A Guest of the Reich Read online

  After Pearl Harbor, Jennings reenlisted and served in the Aleutians, the Alaska islands seized by the Japanese in June 1942 and retaken by the United States after some bitter fighting the following year. Jennings, a lieutenant commander, had been transferred in 1943 to the London branch of the OSS. His assignment was to help the spy service with its air operations; OSS relations with the U.S. Army Air Forces were often strained as the spies battled to secure planes to conduct their work.

  Jennings was also at loose ends. He was scheduled to leave for London early the following week and from there to return to the United States. He had promised his mother he would be able to spend Christmas with her. Listening to the reporters, he, too, was soon infatuated with the idea of getting closer to the western front, though one of the reporters also discussed the risks. Bill Hearst of the International News Service, the agency founded by his father, William Randolph Hearst, told Jennings that three correspondents had recently been captured. Edward W. Beattie Jr. of the United Press, John Mecklin of The Chicago Sun, and Wright Bryan of NBC and The Atlanta Journal had stumbled into German hands while driving near the French city of Chaumont. The front lines were dangerously fluid.

  Jennings, undaunted, said he could borrow an old Peugeot convertible, originally German property but now with “USA” tags and an American flag sticker on its bumper. The car was a little dilapidated, Jennings confessed, but it would get them there and back. Gertie said she could possibly arrange for them to say hello to Patton at his headquarters near Luxembourg.

  At the last minute, the trip became all the more urgent for Gertie. She had gotten a letter from her husband, Sidney, telling her that he had finally been granted permission to travel home from Hawaii for a break—the first leave he had received since he was commissioned after Pearl Harbor. “The impossible has happened,” he told her, “a months duty on the mainland and a months leave, making a total of two months on the mainland…It will be such heaven to pick up our lives again.”

  He said he would leave Oahu on October 1 and suggested they meet in New York City, where their two young children, Landine, eleven, and Bokara, four, had been in the care of their longtime nanny. Gertie and Sidney both missed their girls, but with none of the fervor they felt for each other. Children, in their milieu, were to be enjoyed, but in small doses; the quotidian work of parenting was best left to maids and governesses. “Watching their lives,” their youngest daughter commented, “was like looking at a movie in installments—most of which I never saw.”

  Gertie now knew that the trip to Luxembourg might well be her last chance to get close to the front in order “to smell the fighting.” She could get up and back for one last adventure before flying home to Sidney; she felt sure Bruce would sanction her reassignment.

  “Just received this minute the great news about your return to the States on leave. Hooray! Hooray! How marvelous,” Gertie wrote back to her husband. “Of course I can return and will…beat it home in all speed…a little shooting, a bit of sea and sun life and Oh what fun together. [Here’s] to our happy future darling—I too can’t wait.”

  2

  Luxembourg City

  Paris was overcast when Gertie and Jennings set off early on the morning of September 23. “We rode along straight roads of richly plowed fields that looked the same as in peace time,” Gertie observed. “Only the occasional remains of a burned out truck or tank gave one the feeling of war.” By noon the rain was pouring through the Peugeot’s rotted canvas top; Gertie tried unsuccessfully to patch it with band-aids but the water kept pouring down their necks. It was just the first portent that the trip was ill-fated.

  At Compiègne, about fifty miles northeast of Paris, they blew out a tire. After much discussion with some locals, they eventually found a junkyard and a replacement that fit the rim; they continued undaunted in sheets of rain another fifty miles to Saint-Quentin. The town was packed with soldiers, and they wandered fruitlessly from hotel to hotel in the fading light until a local resident took pity and found them accommodations in a pension—but only after the owner had been assured they were not regular GIs, who to his mind would break his furniture and burn cigarette holes in his carpet.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of K rations—the daily food package for troops on the move—and Nescafé, Gertie and Jennings continued toward the Belgian border, fording a series of rivers on ferries that had replaced bombed bridges. By a farmer’s cottage in a small village near the Belgian town of Arlon, the Peugeot wheezed and died. The local mechanic’s diagnosis was dispiriting—a broken water pump and fan. He said the car needed to be taken to a bigger garage for repairs.

