Texas Liberators - Gerd Miller (July 9, 2013)

SLOAN: This is Stephen Sloan. The date is July 9, 2013. This is an interview with Mr. Gerd Miller, in his home in San Antonio, Texas. This is an interview for the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission's Texas Liberators Project. Thank you, Mr. Miller, for sitting down with me today. I'd like to start--your story is an unusual story. So I would like to start in Germany. And I'd like to know, before we get to your story, if you could tell a little bit--you were sharing earlier about your family history there in Germany.

MILLER: Well, (laughs) that's going back a long way.

SLOAN: Yeah.

MILLER: Maybe I'll just start with my father's service in World War I--(both talking)

SLOAN: Yes. Yes.

MILLER: --as a cavalry officer in a very elite German cavalry regiment called Deutzer Kürassiere. He came back after World War I--1918 the war was over. I 00:01:00was born in '22. At the time I was born, Cologne was occupied by the French. So the commandant of the French occupation in the city of Cologne decided to live in the building that belonged to my parents, which was a pretty nice building, and my parents were allowed to live upstairs in the attic. But my father became very good friends with this Commandant Michaud, the commandant of the French occupation army, who was a staff officer on the staff of General Foch [Marshall 00:02:00Ferdinand Foch] and a very wealthy man who had business interests all over. My dad happened to be in the real estate business. And this Michaud wanted to buy real estate and make other investments in Germany, so they became very good friends.

My father, since he had served in the German Army in Belgium and France, spoke French very fluently. My mother, who was from the little town of Bitburg, Germany--was educated in Brussels, and she spoke very fluent French. Even though, when I was young, we learned French in school--but I knew a little bit from my parents. Every time they wanted to say something that they didn't want the children to hear, they spoke French. And, of course, the children immediately learn. (laughs) So my father worked with this Commandant Michaud and 00:03:00did a lot of business with him, and was finally allowed to go to Paris and work with him there. This man had tremendous investments all over the world. I can remember him vaguely, but I heard my parents talk. And he had a huge interest in a tin mine in what was called French-Indochina, which is what we call Vietnam. So this man was--(both talking)

SLOAN: Well-connected.

MILLER: --very well-situated all over the world. We learned some foreign languages in school, later on, when I went to high school. It had already become very difficult for Jewish children to go to public schools. And eventually they 00:04:00were not allowed to go to public schools. But they made an exception for someone whose father had been a combat veteran in the World War I, which my father--he had an Iron Cross. I mean, he went through the whole works. But he said--right away he said, you know, "That's not going to last very long." So they enrolled me in a Jewish school. And fortunately, my father was far-sighted enough to see what was coming. He contacted his uncle here in the United States, applied for exit visa, and the uncle filled out all the necessary US papers--actually it was his uncle's son. So his cousin filled out all the papers. Eventually, we went through the waiting period until the US quotas came up. We got our visa.

We left Germany in May of 1938: my father, my mother, myself, and a girl, who was my double cousin. And we went to Rotterdam, in Holland. It was all so very difficult, not only to get a permit to leave Germany. In fact, my father lost everything he had there. When he arrived in the United States, he had twenty-four dollars. But he had another cousin who married a man who was on the board of directors of the Holland America Line--who was not Jewish. They lived in Rotterdam. And through that connection, he was able to get passage on a ship. Not one of the big cruise ships, but we came on a freighter. Went from Rotterdam 00:06:00to Antwerp, and then across the Atlantic. The ship went past Bermuda, the Bahamas. And it first touched American soil in New Orleans. But we were not allowed to get off in New Orleans because we were booked into Houston. But we got off just to see the city of New Orleans, learn a little English and so forth.

From New Orleans the ship went back to Mobile, Alabama, to unload some cargo, or reload some cargo. Then we went down to Brownsville, Texas, which had just opened up for deep-sea vessels. Then we came to Houston. We got off in Houston, Texas. And my father's cousin had arranged for us to live in Seguin because his 00:07:00father, at one time, had a little country store there in the center of Seguin. And so we went to Seguin. They decided to send me to high school so that I would have an American high school diploma. It was pretty tough learning the language. But there were a lot of Germans in Seguin, and we got along pretty well. And my father went to work in the grocery store sweeping the floors. I mean, it was a struggle. And it was difficult to go through the school.

SLOAN: So he had done quite well in real estate, but he had to leave all that behind.

MILLER: Twenty-four dollars. That was it.

SLOAN: What are some memories that stand out to you from growing up in Cologne, when you think of that period in your life?

MILLER: Well, you know, we were--the family was pretty well-to-do, and we were 00:08:00very comfortable. My father had an automobile, and we had some servants there. I had a very nice period growing up, until 1933 when Hitler became chancellor. People don't realize he was not elected as chancellor. The president of Germany, who was von Hindenburg [Paul von Hindenburg], who was an old, senile general, appointed Hitler. And there was not an election until 1934, and, of course, he got 90 percent of the vote. Then they passed those Nuremburg Laws against the Jews. And after that it became terrible to live there. Not only for us as Jews, 00:09:00but for everybody there, because this was a true police state. I mean, people didn't dare make any remarks. Even a husband and wife, maybe they would talk to each other in bed late at night. Because if the father said something and the little boy would go to school the next day, and in class, if he'd say, "Well, my father said, 'That isn't so,' or, 'It's so-and-so,'" next thing, the Gestapo was there.

And Dachau was the first concentration camp that the Nazis put up, I think in 1935, somewhere in there. And when we came--when the American army came there, people kept saying, Well, we don't know anything about it. Believe me, I can tell you truly, that was pure BS. Everybody knew about it. They wanted them to know about it because the threat was, You open your mouth, you wind up in 00:10:00Dachau. At that time, it was a small camp. And it became fairly large. It was built, I think, to hold five thousand prisoners. When we liberated it, there were thirty-two thousand people in there.

But life in Germany, you know, was very, very difficult for the churches. My part of Germany, Cologne, was almost, I would say, 80 or 90 percent Catholic. The Germans interfered with the functioning of the churches. They had these propaganda meetings with the children. They started them in the Hitlerjugend [Hitler Youth]. They started them at age six, and then by age ten they gave them a uniform with a swastika and a knife. And then they had these propaganda 00:11:00meetings. Guess when they had them: Sunday morning, so the children couldn't go to church. The parents didn't dare complain because anything that was contrary to the state, you took a tremendous risk. In 1934, Hitler sent a special instruction to the Gestapo, and it was called Nacht und Nebel; literally, Night and Fog. And if they wanted to do away with you, they sent an arrest record and marked it "N and N" [Nacht und Nebel]. You were never heard of again. Because 00:12:00they would take people, kill them in the camp, cremate them. I mean, this was--everybody knew this. I was a young kid. Everybody knew about the concentration camps. When the American army came in there, nobody knew. "Oh, we didn't know." Believe me, they knew. They knew.

When we left Germany, there was already a big buildup of the military. Now, you have to remember, Cologne was in the Rhineland, on the west bank of the Rhine. After World War I, after the Versailles Treaty, that west bank of the Rhine was a demilitarized zone all the way to the Belgian, Luxembourg, and French border. We never saw a soldier. Didn't know what a soldier looked like. We used to ride 00:13:00to school on our bicycles every morning.

And one morning, I think maybe 1935 or '36, we were riding--had to go about ten miles each day, you know, through the town to get to our school. All of a sudden we hear this music and the boots marching. And here's the soldiers. Hitler had ordered to disregard the Versailles Treaty, and he occupied the Rhineland and sent the German Army in there. Interestingly enough, when we processed the papers that were captured at the Seventh Army Document Center in Heidelberg after the war, we found the order that he issued. He sent thirty thousand troops into the Rhineland, but only five thousand were allowed to go all the way to the 00:14:00French border. And they had instructions that if the other side was going to attack they were to withdraw. Nobody did a damn thing when that happened. Now you talk about a preemptive attack. If the French, the Belgians, the British had done something immediately, there probably wouldn't have been a World War II. But we found those documents where they were instructed. Only five thousand were supposed to go all the way to the actual border. And if the enemy were to--well, they didn't call them the enemy--the French, the Belgians show any sign of rejecting them or attacking them, they were to withdraw.

In any event, at that time, life became very difficult in Germany for the Jews. 00:15:00I mean, it was absolutely--they couldn't teach. They couldn't work at any of the universities. They couldn't hold any jobs of any government. They couldn't be lawyers. They couldn't be doctors. They couldn't do anything. I mean, they virtually excluded them from everything. In fact, they were even not considered Germans. When I tried to join the American army after Pearl Harbor, they told me, You can't join our army. You're an enemy alien. (laughs) Because I was--technically, here I was considered a German. In Germany, the Jews were not considered German anymore. My father had an incident with a man from the internal revenue in his office. And he made some remark to my father. He said, 00:16:00you know, "You're not a German. You're a Jew." And my father took him into his father's office, where he had this big picture in his German uniform with the Iron Cross. And he said, "Let me tell you something." He said, "I fought for four years. I'm just as German as you are." And the man apologized. But my father took a chance. If you annoy this guy--so you had to be very careful about what was said.

And the Nazis very early on went after the Catholic Church to pressure them to modify their sermons, especially for the kids. You know, they had their scandals back in those days just like we have today with the choirboys. That was a big thing in the newspaper. And then the Nazis controlled the newspapers. Of course, 00:17:00there was no television. They controlled the radio. Every radio station in Europe was run by the state. So they controlled the radios and the newspapers. When Hitler made a speech, which he did very often, people were asked to put their radio into the window by the street. If you walked down the street when he made his speech, you couldn't miss it. There was no way to get away from it. There were swastika flags flying all the time.

And the Germans, believe me, they were all in favor of what was going on. And there was virtually no opposition. I mean, we found out later, there were these small opposition groups. But the people, the average person, they saw 00:18:00Germany--which previously had, I don't know, 30 percent unemployment. Everybody was working because they were building a huge military establishment. They also decided that, despite the Versailles Treaty, which forbid it--which had forbidden aircraft--they built a Luftwaffe. The Germans' navy was building ships right and left. The army was--under Versailles Treaty, the army was limited to one hundred thousand persons. Well, they trained one hundred thousand, and then they sent them home, trained another hundred thousand. You saw soldiers everywhere, everywhere.

When we left--you can't believe what a relief it was just to get out of the country, to breathe freely. Unfortunately, we lost our family in Rotterdam. 00:19:00Because when the Germans in 1940 attacked Holland, one of the big attacks was on a completely undefended city: Rotterdam. They wiped it out. And we lost the family there. It's hard to describe how the Germans supported Hitler and his people. I mean, these were educated people, cultured people. You know, the country of Beethoven and Brahms and Goethe and Schiller. How they fell for this? How they did not see how it was going to end up, what he was getting into? But fortunately, we were out of the country when they attacked Poland and then made 00:20:00the deal with the Russians.

And we knew a little bit about the political situation because my dad was kind of a fan of radios when they were still fairly new and pretty high-tech. And at night we would get earphones, like he's wearing, (gestures to DeBoard) and you would listen to Radio Luxembourg or German-language from England, German-language from Italy, from France, Holland, and so forth. You took your life in your hands because if they found out that you were listening to foreign broadcasts, that was it. That was it. So we knew a little bit. But when we got to Rotterdam and heard from the people in Holland, who had no idea that they were next as victims, what was going on in the rest of the world. The Germans 00:21:00were so controlled in what they knew and what the papers printed and what the papers were not allowed to print. And they believed everything that they read.

An interesting thing--in 1939, before they attacked Poland--which, of course, was planned a long time ahead--but they wanted to give the German population some official excuse as to why they attacked Poland. There was a radio station--again, a government radio station like they all were--in Gleiwitz. It's a little town just on the border of Poland in east Germany. There had been some 00:22:00sniping from the Polish side. There weren't any major military attacks, but there was some question about where the border would run, you know. There was some minor issue. Well, the Germans decided that they wanted to show the German population that the Poles were the aggressors. So they brought about twenty people from Germany, from a German concentration camp, from Buchenwald, dressed them in Polish uniforms, gave them weapons, without ammunition, obviously. And they killed them all near that radio station in Gleiwitz. A few days later those pictures were in the newspapers. Well, yeah. Look, here are the dead Polish 00:23:00soldiers. They attacked our radio station. We're going to have to invade Poland. It was all phony. The man who staged that got a big promotion and big decoration. But nobody in Germany questioned, Is that what really happened? They were so gullible. I think we--I hate to say it, but we see some of that here today. People are just--they believe what they read and what they hear. And very few people question if it is really so. Are we getting the whole story?

SLOAN: What the truth is.

MILLER: Yeah. That's true. That is true.

SLOAN: Well, I'm interested, going forward, I'm interested in your transition to Texas. (laughs) You're all of a sudden in another world, a very different place. 00:24:00And so what was that like for you?

