Frederick Mayer

   The story of Frederick Mayer is one of great courage and tact in the face of torture and death. Mayer was a Jew born in Germany on October 28, 1921. During the early 1930's anti-Semitism was on the rise. Even with Frederick's father's distinguished military career the family still felt threatened by the Nazis. So they decided to emigrate to America. They arrived in 1938, one year before World War II began in Europe.
   Even in New York City the now seventeen year old Mayer had to deal with anti-Semitism. At one of the twenty jobs that he worked while he lived in New York, one of his bosses made an anti-Semitic remark. I suppose that was the straw that broke the camels back. Mayer knocked him down and immediately quit his job.
   It was the attack on Pearl Harbor that changed the course of his life as it did for so many others. Eager to serve his country and fight against those who were persecuting his fellow Jews, he enlisted in the United States Army. While training in Arizona, Mayer crossed the "enemy" line and "captured" various officers including brigadier general. Mayer's general said, "You can't do that. You are breaking the rules." To which Mayer replied, "War is not fair. The rules of war are to win." 
   Frederick Mayer was trained in demolition, infiltration, raiding, sniping and hand-to-hand combat. He was fluent in German, French and Spanish. These capabilities caught the eye of the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. After he joined he was assigned to Operation Greenup.
   Operation Greenup was a mission of espionage behind German lines. Mayer along with two other men, Hans Wynberg and Franz Weber were to scout the area of Austria's heavily fortified 'Alpine Redoubt'.
    Mayer and his two companions were to be parachuted near Innsbruck, Austria. But all of the flat areas were occupied by the Germans which posed a problem for a safe landing. Fortunately there was a frozen lake between two peaks that could be used as a landing sight. They found a pilot willing to fly them there. He said, "If they are crazy enough to jump there, I will be crazy enough to take them there."
    On February 26, 1945 they made the jump into the thick Austrian darkness. I imagine they could not see the ground very well as they fell from the night sky. What a thrill. I'm sure there was a lot of adrenalin pumping through their veins. What if they missed their landing point? What if the lake was not frozen all the way? What if they were to bust through the ice and freeze to death? I'm sure all of these and many more questions were racing through each of these men's minds. 
   The three men landed safely on the edge of a glacier. They were able to retrieve all but one of the boxes of supplies that were dropped. As fate would have it, that was the box that held their skis. So on they trudged, at 10,000 feet elevation they slowly made their way down the slope in waist deep snow. 

Frederick Mayer in the German uniform he
 used to infiltrate the German barracks. 

   Once they reached Innsbruck Mayer posed as a German officer who had been grazed in the head with a bullet while serving on the Italian front. The Germans were sympathetic towards him and they would talk to him about many things. He stayed in the barracks for several months. Any information he uncovered was immediately radioed back to Hans Wynberg. While he was in the barracks he found out important intelligence on German troop movements, he spied on war factories and even tracked the whereabouts of Mussolini and Hitler. Mayer was able to relay all of this information back to the Americans which in turn enabled the U.S. military to bomb 26 Nazi military trains and block Brenner pass which was a key passage used by the Germans to move supplies across the Alps and Nazi occupied Europe. He also had a detailed description of Hitler's secret bunker complex in Berlin. It was in fact so detailed that when Allied troops examined it after the war it was exactly as Mayer had described.
   After three months in the German barracks, Frederick Mayer had to come up with a way of returning to the Americans without detection. He decided to become a French electrician that was fleeing from the advancing Soviet forces. Unfortunately, Mayer was tipped off by a black market racketeer who had past dealings with Mayer. He was promptly arrested by the Gestapo. Mayer spoke only in French, keeping with his story as the fleeing electrician. The Gestapo were not hearing what they wanted to hear. They began to torture Mayer to get the truth out of him. 
   Mayer was placed in a dark room and was subjected to severe beatings. They also held his head underwater and broke some of his teeth from stuffing a pistol into his mouth. Still Mayer would not talk. So they stripped him and cuffed his hands in front of him. Then they pulled his arms over his head and bent his knees which forced him into a constricted fetal position. They shoved the long barrel of a rifle into the tiny gap behind his knees and then lifted his naked, rolled-up, beaten body and placed him in between two tables and there he hung. Then one of the larger officers brought in a raw hide whip. he began to beat Mayer's body without mercy, putting all of his weight behind each lash. With each crack of the whip Mayer was asked, "Where is your radio and your radio operator?" At last Mayer began to speak in German and he confirmed that he was an American, but he refused to betray his mission and insisted that he worked alone. 
   While all of this was happening there was another American named Herman Matull who was also being interrogated by the Gestapo. When he was shown a picture of Mayer's swollen, beaten face and asked if he knew the man he replied that Mayer was a big shot in the American command and if he was shot the Americans would come and kill every man who had mistreated him. He went even further and claimed that because Mayer was so high ranked that he could only be interrogated by the Gauleiter Tyrol Vorarlberg, Franz Hofer. Fortunately, Matull was a very good liar and the Germans believed him. 
    Franz Hofer believed that the fall of the Nazis was inevitable and he had been waiting for a chance to surrender to the Americans in favor over the Soviets. In his mind this presented the perfect opportunity. He invited Mayer to dine with himself, his wife and the German ambassador to Benito Mussolini's government, Rudolph Rahn. Rightly suspicious of the devious Germans, Mayer believed that this was just another tactic to get him to tell where his radio was. But after talking with Hofer he began to realize that he wasn't interested in the radio so much as he was in discussing terms of surrender. They allowed Mayer to send a message to Allen Welsh Dulles the OSS man in nearby Bern. From there Dulles cabled it to the headquarters in Italy. His message read, "Fred Mayer reports he is in Gestapo hands but cabled, 'Don't worry about me, I'm really not bad off.'"
   On May 3, 1945 the American 103rd Infantry Division was ordered to take Innsbruck. As the troops drew closer to the city they saw a car with a white banner made out of a bed sheet approaching. As the car pulled to a stop a young man with a swollen face promptly jumped out of the car and introduced himself as Lieutenant Mayer of OSS and said that he was going to take the Major with him to accept the German surrender. Think of the irony of the situation. This German city surrendered to an American sergeant whom they believed to be of much higher rank, and who was also a Jewish emigrant from their own country. 
   The surrender saved thousands of lives that otherwise would have been lost in battle. After the surrender one of the Gestapo agents that had tortured Mayer was placed in that same cell that Mayer had been held in just a few days previous. Mayer went to see him and found him cowering in the corner of the dark cell. He said,"You can do whatever you want to me, but don't hurt my family." Mayer looked him in the eyes and said, "Who do you think we are, Nazi's?" 
   When once asked about his story and the obvious danger he was in Mayer replied, "I always figured you can only die once, I wasn't worried about it." This man had guts. He had the courage to return to a country that he knew hated Jews and where he was most at risk. He had the courage to live under a false name in the German barracks for three months. He had the courage to endure three days of torture without betraying his fellow comrades. He had the courage to not give revenge to the officer who had beaten him.
   The former director of the CIA William J. Casey said that Operation Greenup was by far the most successful of the OSS operations. Frederick Mayer was awarded the Legion of Merit and a Purple Heart by the U.S. government.