Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  Donovan would stop by Area F to show the place off to generals and senators over drinks on a terrace overlooking an obstacle course or at lavish dinners in the clubhouse, featuring fresh Gulf shrimp and broiled porterhouse steaks. The soldiers themselves missed out on many of the club’s amenities. Life for Freddy and the other OSS agents was much more austere, with food tightly rationed and men crammed six to a tent or in temporary huts. Training was constant, as they learned everything from parachuting to picking locks and intercepting radio signals. A former police chief from Shanghai taught them dozens of different ways for a man to kill an enemy with his bare hands. The unvarnished goal was “to make young Americans adore wringing the necks and breaking the spines of Gestapo officers, SS men, and all Nazis in European countries occupied by Germany,” one instructor crowed.

  A brand-new, pristine nine-hole golf course was soon torn to shreds by bazooka fire and errant missiles, with land mines and hand grenades buried in the sand traps for the trainees to defuse. Golf divots turned to craters, and the club’s caddy shack was destroyed. Besides paying the monthly rent, the government wound up reimbursing the club $187,000 for the unexpected damage. Three men were killed in training mishaps, and many others ended up in the hospital, with broken bones, burns, and bruised egos. The men figured that if they could survive here, the real war couldn’t be much worse.

  Area F brought Freddy one step closer to fighting the Nazis. In training, he was often the first to volunteer for the mission of the moment, whether it was learning to fight a black belt in jujitsu or planting a live bomb in a sand trap. For Freddy, any chance to impress his superior officers was a chance to stamp an early ticket for his return to Europe.

  Not everyone was so eager. Watching quietly from the back at many training demonstrations was a tall string bean of a kid named Hans Wynberg. A gangly six foot two, the twenty-one-year-old trainee towered over most of his fellow soldiers, but Hans’s unassuming manner helped him fade into the crowd. He was a loner. When he did speak, it was with a foreign accent that sounded vaguely Dutch. He had an air of baby-faced innocence, remarked one of his military supervisors, who questioned whether Hans was tough enough for what lay ahead. “Young and requires direction, but 100 percent willing and gets results,” another military supervisor would write in his file.

  Hans never considered himself much of a leader, and he had no real desire to be one. In the chaotic environs of Area F, he had been bumped up in rank a few times during training only to be bumped down again for various infractions. Yet if anyone at the country club could have mastered the practice of building bombs and detonating explosives, it was Hans. A prodigy in chemistry, he had worked in a New York lab before the war and had science in his blood. His grandfather and his father had developed a special glue process to repair bicycle tires in his native Netherlands; in his bicycle-crazed homeland, just about everyone seemed to have one of their black-and-red Simson repair kits.

  Hans carried a science book with him almost everywhere he went, and there were few chemical reactions that he hadn’t mastered as a boy, at least on paper. Real-life chemical explosions were another matter. He’d always aspired to be a scientist or a professor, not a soldier or a spy. Hans was glad to leave the detonation drills and derring-do to others. There were days he wondered why he was among the recruits at Area F at all. He did his training tasks capably most of the time, but the truth was that he would rather be playing chess or poring over his books than setting off a grenade in a transformed golf bunker.

  Freddy and Hans soon picked each other out of the crowd at training. Yin and yang in personalities, the two young soldiers were drawn together by the eerie parallels that had brought them to this makeshift spy-training site. Each was born to a successful Jewish businessman in Europe; each fled the Nazis as a teenager before the war; and each wound up in Brooklyn, just a few miles apart in an immigrants’ enclave, although they had never actually met there.

  Like Freddy, Hans had embraced the refugee’s life in Brooklyn as a teenager after coming to America. Looking back, he would call it “the greatest time of my life.” He became a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan, sitting in the cheap seats in the bleachers at Ebbets Field as he screamed his lungs out for Pee Wee Reese, Leo Durocher, and the hapless hometown “Bums.” He finished near the top of his class in high school; he got a part in the school production of Julius Caesar, yelling “Hark, hark!” onstage in a Dutch accent, alongside the native-born students; and he came to adore Hollywood starlets like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.

