by Peter Finn
The Berlin correspondent of the Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper, added that Gertie believed that “after her escape she would get a Hollywood contract without difficulty.” The stories were quickly picked up by British and American outlets that emphasized Gertie’s “socialite” credentials. The New York Times described her as “a lover of adventure” and recapped some of her hunting expeditions.
Although OSS officials were upset the story was out, they also believed that the German reports meant “they do not regard her as connected with intelligence work of any significance or no release would have been given.” Unspoken, and probably raising some eyebrows, was the clear implication from the German articles that Gertie had been yammering at quite a clip about her connections and social life. Gosewisch’s late-night chats with Gertie were not just drinks and conversation; he was writing up everything she said. And with every word, Gertie was turning the key on her own detention. Gosewisch’s reports were being read voraciously in Berlin, especially by the Gestapo and other senior security officials.
If Gertie had one regret from her interrogations, it was her statements—and those of Jennings—about her family, wealth, and important friends. Gertie came to believe that she would have been released from Diez had the Nazis not taken such an intense interest in her background. “I had a feeling later on it was entirely possible I was being kept in reserve as a means of contact, or as a courier, should certain negotiations be in order at a time of imminent collapse,” she said. She was now seen not as a prisoner of war but as a “special prisoner” whose social standing and contacts could be exploited. The German high command and senior Gestapo and Foreign Ministry officials in Berlin began to debate how she should be handled.
While the Germans discussed what to do with her, Gertie spent her days in her cell, looking out at the village or reading. A Russian prisoner washed her floor in the morning, emptied her slop pail, and brought her a pitcher of water. Occasionally, she got to exchange a few words with a German guard. But mostly she was alone with her thoughts. Sidney, she imagined, was now back in the continental United States on the leave they had both longed for.
“There were so many things about our companionship I missed,” she recalled. “Principally his never-flagging sense of humor. That, I decided, was the most charming thing about him.” Sidney did make it home, and wrote to her—letters Gertie never received. “I do hope you are well and that you are receiving some of the things we send you,” he told her in one of the copies he kept. “It all feels so hopeless somehow to write when I do not even know where you are or whether you are alive.”
Gosewisch told Gertie he was attempting to arrange her release through Switzerland, a task beyond the powers of a lieutenant, but he might have been aware of discussions among more senior officials about repatriation. Both the Gestapo and the Foreign Ministry—the latter sent two officials to interview Gertie at Diez—became interested in overseeing her case. On October 1, 1944, Himmler had been given authority over all POW affairs, and the camps began to come under his control. The Foreign Ministry remained the principal intermediary with the International Committee of the Red Cross. Following the interrogation at Diez, the section of the Gestapo focused on the United States and Britain was asked if it “was interested in Mrs. Legendre.” It was.
The high command of the Wehrmacht, the Foreign Ministry, and the Gestapo now began to jostle for control of Gertie. Some officials emphasized that the “sympathetic treatment” of VIP prisoners of war could be publicized to reduce the “hate propaganda” directed at the Reich and would ultimately spare the blood of German POWs.
One Foreign Ministry official “explicitly asked for [Gertie] to be treated as a lady,” and another, noting that Papurt was Jewish, said “it would be completely wrong to connect her fate to the Jew because she was only with him coincidentally.” Gertie, the ministry argued, should be exchanged quickly for “propaganda reasons.”
But others in Berlin continued to suspect that Gertie was more than just an embassy file clerk and her connections to senior American officers and other dignitaries had to be examined further. One senior Gestapo official described Gertie as “an important American woman” and suggested she might in fact be Eisenhower’s secretary.
Finally, the order came directly from Hitler himself: Gertie should be sent to Berlin and handed over to the Gestapo.
13
Berlin
Toward the end of October, three plainclothes security officials arrived at Diez for Gertie. She was told she was being taken to Frankfurt and then by train to Berlin. “And after that, perhaps Sweden,” speculated the commander at the castle, toasting her possible transfer to a neutral country with a glass of cognac. “I am very happy for you,” he said. “To be returning to one’s own people is a wonderful thing.”
