SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
It began a while back in connection with my moderating a panel in Suffolk, at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, titled “Freedom from Tyranny: An American Woman’s Struggles and Triumphs to Save Soviet Jewry.” That woman was Lillian Hoffman and the event—which included an exhibit featuring copies of the Congressional Record citing her work and successes as well as posters, letters, films and books—was organized by her daughter, Sheila Bialek of Sagaponack.
On the panel was Peter M.F. Sichel who had a vacation home in East Hampton and is a friend of Sheila and her husband, Al.
Sichel has had quite a life: he has been called the “Jewish James Bond.”
He and his family escaped from Germany amid the Nazi horrors and came to New York. Sichel enlisted in the U.S. Army the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. With his fluency in German and background in Europe, he was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, the military’s intelligence agency during the war, rising to the rank of captain. A main job was arranging for German POWs who were not Nazis to go back behind enemy lines as spies.
When the Central Intelligence Agency was established after the war, he became chief of the CIA base in Berlin. He remained with the CIA until 1959. Not only was he well-familiar with Germany but he has deep knowledge of Russia because of his Cold War intelligence work.
Ms. Bialek arranged for me to interview Sichel for a TV program before the panel program. After the shoot, Sichel and I chatted. He mentioned that in interrogations by U.S. military officers and intelligence agents, members of the German General Staff said they would have overthrown Hitler if the German army had been opposed when the Nazi dictator, in his first big act of aggression, ordered 20,000 troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936. He said France and Great Britain didn’t mount a challenge even though the move was in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles and even though the French had a large army. And, there was the British government’s policy of appeasement then.
What an enormously important part of history, I thought.
In recent weeks, following the invasion of Ukraine, led by another dictator, Vladimir Putin, I got back in touch with Sichel to expand on what he told me earlier. In a set of interviews, Sichel enlarged on how many on the German General Staff “hated Hitler,” looked down at his status as a corporal in World War I. Moreover, “the General Staff told him that they could not face the French. They did not have the means—the troops and the armaments—to do this.” Sending the German army into the Rhineland became a “gamble of Hitler’s and he was successful” because there was no opposition.
I did research and found a variety of historians have also said that strong military action by the French and British to oppose the German move was a moment in time when Hitler could have ended up removed. William L. Shirer in his comprehensive 1960 book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, quotes the testimony at the Nuremberg Tribunal of Alfred Jodl, chief through the war of the Operations Staff of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, that: “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” Shirer writes that the French army “could have” done this, and “had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco.”
Wrote Shirer: “In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact…bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.”
Sichel says of the savage invasion of Ukraine: “Terrible! Terrible!” A comparison with the invasion of the Rhineland as to response is “very complicated,” he said, mainly because of the nuclear weaponry possessed by Russia. However, the rising Russian military death toll will, he anticipates, have an impact on the Russian people. When the “body bags came back from Afghanistan, it was the Russian mothers who forced” an end to that Russian war. Further, with “the public involved” in protesting in Russia, if the number of people “willing to face up to the brutality of the police” grows, that will matter. And the Russian army “is not very strong,” says Sichel. Meanwhile, the sanctions are taking a great economic toll on Russia.
As was the situation with Nazi Germany, says Sichel, also at the center is a “tyrant.”
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.