by Peter Finn
After breakfast, General Germain gave a speech thanking the United States for the liberation of France and noting that an American in uniform “in their midst was a symbol of brotherhood and hope.” Gertie spoke briefly to say how happy she was to be among them.
* * *
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The Rheinhotel Dreesen, which opened in 1894, was a distinguished if faded Art Nouveau structure with a five-story central building and two wings, all painted white, under steep roofs. On the north side of the hotel was a small garden by the Rhine where the prisoners could exercise.
The hotel dining room with its walls of glass offered a panoramic view of the Rhine and the shrinking number of barges that plied its waters—their few captains avoiding the large chunks of floating ice while watching the skies for the Allied planes that routinely attacked river traffic.
Hitler had stayed at the hotel many times in what became known as the Führersuite, located on the first floor with a bedroom behind bulletproof glass, a reception area, and working rooms. Along with Goebbels, he had planned the 1934 purge of Nazi leaders, known as the Night of the Long Knives, at the hotel. And in September 1938, he met Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, there, one of a series of meetings that led up to the Munich agreement and the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain, staying at the Hotel Petersberg, in Königswinter on the other bank of the Rhine, took a ferry across the river to his meetings with Hitler. The banks of the river were crowded with journalists and spectators, and one British official said the spectacle reminded him of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race on the Thames.
The Nazis had first used a section of the Rheinhotel to house South American diplomats until they were repatriated in early 1944. That April, the SS turned the whole hotel into a detention center—technically an adjunct to the Buchenwald concentration camp—while paying the hotel’s owner 15 reichsmarks per prisoner per day. The contract even specified “afternoon coffee” for the VIP detainees.
The grounds were secured with watchtowers, machine-gun emplacements, barbed wire, and a detachment of sixty SS troops. The hotel owner was provided with ration cards that allowed him to buy meat, potatoes, fresh vegetables, bread, margarine, marmalade, cheese, and canned fish—in far greater quantities than the per-person ration of ordinary Germans. Gertie immediately noticed there was abundant bread and sometimes two or three servings of soup. There was even ice cream for dessert. The Nazis weighed the prisoners three times a month, presumably to pass along the statistics to the Red Cross, and on those days there were unlimited helpings of bean soup. “It’s amazing how good the food is considering how really hard it must be to secure,” Gertie observed. “I am continually surprised that the menus keep their usual quality despite their lack of seasoning and repetition.”
On top of that, each prisoner got forty-nine cigarettes, sixteen cigars, or seventy grams of pipe tobacco a week. Beer was available for purchase, and Sekt or cherry brandy was served on special occasions, as it was on New Year’s Eve, when the dinner menu consisted of cold fish, hot consommé, braised beef, green string beans, asparagus, roasted potatoes, and rich pudding with fruit sauce. The meal was followed by a radio speech from Goebbels at 9:00 p.m. and one from Hitler at midnight, both of which were interpreted for the prisoners. “Hitler’s speech chiefly concerned their spirit of continuing the war to the end and never capitulating,” Gertie recorded. The SS guards welcomed 1945 with gunfire. Gertie, sipping vodka in her room, wondered where her family was and how Sidney was ringing in the New Year.
* * *
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Her husband was in Hawaii and, to his immense frustration, knew nothing of her whereabouts or health. The OSS, equally ignorant, was unable to help. American diplomatic inquiries about Gertie, and suggestions that the two sides exchange female prisoners, had been rebuffed by the Germans, who claimed, implausibly, they couldn’t locate her.
For months, Sidney had been writing every week to Gertie in the care of the International Committee of the Red Cross but had never received a reply. Finally, in January, he learned about and read Gertie’s letter to Marian Hall. “Isn’t this a grand, cheerful letter!” Hall told Sidney when she forwarded it.
Sidney wrote to Gertie immediately, drawing on the details she had provided of her incarceration in hopes of cheering up his wife. “Were the lice in your hair as big as the ones we pulled out in Iran?” he asked. “Also I should think that sleeping on straw must have brought back the memories of those days when you use to curl up on a rock and tell me that you never had been so comfortable in your life. Worst of all however I think was the solitary confinement because you could not give anyone hell.”
