Return to the Reich

by Eric Lichtblau

  In Italy, OSS had assigned their mission a secret, random code name: Greenup. But their supervisors christened it the “Gulliver mission,” as in Gulliver’s Travels, the eighteenth-century classic about an Everyman who jumps blithely from one dangerous and improbable predicament to another, squaring off against gentle giants and menacing miniatures. The name seemed apt, especially at moments like this, with the three men finding themselves on a remote Alpine mountain in Nazi Austria, looking haplessly for the equipment they needed to descend it. Jonathan Swift’s satire skewered the senselessness of war, attributing conflicts between nations to “difference in opinions . . . cost[ing] many millions of lives,” yet Hitler considered Gulliver a personal favorite and kept it in his library.

  Freddy and his small team of Gullivers began tying their bags of equipment to the tops of the skis designated for supplies. They couldn’t fit everything, and had to decide which items would be left behind. In a crevice at the foot of the glacier, deep in the snow, they buried a heavy battery, one of their radio transmitters, and some of the extra food rations they had packed. They buried their parachutes and other packing supplies in a second spot. Freddy marked the area with an extra ski pole, hoping the men would be able to retrieve the items later.

  Hans and Freddy used some of the leftover straps and packing material to cobble together makeshift snowshoes, rigging them over their boots. They set off down the mountain, with Franz on his skis and Freddy and Hans on foot, sloshing and sliding their way down the steep, jagged incline. The improvised shoes helped a bit, but every three or four steps, Hans’s long legs would sink deep into the snow, and he would have to summon all his energy to extricate himself. All the obstacle courses and training exercises at OSS hadn’t prepared him for this.

  An hour later, the sun was up, and they realized they had barely crawled a few hundred yards. They could still see the glacier, not far behind them. Exhaustion was setting in. They trudged on. Another hour, another few hundred yards, and still no sign of shelter. Franz, skiing ahead, stayed close enough to keep them in sight and make sure they were still heading in the right direction, difficult as that was. Hans needed to rest more often. The thin air was making him woozy. “Go on without me,” he told Freddy; he would catch up. Freddy slapped him in the face, hard enough to jolt him. He wasn’t going to leave Hans there in the middle of a snowbank in the Alps. They needed to keep moving, keep their blood circulating; Hans would freeze to death just lying there. Hans knew better than to defy Freddy when he wanted something; he had followed his team leader this far, all the way to the Alps in the dead of winter on what seemed more and more like a fool’s mission with every frigid step. Hans stood up and kept moving down the mountain.

  For hours they slogged on, until night descended on them once again. Thirteen hours after they had left the glacier, Franz spotted something in the distance below them: a large building with an A-frame roof. He recognized it even in the darkness. It was the Amberger Hütte, a popular Alpine sporting hut frequented by Austrian skiers and outdoorsmen since the late 1800s. Franz knew the place well. He signaled to Freddy and Hans to keep going; they were almost there.

  At ten o’clock that night, a full twenty hours after they had parachuted down from the B-24, the three American agents in their white snow capes finally made it to the hut. From the outside, the sturdy, two-story stone enclave appeared uninhabited. Franz approached the door hesitantly. German soldiers from Wehrmacht Alpine units—wearing uniforms just like his—were known to use winter huts like this one on their patrols. If he was confronted, Franz had worked out a cover story for why he was out in the middle of nowhere—with two American aviators in his custody. The story had seemed plausible enough in theory when they were back at the Italian villa with Dyno, hashing out ideas. Here in the harsh, real-world environs of the Austrian Alps, Franz wasn’t anxious to find out whether the story—his “fairy tale,” he called it—would work in practice.

  Franz peered inside the hut and tried the door. Locked. Glancing around, he smashed a hole in a window, reached inside, and unlocked the door. The three walked in cautiously and searched the place to confirm they were the only guests. They saw no sign of any occupants, but what they did see convinced them that they had come across a nirvana in the land of the Nazis: a fireplace with neatly stacked wood beside it, a kitchen stocked with canned goods and foodstuffs, working bathrooms, more than a dozen beds, and even a closet filled with clean wool blankets and linens. They seemed to have finally caught a lucky break. Hans, in particular, was desperate for one. He and Freddy had covered some two and a half miles on foot since they had set off from the glacier that morning. It was an agonizingly slow pace, barely the length of a football field every hour, yet in his current state, Hans marveled that he had managed to make it that far.

