“What the hell did we all expect?” Frings had muttered in English. Two MPs told him to shut his kraut trap, but one said: “You give a lickin’, you get a lickin’. Everbody gets got, Fritzie.”
The prison was a former barracks with a half-timbered framework and that light yellow stucco of Southern Germany. The only iron was in the cell doors and cell windows. It was a glorified barn stable and nothing like the villas they surely kept the bigwig Nazis in, nor like those sprawling, exposed, disease-ridden POW bivouacs for the millions of nearly starving Wehrmacht regulars. Theirs was a special place for special types, like an asylum for deviants, sadists and sociopaths. He imagined another wing for former concentration camp guards, another for former Gestapo henchmen.
Back in Stromville he had let down his guard. He should have kept a better night watch. Those Belgian bastards had nabbed him in the middle of the night, right from his position down in Heloise’s former cellar. They tied his wrists with a thick, grating rope and stuffed an oily rag in his mouth and heaved him into a car trunk like Chicago mobsters. Luckily they hadn’t found Heloise’s stash; they were too full of piss and vinegar and dark ale to take time searching. They had delivered him to a US Counterintelligence Corps team sweeping the area. Those boys were German emigré Jews and didn’t want to hear stories. So Frings told them a lot of truth. During the Battle of the Bulge he had taken part in what had become known as Operation Greif. He had deserted after his jeep crashed. But, he had gone on the lam all on his own, he said. He left out the part about a GI named Wendell Lett and a Belgian gal called Heloise.
It was nearing the end of June. He had his own cell, about the size of his S-boat wheelhouse but with walls of cold, damp stone and that thick iron door painted gray. His plank for a bed swung down from the wall but inclined slightly toward the floor, always giving him the feeling he would roll out. So he slept on the hard stuff, like a tired seaman coming off watch without a bunk. They had let him write letters. He had written to Christiane’s family’s address in Brandenburg but nothing had returned, not even his own letter, and he did not expect it to come. He wrote to Christiane’s sister, Hedwig. That letter had just come back undeliverable, stamped by German and Allied authorities. “Dead letters,” the Amis called such mail, almost sounding like Germans in their fitting grimness.
He recognized fellow inmates from his Grafenwöhr training and from Schmidtheim on the Belgian border last December. The US Army had rounded up a couple dozen of the Stielau Unit commandos and stuck them here. Most had been in custody for months, others since the mission itself. When allowed fresh air out on the walled-in courtyard some promenaded the perimeter as if it was intermission at the Bavarian State Opera, a few even arm-in-arm as they debated like two-bit philosophers, others arguing gently like small-time barons and mistresses, all envisioning just what the victorious Allies were about to do with them. They were fools and they were tools. They thought that peace would save them, just like the Führer’s Wonder Weapons were supposed to have delivered them. Frings knew: The Allies could give a shit about them any more they could the shot-up German tanks and planes already rusting across the land. They were so much scrap metal. They were walking dead, a disgrace, an embarrassment even to those few hysterical sows who still clung to Nazi views.
Meanwhile, others had crumpled. They gathered at the courtyard table, heads down, shoulders slumped and hands out, the most pathetic Stammtisch ever known. They could barely look at each other. They had told their own fortunes. So they had been drafting appeals and writing group petitions of mercy to American generals. They had been duped, they said. They thought they were to become interpreters. They could not refuse the duty or would have been shot. And they could only act when it was almost too late, when they were already on the mission. Some claimed they had driven their jeeps right to such-and-such US headquarters and surrendered themselves, but no one would believe their innocence. Some had only gone over and hidden, or done as little as possible and returned to Skorzeny’s command post. The promenading true believers wanting to slit this group’s throats, if they ever had the chance. The poor bastards, all. None of it mattered. The fact was, they had all crossed the enemy front line, and the enemy had won. It didn’t matter who made them, what made them. It only mattered what uniform they wore.
Some were former Kriegsmarine, in both camps. Frings didn’t mix with his fellow sailors now. He kept to himself. Besides, he suspected the Americans only let them congregate so they would talk—and could be listened in on secretly.
He asked around about one matter only, and he got his answer from a diehard still wearing a squared-off Hitler-style mustache. The man told Frings that, the way he heard it, the former Gauleiter Werner Scherenberg had committed suicide in rural Austria. He didn’t know about a wife or any daughters, and looked surprised that Frings expected him to know.
