The Metal Detector

[wind rustling leaves] [wind rustling leaves] [wind rustling leaves] [wind rustling leaves] [wind rustling leaves] [metal detector beeping] Georg: [speaking foreign language] [metal detector beeping] [metal detector beeping] [metal detector beeping] Georg: Here.

Joey?

I'm having a strong signal here.

[metal detector beeping] Joey Reutter: Are you sure it's on?

Georg: Yeah.

Georg: [speaking foreign language] Ah, here.

[speaking foreign language] Joey: I'm skeptical.

Georg: Are you?

Joey: Yup.

George: [speaking foreign language] Joey: Yeah.

Georg: [speaking foreign language] Ah!

That you got to see now: a bullet.

Most of them are empty.

It was produced in 1943.

Joey: Georg digs really deep into anything he's interested in.

He was spending hours and hours and hours on the computer, checking things and checking emails and Google Earth.

You know, put it all in.

Find out.

Then see the satellite view of it.

Going down rabbit warrens in wrong directions, partly.

And then thinking you found something and you haven't found it or whatever it was.

So it was all very, very detailed.

Georg: My idea was first to just find the site where it had crashed.

[speaking foreign language] And then I thought, maybe I can find out more about the crew.

But nobody really knew anything.

I just started from scratch.

[rooster crowing] Georg: The guy in the library said, "Well, what are you looking for?"

And after a while, he showed me a book.

And in the back of that book, all Allied plane crashes in the years '43 and '44.

It had the serial number of the plane, date, the place where it crashed.

And I put that serial number in the Google search machine.

And I came to an American veterans site.

They had de-classified information.

It had even the names of the crew, next of kin, their father, their mother, or a sibling.

And I had the town where they came from.

[speaking foreign language] Joey: [speaking foreign language] [speaking foreign language] Georg: [speaking foreign language] I made a map to show where the flight paths ran over that hill where they jumped near belbach.

It's really very accurate now where at least those five came down.

Zim came down right at the bottom of the hill, then Dan Behre in the middle, Jim Helf on top.

And then Seall landed on a big tree with his parachute but broke his leg and was hanging up there until somebody came to cut him down.

[speaking foreign language] speaker: [speaking foreign language] Georg: [speaking foreign language] speaker: [speaking foreign language] Georg: [speaking foreign language] [drone beeping] speaker: (on phone:) Can you spell the last name for me?

Joey: Seall.

S-E-A-double L. speaker: (on phone:) Okay, no one here by that name, ma'am.

Georg: It's three-- Joey: What am I supposed to say?

Georg: Ha, what are you supposed to say?

Try and find out, the best you can, if the guy's still alive.

speaker: (on phone:) If this is a maintenance emergency, please press zero to speak to an operator.

Thank you and have-- Georg: Or you could have spoke to an operator.

Joey: An operator's not gonna help anybody.

Joey: Off camera--off camera?

I--it really has driven me nuts sometimes.

And at some points I've thought, "This has really grown out of proportion."

Georg: Try this number again that we said was possessed.

[speaking foreign language] Mick Berry: I got up to go practice drums.

And when I parked the car, and here my cell phone rings with this strange number with 14 digits or something.

Well, this is unusual.

Georg: It rang and it rang, it rang.

Finally, somebody picked up.

Hello, hello?

Mick: And here's this man with a strange accent, "I want to get in touch with Mick Berry."

I thought, "Well, it's a telemarketer.

Great.

Okay."

Georg: I knew that I had to be very fast with my story.

Mick: "My mother saw your father's plane get shot down in Austria."

Georg: Mick then really was quiet for a moment.

Mick: Okay, okay.

Georg: We both had goose pimples at that moment.

Mick: And he said, "I want to find out what happened to the serviceman in the plane."

I can tell you exactly.

My father wrote it down.

I have the whole thing written down.

You don't have to wonder any longer, yeah.

Georg: "Account by Daniel Behre of his experience in World War II."

It was written right after he came home.

He got a secretary and he dictated it to her.