The prospect of ultimate release made the trip through the German countryside a pleasant ride, and Gertie observed the farmers behind their plows and the late fall colors with a sense of optimism. None of her escorts spoke English, and the drive passed in silence. “Each kilometer was taking me closer to freedom,” she thought.
They arrived in Frankfurt under moonlight, and the city rose before Gertie as a shadowland of destruction: “crumbled buildings, heaps of rubble, gaunt skeletons of towers” silhouetted against the night sky. This was Gertie’s first sight of the damage wrought by the relentless Allied bombing of Germany—the phalanxes of planes that had flashed across the patch of sky visible through her cell window in the castle. The Allies, as well as targeting key military and industrial infrastructure, were sowing terror among the civilian population, driven by the principle “that in order to destroy anything it is necessary to destroy everything.” To the captured United Press correspondent Beattie, who was separately transferred to Berlin just ahead of Gertie, the “wrecked cities made me realize how comparatively mild the old blitz raids were, terrible as we thought them at the time.”
Allied bombers and fighter planes—growing in numbers far greater than the Luftwaffe as U.S. and British combat losses fell—rained down “well over one million tons of high explosives, incendiaries, and fragmentation bombs” on the Reich. “We had to climb over the dead to get away from the sea of fire,” one German woman said. “I couldn’t help thinking, ‘We’ve been living through the day of judgment.’ ”
To Gertie, Frankfurt appeared mortally wounded—a shocking contrast to the vibrant city with its medieval center that she had visited in 1936. Her escorts drove to what appeared to be the only intact building for several blocks, and Gertie was immediately alarmed when she saw guards from the SD—the Sicherheitsdienst—the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party. The offices had no electricity, and Gertie was brought to a third-story room lit by an oil lamp, where she was given a glass of Malaga wine and some potato salad.
Gertie’s stay was brief, and toward 11:00 p.m. her escorts took her to the Frankfurt train station—its arched halls of iron and glass reduced to ribboned shells. The station was teeming with soldiers, and many seemed sick or lame as they hauled their equipment onto trains. Gertie buttoned her unmarked raincoat to her chin to cover her American uniform. Her caution was warranted. Other POWs had encountered angry mobs while being transported, and as the bombing of Germany’s cities intensified, there were reports of civilians assaulting and in some cases killing prisoners.
The trip to Berlin was fitful. A train in front of Gertie’s was bombed, forcing those behind to reroute. Hours were spent waiting on the line. On either side of the tracks, destroyed railway cars littered the ground like broken toys. From the Lichterfelde neighborhood into the center, Berlin’s classic five-story apartment buildings stood off the tracks like an honor guard of ruin, the roofs and floors having collapsed to the foundations, the windows agape. “There is block after block where man-made fire has swept the life from every building, leaving nothing but the raw, scorched walls,” one witness wrote.
<
br /> Gertie arrived in central Berlin at 3:00 p.m. Clutching her Red Cross box and shoulder bag, she was pushed out of the station by her guards through dense crowds of soldiers and civilian passengers—people scrambling madly for seats on the chronically overcrowded trains. Away from the bustle of the station, the center of the capital of what was once imagined to be the thousand-year Reich was a “dead city.” The buildings were broken. The streets were all but empty. Rubble blocked sidewalks and spilled into the streets. Few buses or streetcars ran, and there were almost no private cars. The gaunt pedestrians, Gertie thought, wore “masks of defeat and apathy.”
Beattie said the despair he saw in the demeanor of Berliners reminded him of the “faces of refugee columns fleeing down the roads of Poland and France in blind terror of the Nazi panzers…I can’t hold down my satisfaction at a debt repaid in full.”