Frings knew how this would play out. Suckers like them didn’t get to survive wars intact. Only the pawns were sacrificed. That was why they had never seen their leaders. Just like before at Grafenwöhr, vaunted SS commando mastermind Otto Skorzeny never ended up in this prison. The reasons why should have been made clear enough when, as they watched the movie allowed them once a week, there came a newsreel in which appeared none other than former SS Lt. Col. Skorzeny himself. It was in a story about prominent Germans captured. The image only lasted a moment. Skorzeny was under guard, but he was smiling along with his MP escorts in dress uniforms of white gloves, white belts and white gaiters. The entourage was exiting an Alpine villa. The newsreel mentioned trials to come. Surely Skorzeny would have a limousine take him there.
Frings had stood before a make-do military court they had set up here, a C-shaped tribunal of wooden schoolhouse tables. The judges sat facing him before the backdrop of a large American flag on the wall. The lawyers on both sides probably called each other by first names as Americans did. Their uniforms were crisp and clean and loaded up with ribbons and decorations (“fruit salad,” Amis called it), and Frings got a whiff of hair tonic and mothballs. They gave no witnesses or testimony. The point was to add him, the latecomer, to the rest of the defendants. A formality. Then a stern Army lawyer in horn-rimmed glasses entered waving papers and announced that he had news for him, for all of them: The ongoing appeals had been halted based on conclusive new evidence that would be provided to defense lawyers.
The gist: Sentencing would be carried out the next morning.
The news hit the others hard, even the hopefuls. Fantasy Land had run out of sugarcoating. Intermission over at the opera. They moaned, shouted, sobbed in their cells. They retreated inside themselves.
Frings had no more retreat left. He had come to understand, finally, the machinelike system that had haunted him on the S-boat when he had manned the wheel but felt no real control. There was no secret, no solution, no release from the cold horror. He never could have had control. He was an implement; he was implemented by orders. The machinelike system should have never given him comfort, and certainly not a feeling of freedom, for this was precisely when it had been allowed to reap its worst damage. Powerlessness was simply his natural state. From his position, he could have never preserved his family. He never could have kept them safe. He should have never promised them, and no one should have expected him to survive. Christiane, in her cruel pragmatism, was the wisest of all in realizing the truth of it.
He requested his last meal: A big steak. Surely they had one like he had remembered from America. The thin slab of meat he got was tough and gray inside, like stew meat past its prime.
In the morning, the names were called out. Three men at a time. Cell doors squeaked open. Some men shrieked, while others said nothing. Frings had sat on the edge of his plank bed most of the night. Like on the S-boat, he had watched the sun come up. The light streamed through the window in vivid rays cut by the iron bars, at first the color of salmon fresh from the Rhine, then golden like the fruit gum dancing bears he loved as a boy. He waited to be called. He clucked h
is tongue, letting the vial in the back of his mouth roll between molars and flesh. A few days before, one of the sailors had shaken his hand out in the courtyard—and slipped a vial into his palm. Frings knew the drill from Operation Greif itself: the vial contained cyanide. A few of the vials had been making the rounds, provided by a sympathetic defense team translator, it was said. But they were getting passed along like they were steaming hot iron. His comrade Matrose figured Frings for a willing taker, considering that he had not been so during the mission itself.
Frings couldn’t believe his good luck. This was the only thing close to deliverance. He had choice now. He had the control.
“Frings, Holger!”
They led him and two others out to the rear side of the building. He saw the wall pocked with bullet holes, the shards of stucco on the ground. Some ten meters before it stood three poles, stained dark red. Walking alongside them were two MPs each and one Army chaplain wearing a black cossack and an OD sidecap with captain’s bars. The sun had risen over the treetops, blinding with sparkle and casting golden patches on the short mowed weed-grass at their feet. He saw a few onlookers on the fringes, smoking, chatting. No cameras, no reporters, and certainly no newsreel.