Joey: Daniel Behre's report was the turning point, because normally you wouldn't have anything like that.

That made this particular plane and its crew much more real.

"Number two engine was leaking a stream of gas through the flame in number one.

At any moment, the ship might explode.

For the first time since I'd flown combat, I put on my parachute.

Jim said, 'Get the hell out of this flying coffin.'

I remember crouching in the hatchway and looking backward.

I stopped thinking and tumbled out of the narrow hatchway into space.

After waiting to be sure I was clear of the plane-- Dan Behre: I pulled my ripcord while I was still facing downward.

The chute, which is attached at the chest, smacked me in the face.

I saw the silk emerge from the pack in a long, thin stream.

And then as the air caught it, I was jerked suddenly and felt myself floating toward the ground.

Zim was behind me.

We called to one another as we fell downward.

Georg: Gary?

Gary Helf: Yes, sir.

Georg: Great to see you finally.

Gary: Great to see you.

Kathy Helmer: You must be Georg.

Georg: Yes.

Kathy: Oh, well good.

Georg: Good to see you.

Kathy: And Mary Ellen.

Georg: Mary Ellen, so good to see you.

Georg: I had managed to get in contact with the six descendants that came to Austria on the 75th anniversary of the plane crash of their fathers for a reunion.

Georg: You go ahead.

Mick: All right, okay.

Georg: Hello, hello.

Cheri Beaulieu: Hey, guys.

Mick: Hi.

Cheri: Here he is!

Mick: Wow.

Joey: You haven't met?

Cheri: No, we've never met him.

Mick: No, we've never met.

Joey: Zim's daughter, Cheri.

Cheri: Do I get a hug or anything?

I mean, Jesus.

Mick: Yeah, but I might fall apart in your arms.

Cheri: That's alright, I bawled when I opened the letter that, you know, I got.

Gary: That's your dad in there?

Mick: Yeah.

Gary: My dad's in the middle.

And that's Bob Zimmerman.

speaker: It's my dad.

Cheri: You have more pictures of my dad than I have.

Georg: [speaking foreign language] speaker: What did you think when he got in touch with you?

Gary: When is he gonna ask for money?

That's what I thought.

Kathy: What does he really want?

Yeah.

Gary: My father was called Jim Helf.

He was a flight engineer on the B-17.

Georg: You were the hardest to find, you were really hard to-- Cheri: Hard to find.

When I got the letter, I almost threw it in the trash.

But because it was handwritten, I thought, "Well, okay, I'll open it up."

And, oh, my gosh, I'm reading this letter and walking back to my bedroom and the tears are just rolling down my eyes and I just couldn't believe that someone was actually interested.

Cheri: My father's name was Robert Zimmerman.

He was the Radio operator on the B-17.

Cheri: But you never found my sister, did you?

Georg: No.

Cheri: Yeah, yeah.

Kathy: Well, is she incognito?

Cheri: Well, but she's been married even more often than I have, so it's even harder.

Kathy: My father is Charles Hahn.

Mary Ellen Banks: And he was bombardier in the front?

Mick: My father didn't--he didn't set out to talk about it.

But 1945, he hired a secretary and dictated the whole story to her.

speaker: Oh, that's wonderful.

Dan: One morning in the tail of the B-17 was all this brain matter and guts from the previous tail gunner.

As I started to hose it down, they said, "Don't worry, Sergeant, you won't suffer."

Average tail gunner only sees ten seconds of combat before he's killed.

Tail gunners got killed because they'd run out of ammunition.

The night before each mission, we'd break into the ammunition barracks and steal over three times what we were issued so we wouldn't run out.

Georg: Look, this is all of the bullets that we found.

Mick: Oh my God.

Georg: Yeah, it's this shiny part, and it looks absolutely new.

Seventy-five years ago.

It is the holder for the bombs.

Yeah?

Then this, it was quite deep in the ground.

I thought, "What could that be?"

And we found out it's a walk-around oxygen bottle.

Now, this piece here, that's a big thing.

You can hardly lift it.

As you can see: the propeller.

