A Guest of the Reich

by Peter Finn

  On the other side of the river, Gertie bounded up a switchbacking mountain road, which rose through heavy forest, to the hotel. She was eventually ordered to slow down and wait for those struggling up behind her. When she reached the hotel, she could see the roof of the Rheinhotel and hear the roar of cannons pressing in on the besieged town. “If only,” she thought, “the Americans would hurry!” But Königswinter, too, was a temporary stop.

  * * *

  —

  The Petersberg Hotel, shuttered since 1939, was not prepared for guests and was without heat, water, and light. Gertie was assigned to a once luxurious room overlooking the river, though the cold forced her to sleep fully clothed and with her coat on. That night she watched the artillery fire flash like lightning and “signal flares hung in the sky like Japanese lanterns.” But conditions at the hotel were miserable. Water was brought in by the pail but was not potable, the toilets didn’t flush, and no one could bathe properly. The prisoners, already dirty, became even more disheveled.

  The amount of food fell sharply; ginger biscuits replaced bread. A small ration of cider or white wine was issued to compensate for the lack of drinking water. Gertie used the wine to wash her teeth and cleaned her face with cold cream.

  The Germans had finally agreed to Cailliau’s repeated pleas that her husband be transferred from Buchenwald, and he joined the evacuees at the hotel. “The man was like a walking cadaver,” Gertie noted; he had lost so much weight that his wife at first had difficulty recognizing him.

  He provided the group with its first hard knowledge of the depravity at Buchenwald, describing the hundreds who died or were murdered every day, their bodies dumped in pits, doused with gasoline, and burned. “We were told of prisoners, too weak to stand, being clubbed to death and thrown into the pits, in some instances before they were actually dead,” Gertie said. “The stories of M. Cailliau underscored the patent savagery we knew the Nazis employed in their treatment of the lesser orders of their prisoners. Now that the Germans were at bay, we were not a little alarmed that it might extend…to those of us who were considered special prisoners.” It was a legitimate fear. As the regime collapsed, it began to execute some of this category of prisoner, particularly prominent Germans involved in anti-Hitler plots who had been kept alive with a view to using them for show trials or other propaganda purposes after the war was won. In April 1945, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer were both hanged at the Flossenbürg concentration camp, while Georg Elser, who had tried to kill Hitler in 1939, was shot at Dachau, where he had been kept in special accommodations pending his public prosecution. “But such killings were merely the tip of the iceberg,” the historian Ian Kershaw noted. “With the regime lurching almost visibly out of control, prisoners, whether in concentration camps or in state penitentiaries, lived or died at the whim of their guards or jailers. Violence towards prisoners, already escalating wildly, now became ubiquitous.”

  On March 4, about eighty of the French officers were taken away. Rumor had it they were going to Bavaria, but no one at the hotel was certain of their fate. Their departure deepened the anxiety of those left behind.

  By March 6, the gunfire was heavy and close. Ferries and rowboats shuttled back and forth across the Rhine as people fled the advancing Allies. Word reached the hotel that Cologne, the fourth-largest city in the Reich, had been breached and was about to fall. VII Corps had pushed into the almost empty city, reduced to 10,000 residents from its normal population of 770,000. “Sherman gunners systematically burned out upper floors with white phosphorous while GI infantrymen grenaded the cellars,” the historian Rick Atkinson wrote. They often found themselves fighting pensioners, because the main German forces had already left, blowing up the Hohenzollern Bridge, which Gertie had crossed in snowfall months earlier.

  On the night of the seventh, the thunderous assault on Bonn, its center just five miles up the river, caused the windows of the hotel to rattle continuously. “The wind that brought the exhilarating sound to me was chilling, but I did not mind it so intense was my excitement,” Gertie said. She could hear American tanks rumbling on the other side of the river; she sometimes thought she heard the shouts of American voices. Tracer fire snapped across the river in both directions. There were German machine-gun nests in the forest around the hotel. To the northeast, the town of Siegburg was on fire after coming under assault with incendiaries. Gertie could hear the whoosh of buildings crumpling in sheets of flame. The artillery fire was relentless. Cracks appeared in the hotel walls, and plaster fell from the ceilings. Glass was strewn all over the floor as window after window blew out with a loud crack.

