It’s a cold December day in the winter of 1944. The Nazis are not exactly in a good
position to win the war. Hitler rages day after day, fearing an embarrassing,
cataclysmic loss, but his propagandists are still hard at work trying to
persuade people to embrace the Nazi cause. On Germany’s state radio, SS officers are
speaking to a man named Captain Martin Wiethaupt, an American who has supposedly seen the light.
He says into the microphone, “What most Americans don’t understand is that Adolf
Hitler is right. There’s a Jewish-Communist conspiracy to enslave the world. We MUST
support the Nazi’s aims before it’s too late.” People are listening to this back in the US,
some wondering if he’s right, but the vast majority shouting, “Traitor! This
man needs to meet with the firing squad!” We’ll come back to Captain Martin and his
date with the firing squad soon– he was, after all, a traitor – but first, we need to understand
what might have led a man to do what no other US soldier had. That is, defect and join the Nazis.
Wiethaupt was not his real surname. His actual full name was Martin James Monti. Born on
October 24, 1921, to a father of Italian heritage and a mother of German heritage,
the name Wiethaupt came from his mother’s side. The family lived in St. Louis, Missouri. They
were well-off. The kids never struggled like many other children in those days. They grew
up with everything they needed. Later in life, four of Martin’s brothers would go on to serve
in the United States Navy during World War II, and unlike Martin, they’d do an honorable job.
The path to Martin becoming the family's ugly duckling started in the 1930s,
when much of the US was down on its knees, beset by the poverty of The Great Depression. This
seemed to greatly affect young Martin. It was a time when people were looking for someone to
blame. It was a time when some Americans turned to fascism, when they looked for scapegoats,
someone to blame for their empty kitchen shelves and bare fridges - if indeed they
were fortunate enough to even have a fridge. While the Monti family got on ok during this
difficult period in US history, St. Louis had plenty of hellholes filled with a plethora of
so-called down-and-outs. 3,000 to 5,000 of them made up one of the infamous Hoovervilles in St.
Louis. These were shanty towns that had popped up like unwanted warts in various places in the US.
We are telling you this to help you understand why an American man from St. Louis might begin
to distrust capitalism and why he might have considered that greedy, uncaring capitalists
were to blame for the woes of the world. And so, when a priest named Father Charles
Coughlin took to the airwaves and condemned what he said was the personification of evil: bankers,
Martin Monti listened intently. But while Coughlin had every right to criticize the banking industry,
he ranted and raved about Jewish bankers. His messages to his many radio show fans were
steeped in antisemitism. He talked about “social justice” and the horror of free-market capitalism,
but as time went on, he showed support for the fascists in Germany and Italy.
He also hated Communism, which he said was an evil in the world that robs people of happiness.
He once explained, “I have dedicated my life to fighting against the heinous rottenness of
modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow,
I shall strike against Communism.” His critique of greed and his disdain
for the banking industry was not especially unique during an era when many Americans were
literally starving to death, but when the priest went right over to the far-right with his views
and started praising the governments of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini,
some of his fans said he’d gone too far. Still, many people said he was right. He stoked
divisions so much that he was accused of trying to incite civil war in the US. One of the people
who never relinquished his support for Coughlin was the young and impressionable Martin Monti.
Now you know the back story. Here’s the front part.
When the war broke out in 1939, Coughlin’s millions of listeners were absolutely enraged when
the government took his radio show off the air. He got canceled 30s style. Monti was furious, talking
about demonic conspiracies of invisible hands. In August of 1942, like his brothers, Martin
signed up for the draft. He told his family he wanted to fight for the Allies in this
disgusting war. But was he telling the truth? We ask that because around two months later,
he traveled to Detroit and met with the man he adored, the fascist fanatic Father Coughlin.
We don’t know exactly what was said during that meeting, but we think as this show goes on, you
will be able to make a good guess. We know that Monti first tried to join the US Navy, but it was
the Air Force that accepted him in November, 1942. Monti trained as a cadet in ’43, and then in
March of ‘44, he was told he’d be a “Flight Officer.” He subsequently passed his training
to fly a P-39 Aircobra and later a P-38 Lightning, which gained him a promotion
to second lieutenant. Notably, his training would help him make his plan come to fruition.
