Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  The payoff was immediate. When Bari informed Freddy that a large cluster of Nazi soldiers had inexplicably disappeared from the fighting lines in northern Italy, he soon located the enemy soldiers—at a train station near Innsbruck. “Three trains of paratroops arrived at Innsbruck from Brenner night of march 30,” he wrote in a cable back to Bari. “They carried no heavy weapons.”

  At a rail yard near Innsbruck, meanwhile, laborers were working around the clock to repair 150 broken locomotives, and dozens of trains were ready to go back into operation, Freddy reported in another cable, citing a “railway engineer” as the source. At another yard, he wrote, the Nazi trains—their cargo unknown—were loaded each night like clockwork between ten thirty and midnight.

  Then there was the lingering mystery that OSS had laid out for Freddy before he had even left for Austria: how did the Nazis manage to rebuild their railway bridges in Tyrol so quickly, time after time, after being destroyed by Allied fighter planes? “The trouble,” an exasperated Ulmer complained to one air force officer, “was that the Krauts had devised so many ways to repair the line as fast as it was cut.” The answer, Freddy discovered on the ground, was that the Nazis hadn’t really repaired the bridges at all, because they weren’t damaged in the first place. Instead, as he learned with the help of Leo’s underground network, the Germans had built massive movable bridges to pass over the ravines in the valleys; they kept the bridges out of sight, inside tunnels, and then painstakingly rolled them into position before the trains passed over them. By the time the allied planes dropped their bombs, the bridges had been rolled back out of their path, with nothing left to hit. Even as he forwarded the startling discovery, Freddy had to give the Nazi engineers grudging credit for their ingenuity.

  Armed with Freddy’s new intelligence, the air force soon began changing the time and patterns for its bombing missions in Italy and Austria to target them more precisely. Still, Freddy was anxious to follow up more aggressively on Leo’s leads himself—but in person. The Nazis had used their intricate Reichsbahn train system with brutal efficiency to move soldiers, weapons, and millions of human prisoners across Europe, and Freddy was beginning to learn all the routes and switchbacks practically as well as any train conductor. He figured he could put his newfound knowledge to use, so he took a trip on the bicycle Maria had loaned him to one of the region’s main railway junctions, in the town of Hall, about seven miles east of Innsbruck. There were throngs of people coming and going: railway workers, soldiers, Nazi bureaucrats. One more Wehrmacht lieutenant milling about the yard for a few hours would attract little notice, Freddy figured. If anyone asked, he would claim he was an Alpine patrol officer recently wounded in the fighting in Italy, just over the Brenner Pass.

  He watched and he listened, his placid expression masking his disdain for the Nazis filing past him at the station. No one seemed to pay him any mind. He took more trips out to the rail yard, and he began to ask questions: nothing too pointed, just a dutiful Nazi lieutenant checking on train operations for security purposes. He even met the head yardmaster, a friendly fellow in overalls, and very chatty. From the man’s body language, Freddy suspected he was no Nazi loyalist, maybe even an old-time Social Democrat who had deemed it in his best interests to get in line with the Nazis, just like everyone else. It was only a hunch, but Freddy engaged the man in conversation. In the yard, Freddy had noticed row after row of Nazi train cars, some freestanding, hundreds of cars in all. He hadn’t expected to see such a large operation. He asked the yardmaster about them.

  “These twenty-six trains are going to go out in two days,” the yardmaster answered.

  The trains were headed for Italy through the Brenner Pass, he told Freddy. And it appeared that they were being loaded with enough military equipment and supplies to last the Nazi soldiers fighting in northern Italy for weeks, even longer.

  Leaving the yard, Freddy hurried back to the city. He suspected that this might be his most important find yet: a massive Nazi caravan of military supplies heading for the front line in Italy in a few days’ time. He jotted down the salient details and passed the message on to Hans through a courier line that was well-tested by now. At the rail yard outside Innsbruck, the cable to OSS read, the Nazis had assembled “26 trains . . . 30 to 40 cars each . . . loaded with ammo, tractors, ack-ack [antiaircraft] guns, gasoline, light equipment. Leaving for Italy via Brenner April third after twenty-one hundred GMT. Source loadmaster of Hall.”

