Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  As badly as Freddy and Kuen were beaten, other prisoners clustered among them in the bunker had fared even worse. One of those arrested in the roundups was Fritz Moser’s uncle, Robert Moser, the electrical contractor for the Nazi factories. The Gestapo whipped and beat him mercilessly for hours. His offense: interrogators accused him of landing Freddy his job as an undercover spy at the factory in Kematen. Freddy would later say that Robert Moser had known nothing about the operation, but no matter: the Gestapo beat the Austrian businessman so badly—“in the most animal-like manner,” said his wife, Margot, who was arrested with him—that he died of his wounds soon afterward at the jail.

  The next morning, his second day in jail, Freddy awoke to find Güttner back at his cell door, along with three Nazi guards with machine guns. It was five thirty in the morning. The “little rat” had become his personal tormentor, his Inspector Javert, seeming to stalk his every step. Güttner was taking him on another trip, though he would not say where.

  It was still dark outside when the Gestapo men shoved Freddy, in shackles, into the back of a green military transport truck. Güttner rode in the front, and the driver headed west in the valley, up toward the mountains. Freddy knew the route well; it was the same direction he traveled, with the same scenic backdrop, when he biked from Innsbruck along the back trails to the airplane factory in Kematen. An April storm had left a blanket of snow in their path, as the Gestapo truck passed patrols of heavily armed Wehrmacht soldiers roaming outside the city.

  Six or seven miles later, they approached the turn for the airplane factory and kept going. Freddy thought he knew where they were headed now; or at least he feared he did. In just another few miles they would be in Oberperfuss. But how? How had the Gestapo heard anything about Oberperfuss? The thought confounded him. Fritz had told the Gestapo what he knew, unfortunately, but he had known nothing about Oberperfuss; Freddy had been careful never to mention the town to him—or to any of the resisters, for that matter—for fear of exposing Hans. Freddy knew that he himself could have been followed biking back to town, or Maria or one of her couriers, but he didn’t think so. He would have heard that by now. Perhaps Güttner had made the link through Eva and the arrest at her apartment, realizing that her brother was Franz, a Nazi deserter missing in Italy, and they were from Oberperfuss. Freddy had to acknowledge that Güttner was cunning, after all—for a little rat. It was possible.

  He hoped he was wrong. Then the truck arrived—back in Oberperfuss once again, almost two months after he had first knocked on Alois’s door to report that Franz Weber had sent him. Many nights since then, Freddy had returned to the town—but never like this, with a truckload of Gestapo agents, and himself shackled in the backseat. It was a crushing turnabout for Freddy; the townspeople had leveraged everything to help him, and now he was bringing the Gestapo back to their doors, with no way to protect them.

  It was a Sunday morning, and Annie, Franz’s fiancée, was leaving for early mass at church at six o’clock, as she usually did, when she saw the Nazi truck and a flank of Gestapo agents standing in front of her mother’s hotel. They were yelling, demanding to search the place. All around Oberperfuss, from farmhouse to farmhouse, the agents were banging on doors, rousing people from their Sunday-morning slumber or stopping them on their way to church.

  Freddy stared blankly as Güttner and the agents went from one farmhouse to the next and brought the scared occupants outside to look at his face, bruised and swollen. Did they know this man? No, no one recognized him, or so they said. No one knew anything about a “radio man” in town either. Then the agents drove up to the Kirchebners’ farm, where Hans had been hiding in the attic for a month. Frannie, the teenager who had been teaching Hans to play Mühle, was still asleep, but her older brother was out by the stables tending to the horses. The boy seemed nervous when Güttner began questioning him. Güttner slapped him across the face. He quickly “lost his nerve,” as OSS related the scene, and admitted that he knew the Dutch radio operator and the Austrian deserter. They had fled the night before, he said. The boy said a woman in town named Maria was with them.

  The agents quickly stormed the farmhouse. Güttner waited with Freddy downstairs as the agents went through the house room by room, looking for the radio operator. They made their way to the attic, ransacking the place. They did not find anyone there, but strewed around the attic, they did find a store-bought radio, spare electronics parts, some gold coins, and a chemistry book written in English. It looked as if someone had left very quickly.

