The Catcher Was a Spy - Moe Berg and the Lecture Hall in Zurich

Episode Title: The Catcher Was a Spy — Moe Berg and the Lecture Hall in Zurich

Season 1, Episode 8 — The Spies & Secret Wars — SEASON FINALE

He was a backup catcher with a .243 batting average.

He was also fluent in seven languages. He held a law degree from Columbia. He read six newspapers a day in multiple languages — in the dugout — while his teammates played cards. A teammate once said of him: "He can speak twelve languages, but he can't hit in any of them."

In December 1944, Moe Berg sat in a lecture hall in Zurich, Switzerland, with a loaded pistol in his jacket pocket and a cyanide pill in his shoe. Across the room, Werner Heisenberg — Nobel laureate, founder of quantum mechanics, and the man Allied intelligence believed was at the center of Nazi Germany's atomic weapons program — was about to deliver a lecture.

Berg's orders were precise: listen carefully. And if anything in that lecture suggested Germany was close to building an atomic bomb, find a way to be alone with Heisenberg afterward.

And do not let him leave.

This is not fiction. This is the true story of one of the most extraordinary human beings of the Second World War — a man who filmed the Tokyo skyline from a hospital rooftop during a baseball goodwill tour in 1934, a decade before anyone asked him to. A man who crossed the Atlantic with a pistol that nearly fell out of his pocket at 30,000 feet. A man who was offered the Medal of Freedom after the war and turned it down — because it would embarrass him.

His final words, spoken to a nurse in a Newark hospital in 1972, were a question: "How did the Mets do today?"

Season One began with a man nobody wanted — who fooled Hitler's entire intelligence operation from a kitchen table in Lisbon. It ends with a man nobody expected — who sat across a dinner table from one of the most dangerous physicists alive, made a judgment call that may have changed the course of the war, and then went home and never really talked about it again.

This is the Season One finale of WWII Unwound. And it is something else.

In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind the most genuinely unbelievable true story of the entire season.

Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com

Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to World War II Unwound, here on the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network, where every story matters, every truth deserves to be told, and every question is worth asking. I'm Alan Best. This is it, the season one finale. We have told you about a man who invented an entire spy network from a kitchen table. We have told you about a safe cracker who became one of the most effective double agents of the war. We have told you about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, the limping lady who crossed the Pyrenees on a wooden leg, a dead man who fooled Adolf Hitler, and five Cambridge men who spent decades quietly betraying the country that trusted them completely. That last one was heavy. I know it was heavy for us to make, and I suspect it was heavy for some of you to listen to. So for our season finale, we wanted to give you something different. Something that is genuinely one of the strangest and most delightful true stories of the entire war. And it starts with a baseball player, not just any baseball player. A man who spent 15 years as a backup catcher, a perfectly mediocre hitter by his own admission, while quietly being fluent in seven or more languages, holding a law degree from Columbia, and reading newspapers in multiple languages in the dugout while his teammates played cards. A teammate once said of him, he can speak 12 languages, but he can't hit in any of them. In December of 1944, that man sat in a lecture hall in Zurich, Switzerland, with a loaded pistol in his jacket pocket and a cyanide pill in his shoe, listening to a lecture by one of the most brilliant physicists alive, with orders that if the lecture suggested Nazi Germany was close to building an atomic bomb, he was to use the pistol. This is the story of Moeburg. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Thanks, Alan. On the 18th of December, 1944, in a lecture hall at the University of Zurich, a small audience of perhaps 20 people, mostly Swiss physicists and graduate students, settled into their seats to hear a lecture on a topic called S matrix Theory, a fairly abstract corner of theoretical physics. The man delivering the lecture was Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, and, as far as Allied intelligence was concerned, the most dangerous physicist alive, because Heisenberg was widely believed to be at or near the center of whatever atomic weapons program Nazi Germany was running. Seated among the students, in a coat that concealed a loaded 45-caliber pistol, a pistol that had nearly fallen out of his pocket on the flight across the Atlantic, was a 42-year-old American who was, by training, by appearance, and by genuine personal interest, almost nothing like a typical intelligence operative. He was a former Major League Baseball catcher. He had a law degree he had never really used. He spoke German well enough to follow a physics lecture in real time, and he had been sent here by the American Office of Strategic Services with instructions that were as simple as they were extraordinary. Listen to this lecture, and if anything in it suggests that Germany has solved the problem of building an atomic bomb, find a way to be alone with Heisenberg afterward, and do not let him leave that room alive. His name was Morris Berg. Everyone called him Mo. And this was very far from the first strange thing he had ever done.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Harry, before Zurich, before any of the OSS stuff. Who was Mo Berg as a baseball player? Because I want to understand how someone like this ends up in professional sports at all.

