by Peter Finn
Grieme argued repeatedly to Gertie that the United States was not fully aware of the Soviet danger. In stressing the matter so emphatically, he might have been following instructions to make a significant impression on Gertie before her repatriation. The OSS learned from the interrogation of one of Gertie’s interpreters of such a plan. “Prior to exchange she was to receive a suitable anti-Bolshevist indoctrination under the auspices of the Frankfurt Gestapo,” the interpreter Werner Müller told his American interrogators in April 1945. And to some extent Gertie’s jailors were successful. She wrote a series of memos for Donovan on conditions in Germany, noting in one the deep fear of Soviet domination.
“The hand that fed the German people would be the one to rule them,” Grieme warned.
“America must keep a political hand in our business. It is absolutely necessary,” he insisted. “My people cannot control themselves. That has been proven. Left to their own devices, immediately twenty-five or more parties will spring up. That was the situation when Hitler came in. I know my people. They have one inherent weakness: they must be given orders…They must learn democracy and your people must stay to teach it.”
* * *
—
A German man who occupied a room over the Griemes’ garage invited Gertie to walk through the Opel estate, a nearby nature preserve with wild elk owned by the family of the German car manufacturer. The two-hour trek was refreshing but exhausting, and Gertie realized how much of her old vigor had dissipated; she had lost twenty pounds while in captivity.
On another walk, the bombing of Wiesbaden was audible, and Gertie was once again struck by the weirdness of her situation—tromping through beautiful German countryside while just a short distance away German towns and cities were being obliterated by her countrymen. On the way back, looping through Königstein, she passed a medical facility with young amputees out in the courtyard, some of them no more than sixteen, moving about awkwardly as they learned how to use their crutches. On another afternoon, she visited a family farm where she was treated to a thirty-minute impromptu concert. The German farmer’s son played piano, accompanied by a Frenchman, a forced laborer, on violin. It was momentarily transporting and deeply peculiar. Everywhere people were looking for ways of escape.
Other days Gertie sat in a chaise longue on the terrace, sunbathing—“delicious”—and rereading Gone with the Wind. “Love it,” she raved.
The Griemes socialized frequently with friends in and around the town and took Gertie with them—a strange American exhibit in their collapsing world. On one evening, five people, including Gertie, were standing in the corner of a large room, sipping Rhine wine mixed with champagne, mint, and ice, when bombs struck. “The flash which preceded the sound of the explosion lit up the room; then came the reverberations. The walls seemed to sway slightly.”
A wall of fire erupted near the house, and black clouds of smoke plunged through its blazing hue. The Germans stood in silence, momentarily frozen with shock, but when the threat of conflagration seemed to subside, they quickly resumed drinking and later produced a gala meal. Gertie wondered about their ability to continue the dinner party. “Were they heartless…or did they have the stoutest of hearts?” she asked herself. “Then I remembered we had acted much the same way in London.”
Nonetheless, she decided, “It was a queer feeling being an American in enemy country and being entertained.”
* * *
—
As she tried to kill the chicken-marauding hawk for Grieme, she asked him if he could contact Gosewisch, saying that she was due some Red Cross boxes. Two days later, the lieutenant and his commanding officer at Diez, Colonel Willibald Köstner, showed up—presenting Gertie with three food boxes, a pair of silk stockings, and a bunch of violets and white snowdrops. “I was delighted with their loot,” said Gertie, the incongruity of the flowers and stockings notwithstanding. If nothing else, she was back to smoking Camels and Chesterfields. “So good!” she exclaimed.
Gosewisch and Köstner also carried with them the illusion of a deal with the advancing Americans—with Gertie, in their minds, exploiting her contacts and acting as some kind of intermediary with officers like Patton while they facilitated communication with the German military command. “If only your side wanted to talk, wanted to stop this useless killing right now…it could be done with the stroke of a pen,” Gosewisch asserted.
Gertie listened politely but didn’t have the heart to tell them that their proposal would have no more impact on Patton or any other U.S. general than the “chirping of sparrows to warring eagles.”
Roosevelt had announced the policy of unconditional surrender at the Casablanca Conference with Churchill in January 1943 and would brook no dilution of the demand as the war progressed. He believed that abject defeat was the only outcome for a country that had “been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of man.” The Nazis exploited Roosevelt’s position, telling their people it meant “slavery, castration, the end of Germany as a nation,” and subjugation, in particular to the Russians. There was no alternative, according to the Goebbels propaganda machine, but to fight to the death. Whether the Allied policy had the effect of prolonging the war, and whether elements of the German high command, or even the Nazi Party, might have sued for peace sooner without it, were the subjects of debate during and after the war. But it was a fantastical notion that a couple of Wehrmacht officers and an American civilian, the tiniest of dots in the continent-wide enterprise around them, could silence the guns. Gertie, unlike her delusional interlocutors, recognized the desperation and folly of the request, but she happily played along with the notion of being a courier, hoping it would speed her release.
18
Constance
On the evening of March 21, Grieme fetched his best bottles of extra-dry Moët & Chandon champagne from the cellar. Gertie’s departure was imminent, and they drank to it.
