The Catcher Behind Home Plate Was a Spy

Once upon a time in America, baseball was not only the National Pastime but also the national obsession, an idyl of summer. Every town and city had a team. Abbott and Costello made their bones with their classic routine "Who's on First?" Baseball was the great equalizer on sandlot and ballpark. Everybody knew the words to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," and everybody shared in the enthusiasm for the home team.

Baseball was the great equalizer for Jews in the common excitement of the sports culture, as it eventually would be for blacks and Hispanics. But Detroit fans threw pork chops at Hank Greenberg, the Jewish first baseman for the Tigers who came close to breaking Babe Ruth's home run record that everyone thought would stand forever. He was admired by Jews and Christians alike when he declined, on religious principle, to play on Yom Kippur during a close pennant race.

Aviva Kempner, the daughter of Holocaust survivors who makes award-winning documentary movies about Jewish heroes in sports, entertainment and education (including Greenberg), has aimed her camera at another Jewish baseball player in a documentary film called "The Spy Behind Home Plate." She introduced it on Memorial Day weekend in Washington.

Moe Berg risked his life as a spy before, during and after World War II. He spent 14 years in the majors, playing for four different teams, including the old Washington Senators when they won the World Series in 1924. The documentary is fascinating and timely, arriving when rank anti-Semitism is emerging again.

We watch Berg carousing with Ruth and a team of all-stars dispatched to Tokyo before World War II to undercut growing Japanese hostility to America. Japanese fans loved the players, including Berg, but the trip fell short of its worthy goal, like a futile ninth-inning rally. Berg, armed with a movie camera, posed as a visitor to get to the roof of a hospital and took panoramic shots of the city. His film was used in the briefing of B-25 crews who flew the famous "thirty seconds over Tokyo" in the early days of the war. He later impersonated a student at a lecture in Switzerland led by the chief Nazi scientist at work on an atomic bomb. Berg was armed with a gun and a cyanide pill, and instructed to assassinate the scientist and then swallow the pill if he concluded the Germans were close.

Berg was the original "good field, no hit" prospect but had a rifle arm on which few runners dared steal a base. He was a student of the game and just about everything else. Casey Stengel called him "the brainiest man in baseball," the "strangest" man he ever knew in baseball. Berg had a priceless gift for handling pitchers. He graduated from Princeton, a brilliant student when "Jewish Princetonian" was almost an oxymoron. A star on the Princeton diamond, he was invited to join an elite eating club with the stipulation that he not attempt to recruit other Jews. He declined. He eventually mastered eight languages, including Japanese. He read voraciously throughout his life, forming a habit (which particularly endears him to me) of devouring up to 10 newspapers every day, from the front page to the back, and putting what he read to a prodigious memory.

Anti-Semitism is not what it was when Berg encountered it. A few weeks ago, San Francisco State University, facing a lawsuit by two Jewish students alleging religious discrimination, said it would spend $200,000 to promote "viewpoint diversity" (including but not limited to Zionist and pro-Israel viewpoints).

A few college presidents have stood up to mounting anti-Semitism. When the College Council at Pitzer College in California resolved to prevent an exchange of students with the University of Haifa, the president of Pitzer refused to implement the resolution. When a professor at the University of Michigan refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student who had applied to the University of Haifa, the university disciplined him for "political unprofessionalism."

But there's often a refusal to call the ancient evil for what it is. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives watered down a mild rebuke of Rep. Ilhan Omar for saying Israel had "hypnotized" the world, rewriting it to make it a catchall criticism of everything hateful. Anti-Semitism is often described in the media as the work of right-wing extremists in both Europe and America, but here it's usually the work of radical Muslims and anti-Israel ideologues. Felix Klein, the German minister for monitoring anti-Semitism in Germany, says it's "problematic" to say whether left or right is to blame. But it's important to denounce anti-Semitism no matter the source, no matter the numbers. It's a lot more serious than "who's on first."

