Peter Sichel, the ‘Jewish James Bond,’ Passes Away

The obituary for Peter Sichel began on the front page of The New York Times two weeks ago and continued on nearly an entire page inside the newspaper.

It was written by Eric Asimov, chief wine critic of The Times, fitting because as the top of the obituary said, “Peter Sichel was many things in his long, colorful life, but he was probably most often identified as the man who made Blue Nun one of the most popular wines in the world in the 1970s and ’80s. At its peak, in 1985, 30 million bottles of this slightly sweet German white wine — its label featuring smiling nuns holding baskets of grapes in a vineyard — were sold.”

Asimov wrote, “By the time Mr. Sichel…took charge of his family’s wine business in 1960, he had lived a long, clandestine life. For 17 years, first in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and then in the Central Intelligence Agency — from its formation in 1947 until he resigned in 1959 — he played a crucial role in gathering intelligence for the United States.”

“He died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan, his daughter Bettina Sichel said. He was 102,”it related, and went on: “As a 19-year-old German émigré to the United States who volunteered for the U.S. Army the day after Pearl Harbor, Mr. Sichel was recruited to join the O.S.S. as part of an effort to build an American intelligence-gathering force where none existed. He served in Algiers in 1942 and ’43, and then as head of the O.S.S. unit attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army as it drove from Southern France toward Alsace in late 1944. Among his jobs were interrogating German prisoners of war and recruiting volunteers to infiltrate the German lines and report back to him.”

“After Germany surrendered, Mr. Sichel became the O.S.S. station chief in postwar Berlin,” wrote Asimov. “He was 23 and known as ‘the wunderkind.’ As the O.S.S. evolved into the C.I.A., and the Allies’ wartime united front deteriorated into the international standoff that became the Cold War, he oversaw espionage operations.”

Needing to be emphasized with the passing of Sichel is a highly important historical fact—especially with the rise of despots in our time—which he shared with me. I interviewed Sichel several times, including before an audience in Manhattan at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—a Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

He told me that in interrogations by U.S. military officers and intelligence agents of members of the German General Staff, they said that if the German army had been opposed when Hitler ordered 20,000 troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936, the German General Staff would have moved to overthrow Hitler.

Sichel said many of the German General Staff “hated Hitler.” They looked down at his status as a corporal in World War I. Moreover, “the General Staff told him that they could not face the French. They did not have the means — the troops and the armaments — to do this.”

In 1936, Sichel noted, the German army consisted of a small fraction of the millions of soldiers it would have during World War II.

Sending it into the Rhineland became a “gamble of Hitler’s and he was successful,” Sichel said, because France and Great Britain didn’t mount a challenge. “The French had a very professional army and then they had universal conscription,” he said. The British, he added, “had enormous problems” including unemployment. “It was the middle of the Depression.”  And there was the British government’s policy of appeasement.

After World War I, the Rhineland, a portion of Germany bordering on France, Belgium and the Netherlands, was to be permanently demilitarized to increase the security of those countries against future German aggression. Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the German military was to be barred from this area west of the Rhine River or within 50 kilometers east of it. Buttressing that treaty were the Locarno Treaties, signed in Locarno, Switzerland in 1925.

When Sichel first told me about this huge, missed would-be turning point in world history, he said that because of rules of the CIA rules and its involvement in the interrogations, he could not discuss publicly, without CIA clearance, what the members of the German General Staff had said.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, however, I thought that with so many years having passed and the parallels between Hitler sending the Germany army into the Rhineland and Vladimir Putin having the Russian army to invade Ukraine, Sichel might talk for publication about what these German General Staff members had said. And he did.

My piece on this ran as my blog on The Times of Israel in 2022 with the headline: “When Hitler could have been overthrown.” Its subhead: “When the ‘Jewish James Bond’ explains how even Hitler didn’t have to be Hitler and the West can still stop Putin’s tyranny, you believe him.” It can be viewed at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-hitler-could-have-been-overthrown/

In it, I cited William L. Shirer, a journalist in Europe including as a correspondent in Berlin between 1934 and 1940, and a U.S. war correspondent during World War II, in his 1960 book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, also saying that strong military action by the French and British to oppose the German move was a moment in time when Hitler could have ended up removed.

Shirer quoted the testimony at the Nuremberg Tribunal of Alfred Jodl, chief of the Operations Staff of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, through World War II, that: “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.”

