Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  Perhaps most important of all, Freddy wanted OSS to forward all the personal mail that he and Hans had received while they were gone, no doubt stacked up somewhere in a mail room in Italy. After seven weeks spent incommunicado in Austria, Hans was anxious to hear how Elly was liking her studies at Cornell University, and Freddy was desperate for any news from his parents and his little sisters in Brooklyn. He knew his mother, in particular, must be fretting over him after the long silence. The mail from home was so eagerly anticipated that the supply people tied a red sash around the container for easy identification amid all the guns, ammunition, and explosives.

  The sash was an inspiring touch of sentiment in the midst of a brutal war. But in a mission that Ulmer declared had been “phenomenally successful,” things soon began to go phenomenally badly for the Gulliver team, setting off three weeks of bedlam.

  On a moonless Saturday night in April, Freddy finished his shift at the airplane factory and snuck out of the labor camp to meet up with a handful of Kuen’s men. They drove out to a secluded area in the mountains far outside Innsbruck, hidden from passersby, and gathered for the weapons dropoff at the designated “pinpoint” location—which, on OSS’s vegetable-coded maps, was marked inside the grid for “peas.”

  “Awaiting drop tonight,” Freddy had cabled. This was a moment of such expectation—the start of an armed rebellion, he believed—that Hans and Franz put aside their misgivings and came out of hiding in Oberperfuss to meet up with Freddy and help gather the supplies. Maria, always willing to assist Freddy, tagged along as well. A driver with a two-and-a-half-ton German truck was waiting at the site to haul it all to a hiding spot.

  Before midnight, Freddy began flashing a white signal light into the night sky. He watched, and he waited. Someone thought they heard an engine rumbling in the distance, but nothing appeared. Kuen’s men, armed with rifles, kept an eye out for any Nazi patrols in the area. Freddy continued flashing his signal in vain. An hour passed, then another. Finally, Freddy sent everyone home. It didn’t look like their supplies were coming after all.

  The next night, Freddy came back to the field alone, still rankled over OSS’s no-show. Hans had heard nothing more from Bari in the meantime. Freddy began flashing his white signal again. This time, he saw a plane approaching in the distance. He thought it looked like a British, not an American, aircraft. Stranger still, the plane was shooting bright flares toward the ground—so bright that Freddy thought the Nazis must surely be able to see them from halfway across the valley. What the hell was going on? No one had said anything about using flares; that was practically inviting the Nazis to locate him and his people.

  Freddy’s frustration only mounted the next day, when he made his way back into Oberperfuss. A new dispatch from Bari explained the missed dropoff that first night: Freddy’s team had the wrong day. The drop wasn’t scheduled until the next night, Hans said. Freddy hadn’t factored in the two days of lead time that the air force would need once they received the go-ahead for the drop, OSS said. Freddy had gotten sloppy.

  That night, Freddy went back out to the drop site for a third time, bringing along his full complement of assistants. Again, he flashed his blinking signal into the sky—white and green, this time, on Bari’s orders. He thought he heard a faint crackle over a special “Eureka” shortwave radio designed to communicate with an overhead plane, but the signal was too far away to pick up. Demoralized, he left empty-handed again, the truck still empty. He had an army of resisters ready to fight the Nazis, and the banality of aerial logistics was getting in the way.

  Only days later did Freddy get the cable that explained the latest foul-up: the B-24 had made it into Austria, almost reaching the drop site, when one of its engines blew out. To lighten the plane’s load, the pilot made the decision—much to OSS’s chagrin—to jettison all eight containers of cargo. “A great screw-up,” Ulmer called the episode.

  All the supplies—the weapons, the explosives, the gold coins, even the insulin and the red-sashed package of letters from Brooklyn—were now scattered somewhere high up in the Alpine Mountains. And Freddy was left to fume.

  The commotion in the mountains was not lost on the Gestapo. The flares from the mystery plane had gotten its attention, just as Freddy had feared. By the next day, the Gestapo agents in Innsbruck were on high alert in a now-urgent hunt for spies and saboteurs believed to be hiding in their midst. “The whole area was alerted,” OSS said. The Nazis had grown accustomed to Allied bombing raids over Innsbruck, but this was clearly something different.

