Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  From their new OSS base in Italy, Freddy and Hans were anxious to join the fight, but they were not there yet—and they were losing hope that they ever would be. They had spent months training and traveling, shuffling aimlessly between military camps in Africa and Europe. They were inching closer to the fighting, yes; but it made little difference to them whether they were biding their time four hundred miles from the war at a remote Italian villa, or four thousand miles away at a Maryland country club. In their minds, they were still nowhere.

  Their inauspicious reception on foreign soil months earlier might have been a harbinger. Their ship from America docked in Algeria, in northern Africa, in June 1944, and Freddy and Hans, along with another thirty or so men from Area F, showed up at the Allied base in the historic seaside city of Oran, which had been occupied by the Nazi-aligned French Vichy forces until the Allies seized control eighteen months earlier. Private First Class Fred Mayer and Sergeant Hans Wynberg from OSS were reporting for duty, awaiting their new assignment. Except that none of the army and navy men at the base knew who they were or what they were supposed to be doing; they didn’t even seem to know what “OSS” was.

  Freddy and Hans were issued cots and sheets, then went in search of their unit. But with linens in short supply in town, a swarm of Algerian youngsters near the train station grabbed the sheets out of their hands, tossed them some francs as payment, then scampered away. The boys were out of sight by the time Freddy and Hans figured out how little a local franc was worth and realized they had been swindled. They would have to go without sheets for the night.

  They finally found their OSS team, but what they were supposed to be doing in this far-off African land still remained a mystery. Day after day, they went through more training in spycraft—but toward what end they didn’t know. The wait seemed unending, as they trekked from one military installation to another with no final destination in sight. From Oran, they went up and around the northern African coast to Algiers, then across the Mediterranean on a British transport to the southern heel of Italy. Hurrying, waiting; hurrying, waiting. More training, then more waiting for weeks at a time.

  For that whole summer and into the fall of 1944, no assignment came. It was maddening for the pair. Seventy-three thousand American soldiers had just stormed the beaches of Normandy in June, while they were counting their days aimlessly in Africa, resigned to reading about the action from afar in Stars and Stripes. Hans chafed as his own twin brother was sent into France with the army after Normandy, fighting for his adopted country. But Hans and Freddy were stuck at another way station. They were killing time, not Nazis. The inaction grated on them.

  Hans used the time to master Morse code, but he wrote off most of the other exercises as silly. He was struck by the advice of one of his OSS instructors, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War a few years earlier. “Hans, the only thing you have to do every morning,” the instructor told him sardonically, “is this exercise with your pistol: Point it at a Nazi and pull the trigger. That is all you have to do.” Hans figured he could remember that much.

  Beyond marching and doing drills, they passed the time as best they could. Hans had his radio codes and chemistry books to occupy himself, but Freddy was always looking for a diversion. Once, they drove a jeep up the steps of the historic Casbah in Algiers—just to see if it could be done. They played in craps games, selling their blood to the local Red Cross to make up for one costly gambling loss. To avoid a long, hot march in the desert, Freddy hot-wired a military truck he found at a British salvage yard; the tires blew out, so the men ended up having to walk the last leg anyway. In one town, Freddy spent his downtime with a lovely young French-Spanish woman he had met named Fernande. But when the young woman grew too attached to the American soldier with the mischievous smile, Freddy passed on word through another soldier that PFC Mayer was officially “missing in action.”

  Freddy and Hans had become unwitting characters in a World War II movie, but this wasn’t the epic John Wayne drama they had envisioned; instead, it was one of those slapstick military films with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, where high jinks and hilarity combine with interminable bouts of boredom and frustration.

  The closest Freddy came to glimpsing the violence of war firsthand was during a training exercise. They were hiking through the mountains of Algeria when a white shroud billowing in the distance caught his eye. It seemed like an apparition. As he and his unit moved closer, he realized there was a body underneath. And then the body jerked suddenly. Freddy didn’t scare easily, but the sight jolted him. The man, apparently a soldier from the local area, was still alive. He appeared mortally wounded, and he was lying next to a freshly dug grave. Someone had dug it out for him, a makeshift funeral plot in the middle of nowhere. The man squirmed, then signaled to Freddy. He didn’t want help; he just wanted a cigarette, just one last drag. Someone in the group handed him one and lit it. The man seemed content.