But a week later, in another letter, he was unable to joke and expressed his frustration at her continued detention. “The war seems to be moving so quickly that I am hoping the Germans will release rather than move you from camp to camp,” he wrote, “because I cannot possibly see what earthly use you are to them or what purpose is being served by detaining a woman.”
In this strange dialogue of unread letters, Gertie assured Sidney in a letter written on the same day, “Maybe this restrained life of inactivity under armed guard is good for my soul—for it is decidedly a novel experience for any independent spirit.”
Gertie quickly realized that the Rheinhotel had taken on the complexion of an old people’s home—lots of distracting daily activities and outbursts of pique over petty issues. “The old timers were extremely possessive of their comforts. Each has his favorite chair and considered it his private property,” and feelings ran high if someone else dared to sit where he or she should not. Gertie was offered an armchair, and it became, by default, hers and no one else would use it.
Germain at one point had to address the geriatric warring over issues of property and said that people could not lay claim to things when not in the room. Dining was another major source of grumbling. “Trivial unimportant food items become a no. 1 major problem,” Gertie noted. “The toast is not toasted, the coffee is lukewarm. Insufficient potatoes…While everyone, including C, are stuffing themselves.”
Days at the Rheinhotel began with prayers before breakfast, organized by Cailliau, an ardent Catholic. On Sundays, a French priest, who was arrested because he was a retired reservist, said Mass in the dining room. Gertie, never very religious and in any case not Catholic, didn’t attend but sometimes went to an improvised Protestant service in a cold upstairs bedroom. The group of five non-Catholics said the Lord’s Prayer and read from the Bible before returning to the salon—which, in contrast, was insufferably hot from the steam heat kept at a constant eighty-five degrees.
“One old gentleman with faltering step had the self-appointed duty of keeping the windows sealed and would hop, fuming, like an arthritic bird for the casements when he detected the slightest whiff of fresh air.”
When the furnaces stopped working, the room was heated by a woodstove, and the old men gathered around it, “huddled, shivering and complaining, like baby chicks about a brooder.” Apart from the daily chatter, the room was also cacophonous with coughing, sneezing, and nose blowing. The Germans organized periodic visits to a doctor and dentist in the town of Bad Godesberg.
A hot-water bottle was placed in every bed at night to mitigate the hotel’s temperamental heating system; it switched off completely when spring rains caused the Rhine to flood its banks and flow onto the hotel grounds and into the cellar, dousing the furnaces.
Most daylight hours were spent in the large rectangular salon, under its high ceilings and huge crystal chandeliers, with games of chess, bridge, and Chinese checkers taking place in different parts of the room. There were lessons in German, Russian, and Spanish, and Gertie was appointed professor of English, teaching her class after breakfast from 9:30 to 10:30. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Adventures in the South Seas, and Three Men in a Boat were her study texts because they were the only available book
s in English. At first, she had two students, but the class grew to nine. “Not only did I enjoy teaching, but I found the hours slipped by with greater ease,” Gertie recalled. In turn, a general helped her with her French pronunciation.
There were classes on higher mathematics and specially organized lectures on topics such as “the atom” and “hunting with a dog.” The group even produced a magazine of poetry and drawings. In one piece of doggerel called “Godesberg,” Gertie described life at the hotel. It read, in part,
Every morning sharp at nine
We watch the ice float down the Rhine
A twinkling bell means Come and get it!
That ersatz coffee—you’ll regret it!
The microbes float through clouds of smoke
We breathe, we sneeze, we laugh and choke
The sick with fever and the grip
To the doctor make a trip
The view from here is a sensation
We all agree a revelation
We see the smoke of our front line
We see the bombs drop up the Rhine…
The cannons shelling of each town
And watch the flares as they drop above
The war comes nearer in each day
We’ve front row seats to watch the play.