  During Freddy’s time in Innsbruck, the Gestapo had always been a menacing presence, but recently, he had sensed a growing complacency in its ranks, as if the Nazis sensed imminent defeat. It had been almost too easy to evade them all these weeks. Now, in the wake of the botched airdrop, the atmosphere had become ominous almost overnight. Teams of Gestapo agents, hundreds in all, were suddenly swarming the Inn Valley to try to determine what had happened in the mountains—and who was behind it. They searched homes, interrogated townspeople, imprisoned enemies and innocents. Everyone, it seemed, was a suspect.

  All hell has broken loose, Freddy thought. From Italy, Ulmer realized it, too. They would have to hold off for now in trying to drop down any more weapons or supplies. “Area became too hot,” he cabled Freddy. With the Gestapo banging on doors throughout the city, Innsbruck had become too dangerous for him to maintain his cover, so Freddy did something he rarely did: he hid. For two nights, he stayed alone in the woods, up in the mountains toward Oberperfuss, waiting until it was safe enough to return. He was cold and hungry, living off berries, mushrooms, and roots. He would have gladly settled for a slice of the Spam that he used to give away. The waiting—not knowing what was happening in Innsbruck, in Oberperfuss, or in Bari—was excruciating. He felt useless, left to ponder what had gone wrong in the dropoff. The flares shooting from the plane that night were the most confounding part. From a British plane, no less. Weren’t the Brits and the Americans on the same side?

  After three days hidden in the woods, Freddy finally decided to venture back into Innsbruck, unsure what he would find there. It was April 20—Hitler’s birthday; a bad omen, perhaps. He soon learned from one of his contacts that the Gestapo’s hunt for possible saboteurs had only intensified while he was in hiding. The Nazis had jailed Fritz Moser, the informant who had told him about his uncle’s foreign electrical workers. Leo, the black marketeer who sold him information on the rail lines, had been arrested, too. Whether the Gestapo had connected him to either man, Freddy didn’t know. Even now, he imagined he was safe. The idea that the Nazis would discover him, after he had eluded them for so long, seemed inconceivable to him.

  He went to Gretl and Eva’s apartment for the night. He had never had any problems at the sisters’ flat, and the small loft upstairs where he usually hid seemed like the safest spot for now. Some of his belongings were still hidden in the crevices there—his gun, his money belt, and, most important, the Gestapo papers that Kuen had given him. If he was forced to flee the area for good, he would need them all.

  In his hideaway upstairs, Freddy took off his shoes to rest his feet. A stove was burning nearby, keeping him warm, and he began flipping through the large stacks of Gestapo documents. He needed to put the prized papers in order so he could arrange the planned handoff. Despite all the tumult in the last few days, OSS wanted to move ahead with the transfer they had planned to get the documents into American hands in Switzerland. In fact, Bari had already cabled Hans with the details, with the handoff scheduled for the very next day. Somehow Freddy was supposed to use his cutouts to relay the documents to an American agent waiting more than a hundred miles to the west, in Lichtenstein, who would be holding a copy of the newspaper Der Bund, OSS informed him in a cable. “Your man should follow him to quiet spot and use password ‘Welche Zeitung lessen Sie?’” the cable advised. “What newspaper are you reading?” This would be a challenging bit of spycraft in the current climate, even for Freddy
. With Gestapo agents now roaming the city, Freddy wasn’t certain how he was going to arrange his end of the handoff.

  As he continued assembling the documents, a pounding at the front door downstairs interrupted his work. It was eleven o’clock at night. He hadn’t scheduled any meetings with his local allies, not with the heightened state of alert, and his contacts knew better than to use the front door anyway. He listened in silence as Eva went to open the door. Freddy heard voices that he didn’t recognize, loud and insistent, and then a name that he did recognize: Frederic Mayer, its lyrical French pronunciation not evident in the German utterance. The Nazis were here.

  Still, he downplayed the threat. Freddy’s first thought was that the late-night callers were looking for him because he was a foreign laborer who had left the barracks after dark, violating the camp rules. It was probably nothing more than that, he convinced himself. He wasn’t worried; he still figured he could talk his way out of the situation. What can they do to me? he asked himself. Maybe a few days of hard labor in a Gestapo prison for his transgression.