A squad of MPs stood farther out, the sun bouncing off their polished helmets. The brightness made the men squint and look like they were wincing at what they were about to do, but Frings didn’t buy it. They were a firing squad, just as he had been an S-boat wheelman. The first line knelt and the second stood like ranks of infantry from the days of Napoleon, as it always had been, back to the Thirty Years War. Tiny stars of light danced on the shiny barrels of their rifles. The two MPs grabbed his wrists, pulled them behind his back and around the pole, and tied them off. At some point a circle of white paper had been pinned to his chest. His brain couldn’t follow it all now; the more he tried to focus, the blurrier things became until the perimeter was only a gold-rimmed whiteness of sunlight. Then the Army chaplain was speaking to him, first in English and then in a wooden, formal German but it was like Frings could understand no more human language. He only shook his head. He thrust his back against the pole, letting it dig into his spine. A hood came over his head, black fabric that still carried the metallic scent of another man’s desperate spittle. This triggered some drastic lever in him and his pulse kicked in, racing full ahead. He heard the rustle of feet out before him, the soft clatter of rifles held to aim. The squad leader shouted: “Ready!”
Frings bit down, crunch, and the poison burned inside his mouth and brain, searing, expanding. He couldn’t breathe, got no oxygen like he was drowning, and he wanted to flap his limbs as if to swim up to the surface but his limbs had seized up, and his lungs, and the whole of him squeezed up, compressing into nothing.
It was so dim he could only make out his hand. He held it up before his eyes, pasty white and glowing. Dark sea surrounded him. He floated. He was underwater. He floated without needing air, without breathing at all. He sensed something looming above him—the hull shape of a boat, about 35 meters long and narrow and almost sleek. He looked down. A black abyss waited below his feet, far, far below. He felt a chill from it, rippling up his spine, but then he realized that he wasn’t descending. He wasn’t even treading water to stay in place. He didn’t have to.
The dark water began to lighten, in one spot far off yet growing brighter, whiter, wider, at first like a diving light and then, fantastically, like a star beneath the dark sea.
Two little figures floated before him, the white light illuminating them.
“Elisa, Kristina,” he said, able to speak even though he was so far underwater.
Their faces brightened. They flapped their arms as if treading water, in that way they liked to play. He flapped his arms for them.
They grinned. He grinned. A profound warmness filled him. Whatever held him there in place released him, he felt it. He moved toward his Elisa and Kristina, just by thinking he could.
They moved on away from him but facing him, smiling still. He followed. As they traveled along he reached out to touch them but it only made them rush onward in a spurt, like keen and perky fish. They led him to the light this way, the water brightening them, growing ever whiter, warming them together.
***
“Fire!”
Lett jolted awake. He’d had another nightmare. This one was different and new. He was up on the line as always, but Heloise and the baby were huddled in his foxhole with him. It’s night. Enemy artillery shrieks down from above while friendly mortar fire thunks from the rear, all of it finding his line. He covers Heloise and baby with his body, hugging them underneath him. Shrapnel zings past, striking his helmet, tearing at his web gear. Daylight comes. Men shout. They yank him from the hole, leaving Heloise and the baby exposed, reaching out for him and screaming. The men are MPs. They drag him away kicking and punching at air and they stand him to a post. A chaplain comes, in black. He ties Lett’s wrists behind him and to the post. A firing squad faces Lett. Dead men, already executed, lay between him and the firing line, like so many olive drab bedrolls and packs but they’re bloody, ripped through with bullet holes. Tom Godfrey lays there, and Thatch, and all his GI buddies. They’re dead but they watch him. Then, Holger Frings is there. He stands watching from the side, on his own, with a serene look on his face that Lett has never seen, what he imagines as Frings before war. At the chaplain’s command, the MPs pull a black hood over Lett’s head . . .
It was the fourth time that night Lett had shocked himself awake, as far as Heloise knew. The truth was, he had been awake most of the night. It was only when he fell into something like a sleep that the nightmares came. It was the end of June 1945 now. They had come so far. He had long burned all traces of Thatch’s identity that he had carried, and Heloise had helped create a new identity for him using her stash and her Resistance contacts, some of whom had drifted back into crime now that war didn’t require their expertise. His papers were intact, though some would not pass dedicated scrutiny by a crack detective from Criminal Investigations Division or even a hawk-eyed MP. It was enough to get started. They had even made him fake discharge papers. His name was now John Macklin. John Macklin had been in a unit like Lett’s, up on the line since Normandy, so he wouldn’t have to pretend to be someone too far from what he was. The best part was, John Macklin now had a proper Belgian carte d’identité. If he could only get on with his new life. The daytime wasn’t always easier. Too many noises rattled him. Confessing things to her had helped. He had told her he felt like a criminal, but not like a common deserter. He felt like he had gotten away with something sick, like a murderer. Other times, he told her, he felt guilty about all the other guys who bought it. Why not he? Why a good man like Tom Godfrey?
