How Superman Took on the Ku Klux Klan—and Helped Bring It Down

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas.

Henry G.

Plitt returned from World War II a hero, not just to everyday Americans, but especially to Jewish Americans. He had been one of the first soldiers on the ground in Holland during Operation Market Garden and in Normandy as a parachuting pathfinder, and he later captured Julius Streicher, the founder of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, who had been advocating for the extermination of Jews as early as 1933. Here’s the late Brigadier General with the story of his service, and we’d like to credit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection deserving and publishing this audio. Let’s get into the story.

I was in law school in Saint Lawrence University, Brooklyn, and at this time, I was getting close to 1940.

I was in ’38, ’39.

Nine. And my family managed, through an organization called HIAS, to bring into this country some of my relatives who were in the German-occupied areas. And when I heard their story, I just made up my mind that all this — one man was responsible for all this — and his name was Hitler. And somehow or other, I wanted to kill him. Now, that sounds terrible in the light of today’s world, but at that time, when you heard those horror stories, you couldn’t do anything but want to destroy this person who was responsible for it. So, I switched my allegiance in the Army to parachute troops because at that time, parachute troops were trained to blow up bridges, blow up planes, dropped behind the lines, assassinated, execute, and all this kind of thing. But during our period of training, it was very strange. Many, many people came into parachute troops, and before the training was over, we suddenly had ourselves a regiment of men, and now the tactics were not going to be the same. The regiment, incidentally, grew into divisions, and by the time we jumped to Normandy, there were three divisions that went in.

So, you can see that.

The idea of jumping behind the lines and killing it, it was a long way from potential fruition.

It just couldn’t happen that way.

But the only reason, the only reason that I — I ended up with the first group to jump in Normandy — is the man that we had selected as our pathfinder the day before, during the period Eisenhower delayed for 24 hours. We had a chance to go up and see what he had done, and we…

…were very dissatisfied with it.

And my colonel said to me on the way back, “Plitt, I want you to go in, take the pathfinder detachment in, and I’ll meet you on the ground and put a DSC on your neck.”

So, I didn’t have any choice, anyway.

But the point is that that put me among that — we had three airplane loads going in the pathfinders — a total of 18 people per plane for a total of 54 people. Now, the actual flight itself over England was nothing, but when we got to the English Channel, we went down on the deck, and there were some very exciting moments when the ships at sea were flashing the V-F-A victory sign to us.

Right overhead. And then when we got to Cherbourg…

We pulled up to 500 feet — imagine, up to 500 feet! — and we went along the line, the road that we had all been briefed so carefully on and studied so long, running from Montberg to Bologne, from Cherbourg to Montburg to Bologne on down to Saint Mary Glees and Karantan, and so on. And when we got over our drop zone, boom!

There it is! Now…

If you want to know what went through my mind, I was just as scared as any human being could be. Here I was jumping into Festung Europa, which was a Nazi-dominated France. German soldiers — at that time, the Army put your religion on your dog tags, and they did it only so that if you needed last rites or what have you, they’d know what you are and what you aren’t. And they only had three categories: there was P for Protestant, C for Catholic, and H for Hebrew or Jewish. And I had an H on my dog tag. And so, there I was all alone in France, German-occupied, but I was able to pick up 101 men. Strangely enough, we were 101st Airborne. I picked up 101 men, and we attacked the gun position, which was the division mission. Now, the reason we did that is that we were supposed to be on the ground for 30 minutes, and after that, hearing our own planes come in…

…we would put the lights on. That’s what we jumped for.

The pathfinders put the lights on and guide the rest of the units in. For a long time, it got to be very thin and tight, and for a long time, I thought maybe Eisenhower had canceled again, in which case we got to stay here for 24 more hours and sweat it out. Or — and before the “or” really had a chance to take hold — we could hear the drone of airplanes coming over. The first part of the mission, the pathfinder mission, was worthless because these were new pilots who had never flown in combat before. And when they anti-aircraft started coming up at him, they broke from formation. They dropped troops in the Channel. They dropped them all the way north to Cherburg and all the way south of Karantan. And so, that part of the mission was just — was.

