GIVING HITLER HELL

Giving Hitler hell
When Nazi decrees destroyed Albert Weiss' family, leaving him abandoned, it would have been hard to imagine this powerless child one day returning to Germany to mete out a rough justice of his own.

Weiss recounts his years in an Orthodox Jewish orphanage near Nuremberg, where the Nazis first wrote their deadly race laws. A murmur of surprise rises from the younger employees when they discover that one of their board members was Weiss's classmate in Germany: Henry Kissinger. But silence descends again, as Weiss recalls running the gantlet through Hitler Youth gangs on his way to school every day, and the foot chases, the beatings in alleys and the scar he bears to this day from being strung up on a lamppost by teenage Nazi wannabes.

Second World War has begun, and everyone in Weiss's orphanage has been sent to the extermination camp in Auschwitz. Young Arnie, however, is safely in the United States, having made it out of Germany in 1938 in one of the so-called Kindertransports that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the gas chamber. He is 13 when he arrives in this country, with only a cardboard suitcase and $5 to his name. He does not speak a word of English or know a single soul.

Now it is 1945, and the 21-year-old Weiss is back in Germany as a U.S. military intelligence officer trained by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA. Hitler's armies are in retreat, and Weiss, a newly minted American, is sent behind enemy lines into Dachau, the German concentration camp, on a daring mission .... the work of his Army intelligence unit begins: tracking down fugitive Nazis.

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