Sam E. Woods

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Sam Edison Woods (born May 15, 1892 in Starrville, Smith County (Texas) , † May 22, 1953 in Munich , buried in the park of Höhenried Castle ) was an American diplomat and agent.

Life

Sam Woods was the second child and eldest son of Roderick Sam Woods and his wife Annie Lee, b. Palmer. His father worked in sawmills and the family moved frequently during his childhood. After attending high school in Purvis , Lamar County (Mississippi) , he studied at the Valparaiso University Manual Arts (crafts teaching shop class ) and closed it in 1913 with the Bachelor -degree from. In 1914 he was a brief student at the University of Wisconsin and in 1917/18 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . During World War I he served as a war volunteer in the United States Marine Corps Aviation , including in France .

His first marriage was on August 2, 1917, with the housekeeping teacher Katie Rose Anderson. Shortly after the birth of their daughter Katie Rose, the mother died of the Spanish flu on September 14, 1918 .

In 1920 he taught Manual Arts (on German about craft suntericht) at Mississippi State Teachers College , now the University of Southern Mississippi and acquired here a Bachelor of Science (B. Sc.). He joined the US Army Education Corps and served in France, Germany and Czechoslovakia . During his time in Prague he met Milada Paula Vodracekovova (1902-1993), who in December 1923 became his second wife.

After various jobs in Mississippi, including as head of a rehabilitation program for the Mississippi State Department of Education , he was appointed Deputy US Trade Representative at the Embassy in Prague on the recommendation of Senator Pat Harrison in 1929 . He stayed here for eight years and rose to the position of trade attaché at the embassy. In 1934 he accompanied Joseph Taylor Robinson on his visit to Czechoslovakia and the Oberammergau Passion Play . In August 1937 he was appointed inspector of all commercial departments of the US embassies in Europe, based in Berlin, and two years later, in August 1939, he was appointed commercial attaché of the Berlin embassy.

Woods managed to build up a dense network of contacts in Berlin. These included Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff , Bernhard Berghaus and above all Erwin Respondek . Woods used his contacts for informal intelligence work. He achieved his greatest success in the intelligence service when Respondek, whom Woods always referred to by his code name Ralph in his files for security reasons, informed him in January 1941 of the German plans to attack the Soviet Union . Woods forwarded a report written by Respondek on the strategic, political and economic plans of the German Reich leadership, bypassing the official channels, to the State Department in Washington, which thus became aware of the German invasion plans (see Operation Barbarossa ). At Woods's recommendation, Respondek's identity and reliability were confirmed by his former party friend, ex-Chancellor Heinrich Brüning , who at the time was living in exile in the United States and taught as a professor at Harvard University , and Respondek was subsequently dated American State Department classified as a reliable source. Historians William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason later ruled that Respondek's report was "of truly staggering import" as it provided clear evidence that Hitler's operational directives on attack aimed at the Soviet Union. A little later, Respondek's report was confirmed by Japanese diplomatic telegrams intercepted and deciphered by the US.

In the years that followed, Respondek continued its informational work for the Americans and regularly sent them through his liaison man Woods with reports containing secret information he had obtained. Among other things, he informed the USA about the progress made in German nuclear weapons research (see uranium project ) and about his contacts to Kalle von German Zyklon B developments.

After the American entry into the war as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Woods was interned with the embassy staff under George F. Kennan in Bad Nauheim . In June 1942 the diplomats were able to return to the USA via Lisbon .

Woods received a new post as Consul General in Zurich in August as a legal cover for his intelligence activities. Respondek continued to deliver his reports, and Woods made new contacts, for example with the publisher Emil Oprecht . With his help he got an insight into German emigrant and resistance circles. From Reuben Hecht he received information about the fate of the Hungarian Jews, which he passed on to Washington. Woods brought Hecht together with the rabbi couple Sternbuch; they were then involved in reaching the agreement between Himmler and Musy .

One of the secret operations for which Woods was responsible was the smuggling of US Air Force pilots who had fled their Swiss internment into France. He created a very effective network of escape helpers, which from the summer of 1943 enabled over 200 airmen to escape. On November 6, 1946 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom , one of the two highest civilian awards in the United States.

At the Zurich hotel Baur au Lac he met Wilhelmina Busch, widowed Scharrer, divorced Borchard, the very wealthy youngest daughter of Adolphus Busch ( Anheuser-Busch Companies ). She lived here since 1941 with her sister Claire von Gontard, the widow of Paul von Gontard , and her niece Lilly Claire Berghaus, the wife of Bernhard Berghaus, who also often spent long periods of time here and fled to Zurich from Germany towards the end of the war . Because of their contacts in Germany, the Busch heiresses were blacklisted by the State Department, meaning that their assets in the USA were frozen and threatened with expropriation. Woods used his political contacts in Washington, DC to remove them from the list and get their assets free, and also defended Berghaus in the Allied post-war investigation.

