A Guest of the Reich

by Peter Finn

  Back in Hawaii following his leave on the mainland, Sidney said he dreamed of Gertie, seeing her on the horizon, coming into sight, coming toward him. “I could see your smile, your brown eyes and the little curls on your forehead,” he wrote. “This letter brings you all my love and I can only hope that before very long they will exchange you.”

  Gertie’s journey through Hitler’s collapsing Reich was far from over. The custodian of the house, who made no secret of her dislike for Gertie and had some influence with Kaltenbrunner, wanted the American woman, her guards, and her interpreter out of the villa. Clemens, the Gestapo officer, proposed in a memo that Gertie be transferred back to the Allies but after she had been indoctrinated with the idea “that German defeat was impossible.” The proposal never reached Himmler, because Müller, the Gestapo chief, refused to endorse it and believed there was some possibility she was a spy. Moreover, Gertie, who was told by Zieschang of the plan to brainwash her, said she would never agree to be anyone’s stooge—“even to save her life.”

  Clemens next proposed that Gertie be sent to the Liebenau women’s and children’s internment camp near Lake Constance. Before the war, the camp had been a facility for people with mental disabilities and was run by Catholic nuns. It was now used to house American and British female civilians and their children who were in Germany when war broke out or had been detained when the Germans overran the Low Countries and France. Treatment of the prisoners at the facility was relatively good, with adequate food and medical care.

  Gertie, however, was told that she was being transferred to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, leading to hours of panic. The prospect of being imprisoned in one of the Nazis’ notorious death camps, some of whose horrors had already been chronicled in the press before Gertie’s capture, was a moment of genuine and abject fear for her in an experience that for the most part she treated as another escapade. “My anxiety rose to fever proportions,” she said of the thought of the “cold and starvation or worse” if she was sent to a camp. But even when that threat eased, she still didn’t know her next destination, so her sense of dread during her final hours in Berlin never fully abated.

  The proposal to take Gertie to Liebenau was rejected by Himmler. The Reichsführer-SS had other plans for her. December 28 was her last day in Berlin.

  After leaving the villa, where Zieschang and other staff lined up to wave good-bye, Gertie was briefly taken back to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. “Town flat. Awful mess,” she observed as she passed back through the center of the city. She spent several hours in an office while a parade of officials glowered at her. She was driven from there to another packed train station, where soldiers were carrying their backpacks, guns, gas masks, and blanket rolls to the various platforms.

  The Gestapo agent who was escorting her, joined by the policewoman Sebastian, cleared a path through the crowd, which had surged toward the doors when the train—destination Cologne—first arrived. The station was full of shoving, shouting crowds desperate to get out of the doomed city. The agent, wearing a black coat and black fedora, merely announced himself, and people who had just been jostling for position in a scrum around the door meekly stood aside. With a word to the conductress, the official also secured a large first-class cabin, forcing about a dozen occupants out into the corridor. The carriage was left with numerous empty seats, and some of the displaced visibly seethed at their high-handed master but kept their counsel. The Gestapo agent “was all-powerful in gaining anything he wished by merely whispering the magic word of who he was,” Gertie observed.

  The following morning, all passengers were forced onto the platform in Solingen, north of Cologne, because a train just ahead had been destroyed by fighter planes and it blocked the tracks. The Gestapo agent commandeered places in a passing army truck, and Gertie and the policewoman clamBered into the rear, where they joined eight shivering, silent soldiers. “I was never colder in my life,” said Gertie, who sat on a wooden bench under a canvas top as they drove first to Düsseldorf. “Our feet and hands were near to freezing.”

  At a café in the city, they secured a surprisingly good meal of hot soup, ham, boiled potatoes, and cabbage. Despite the heat in the café, Gertie was told to keep her coat buttoned so she would not be recognized as the enemy. The Americans, the Gestapo agent told her, are “gangsters” and a “bunch of murderers,” and he insisted that German soldiers hated the United States with a homicidal intensity.

