Seven decades ago World War II veteran Rudy Pins was part of the country’s best-kept secret — interrogating and monitoring the highest-ranking enemy German officers, scientists and diplomats.
He was required to take an oath of secrecy, swearing never to reveal his role.
The work of Ala Wai resident Pins and the soldiers he served with at Fort Hunt near Alexandria, Va. — just 13 miles from the nation’s capital — was declassified in 1977.
Fort Hunt’s 100 buildings were razed in 1946, and the area is now managed by the National Park Service, which is trying to uncover the history of the secret POW camp that was part of the military base.
For two years, from 1944 to 1946, Pins was a part of that history.
The German-born Jewish-American soldier interrogated German prisoners of war in a secret part of Fort Hunt that is now a Potomac River picnic site where federal park officials hope to establish a visitors center.
Nearly 4,000 prisoners of war from Germany, Japan and Italy were questioned at Fort Hunt, according to a 2010 National Parks magazine article. Among the POWs interrogated in secret were notable members of the Third Reich including rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, under "Operation Paperclip"; spymaster Reinhard Gehlen; and Heinz Schlicke, inventor of infrared detection.
Pins, who moved to Hawaii four years ago, said he personally interrogated a German general who was in charge of armies in Russia and eastern Europe, as well as a German foreign service officer who served in Moscow from 1917 to 1941 and was a friend of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. Another prisoner was the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, Gen. Hiroshi Oshima, who was one of the main architects of the German-Italian-Japanese Tripartite Pact, Pins said.
In 1934, when Pins was 14 years old, he was among 1,000 German-Jewish children under the age of 16 granted emergency visas by President Franklin Roosevelt.
Fleeing Germany, Pins was raised by a foster family in Cleveland. Following the Japanese attack on the Pacific Fleet in 1941, while Pins was attending college in Ohio, he was classified by an American draft board as an enemy alien because he was technically still a German citizen and not eligible to enter military service.
"I was later reclassified … and drafted in 1943," Pins said.
Pins was training at Fort Belvoir in Virginia with the Army Engineer Corps when he was interviewed by an Army intelligence officer. After the interview, which was conducted in German, Pins was told to report to Fort Hunt.
"I didn’t have a clue," said Pins. "I got on a bus to Alexandria and was just told to call a number when I arrived."
Many of the men assigned to Fort Hunt were young boys when they fled Hitler’s regime in the late 1930s, according to the 2010 National Park Service magazine article.
"These men were selected for their loyalty and their basic science skills, but also for their proficiency in German and their cultural background, which could prove useful during interrogations," the magazine said.
Pins said many in the cadre of soldiers had been graduate students and professors before the war.
"They were a terrific bunch of people to work with — a very diversified group of interrogators," Pins said.
He said the interrogations were like conversations about the prisoner’s families, backgrounds and wartime experiences, but force was never employed.
Pins said during the interrogations the German POWs were asked questions about the Nazi order of battle and technical information. They were also questioned about German cities, and interrogators were especially interested in prisoners with specialized backgrounds, training and political and family connections.
After Pins was mustered out of military service as a staff sergeant in 1946, he served as an interrogator in the Nuremberg war crimes trials in Germany. Pins participated in the interrogation of Hermann Goering, who founded the Gestapo in 1933 and later was appointed commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and was considered to be Hitler’s successor.
After the war Pins graduated from Case Western University in 1948 and worked in the trade publishing business in New York.
The National Park Service began managing Fort Hunt in 1933. During World War II the War Department took over Fort Hunt to operate the unit, which was run by the Army and Navy Military Intelligence Service.
Originally part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate on the shores of the Potomac, Fort Hunt has undergone several transformations.
Besides using the fort to interrogate WWII prisoners of war, batteries at Fort Hunt defended the Potomac River during the Spanish American War, and the Civilian Conservation Corps operated a camp there during the Great Depression.
