Elsa summoned her courage and approached the young man, with her classmate behind her. Franz’s eyes held a look of alarm as he stared down at the brown-eyed girl who had called him by name. He seemed to recognize his old neighbor almost immediately, and he began speaking to her in hushed, forceful tones. “You must promise not to tell anyone,” he said. That meant no one on the train, no one at home in Oberperfuss, no one anywhere, he said. Elsa nodded fearfully, and she and her classmate took their seats again. Franz was a decade older than the girl, and she had always looked up to him; shaken, she didn’t know what to make of it all. Franz was alive, here on a train heading back to Oberperfuss. And the two men accompanying him: who were they? She had noticed the heavy boots peeking out of the bottom of their huge snow capes. The boots seemed odd, out of place, but she couldn’t quite say why.
Elsa sat anxiously with her classmate, Marianne, for the rest of the train ride. She kept her word and said nothing to her father or mother when she got home. It was just another day at school, she told them; nothing out of the ordinary. But her friend Marianne was disturbed by what she had seen, and unable to remain quiet. She did what she had been taught to do in such a situation: she went to the Catholic church in the center of town, Saint Margareta, and confessed what she had seen to Father Mayr. “Imagine who we met,” the girl told the priest. She feared it would be wrong to keep a secret that perhaps should not be kept.
Father Mayr now had a dilemma of his own. A confession from a congregant was sacrosanct, of course, but the Nazis didn’t much care about religious vows. The Gestapo would surely want to know about a missing soldier who had mysteriously returned to Tyrol and had been spotted on a train. Many priests throughout Austria had developed strong alliances with the Nazis, and in similar circumstances might have run to the Gestapo with such news of a possible security threat. Fortunately for Franz, Father Mayr was not one of them.
The Gestapo, in fact, had begun to question the priest’s loyalty to the Reich recently, forcing him to transfer from a church in a neighboring town after he made an imprudent political comment about the Nazi movement during a sermon. The Nazis’ control of all aspects of life in this staunchly Catholic region had left him disillusioned. The mandatory Hitler Youth activities on Sunday morning were causing the children to miss mass. The parades for Hitler’s birthday and other Nazi events had replaced the popular church processionals in town. Life had changed, and not for the better. So instead of running to the Gestapo to report the news of Franz’s sighting, Father Mayr absolved Marianne of her guilt and rushed to Elsa’s home to speak privately with her father, giving him an urgent warning. Marianne already knew to stay quiet, but Elsa and her family also needed to stay silent about what the girls had seen on the train, the priest warned. “You keep quiet, otherwise you will all end up in the KZ”—the Nazi concentration camps—he said. “And then it will be very bad for you.”
On the outskirts of town, a long-missing resident of Oberperfuss and two strangers hid out in a farming shed crammed with hay and waited for nightfall to come.
Freddy, Franz, and Hans had made it to town hours earlier. They had gotten off the train a few stops before Oberperfuss to avoid the prospect of anyone else recognizing Franz; one neighbor was enough of a jolt for the day. Then they hiked the last five miles through backwoods trails, their rucksacks on their backs. A hard snow pelted them along the way, their latest Alpine storm. They stopped at a cluster of tree stumps to sit and rest, smoking German cigarettes that Franz had packed away.
Franz could have taken that moment to slip away from his two partners and leave them in the woods. Or he could have bolted from the train, or disappeared on the mountain before that, or fled at a dozen points in between. Freddy and Hans could fend for themselves; they had the maps and money and food rations in their rucksacks, and Franz had gotten them this far already. He could simply disappear, just as a number of the ex-Nazis working for OSS had done before him, their missions still unfinished. Franz had deserted an army once already, after all. But something made him keep going—perhaps the Gewissen, the pangs of conscience that impelled him to stick with the mission, stick with the Americans. And so he and his two partners took a few last drags from their cigarettes for warmth and kept on walking in tandem.
