The Jew Who Found Hitler’s Last Will And Testament
Dec 12, 2010 8 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
For a half-century, Arnold Weiss was best known as a Washington lawyer and founder of an international investment group. Perhaps it was his desire “to build rather than destroy,” to move beyond World War II and the memories it conjured, that kept him silent for so long about his clandestine wartime mission.
Mr. Weiss, who died of pneumonia Dec. 7 at 86 in Rockville, was the man who found Adolf Hitler’s last will and political testament.
He grew up in a Jewish orphanage in Germany just as the Nazis were coming to power, then made his way to the United States at 13. Because of his German-language skills, Army counterintelligence officials deployed him back to Europe during World War II.
In the autumn of 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide in a Berlin bunker, Mr. Weiss was dispatched to Munich on a special assignment.
Many Nazi loyalists refused to believe that Hitler had disgraced the Reich by killing himself. No witnesses confirmed the death, and the Soviets, who were the first to find Hitler’s body, had refused to hand over his remains. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin told President Harry S. Truman at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 that Hitler might be in Spain or Argentina.
Mr. Weiss and his counterintelligence team were charged with hunting down rogue members of Hitler’s inner circle and finding evidence of the German leader’s demise.
In a 2005 profile in The Washington Post Magazine, Mr. Weiss described his war service alongside British intelligence officer Maj. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who became a historian and author of “The Last Days of Hitler.”
Mr. Weiss sought out Wilhelm Zander, the military aide of Nazi Party secretary Martin Bormann, who was stationed at Hitler’s lair during his final days.
Mr. Weiss tracked Zander down in late December 1945 to a stone house near a village on the Czech border, where Zander was arrested during an early-morning raid.
In a 10-hour interrogation, Zander said he’d been arrested under a case of mistaken identity.
“We confronted him with all the facts of his life,” Mr. Weiss said of his strategy. He lied and told Zander, “We have your mother and sister.”
Shortly afterward, Zander confessed and gave a full account of his military service. Toward the end of their conversation, Mr. Weiss asked Zander why he’d left Hitler’s bunker shortly before the leader killed himself.
Zander said he had been dispatched as a courier with an important envelope and then said, “I suppose you want the documents?”
Not knowing what the papers were, Mr. Weiss answered in the affirmative and escorted Zander to a farm on the outskirts of Munich, where the German soldier had hidden the manila envelope in a suitcase at the bottom of a dry well.
Mr. Weiss opened the package and read the typed heading on the first page: “Mein privates Testament,” signed by Hitler on April 29, 1945, at 4 a.m – the day before he died.
In the document, Hitler outlined his succession in the event of his death and said that he would rather commit suicide in impending defeat than be paraded as a prize of the Allied victors.
“Hitler was trying to run Germany from the grave,” Mr. Weiss said in 2005. “Talk about chutzpah!”
Mr. Weiss handed the envelope, which also contained Hitler and Eva Braun’s marriage certificate, to his superiors. Later, Mr. Weiss’s commanders commended him for his achievements and sent him photocopies of Hitler’s wills.
He kept them as mementos of his war service. The originals are in possession of the National Archives.
Hitler’s will was authenticated by U.S. intelligence officials and used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, said Peter Black, a senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Mr. Weiss was proud of his accomplishments but not boastful. He did say that it was ironic that his Jewish eyes were the first to read Hitler’s last words, which implored German leaders to “mercilessly resist the universal poisoner of all nations, international Jewry.”
ad_icon
Mr. Weiss was born Hans Arnold Wangersheim on July 25, 1924, in Nuremberg. He was the son of a former World War I German army officer who became a sports columnist for a local newspaper.
His parents divorced when he was a toddler and left him at an orthodox Jewish orphanage. He wore a yarmulke, which made him a target of abuse during the rise of the Nazi Party. He was once hoisted to a lamppost and flogged by a horde of Hitler Youths.
He fled Germany after his bar mitzvah and made his way to the United States with the help of a charitable Quaker group.
When he arrived with $5 and a cardboard suitcase, Mr. Weiss stowed away on a train bound for Milwaukee. He was eventually taken in by a family from Janesville, Wis.
He reversed his first and middle names and adopted the surname Weiss from a popular University of Wisconsin running back.
After the United States entered World War II, Mr. Weiss served in the Army Air Forces and was assigned to an intelligence unit after officials learned he spoke German.
As an American soldier, Mr. Weiss helped liberate thousands at the Dachau concentration camp and was overwhelmed by the stench of a trainload of decomposing bodies.
He later learned that his father had survived internment at Dachau and that his grandmother had died as a prisoner at Auschwitz.
Mr. Weiss returned to the United States and graduated from the University of Wisconsin and its law school in the early 1950s. He joined the U.S. Treasury Department as general counsel of the Office of International Finance and later was one of the first employees at the Inter-American Development Bank.
From 1977 to 1992, Mr. Weiss was a partner at the Washington law firm Arent Fox, where he specialized in international finance before founding Emerging Markets Partnerships.
At EMP, which handled more than $7 billion worth of investments, Mr. Weiss helped fund international development projects. He retired in 2006.
His wife of 49 years, Artemis Lychos Weiss, died in 2005. Survivors include two sons, Daniel Weiss and Andrew Weiss, both of North Bethesda; a foster sister; and three grandchildren.
ad_icon
Toward the end of World War II, Mr. Weiss interrogated scores of senior Nazi officials who were later put on trial in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity.
In time, Mr. Weiss became frustrated with the slow rate of prosecution for low-ranking personnel.
“The war crimes courts were already backlogged,” Mr. Weiss said in 2005. “The jails were full. They were going to slip through the cracks.”
In at least a dozen cases, Mr. Weiss said, he and his team left vehemently unremorseful Nazi prison guards at the gates of refugee settlements for “additional debriefing.”
Whatever happened to the German soldiers – whose fates were decided by the labor and death camp survivors who lived at the settlements – Mr. Weiss claimed never to know.
“The German people paid dearly for their infatuation with Hitler,” Mr. Weiss said in 2005. “But there were times when justice had to be done.”