  The conversation seemed to be getting more heated downstairs. The men were asking Eva questions, and Freddy could hear her explaining that she had met a Frenchman in Innsbruck earlier that night. She seemed to be trying to stall for time. Looking around, Freddy realized that if the Nazis searched the apartment, the intelligence documents alone would make clear that he was much more than simply a French electrician. His confidence faded. He wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of that. Hurriedly, he threw the Gestapo papers into the fire in the stove. Then he grabbed his gun and his money belt, filled with his cash and the gold coins, stuffed them all in his rucksack, and shoved the bag as far beneath the sofa as he could reach.

  He tried opening a window so he could flee out a back fire escape, but it was frozen shut. He couldn’t budge it. That was when he heard the thundering sounds of footsteps coming up the stairs, and the door slamming open. He turned to see what looked like a half-dozen Nazi officers rushing into the room with pistols drawn. He thought for a moment about reaching for the gun under the couch, but he realized he stood no chance against a swarm of armed Nazis.

  “Frederic Mayer?” one of the officers asked.

  “Oui,” he answered.

  “You’re under arrest.”

  11

  * * *

  The Water Treatment

  GESTAPO HEADQUARTERS INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA

  April 21, 1945

  “Je suis un électricien,” Freddy kept telling the Nazi officers. I am an electrician.

  Yet no matter how many times he said it, or how calmly, his three interrogators clearly didn’t believe him. They thought he was a spy. They did think enough of his French to find him an interpreter in the building, once he had convinced them he didn’t speak German. The rest of his story, though, they dismissed as eine Lüge—simply a lie.

  The main interrogator sitting across from Freddy in a dank basement office at Gestapo headquarters was a blond-haired, pasty-faced man named Walter Güttner, who looked to be in his midthirties. Güttner, an Obersturmführer—a midlevel Nazi officer—was a diminutive man: shorter than Freddy at about five foot four, with a skinny frame and a nervous demeanor: not at all like the hulking presence Freddy had come to expect from the Nazis in Austria. Güttner’s slight physique and his eyes—small and beady, darting constantly—put Freddy in mind of a “little rat.” Or perhaps one of the tiny, treacherous Lilliputians who terrorized Gulliver in his travels.

  Güttner, flanked by two senior SS officers, had started the conversation civilly enough as guards nearby stood watch over the unshackled prisoner. He spoke in a cordial, almost fatherly tone. Freddy would not be mistreated if he answered all their questions truthfully, Güttner promised him. The Gestapo just needed to know some basic things: where was he from; how had he gotten into Austria; who else came with him; what local contacts he had among the loose association of Austrian resisters.

  Freddy sat stoically and listened. He wasn’t worried. Even now, hours after the Nazis had taken him from Eva’s apartment with his hands tied behind his back, even after they brought him to Gestapo headquarters and started questioning him, he told himself that he could still somehow talk his way out of his latest predicament. He always had. They had “nothing concrete” on him, he told himself with calming reassurance.

  Piece by piece, he gave Güttner his well-honed cover story: His name was Frédéric Mayér. He was a French electrician who worked at a Nazi plant in eastern Austria until Russian troops forced him to flee with other foreign laborers. Weeks earlier, he had come to Innsbruck and begun working at the Nazi aircraft facility in Kematen. He had his labor papers. He worked in the maintenance section. He didn’t know anything else, he insisted.

  He was determined to stick to his answers no matter how the questions were posed, and his French cover gave him a few extra seconds to mull over each question thrown at him while the interpreter translated it from German. But he could see that Güttner was growing frustrated. The Gestapo investigator didn’t want to be there either. It was the middle of the night, and the interrogation seemed to be going nowhere. He was a bit drunk after a few glasses of schnapps at the office earlier; he had assumed he would be home long ago, with his wife and four children. Plans changed when his boss, Friedrich Busch, who was the second-ranking Gestapo officer out of roughly a hundred employees at headquarters, directed him to interrogate a new prisoner. Güttner had hoped it could wait until morning, but Busch had insisted.

