Pulitzer Prize winner Lucinda Franks learned that her father had been a secret agent for the Allied forces during World War II. She addressed an audience at Congregation B’nai Israel in Rumson on Nov. 5.
Photo by Jill Huber
November 18, 2008
When Lucinda Franks was removing storage boxes from her father’s apartment in Massachusetts, she made a chilling discovery: One carton contained an iron cross and a military cap with a peaked visor and Nazi insignia.
“I was flabbergasted when I found those things,” Franks told NJ Jewish News. “What were they doing in my father’s home? Was he a Nazi sympathizer?”
In fact, Thomas Franks, a young lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was a spy behind enemy lines. During an undercover mission, he had worn the cap while dressed as a member of the Waffen-SS.
As Franks, who now lives in New York City, struggled to find the person inside the man, her reportorial skills led her from one clue to another as she discovered information about a man who remained at war with himself. In 2007, she wrote My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir.
More than 100 audience members at Congregation B’nai Israel in Rumson learned about her search into Thomas Franks’ life as a secret agent and his life-altering experience as an eyewitness to a Nazi concentration camp, during a Nov. 5 appearance at the synagogue. The event was sponsored by the congregation’s adult education committee.
While growing up in their Episcopalian home in a Boston suburb, all Franks knew about her father’s military service was that he entered the U.S. Navy in 1942.
“As a child, I idolized my father; I thought he was invincible,” Franks told NJ Jewish News after her lecture. “But as the years passed, he became more and more withdrawn and emotionally alienated from his family. Finding that cap and the cross — symbols of horror — was the catalyst that sent me on the trail of my father’s wartime participation.”
Franks, a former staff reporter for The New York Times and United Press International, and a contributing writer for the Times, The New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly magazines, won the Pulitzer Prize — the first woman to win the prize for national reporting — for a series on the Weathermen, a violent antiwar group that opposed America’s involvement in Vietnam.
She also filed firsthand reports during the conflict in Northern Ireland, and despite the violence that surrounded many of her job-related activities, her toughest assignment took place on the home front, as she tried to piece together her father’s secret life, Franks said.
“My father was very reserved by nature, and I also learned he had taken a government oath of silence that prevented him from discussing his wartime missions,” she told the B’nai Israel audience. “While I was trying to uncover his activities and questioning him about them, he had to relive this extremely painful part of his life.”
A grim reminder
Attempts to ask him about the war were met with silence, but discovering the cap and the cross offered Franks “visible evidence” of something her father couldn’t deny.
“When I showed him what I had found, he almost recoiled,” Franks said. “He said they belonged to him but that he couldn’t talk about them.”
A former friend of her father’s told her Thomas was a haunted man. He related an incident in which her father reacted violently when a man at a nearby restaurant table uttered anti-Semitic comments. It took three men to pull her father off the man who had made the offensive remarks, she learned.
The full story emerged. During World War II, Franks, who spoke fluent German, had been trained in “special techniques” that allowed him to eavesdrop on conversations, read lips, and catch the enemy off guard. On a mission in April 1945, he’d been sent into the concentration camp at Ohrdruf — part of the Buchenwald complex — which German troops had abandoned the previous day.
Thomas Franks saw stacks of bodies. Some showed signs of brutal beatings, some had been burned, others had been shot, and all were emaciated. After several hours, Franks’ unit left the camp, and he was told by his commanding officers to submit a handwritten report. He also was told never to discuss what he’d seen, but his report was among the documents that persuaded Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to visit Ohrdruf and other liberated camps, Lucinda Franks said.
During the mid-1990s, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust began recording the testimony of survivors and non-Jewish witnesses. (Lucinda Franks’ husband, Robert Morgenthau, district attorney for New York County, was a museum founder.) Thomas Franks agreed to talk about Ohrdruf.
“My father talked incessantly about Israel when I was growing up. He said no one could ever understand what the Jews had been through,” Lucinda Franks said. “I just thought he was ranting. But when he videotaped his testimony, he was asked if he had a message for future generations. He said, ‘Don’t ever judge a person by his ethnic background.’”
The Nazi memorabilia served as a grim reminder of all he had seen.
“I asked him why he kept it,” she said. “He said it was because of the death’s head insignia on it. He said he never wanted to forget who those German soldiers really were.
“He was a Jewish soul inside the body of a gentile.”
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