  Hans himself was now three miles away, hiding with Franz in a farmer’s hayloft in the neighboring town of Ranggen. They had gotten a two-day head start on the Gestapo thanks again to the tag-team operation of Franz’s sisters in Innsbruck. After the Gestapo captured Freddy at her apartment, Gretl alerted her sister Alouisa, the hospital nurse who helped him get his Nazi uniform, and she set out for Oberperfuss by bicycle to warn her brother. Freddy had been arrested, she reported; Franz needed to flee. Franz grabbed his rifle and roused Hans from his attic hideout nearby. The two of them packed whatever they could fit into their rucksacks, trudged down a snow-covered hill toward the train tracks, and kept running.

  They found a temporary refuge up in the hayloft on a farm owned by another resister, hiding alongside two Russians also running from the Nazis. They were safe for now, but Hans was terrified for his friend. Freddy had been arrested. As many risks as Freddy had taken, the news still came as a shock to Hans. “We have to do something to rescue Fred,” he told Franz. There was nothing they could do, Franz said. “If anybody could help Fred,” he said, “he himself could do it.”

  In Oberperfuss, Güttner was bristling once he realized that the radio operator and the Nazi deserter were nowhere to be found. With the Gestapo threatening to torture Maria if she did not tell them what she knew, Maria admitted that she had seen the pair fleeing, and she agreed to show Güttner’s men where they had gone—leading them up the mountains in the opposite direction in a fruitless, hours-long search. Güttner felt duped. He was convinced that, somehow, Freddy “was able to warn his comrades and make it possible for them to escape.” He thought about arresting the whole lot of possible accomplices in town on the spot, but decided to wait on the arrests “to save expenses.”

  But he still had Freddy. Güttner had his men put the shackled prisoner back in the truck and head back to Innsbruck to lock him up once again.

  Hours later, after the Gestapo had left town, Mama Niederkircher decided to organize an unscheduled mass at the Church of Saint Margareta. The church bells rang for an hour that night, and she and a few dozen other townspeople whom she trusted gathered to pray—not for peace or salvation, but for the safety of an American named Fred.

  12

  * * *

  A White Flag

  GESTAPO HEADQUARTERS

  INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA

  April 24, 1945

  Güttner was back.

  It had been two days since the trip to Oberperfuss, and Freddy had seen mercifully little of him since their venture into the mountains. But now the tiny Gestapo investigator had returned, and he was standing at his cell door with another Nazi, this one dressed in a regal brown uniform with gold threads. Freddy recognized him. It was the man who had brought a halt to the vicious beating administered by Güttner and his thugs.

  “This is Kreisleiter Dr. Primbs,” Güttner told Freddy. “You’re going with him. The Gauleiter wishes to see you.”

  Another surprise trip—this time to see the most powerful Nazi in Tyrol: Gauleiter Franz Hofer. Primbs was Hofer’s top deputy, a close friend of the Gauleiter’s as well, and the two men would hold court together at parades and public events in Tyrol to extol the Führer and the new order of the Reich. Freddy could only guess at the purpose of this latest trip, as Güttner led him in handcuffs to Primbs’s black BMW convertible, with his personal chauffeur waiting.

  All three men climbed in for the ride, but Güttner was largely inv
isible. The prisoner was the one who held Primbs’s rapt attention. The Kreisleiter brought up the brutal beating he had witnessed a few days earlier. Primbs found it astonishing, he told Freddy, that someone could withstand such punishment—all without answering their questions. Primbs had already told Hofer all about the interrogation, he said, and the Gauleiter was anxious to meet the stalwart young American. They would be having lunch today at Hofer’s home.

  Primbs had a charm and civility that Freddy found striking in a Nazi; he seemed like one of the decent ones. Freddy thought that the Kreisleiter might well have saved his life in the interrogation room, after all. Perhaps the rescue was all just a ruse—with Primbs pretending to be the “good cop” to win his trust—but Freddy didn’t think so. Primbs was a critical cog in the Nazis’ brutal machinery, but his one apparent act of valor had eclipsed, in Freddy’s mind at least, whatever horrific things he might have done in enforcing the Nazis’ rule in Tyrol for years.

