IT IS ANOTHER SNOWY DECEMBER DAY, AND JOHN WOODBRIDGE is once again sitting in the family room of his home on the outskirts of Lake Forest, north of Chicago. Five years have passed since the night he sat here and read about the auction of one of Adolf Hitler’s firearms in a scroll running at the bottom of a televised news program. His memory jarred that night, he began a journey into his own past. But what started as an attempt to satisfy his curiosity became something else, something much bigger and more meaningful.
“Yes, it was Hitler’s pistol that began this journey,” Woodbridge says. “But it turned out that the gun, and my interest in what happened to the gun Teen Palm had given to my father, became secondary to what I did discover about war and heroism and faith.”
In the more than seventy years since the end of World War II, the attraction of Nazi memorabilia has ebbed and flowed. Thousands of German pistols, ammunition belts, uniforms, and helmets were shipped home by American soldiers. And most of them, not surprisingly, wound up stashed under beds and in footlockers, garages, and attics, where they gathered dust, mostly forgotten — except for items with any link to Adolf Hitler. His personal possessions that have been bought and sold over the years include a desk, a limousine, stationery, and books. Items that once belonged to Hitler’s longtime mistress, Eva Braun, have brought spirited bidding. This demand has fueled a lively trade in forgeries. In 1983, the German magazine Stern published what it said were the personal diaries of Hitler. They were all fakes.
Who stole Hitler’s pistol from Charles Woodbridge’s home? Was it someone who had heard Woodbridge talking about his treasure, perhaps a neo-Nazi who saw it as a prize, or an idol to be cherished and held up as a source of power? Right after World War II, a neo-Nazi group called the Columbians sowed racial hatred and bigotry in Georgia.
After disappearing from the Woodbridge home, the pistol Teen Palm took from Hitler’s desk first resurfaced in the mid-1950s, when Al Pinaire, a police detective in Wichita, Kansas, saw it at a gun show there. Pinaire was a longtime gun collector who kept meticulous records of every weapon he bought, sold, or traded. After he died, his family found a large photo album containing scores of photographs of guns. Among them were photos of Hitler’s pistol — one taken of each side of the gun. Included in the photographs, along the bottom, was a ruler that bore the words “WICHITA POLICE LABORATORY.” Pinaire did not have the money to buy the pistol, but he persuaded the owner — whose identity was not recorded — to allow him to take it to the Wichita police station. Pinaire asked a crime-lab employee to photograph it because the lab had a better-quality camera.
There was no further news of the gun until February 1966, when the March issue of the men’s magazine Argosy rolled off the presses, featuring a front page dominated by an oversized photograph of Hitler’s pistol along with a black swastika and a picture of the Nazi leader.
The magazine said the pistol was going to be put up for sale by a Cleveland gun dealer. Buried on page 85 of the 144-page publication was an uncredited one-column article. The brevity of the article and its placement — given that the cover of the magazine was devoted to the story — suggested it was a last-minute, just-before-deadline addition to the issue.
The article was written in breathless prose.
“Surely the most successful souvenir hunter of World War II is the fellow, identity unknown, who copped Adolf Hitler’s solid-gold 7.65-mm Walther automatic, shown on our cover, and brought it back to the States,” it began.
The gun is the one that was presented to Hitler by the Walther Company on his fiftieth birthday — April 20, 1939 — and which he wore as his personal sidearm from then on. Hitler was a nut for uniforms, and having his solidgold ivory-handled, monogrammed pistol strapped to his side must have added a little extra bounce to that famous strut of his.
It is possible that this weapon is the one with which he ended his life. The usual story of Hitler’s death is that he shot himself in his bombproof bunker. Subsequently, the bunker was blown up, along with Hitler’s body. The gold Walther is undamaged, however, though a laboratory check has revealed traces of human blood under the ivory hand grips.
Exactly who it was who “liberated” this weapon and brought it out of Germany is a question that is shrouded in mystery … The present owners are Richard Elrad and Walter Woodford, who run an antique firearms and armor shop, The Musket and Lance, in Cleveland, Ohio. They acquired the gun from an undisclosed source, together with several trunksful of miscellaneous items — silverware, silver dishes, a tablecloth, some books, flags — all of which has not been positively identified as Hitler’s personal property. The present owners refuse to disclose how much they paid for the gun and the other items or to speculate on what they might bring. They will only say that the collection is “priceless.”
In just the first two paragraphs, the article had made two errors. The gun was not solid gold — it was gold-plated. And Hitler did not carry the gun as his personal sidearm. But those were minor mistakes compared to the egregious error contained in the third paragraph. This was not the gun with which Hitler committed suicide but rather the pistol that Teen Palm had taken from Hitler’s desk. Elrad and Woodford were later quoted by newspaper reporters as saying they had purchased the trove of Hitler memorabilia two years earlier from someone whose identity they declined to disclose.
In an attempt to confirm the gun’s authenticity, Elrad traveled to London and to Munich, Hamburg, and Ulm in Germany. He showed photographs of the weapon to members of the Walther family, who agreed it was the gun presented to Hitler on his fiftieth birthday.
Elrad met with Heinz Linge, Hitler’s personal valet, who also confirmed the weapon was authentic. But he would not say it was Hitler’s suicide pistol.
Still, or perhaps to increase its value, Elrad insisted it was.