  “The effect from our lofty perch was like that of witnessing a pageant of destruction,” Gertie said. “It was a wildly exciting experience and I was thrilled as I have never been before.”

  It was already clear the Germans planned to retreat again. They had begun packing up equipment that afternoon. And as the evening wore on, they moved about the hotel in a state of panic. At seven the following morning, Gertie, having finally gone to bed, was awoken by a soldier flinging open her door.

  “Funf minute!” he shouted. “Schnell! Schnell!

  “Sie sind die letzte…verstanden!” he shouted at Gertie. “You are the last one…understand!”

  She rushed down to the lobby and stuffed some gingersnaps in her pocket. Outside, a column of the remaining prisoners had been formed to march down the mountain. This time there would be no buses, and some of the French officers were forced to abandon their suitcases. Gertie carried just a small rucksack with a few essentials, including a pint of white wine and her trusty tin hat. She had left a straw bag behind to lighten her load on the forced march.

  The column struggled down the mountain in a cold sleet, flanked on either side by German soldiers and detouring around bomb craters, before they eventually reached a main road. There they joined a procession of fleeing civilians—some pushing carts or baby carriages, others on bikes and horse-drawn wagons or jammed into trucks. Some vehicles were abandoned in ditches. Mixed in among the stream of humanity were other prisoners, Russians and Poles, being driven along roughly by soldiers. Camouflaged tanks and military trucks added to the caravan.

  Some of the French prisoners were struggling, but Madame Cailliau, Gertie noticed, “was swinging along remarkably well” in the rain. There were occasional breaks to rest, smoke, and munch on the gingersnaps.

  By noon, they had reached the village of Oberpleis, where they were taken to the railway station and piled into empty freight carriages so they could shelter and rest. Several hours later, three men, whose smug authority marked them as Gestapo, approached the carriages and scanned the prisoners. One of them nodded at Gertie.

  “Kommen Sie,” he said.

  Gertie said good-bye to her French comrades; she had a list of their names prepared by Prince Michael stitched into the lining of her coat. Her plan was to turn it over to the Allies if she was freed first. She dreaded being separated, believing that she was safer in the company of these “Internés d’Honneur.” But protest was futile.

  Gertie was deposited in the rear seat of a car and found the straw bag she had discarded at the hotel; clearly, the Germans had already planned her separation from the French group before she left Königswinter.

  The SS colonel who had commanded the guard force at the Rheinhotel came over to say good-bye.

  “You understand where you are going, do you not?” he said in English.

  “No, I haven’t the least idea,” Gertie replied.

  “You will be sent to your people; then you will return to us again,” he said.

  He offered her a cigarette, turned, and left. The driver started the car and pulled away.

  Gertie couldn’t decipher what the colonel had meant. Was she going home? Why would she come back?

  She thought of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, h
er favorite storybook, and said to herself, “My, I wonder what in the world is going to happen next?”

  17

  Kronberg

  A couple of weeks later, Gertie was back in a familiar if wildly improbable stance deep inside Nazi Germany—sitting in a deck chair, the afternoon sun on her face, with a loaded .22 rifle across her knees.

  She was scanning the sky for a hawk, which had attacked and killed two chickens at an estate near the town of Kronberg, a rich suburb of Frankfurt. Gertie’s German hosts wanted someone to kill the bird of prey. And who better than the American hunter? She had taken yet another strange detour on her journey across the Reich and become a houseguest at the country home of a German industrialist.

