• • • – – – • • •

Two National Parks Service rangers working hard to preserve a key chapter in Kohn’s story don’t see him as anything less than a hero. Vincent Santucci and Brandon Bies are compiling the story of the secret POW camp known to its soldiers only by its code name, “PO Box 1142.” They and Bies clearly love the unlikely charge they have been given as park rangers at George Washington Memorial Parkway (GWMP) in Virginia.

“Our job,” Santucci says, “is to protect and preserve the natural, historical and cultural resources of our country.” That duty took Santucci and Bies, GWMP’s chief ranger and cultural resource specialist, respectively, down an atypical trail recently, one that ultimately led one of their colleagues from Alexandria to Asilomar to interview Kohn.

For them, the quest began with a plan to install a series of panels describing the history of Fort Hunt Park, which sits along the Parkway. The panels would describe the fort’s Native American heritage, its time as George Washington’s home, and its spell as a World War II military post. Their research into the post, which they knew as a standard-issue POW camp called Fort Hunt, led to one tight-lipped officer who worked there and resolutely refused to speak on the subject. The old soldier still honored a secrecy oath he had made 60 years ago, because he believed its revelation could jeopardize military operations taking place today. The rangers feared that their research was over.

A year and a half later, however, a park visitor triggered the project’s relaunch.

“We assumed there was no one left to talk to,” says Bies, an avid military historian and expert archaeologist equally comfortable giving tours at GWMP as he is digging through an avalanche of historical documents. “Fortunately we were mistaken. During a regular history tour, one woman said, ‘My next-door neighbor was an interrogator at Fort Hunt; he might be willing to speak with you.’ The information he had was absolutely unbelievable.”

The woman’s neighbor gave the rangers their first hint that very important activities had taken place at Fort Hunt. He told Bies and Santucci about a submarine that had been sent by the Third Reich, nearing defeat, to Japan to continue the war against the Allies. The sub was stuffed with some of the world’s most advanced tools of war: V-1 rockets – which had redefined the range and accuracy of missiles; parts for the best fighter jet in Germany; and a store of uranium oxide. More importantly, the sub also contained several high-ranking German technological experts.

When the Nazis acknowledged defeat, the sub’s captains aborted their mission in favor of surrendering to the US, and the scientists on board were sent to Fort Hunt to describe what they knew of Germany’s war technology – which was superior to anything the US had, especially in terms of rocketry and submarines.

“We had thought Fort Hunt was everyday interrogations,” Bies says. “We had no idea.”

Reenergized, Bies and Santucci’s next stop was the US National Archives in Maryland.

“We met with the staff,” Santucci recalls. “They showed us a lot of recently declassified information and said, ‘You have a big undertaking – there’s 742 boxes of information.’ ”

As the rangers began sifting through the boxes, they noticed something striking about the identity of the POWs listed in the camp’s documents.

“In the tens of hundreds of individual forms, transcripts of interviews, mugshots, photos, background, psycho-profiling,” Santucci says, “we were looking at the highest ranking officers, party leaders and scientists of Germany.

“We said, ‘This is not a typical cross-section of POWs.’ ”

Among the prisoners was Dr. Wernher Von Braun. Before arriving at PO Box 1142 he was the foremost mind behind German rocketry. Later, as a naturalized US citizen, he would run NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, design the superbooster that took >>Saturn V to the moon, and eventually earn a reputation as the father of the American space program.

Other less prominent scientists also made impacts, particularly in aerospace – a former SS officer named Kurt Debus served as director of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. Others won Nobel Prize nominations and a National Medal of Science. Some worked on the Manhattan Project. Still others were assigned posts throughout the private sector and in each branch of the military.

Santucci and Bies realized that the story of PO Box 1142 was huge.

With the help of volunteers, the rangers began to track the former prisoners with the hopes of completing the history of the camp, and also began going through the list of the 350 people that worked there. As they searched, a sense of urgency grew – many, including the most knowledgeable senior officers, were already dead. Maybe a dozen officers, Bies estimates, are still alive. They’ve located only two. Getting to those officers quickly became a top priority.

“We have the opportunity to preserve the unheard stories of one of the most important moments in our country’s history,” says Bies, who has spearheaded the interview process. “We are only going to have that opportunity for a short time. This is our only chance.”