Their most urgent task, now that they had survived the descent from the glacier, was to find allies in Tyrol. Freddy was fearless, but he wasn’t stupid; he knew his team would need locals willing to assist them—even though making such contacts could put them in clear peril. Without help on the ground, Freddy said, they might as well turn themselves in to the Gestapo right now. This wasn’t France, where throngs of anti-Nazi resisters would be waiting to join forces with OSS agents parachuting down. Freddy remembered what Lieutenant Ulmer and the other OSS officers at Bari had told him about Austria: You can expect ninety percent of the Tyroleans to be pro-Nazi. Their first mission now—Franz’s mission, really, as their point person on the ground—was to somehow find the other ten percent.
Franz knew from his own conflicted experience with the Nazis that many of the townspeople, like Austrians in cities big and small, had cheered the arrival of Hitler’s troops seven years earlier in the Anschluss, the annexation of the country. Hitler, with his Austrian roots and personal flamboyance, had promised jobs to his brethren and pledged to reverse the “economic deterioration” that he contrasted so starkly with the “flourishing new life in Germany.” It was all part of Hitler’s long-held vision of re-creating a Greater German Reich. The message held wide appeal in Oberperfuss, where many people were hurting financially. Franz’s own father, a widower trying to feed eight children, struggled to find odd jobs to supplement his small farming income. Their life had always been einfach und bescheiden—“simple and modest,” as Franz put it—and now came the Nazis, promising him and the Austrians “all sorts of grandiose things for the future,” he recalled. It had all seemed so hopeful to a boy of seventeen.
Almost overnight, it seemed to Franz, the past had disappeared. Nazi flags flew from the windows. Soldiers from the Gestapo began roaming the town and countryside. In Innsbruck, uniformed Nazi Party officials took over many of the institutions in the capital of Tyrol, including Franz’s own school, under the iron hand of Franz Hofer, a Hitler acolyte who became the Gauleiter for the region. It was a dramatic shift, but few people questioned it. Many Tyroleans were happy with the new regime, and even among the skeptics, there was a long tradition in Austria of abiding by orders from the government and the military, no matter what. Befehl ist Befehl, as the saying went. An order is an order.
As for the Nazis’ terror campaign against the Jews, that was irrelevant to most people in town, if not welcomed outright. There were no Jewish residents within miles even before the war, and decades of anti-Semitic tropes across Austria had the intended effect of dehumanizing the Jews. The country’s largest Jewish settlement, tragically, was now more than two hundred miles away in Upper Austria at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where tens of thousands of Jews from across Europe, along with political opponents, foreign soldiers, homosexuals, Roma gypsies, and other “undesirables,” were imprisoned in horrific conditions. Nearly 120,000 people would die there.
The closest that many people in Oberperfuss would come to the Nazis’ brutal mistreatment of its undesirables was when the Germans trucked in crews of forced laborers to build a water line running through town to a Nazi military factory nearby; the workers appeared half-starved, but when a few sympathetic locals went to the construction site to bring them some food, a Gestapo officer warned them off. “Do that again,” he said, “and you’ll end up in the camps.”
The barbarism extended to some residents personally. When a three-year-old boy named Anton began suffering seizures after a fall down the stairs, the Gestapo came for him with an order signed by Gauleiter Hofer himself. The Nazis first took the boy to a nearby facility for disabled children, then to an infamous castle known as Hartheim, near the Mauthausen camp, where he was
killed with other children in the “T4” euthanasia program, the family learned. For thirty reichsmarks, the Nazis offered to return his ashes to the family.
No one would dare say so publicly, but by the time of Franz’s return in early 1945, the allure of the Nazis had begun to fade for some of the townspeople in Oberperfuss. Franz’s challenge was to figure out which ones might be willing, as he put it bluntly, to consider “playing with life and death” by helping them. He didn’t want to risk going directly to his own family in town, or to Annie, his fiancée—not yet, anyway: the Gestapo might well have them under surveillance, given his desertion. Besides, there was no certainty that even his family members would risk helping the Americans. In an OSS mission that started weeks earlier on the opposite side of Austria, another Nazi deserter, who had become an American agent like Franz, snuck back into his hometown but was turned in to the Gestapo by his own father, a die-hard Nazi supporter; he escaped capture only by jumping out a window. Trust was a commodity in short supply in the Reich.
