March 12, 2007 issue - A few years ago, just as her father was about to disappear into the fog of dementia（痴呆）, journalist Lucinda Franks stumbled upon a small box in a corner of his dilapidated（荒废的） apartment. The contents shocked her. Beneath some mysterious maps and crumpled¹ foreign bank notes, she found a military cap embellished² with the raised metal insignia（记号，标志） of an eagle, a skull³ and crossbones—and a swastika. Franks knew little about her father's military service during World War II, and had always sensed that he was hiding something. Now questions consumed her. "Was my sphinx-like father presenting one character and living another?" she writes in her new memoir⁴, "My Father's Secret War." "Whose side was he really on?" When she pressed for an explanation, her father refused to talk, citing a decades-old pledge of secrecy⁵. 

 

But after years of detective work and long conversations with her ailing⁶ father, Franks eventually pieced together most of his story. Fluent in German, he was a spy and occasionally an assassin. The Nazi⁷ cap was part of his disguise as a member of the Waffen SS, worn the night he broke into a Gestapo headquarters and killed a guard while looking for files with the names of people wanted by the Nazis⁸. Near the end of his life, he finally tells Franks he kept the hat because of the "death's head" insignia: "I never wanted to forget who these German soldiers really were."

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