  Güttner noticed the unusual way that the Nazi leader spoke to Freddy. Primbs talked to the prisoner in both English and German, as if they were old friends. Freddy was “a fine boy,” Primbs told Güttner, the man who had beaten him bloody just days earlier. Güttner didn’t know what to make of the odd dynamic between the two men.

  Primbs’s chauffeur drove east toward the mountains and on to the town of Hall, about six miles from Innsbruck. Just weeks earlier, dressed in his Nazi uniform, Freddy had visited the sprawling rail yard in the town, spotting the huge Nazi caravan headed to the Brenner Pass with weapons and supplies. Now he was on his way to the Gauleiter’s stately home nearby in the paradoxical role of both prisoner and guest—a turn of events that even Freddy found dizzying.

  Güttner uncuffed Freddy when they arrived at the house, but he himself was told to wait outside—another reminder of the Gestapo man’s subordinate role in the new scheme of things. Hofer greeted Primbs and Freddy at the door, smiling gregariously. He was a big, portly bear of a man, with fleshy cheeks and a baby face that belied his reputation as a Nazi tyrant. The husky build and Nazi uniform made Freddy think of Hermann Göring. He didn’t look evil, not exactly, but Freddy knew his reputation: a hard-core Nazi, “100% pro-Hitler,” a personal friend and devotee of the Führer’s since Hitler first seized power.

  Hofer, in fact, had been an early Nazi leader in Austria even before the Anschluss, when party membership was still illegal. Imprisoned in 1933 for his work on behalf of the Nazi Party, Hofer made a dramatic escape from jail that left him wounded by gunfire, only to give a speech from a stretcher at a Nazi rally in Nuremberg soon after. His dramatic appearance at the rally “is remembered by all,” read the text beneath his portrait in an official Nazi calendar that featured Hofer for the month of November in 1939. He even had a part in Triumph of the Will, the infamous Nazi propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl.

  Hofer, born the son of a hotel manager in central Austria, had run Tyrol as his private fiefdom for years—“my territory,” he called it. Early in his brutal reign, he declared his perverse dream of making it the Reich’s “first Jew-free region,” and he was accused of ordering the roundups of tens of thousands of Jews, Communists, Catholics, mentally ill, and other “enemies” in the area—many of whom were sent to concentration camps and ultimately killed. He was the main architect of Hitler’s “Alpine fortress,” a project still more an aspiration than a reality, and like Hitler himself, whom he had met with weeks earlier at the Berlin bunker, Hofer had vowed there would be “no surrender” on his watch. Just two months earlier, he ordered thousands of maltreated Nazi slave laborers to build still more fortifications outside the city, and he urged Tyroleans to brace for a final battle and earn “the German victory in which we all fanatically believe.”

  Hofer invited Freddy to sit down in his living room, along with his wife and several other Nazi dignitaries, while they waited for lunch to be served. Freddy—unshaven, badly bruised, wearing the same soiled, oversized clothes for days now—was not exactly dressed for the occasion. After all his weeks spent in cramped, grimy hideouts, this was a discomforting place to find himself—in the well-appointed den of a Nazi lion. Hofer was enjoying the life of a bon vivant—with a beautiful home, a beautiful blond wife, a beautiful lunch buffet awaiting—while the Reich was burning, Freddy thought.

  “Well,” Hofer surprised him by asking, “what do you think about the war?”

  Guest or not, Freddy didn’t mince words. “I think it’s about over,” he said. The Russians had entered Berlin the day before, and American forces were coming at Austria from all sides, with General Patton’s Third Army Division leading the way from the east. Freddy had only a vague glimpse of the Allies’ recent advances, but he was ready to predict the outcome nonetheless. Hitler “can about throw in the towel. It will be over very shortly,” he told his Nazi host with a brashness outstripping his new rank of sergeant.

  It was time for lunch.

  After a steady diet of inedible soup and rock-hard bread in the Gestapo jail, Freddy feasted on a four-course meal of potatoes, fresh breads, jams, and Wiener schnitzel, and other Austrian delicacies. It still hurt to chew, but he wasn’t going to pass up a real meal. When Hofer offered him some wine, however, he demurred. Sensing his discomfort, Hofer laughed and switched glasses with him, as if to demonstrate that the wine had not been poisoned.