  What the three Joes craved more than anything was heat and sleep—and food; anything besides Spam. They threw some kindling wood in the fireplace and started a fire, stripped off their sopping-wet layers of clothing, and sat motionless in front of the flames, soaking in the warmth. They wouldn’t worry about their next move yet. For now, they just needed to rest. Freddy rifled through the food in the pantry and opened a can of green tomatoes, gulping them down ravenously. They didn’t have the energy for much conversation, but at one point Franz pondered aloud what might happen to him after the war—as an ex-Nazi and now an American spy. “When it’s over,” Hans assured him, “you will get the Legion of Merit award!” Assuming they survived, of course.

  They slept so soundly that night, they weren’t completely sure what day it was when they finally awoke. Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday. Hans knew that Bari would be expecting a radio transmission very soon. OSS in Italy would be monitoring their designated radio frequency round the clock for a coded message advising the agency on their status. If Bari didn’t hear anything within four days, they had warned Freddy, they would have to consider the team lost, or dead. OSS didn’t have the manpower to stay on the open line indefinitely. It was a depressing scenario. The whole purpose of their mission was for Freddy to send back Nazi intelligence in Tyrol, and if OSS stopped listening for their transmissions, they would become useless, risking their lives to relay secret intelligence into a black hole. For nothing.

  Hans unpacked the various parts of his shortwave radio from the cache of supplies. The military billed the 44-pound transmitter-receiver, called the SSTR-1, as “light, compact, and durable,” but none of those qualities was apparent to Hans at the moment, especially after their mountainside journey. He connected all the components, the heavy battery unit, and an antenna. Then he flipped the power switch and searched for a signal. There was nothing but static. He tried again. Still nothing.

  Hans was in this frigid no-man’s-land for one reason: to make radio contact with Italy. That was his main job—in some ways, his only job—and now he couldn’t get through. Frustrated, he began taking the transmitter apart, finding what he thought might be a faulty electronic tube inside; perhaps it had been damaged during the drop to the glacier, he thought. He went to swap it out only to discover that the replacement parts that OSS’s supply people in Italy had given him—the same people who had managed to get Freddy a working fridge—had packed the wrong type of tube in his backup supplies. He was stuck. Finally he managed to get a signal allowing him to send out a “blind” message to a generic frequency; he hoped that someone in the American military, somehow, would receive it. But the signal went unanswered. He would have to find another way to get the transmitter working, and soon.

  Freddy was having his own problems. The canned tomatoes he had gorged on did not sit well with him, and he was spending much of his time running to the bathroom. One of the few things he couldn’t find in the well-stocked cottage was medicine to ease nausea. He tried baking some bread with the ingredients at hand; it was easier on the stomach than the green tomatoes.

  Franz studied their maps. Now that he had found a point of reference at the Amberger hut, he determined that th
ey had landed at a glacier called the Sultztaler Ferner—about 10,500 feet above sea level in the eastern Alps. That meant they were still some forty miles from Freddy’s ultimate target in the heart of Tyrol: the city of Innsbruck. But they were near a tiny farming town on the mountain called Gries, with a trail leading there. Franz had been to Gries before, and he knew the area well enough to get around—but not so well, he hoped, that anyone in town would recognize him. They would head there, Freddy decided, and then look for a way to complete their descent. They could worry later about how to get to Innsbruck. One snowy step at a time.

  Hans tried again to fashion snowshoes for the next leg of their journey—this time utilizing pieces of metal and rubber from a doormat in their mountain refuge. The new shoes were an improvement over his first try. But what if a Nazi Alpine patrol should stop off at the camp after them? They didn’t need the Nazis out looking for interlopers who had ransacked the place, smashing a window and pilfering the doormat. That would only arouse suspicion. So to cover the damage they had caused, and the food they had eaten, Franz left 250 marks—real marks, not the counterfeits they had brought—along with a note of apology. He hoped the gesture of civility would suffice.

