Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  Just as Leo had tried to warn, Herr Hitler was now in charge. A Nazi “civil service” was now running the Netherlands, with its own handpicked mayors, judges, and police commissioners, but writing to Hans and Luke in the fall of 1941, Leo still tried to give the twins the most reassuring view of the situation that he could. At least the Netherlands didn’t have it quite as bad as France or Belgium, where the full weight of the occupying German military enforced the hammer of Nazi law, he wrote to them. He explained that the occupying Nazis viewed the Dutch as “tribal kin,” with hopes that they would eventually adopt the Nazi approach willingly. “But the Dutch masses are stubborn and opinionated. They have yet to be convinced that the old was so bad, compared to what has been visible of the new so far.” People were upset about the daily necessities that they cared about, which were being redirected to the occupiers. Many foods—milk, cheese, beer—were hard to come by now, and it was difficult to find the materials for the cigars that Leo smoked.

  No one knew how it would all turn out, Leo wrote. Separated from his sons for more than two years now, he loved to receive their letters with the news of their lives in America, land of the “cowboys and Indians.” He was thrilled to learn that the twins had re-created a puppet show that the family used to put on in the Netherlands, complete with a hissing devil, and he read excitedly about all the activities and sports they were doing at school. Just don’t overdo it with the swimming and the “excessive exercise,” he cautioned Hans; there was no reason to risk an injury. “You are already the representative of the chess players,” Leo wrote. Wasn’t that enough?

  There was no talk of any imminent reunion. But Leo looked forward to joining them in all the new pastimes they had picked up in America, once the family was together again. “Thankfully I’m still young enough so that once we are reunited in good health, I can join you for swimming, rowing, fishing (if you haven’t become a vegetarian yet), and whatever else. You can rest assured I would take at least six weeks off for everything, as soon as this rotten war is over,” he wrote.

  At the very bottom of the letter, Robbie, now a teenager, added a note of his own in careful, cursive handwriting. “Dear brothers,” it began. “Just now I was studying piano. I dream a lot of you guys lately (I know, what a surprise). Good luck! A punch from me! Rob.”

  By early 1942, there was no further talk in the letters of the Nazis or the war, much less a reunion. The Nazi censors might be screening the mail, and Leo was still intent on putting a bright veneer on their life in the Netherlands, writing of ice-skating outings and family birthday parties. It had been a cold and brutal winter, Leo wrote that February; more snow than he had ever seen. But everyone was healthy, he wrote, and missing the twins very much.

  Hans received each new letter in the mail with a mixture of relief and expectation: relief that his parents and Rob were okay, and expectation that the latest letter might contain word that they had found a way out. It was too painful to read most of the letters himself, so he would let Luke read them and share what they said. In his father’s absence, Hans clung to the memories of all the stories Leo had passed on to him as a boy: stories about science, about Dutch history, about life. One that always stuck with him was about a Dutch naval commander in the eighteen hundreds who found a way to blow up his own ship rather than turn it over to foreign invaders. “I’d rather ignite the fuse in the dynamite!” his father would shout at the story’s climax. It was a story with an element of chemistry in it, a subject father and son both loved; but more than that, it was a story about bravery and heroism in wartime, topics that now seemed more relevant than ever for Hans.

  In mid-1942, without explanation, the letters from his family simply stopped. Hans and Luke could only speculate, grimly, about what had happened. They knew that the news from the Netherlands, like much of Europe, was growing bleaker with every headline. “Nazis Execute 150 Jews; Netherlanders Taken to Poland Reported Machine Gunned,” read one wire-service report from his homeland in the summer of 1943, just as Hans was entering the US army. Jews throughout the Netherlands were now in hiding. In Amsterdam, less than fifteen miles from the Wynbergs’ home in Overveen, a young Dutch girl named Anne Frank was hidden away with her family in an attic. Hans’s own family was “believed to be living in Holland,” the American military noted in his file that year, but the truth was that no one knew for certain. Hans certainly didn’t. In his mind, his parents and his little brother were neither dead nor alive; they were simply gone—taken from him in the moment by the Nazi menace his father had feared for so long.

