by Peter Finn
But Gosewisch was working with shards of information, rather than more fully formed allegations, and his examination of his prisoners suffered because of it. He couldn’t expose them as liars if he didn’t already know the truth.
That night, Gertie was returned to Gosewisch’s office. Without speaking, he immediately handed her the SCI paper found on Papurt.
“Read this please. Tell me whether you have heard of any of these names.” He passed the list to Gertie and said, “Don’t lie to me either.”
Gertie had arrived feeling calmer than the night before, but when she first glanced at the paper, she felt her pulse quicken. She recognized some of the names from her time in the London office. To disguise how startled she felt, she leaned into the lamplight to hide her face.
“I have never heard of any of them,” she said.
“What does SCI stand for?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” Gertie said. “The Army changes names all the time. I can’t keep up.”
11
Naples
At the hospital in Limburg, Papurt was also interviewed several times but parried the questions, as his superiors were confident he would. According to an American captain in a bed close to Papurt, the OSS major was the subject of two interviews and a visit from a Gestapo official who also seemed to lose interest in him. “Reports concerning [Papurt], though conflicting, show that little if any OSS information was made available to the [German intelligence services] through this prize capture,” a postwar assessment concluded.
The Germans were also preoccupied with the fact that Papurt was Jewish. Both Wehrmacht and Foreign Ministry reports noted his religion, and it’s possible the focus on Papurt as a Jew deflected attention the Nazis might otherwise have spent on the possibility that he was an intelligence officer. The issue was a worry for Gertie, who feared Papurt would be mistreated and hoped his American uniform would protect him. Most American Jewish prisoners of war—identifiable by the H for “Hebrew” on their dog tags—were not singled out for abuse, but there were instances where Jewish prisoners experienced horrifying treatment because of their religion. The commandant of Stalag IX-B at Bad Orb, west of Frankfurt, sent eighty Jewish POWs to a slave labor camp west of Leipzig, where 20 percent of them died.
The Allies were keeping a close watch on German wireless traffic to see if Papurt had revealed anything about Ultra. While there was some decline in the quantity of usable material being swept up in intercepts, it was attributed to a series of new security measures that Himmler had put in place after the July assassination attempt on Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, his military headquarters in Prussia. “So far as we can learn from monitoring there have been no ill effects traceable to the capture of Papurt,” Pearson, the head of X-2, concluded in a letter to the London branch of the OSS.
Papurt, Jennings, and Gertie might also have been helped by the fact the Germans did not know much about the OSS. While Goebbels’s propaganda machine had railed against Donovan and the OSS after the formation of the American intelligence service, the Germans had little hard information on the organization, its structure, and its missions. A postwar U.S. assessment, based on the interrogation of senior German military and intelligence officials, concluded that “German knowledge of OSS was fragmentary, uncollated, incorrect and diffuse.”
Pearson of OSS counterintelligence wrote with an almost audible sigh of relief that the Allies’ ability to keep intercepting German military communications was secure.
“It is possible to believe that we may escape what would have been one of the disasters of the war,” he said.
* * *
—
As he lay in a German hospital bed, Jerry Papurt’s thoughts must have returned to Naples a year earlier. In late October 1943, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, on assignment for Life magazine, had arrived to document the heavily bombed city and the U.S. Fifth Army’s Italian campaign—an experience she would record in the book Purple Heart Valley.
In Naples, Bourke-White needed a military pass from the commanding officer at the local army counterintelligence unit. Papurt was a little starstruck when she walked in, but his easy charm won her over and she agreed to a date.
Papurt fell hard for her. Between assignments, they “spent their evenings singing songs together off key, wrapped in overcoats in an unheated palazzo, or dancing in a ballroom where the rain dripped though the ceiling.”
“From Africa and Italy the word has gone out—Papurt’s got it bad,” he declared.
By November 9, Papurt was writing to her, “I hereby solemnly swear that it is my unalterable intention to wed, espouse, marry and tie in bonds of wedlock the above-mentioned Maggie, the Bourke-White.” He told her his marriage was troubled, though this would prove to be news to his wife back in Columbus, Ohio. Bourke-White, coming off a recent divorce and then a relationship with an officer in North Africa, was cautious. “Don’t let your fear spoil a really great love,” Papurt told her in a letter. “If there is one thing in this world you can count on, it is my love for you…Love me too.”
The photographer’s confidence and fearlessness struck a deep chord with Papurt. Just as he earned the fierce loyalty of his men through his willingness to share the risks of combat with them, Bourke-White was a frontline journalist, always daring in pursuit of the great photograph and remarkably calm in the heat of battle. She had survived the torpedoing of a troopship in the Mediterranean, flew on bombing missions during the North African campaign, and was also a veteran of the eastern front. Bourke-White had been in Russia when the Germans invaded and went on to photograph air attacks on Moscow and fighting at the front near Smolensk, a city in western Russia that had quickly fallen to the Germans.
