The secret US facility where Jewish soldiers interrogated Nazis

New Netflix doco ‘Camp Confidential: America’s Secret Nazis’ tells the remarkable story of PO Box 1142. The film’s Israeli directors explain why so few people know this story

IT COULD BE the plot of a dystopian novel: In a classified World War II military intelligence facility near Washington DC, young Jewish refugees – some of whom had fled from Germany just months earlier – are charged with guarding and interrogating Nazi scientific masterminds.

Ultimately, the secrets these refugees-turned-US soldiers manage to extract from their prisoners will help the Allies win the war.

Yet this incredible story is not fiction but a secret history that remained untold for more than 50 years. The new Netflix documentary “Camp Confidential: America’s Secret Nazis” tells the story of this facility, code-named PO Box 1142, through the eyes of the young Jewish GIs who served there.

These young Jewish men fled Europe in the late 1930s and early ’40s, and eagerly enlisted in the US Army, ready to battle the Nazis who had upended their lives and threatened the families they left behind.

After basic training, as they piled into a military bus with boards over the windows, they were stunned to discover that they were not being sent to Europe but a mysterious location in Virginia.

“We had to swear: Don’t tell anybody where you are or what you’re doing, not even your wife or your parents,” said Dieter Kober, one of the soldiers whose story is told in the film.

Kober and the other soldiers were handpicked by US military intelligence for their fluency in German and familiarity with its culture. Their mission?

Accompanying top Nazi officers and scientists who had been captured and smuggled into the United States, getting them to reveal the secrets behind Germany’s superior technology, which was giving Hitler’s military the edge. They were also to learn the location of facilities where these weapons were being manufactured.