  Freddy wasn’t sure who the man was, how he got there, or whom he was even fighting, but the image stuck with him: a man at war, lying next to his own grave, just waiting to die. For all of Freddy’s craps games and carefree joyrides of late, the scene was an opaque reminder that people were actually dying in a war around him. It was easy to forget sometimes.

  An assignment finally came their way: Freddy and Hans were scheduled to parachute into southern France with an OSS unit to help the Maquis, rural bands of French Resistance fighters on the ground. Donovan’s people had begun sending commando teams deep into Nazi territory in France a year earlier—even before the invasion at Normandy—to work with the Resistance in organizing sabotage missions. Hans and Freddy, who both spoke French, were supposed to help the Maquis blow up bridges. They readied themselves excitedly for the mission and reported to the airstrip at the appointed hour with parachutes on their backs and hand grenades on their belts. They were finally getting their chance. But just as they were about to board the military flight for France, the notification came: the mission had been scrapped. There was no official explanation, but word filtered down of a rift between the Americans and the Maquis fighters, who reportedly thought the OSS captain overseeing all the operations was “an absolute ass.” Freddy and Hans were grounded, left once again to hurry up and wait for another chance, even as OSS moved them to another base—this one in Naples, Italy.

  “I’ve had enough of this crap,” Freddy finally declared in frustration. He threw out a radical proposition to Hans and three other OSS agents at the base—all three of them Jewish refugees as well, and all of them out of patience. If OSS wouldn’t give them a real assignment, the five of them were ready to demand one for themselves, and they would go around their commanding officers to do it. So Freddy and his cohorts simply walked off the base in Naples one morning—without getting approval, without talking to their captain, without even having a concrete plan in mind. OSS was looser about the rules than other branches of the military, but even so, Hans realized as he followed Freddy out, that what they were doing amounted to desertion. Desertion with a twist: traditional deserters were trying to get out of the war; they were trying to get into it.

  They hitched a ride twenty miles up the road from Naples to the historic Italian province of Caserta, where OSS had set up headquarters in an enormous eighteenth-century royal palace. They talked their way inside and went looking for a lieutenant colonel named Howard Chapin. Freddy and Hans had first met Chapin back at Area F in Maryland, and they figured maybe he could get them off the hamster wheel they seemed stuck on. Chapin was always full of ideas: a Dartmouth man, he came to OSS by way of Madison Avenue, where he was a top advertising executive for General Foods. Like many of Donovan’s “glorious amateurs” at OSS, Chapin was expected to adapt his peacetime skills for wartime use on the fly. More accustomed to pitching advertising campaigns for Jell-O and frozen peas, he was now pitching secret espionage plans to Donovan and his top aides in the effort to help quash the Nazis.

  It had been a brutal time for Chapi
n and the OSS command in Italy, with missions blown, men lost or killed, and friction building with other branches of the American forces and their allies. One team of covert agents, led by a navy officer who was an orthodontist in Los Angeles before the war, had been captured by the Gestapo after parachuting into northern Austria; he was imprisoned at the Mauthausen concentration camp. The leader of another mission, meanwhile, shot himself to death when the Gestapo found him in bed with a local woman, a rendezvous that OSS noted dryly was not part of his assignment.

  Now into Colonel Chapin’s office marched, uninvited, five OSS men—all of them European refugees, all of them Jews—who had just deserted their base. Freddy, the self-appointed platoon leader, pleaded their case, a note of urgency piercing his guttural German accent. He told the colonel about all the training they had done at OSS, all the man-hours they had put in, all the far-flung places they had traveled at home and abroad—all to prepare for a mission that had still not come. “Our talents and time are wasted here,” Freddy said, still smiling despite his obvious aggravation. “How about something a little more interesting?”

