Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  Freddy’s message made it from Hofer into the hands of OSS agents in Switzerland, as promised. But the carefree guidance—“will get out one way or another shortly. Don’t worry”—met with as much skepticism as relief from his handlers. The OSS man in Switzerland who received the message knew Freddy from the base in Bari, and he knew his wry nonchalance. Still, it was difficult to feel confident when one of your best agents was in the custody of the Gestapo. And OSS had no faith in the Nazi diplomat who delivered the message, after an unpleasant exchange with him just weeks earlier over a possible cease-fire offer. OSS let the diplomat know that if the Gestapo were to harm Freddy, he would be held “personally responsible with his life.”

  Meanwhile, Freddy’s status as a VIP prisoner now seemed strangely in doubt. For days after his lunch with Hofer, Freddy stayed in his cell and heard nothing more from the Gauleiter about his interest in a surrender. The news that Freddy did receive, though, was not good: Güttner was transferring him and the rest of the prisoners at the Gestapo jail to a different location—for reasons unknown.

  Their destination: a concentration camp a few miles outside Innsbruck called Reichenau. Güttner assured Freddy that there was no reason for alarm, nothing to fear. The Nazis wouldn’t hurt any of the prisoners, he said pleasantly. It was just a concentration camp. Freddy said nothing. The name “Reichenau” meant little to him; it was just another stop on his journey. But the wild extremes of his wartime life were now taking another unthinkable pivot: seven years after Freddy had fled Hitler’s Germany, the Nazis were sending him to a concentration camp.

  Reichenau was an obscure place in the grim collection of Nazi camps throughout Europe. It wasn’t nearly as large, or as notorious, as other camps like Dachau, in southern Germany, or Mauthausen, in Upper Austria. But the stories of death and savagery within its walls since its founding in 1941 were almost as graphic for the foreign laborers, political opponents, Jews, Roma gypsies, and others imprisoned there.

  In just the last few weeks, Reichenau had become more critical to the Nazis’ desperate plans. With American troops advancing toward them, Nazi jailers at Dachau, outside Munich, abandoned the camp and began relocating their most “valuable” prisoners there by bus to the Reichenau camp about 120 miles to the south. More than 140 of these Prominenten, with credentials from across Europe, were hauled to Reichenau: captured enemy officers from Britain, France, Norway, and Yugoslavia; high-ranking German defectors and saboteurs; prominent politicians from Greece and Hungary; even the former French prime minister and a distant relative of Winston Churchill. They were too important to leave behind at Dachau. The Nazis saw them, like Freddy, as possible bargaining chips.

  The Nazi guards moved a stoic Freddy and other prisoners from the Gestapo jail to Reichenau in late April, a week after his arrest. Güttner went along with them. POLICE EDUCATION CAMP—REICHENAU announced a metal sign at the barbed-wire gate in the shadow of the Alps. Freddy was shoved into a decrepit barracks along with a pack of other prisoners. His first impression was of chaos and commotion: there were lots of people huddled together, but it wasn’t clear who they were or which of the Nazis, if any, were actually in charge. There was a sense of dread among the prisoners. Just a few days earlier, the guards at Reichenau had hanged three Austrian resisters at the camp for unspecified offenses; the other prisoners held a silent vigil in their memory.

  Freddy’s ever-present confidence was waning. He could see the unmarked graves of prisoners killed at the camp. He thought of himself, for the first time, as a dead man walking, just waiting for one of his Nazi jailers to shoot him on the spot there at the concentration camp. He had been so defiantly optimistic just days before in the message that Hofer relayed to OSS for him. Will get out one way or another shortly. Don’t worry. He wasn’t so certain anymore.

  Hours after he arrived at Reichenau, a jailer called his name and led him from the prisoners’ barracks. More unexpected news: Freddy was being relocated yet again. In fact, a BMW and a driver were waiting for him outside the gates. It was the chauffeur of Dr. Primbs, his new ally. Primbs had learned that Freddy was at the concentration camp and quickly arranged to have him released into his personal custody. Primbs’s driver had the official papers with him. Güttner, frustrated again by Freddy, protested the order briefly before giving up the fight; he wasn’t prepared to butt heads with the second-ranking Nazi in all of Tyrol over the fate of a single prisoner. He let Freddy walk out the metal door. Many prisoners would never leave those gates at all; leaving in a chauffeured BMW was a rarity indeed.