  The hapless vehicle was hauled into Arlon, where Gertie and Jennings spent another rain-soaked evening trudging through the streets in search of a hotel. The next morning the pair pushed and steered the car, which had been deposited on the street, to a mechanic who said the parts could only be obtained in Luxembourg City. At a nearby military barracks, the sight of two distraught Americans was sufficient passport to secure a tow.

  Along the way to Luxembourg City, the emboldening effects of liberation were evident. A “stuffed effigy of Hitler, dressed in a tattered German uniform and complete with helmet and black boots,” hung from a tree, and the “grotesque face above the noose somehow caught the agony of strangulation.” The tow truck driver stopped at Gertie’s request so she could jump out and snap some photographs.

  At a garage in Luxembourg City, the mechanic said he needed twenty-four hours to fix the car. A visit to Patton’s headquarters seemed out of the question; time was running out, and soon they would have to return to Paris. The pair dolefully explored the city. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which was incorporated into the Reich by the Nazis, had survived the war largely intact, and there was an air of prosperity to the place. Also, a heavy American presence: “Convoys rumbled through the streets incessantly. Soldiers on the march, our countrymen going to battle, were everywhere. Their faces were so young, so full of eagerness and spirit,” Gertie said. This was some of what Gertie had hoped to see, but the following morning at the Hôtel Brasseur, over coffee and cigarettes, she and Jennings rued “the failure of our trip.”

  At that moment, Jennings spotted two U.S. officers entering the dining room and exchanged a grin of recognition with one of them—Jerry Papurt.

  Major Maxwell Jerome Papurt was in X-2, the counterintelligence branch of the OSS. He was part of an OSS detachment with T-Force, a joint U.S.-British intelligence mission designed to seize key German technology as the Wehrmacht retreated and root out and flip any agents the Germans had left behind. T-Force was under the Twelfth Army Group, commanded by General Omar Bradley, and Papurt’s small unit was based at the Hôtel Brasseur.

  A thirty-seven-year-old native of Cleveland, Papurt had a PhD in psychology, specializing in the rehabilitation of young criminals. He had taught at Ohio State University and worked in various corrections systems before enlisting in 1942. The son of Austrian Jews who had immigrated to the United States, Papurt spoke German, as well as some Italian, French, and Spanish. He had served first in the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) before joining the OSS. Prematurely gray and wearing glasses, Papurt in uniform still looked like a slightly doughy academic. But he was also a charismatic and daring veteran of army counterintelligence in North Africa and Italy, where he “had controlled important enemy agent operations.”

  The photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who met Papurt in Italy when she was on assignment to cover the Italian campaign for Life magazine, recalled that Papurt’s comrades—who called him Pappy—admired his smarts and bravery; he always accompanied his men on the most dangerous missions. “If they gotta, I gotta—that’s my code as an officer,” he told Bourke-White.

  “He was a dead shot with a pistol, had great moral as well as physical courage, and commanded intense loyalty from his staff,” said Bourke-White. The two had begun an affair in
Naples. “One soon forgot his ugly face for his kind eyes,” she said.

  Though his wife in Columbus, Ohio, was awaiting his return, Papurt had fallen hard for the photographer. He proposed shortly after they first met in October 1943. Bourke-White, recently divorced, had yet to respond when Papurt met Gertie and Jennings.

  Because of his mission and position in the X-2 branch of the OSS, Papurt knew of one of the Allies’ most closely held secrets: British cryptanalysts and mathematicians had broken German codes and were able to read large portions of the German armed forces’ top-secret communications—a bounty of intelligence that was distributed to Allied commanders and select personnel under the code name Ultra from Bletchley Park, north of London. All military personnel briefed on Ultra were under strict orders to avoid any risk of capture by the Nazis. Papurt was expected to stay well behind the lines.