And you’ve been listening to Henry G. Plitt tell one heck of a story about his service to his country, and also as a Jewish man, a unique perspective. And imagine having on your dog tag the “H” letter as you’re parachuted into Nazi Germany, knowing what he knew from his German relatives. It’s why he left law school and wanted to, as he put it, kill Hitler.

And he was not alone.

Lots of Jews and non-Jews alike were at that task and at that effort, including, by the way, my mother’s brother, her only brother, who had parachuted into France as well and didn’t make it. He is buried in Saint Laurent Cemetery in France. When we come back, more of this remarkable soldier’s story. The soldier who captured Germany’s most anti-Semitic writer continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on Communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we returned to Our American Stories with Brigadier General Henry G. Plitt’s story, and we learned that the early airborne units were designed to operate behind enemy lines, conducting the kinds of special ops that drew men like him to the parachute infantry in the first place. It was truly dangerous work. While the tactics evolved, he would still get his chance to capture Nazis as the war progressed, including one of Germany’s leading anti-Semites, Julius Streicher. Let’s return to the story.

Maybe ten days before the 8th of May, I saw people walking on the road wearing a pajama-looking thing with a blue and a gray, and I…

…said, “What the hell is this?”

“I got another army here we don’t know about?” But I had never seen that before. And how and why they were out, I can’t tell you.

But they were out.

There, and not with a guard, because the guard would have been a German, would have shot him.

Had no idea.

As you got into areas like Munich and what have you, I knew of the horror things that had happened through the cousins of mine that came back from there in 1940 and ’39. But they didn’t describe concentration camps. They didn’t know anything about that. What they could describe was how a store window would be broken, a person would be taken off the street. If you were a doctor, you couldn’t practice. If you were a teacher, you couldn’t teach. If you wrote a book, it wouldn’t be published. Those things I knew. I didn’t know anything about these camps. As we got in there, it was a horrible sight. Everything was horrible: the huts they lived in, the furnaces that they…

…burned in.

And as we got there, moving up into this area, one of the men I was with said, “Look at those crematoriums,” and another officer standing next to them said, “No, it’s crematoria. That’s the plural for crematoriums.” I’ll never forget that, because that whole moment was just unbelievable. These people were sitting on stoops and porches and on the ground. Their bodies were totally emaciated; their legs were swollen. It was an unbelievable time. It changed my life dramatically right then because I wanted to capture as many of these bastards as I possibly could. Now, how to go about it? We had an arrangement with the burgomasters of the various cities that if they had any known — what would later become termed as — war criminals in their area, they were to notify us. If they intended to hold their job as burgomasters did, they’d better do it. And so, we got a call one night — I don’t know who was on the board — got a call from a burgomaster telling us about this man that was living in a certain building.

We went to the building, and he was in bed, and the minute we came in the door, he reached for a pill on his night table.

One of my boys knocked it out of his hand, and then he said he didn’t know why.

…we were bothering him. He was a professor, a teacher.

His name was Disselbruger, and he claimed to have — he never was a Nazi, knew nothing about Nazism, and so on.

Now, I have to take you back for a moment. When V-Day…

…came around, which was May the 8th, my particular unit of 101st Airborne was in an area occupied by 13,000 SS troops. Now, there we were, 2,000, now in charge of these people who had surrendered.

And when May 8th came around…

My commanding officer — a full colonel — my commanding officer told me I couldn’t use any…

…of our men to go out on patrol.

And the reason, he said, was, “The war’s over now, and I can’t write a letter to somebody’s mother and father telling them their son was killed on the 10th, the 11th, or 12th of May. I just can’t do it. The war’s over for us. If they get killed, it’ll have to be in a traffic accident.” So, he said, “But I don’t object to your continuing to do your scouting and patrolling if you will, but you’re going to have to do it with the SS troops that we have under our command.”

