G-Men at War

Series

Series Name

The March of Time 8th Year

Issue

Issue No.

5

Date Released

1942

Length of issue (in feet)

1814

Stories in this Issue:

1. 1G-Men at War

Story

Story No. within this Issue

1 / 1

Summary

The March of Time synopsis: From its peacetime staff of a few hundred, war finds the F.B.I. mobilised to a strength of 12,000 - 4,500 of them special agents. In every important city in the U.S.A. headed by a Special Agent in Charge, is a field office of the F.B.I. upon which is enjoined the duty of carrying on the secret war against spies, saboteurs and traitors. Working with them are specially trained officers of the nation’s police force, and from all these sources information pours in to be added to the great F.B.I. files in Washington. Experts in decoding microfilm messages, in detecting sabotage from a scratch, in every technique of rapidly changing espionage, fight enemy sabotage with modern methods of counterespionage, like the concealed movie camera whose films, run off in court, have convicted many an Axis agent.
Because every Nazi in every land plays a part in Hitler’s New Order, Bureau files on the German American NoS are particularly complete. Allowed apparently to flourish with impunity, local gaulieters like Fritz Kuhn and lesser known figures, actually were being given rope enough to hang themselves.

As an instance of how this was done, the March of Time has re-enacted the case of a hypothetical NoS Fuehrer, August Baumeyer. Climax of Baumeyer’s career was the day when, with Fritz Kuhn and other NoSsmen, he enjoyed an audience with Hitler. This served both to reward him for previous activities on behalf of the Nazi Reich and to further treachery toward the land of his supposed adoption - the U.S.A.
Relays of NoS meetings in the rear room of his restaurant were secretly transmitted by G-Men using portable equipment. And so, through the various procedures employed by the F.B.I. - tailing and surveillance, investigation of contacts, and telephoto motion pictures - the G-Men began to close in.
Penetrating inside the subversive organisation, they discovered an attempt to shelter and expedite the escape of two young Nazi fugitives from a prison camp. Search of their belongings disclosed further contacts and supplied the last links of missing evidence. Tailing one young Nazi to a rendezvous off-shore, the Bureau men stripped him of his clothes and credentials which one of their members assumed. When a silent rubber craft put in to shore that night the F.B.I. man was waiting. Whom he met, where he went, receding into the silent blackness of the ocean, must be left to conjecture. With the arrest of August Baumeyer and the continuing roundup of hundreds of NoSsmen like him, with the seizure across the country of thousands of firearms, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition and hundreds of pounds of high explosives, the F.B.I. is today achieving the destruction of an organisation Adolph Hitler had intended to be one of his most potent weapons in paralyzing American democracy from within.

Researcher Comments

This story was included in Vol.9 No.1 of the US edition.

Keywords

Organisations; Politics and government; Police

Written sources

The March of Time Promotional Material   Lobby Card, Used for synopsis

Credits:

Production Co.

Time Inc.