This is exactly that part.

We found these tiny little plastic parts.

Our metal detector would have never found them, and they fit together.

A navigator's slide ruler.

For me, this is the most moving part, actually, because I know that George Gaudaen had this part in his hands.

One B-17 is still flying in Europe.

I managed to see the engineer that he gave me that, and it shows you all the parts of the engine.

And that helped me then to find what was what.

That's exactly that.

I could go on and on and on, you know?

Kathy: All of this you found since last summer?

Georg: Yeah.

Kathy: All of it?

Georg: All of it.

Kathy: And it was still there.

No one had ever been out there hunting for anything.

It's amazing to me.

Dan: We were always afraid when we flew missions.

Every one of us.

But we grew to love this fear and to welcome it.

It was a companion one always had on these missions, and without this fear, I think any one of us would have been lost.

Jim, I remember particularly, would always shake as though he had palsy when we went over heavy flak concentrations.

Perhaps it was because we had been through that rough mission together that I knew better than others how he felt.

Georg: Please welcome, this is Father August.

He is a representative of the monastery.

The owner of the woods.

Kathy: Nice to meet you.

August: [speaking foreign language] Cheri: Where do you feel the main fuselage landed?

Georg: Right there.

It really hit the top here, exploded, and parts were thrown all over the place.

Mick: Yeah.

Georg: We'll just go in here.

Cheri: Who's to say we'll find something now.

Georg: We might be lucky.

Maybe we are not.

Ah, found already something here.

So just dig more there.

[metal detector beeping] speaker: A mine.

Cheri: Oh, there it is.

Yay, we found one!

Mick: A bullet!

Cheri: Yay, whoopee!

Joey: Unbelievable.

[metal detector beeping] Georg: Ammo here.

It's most likely a rock.

It's big.

Mick: Oh, there it is.

Cheri: A flak jacket.

speaker: Another piece of-- Mick: It's a flak jacket, a piece of a flak jacket!

Cheri: You didn't think we'd probably find anything?

Georg: No, not here, I thought maybe a few-- Cheri: 'Cause you thought you'd done it all.

Georg: Yeah.

Cheri: And there you go.

Joey: As well as you get addicted, once you've found something.

Georg: [speaking foreign language] Kathy: This is the bullet.

Georg: [speaking foreign language] Mick: I'm so happy to see it.

I'm so happy to be here.

But thinking about your father being 23 and doing this.

It's so hard to believe, and then to find a piece of a flak jacket.

There's a connection--huh.

speaker: Do you want to hang it very high or just-- Mick: Yeah, yeah.

It's kind of a backdrop to the show.

It's a parachute.

Mick: I wrote it 20 years ago or something more than that.

But it's not just about my father in World War II.

It's about my experiences with him.

I know my father, he had an uncle that was a big-time Hollywood producer, and he went to live with him after he got out of the Army because he thought he might want to be an actor, but he didn't follow through with it.

Dan: We were hit like I've never been hit by flak before.

And my own tail compartment was so spotted, I could not put my hand on-- Mick: "Any part of the wall without covering five or six holes."

Mick: One and two engines were both out, three and four superchargers were out.

Number one was burning.

Number two was leaking gas.

Jim said, "There's only one thing to do."

Dan: "Get the hell out of this flying coffin."

Mick: Jump!

It was a wonderful feeling when I looked up and saw my parachute billow out and catch the wind!

Interrupted briefly by the sound of our plane exploding.

Georg: Mr. Katzbauer will explain us now what they thought at the time and [speaking foreign language] Mr. Katzbauer: [speaking foreign language] Georg: Six years, six years, okay.

Cheri: Get a little closer together.

Georg: Okay, and about where he's pointing now.

Mr. Katzbauer: [speaking foreign language] Georg: They saw bombs falling out, they saw-- Mr. Katzbauer: [speaking foreign language] Georg: They realized it was the crew that just jumped.

Mr. Katzbauer: [speaking foreign language] Georg: His father was the mayor of the village.

And he went that direction where he saw that man coming down.

