Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  Some nights on his journeys, he would hide out with Fritz at his apartment, or at the row house apartment that Gretl shared with her two small children and with Eva, then be back at the factory by daybreak for his morning shift. Once a week or so, he would bike at night uphill to Oberperfuss. There, he met with Alois and Franz under cloak of darkness at one of their designated hideouts, usually at Mama Niederkircher’s hotel, to quietly plot out their next steps. Freddy was growing more ambitious, emboldened by his success. He had heard talk of Austrian resisters who might be willing to actually take up arms against the Nazis—real resistance fighters, not con men looking for a payoff—and he was anxious to find out if the talk was true.

  On his trips back to Oberperfuss, Freddy always found a few minutes for a clandestine visit with Hans as well. After spending so many months side by side, the two men had been separated for nearly six weeks, their only contact the scraps of paper relayed by courier. Freddy still felt protective of the man he had come to think of as a little brother, and it was calming to confirm that Hans was still safe and healthy, if a bit bored, in his attic home.

  Freddy never stayed long in Oberperfuss, just a few hours or so. But Mama Niederkircher would never let him leave without eating first. The farming town had no food shortages, not like in the city, and she and Annie, or sometimes Maria, would bring Freddy dairy products galore: whipped cream, eggs, real butter with his bread, and as much milk as he could drink. Freddy felt a perverse satisfaction, a schadenfreude, in knowing that “I got whipped cream while the Germans were starving.” He always biked back to the jet-plane factory on a full stomach.

  There was one issue still gnawing at Freddy, however. He had worn a Nazi lieutenant’s uniform all those weeks, and before that, the uniform of an American officer as he parachuted down onto the glacier. Pretend stuff, all of it. In real life, he was a lowly enlisted man, a “tech corporal,” or T/5, in the United States army, and he had been stuck at that rank since he had shipped off almost a year earlier. He wanted to be made an officer, or at least earn a promotion. He knew that OSS was thrilled by what he had accomplished so far in Austria, but he didn’t think his rank, or his pay, reflected it.

  When he was still in Italy, he had angled for promotions for himself and for Hans, but that had gone nowhere. As a mechanic in Brooklyn in his teens, he had quit any job he didn’t think was paying him properly, leaving to find a better-paying job at another garage. He couldn’t very well do that here, not as an undercover agent in the middle of a war zone. But the inequity still grated on him, and it simmered over as he was scribbling down another message for OSS about the Nazis’ railway lines. At the close of the cable, Freddy veered off topic and wrote bluntly: “What are arrangements for our commissions . . . Fred.” There was no question mark.

  A week later, after sending off more cables about the Nazi operations in Innsbruck, a frustrated Freddy had still not heard anything back from OSS on that question. He fired off another message, referring back to his earlier query. This one was even blunter than the last. “Reread 14. Definite answer expected,” he wrote in a tone verging on insubordination.

  Ulmer and his men in Bari were now becoming almost as frustrated with their brash young agent as he was with them. They spit back a response that same day, telling Freddy that the ranking officers above them in Europe had “cabled Washington for promotions. Hold your horses.”

  OSS could not risk having a disgruntled spy deep inside the Reich, especially not with all the valuable secrets that Freddy had collected. After a rushed review, a decision came back from Washington just a week later. OSS passed on the good news not only to Freddy and Hans, but to family in Brooklyn as well. In a letter to Freddy’s parents, Ulmer wrote that while he was not free to disclose their son’s whereabouts, he wanted them to know that “he is alive and well . . . [and] is continuing to do an outstanding job for his country . . . To express in some small way this organization’s appreciation for Freddie’s work, he has just been promoted to Tech Sergeant.” It wasn’t the rank of an officer yet, but Freddy, in absentia, had gotten a promotion.

  10

  * * *

  “Take Innsbruck”

  OBERPERFUSS, AUSTRIA

  Mid-April 1945

  Hans was growing anxious—anxious about Freddy and all his “grandiose ideas” for defeating the Nazis. Freddy wanted to start his own army. Drop weapons into Tyrol. Arm Austrian resisters. Meet force with force. Just thinking about the scattered schemes made Hans nervous, as he waited in his attic hideaway for more cables to relay to Bari. Their main job, he had tried to persuade his zealous partner, was to gather intelligence for OSS—and by all accounts they had been doing a damn good job of it. Let General Eisenhower and the military men—the ones with the bombs and the guns and the platoons of soldiers—figure out what to do with all the information Freddy was supplying them.

