Putting down the whip, Güttner took out his pistol and stuck the barrel in Freddy’s mouth. “Go ahead and shoot,” Freddy said in French, taunting him. “We don’t do it that easy,” Güttner replied with a smirk. He pulled the barrel of the gun out of Freddy’s mouth and jammed it back in—sideways this time, with the cold metal stretching out the inside of Freddy’s cheeks. With the gun lodged inside Freddy’s mouth, Güttner then delivered a looping uppercut, a haymaker, to his chin. Freddy could feel his back teeth snapping out, and he tasted blood as Güttner ripped the pistol out of his mouth. He spat out the blood, and a mouthful of teeth along with it. Blood oozed from wounds across his entire body: his back was ripped raw, his face was battered, and his genitals were bloodied.
Güttner told the prisoner that he had proof he was a spy. He was determined to break him, Jew or not. His boss, Busch, and several other top Nazis had now assembled in the interrogation room to watch the spectacle. Dazed, Freddy could make out the glint of gold threads gleaming from the formal brown Nazi uniform of one of the men, who looked to be the most senior among them. His beating was attracting quite an audience.
A guard led another man into the room—another shackled prisoner this time. Freddy recognized him immediately: It was Fritz Moser, the black marketeer who had fed him information about his uncle’s foreign laborers. Freddy might never have become Frédéric Mayér without Fritz. He had come to rely heavily on him, using his apartment as one of his hideouts, and he had learned from Fritz’s girlfriend a day earlier that he, too, had been arrested in the roundup. Still, seeing his ally standing in the prison just a few feet away from him was a jolt for Freddy, lying naked and battered on the floor.
He pretended not to recognize his former source. Fritz looked as if he had been roughed up himself, and he had an apologetic expression on his bruised face. It struck Freddy as a look of betrayal. “It’s no use, Fred,” Fritz said in German, the interrogators looking on. “Tell them the truth.” The pieces fell into place immediately for Freddy, even in his beaten haze: Fritz had talked. Fritz knew where Eva lived; he must have told the Gestapo where to find him. Not only that, but he could have told them that Freddy was an American, and a spy. He tried to remember what else Fritz knew from their many conversations in the past month: his work at the airplane factory, information about the train lines, the identities of his other cutouts. He didn’t know anything about Hans, thankfully, or about Oberperfuss; Freddy had been careful about that. But he knew enough. Freddy was furious. Why couldn’t Fritz have just kept quiet? He might never have been captured if he had. Freddy had the urge to spit in his eye, but he couldn’t muster the energy.
“I don’t even know this man,” Freddy said finally. His interrogators looked incredulous. Even as he said it, Freddy realized that he was going to have to change his story. The Gestapo knew far more than he had thought, and it seemed futile to stick with his Frenchman’s farce at this point. He decided to tell the truth, or at least a small part of it.
“Ich bin Amerikaner,” he said in perfect German. I am an American. It was a rare moment when Freddy was confronted with his own tortured identity. What was he really? He was an American, no doubt; not just an American “immigrant” with second-tier status, but an American citizen who had completed his citizenship papers a year earlier on break from the army. But he was a German, too, and a proud one; or at least he had been for most of his childhood before Hitler robbed him of that. Then he became defined as a German Jew, a deadly distinction; then a German refugee on a boat to Ellis Island; then an American soldier; and now an American spy with so many cover stories that his own parents didn’t know his true identity.
He was able to be whatever he needed to be, John Billings, the B-24 pilot who had mistaken him for a fellow aviator, would later marvel. After nearly four hours of brutal beatings at the hands of the Gestapo, Freddy was finally admitting he was an American—but his Nazi interrogators still didn’t believe him. Güttner was convinced he was lying; Freddy’s German was too perfect for him to be an American. Güttner detected the Swabian accent of a man from Germany’s southern region; he was convinced Freddy had come to Austria to foment resistance.
No, Freddy said; he was an American, and he had come to Austria by way of Switzerland. He had come alone. Exactly why, though, he wouldn’t say. “I refuse to answer any further questions,” Freddy said, “and I’m willing to take the consequences.”
