A Guest of the Reich

by Peter Finn

  Conditions at the camp, never good, still varied depending on nationality. Some of the Russians, in particular, struck Gertie as “dirty and devitalized,” moving about like robots. “My emotions were those of mixed sympathy and revulsion,” she said. The Russians were treated far worse than the other prisoners, in terms of the food they received and their living conditions, and were forced into grueling labor.

  Of the 5.7 million Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans, 3.3 million, or 58 percent, died in captivity; the rate of death for American or British POWs was 3.5 percent. Explanations for the vast number of Soviet dead include an overwhelmed detention system, prisoners who were already malnourished, extreme weather, and disease. “All of these things are partially true, but they fall well short of the whole truth,” according to one historian of the Reich. “What is missing is human agency and intentionality within this exculpatory fog of contingent circumstances.”

  In short, the Russians were starved to death or worked to death or allowed to freeze to death.

  Gertie’s stay at Stalag XII-A was blessedly brief. This was not her destination. It lay just two miles away: the Wehrmacht interrogation center at Diez Castle.

  10

  Diez an der Lahn

  Diez Castle in Germany’s Lahn valley juts high above the village below, a fairy-tale pastiche of sheer slate walls, battlements, and turrets, parts of which date back to the eleventh century. Once owned by the Dukes of Orange-Nassau, the castle had been a penitentiary for many years before it was commandeered by the German army to interrogate prisoners of special interest captured on the western front; it had about thirty individual cells as well as several dorms.

  As she approached the castle, Gertie thought the “forbidding towers looked like an ogre’s lair” and “conjured up pictures of dungeons and thumbscrews.” The German army used the castle’s louring menace, followed by a period in solitary confinement high in its keep, to loosen the tongues of its occupants. The military facility was also staffed with fluent English speakers, German soldiers who drew on their prior connections with the United States to try to establish a rapport with their prisoners. One spoke of his time working at a gas station in Nebraska; another said he had lived in Washington when his father had served in the German embassy there.

  One such officer, five feet eleven and trim in the gray-green uniform of the Wehrmacht, emerged from the shadow of an arched doorway as Gertie and Jennings stood in the courtyard. He crossed the yard, clicked his heels, saluted, and said, “Follow me please. You are my prisoners now.” Jennings arched his eyebrows at the American accent. They followed the officer up a steep stone stairway, the steps grooved by centuries of use, to a parapet that provided them with a brief panorama of the valley below. Next, they stepped into a dimly lit hallway of steel doors, each numbered. The walls seemed a yard thick. “This is yours, Mrs. Legendre,” the officer said, pointing to number 38 but continuing on without opening it. Gertie and Jennings followed him into an office where he invited them to sit.

  “Please call me Bill,” he said. He offered each of them a pack of Camel cigarettes, which they grabbed a touch too enthusiastically despite the unease they expressed in stolen glances: Who is this guy?

  His name was Wilhelm Gosewisch; he was a forty-one-year-old lieutenant. He had immigrated to the United States in 1921 and married another German immigrant in 1925. They had two children in New York City, a son born in 1929 and a daughter in 1932. Gosewisch, by his own account, had worked as a confectioner, a longshoreman, and a piano tuner before opening a lunch counter in Brooklyn.

  He described himself as a once “quite well to do” businessman and recalled vacations fishing for bluefish and kingfish off Southampton. Gosewisch told Gertie that he returned to Germany with his family in 1939 and over time offered a number of different explanations as to why: anti-German boycotts in New York had affected his business; his citizenship application was denied when he said he would not fight on German soil; he was showing his wife, who he said was an American, his home country; and finally, because he wanted to finish a German undergraduate degree he had nearly completed before first immigrating so he could use it to apply to St. John’s University Law School. He also said he was still in Germany when war broke out and he was conscripted into the army.