  “This has now gone on for a year,” Hans added, inspired as usual by Freddy’s brashness. “I was promised that I’d liberate Holland. Now I am sitting in this goddam replacement depot in Naples. We’ve got to do something.”

  Freddy already had a plan in mind, and he laid it out for the colonel: Drop him and a small team of men into southwest Germany, back into the Black Forest near his hometown of Freiburg, where he could gather advance intelligence for the Allied troops that had started coming ashore on D-day. “I’m very familiar with the Black Forest,” he told Chapin. “My brother and I used to bicycle there. Parachute me in there. I can be of more use than sitting around waiting for something to happen.”

  Not an option, Chapin told him; the Black Forest was well behind enemy lines, and OSS wasn’t running any operations in the region. But Chapin had to admire Freddy’s zeal. With all the trouble he was having finding competent agents, he certainly wasn’t going to turn away five eager young men who spoke the enemy’s language. He would find them a spot, Chapin assured them. With General Eisenhower’s sign-off, OSS had recently created a new “special reconnaissance” battalion for parachuting as many as a thousand agents behind enemy lines into parts of Austria, Italy, and Germany itself. Chapin would try to get them assigned to this new group. He made no promises, but Freddy and Hans felt confident that their forced meeting had dramatically improved their chances of getting into the action, and soon.

  Officially, Freddy’s new supervisors at OSS papered over the matter of desertion and instead labeled Freddy and his crew as “brown offs”—military parlance for men who had, supposedly, gone through proper channels to request a transfer. Whatever it was called, their coup had paid off. The men got their orders to report to Bari, a port city along the Adriatic Sea abut 160 miles to the east. OSS had a base there that was used mainly for hazardous air operations over Nazi-held regions in the Balkans, and the mere existence of the place was a tightly held secret. None of their family or friends could know where they were going or what they were doing, the men were told. OSS would strictly censor their letters home to keep out any hint of their whereabouts, and anyone who disobeyed faced immediate discharge. Breaking the rules this time would have consequences, they were warned.

  Freddy and Hans bunked in a spacious Italian villa surrounded by rolling green lawns: almost like the country club at Area F, but without the golf courses. A Yugoslavian woman in the kitchen cooked them more variations of Spam than they ever knew existed. Her concoctions were good enough for most of the men, but not Freddy. Always adept at working the angles, Freddy persuaded one of OSS’s official document forgers at the base to draw up papers making him the supply sergeant for a ghost unit, and he parlayed his new assignment into extra rations of beef, turkey, ham, and other hard-to-find delicacies for his team. A man couldn’t live on Spam alone. Freddy would need a refrigerator to store all the food, too, so he requisitioned one and put it in his new boss’s office, helping to get in his good graces. About the only thing they lacked for a time was electricity, but Freddy convinced the MPs to loan him an unused weapons carrier, and he brought back a generator to rig up lights and a movie projector to pass the time.

  There was still more training in Bari. But their main OSS instructor there, a tall, wily young lieutenant named Dyno Lowenstein, was not like their other instructors. Dyno was a German Jewish war refugee himself, for one; his father was a prominent Social Democrat in Berlin in the early 1930s who was chased out of the country by the Nazis when Dyno was a boy. Freddy could tell that Dyno knew intelligence matters—and that he knew the Nazis; he liked him right away. Dyno’s philosophy was that a man who was about to risk his life parachuting behind enemy lines should have some say in what the mission looked like. That attitude played well with his new crew; Dyno sensed that Freddy, in particular, thought that his past instructors were, to put it bluntly, “a bunch of idiots.”

  Not long after their arrival in Bari, Dyno, often leading instructions with a cigarette drooping from his lips, asked Freddy what kind of mission he thought he could pull off. Freddy had already given the question some thought. He was undeterred by Colonel Chapin’s rejection of his proposal to return to his home turf in Germany’s Black Forest. So he came up with an even more audacious idea for Dyno: parachuting down into a different part of Germany, 250 miles to the east, at a place that had become notorious: a place called Dachau. Freddy and his team would bring a cache of weapons into the Nazi concentration camp, he told Dyno, then arm the Jewish prisoners and overtake the guards before they could be marched to the gas chambers. Freddy was “going to start a revolution that way,” he declared with no lack of aplomb.