In August, 1944, Monti was sitting on a ship on the way to India. When he arrived,
he joined the 126th Replacement Depot. It was now only a matter of time until he was actually
deployed to the battlefront. As his fellow soldiers talked about taking down Hitler and the
rest of wretched Nazis, Monti had other things on his mind, quite contrary things, in fact.
He didn’t wait for deployment, instead deciding to blag his way out of the British colony of
India. Questions should have been asked when he just walked onto an air transport plane heading
to Cairo, although his rank and uniform no doubt helped. He later walked onto another plane which
took him to Tripoli, and after that, he did the same thing again to get to Naples in Italy.
On October 10th, he ended up at an airbase not far from Naples. There he met with some guys from
the 82nd Fighter Group, some of whom he’d known from flight school. He attempted to join them,
but since he’d pretty much flown around the world without any orders to do so,
he was without papers. He didn’t get any joy there.
Nonetheless, this didn’t stop him. He then went to a place called Pomigliano d'Arco,
just north of Naples. There, the 354th Air Service Squadron was getting aircraft ready for fighter
squadrons. Monti had to stretch the truth again. On October 13th, he lied and said he was a pilot
from the 82nd Fighter Group. No one suspected he was up to no good, so he was handed the keys when
he volunteered to test an unarmed reconnaissance P-38 - the type of plane he’d practised in.
He didn’t take the plane for the test flight but flew it right over to Nazi-occupied Milan.
The Nazis saw the plane coming in and thought, what in the Fuhrer’s name is
going on? That’s an American plane! No sooner than Monti put two feet on Italian ground,
he was being escorted away by German forces. They didn’t believe him at first when he said
he was on the side of Hitler and explained he was a fascist. They took him as a POW,
but they also found it strange that he’d landed a perfectly good aircraft in their territory.
They even studied it to better understand what kind of plane the Americans were developing.
In November, after telling them about Father Coughlin and explaining why he
hated the corrupt western capitalists and morally bankrupt communists, they finally
believed Monti was an actual deserter. Now he was useful. Deserters always make the
other side look bad. That’s why they usually got shot or hanged if they ever went back.
The Nazis soon put Monti to work, first appearing on the radio in Berlin as Captain
Martin Weithaupt. He talked in English about how righteous the Nazis were. He
said that the US had gotten it all wrong, fighting alongside the Soviets. Monti said
the Soviets wanted to enslave mankind under Communism, which, to be fair, if you know much
about Joseph Stalin, wasn’t far from the truth. During this stint talking on the radio,
he bumped into another American traitor. That was a woman named Mildred Gillars. In the future she
would achieve the accolade of being the first female American to be convicted of treason.
So-called “Axis Sally” had gone from teaching English in Germany to talking about how bloody
great Adolf Hitler was. When she crossed paths with Monti, it seems she thought there was
only enough space on the radio for one American traitor. She told her boss, “That man is a spy or
a traitor, either he must go, or I will.” She was wrong. Monti was the real deal,
or at least, he probably was. We’ll explain later why that’s questionable.
The thing was, Monti was a terrible radio presenter, so the Nazis got him to make propaganda
leaflets under the rank of SS-Untersturmführer. He was proud as punch. In those leaflets,
he tried to persuade Americans that they were living under out-of-control capitalism or,
conversely, they were supporting totalitarian Communism by allying
with the Soviets. Monti wrote that they’d live on Easy Street under Adolf Hitler.
But as you know, Hitler later had a hard time in a bunker in Berlin just as Red
Army tanks were pounding the streets. The war was lost, so Monti had to make plans.
It wasn’t as if he could just go back to the US and say, “Er, sorry, guys. My bad.”
Monti didn’t know the numbers right then, but if he had known, he might have been somewhat
nervous. The US convicted about 20,000 soldiers for desertion during the war.
Forty-nine were handed a death sentence, but only one was executed: Eddie Slovik.