  As the radio man, Hans had been willing to stretch his own job description, becoming a journalist provocateur and typing up his Free Austria newspaper on carbon paper to counter the Nazis’ propaganda. But that was about as far as his ambitions reached. What Freddy’s team was already doing, he felt, was “good enough.” From all the BBC bulletins that Hans was typing up early that April, it seemed as if the Germans were well on their way to defeat anyway: General Patton’s troops had crossed the Rhine weeks earlier, and American soldiers were pushing toward Innsbruck from both Germany to the west and Italy to the south in order to head off Hitler’s feared last stand. The Nazis, he believed, seemed on the way to being vanquished with or without Freddy’s heroics.

  Franz shared his partner’s nervousness. The Nazi defector, still hidden in the back of Mama Niederkircher’s hotel, also worried that Freddy was becoming too reckless, wanting to single-handedly “play war.” He could get them all killed. When he huddled with Freddy in secret at the hotel every week or so to plot their next steps, Franz found himself trying to talk Freddy into scaling back his ambitious plans. Franz knew Austria far better than his American friend, he pointed out gently, and he knew the Nazis better, too; he had been one of them until six months ago.

  But Freddy—well, Franz and Hans both realized that their team leader viewed danger differently than most people they knew. As successful and as risky as his weeks of sleuthing had been, Freddy felt that merely gathering up intelligence—“just sitting there and sending a telegraph every now and then,” as he put it—was not enough, not with the Nazis now on their heels and facing defeat. He wanted to help deliver the final blow, and Hans and Franz weren’t going to dissuade him. So when Freddy relayed one of his more unnerving messages that April, all that Hans could do as the team’s radio operator was to encode it and tap it out, just as written, for OSS.

  IF DESIRED CAN TAKE INNSBRUCK AND AREA AHEAD OF AIRBORNE LANDINGS. POLITICAL PRISONERS WOULD NEED 500 M-3 PISTOLS. DETAILS AWAIT ANSWER.

  This wasn’t the first time such an audacious plan of action had occurred to Freddy, of course. Hans was there in Bari at OSS training months before, watching with wide-eyed alarm when his fellow agent pitched the idea of parachuting into the concentration camp at Dachau with guns and explosives to free the Jewish prisoners. Impossible, their instructor, Dyno, had told him then; Freddy might as well go jump out the window.

  Since Freddy’s very first days in Innsbruck, he had been tempted by the idea of building a band of resisters. Tyrol as a whole remained staunchly in Hitler’s camp, with “the highest proportion of Nazi supporters of anywhere in Austria,” as one scholar would note. But beginning in late 1943, even before the D-day invasion, Wehrmacht deserters began to show up in small numbers at a wooden cottage on a picturesque seaside cliff less than twenty miles east of Innsbruck. Their main aim was to hide out from roaming Nazi manhunts, not to resist them. As the Reich’s fortunes continued to decline in late 1944, however, scattered pockets of deserters and Nazi opponents in Tyrol and elsewhere in Austria began plotting acts of sabotage, and one loosely formed resistance group managed to make con
tact with OSS headquarters in Switzerland a few months earlier in hopes of forming an alliance.

  The resisters had little impact in Tyrol for the most part, except to risk getting themselves jailed and executed. Yet by the time Freddy began talking about an armed resistance, Austrians quietly claiming to be “anti-Nazi” suddenly seemed to be popping up everywhere in his underground travels. Many of the so-called resisters, Freddy found, were poseurs looking to make money off him in bribes, or get on the winning side of the war if the Nazis went down to defeat. In Oberperfuss, Freddy’s allies, like Alois and Mama Niederkircher, were motivated mainly by their hatred for the Nazis, asking him for little other than a few cigarettes now and then. But in the city, in Innsbruck, almost everyone seemed to be on the take, looking for a few gold coins for their help.