In Italy, the United States flew unarmed, two-seater reconnaissance planes, known as Grasshoppers, over the front to spot enemy positions and call in artillery fire. Bourke-White went up in one several times to capture the bloody slog of the battlefield near Cassino. “I was struck by the polka-dotted effect of the valley, with hundreds of thousands of shell holes filled with rainwater and shining in the sun,” she recalled. “It was as though this valley, in which so many had suffered and died, was clothed in a sequined gown.”
As they were near the end of one flight, two German Me-109 fighters emerged from the sky. The slow-moving Grasshopper was an easy mark, and the pilot, Colonel Michael Strok, began “violent corkscrew dives” to evade fire from the German planes and reach the safety of American anti-aircraft guns. Strok recalled that as he looked back quickly at Bourke-White to reassure her, “she was calmly shooting rapid-fire pictures of the action.”
Back on the ground, Strok asked her, “Peggy, you are either the bravest person I’ve ever met or a damn fool—what are you?” She gave him that “intense blue-eyed look and that mischievous grin” and said, “Which do you think I am?”
Like Gertie, Bourke-White could be seen—by the lights of the military and some of her colleagues—as demanding and imperious. As her assignment in Italy ended in January 1944, the military refused to renew her accreditation, saying she had at times been too independent-minded and difficult—fairly standard attributes for good journalists, but unwelcome to some of the bureaucrats in uniform. She returned involuntarily to the United States. For the next six months, Papurt wrote to her almost every day, sometimes several times a day, and implored her to reciprocate with the same epistolary intensity. He told her she had an “adolescent” on her hands, declaring he had “never really been in love before.”
“I’d rather spend two months a year—or two nights—with you than a lifetime with any other woman,” he exclaimed. He urged her to secure an assignment in England. “There will be millions of pictures to take on the continent that only B-W could really do—so hurry over and take them.”
But Bourke-White’s reputation was hampering her ability to get back to Europe. Among her hurdles was how
high the animosity she generated reached. Eisenhower regarded her as a congenital rule breaker who had to be closely chaperoned because she would not be controlled. The army refused to credential her for the invasion of France. Bourke-White eventually wrangled a return to Italy, selling her presence there as a way to record a campaign largely forgotten after D-day. She hoped the assignment would eventually get her to the main event—the assault on Germany.
Five days before she docked in Naples, Papurt was captured.
“I was numb with worry lest the enemy should know this was no ordinary prisoner,” she recalled, fearing that Papurt would be tortured to extract what he knew about U.S. intelligence operations. But she also believed that Papurt with his “quicksilver mind” was “a past master of this kind of game of chess.”
Bourke-White learned that Papurt was in a POW hospital and that the Vatican could deliver messages to prisoners of war either on radio broadcasts or by other means. Messages had to be limited to ten words. Bourke-White needed just eight: “I love you. I will marry you. Maggie.”
It was not to be. On November 29, Papurt was killed in Limburg when an Allied bomb struck the hospital in which he was being held during a raid on the city. He was already up on crutches but had not gone down to a shelter when the siren had sounded.
Bourke-White never learned if Papurt got the message that she would marry him.
12
Diez an der Lahn
At Diez Castle, after days of interrogation, the atmosphere had changed noticeably for Gertie and Jennings. By mid-October, Gosewisch had softened his approach, initially to see if it would elicit information his harsh demeanor had failed to. A German military report found that “interrogation of Allied POWs was most successful when the prisoner was unaware that the interrogation was going on, and instead felt he was taking part in a ‘voluntary and pleasant conversation.’ ”
The lieutenant began to see Gertie not as a spy but as a potential propaganda tool. Gosewisch had attempted to exploit other prisoners in the same way for the regime. He suggested to Ed Beattie, a United Press correspondent who was also being held in the castle, that he could travel around Germany, “seeing everything you want and talking to everyone you want to meet, so that you can go out and tell the world the true story of Germany.”
A fluent German speaker, Beattie was more than familiar with the Nazis, having first been posted to Germany as a correspondent in 1932. He was in Berlin on Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—in November 1938, witnessing Goebbels switch the anti-Jewish violence on and off. He was in Prague in March 1939 when the Nazis entered the city and heard “the hisses and catcalls of the people, who sang the Czech national anthem.” And he was in Warsaw later that year when “German troops…smashed across the frontier from Slovakia to the Baltic.” When Poland fell, he transferred to London, where he covered the Blitz before returning to the Continent after D-day. Beattie told Gosewisch that his offer was an invitation to commit treason.
Gosewisch began to focus on Gertie’s wealthy background and her connections to senior U.S. generals, including Patton and Spaatz, the chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces, who had dined at Gertie’s London town house. The conversation noticeably relaxed, and the lieutenant produced fine French wine and cognac to lubricate their exchanges, which sometimes ran from 9:00 p.m. until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning.
Gosewisch expressed regret that he had ever left the United States and mentioned he had relatives on Long Island; he neglected to note—almost certainly as a matter of self-preservation—that his brother, who had immigrated to Long Island, was a GI fighting in the Pacific. He also had a nephew who was a German POW in the United States after being captured in North Africa.
