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During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure
by WalterBright 2y ago
During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.
The GIs discovered they could just ask the officers about baseball. A wrong answer, and the officer got shot.
I heard this from my dad (WW2 vet). I don't recall seeing it in any documentary. He told me I would have been shot :-/ as I had zero interest in baseball.
- shawabawa3 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif
- sterlind 2y agothe joke I heard growing up is they'd ask suspected spies to sing the Star Spangled Banner, and shoot them if they knew the lyrics beyond the first verse!
- eesmith 2y agoIn Issac Asimov's 1980 short story "No Refuge Could Save", the suspected German spy is identified by a word association test based on the third verse of the national anthem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Refuge_Could_Save https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Refuge_Could_Save
- alabastervlog 2y agoMaybe a spy could finally explain to me what it means for light to be donzerly.
- autarch 2y agoI think you may have misheard the lyrics. It's "donzer lee lights". Obviously, "donzerly" is not a word, but all lee lights are donzer.
- alabastervlog 2y agoOh, it makes so much more sense now. Implicitly, I suppose that makes the lights on the windward side blitzen.
- qzw 2y agoOk, I found the German imposter right here.
- alabastervlog 2y agoOh no! Damn you, Gene Autry!
- paradox460 2y agoThe general don zerlyite was an important figure in the defense of Ft McHenrry
- ninju 2y agodawn's early light :-)
- mannyv 2y agoWhat are the last two words of the star spangled banner? "Play ball!"
- m463 2y agoreminds me of a spoof game show I saw once. It was something like Are you as smart as a 5th grader? A question would be something like "Who was the 5th president?" and the answer was "Benjamin Franklin" or similar. :)
- aidenn0 2y agoI don't remember the name of the film, but there was one where (Soviet I think?) spies were caught because they threw away their copies of National Geographic.
- WalterBright 2y agoI have my grandmother's NGs from the 1920's.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- timrichard 2y agoI remember seeing something similar on Masters of the Air, where the Resistance would question downed airmen : https://youtube.com/shorts/EJmmq0yc08U?si=dnFXr0IgJh18pmp- https://youtube.com/shorts/EJmmq0yc08U?si=dnFXr0IgJh18pmp-
- fallinghawks 2y ago> Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US. Curious if you have any links that go into this further. Were they Americans of German descent who rejoined family in Germany, or? I'm sure it's not monolithic but curious if there was a pattern.
- rtkwe 2y agoThe exact numbers are unknown but there are a known handful in units like the Wafen-SS. A LOT of documents were destroyed in the fall of the regime. The encounter shown in Band of Brothers supposedly did happen where a PI spoke with a German POW who grew up in America there's no documentation of it but that's not terribly surprising. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/german-americans-fight-wwii.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/german-ame...
- fallinghawks 2y agoVery interesting, thanks much for the link!
- zingababba 2y agoMark Felton has a good video on it: https://youtu.be/1dninvXjUzA?si=Qdm6D97qPb8Dmzbl https://youtu.be/1dninvXjUzA?si=Qdm6D97qPb8Dmzbl Otto Skorzeny was an interesting man.
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoIf they spoke perfect English and grew up in the US, why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball? This sounds like it can't have been true, or at least, can't have been common practice, because the false positive rate would be way too high for shooting a person.
- dylan604 2y agoTo be knowledgeable about baseball is hard to fake. Like the GP said, I'd have been shot. I might know some names of players, and I might even get some of their positions correct. If you ask me about ERAs, RBIs, batting averages, I wouldn't have a clue. I might know a large number of teams, but I doubt I know all of them. I absolutely couldn't tell you which ones were in the NL and which were AL, nor what the differences are--something about designated hitters or not. Also, they could just have them count three strikes using their fingers So it's perfectly reasonable that a person of German ancestry would just not care about American sports.
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoI'm not saying it wouldn't detect spies, but a test is no good if it also results in summary executions of one in every five apple-pie Americans.
- WalterBright 2y agoWhen you're fighting for your life, yes it would be acceptable, and yes it happened.