“What is it?” Heloise whispered in the dark. She brushed back his damp hair with her fingers. His sweat was cooling, chilling his neck and messed-up ribs. She had moved closer to him, warming him with their baby in her tummy.
“He came back,” he whispered.
“Who came back?”
“Holger. In the dream. He was there. I saw him.”
He thought about Holger Frings all the time. He wouldn’t be here without the German. He wouldn’t be alive. Frings had even left Heloise a bundle of francs, for them. Lett had to repay the German. Many times he wanted to head out and find Frings, but Heloise wouldn’t let him. It was too risky. Lett knew about risky. He worried that the phony Belgian patriots would come back or finger them to the Americans, but Heloise assured him that they certainly would not. This was a kind of stalemate. In grabbing the defeated enemy Frings, they were only looking for easy booty, something they could use to move up in the world, to prove themselves to the Allies. Fingering her was too bold for such men. She and her Paul had been in the Rèsistance while they had cowered and some even collaborated, so she could always hold that over them if they ever tried.
“This does not sound like a nightmare,” she said.
“No. I know. It started out
like one, and then it wasn’t one at all.”
In the dream, with the hood on his head, all had gone black. He heard the firing squad ready their rifles. Except he could still see Holger Frings through the dark fabric, his silhouette shining through it as if illuminated by a bright light. The squad leader had yelled “Ready!” But Frings had only smiled for Lett.
Once Lett’s sweat had dried, and his breathing eased, Heloise rolled away from him to get something from the side of the bed. She came back grasping it, just glints in the near dark it was, but he recognized the soft jingle it made. As his eyes adjusted he saw the thin metal rectangles hanging on a ball chain like some sick joke of a rosary. She held them up dangling, catching a little moonlight through the windows.
His dog tags.
“Holger wanted that I keep these,” she said. “I couldn’t throw them away.”
“Good man. It’s okay.”
“I did not know if you wish to see them. If you want them still, for yourself.”
He stared at them a while. They were probably his only way back to his old life. “Of course not. I don’t want them. Don’t be silly, chérie.”
“I feel I must give you the choice. For a one last time.”
“We’ll throw them away. Bury them deep, melt them down, whatever. Tomorrow.”
“Very well.” She watched him, one hand caressing his chest and one hand feeling her belly, linking all three of them.
“What did he say to you?” she said. “In the dream.”
Lett turned to her. “How do you know he said something?”
“The look on your face. You look something like happy. Maybe this is you before the war.”
“I don’t think I can ever be like before. But, you got a good eye. What he said was, we were going to be all right. He didn’t say it out loud, but I heard what he was saying just the same.”
AFTERWORD
I thought I had finished writing about everyday soldiers forced to impersonate the enemy and endanger themselves as spies during the Battle of the Bulge after writing a novel (The Losing Role) and a brief nonfiction history of the Germans’ notorious false flag operation (Sitting Ducks). And yet the story found me again. Acting on a tip from a friend, I had the honor of interviewing an elderly American, loved and respected in his community, who had a secret to tell me. In 1944, he revealed, he was called up to take part in intelligence missions similar to Wendell Lett’s: one was with a frightening recon patrol disguised as German soldiers that somehow ended up in bombed-ravaged Cologne; another mission, conversely, was a decoy operation to hunt down Germans disguised as Americans roaming behind American lines in Belgium. At the time of my contact’s mission, S-2 had told him never to speak of his duty for a good fifty years, for it would remain classified. Despite speaking to me, my contact wished to remain anonymous. I searched for records of such missions nevertheless, and kept finding dead ends. My contact may have had some details mixed up in his old age, though one thing was clear—the emotions he expressed to me lay bare horrid memories. I doubt I’ll ever know the whole truth.
Under False Flags Page 24