Deadly Little Dagger: America’s Most Dangerous Knife
Deadly Little Dagger: America’s Most Dangerous Knife
by Jim Phillips
Governments and their agents have long puzzled over just what to do in the event of being captured by the enemy. Was there a suitable method for an agent to quickly end any chance of being tortured?
British agents during WWII were issued capsules that unfortunately did not contain enough poison to end their days. Upon taking the pill these agents found, to their dismay, that it only made them very sick and did not end their torture at the hands of their Gestapo captors.
The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), did have available cyanide capsules. At the end of WWII, when German General Hermann Goering was under arrest pending his trial, it was decided to allow him to make a self-inflicted exit via poison supplied by the OSS to his prison cell.
The above article appears in our August 2020 issue of Knife Magazine. Click the blue box below to read the whole thing.
Here is the YouTube Video Jim references in print:
H. Clay Aalders
This was left on a different thread, but belongs here:
Philip McEvoy
August 2020, Knife Magazine, ‘A Deadly Little Dagger’ Correction.
Himmler took poison, presumably his own, shortly after being captured by British troops,
Goering was captured, tried and convicted of committing War Crimes. He was sentenced to die by hanging. The night before his execution was to be carried out he also took poison, source unknown. I have never read that any historian claims the OSS supplied either Nazi with their fatal poison.
H. Clay Aalders
Here is our response:
H. Clay Aalders
knifemagazine.com
clay@knifemagazine.com
In reply to Philip McEvoy.
The claim about Goering raised an eyebrow here in the office as well.
Jim is _incredibly_ well connected, and stands by the assertion. But we recognize that this is is a controversial, and not universally accepted position.