Rudolph Pins (right) with two other soldiers stationed at Fort Hunt.
National Park Service
Rudolph “Rudy” Pins was born in Höxter, Germany in 1920. His father, Leo, was a veterinarian; his mother, Ida, was a housekeeper. He had one older brother named Jacob. The Pins family was the only Jewish family in their small town. Rudolph was an excellent student and enjoyed the outdoors.
Life in Höxter was normal for Pins until 1933, when his family noticed boycotts of Jewish businesses and hateful rhetoric about Jews on the radio. In 1934, when Pins was fourteen, one of his teachers forbade him from coming on a class field trip because Pins was Jewish.
Pins’s parents became concerned for their son’s safety in Germany and began researching ways for him to leave the country. They discovered The German Jewish Children’s Aid, an American organization that worked with the United States government to help approximately one thousand unaccompanied Jewish children under the age of sixteen to emigrate to the United States from Germany. Once the children had arrived in the United States, The German Jewish Children’s Aid arranged for these German refugees to be raised by Jewish American foster families. Pins’s parents applied for a visa to allow him to live with a foster family in the United States. The application was accepted.
Pins’s last memory of being with his parents was his father taking him to a train station to see him off on his way to America. Pins would never see his parents again.
In 1934, Pins arrived in New York with several other Jewish children from Germany. Representatives from The German Jewish Children’s Aid received the group and arranged additional travel to their foster homes. Pins took a train to Cleveland, Ohio, where a family with a son Pins’s age took him in for six months. Language barriers made it difficult for the foster family—who spoke English and Yiddish, but no German—to communicate with Pins, however, and after six months, he was relocated with another family. Pins later found out that part of the reason he was relocated was that his first foster family had tried so hard to take good care of him that they neglected their biological son.
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Pins was studying at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. As a citizen of a country with which the United States was at war, Pins was ineligible for the draft. Two years later, however, the United States changed this, recognizing that conscripting German Jews could offer important strategic advantages to the American war effort. Pins was drafted in July 1943 and shipped out to basic training at Camp Abbott, Oregon. After realizing that many of his fellow trainees had little formal schooling, Pins made friends by volunteering to help them write letters home to their families.
Veterans of PO Box 1142 attend a reunion at Fort Hunt in 2007. Rudolph Pins was among the attendees.
National Park Service
Once Pins had completed basic training, the Army sent him to Fort Belvoir, Virginia for additional training. An Army Major at Fort Belvoir named Walter Rath identified Pins’s fluency in the German language and arranged for Pins to be sent to Fort Hunt, where there was a need for German speaking soldiers.
From 1944 until 1946, Pins interrogated Axis prisoners of war at Fort Hunt. His contacts included major intelligence assets for the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Among these were Oshima Hiroshi, Japan’s ambassador to Germany before and during World War II, and Gustav Hilger, a German diplomat and expert on German-Soviet relations.
In a 2014 interview conducted by CBS, Pins was asked if interrogators at Fort Hunt used coercion to make prisoners share information. “Never physical,” Pins replied. “Psychological? Yes.” “You don’t get people to talk by beating them or waterboarding or anything of that nature,” Pins said. “If you make life for certain prisoners fairly easy, they will relax,” and Pins could take it from there.
By 1946, the Second World War was over. In Tokyo, Japan and Nuremberg, Germany, the Allies were conducting trials of Axis leaders accused of war crimes. Major Rath told Pins that the Allies needed German speaking interrogators to help with the prosecution of German defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. Pins left the Army and assisted with the trials as a civilian. At Nuremberg, Pins questioned German defendants to gather information for Allied prosecutors. The most high-profile defendant interrogated by Pins was Hermann Göring, an important member of Adolf Hitler’s cabinet before and during the Second World War. Göring was charged with crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit these crimes. On September 30, 1946, Göring was convicted of all four charges and sentenced to death.
While in Germany for the Nuremberg Trials, Pins visited his hometown of Höxter. His parents were gone. Like those of many refugees brought to the United States by The German Jewish Children’s Aid, Pins’s parents had not survived the Holocaust. The German government had deported his parents to Riga, Latvia and murdered them there. Pins’s brother, Jacob, had left Germany in 1936. He survived the Holocaust and grew up to be a woodcut artist.
Pins returned to the United States to complete his education. During a 2006 interview with the National Park Service, Pins suggested he later did more work for the United States government after World War II but declined to discuss what kind of work it was. Pins then made a career in publishing until his retirement.
Pins attended a reunion for veterans of PO Box 1142 hosted at Fort Hunt in 2007. During twenty-first century interviews, Pins described his work at the Nuremburg Trials as “rewarding and interesting,” but criticized many of the defendants’ sentences as “rather mild.” Asked if his work at Fort Hunt helped the Allies win the war, Pins said “I would hope so. But, you know, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You need all the pieces to get the picture, and we got some of the pieces” but did not solve the whole puzzle.
Pins died in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2016. He never married or had children. He was ninety-five years old.
Sutton, Robert K. Nazis on the Potomac, pg 19. Havertown, PA: Casemate Publishers, 2021.
Guide to the Records of the German-Jewish Children's Aid (GJCA),1933-1956, 2004; German Jewish Children's Aid (GJCA); RG 249; YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/7/resources/549