  Hans liked to say he had become “more American than the Americans.” He would venture into Manhattan on Saturdays to watch the city’s most famous chess players in the park, and he found a restaurant in the basement of Grand Central Station that served Dutch-style raw herring just the way he liked it. Even better, he had met a girl named Elly—a Dutch immigrant like himself, and brainy, too—and he thought she might be the one. Home on leave from military training soon after a promotion, Hans took Elly to New York’s iconic Tavern on the Green restaurant, and he wrote her a poem for the occasion: The sergeant and his lady / They went and saw the town / He had a brand new uniform / She had an evening gown.

  Brooklyn hadn’t brought Hans and Freddy together, despite their proximity as refugees there; Hitler had. Training together at OSS, and grumbling about the endless exercises, the two young men developed a deep kinship born of exile. “My little brother,” Freddy called Hans. Freddy’s own brother, after finishing college, had enlisted in the army and shipped out for the Philippines, but in the bookish Hans, he found a worthy stand-in. If it weren’t for the army’s “lights out” rules, Freddy might have been yelling for Hans, instead of his brother, to quit reading and turn the lights out at night so he could get some sleep.

  Though Hans was nearly a head taller and outranked him, Freddy played the role of domineering drill sergeant in the pairing. Hans revered him for his brashness and sheer chutzpah, and he tolerated his bossiness. Hans could be headstrong himself, chafing at times under military rules, but he was no match for his newfound OSS partner. Freddy had bent the rules with abandon his whole life—whether it was “borrowing” his father’s car as an eight-year-old in Germany or getting a general to surrender in an army war game in the Arizona desert. He was an agitator, an innovator, and nothing seemed to rattle him as far as Hans could tell. And boy, could he talk. That riled some people—colleagues described him as “a windbag” and a “talkative braggart,” noted one military review—but Hans loved listening to Freddy spin his yarns about his old homeland and their new one.

  Freddy and Hans stood apart at OSS. Many of the agents who passed through the spy agency during the war were well-connected blue bloods, Ivy League professionals who would come to steer American intelligence for decades: men like Princeton-educated William Colby, who trained at Area F and was one of four OSS men to become CIA directors. Or Harvard-trained scholar Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; major-league baseball player Moe Berg, who graduated from Princeton and spoke eight languages; and famed movie director John Ford. Donovan’s spy crew at OSS was dominated by men who had been noted lawyers, writers, businessmen, and academics before the war, and the tony grounds of the Maryland country club were, at least before the bombing drills started, just the kind of place many had frequented in civilian life. The joke at the agency, in fact, was that “OSS” actually stood for “Oh-So-Social.”

  But Freddy, the German-born mechanic, and Hans, the nerdy Dutch science whiz, were a different breed, refugees who were in high demand by OSS more for the foreign languages they spoke and their experience with other cultures than the people they knew or the schools they attended. Donovan and his aides understood that the United States couldn’t hope to gather needed intelligence on its wartime enemies in Europe and Asia if it couldn’t understand them. Ironically, Donovan himself had stirred fears before the war about the possibility of German émigrés worldwide secretly helping the Nazis—the dreaded Fifth Column. But now that he was
running OSS, he was anxious to find immigrants who spoke German, as well as Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and other war-zone languages—even though many, like Freddy, had never finished high school much less gone to elite institutions.

  Freddy and Hans were assigned to an “OG,” an operational group made up of about thirty men. The Mission: Impossible–style mandate out of Washington for these groups was to train foreign-speaking soldiers “skilled in methods of sabotage and small arms” and launch them “in small groups behind enemy lines to harass the enemy.” That so many of the spies-in-training were foreign-born Jews was not lost on the higher-ups. Despite the prejudice that many Jewish Americans faced before the war, and even during it, more than a half-million Jews ended up serving in the US military in World War II. Among them, thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe returned to fight the Nazis for their adopted country. Out of that group came the smallest and most elite subset of all, numbering only a few dozen or so: Jewish immigrants who had fled Hitler and volunteered to be dropped behind enemy lines for OSS.