Once the Gulliver team had reached the farmlands at the edge of Oberperfuss, Franz found an unlocked shed where the three of them could hide out and plot their next steps. It wasn’t a random location; Franz had chosen it because of its proximity to a farmhouse belonging to an older man who he hoped might be willing to help them.
The man’s name was Alois Abenthung, and he had been the Bürgermeister in Oberperfuss—the mayor—before the Anschluss; the Nazis quickly removed him from office for not being “loyal enough” to the new order. Before Franz left for the war, he and Alois had become friendly and would occasionally share a few drinks at the pub. The Nazis were a bitter topic of conversation; Alois had no great affection for Hitler, Franz knew.
What Franz didn’t know was that his friend’s views had only hardened since the two men last saw each other. Alois had tried, covertly to start a political opposition group in Oberperfuss inspired by Otto von Habsburg, a staunch Nazi opponent who was the last ruling member of Austria’s royal Habsburg family. Eleven months earlier, after the Gestapo learned of his political stirrings, he was convicted by a sham Nazi court in Innsbruck of violating an edict “prohibiting the formation of new political parties”—other than the Nazi Party. The court sentenced him to four months in jail, but, surprisingly, allowed him to remain free at his farm for now. The unexplained showing of leniency would prove pivotal to the OSS.
The three American spies waited in the shed until nightfall, then went over their plan one more time. Alois’s farmhouse was just a short walk: up the dirt road, the first house on the left, with a big wooden barn and a large silo behind it, a majestic view of the Alps in the distance. Freddy would make the first approach, since Franz ran the risk of being spotted again.
Freddy headed up the dirt road, knocked on the door, and waited. After a short interlude, the door opened a crack, and an older man peered from behind it cautiously. He was a short man with stern gray eyes and a tiny, toothbrush mustache—the same style made fashionable by the Führer himself. Dressed in his pajamas, the man was obviously unsettled by the unexpected visitor. “Franz Weber sent me,” Freddy said quietly in German, hoping to reassure the man. But the farmer revealed no hint of recognition. “Franz Weber? I never heard of him.”
The man was clearly agitated now, Freddy saw. Perhaps he thought the late-night call had been ordered by the Gestapo, to test whether he was mingling with subversives. Perhaps Franz had misread the ex-mayor’s allegiances altogether. Or maybe Freddy just had the wrong house. With Freddy standing in the dark on a stranger’s doorstep in the middle of Nazi Austria, no explanation seemed any more implausible than the next.
“You are Alois Abenthung?” Freddy asked. “Ja,” the man said, nodding. Freddy repeated his script, telling him again that Franz Weber had sent him, merely to talk; he was not there to make any trouble. But again, the man said he did not know any Franz Weber, and finally shut the door. Freddy returned to the shed in frustration, telling his two shivering compatriots what had happened. The old farmer had insisted that he didn’t know any Franz Weber, and Freddy thought he was telling the truth.
Franz was flummoxed. He thought for a moment, then realized his error. “Oh, my God,” Franz said, angry with himself. The old-timers in Oberperfuss had an odd local custom of using the name of their property as a first name to identify one another. Franz had been away so long, he had practically forgotten the practice.
“Go back and tell him Tomassen Franz sent you,” he said.
Freddy walked back to the farmhouse, where the farmer answered the knock on the door with even greater agitation than before. Freddy tried to assuage him, apologizing for getting the name wrong. “Tomassen Franz sent me.” This time there was a glimmer of recognition in the farmer’s face. Yes, he knew Tomassen Franz, he said. He was still clearly nervous, still suspicious of Freddy, but his demeanor had now changed. He was pensive, yet curious. Tomassen Franz, the missing Nazi officer from town, had sent this young man with the unusual German accent? What could that possibly mean?