  Nazi propagandists portrayed enemy fliers as murderers, and Goebbels, in articles in 1944, said they should be killed like “mad dogs” when they bailed out of their stricken planes and were captured. There was also a desire to frighten German soldiers who were considering desertion by implying that they might face the same treatment from the Allies. As Hitler explained, “If I make it clear that I show no consideration for prisoners, but that I treat enemy prisoners without any consideration for their rights, regardless of reprisals, then quite a few [Germans] will think twice before they desert.” There were numerous atrocities against Allied prisoners—as they were captured, in the camps, and, especially, when the Germans were in retreat and moving POWs with them—but summary execution was never adopted as policy, in part because the regular German army, concerned about its own men, resisted any such move.

  On the road to Cologne, the truck twice pulled over and sheltered under trees as U.S. fighter planes raked the road. When they reached the Rhine just outside the city, the truck dropped Gertie and her escorts off to walk the rest of the way. They crossed the Hohenzollern Bridge in a snowstorm, the city’s famous cathedral rising blackened in front of them. Its twin spires were all the more spectral because so much of the rest of Cologne was flattened. “Nothing left,” Gertie thought.

  The city on the Rhine had been bombed more than 260 times; the cathedral by the shining curve of the river made Cologne easy to find for navigators. In 1942, it had been subjected to the first “thousand-bomber” raid by the Allies, and the Swiss consul described civilian morale “as well below zero.” A year later, over three consecutive nights of bombing, more tonnage fell on Cologne than all previous bombings combined. Whole sections of the city burned and collapsed. Clouds of phosphorus hung in the air from the incendiary bombs. Nearly six thousand people were killed.

  One former aircraft gunner told the German writer W. G. Sebald that he “could still see the burning city of Cologne even when they were on their way out again over the Dutch coast; it was a fiery speck in the darkness, like the tail of a motionless comet.”

  * * *

  —

  Gertie’s hair was white with snowflakes as she and her guards picked their way through the ruins. It seemed as if no one lived aboveground. Eventually, they descended into a fetid underground passageway lined with women, children, and babies huddling listlessly together—“the plight of the doomed,” Gertie thought. The Gestapo agent took her to a room where police officers were eating soup and bread. As they entered, an old man who tried to slip in with them had the door slammed in his face. “It’s all gone,” one of the policemen screamed. Gertie was given soup and coffee and then taken to an empty section of the cellar complex where a radio was broadcasting William Joyce, the American collaborator better known as Lord Haw-Haw—no doubt for her benefit.

  Gertie had thought Cologne was her destination, but the stop was just to obtain new transport. An hour later she was on the move again—and freezing again—this time in the back of a convertible that took her out of the city. Through a heavy mist, she began to see the night sky shimmering pink in the distance. Ahead was Bonn, and it was burning.

  The city had been hit by a heavy incendiary attack that afternoon, and whole sections were still ablaze. Driving through the streets, Gertie’s escorts stared ahead fixedly as the car skirted around burning rubble and blackened craters. Occasionally, she could hear the crash of a falling building. Residents were hauling furniture out of ho
mes near the fire line, while women carried and dragged children as they rushed to safety. What struck Gertie most was the strange quiet in the cauldron; people rushed about, but whatever noise they made was enveloped by the roar of the flames. The driver was forced to make numerous detours, sometimes stopping to remove debris from the street. But just beyond the worst of the fires, he hit an object in the street, and the front axle was damaged. The car was immobilized, but another vehicle was quickly commandeered and the journey continued, out of Bonn, along the Rhine, in silence.

  At 2:00 a.m., the car passed by a series of machine-gun posts and entered a yard surrounded by a ten-foot-high barbed-wire fence. Gertie trudged through the snow toward a large building perched on the Rhine embankment. She found herself in the lobby of an aging hotel with soldiers behind the reception desk. “I was completely befuddled,” Gertie said. She was escorted to a dark room on the third floor and told to report downstairs for breakfast at 9:00 a.m.

