Nazis on the Potomac: The Top-Secret Intelligence Operation that Helped Win World War II

“In Nazis on the Potomac, Sutton tells the incredible previously secret story of an institution where Americans listened and learned the lessons needed to win World War II.”

Robert K. Sutton in Nazis on the Potomac: The Top-Secret Intelligence that Helped Win World War II, tells the history of the interrogation of thousands of German prisoners near the center of Washington, DC, during World War II. The narrative is told from interviews with the last American veterans who served at Fort Hunt and previously closed documents.

The author explains that the location of these events seems strange because Fort Hunt was built in the 1890s as a battery to upgrade nearby Washington's defenses and had an unremarkable history. Even its role in defusing Hoover’s Bonus Marchers Crisis of 1938 and Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps went unnoticed in public history.

At the beginning of World War II, Naval Intelligence proposed two centers for interrogating prisoners, one on the West Coast and the other within 100 miles of the new Pentagon. The California facility was the Byron Springs Hotel between San Francisco and Stockton. American-born Japanese from the United States’ civilian internment camps acted as interrogators there under the supervision of non-Japanese American officers.

Fort Hunt was ideal for the East Coast facility. Only twelve miles from the center of Washington “with everything from enlisted men’s and officer's barracks, and mess halls, recreation buildings and a swimming pool, to maintenance and storage facilities.” It still needed the permission of the National Park Service for use by the War Department and $221,000 in improvements to become a “bustling small town.”

The facility was referred to as “PO Box 1142.” Aside from eavesdropping on prisoners and conducting interrogations, Fort Hunt had a section for analyzing documents and another for putting out publications for use in the field by the American military.

For flexibility in complying with international law, the facility was a temporary detention center, not a prisoner-of-war camp. Of the 3,451 prisoners who passed through Fort Hunt, “some stayed for months, others for days.” After interrogations, prisoners were transported to long-term detention facilities.

This camp was part of a network. Most in-depth interrogations of special prisoners took place 120 miles away at Pine Grove Furnace, Maryland. Camp Ritchie, Maryland, a remote facility near today’s Camp David, trained German Jewish interpreters for intelligence work for Fort Hunt and service in American forces overseas.

This important narrative is a chapter in the history of Jews in the United States and is told in that context. Despite a tradition of American antisemitism, they have served admirably in the United States military in every war, including World War II. Jews escaping “the Nazis were anxious to do whatever they could to end Hitler's reign of terror.” German-speaking Jews, immigrants, refugees, and native-born Americans came to find themselves at Fort Hunt by different routes and many adventures.

Much of Nazis on the Potomac concerns the intelligence school at Camp Ritchie. Called the Military Intelligence Training Center, or MITC, a joke had the initials meaning “Military Institute of Total Confusion.“ There, Sutton writes, “the War Department built an intelligence program that had not previously existed,” although “they borrowed heavily and learned many tricks from British intelligence.”

Guy Stern remembered the training was never superfluous, although some other participants thought the course was a waste of time. It was quick and intense, with a 40% failure rate. “The facility included fake German military vehicles, a village, and even fake pro-Hitler rallies! Sutton writes that the War Department made the secret surveillance system a centerpiece of the camp.

Trainees practiced on soldiers pretending to be belligerent Germans. They even had men trained to pretend to be brutal Russian integrators to threaten reticent German prisoners. Soldier Trainees could also practice being German soldiers and learned to discern a German American soldier from a Nazi spy.

The first prisoners interrogated at Fort Hunt were German submariners, but thousands of soldiers followed. Sutton writes those interrogators “spent three to six hours preparing for each prisoner.” “They used several clever tricks short of torture to coerce the Germans to talk.” Threats and fear were valuable tools, especially threatening to ship them to the Soviet Union. Interrogation methods would be familiar to many law enforcement veterans, such as establishing empathy, letting the subject do the talking, trick questions, etc.

The author writes that some of the Germans questioned were real treasure troves of information. Gustav Hilger, for example, “knew more about the inner workings of the Soviet Union than any other German and quite possibly of anyone living outside of Russia at that time.” Dr. Carl Hellmuth Hertz was “one of the most important and accomplished physicists in Nazi Germany.”

“Some interrogations provided scant information,” although the author writes, "most fell somewhere in between.” Military intelligence learned much practical first-hand information about the failures and successes of the American war effort.

Questions would be targeted to obtain specific information as needed. Interrogators, for example, learned of jet engines and rockets and why bombing German railroad stations proved ineffective.

Interrogators carefully studied prisoner politics. Some prisoners volunteered to be spies and monitors of listening devices. Taking a German general to a brothel was the extreme in accommodation, but “most were happy with much less.”

Fort Hunt continued, for a time, after the war. Evidence was gathered about war crimes and new technologies. Interviewing German scientists provided especially valuable information. Sutton argues that information gleaned at Fort Hunt predicted the coming Cold War realities.

In Nazis on the Potomac, Sutton tells the incredible previously secret story of an institution where Americans listened and learned the lessons needed to win World War II. This concise book has annotations, a bibliography, and photographs, some in color.