  Just a few months earlier top officials at the War Department in Washington had considered, but quietly rejected, the idea of bombing the rail lines to Auschwitz in Poland in an effort to prevent more mass killings there. One member of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board had even raised the far riskier idea of dropping guns into the camps or parachuting commando teams inside. The proposals went nowhere. The raids were unlikely to work, military officials reasoned, and even if they did, the Nazis would simply build new camps.

  Freddy knew nothing of these secret internal discussions as he sat with Dyno in an upstairs room in the villa and talked about potential missions. All he knew, based on a smattering of media reports in Stars and Stripes and on the BBC, was that the Nazis were killing Jews in horrific numbers at Dachau, and that America needed to do something to stop it. Why shouldn’t he do what he could?

  Dyno didn’t know quite what to say when Freddy finished pitching his plan. He thought the proposal was nonsense, a senseless sacrifice. “Look,” he said, “this has no chance of succeeding anywhere.” He gestured outside at the ground below them. “Why don’t you jump out the window now? It would be cheaper and more practical.” Dyno loved Freddy’s gumption, and his desire for vengeance against the Nazis was certainly apparent, but he knew he would need to rein him in.

  Some of the other men at OSS thought Freddy was just a glory hunter, a man looking for a “spectacular” mission that could earn him some medals. Dyno didn’t think so. The man’s motives seemed righteous, he believed; his shortcoming, or maybe his strength, was that he didn’t know any limits. He thought he could do anything, and he was always willing to try. There was nothing nuanced about Freddy, no shades of gray when it came to the war against the Germans. “Honest guys versus crooks is about the way Fred looks at civilization,” as another OSS supervisor put it.

  The wait for an assignment dragged on; only the Italian villa where they now bunked had changed. The frustration bubbled over in a letter that Hans wrote from Italy to his girlfriend Elly’s parents in the Bronx. With all the starts and stops they had endured without yet seeing any action, Hans wrote, “it seems to me we are not nearly as vital to this war as we might be inclined to believe.”

  Hans had so mu
ch downtime on his hands that he decided to go to France anyway in November ’44—not on a mission with French resisters, but on leave. He hitched a ride with an OSS flight crew and went to Normandy to see his twin brother, Luke, stationed there with the army. The Allies were firmly in control of the coastal region by now, and Hans and Luke had time to relax for a few days together and catch up on army life after nearly two years apart. Hans met Luke’s girlfriend—his twin had a French girlfriend!—and he got to explore some of the countryside, with a full-length winter coat keeping him warm in the winter chill. The atmosphere among the American troops seemed practically buoyant.

  But there was one bleak topic that hung over Hans and Luke, almost unspoken. Neither one of them had heard anything more from the Netherlands about their parents and Robbie. Gently, Luke mentioned them to Hans, and he waited. There was only silence. Had Hans even heard him? Yes, he had heard. There was just nothing to say. Their family members’ fate was unknowable, and talking about the void offered Hans no promise of filling it. So he didn’t.

  By the time he returned to Italy, OSS had another assignment in mind for him and Freddy. Dyno had been trying to bring Freddy around to a more realistic target than Dachau. The agency’s focus at the moment was “mostly Austria,” he explained. As American troops advanced, the military was in particularly desperate need of intelligence about the Nazis’ “Alpine fortress”; about their battle-hardened troops in the Tyrol region under Marshal Kesselring; and about their operations through the Brenner Pass dividing southern Austria and northern Italy for some sixty miles. The Brenner line had been a critical passageway through the Alps since Roman times, and it now provided the Nazis with a lifeline for transporting weapons and troops. US fighter planes had been bombing the train tracks and rail yards along the pass relentlessly, but somehow the Nazis always seemed able to get the rails up and running again quickly after a raid. The Americans couldn’t figure out how they managed it. They needed help.