  A snowstorm slowed their departure by a night, but after three restful days at the hut, they set off for Gries, their supplies in tow. The trek took them only six hours this time, a relief after their last adventure getting down from the glacier. Entering the small mountain town, they braced themselves for their first encounter with actual Austrians, as they spotted a tiny café. They walked in and ordered some hot tea, anxious to see how their guise would go over with the locals. Franz was in his Wehrmacht officer’s uniform, but Freddy and Hans had ditched their American aviator suits for civilian attire, covered by their giant snow capes; they never liked the idea of the American uniforms anyway. “Ja, Herr Oberleutnant,” Hans answered crisply whenever Franz addressed him at the table. The woman who served them showed no hint of suspicion. A Nazi was a Nazi.

  When Franz asked where he might find the village leader—the Ortsbauernführer—the woman directed him to a nearby farmhouse. Franz took a deep breath. The village leader would be a Nazi loyalist, he knew, and he knew, too, that if their true identities were discovered, he would be treated even more harshly than Freddy or Hans, as an ex-Nazi who had dared return to Austria as an American spy. Steeling himself, he knocked on the door. A husky, middle-aged man, the de facto mayor among the farmers of Gries, answered it. Franz introduced himself with his alias—Leutnant Erich Schmitzer—and showed him his Nazi Soldbuch identification with his name, his Alpine unit, and his photo. Once again, there was no sign of suspicion; the OSS counterfeiters in Bari had done a good job with his papers. Franz explained his predicament: He had become separated from his unit along with two Dutch collaborators under his command—he pointed over to Freddy and Hans, waiting silently behind him at a respectful distance—and they had broken their skis. They needed to get down the mountain as quickly as they could so that they could rejoin his unit. Could they borrow some extra skis, or perhaps a sled of some sort?

  The Ortsbauernführer was more than happy to help. Franz was struck by just how friendly he was under the odd circumstances; he seemed willing to do anything he could to assist a fellow Nazi. He led Franz to a long toboggan that he owned; he used it for transporting farm supplies and workers, and it was usually drawn by a horse. But Leutnant Schmitzer was certainly free to take it; he only asked that he return it to a friend at the base of the mountain when they were done with it.

  The Gulliver team had gotten lucky again. Franz thanked the farmer, and the three of them packed into the toboggan: Franz in the front, tasked with steering; Hans jammed in the middle; and Freddy in the back as a brakeman, using his wooden ski poles to slow them down as needed. Stuffed between them on their seats were their rucksacks filled with radio equipment, codebooks, gold, cash, and the rest of their supplies.

  The huge sled, with animal horns for handles, looked to Freddy like it could be one of Santa’s sleighs—but with two Jews and a Nazi defector delivering surprises through the snow. They pushed off down the icy, snow-covered outlines of a dirt path—slowly at first, then building up speed with each steep incline. Franz didn’t hold back, flying around turns with abandon. He was in his natural element now. This was just another sledding trip down the Alps for him, like so many he had taken as a boy, but with a different mission. His two passengers, however, were increasingly unnerved. Hans gripped the sled, fearing he would fly off at any second. OSS hadn’t trained him in tobogganing either. He tried to calculate their speed: sixty miles an hour at their frightful peak, he guessed; his slog from the glacier now seemed uneventful in comparison. And the bottom of the mountainside was still nowhere in sight.

  Normally so unflappable, Freddy grew wide-eyed with alarm when he saw sparks flying from the tips of the ski poles due to friction. As brakes, he realized, the poles were practically useless. He would later recall the sleigh ride as the most hair-raising trip of his life.

  More than three hours after they started, Franz and his white-knuckled passengers made it to the base of the mountain. And still in one piece, Hans thought with relief. As promised, they returned the sled in town to a friendly woman who offered them supper and a place to stay for the night. There, Freddy plotted their next move—on the fly, like most everything he did these days. They were still more than thirty miles from Franz’s hometown, and they were now four days into their mission with no radio signal; Hans knew that OSS in Bari must be getting anxious.

