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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.

The GIs discovered they could just ask the officers about baseball. A wrong answer, and the officer got shot.

I heard this from my dad (WW2 vet). I don't recall seeing it in any documentary. He told me I would have been shot :-/ as I had zero interest in baseball.

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If they spoke perfect English and grew up in the US, why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?

This sounds like it can't have been true, or at least, can't have been common practice, because the false positive rate would be way too high for shooting a person.

Baseball was called the national pastime for a reason. Back in the day it was the sport in America. It had a degree of cultural ubiquity that’s hard to understand for us today. Also I assume the questions weren’t about the basic rules of the game but more along the lines of what was going on in the season at the time. The American soldiers would have had up to date news while the Germans would presumably not.

Nah, this is definitely one of those just-so stories that’s too cute to be true. Like it sounds like the person who came up with it started with the idea of using American cultural stuff to tell soldiers apart (which maybe happened in some form at some point) and then worked backwards to try and justify why it would be a common practice with a harsh penalty (German officers who spoke perfect english because they… actually were American… but didn’t follow baseball?)

Edit: It reminds me of my favorite definitely fake boomer story: That people used to call out speedtraps on the highway by pulling over and standing in a salute… because cops can compel you not to alert people of a speedtrap… but they can’t compel you to not salute… because that would violate the first amendment? Before the internet dudes used to just sit around telling each other stories like this.

To be knowledgeable about baseball is hard to fake. Like the GP said, I'd have been shot. I might know some names of players, and I might even get some of their positions correct. If you ask me about ERAs, RBIs, batting averages, I wouldn't have a clue. I might know a large number of teams, but I doubt I know all of them. I absolutely couldn't tell you which ones were in the NL and which were AL, nor what the differences are--something about designated hitters or not.

Also, they could just have them count three strikes using their fingers

So it's perfectly reasonable that a person of German ancestry would just not care about American sports.

I'm not saying it wouldn't detect spies, but a test is no good if it also results in summary executions of one in every five apple-pie Americans.

When you're fighting for your life, yes it would be acceptable, and yes it happened.

There's no evidence people were summarily executed for bad answers. People were detained through this method though

Operation Greif

What was described above is someone asking another person a factoid about baseball and then shooting them if given an incorrect answer.

You're referring to instances of captured spies (potentially captured by said baseball questions) being tried as spies and executed.

The former did not happen, the latter did happen (which I don't think anyone here would've disputed).

Historically, these kinds of questions were kept relatively simple, like how many bases are there, how many strikes, how many balls, how many innings, what's the name of the referee (answer: umpire), etc. They're also a product of a different time when baseball was much more popular in the US among US youth, with a much stronger youth monoculture, where the only way you didn't play baseball as a kid would be if you were a loner or in a wheelchair, neither of which were consistent with becoming an officer 80-90 years ago.

Wouldn't that also apply to the spies, if they grew up in the US?

It would seem like a German who spoke perfect American English bc they had grown up here would be able to answer these basic facts

>how many bases are there, how many strikes, how many balls, how many innings, what's the name of the referee (answer: umpire), et

What percentage of Germans who grew up in the US and speak perfect American English can't answer those basic questions correctly?

While it might not be widespread there were stories of it happening, and one alleged story of an American being held(but not harmed) because of his lack of knowledge.

A better one I heard is asking about the second verse of the national anthem. The enemies studied it to know it, but ask your average GI(or most americans) what the 2nd or 3rd verse is, lol.... that's a good trick.

Okay, every other commenter here is talking about how baseball is the national pastime. And, I think you understand that.

I'll rephrase the question a bit here: How could any idiot white male raised in the US in the last 120 years possibly not know about baseball?

What I think was happening was that the US GIs would ask the infiltrating German about current baseball. Not Ty Cobb stuff, but Ted Williams stuff.

Also, for the non-baseball fans here, you have to remember that there were only 16 (28) teams back then [0], essentially no trading of players, and no interleague play. So for your team, you really had to know the core 8 players and a few pitchers. Adding in the other 7 teams gets you to ~80 or so (maximum) and they would reappear on the exact same teams year after year. And there really wasn't any other sports worth mentioning in 1943 [1]. Cognitively, it's a lot less than today.