Defeat, Gosewisch said, was inevitable. He told Gertie that after the Americans had toppled “Hitler’s gang,” he hoped they would build a new Germany. “Democracy,” he said, “was the white hope now.”
And Gosewisch promised he would do what he could to ensure that Gertie was transferred back to the Allies. He clearly recognized that this American woman, with her impeccable connections, was a potential ally for his own postwar survival.
Both Jennings and Gertie were allowed to write home in letters routed through the International Committee of the Red Cross. Jennings wrote a short note to his mother in Michigan telling her he was a prisoner of war. “I do worry about the distress it must have caused you! I so wanted to be with you for Xmas and I should have been except for just rotten luck,” he told her.
Gertie wrote to Sidney, but he never received the letter. She also sent a letter to Marian Hall, her roommate in Paris, which got through; her husband did not learn about the Hall letter until January 1945.
“You see how my innocent little trip to Luxembourg has ended up!” Gertie told Hall. “Behind a double row of iron bars eating black bread and potato soup with plenty of time to catch up on my sleep. No alcohol or fattening foods to spoil the health regime and I shall come out a new woman (some day).”
But Gertie also managed to embed a message to the OSS, telling Hall that she was tired of being questioned over and over again about her job as a clerk at the embassy and her work for the Red Cross. This would provide some guidance as to the cover story she was using. “I seem to be very much under suspicion and am quite flattered to be considered smart enough to play the part of an international spy—No one has ever given one so much credit.” She noted that Papurt and Dickson had both been wounded but believed they would be all right.
She signed off, “Your caged lion, Gertie.”
* * *
—
While in solitary, Gertie had been allowed to exercise for an hour a day on one of the battlements above the castle courtyard. Her presence led to endless speculation among both the American prisoners and the ordinary German guards about who the “fair prisoner” was. The blue USA patch on a white triangle on the shoulder of her uniform designated her a civilian attached to the U.S. Army, but to many of those looking up at her, she seemed more apparition than real; women were not allowed anywhere near the front lines. How could she have been captured?
“Whoever she is, she has given both guards and prisoners a lively topic of conversation,” Beattie noted in his diary. “The svelte spy theory has the support of most of the guards and a fair proportion of the prisoners.”
Jennings eventually explained her situation when he was let out of solitary confinement, though he was careful to maintain their cover story, even in private conversations with other American prisoners. “One never knows whether the Germans have microphones planted in the camps, or what conversations reach their ears, through planted stool pigeons or by some other means,” Beattie noted.
* * *
—
Jennings was transferred out of Diez Castle on October 22. Gertie was allowed to say good-bye. In an earlier conversation in the courtyard—on a day she had finally been permitted to mingle with other prisoners—they had quietly confirmed with each other that they had stuck to their cover stories. Jennings was taken to an interrogation center run by the Luftwaffe just north of Frankfurt. He was put back in solitary in a cell with painted windows and an externally controlled heating system, which was switched from stifling hot to shivering cold. The Germans again insisted he was a spy and demanded that if he was a naval officer, he prove it by writing a report on antisubmarine warfare. Jennings refused.
The newest round of interrogations was followed by a bizarre trip to a hunting lodge, formerly owned by the family that founded the car manufacturer Opel, with two plainclothes agents, possibly Gestapo. Jennings was served a fine dinner and liquor. “They simply wait to see if you won’t break down through a sense of relief and in this way obtain information from you,” he recalled. One of the agents said he had been a jewelry salesman in North and South America; the other said he had worked in a New Jersey trucking company before the war. Jennings ate the food but otherwise
kept his mouth shut. It was the last gambit before the Germans closed the book on the navy officer. He was transferred to a POW camp.
* * *
—
The capture of Gertie and the others, despite the best efforts of the OSS to keep it under wraps, was beginning to leak out. “International News Service had the story on A who is obviously [the] only one with big news value,” wrote the Paris office of the OSS in an October 13 memo to Donovan, referring to Gertie as “A.”
“Story was killed and through censorship sources no story will be published on this side on any of the individuals involved,” the Paris branch assured Washington.
But on October 20, the story broke—from the German side. The Transocean news agency headquartered in Berlin reported that Gertie, described as a “member of New York society circles,” was “the first American woman to fall into German hands.” The report said the decision to inspect Wallendorf had been taken “at a merry party in Paris,” but Gertie’s “craving for sensation received a sudden shock when together with her companions, she was caught in German machine gun fire.”
Reports by Berlin radio and other outlets quickly followed, and Gertie was described as a WAC officer and interpreter who also acted as a liaison officer between the U.S. Army and the Allied Expeditionary Force Club in Paris. The reports named Papurt and Jennings and noted that Papurt and an unnamed driver were wounded. Berlin radio quoted Gertie describing their capture at Wallendorf with Papurt jumping out of the jeep when they were fired on. Papurt “jokingly pointed his pistol as if to pick off the sniper. He looked so funny I just had to take a snapshot,” Gertie was quoted as saying. She also said her treatment at the hands of the Wehrmacht was “irreproachable,” Berlin radio reported.