  That Freddy had been banned from the army as an “enemy alien” just two years before didn’t matter now. Nor did it matter that in peacetime, he and Hans would have had trouble even getting on the grounds of Congressional Country Club, which had few minorities or Jews as members. What mattered now, in the view of Donovan and his top officers, was that they had the background, the language skills, the training, and the indefinable “guts” to confront the enemy at almost incalculable risk. If the ideal OSS spy was “a PhD who could win a bar fight,” as agency leaders liked to say, then Hans’s brains and Freddy’s brawn combined those elements in a tag-team pairing.

  For Hans, like Freddy, OSS was a way out of the traditional army. He had already served a stint in the infantry after enlisting, but he felt like he never quite fit in. He wasn’t an army grunt; he was an individualist, a scholar who wrote poetry, listened to Bach, and dabbled in the philosophy of Socrates and Plato; he resisted the “groupthink” of his army days, of marching in formation and working en masse. Just the thought of large numbers of people reminded him of Hitler and how he riled up a crowd. He found the whole notion of mass manipulation deeply unsettling.

  Hans also chafed against the army’s rules and rigidity. He often thought he knew better than the people above him—not a good trait in the military, he admitted. Once, marching in the Texas heat during basic training, he had asked his drill sergeant if maybe they could take it a bit slower. That did not go over well, and the whole company got KP duty because of his insolence. The lanky kid from the Netherlands was not a popular man that day.

  Hans got his chance for something different when he was called into base command in Texas one day. A lieutenant had an unexpected question for him. A new agency called OSS was looking for European-born soldiers, the officer explained to him. He spoke Dutch, right? Yes, Hans said. “So,” the lieutenant asked, “do you want to liberate Holland?”

  What a question, Hans thought to himself; of course he did. After war had first erupted in Europe, the Dutch army had drafted him to return to fight, but he had decided to stay put in America. Now the thought of going back to the Netherlands with the Americans to fight the Nazis energized him, and not just because of his Dutch loyalty. He was also drawn back to his native land by a wrenching burden, a piece of his life story that he had hidden from almost everyone. The truth was that, as much as he loved his new life in Brooklyn, he had left his parents and his little brother behind in the Netherlands, and he had no idea what had become of them under Nazi rule.

  The agonizing separation from his family had not been Hans’s choice. Four years earlier, in 1939, his father, Leo, alarmed by the growing Nazi menace in Europe, had sent him and his twin brother, Luke, to America at the age of sixteen. They couldn’t all leave yet, Leo told the boys. Leo stayed behind with Hans’s mother, Henrietta, and their youngest son, Robbie, then twelve, and waited for their chance. Money, visa problems, family obligations—all kept them in the Netherlands for the time being. Leo’s friends and relatives in the Netherlands were baffled when he first told them he was hatching an exit plan to send the twins away by themselves. Hitler was not the Netherlands’ problem, not yet at least, and sending a pair of teenage boys to live alone in America—in the land of the “cowboys and Indians,” as they called it—seemed rash, if not downright foolish. Gek, they called him: “Crazy.”

  But Leo was a determined man. Always politically minded, he had become alarmed by Hitler’s piercing, anti-Semitic rhetoric soon after hearing one of his very first speeches as German chancellor in 1933. The man was “a maniac,” he told Hans and anyone else who would listen. He started a political group not long afterward opposing Nazi-aligned political candidates in the Netherlands and the spread of fascism in Europe, and he went door-to-door to make his case. When civil war broke out in Spain three years later, he told Hans that he wished he could go there himself to fight Franco and the Nazi-backed fascists, but his family and his business kept him where he was. Meanwhile, he watched with dread as more and more Jews from Germany began to stream into the Netherlands to escape Hitler’s reach.