  Bari rushed the dispatch into the hands of the 15th Air Force in southern Italy, which quickly sent out a reconnaissance plane high above Innsbruck to verify the sighting. Six weeks earlier, one of these same “recon” planes had been flying high over the Alps not far away, looking for a possible drop point for Freddy and his team. Now, thanks to Freddy’s intelligence, the reconnaissance plane was looking instead for the ominous outline of a massive caravan of Nazi trains outside Innsbruck.

  The flight crew found it—parked in the rail yard in Tyrol, just where Freddy said it would be. Bari sent him back the news: the 15th Air Force was “delighted” to report that it had “verified by photos” Freddy’s intel on the presence of trains outside Innsbruck. Not only that, but fighter planes from the 15th were planning a heavy-bomber operation against the trains as they left Austria for the Brenner Pass. More bad weather in the Alps had scuttled the bombing mission for the moment, but the air force was hoping it would get another shot once the trains passed slowly through the other end of the winding pass.

  Freddy had rarely been as excited to get a cable from the bureaucrats in Bari, and he decided he would try to see for himself the results of his spy work. Like many of his unorthodox decisions, this one was not in the OSS training manual. At the Nazi officers’ club, Freddy hitched a ride with a military transport heading south toward the Brenner Pass. It was an unusual request: the pass was more than seventy miles away through dangerous, snow-covered mountain terrain, with American fighter planes not far off. But Leutnant Mayer explained to the driver that, after spending the last few weeks recuperating in Innsbruck, he needed to get back to his old platoon in northern Italy to retrieve his belongings and personal papers. The driver took him at his word.

  When the truck finally stopped at a Nazi outpost near the Italian side of the pass, Freddy stared down the Alpine mountain ridge. Off in the distance, there it was, the reason he had made the long trek—not only the one that day from Innsbruck, but the one before that, from southern Italy, and before that, from northern Africa, and before that, from Maryland and from Arizona and from Brooklyn. He had spent nearly two and a half years with the army and OSS, often in limbo, frustrated by inaction, but now he could see that the waiting had paid off. Down the mountainside were the smoldering remains of the Nazi supply trains, loaded with guns, ammunition, gasoline, and equipment, derailed on their path to the frontline Nazi troops in Italy.

  Freddy hadn’t made it in time to see the bombing itself, but he was there for its aftermath. While bad weather had prevented the bombing run in Austria, B-17 fighter planes from the 15th Air Force had gotten a second look at the train line in Italy and met it with a hail of fire that, as Ulmer said, “destroyed virtually the entire lot.” Freddy stared at the wreckage in solitary satisfaction. They bombed the hell out of them, he thought to himself.

  They did indeed. As OSS would later attest, Freddy’s intelligence had enabled US bombers to “destroy completely heavy shipments of critically needed German ammunition and materiel for the Italian front.” American bomber planes had made scores of runs over the Brenner Pass in the past five months, but few were deemed as critical as this one. The Nazi troops in Italy were in dire need of gasoline and equipment, and the cache of supplies on the train line could have extended the fighting by months, officials believed.

  Freddy rarely gave any thought to dying, or even to the threat of being captured. But at that moment, staring down at the destruction he had set in motion, it occurred to him that even if his true identity were revealed and th
e Nazis executed him on the spot, it would all have been worth it. Because he had made this happen.