  Many of these complicated explanations were lies. Gosewisch later affirmed under penalty of perjury that he left the United States in November 1934 with plans to return and he applied to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for extensions of his right to reenter the country. He told U.S. officials he needed to complete his studies in psychology and pedagogy. While in Germany, he worked as an English teacher, joined the Nazi Party, in 1937, and the National Socialist Teachers League, as well as the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization, the Association for German Cultural Relations Abroad, and the Reichskolonialbund, which sought the restoration of colonies Germany lost in the Treaty of Versailles. There were about 850,000 Nazi Party members in May 1933, when the party itself suspended new registrations to control a surge of applicants. The suspension was lifted in 1937, when Gosewisch joined, and by the eve of war there were about five million party members—about 6 percent of the German population. Teachers had to swear allegiance to Hitler and follow the prescribed curriculum, but party membership was not mandatory and the majority of educators did not join.

  The lieutenant, for all his apparent bonhomie and cultivated American accent, had been at the very least a Nazi sympathizer, and perhaps a committed fascist, albeit one who was now rapidly realizing the war was lost. He held valid reentry visas for the United States in the 1930s but chose to stay in Nazi Germany long after the country’s direction under Hitler was abundantly clear. He didn’t join the military until July 1941, trained as a military interpreter in Berlin in 1942, and served in occupied Belgium before his posting at Diez.

  * * *

  —

  With Gertie and Jennings, Gosewisch was following a well-practiced script. He told them that he had to leave for a few days and that their questioning was scheduled to begin upon his return. In the interim, they would be held in solitary confinement.

  “How long will that be?” Gertie asked.

  “Are you impatient?” Gosewisch replied.

  “Frankly, yes. We’ve been going from here to there and everyone tells us the same thing. They told me I’d be exchanged as soon as I reached high headquarters.”

  “I will return next Tuesday,” Gosewisch said.

  It was Friday afternoon, October 6.

  Gertie was taken to her cell. Jennings was briefly taken back to the Limburg camp to be deloused—a blistering-hot shower followed by two hours of naked shivering while his clothes were run through a hot-air chamber.

  The six-by-ten-foot cells, unlike the filthy barracks Gertie had been held in prior to her arrival at Diez, were clean. A Russian forced laborer cleaned out the cells every day. There was a wooden bunk with a mattress, sheets, a pillow, three blankets, a stool, and a chamber pot. A guard brought her a novel—Zane Grey’s Sunset Pass: A Western Story—to help pass the time. The windows were unbarred; it was a steep drop to the ground below. From her window, Gertie could see a village street, a river, railroad tracks, and grassy areas where children played. She watched as the residents rushed home when the air raid sirens sounded. The sky seemed to pulsate almost every day as hundreds of American bombers and fighters passed directly overhead.

  Gosewisch had also given Gertie a Red Cross care package. After days of bread and slop, she enumerated its contents with lip-smacking pleasure: six packs of cigarettes; Nescafé coffee; one chocolate bar; a can of powdered milk; some lumps of sugar; dried prunes; packaged cheese; fortified biscuits; tins of corned beef hash, roast beef, and salmon; grape jam; and soap.

  Treasure. Unimaginable treasure! “If the Red Cross had no other function, the sending of such packages would have made its war
time services invaluable,” Gertie decided, a conclusion shared by all prisoners of war lucky enough to get food parcels. Deliveries became more difficult as the war progressed, especially to camps in the east.

  Gertie was learning one of the first truths of life behind bars: food—stale or rotten and always inadequate—was a persistent ordeal. The Geneva Conventions required that prisoners be given the same quantity and quality of food as their guards, a provision rarely honored by the Nazis. Most prisoners subsisted on a diet of sawdust-based black bread, soup, and potatoes, with foul, fake coffee or tea to drink. Rations were steadily cut as the war progressed, and men emerged from some POW camps as living skeletons.