MILLER: Well, our most important thing is, how were we going to live? And for a while, my dad's cousin gave us a few hundred dollars so we could manage. Then, my dad got a job in a grocery store as a clerk. And he was sweeping the floor. But he didn't mind. He said--I think my dad was the best American citizen they ever had. He said, "I would rather sweep the street here than to live over there." Because, first of all, he knew, from his World War I experience, the Prussian army and that whole--that whole philosophy of the German military, glorifying war. I mean, this wasn't the first time, you know.

My mother had taken a course in Germany in baking and cooking, and she started 00:25:00to make some stuff in the kitchen, candied pecans. And my dad went around and sold some of it in Seguin. And eventually he got a car, like a 1929 old Chevy, you know, that he paid out. The interesting thing was, in those days, everything you bought you could pay out in installment payments. I remember when we were in Seguin there was a Western Auto store, and they had a little radio in the window. And my dad and I walked by there one day. I came from school, and he came from work. And the man came out and said, "Oh, you like that radio?" And my dad said, "Yeah, but we just got here from Germany. We don't have any money." And the man said, "Oh, Fred, don't worry. Take it home and try it." He says, "If you want to keep it, you pay fifty cents a week. And if you miss payment once in 00:26:00a while, that's okay. I know you're an honest guy and you'll pay us for it."

At that time, that was the major social difference between the United States and Germany. Germany, there were very wealthy people, there were the blue-collar workers, and poor people. And there wasn't--there was a middle class, but nobody, nobody ever bought anything on credit. That was unheard of, except the very poorest people. Here everybody bought whatever they wanted to buy, and they bought it on credit. And they paid in time, a little bit at a time. And I think that was the major difference, that our country here had this middle class who didn't have a lot of money, but they had jobs and they worked hard. And in those days--I mean, you put in ten-, twelve-hour days. And they paid off their debts. 00:27:00And the country thrived.

SLOAN: Did you work while you went to school?

MILLER: Yeah. I worked at a filling station. And then I worked in that same grocery store where my dad was on the weekend. At that time, the farmers from around Seguin, they came in on Saturdays and bought, like, a whole week's worth of groceries. And I still remember, if they bought more than five dollars' worth, I had to get one of the wagons. You know, they bought, like, a block of salt for the cattle, a sack of flour, a sack of coffee, a sack of sugar. Big stuff, but it was very inexpensive. I had a job--I had a job to candle the eggs, because the farmers brought in the eggs and some of the eggs were fertile. And 00:28:00we had a little wooden box with a light bulb in it, and I put the egg there. And if it was fertile, threw it in the garbage. In fact, one of our first impressions of this country was, Here in America, they waste more than Europe consumes. Everything was plentiful. I can remember to this day, the farmers got nine cents a dozen for those eggs. Now, this was 1938. The store sold them for eleven or twelve cents--a penny apiece. (both laugh) And all the bad ones went in.

I got a job--when I graduated from high school, I got a job with a man in Seguin who had a little general store. And my dad convinced him that he wanted to import some textiles from Europe. And guess where he got the textiles. From that 00:29:00former French commandant who had interests in textile mills in France and in Belgium. And my dad got this man to invest a few hundred dollars, or a few thousand dollars to import those European textiles. And I worked in that store to do all of the folding and the boxing and the packaging and kept all the records and so forth. So I worked there for a while. And then, of course, in 1940, the Nazis marched into Belgium and Holland. And that was the end of that. So I got a job here in San Antonio. And I worked for a big wholesale dry-goods company in the building that is now the City Public Service. Downtown right near the--what we call the Transit Tower, which used to be called the Smith-Young 00:30:00Tower, and I worked there for about a year and a half.

Of course, then, Pearl Harbor came, and I tried to get into the army. The army wouldn't have me. Then I tried to go--tried the navy; tried to get into the National Guard. The National Guard was doing close-order drill in the basement of the San Antonio Auditorium, the city auditorium. And I went down there. And I talked to some old non-com [non-commissioned officer]. And he said, "Well, you're an enemy alien. You can't join our forces." But he said, "One thing you could do." He said, "You can volunteer to allow them to draft you." I said, "Whatever it takes," you know. I signed some paper. And it took, maybe, six months, and I got my draft notice. I went into the service out here at Fort Sam 00:31:00Houston, a place called Dodd Field. And at that time, directly next to Dodd Field there was a big POW [Prisoner of War] enclosure. They had a bunch of German prisoners there from--I think from the Afrika Korps.

And from here they sent me to Keesler Field, Mississippi, in Biloxi. And I went through basic training at Keesler Field. And the last week of basic training, one morning, standing in formation, I just passed out. I had been sick, and I just passed out. It turns out I had pneumonia. But I wanted to finish, so I didn't tell anybody. So they put me in the hospital. In the meantime, all my 00:32:00buddies finished, and they were shipped off elsewhere. I said, "Well, where did they go?" "Well, the same place you would have gone. You would have been a meteorologist." I said, "Why a meteorologist?" "Well, you passed all the tests." I guess they needed meteorologists at the time. So I said, "Well, what happens now?" "Well, we'll assign you somewhere else."

Now, you would think with my German background they would put me into intelligence. They sent me to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to the radio school: You'll learn to be a radio operator for the army air corps. That's what happened. I went to Sioux Falls. I went through the whole training. Wound up in the top 5 percent of the class, but they wouldn't let me go to radar school because I didn't have the security clearance because I wasn't a citizen. Then, I 00:33:00was interviewed by an intelligence officer. They made me an American citizen. And then, I went to Camp Ritchie, Maryland.

SLOAN: Well, you told me the intelligence officer asked--what was the first question he asked you?

MILLER: The first question he asked me, in perfect, flawless German: "Where did you learn to speak German?" And I told him, "The same place you did." (laughs) And, you know, we spoke--but he had been naturalized. He had been in this country a little longer. And he was--I think he was a first lieutenant. Now, Camp Ritchie, Maryland, was a very unusual place. That was the only military intelligence school. And the Military Intelligence Service, MIS, for some reason, it was structured so that they were directly under the War Department. 00:34:00They weren't under--any of the other branches. And Camp Ritchie, which is about ten miles from what is now Camp David--Camp David, at that time, was the psychological warfare school, when we were at Camp Ritchie. Later it became Camp David.

Camp Ritchie had two sections, Japanese and German. And they had a lot of Japanese Americans. And they were all running around in Japanese uniforms and speaking Japanese. That was one section. We had nothing to do with them. We were in the German section. They wore German Army uniforms. Everything was spoken in German. We had to learn everything about German Army organization and the ranks and the weapons. I mean, it was a very intense, very difficult training. Terrain 00:35:00intelligence--I mean, it was very, very thorough. And they said, From here, you will go overseas. And some of you may have to have special training to be dropped behind the lines. But you have to volunteer. But in those days, the army said, We need three volunteers: you, you, and you. (laughs) I was extremely lucky. And believe me, somebody was looking out for me.

They decided, a couple of weeks before we were supposed to ship overseas, that they wanted a group of German-speaking officers and enlisted men to put on a--actually it was kind of a show--a presentation to the units that were getting 00:36:00ready to go overseas. Show them how to handle POWs. How to search them, you know. And we put on a show in those army theaters. Came down--we're wearing German uniforms, and the American soldiers behind us. We had all kinds of weapons that were hidden on our body: a knife stuck in a boot, or a hand grenade. It was really kind of a humorous thing. The American soldier would say to the German POW, "Will you hold my gun a minute while I'm tying my boot?" We would try to show them whatnot to do in the beginning, and then they had a serious presentation showing how to handle those people. How to search them to make sure they had no weapons, no hidden weapons. How to go through the process 00:37:00of interrogation. Can you stop for just a minute?

SLOAN: Sure.

pause in recording

SLOAN: You were mentioning what an interesting place this was.

MILLER: Yeah. It was a very interesting place because they had a lot of information on the German military, on their weapons, on their structure, you know, on their military tactics and military strategies, very thorough. And they had people there that had been in Europe and had come back. Like I said, I was lucky to go with that group that went from unit to unit throughout the United States to teach them how to interrogate prisoners and how to handle prisoners. 00:38:00But the training we got there at Camp Ritchie was very, very thorough. I mean, we learned to recognize the different ranks. They had a book, The Order of Battle, which we used later, even in Europe, that had information on virtually every German unit that existed: who the commanding officer was and where they were activated and where they were serving. I mean, it had a lot of information which they had gotten from prisoners before.

So to make a long story short, we traveled around the country. We were in one of the camps in Oklahoma. We were in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina. Then we 00:39:00went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, where they were getting ready to go overseas. There was one unit there that got the presentation at the last minute. And then we went to--I don't know. It must have been a dozen different units. One of the units we went to--I think it was in--they were stationed at--I think at Fort Benning, Georgia. And while we were there, they took us through the parachute school because they said, Some of you may have to be dropped behind enemy lines. We want to put you through that training. So we jumped from the towers, and then we jumped out of a plane.

SLOAN: How was that?

MILLER: That was--for me, it was nothing. I'll tell you why. While I was at the 00:40:00school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a group of us were sent on detached service, or whatever it was, to the Second Air Force in Boise, Idaho, to work as a radio operator on a B-24. And this was strictly for training purposes. And about a week or two after we got there--we were flying these training missions out of Boise. Really tough situation, because all the good planes--the planes that were in real fine condition, they were all overseas in combat. And they had these old beat-up B-24s there. They had no heating in them. They had no CO2 extinguishers for those engines. We wore those heavy flying suits, you know, but 00:41:00the outside temperature at twelve, fourteen thousand feet was like minus fifty-four degrees.

About a few weeks afterwards, we were flying along towards the West Coast. And all of a sudden--I was the radio operator, and I had a little window, and I could look right along the right wing. And I see smoke coming out of one of the engines. So I got ahold of the pilot there on the intercom. I said, "Your engine's on fire." And he says, "Oh, that's not good. We don't have any CO2 units here." So they looked and shut that engine off. And before we knew it, another engine started smoking. I don't know, low on oil or something. Anyway, he said, "Everybody bail out." This was over Idaho. The radio operator was the number-two guy to go out. We had the parachutes, you know. You hooked it on, and they opened that hatch. Fifty-four below zero, and I'm sitting there shaking. 00:42:00Somebody kicked me. I got out and landed okay. So when I went to Fort Benning, I said, "I don't need this. I've already jumped." And I was very fortunate. I didn't get hurt. A couple of the guys broke their bones--one broke his ankle or leg. He landed in a tree or something. And we were there in Idaho for about two days before they finally picked us up.

So, getting back to Fort Benning, we went through that whole parachute training, which is the toughest thing I've ever seen in my life. They had classes for those soldiers. No chairs in the room. They stand at parade rest. Somebody did something wrong, and the instructor said, "Twenty-five." They had to get down and do twenty-five push-ups. Between classes, double-time. They didn't walk to another building, they double-timed. I mean, this was a tough, tough training. 00:43:00And when they finally trained us to jump, we had the right to refuse to jump. And then we would be out of the program. I jumped because I had already jumped before. And at Benning it was much easier than in Boise because in Boise, it was a free fall. Here we hooked up to those static lines.

Anyway, when we finally got finished with all these units that were getting ready to go overseas, one of them was the 106th Infantry Division. When we went from place to place, you know, we arrived and they were supposed to have made arrangements for us to sleep and to eat and so forth. And you got, kind of, a feeling for each unit--what kind of unit it was. A lot of them, the morale was 00:44:00very good. And a lot of these young guys, they were ready to go. That 106th Infantry Division, I can remember the minute we got there. They didn't know we were coming, and they didn't have any room for us. They finally put us in a tent instead of a barracks. Everything was screwed up. And we said, What a screwed-up outfit this is. And even the relationship between some of the officers--I mean, the morale was just bad. Now, I don't know if it was the commanding general or whoever was in charge. All we knew, We hope we never have anything to do with them. They were the outfit that was completely wiped out during the Battle of the Bulge.

And by a strange coincidence, when we finally got overseas--we were in England 00:45:00and then came to France. And we were supposed to report to the 106th Infantry Division. Fortunately, our assignments were delayed. But we knew then there was something not right about this. And what the problem was, I don't know. It was just mismanaged. In any event, eventually, we went to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Got on a ship. Went in a convoy across to--we landed in Liverpool, which was completely--the harbor was completely destroyed. A bunch of ships that were half sunk or totally sunk. It was in terrible condition from the German bombings. Then they took us to some camp where they had German prisoners. And we got a lot of information from the German prisoners there because, you know, for them the 00:46:00war was over.

SLOAN: Sure.

MILLER: Then they transferred us to another camp outside of London. And I had a chance to visit London a couple of times. And I mean, it was a disaster. It was a--I mean, there were a few buildings left, but it was just horrible. And the British people, I will tell you, they are the hardiest, sturdiest people that I have ever seen. Of course, most of the men, the young men, they were all in the military. So there were these older people and the women. And they stood in line endlessly. And they had rationing. And they got a few ounces of meat and a few ounces of butter, some bread. And no heating. And I don't know how those people survived--but they were sturdy people. They never complained. You really have to 00:47:00admire them. At that time, you know, they had been fighting the Nazis for a number of years.

