Hans, meanwhile, was alone—holed up in a cold, musty attic. Alois had hidden him for the time being in the home of his next-door neighbor, Herr Schatz. A gamble, to be sure, but Alois figured his neighbor would be willing to help without asking too many questions. In a town where everyone once knew everyone else, Oberperfuss had seen an influx of new residents lately: forced laborers, prisoners of war, soldiers, families bombed out of their homes, and more. The Nazis had forced Alois himself to find housing for a handful of the new arrivals—a German family, and a couple of laborers from eastern Europe—and he thought all the new faces about town might help Franz’s friends escape notice. Freddy and Hans hoped he was right.
Hans knew his most urgent task at the moment. It had now been more than a week since the team had landed on the glacier, more than a week with no radio contact to Bari. He knew that OSS must be frantic. They might have even stopped monitoring the line by now. Settling himself in the sparse attic, he fiddled with the balky radio transmitter once again and tried jiggering the glass vacuum tubes. Still no signal. He had another idea. He unspooled a thin copper antenna nearly twenty-five feet long from his cache of supplies, and he made a tiny hole in the attic roof; he hoped Herr Schatz would understand. OSS had assured him that the antenna line would work just fine indoors—the technicians had even made a “how to” film for him and other radio operators, with a hidden antenna running along an inside wall—but he thought that hanging the line outdoors could only boost his chances of getting a signal.
A long clothesline was hanging between Herr Schatz’s house and Alois’s home next door, with wet linens and overalls set out to dry. That night, when Alois crept up to the attic to bring him some dinner, Hans decided to ask him for another favor. Whatever I can do to help, Alois had said. Hans handed him the antenna, and with no one in sight, Alois ran it along the clothesline between the houses, as taut as he could get it. In the daylight the next morning, lost among the laundry, Hans’s antenna was practically invisible from the ground.
Hans tried the radio again. This time, he was able to reach the covert radio channel that OSS had instructed him to use, a victory in itself, but he still couldn’t send a transmission through on it. He had a message all ready to go, with their status translated into a secret code built around random five-letter sequences. But Hans was still powerless to actually get the message to Italy. He imagined the radio signal bouncing vainly from one mountain wall of the Alps to another without ever leaving Austria. His frustration was mounting. This was why he was here, and he was failing.
Lieutenant Ulmer and the other OSS officers in Bari had all but given up hope of ever hearing from Freddy and his men again. Each day of silence seemed to confirm that Ulmer’s Austrian section had lost another team of men—and another opportunity to gather critical intelligence that General Eisenhower and the troops could use to win the war. On the other side of Italy, OSS commanders in Caserta were so concerned by the string of blown missions from the Austrian section that they sent two colonels to Bari in early March, just as the Gulliver team was making its descent, to find out why things were going so badly in their Mediterranean outpost. Ulmer had inherited the “circus” at Bari just months earlier, but he knew its success or failure now rested on him. The visiting commanders went over all the recent failures with him before finally zeroing in on the still-missing Gulliver team.
“You’ve had no message from them since they dropped?” one colonel asked. Lieutenant Ulmer nodded glumly. “Don’t you think that if this team is safe, it would send a message so stating?” the colonel asked.
Ulmer bluffed. “Not necessarily, sir,” he said. Freddy and Hans might just be waiting for something of importance to send rather than risk the Gestapo intercepting a routine cable, Ulmer said, knowing that they were supposed to cable when they landed, regardless. “Within four days,” Ulmer predicted with false confidence, “we will probably get a message.”
The next night, after the visiting colonels had left Bari, a dejected Ulmer went to see a forgettable movie at the base, hoping to take his mind off the latest disaster in his spy shop. Halfway through the film, one of his officers tapped him on the shoulder and told him he was needed in the message room. A newly arrived cable was waiting for him. Ulmer rushed to the message room in anticipation and picked up a terse, seven-word cable.
ALL WELL. PATIENCE UNTIL MARCH 13. HANS.
Cheers of raw relief erupted in the room. Ulmer went looking for Walter Haass, the jump master on the plane who had given the men the “go” signal eleven days earlier; he wanted to tell him the news himself. He grabbed an expensive bottle of Scotch that he had been saving for just such an occasion. Ulmer finally had something to celebrate: the Gulliver team was still alive.