  The war was unraveling quickly for Hitler and the Reich in those last days of April. American troops marched into Dachau on April 29 and discovered the unimaginable atrocities that it hid. Nazi troops in Italy surrendered that same day in the secret deal engineered by the OSS’s Allen Dulles with a notorious war criminal, Nazi general Karl Wolff. Hitler, facing the inevitable, married his longtime companion Eva Braun in his Führerbunker in Berlin—the same bunker that a drunk Nazi engineer had revealed to Leutnant Mayer. Hitler and his newlywed wife killed themselves in the bunker the very next day, with a Nazi admiral, Karl Dönitz, taking his place as Germany’s head of state.

  But in Innsbruck, Hofer remained strangely silent about the future of Tyrol, even as American troops had moved less than twenty miles west of the city by the start of May, fighting off sporadic attacks from Wehrmacht units and bands of civilian resisters. An all-out assault by the Americans seemed imminent. No one was clear on what Hofer planned to do.

  Primbs thought the outcome appeared all but final; it was time to end the war. He was alarmed to learn, however, that Hofer, the only Nazi in Tyrol who outranked him, was planning to deliver a major radio address rallying the Tyrolean people to fight on. The remarks that Hofer had prepared ahead of time for the speech were an exhortation to the people to make “a last-ditch stand.”

  Primbs had no success in convincing Hofer that his stance was futile, but he thought that hearing it from an American—from Freddy—might change his mind. Together, he and Freddy went to see Hofer on May 2—marching unannounced into the Gauleiter’s office, not far from Primbs’s own. Hofer was at his desk, getting ready for the radio address, which was now scheduled to begin in less than half an hour.

  “Mr. Hofer, you’re making the mistake of your life,” Freddy told him. “Surrender the territory and I’ll make you a POW instead of a Nazi,” he said.

  Hofer, a cornered animal, began rambling on about the need to defend Tyrol. He would not agree to an unconditional surrender, he told Freddy. He planned to follow the lead of Admiral Dönitz, the new leader of Germany, who had pledged the day before to continue waging war against the Russians—in order “to save German men and women from destruction by the advancing Bolshevist enemy.” He was willing to lay down German arms against the Americans and the British, Dönitz claimed, but only if they would accept his terms. Hofer aimed to take that same tack in Tyrol.

  “That proposal will never be accepted,” Freddy declared, without knowing what American officials high above his new pay grade might or might not accept. “The only course for you is to surrender unconditionally.” Otherwise, he said, the American army would surely invade Innsbruck. Once they made it over the mountains, there would be a bloodbath in Tyrol. And, Freddy said, he had no trouble predicting which side would win.

  Hofer was terrified for his own safety—not only from an oncoming attack by the Americans, but also from Austrian resisters now roaming some parts of Tyrol with greater abandon in the past few days, as the Reich was collapsing. Hofer knew what had happened in northern Italy to Mussolini, just on the other side of the Brenner Pass: Italian partisans had captured and executed him, hanging his disfigured corpse from a meat hook in a town square. Hofer worried that he could face a similar fate after his own dictatorial reign over Tyrol.

  Freddy, raising his bluff, vowed to protect Hofer and his family. He could put him under “house arrest” and make sure that the Americans kept hi
m safe once Tyrol surrendered; Hofer would be better off as a POW than a Nazi dictator who refused to relinquish power. But none of that was going to happen, Freddy said, if he went on the radio and told his people to continue fighting. It would be crazy, Freddy added, to keep fighting a war that was already lost.

  Hofer mulled over the dire situation in which he now found himself. He was supposed to begin his radio broadcast in less than ten minutes. He told Freddy that he wanted a firm assurance that the Americans would protect him. Freddy said he would give him his word “as an officer”—not mentioning that, for now, he was still an enlisted man, or that he had no authority, regardless, to give Hofer any such assurance.

  With his Nazi fiefdom crumbling, Hofer agreed. He would make his radio address—but instead of rallying for the last-ditch battle that the Americans had feared for months, he would tell Tyroleans that the war was over. He would order his people to stand down, declare Innsbruck an “open city,” and agree to an unconditional surrender.