He and Woodford were selling the gun and other Nazi booty, including a spade that Hitler was said to have used to break ground for the Autobahn, a Nazi flag that storm troopers had presented to Hitler, and a statue of Ottilie “Tilly” Fleischer, a famous German athlete who won a gold medal in the javelin throw at Germany’s 1936 Olympics. The statue, made by Joseph Thorak, one of the Nazi Party’s official sculptors, was three feet high, and Fleischer was holding an Olympic wreath over her head.
Also up for sale were tablecloths made of white linen and damask — one of which had been presented to Hitler by Mussolini — as well as Hitler’s personal silver, and a signed copy of Mein Kampf.
It was an amazing collection — so amazing that it seemed almost impossible that one person could have brought it all back from Germany by himself, as Elrad and Woodford insisted.
The Argosy article attracted considerable attention in the rare-gun collecting community, and particularly those who specialized in Nazi memorabilia. Among them was a Canadian named Andrew Wright, a gun and Nazi memorabilia collector from Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Wright was one of the largest collectors of Nazi memorabilia in North America. He kept it all on display in a museum on his farm outside of Swift Current. Spurred by the Argosy article, Wright and his wife drove to Cleveland.
After one look at the gun, Wright pronounced that he was ready to buy the entire collection if Elrad was ready to sell. After two hours of negotiation, they struck a bargain, and Wright paid $50,000 to buy the entire lot.
The gun was headed for Canada.
Wright considered the gun priceless. “This gun will put Swift Current on the map,” he told a Swift Current newspaper. “There are hundreds of gun collectors in the United States who have never seen it and they will come up.”
That dream of huge crowds of visitors never materialized, though, and in 1987, Wright decided to sell the gun. By that time, no one was claiming Hitler had committed suicide with it. A newspaper article reported that a person who wished to remain anonymous bought the gun for $114,000 — the highest price ever paid for an item of military memorabilia — and that the gun had been taken from Hitler’s Munich apartment by American soldiers.
Since then, the gun has changed hands more than once. Australian construction magnate Warren Anderson owned it for a time. By 2010, the gun was in the hands of a collector who prefers to remain anonymous.
Richard Elrad, who journeyed to Germany to investigate the gun back in the 1960s, no longer lives in Cleveland. Years after the sale, he moved to a suburb of Atlanta. His partner in the sale is dead. Elrad still refuses to believe the gun Teen Palm brought back from Munich was the same weapon he sold to Andrew Wright in 1966. He insists that the gun he sold to Wright was not the weapon stolen from the Woodbridge home. He asserts that he obtained the pistol from a U.S. Army colonel who kept it in a footlocker on his farm for two decades after the war. Elrad says he promised to keep the soldier’s identity secret and he will not break that promise, even though he says the man is dead and has no living relatives. Elrad says he has a tape recording of an interview with the man in which the man says he found the gun in Hitler’s office building, known as the Fuehrerbau. But he declines to share the tape.
Al Pinaire’s photographs are fakes, Elrad says, even though at least two gun experts who have personally examined Hitler’s pistol assert the photos are genuine. Elrad has a photocopy of a black-and-white photograph he says depicts an unidentified soldier holding Hitler’s pistol. He says he looked at it with a magnifying glass, and it is the same gun he sold to Andrew Wright in 1966.
“History has a way of refashioning, burying, or confusing facts, especially when they concern something as potentially valuable as this gun,” says John Woodbridge. “Initially, no person was going to say, ‘I stole this gun from a house in Savannah.’ And so other stories are spun. Perhaps one day the gun will resurface and the facts will become clear.”
The principals in the story are all gone. Charles Woodbridge died in 1995 at the age of ninety-three; his wife, Ruth, died in 1962, shortly after she and her husband had visited the Palms in Germany. Helen Palm died in 1997, but her daughter, Susie, kept the voluminous correspondence between her parents and shared the letters with Woodbridge.
“These were revelatory,” Woodbridge says. “Through them I was able to see the remarkable transformation of a talented but relatively aimless and self-doubting young man into a more confident person who could lead troops into mortal combat. This transformation was enhanced by his Christian conversion, his marriage to Helen, a great love story, and his actual experiences in warfare.
“Teen was a Christian who lived out his faith in an exemplary fashion. He wanted others to experience the same faith, but he never attempted to have this happen through any form of coercion or the exploitation of his rank as an officer. He was also a great American hero. My father had told one of my sisters that in the wake of the death of Captain Robertson, Teen volunteered for the dangerous, potentially suicidal mission to find and kill Hitler in Munich.”
Woodbridge also gained a new appreciation for the sacrifice and bravery of the men and women who fought in World War II.
The last five years have also given him a deeper understanding of his own father.
“Yes, I learned things I never knew or understood before,” he says. “This would include his ability to communicate with young men, and how deeply he participated in the life of the communities in which he ministered. I also came to a better sense of my father’s personal Christian faith.”
He talks about learning of what he calls the “good Germans,” including those who risked their lives to try to destroy the Nazi infrastructure of Munich and who viewed the advancing American troops as liberators, not as foreign occupiers. And he says that inside the story of the “greatest manhunt in history” was the untold account that Hitler was once literally in the crosshairs of Rupprecht Gerngross’s rifle.
He pauses for a moment and then says, “I have changed in the last five years, and I will undoubtedly continue to reflect upon Teen Palm’s story of courage and faith for the rest of my life.”
The voices on the television, talking of the usual contentiousness in the world, begin to fade as Woodbridge turns his attention to the snow falling gently outside the windows of his home. The winter scene evokes a word. That word is “peaceful,” and it is a very good word.