  Food, inevitably, was a singular obsession for all prisoners, both a daily deficiency and a recurring fantasy, a preoccupation that found amusing expression in a poem by Larry Phelan, a lieutenant from New York held at Oflag 64, a camp for American officers in Szubin, Poland:

  New Year’s Sonnet

  (Written to the Loveliest Girl in the World—Who Won’t Like It)

  I dream as only captive man can dream

  Of life as lived in days that went before:

  Of scrambled eggs and short cake thick with cream

  And onion soup and Lobster Thermidor;

  Of roasted beef and chops and sirloin steaks,

  And turkey breast and golden leg or wing,

  Of sausage, maple syrup, buckwheat cakes,

  And chickens, broiled or fried or a la king.

  I dwell on rolls or buns for days and days,

  Hot cornbread biscuits, Philadelphia scrapple,

  Asparagus in cream or Hollandaise,

  And deep dish pies—mince, huckleberry, apple;

  I long for buttered, creamy oyster stew,

  And now and then, my pet, I long for you.

  The hours and days passed slowly at the castle. Gertie recalled in detail past expeditions, taking herself back through Africa and Indochina, remembering waltzes in Vienna and harvest time in the vineyards of France. “My mind never stopped daydreaming as I lay sprawled on my cot, fully dressed except for my boots, until stark reality intercepted my fancies.”

  Solitary confinement was a standard German tactic to unnerve and ultimately break a prisoner, and a U.S. military report noted that American airmen in bursts of relief often talked incessantly when they were finally let out.

  Gertie also rehearsed her lines in her head and worried about what would happen to her. “Realization that this was the all-important interview at ‘higher headquarters’ put me into a cold sweat,” she recalled. “I wanted to keep cool, appear unruffled and unconcerned. Often devilish voices would taunt me: ‘You’re OSS, you’re OSS. You know what that means.’ ”

  Gertie had reason to be concerned. The Germans still believed she and the others might be intelligence officers and that there was something “sinister” about their presence at Wallendorf. They planned a series of overlapping interviews of Gertie, Jennings, and Papurt. If one of the three broke and disclosed an intelligence connection, the case would be turned over to the Gestapo. And the Nazi secret police would prove ruthless with American intelligence operatives.

  Several OSS officers who were part of an Anglo-American team were captured in Slovakia in late 1944 as part of a mission to evacuate Allied airmen and assess the needs of the local partisans. All were in uniform, but the Germans discovered orders on one of the men from OSS headquarters in Washington. “A great deal of interest was shown by the [Reich Security Main Office] in the OSS,” according to Werner Müller, a Gestapo interpreter, who was one of the officials involved in the interrogations of both Gertie and the men captured in Slovakia.

  The Reich Security Main Office was part of the Nazi security structure under Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, and it managed the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the SD, the intelligence arm of the Nazi Party. The organization—the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA, in German—was headed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, an Austrian Nazi who had succeeded Reinhard Heydrich after the latter’s assassination in Prague in 1942.

  Some of the Americans and British officers captured in Slovakia, as well as the Associated Press correspondent Joseph Morton, who was covering their mission, were taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria in early January 1945. They were tortured and then summarily executed under orders from Kaltenbrunner. Naked—ostensibly for a medical examination in advance of their transfer to a POW camp—they were shot without warning; their bodies were burned in the Mauthausen ovens.

  * * *

  —

  Gertie’s knowledge of the OSS, based on her reading of sensitive cables, might have been fragmentary, but she held vital information about the agency’s personnel, agents, structure, locations, and means of communication as well as some of its covert plans. The almost blithe manner in which she had handled her captivity was about to undergo its most consequential test. Could she continue to play the unfortunate but harmless female prisoner?

  Lights were out, and Gertie had already gone to bed, when a guard appeared at her door to take her to Gosewisch’s office on October 10.

  “Please be seated,” Gosewisch said as she entered.

  He sat, smoking, in semidarkness, his long fingers flipping through a notebook.

