For Your Consideration: Camp Confidential
“Imagine a Jewish boy, a recent refugee from the Holocaust, making nice to the Nazis.”
This is the pioneering human rights lawyer Peter Weiss talking in the 2006 oral history he gave about his participation in a secret American program to capture and coopt the best (and scarily vast) Nazi scientific talent. Even though I’ve known Peter since I was in my twenties, I only learned recently that not long after he fled Nazi Austria to the United States and enlisted in the Army, because of his language skills, this 19-year old Jewish still-teenager was recruited to become an American interrogator.
“There was no precedent for this kind of shit, was there?”
And that’s historian Arno Mayer, who is one of the refugees from the Nazi march on Europe featured with Weiss in the beautiful and bone-chilling Netflix documentary written, directed and edited by the Israeli team, Daniel Silvan and Mor Loushy, Camp Confidential: America’s Secret Nazis. (Now short-listed at this year’s Oscar’s for best “Documentary Short Subject”)
I suppose it’s no accidental slip of the tongue that I keep calling it “Camp Concentration,” because the 36-minute tale tells the story about a “camp”—complete with swimming pool and tennis courts—outside of Washington, D.C. that was created by the American military, while the Nazis were carrying out mass murder in, well, their own “camps” in Europe.
Also referred to as P.O. Box 1142, this suburban installation housed a top-secret American program designed to coopt Nazi scientists—both to learn about the German V-2 rocket program, and to keep the Soviets from scooping them up. (Can someone please explain to me why the Nazis were so together on STEM? Or was it a Weimar innovation?)
In the 1930’s, and even into the early 40’s, thousands of young men like Arno Mayer and Peter Weiss, fled Europe, often learning only after the war that the families they left behind had been slaughtered in the Holocaust. As refugees in America, they joined the U.S. military, to accelerate their path to citizenship and to fight against the Nazis.
But because they spoke fluent German, and perhaps because they were Jews, instead of being shipped to battlefields in Europe, they were recruited to a sophisticated intelligence program. Some were tasked with debriefing hundreds of Nazi scientists at P.O. Box 1142 (some 1600 came to the United States during and after WWII).1
By 2006, the existence of this program was finally declassified, and the National Park Service (which had technical physical jurisdiction over the property dating back to the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration or WPA) embarked on an extensive oral history program, interviewing the surviving members of the intelligence operation.
Even though the fact of the program was declassified, any documentation about what it did and who was involved has long since vaporized— whatever photographs, audio recordings, or documents it amassed at the time were destroyed. That explains why this documentary relies so heavily on animation. And to great effect. The story is told through the eyes of the young recruits, using the voiceovers and interview footage of their older selves recorded fifty years later.
The young soldiers were furious at their predicament, currying favor and engaging with the most cosseted, Aryan, high-ranking Nazi scientists. They were eager to dominate, even destroy, their charges, if not literally, then through their wit and brains, charm and tennis prowess. Thanks to the design and animation team under Jocelyne Meinert at the Canadian studio Little Blackstone, we see the complexity of their emotions, with eyes and brows and postures that bring to mind the humanity of the characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s work (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away).
I don’t want to give away the identity of the most famous Nazi scientist recruit, (hint: think NASA’s first achievements). But he recedes in importance as we watch the torments of Mayer, who as “morale officer,” dutifully takes his charges shopping (with our tax dollars) for holiday gifts (bras and panties), and Weiss, who, despite profound misgivings, cultivates these Nazis over drinks and sports to gather vital intel about the V-2 Rocket program. These two young men, and then as old men, pointedly ask and answer the central question of the documentary: is it morally acceptable to do repulsive things—to treat monsters with humanity and deference—in order to achieve ultimately good ends?
For their answer, and for a visual and historical feast, don’t miss this work of art and storytelling.
And here’s a question: how many secret U.S. government programs have recruited refugees since, and to what end?
I called Peter after I watched the documentary. "How did it feel, living with this experience, and keeping it all a secret, for almost 80 years?"
He paused, letting the question sink in. “That,” he said, "would take a very long time to answer.”
Which suggested to me, that he had just given me an answer. We then spoke for over an hour, as he recounted the almost surreal nature of being a young Austrian Jewish refugee, wearing a U.S. Army uniform during World War II. And every time he returned to 1142, his observations as one who had lived it, only underscored the complexity — even if along with moments of levity — of what he faced, and of 1142’s questionable morality.