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Mo Berg was born in 1902 in New York, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and from very early on, he was simply unusually intelligent in a way that had nothing to do with athletics. He went to Princeton, graduated Magnikum Laude with a degree in modern languages, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, academic distinctions that essentially nobody else in professional baseball at that time could claim. He played professional baseball for 15 seasons, mostly as a backup catcher, across five different teams: the Brooklyn Robbins, the Chicago White Sox, the Cleveland Indians, the Washington Senators, and the Boston Red Sox. His career batting average was 0.243, which is, to put it gently, modest. He did set an American League record for consecutive errorless games court, so he was a genuinely good defensive catcher, reliable hands, good with pitchers. But nobody remembered Mo Berg for his bat. While he was playing, he was also attending Columbia Law School during the off-seasons, and he earned his law degree in 1930, passing the New York Bar the following year, all while still playing in the majors. He spoke, depending on which account you read, somewhere between seven and twelve languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, even some Sanskrit. He read several newspapers a day in multiple languages in the dugout. Teammates genuinely did not know what to make of him. The brainiest man in baseball was not really a joke. It was simply, factually, true.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Tell me about the 1934 trip to Japan, because I understand this is where his unofficial intelligence career actually begins. Years before the OSS even existed.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

In 1934, Major League Baseball sent an all-star team on a goodwill tour of Japan, a team that included Babe Ruth and Lou Garrick, among others, and Mo Berg, who by this point spoke Japanese fluently from earlier trips. On November 29, 1934, while his teammates were playing a game at a stadium outside Tokyo, Berg quietly left the group entirely. He went to St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo, at the time one of the tallest buildings in the city. With a cover story, he was visiting the newborn daughter of the American ambassador, Joseph Grew, who had just given birth there. He brought flowers. He never actually visited her. Instead, dressed inconspicuously, he made his way up to the hospital roof, took out a 16mm Bell and Howl movie camera he had been carrying, and calmly filmed a slow panning shot of the entire Tokyo skyline. The harbor, the industrial districts, the naval installations in Tokyo Bay. Then, he put the camera away, came back down, rejoined his teammates as though nothing had happened, and nobody noticed. Nobody had asked him to do this. There was no OSS in 1934. The organization that would eventually employ Berg did not exist yet. He simply did it on his own initiative. Because he found it interesting and because, by several accounts, he had a long-standing fascination with intelligence work that predated any formal role.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

And that footage actually mattered later.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

It did. Berg held onto the film for years. After Pearl Harbor, in 1942, he screened it for American military intelligence officers. There is a surviving internal memo from an OSS officer, thanking Berg specifically, and noting that the film had been assessed as being of, in the officer's words, strategic importance. Some accounts connect the footage to the planning of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, the first American bombing raid on the Japanese home islands. The precise extent of that connection is difficult to verify with full certainty, but what is not in dispute is that Berg's footage was taken seriously by military intelligence eight years after he shot it, on a baseball trip, for reasons nobody had asked him to have. By January 1942, Berg had left baseball behind. He took a position with the office of the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson Rockefeller, his first formal government role, and within months, in February 1942, he made a radio broadcast directly to the Japanese people, in Japanese, as part of an American propaganda effort following Pearl Harbor. By 1943, he had moved to the OSS itself, the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA, where, by his own later accounts, he trained in safe cracking, lock picking, codes and ciphers, and weapons handling.

SPEAKER_00 8:53

Walk me toward Heisenberg. What was the actual concern that the OSS had, and how does a former baseball catcher end up at the center of it?

SPEAKER_02 9:00

By 1943 and 1944, one of the most urgent open questions for Allied intelligence was simple and terrifying. How close was Nazi Germany to building an atomic bomb? Germany had, after all, been home to much of the foundational physics that made nuclear weapons theoretically possible. Nuclear fission itself had been discovered in Berlin in 1938. The Allies had no reliable way to know how far the German program had progressed, and the consequences of being wrong in either direction were enormous. The effort to answer this question was codenamed the Alsace mission, and it operated alongside the Manhattan Project itself. Essentially, while one arm of Allied science was trying to build an atomic bomb, another arm was trying to find out whether Germany already had one, or was close. Berg was assigned to a related operation, Project Larsen, and in 1944 he travelled to Italy to interview Italian physicists, including Edoardo Amaldi and Giancarlo Wick, who had worked alongside figures like Enrico Fermi before the war. What Berg learned in Italy was genuinely useful. The Italian physicists told him that even if Germany was working on a bomb, it would likely take at least a decade to complete, a meaningfully reassuring assessment, though obviously not a final answer. The central remaining question was Werner Heisenberg himself, who was widely understood to be at or near the heart of whatever German nuclear research was happening.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

And the OSS had actually considered other plans for Heisenberg before settling on sending Berg to a lecture?

