A Guest of the Reich

by Peter Finn

  Zieschang typed up Clemens’s reports on Gertie, which were sent to Himmler, after being reviewed by Lischka, Kaltenbrunner, and Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. Clemens ultimately concluded in his reports that Gertie had little intelligence of value to offer and came to believe—not entirely inaccurately—that her low-ranking position in London was probably just a rich lady’s excuse to be abroad during wartime.

  Himmler’s interest in Gertie likely stemmed from the possibility of using her as an intermediary with some of her influential friends such as Patton and Winant. To the war’s end, Himmler made “a series of attempts, albeit hesitatingly and indecisively to the last, to come to a political agreement to end the war,” according to one of his biographers. And he harbored some illusion that Germany could forge a separate peace with the Western powers, to the exclusion of the Soviet Union. This Nazi fantasy held that the United States and Britain would tire of heavy casualties as they pushed into Germany and awoke to the danger of the Bolshevik hordes in the east.

  Himmler had also shown a willingness to negotiate the release of Jews and some prominent French prisoners in exchange for cash and war matériel, possibly as the preamble to wider diplomatic negotiations. He allowed 318 Jews to leave Germany for Switzerland in October 1944 and continued to negotiate the release of more with Swiss and Swedish intermediaries. “In a grotesque irony, Himmler had convinced himself that the key to the Reich’s salvation lay with the people which for three years he had been annihilating as its greatest enemy, the Jews,” the historian Peter Black wrote. Himmler indulged “in the illusion that once a good business relationship had been established between the SS and World Jewry, the latter would exercise its legendary influence to induce the Allies to open peace negotiations.” The negotiations were also a self-deluding effort to burnish his credentials for a role in postwar Germany and an attempt to distance himself from the regime’s crimes.

  In a world where this kind of fevered thinking was possible, Gertie was another potential stratagem, and one that carried fewer internal political risks than his dealings with the Swiss and Swedes. Besides Himmler, a series of senior Nazi figures—including Goebbels and Kaltenbrunner—had contemplated some kind of peace accord with either the Anglo-Americans or the Soviets, in order to divide the Allies, but all faced the same insurmountable hurdle. Hitler was completely opposed to negotiations. If Germany—and he—were to be defeated, then Germany, in his mind, did not deserve to exist.

  So while much of the suspicion that Gertie was a spy was lifting—with the Foreign Ministry concluding that her “capture was a mistake with no sinister tinge about it”—there was still interest in learning if she could be used to support German war aims or provide insight into the enemy. An official from the Propaganda Ministry along with his wife, who spoke excellent English, questioned Gertie about the attitudes of Americans to the war and asserted that undisciplined U.S. soldiers would surely tire of the fighting—a perennial and wishful Nazi trope. Gertie was roused to inform him that the war would be very short and the outcome certain. “There’s no question about it,” she said, smiling.

  The man, nonplussed, asked Gertie if she would like to write a note to Patton.

  “Of course, but how do I know it will be delivered?” Gertie asked.

  “There are ways,” came the reply.

  “Dear General Patton,” Gertie immediately wrote on a piece of proffered notepaper. “I am waiting like Lili Marlene at the barracks gate for Old Blood and Guts to come and get me. Gertrude Legendre.”

  The official took the note, folded it carefully, and left; it would not make for good copy.

  A succession of Gestapo and other officials came by to speak to her, some simply curious to see an American woman in uniform. “I feel like a rare animal in a zoo,” she shouted at one visitor. “Couldn’t I charge admission for your people to come and look at me.”

  At another point, it was suggested that Gertie might get to meet Hitler. It was unclear to her what was meant by the offer, or even if it was real, but she said she wasn’t interested, infuriating her hosts, who railed at her for her impertinence. Later, she wondered if she hadn’t been too hasty in her refusal. “It might have been interesting to have a close look at the tyrant,” she mused.

