World Battlefronts: Fat Cat in a Corner

Outside an abandoned brewery in Metz last week SS troopers fought desperately against the advancing Americans. Inside, Sergeant Leonard O’Reilly saw a pair of beady eyes peering at him from a dark corner, flushed out a shiny-booted, handsomely uniformed German. Cringing no longer, the prisoner strutted about, barked orders: he would not surrender to a sergeant—go get an officer of high rank. O’Reilly’s response: a pistol poke in the German’s ample belly. He meekly joined the other prisoners.

Not until next day did O’Reilly, onetime elevator operator from Brooklyn, learn what a fat cat he had caught. His prisoner was Major General Anton Dunckern. Slick-haired, cruel-faced, arrogant, Prisoner Dunckern was a model for Hollywood’s version of a Gestapo bully—and he was Heinrich Himmler’s SS commander in Lorraine and the Saar.