by Peter Finn
She was brought to a room where an officer spoke to her in French and asked how she had reached the border. She repeated the story prepared with Gay about receiving the assistance of French workers and getting on the train in Singen. He didn’t challenge her description of events.
“May I telephone the American legation at Bern?” Gertie asked.
“No, not until the district governor sees you in the morning,” the officer said, referring to the local official called the Bezirksstatthalter.
This first interview over, she was escorted through the streets of Kreuzlingen, the Swiss town she had entered, until they reached the local jail. Her passport was examined and her bag searched before she was directed up a steep flight of stairs to her cell. She kept her toothbrush and was given a basin and a jug of cold water.
After nearly twenty-eight hours on the road, she slept without interruption until 7:30 a.m., when a female guard brought her a café au lait and two thick slices of black bread. She could hear church bells and singing birds.
“I lay there for a long while, thinking how wonderful it was to be alive.”
The guard fetched a copy of Balzac’s César Birotteau from Gertie’s rucksack, and she read the novel until the district governor, Otto Raggenbass, arrived. He was accompanied by his wife, who spoke English, and they explained that there were various bureaucratic requirements to be met before Gertie could be handed over to U.S. diplomats in Bern. Already, Raggenbass said, the Germans had filed a formal protest and were demanding Gertie’s return, insisting that the Swiss should only have allowed her entry as part of a formal prisoner exchange. The German position was a show of indignation; all sides understood the Swiss would not return an American to the Nazis.
The Raggenbasses invited Gertie to be a guest at their home until her situation had been resolved. She was given a hot shower before she left the station, and as she dried herself, she was already making plans to buy new shoes as well as underwear to replace her Gestapo-issued garments.
“I was almost giddy and felt like skipping as I walked through the prison door into the sunshine,” she recalled.
* * *
—
Word quickly reached Bern, Paris, London, and Washington of the escape of an American woman in uniform into Switzerland, and the first OSS cables indicated it was probably Gertie, though they noted that positive identification had yet to be established.
The story also broke quickly in the press. A Reuters report out of Zurich noted that “the first American woman to be captured on the Western Front last night fled from captivity in Germany across the Swiss border.”
The story added, “Today she said that she wished to return to the front as soon as possible.” Gertie never spoke to a reporter, and the information was no doubt provided to Reuters by the Swiss, but her wish, if she ever actually expressed it, was preposterous, given that she should never have been near the front in the first place.
Sidney was elated. On March 24, the day Gertie left the Swiss jail, Washington HQ cabled the OSS office in Honolulu to instruct officials there to tell Gertie’s husband the news but insisted that he be warned not to discuss the matter with anyone—a position that Sidney found mystifying because the story was already on the news wires. “I told the man it was in the papers in New York but he just shook his head and looked mysterious,” Sidney told Gertie in a letter.
“If you are out I think it is the most wonderful thing in the world and cannot wait to hear the story of what happened to you and how you have been treated,” Sidney wrote. “It must be absolutely amazing…You have seen a side that not many men and practically no women have experienced and must be as full of adventures as a pot full of water. No doubt you are thin but I know you are in the best of spirits because that is the one thing that never leaves you.”
He later told her that the only thing that made him worry a little about her health was the news that a German soldier had poked her with a pistol as she fled. “In the old days,” Sidney said, “you would have given him hell and rapped him on the head with it.”
Gertie was soon enjoying herself in Kreuzlingen. On March 25, a Sunday, she biked with Risa Raggenbass to a nearby castle and had a fish dinner by the lake. “Charming day,” she noted in her diary.
“I felt at last I was again a free citizen. The sensation was like walking on air.”
Her U.S. uniform, which she now wore openly, turned Swiss heads, and she felt like a minor celebrity. “Everyone was staring at me as it was an extraordinary thing to see an American in uniform in the town.” On Monday, she had a checkup with a local doctor and went shopping, buying a pair of square-toed oxfords, new underwear, silk stockings, fresh handkerchiefs, a new toothbrush and toothpaste, a Dunhill lighter, and several packs of Swiss cigarettes. “I reveled in the variety of my loot.” Photographed by her hosts, Gertie looked thin, her hair a little lifeless, even as she summoned a smile for the camera. The uniform she had worn for six months looked remarkably good—a testament to the care she had taken to keep it clean and presentable.
At the Raggenbass apartment, Gertie took a phone call from a U.S. legation official in Bern who warned her not to talk to anyone about her experiences. (The United States would not establish a full embassy in Switzerland until 1953.) Already, a Life magazine reporter had managed to contact her through the Raggenbasses, but she declined to be interviewed.
Her story was drawing some skepticism from the Swiss. In a report on the incident, Raggenbass wrote, “The fact that this woman dressed in US uniform with luggage could move from Kronberg to Konstanz unchallenged, and observations during her border crossing, suggest that her escape was organized and monitored by German officials.”