  “Are there other Americans here?” she asked. “Am I alone? Where am I?”

  “I don’t know” was the only answer the policewoman Sebastian could give her.

  Gertie watched from her window as the Gestapo agent and Sebastian left. “Wish to God I knew where I was,” Gertie said to herself. “So much mystery.”

  She was happy to be near the front, however. “Better chance for liberation,” she decided.

  The room was sparsely furnished, but the bed was comfortable and warm and Gertie was soon asleep. She woke in time to meet her 9:00 a.m. summons and walked downstairs unescorted, passing soldiers posted on every floor. As she reached the lobby, she followed the buzz of multiple conversations to a large salon where about 130 men—and 1 woman—milled about.

  A hush fell over the room. A man rose to meet her. “Madame, bienvenue à Godesberg,” he said. “I am General Germain. Allow me to introduce you to my compatriots.”

  Gertie wasn’t wearing the magic boots of Zieschang’s Christmas fairy tale, but she had crossed into a strange world within Hitler’s realm.

  15

  Bad Godesberg

  The crowd of Frenchmen and one Frenchwoman were called “special and honored” prisoners of the SS. The place was the Rheinhotel Dreesen, one of Hitler’s favorite places to stay before the war. And Gertie had entered a parallel Nazi detention system whose relative privileges stood in stark contrast to the horrors and barbarism of the death camps.

  The Nazis created a network of castles, hotels, private villas, and purposely built houses inside concentration camps to detain mostly high-ranking aristocratic, political, diplomatic, or military figures from the occupied countries. King Leopold III of Belgium, for instance, was held under house arrest at his royal castle of Laeken before he was transferred to a castle in Hirschstein in eastern Germany in June 1944, and from there, near the end of the war, to a villa on Lake Wolfgang in Austria.

  There had been a small number of “special and honored” prisoners before the war—mostly at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, where prominent detainees, including the former Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, were held in comfortable quarters apart from other prisoners; Schuschnigg’s wife and daughter came to live with him and were allowed to come and go from the camp as they pleased. A castle in Itter, Austria—converted into a hotel and then a prison—held the former French prime ministers Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud along with some other French luminaries.

  “Special prisoners were prisoners that for reasons of state were to be kept separately in or near the camp [and] were not supposed to mingle with other prisoners, or whose imprisonment was to be kept secret,” said Rudolf Höss, the notorious commander at Auschwitz. “Before the war, they were few; during the war, the number increased considerably.”

  Eventually, the system would house hundreds of prisoners: members of several European royal families; German dissidents whom Hitler or Himmler didn’t wish to be killed, at least not immediately; senior political officials from erstwhile allies, including Italy and the Baltics; the large group of French nationals now surrounding Gertie—and Gertie herself.

  “Mrs. Legendre was not treated as a prisoner of war but as a special prisoner,” according to Zieschang.

  Most of the French gentlemen greeting Gertie were retired generals and colonels who had been arrested in the run-up to D-day or shortly thereafter and taken to Germany, ostensibly to prevent their recall into government or military service following liberation. Some had been summoned for routine questioning and had shown up voluntarily, not imagining that the Nazis would have much interest in retired officers. But they were wanted as bargaining chips in any future negotiations with the Allies, and their detention was also a kind of implicit threat that German prisoners of war, about to be captured in large numbers, should be well treated or else these elderly French citizens could suffer more.

  Gertie was initially swamped by dozens of people wishing to shake her hand and ask her about the state of France, especially Paris. “Had much damage been done to the city?” “Was the Metro running?” “Was there enough food?” The prisoners were starved for information, and Gertie became aware that they had received no letters from home. Their only news was German.

  Interrupting the crush of questions, a young boy stepped into the room and rang a small bell: breakfast was served. The Rheinhotel Dreesen was still a hotel with its own civilian staff all within the accoutrements of a military prison camp. The Nazis’ code name for this special camp for French VIPs was Winzerstube—the “winemaker’s lounge.”