Franz was nearby, Freddy explained. And he was hoping to speak with Alois. The farmer mulled over the request. Come back in a few minutes, he said finally. Alois went upstairs and changed out of his pajamas. By the time he had come back downstairs, all three OSS agents were there at his door, with Franz leading the way.
Franz dispensed with the pleasantries and explained his sudden reappearance. He was working with the Americans now, and he needed help: help to find safe houses where the three of them could stay, help to make contacts among anti-Nazi resisters, help to gather intelligence. In short, he wanted Alois, the kindly elder statesman in town, to help the Americans take down the Nazis. It was a leap of faith, but he told Alois that he knew his politics and that he hoped he might be amenable.
It was a lot for Alois to take in. The presence of the three agents terrified him; the Gestapo would surely kill him if they found out about any of this, he told Franz. He was already an enemy in their eyes. But at the same time, he wanted nothing more than to rid his town and his country of the Nazis. This was not the Austria he had once known. The enormity of the decision showed on his face. Yes, he would help, he declared finally; he would give Tomassen Franz and his friends “all possible assistance,” he said.
Franz could take satisfaction in knowing that his hunch about Alois had proven right. Freddy, in fact, would come to call Alois “my first and most reliable contact on my secret intelligence mission in Austria.” Franz, with a single introduction in a darkened doorway, had earned the trust that Freddy and OSS had placed in him.
Alois hurriedly summoned his visitors inside the farmhouse and found them places to sack out for the night. The next morning, as discreetly as he could, he went into the village to look for longer-term accommodations. He went to the Gausthaus Krone—not to look for a room, but to speak with the owner’s daughter, Annie, a young woman with long brown hair, an easy smile, and a round, cherubic face. He found her working in the back of the hotel and divulged the news: her missing fiancé, Franz, was back in town. “He came with two Americans,” Alois whispered.
Annie’s mind raced: Franz was alive—in Oberperfuss, with two Americans. She knew instantly what that must mean, as improbable as it sounded: Franz, the rising young Nazi officer, was somehow working with the Allies. She wrestled with a flood of emotions—relief, fear, anger—as she tried to process what Alois was telling her.
Annie and Franz had grown up in the same small town, but they had little to do with one another for years. They came from different backgrounds, with Franz the son of a struggling farmer, and Annie the daughter of the only hotel owner in town. She and Franz would see each other occasionally at school or church; she always thought he was fit and good-looking, with his dark, slicked-back hair, but nothing more than that.
It wasn’t until Franz went away to war with the Nazis and returned home on furlough that the two ever really talked. Annie was taking the bus to Innsbruck for an unofficial dance class�
��the Nazis had banned public dancing in the city—and Franz was on the bus with her. “Where are you going?” he asked. Franz didn’t dance much, but before she knew it, he had arranged to be there, too. A wartime courtship ensued—the Nazi officer and the hotel owner’s daughter—and on another furlough home, Franz proposed.
Then came Franz’s disappearance months later. Annie had no warning. With all the speculation stirring in town about what had happened to him, she feared that the worst of the reports—that the Nazis had captured him as a deserter and sentenced him to death—might be true. For months, the uncertainty gnawed at her. And now here was Alois, showing up at the hotel with the unexpected news of his return. He took her to a house outside town where he had arranged for Franz and Freddy to hide for the night. It all seemed so surreal to her. Incredulous, she walked into the darkened room to see her missing fiancé alongside a stranger—a short, squat man wearing a snow cape, smiling. One of the Americans, she guessed. Freddy excused himself to give the two of them some time alone for their impromptu reunion.
As she gazed over at Franz in his well-worn Wehrmacht uniform, Annie didn’t know whether to hug him or slap him. He had done such a foolish, stupid thing in coming back, she thought. The Gestapo would hang him in the center of the church square if they found out. Annie glared at Franz. “This is not a good idea,” she told him, mustering her sternest tone. The risk he was taking—to himself, to his family, to her. Then she rushed into his arms and kissed him, over and over again, before bursting into tears.
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