So then we finally got to the coast, and they took us across to France on an old, rusty tub, (laughs) I think to Le Havre, in France. And then from there we were assigned to go to Paris. And there was a suburb of Paris called Le Vésinet. That was the headquarters for our Military Intelligence. And from there they would make the assignments. And I had a chance to sneak out one day and visit that gentleman who--

SLOAN: Ah, the friend of your father's.

MILLER: Yeah, who was the commandant of Cologne. He lived in a very fancy villa in Paris because, you know, he was a very wealthy man. And the French, they suffered tremendously too under the German occupation and had very little to eat. But when we visited him, he served dinner. And he had everything you wanted there because he had big estates in the central part of France. And he had--I guess they raised some animals there. They also had deer they were hunting. They had venison. But anyway, these people--

SLOAN: So he didn't want for anything?

MILLER: He didn't want for anything. From Le Vésinet--now, I spoke some French, 00:49:00fairly good French that I knew from my parents and from school. They assigned us to work with a French Resistance unit in the central part of France, where the Nazis were already--they had pulled out. But there were little pockets that stayed, in the mountains. And we were sent down to a town called Clermont-Ferrand, which is in the central part of France. Mountainous, heavily-wooded area.

And I mentioned to one of the Frenchmen where we were going. And he said, "Well, you--you know where that is, don't you?" And I said, "Well, we got maps." And he said, "No, that's not what I'm talking about." He said, "That's very close to Oradour-sur"--let's see. Oradour is the village. Ouradour-sur-Glane is on some 00:50:00little river. I said, "I never heard of that." He said, "Oh, you didn't know what the Germans did there?" I said, "No. I never heard of it." And it was fairly close to Clermont-Ferrand, Oradour-sur-Glane, G-l-a-n-e. The Germans were starting to pull out. They had a panzer tank regiment go through there. And some French sniper from the Resistance killed a German officer that was coming through the town in a tank. And they stopped. They rounded up everybody in that village, and it was just a small town. They rounded up everybody. Took all the men, stood them against the wall in the city square. They killed all the men. Then they killed all the dogs and the goats and the cows, and every living thing 00:51:00that was there. And then they took the women and the children, put them--locked them in the church, and then they set the church on fire. So there was nobody left from that town. I hadn't heard of that. And I said, "Well, we're going down there. And when we get some German prisoners, we're going to give them the third degree and get information."

Well, we worked with those Frenchmen. And at night we went out into those areas where they suspected there were Germans. And, of course, they knew that terrain. And they came back in the morning, and they said, Yeah, we got six of them or ten of them. I said, "Well, let us talk to them." They said, We didn't bring 00:52:00them back. They killed them all. I said, "Well, we need to talk to people. You can kill them later." They wouldn't bring anybody back alive because--mostly because of what happened at Oradour. That delayed us, and then we had to go back to Le Vésinet. And by that time, some had gone to Belgium. And from there we finally went across Northern France. Went to Lille Verdun on over into Germany. And we finally wound up--well, on the way, I was wounded.

SLOAN: Well, I want to ask about that story in just a minute. But I'd like to go back and ask a couple of questions if I could.

MILLER: Okay.

SLOAN: One is about your decision to enlist. What was your motivation behind wanting to enlist?

MILLER: This was my new country, and that's the least I could do for the country after the Pearl Harbor attack. And I never even thought about it. I said, "Hey, 00:53:00that's your duty to do that." And, you know, I had difficulty trying to get it accomplished.

SLOAN: Yes. And I know you--we already established your birthday is Pearl Harbor Day. So do you remember when you heard the news of Pearl Harbor?

MILLER: I do very well. I had a furnished room in a little place out on the southeast side of town, in a building that was owned by an old Italian couple. And they had rented out several furnished rooms. I had a room upstairs--which by the way I still remember. I paid three dollars fifty a week. (laughs) But everything was priced different. They had a front porch, and they had a little roof over the front porch. And my room had a window. And I could step out 00:54:00through the window and sit on the roof of that porch. And on Sunday morning--this happened on a Sunday morning. I love classical music. And at that time, every Sunday morning the New York Philharmonic or somebody had a concert. So I took a radio with the cord and set it out there. And I was sitting out there getting a little sunshine. And I was reading, and I was listening to the music. And this was, maybe, eleven o'clock in the morning or something like that.

All of a sudden, they interrupted the broadcast. They said, "We interrupt this program. We have news that the Japanese have attacked our naval base in Pearl Harbor." I'd never heard of Pearl Harbor. I didn't know where it was. I didn't know it was in Hawaii--I said, "The Japanese?" You know, they were supposed to be negotiating in Washington with them. I mean, it came as such a shock. And 00:55:00then I went downstairs and asked the owner, "Did you listen to the radio?" He hadn't. And so we turned on the radio. Of course, that's all you had then. And I asked, "Where is Pearl Harbor?" I thought maybe it was in California, I don't know. He said, "Damned if I know." I mean, people here just didn't know. Hawaii was a long distance away. And what a disaster that was. I mean, how unprepared we were. And then when we finally declared war, this country was so unprepared, especially for us who came from Germany, where you had nothing but military.

I remember out here at Fort Sam Houston, the first draftees. They did close-order drill. They still had their civilian clothes because they didn't 00:56:00have enough uniforms. And they carried broomsticks and two-by-fours because they didn't have any rifles. This went on for weeks and weeks. And finally, you know, little by little, they got their uniforms and they got their equipment and the place got organized. And I will have to say, especially for the purpose of this, the country was 110 percent behind the military. In this country everybody, naturally, all the young men were drafted. Everybody wore a uniform. San Antonio, you went downtown, all you saw is army uniforms and once in a while a few navy uniforms from Corpus Christi. And everybody supported the soldiers. And we built up a tremendous military force. I happened to just read the other day that when the war started, the United States had two thousand airplanes. And I'm 00:57:00sure they were--some of them were pretty old.

SLOAN: World War I surplus, yeah.

MILLER: When the war ended we had sixty thousand airplanes. And then the women started to go to work in those defense plants. I mean, everybody. Out here in San Antonio, Kelly Field and Fort Sam and Randolph Field. I mean, around Seguin and around Randolph, all you'd see were those planes buzzing. They were training pilots. And the country was really 100 percent behind them.

SLOAN: Well, the other story that I wanted to get that I didn't get is your citizenship, when your citizenship came through.

MILLER: Well, when they decided at the radio school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to transfer me to Military Intelligence School at Camp Ritchie, they realized I 00:58:00wasn't an American citizen. But I had applied for citizenship the day we--almost the day we came, the week we came. So they called me into the orderly room. And I met up with some sergeant that I didn't know. And he took me downtown to the Federal Courthouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and told the judge how long he had known me and what a wonderful guy I was and how loyal I was to this country and what a great soldier I was. And I raised my hand, and I became an American citizen. They handed me my certificate. The whole thing took, like, five minutes. (both laugh) My parents had to wait five years. But, you know, technically a German citizen would not have access to classified information. As 00:59:00it turned out, at Camp Ritchie we got a lot of really highly classified information. Much higher classification than I would have gotten at radar school--

SLOAN: In Florida.

MILLER: --in Florida on the radar circuits. Radar, at that time, was very new and very hush-hush. But in any event, I've been an American citizen since 1942.

SLOAN: Well, I'd like to ask a little more about your training in the MIS. Because I know this is a period where the Brits in particular had a lot of experience doing intelligence work. But this is kind of the beginning of the American intelligence work. And so I'm interested to know--you talked a little bit about your training, but what other sorts of things were you being instructed in or trained in?

MILLER: Well, at Camp Ritchie, the training was so thorough to make sure that we 01:00:00would be familiar with everything and anything about the German Army, their uniform, their unit structures. We had something that--I think I had mentioned this book, it was called The Order of Battle. It was a thick book that had information on every German unit that we knew about. And I think we knew about all of them. And we used that book overseas too. The Order of Battle had all information on every unit. Like, we would get a prisoner from the Second Panzergrenadier Regiment, and we would look in our Order of Battle. And I said, "Oh yeah. That was organized in Hanover in 1939. And then you went to train in 01:01:00Pomerania, and then you went to Bavaria. And then you went to the Russian Front." They really had it all and this was kept up.

We did terrain intelligence. We learned to read maps, learned to find our way around the country. They had night exercises. They gave us a map of the area of Maryland around Camp Ritchie. But the map was in Egyptian or Italian or Yugoslav, you know. The map was accurate, but all the names had been changed. And they took us out at night in a closed truck. And they dropped us off in 01:02:00pitch darkness on a highway somewhere, and then we had to orient our map and try to find out where we were. And at midnight we were supposed to meet at the church in some town that was five miles away, you know. And they said, Now, be sure and don't tell anybody what you're doing and why you're there, everything. So the second--I remember the second night we went out, we started to--you know, we just had a compass heading and came across some field. And a bunch of dogs were barking. And here we're walking through some farmer's area. And he called those dogs back. And we came up to the house. And he said, "What have you got tonight, the Egyptian map?" (laughs) They knew all about it. But we were told never to mention it. But that was pretty difficult training.

And then we were also trained in trying to make sure that the proper methods 01:03:00were used to detect camouflage. I remember in Pennsylvania, they drove us up to a hill. They drove us to the foot of a hill. And then we had to walk up a pretty good distance on a road to the top of the hill. And they said, We want you to record everything that you see, because we're going to have fake German units. And then from the top of the hill you observe the valley down below. And then you saw a truck coming, two trucks coming and some soldiers marching. Piece of artillery being towed--we had to record all that. On the way down from the top of that hill, they said, You probably missed a few things on your way up. We want you to pay attention when you go down. They had, like, two hundred guys 01:04:00that were behind rocks and boulders and bushes. They were there all the time. We didn't see them. And that was the lesson. They said, Observe everything that is a potential hiding place, because there's no telling what you would walk into.

So we had that night training. We had the terrain intelligence. We had the map intelligence. And mainly, we were taught how to interrogate prisoners and what kind of things to ask for. Many times we needed tactical information. You know, here's a unit that we're facing. We have a prisoner. "We want to know how many people are in your unit. What kind of weapons do they have?" "Well, we have those eighty-eights." "Well, what kind of ammunition does the eighty-eight carry?" Because essentially that was an antiaircraft gun, but became a very 01:05:00nasty artillery weapon. And they could have explosive ammunition, anti-personnel. They could have incendiary. And we wanted to know all these things. And you have to be taught how to do that and how to get information out of those prisoners.

Overseas, we were fairly lucky because we had so many prisoners. We didn't have to beat them over the head. I mean, we had a few instances, especially the SS, who refused to give information. But we had so many prisoners that if they gave us a hard time, instead of wasting time, we kicked them out and you had ten more waiting. So, all in all, the most difficult thing was to try to get the correct kind of information, you know. Like, I remember one guy telling me there's a minefield. And we wanted to see the maps of where the minefields were, and he 01:06:00knew. Saved a lot of lives. How many people are opposing us on the far side of the hill and what kind of weapons they have? Do they have heavy artillery, light artillery, mortars, machine guns? I mean, it was a very thorough training at Camp Ritchie. And so when we got through there, we felt pretty comfortable when we got to Europe.

SLOAN: It sounds like you had really good intelligence on the Germans.

MILLER: Very good intelligence. We had a lot of information. Well, don't forget there were a lot of people, like myself, that had lived there. For instance, in the area around Cologne, we used to ride our bicycles there on weekends and go on day trips. And I knew it like I knew the back of my hand. And there were 01:07:00other people from other parts of Germany that knew the area very well. There was a lot of good information that we got from people who lived there and who knew.

And we had information--for example, a lot of prisoners showed up on the Western Front that at one time had served in Russia. In fact, that's the one thing that the intelligence missed before the Battle of the Bulge. Because the Germans brought a lot of troops from the Russian Front over there into west Germany to stage that last battle. And we found out later from other people that I knew that did intelligence--that did interrogation of prisoners. Suddenly, some guy comes in there, and he's from an outfit that's supposed to be in Kiev in Russia. 01:08:00"What are you doing here?" "Well, we just--they put us on a train. And it took us three days." That should have been a giveaway and somebody missed that. Because intelligence--first, you get information from people, and you don't know whether they're telling you the truth or not. Even assuming that they're telling you the truth, there were so many prisoners that at the end of each day we had to do summaries. And by the time it gets summarized and gets up to some higher level, somebody missed it. I mean, that they missed.