Mr. Katzbauer: [speaking foreign language] Georg: And he captured that young soldier.

Mr. Katzbauer: [speaking foreign language] Georg: The man was able to speak a little bit of German.

A few words, enough to tell him that he had a few missions left.

That, for us, is very clear to us that it's Kathy's and Mary Ellen's father.

Kathy: Pretty exciting.

Mary Ellen: I never knew he could speak any German.

It makes me sad to know.

Kathy: We know a lot more now than we did then.

I was six weeks old when the plane crashed and when he came home, he had a fairly brand new wife and a daughter he'd never met before.

And he had what we think is now called PTSD.

The alcohol and the abuse?

Yup.

Not a happy childhood.

Mick: "I don't give a [bleep] what the doctor said, Charlotte, I'm having another drink.

The hell I ain't.

You go to hell if you think you're gonna stop me.

[bleep], I said, I'm having a drink.

Try to stop me, I'll knock you upside your head.

[bleep], I said get out the way!"

Dad misses her with a chair.

Mom runs and locks herself in my sister's bedroom.

Dad starts kicking the door.

My whole family lives in fear of my father.

Every day, I live with the same awful thought.

The best outcome is that he kills himself and doesn't take anyone else with him.

Joey: All these fathers came back extremely damaged, completely understandably.

It must have been very, very difficult to be a wife or a child.

So the children might have had very mixed feelings about their fathers.

On the one hand, really wanting to know what happened.

But on the other hand, maybe not wanting to know too much, actually.

But then to actually go to the place where their fathers nearly lost their lives.

How incredibly brave it was of them to come.

Georg: There were 29 planes.

They left from Foggia in southern Italy.

The mission was to attack W llersdorf, the big aerodrome of the Nazis.

The plane had to turn around about ten minutes before it reached W llersdorf because an engine started burning.

The plane was shot down before it then finally crashed.

Georg: Thousands of pilots came down in the area of Austria in the Second World War.

Two hundred had been lynched by the local population, that were actually not taken prisoner but were murdered by the population where they had come down.

Georg: So many little circumstances lead either this way or that way.

Sometimes it's just a few words or the wrong person, the wrong moment in the wrong place.

That's what happens when things go wrong.

Gary: And that really brings it full circle how lucky we are.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to come where my father had been, and to relive all the memories.

It just rekindled my whole father's spirit.

Cheri: It just makes you think about what he must have gone through that young when they were in the war.

And they were.

They were just kids.

Kathy: They were very brave men.

I can't imagine what it was like to be in an airplane that was coming down and not ever having experienced putting a parachute on and then to be captured and put into a prison camp.

Cheri: I found out a lot.

I'm so happy I came.

Kathy: I understand now why my dad was antisocial.

I think he just didn't really know how to overcome what happened to him.

Now that I know that, I have a lot more appreciation for my dad and what he did.

Mick: "As a prisoner of war, I have seen men shot for practically no reason.

I've seen them kicked when trying to crawl down the road.

I have seen men starving.

I've seen men die.

I arrived in New York Harbor on June 12, 1945, a year and six months after I left the States and forty days after I was liberated.

It is impossible to express the gratitude I feel towards those men who liberated us, and to those who have helped us in all our troubles."

Joey: What's come out of it, I think, has been really actually quite incredible.

It's touched a few people's lives, but it's touched a few people's lives very significantly.

Basically, we're all just normal people.

We're all so alike.

Maybe for them they realize that the Austrians aren't all running around with long black leather coats with a swastika on their arm anymore.

That sounds terribly superficial, but I think that's what it boils down to.

Joey: Maybe there's some hope that by remembering, one can keep some sort of peace.

There is a sort of preventative measure.

all: Cheers!

Joey: I've also realized how lucky we are.

It's extraordinary that some person like Georg would go to all that effort, collect this all together, and actually make something out of it.

Georg: [speaking foreign language] Joey: But no, you can't go on forever, no.

You mean, when he's 90, he'll still be going with his metal detector in the woods?

I don't think so.