The consequences were swift. Güttner sent for “the sticks,” and a Gestapo messenger returned with two long poles. “Where is the radio operator!” Güttner demanded again. Freddy said nothing. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he tried to resist once again as the three Nazis forced him down into a crouch, doubled him over, and jammed the poles beneath his arms and knees. They then threw him onto a table and hoisted the poles to the ceiling. Freddy dangled from the poles above the table, head down and naked, as Güttner and the SS men sent for a jug of water and a bucket. They dunked his head in the water and, cupping his mouth, took turns pouring the water up his nose and into his ears. This was what Güttner and his men benignly called the “water treatment.” Freddy felt as if he were drowning. Choking and spitting up water, he was unable to breathe, and the pain caused by the water gushing through his burst eardrum was excruciating. He was barely conscious. He tried to force himself to pass out, hoping to ease the pain, but he couldn’t do it.
The water finally stopped. Someone teased him with a piece of food, holding it in front of his face, then snatching it away when he tried to take it. Were they laughing at him now? The Nazis and their psychological tricks—he wouldn’t be so gullible again.
Güttner left him hanging from the ceiling for hours, letting him ponder his plight. How long exactly, Freddy couldn’t say; time seemed an abstraction as he hung there, motionless. Eventually his torturers returned and began another round of the water treatment, but Freddy’s answers, barely audible in his current state, didn’t change. He was an American. He had come into the country from Switzerland. Alone. He didn’t know a radio operator.
Finally, after he had been suspended from the poles for a gruesome six hours, Güttner and the SS men took him down and dropped him on the bone-cold floor, his teeth chattering, only to begin kicking and punching him all over again. Freddy lay motionless, pretending to be unconscious; he had no strength left to resist.
“Better stop. He’s unconscious,” Freddy heard someone say; it was a voice he didn’t recognize. The pummeling ended on command. This man was the same senior Nazi he had seen in the interrogation room earlier, the one with the gold threads on his uniform. His name, Freddy would learn, was Max Primbs. He was a doctor, but much more important in Innsbruck was his title as the Nazi Kreisleiter for the entire region, the second-ranking position under Franz Hofer. Primbs was a powerful figure in Tyrol; he didn’t spend a lot of time at Gestapo headquarters, but he had taken a personal interest in the new prisoner. The man needed to be kept alive, Primbs told Güttner. If he really was an American, he said, then Hofer would need to know about it immediately.
Güttner had been at this all night now, and morning had come. He needed to update Busch on what he had found out—which wasn’t nearly as much as he had hoped. Even if the prisoner was an American, which Güttner continued to doubt, he did not know why he had come to Innsbruck or who had accompanied him. But Güttner had an idea that he thought might break the impasse. He ordered his men to find a cell for Freddy. There was another man Güttner wanted to find.
Months earlier, when Freddy and Hans were still training in Italy for the Alpine jump, OSS had given strict orders to them and all the other would-be spies at the base in Bari: they were not allowed to talk about their missions with anyone, or try to learn about the other operations in the works. The OSS officers were loose about many military rules, but violating that one could get a man sent home. The agents weren’t even supposed to know the identities of the other agents at the base. The secrecy was for their own
protection, Lieutenant Ulmer said. “If you are captured, you may be sure that every effort will be made to force you to tell all you know,” he warned. The less they knew about other operations, the less they could reveal under pressure. The problem with many of the OSS agents roaming around the Italian base, Ulmer grumbled, was that “the guys just weren’t smart enough to keep their mouths shut.”
Freddy didn’t need any warnings; he was determined to stay quiet, even after the Gestapo had beaten him bloody and dumped him, naked and cuffed, on a flea-ridden straw mat in an ice-cold cell. Now that Fritz had told the Gestapo what he knew, Freddy figured the Nazis had already found out all that they could about him. What he didn’t know, however, was that there was another OSS spy in Innsbruck at that same moment who knew all about Freddy’s true history—and he was willing to tell the Gestapo men anything they wanted to know.