  * * *

  —

  At the lakeside villa, Gertie was mostly surrounded by true believers who had absorbed (or at least appeared to have) the relentlessly promulgated Nazi line that German retreats on both fronts were temporary setbacks. Beattie also said the people he encountered in Berlin “live[d] in a strange world of fears and fantastic hopes.” The Russians, they believed, had stalled out on the Reich’s eastern border, while the Allies, should they attempt to cross the Rhine, would be wading into a bloodbath—reminiscent of World War I’s Verdun or the Somme—as they encountered Germany’s stoutest defenses.

  “They were convinced of an ultimate German victory, even if it took two years to win it,” Gertie noted. “Only in Berlin did I find such confidence and assurance. Elsewhere, soldiers and civilians alike put up a token show of diluted patriotism, but they were like small boys whistling in the dark to keep up their courage.”

  On her second night at the house, when the air raid sirens began to howl, Gertie and the others rushed to a bunker in the garden, about forty feet from the building. They went down a narrow passage paneled with pine to a stuffy underground room. Gertie thought it was a death trap and that the villa’s cellar would have been much safer. She came to dread the time spent in the shelter—during the day when the American bombers came, at night when the British struck. Gertie had a fear of being enclosed underground. She could tolerate a small cell—or a night in a hunting blind—if there was a window to allow in daylight or see the stars, but she found the claustrophobia of bomb shelters unbearable.

  Sitting in the semidarkness, she could feel the concussion from the bombs exploding in the city. After raids, the garden was littered with slivers of silver tinfoil, dropped by the Allied planes as they approached Berlin to confuse German radar systems. One day, Gertie saw “two of our planes destroyed” and “nose dive to earth in black smoke,” though some of the crew appeared to escape as two parachutes were visible in the sky. For the most part, southwestern Berlin was not a target of the Allied attacks, but there was still visible damage from errant bombs—some destroyed villas, broken roof tile and shards of glass in the gutters, and big craters in the woods.

  On December 5, the city witnessed a massive daytime raid by the U.S. Army Air Forces, with the distant murmur of up to five hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators, accompanied by groups of fighters, becoming a wall of noise as the planes approached. “All traffic had stopped, even to the subways, and the whole city was under cover,” Beattie wrote. “As the bombs struck in thick swarms, the ground even here on the southern edge of the city shook and shuddered. In the northern distance, we could see the great columns of smoke and dust billow up and then stretch out eastward in a heavy pall over the whole city.”

  There were, he noted, no German planes in the sky to defend Berlin.

  Several weeks after Gertie arrived in Berlin, on December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a surprise attack in the Ardennes and quickly overran weakly defended American lines, seizing thousands of prisoners and, for a brief period, looking as if they had the Allies on the run. But the Wehrmacht, even though it had shifted some of its best divisions and equipment to support the offensive, no longer had sufficient military and industrial strength to defeat the Allies, though it did inflict a serious bloodying. Each side suffered tens of thousands of casualties.

  The attack, and its early success, was a matter of jubilation at the villa. One of the staff told Gertie that the Wehrmacht was on a straight path back to Paris. Gertie, yielding no ground, said she still fully expected to be greeted by Patton in Berlin. And indeed the Battle of the Bulge—so-called for the protrusion of terri
tory the Germans temporarily held—was Hitler’s last throw of the dice on the western front. Begining in early January, it was apparent to the more clear-eyed Nazis that from now on there was only defense.

  * * *

  —

  Occasionally, the most senior Nazi officials, including Kaltenbrunner—“a tall man, slightly stooped with an unpleasant face”—came to the villa, but Gertie had no interaction with them. When Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, visited the house, she asked to speak to him to plead her case for release but was not allowed near him. (Kaltenbrunner, following his trial at Nuremberg, was executed by hanging by the Allies on October 16, 1946; Müller vanished at the end of the war but is believed to have committed suicide a few hundred yards from Hitler’s bunker, though a body has never been found.)

