German-born Hans Spear lives quietly on Tucson's East Side, but on Monday night he will talk publicly here about his once-secret efforts to undermine the Nazis as a Jewish-German U.S. soldier in World War II.

Spear, now 88, was designated an "enemy alien" as the war began. He wasn't a citizen when the U.S. military drafted him.

The American government wanted his language skills and he became one of an elite group of special agents in the Counter Intelligence Corps unleashed in Europe by air, sea and land.

Photos by VAL CAÑEZ/Tucson Citizen ABOVE: Hans Spear, 88, looks over a scrapbook at his East Side home. Spear became a special agent with the U.S. Army in World War II after he was drafted. BELOW: Some of the medals he earned in the war.

He will appear at a Veterans Day event Monday at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, where a film about Jewish-American soldiers who served in World War II - "From Philadelphia to the Front" - will be shown.

Spear's war experiences are featured in another film, a Dutch-German documentary titled "The Ritchie Boys," which was shown during the TJCC Jewish Film Festival in 2006.

The Ritchie Boys were special agents trained at a then-secret location, Camp Ritchie, outside Baltimore, as counterintelligence experts and propagandists.

Spear, a German refugee, came to America at age 19 with the help of a relative. He was a house painter in Chicago when he was drafted into the Army Medical Corps in 1943.

Like other enemy aliens, he was drafted into the Medical Corps because the Germans "weren't trusted with weapons," Spear said.

His skills as a linguist were recognized and he was sent to train for the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps.

He was attached to the 30th Infantry Division as a special agent of the CIC. Spear said trainees included FBI agents, police officers and lawyers whose interrogation skills would be put to use against the Nazis.

"Hank," as he was known to fellow soldiers, thus became one of the "Ritchie Boys."

He worked in psychological warfare, espionage and interrogation in France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands.

He and other Ritchie Boys interrogated thousands of German prisoners of war.

Before he shipped out, Spear and the other "enemy aliens" were made "instant Americans." If they were killed in Europe working for the U.S., they wouldn't be identified as German citizens.

On June 6, 1944, he and about 15,000 others were transported on the Queen Mary to England.

From there he was flown to Normandy a few days after the Allies' D-Day invasion to begin his work on the ground.

He also took part in the Battle of the Bulge, in which 75,000 Americans were killed, wounded or captured in 1944-45.

Spear said he and other Counter Intelligence Corps agents did their jobs under fire and in grave danger.

He learned to sort out German SS troops who denied they were SS by asking them to remove their shirts "and reach to the sky." All SS members had their blood type tattooed in their arm pits, he said.

After the war ended, he was ordered to stay on. He spent six months with occupation forces working on the "de-Nazification of Germany," he said.

For more than 50 years in Chicago, he and a former World War II B-29 tail gunner ran a commercial painting business. He retired to Tucson more than a dozen years ago.

His favorite war medal was presented to him by the Dutch.

A few months before the Battle of the Bulge, in the Dutch village of Heerelen, German soldiers killed the cows to starve the children, he said.

"The children had no milk for a month."

Spears asked American soldiers to give their powdered milk rations to the children.

To honor him, the Dutch presented Spears with a target-shooting medal hung from a yellow ribbon. Target shooting was the local sport then and it was the only type of medal around.

"I did a mitzvah (good deed) during the war. I gave milk to the children," he said.

SHERYL KORNMAN, Tucson Citizen - Tucson,AZ,USA

FORT HUACHUCA — Landing on Omaha Beach 10 days after D-Day in 1944, Hans Spear found himself moving through France, Belgium, Holland and finally into Germany as Nazi forces fell back from areas they had conquered.

Although Spear wore the uniform of an American soldier, he was considered an “enemy alien” by the U.S. government.

His ability to speak German fluently was badly needed as Nazi functionaries and members of the German military were captured in the waning days of World War II.

Spear’s capability to speak German like a native was easy — he was German born and raised until he fled his homeland in 1938 to escape growing persecution against Jews by Hitler and his henchmen by seeking refuge in the United States.

He moved through Europe as a member of a counterintelligence team with the 30th Infantry Division.

It was not until Dec. 24, 1945, that he was finally saw his Army service concluded, months after Germany’s surrender in May of that year.

Unlike many soldiers who left the field of battle with medals, Spear and another Jew in the unit were not presented a Bronze Star Medal. Other soldiers in the organization were.

That was corrected Wednesday when Maj. Gen. John Custer, commander of the Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca, presented Spear with the Bronze Star, as Spear’s wife of 68 years, Bea, watched.

“You’ve waited a long time for this,” she said to her husband after Custer pinned the medal on her husband.

For the general, the award, while late, goes to a man whose decision to fight for what would become his adopted nation shows how the world stood up to those who would take freedom from people. He said Spear was “a  man who certainly is deserving of it.”

“We live in a period of revisionist history. Some people deny the Holocaust happened,” Custer said.

But a person like Spear knows the truth of those times because he lived through them, when members of his family were killed by the Nazis, the general said.

Awarding of the medal to Spear was not to revise history but “to correct history” by honoring him, Custer said.

And, he said, that the medal was being presented at Fort Huachuca should not be lost on people, since it is the home of training today’s soldiers into many intelligence fields.

While Spear was initially going to be an enlisted medic, he was chosen for duty in counterintelligence and became one of the famous “Richtie Boys,” a name given to those who were from Europe — many of them Jews — and tasked to provide critical support to the American Army.

Camp Richtie, Md., was the post where the soldiers trained before heading overseas for duty. The late Maj. Gen. Gerd Grombacher, a Sierra Vistan and also a German Jew who fled his homeland before World War II broke out, was a member of the Richtie Boys. Grombacher’s widow, Ellen, who lives in Sierra Vista, was in the audience Wednesday. Grombacher once commanded Fort Huachuca.

Soldiers such as Spear used guile and other means to entice Nazis and German military personnel to surrender, and then went on to interrogate them or act as interpreters to help the U.S. war effort, Custer said.

“These men had a real impact,” he said.

Spear spoke to the audience a number of times, many of it filled with humor, some of it biting, as he told about the importance of what the Richtie Boys did.

Many of those who listened to him were friends from Tucson, where he and Bea live.

Spear said there can be no denying that as he went through western Europe he knew his mission was to help shorten the war, so fewer Americans and civilians would have to die.

In June 1945, his executive officer wrote a commendation naming Spear as “an intelligent, loyal and industrious and reliable agent.” His dedication to the U.S. Army was without question, the officer said of his work with the division’s counterintelligence detachment. “While (he) is a native of Germany, his loyalty to the United States cannot be doubted,” even in face of possible execution by the Germans if captured, the officer wrote.

While Spear waited more than six decades to be honored with the Bronze Star Medal, he told Custer about an item he was given by a female Czech Jew who was forced to make bullets out of aluminum for the Germans.

She had stolen a piece of the metal and carefully shaped it into the tablets of the 10 Commandments and incised on them in Hebrew those articles of faith. Since he helped her near the end of the war, she wanted him to have the small metal piece. At first Spear refused, but the woman insisted and he accepted the item which he has to this day.

Spear told Custer the story as the two men sat on the stage in Fitch Auditorium where the ceremony was held. “This means more to me than any other thing,” Spear said of the small thin piece of aluminum.

It was perhaps appropriate that the ceremony ended with Spear, his wife, Custer and the audience standing as everyone sang the national anthem.

Custer stood at attention as husband and wife held their hands over their hearts.  Sierra Vista Herald - Sierra Vista,AZ,USA