So, there I was driving through the Alps — narrow littles — in a Volkswagen instead of an American jeep, and I got a German driver, SS. And in those days, to make it even more precarious than the height and what have you, the rumor among the SS was they were all going to be executed for being in the SS. So, they really had very little stake at just turning the wheel a little bit, and off the Alps we went.

But in my headquarters, there was a full…

…colonel Nazi. And when I walked in with Disselbruger, he clicked…

…his heels, popped to attention, and said…

“Heil! How the hell can the schoolteacher have a…”

…full colonel do this?” So, I called the division headquarters…

And I said, “I’m sending this guy up to you,” and I did. And he turned out to be Robert Ley, the Minister of Labor.

During these trips…

With the SS, I managed to get the President of Vienna.

His name was del Bruger.

I found Jules Oberg, who was the Butcher of Paris, roaming around in a 20th Armored stockade in an enlisted man’s coat suit. We just spent days and days and days looking for these people. But Streicher — that was a more solitary role because I got in by myself.

We got a tip that there was a…

…high-ranking Nazi living in the town of Widering, in Austria.

…is his name? We didn’t know.

I thought it was Heinrich Himmler from the description, but I didn’t have a jeep of my own. I didn’t have an interpreter of my own at the time, so I borrowed another guy’s jeep and his driver. The three of us went up the hill to this house — chalet, chateau, whatever you want to call it — and I ended my .45 in hand, and I went upstairs.

There was a man…

…sitting on a chair with an easel to his right, painting the opposite out.

And I asked him his name.

And he reached right and back, and he pulled out an identification paper made out to the name of Joseph Sailor. Now, it didn’t hit me quite that fast that this was Julius Streicher. And I began asking him things about Himmler because I thought I had…

…the wrong guy.

And he said he knew nothing about politics. He was a painter. He knew nothing about anything that had to do with what I was interested in. And then, I don’t know why, I said, “And what about Julius Streicher?”

And he said, “Ja, da bin ich.”

Now, I got that only from the “JS” on his work papers.

Joseph Sailor was Julius Streicher. “Yeah.”

“Da bin ich,” which, when translated into English, reads, “Yeah, that’s who I am.” In the car, in the jeep, I had my gun right and his ribs, so nothing was going to happen there. He was going to jump out or commit suicide or anything.

I said to him — this is the only interrogation he got from me…

I said to him, “Sind Sie der Streicher, der gegen die Juden war?” which, when translated, means, “I used the striker who was against the Jews.” And he very calmly said, “Ja, da bin ich,” which meant, “Yeah, that’s who I am.” But he might just as well have said, “So what?” I mean, he was arrogant to the very end. When we got to Berchtesgaden, as he was getting out of the jeep, I booted him a little bit so to accelerate his departure.

And the place was loaded with reporters and this, that, and the other. And one reporter came up to me, and he said, “You know, you just killed the greatest story of the war.”

I said, “How?”

He said, “Can you imagine if a guy named Kohn, or Goldberg, or Levy had captured this arch anti-Semite?”

“What a great story?” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because a Jew would be doing this.”

And I told him, “I’m Jewish!” And that’s when the microphones came into my face, and the camera started clicking away, and things started to happen to changed the rest of my life.

With Ley, I just felt it was a part of my job.

With Streicher, there was a very personal feeling about the whole thing. I controlled myself not killing him from time to time when I had the opportunity. But I had two other people in the jeep, and…

“War and not war.”

“You just don’t kill people who surrendered.” So, that’s the story of Julius Streicher.

“War or not.”

“You don’t kill people who surrendered.” The story of the Jewish soldier who captured Germany’s most anti-Semitic writer, the story of Brigadier General Henry G. Plitt. Here on Our American Stories.