Nazis on the Potomac

The Top-Secret Intelligence Operation that Helped Win World War II

By: Robert K. Sutton

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

Now a green open space enjoyed by residents, Fort Hunt, Virginia, about 15 miles south of Washington, DC, was the site of one of the highest-level, clandestine operations during World War II.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II, the US military realized that it had to work on exploiting any advantages it might gain on the Axis Powers. One part of these endeavors was to establish a secret facility not too close, but also not too far from the Pentagon which would interrogate and eavesdrop on the highest-level Nazi prisoners and also translate and analyze captured German war documents.

That complex was established at Fort Hunt, known by the code name: PO Box 1142. The American servicemen who interrogated German prisoners or translated captured German documents were young, bright, hardworking, and absolutely dedicated to their work. Many of them were Jews, who had escaped Nazi Germany as children - some had come to America with their parents, others had escaped alone, but their experiences and those they had been forced to leave behind meant they all had personal motivation to do whatever they could to defeat Nazi Germany. They were perfect for the difficult and complex job at hand.

©2021 Robert K. Sutton (P)2022 Tantor

Author obsessed with torture claims

Largely anecdotal account of this operation with little research from military or official original sources. I was looking for greater details of the support of US POWs held in Germany but this book did not provide background and genesis for this secret operation.
A large detraction in this "historical" account was the author comments throughout the book of the unfounded use of torture in recent US Middle East military experience as compared to the lack of torture by American interrogators during WW 2. The comments imply that the US military engaged in this illegal activity and were political remarks which have no place in an objective historical account.

A Story Worth Telling

Nazis on the Potomac: The Top Secret Intellegence Operation that Helped Win World War II reads like a novel. But it chronicles the true stories of people who inhabited a clandestine Army post known only as Post Office Box 1142. Housed in an abandoned fort on the bank of the Potomac, just a dozen miles from the Pentagon, a group of American soldiers interrogated hundreds of Nazi prisoners of war. Their work was so secret that their neighbors in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, had no idea of who they were or what they were doing.

Even more unlikely than the fact that Nazi prisoners were held there, so close to the seat of the U. S. government, is that their interrogators were almost all Jewish immigres, who had fled Nazi rule in Germany, Austria, and other European countries as boys and young men during the decades before the War. These new Americans volunteered to serve in the military, hoping to fight the Nazis in Europe. Instead, because of their fluency in German language and their knowledge of German culture, the Army assigned them to intellegence work. During the roughly four years they served there they effectively gleaned a trove of information that helped the Allies defeat the Nazi regime.

This secret post, which we know today as Fort Hunt Park, a unit of the George Washington Memorial Parkway and a part of the National Park system, shows little of its wartime importance. Everything about the World War II activities there remained highly classified until the late 1990s. Many of the soldiers were reluctant to discuss their work there even after learning that it had been declassified.

Historian Robert K. Sutton does a masterful job of relating these soldiers’ stories and the effects of their work. Using documentary research and a host of oral history interviews conducted by National Park Service historians, he weaves a fascinating tale that is particularly revealing about how top-notch interrogation actually works.

Despite their obvious good reasons to hate the Nazis who had persecuted and killed many of their relatives, these soldiers were disciplined and professional. According to all the accounts, not one incident of physical violence against a prisoner took place there. Instead, the Americans were cordial and even kind to their interrogees. There was, to be sure, some deception and trickery involved. For example, if a prisoner refused to cooperate, he might be introduced to a Russian-American soldier who dressed in a Red Army uniform and promised, in Russian, (translated by the German speakers) to escort him to Moscow for further interrogation – a terrifying prospect for German prisoners.

In a later chapter, Sutton follows the stories of several of the soldiers after the war, many of whom went on to become highly successful scholars, scientists, and businesspeople. He concludes his book by recaping an extensive 2007 conversation that took place among several of the survivors regarding interrogation, torture, and the treatment of prisoners of war. To a man they insisted that mistreatment of any kind is counterproductive to the effort to gather accurate and useful information.

Narrator David Colacci does a good job of reading the book clearly and with appropriate emphasis. I rate this audiobook as an excellent listen.

Poorly written.

This reads like a textbook but doesn’t
have the same depth that a textbook has. Lots of extraneous and irrelevant information. Don’t waste your time.