  Hans hoped that, wherever they were, they weren’t suffering. But in darker moments, hope and faith collided with the reality of war. He was raised in an orthodox Jewish home, where his mother kept a kosher kitchen, his father followed the Jewish tenets, and he himself celebrated his bar mitzvah two years before coming to America, just as Freddy had. Yet the agonizing silence from his father tested his faith in God, and he became distrustful of religion. With Hitler creating such mayhem, terrorizing the Jews in the name of a Christian god, it was difficult to believe there was a higher power at work.

  The military training he received at OSS was a welcome distraction for Hans. Although he might have lagged behind others in physical strength and endurance, the sweat and strain of the regimen gave him something to focus on apart from his family in the Netherlands. Where he excelled, however, was in more cerebral tasks: radio operations and secret codes, where his facility for science and mathematics came into play.

  He and Freddy would travel a few hours with their units to rural Virginia, where they were tasked with sending coded radio messages from remote mountain areas with unreliable signals. OSS, with the help of a navy engineer from the RCA electronics company, was working to develop a wireless radio-transmission system to evade German ground radar. In the meantime, OSS’s radio operators had to lug around the system’s erratic, suitcase-sized predecessor. Freddy was lucky if he could transmit thirty words a minute in coded messages, while Hans would be tapping away furiously at twice the speed; it was one area where Hans could claim bragging rights over him.

  Freddy’s own passion was always for war games; quick, strong, and crafty, he thrived under the stress and physical demands. On one training mission, his group trucked up to Baltimore after hours to the offices of a major defense contractor; once there, instructors challenged them to find a way inside to pilfer top-secret military blueprints without getting caught. Most of the men were “captured” on the way, but not Freddy. He broke into the place without being detected and stealthily snagged the prized documents. On another training excursion, this one all the way out in Southern California, he learned to scuba dive and detonate explosives underwater, then raided an island and shot a steer for food in a test of survival skills. Once he had captured his target, he and his small team—three of them Jewish refugees like himself—posed shirtless on the beachhead for a victory photo, rifles raised and muscles flexed, looks of elation on their faces.

  For Freddy, success was a momentary rush, fun but fleeting. These were still war games, not the real thing—he was fighting phantoms, not Nazis. Much of the training was “piss poor” anyway, he would complain. In his opinion, these were skills he could have taught himself. In one session, Freddy and Hans even had to watch films on the venereal diseases they might contract in their foreign travels if they weren’t careful. But they weren’t going anywhere. Freddy felt stuck. He couldn’t understand why Donovan and the agency brass wouldn’t send them overseas to fight the real war. After two months of the constant “hurry up and wait” mind-set of military training, Freddy groused that the Area F officers were “wasting our time, not fighting a war.” He felt useless: just one of the masses, “another body in the infantry.” If he really wanted to see action, he might have been better off staying in Arizona with the 81st Wildcats, who at least were heading off soon to the Pacific theater.

  His restlessness was infectious. Early in their training, Hans hadn’t seeme
d to be in much of a rush to get back to Europe. Yes, he was ready to fight for his new country whenever he was called upon, and the prospect of somehow liberating his homeland—and finding his family—held deep personal meaning. But until the time came to head somewhere, he was content reading his chemistry books and playing chess in the country-club setting.

  As training wore on with no end in sight, however, Hans grew frustrated, too. He still had no word about the fate of his family in the Netherlands, and chilling new reports from Europe in the spring of 1944 indicated that hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews had become only the latest Nazi victims sent to their deaths at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Who would stop the genocide? Hans now longed to go somewhere—anywhere—to see action. Liberate Holland? No one in the military even talked to him about that anymore. The way things were going, he complained to Freddy, they might not even make it out of Area F.