8
* * *
The Führer’s Bunker
INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA
Late March 1945
His head wrapped in a large bandage, Freddy marched up to the barracks for wounded Nazi officers with all the swagger of a man who belonged there. A gray Nazi lieutenant’s uniform hung smartly from his five-foot-seven-inch frame; Freddy had lifted it from a dead Nazi with the help of Alois’s budding network of allies in Oberperfuss. His military papers, stamped with two official-looking Nazi seals, were folded in his pocket; he had obtained the papers after convincing a helpful young woman in Innsbruck that his identification had been stolen in Italy. OSS hadn’t wanted him to pose as a Nazi soldier, but Freddy, not for the first time, had his own plans.
A Nazi guard stood watch at the door of the VIP barracks as Freddy approached from the street. Inside were scores of injured Nazi officers recuperating from their wounds—and passing the time over drinks at the officers’ club. Freddy had heard stories about this place, and now, two weeks after parachuting into Austria, he was determined to try to talk his way inside. It was a brazen play, nothing that OSS in Bari had sanctioned beforehand, but Freddy figured he had the element of surprise in his favor: he told himself that no one would ever expect to find an American spy inside a Nazi officers’ club.
“I need temporary quarters,” Freddy explained to the guard at the door. “I have to report in to the hospital daily.” He clutched the papers in his pocket, waiting for the sentry to ask for them. Instead, the guard simply waved him toward the officers’ quarters. It all seemed too easy, Freddy thought. At least the Nazi officer on the train had inspected Franz’s fraudulent papers for a few moments. This time, not even a look. So much for the Nazis’ meticulous efficiency. The only explanation Freddy could muster was that a low-level enlisted man knew better than to question a wounded Nazi officer in uniform.
Soon enough, Freddy was assigned not only a room in the officers’ quarters, but an orderly to press his uniform, shine his boots, and provide whatever other assistance he might need. He had practically free run of the place, coming and going as he pleased. He discovered that the hub of activity was indeed inside the officers’ club at the barracks, where the Nazis would watch movies, play cards, smoke, and have a beer or a glass of schnapps at the bar—sometimes with other officers, sometimes in the company of young fräuleins from the city. Many of the recuperating Nazis did not seem to be in any hurry to get back to the front line.
Freddy made full use of the club, sitting for hours alone in the beer hall–style bar in hopes of overhearing something of interest. No one seemed in the slightest bit suspicious of him, and no one asked to see his papers. Sometimes he introduced himself—“Leutnant Frederic Mayer”—with a smile and a “Heil Hitler!” He had decided to use his real name, even on his fake papers, because it was a common one in Germany, for Christians or Jews. It sounded authentic. He had his cover story ready if anyone asked: a Nazi officer born in Germany, he was recuperating from a head wound suffered in the fierce fighting in northern Italy, and he was being treated at the military hospital just down the main road in the center of Innsbruck.
A handful of combat medals and ribbons, pinned neatly to his chest, spoke for themselves. O
ne was an Iron Cross—the same renowned German medal that his father had earned when he fought for the Kaiser three decades earlier. To the Nazis who saw it on him at the club, the ribbon was an affirmation that this young wounded officer had fought bravely for the Führer. But for Freddy, the ribbons and the uniform—the whole image he presented—held a much more complicated meaning. He had finally transformed himself into a German officer, just as he had dreamed of doing as a boy in Freiburg, when he would listen to his father’s war stories and strut around the house in his military belt. He had never envisioned doing it this way, as an enemy incognito hoping to assist his new country in defeating his old one.
One night in the bar, Freddy sat by himself, as usual, while a small group of older officers sat together at a table nearby. One of the officers, a captain in his midthirties, seemed to be dominating the conversation. He was drinking wine, lots of it, and the more he drank, the more he talked. Another officer noticed Freddy and beckoned him over; Freddy gladly pulled up a chair. He figured that they must have felt sorry for him—a young officer, newly arrived at the club and sitting by himself.