At 6:00 p.m. the following day, the car to take her away arrived. A Gestapo official from Frankfurt—introduced as Mr. Gay, no first name—who spoke English with a British accent, said he had orders to get her across the German-Swiss border. Nena Grieme prepared a food box with a flask of cognac. Gertie wrote a note for the Griemes to hand to U.S. troops:
To Whom It May Concern:
As an American prisoner of war who has been kindly treated in this house by Dr. and Mrs. Grieme, I ask that in return for their hospitality they be given full consideration and a minimum of trouble by representatives of the American Army. I ask that this note be delivered to Colonel Charles Codman, Aide-de-Camp to General Patton, or to the General himself.
—Gertrude S. Legendre, WAC, Simulated Rank, 1st Lt.
They drove first to Frankfurt, which was even more of a wasteland than the city Gertie had seen in late October on her way to Berlin. “A few facades, like the false fronts of a movie set, stood along our way.”
As they continued south in the pitch black, the thunder of warfare was almost continuous. Before she left Kronberg, Grieme had told her that American troops were already in Mainz and Bingen, just to the west. Heavy vehicles clogged the roads, some stuck in mud, which occasionally forced the car to detour around them, with Gay picking out the way with a hooded flashlight. In heavy rain, they passed through endless crowds of fleeing civilians who rapped on the car and begged for help. Their “faces drifted by the window like phantoms.”
“I tried to close my eyes to the misery all about me,” Gertie recalled. “Old women and children, even tiny tots, struggled along the swamped road carrying bundles and boxes.”
Gertie thought the night and its endless cavalcade of shattered humanity would never end. “I was cold and cramped and my heart ached,” she said. In the gray mist of dawn, they entered the city of Ulm on the river Danube, now a shattered ghost town because the Allies had targeted some of its factories and destroyed most of its housing stock in the pr
ocess. Gay directed the driver through the ruined streets and had him stop in front of a stone building with a balcony. “This is my house,” he said, before he climbed out and entered. He returned smiling to say his wife and mother were safe. The journey continued south to the Untersee, part of Lake Constance, where they took a ferry to Constance. They arrived in the German city right on the Swiss border on the morning of March 23, 1945.
Gertie immediately remarked on how intact Constance looked. Geography had helped preserve it. Allied bombers could not distinguish Constance from the adjoining Swiss settlements, and the city, which didn’t observe a blackout so its lights would blend with those of Switzerland, had been largely untouched by the air campaign.
After leaving the ferry, they drove to a government building in the center of town where Gay—Gertie described him as secretary of the SS office in Frankfurt—went in to finalize her passage across the border. The crossing at Constance had been used repeatedly for prisoner of war exchanges, including the repatriation of seriously wounded soldiers and the transfer of noncombatants.
An hour passed and Gay did not reemerge. When he did reappear, he looked dejected. He stood before the car and spread his arms.
“They will not permit you to leave Germany,” he said. “They say you are an American prisoner in uniform, and there is no reason why you can be allowed to cross the border.”
“You have my orders, haven’t you?” Gertie pleaded, her voice breaking in distress.
“Verbal orders,” Gay said. “No doubt written ones will arrive from Berlin someday.” Gertie was unsure who had approved her transfer to Switzerland, though Gay’s involvement and his reference to Berlin indicated that someone in the Nazi security agencies had sanctioned it. But his arrival in Constance without documents also suggests that the plan to get Gertie out of the country was at least partially improvised and that Gay might have overestimated what he could achieve merely because of his status as an SS official.
“Won’t the officials in the Custom House take your word for it? Ask them, beg them!” Gertie implored.
“No,” Gay said. “Their word is final. I can do nothing.”
They drove to a boardinghouse, where Gertie, inconsolable, collapsed into an armchair.
Gay stood before her, brooding. “I have pledged my word to get you over the Swiss border,” he said, though he never said to whom he had given his word—Grieme, Gosewisch, Clemens, or someone more senior.
“What can I do then?” Gertie asked. “I won’t go back to Germany. You certainly wouldn’t make me do that.” She momentarily forgot she was still in Nazi Germany—an unbombed corner, but still Germany.
“There is only one thing to do,” Gay said. “You will have to escape.”
* * *
—
The evening train from Singen, just twenty miles to the north, arrived in Constance, unloaded its passengers, and continued into Kreuzlingen, just over the line in Switzerland, according to Gay. The cities of Constance and Kreuzlingen bordered each other, linked by railroad tracks, just west of Lake Constance. Gay said his plan was to get Gertie on the train after the passengers were off and have her hide until it reached Switzerland.
Gertie was suddenly excited.
“And I must get on the train after the others get off,” she repeated. “I must hide until it crosses the border.”
“Precisely,” Gay said. “As soon as you are safely in Switzerland, ask the first person you see to direct you to the nearest phone. Call up the American legation.”
He made it seem comically easy to depart the Reich.
