A few weeks later, Freddy appeared before an officers’ review board in Italy for his chance at a second promotion in less than two months. OSS, citing his “outstanding performance” in Innsbruck, rushed to make Freddy a second lieutenant in postwar Europe.
Still wearing his dirt-crusted military boots, he noticed that everyone else in the room had on their best shined shoes. The cuts and bruises on his face were still visible as he stood before the board. “You look as though you’ve had a little trouble with the Nazis,” one of the army reviewers said to him. “Obviously, sir,” Freddy said with a smirk, his characteristic brashness on display. He got the promotion.
Officials at OSS thought that Freddy’s wartime heroics deserved still more recognition. He did earn several medals, including a Legion of Merit awarded by Donovan himself. But Colonel Chapin at OSS—the man Freddy had lobbied so strenuously in Italy for an assignment—pushed for months for him to receive the military’s highest distinction, the Congressional Medal of Honor. The military turned Chapin down. That honor was normally reserved for combat troops, not spies, and as hazardous as Freddy’s service in Austria was, it did not demonstrate “actual conflict or direct physical contact with an armed enemy,” one general wrote.
The army would reconsider sixty-seven years later, in 2013, with the backing of Freddy’s home-state senator in West Virginia, Jay Rockefeller, who considered him “one of the great unsung heroes of World War II.” The result was the same. The army once again denied Freddy the honor, based on the same rationale, stating that “the fact the applicant was not directly involved in armed conflict during the cited period supports the original decision.”
After the war ended, Freddy—now newly commissioned as Lieutenant Mayer—spent a few months in Germany investigating Nazi war crimes as part of the military’s “de-Nazification” of Europe. While in Germany, he walked the grounds of the concentration camp at Dachau. He had pushed OSS to let him parachute into Dachau with an arsenal of weapons, and now he was finally there. He saw firsthand the enormity of the Nazis’ atrocities—“the residue of human misery,” as he called it. The brutal executions were over now, but he wondered whether some of the misery he witnessed could have been prevented if OSS had not “wasted so much time” sending him from one training assignment to another all those months before the jump.
From Dachau, Freddy went back to his birthplace—in Freiburg, in Germany’s Black Forest. The vestiges of Nazi barbarism were gone, replaced by an occupying army and a city in rubble. Allied bombers had destroyed most of the houses in his old tree-lined neighborhood, but there, standing untouched between two craters, was his boyhood home, as if the bombs had simply passed over it. He went next to the Jewish cemetery, where the gravestones of his father’s parents sat undamaged as well. He took a photo of the gravestones to send to his father in Brooklyn; he would like to see that, Freddy knew.
OSS thought Freddy had a bright future as a spy—but out in the field, not at a desk, considering his penchant for mischief. “Has great postwar possibilities as an agent . . . but is not suitable for staff or office work,” OSS wrote. Freddy wasn’t interested. He wanted to go back to his adopted home in the United States. One improbable spy mission was enough for him.
He left the military with an honorable discharge and returned home to his family in Brooklyn in late 1945 in time for Thanksgiving—after three years in the army, seventeen months overseas, and seven days in Gestapo custody in Innsbruck. He came home a celebrity of sorts, at least in his local neighborhood; a story about his exploits had run just the month before in the New York Times under the headline “Torture Endured by Brooklynite Made Innsbruck Entry Bloodless.” His father, the decorated German soldier from the First World War, was now beaming with pride for his son, the American war hero; Hilda was just happy he was alive. On one of his first shopping trips in New York, Freddy bought a pair of silk stockings and sent them by international mail to Oberperfuss—to Maria. She had always wanted a pair.
Freddy worked for General Motors in New York for a few years, troubleshooting diesel locomotives. Then he got a call from one of his old OSS supervisors asking him if he was interested in working for Voice of America, the global radio network that the US government started during the war. Freddy went to work as a plant supervisor for the radio network in the Philippines, spending the rest of his career working at different plants around the world. He rarely missed the spy work. He had had his moment as a secret agent, and he had relished it. But those days were done.