Raggenbass told Gertie he knew she had been escorted to the border by a German. “I flushed a little and then laughed with him as he raised a glass to toast my health and speedy return to my family.” He said that his intelligence suggested that Gay would not be punished, because the German did have orders to get her across the border. Raggenbass maintained close relations with the German authorities, including the Gestapo, in Constance, and he acted as an intermediary with advancing French forces the following month, leading to the peaceful surrender of the city. Constance would eventually name a street after him, but his hostile attitude to Jewish refugees during the war would lead to charges that he was an anti-Semite.
Gertie would never learn what decisions lay behind her release—who specifically had ordered it and why. Discussion at the Gestapo of sending her back after she had been indoctrinated about the Soviet threat suggests there was a plan, albeit one that was absurdly futile. Gertie was never going to move the needle on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. But by March 1945, some Nazis dwelled in their own phantasmagoria—that they somehow could make common cause with the Americans to avoid total defeat.
On March 27, Risa Raggenbass accompanied Gertie on the train to Bern, the Swiss capital, about 115 miles to the southwest. They spent most of the trip in the dining car as Gertie, making up for the deprivations of prison life, gorged herself.
Security remained a live issue for the OSS because Jennings was still in a prison camp and they had no word on Dickson’s fate. A cable from London warned, “Vitally important Gertrude connection this organization be treated on most secret basis. Two other lives still involved and foresee possibility of great danger if there is general relaxation of security in this respect now that she has escaped.”
Bern was a city crawling with spies, and the OSS wanted no one to learn Gertie’s true employer. All negotiations with the Swiss were handled by the military attaché at the U.S. legation. “Every security measure taken,” the Bern branch of the OSS assured Washington and London.
Once she was safely in American hands, Gertie was greeted by Tracy Barnes, an OSS officer and old friend. “Tracy!” she exclaimed when she saw him. “I don’t believe it.”
Ger
tie was quietly whisked to the home of Allen Dulles, the future CIA director, who ran OSS operations in Switzerland. He lived in the ground-floor apartment of a large gray sandstone building on a street with old paving stones. The terraced garden behind the house looked out on the river Aare. Gertie was delivered to the study, and a snack of tea with thin watercress sandwiches and chocolate sponge cakes was served.
“Ah, this is too good to be true,” she cried, immediately digging in and eating without restraint.
Dulles entered. “Surely this can’t be our Gertrude Legendre returned from the beyond,” he said, shaking her hand warmly. The two hadn’t met before.
“Surely, I have much to thank you for in getting me safely out of Germany,” Gertie began.
“No,” Dulles said. “The OSS did not dare touch you, nor did the American embassy. You were ‘too hot.’ We could not acknowledge you, or have anything to do with you whatsoever.”
Dulles said any effort to use OSS channels to contact her might have endangered networks inside Germany as well as the safety of those captured with her. “We could not risk having it known by anyone that you had any connection with our work,” he said. “It was too dangerous for you and for the others.”
He looked at her closely. “I am surprised you are here at all,” he said. “I can hardly believe it.”
Others at the OSS were more than disbelieving; they were highly doubtful of Gertie and her story. In a cable marked “top secret” from London to Washington, one official asked whether Gertie was released as part of an exchange or as the result of some kind of diplomatic pressure.
“This important from CE [counterespionage] standpoint in determining her future treatment and disposition,” the official wrote. “If she was not subject of exchange or agreed release her story to me would indicate she may possibly be at least unconscious DA [double agent] rpt. DA. I am not satisfied with her story and think she has not told the truth. I also feel that she had been sold a bill of goods and should not be permitted to peddle it in the United States.”
That suspicion didn’t persist, but it did reflect some of the lingering anger within the organization toward Gertie and Jennings. Upon Jennings’s release, Donovan would want him immediately sent to the brig. Others prevailed on him to issue a reprimand and dismiss the navy commander from the OSS instead. Nothing so severe was contemplated for Gertie, but a lot of agency officials were still smarting over her caper, the intelligence gathering it had risked, Papurt’s death, and the overall embarrassment to the OSS, especially with the British.
“I think Gertrude was rather contrite,” Dulles wrote in a memo to Donovan. “She made no effort to make excuses for her escapade. I did not comment on this one way or another as I had no facts on the background of the case, and it was not my job to take her to task. She obeyed instructions explicitly while she was with us, and impressed me as being a person of a good deal of resourcefulness.”
That night Gertie, Dulles, and Barnes ate a fine French meal prepared by the spymaster’s staff. “An equal pleasure was that of being served by perfectly trained and friendly French servants,” Gertie observed, settling back nicely into her life of expected privilege.
She recounted her story in detail after dinner as Dulles’s secretary recorded it. When she reached the part about the Rheinhotel, she cut open the sleeve lining of her raincoat with a pocketknife to retrieve the list of French officers at the hotel that Prince Michael had prepared. With a flourish, she handed it to Dulles, proud of her tradecraft. Dulles scanned the names and asked her if she had read an accompanying note in German.
Gertie’s ears burned as the clearly entertained Dulles translated:
For the information of Mrs. Legendre.