  After leaving the railway station at Oberpleis, the car carrying Gertie wound through a series of back roads before taking a major highway back toward Limburg an der Lahn and Diez. Progress was slow because the road was pockmarked with craters, some of them wide and deep. Three men in civilian clothes accompanied Gertie. The one in the front passenger seat watched for the approaching dots of Allied planes, and the driver sometimes pulled over to find cover until the threat of strafing had passed. No one spoke to her.

  Limburg had been badly damaged since Gertie last passed through on her way to Diez Castle, and the town was reduced to what she described as a series of “scarecrow houses.” The car continued south for another thirty miles before eventually pulling over by a large wrought-iron gate in Kronberg. Inside, a large modern home, camouflaged with green paint, sat at the base of a wooded hill with the rolling countryside of the Rhine-Main plain stretching out before its windows and terrace.

  One of Gertie’s escorts went inside, and ten minutes later a young woman, her coat draped casually over her shoulders, emerged from the house.

  “I am Mrs. Grieme,” she said in English. “You will stay here with us. We are very glad to have you.” Gertie followed her into a comfortable, well-furnished home as one of the men took up guard at the front door. Nena Grieme was warm but appeared unsettled, and it seemed clear to Gertie that her host had taken in this woman in an American uniform only at the insistence of the Gestapo and had not had much time to prepare.

  “Would you like a bath?” Grieme asked.

  “More than anything else in the world!” Gertie replied, her wide-eyed enthusiasm drawing a smile from the young German woman.

  Grieme led her to a bathroom with a large tub and a glass-doored shower, cakes of soap, and piles of towels, and Gertie tingled with excitement. “I soaked, scrubbed and luxuriated in the bath. I lathered myself repeatedly. I washed my hair over and over again, thoroughly for the first time since my capture. Refreshed, I put on my clean change of orange Gestapo underwear and washed out the set I had been wearing.”

  Gertie emerged to a cup of real, not ersatz, tea.

  “This is serving [as] a prisoner de luxe, in the most unconventional and perfect way,” she thought.

  Gertie was in the residence of Hans H. Grieme, a former executive with IG Farben, the massive chemical conglomerate that was a major contributor to the German war effort. He told Gertie he owned a machine tools factory in nearby Frankfurt.

  Grieme arrived home from the city that evening and immediately complained about the guard at the front door, deeming his presence an insult to the dignity of his household. After a loud argument with Gertie’s escorts and an equally tense phone call with persons unknown, the guard departed.

  Gertie was left with the impression that Grieme, forty-four, soft-featured and sporting thick spectacles, was “a man of unusual influence, for nowhere else in Germany had I seen or heard another person speak up” to Nazi officials in that manner.

  He asked Gertie for a promise that she would not try to escape and told her she was his guest until arrangements could be made to send her across the front lines. “My heart leaped at this information,” Gertie recalled. “I assured him that I would attempt nothing rash.”

  The lines were moving closer by the day. At that moment, some American forces had already formed a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Rhine at Remagen, between Bonn and Koblenz, and U.S. and British forces were staging to cross or push toward the river up and down hundreds of miles of front. “The inner door to Germany,” as one Wehrmacht general called it, had opened. And it was Patton’s divisions that were staring down Frankfurt, a city that the general called “another brick and stone wilderness” because of the bombing campaign.

  * * *

  —

  Gertie’s hosts lived in a twilight world of afternoon walks, evening cocktails, and dinner conversation laced with the dread of approaching ruin. The skies above them buzzed with American aircraft, and the air reverberated with the bombing of nearby cities, including Mainz, Wiesbaden, and Frankfurt, each tremor a harbinger of defeat. Yet, with a kind of equanimity bestowed by the certainty of their fate, the Griemes carefully packed their fine china for safekeeping, drank the best of their champagne, practiced their anti-Nazi lines, and waited, one day falling into the next, like a terminal patient conscious of every breath. “They are punch drunk, waiting to die, about to go down for the last time,” Gertie observed.