  Freddy took off his Nazi uniform for good just days later; he had a new disguise in mind. This latest idea had come to him in the same roundabout way that produced many of his best leads: he heard something from someone who knew someone else, who had been somewhere and might know something. An ally of Alois’s had connected Freddy with another black-market operator in Innsbruck, named Fritz Moser, who claimed to have soured on the Nazis. His uncle was an electrical contractor for Nazi factories all around Austria, Fritz said, and some of the foreign-labor electricians working for him at a Nazi plant in eastern Austria, near Vienna, were fleeing west to Innsbruck to stay ahead of the advancing Russian military. They were coming without any papers or identification, Fritz said, and getting jobs at an airplane factory outside Innsbruck where his uncle handled all the electrical work.

  The Nazis were so desperate for more skilled workers at their factories that they put the foreign laborers to work—with pay and food rations, no less—alongside Jews, POWs, and other prisoners being used as slave laborers.

  Freddy soaked in everything he was hearing. He knew that his bosses in Bari were keen to get information on German aircraft production; the air force had been sending OSS queries on that very topic for their man inside Innsbruck to investigate. The outlines of a new undercover role began to come into focus in Freddy’s mind. He assumed he could handle whatever “skilled labor” job the Nazis might throw at him. He was a diesel mechanic by trade, not an electrician, but when it came to building and fixing things, he was confident he could make a go of most anything.

  In early April, five weeks after their glacier landing, Freddy set out in search of a new job. Dressed in workman’s apparel, with a French beret on his head to top it off, Freddy showed up at the Arbeitsamt, the Nazi foreign-labor office in Innsbruck that Fritz had told him about. He hadn’t known that such a place even existed. There was a long line of men ahead of him—French, Italian, Dutch, eastern European; all apparently waiting for jobs. Freddy had run through his new cover story: a Frenchman, he had been working at a Nazi electrical plant in eastern Austria—the Boehler Werke, the one that Fritz’s uncle serviced—but the incoming Russians had run him and other foreign workers out of town.

  The language wasn’t a problem. As a boy growing up in Germany close to the western border, Freddy had learned to speak French; it was one of the few subjects he excelled at in school. He decided, again, to keep his real name for his newest identity, simply adding a French accent: Freh-deh-REEK May-YEHR. He sounded like a true Parisian as he practiced the pronunciation. That was about as much rehearsal as Freddy ever did. He never considered himself much of an actor; he simply went with his instincts and improvised instead.

  Freddy’s turn in line came, and he walked to the desk. The clerk was a young woman; that always seemed to help Freddy’s prospects. He smiled as she asked for his name, birthplace, and work skills.

  “Frédéric Mayér,” he stated in French. “Born 19 February, 1920, in Marseille, France. Electrician.” “Papers?” she asked. Freddy shook his head. “They’re gone. I was in Vienna fleeing the Russians.”

  The clerk nodded; she seemed to have heard the same explanation from many of the workers of late. She waved him on with a form authorizing him to get new work papers and a meal ticket for three days of food rations, a prized commodity at a time when food in Innsbruck was so scarce.

  Hours later, Frédéric Mayér, French electrician, had his new Nazi papers in hand, allowing him to stay in Innsbruck as a duly registered foreign worker. He couldn’t get over how official the papers looked, even more impressive than his previous papers as a Nazi lieutenant. Better still, the labor office soon gave him his first assignment: a job at a Nazi airplane factory seven miles outside Innsbruck in the town of Kematen—the very same factory that Fritz had mentioned.

  Freddy had been hearing about the airplane factory for weeks, in fact. Eva, in another one of her helpful introductions, had set Freddy up with an Austrian friend who worked there. Her friend liked to drink and talk—two things that served Freddy well—and he mentioned over a few beers that the plant was having problems getting enough parts and metals to build its planes. Freddy had promptly reported to Bari that “production [is] zero” at the factory because of supply problems. The cable, citing a “trustworthy worker,” immediately caught the attention not only of OSS’s analysts, but of air force and army officers across Europe looking to determine how many of the newly remodeled aircraft they would be facing in the skies.