So that you may not have a bad impression of the Kreuzlingen police and of the Swiss border control we wish to inform you that we found the attached list of addresses at the time of your arrest by the Kreuzlingen police. As we ascertained that it was only a charitable service for the benefit of prisoners we put the document back in its hiding place. Have a good trip and greet America for us.
Kreuzlingen. 24 March 1945. Der Bezirksstatthalter, Raggenbass
Dulles forwarded it to Donovan as an “amusing sidelight” and sent Raggenbass and his wife flowers and a bottle of champagne.
In his report to the director, Dulles said he judged from the good treatment they had received that the story Gertie and Jennings fed to the Nazis had been believed. He noted Gertie’s report of Papurt’s death and said that the driver—Dickson—was “presumed safe.”
Stripped by Dulles of all her personal papers, including the diary she had kept during her detention, Gertie was driven to Lyon on March 28 and put on the Paris express train. She carried official army orders to maintain her cover. Dulles, following a stern admonition from Washington, cautioned her to talk to no one. “Avoid newspaper reporters above all,” he said. “No one must know of your return.”
Sidney was eager to learn of her plans. “What do you intend to do now?” he wrote. “Do you think you will stay with the children in New York a while and rest or are you going to be off again on another tour of duty for your organization?”
The children weren’t at the front of Gertie’s mind; nor was duty. She wanted to hang out in Paris, where she celebrated her forty-third birthday on March 29 with Marian Hall and other friends. She asked the OSS Paris branch for permission to stay in the city despite her orders to return to the United States. “We have seen Gertrude and she is in excellent health,” the Paris office cabled Washington. “She personally feels it much better for her to cool off here for 10 days rather than come immediately to States. She will not come near this office, maintains the same cover she had throughout, that is [as a] member of the American embassy, London, and will make no public statements. She urgently requests you reconsider your former cable. Please advise.”
Gertie also suggested that rather than return to the United States she and an OSS officer might drive back to the Frankfurt area, now overrun by American forces, to try to find Jennings, the Griemes, and Gosewisch.
Donovan’s response was immediate. “This is a very serious matter,” he said in a rocket back to Paris. “She will not remain there but will be returned to Washington by first available means.”
Gertie was put on a military transport flying to the United States via Iceland on April 2, Easter Monday. “One of those awful flights where you lie on the floor with the GIs who were going home.”
“Hated to leave Paris,” she complained.
Gertie returned to New York City, where a governess, Miss Evans, who was called Mamie, and a maid, Rose, had been raising her children. “One afternoon, long red fingernails tap-tap-tapped against the frosty glass of our front door,” Bokara, the younger daughter, then four, recalled. “Mamie opened the door to a strange woman with dark hair and small brown eyes, dressed in a black suit. I ran to hide but Mamie caught my arm.
“Say hello to your mother, Bo,” she said. “She’s home from the war.”
20
Brandenburg
At 4:00 a.m. on January 12, 1945, the Soviet Union launched its final push into the Reich. Hitler’s forces were vastly outnumbered—in infantry, tanks, guns, and airpower—and the offensive was devastatingly swift. By the following month, the Wehrmacht had ceded large tracts of East Prussia, East Brandenburg, and Silesia, a key industrial sector for the Nazi war machine, and major cities, including Königsberg and Breslau, were besieged. Hitler’s command center near Rastenburg in East Prussia, called the Wolf’s Lair, was overrun. Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, laying bare the depravity of the regime.
The scale and success of the Soviet onslaught was not immediately apparent to many in Berlin. “We know no more about [the offensive] than the bare fact,” Beattie noted in his diary on January 13, “but think it’s significant that the High Command speaks of ‘heavy defensive f
ighting’ everywhere and makes no claim to have halted the drive.” Over a week later, Beattie observed that “the public is interpreting the news at its worst, and for the first time I can see real signs of panic in the people outside the camp.”
German civilians by the tens of thousands were fleeing west—better to face frostbite and starvation than the advancing Soviet troops whose thirst for vengeance, in the form of summary execution and rape, was living up to Goebbels’s propaganda and accelerating the stampede. As refugees poured into Berlin, initially sheltering from the frigid cold in train stations and makeshift shelters, the Nazis began to convert what had been camps for prisoners and forced laborers into centers to house the displaced. Prisoners like Beattie had to leave the capital to make room. He was transferred on January 25 to Stalag III-A, a POW camp in the market town of Luckenwalde, about sixty miles south of Berlin.
At Anhalter station, as he departed, he witnessed the chaos of a city in its death throes. The train station was full of refugees from the east “screaming, shoving, and crowding their way to the emergency soup kitchens, to the toilets, to the waiting rooms and above all to the trains that might carry them farther away from the Russians.”
The German civilians on the train out of the city seethed with anger, disillusionment, and fear. The average German, Beattie concluded, “hates Hitler and condemns him bitterly, not because Hitler plunged Europe into chaos, not because he trampled over a dozen ‘inferior’ nations or because he ordered the mass destruction of millions of human beings, but purely and simply because Hitler, who told the average German he was of Herrenvolk and gave him the dream of world domination, had failed to bring it about.”