His name was Hermann Matull; the Gestapo knew him as Max. He was a German-born huckster who had worked as a Nazi radio operator in the war, until he deserted. OSS’s Dyno Lowenstein, in his hunt for “deserter volunteers” to bring back to Bari, had spotted Matull in a POW camp in northern Italy six months earlier and thought he would make a good spy. Others at OSS weren’t so impressed. With his slicked-back hair, checkered history, and scattershot banter, Matull seemed slippery even by Nazi standards. “A Mississippi steamboat gambler,” Ulmer called him. “A real guttersnipe,” said Walter Haass, who helped train Matull in Bari.
In Bari, Matull trained for an unusual solo mission into Germany at the same time the Gulliver agents were at the base preparing for their own jump. Freddy didn’t remember hearing anything about Matull during his time at the base, and he knew nothing of his parachuting operation. But Matull—ignoring OSS’s demands for strict secrecy—had managed to learn all about Freddy and many other commando agents while he was in Bari.
Matull’s mission, code-named Deadwood with unintended irony, had begun just three weeks before Freddy’s capture, at the beginning of April. Haass was the jump master for the flight from Italy, just as he had been for the Gulliver team, but he and Matull had a frosty relationship. As their plane whizzed over Austria toward Munich, just as Haass prepared to give Matull the “go” signal to jump through the Joe hole, the Nazi defector turned to him. “I know you bastards don’t trust me, but I’m going to prove you wrong,” he vowed.
He didn’t. Matull was supposed to be gathering military intelligence inside Germany, but soon after getting to Munich, he got on a train and headed back toward Italy with the thousands of dollars in cash and gold that OSS had given him for the mission; he wanted to see a girlfriend in Milan. The Nazis picked him up on the train after he was spotted smoking American cigarettes, a sure giveaway; it almost seemed as if he wanted to get caught.
Matull soon agreed to cooperate with his Gestapo captors—as a double agent working, once again, for the Nazis against the Americans. Under the direction of his new Nazi handlers, he radioed a series of muddled messages back to OSS with supposed updates on his “mission,” and the Gestapo sent him to Innsbruck to help root out resisters and spies in Tyrol. He arrived there on the very same day as Freddy’s capture, but instead of getting a cell at the jail, he was housed, under guard, at a comfortable Nazi guesthouse nearby.
The Gestapo had assigned Güttner to debrief Matull, aka Max. Between the all-night torture of Freddy and the roundup of the Innsbruck resisters, Güttner had practically forgotten about Max and the assignment. But as Freddy’s brutal interrogation wore on, Güttner realized that Max might know something of relevance. He knew that the new arrival was a German defector and an American spy who, after his capture, had “already declared himself willing to work for the Gestapo.” He regretted that it hadn’t occurred to him to go talk to Max earlier, as he headed for the Gestapo guesthouse just a few blocks away.
He asked Matull almost immediately whether he knew a man named Fred Mayer. He might be an American spy, he said; dark brown hair; short and stocky, very strong. Matull said the name sounded like someone he remembered from his training at OSS in Italy. If it was him, Matull said, he was a “big catch”; he might know for certain, he said, if he could see a photo.
Güttner returned to headquarters to tell his Gestapo supervisors what he had found, then headed to the basement to Freddy’s jail cell. It had been a brutal day for Freddy, with the straw in his makeshift bed cutting into the open wounds on his naked body, and the handcuffs behind his back making it almost impossible to sleep. The soup and bread that the jailers gave him were putrid, but one guard, with a surprising sense of sympathy, slipped him part of his sandwich, along with a handkerchief to wipe away the dried blood on his body. It was the closest he would come to medical attention.
Güttner arrived with an oversized pair of old pants and a jacket, both far too big for Freddy, and directed him to get dressed. Then he led him out of the cell and threw a raincoat over his head so none of the jailed resisters would see his face as he walked past the cell block. Freddy was going to have his photo taken. His whole face was swollen and badly bruised, with his eyes glassy and bloodshot. Even so, when Güttner returned to the guesthouse with the black-and-white photograph in hand, Matull recognized the face immediately. That was the man he had known as “Lieutenant Fred” at the OSS base in Italy, he said; he was an important man there. Matull went on to tell Güttner all about Freddy and the OSS spy-training operation in Bari: where exactly it was located, who ran it, how the men trained, where they went for R&R in town. He got some of the details wrong, but it was far more than Güttner had hoped to get from him.