  Freddy did not wait to hear Hofer’s address. He wanted to get to the front line as quickly as he could to relay the Gauleiter’s intentions. Hofer agreed to have his men drive Freddy to the Americans’ advance guard, now positioned less than fifteen miles to the north of Innsbruck, to notify them that Hofer was surrendering. But first, Freddy insisted on making another stop—to find Hans. He didn’t trust the Germans to radio OSS with the dramatic developments, and his knowledge of Morse code was too rudimentary to do it himself. He wanted Hans, the radio operator, to make the transmission himself—and just as important, he wanted to find out if his “little brother” was still safe after his harried flight from Oberperfuss.

  Primbs and his driver took Freddy back to Franz’s hometown. Hans and Franz had returned to Oberperfuss after their escape, and Hans excitedly came out of hiding when he was told that Freddy was looking for him. They hadn’t seen each other for weeks. When Freddy told his fellow agent that he had negotiated a surrender with Hofer and needed Hans to cable the news, Hans stared back in astonishment. He didn’t know what surprised him more: that the Nazis might surrender, or that Freddy, last seen in town in Gestapo custody, was alive and free—and being driven by a Nazi chauffeur.

  Primbs’s chauffeur drove Freddy the next day, on May 3, from Hofer’s home, past scores of Wehrmacht patrols outside Innsbruck, and toward the oncoming American troops perched over the mountains to the west. Near the town of Zirl, eleven miles outside Innsbruck, he saw in the distance a Sherman tank and about fifty infantrymen that the 103rd Division had set up as its advance guard. Freddy pulled out a white flag he had brought—a bedsheet tied to a pole—and began waving it furiously. The American infantrymen eyed the car warily as it pulled forward.

  Freddy approached the tank, saluted smartly, and told a stunned officer that he was an American and needed to speak with someone from the “G-2,” the army’s intelligence division. The call went back to the command post, and a senior officer, Major Bland West, made his way to the advance line. There, he faced the baffling sight of a German civilian vehicle and, standing next to it, a badly bruised but smiling young man in mismatched clothes, with a white makeshift flag in his hand.

  Freddy saluted again and introduced himself: Sergeant Frederick Mayer from OSS, he said in a German accent with a Brooklyn flourish. He had negotiated a surrender with the Gauleiter of Tyrol, he told the flummoxed officer matter-of-factly. He went on to inform him that the Gauleiter was under arrest at his home in Hall, he had ordered the Nazis under him to stand down, and he was awaiting the arrival of the Americans.

  The rest, in Freddy’s mind at least, was practically a formality. Not so for Major West. He and the 103rd had no idea that the Americans and OSS had any spies inside Tyrol, much less that one of them might be negotiating a surrender. But once he was convinced that Freddy’s dramatic appearance was not some sort of bizarre Nazi setup, West and a small platoon warily followed Freddy back into Innsbruck in their vehicles, through open roads, to Hofer’s home to formalize what Freddy had started. Hofer, anxious to secure favorable treatment, told the major everything he wanted to know about the Nazi defenses in the area and agreed to make another radio broadcast directing Tyroleans to lay down their arms. As the Americans led Hofer out of his house and took him into custody, he gave one final Nazi salute and yelled: “Heil Hitler!”

  The bloodless surrender of Tyrol became official at quarter past ten in the morning the next day, and American tanks rolled into Innsbruck to take control of the city and the entire Nazi stronghold. Not a single shot was fired. People in Innsbruck, many of them now claiming they had long opposed the Nazis, flooded the streets, with red and white banners—the colors of Austria’s flag before the Anschluss—replacing the onerous Nazi swastikas.

  Germany agreed to a full and unconditional surrender three days later, on May 7. Freddy and Hans went back to Oberperfuss the day after that for what amounted to a victory lap. Hans got drunk on a bottle of champagne he had swiped—“liberated,” he joked—from the Nazis; it was the first taste of alcohol he had ever had, and undoubtedly the best. He and Freddy, reuniting with Franz, thanked Alois, Maria, and all the other townspeople who had helped them, and Mama Niederkircher told Freddy about the mass they held to pray for his safety.