Twice a day, at 3:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., scratchy newscasts from Berlin were piped into the room and were interpreted by Paul Dungler, one of the youngest prisoners and described by Gertie as “our German scholar.” Gertie learned that he had an OSS connection and had been sent into Vichy by American operatives based in Algiers, but Dungler had been betrayed by a comrade who “turned him over to the Germans only with the stipulation that he would be treated civilly.”
Dungler, a royalist and driving force in the non-Gaullist Resistance in Alsace-Lorraine, was in fact closely tied to the leadership of the Vichy regime and had been sent to Algiers in 1943 to forge some kind of rapprochement with their nemeses, de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, then the commander of French forces in North Africa. The offer was rejected, but Dungler, in January 1944, was parachuted back into Vichy by the OSS to make contact with anti-Hitler elements of German military intelligence as part of what one historian of the agency called a “fantastic scheme” to divide the Nazis. After an expected assassination of Hitler, Dungler would facilitate communications to allow dissident elements in the German military to negotiate with the OSS and end hostilities in North Africa. Instead, the Frenchman was arrested, but his old Vichy connections might have saved him from a fate far worse than Bad Godesberg.
A map of the front, with pins denoting the various forces, hung on one of the walls and “raised great clouds of debate” among the retired officers who interpreted German propaganda to decipher the real progress of the war. Official communiqués used “expressions like ‘Abriegelung des Angriffs’—sealing off the attack…to gloss over serious enemy penetrations by pretending they have been halted.” No one believed these bulletins—not the French generals or those guarding them. The noise of battle from the approaching front told them all otherwise.
Gertie spent much of her time with Jean Couiteas de Faucamberge, a former French tennis champion who consistently beat her at deck tennis in the hotel garden, where they played even with snow on the ground. “Brilliant and fluent, he combined wit with intelligence to keep me amused,” Gertie recalled. She heard that he was arrested on the Riviera as a member of the Resistance but escaped execution by mesmerizing the German officer in charge of his case; he was said to have hypnotic powers. Gertie found him a brilliant conversationalist who could range over subjects as diverse as enology, Egyptian astrologers, yoga, and modern warfare.
Couiteas de Faucamberge also had an endless array of card tricks and, with limited success, tried to teach Gertie how to play contract bridge. She finally bested him when she bet she could balance a glass of water on her forehead while lying flat on her back and stand up without spilling a drop or touching her hands to the floor or the glass. It was a trick she had learned as a child and still managed to pull off to the delight of the French crowd. Several of the generals got drenched trying to replicate Gertie’s feat, which left her as chuffed as the Riviera waterskiing triumph in her evening dress had.
There were frequent visits to the hotel cellar during air raids. “Keller, Keller!” the Germans shouted when the planes were already bombing nearby targets because the advance warning system no longer functioned. Two kerosene lanterns provided the only lighting, the air was foul, and Gertie hated the place, preferring to hide in her bedroom rather than go down.
She sometimes used these attacks to hang back and steal some of the hotel’s limited hot water, because there was a monthly rotation for baths. “Without a twinge of conscience, I hopped into many a tub not meant for me and thus increased my baths far above my legal quota. If I ever was under suspicion of foul play, no word or look betrayed it,” she confessed. “I felt classed with all the other wily women of the ages, but unashamed—I was keeping cleaner than the others.”
Cigarettes were the coin of the realm, traded for food, warmer clothes, and toiletries, even though the tobacco was “ineffably poor” because it was “adulterated with all kinds of trash.” In the hotel’s strange economics, four caramels would buy eight cigarettes, two spoonfuls of soap powder was worth five cigarettes, and one cigarette would buy a pail of hot water from one of the hotel maids on days when the furnace was out. Prince Michael of Montenegro, a chain-smoker, had traded away almost everything but his dressing gown to keep himself in tobacco. Gertie, when her ration had expired, would sometimes smoke tobacco scraped from cigarette butts in her German-issued pipe—a lust for nicotine that raised Madame Cailliau’s disapproving eyebrows.