Güttner returned to Freddy’s cell. Ever resilient, Freddy smiled at him disarmingly, despite his injuries—“a happy and friendly face,” Güttner reported later. He didn’t see that very often from the men he tortured.
“Lieutenant Fred!” Güttner said. Excited to show off the store of information he had received, he mentioned OSS and Bari by name and proceeded to toss out for Freddy all sorts of details about life in training: names of agents and instructors; oddball stories from the mess hall; the name of the theater in town, the Teatro Piccinni, where the men would see shows; and even Villa Suppa, the name of the grassy quarters at the base where Freddy had been sequestered with Hans and Franz.
Freddy remained quiet, though the level of detail his Nazi interrogator had displayed was stunning. It was clear the Gestapo had an inside source—deep inside the American spy operation.
“We also have our agents,” Güttner told him by way of explanation. “We have another man from OSS.”
Freddy did not doubt it, and he had every reason to expect that Güttner would haul him down to the interrogation room again for another round of “severe” questioning. Yet he didn’t. Güttner left him in his cell, on his uncomfortable straw mat. Freddy wasn’t going to ask why. There was no point in trying to read the motives of a Nazi torturer in going easy on him. Psychological strategy, exhaustion, a rare bit of mercy—his reasons didn’t matter.
Or maybe it was the air-raid warning. Not long after Güttner left, the sirens blared, and the guards hustled him down to an underground bunker ahead of an oncoming Allied bombing raid over Innsbruck; it seemed the Nazis really did want to keep him alive. But the wailing of the air-raid sirens through his injured ear made him feel as if his head were going to explode.
Güttner had not wanted the other prisoners to see Freddy, his “big catch.” But the air raid left the jailers little choice but to put him inside a small room in the bunker with a handful of other prisoners. Freddy was surprised to see his new neighbor. Right next to him was his friend and ally, Kuen; the Gestapo had picked up the Kripo police officer three days earlier, a major blow to the resistance fighters. The roundup had reached even further than Freddy had thought.
Freddy had managed to evade the Gestapo with seeming ease for nearly two months on the ground in Innsbruck, becoming ever more aggressive in his tactics. But the Gestapo’s officers, ruthless as they were, were still inten
t on crushing their enemies. They had worn down his onetime ally Fritz Moser, forcing him to identify Freddy. They had turned OSS spy Hermann Matull into a double agent. And unknown to either Freddy or Kuen, they had a mole within the clan of Innsbruck resisters.
Freddy, in fact, had met unwittingly with the mole weeks earlier. The informant, Karl Niederwanger, was the same man who told Freddy he could produce five hundred resistance fighters for him, before failing the test run they had arranged. Freddy had never trusted him—with good reason, as it turned out. Niederwanger, a Wehrmacht deserter, was working for the Gestapo. He had gone to the Nazis with information about Tyrolean resisters—including ranking officers in the Kripo police force. The Gestapo promptly dispatched him to join the resistance forces. The information that he had collected in his undercover role as a self-proclaimed “resister” had triggered the roundup days earlier of Kuen, along with a number of his men in the Kripo—and ultimately of Freddy himself.
Less than a week earlier, Freddy and Kuen were exchanging internal Nazi records and waiting together in a darkened field in the mountains for a supply of OSS weapons to start an insurrection. Since then, all their plans had turned helter-skelter, and the two of them were now sitting side by side in a Nazi bunker, waiting to see whether an Allied bombing raid or a Gestapo beating killed them first.
Talking in hushed voices to avoid the guards’ notice, the two men compared notes about their harrowing experiences in the past few days. Kuen told Freddy that after his own arrest, he had escaped by jumping out of a second-floor window at the jail, but he badly injured his arm in the fall, and the Gestapo soon chased him down. He had not told the interrogators anything, despite the harsh questioning that inevitably followed, he said.
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