  Jennings explained what he and Gertie were doing in Luxembourg.

  “We had a little extra time and thought maybe we’d mosey up to the line so the lady could hear some gunfire,” he said.

  Papurt flashed his oversized grin and lit a cigarette.

  “I know where there is some gunfire. Think you could spare the day for a little trip?” he asked.

  “That’s all you have to say, Major,” said Gertie. “That’s what we came up here for.”

  “Where is it?” Jennings asked.

  “Wallendorf,” replied Papurt. “Forty kilometers from here, just over the border…It’s the first German town we took.”

  Wallendorf was to the west of the Siegfried Line—Westwall to the Germans—a constellation of border fortifications that stretched from the Netherlands to Switzerland. Through the first half of September 1944, the Germans were on the run, retreating through the northern French countryside, but the Wehrmacht was now digging in to defend the fatherland.

  The Allies faced the forces of the Reich in an arc along the Dutch, Belgian, and French borders. Eisenhower’s troops were far ahead of where they expected to be when the invasion had been planned, and had suffered relatively few casualties in the drive up to the German frontier. Their supply lines, the lifeblood of all armies, were stretched thin, however, and a general pause was under way.

  The Westwall was made up of bunkers, gun pits, antitank ditches, and pillboxes—some with eight-foot-thick walls—that were connected in places by tunnels to facilitate mobility in battle. “Planned with a shrewd eye for terrain and interlocking fields of fire, the pillboxes were most numerous where approach avenues seemed especially vulnerable; as many as fifteen big bunkers might be found in a single square kilometer,” wrote one historian.

  Adolf Hitler had ordered the barrier built in 1936 to protect against a ground assault from the west. It had been neglected over the course of the war, but as the German army retreated, there was a desperate effort to rehabilitate these defenses. Beyond lay the Rhine and Germany’s industrial heartland. For all its disrepair, the Westwall remained a formidable barrier, immune in some early probing to bazookas, flamethrowers, and small explosives.

  The 5th Armored Division, assigned to V Corps, protected the city of Luxembourg and was responsible for thirty miles of the front, including the area facing Wallendorf. Major General Lunsford E. Oliver, the division commander, instructed Combat Command R—CCR—to probe the Westwall and be ready to attack, if ordered. The initial reports back from these surveillance forays were encouraging. Some parts of the wall were unmanned; at others, the Germans seemed to be just arriving and getting set up. And the wall itself was not as stout as in other sectors, because its German builders had relied on the area’s rugged terrain to form a natural barrier. On September 13, CCR conducted a reconnaissance by fire and “failed to provoke a single return shot.” In the face of this apparent weakness in the German lines, CCR was ordered to advance through Wallendorf and take the high ground beyond.

  On September 14, CCR forded the Sauer River, about forty yards across, and entered Germany. Those defending Wallendorf, though they had only small arms, “defended with tenacity” and were only forced back with artillery fire and flamethrowers. The village was left gutted and smoldering. Nazi propagandists seized on this early attack into the fatherland as evidence of “the Allies’ will to destroy all Germans together with German culture and history.”

  By the night of September 15, CCR was five miles inside Germany beyond the Westwall. But just a day later, Oliver called off the offensive. “The explanation for the halt appeared to lie…in the decisions that had emerged from the meeting of General Eisenhower and his top commanders on 2 September at Chartres and in a critical over-all logistical situation,” according to one history of the campaign. The advancing forces, in short, could not outrun their supplies.

  CCR now sat in a soft bulge just over the German border, and the inevitable counterattacks by infantry and panzer units followed, beginning on September 17. The Americans held and “sent the enemy armor and infantry reeling,” but with some serious U.S. casualties in the effort. Oliver pulled CCR back to a smaller perimeter around Wallendorf on the nineteenth, protecting two tactical bridges across the Sauer. But late on the twenty-first, orders came from V Corps to abandon the village. Oliver’s troops fell back, blowing up both bridges as they left.