  There was a railway station nearby where they could get a train for the hour-long ride to Oberperfuss. Franz affixed to his face some large bandages—hoping to evade recognition as they moved closer to his hometown. That was the extent of his disguise. When they got to the train station, it was swarming with armed Nazi guards and transportation police. Too risky, Freddy decided. Franz’s cover as Leutnant Schmitzer had served them well so far, but he didn’t want to test their luck in a station teeming with Nazis. Franz remembered a smaller, less well-traveled station a few miles away. They walked there, and exchanged their reichsmarks for tickets at the ticket window.

  Waiting for their train, Freddy heard a woman on the platform cursing the Americans for bombing her home and leaving her with no place to live. They would stay away from her. On board, they noticed a few passengers eyeing their snow capes. A Nazi security officer approached them and asked for their papers. Franz produced his Soldbuch, and the officer glanced at it before motioning to Franz’s two companions, signaling for their papers. Freddy and Hans waited silently. Franz spoke for them; they didn’t speak German, he told the officer. “These two are foreigners who work for us, and we are now en route to Salzburg to our unit,” he said. They had lost their papers on the mountain in a ski mishap, he explained. “This can happen,” the officer acknowledged, as he moved on down the carriage.

  Barely ten minutes later, another officer—this one Gestapo—approached them, looking less amenable than the first. Freddy gripped the .38 pistol hidden inside his coat. It was the first time he had thought about using it since they landed. This was the “scare pistol” he had told Lieutenant Billings about when they were stranded at the air base in Italy. If I have to use it, he had said to Billings then, I’m finished.

  The Gestapo officer asked to see their papers. Franz gestured to his traveling companions and explained that they had already produced them for another officer. “We’ve just been checked,” he said. Hans struggled to maintain his composure. If the Gestapo officer pressed them, Hans thought to himself, the mission would be over before it had even started. He didn’t want to think about what would happen to them at that point. But after regarding the three men for a moment, the Gestapo officer nodded at Franz and kept walking.

  After making it undetected past two Nazi officers, the trio relaxed a bit as the train rumbled east toward Innsbruck. A few small children traveling with their parents were playing in the aisle nearby. Han
s played with them for a few minutes, trying to look like he fit in. Austrian laborers on their way to work talked among themselves. Freddy watched as a group of schoolchildren boarded the train, schoolbooks in hand. One girl, who looked to be about thirteen or fourteen, stared in his direction through a glass partition in the carriage before walking toward them, a look of curiosity on her face.

  “Franz?” the girl asked as she drew nearer. “Is that you?”

  7

  * * *

  “Franz Weber Sent Me”

  OBERPERFUSS, AUSTRIA

  March 5, 1945

  The war was exacting a heavy toll on Franz’s small hometown by the time he set out to return there. Fathers and sons from Oberperfuss had gone off to fight for the Nazis, and fifty-seven had not made it back. While Allied ground troops were still hundreds of miles away, fighter planes regularly screamed over the small farming town, on their way to cascade bombs down on the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck, less than ten miles away. The schools that many local children had attended in Innsbruck had been bombed to bits, forcing them to commute to new schools twenty miles away.

  So it was that fourteen-year-old Elsa Weber and her classmates were taking the train from their new school back home to Oberperfuss that bone-chilling March day. Their commute was a long one now, almost an hour. Across the train, Elsa thought she recognized a face from the past. She noticed a young officer in a Wehrmacht uniform standing on the train’s outer platform with two men in big hooded ski capes. Beneath the bandages obscuring his face, he looked just like an older boy she knew named Franz, whose family lived down the road. She was startled. She knew Franz had become a Nazi officer, but he had been missing now for many months, and no one in town seemed to know for certain what had happened to him—not even his family or his fiancée, Annie. Was he killed in action, captured, maybe even a deserter? Wartime rumors swept through the small community of fewer than a thousand people.