  The Frenchwoman at the center table in the dining room—her tangle of gray hair resistant to her efforts to pin and bun it—appearing gaunt but still exuding a composed authority was Marie-Agnès Cailliau de Gaulle, the older sister of General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French. Gertie was seated next to her. She would come to know Cailliau well within this cloistered community and found her kind but deeply despondent over the fate of her husband, imprisoned at the Buchenwald death camp.

  She was endowed with some of the copious haughtiness of her distinguished sibling. “At times we could distract her with questions about her famous brother. She would become proud as she extolled ‘Mon Frere Charles’ as the saviour of France, and would forget for a moment that the soup had no seasoning,” Gertie recalled.

  Cailliau was also bemused by Gertie, who struck her as outrageously American in her casual approach to life and her gender. “She was a smart and friendly woman, but her hair was very short, she wore men’s pants, and the fact that she smoked a pipe did not make her very feminine and astonished my comrades,” the Frenchwoman observed.

  * * *

  —

  After the fall of France, Cailliau and her husband, Alfred, had lived outside St.-Étienne, part of Vichy France, the southern part of the country not occupied by the Nazis and governed by a collaborationist regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain. The Cailliaus, fervent if quiet supporters of de Gaulle and the Resistance, had moved there from their home in Le Havre, on the coast of Normandy, to try to live beyond the scrutiny of the Nazis. Three of their sons had joined the Free French in either England or North Africa, while another, having escaped from a POW camp in Germany, was part of the Resistance. A fifth son—twenty-four-year-old Charles—was killed in combat fighting the Nazis in 1940. A sixth son, the youngest, lived with his parents.

  In April 1943, on a visit to Normandy, Alfred and Marie-Agnès were arrested at the home of a cousin and transferred to separate wings of Fresnes Prison, a facility south of Paris where the Gestapo interrogated and brutalized captured members of the Resistance. The Cailliaus, because of Marie-Agnès’s lineage and their minimal intelligence value, were not tortured, but the poor diet and crowded cells took a toll on the couple; she was fifty-three, her husband sixty-six, when they were arrested. For Alfred, Fresnes was prelude to the nightmare of Buchenwald, the concentra
tion camp outside Weimar in central Germany. In January 1944, Marie-Agnès heard through the prison grapevine that her husband had been taken to Germany. She did not know that he had been stripped naked and put in a cattle car in bitter cold for the three-day trip.

  The Nazis had different plans for Madame Cailliau. In July 1944, as the Allies broke out of Normandy and threatened Paris, the Gestapo began to summarily execute prisoners at Fresnes. But Marie-Agnès was a potentially valuable chit. She was taken under armed guard to the Gare de l’Est in Paris and placed in a reserved compartment on a train bound for Germany. “I was sad to leave France,” she recalled, “while everything announced the imminent deliverance of Paris.”

  Cailliau arrived at the Rheinhotel Dreesen to find it already packed with retired French officers—forty-two generals and seventy-five colonels—and a smattering of other nationalities, including a former Lithuanian diplomat and a Montenegrin prince. Their political leanings ran the spectrum from supporters of the Vichy regime to de Gaulle’s Free French, but ideological differences were kept in check within the cocoon of the hotel, and General Maxime Germain’s authority as the senior officer was respected by all, as was the social preeminence of Cailliau.

  There were also two German prisoners: an industrialist who claimed to have been a friend of Hitler’s at one time but had fallen out with the dictator, and his invalid sister who spent most of her time in her room watched by a German nurse. The industrialist, a large, bald man, wrote almost daily letters of complaint to the führer, as well as “I told you so” notes about the disastrous progress of the war. “We called him ‘Le Mammouth,’ after the lumbering prehistoric creature he resembled,” Gertie said, “and suspected that he was in reality a stooge planted by the Germans in our company for the purpose of picking up odd scraps of information.”