  But the tide of the war in Europe was shifting in the spring of ’44. Allied military leaders were mapping out secret plans for “D-day”—the Normandy invasion on June 6—with Donovan at OSS closely involved in American strategy. His spy agency already had secret agents planted inside France, working side by side with French Resistance fighters to provide intelligence on Nazi troops in advance of the Allied landings. Donovan, never content as a desk manager, flew to Europe to be there in person for the massive invasion, aboard an American destroyer ship, and he went to France ten weeks later in hopes of witnessing the liberation of Paris from the Germans. Under occasional Nazi gunfire, he made his way to the French capital in a jeep with a noteworthy guest in the backseat: war correspondent Ernest Hemingway, armed with a submachine gun as bullets flew past them.

  Donovan’s hope was for the Normandy invasion to clear the path for OSS to expand its surveillance operations, allowing American agents to penetrate enemy lines in Nazi strongholds throughout Europe—Germany, Austria, Italy, and the Balkans—and priming the way for General Eisenhower’s troops. That would require dozens, perhaps hundreds, of his “glorious amateurs” at OSS, trained and ready to go. The call went out to Area F, the call that Freddy and Hans had doubted would ever come. Their units got their new orders that spring: another round of parachute training—always more training, they grumbled—and then they would sail across the Atlantic Ocean to northern Africa for points unknown.

  There was talk that they would be parachuted into France after they landed in Africa, but their exact mission, and even their ultimate destination, was unclear. No matter. The details weren’t of much concern to Freddy and Hans. They were finally going back across the Atlantic—this time not to flee the Nazis, but to fight them.

  4

  * * *

  The Third Man

  NAPLES, ITALY

  Autumn of 1944

  The Nazis were on the run in Italy, but inside POW Camp 209 in Naples, the Führer’s men stood loyal. Day after day, the Allied military police hauled in German soldiers captured in battle and locked them up inside the gated compound. One prisoner, a Nazi sergeant still clad in his swastika-emblazoned uniform, would greet the newly arrived German POWs with a jarring command: when his fellow Nazi prisoners answered to one of the American jailers in the camp, the sergeant barked, “It’s still ‘Heil Hitler!’” It was a sign of defiance and loyalty; they might be imprisoned, but the Nazis weren’t beaten yet, no matter what their Allied captors were telling them.

  Franz Weber, a twenty-three-year-old prisoner from the Alpine region of western Austria, saluted Hitler on command, just like his fellow POWs. He wasn’t about to invite trouble. Franz looked every bit the proud, unbroken Nazi: trim and fit, with the confident manner of the Wehrmacht officer he had once been. Franz had fought for the Führer across Europe—first in Poland and Russia, then Yugoslavia, then on to Italy—and had risen to company commander as a Nazi lieutenant in the Baltics.

  But in reciting his Nazi credentials for his fellow prisoners, Franz left out the rest of his story: how he had become disillusioned with the Nazis; how he had been bumped down in rank for not toeing the party line; how he had slipped away during a bomb-laying mission near the Italian front that September and made his way through the vineyards to the Allied side to surrender; how Franz was, unknown to his fellow prisoners in Camp 209, a Nazi deserter.

  If the truth got out, there was little doubt what the other prisoners in the camp would do to him. In the Reich’s twisted moral code, deserters occupied a bottom rung near other undesirables like the Jews, the Communists, and the gypsies. Franz kept to himself in the tent that served as his jail bunk. His fellow POWs left him alone for the most part. But a few months after his imprisonment, a new Nazi prisoner, still in his German uniform, arrived at the barracks and soon after offered Franz some of his Spam. Any offer of food—even a strange, American-made meat concoction—was a surefire way to make an introduction to a hungry German prisoner. The new man was short and stocky, with a swarthy complexion, and he spoke in the Swabian accent of Germany’s southern region. He had been captured in battle in northern Italy, he said. He was quick to smile, despite his confinement. He dutifully gave the “Heil Hitler” salute on command, but he seemed to be watching the other prisoners, almost studying them.