The book written about his life as a spy called ”The Catcher Was a Spy” by Nicholas Dawidoff. Shooting Heisenberg would have been a very serious step, because the U.S. embassy in Switzerland was key to acquiring intelligence about Nazi Germany and especially about their progress in developing an atomic bomb. Several scientists escaping the Nazis in the 30’s emphasized that Germany at their departure was well on the way to developing the atomic bomb, and well ahead of the British and Americans. Albert Einstein sent a confidential letter to FDR warning that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics had been taken over by the military, and that a nuclear chain reaction in uranium could lead to construction of a bomb of enormous power. Germany had acquired Europe’s only uranium mine when subjecting Czechoslovakia. After conquering Europe, the Nazi’s placed Norway’s heavy-water plant at Rjukan under I.G. Farben’s control with the directive to vastly increase its output, which the cartel did by increasing its budget 1000%. Defeating France in June 1940 meant the Germans obtained control of Europe’s only cyclotron.

Fascinating stuff. In a previous life, I met one of the key figures who was in on the heavy water sabotage partisan operations in Norway. He was a very non-descript sort of guy, but something of a national hero for a time. Like most rural Norwegians, he grew up on skis and got his team in and out fast to do the business of delaying Hitler's atom bomb.

My Dad always claimed that Ike slowed down Patton's invasion of Germany proper intentionally because FDR was fond of Joe Stalin and wanted to give the Red Army time to grab their share of German occupied territory.

Thus, the allied armies in the west were essentially halted along the Ardennes line in October 1944 while the Red Army was allowed to advance in the east. Part of the reason for the pause was, of course due to the Allied fiasco with Operation Market Garden, but Patton's third army could have driven north (as it eventually had to do in the Battle of the Bulge) if the supply line logistics had been available at the time.

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

..................

Since the article didn't include much, other than spy. As someone who has forgotten several languages I knew as a youth, I am impressed by that, not to mention his other activities. Including baseball

Moe Berg

Morris “Moe” Berg (1902-1972) was an American catcher in Major League Baseball from 1926-1939. He later became a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Berg was born in New York City on March 2, 1902. After graduating from Princeton in 1923, he began his career in Major League Baseball as a catcher, playing for several teams, including the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox. He was never more than an average player, often spending time on the bench, but his soaring intellect and gift for languages earned him the title of "brainiest guy in baseball." Berg was fluent in German, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and had some knowledge of at least a dozen other languages. In three years during the off season, he earned a law degree from Columbia University in 1928 and eventually took a position with a Wall Street law firm while still playing baseball.

After several disappointing seasons with the Red Sox, and two years of coaching, Berg quit baseball in August 1939 and began looking for a way to get involved with the war effort.

The Alsos Mission

In 1943, Berg was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services to travel overseas and spy on the German atomic bomb program. Berg's gift for languages and quick wit made him the perfect candidate for the job, and he was selected for a special mission codenamed "Project Larson", as part of the ongoing Alsos Mission. The purpose of Project Larson was to interview top Italian physicists to see if they knew anything about a German bomb program.

In 1944, Berg traveled to Italy and met with physicists Edoardo Amaldi and Gian Carlo Wick, who admitted that they had not done any atomic research for the Germans and suspected that even if the Germans were working on an atomic bomb it would have taken them at least a decade to complete it. Berg continued to visit with other Italian scientists throughout the summer, though little was learned about a German nuclear program.

In December 1944, the OSS learned that renowned German physicist Werner Heisenberg was leaving Germany to give a lecture in Zurich. Berg was ordered to attend the conference and to make contact with Heisenberg. If there were any indications that the Germans were working on the bomb, he was ordered to shoot Heisenberg (inside the lecture hall if necessary). On December 18, Berg attended the lecture and quietly sat with a pistol inside his pocket before a small audience of professors and graduate students. He had also been given a cyanide tablet. Heisenberg did not reveal anything about a German nuclear program during the lecture, but Berg was able to meet with Heisenberg's Swiss host and OSS source Paul Scherrer and secure an invitation to dine with Heisenberg later that week. Berg listened carefully to the conversation that evening, but there was no indication that the Germans were working on an atomic bomb.

Berg returned to the United States on April 25, 1945, and resigned from the Strategic Services Unit, the successor to the OSS, in August.

Later Years

After the War, Berg declined several offers to coach for Major League Baseball. In 1952, Berg was hired by the CIA to use his old contacts from World War II to gather information about Soviet atomic science, but his efforts produced little intelligence. Berg died in Belleville, New Jersey, on May 29, 1972.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.