John Woodbridge and Maurice Possley: Hitler in the Crosshairs: A GI's Story of Courage and Faith

16 Prinzregenten Platz was one of many apartments in that middle-class part of Munich, but it had one considerable distinction: its owner. On April 29, 1945, a young American soldier named Ira “Teen” Palm led his small group of men up two flights of stairs to find out whether Hitler was home.

With the Nazi regime on the verge of collapse and Hitler’s whereabouts unknown, the search was on throughout Berlin and Munich. Palm found the apartment unoccupied, but took with him a curious souvenir from Hitler’s office: a golden pistol, engraved with the initials ‘AH’. After the war, Palm gave the pistol to Charles Woodbridge, his pastor – and, years later, Woodbridge’s son John would use that unusual gift to unlock the untold story of one man’s heroic service in World War II and his journey to faith.

John Woodbridge (Doctorat de Troisiéme Cycle, University of Toulouse, France) is Research Professor of Church History and Christian Thought at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Northwestern University and Hautes Etudes, the University of Paris, France. He has served as a Senior Editor of Christianity Today and is the author of Revolt in Pre-Revolutionary France (Johns Hopkins). He is the coauthor of Letters along the Way, The Mark of Jesus, and A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories that Stretch and Stir. Woodbridge is the recipient of four Gold Medallion Awards for his writing projects.

Maurice Possley is a Research Fellow at the Santa Clara University School of Law’s Northern California Innocence project. He is the author of two non-fiction books: Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth and The Brown’s Chicken Massacre. He was an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune for nearly twenty-five years, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his investigative articles. He currently lives in Santa Clara, CA.