Höhenried Castle
Graves of Wilhelmina and Sam Woods in the Höhenried Palace Park

In 1947 he was transferred to Munich as Consul General; at the same time, his wife obtained a divorce in Reno, Nevada . Shortly afterwards he married Wilhelmina Busch on February 22, 1948. The couple lived at Höhenried Castle, which Wilhelmina Busch had built in the 1930s. Due to his position and her fortune, important political and social events took place in Höhenried.

In the following years, the Busch-Woods couple had the approximately 600,000 square meter park redesigned according to their plans. a. built the Mississippi ponds and an enclosure with white fallow deer that still exist today. In addition, in 1950 Wilhelmina Busch-Woods donated the Bernrieder Park , an area of ​​around 80 hectares, the grounds of which may no longer be changed, to a foundation. From 1952 this park was also opened for viewing.

Wilhelmina Busch died in Munich on November 23, 1952 after heart surgery. She was buried on Wilhelminen-Platz in Höhenrieder Park. Sam Woods became the sole heir to her immense fortune. Ten months later, on his return from Switzerland, he was in a car accident and had to be treated in the American military hospital in Munich. He suffered a fatal stroke the day he was released . He was also buried in Höhenried. On the coffins is the saying: "Love never ends". After his death, the fortune, estimated at over 5 million US dollars, was passed on to a community of heirs who sold Höhenried Castle to the LVA Oberbayern in 1955 .

estate

USM, McCain Library

After his wife's death, Woods planned to move to Hattiesburg with his daughter Katie Rose McClendon , and had part of his art collection and library shipped to the United States. He bequeathed this collection to the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg. In 1976 the collection found an adequate home in the newly built McCain Library , where the Woods Rare Book Room commemorates Sam Woods and his brother Clarence, who was the commercial director of USM for many years. In 2015 the library organized a special exhibition with books and objects from the collection entitled From Calvin to Rembrandt .

Awards

literature

  • John Van Houten Dippel: Two Against Hitler. Stealing the Nazis' Best-Kept Secrets. New York: Praeger 1992 ISBN 0-275-93745-3

Web links

Commons : Sam E. Woods  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Van Houten Dippel: Two Against Hitler. Stealing the Nazis' Best-Kept Secrets. New York: Praeger 1992 ISBN 0-275-93745-3 , p. 24
  2. ↑ John Van Houten Dippel: Two Against Hitler. Stealing the Nazis' Best-Kept Secrets. New York: Praeger 1992 ISBN 0-275-93745-3 , p. 26
  3. ↑ Undeclared War, 1940-1941. New York 1953, p. 336.
  4. ^ Intelligence Throughout History: US Intelligence and the German Invasion of the Soviet Union , accessed July 25, 2017
  5. ↑ Patricia Hachten Wee: World War II in Literature for Youth. A Guide and Resource Book , 2004, p. 56.
  6. ^ In 2010, Egmont R. Koch and Scott Christianson processed Respondek's agent activity during the Second World War in the documentary The Spy from Pariser Platz - How the Americans found out about Hitler's poison gas .
  7. ↑ John Van Houten Dippel: Two Against Hitler. Stealing the Nazis' Best-Kept Secrets. New York: Praeger 1992 ISBN 0-275-93745-3 , p. 76
  8. ↑ Manfred Flügge : Rescue without a rescuer, or, A train from Theresienstadt. DTV 2004 ISBN 9783423244169 , p. 152
  9. ^ Cathryn Prince: Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland. Naval Institute Press 2015 ISBN 9781612513478 , pp. 126-128
  10. ↑ John Van Houten Dippel: Two Against Hitler. Stealing the Nazis' Best-Kept Secrets. New York: Praeger 1992 ISBN 0-275-93745-3 , p. 136
  11. ↑ John Van Houten Dippel: Two Against Hitler. Stealing the Nazis' Best-Kept Secrets. New York: Praeger 1992 ISBN 0-275-93745-3 , p. 136
  12. ↑ See the - SSU - CIG EARLY CIA DOCUMENTS VOL. 5_0006.pdf Statement  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from SSU officer Jan F. Libich on his Berghaus memorandum of December 14, 1946@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.cia.gov  
  13. ↑ Sylvia Böhm-Haimerl: A dream come true , article in the Starnberg local edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung from August 31, 2015
  14. ^ Bernried Park
  15. ^ A Way Through the Woods: The Artful Life and Collection of Sam Edison Woods. In: University Libraries, "Library Focus (Spring 2002)" (2002). Library Focus. Book 22. ( full text )
  16. ↑ From Calvin to Rembrandt: Selections from the Sam E. Woods Collection , accessed July 25, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Woods, Sam E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woods, Sam Edison; Woods, Samuel Edison
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American diplomat and agent
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Starrville, Smith County, Texas
DATE OF DEATH May 22, 1953
Place of death Munich