  Leo wasn’t going to wait any longer to see how far Hitler’s territorial ambitions would extend. With Europe on the verge of war in 1939, he managed to snare two prized visas to America for Hans and Luke. He mortgaged the family tire-patching business, booked passage for them on a transatlantic ocean liner, deposited $3,600 at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York for their support, and sent them to stay with a kindly Polish businessman there, a diamond cutter whom he barely knew. He was desperate to find a refuge for his family, even if it meant breaking them up and sending them away in stages.

  Hans didn’t question the decision, as difficult as it was to leave his family, even temporarily, for a foreign land. He trusted his father’s judgment. Leo had always been a successful, charismatic, and dapper figure in the twins’ lives. When Hans wasn’t making model planes on his own or inspecting his stamp collection, Leo would be taking him and Luke out on the weekends to go fishing in one of the local canals or to look at Dutch ships and trains.

  On the day the twins left for America in May 1939, Leo and Henrietta held a farewell party for them in their yard on a bright morning. Hans’s parents were determined to put on their best face; they wanted this to be a celebration, not a wake. Leo chronicled the event in a black-and-white home movie, with Hans and Luke preening for the camera. Everyone was dressed in what even the Dutch Jews called their “Easter best”; Hans had on his fanciest suit, with his tie knotted tightly under a sweater vest. He kissed his grandmother on the cheek, hugged the family dog, and tussled playfully with his little brother, Robbie. With an American flag flying from the house for the occasion, Hans unfolded a giant map of the United States and searched for their destination in New York. Robbie, in knickers and knee-high socks, did handstands on an antique chair, and the three brothers competed in a spirited footrace.

  As the twins prepared to leave on their long journey, Leo reminded them of an expression that emphasized family bonds: “Family,” he said, “are the people who can call you by your first name without having to ask permission.” Leo assured the twins that he and the rest of the family would follow them to America later, as soon as they could.

  Hans and Luke made it to Brooklyn, settled in together in a small room in the diamond cutter’s apartment, and enrolled in public school. But Leo’s promise to join them “soon” turned to weeks, then months, then years, and still Hans’s parents and his little brother were unable to flee. Leo would write long typewritten letters to the twins every week or so, asking about their faraway new life in Brooklyn, pushing for them to give him more details in their letters home about their schoolwork, and dutifully updating them on the mundanities of daily life back at home: a shipment of tire tubes that just arrived; a new train station nearby that finally opened; an infuriating car tax that he was contesting.

  What weighed more heavily than ever on Leo’s mind, though, was the
madman Adolf Hitler, who was holding court barely four hundred miles to the east in Berlin. In one letter in the fall of 1939, five months after Hans and his brother had left for America, Leo wrote of how a Nazi U-boat had sunk a British aircraft carrier in one of the first naval skirmishes of the European conflict; he was worried about the strength of England’s vaunted military, which he considered “the most important defense against Nazism,” not only for the British but for all of Europe. Nor did he have any faith in Britain’s Neville Chamberlain, a Nazi appeaser always walking around with his silly umbrella, Leo said.

  His friends and neighbors in the Netherlands were finally beginning to see the grave danger that the Nazis posed, Leo reported. But too many others, he observed, were still painfully slow to recognize it. Like Mr. Buttinger down at the metal company, he wrote, who “continues to believe that Herr Hitler is a swell guy for the Germans!!” Leo couldn’t fathom how people in the Netherlands, and even in America, could support Hitler and the Nazis. “That guy Lindbergh, he is so transparent,” he wrote of the famed aviator, who was feted by Nazi leaders on trips to Germany. Such Nazi sympathizers “are the true traitors of the causes of freedom and humanity.” More people were trying to go to America, he noted, hinting that the family might make it there soon, too. How and when, he didn’t say. He made no promises. “OK boys, I will leave it at that for today,” he wrote. “Kisses and all the best from your Pipa.”

  Leo’s dire predictions were realized seven months later, in May 1940, when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. The Dutch army was little match for Hitler’s mobilized Panzer tanks, and five days after the invasion, the Dutch were forced to surrender. The German occupiers, greeted with Nazi salutes by some Dutchmen, soon began jailing many of the Jews who had fled Germany for the Netherlands and instituting their own brand of Nazi rule.