We had one man working in our group. He was originally from Czechoslovakia. He was an interrogator, like myself. He was a little older than the rest of us. Kind of a chubby guy. He spoke five different languages. I mean, he spoke Czech and German and I think Russian and Italian, French. I forget. But he was short, 01:09:00stubby, and he had a stutter. And when we first put our team together, I said, "Why the hell would they send a guy like this? He can't even speak straight. He stutters." He was the best interrogator we had because everybody got put off by him, you know. He's a nice guy, and he offered them some cigarettes. He got more information than the rest of us put together.

When we first got into Germany, in a German town he got into a shop that made rubber stamps. And he had rubber stamps made, two rubber stamps. One said "USA"--and they used to have those stamp cushions with the ink. One said "USA," and the other one said "USSR." When he got a prisoner that had served on the 01:10:00Eastern Front--and those Germans were terrified of those Russians because those Russians, they were ruthless. And you can't blame them, you know. Twenty million people died in that country. He told the prisoners, he said, "Look, if you cooperate with us, tell us what we want to know, we'll send you to a nice American POW camp. You'll get medical attention. You'll have cigarettes. You'll have good food. The war is over for you. If you don't, we'll send you--turn you over to the Russians. USSR. It's up to you." Well, every time that he ran into some problem, the guy says, "Okay, you don't want to talk to us? (claps) USSR." "Ein Moment!" (laughs) Those people that had served on the Eastern Front, they were--they knew what their fate would be if we turned them over to the Russians. 01:11:00What they didn't know, we had no way in the world to turn them over to the Russians. (laughs)

SLOAN: Sure, yeah.

MILLER: The Russians were hundreds of miles away. But we told them, You can either be an American prisoner, and you'll be treated well, or we'll turn you over to the Russians, and you know what's going to happen to you.

SLOAN: Well, I'm interested, as you mentioned that, some of the other interrogation methods you were taught, particularly if you have someone that's unwilling to talk or hesitant to talk. What are the ways in which you worked--or you were taught to work to get information out?

MILLER: I'll tell you, in my personal experience, most of them were willing to talk. Because, especially by the time we got down into Bavaria, I mean, everybody knew the war was over.

SLOAN: Yes. They're surrendering en masse, yeah.

MILLER: Oh, we had so many prisoners we didn't know what to do with all of them. 01:12:00From Munich we were called to a little town called Tegernsee. They had a POW enclosure that had five thousand German prisoners from a mountain division that had surrendered in the Alps, and they brought them down and disarmed them and they put them in. All it was is, like, a huge meadow with barbed wire around. If we got a prisoner who wouldn't give us information, well, we got four thousand more. By that time, they were surrendering en masse. Before that, once in a while--once in a while we would have somebody that would give us a hard time and wouldn't give us any information.

And I'll tell you what worked real well. We moved around almost every day. And I 01:13:00mentioned earlier, we were on detached service with so many different outfits that sometimes we didn't know from one day to the other, you know--all of a sudden, one day we were with Sixth Army Group. Didn't even know where that was or who that was. They were above Seventh Army. And then the next day, we would be with some infantry unit or some reconnaissance unit.

But we were always prepared because we had been through combat long enough to know that whenever you settled down--we set up a tent for the interrogation. First thing you do is you dig yourself a foxhole, because there were always air attacks or artillery attacks. Some of those prisoners that didn't want to talk--we had a bunch of shovels in our trailer. We asked them, "How tall are 01:14:00you?" "Uh, two meters." "Okay, start digging. Two meters, six foot deep." And they start digging. And the more they were digging, they were sweating. They didn't realize that we wanted someplace to dive into if there was an attack, which there was more often than we expected. And a lot of times that worked. Because they thought, I'm digging my own grave here. The war's over. Why shouldn't I tell them?

I know some other guys had difficulty making some of these prisoners work, and they used some pretty rough--pretty rough methods. We didn't have waterboarding, but there were ways of--the SS were the people that gave us the hardest time. 01:15:00And some of them were arrogant and wouldn't give us anything but their name, rank, or serial number, or even that much. And we sent them back into the prison cage. We had so many others that were willing to give us information.

One day, believe it or not, I ran into a prisoner who was from my hometown. Just by--I mean, one chance in a million, you know. Twice I ran into a guy that said he was from my hometown. But over there, every area and every town has, sort of, a local dialect. The minute he said to me in German, "I'm from Cologne," I knew damn well he wasn't because he was not from Cologne. It turned out later--he turned out to be from some place in Saxony. But this other man that I was 01:16:00interrogating, he said, "I'm from Cologne." And also the German soldiers carried a little book. They called it Soldbuch, like a little paybook. And they had all the records in there. And then you could see where the units were from and when they got paid and what their ranks were and all that stuff. So he said he was from Cologne. And I said, "Oh, we know that very well." He said, "You do?" I said, "Yeah." He happened to live in the street that was, like, two blocks away from where my grandmother used to live. And I said to him, "Now, I know they had some terrible bombing there. Is that Saint Agnes Church still standing there?" And he said, "No. It's been damaged. How do you know about it?" I said, "We know 01:17:00everything." (laughs) And they must have thought we knew--we knew everything.

Most of those prisoners, except for a couple of the high ranking officers--I mean, they would tell us anything we wanted to know. And what we needed to know, in those days, was: Who are we facing? How strong is their unit? How are they equipped? What kind of weapons do they have? And then, sometimes, How the morale is?

SLOAN: I think about, as you're talking about the work that you're doing, it's very personal for you in a way that it may not have been as personal for some of your--

MILLER: Yeah. Well, of course, they knew immediately when I started speaking German, unless they were pretty dense, that they weren't going to put anything over on me. (laughs) But at the same time, our concern was to save as many lives 01:18:00as we could. And don't forget, we were pushing into Germany and all the way down there towards Austria towards the end of the war. And our job was to save as many lives as possible. Like I say, we captured somebody in those hilly areas, and we knew there were minefields. Well, you interrogate enough prisoners, finally you find a guy from the unit that the Germans called Pioniere [Pioneers], but we called them engineers; they lay the minefields, you know. And we got a guy that I said, "I remember. I talked to somebody yesterday. He was from that engineer unit." We called him back. I said, "What about those minefields?" "Yeah. I have the papers on that." I said, "Okay. You walk us through that." At first we talked to him. "Do you have a wife?" "Yeah. I've got 01:19:00a wife and three children." I'd say, "You want to see them again? If you work with us, we'll see to it." I said, "You walk ahead of us in that minefield. You know where those mines are." That's the kind of information we wanted.

If they had weapons--sometimes they had heavy weapons; they had no ammunition. Sometimes they had tanks, and they had no fuel. Later on, when we went from Munich to Salzburg along the Autobahn, there were hundreds and hundreds of German jet planes there. We didn't have jet planes at the time; they did. And they were sitting in these revetments alongside the Autobahn. They didn't have any fuel, though, because we bombed those German refineries and the oilfields in Romania. You know, those are the things we needed to know. If they have a tank 01:20:00battalion and the guy says, "Yeah, but they won't bother you because they don't have fuel," or, "They have so little fuel they can barely keep those engines running."

The other kind of information is that they have a German regular army unit and part of that unit was Austrian soldiers. Well, they didn't get along. And we knew they didn't get along. After you talk to those prisoners for a few minutes, you realize, Don't worry about those guys. They're on the other side of the hill or on the other side of the creek. They're not going to bother us. Some of the Panzer-SS--actually, they called it the Waffen-SS, which was the military SS, compared to the ordinary SS, which were originally strictly political. That's 01:21:00the kind of information we needed.

We had very little guidance in the way of saying, Here's what we want you to find out. Once in a while, we would get that from a higher level, and said, We want you to find out whether they blew the bridges. When the flying weather was bad, for example. You know, there was fog, and they didn't know whether five miles ahead if the bridges were still there. And we get enough prisoners, and I said, "What about that bridge?" He said, "Yeah, the bridge is mined, but they haven't blown it up yet. But if you get near us, they will." That's the kind of information we needed. And then a lot of them told us, If you push a little more, our people are going to give up because they don't have food. And they 01:22:00don't have ammunition. They know the war is over.

So in my personal experience, with a few exceptions, it wasn't too bad dealing with those people. The worst thing was that nobody admitted to knowing anything--especially about the camps or knowing anything about anything. Nobody was a member of the Nazi Party. In fact, I'll tell you a funny thing. One of our guys took a big piece of cardboard, just a corrugated board. We were usually in a tent. And we nailed it to the outside of the tent. And it said, in German, "Wir wissen schon--" ["We already know--"] And then they listed five things. "Number one, that you were never a member of the party. Number two, that you 01:23:00never were in favor of the NSDAP," which was the party. "Number three, that you have an uncle in Milwaukee." (laughs) "Number four, that you were cheering for the Americans when they bombed your cities." It was so ridiculous that these people--they--Oh, we didn't know anything. Once in a while, you would get a man that said, "Yeah, I was a young student, and I believed in Hitler. And I joined the party," or, "I joined the SA [Sturmabteilung] or the SS." You almost wanted to shake their hand.

SLOAN: For their honesty, yeah.

MILLER: I mean--but the Germans, believe me, up until the very end, as long as they were winning, they were all in favor of this. They changed their tune when 01:24:00they lost the war. And one interesting thing, in the last few weeks of the war--so, I would say, we were in Dachau end of April, somewhere along in there and then in May. Several of the German officers that I interrogated said, We understand that you are going to let us keep our weapons so that we can help you fight the Communists, the Soviets. They spread that propaganda among those troops. That if you surrender to the Americans you'll keep your weapons and you'll fight. By this time, the Russians were already in Berlin and Dresden and Leipzig and Vienna, you know. But they believed that, because that's what they were told by their people.

SLOAN: Well, I'd like to go back, and you were taking me--you were heading east.

MILLER: Right.

SLOAN: And you said that when you were being transferred toward where the front line was you got injured.

MILLER: Yeah, we crossed the Rhine at Mannheim. We were over in--on the opposite--on the west side of the river of the town called Ludwigshafen. And we were sitting there, and Mannheim the Germans were still defending very powerfully. The British bombed Mannheim during the night; the Americans bombed during the daytime. And Mannheim was a--it was just flattened out. And then there was heavy artillery--our artillery going in there. And then one morning, about four o'clock in the morning, everything stopped. Despite the noise, people might find that hard to believe. We were sound asleep. But when it stopped, we 01:26:00woke up. What the hell is going on? The artillery stopped. And that's when the attack came, and they went across the Rhine in assault boats. And I think they built a--I don't remember whether they built a pontoon bridge across there. No, I think they went in those rubber assault boats.

Anyway, then we got into Mannheim, Germany. And then went past Mannheim, Heidelberg, and then we kind of turned south. Went into the area that is the Black Forest, which was part of--the French were fighting on our southern flank. And we came to Stuttgart, Germany, which I knew because that's where the American consulate was when we got our visas. Well, the French had occupied Stuttgart. And they had with them some of their colonial troops. And I still 01:27:00remember like it was yesterday, they had Senegalese. You remember our president was just in Senegal? Well, I didn't know who the Senegalese were. They were in the French Army, and they wore French uniforms, but they were allowed to wear their native outfit over those uniforms.

And before we got into Stuttgart, somebody told our officer, he said--you know, they set up checkpoints and whatnot. He said, "Don't mess with those people." He said, "They're the meanest people in the world." And everybody laughed except the Frenchman--I mean, just between you and me, we didn't think much of the French soldiers. They had some that were great soldiers, but as a whole, they 01:28:00pulled back. When you needed them they weren't there. But we said, Why do we want to worry about the French soldiers? He said, "No, not the French soldiers. Those Senegalese." We found out from German prisoners what they would do at night. They would--and these were tall guys. I mean, they were huge. Very slender, very tall, very dark-skinned. At night, they would get completely undressed except for a loincloth. And they carried a knife in their mouth. And they would crawl across to the German lines, where the German guards, the patrols were. They would sneak up behind them and cut their throat, put their head on their chest, and take off. The German soldiers told us that, We didn't 01:29:00want to go on guard duty over there in that area, because they had those--they just called them the blacks, you know. They didn't know they were Senegalese. Now how that worked within the French Army, I don't know. But we wanted prisoners to talk to, and here again they said, They don't talk to them. They kill them.

So anyway, we got through Stuttgart. And we were constantly moving from place to place. We went to Ulm, the German city of Ulm. In Ulm they had big factories that had been bombed heavily, but they were still half functioning. Except they had a--I say--hundreds of thousands of Polish workers, slave labor. These were not concentration camps. They were just people that they had taken from Poland 01:30:00and forced them to work in those German factories that produced ammunition, and I don't know what all. They also had young Frenchmen there that had been trying to get out from slave labor in France, and the Gestapo caught them and sent them down there. They lived under terrible conditions in those barracks. There were men and women. They were undernourished and looked awful. Then, when we finally came in, all they wanted to do was go back to Poland to find out if their families were still around. And the Germans, believe it or not, they came to our headquarters, and they complained. They said, Those Poles are stealing our bicycles. We said, in German, we said, "Poles? What do you mean Poles? This is Bavaria. There can't be Poles." Oh yeah, they volunteered to work here. I said, 01:31:00"Well, I hope they steal all your bicycles. And if you're lucky, they won't cut your throat." I mean those poor people, they were in terrible condition.