He soon picked up enough of the conversation to tell that the garrulous, drunk captain was an Austrian who served in the Nazi engineering corps; he had returned to Innsbruck from Berlin just days earlier. The nature of his injuries was unclear, but the engineer seemed determined to impress his drinking mates with everything he had done in Berlin. He told them how he had been stationed at Nazi headquarters in Berlin, and that he had worked on fortifying the Führerhauptquartier—Hitler’s underground bunker.
Now Freddy’s interest was piqued, but he tried not to appear too interested. He signaled to the bartender for some more wine for his new friend. The captain kept talking, tossing out one striking detail after another about the underground complex: the precise location, the dimensions and thickness of the walls, the layout of the rooms, even where Hitler usually slept. The man clearly had a memory for numbers. He was throwing out so many details, in fact, that Freddy worried he wouldn’t be able to remember them all.
The Nazi engineer kept talking, describing one particularly notable scene during his time at headquarters. Just a few weeks earlier, he said, a haggard Hitler had watched with apparent fatalism from his balcony at the Berlin compound as the Allies launched their latest bombing raid on the city. “Hitler is tired of living,” the engineer declared to his listeners. Then, as if suddenly remembering the sensitivity of what he was revealing, the officer motioned to Freddy and made an oblique remark to the group suggesting that the young stranger sharing drinks with them might be a spy. Freddy sat frozen for a moment—until the smirks and smiles around the table made him realize he was the punchline for the joke.
Around midnight, the group dispersed. Once alone, Freddy hurried to record the engineer’s revelations. So many details; he hoped he could commit them all to writing. He finally turned his scribblings into a lengthy message for Hans to transmit to OSS. It began:
Fuehrer HQ is 1½ km southeast of the Zossen Lager rail station.
The next day, a young woman with a plain face and unkempt blonde hair stood alone on a historic stone bridge in Innsbruck, leaning against the railing that separated her from the icy river below. Bundled in her winter clothes, Maria Hortnagl gazed down at the water, looking forlorn. Military jeeps rumbled over the bridge, and Nazi soldiers roamed the city’s cobblestone streets in every direction. A stranger in civilian clothes approached her, a look of concern on his face. “Are you all right?” the stranger asked. “I’m tired of life,” Maria answered.
That was the cue. The stranger took Maria by the arm, and together the pair walked toward the old section of Innsbruck—across the river from Gestapo headquarters on the other side of the bridge. They reached a dark, secluded alley, where the stranger slipped Maria a sealed envelope and walked away. Maria tucked it away without opening it. She didn’t need to know what it said; she just had to get it back to Oberperfuss.
In the span of just a few weeks, Maria—“the first link in the cutout system,” as OSS would call her—had already become a key player in the network of intermediaries and accomplices working for Freddy on the ground in Austria. She was among more than a dozen townspeople in Oberperfuss whom Alois ultimately trusted enough to help the Americans. They served as couriers, cooks, decoys, and drivers, bonded by both a shared hatred of the Nazis and, often, by personal ties to Alois or Franz. That most of them were women only helped to make them less noticeable in the male-dominated Reich. These “cutouts” knew little about the purpose or the details of the American operation itself, or about the two mysterious Americans hiding with Franz somewhere in town. Even Alois, the organizer, knew only what Freddy or Franz decided he needed to know. But on one central point, there was little confusion: Maria and her cohorts knew enough to realize that they were helping the enemy—and that they were putting themselves and their families at enormous risk if the Gestapo were to find out.
Franz soon found a command post for himself in Oberperfuss with the help of Annie’s mother, a commanding presence who was known around town as Mama Niederkircher. A widow, she owned the only hotel in town, Gausthaus Krone, along with a farm and a food business. But she had a hidden agenda as well. She was a devout Catholic—stern and quiet, but strong-willed—and she vowed privately to Annie that if Hitler won the war, “I no longer believe in a God.”
Wehrmacht soldiers stationed in Tyrol had taken over an entire wing of the hotel, but Mama Niederkircher reserved an out-of-the-way room in the back for use by Franz and Freddy. There were now so many new faces roaming the area that the agents’ nighttime maneuverings attracted little notice.
