Widow Shares Husband’s Role in Bringing Nazis to Justice

Shortly after Bruce Mises died, his wife was baffled to find a box of old documents that seemed to defy his life as an unassuming businessman.

He didn’t talk much about the past, and Joy Mises, his wife of 20 years, knew only sketchy details: He was born in Austria, had immigrated to the United States around the start of World War II, and he had lost relatives in Holocaust.

Until she found the documents, the Redondo Beach widow had no idea of the role her husband played in bringing Nazi officers to justice after the war ended.

“He never talked about this,” she said. “He was a very modest man. He never wanted any kind of recognition.”

Inside the box were old passports, his citizenship certificate, military service papers and – more telling – letters commending him for his service during the Nuremberg trials in Germany in 1945 and 1946.

On an otherwise innocuous employment application, Bruce Mises typed neatly in all caps that he “supervised the assembling and distribution of document books (English and German) used in various of trials of OCCWC,” referring to the Office of Chief Counsel for War Crimes.

She also found a sturdy brass medallion given to her husband by Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Holocaust survivor who helped bring roughly 1,100 Nazi criminals to justice. Inscribed are the words: “Keeper of the Flame of the Conscience of the World.”

“I was very surprised,” she said. “I had no idea.”

Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Mises will donate the medallion to Congregation Beth Torah in Torrance during a memorial service for the 6 million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust. Though Bruce Mises attended the synagogue for more than a decade, Rabbi Gary Spero had no clue about his storied past.

“I think it’s pretty common for survivors to keep quiet,” said Spero, who once worked as a docent for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. “These are very difficult, painful memories.”

Joy Mises, a retired clinical psychologist who treated people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, agreed. She recalls her late husband’s seemingly strange fears that persisted throughout his life, such as his protests against her placement of a mezuzah – a Jewish marker that contains pieces of the Torah – on the door of their condominium.

“He didn’t want people knowing that we were Jewish,” she said. “All these years later he still had that fear of being known buried deep inside.”

Since her husband’s death at the age of 92 in November 2008, Joy Mises has worked to assemble his documents and, with help from historians, compile a more accurate account of his life.

He was born in 1915 in Vienna, Austria, to well-heeled parents. His father was an attorney, and his mother was a concert pianist. Mises was a college student when the Nazi soldiers marched into Austria in 1938.

He was arrested shortly after the invasion and taken to a school that had been turned into a jail. Joy Mises can only guess, but she believes her late husband’s uncle must have bribed one of the guards to release his nephew, who was given 24 hours to leave the country and promise never to return.

For the next year, Mises lived underground, working on a farm in Estonia with a family that hid Jews during the Holocaust. He was then sponsored to come to the United States by an American businessman, and worked for the railroads until joining the U.S. Army to fight the Germans.

After his discharge, Mises, who was fluent in English and German, was enlisted to work in civilian service for the U.S. Air Force. He was placed in charge of guarding, indexing and preparing key evidence – correspondence between the Nazi leaders, records of the death camps and other detailed documentation of methods and plans to kill Jews – for the trials that were to take place in military tribunals after the war.

It was during these years that he developed a close relationship with Wiesenthal, who dedicated his life to hunting down Holocaust conspirators that had been living openly in Europe after the war ended. These survivors helped bring hundreds of criminals to justice, including Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank.

In March of 1980, then-

President Jimmy Carter gave Wiesenthal a Medal of Honor for his work. Wiesenthal made a limited number of copies for his close associates, including Mises, who tediously pieced together evidence over the years to support legal cases against the Nazis.

By the time he received the medal, Mises had moved on from this horrific task. He was married and working as an importer of fishing line, and rarely spoke of the past.

Joy Mises, who married Bruce Mises after his first wife died, recalls him telling her about going back to Vienna shortly after the war to find out what happened to his family. He learned, with help from the Jewish Documentation Center established by Wiesenthal in Vienna, that his parents had been taken to the death camps – though he never knew where or when they were killed – and that his brother had been killed during a German raid in Europe after being hit by a bus.

“Bruce was the only survivor of his entire family,” Joy Mises said. “That must have been very difficult for him.”

When he came to America, Mises had no family, no skills and just $20 in his pocket. Spero said he is continually amazed at the resilience of these early immigrants who shouldered so much loss.

“It would be understandable for them to wallow in bitterness,” he said. “But they didn’t. They started working, they started new lives and continued on.”

The rabbi recalls Mises as a “true gentleman” who was always concerned about the welfare of others. Though he was a humble man, Spero said it is important to tell stories such as his.

“It is a great honor to have this medallion,” he said. “We will display it proudly. It is important, especially for the younger generations, to be aware of this past so that it is never repeated.”