And then from Ulm we went to Augsburg, which is a pretty big city. And there too, we found these foreign workers that had been forced to work in German armament factories. Same thing, you know. From Augsburg, they sent us to the city of Nuremberg. Now, you have to understand, Nuremberg is where the Nazis used to hold those big party rallies. And the anti-Semitic laws that were written in 1934, the Nuremberg Laws. Well, Nuremberg, like most other cities were--I mean, it was in terrible condition. It had been bombed, and whatnot. But the Germans defended it very thoroughly. They had a lot of artillery in 01:32:00Nuremberg. Now, believe it or not, we got there on the--maybe seventeenth or eighteenth of April. And word came down--I want to say it was a Texas--Third Infantry Division. They had kind of blue and white stripes. Anyway, we were assigned at that time to that division. They were waiting outside of Nuremberg. And again, Nuremberg was bombed in the daytime and nighttime.

Well, some general high up the line decided that on the twentieth of April is Hitler's birthday, and the Americans must take the town on the twentieth of April. So they really poured on the works. And they wanted somebody to go into 01:33:00the city. Now, there was an OSS [Office of Strategic Services] unit. The OSS was there before CIA. These were underground workers, Americans. And they said the chief of police of the city of Nuremberg, a big Nazi, he has been cooperating with the OSS. Has given them information. And they want to be sure and get him out. Well, unfortunately, that didn't work because we found out later they found him shot in the head inside the city walls. You know, they had these ancient walls there. Now, whether the Nazis shot him or some of our people did it not knowing.

But anyway, they wanted somebody to go into Nuremberg because the Germans had 01:34:00hundreds of these eighty-eight antiaircraft units in Nuremberg. And what they would do, they had fitted them with a big steel shield. And they would back them into some of these buildings that had been partially destroyed. And then they would blow up more of the building and cover them up so that just those barrels would stick out. And when we came in there to bomb, we had terrible casualties. But they couldn't find out exactly where these things were. So they asked us, We need somebody to go in there and find out where they're concentrating those eighty-eights. I was one of the people: young, stupid, (laughs) indestructible. Three of us went into Nuremberg at night.

Now, the biggest problem was--I spoke pretty good English at the time, probably 01:35:00not as good as I do today. But two of the other guys, who were also German refugees, they spoke with very strong German accents. And we said, When they're going to try to come back our guys are going to shoot them. "Halt. Who goes there?" "Americans." "Yeah. Recite the first stanza of the national anthem." "Hell, damn if I know." So they put us into German uniform. I wore the uniform of a Luftwaffe--like a second lieutenant or a first lieutenant. And they took us across that moat at night in a raft. Now, they did notify all these guards that were on the perimeter. And in the morning we would come back, and don't shoot 01:36:00before you know who you're shooting.

We went in there. It was foggy and rainy. But a few of the streets you could walk along. We were supposed to find out from those German soldiers that were on the other side where these eighty-eight units, most of them, where they were. And I walked down the street there, turned on the corner. All of a sudden there is a German officer in front of me. And he asked me, "What are you looking for?" And I said--well, I gave him a story. "I'm lost. The Americans were after me, and I came across. And I belong to one of the units from the Luftwaffe, but we were supposed to report to such-and-such regiment," which were these eighty-eight antiaircraft artillery battalions. He didn't suspect a thing. We 01:37:00talked. But I could tell you this: he was drunk. And most of those soldiers that I ran into--there weren't that many, but the other guys had the same experience--they knew the jig was up. And they got drunk, because they stole every bottle of Cognac from the French. I mean, they were drunk. And they weren't functioning. The only people that gave us trouble were those eighty-eight antiaircraft gunmen.

And then, in the afternoon, we came back across. And fortunately, a captain from my unit was there where I came across, and I didn't have any trouble. But the other guys, we were worried because of their accent they wouldn't believe that they were American soldiers because they were in German uniform. Well, they found out where those eighty-eights were concentrated. And then there was 01:38:00another big air raid. I seem to think it was the British, and it was at night. So on the twentieth of April, on Hitler's birthday, the Americans conquered Nuremberg. And unfortunately, that chief of police who was working with the OSS, he was found dead. And then from Nuremberg, we went--maybe it was from Nuremberg we went to Augsburg. You know, they kept shuffling us around.

SLOAN: Sure. Sure. And you're with different units, right?

MILLER: Different units all the time. All the time. All Seventh Army, but different units. And then we made our way to Munich, but we made our way around the western part, because that's where the Forty-Second Division or Forty-Fifth 01:39:00Division--that's where the major thrust was. And that's where some of the roads were still in good condition. And we got into Munich and set up headquarters in Munich in a building that was only halfway destroyed. Happened to be at one time a German art museum. Beautiful building, you know. Half of it was gone; the roof was gone. But we set up headquarters there. Right in, really, downtown Munich. And that's when--that's when we got the call the next morning. They said, We need every German-speaking soldier to go to Dachau. And I knew right away what Dachau was because I knew it since I was a kid. But I never suspected to find what we did there. I mean it was--I can't begin to tell you. It was hell on 01:40:00earth. I mean, it was like Dante's Inferno.

We came in there shortly after these two units liberated the camp. We had to drive from Munich into Dachau, which was north, northwest. It took us about twenty minutes. It's not very far up, maybe ten miles. When we approached the village of Dachau, the smell--the smell was so awful. Now, we had all been in combat. And we had all seen and smelled dead soldiers, dead cows and horses. Nothing like what we found there. We came to the gate. The Americans that had gone in there, they had--I think they bulldozed through the gate or ran a tank through there or something. The camp was completely enclosed in high tension 01:41:00wire. And somebody had cut that power out, but we found like half a dozen guys hanging in there. They had committed suicide by jumping on to the live wire. And I tell you, this may sound bad, but they were the lucky ones. What we found in that camp.

First of all, like I say, the smell of all those bodies, those rotting bodies. They were stacked all over the place. The people that were moving around, they were like skeletons. I mean, they were like zombies. They--most of them--a lot of them didn't have shoes, and they wore those blue and grey concentration camp outfits. Undernourished, covered with sores, teeth missing. A lot of them couldn't even move. They were laying on the ground. They waved to us, said 01:42:00something. A lot of foreigners there. You know, not everybody there was German. They were French. They were Russian, Polish, Yugoslav. I mean--but when we came in there, we didn't know what--I mean, it was so stunning and so unbelievable. They had a gas chamber there, which we found later. And they had an oven--two ovens, those crematoriums. And they had run out of fuel, so people kept dying. I mean, I think they gave them eight hundred calories a day and worked them fourteen hours a day. These people were living skeletons and sick and weak. And their eyes were sunk. And they [were] covered with lice. And we had--well, later 01:43:00some of the medics finally came in there. Right near the main gate there were these administration buildings where the Nazis lived. And they were beautiful. Nice buildings, neat. They had a flower garden. And we knew right away, if there's any documents--you know, these guys took off--that's where we're going to find them.

But we wanted to go through the camp first to see what we could do for those people. The most frustrating thing was, What could we do for them? I mean, the American GI, they see these poor starving people. They reach in and gave them their K rations. They gave them food. When I was there--five minutes after I got 01:44:00there, near the--not too far from the front gate where they had an enclosure where they trained the dogs. The Germans had these Dobermans and German shepherds they would train against those prisoners. And there were prisoners tied to a post, and the dogs had chewed them up. Our guys killed all those dogs. Finally, somebody came. An officer came and told one of the soldiers to get the PA system going. And he got that PA system going. I don't know how they did that because--I think they had generators there, or maybe they had electric power. I don't know. He finally got on. And he said, "Do not give them food." He said, "They can't take that food. They haven't had a decent meal in months." All they got every day--they had these big kettles over a fire, and they got, like, a soup that was like--I would say 90 percent water and cabbage, and some kind of 01:45:00crap in there. And then they got a piece of dry bread. That's all they got to eat. Those people, they were weighing ninety, a hundred pounds.

There were bodies stacked all along these buildings. Just stacked up like firewood, smelling. The ones that were alive--there were only a small handful that came that I spoke with in French. They were fairly--they were in fairly good condition because they had just brought them into Dachau from France. The others, you just cannot believe what one human being would do to another. How they treated them and how they--they beat them and how they broke their arm. Then we found in one area--had gallows. They had--the bodies were still hanging 01:46:00there. The flies coming around. Then we went in the back, and they had--it was hard to talk to any of those people. What do you say to these people? We gave them our--the officer who got on the PA system, he said, "If you want to give them cigarettes, give them something to drink from your canteen." Because they kept begging, "Wasser," you know, water, and something to eat. He said, "Don't give them anything to eat because they can't take it." We found out a few days later, two, three hundred of them died because the GIs gave them food and they couldn't take it. They hadn't had a meal in I don't know when.

We went around the back where they had the gas chamber. The gas chamber was in 01:47:00an area towards the back of the camp. And there were towers at each corner where they had the guards with machine guns. And the guys that liberated the camp before we got there, they said those guys were shooting at them, and they were fighting them. (laughs) I mean, they were completely surrounded by American soldiers. So we went back in the back. The building was labeled in German "Disinfection Station." And then the gas chamber itself was labeled "Brause Bad," shower. They had a big sign on there: shower. So what they would do is make those people go into that first building, take off all their clothes. They said, You're going to be disinfected there. And then marched them naked into the 01:48:00building that had the gas outlets at the top, locked the doors, dumped that Zyklon in there, and some of them--well, you saw the pictures. Some of them were still in there. They hadn't even taken them out yet.

And then, a little distance away from there, that's where they had the ovens. And they had run out of coal or whatever they use for the oven, so that's why there were so many people that died. They were just stacked up everywhere, throughout that camp. Unbelievable. Then we came to a barracks, and you've seen pictures of the barracks where they lived in little cubbyholes. This barracks had, like, two-by-fours nailed across the door so they couldn't--whoever was in there couldn't get out. And it said in German "Danger, typhus." They let the people die. The people that got typhus, typhoid fever. They just nailed them up 01:49:00and let them die.

And last thing we saw--in fact, one of the Frenchmen told me in French, "Have you seen the chemin de fer?" The railroad. I said no. That was way in the back, where the railroad track came in. And that's where we found thirty-nine cars full of bodies. It--I mean, it was so unbelievable. We didn't know what to do with those people. They had dysentery. They had--some of them had typhoid fever. They had sores all over their faces. They were undernourished and worked to death. Some of them were barefoot. Some of them had some of those wooden shoes. Some of them had nothing. A lot of them were just laying there on the ground, 01:50:00unable to move.

And then a medical unit finally came in. They made more announcements. They said, Be sure and don't give them food. Because in the C rations, if you opened that up, there was a big hunk of cheese. They couldn't take it. There was meat, Spam, I think, or something like that. There were powdered eggs. And these people were starving. I mean, they would eat--they would eat the weeds that were growing there just to get something into their stomach. Because the German--the SS guards, somebody said they needed to have something to eat. We made them eat the stuff that they used to feed their prisoners. Because they ate--they ate pretty well.

There was some shooting in the camp because somewhere they rounded up the SS 01:51:00guards and stood them up against the wall. And some of those guys, the SS, tried to run away or shoot at our troops. And some guy with a machine gun opened up and killed a few of them. And then, some officer came running along there and stopped all that. I think that was the Forty-Fifth Infantry Division. And I believe their commanding officer got into a lot of trouble over that later. But, I mean, we went through that camp, and we just didn't know what to do. How can you help these people? We gave them all the cigarettes we had. I gave them my canteen. Everybody gave them their canteens so they have clean drinking water.

The medics finally set up some kind of a--I guess you would call it a mess hall, 01:52:00big cooking pots. And they brewed some kind of--some kind of soup for these prisoners. And then they used some of our tin cups to let them drink. And they told them, Very slowly. And then we gave them bread. They called it cake. You know, we had that white bread. Well, in Europe the bread that they got was the ordinary bread, and half of it was wood chips, sawdust. They'd mix that. But a lot of Germans had to eat that too because they were short of food. So they called our bread, cake. And they said, Eat it very slowly, and dip it in that soup. Let your stomachs get used to it. And then more and more medics came in. I don't know from what unit.

So by that time we had seen enough. And I'll tell you something: I saw American soldiers just collapse and crying, throwing up. Really, nobody knew--what do you do? How do you help these people? So our officer, the senior officer said, "Let's get in these buildings and get ahold of all the documents and records." Because we found out, one of the things that happened in Dachau, they did these medical experiments on the prisoners. There was--and I have a list here of the names, which I will give you in a minute. One of the first ones was they did experiments on malaria, on how to treat malaria. So they intentionally infected hundreds and hundreds of prisoners with malaria. And then tried different 01:54:00treatments, most of which didn't work. I spoke to a prisoner who was in pretty good shape but wore the prison outfit. He was a doctor. He was from Czechoslovakia. The Nazis had him do autopsies of all the people that died. He was forced to do that. I forgot what he told me, how many thousand autopsies he had to do, people that died from the malaria experiments.