Why only one, you might ask? It seems it was because Slovik had also been a petty
criminal in the past, but there were likely some other political reasons. Just before a
firing squad ended his life, he said: “They're not shooting me for deserting
the United States Army, thousands of guys have done that. They just need to make an
example out of somebody, and I'm it because I'm an ex-con…They're shooting me for the bread and
chewing gum I stole when I was 12 years old.” Monti didn’t know any of this, of course,
but no doubt he thought he’d get shot or hanged if he was caught. Still,
you must admit he was brave for what he did next. On May 10, 1945, still dressed in his Nazi
uniform, he walked right into an American army base. An Italian-American soldier looked
up from his mess tin and said to his buddy, “Can you believe the cojones on this guy?”
It was a risk, but Monti told them he’d used the uniform as part of a daring escape from
the clutches of the Nazis. The army didn’t know about his radio work in Berlin, so at first,
he was just charged with going AWOL and pilfering that P-38 plane. Monti told them he’d used it to
fly against the Nazis, and that’s how he got shot down and taken prisoner. He thought they
believed him, so Monti smiled like a Cheshire cat thinking he’d got one over on the US military.
Things got even better for Monti. He’d been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,
but in February 1946, President Harry S Truman commuted his sentence to time served. He was
free. What idiots, he thought. How did these guys win the war? Now he’d fooled
the US government. No sooner than he was out, he became a private serving in the Army Air Corps.
Still, mouths started wagging, and people started looking into who that American guy
who spouted anti US propaganda on the German radio was. Monti was soon exposed after some
crack investigating. Then, in 1947, you could read headlines in The Washington
Post and the New York Times about an ex-officer being “held for treason”.
The Times wrote what we have told you today, that he had gone on a crazy mission
to end up working as a Nazi propagandist. As Monti sat in jail awaiting his trial,
psychologists tried to figure out what made him tick. They said he had superior
intelligence according to his IQ score, but they also called him immature and a
bit paranoid. People rightly pointed out that he couldn’t have been too clever, joining the Nazis
when the war was pretty much already lost. We’ve seen the court transcripts. Monti
doesn’t say much at all. When he’s asked if he stole a plane or if he promoted pro-Nazi
stuff on the radio, he just says, “That is correct.” And when asked if he was “coerced”
or “physically intimidated”, he just says, “No.” He admitted to doing everything on his own back,
but he was never asked why he did it. On January 18, 1949, Monti was handed
a $10,000 fine and sentenced to 25 years in prison, which wasn’t bad considering the fate
of the chewing gum thief, Eddie Slovik. The fine was actually the lowest amount he could
be fined for that particular crime. Many people thought he got off very,
very lucky. Some people asked if he’d had any inside help. They said this guy hadn’t just
gone AWOL; he’d joined a bunch of guys that had been committed to genocide on
a scale that would have shocked Genghis Khan. Monti’s light sentence was certainly strange.
He didn't seem to care when he was told he’d grow older in prison. He didn’t apologize,
and he didn’t complain. He was shipped off to Fort Leavenworth Prison in Kansas, where
he spent a bit of time in solitary confinement for going on a hunger strike and once got in
trouble for stealing food from the kitchen. Monti got to taste food as a free man in 1960
after serving way less than 25 years. The tale takes a strange twist here, though. In 1963,
he tried to get the courts to reverse his traitor conviction. He proclaimed that
he wasn’t a traitor because he actually went to Germany to help the US. He told
the court that he “only went to Germany to assassinate Adolf Hitler and end the war.”
This didn’t work out for him, but it seems he lived a fairly regular life. He moved to
Fort Lauderdale in Florida, where he kept a low profile until his death in the year
2000. His obituary in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel said he popped his clogs,
German clogs no doubt, on September 11 that year, exactly one year before the Twin Towers attacks.
Monti was buried next to his brothers and parents in Missouri,
ending the legacy of the dubious US traitor. We think you now need to watch “What Happens
When You Go AWOL?.” Or, have a look at “What Happens If You Dodge the Army Draft?”