Eric Lichtblau - Return to the Reich: A Holocaust Refugee’s Secret Mission to Defeat the Nazis

Copyright 2019 by Eric Lichtblau

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lichtblau, Eric, author.

Title: Return to the Reich : a Holocaust refugees secret mission to defeat the Nazis / Eric Lichtblau.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009834 (print) | LCCN 2019011526 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328529909 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328528537 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH : Mayer, Frederick, 19212016. | SpiesUnited StatesBiography. | United States. Office of Strategic ServicesOfficials and employeesBiography. | JewsGermanyFreiburg im BreisgauBiography. | World War, 19391945Secret serviceUnited States. | World War, 19391945Underground movementsAustria. | Espionage, AmericanEuropeHistory20th century. | Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany)Biography. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / World War II. | HISTORY / Holocaust.

Classification: LCC D 810. S 8 (ebook) | LCC D 810. S 8 M 337 2019 (print) | DDC 940.54/8673092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009834

v1.0919

Photo credits appear on .

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

Cover photographs: mountains, Andifo / Shutterstock; parachute, courtesy USAMHI

Author photograph, taken in Oberperfuss, Austria Daniel Jarosch

Images taken from the interviews of Frederick Mayer (1997) provided by USC Shoah Foundation. For more information: http://sfi.usc.edu/.

Excerpt from the poem by Hans Wynberg originally appeared in an email to Marjorie Bingham dated March 9, 2009. Lines reprinted with permission.

To the ZollersLeslie, Matthew, Andrew, Elliot, and Harold... who inspire me every day

This book grew out of an impromptu discussion about heroism and the Holocaust. I was meeting at a Washington coffee shop a few years ago with Eli Rosenbaum, a dogged Nazi hunter who was a critical resource for my last book. Skimming the days news that morning, I came across the obituary of an obscure European man who hid countless Jews from the Nazis seven decades earlier. I mentioned the obituary to Eli, admitting with some embarrassment that I had never heard of this man before. How was it, I asked, that so many anonymous people did such heroic things during the Holocaust, yet we only learned about them after they died?

Eli had no ready response. Okay, I continued, so tell me someone that Ill wish I had heard about before they die. This time Eli had an immediate answer. You should meet Fred Mayer, he said. A Holocaust survivor and a war hero. He lives in West Virginia. Well into his nineties now.

So began my introduction to Freddy Mayer, as Eli gave me a brief recap of his remarkable life: from Jewish teenager in Germany to Holocaust refugee in America to spy and war hero in Nazi-occupied Austria. After all these years, there was a campaign going on to award him the vaunted Medal of Honor, Eli said.

I wanted to meet Freddy. I had been writing about villains for yearsNazis in World War II, modern-day scoundrels in the US capitaland his story seemed like an inspiring respite. Eli helped me get in touch with him, and in February 2016 I drove the ninety minutes from Washington, DC, to Mayers cottage in the woods of West Virginia, not far from a casino and a racetrack. I spent a moving afternoon with him. At the age of ninety-four, he had trouble with his hearingthe lingering effects of his treatment by the Nazis, I learnedbut otherwise he seemed remarkably spry. Living by himself, he was still driving, still shoveling snow, still delivering Meals on Wheels to less independent elderly neighbors. And he could still tick off the names and dates associated with his war story in rapid-fire succession. He struck me as ageless.

We talked about what it was like for him to grow up as a Jew in Germany, a pleasant childhood turned toxic by the Nazis. He told me about his fathers resistance to leaving a country where he had fought proudly as a decorated officer in World War I. We talked about his life as a teenage immigrant in Brooklyn, and of course we talked about his Nazi spy mission.

I had already read a bit about the three-man espionage team he led into the Austrian Alps. I told him how inconceivable it seemed that he managed to pose undetected as a German officer on the ground in a Nazi stronghold for more than two months, gathering valuable intelligence on military operations. He smiled and gently corrected me. The Nazi officer was just one of his disguises; he had also transformed himself into a French laborer at a Nazi factorysimply changing the pronunciation of his name to Freh-deh-REEK May-YEHR, he told me in an exaggerated French accent. He laughed as he said it, flashing the wide grin that I would come to learn was a personal trademark.

He turned deadly serious, though, as he recounted for me in wrenching detail his eventual capture by the Gestapo. Standing up from his chair slowly but determinedly, he showed me how Nazi interrogators hoisted him onto poles and tortured him for hours. In slow motion, he demonstrated the roundhouse punch delivered to his chin as he reenacted the gruesome scene. Then he revived his French accent to describe how he had kept his mouth shut, telling his Nazi interrogators that he was just a simple workman who knew nothing about any American spy operations. Je ne sais rien! I know nothing!

Telling reminders of the war dotted the house. On a kitchen wall was a large photo of an airborne B-24 Liberator, the aircraft on which hed flown back into the Reich; it was signed by the members of his mission. By the door was a three-foot statue of William Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency that dropped him into Austria. And in a glass-enclosed frame were a half-dozen medals he had been awarded. Freddy wanted me to see another medal, too: the golden eagle of Tyrol, which the Austrian embassy had given him four decades after the war. He rummaged through a dresser in his bedroom looking for it, then gave up in frustration. The medal, like his story, seemed to have been stashed away somewhere and largely forgotten.

I told Freddy Id like to write about himmaybe for a book, or maybe for the New York Times, where I was an investigative reporter based in Washington. He shrugged, as if to say, Whats the big deal? I would learn that the shrug, like his smile, was another of Freddys trademarks. Eh, what more is there to say? he asked me. Over the last forty years, there had been several books and documentaries about his mission and other notable OSS spy operations targeting the Nazis. He pulled out one book from the 1970s to show me.

I explained that I thought there was still a lot left to say. Many people remained sadly unfamiliar with the wartime heroism of refugees like him, I said, and it seemed like a particularly ripe time to remind them. During the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald J. Trump was vilifying immigrants as the central plank of his platform. At the same time, he had triggered a mystifying debate about the meaning of heroism when he said that Senator John McCain, who had spent more than five years as a POW in Vietnam, was not a war herobecause he had been captured. Freddys story, from war refugee to war hero, fascinated me: too often it seemed that America had forgotten its true heroes and their origins.

At the end of a conversation that could have lasted all night, Freddy asked me to come visit with him again soon. Just two months later, in April 2016, he died after a sudden decline. As it turned out, I did write about Freddys heroism for the