Then, they did experiments on people on how they--for the Luftwaffe--how they would survive in freezing water. They threw them into a container that had ice blocks floating in there and took their temperature every two minutes, and the people were screaming and hollering and freezing to death. And then they put 01:55:00some of these flying suits on that they were testing. And some of them protected them a little against that, but most of them didn't. And there were hundreds and hundreds of those people that just didn't survive, and if they were halfway alive later, they killed them. Then they did another set of experiments on explosive decompression. That was for the Luftwaffe also, because we found all those records later. That's how we knew. But we also heard from some of the prisoners. They would put them into a compression chamber and gradually increase the pressure like they would have in those planes. And then they would very suddenly drop the compression to simulate explosive decompression. But most of those people died, if not instantly, but miserably. You know, their blood was boiling and it was so horrible.

And strangely enough, I will digress for just one minute, the experiments that were done for the Luftwaffe, which was the explosive decompression and survival in arctic water, they were reported to a doctor in Berlin who was the head of the German--the Luftwaffe medical unit. And he went to Dachau any number of times because we found the records. His name was Hubertus Strughold. Do you know where he wound up? At Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas. He was a war criminal. We had the list finally of all these doctors. By the way, a bunch of those doctors, they were caught, and then some of them were hanged, and some of them got long prison sentences.

And this doctor Strughold, the Americans got ahold of him, and for some reason, they brought him to this country. And he worked at Randolph Field in the air force medical unit and then at Brook[s] Field, where they had the aerospace medical center before we trained the people for our space program. We couldn't believe it, after we came home--after I came home and some of our soldiers--they had American Veterans Association or something like that. We said, Do you realize this guy is here in San Antonio? Somehow--it gave the name in the paper. We called our congressman--we called our--yeah, we called our congressman. He said, "Let me check into this." And never heard a word. Later on, we talked to 01:58:00our senator, United States Senator, and he said, "It's out of our hands. They want this guy because of all his experience." I said, "Well, he's wanted as a war criminal. He should be hanged." He worked here in San Antonio.

And you're going to find this interesting. Just not too many years back, they were going to name a library building at Randolph Field the Strughold Building, and I happened to pick this up. By the way, our congressmen, our senators, nothing was ever done. Nothing was ever done about it. It [newspaper article] says, "Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the German scientist hailed as the father of US space medicine, is being removed--the name is being removed from US Air Force 01:59:00library at its school of aerospace medicine in Texas," which was Brooks. But first he was at Randolph, then he came to Brooks--"following the disclosure that he was on a US Army list of wanted Nazi criminals. Strughold, who was secretly brought to the United States in 1945 to work on the country's space program, headed the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine, had participated in conferences of medical experiments conducted on inmates from the Dachau concentration camp." The guy is in my hometown.

SLOAN: So very quickly you're looking for those records. Or you're wanting to secure those records.

MILLER: Okay, yeah. We took all the records that we could find and we got some--one of the units gave us a truck, and we packed up everything: files, books, records, films, and so forth. There was a big Nazi medical unit, and 02:00:00those doctors kept--you know, typical Prussian efficiency, they kept immaculate records. And we brought them all to our headquarters in Munich, where they were processed later on. And, for some reason, we spent part of the day there, but rounding up all those records. Well, first of all, we are looking for people that we could arrest and take prisoner. And very few of those doctors--well, none of the doctors were left in the camp. Few of the officers were left there. And that Forty-Second or Forty-Fifth Infantry Division, they took care of all the--I don't know what happened to those people. I do know this. Eventually, 02:01:00they found most of those doctors, and a bunch of them were hanged.

(shuffling through papers) And somewhere I have a note here of the names, especially the guy that was--that did the experiments on the malaria. Let me see here. Because I had the names, and I got the names from that doctor, that Czechoslovakian doctor who had to do the autopsies and write the reports for the Germans. Let's see, they were--I don't know if you want those names.

SLOAN: Yes. Yeah.

MILLER: There was one doctor, Kahr, K-a-h-r. Then there was a Dr. Ramsauer, 02:02:00R-a-m-s-a-u-e-r. Then there was a Dr. Wolters, W-o-l-t-e-r-s. Then there was a Dr. Lang, L-a-n-g. And the worst one was that Dr. Murmelstadt, M-u-r-m-e-l-s-t-a-d-t. He did the--he infected the prisoners with typhoid fever and tried various cures. Then there was a Standartenführer, which is a pretty high SS, Lolling, L-o-l-l-i-n-g. He witnessed operations on the prisoners where they operated on them without anesthesia. They tried to sterilize the women and 02:03:00operated on them without anesthesia. The malaria guy, Dr. Klaus Schilling, S-c-h-i-l-l-i-n-g. And then there was the doctor on that explosive decompression. Let's see, they did twenty-five people at a time. They wound up with internal hemorrhages in their lungs and brain, but his name was Dr. Sigmund Rascher, R-a-s-c-h-e-r. And I know that he was hung. And I think some of the others were, too. But this was--you know, even after all these years, I mean, I 02:04:00don't know--how can you describe something like that?

SLOAN: So you're working as you're there and you're gathering intelligence on any information you can get(??).

MILLER: Well, let me tell you what happened. We rounded up all the documents that we could find. But I think they found some more later on that those doctors kept in the city of Munich. And they were all brought to our headquarters and processed later. We went back to Munich. And for some reason, we were told we have to move south into the Alps because--I think I mentioned earlier there were these rumors that the Germans were going to put up a last stand. And there were some of these mountain divisions down there that were going to be fighting. And they had a lot of prisoners.

So we were sent to this town of Tegernsee, which is maybe, I don't know, thirty, forty miles from Munich towards the Alps, kind of on the way to Innsbruck. But 02:05:00they had this huge enclosure there and a lot of German prisoners. And we tried to interrogate some of those. And we found out, pretty well, there's ten thousand more waiting up in the mountains. And they're drinking up all of their booze. And they're just waiting for the Americans to come bring them down. So we spent a few days there. And, I mean, they--instead of just having barbed wire around that camp, they finally put some guards there and more security. Then we found out from some of the prisoners--from one of the officers, that the German officers who were there asked would we allow them to keep their sidearms. And we said no, you can't keep any arms. He said, "Well, there's some SS people in there that are threatening us." So we tried to segregate those SS people out of 02:06:00there. And we wouldn't let them keep any arms of any kind.

And then we were told to report to Salzburg. And then we got on the autobahn from--taken there we got back on the autobahn and drove towards Salzburg. That's why I told you we saw all these German jet planes that didn't have any fuel. And we got to Salzburg. German prisoners everywhere. And like I say: on the roads, total chaos. Refugees trying to get--you know, with carts and horses and oxen trying to get away. And our traffic and all those ninety-millimeter self-propelled artillery and tanks and armored cars. And we had these--what did they call them?--armored personnel carriers. They had half-tracks. Once in a 02:07:00while we would get in there because all we had is a jeep and had no protection, and we needed something with a machine gun mounted in. So we went in the half-tracks.

And then, when we were in Salzburg, they sent us to a small town, which is very famous resort town up in the mountains, called Bad-Ischl, I-s-c-h-l. They said there was German prisoners there that need to be processed. Well, we got to Bad-Ischl. There were German prisoners everywhere. Some of them were just walking in the street. But, you know, they didn't have any weapons. They're walking around there, wanting to get home. But we were looking for certain people. Anybody SS was automatic arrest. Gestapo, if we could find them, automatic arrested. So we only spent a day or so in Bad-Ischl.

And then they told us, we want you to go to Linz, which is farther east towards Vienna. They said there's another concentration camp there, and they need people to interrogate some of the inmates and get information and arrest the guards and whatnot. But from Bad-Ischl, the shortest way to Linz we couldn't take because of traffic jams and so forth. So one of the people in our organization was from Austria. And he said, "We can take this road through around here, and you go to Ebensee." And Ebensee, he said, "There is an out-camp for the one in Linz. And Ebensee is, I mentioned earlier, one of the worst places I've ever seen. They 02:09:00were doing this tunnel work and bringing out rocks. And they had these deep tunnels in there. And I think they were assembling some of those German V-1s and V-2s in those tunnels. All those people in Ebensee--they were all Jewish. And ever so often, one of the survivors told me, they would set up these explosive charges to deepen their tunnel. And somebody said, "Oh, don't set them off. There's fifty people in there." And they said, Oh, they're just Jews. Boom! That place--I mean, those people--they looked even worse than Dachau. I mean they were literally, literally worked to death, intentionally. Undernourished, worked until they couldn't work anymore, and then they killed them. I don't know how we got out of there. I mean, it was awful.

Then we found our way to Linz, and on the other side of Linz was that huge concentration camp, Mauthausen. There were even more prisoners than Dachau, and it looked just like Dachau. Bodies stacked everyplace. The survivors walking around, you know, skin and bones. That was liberated by another unit in the Seventh Army, but not the Forty-Second. I'm not sure which, some other infantry unit. And one of the worst things in Mauthausen, it's hilly country. They had a big cliff there. Like a two-hundred-foot cliff. And when the Nazis couldn't bury the bodies fast enough--kill the people fast enough, they'd push them off that cliff. Down below there were just tons of bodies laying there.

And Dachau, by the way, to get back--you know what we had to do with those dead prisoners? They went in there with a bulldozer and dug a big ditch, and they had to bury them there. And to this day I hate to go to funerals because every time I attend the funeral, I keep saying to myself, At least this person died with dignity and has a decent burial. Those poor guys--thousands--they were dumped in a ditch with a bulldozer and covered up at the foot of that cliff in Mauthausen. The bodies were just stacked, rotten, rats running through there. It was just as bad. And, of course, now we know the Nazis had hundreds of those camps. It was 02:12:00just--I had one interesting experience. I don't know if you've heard of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles?

SLOAN: I've been there, yeah.

MILLER: You've been there, okay. Have you met the Rabbi Hier or any of those people? Well, early on, I heard about it. And I said--you know, by this time my business had done a little better, and we could afford to make a contribution. So I wanted to make a contribution to them in memory of our family members who were killed over there--whom, incidentally, I never found any trace of. I don't know where they wound up. I got one report that said they were sent to Lithuania. But I'm not sure. So anyway, we contacted the people at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and said, "I want to make a contribution, but I want the names 02:13:00of my family up there." So it was a pretty sizable contribution, but they did exactly what we did [ask]. And I said if there's anybody I want to help, it's that Simon Wiesenthal Center, because they go after, not only the Nazis, but even today every place where there's violence against Jews, anti-Semitism, they go after it.

Well, one day I got a call. We were visiting a cousin of mine in California, and when I was there I got a call from Rabbi Hier, who was in charge at the time. And he said, "Next Wednesday, we're going to have a big dinner. We're going to enlarge that Simon Wiesenthal Center." You know, you've seen--

SLOAN: Um-hm.

MILLER: "And Simon Wiesenthal is going to be here from Vienna." It's named in 02:14:00his honor. So, to make a long story short, I had occasion to meet him. He was already way up in his eighties or nineties, a remarkable man. He had lost eighty-something members of his family. I mean, everybody; except he was one of the survivors. He was in Mauthausen. And, you know, I talked with him about--I said, "I was there." I said, "You were one of the twenty, thirty thousand people there." And a remarkable man. He was not bitter or hateful or spiteful. He said, "I just want these people brought to justice," the people that were responsible. And I had quite a long talk with him. He spoke pretty good English, and then we spoke a little bit in German. But he never let up until the day he died. Because 02:15:00he got records--he's one of the people that helped the Israelis locate that Dr. Mengele in South America. And he also helped them with Eichmann [Adolf Eichmann]. Just a remarkable person. He was arrested when he was a young man. He was an architectural student, sent from one camp to the other and treated miserably.

So after that, we went back to Munich. Started to process some of those--the documents from Mauthausen we didn't have, because I think the Russians came in and they took those and took them to Vienna. I'm not sure. Anyway, we had the ones from Dachau. I don't think we had anything from Ebensee. We processed that stuff from Dachau. And I mean just to--the Germans, they kept records and had 02:16:00photos. They even had films of what they were doing to those prisoners. And it was an endless, endless job to try to do this and to translate it into English. Extremely difficult. Extremely difficult. Plus the fact--remember, in those days, there were no copiers. They had to type it up. And they had a mimeograph machine. (laughs) And then, there was no recorder either. They had something which was brand new at that time. This was in the spring of '45. They called it a wire recorder. You know, there were no tape recorders, and some of the interviews that we did with the inmates from the camp, a lot of them you couldn't talk to. But a lot of them we did. And then, some of the German 02:17:00officers that we interviewed, we did it on a wire recorder. And then you had to type a mimeograph master and then run it off on mimeograph. It's most unfortunate that we couldn't do better.