  The new man and Franz got to talking over bites of Spam—small talk at first about the dreariness of prison life, and then weightier concerns about the flailing state of the war. Out of earshot of the other prisoners, the new man confided to Franz that he had no great loyalty to the Nazis; he just wanted the fighting to be over. He struck Franz as sincere, and Franz revealed his own bitterness over what the Germans had done to his Austrian homeland. “I have no use for the Nazis,” he confided; Hitler, he said, was a “son of a bitch.” If it weren’t for the Führer, “I could be home now,” he grumbled. “Where’s home?” the new man asked. A small town in Tyrol, Franz answered; a place called Oberperfuss.

  It was just a few days later that Franz’s newfound confidant was gone from POW Camp 209, ushered out by the Allied guards. What had become of him, Franz didn’t know.

  A free man once again, Freddy Mayer was escorted from Camp 209 back to a secret OSS base clear across southern Italy on the Adriatic coast. Posing as a German POW for three days amid a swarm of Nazis, he had made it safely through his first big assignment for OSS.

  He gave his commanders a buoyant debriefing. His German, though rusty, was still passable enough for him to have gotten by in the Nazi barracks without any obvious stumbles, Freddy told them. Some of the German military expressions that his father had taught him all those years ago in Freiburg had come back to him, and none of the Nazi prisoners seemed skeptical of his cover story.

  Even better, he had identified a possible German collaborator, the third man they needed for a would-be mission OSS was in the process of planning. “He was very anti-Nazi,” Freddy reported, and he hailed from the same part of Austria that they were looking to target: the Austrian Alps in Tyrol just north of the Italian border. He could make a perfect point man for them on the ground, Freddy said.

  The Nazi’s name, he said, was Franz Weber.

  “The Alpine Fortress,” the Americans called the scenario. The Nazi battleground they envisioned was a chilling one indeed. If Hitler was going to lose a war that he himself had begun, he was determined to mount one final, epic stand and go down in flames: at his country home in Bavaria, the birthplace of the Nazis, against the idyllic backdrop of an Alpine mountain range booby-trapped with explosives. And he wanted to take as many Allied soldiers down with him as he could.

  That, at least, was the great fear of General Eisenhower and American leaders in Washington, as the collapse of the Third Reich began to look more and more likely by the winter of 1944–45. Warnings about a last-stand Nazi “fortress” in the Alps were piling up in top-secret intelligence reports, becoming what General Omar Bradley called “an obsession.” Newspapers at home were raising alarms over “Hitler’s Hideaway” as well, with stories about an enormous network of underground tunnels and cave
s that were mined with bombs and could, with the push of a button on SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s desk, blow up oncoming invaders. The “Alpine redoubt,” military planners dubbed the plan. At OSS, Donovan wrote to FDR himself to warn of reports that stalwart Nazis under Himmler were stockpiling weapons and organizing “a German resistance army of between 35,000 and 40,000 men” trained in guerrilla warfare to mount a final siege.

  Some skeptics saw the reports of an impregnable Nazi hideaway as exaggerated, if not fanciful. But American intelligence officials gave them credence—and were so desperate to avoid the disastrous scenario that they were willing to take ethically treacherous steps to do so. Donovan’s top OSS man in Europe, Allen Dulles, met over a bottle of scotch in Switzerland with Nazi general Karl Wolff about the prospect of a surrender by Nazi SS in Italy, including parts of Tyrol. Wolff was a brutal and notorious figure: Himmler’s onetime “bureaucrat of death,” the man who set up the rail system that took trainloads of Polish Jews to death camps. Yet Dulles, disregarding a vow by FDR not to negotiate with the Nazis, was willing to treat Wolff favorably in an effort to work out an agreement. In secret cables back to Washington, he portrayed the Nazi war criminal as a “moderate” and well-intentioned Waffen SS man; he was “no ogre,” Dulles wrote of him.

  After softening up the Nazi leader’s image, Dulles worked to protect him from war-crimes charges at Nuremberg once his SS men in the region laid down their arms in a war that Wolff feared he had already lost. It was an unsettling Faustian bargain that was justified in part, Dulles said, by the desire to avert the dreaded “Alpine fortress” scenario. Victory over Hitler seemed finally within reach, and Dulles was willing to help one of the Nazis’ top generals to try to avoid a violent last stand in the Alps.