  The three American agents then returned to Alois’s farmhouse, two months after Freddy first knocked on the door to ask for his help against the Nazis. Alois’s son was quite ill, and Alois wanted to get him to a hospital. So Freddy wrote a letter vouching for him—“my first and most reliable contact on my secret intelligence mission in Austria,” he called him in the letter—to get them through the American lines for medical care.

  The three members of the Gulliver team posed for a triumphant photo in Alois’s backyard, with Freddy and Hans wearing their American uniforms once again, and Franz—flashing a rare smile—dressed in a natty suit and tie. The majestic peaks of the Austrian Alps, the starting point for their long journey, shone in the distance behind them. “Das verwegene Trio,” Alois wrote on the back of the photo. Three swashbuckling guys.

  Weeks later, after the American military had taken control of the region, the army captured Güttner and jailed him. Searching him, an officer found inside Güttner’s wallet the photo he had taken of Freddy at Gestapo headquarters, with his face swollen and bloodied.

  OSS let Freddy know that Güttner was in custody, and Freddy went to see him at the POW jail. Freddy thought about giving the “little rat” a whack or two himself in retribution. He decided against it. Güttner, once so smug, with his whip, his gun, and the power of the Third Reich in his hands, now looked pitiful in his prison garb. He begged for mercy. He was just following orders from his bosses at the Gestapo, he insisted. He pleaded with Freddy not to hurt his wife and four children, no matter what else he did to him.

  Freddy just smiled down at him. “What do you think we are—Nazis?” he said. Then he walked away.

  Epilogue: After the Fall

  Known officially as Greenup, the Gulliver mission proved to be one of the most successful American spy operations of World War II. The men of the mission earned recognition not only for providing vital intelligence needed to bomb Nazi supply trains, track German troop movements, and pinpoint Hitler’s bunker, but also for managing “to arrange the surrender of Innsbruck to American troops” in the critical Nazi battleground of Tyrol.

  The operation was “by far the most successful” mounted against the Nazis in central Europe from the secret American base in Bari, Italy, according to William Casey, a senior OSS officer who went on to lead the CIA. He marveled that the operation allowed the American army to take over Innsbruck “without a drop of blood being shed.” OSS’s official war report, meanwhile, described the mission as “the most productive” of all its spy operations in Nazi-occupied Austria.

  The Innsbruck mission brought an abrupt end to the war in the Nazis’ greatest remaining stronghold in Austria, four days before Germany itself surrendered. One of the miss
ion’s chief intelligence targets—the grand Alpine fortress that American military leaders had so feared—turned out to be more myth than menace, a defense that was porous and half-finished. Even so, the surrender that Freddy negotiated with Nazi Gauleiter Franz Hofer avoided an imminent American invasion that military officials said could have lasted weeks, perhaps even months, with untold numbers of casualties.

  Likewise, the fighting in northern Italy on the other side of the Brenner Pass might have extended far longer, without the critical intelligence that Freddy and the team generated in the weeks before the surrender. Most notable of all was his “ten-strike” discovery of the massive caravan of Nazi supply trains heading for Italy from the rail yard outside Innsbruck, which allowed American bombers to “destroy completely heavy shipments of critically needed German ammunition and materiel for the Italian front.” The bleeding of supplies destined for the German troops was one critical factor in Nazi general Karl Wolff’s decision to negotiate a surrender of his own troops in Italy. As Wolff himself acknowledged after the war, “The front died of slow starvation.”

  OSS itself died just a month after the end of World War II, despite “Wild Bill” Donovan’s best efforts to keep intact his band of “glorious amateurs.” President Truman, who was never as high on the agency as Roosevelt had been, signed the executive order abolishing OSS. In 1947 Truman created its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, built partly from the remnants.

  Eleven days after the fall of Innsbruck, Fred Mayer went for his first medical treatment after the beating he endured at the hands of the Nazis weeks earlier. Among his injuries, an American army doctor reported, were “severe” cuts to his backside and a “moderately severe” contusion in his left ear, suffered “in action when an enemy Gestapo agent struck him with a club in Innsbruck,” which would create lifelong hearing problems. He had lost six teeth as well.