Well, from there, we were moved to the town of Ludwigsburg to interrogate more German prisoners, high-ranking German prisoners. And then, we were sent to Heidelberg. And Heidelberg, what the people in Heidelberg called the American university, which is a university that was founded in 1200 or 1300--it's been there. And apparently many years ago, it fell into disrepair. And I don't know, 02:18:00Rockefeller or some wealthy American gave them millions of dollars to modernize it and bring it back in shape. So that's why they called it the American university, but it's really an old German university. They cleaned out the entire library of the university, which was a three, four-story building. Cleaned it. Took everything out of there, turned it over to the university, downtown. And then they brought all these captured documents that the army had from everywhere. It was the Seventh Army Document Center, and there were others. And that's where they decided to go through all of those records, including some of Hitler's personal diaries. And I've read those myself, because on night duty 02:19:00I always managed to get the key to the safe and read some of the stuff.

My section was the German Foreign Office. The files of the Foreign Office from the end of World War I through the Nazi period and right through the end, you know. It was so unbelievable. You wouldn't believe how much support those Nazis got from American companies. We were there. We couldn't believe it. We said, Did you ever hear of this? The Hearst papers. Well, Charles Lindbergh everybody knew. Henry Ford everybody knew. DuPont, Bakelite Corporation, IBM [International Business Machines]. IBM worked with the Nazis. In those days they had punch cards to keep track of some of the inmates in the concentration camps. 02:20:00We couldn't believe what we found there. And ever since then, whenever I learn something that is astonishing and unusual, I say to myself, To me nothing is astonishing or unusual. I couldn't believe how much support they got from people in this country, strictly for business reasons. In any event, that's where we processed all of those documents and tried to sort them and translate them, and it was an endless job.

SLOAN: It's a huge job.

MILLER: Now, technically, I was entitled--you know, you got so many points when you were in combat, for each month that you were over there. And then I could have gone home. And they asked me and some of the other fellows to stay and help them process. So I stayed there until March of--February of 1946. And we 02:21:00processed all those papers. And I'll tell you, it was an eye-opener. And after a while, you become so immune to all of this stuff that you read, all of the things that they did and how everybody in the German--not just the party but everybody in the German government, how deeply they were involved in all this, including the meeting that settled on the Final Solution. The Endlösung, everybody knew.

The other thing that we did in Heidelberg, there was a unit called the Monument Unit. They brought all those art objects that the Germans had stolen everywhere. 02:22:00And they were hidden near Berchtesgaden in a salt mine, and then in Central Germany in a salt mine. And, you know, they had cleaned out all the museums and the churches and the altar pieces. And it was just unbelievable. We worked together with those people because some of them tied into the work that we were looking at. Like Goering, he set up a special unit. He stole more artwork than any other three people put together. And they gave some name to this unit. Everybody would say, What is that? Well, that's the Hermann Goering Unit.

Finally, in March of--in April of--no, in March--in February of 1946, I had enough. I said, "Listen, I've been in the army now close to four years. I've 02:23:00done my duty. I want to go home. I have a father and mother." And my dad had just moved from Austin to San Antonio and had started a small business, a business of his own. And I felt, Okay, I want to get home and help my father and his business, and we started out a very small business.

SLOAN: Now, what was the business?

MILLER: The business was called Miller Curtain Company. It was a manufacturer of curtains and draperies. It has an interesting aspect to me. When we first came to Texas, when we first came to San Antonio and Seguin, a lot of people didn't like foreigners coming in. Like we have the problem today with the immigrant[s]. Oh, they're going to take jobs away. Don't forget, it was still the end of the Depression, 1938. And a lot of people--it wasn't an overt anti-Semitism. But it 02:24:00was, Oh, we don't need these damn foreigners to come in here to take our American jobs away. Well, we started this very small business. Started it with four employees, worked very hard. I mean, it was--like I always tell everybody, the first twenty-five years were the hardest. But the business grew and developed, and we worked endless hours. I met my wife about that time. We got married, had twins.

SLOAN: Well, I need that story. How did you meet Dorothy?

MILLER: I met her at my cousin's wedding, a blind date. But anyway, just before the Chinese killed our business here a few years ago, we had fourteen hundred employees here in San Antonio. We had three buildings. One of them worked the night shift. We had fourteen hundred people. And I always think to myself, 02:25:00Somebody said this guy is coming over here to steal our jobs. And I was very proud of the fact that I was able to provide good jobs to fourteen hundred San Antonio families. And then, little by little, the foreign stuff started to come in here, and we were absolutely wiped out. Our customers wouldn't buy from us anymore because they could get it in Taiwan or India or South Korea or China at fraction of the cost. So just a few years ago--I worked till I was almost eighty-nine. I was there every day. But eventually, we just had to give it up. Lost millions of dollars, and the Chinese took all that business.

The worst part to me was, we had so many people that'd been with us thirty, 02:26:00forty years and more. In fact our first employee became our forelady. She was with us forty-six years. And we lost so much money towards the end because of China--basically China--that we couldn't even give them any benefits after the business finally went out. It really bothered me, and it still bothers me. Don't forget, for sixty-five years I've worked every single day. And I knew the older employees real well. The newer ones--obviously, when you have fourteen hundred--and we provided good pay and good benefits to them. Our customers, which were mostly Sears, JCPenney--you know, the big chain[s]--they kept pushing us for lower prices and lower prices. I said, "Hey, our average sewing machine 02:27:00operator with the fringe benefits--that is, social security, health insurance, and pension plan--they made around fourteen dollars an hour, average.

Finally, we set up a subsidiary in Guadalajara, Mexico, to try to adjust. We did the cutting here, and we sent it down to Mexico to be assembled and then brought it back. At that time, Mexico was paying around two dollars an hour against our fourteen dollars an hour. Well, after a while that wasn't good enough for our customers. I entered into a joint partnership with a man in China. He was actually Taiwanese, but he lived here in this country, had an operation in 02:28:00China. And they started making stuff over in China. You know what they were earning? Twenty-eight cents an hour. So from fourteen dollars an hour to twenty-eight cents. And in my personal opinion, all these politicians who promise us they're going to bring those jobs back, they're never going to bring them back. How can they--now, today China is earning more like a dollar fifty. Their middle class is beginning to do better. But fourteen dollars didn't do it. We went to two dollars in Mexico; that didn't do it. Even the twenty-eight cents, which later became fifty, sixty cents; Chinese government subsidized those manufacturers. And eventually, unfortunately, our customers decided to go 02:29:00over there direct and cut us out altogether. But in any event, I was very proud of the fact that--

SLOAN: Yes, four to fourteen hundred.

MILLER: From four to fourteen hundred.

SLOAN: Well, I know you have a doctor's (device beeps) appointment coming up, but I'd like to go back and ask you--

MILLER: I gave you the wrong time. It's 2:30, not 1:30.

SLOAN: Okay. So we've got a little more time.

MILLER: So we--yeah, maybe about another thirty minutes.

SLOAN: We'll stop fairly soon. That experience at Dachau--you talked about all the emotions that you have. One of them had to be rage, just anger at what you saw there and what you witnessed there.

MILLER: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It was so horrible, and the extent of it--you know, it wasn't like some mass murderer killed a half a dozen people or 02:30:00a dozen people. This was a government-operated extermination organization. And not to mention, you know, Treblinka and Auschwitz.

SLOAN: All the extermination camps.

MILLER: I mean some were in Germany. And there was one camp in France in Alsace-Lorraine, in Natzweiler. They were just as bad. And that's why at Fort Sam Houston, I couldn't make those people understand the magnitude of a government deciding to eliminate ten million people. Of course, Stalin wasn't much better, and the Chinese weren't much better later, and I guess we'll never 02:31:00see the end of it. But here, I was directly involved and lost some of my own family.

You know the guy that machine-gunned those SS men in Dachau? I thought they should've given him a medal. I mean, what they did, not only that they guarded them, but they beat them, and they made them stand at attention. They had those--in the middle of the night they called them out. They had a roll call. Freezing at night, they had to stand at attention. Some of the people in the barracks had already died. They had to bring them out there and support them. If the count wasn't right or somebody dropped one of those bodies, those are the ones that were hanged for minimal offenses. The ones that worked, if they couldn't work anymore, they killed them. Some people got to the camp--they were 02:32:00old and sick, and they sent them to the gas chamber straight away. Most of them, they literally worked them to death, intentionally. Because they said, There's plenty more (device beeps) where these came from. So I--you know, you didn't know what to think.

And all those soldiers that were there. Of course, now, they went on. They went on into Bavarian Mountains and into Austria and eventually met up with the Russians. And then they finally settled who was to be in Vienna. And I think we pulled back a little bit somewhere. And it was Russian territory, near Vienna, and the American troops were still in most of Austria, Bavaria. The French were in the Black Forest in southern Germany.

I went to my hometown when I finally had a chance, when we were in Heidelberg. 02:33:00Because it wasn't easy to get permission to travel. Cologne, after World War II, were under British occupation. We had to get permission from the British to go in there because Cologne was totally destroyed. I mean, Cologne was the first city that was bombed by a thousand planes. I mean, it was just saturation bombing. The only thing that was left standing there--Cologne has a very famous cathedral that was started in the year 1305 or something like that. It's directly by the Rhine River, right near the railroad station and the bridge across the Rhine River. Well, the bridge had been blown up. The railroad station had been blown up. For some reason, from a distance, as we approached the 02:34:00[Kölner] Dom, the cathedral, it was still there. But when we got close, it was severely damaged. And my town--I tried to find the house where I was born, which was right near the Rhine River and where we lived later, where my dad had his office and where my grandparents lived. And I mean it was a pile of rubble.

Most German cities were exactly like that. Heidelberg was one of the few that was not damaged because there was nothing there but [the] university. I think they bombed the railroad station. Every major city was totally--almost totally destroyed. But the villages, depending on what was there, whether the military was there, or whether there were factories--like for example, there was a town in southeast Bavaria, Schweinfurt. We staged a huge air raid on the city of 02:35:00Schweinfurt because there were three or four factories there. And those factories produced ball bearings. So they said, Instead of destroying the factory that built the tanks and the motors and the engines, if we destroyed the ball-bearing plant, it will knock out the rest of the military production. Well, we took tremendous, tremendous losses, because for some reason the Germans expected that. And the antiaircraft--I mean, I think we lost close to 50 percent of the planes. But they knocked out the ball-bearing plants. And then in other cities, heavily industrialized cities, you know, they destroyed everything that helped the military and that demoralized the Germans, the German population to 02:36:00where, as the Allies insisted, there would be no thing other than total unconditional surrender.

SLOAN: (beeping sound) You mentioned earlier that Dorothy had convinced you to go back to visit Germany.

MILLER: Well, she wanted to visit. She had been to England, and we had been to Switzerland, and she said, "I want to see Germany." And I said, "Hey, if I never go back there, it will suit me just fine." What reason would I have to go back there? The person that I meet on the street was maybe the one that killed my grandmother or my uncle, you know. And there were still a lot of people in Germany that, despite of what happened, they were still (beeping sound) Nazi supporters or Neo-Nazi supporters. But my wife wanted to see it, so I said--at 02:37:00that time--

SLOAN: Oh, wait wait just one second. We may have lost--can you stop it? You were talking about your feelings going back to Germany, and really, you didn't want to go?

MILLER: Well--because this is a new generation, two generations. And we found some young people in one of the tourist places, a restaurant. And they were very ill-behaved and noisy and yelling and screaming. I said to my wife, "Look at these kids." She said, "Well, would you rather have them be like they were under the Nazis?" You know, well-behaved?

And I had to tell one of the officers at Fort Sam Houston, he said something about what's happening today with these radical Muslims, the jihadists. And he 02:38:00said, "Those Muslims, we shouldn't let any of them in the country, and we should wipe them out." Now, you know how I feel about Germany. But I said to him--he was a lieutenant colonel. I said, "Colonel, I think you need to be very careful before you denounce a whole religion." I said, "Who do you think killed ten and a half million people in Germany? They were all Christians." He looked at me like--he said, "You know, I never thought of that." I said, "Well, maybe they weren't good Christians, but you can't kill ten and a half million people with just a handful of radicals. I mean, it took a lot of people in Germany who were 02:39:00behind this 100 percent." And I said, "These people that committed these crimes, they were not Muslims, and they were not Hindus, and they were not Buddhists. They were Christians." He said, "Yeah, I think we need to be very careful." And that's what they show at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, right?

SLOAN: That's right.

MILLER: How careful you have to be not to denounce a whole group of people.