  Freddy struggled to understand Hofer’s aims. He looked like a half-dead hobo in his clownish garb, yet here Hofer was, treating him like Nazi royalty. He might be trying to lull Freddy into giving up more information—the location of the elusive “radio operator,” for one. Or he might be trying to ingratiate himself with the Americans in the event the war was truly lost. The Gauleiter might be employing a carrot-and-stick strategy, Freddy thought: Güttner had beaten him senseless with the sticks, and now Hofer was feeding him the carrots.

  Hofer steered the conversation back to the war. He seemed conflicted, and he was looking to his mysterious guest—an American, Hofer seemed to assume, although he still did not know Freddy’s true identity—for a possible way out. The Bolsheviks in Moscow were the world’s real enemy, Hofer told Freddy, not the Germans. He proposed an alliance. “Why don’t the Yanks and Brits join forces with the Germans against the Russians?” he asked plaintively. Out of the question, said Freddy, suddenly cast in the role of international diplomat. Hitler had never lived up to his agreements before now, Freddy pointed out. What made anyone think he would start now?

  Hofer seemed desperate, and defeated.

  American military leaders were still vexed by the question of how much fight the Nazis had left in Tyrol and the Alpine region. Eisenhower and his top generals were hotly debating that April whether the Alpine fortress was a “phantom” or a massive threat that could marshal two hundred thousand Nazi SS men and extend the war by months, or longer, as one media report weeks earlier had suggested. OSS itself fed the fears, saying in a report in March that “it is believed that eventually the Redoubt will hold 15–25 divisions composed chiefly of SS storm troopers.”

  History would show most of the predictions to be wildly exaggerated, but the threat was considered grave enough that General Eisenhower decided to send troops toward the Alpine region to head off any troop surge. “Operations in Berlin will have to take second place,” Eisenhower said, leaving the city to the Russian forces in a strategic decision that would help shape the Cold War for years in a divided, postwar Germany.

  The truth was that even Hofer was uncertain how many garrisons of Nazi soldiers were available—and willing—to defend “my territory.” Thousands of heavily armed Wehrmacht soldiers were still patrolling the region, but they were hindered by low morale, depleted numbers, and a dearth of fuel and supplies. Hofer himself clashed with Field Marshal Kesselring, the top military commander for the region. The Nazi field marshal wrote later that, in those critical weeks in April, “Gauleiter Hofer’s behavior was hard to understand, and he interfered so alarmingly in the conduct of operations that
I actually had to transmit an order that the Innsbruck Gauleiter’s instructions on military matters were not to be followed.”

  Freddy now found himself face-to-face with Hofer’s erraticism, as the Gauleiter veered from a defense of Nazi supremacy and might one moment to regrets about the war the next. He startled Freddy with an olive branch: he might be willing to negotiate with the Americans to end the fighting in Tyrol, Hofer said. And he might want to use his lunch guest, Freddy, as his liaison with the Americans to do it.

  It was an unpredictable moment. Hofer’s words didn’t sound to Freddy like those of the man who had vowed to fight until the end for the Thousand-Year Reich. If he was sincere—an obvious question with any Nazi leader—Hofer appeared ready to end the fighting, and Freddy was eager to push him down that path. “I suggest you surrender,” he said, “without damaging any more [of Tyrol] than you have to.”

  Freddy, in his newfound role as unofficial peace negotiator, asked for a show of good faith from Hofer: he wanted to get a message to OSS to let them know that he was okay. It had been four days since his arrest, and because Hans and Franz had fled Oberperfuss, he knew that Bari would be anxiously waiting to find out what had happened to the team. Hofer quickly assented, and Freddy scribbled out a message—with his usual brevity and aplomb.

  Am at present in hands of Gestapo, but will get out one way or another shortly. Don’t worry.

  Hans, wherever he was, couldn’t radio this one to Italy. But Hofer promised to get the written note to OSS headquarters on neutral ground in Switzerland, and he sent Freddy off from the house with some bread, salami, and chocolate to bring back to the jail. He was still a prisoner, although no ordinary one. After the day’s strange events, Güttner fully understood that new reality. Back at the jail, the Gestapo man made a point of unlocking Freddy’s handcuffs once he was inside his cell, and he went to find a newspaper for him to read while he munched on his treats.