Like Freddy, Hans Wynberg revisited his homeland soon after the war. His journey was a much more emotionally wrenching one. He and his twin brother, Luke, had not heard anything from his parents and Robbie in nearly three years. Hans, promoted to lieutenant along with Freddy, asked for leave from his post in Austria and drove more than six hundred miles to his hometown of Overveen, outside Amsterdam. (Freddy had taught him how to drive after the war.)
Hans had no clear sense of what he might find in the Netherlands now that the Nazis were defeated, but he held on to hope. He walked up to the door of his family home, six years after the farewell party there for him and his twin, only to find the house empty and abandoned. He found a neighbor who told him the news he had dreaded: his parents and Robbie had fled the Netherlands, and the Nazis had caught them in France. They were thought to be dead; killed in a concentration camp. The neighbor had salvaged two paintings—winter scenes—and some family photos from the home to give to Hans; the Nazis had seized the family bike-tire factory, and the paintings and photos were all that was left now.
A letter that Hans received from the Red Cross in Holland years later filled in the sobering details of his family’s fate:
Your parents and their son Robert fled the Netherlands . . . and were arrested at the end of August 1942 in Paris and imprisoned in Drancy [a Nazi internment camp]. On the 19th of October 1943 they were sent from France to Auschwitz together, where your mother and brother shortly died after their arrival. From Auschwitz, your father was put to work in the working camp Tsjechowitz, 50 km East from Auschwitz, where he, according to the statement of a witness, died of exhaustion at the end of October 1944. More information is not available.
Hans was determined to suppress the memories of his parents and Robbie, pushing them as deep into the recesses of his mind as he could. “Okay, this part of your life has ended,” he told himself after he learned of their murders. “The Netherlands is gone, family is gone.”
Work and chemistry helped fill the void. For months after the war, Hans worked in military intelligence in Europe—spying on America’s new Cold War enemy, the Russians—then left the army in early 1946 to return to the United States. He focused on chemistry, putting his studies on chemical structures, conducted for weeks in an Austrian attic, to good use, earning an undergraduate degree and a PhD. He became a chemistry professor in the United States before being offered a Fulbright fellowship in the Netherlands in 1959. His twin brother, also a science professor, was never willing to move back to Holland—a country that he saw as complicit in allowing the murders of his parents, his brother, and more than one hundred thousand other Jews. Hans, however, accepted the prestigious position, returning to his homeland with his wife, Elly, and their children. “Never forget, always forgive,” he wrote of the Holocaust.
He placed a gravestone in the backyard of his new home for his parents and his brother. Still, he was rarely willing to discuss the Nazis or the war. He tried to teach his children Morse code—they weren’t interested—but if they asked him about the Holocaust or details of the war, he would simply send them to one of the many books on the subject in his well-stocked library. “Too much about that past and the misery is not healthy,” he said. If he talked to his children at all about the war and the Gulliver mission, it was usually to extol Freddy and downplay his own contribution. “I just tagged along. The only thing I knew was Morse code,” Hans told one of his sons.
Franz Weber stayed in Tyrol and, months
later, married Annie, his dance partner before the war and his accomplice during it. Fabrics were in short supply, so Annie made her wedding dress partly from the parachutes the team had buried near the glacier; Franz went back up the mountain soon after the war to retrieve them.
He did not seek to publicize his involvement with the Americans until many years later. He became a lawyer and a politician, winning seats in the state and federal legislatures in Austria in the 1950s and 1960s, yet his role in the mission against the Nazis was not even listed on his official résumé. Austria was wrestling with its own conflicted—and complicit—relationship with the Nazis, and Franz realized that some of his Tyrolean neighbors, even many years after the war, did not look favorably on a man who had deserted the Nazis and joined with the Americans. In their view, he had dared to break with the deeply held tradition that “Befehl ist Befehl.” An order is an order. “This was a great problem for me,” Franz said. While many Austrians did support what he had done, “some [were] negative,” and they would let him know it, he acknowledged.
