Giving Hitler Hell

The family who owned the house had come running downstairs, shocked at all the commotion. There followed a good deal of yelling, not the least from Zander, who was demanding to know who his captors were and what they wanted.

"We're Americans, and we've come to arrest you," said Weiss.

"Why?" Zander demanded.

"What's your name?"

"Paustin."

"Do you have ID?"

Zander produced an identity card: It listed him as in his late thirties, a shade under 6 feet, and of medium build, which was all accurate. The photo too showed a good likeness; dark hair and cool, light eyes forming an arrogant gaze that had apparently made Zander/Paustin a ladies man.

"This is a fake," said Weiss. "You're coming with us."

The whole way back to Munich, as Weiss drove and Rosener guarded the handcuffed prisoner, Zander maintained his innocence. "He kept screaming, 'What do you want from me?'" Weiss recalls. "And we kept saying, 'We'll tell you when we get there.'"

When they arrived at Gauleiter Haus, they began the interrogation immediately. "We wanted to go after him while the shock of the arrest was still fresh." Trevor-Roper, as the senior officer, led the questioning, and Weiss acted mostly as interpreter. For 10 hours they grilled Zander, who initially continued to insist that his was a case of mistaken identity.

"We confronted him with all the facts of his life," Weiss recalls. The aim was to show Zander that Allied intelligence already knew everything about him, that there was no point in continuing the charade. Zander's answers started growing contradictory. Weiss turned up the heat.

"We have your mother and sister," he said. This wasn't true. Weiss had arrested only the girlfriend. But Zander didn't know that.