Shapiro: Who’s ‘the brain’?
By L. S. B. Shapiro
BERLIN, Germany – Security precautions instituted for the Big Three Conference have been intensified as a result of sinister underground developments uncovered among the apparently prostrate and docile German population.
American war crimes investigation officers working closely with British and Canadian field security sections have discovered the existence of several Nazi underground movements, at least one of which is nationwide in scope and is organized on the imaginative scale of a Conan Doyle thriller.
Somewhere in Germany there is one man whose identity is camouflaged as thoroughly as is humanly possible, and who alone knows all the ramifications of this nationwide secret organization.
Allied authorities are aware of his existence and of that or this movement. As yet, he has not begun operations, but his influence is being felt and German democrats are freely warning the Allies that the current quiet may be replaced by highly organized violence on the part of the underground before the end of this war.
Patriots ‘spill the beans’
The known history of this organization reveals its potential danger. as far back as 1942, a special Gestapo commission was formed to study the resistance methods of the French, Russian and Polish undergrounds, to examine the reasons for their success and analyze the failure of German countermeasures against them in order that a foolproof German underground might be quickly organized if and when necessary.
The report of this commission has now become the bible and constitution of the new Nazi terroristic underground being prepared for action.
Allied investigators have come up against the first concrete results of the Gestapo study. Experience taught the Gestapo that “properly interrogated” French or Polish patriots often revealed the whole network of their organizations and made possible crushing countermeasures.
Now, in the new German organization, the cardinal rule is that each cell works in complete independence of the others, and knows nothing of the identity or even of the existence of other cells who may be operating close by. Only one supreme leader knows all and directs all.
Not being underestimated
This melodramatic arrangement is not being underestimated by the Allied authorities. In addition to many unapprehended SS and Gestapo thugs assumed to be in hiding, there is one other frightening fact: stock-taking of captured or surrendered German armament reveals that one-third of the nation’s small arms – from pistols to heavy machine guns – have, as yet, been unaccounted for. Undoubtedly the men of the new Nazi underground movement will be heavily armed, and because they know the death penalty must inevitably follow their capture, they will snoot it out to the finish if caught.
This already has happened when our security troops discovered a buried munitions dump.
A great army of Allied police is now scouring Germany in an effort to uproot this organization before it can get started. For these men, the last and most desperate battle of Germany has not yet really begun.
