Posted on 11/11/2019 8:10:09 AM PST by billorites
It was 1944. Martin Gelb, an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, was behind Nazi lines with a .45 and a Tommy gun.
“I was asked to do a lot of strange things, but you follow orders. It did get a little crazy,” the 100-year-old OSS veteran from Hudson, N.H., told the Herald last week.
He was part of William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s small crew of intelligence operatives working with the French resistance, hunting down German scientists and rounding up war criminals.
He was an expert radio operator who knew Morse code and International Morse code who slipped into France and Germany along with the D-Day invasion. He remained in Europe all the way through the Nuremberg trials.
“I was assigned to an advance radio group that would contact resistance fighters,” he said. “Everything was secret. So secret.”
He doesn’t highlight that he was a Jew fighting against the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but he doesn’t hide the fact that he was driven to succeed. He’s partially blind but his mind is sharp. Martin Gelb is one of the Heroes of a Generation the Herald is chronicling.
But unlike other World War II veterans, his bravery remained top secret until records from the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA — were declassified in 2008. He was recently awarded the OSS Congressional Gold Medal for his service.
This centenarian said he has seen more than he cares to remember. His name was on a list of spies the Germans kept locked up in a safe in Paris, until the Allies unlocked that vault. But that was “a joke” fellow spies could laugh off, he said.
Buchenwald was another story. “I shot my Tommy gun in the air,” Gelb said when asked about liberating the concentration camp — German’s first and one of the largest.
Gelb’s daughter, Nancy Sag, 72, said her father has “compartmentalized the horror” of World War II.
But photos Gelb took while in the camp capture the inhumanity. He wrote on the back of one picture: “This is one of the few sights left behind at Buchenwald prison. I took this and many others. the furnaces were still smoldering with bodies in there when we reached there. Stacks of bodies were found all over the camp. Hundreds of others were too far gone and dying of starvation in the filthy barracks that house 1,000-1,800.”
He said he has “no idea” why he was assigned to liberate the camp. “All I know is I have that picture from the camp.” He was angry, though. And that kept him accepting one dangerous assignment after another.
“I was pretty wild and uncontrollable but they kept promoting me,” he said. “I resented the treatment that the German people, and particularly the Polish people, gave the Jewish people. It just upset me.”
Gelb recalls a mission to capture a German engineer in Germany, only to lose him to the Russians who got there first. That “engineer,” Gelb said, was involved with nuclear science. He had to shoot his way to safety using his Tommy gun that day.
He avoided snipers, was almost shot in the Battle of the Bulge, hauled German industrialists to the Nuremberg trials and said he once got into trouble with Gen. Omar Bradley — commander of the First Army — when he refused to leave an officer’s mess hall because he had an enlisted man with him.
“Bradley asked me ‘Who’s your commanding officer?’ And I said William Donovan.”
“Wild Bill? I know Wild Bill,” Bradley answered, Gelb said. And the general let the two men have lunch.
“I was completely different then than I am now,” Gelb says. “It seemed every time they sent me on a mission it was behind the lines.
“I never spoke about the war, what I did or what the problems were,” he added of his decades of silence. “It was classified. … My wife, my daughter, my son never knew what I did. It was just a part of my life that was over.”
Martin Gelb remains humble. “I don’t know if I was fearless,” he added, “all I know is a few times, I disobeyed orders and I got rewarded for it.”
The OSS wanted spies who could think on the run. “The ideal OSS candidate was described as a Harvard PhD that could handle himself in a bar fight,” said Charles Pinck, a native of Massachusetts and president of the OSS Society. “The OSS needed people who could think and act independently.”
People like Martin Gelb.
Appreciate his service, but I suspect this another article to make the CIA to be the “good guys” prior to stuff coming out about their involvement in a coup attempt against the results of the 2016 election.
There's a man! I think he is the greatest man in American history with the distinction of being one of the least-known in our generation.
I doubt if any of the OSS people would recognize today’s CIA....probably kill a bunch of them.
Have you ever seen a commie drink a glass of water?
Thanks billorites.
"I was completely different then than I am now... It seemed every time they sent me on a mission it was behind the lines.... I don’t know if I was fearless... all I know is a few times, I disobeyed orders and I got rewarded for it."
I know one of Bill Donovan’s grandchildren.
Most of the OSS veterans were driven out in the early years of the CIA, deemed “unacceptable” by the Washington establishment. The last of them were scapegoated for the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation (which was conceived very differently from what was enacted) in 1961, and removed.
Ironically, the word "gelb" in German means "yellow."
I had a physics teacher that had been OSS and occasionally talk about some of the nonviolent activities head had been in.
Years later when I learned more about the OSS I wish I had asked some questions, but my father was career Navy and all his friends had some letters with their name, nothing unusual.
So where does that grandchild live? Donovan was from Buffalo.
If I told you I’d have to kill you.
Mid Atlantic
Close enough; thanks; what an honor!
Praise the Lord for heroes like Martin Gelb. I’m sure we have some today with that potential, but they are held back by today’s CIA and the State Dept.
I knew an elderly gentleman in this area who used to volunteer his expertise (he was an attorney) in matters of local government. I asked him once why he was so generous with his time. He said that he was with the first troops to liberate Bergen-Belsen and that the sights still haunted him. He vowed to do everything he could to ensure good government for a free people for as long as he lived. He’s gone now, but I’ll never forget him.
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