JEWISH WORLD

JEWISH WORLD • APRIL 1 - 7, 2022 27 prohibited in the Versailles treaty.” A mid Nazi horrors, the family escaped to NewYork. The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Sichel enlisted in the U.S. Army. With his fluency in German and French and background in Eu- rope, he was recruited into the OSS in 1943. A main job was “visiting POW camps to recruit German prisoners of war to spy for us.” “We furnished these agents with false papers (and new identities, when needed), permitting them to go on home leave, where their routes would enable them to iden- tify troop dispositions and specific targets,” he related. “Though none of our agents were believers in the Nazi Party or especially enamored of Hitler, most of them were patri- otic Germans who wanted to end the war, end the killing, and end the destruction of their fatherland.” After the end of the war, “OSS was split up” and “went through a number of name changes during 1945 and early 1947 — being first called the Strategic Service Unit and then the Central Intelligence Group,” and then a “centralized in- telligence organization,” the CIA, which was formed in mid-1947. He was chief of the CIA base in Berlin until 1952 when he was ap- pointed CIA station chief in Hong Kong. But the CIA was changing its focus in the 1950s to covert actions which often had disastrous results. So, he resigned from the CIA in 1959. “I spent over sixteen years in OSS and its successor organiza- tions: sixteen continuous years, in war and peace,” writes Sichel. “I and the Netherlands, was to be permanently demilitarized to increase the security of those countries against future German aggression. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the German military was to be barred from this area west of the Rhine River or within 50 kilo- meters east of it. Re-affirming this were the Locarno Treaties, sev- en treaties negotiated in Locarno, Switzerland in 1925. In 1936, said Sichel, the German army consisted of a small fraction of the millions of soldiers it would have during World War II. Hitler took over in Germany three years earlier. Sichel also spoke in our interview of how in other ways members of the German General Staff looked down at Hitler. “Many of the officers were aristocrats,” part of a “landed gentry.” Sichel knows Germany well — he was born in Mainz where his great-grandfather founded the orig- inal Sichel wine company in 1857. The family was Jewish and with the ascent of Hitler, his mother no- tably feared for the future. “Mama started worrying about the Nazis,” he writes in his autobiography, published in 2016, The Secrets of My Life, Vintner, Prisoner, Sol- dier, Spy. She read “Voelkischer Beobachter , the organ of the Nazi Party, and Mein Kampf , Hitler’s book outlining his worldview and plans. She was convinced that their propaganda outlined what they planned for Germany and that they would triumph, not shirking from murder and intimidation.” His father, however, was in “de- nial of the darkening social, polit- ical and religious situation within Germany through the 1930s.” He said his “mother’s more realis- tic assessments of the threats we all faced as Jews, certainly had an important bearing on my feel- ings while being raised in a Ger- man-Jewish household.” His mother “urged my father and his partners to prepare their emi- gration from Germany,” but they “took little note, convinced that the Nazi government was but of short duration and would ultimately fall, like so many governments before it. This, however, was not the case. The Nazis consolidated power and soon remilitarized the left bank of the Rhine, which had been specifically continued on page 31 Hitler continued from page 11 Western leaders did nothing for fear of “aggravating” Hitler. That mistake cost the world hundreds of millions of lives. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany By William L. Shirer (Simon and Schuster, 1960) 1197p., $6.82