  Early on, Freddy met with a Wehrmacht deserter named Karl Niederwanger—another introduction set up, indirectly, through Eva—who claimed to lead a covert resistance group of five hundred men, holed up somewhere in the Alps and ready to fight. Freddy was skeptical. Something about the self-styled Nazi opponent didn’t ring true to him. Freddy decided to test the man’s mettle. He tasked Niederwanger with blowing up a generator outside town. If the test run succeeded, Freddy would talk about a real mission—and about money. When the day of the test came and went with the generator still untouched, Freddy dismissed him as a pretender.

  But as Freddy’s web of underground contacts grew, his hopes for an armed band of real resisters and saboteurs grew with them. To the amazement of Ulmer and his OSS men in Bari, “more than one hundred natives of Innsbruck” now knew that an undercover American agent was somewhere in the area, yet no one had turned him in to the Gestapo. A prospective ally in Innsbruck—a legitimate one this time, Freddy decided—was a Nazi police officer named Alois Kuen, a former SS agent who now worked for the Kripo, the criminal branch of the Nazi police forces. With word circulating about a mysterious agent in Innsbruck, Kuen—using the alias of “Karl Kern”—decided that he wanted to meet the man. He and Freddy arranged a clandestine meeting in mid-March. As the two men—one a Nazi, the other a Jew recently disguised as one—sized each other up, Kuen said he had become disillusioned with the Reich, despite his senior position with the Kripo. So had a number of Nazi officers under him, he said. Kuen and some of his supporters had been secretly printing anti-Nazi “propaganda sheets,” not unlike the ones Hans had circulated, and they had also destroyed the internal Kripo files of anti-Nazi officers in the area to protect them from arrest by the Gestapo. He said they were willing to do more to bring down the Nazis—with the Americans’ help.

  Freddy realized that the Kripo officer speaking in hushed tones across from him could be laying a trap. Kuen might simply be trying to get more information from him about the American operations in Austria before tipping off the Gestapo about Freddy’s true identity. Yet for reasons that Freddy could never fully explain, he believed Kuen; the Nazi police officer seemed genuine, even impressive, Freddy thought, and an alliance was born.

  Kuen claimed to have a large band of Kripo officers already on his side, ready to join with Freddy, and he said he knew where he could find still more. The Gestapo had imprisoned five hundred political opponents—all of them ardent anti-Nazis—at a barracks in Kematen, the same town where Freddy, or Frédéric Mayér, was still working at the airplane factory. Kuen proposed a prison break: he could arrange to free all the political prisoners, team them with the other resisters, then take up arms against the Nazis. But first, Kuen said, they would need a cache of guns—thus the five hundred military-grade pistols that Freddy requisitioned in his earlier cable to “take Innsbruck.”

  Freddy loved the idea. His bosses did not. Like Hans and Franz, some OSS officers were also becoming concerned about an agent who, as William Casey, a senior OSS official in Europe, put it, had to be reminded “that he was on an intelligence mission, and not acting in an Errol Flynn movie.” Colonel Chapin, the OSS officer who had sent Freddy and Hans to Bari months earlier, fumed when he learned the pair had asked for a heads-up about Austrian bombing missions, so that Freddy could stay out of their path. Chapin took that as a clear sign that Freddy was spending too much time inside dangerous bomb zones himself—and failing to find Austrian cutouts to do the risky groundwork for him. The colonel sent off a dispatch to Ulmer’s OSS crew on the other side of Italy. They needed to let Freddy know “in strongest terms,” Chapin wrote, that “his personal security [is] highest importance . . . If as leader he gets burned, whole setup is finito.” Chapin stressed that “nothing he could do in person, however courageous,” would justify getting caught and exposing the operation.

  The idea of dropping five hundred guns into Austria struck Ulmer and his aides in Bari as half-cocked. Freddy’s latest proposal didn’t seem well thought out, and it was a distraction from more important intelligence-gathering work, Ulmer concluded. “If you have top-notch plan,” he wrote back to Freddy, “give complete outline and will resubmit” for consideration. “Otherwise continue your intelligence program which G-2 [the intelligence section] likes.”

