Nellie Hertz: Writer on theology whose husband was kidnapped in Vietnam

Hertz: developed a following for her religious writing (Eugene Scheel )

Nellie Hertz was an author of religious books whose husband, a US government employee, was kidnapped by communist guerrillas in Saigon during the Vietnam War and perished after more than two years in captivity.

Hertz wrote two dozen books on spirituality and conservative Catholic theology, many self-published. She also wrote articles for Catholic magazines and published a newsletter called Big Rock Papers, often focused on her dissent from the Vatican II reforms of the mid-1960s.

Although she developed a following for her religious writing, Hertz was for a time far better known for the tragedy in Vietnam that enveloped her life. Her husband’s disappearance swept her into news headlines just as the war was heating up. Hertz, then 45, was living in Saigon with her husband, Gustav Hertz, and three of their five children. He was chief public administrator for the US Agency for International Development mission in Vietnam.

On the afternoon of 2 February 1965, he went out for a ride on his motorbike and never returned. Frantic, Nellie called US military authorities, who sent two military policemen to investigate. All they wanted to know, she would say later, was what bars her husband frequented and the names of any women he met there.

Ten days later, Hertz received a handwritten letter from her husband saying that he would be home within a week. The handwriting was his, but he addressed her as “Solange”, her middle name. He had always called her “Nellie”. It was the last time she ever heard from him.

It was learned later that he had been taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. There were several efforts to have him released, including the payment of a ransom, which was rejected, and an unsuccessful attempt at a prisoner exchange.

In June 1967, the Viet Cong Liberation Radio announced that he had been executed, and had “paid his blood debt to the Vietnamese people.” Not long afterwards, however, Nellie was informed through intermediaries that her husband had not been executed; rather, he had died of malaria in a North Vietnamese prison.

In 1973, the name of Gustav Hertz was on a list delivered to the US government of Americans who had died in captivity in Vietnam. There followed a decades-long effort by US officials and the Hertz family for the return of his body.

Nellie Solange Strong was born in 1920 in Washington DC. She graduated in 1935 from Western High School as class valedictorian. At 19, she graduated summa cum laude from American University, Washington.

In 1938, she married Gustav, a classmate. They bought a historic stone farmhouse in Leesburg, Virginia, which in 1950 would become the motivation for Hertz’s first book, Old Stone Houses of Loudoun County, Virginia.In the 1950s, the family lived for a period in Manila, where Gustav was a State Department foreign assistance officer in the Philippines.

BART BARNES

Nellie Hertz, author: born Washington DC 1 January 1920; died Leesburg, Virginia 3 October 2015.

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