  “There is no use mincing words,” Gosewisch said. She was considered “a very dangerous, international spy.”

  Gertie didn’t respond, but “an arrow of alarm shot through my spine.”

  “You might as well tell me the truth,” the German said sharply. “There are certain questions I must ask you. If you don’t [answer], well, we have ways of finding things out and, frankly, I would not like to force you to experience our methods.”

  Gertie felt her anxiety growing. Would she be tortured? In her head, she quickly ran through her rehearsed answers while feeling a “confusion of thoughts and emotions.”

  For the first time, Gosewisch appeared threatening, the facade of the benign American discarded for the countenance of the inquisitor. Gertie, with a chill, “noted the Germanic stiffness of his neck, as if the column were welded to his square shoulders.” Gosewisch began by recapping summaries of her previous interrogations, running through the material in a manner that was “neither rough nor rude, only insinuating and direct.”

  Gertie steadied herself, drawing on her reserves of mettle. “I found myself listening to my own voice,” she recalled. “It sounded alright and carried an air of confidence. I was perspiring, yet felt collected, and was not nervous in the extreme.” It was the kind of controlled tension she had felt many times as she raised her rifle and listened to an animal crashing through the brush—coming toward her.

  The Wehrmacht rarely tortured American POWs, but it did play on the prisoners’ fears of Nazi brutality and the prospect of being turned over to the Gestapo. “Mental strain, psychological threats, solitary confinement and deprivation were all considered fair and used routinely,” one historian wrote.

  The questions from Gosewisch—issued with the snap of an impatient lawyer—first concentrated on her job.

  “Where did you work before you came to London?”

  “In the State Department.”

  “What were the names of the people in your office?”

  “Is it absolutely necessary to answer that? According to the convention, I don’t have to answer that.”

  “No. You don’t. But, believe me…only what you yourself have to say can clear you.”

  Gertie pulled a name from nowhere: Edna Robinson, “a nicely rounded American name,” and she added another, Sarah Elberfeld.

  “German?” asked Gosewisch.

  “I hardly know,” replied Gertie. “The name is, I guess…come to think of it, she’s Pennsylvania Dutch.”

  Gosewisch changed tack abruptly.

  “Who
was Major Papurt?”

  “An ordnance officer. I met him that morning in Luxembourg.”

  “A prearranged meeting?”

  “No. Just a casual one. I didn’t know him before. I think you have the account there. Tell me, is he alright?”

  “He’s being well taken care of.”

  The interview circled through the same series of subjects for two and a half hours. Finally, in apparent exasperation, Gosewisch said, “You probably belong to the FBI.” He ended the interview abruptly, and the guard took Gertie back to her cell.

  Jennings was interrogated twice the following day. He was asked about his naval career, the trip to Wallendorf, Papurt, and Gertie, and he provided the Germans with the first indication that their female prisoner was a society heiress.

  Gosewisch also probed the lieutenant commander with a series of questions about the OSS, without mentioning the organization by name. He was asked about Papurt’s deputy, Walter Hochschild. “I gathered they knew something of the work Hochschild and Papurt did in Luxembourg,” Jennings later said. He told Gosewisch that he knew Hochschild socially and believed he was “attached to some air corps doing liaison work.”

  Did he know what was located at 79 Champs-Élysées, Gosewisch asked. Jennings feigned ignorance about the address of the Paris branch of the OSS. And Colonel Walter Giblin? Jennings said he had met him socially in New York because they were both in the investment business, but said he knew nothing of his current role. Giblin worked with Bruce in the Paris office, focused on the penetration of Germany by OSS agents.

  “Giblin was in a very dangerous business,” Gosewisch said.

  Jennings was shown the SCI document found on Papurt but persisted in his ignorance of it, though he recognized one of the names on the list. Gosewisch told him he had figured out what SCI stood for: “Secret Civilian Intelligence.” He told Jennings that he and Gertie were “in a very bad spot.”