  OSS’s reluctance was clear to Freddy, even behind the veil of bureaucratese, and he took it as a personal rebuke: Stick to your first assignment and don’t be in a hurry to get killed. He didn’t bother to come up with a “top-notch plan” that might pass muster with Bari. But nor did he give up completely on his hopes of arming the Nazi opponents. Instead, he simply devised a new plan that was even more eye-popping than the last. He met again with Kuen, this time alongside a Wehrmacht major named Hein who claimed his people were ready to dynamite local bridges in the Alps to deter the Nazis. More confident than ever after the meeting, Freddy penned a new cable declaring that he now had “one thousand partisans . . . under my command. A full plane load of explosives for bridges sabotage and a quantity of propaganda material should be sent to me at once.”

  OSS had never done anything quite like what Freddy was proposing, and Ulmer had every reason to quash Freddy’s latest brash pitch. Under his watch, the Bari section was continuing to lose agents in bungled operations. In a particularly gruesome episode that same month during a parachute mission into northern Italy, the tether on an OSS agent’s parachute failed to release on the drop. He was slammed repeatedly against the bottom of the plane and killed. Only a month before, OSS headquarters had sent the two colonels to Bari to diagnose all the problems in the field operations. With the recent failures so glaring, Ulmer didn’t need to risk losing Freddy, one of his best field agents, just as an Allied victory seemed in sight. His agent in Innsbruck was already generating valuable intelligence without organizing any armed revolts.

  Still, Ulmer found it difficult to say no to Freddy. He considered many of his OSS agents wildly overmatched for their missions, but Freddy’s agile spy work and his judgment had earned Ulmer’s unflinching trust. “He was magnificent at bluffing and lying,” Ulmer would remark, “and everything you needed to survive.”

  If Freddy believed he had the manpower to “take Innsbruck,” Ulmer decided he was not going to be the one to stand in his way. He gave the tentative go-ahead for the improbable plan to drop the cache of weapons and supplies. But the decision was twisted into a Gordian knot that left Freddy’s own role open to wide interpretation. Freddy could work to organize the resisters, Ulmer decided, but “under no circumstances” should he become involved “too closely with any sabotage missions.” He wanted him to “keep aloof” from the resisters and their actual operations, “to continue the priceless flow of information.” That delicate balance would require Freddy to rein himself in—something he had never found easy to do.

  Freddy continued bringing in all sorts of valuable intelligence on the Nazis, even as he planned his armed resistance. “Fifty fighter planes expected at New Innsbruck Airport. This shipment by rail,” he reported in one cable on April 14. His source: “a bragging major with the air force.” The very next day, he sent another cable, about a sighting of “67 four-ton trucks wi
th trailers loaded with coast artillery.” Then came some frustrating news he had picked up from a worker on a Nazi bomb-defusing crew in the city: In two recent Allied air raids, Freddy cabled, six hundred bombs that American fighter planes dropped over Innsbruck included “one hundred duds. Repeat: duds.”

  Freddy continued to ply new avenues for information. At Kripo, Kuen had obtained for him a thick stack of internal Gestapo documents that revealed, among other things, the names of many Nazi Spitzel, or insiders suspected of opposing the Reich. The documents promised to be an invaluable spy tool against the Nazis, and OSS officers were keen to get their hands on them. But they were so voluminous that Hans couldn’t send them all back to OSS by cable, so Bari was scrambling to arrange for Freddy to hand the originals off, through his cutouts, to an OSS operative in Switzerland.

  The supply team in Bari, meanwhile, was busy loading a B-24 fighter plane with all the supplies that Freddy wanted OSS to parachute down for his resisters: eight containers filled with explosives, pistols, submachine guns, hundreds of rounds of 9 mm ammunition, and enough other weaponry to arm a large band of disaffected Nazis. There were electronics parts, a new receiver, and batteries for Hans, along with cartons of cigarettes, coffee, more gold coins, and another $1,500 in cash; more than fourteen hundred pounds of supplies in all, “plus special stuff Freddy wanted,” as Ulmer noted. That included one particularly hard-to-come-by item: insulin for Freddy to bribe a diabetic Gestapo official who ran security at the Kematen labor plant and who was running out of medicine; ten tubes of insulin were packed away.