  On that first night, after a glass of French cognac, followed by a mouthwatering dinner of fresh eggs and canned tomatoes, Gertie went to bed and, bereft of the anxiety troubling the Griemes, fell into a deep sleep.

  The following morning, a beautiful spring day, Gertie circled the property. The structure, with its sharp lines, flat roof, and terraces, reminded her of “a modern country house in California.” The view was spectacular, but the pastoral setting was an illusion. The afternoon brought a series of air raids, and Gertie saw a squadron of B-26 Marauders just overhead before retreating to the house cellar, which was packed with frightened women and children; the Grieme house already held eighteen evacuees from Frankfurt. Grieme, who still commuted in and out of the city, reported later that night that his factory had just been destroyed in a bombing raid.

  * * *

  —

  Gertie settled into a sojourn of killing time and waiting for release while exploring the surrounding countryside with her new companions. Hans Grieme took her on a walk to Königstein im Taunus to get some milk. Her raincoat covered her uniform, and she drew no attention. The village of stone houses and narrow cobbled streets seemed physically untouched by the war, but there were signs warning residents not to provide shelter to deserting soldiers—an increasing problem on both fronts, but especially in the east; Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, estimated that 600,000 soldiers were avoiding combat. “Men who take themselves from the front are not deserving of bread from the homeland,” said Himmler, in an appeal to the German people in late January 1945, saying that “shirkers,” “cowards,” and “weaklings” must be returned to the battlefield. A few days later, he ordered deserters shot “on the spot.”

  Gertie was impressed that the shops were still honoring ration cards, even though the “American Army at this time was not more than 25 kilometers distant.” Mrs. Grieme had been provided with a ration card for Gertie; food was scarce and the family relied on preserved vegetables and fruits from the previous summer to supplement their food allowance.

  * * *

  —

  Grieme, relaxing in her presence, began to tell Gertie of his antipathy for the Nazi regime, emphasizing that he was not a party member and only wore a party pin on his lapel when at work; members were obliged to wear it at all times.

  “When Hitler came to power…we were quite sure he symbolized the hope of the German nation, but now…,” Grieme said, trailing off. “But you see he went too far. Before the German people realized it they had an absolute dictator on their hands whose capricious word became the supreme law.”

  Though she found him “intelligent, worldly, open-minded,” Gertie regarded his professed antifascism as a little too expedient. She was grateful
for the hospitality of the Griemes, but the evidence of their proximity to the Nazis was everywhere, from his business position and well-appointed home to the Russian girl, a forced laborer, tending the house and garden.

  “I thought to myself how easy it was for him to plead his case, in the shadow of doom for the structure he had somehow fitted into by reason of force or convenience,” she recalled. The Griemes’ wealthy friends, industrialists and bankers sheltering in the countryside as well, also voiced their hostility toward the regime—“no doubt, for my special benefit,” Gertie concluded.

  As Martha Gellhorn wrote in Collier’s magazine on May 26, 1945, in a report from defeated Germany, “No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and, as a matter of fact, in that town about twenty kilometers away it was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom…We have been waiting for the Americans. You came to befriend us. The Nazis are Schweinhunde.”

  “They knew they were losing,” Gertie said, and she was left to wonder if their warmth toward her was sincere or if they expected reciprocity should they soon become prisoners.

  Grieme was terrified not by the approaching Americans but by the possibility of the Soviet Union dominating a defeated Germany. It was a fear that the Nazis exploited endlessly to keep their people fighting. To stiffen resistance, for instance, Goebbels fabricated U.S. propaganda leaflets that he then had dropped on German cities promising all manner of revenge by the Americans, including the forced transfer of all German POWs to the Soviet Union regardless of where they were captured. It was part of a pervasive campaign and had some success, because Grieme, who had picked up some leaflets, believed they were produced by Americans. Beattie noted that German steadfastness “sprang from the devouring fear of ‘Bolshevism,’ the mass hypnosis with the impending Communist chaos, which the Nazis have managed to invoke.”