Only decades later did Franz begin to come to terms publicly with his involvement in the mission. In 1969 his role was recognized with a prestigious national award “for service to the Republic of Austria,” and in 1988—in the midst of a heated national debate over then-president Kurt Waldheim’s long-hidden role with the Nazis—Franz wrote in support of honoring three of the women in Tyrol who helped in the operation: Maria, Frannie, and his own sister, Gretl. (Both of his other sisters involved in the mission, Eva and Alouisa, had since died.) The operation “would have never achieved its success without the support of local Tiroleans,” he wrote. “I believe that the decision to honor the 3 named Persons and many others (most of them deceased by now) who had risked their lives to liberate Austria is the right one.”
Franz Hofer, the powerful Nazi Gauleiter for Tyrol, was arrested three days after the surrender and jailed in an internment camp to await possible prosecution for war crimes. Freddy’s half-hearted promises to protect him if he surrendered would do Hofer little good in the face of possible charges over the roundup and killings of many thousands of prisoners in Tyrol under his brutal reign. OSS was willing to overlook the questionable assurances that Freddy, after his beating, had given Hofer—with “his word as an officer”—in an effort to negotiate the peace. The promises, which Freddy did not have the authority to offer anyway, were made “under duress, so we ignored that,” OSS’s Lieutenant Ulmer said.
Any ethical questions surrounding the negotiations proved moot, however, because Hofer—like dozens of other senior Nazi war criminals—would never be brought to justice. He managed to escape from American custody three years after his arrest and fled to Germany, where he worked as a salesman and lived freely under his real name for decades with his wife and children. A year after his escape, he was tried in absentia by a court in Austria, which sentenced him to death for war crimes. Yet he remained free, even after reports in 1965 in Jewish and Catholic publications that he was living openly as a “respected businessman” in West Germany. He died of natural causes in 1975.
Walter Güttner, the Gestapo agent who led the torture of Freddy, was released from American custody without explanation after the war. In 1955 he was belatedly put on trial in Austria for war crimes, including the beating of Fred Mayer. But the charges were dropped after the American government was unable to locate Freddy or other key witnesses, even though Freddy was working for the American government in Europe at the time for Voice of America.
Max Primbs, the Nazi Kreisleiter in Tyrol under Franz Hofer, was also jailed in an American internment camp for a short time after the war before returning to Germany, to practice medicine. Freddy met with him several times in Germany after the war and came to consider the onetime Nazi leader a “good friend,” crediting him with saving his life.
In 1993, a half-century after Freddy and Hans joined OSS’s band of “glorious amateurs,” they traveled back to Austria to reunite with Franz, as well as with pilot John Billings and other members of the B-24 flight crew that dropped them into the Alps. Freddy and Hans stayed once again at the Gausthaus Krone hotel in Oberperfuss, not as agents-in-hiding this time, but as honored guests. Mama Niederkircher had passed away years earlier, but Freddy and Hans reminisced with Annie, Maria, and many of the other accomplices still in town about the remarkable adventure that had brought them together to help defeat the Nazis.
While the three ex-agents were not as spry as they once were, Freddy, Hans, and Franz hiked part of the way up the Alps toward the Sultztaler Glacier—not nearly to the top, but far enough to bring back the images of that wartime winter all those years before.
Four years later, in 1997, Freddy sat down for an interview at his home in West Virginia for a historical project initiated by director Steven Spielberg to collect video testimonials from fifty thousand Holocaust survivors. Freddy’s bushy black hair was now thin and white, and he wore large, owl-shaped glasses to correct what had been 20/20 vision during the war, but the ear-to-ear grin was unaltered.
The interviewer, Esther Toporek Finder—herself the daughter of Auschwitz survivors—asked Freddy what made him such an effective spy during those remarkable two months in Austria. He flashed his famous smile and summoned a Yiddish word from his childhood in pre-Nazi Germany. “Chutzpah!” he said buoyantly. “I was afraid of absolutely nothing.”