  With Freddy showing no signs of wavering from his story after more than an hour, Güttner wanted to quit for the night. Busch directed him to keep at it—and to get answers this time. Out of earshot of Freddy, Güttner asked Busch whether that meant using “extreme, severe” measures. “Naturally,” Busch said.

  The Nazis had begun employing the tools of torture almost immediately after Hitler’s rise to power, in 1933, in an effort to extract information from the regime’s “enemies.” The early victims included political opponents jailed in the first concentration camps, as well as suspect foreigners, like an American doctor in Berlin who had been whipped until his skin was a “mass of raw flesh.” Knives, sticks, whips, nooses, chemicals, and human excrement all became the means of torture to bring to heel those prisoners who were not executed outright. Twelve years later, torture had become so routine that a Gestapo chief like Busch was surprised that his underling would even question whether or not to use it against a prisoner.

  Güttner and the two SS men who were with him moved Freddy to a barren room next door. This was the place reserved for “severe” interrogations. Down the hall, locked in cells, were another thirty or forty prisoners the Nazis had rounded up in the past few days as suspected resisters. Güttner and the SS men began the litany of questions all over again; while Freddy’s answers never changed, his interrogators grew ever more insistent. They were determined to break him, and Güttner was acting as though Freddy knew more than he was letting on.

  Abandoning the charade of civility after another of the prisoner’s scripted responses, Güttner abruptly slapped Freddy across the face. “Are you a spy?” he shouted. “Are you a spy?” Freddy shook his head. “Je suis un électricien,” he repeated. Now one of the SS men slapped him, harder this time, and soon all three Nazis were taking turns slapping and punching him in the head.

  “Where is the radio operator!” Güttner demanded. “Where is the radio operator!” Güttner seemed intent on getting an answer to this question more than any other, but it was the last thing Freddy would be willing to disclose. “Je ne sais pas,” he said again and again. I don’t know. Another question, another denial, then another blow to the head, and another, and another. When one of the SS men boxed both of his ears at once, puncturing Freddy’s eardrum, the pain rifled through his body. Blood from his mouth and face began to drip onto the concrete floor.

  “Je ne sais rien!” I know nothing, Freddy kept insisting. The Gestapo would k
eep him alive, he believed, only if they thought there was information they could extract from him. If. Otherwise they might as well kill him right then. He was becoming woozy, and every blow made it more difficult to speak, even if he had wanted to say something of consequence.

  He thought for a moment about the suicide pill that OSS had given him for an occasion like this. And he thought about Hans and Franz in Oberperfuss, but especially Hans. He wondered if his Dutch comrade was still safely in hiding. He was determined the Nazis not find out about his fellow traveler.

  Staring at the bloodied prisoner, one of the SS men remarked, apropos of nothing, that he suspected Freddy was a Jew. Güttner scoffed at the notion. “Ach Quatsch,” he said. Nonsense. No lowly Jew could withstand such punishment. Freddy, half-conscious, took silent satisfaction in the exchange. They underestimated me, he told himself.

  The Nazis began stripping off his clothes, looking for valuables or documents that might have been missed during an initial search at Eva’s apartment. Freddy recoiled as they grabbed at his clothes, punching and kicking at his captors to keep them at bay. He knew that the Nazis routinely stripped male prisoners to see if they were circumcised Jews. Freddy wasn’t going to let that happen without a fight. That boy in grade school, the one in Freiburg who had called him a “stinking  Jude,” had learned his lesson when Freddy decked him. Now he managed to fight off all three Nazis as they converged on him. In a fair fight, Freddy thought, he could take down Güttner with one hand. He swung and squirmed so effectively that a few wild swings from the SS men missed him and struck Güttner instead, causing the Gestapo officer to complain later that “my arms were sore.”

  The prisoner’s strength took Güttner by surprise. Once they finally had Freddy pinned down and finished stripping him, Güttner ordered Freddy handcuffed. Freddy continued to struggle, and when his hands were finally restrained, Güttner brought out a long, cowhide whip and began lashing at his bare back with the practiced strokes of a man who had used it many times before. Ten lashes, twenty lashes, thirty lashes, and still the blows kept coming. “He hit him wherever he could,” said one Austrian woman who worked at the Gestapo headquarters and witnessed part of the beating.