Gay returned the cash that had been taken from Gertie after she was captured, which confirmed to her that she had been brought to the border under official purview, though one insufficient to get an exit visa. As darkness fell, Gertie and Gay walked to the train station and on to the far end of the platform. Gertie’s coat was again buttoned tight to cover her uniform. She also wore a beret given to her by one of the French generals and carried a rucksack and leather shoulder bag. She was uncommonly nervous.
Within minutes they were joined by a man, never introduced by name to Gertie but obviously part of the plot. Tall and wearing a light overcoat, he spoke rapidly in German to Gay, who interpreted for Gertie. The man said that when she reached Switzerland, Gertie had to say she had been helped by French workers who had arranged rides on trucks that moved her from town to town and that she had been put on the train at Singen, not Constance. Under no circumstances, he said, should she mention that she was helped by Germans. Unspoken was that she could use the same tale if captured on the German side of the frontier. The fiction of French assistance seems to have been a hastily constructed cover to protect Gay and his accomplice. By that moment in late March 1945, there was surely enough general chaos for them to dodge responsibility until the final collapse.
The train was late and the three paced nervously. Ten minutes later, Gay raised his finger and said the train was crossing the nearby Rhine bridge several hundred yards away. Gertie soon saw the round glow of a single light on the lead locomotive.
“Now we go,” said Gay as he and the other man walked away down the platform. “Good luck.”
Gertie was on her own.
The train rolled past her and ground to a stop. Immediately passengers began to disembark. Gertie blended into the exiting crowd but then turned around as if she had forgotten something and slipped into an empty car. She moved to the center of the carriage and sat in the aisle between the seats, in darkness. She was breathing heavily, sweating, fearful. The minutes passed. Would the train never start?
As she waited in the shadows, she saw a conductor in the next car swinging a lantern and inspecting the seats. She ran hunched through the carriage, slipped into a toilet, and latched the door. She could hear the man approach. He moved on without trying to unlock the door and look inside. “The sound of moving feet almost made me gasp with relief,” Gertie said. A second individual passed through, but he also didn’t inspect the toilet.
With a whistle from the lead engine, the train began to move. “I think for the first time in my life I was genuinely scared,” Gertie recalled.
If the security checks for a train about to leave Nazi Germany seemed extraordinarily lax, they were. The train was not crossing the border. Gay’s information was inaccurate.
A few minutes later—what seemed an eternity to Gertie—she heard the brakes being applied. She counted to sixty, opened the toilet door with what sounded to her like a “terrific scraping sound,” and crept to the carriage exit. She was uncertain if the conductor or guards were still on the train. The door to leave the train “groaned hideously” as she opened it; every noise was accentuated, sounding to Gertie like an alarm to summon the authorities.
Taking in her surroundings as she peered out from the carriage door, she realized to her horror that the frontier gates were still about a hundred yards up the line, bathed in harsh spotlight. The crossing itself was little more than a four-foot-high gate, a marker sandwiched between two tracks. It still looked formidable to Gertie.
“I was in a tough spot, and knew it,” Gertie recalled.
She dropped onto the tracks and began walking in the shadow of freight cars. But when she reached the end of the train, there was still open railyard up to the frontier. As she prepared to dash, she was startled by Gay, who had crept up on her; he had not left but continued to monitor her progress. “He told me to run as fast as I can to the white rails,” Gertie recalled. He grabbed Gertie and shoved her forward, almost causing her to fall. She was now out in the open, in a stumbling run, visible in the shroud of light along the frontier. A whistle sounded. It was followed by a shout of “Halt!” Adrenaline surging, Gertie tried to run faster. She could hear chasing footsteps behind her. A German border guard kept shouting at her to stop. “Ich werde schiessen,” he shouted, “I’ll shoot.” He was running bes
ide her. She felt the muzzle of his gun prodding her in the shoulder and then the ribs. The border was just yards ahead. A Swiss guard leaned on the barrier and watched the foot chase.
“Identité?” he shouted.
“American passport,” Gertie screamed.
“Lift the gate,” Gertie panted to herself. “Oh please God…lift the gate.” For some reason, the German border guard, still yelling angrily, didn’t shoot; “maybe it has been a long time since he killed someone and he did not have the heart to shoot a woman.” Or was the guard, too, in on the scheme of Gay and his mysterious colleague? Gertie would never know.
As she threw herself at the gate, it opened, and the Swiss guard pulled her across. Her entry time was recorded as 9:30 p.m. The German stood on the other side, still shrieking at her. It didn’t matter.
Gertie was in Switzerland.
19
Bern
Gertie was soon back in jail, behind a heavy metal door, in a cramped cell with barred windows above her reach. But it was a Swiss and auspiciously neutral cell; her incarceration, she knew, was a temporary detour—a night’s sleep at most. “This time…jail is not so bad,” she wrote in her diary. “Tomorrow may mean liberation.”
After falling across the border, Gertie had been brought to a guardhouse where she recovered on a wooden bench with a cigarette, dragging heavily on it as her head rested against the wall. A couple of Swiss guards stood over her, speaking German but smiling and shaking their heads, as if to say, Gertie thought, “Mad fools, these Americans.”