Not usually the self-reflective type, Freddy pondered for a moment what it had meant for him to flee Europe for America, then go back to infiltrate the Nazis. Returning to the Reich struck him as both a rare opportunity and a solemn obligation. “I would just like people to realize,” he said in a soft voice, “that refugees who got a haven in the US did their best to repay” that debt.
Author’s Note & Acknowledgments
My research into the OSS mission in Innsbruck relied on thousands of pages of historical documents, including US military records, archival material, and personal letters and emails, as well as extensive interviews that I conducted with people with a range of perspectives, including the last surviving member of the mission (John Billings), family members and friends of the participants, Austrian residents, World War II scholars and researchers, and others. I also took two trips to Innsbruck and Oberperfuss in my research. I spent just one afternoon with Freddy Mayer, unfortunately, before he passed away, in April 2016, but I hope I was able to give readers a full sense of the man and his mission.
Phrases and conversations in quotation marks in the narrative of my book reflect the verbatim accounts of participants and others, as reflected in the endnotes. As with any historical work, the memories of participants can differ on events that occurred many years earlier, and the official military records contain some errors and contradictions on matters of timing and substance. (For instance, some of the cables that Freddy Mayer and Hans Wynberg relayed to OSS in Italy appear to have been dated out of order.) When I found contradictions in the historical records, I included what I believed to be the most credible version in the book, and in a small number of instances where there are contradictions on matters of some significance, I have noted the alternative versions in the endnotes.
I am grateful to many people for their support in this project, beginning with Esther Toporek Finder, an advocate for Holocaust survivors who introduced me to Freddy Mayer in 2016 at the suggestion of Eli Rosenbaum. A three-and-a-half-hour video interview that Esther conducted with Freddy in 1997, one of dozens that she did with Holocaust refugees, was indispensable to me in understanding the arc of Freddy’s life, from Germany, to Brooklyn, to Austria, and beyond, and she provided valuable feedback to me through the course of my research.
The work of two other war researchers, Joseph E. Persico and Gerald (Gerd) Schwab, both now deceased, was also particularly valuable. Persico’s 1979 book, Piercing the Reich: The Penetration of Nazi Germany by American Secret Agents During World War II, provided a groundbreaking look at a number of important OSS missions, including Freddy’s, and
the taped interviews and papers that Persico left behind at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University were even more valuable to me in my research. Likewise, OSS Agents in Hitler’s Heartland: Destination Innsbruck, by Schwab, who was a childhood friend of Freddy’s in Freiburg, Germany—and even more so the exhaustive records and interviews that Schwab donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington—were enormously helpful.
I also want to thank John Billings, the pilot of the B-24 who dropped the Gulliver team; Josef Weber and Alois Abenthung in Oberperfuss, Austria; Matthias Breit in Absam, Austria, and Peter Pirker in Vienna; and Richard Breitman in Washington, as well as members of Hans Wynberg’s family, including his twin brother, Luke Wijnberg, daughter Audrey Wijnberg, son Jeffrey Wijnberg, and grandson Rob Wijnberg, and Hans’s friend and former student Marjorie Bingham. I relied extensively on research assistance from Maria Herd in College Park, Maryland; Diana Fong in Germany and Satu Haase-Webb in Washington as well as translation assistance from Bart Oosterveld in Washington, Lotje Krouwel in Amsterdam, and Simone Kellner in Innsbruck.
I could not have completed this book without the feedback, insight, and unending patience of my wife, Leslie Zirkin, as well as help from others who read early drafts or provided help, including Marty Kanovsky (the fastest reader I know), Anita Lichtblau, John Melissinos, Stephen Meagher, Michael Wolivar, Judy Feigin, Harold and Nancy Zirkin, Holger and Mara Kunst, Jennifer Maisel, Eric Schmitt, and my literary agent, Ronald Goldfarb. Lastly, I am grateful to Bruce Nichols, my wonderful editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Ivy Givens, his editorial assistant, for all their help and input. Chronicling the horrors—and heroism—of the Holocaust seems more important today than ever.
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