It was 1944. Martin Gelb, an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, was behind Nazi lines with a .45 and a Tommy gun.

“I was asked to do a lot of strange things, but you follow orders. It did get a little crazy,” the 100-year-old OSS veteran from Hudson, N.H., told the Herald last week.

He was part of William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s small crew of intelligence operatives working with the French resistance, hunting down German scientists and rounding up war criminals.

He was an expert radio operator who knew Morse code and International Morse code who slipped into France and Germany along with the D-Day invasion. He remained in Europe all the way through the Nuremberg trials.

HUDSON, NH - NOVEMBER 7: World War II veteran Martin Gelb talks about his experiences on November 7, 2019 in Hudson, N.H. (Staff Photo By Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

OSS Capt. (retired) Martin Gelb back when he was in the service with his Colt .45. (Courtesy of Gelb family.)

OSS Capt. Martin Gelb helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp and wrote on the back of the photo this caption: "This is one of the few sights left behind at Buchenwald prison. I took this and many others. the furnaces were still smoldering with bodies in there when we reached there. Stacks of bodies were found all over the camp. Hundreds of others were too far gone and dying of starvation in the filthy barracks that house 1,000-1,800."



HUDSON, NH - NOVEMBER 7: World War II veteran Martin Gelb holds his OSS medal on November 7, 2019 in Hudson, N.H. (Staff Photo By Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

HUDSON, NH - NOVEMBER 7: World War II veteran Martin Gelb, center, is seen in 1943 photo with other officer candidates on November 7, 2019 in Hudson, N.H. (handout photo)

HUDSON, NH - NOVEMBER 7: World War II veteran Martin Gelb talks about his experiences on November 7, 2019 in Hudson, N.H. (Staff Photo By Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)



HUDSON, NH - NOVEMBER 7: A photo of World War II veteran Martin Gelb is seen with his OSS medal and a wartime letter to his mother on November 7, 2019 in Hudson, N.H. (Staff Photo By Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

HUDSON, NH - NOVEMBER 7: World War II veteran Martin Gelb holds a 1943 photo of himself and other officer candidates on November 7, 2019 in Hudson, New Hampshire. (Staff Photo By Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

HUDSON, NH - NOVEMBER 7: World War II veteran Martin Gelb talks about his experiences on November 7, 2019 in Hudson, N.H. (Staff Photo By Angela Rowlings/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)



“I was assigned to an advance radio group that would contact resistance fighters,” he said. “Everything was secret. So secret.”

He doesn’t highlight that he was a Jew fighting against the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but he doesn’t hide the fact that he was driven to succeed. He’s partially blind but his mind is sharp. Martin Gelb is one of the Heroes of a Generation the Herald is chronicling.

But unlike other World War II veterans, his bravery remained top secret until records from the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA — were declassified in 2008. He was recently awarded the OSS Congressional Gold Medal for his service.

This centenarian said he has seen more than he cares to remember. His name was on a list of spies the Germans kept locked up in a safe in Paris, until the Allies unlocked that vault. But that was “a joke” fellow spies could laugh off, he said.

Buchenwald was another story. “I shot my Tommy gun in the air,” Gelb said when asked about liberating the concentration camp — German’s first and one of the largest.

Gelb’s daughter, Nancy Sag, 72, said her father has “compartmentalized the horror” of World War II.

But photos Gelb took while in the camp capture the inhumanity. He wrote on the back of one picture: “This is one of the few sights left behind at Buchenwald prison. I took this and many others. the furnaces were still smoldering with bodies in there when we reached there. Stacks of bodies were found all over the camp. Hundreds of others were too far gone and dying of starvation in the filthy barracks that house 1,000-1,800.”

He said he has “no idea” why he was assigned to liberate the camp. “All I know is I have that picture from the camp.” He was angry, though. And that kept him accepting one dangerous assignment after another.

“I was pretty wild and uncontrollable but they kept promoting me,” he said. “I resented the treatment that the German people, and particularly the Polish people, gave the Jewish people. It just upset me.”

Gelb recalls a mission to capture a German engineer in Germany, only to lose him to the Russians who got there first. That “engineer,” Gelb said, was involved with nuclear science. He had to shoot his way to safety using his Tommy gun that day.

He avoided snipers, was almost shot in the Battle of the Bulge, hauled German industrialists to the Nuremberg trials and said he once got into trouble with Gen. Omar Bradley — commander of the First Army — when he refused to leave an officer’s mess hall because he had an enlisted man with him.

“Bradley asked me ‘Who’s your commanding officer?’ And I said William Donovan.”

“Wild Bill? I know Wild Bill,” Bradley answered, Gelb said. And the general let the two men have lunch.

“I was completely different then than I am now,” Gelb says. “It seemed every time they sent me on a mission it was behind the lines.

“I never spoke about the war, what I did or what the problems were,” he added of his decades of silence. “It was classified. … My wife, my daughter, my son never knew what I did. It was just a part of my life that was over.”

Martin Gelb remains humble. “I don’t know if I was fearless,” he added, “all I know is a few times, I disobeyed orders and I got rewarded for it.”

The OSS wanted spies who could think on the run. “The ideal OSS candidate was described as a Harvard PhD that could handle himself in a bar fight,” said Charles Pinck, a native of Massachusetts and president of the OSS Society. “The OSS needed people who could think and act independently.”

People like Martin Gelb.

If you know a World War II veteran with a story to tell, email joed@bostonherald.com. Here is a link to the first story in this series: Memories of JFK, a lost brother and beloved husband.