That just makes it an urban legend instead of just a joke.
Back to Drew Pearson: Just google the words
drew pearson eichmann fiendishly clever
and you can find that article, or an image of the page it’s on, on-line. His column was syndicated, so you’ll find it in many papers.
He was an American newspaper columnist. So I wouldn’t accept anything he writes as true source material itself. If he says Eichmann trained SS like this, one would still need to wonder where he got that from.
ETA: Here’s one such link: Ocala Star-Banner - Google News Archive Search
Sorry I missed this in February.
I guess this would explain why no one in the popular media talks about military survival training. Astronauts in training being written about in National Geographic, GI Jane, whatever, they all were very cryptic about survival training, to the point it seemed like they were deliberately hiding details. Made me wonder what they were hiding. I mean, it’s survival training - how to find food, make shelter, you know, basic Boy Scout stuff. Nothing secret.
Why should it be secret? Are there secret military foraging techniques we don’t want the Russkies to have? Was there a “survival gap”?
But I guess finding out our National Hero Astronauts were killing fuzzy bunnies might be too much for some people, even in the pre-internet days of Apollo. Especially since they really would never need any of that training. It’s not like they could get lost coming back from the moon (Ah…Houston? I think we landed in Mongolia…).
I had a professor relay a story that during his survival training he was given a chicken as part of his ‘kit,’ but he decided not to kill it. More anecdotal stuff, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable. and he mentioned it fairly casually.
Variations on this seem to be common. I recall once reading how as part of their training Soviet Spetsnaz soldiers were supposed to kill a pregnant cat, tear it open and count the kittens inside.
I thought that unlikely at the time and nothing has made me reassess that view.
Actually a little googling suggests it was ‘Inside the Aquarium’ by Viktor Susorov, and killing puppies is also mentioned.
Those big meanies.
Given how the Nazi’s worked, some other branch would have finked them out. The Navy, the Luftwaffe, the Army, the Abwehr, someone.
I have heard this also, and since I have heard it directly from the Professor of my Survival class, I believe it.