Gertie walked through the streets with her guards to 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse—Gestapo headquarters. The high stone entryway was as forbidding as ever. Swastika flags and busts of Hitler decorated the central passageway of the building, the former School of Industrial Arts and Crafts. But the large windows were covered with cardboard, and inside it was dark and frigid, drafts gusting around Gertie’s ankles. Parts of the staff and their files had been evacuated that August as the bombing of the center of Berlin intensified. The imposing marble lobby no longer reeked of fear and malevolence but was redolent of the coming defeat, even though the remaining party officials continued to “strut around with the old pomposity.”
For close to three hours, Gertie sat bored in a hallway, snacking on her Red Cross treats as her escorts sought guidance on what to do with her; it apparently was hard to find someone to make a decision. Eventually, two women from the Kripo, the criminal police, emerged as her new custodians, and Gertie followed them outside to a limousine with a soldier at the steering wheel. The car passed by the Brandenburg Gate and crossed through the Tiergarten before heading for Berlin’s southwest suburbs.
As darkness fell, they drove through iron gates onto a graveled driveway leading to a large house with a manicured lawn stretching down to a lake. Gold lettering over the main entrance designated it as the headquarters of the Internationale Kriminalpolizeiliche Kommission—the forerunner of Interpol. The Nazis had taken over the Vienna-based organization after the Anschluss with Austria and moved it to Berlin, where senior Nazi security officials—Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner—served in succession as president. In his role as head of the Reich Security Main Office, Kaltenbrunner—a zealous loyalist and boyhood friend of Adolf Eichmann’s, a key implementer of the Final Solution—also issued directives on the treatment of captured prisoners, mostly fliers picked up by police after bailing out of their planes. If they put up resistance or wore civilian clothes under their uniforms, he instructed, they were to be shot immediately. It was Kaltenbrunner who ordered the execution of the OSS and British officers and the AP reporter Morton, who were captured behind the lines in Slovakia in December 1944.
The International Criminal Police Commission essentially ceased to exist as a functioning organization during the war, though it still managed to publish its journal, Internationale Kriminalpolizei, which now churned out “articles on racial inferiority and crime, praiseworthy reviews of books on racial laws, and reports concerning preventive arrest.”
The commission’s headquarters on Little Wannsee Street was to be Gertie’s place of detention in Berlin.
The custodian of the house, not hiding her scorn, escorted the American prisoner, followed by the two female policewomen, to a second-floor bedroom. Gertie noted the abundant vases of flowers, fine furnishings, and plush carpets. Her room, with an en suite bathroom, was open and cheerful with large French windows and two beds. She was silently admiring her surroundings when she realized, to her dismay, that her guards—introduced as Frau Krautheim and Frau Sebastian—would be staying in the room with her.
A male officer came by as they were settling in.
“You are comfortable here, are you not, Mrs. Legendre?” he asked in English.
“Yes, this is quite comfortable, thank you,” Gertie replied. “But when do I leave for Sweden?”
The officer paused before replying, “You are comfortable, why should you worry?” He turned and left.
Gertie asked her guards about Sweden, one of whom laughed and turned out the light as she settled into the second bed. The other woman took the couch.
Gertie—described by one senior Foreign Ministry official as a “little problem child”—appears to have been brought to the commission headquarters as a kind of adjunct prisoner to the nearby Stalag III-D camp in Berlin’s Zehlendorf neighborhood. Beattie, the American correspondent who was held at the camp, described one section of it—Kommando 806—as a place for “odd lots whom nobody knows quite how to handle, or individuals being kept handy to Berlin at the disposition of one Nazi agency or another, possibly because they might prove useful to the German cause.” Beattie’s fellow prisoners included Italian military priests, South African officers, about a dozen Russians, and a few Frenchmen. Beattie and Gertie shared the same Foreign Ministry official who had watch over their cases for that agency. The official seemed confident that Gertie would be transferred to Switzerland, a fate Beattie was also hoping for as a noncombatant. The Gestapo, despite memos stating it would soon turn Gertie over to the ministry, was in no hurry to arrange her transfer and eventual release.
