About
Who was Moe Berg?
The Spy Behind Home Plate is a documentary about Moe Berg, an enigmatic Jewish catcher during baseball’s Golden Age before joining the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to spy for the U.S. on the Nazis’ atomic bomb program. Berg grew up in an immigrant Jewish family in Newark, N.J., attended Princeton University and received a J.D. from Columbia University during his off seasons in baseball.
Known as the “brainiest guy in baseball,” Berg attended the Sorbonne, and was known to speak or write in 12 languages. Highlights of the documentary include Berg’s All-Star exhibition tour with Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Lefty Gomez and Lou Gehrig to Japan in 1934, his selection by the OSS’ mission to interview top Italian physicists to see if they knew anything about the German bomb program and his 1944 OSS assignment to attend a lecture by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in Zurich.
For the Swiss trip Berg was given a gun and a cyanide pill to take with him and was instructed to shoot Heisenberg if he was constructing a bomb for the Nazis. Interviewees include; Berg’s relatives, fellow baseball players, biographer Nicholas Dawidoff, authors David Ignatius and Thomas Powers, playwright Michael Frayn, Sports Commentator Larry Merchant, Sportswriter Ira Berkow and baseball executives Jerry Reinsdorf and Bud Selig. Produced, written and directed by Aviva Kempner.
Two of Moe Berg’s baseball cards are displayed at the CIA Museum. One of them is pictured above: 1933 Goudey Moe Berg #158.
Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to Moe Berg in 1945 by President Harry Truman as an award for war service. Upon Berg’s death, his sister Ethel received the award on his behalf and donated it to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. (Photo: Milo Stewart Jr. / National Baseball Hall of Fame)
Photograph album presented to participants in the 1934 American baseball tour to Japan by the tour’s sponsor, the Yomiuri newspaper. This album was donated to the Hall of Fame in 1951 by Sotaro Sukuzi, an employee of the newspaper, who also served as the traveling secretary of the All Americans.
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