  Gertie’s world mostly centered on the bedroom and an office–cum–sitting room across the hall that was decorated with a terra-cotta bust of Hitler, which she found “revolting,” and a propaganda painting of a heavily pregnant young German woman. At night, when no guests were present, she was sometimes allowed to sit downstairs with one of the staff and listen to music on the radio.

  Gertie gradually developed a friendship with Zieschang, the young interpreter, who brought her English books to read and walked with her in the garden. There were weeping willow trees around the house, including one at the edge of Little Wannsee Lake, and just beyond it a wooden dock jutting out into the water. Directly across the lake from the International Criminal Police Commission building was the boathouse of a rowing club.

  The policewomen didn’t share Gertie’s enthusiasm for exercise, so she and Zieschang were left alone on the grounds of the villa; when an official from the Foreign Ministry visited, he gave permission for Gertie to walk, with her female guards, in the surrounding neighborhood. “It was an odd feeling, walking undetected as an American along streets filled with Germans,” Gertie noted. In her raincoat, she “looked like the other untidy civilians.” The ability to walk outside the wire was a privilege accorded to other POWs; American and British soldiers who had been interned for a long period were allowed such supervised walks at some camps. Beattie strolled in nearby Zehlendorf, recording his observations in his journal, which he published after the war as Diary of a Kriegie. (“Kriegie” was the English abbreviation of the German word for prisoner of war, Kriegsgefangener.)

  The Germans, remarkably, allowed prisoners to keep diaries, though they were subject to examination and confiscation. Gertie was careful to write nothing that would lead to the seizure of her journal. But in recording the day’s activities, she was also creating prompts to recall what was not included. Beattie, another avid diary writer, included as many “hints” as possible about the incidents or thoughts he couldn’t explicitly record. “The job was made the easier,” he noted, “by the fact that a prisoner’s existence is so dull that even minor events take on tremendous importance at the time and impress themselves deeply on the mind.”

  * * *

  —

  Gertie and Zieschang talked endlessly, and the interpreter, who had never been out of Germany and had been weaned on Nazi propaganda, seemed bewildered and upset by some of what she learned from their conversations. When Gertie told her that most of the Jews in Germany had been murdered by the Nazis, Zieschang cried, “No. That cannot be! They have only been deported”—a measure of either how sheltered she was or her willful ignorance, because Germany was “awash with rumors about the mass killing of Jews in the east.” Moreover, Zieschang had spent the previous two years in the employ of the Gestapo.

  Some Germans believed the bombing of their cities was vengeance for the pogroms against the Jews, especially the events of November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht—when anti-Semitic violence broke out across the Reich. Some of the Nazi structures built on the scorched ruins of Jewish life were now emblematic of the Reich’s destruction. “In Wetzlar, Braunschweig, Solingen, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Siegen, Cologne, Emden and Hamburg, massive concrete bunkers had been erected on vacant sites where synagogues had stood until November 1938. In Cologne and Aachen, people connected the burnt synagogues with the churches destroyed in the air raids, evoking a sense of divine retribution,” according to the historian Nicholas Stargardt. “As a clerical informer summarized such views for the local Gestapo: ‘Yes, it’s deserved…everything avenges itself on earth.’ ”

  Zieschang was equally incredulous that the Nazis used slave labor, even though most of the work around the villa was performed by two Russian women who had no coats or stockings but were required to shovel snow, feed the rabbits and chickens kept on the grounds, and work in the kitchen. “But the wages are high,” Zieschang protested when Gertie told her millions of people were being “driven like beasts” and that Germany would pay for its crimes.

  Zieschang translated the newspapers every day and listened to Gertie’s assessment of the war’s actual progress, despite the “strategic retreats” and “stout resistance” of Germany’s defenders cited in Nazi propaganda. Zieschang even risked her life on one or two occasions to let Gertie listen to the BBC, standing guard as Gertie glued her ear to the radio set.

  While she was sent into the Wannsee house to interpret for Gertie and report on her, Zieschang developed “sincere affection” for Gertie, according to OSS officials who questioned the German woman after the war—so much so she seemed to them reluctant to say anything that might cause Gertie trouble.

