There could be no more american an event. It was the sixth and final game of the 1951 World Series. The New York Yankees, who came into this game leading the Giants three games to two, would ultimately win the championship, 4–3. Years later, sports fans would refer to 1951 as “the season of changes.” This was the year that Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, decided to retire. And it was also the season that introduced a new generation of ballplayers led by future hall-of-famers Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

There were 61,000 individual stories in the stands that day. Most of the men were World War II veterans. The women cheering alongside them might well have worked in a factory to keep the bombers flying and the ammunition dumps overseas filled. Some had lost loved ones in the war; indeed, there was probably no one at the game who did not know a family who had experienced a death. All were grateful that the war was over and that they were now sharing some peacetime prosperity.

Not everyone who saw DiMaggio play his last game had fought on the same side in the Second World War. Wearing tinted glasses and feeling somewhat uncomfortable at his first baseball game was a trim, well-dressed, middle-aged man of average height sitting with a group of similarly well-dressed middle-aged men. His visa indicated that he was a German businessman who specialized in international patent issues. What it did not say was that seven years earlier, Adolf Hitler had promoted this man to generalmajor (brigadier general) for his intelligence work on the eastern front.