SPEAKER_02 10:44

They had, and some of the earlier proposals were considerably more elaborate and considerably less plausible. One plan that was seriously discussed involved a former Los Angeles police officer who would seize Heisenberg inside Germany, smuggle him across the border into Switzerland, and then parachute with him into the Mediterranean Sea, where a waiting submarine would supposedly retrieve them both. That plan, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not proceed. What did proceed was considerably simpler, on paper. In December 1944, the OSS learned that Heisenberg himself was going to leave Germany, a rare event by that point in the war, to deliver a lecture at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, at the invitation of the Swiss physicist Paul Scherer, who was himself a source for American intelligence. This was an opportunity to get Berg into the same room as Heisenberg, in a neutral country, with minimal security. Berg was given a 45-calibre pistol and a cyanide capsule. The cyanide, presumably for Berg's own use if things went badly, and sent to Zurich, posing, somewhat improbably, for a 6'1 former professional athlete in his early 40s as a Swiss physics student.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

And the instructions were genuinely: if the lecture suggests Germany has the bomb, he's supposed to act on the spot inside the lecture hall if necessary.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

That is what the historical record indicates. Yes, according to the Dutch physicist Samuel Goudsmit, who was the scientific head of the Alsos mission, Berg was expected to render Heisenberg, in Goudsmit's phrase, order combat, out of the fight, if the lecture revealed Germany was close to a weapon. Berg reportedly had three potential opportunities identified in advance, during the lecture itself, at a dinner reception afterward hosted by Scherer, or while walking Heisenberg back to his hotel. On December 18, 1944, Berg sat in that small lecture hall, by most accounts, a room with perhaps 20 people in it, mostly Swiss academics and students, with the pistol in his pocket, listening to Heisenberg deliver a lecture on S-matrix theory. And S-matrix theory, whatever else it is, is not bomb design physics. It is a fairly abstract, foundational area of theoretical quantum mechanics, the kind of thing a physicist might be working on, regardless of whether their country had any weapons program at all. Berg sat through the entire lecture. Heisenberg said nothing that indicated an active, advanced weapons program. Berg did not use the pistol.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

But he didn't just leave after the lecture, he actually got closer to Heisenberg afterward.

SPEAKER_02 13:39

He did. And this is where Berg's particular skill set, the languages, the easy charm that had apparently made him popular with teammates despite his eccentricities, actually mattered. Berg used his arranged connection through Scherer to secure an invitation to the dinner reception held in Heisenberg's honor after the lecture. By some accounts, Berg then arranged to leave the dinner at roughly the same time as Heisenberg, and the two of them ended up walking and talking together afterward. A German theoretical physicist and an American former baseball player, having what was, by every surviving account, simply a conversation between two clever, well-read men, one of whom was quietly assessing the other for assassination. Heisenberg apparently suspected nothing specific about Berg. To the extent he was suspicious of anyone, some accounts suggest he wondered if Berg might be some kind of German intelligence officer with an unusual accent, which is a remarkable thing to get backwards. Berg came away from the lecture and the dinner with the same overall assessment the Italian physicists had given him months earlier. Germany was not close. The program, whatever its ultimate ambitions, was not at a stage where it represented an imminent threat. Berg reported this back. Heisenberg lived. He returned to Germany. The war ended five months later with Germany's atomic program nowhere near a usable weapon. A conclusion that subsequent historical research has broadly, though not without ongoing debate about the reasons why, supported. Berg returned to the United States on April 25, 1945, just weeks before the war in Europe ended, and resigned from the Strategic Services Unit, the OSS's successor organization, that August. In October 1945, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the predecessor to today's Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his wartime intelligence work. And Berg refused it. By most accounts, he simply declined to accept the award, reportedly saying it would embarrass him, though he never offered a fuller public explanation, which is itself very much in keeping with who he seems to have been throughout his life. The medal sat unclaimed until after Berg's death, when his sister Ethel formally accepted it on his behalf. It now hangs at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, the medal its recipient refused to take, displayed alongside the bats and gloves of a man whose batting average was.2.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