  Zieschang brought shoe polish, sewing thread, and face cream to the villa, as well as bottles of beer to supplement Gertie’s diet. At the villa, Gertie typically had coffee, bread, and jam for breakfast; soup and potatoes and occasionally lung or liver for lunch; and potatoes, cabbage, semolina pudding, and cheese or pumpernickel for dinner. Compared with the rations of ordinary Berliners, it was a daily feast and was designed to impress on Gertie that the food situation in Germany was fine, according to Zieschang. Gertie also got a pack of cigarettes each week. “Awful,” she declared, but she smoked them nonetheless.

  Gertie was shedding pounds and none too happy with her appearance. “My hair, with little natural curl, hung much too long and gave my face an even thinner aspect, pointing up the hollows in my cheeks and the blanched skin. I looked much worse than I felt. I felt fine. I liked the idea of being thin,” though she noted that her “unpressed skirt was too large around the waist” and “baggy in the seat.” She used her pocket comb and Revlon lipstick to do what she could and employed her small pocketknife to both trim her nails and spread jam.

  When her underwear had fallen to shreds, Müller, the Gestapo interpreter, was ordered to get her a new set. The orange-colored items he returned with, including stockings that seemed designed for a “muscular trapeze artist,” led Gertie to observe that as a personal shopper the official was “something less than a novice.”

  14

  Cologne

  Christmas arrived bitterly cold under clear skies and a pale sun. Gertie was allowed a hot bath—her first non-sponge cleaning since the shower fiasco in Wittlich shortly after her capture. It felt like a luxury, and Gertie was serenely content when she emerged from the water. Zieschang and Sebastian, the more pleasant of the two policewomen, took Gertie on a walk across the frozen lake past the holiday skaters to the pine forest on the opposite shore. The snow there was soft and untouched.

  “All about us was unfenced space,” Gertie recalled. “I exulted in the feeling of freedom.”

  Gertie and her minders made Christmas cards for one another, drawing and coloring in the days leading up to the holiday. Zieschang also wrote a fairy tale about a little girl called Gertie whose “magic boots” took her to a strange land where she was imprisoned first in a castle and then in a big house: “Everywhere there was busy life going on, but she was secluded, all she could do was sit there and wait for her old friend who was full of blood and guts, that he might come to her rescue. But he could not come as th
e strange country was surrounded by a strong wall and he had to fight fiercely and tried in vain to break through.”

  That night, wearing a beard of white cotton, Gertie played Santa Claus, filling a rucksack with potatoes wrapped in homemade tinsel—the silver tinfoil dropped by the American bombers. The others shared wine and champagne, chocolate and cookies—war loot that was given to the villa’s German staff as gifts. Gertie also got some presents from her minders—writing paper, a candle, face cream, stockings, a pencil and eraser, and—her favorite—a flask of vodka. It was a choice bounty compared with the Christmas of ordinary Berliners, who were subsisting on meager rations and trading in gallows humor—“Be practical, give a coffin.”

  The festivities couldn’t prevent a feeling of gloom settling over Gertie. For weeks, all her inquiries about Sweden had been dismissed with a curt “no news.”

  “Your side has not yet asked for you,” one official said.

  “They probably don’t even know I’m alive,” Gertie protested.

  She was allowed to write a cable to the U.S. ambassador in London, but never knew if it was sent.

  Her mind inevitably drifted to Sidney, her girls, and the plantation in South Carolina. Sidney wrote to her on Christmas Day, telling her—in a letter she never received—“about the only consolation that I can give you is that you can be fairly certain that this will probably be the worst Christmas that you will ever spend.”

  Gertie’s children passed Christmas in New York with their nanny and maid. They trimmed the tree on Christmas Eve and the following morning opened their stockings before breakfast, but the main presents had to wait until the meal was over. “It smacks of Miss Evans and is unmitigated cruelty,” Sidney wrote in another undelivered letter to Gertie, referring to the children’s governess.