  The Nazis, in their frenzy to find more workers, had now handed Freddy the opportunity to go down into the factory in Kematen himself and witness firsthand what was happening. He realized from his very first shift that Kematen was not just an ordinary airplane factory. For one, the sprawling plant—run by the giant German manufacturer Messerschmitt—was built beneath an Alpine ridge with a labyrinth of underground tunnels that were still being dug by slave laborers as Freddy descended for the first time. And the airplane he was supposed to help build was not just any airplane. This was the first jet-propelled fighter plane ever put in operation, the Nazis’ Me 262; nicknamed “Schwalbe,” for the fast-flying swallow, it could outrace any Allied plane by 120 miles an hour. The Schwalbe was one of the “secret weapons” that Hitler was desperate to throw at the Allies en masse. The Führer clung to the hope that the jet fighters, like the V-2 missiles that famed Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun was building for him at another mountainside factory, in Germany, called Mittelwerk, might change the tide of war in his favor. The Luftwaffe had managed to get only a few hundred of the Me 262s out of production and into the air beginning the year before, but American military leaders worried about the potential for the Nazis to ramp up production. Hitler was trying to do just that at factories run by Messerschmitt, like the one outside Innsbruck, which had doubled the number of workers to four hundred just a few months earlier.

  For the next three weeks, in his new role as Frédéric Mayér, Freddy worked in electrical maintenance at the jet factory; he was assigned to a housing barracks at a compound where throngs of voluntary laborers bunked. The forced laborers—military POWs, Jews, and others from camps like Mauthausen, some two hundred miles away—were kept apart, normally in horrid, subhuman conditions. Freddy was to show up promptly each morning at eight o’clock and proceed through the dark, dank tunnels to his section. His main job was fixing fuses and other blown electrical parts on the massive pieces of machinery used to assemble the jet planes. He quickly overcame his limited training in electrical work, but he couldn’t stomach the idea that his labors might, in some small way, help get one of the Nazis’ new jets off the ground. So when the plant supervisors weren’t looking in his direction, he would tinker with the circuitry and electronics in an effort to disable them. “I blew more fuses than I fixed,” he later boasted. On a good day, he spent “one hour building and three hours destroying.” At the Nazis’ military factories, acts of sabotage like this usually ended with the offending worker being put to death by the SS, hung from a giant crane while the other workers were made to watch. Freddy, however, always managed to avoid getting caught.

  The truth, he learned, was that there wasn’t all that much work to sabotage at the jet-plane plant. The pace was slow and sporadic. Freddy could see that the plant worker’s earlier assessment of the production problems here was spot on. With the Allies blocking supply routes, and raw materials becoming more and more scarce for the Germans, the plant operators in Kematen waited in frustration for shipments of supplies that never seemed to come. A decade earlier, the Nazis had starved Freddy’s father of the metals he needed to run his hardware business in Germany. Now, in a bit of golden karma, he was witness to a supply crisis of the Nazis’ own on a much bigger scale.

  Freddy saw only a handful of airplane assemblies that looked close to completion. Otherwise, the assembly lines were all but stalled. If this first-
of-its-kind fighter jet was truly designed as one of Hitler’s secret weapons, the Führer would be waiting a long time indeed.

  Freddy recognized just how welcome this news would be to OSS and the rest of the American military, as the Allies sought to ground the Luftwaffe’s once-dominant air fleet. This was one of those moments, Freddy realized, when knowing what the Nazis couldn’t do was almost as valuable as knowing what they could do. That news alone, he realized, would be an enormous relief to American military planners.

  The foreign workers housed at the plant weren’t supposed to leave the compound, but Freddy would routinely slip out of the barracks unnoticed after dark and ride Maria’s bicycle to meet up with his contacts from his growing network of allies scattered around Innsbruck. The treks uphill on the rugged mountain paths were exhausting, even as fit as Freddy was. To ease the strain, he gave one of his black-market contacts a few gold coins in exchange for a small motorcycle that he was promised. Freddy never saw the man or his money again.