What did the rest of his life look like? Because going from all of that back to ordinary life sounds like it would be genuinely difficult.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

It appears to have been difficult, though Berg seems to have approached it with the same idiosyncratic calm he brought to everything else. He declined multiple offers to coach or manage in Major League Baseball after the war, doors that were genuinely open to him, and that he simply chose not to walk through. In 1952, the CIA hired him to use his old wartime contacts to gather information on Soviet atomic science. By most accounts, this produced very little of value, and the relationship did not continue. For the last two decades of his life, Berg did not really have a conventional job. He lived, by several accounts, as something of a wanderer, staying with relatives, particularly his brother Samuel, and later his sister Ethel in Belleville, New Jersey, spending his time reading, attending baseball games, and browsing second-hand bookshops, supported in large part by the goodwill and patience of people who, by all accounts, found him genuinely charming despite, or perhaps because of, how strange a life he had clearly lived and how little of it he ever explained. He never married. According to the documentary filmmaker Aviva Kempner, he spent some of this period quietly helping raise money for Jewish refugees.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

And how did he die?

SPEAKER_02 17:52

Mo Berg died on May 29, 1972, at the age of 70, in a hospital in Newark, New Jersey, from injuries sustained in a fall at home. And by what is one of the more quietly perfect final details in any story we've told this season, his last recorded words, addressed to the nurse attending him, were a question: how did the Mets do today? The man who had sat across a dinner table from one of the most important physicists in the history of science, with a pistol in his pocket and the fate of an unimaginable decision resting on his judgment, spent his final conscious moment asking about a baseball score. Whatever else Mo Berg was, and he was, by any honest accounting, an extraordinarily strange and capable man who did something almost nobody else alive could have done. He was also, to the very end, just a guy who loved baseball.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Okay. Season finale. So I want to take just a minute here, because I think Mo Berg is actually a pretty perfect way to end this season. And not just because his story is fun, although it absolutely is. Every single person we've covered this season was, in some sense, not what they appeared to be. Garcia was a man with no credentials who the British turned away, and he built an entire fictional intelligence network that helped win the war. Chapman was a criminal the Germans trusted completely while he worked against them the whole time. Virginia Hall was an American that Gestapo hunted for years without ever learning her name. Even Major Martin, the man in episode six, wasn't even a real person, and he still managed to move German tank divisions across a continent. And then last week we told you about five men who were exactly what they appeared to be on the surface. The right schools, the right accents, completely trustworthy. And that surface hid something for decades that cost real people their lives. Moe Burg is the gentlest version of that same idea. A backup catcher with a point two four three batting average, who teammates joked about because he read newspapers in five languages in the dugout. Nobody looking at him saw what was actually there. And what was actually there when it mattered most was a man who sat in a room with a loaded gun, listened carefully, made a judgment call under enormous pressure with incomplete information and got it right. And then went home and, as far as we can tell, never really talked about it again, and asked a nurse about the Mets on his way out. That's the whole season, really. People are not what they appear to be. Sometimes that's wonderful, sometimes it's genuinely terrible. And almost always it's more interesting than the version of the story everyone else was told. Thank you for spending this season with us. Season two is coming, and it's going somewhere very different. Before Alan sends us off for the season, we've spent eight episodes on people who were not what they appeared to be. Has someone in your own life ever turned out to be completely different from what you expected? In a good way, in a strange way, in any way? We genuinely love to hear those stories as we head into season two. Send them to beststorypublishing at gmail.com. We read every single one, and honestly, they're some of our favorite messages we get.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

And that's season one of World War II Unwound here on the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network. Mo Berg, the brainiest man in baseball, the rooftop in Tokyo, The Lecture Hall in Zurich, The Metal He Wouldn't Take, The Question About the Mets, Eight Episodes, Eight People Who Were Not What They Appeared To Be. Thank you, genuinely deeply, for spending this season with us. If you've made it all the way from Garcia to Berg, you've heard some of the most remarkable true stories of the entire war, and we are so grateful you chose to hear them here. Visit us at beststorypublishing.com and send your thoughts, your reactions, and your own stories of people who surprised you to beststory publishing at gmail.com. We read every single one and we'll be drawing on some of your responses as we plan what comes next. Season two of World War II. Unwound will start next week, and we will begin with the decision makers, and it's going to take us somewhere very different. Out of the world of spies and deception, and into the rooms where the war's biggest decisions were actually made by the people who had to make them. Until then, keep asking questions, keep digging deeper, and never stop being curious. I'm Alan Best, and this is the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network.