Once Franz’s three sisters learned that their brother was still alive, they were anxious to help as well. Gretl, the eldest, let Freddy use a loft in her row house apartment, where he stashed some of his gold, papers, and supplies. Alouisa, a nurse at the hospital, managed to smuggle out the uniform of a fatally wounded Nazi lieutenant, the medals still affixed, for Freddy to wear. After trying it on, Freddy declared it “a perfect fit.” Eva, meanwhile, was a government clerk and introduced Leutnant Mayer, in his new uniform, to a woman she knew in Nazi document control. Freddy always had a smile for the ladies, and he convinced Eva’s friend that his military papers had been stolen in Italy; “I lost everything, I lost my papers down there,” Freddy told her. Back in Bari, OSS had denied Freddy’s request for counterfeit Nazi papers—too risky, the officers said—but in Austria, Freddy was now carrying his new German identification book with the official Nazi seal of Tyrol on it.
Then there was Maria, a versatile accomplice who would shuttle secret messages, act as a decoy, locate safe houses, or simply lend Freddy her bicycle to get down the mountain to Innsbruck and back on a backwoods path, avoiding the Gestapo. She cleaned rooms at Mama Niederkircher’s hotel, and she, too, had grown to loathe the Reich; a “genuine anti-Nazi,” Franz called her. But her eagerness to help was driven as much by personal motivations: she had become smitten with the handsome American spy. Her father had agreed to let Freddy and Franz sleep on a bench next to the woodburning stove in his home for their first few nights, and Maria, whose bedroom was nearby, quickly took a liking to the flirtatious young man with the infectious smile. Maria was still single at twenty-eight, unusual for the era in Oberperfuss, but her parents were not happy about her obvious infatuation. They didn’t want her becoming too friendly with an American soldier-spy—and that was before they came to learn he was Jewish. They soon decided that Alois would have to find another safe haven for his new friends. Freddy and Franz were no longer welcome there.
The pair moved to another hideout in town, but Maria continued for months as Freddy’s Mata Hari any way she could. She was not the prettiest woman in town, he would later remark, but “an absolutely wonderful” operative and “a hell of a good girl.” Maria might have lost Freddy as a houseguest because of her parents’ protests, but he could still count on her help.
Hans,
meanwhile, whiled away the late-winter days in an attic in Oberperfuss, waiting for news from Freddy to relay to OSS, now that his transmitter was finally working. Alois had arranged for Hans to move from his original hideout to the attic of another helpful ally, Herr Kirchebner—not because of any romantic entanglements this time, but for safety concerns. The longer the Americans stayed in one place, the greater the risk that a nosy neighbor might notice something peculiar and alert the Gestapo.
With Alois’s help, Hans once again rigged a hidden radio antenna to a clothesline outside his hideout. A few written messages had begun to trickle in from Freddy, with Hans dutifully encoding them and radioing them on to Italy. Still, days and weeks would go by with nothing but silence from his fellow agent. He and Freddy had been side by side for nearly a year, brothers in arms wandering together in exile from Maryland, to Africa, to Italy, and now Austria, but lately his only contact with him was limited to cryptic messages on scraps of carefully folded paper.
Boredom was Hans’s main adversary between transmissions—that and the physical demands of waiting until the middle of the night to tiptoe downstairs to use the bathroom; daylight trips were too risky. Impatient by nature, Hans was going a bit stir-crazy in the house. At least he had his chemistry books to distract him; he spent hours at a time copying and rewriting complicated chemical structures that mapped out the composition of molecules. Like the OSS coding he had learned, this was his own secret language that almost no one he knew was able to understand. He thought he might have the makings of a college thesis in mind.
Eventually even his chemistry studies became monotonous, though. Looking for a new diversion, Hans began carving a chess set out of some old wood scraps in the attic. Waiting for news from Freddy on the real war, Hans gamed out the battle in miniature in a stranger’s attic, with the white knight he had carved trying to pierce the defenses of the dark king. Kirchebner’s teenage daughter, Frannie, felt sorry for the foreigner hiding upstairs, so under a vow of silence to her father, she tried to find amusements to occupy Hans. She taught him how to play Mühle, a popular board game exported from Germany; it became one of Hans’s favorites.
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