The day after her arrival in Berlin, Gertie was questioned by Kurt Lischka, an SS lieutenant colonel and Gestapo department head, and Major Wilhelm Clemens, who headed the section under Lischka that dealt with counterespionage against the United States and Britain, including efforts to “turn” captured enemy agents. The two men—both in their thirties, younger than the century and steeped in its blood—had long careers in the Nazi security services.
Lischka had joined the SS in 1933. His focus, according to one biography, “was ‘the Jewish Question,’ in which he had specialized since 1938 when he took over…(Jewish Affairs) in the Gestapo.” At the end of 1938, he had been appointed head of the Reich Center for Jewish Emigration in Berlin. He went on to head the German police and intelligence apparatus in occupied Paris in 1943, where he was responsible for the deportation of eighty thousand French Jews to Auschwitz.
“His face was perpetually set with hard, cruel lines,” said Gertie, “and I hated him from the moment we met.”
Clemens had previously headed the intelligence arm of the SS in Prague. Gertie found him quiet-spoken, kindly, and polite but “insistent with his questioning, which seemed interminable.”
In this first interrogation, Gertie again recounted how she was captured at Wallendorf and described her clerical work for the U.S. government. Her lies flowed easily because she had created a whole imaginary life around her job as the embassy file clerk who had unfortunately stumbled into enemy hands. “I now began to think that what I had been saying was really true,” she felt. Clemens, however, emerged from the encounter insisting that Papurt and Jennings were intelligence officers and suspicious that Gertie might be as well. Lischka was upset that Gertie assumed she would be exchanged and wanted to know who at the Foreign Ministry or elsewhere had discussed the matter with her or made such a promise.
A second interrogation by Clemens was organized several days later as an informal tea party, and the major was joined by two Gestapo interpreters, Werner Müller and Ursula Zieschang. Müller, thirty-three, who had worked in the hotel industry, including in England, before the war, spoke fluent English, French, and Italian and had worked for a Wehrmacht counter-Resistance unit in France before he was transferred to the Gestapo in 1944. One of the “best linguists” at the Reich Security Main Office, he would also act as the interpreter at the interrogation of the OSS and British officers and Morton while they were held at the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Z
ieschang, twenty-five, joined the Gestapo in January 1943 after graduating from translator school in Leipzig. She had been based in Trebnitz, just south of Leipzig, since the evacuation of her offices on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in August 1944. In late October, she received orders to travel to Berlin for a “special operation”—to act as the “companion” of an important American woman being held in the city.
Müller was briefed by Clemens to keep the second questioning as informal and relaxed as possible, but to touch on a specific list of subjects: Gertie’s contacts with VIPs, living conditions in Britain, the effects of the buzz bombs, and American attitudes toward the Soviets.
Gertie discussed Patton, Ambassador Winant, the Duke of Windsor, Marian Hall, Marie-Pierre Koenig, and the U.S. secretary of the navy, her friend James Forrestal, but in “pleasant generalities,” according to Müller. Gertie told her hosts that the German fear of the Bolsheviks was “an anxiety psychosis” and the United States would be able to handle the Soviets after the war. On the prospect of an Allied victory, Gertie expressed “great optimism” and said Patton had told her that he would be in Berlin within eleven days of crossing the Rhine. And Gertie dismissed the damage caused by the V-1 and V-2 weapons in London as “unimportant.” When she was asked what the reaction would be to the aerial bombing of New York, Müller said that Gertie replied that “she wished it would be attempted. The effect would be to wake up Americans to the gravity of the war; at present they were too easygoing.”
For all her loquaciousness—and occasional heedlessness—over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour discussion, Gertie drew the line on some subjects. When Clemens pressed her on the military situation in Luxembourg near the front, Gertie “refused flatly to say anything,” according to Zieschang, who also noted that when she later asked for Gertie’s help to properly describe a piece of Allied military equipment in a translation she was working on, Gertie angrily dismissed the request as inappropriate.