When the cellar was flooded, the prisoners stayed in the garden during air raids. They could watch fighter planes diving toward their targets—the railway station at Godesberg or a coal barge on the river. Once they witnessed a dogfight between one German and two British planes, and bullets from the engagement rained down on the Rheinhotel grounds. Sometimes on the horizon Gertie saw the vapor trail of rockets—V-2s, she believed, directed at London. “The feeling of being on the front line…adds a certain zest to our incarceration,” Gertie decided, as well as the “hope of deliverance.”
The routine was rarely broken, but one afternoon, following her French lesson, Gertie was astonished to find Gosewisch in the hotel lobby.
“What in the world are you doing here?” she asked, rushing over to greet her former interrogator.
“Thought I’d drop in…to check up.”
The German major’s real business was checking on his potentially valuable American ally as the course of the war became ever clearer.
Gertie asked about Jennings.
“He’s alright,” Gosewisch told her.
“And the major?”
“Dead,” he replied, explaining that an Allied attack had hit the hospital where Papurt was being treated.
“How dreadful!”
The brief visit—Gosewisch was brusquely ordered to leave by the SS colonel in charge at the hotel—left her dispirited. “There were no assurances of early release and I began to share the feeling of helplessness, the submission to the inevitable, which characterized the defeated old Frenchmen about me.”
16
Königswinter
Gertie’s despondency didn’t last long. By early February 1945, the prisoners began to hear the persistent boom of American guns. On February 9, Gertie wrote in her diary, “The cannons sound closer, the bombings are more frequent and the news on the west front is improving. The 3rd Army appears to be on the move. The Russians have crossed the Oder and are only 45 kil. from Berlin.”
The Allied push toward the Rhine across a broad front from Nijmegen in the north to near the Swiss border in the south had begun in earnest. It was the U.S. F
irst Army, under General Courtney Hodges, that was driving toward the river between Cologne and Koblenz, including Bad Godesberg, with Patton’s Third Army operating to the south, with Frankfurt in its distant sights. The city of Düren, among the first in Hodges’s path, was described by an American engineer, when it was overrun, as “the most totally destroyed city I have ever seen.” Almost no building among the city’s nine thousand structures was left intact under the relentless barrage of tank and howitzer shells. The horizon burned, and the Americans, with bulldozers clearing their path, advanced through the stench of death. From the air, fighter-bombers “harried the fleeing enemy in what one pilot called a ‘rat hunt: You beat the ground. You flushed the vermin.’ ”
The Germans referred to these fliers as “Terror Flieger.”
On February 21, Gertie recorded that the guns resounded all day and a bombing raid on the town of Bad Godesberg blew out all the windows on the west side of the hotel. Despite the increasing danger of a strike on the hotel itself, Gertie was gripped by “a feeling of suspense and excitement.”
On the last day of February, the SS commander at the hotel ordered a retreat across the Rhine. That night, Herr Dreesen, the owner of the hotel, gave everyone a bottle of local wine at dinner and wept as he bade his guests farewell. (American troops when they finally reached the hotel found a huge wine cellar.) “With the wine we drank toast after toast to victory and liberation,” Gertie said. “Some dared to discuss the possibility of escape or hiding until allied soldiers appeared. But the wild plans were only flights of fancy. We were placed under even more strict surveillance.”
The following morning, the prisoners were divided into two groups: those who would be able to walk up the steep incline to the Hotel Petersberg, their destination across the river in Königswinter, which stood on a rise about a thousand feet above the Rhine, and those who would have to be bused. Gertie, despite the jumpy soldiers and nervous prisoners, was “enchanted with the idea of a full morning’s exercise.” Before leaving, she asked Dreesen’s nephew, who spoke a little English, to tell Patton’s troops that she had been held at the hotel and where she was being taken. As Gertie drove down to the ferry, she could see the consternation on the faces of the town’s residents. The departing soldiers and prisoners did not bode well for those left behind.