UNKNOWN: You must have had more stories to tell than I've heard.

pause in recording

MILLER: You might have gotten a name from the Holocaust Center: Bill Samelson. Later he became a professor here, Trinity University, in Holocaust studies and language studies. But as a young boy, he was caught by the Nazis. And his mother was killed in front of him. And his little sister was killed in front of him. 02:40:00And he was put into a number of concentration camps, but somehow he survived. In fact, he wrote a couple of books. But one day we were talking with him, and I said, "I hate those damn--not only the Nazis but the Germans, because there's something in their blood that--aside from killing six million Jews--they've always glorified the military. And they were fighting in the Thirty Years' War. They were fighting in the Anglo-French War, in the German and French war. They started World War I. They started World War II. They're just that type of people." I said, "I hate them." He said, "You don't want to do that." I said, "After what you went through, you don't hate them?" He said to me, "If you hate 02:41:00them, it will eat you up." He said, "I will never forgive them, I will never forget, but I don't hate them. I've learned when I hate them it injures me more than anybody else."

Well, I don't agree with him. I mean, I don't hate them to the point where I would kill every German that I saw, but to me, those people who committed these crimes--not just in the concentration camps, but like I said, everybody in Germany knew about those camps. And if they say they didn't, they were living in a different world, or they're just liars. Like the people who claim there was no Holocaust. But I said--one time I made a presentation to a class of MBAs here at 02:42:00the University of Texas. And they wanted to know--well, basically it was supposed to be about our business, but then they got into my background and we got into the Holocaust. These were not young students. I mean, these were the MBA class. Most of them were executives from companies that wanted them to get their degree. And we talked about it a little bit. They too had no idea what all went on and how this was planned and how these millions of people were murdered.

And one of the ladies asked me, she said, "Tell me"--this was afterwards we talked. She said, "Tell me. Did you ever forgive them?" And it kind of surprised 02:43:00me what she asked me. I said, "How can you forgive people that kill ten or eleven million human beings?" And then it occurred to me. I said, "I'll tell you this funny thing. I talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of German prisoners and German civilians and soldiers. Nobody ever asked me would I forgive them. Never. Nobody ever asked that." And I don't know how Bill Samelson finally reached the point where he said, "If I hate those people"--who killed his little eight-year-old sister--but he was, I think, twelve years old--and killed his mother. And how he was treated in those camps and barely made it. I don't know 02:44:00how he can not hate them. I think it takes a great person to reach the point where you say, Well, I won't forget, and I won't forgive, but I don't want to hate those people. Doesn't do any good anyway, right? They don't care whether I hate them or not.

But as far as I'm concerned, there were so many people involved. There's a book that was written--you may have it in your archives--Hitler's Willing Executioners. When you read that, that tells you all about--I spoke to a German civilian who lived in the city of Dresden--not Dresden, Leipzig--which is not 02:45:00too far from Dresden. He told me when he was there--and he had some kind of civilian job but for the government. But he wasn't in the military. Oh, he was in the military, but he was wounded, and then he got a civilian job. And he said one day there's a whole train--or a bunch of trucks--came to Leipzig, to the big main square, which has cobblestone paving. And he said they made all these people get out of the trucks. And I think they were all Jews, but they were all concentration camp people. I don't know if they were all Jews or not. They made those people dig up all those cobblestones in that whole square with their bare hands. And they beat them and kicked them and killed some of them. And then when they had them all out, he said they made them put them back. And he said there were thousands of Germans standing around. And he said, "Guess what? They were 02:46:00cheering them!"

There's something--there's something in there--you know, you don't want to condemn a whole nation. Obviously, all people are not the same. My father had a few friends, non-Jewish friends that we know how they felt. They helped us, and they were not Nazis. But if you want to define the German nationality in a few words, the word that comes to my mind is arrogance. For some reason, they considered everybody other than Germans inferior. In fact, they even coined a word for the people in Eastern Europe. They called them Untermenschen, 02:47:00sub-humans. And the German people were the Herrenvolk, the super race. And everybody else should be slaves. There's something in there. And we can't deny that the Germans have very, very fine people in all areas of science and industry and education, very civilized and highly cultured. Maybe German engineering, there's nothing quite like it. But for some reason, to consider other people inferior, that's what's wrong.

SLOAN: When I think of you in Heidelberg, in this library, reading these documents--that's what's coming back to you over and over again in these--

MILLER: That is so unbelievable. And the more we read, the more astounded we got. And there were--some of the other officers that were there, they'd say, Did you see this file? Did you see this file? Couldn't believe it. But it wasn't only Americans that helped. In France, they had--and those Frenchmen suffered badly under the German occupation. But they had a lot of collaborators in France. And a lot of people were arrested because somebody denounced them. The German SS, they had units--special separate units of foreign troops that wanted to fight with the Nazis. One were the Ukrainians. And there were some guards in Dachau that were Ukrainian SS. They were the worst of all.

I interrogated a German officer who was fighting in Yugoslavia. Because first the Italians were in Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslavs had a lot of resistance fighters and gave the Italians a lot of trouble. Finally, the Nazis decided to send troops of their own, German troops. And they went into Yugoslavia, and they went into Greece, Romania, Bulgaria. This German officer told me, he said, "The Yugoslav resistance fighters, they gave us a tough time." Because there were two groups of resistance fighters. One of them were the ones that supported the old system and the king, and the other one was--were the Communists. And that turned 02:50:00out later to be Tito whose real name was Broz. And he killed Mihailović, who was the leader of the other group. But this German officer told me, he said, "I know we did things that were bad, but I have never seen any country as bad as the Croats." I said, "Why the Croats?" Well, Yugoslavia consisted of, I don't know, seven or eight different provinces. Hate each other with a passion. They killed each other, they raided each other's villages, stole their cattle. You know, up in those mountains. He said, "Those Croats were worse than the Germans." And he said, "I know we were no choirboys." So he was shocked about what he found there.

And the Ukrainians, they were known to be bad. I had a friend who flew supplies to the Yugoslav Underground, out of Italy, I think, from Foggia. This is the American air force, and there were also British air force units in Italy. And he said there was a big--according to what he told me, he said there was a big fight between the high-ranking British officers and American officers about what kind of weapons and ammunition to drop to those resistance fighters. The British just wanted to drop Sten guns and light weapons and uniforms and medical supplies. Because they said, If it gets into the hands of the Communists when 02:52:00it's all over, they're going to take over the country if you give them heavy weapons. Well, the Americans, they dropped stuff, too, from the planes, but they sent in light artillery and stuff. So this has been going on. This fellow, Mihailović--he was the first really successful resistance fighter in Yugoslavia. Eventually, Tito took over. They gave Mihailović a trial, accused him of treason. They killed him. Tito, who had the heavy weapons and the support of his people. Now, he was not--he was not totally subservient to Moscow, but he ran Yugoslavia as a unified country through methods that were almost as bad as the Nazis.

SLOAN: So we're--end one war, beginning of another, yeah.

MILLER: You had Serbia, you had Bosnia-Herzegovina, you had Croatia, you have Kosovo, you had Montenegro, and there's one other. That country was created after World War I, the year I was born. Before that, they were all different provinces and different countries. Fought each other since the year 1500 or something. It still carried over; very difficult to work with those people.

But getting back to how we felt after Dachau, and then later, Ebensee and Mauthausen. I think you sort of become immune to what you see. It's just like--I 02:54:00saw a lot of my--not a lot, but a number of my friends that were severely wounded in combat before we got down to Bavaria. Because we were constantly with front line units, because we were looking for prisoners. And as bad as it is the first time you see it--you get sick, and you want to throw up. And then when you know you can't help the guy out or he's already dead. After a while, your mind works in different ways. The first thing that happens when a shell explodes and somebody starts screaming or yelling or gets hit, the first thing you say, "Thank God it wasn't me." I don't know what it is, that maybe you have to be that way, otherwise you go crazy. You just have to totally ignore what you see 02:55:00and the things that are happening. You're still in one piece. Fortunately, except for that one little incident, I came out okay.

I had a very good friend, went all through the war, finally was stationed in Southern France. He was there longer than I was. He was from New Jersey. Never had a scratch. Went back to New Jersey, decided to go to school on the GI Bill. Three months after he started, he stepped off the curb and a truck hit him and killed him instantly. Other guys--especially some of the replacement units that they sent us from here towards the end of the war, the first or second day, they got killed or they got injured. Of course, they were very poorly trained and very inexperienced. We had our trouble with those replacement people. And we had to straighten them out and say, "Listen, first dig yourself a hole so you have 02:56:00some protection when the shells come in or when the planes fly over." "Oh yeah, but that ground is frozen." I said, "Okay, you do what you want; I'm going to dig me a hole." They were so inexperienced, and they got like six weeks of training here, I think. It didn't take them long. After one or two enemy attacks, some places we had to retreat. They moved pretty fast. They learned to dig.

I don't know what happens to you when you're in combat. After a time, I think your mind almost shuts out all these horrible things that you see, and afterwards, yeah. I think that night after Dachau, we all got back to our headquarters there in Munich, and we drank a lot of booze. And you feel so 02:57:00helpless. From what I can remember to this day, that horrible smell and those damn people in the town of Dachau telling us they didn't know anything that was going on there when you could smell it all the way. And you're so helpless: how you going to help these people? Fortunately, those medical units came in, and they started giving them some clear broth and some--that bread that they called cake. And I guess, eventually, they took care of them.

Later we went back, and we interviewed a number of the survivors from the camp that were able to tell us names, these doctors, and who did what and even some of the guards. And some of the guys that were in charge of some of the barracks that were--don't forget, beside the political prisoners, there were a lot of 02:58:00criminals in there. And the Nazis put those criminals in charge of a barracks. And it is just--that one human being can do this to another. Including like in those thirty-nine cars, children, women--children--they let them die there. They either shot them or machine-gunned them or let them die from exposure and starvation. I will never understand, never understand--a country like Germany; educated people, you know. How could this happen? I don't know. I don't know to this day, how can they be that gullible? How can they be that uninformed? But a 02:59:00lot of them saw things that were going on and they looked the other way. Maybe they didn't participate, but they looked the other way. I mean, if you live next door to me here on Riviera Drive, and one morning if you see my house and the doors and windows are open and people are carrying out furniture and stuff, and, The Millers are gone. Wouldn't you say, What happened? Where'd they go?

It was a really small group of high-ranking officers in the army who formed an organization called the Schwarze Kapelle, the Black Orchestra. They said we have to do something about this man Hitler. They were the ones that eventually--I 03:00:00think they all died. Almost all of them died. They were such a small group. Now, in France, there was a lot of resistance: the Rèsistance and the Maquis. In England, obviously, intelligence people were active with agents that they dropped into France, in Holland, in Belgium, in Denmark, even in Norway, in Germany. You know the group that they called the Junker, the East German Military, high-ranking military--all the generals came from that area in Prussia and East Germany, owned huge estates, wealthy families. But the greatest thing that could happen to a son in that family, they became an officer in the army. If you have officers and you build weapons, sooner or later you have a war.

SLOAN: You got a war.

MILLER: Yeah. And they adored that. I mean, they glorified it. I mean, if a German officer went into a store and--and this wasn't just under Hitler. This existed under the Kaiser, too--he bought a suit or something on credit, nobody would even question him. He was a German officer. But he couldn't pay--he gambled and he ran up debts--you know what he had to do? Had to kill himself. Had to commit suicide. I mean, they had these weird honor ideas and systems. A German officer--nobody questioned anything that he did. The biggest conflict between Hitler and the German General Staff was, Hitler was a--first, he wasn't 03:02:00even a German. He was born in Braunau, Austria. And he was an Austrian, but he became a German. He was certainly not your typical Aryan: blonde, blue-eyed. None of the others were either. Goebbels: little guy, limping. Goering: big fat guy. Himmler: a little chicken farmer. The German officer corps--I'm talking about the top officers--they could see all the mistakes Hitler was making, and they didn't dare to speak up. The few that did, they were demoted or they were killed. Rommel from Afrika Korps, they forced him to commit suicide because he was opposed.

But they could see--especially after Stalingrad, they knew the jig was up. But 03:03:00Hitler didn't. He didn't. He issued orders in Stalingrad: "You fight to the last drop of blood, till the last man. You don't retreat." Well, they lost a hundred and thirty thousand people there. And they couldn't do anything, except for a handful that finally decided that they have to do away with him. And there were several attempts that didn't work. And then the one in July of '44, where he was injured but he wasn't killed. And still he never allowed any German unit to surrender. When they were coming close to Berlin and the Americans were coming from the West, the British, Canadians, Americans, French; the Russians from the 03:04:00East--you fight to the last man.

SLOAN: Fanatical

MILLER: Absolutely. Absolutely.

SLOAN: Well, I--we're going to have to stop, Mr. Miller--

MILLER: Yes, sir.

SLOAN: --because I don't want you to miss your appointment.

MILLER: Yeah, you bet. I think so. Well, I hope I've given you what you wanted.

end of interview