- sorcerer-mar 2y agoThere's no evidence people were summarily executed for bad answers. People were detained through this method though
- 2y ago
- PaulRobinson 2y agoWhen the pre-cursor to MI5 would interrogate suspected German spies during the war, they would ask them to talk about squirrels, and they'd mangle the word so badly, no matter who well trained, that it was an easy tell. Related: after the war, they were concerned that there were Nazi spies still in England they hadn't uncovered. When the files in Berlin were seized, they went through every single asset sent to England. Not only had they successfully identified every agent, and turned quite a few into double-agents, they also noted that very few agents going the other way had ever been detected.
- ceejayoz 2y agoYup. They managed to catch and frequently turn literally everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System > There was even a case in which an agent started running deception operations independently from Portugal using little more than guidebooks, maps, and a very vivid imagination to convince his Abwehr handlers that he was spying in the UK. This agent, Juan Pujol García (Garbo), created a network of phantom sub-agents and eventually convinced the British authorities that he could be useful. He and his fictitious network were absorbed into the main double-cross system and he became so respected by Abwehr that they stopped landing agents in Britain after 1942. The Germans became dependent on the spurious information that was fed to them by Garbo's network and the other double-cross agents.
- philwelch 2y agoJuan Pujol Garcia was awarded both the Iron Cross from Germany and the MBE from the UK, which makes him a very literal "double cross" agent having received cross-shaped medals from both sides.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI'm very curious to know if he ever wore them both. Would be a fun double-take to someone in the know.
- bobmcnamara 2y ago
- i_don_t_know 2y agoIn the movie “Stalag 17”, the Germans place a spy among the US prisoners. The spy is a German who grew up in the US and speaks English without accent. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_17 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_17
- casenmgreen 2y ago> During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US. This did not happen. However, at the time, in the massive confusion of a wholly unexpected large-scale German attack, rumours and paranoia were rife, including that of German parachute landings behind the lines. A result of this was the widespread belief, at the time, that Germans had infiltrated and were giving fake orders, etc, and so troops were indeed widely being suspected, and asked for example the capital of Illinois and so on (and being asked by privates, who did not know that the actual capital is Springfield rather than Chicago, to generals, who did know).
- regnull 2y agoOperation Greif (English: Griffin) (German: Unternehmen Greif) was a special operation commanded by Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The operation was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler, and its purpose was to capture one or more of the bridges over the Meuse river before they could be destroyed. German soldiers, wearing captured British and U.S. Army uniforms and using captured Allied vehicles, were to cause confusion in the rear of the Allied lines. A lack of vehicles, uniforms and equipment limited the operation and it never achieved its original aim of securing the Meuse bridges. Skorzeny's post-war trial set a precedent clarifying article 4 of the Geneva Convention: as the German soldiers removed the Allied uniforms before engaging in combat, they were not to be considered francs-tireurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif
- AStonesThrow 2y agoWe can laugh about this stuff here, but it seems to happen on the regular in the Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic liturgy is so stringently regulated that it is in fact very difficult for any priest or layman to stay current after a decade or more has passed. Perhaps this is one of the genius moves of the vernacular liturgy: that the Latin liturgy hardly changed its words for 500 years, but English and other languages are being constantly retranslated and reinterpreted with new Missal editions. Case in point: the neutering of the Church for 40 years. The Church was made an "it" in English, and only after a top-down correction was issued did she become feminine again. This did a lot of trauma to many Catholics on visceral levels. More up to date changes include the addition of "Holy" to "...for our good and the good of all His [Holy] Church]." this one is guaranteed to catch out anyone who's not been to Mass in 10+ years, such as at a wedding, funeral, or Christmastime. A very recent priest's change is "...who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, [One] God, forever and ever. Amen." the "One" is now omitted, as of last year or so, and in fact every church was compelled to scratch it out in their existing Missals until new editions could be printed. It is these sort of very subtle yet urgent changes that can really trip someone up if they're not 100% current with liturgical directives. So if you ever suspect you got a fake priest marrying you, see if he says "One God" or not!
- red_admiral 2y agoI think some countries in the EU use local variants of that on interviews/exams to gain citizenship for resident foreigners. The UK, as far as I know, has a written exam but you'd better know what kinds of birds are kept at the Tower of London and stuff like that.
- LightBug1 2y agoDrei Gläser!