Nazi internment baseball bat on American tour

NEW YORK, Apr 9 (Reuters) It hung in a Virginia garage for years, but now a baseball bat from Nazi Germany is touring the United States with a Baseball Hall of Fame exhibit.

The bat, used by American journalists and diplomats held captive in Germany in 1941-42, was given to the Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, by Angus MacLean Thuermer, an American reporter working in the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press when Germany invaded Poland.

Now the bat is on view until early September at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, the last stop of the Hall of Fame's 10-city travelling ''Baseball as America'' exhibit that opened in 2002 in New York.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War Two, Thuermer was rounded up by the Gestapo with other US journalists and diplomats still in Germany.

On December 14, 1941, more than 100 Americans gathered at the US embassy in Berlin, by then guarded inside and out by members of the Gestapo.

They were taken to Bad Nauheim, 320 miles southwest of Berlin, and interned at the Jeschke Grand Hotel.

Among them was George Kennan, future architect of ''containment,'' the basis for US strategy for fighting the Cold War. Kennan, assigned to the embassy in Berlin at the time, ''was in charge of us while we waited for a swap'' with German journalists and diplomats held in the United States, Thuermer said in a telephone interview from his Virginia home.

Thuermer said the prisoners were allowed to walk to a field and back for exercise.

KNOB AT THE END ''As we were coming back one day, I saw a branch that had fallen off a tree. So I dragged this thing back to the main room of the hotel and Glen Stadler of the United Press had a Finnish 'pukka' knife, the kind you might have in a carpenter shop,'' he said.

''He skinned off the bark and worked at it and worked at it and worked at it. We rounded it off and put a little knob at the end of it.'' First-aid adhesive tape was used to wrap the bat handle. A champagne bottle cork formed the core of a baseball.

''We wrapped tape around the cork, then a sock, then more tape, another sock and more tape,'' Thuermer said. ''Then we took the ball out to the field. The military attache said, 'With this ball, even Babe Ruth couldn't hit more than a double'.'' Using diplomatic bags for first, second and third base and an old orange crate for home plate, the US internees formed two teams, newsmen versus the diplomats.

''Playing baseball was good for our morale,'' Thuermer said.

The Bad Nauheim baseball season was short-lived. The internees were exchanged for German journalists and diplomats detained in the United States in May 1942. Thuermer carried the bat home with the rest of his belongings.

REUTERS PG RN0836