Also, the Germans wouldn't have access to the information about the 'current-ish' state of the game. It was mostly in newspapers back then, and with the war, getting information from the sports pages out of St. Louis wasn't happening.

Same as it ever was, sports is the lingua franca of the US.

[0] 8 in MLB-NL and 8 in MLB-AL, 6 in NL-NL and 6 in NL-AL (yes, the Negro leagues are the major league, but black GIs weren't on the front lines where Germans would be infiltrating (yes, it's more complicated than this simple comment))

[1] The NFL was pretty nascent still.

To add to everything you said, another way to think about the importance of baseball at that time is to imagine that all the time kids now spend on Minecraft, TikTok, Pokemon, Twitch, and YouTube was instead directed at just one thing, and that one thing was baseball.

I would guess it would have to be a question of false confidence, akin to: 'What do you think of the cardinals win last night' when in fact there was not even a game. Obviously not sure if thats enough to shoot someone, but you may detect someone that is bullshitting quite well.

The first time I met my Bride's siblings, I was doing everything in my power to fit in. I noticed her brother was wearing a Miami Dolphins hat. Made the comment - is that your favorite baseball team? Her brothers were horrified. Her sisters were thrilled that I did not know either baseball or football.

I'd get shot for getting that one wrong, too.

I was once invited to a Super Bowl party, and I thought sure, I'll come. So I went, and watched the game for a bit on the big TV. I was asked, which team are you rooting for? I answered "the ones in the red shirts".

That didn't go over well.

> why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?

Because their knowledge of teams and scores and wins and players would be 4 years out of date.

Amazing how nobody can imagine a world before the internet and satellite television.

Following American baseball news from Germany in detail would be virtually impossible in the 1940s.

They did have radio back then, and the American soldiers in Germany must have been following it pretty closely from Germany to be using this interrogation method.

> During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.

This did not happen.

However, at the time, in the massive confusion of a wholly unexpected large-scale German attack, rumours and paranoia were rife, including that of German parachute landings behind the lines.

A result of this was the widespread belief, at the time, that Germans had infiltrated and were giving fake orders, etc, and so troops were indeed widely being suspected, and asked for example the capital of Illinois and so on (and being asked by privates, who did not know that the actual capital is Springfield rather than Chicago, to generals, who did know).

Operation Greif (English: Griffin) (German: Unternehmen Greif) was a special operation commanded by Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The operation was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler, and its purpose was to capture one or more of the bridges over the Meuse river before they could be destroyed. German soldiers, wearing captured British and U.S. Army uniforms and using captured Allied vehicles, were to cause confusion in the rear of the Allied lines. A lack of vehicles, uniforms and equipment limited the operation and it never achieved its original aim of securing the Meuse bridges. Skorzeny's post-war trial set a precedent clarifying article 4 of the Geneva Convention: as the German soldiers removed the Allied uniforms before engaging in combat, they were not to be considered francs-tireurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif

the joke I heard growing up is they'd ask suspected spies to sing the Star Spangled Banner, and shoot them if they knew the lyrics beyond the first verse!

In Issac Asimov's 1980 short story "No Refuge Could Save", the suspected German spy is identified by a word association test based on the third verse of the national anthem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Refuge_Could_Save

What are the last two words of the star spangled banner? "Play ball!"

reminds me of a spoof game show I saw once.

It was something like Are you as smart as a 5th grader?

A question would be something like "Who was the 5th president?" and the answer was "Benjamin Franklin" or similar. :)

Maybe a spy could finally explain to me what it means for light to be donzerly.

I think you may have misheard the lyrics. It's "donzer lee lights". Obviously, "donzerly" is not a word, but all lee lights are donzer.

Oh, it makes so much more sense now.

Implicitly, I suppose that makes the lights on the windward side blitzen.

Ok, I found the German imposter right here.

Oh no! Damn you, Gene Autry!

