My Mom at Hitler’s bunker and other untold stories

In the Recording Evil series on Israel’s Kan-11 TV channel, the children of the Jewish refugees who listened to the secretly recorded conversations of Nazi prisoners in Britain during World War II mournfully confess they had no clue what their parents had done. That regret over the stories never told struck a special chord, particularly as both VE (Victory in Europe) Day and, in America, Mother’s Day, approached.

During the war and afterwards, my mother was involved in US economic intelligence activities. Before her death, she dropped a few hints about what she did. It was only as I researched her life decades later, however, that some details emerged, even as large holes remained.

On May 9, 1945, Germany surrendered. Just two months later, my mom, a single woman a few weeks short of her 26^th birthday, was granted the equivalent of the military rank of captain and sent to Germany to work with the US occupation government. Her parents, Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants who’d come to America from Eastern Europe before the First World War, were not happy.

Charlotte Katz Millenson was one of the super-sharp graduates of New York City’s Hunter College back when it was a women-only school whose free tuition was a magnet to families struggling during the Great Depression. When Charlotte’s parents moved to Washington, DC so her dad to could take over a laundry business, she soon followed.

I interviewed my mom and dad a couple of years before her death in 1993, a time when her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease made it difficult to speak at length. She mentioned something about analyzing intercepted economic messages where she was working prior to going overseas. Her Civil Service records, which I found in my research, told a more dramatic story. The blandly named Foreign Economic Administration that she joined in 1944 was charged with analyzing thousands of intercepted German communications to help guide Allied bombing raids on economic targets.

In 1945, Charlotte transferred to the War Department as a civilian “financial reports specialist.” Shortly after, she was given a pay raise, a rank, a uniform and flown to Frankfurt on a military transport. While working there, she photographed a white building that was the Military Government’s headquarters and formerly housed the headquarters of chemical company IG Farben. It wasn’t widely known then that Farben made the Zyklon B gas used for mass murder in the concentration camps. I wonder what my mother thought later looking at that picture.

In January 1946, Charlotte was transferred to Berlin. It was in Berlin that she participated in the interrogation of Albert Speer, the man Adolf Hitler appointed to oversee German’s wartime economy. That interrogation, my research showed, was part of a confidential US project designed both to evaluate the effectiveness of the Allied bombing and to gather German industrial secrets before the Russians could obtain them.

What was it like for Charlotte to come face-to-face with Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War, knowing the massive destruction wreaked by those armaments? What questions was she allowed to ask? Meanwhile, there’s a photo of my mom posing with a Russian soldier, his left arm around her shoulder, both smiling, as he guarded the ruins of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide days before the war’s end. What were her feelings standing at the entrance to the Führerbunker, literally walking in Hitler’s footsteps? One more untold story. And there were others.

Though I obviously can’t know for sure why my mom didn’t speak more and in more detail about her experiences, I have some guesses. There was, naturally, the confidentiality component, even years later. Moreover, my mom was often reticent to talk too much about herself; my dad was more the raconteur.

But I also think there may have been more personal reasons. After the war, it took Charlotte a while to land a job that wasn’t secretarial. Then, after a few years as a junior economist at the World Bank, she met my father, got married and had my sister, brother and me. Her full-time job became raising three smart, verbal, difficult children on the modest salary of a husband working for the government and a non-profit. It was by no means easy. She did it well and with love. Yet part of her, I think now, remained frustrated. One reason Charlotte may have been reluctant to share more stories about her experiences may have been because of the memories they conjured at a time when “housewife” was the only role she could play.

In  the song “Free Man in Paris,” Joni Mitchell sings: “I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive.” My mom was, indeed, free in Paris, visiting there twice with friends, and, as a surviving letter to her mom shows, did feel “unfettered and alive,” as the song put it. It was the same in Germany. As Atina Grossman writes in the book Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany, for the young men and women in the Military Government, this was “the great adventure of their lives.” Enjoying the benefits of dominance and affluence in a defeated nation, there were dates and parties, “drinking and playing and romancing.”

I value what I uncovered about Charlotte as an intelligence analyst, and, like those interviewed in the documentary series, wish I’d known more. Had there been more time ­– if she hadn’t fallen ill, if we had reached the point in our lives where we knew better what to ask and how to listen – it might have been different. But the influence that continues to resonate throughout my life is from the love that came from Charlotte Katz Millenson, mom.