Gumpertz, Werner Herbert (42033526): Difference between revisions

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 In the United States he worked as a junior engineer and surveyor in New York and on defense housing in Newport News, Virginia. Drafted on 27 August 1943, he trained at the Engineering Replacement Training Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, served in Pennsylvania, and returned to Belvoir as a supervisory noncommissioned officer. On a free day he went to the Pentagon, told an intelligence officer he wanted the work, and within a week was sent to [[Camp Ritchie]].
-Gumpertz trained as an interrogator with [[:Category:Class 25|Class 25]] (30 November 1944 – 29 January 1945). He later recalled a graduation exercise in which he and two others spent three days reconstructing a German force in northern France from a laundry basket of ordinary papers—laundry tickets and speeding citations—with the secret material already stripped out. Another night exercise dropped them on the Gettysburg battlefield with a map printed in Japanese; they had to match terrain features to find the assembly point. He went overseas on a British liner (sleeping under a table rather than in a hammock), to England, then across the Channel to the suburbs of Paris, and into Germany with Seventh Army as a translator and interrogator of prisoners. Research notes place him with MFIU-5 at Jugenheim, attached to Seventh Army. The unit ended the war in Augsburg. He later said he once had a short conversation with Hermann Goering, and that when the small intelligence section needed a doctor it brought in a captured German air-force medical officer whose father-in-law, a Protestant bishop in Heidelberg, had refused to yield to the Nazis; Gumpertz later corresponded with that bishop from Frankfurt.
+Gumpertz trained as an interrogator with [[:Category:Class 25|Class 25]] (30 November 1944 – 29 January 1945). He later recalled a graduation exercise in which he and two others spent three days reconstructing a German force in northern France from a laundry basket of ordinary papers—laundry tickets and speeding citations—with the secret material already stripped out. Another night exercise dropped them on the Gettysburg battlefield with a map printed in Japanese; they had to match terrain features to find the assembly point. He went overseas on a British liner (sleeping under a table rather than in a hammock), to England, then across the Channel to the suburbs of Paris, and into Germany with Seventh Army as a translator and interrogator of prisoners. He was assigned to MFIU-5 at Jugenheim, attached to Seventh Army. The unit ended the war in Augsburg. He later said he once had a short conversation with Hermann Goering, and that when the small intelligence section needed a doctor it brought in a captured German air-force medical officer whose father-in-law, a Protestant bishop in Heidelberg, had refused to yield to the Nazis; Gumpertz later corresponded with that bishop from Frankfurt.
 After the fighting he joined United States military government in Karlsruhe as agent in charge of publications, covering periodicals and books. Discharged in early 1946, he spent a year as an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers in Frankfurt, then used the GI Bill at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning bachelor's and further engineering degrees and teaching there. With Howard Simpson and Frank Heger he formed Simpson Gumpertz and Heger. He married Elizabeth Lewit in 1949, lived in West Newton, Massachusetts, and died there on 1 December 2017 at the age of 99.