The general don zerlyite was an important figure in the defense of Ft McHenrry

dawn's early light :-)

I don't remember the name of the film, but there was one where (Soviet I think?) spies were caught because they threw away their copies of National Geographic.

I have my grandmother's NGs from the 1920's.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif

We can laugh about this stuff here, but it seems to happen on the regular in the Catholic Church.

The Roman Catholic liturgy is so stringently regulated that it is in fact very difficult for any priest or layman to stay current after a decade or more has passed. Perhaps this is one of the genius moves of the vernacular liturgy: that the Latin liturgy hardly changed its words for 500 years, but English and other languages are being constantly retranslated and reinterpreted with new Missal editions.

Case in point: the neutering of the Church for 40 years. The Church was made an "it" in English, and only after a top-down correction was issued did she become feminine again. This did a lot of trauma to many Catholics on visceral levels.

More up to date changes include the addition of "Holy" to "...for our good and the good of all His [Holy] Church]." this one is guaranteed to catch out anyone who's not been to Mass in 10+ years, such as at a wedding, funeral, or Christmastime.

A very recent priest's change is "...who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, [One] God, forever and ever. Amen." the "One" is now omitted, as of last year or so, and in fact every church was compelled to scratch it out in their existing Missals until new editions could be printed.

It is these sort of very subtle yet urgent changes that can really trip someone up if they're not 100% current with liturgical directives. So if you ever suspect you got a fake priest marrying you, see if he says "One God" or not!

When the pre-cursor to MI5 would interrogate suspected German spies during the war, they would ask them to talk about squirrels, and they'd mangle the word so badly, no matter who well trained, that it was an easy tell.

Related: after the war, they were concerned that there were Nazi spies still in England they hadn't uncovered. When the files in Berlin were seized, they went through every single asset sent to England. Not only had they successfully identified every agent, and turned quite a few into double-agents, they also noted that very few agents going the other way had ever been detected.

Yup. They managed to catch and frequently turn literally everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System

> There was even a case in which an agent started running deception operations independently from Portugal using little more than guidebooks, maps, and a very vivid imagination to convince his Abwehr handlers that he was spying in the UK. This agent, Juan Pujol García (Garbo), created a network of phantom sub-agents and eventually convinced the British authorities that he could be useful. He and his fictitious network were absorbed into the main double-cross system and he became so respected by Abwehr that they stopped landing agents in Britain after 1942. The Germans became dependent on the spurious information that was fed to them by Garbo's network and the other double-cross agents.

Juan Pujol Garcia was awarded both the Iron Cross from Germany and the MBE from the UK, which makes him a very literal "double cross" agent having received cross-shaped medals from both sides.

I'm very curious to know if he ever wore them both. Would be a fun double-take to someone in the know.

The problem was of course that they were looking too far west.

In the movie “Stalag 17”, the Germans place a spy among the US prisoners. The spy is a German who grew up in the US and speaks English without accent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_17

I remember seeing something similar on Masters of the Air, where the Resistance would question downed airmen :

https://youtube.com/shorts/EJmmq0yc08U?si=dnFXr0IgJh18pmp-

I think some countries in the EU use local variants of that on interviews/exams to gain citizenship for resident foreigners. The UK, as far as I know, has a written exam but you'd better know what kinds of birds are kept at the Tower of London and stuff like that.

> Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.

Curious if you have any links that go into this further. Were they Americans of German descent who rejoined family in Germany, or? I'm sure it's not monolithic but curious if there was a pattern.

The exact numbers are unknown but there are a known handful in units like the Wafen-SS. A LOT of documents were destroyed in the fall of the regime. The encounter shown in Band of Brothers supposedly did happen where a PI spoke with a German POW who grew up in America there's no documentation of it but that's not terribly surprising.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/german-ame...

Very interesting, thanks much for the link!

Mark Felton has a good video on it: https://youtu.be/1dninvXjUzA?si=Qdm6D97qPb8Dmzbl

Otto Skorzeny was an interesting man.

Drei Gläser!

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