  Wallendorf was back in German hands.

  Major Papurt, Gertie’s new acquaintance, didn’t know any of that despite his role in the OSS. He had recently checked the status of the village on a situation map at a nearby army headquarters, and Wallendorf “appeared to be close to the lines but in American hands.” He was also told at headquarters that “the situation north of Luxembourg was fluid and that persons traveling there had to be on the alert.” Papurt informed his commanding officer about the trip, but without specifying that the mission was little more than a joyride.

  At the Hôtel Brasseur, a visit to Wallendorf that September 26 seemed like a daring but safe enough jaunt. Papurt said they could be back in time for lunch and Jennings and Gertie could return to Paris later in the afternoon, after picking up the Peugeot.

  “Let’s go,” said Jennings. “Why talk about it?”

  Still, Papurt stopped by headquarters once more “to check the situation map again and verify that Wallendorf was safe to enter.” The maps still had not been updated. As he emerged, he gave an all-okay sign with his thumb and forefinger. Papurt, Jennings, and Gertie took off at 11:00 a.m. in a jeep driven by Doyle Dickson, a twenty-year-old private from Los Angeles who was assigned to the OSS.

  The rain of the previous days had cleared, and they drove in brilliant sunshine past fields and woodland. They saw army convoys traveling in the opposite direction, and Gertie could hear the distant boom of cannons and artillery fire. The war she had helped prosecute, albeit as a key administrator in an office across the channel, was now thrillingly close.

  Dickson had a heavy foot, and they raced through small villages, scattering ducks and geese. They headed north to Ettelbruck before turning east toward Wallendorf. As the trip progressed, other traffic disappeared. Jennings, experiencing a frisson of unease, asked Papurt if he was sure they were on the right road. Looked like a good spot for an ambush, he said.

  Papurt spoke in German to the next farmer they passed, and he seemed quizzical about the presence of Americans but told them they would be able to see the village when they got around the next bend. He also said the front was close to two miles away.

  All was quiet. “There were no signs of convoys, no sound of gunfire,” Gertie noted. The sound of artillery had receded. They were in the well of a valley with the village on a slight elevation above them. It lay across a large field cut by a river. For the first time, images of the war began to intrude on the pastoral setting. A cow lay bloated in the field, its legs stiff with death. As the houses in the village came into focus, they noticed they had no roofs. There also didn’t seem to be any American presence.

  “Well
, here’s Wallendorf, according to the sign,” said Gertie. “But I don’t see any…”

  The whistling crack of a single shot cut her short. A bullet had hit the front fender.

  Gertie experienced a long moment of disbelief before she heard Papurt shout, “Sniper, he’s mine.”

  The major grabbed a rifle and ran behind a roadside hedge. As he crawled on the ground, he lined up his sight on a distant copse of trees from where the shot seemed to have come. Gertie thought he looked faintly ridiculous; he reminded her of the actor Tom Mix, a cowboy from the silent film era. Still oblivious to the possibility they were actually in danger, Gertie, Jennings, and Dickson remained sitting upright in the jeep “watching the major’s performance.” Gertie even pulled out her camera and took Papurt’s picture as he wriggled about in the dirt.

  There was no second shot, and after several minutes Papurt stood up. The group considered what might have happened: “An enemy sniper, who perhaps had eluded our occupying forces; a stray shot not intended for us at all; a diehard German civilian putting up a token defense of his pitiful property; even the possibility that one of our own men had mistaken us for a party of the enemy making an escape in a stolen jeep.”

  Papurt shrugged his shoulders. “If there’s anybody up there I can’t see them,” he said.

  Against all common sense and training, they decided to push on.

  Dickson started the motor, and Papurt climbed in, placing the rifle between his legs.