Shirer wrote that the French army “could have” done this, and “had it, that almost certainly would have been the end of Hitler, after which history might have taken quite a different and brighter turn than it did, for the dictator could never have survived such a fiasco.”

Shirer also referred to Hitler himself saying, “The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.” Hitler also said: “A retreat on our part would have spelled collapse.”

Wrote Shirer: “In retrospect, it is easy to see that Hitler’s successful gamble in the Rhineland brought him a victory more staggering and more fatal in its immense consequences than could be comprehended at the time.” It “opened the way as only Hitler (and Churchill, alone in England) seemed to realize, to vast new opportunities in a Europe which was not only shaken but whose strategic situation was irrevocably changed by the parading of three German battalions across the Rhine bridges.”

Declared Shirer: “In March 1936 the two Western democracies were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact — as we have seen Hitler admitting — bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip by.”

Of a parallel between Germany’s move into the Rhineland and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and responses to both, in the 2022 blog I quoted Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a one-time oligarch in Russia—who became the richest man in Russia but split with Putin and ended up in jail for a decade —saying on CNN: “I believe that actually what we are seeing now is that western leaders are repeating the same mistake that their predecessors committed years ago with Hitler, when Hitler was very vulnerable back then, when he tried to invade Europe and that’s what his accomplices did admit during the Nuremberg tribunal.”

“Western leaders kept saying they that were afraid to aggravate Hitler and they thought, well, if they are not showing any resistance then eventually he’ll stop,” Khodorkovsky said. “However, that mistake cost hundreds of millions of human lives, hundreds of millions of human lives were lost, and the same mistake is being committed now.”

Sichel told me in 2022 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Terrible! Terrible!” A comparison with the invasion of the Rhineland as to response is “very complicated,” he said, mainly because of the nuclear weaponry possessed by Russia. “Armaments of today have moved further than the human mind.”

However, the rising Russian military death toll would, he anticipated, have an impact on the Russian people. When the “body bags came back from Afghanistan, it was the Russian mothers who forced” an end to that Russian war. Further, with “the public involved” in protesting in Russia, if the number of people “willing to face up to the brutality of the police” grows, that will matter.

The Russian army “is not very strong,” said Sichel.

As with the case of Nazi Germany, there is a “tyrant” at the center, said Sichel, then 99 years old, known then as the oldest living former CIA agent and called the “Jewish James Bond.”

Sichel was born in Mainz in Germany where his great-grandfather founded the original Sichel wine company in 1857. His mother with the rise of Nazism feared for the future. “Mama started worrying about the Nazis,” he wrote in his autobiography, published in 2016, The Secrets of My Life: Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy. She read “Voelkischer Beobachter, the organ of the Nazi Party, and Mein Kampf, Hitler’s book outlining his worldview and plans.

She was convinced that their propaganda outlined what they planned for Germany and that they would triumph, not shirking from murder and intimidation.”

His father, however, was in “denial of the darkening social, political and religious situation within Germany through the 1930s.” He said his “mother’s more realistic assessments of the threats we all faced as Jews, certainly had an important bearing on my feelings while being raised in a German-Jewish household.”

His mother “urged my father and his partners to prepare their emigration from Germany,” but they “took little note, convinced that the Nazi government was but of short duration and would ultimately fall, like so many governments before it. This, however, was not the case.

The Nazis consolidated power and soon remilitarized the left bank of the Rhine.”

Sichel was recruited into the OSS because of his fluency in German and French and background in Europe. A main job, he wrote in The Secrets of My Lif: Vintner, Prisoner, Soldier, Spy, was “visiting POW camps to recruit German prisoners of war to spy for us.”

“We furnished these agents with false papers (and new identities, when needed), permitting them to go on home leave, where their routes would enable them to identify troop dispositions and specific targets,” he related. “Though none of our agents were believers in the Nazi Party or especially enamored of Hitler, most of them were patriotic Germans who wanted to end the war, end the killing, and end the destruction of their fatherland.”

After the end of the war, “OSS was split up” and “went through a number of name changes…being first called the Strategic Service Unit and then the Central Intelligence Group,” said Sichel, and then a “centralized intelligence organization,” the CIA, formed in 1947. He became first OSS and then CIA station chief in Berlin. And after leaving the CIA in 1959, he took over his family’s wine business in 1960 and subsequently created quite the global hit with Blue Nun.