics, glass and stone, set by hand. His work is in the California State Capitol.

43:39It is at Epcot. If you have ever walked through the archway inside Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney

43:46World and looked at the mural on the wall, you have stood in front of work by the man who

43:51interrogated Gabreski and Zemke. He died in California in September of 1992. Gabreski came home. He flew again

44:00in Korea and finished the only way that man was ever going to finish. As one of the very few

44:06Americans to

44:07be an ace in two wars. He died in 2002.

44:13Zemke came home too. 17 ¾ victories, 154 combat sorties, and a winter in Stalag Luft 1 at Barth

44:23on the Baltic before the war let go of him. Bill Malden got his Pulitzer at 23 and drew for

44:30another

44:3150 years. When he died in 2003, the Stars and Stripes headline called him what he had been for

44:3760 years. Friend of the GIs. The man who created Willie and Joe. And the private who flew to

44:46Wilhelmshaven with a notebook. Andy Rooney spent the rest of his life on American television, arguing with

44:53everybody. Which is exactly what he had been hired to do in 1942. And the newspaper is still there.

45:01It came out of London in April of 1942 as an eight-page weekly, put together by enlisted men.

45:08And it never stopped. It followed the armies into Germany. And it did not stop when the shooting did.

45:14It is still publishing. Now go back one last time to that room north of Frankfurt,

45:20in the first days of November 1944. An American colonel is sitting there, hurt and captured.

45:28And a German corporal is showing him a folder because he wants him to feel that everything

45:33is already known. And beside the folder, on the desk, is a stack of American newspapers, three days old.

45:42Scharf thought he was showing Zemke the reach of German intelligence.

45:46What he was actually showing him was the United States Army, printing more than a million copies a day

45:52of a paper it did not control, written by men who could not be fired and could not be silenced,

45:59carrying their names and their hometowns and their complaints, and shipping it forward every morning

46:06to the men in the line. That is the answer, and it is simple enough to say in one breath.

46:13German intelligence went looking in that newspaper for what the American army had.

46:18What was actually printed there, every single day, was why it worked.

46:23They collected the first and never understood the second, and the war went the way it went.

46:30A folder can hold a name, an airfield, a commanding officer, the pub on the corner.

46:37There is no card in any index anywhere for an army that lets its privates print the truth about it.

46:45And the last thing worth saying is not about the folder or the colonel or the corporal.

46:50It is about a private somewhere in France or Belgium in the winter of 1944, cold and filthy,

46:58and a long way from Lancaster or Pontiac or Mayfield, who picked up a four-page paper written by men

47:04exactly like him, read a complaint he agreed with, saw somebody answer it, and went back to work.

47:13Nobody had asked him to be quiet. That was the deal his army had made with him.

47:18And he kept his end of it all the way to the Rhine.

47:41I will read the book in the comments. First, where you are watching from. Second, if your father,

47:47your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War, give me his name and his unit.

47:54Put it down here where it can be read. Somebody will read it.

47:58Let me know you're supposed to tell you that.

47:58But that means to fullyеты not destiny, but everything will maintain the fact that he described

47:58But he said you should go in Marching right now.

Stars and Stripes in German Intelligence: What Nazi Analysts Found in the U.S. Army Newspaper

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