Lee Geiger

I think a hero is any person really intent
on making this a better place for all people.

Maya Angelou

Two Gestapo officers pummeled Fred Mayer in the face. Refusing to tell where his radio and radio operator were, the tall one decided to strip Mayer, a 24-year old American spy hiding his identity by speaking only in French, naked from head to toe. Despite Mayer’s bullish strength, the SS men brutally manhandled him, shoving him to the floor. Cuffing his hands in front of him and pulling his arms over his knees, they forced Mayer into a constricting fetal position, then shoved the barrel of a long rifle into the tiny gap behind his knees and cuffed hands. With a man on each side of the rifle, they lifted his naked, rolled-up body and suspended the human ball between two tables, like a piece of meat on a skewer. Uncoiling a rawhide whip, the tall one put his full weight behind each swing, mercilessly thrashing Mayer’s body like a side of beef. Hours later, Mayer was confronted by the man who betrayed him, who spilled his secret life to the Nazis. Realizing there was no more use pretending, Mayer began speaking German. He confirmed he was an American spy. However, he insisted that he worked alone.

The Nazi soldiers noticed that Mayer was circumcised, but dismissed it. They refused to believe that a Jew would return to Europe as an agent for the Allies. But Fred Mayer was Jewish. He was also born in Germany.

Mayer was 16 years old when his family fled Nazi Germany for New York City in 1938 to escape Hitler’s persecution of Jews. The soft-spoken teenager worked twenty different jobs over the next few years to help his family make ends meet, though he did quit one job after punching his boss in the face for making an anti-Semitic remark. On December 8, 1941, one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mayer enlisted in the United States Army.

Trained as a mechanic, Mayer was assigned to bases in Arizona, Georgia and Maryland. Bored from his duties, Mayer quickly raised his hand when the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a wartime precursor to the C.I.A., was recruiting soldiers able to speak Continental languages to train for covert missions in Europe. Schooled in demolition, infiltration, raiding, sniping, and hand-to-hand combat, Mayer, who spoke German, French and Spanish, knew his new duties would place his life in danger. If caught by the Gestapo and exposed as a spy, a German and a Jew, he would be summarily executed. “What can I say?” he told friends with a bashful laugh, “I love the adventure.”

On a dark night in February 1945, as the leader of an elite operation code-named Greenup, Mayer and two other men parachuted from a B-24 Liberator behind enemy lines onto a 10,000-foot glacier outside Innsbruck, Austria. German forces had fortified their positions around Innsbruck and were rumored to be building a vast underground fortress that would enable them to continue the war indefinitely. The goal of Operation Greenup was to gather intelligence about Nazi troop movements, train schedules and ammunition depots that would enable Allied bombers to disrupt supply lines to the battle front.

Mayer, wearing a German officer’s uniform and some strategically placed bandages, infiltrated the local army barracks. As a cover story, he said he had been serving on the Italian front when he was grazed in the head by a stray bullet. The personable, self-effacing Jewish spy got the loose-lipped Germans to share sensitive information that was promptly transmitted back to the Allies, including precise details about Hitler’s Berlin Bunker that turned out to be accurate. In one of the biggest intelligence coups of the war, Mayer learned of a convoy of German military trains headed for Italy with troops and munitions, and he had the information radioed ahead to American commanders, allowing Allied warplanes to bomb them, essentially ending Germany’s involvement in Italy. Mayer later posed as a French electrician who was able to infiltrate an underground munitions plant, but he was betrayed by a local black market racketeer. In April, just weeks before the end of the war, Mayer was captured by the Gestapo and brutally tortured.

At the same time Mayer was captured, another American agent was being interrogated by the Gestapo. Shown a picture of Mayer, the agent claimed that Mayer was a “big shot” in the American command, and that if Mayer were shot the Americans would kill all who had mistreated him. The agent even insisted that a man as senior as Mayer could only be interrogated by the local Nazi leader, Franz Hofer.

Hofer was in charge of Innsbruck and the local surrounding area, and he recognized the war was coming to an end. Looking for a way to surrender to the Americans instead of the also-advancing Russians, Mayer ordered the Gestapo to bring Mayer to him. Mayer was introduced to Hofer’s wife and the German ambassador to Benito Mussolini’s Italian government, Rudolph Rahn. They ate dinner and talked. Mayer initially believed that it was just a subtle way to make him reveal where is radio operator was located, but he later understood that the Germans were really there to discuss their surrender. Rahn said he was going to Bern, Switzerland, and promised to deliver Mayer’s message to Allen Welsh Dulles, the OSS man there. Dulles got the message and cabled it to OSS headquarters in Italy.

On the morning of May 3, 1945, the American 103rd Infantry Division was ordered to take Innsbruck. When the troops got closer to the city, they were greeted by a swollen-faced Mayer, who told them he was with the OSS and that he was taking them to accept the German surrender. Little did the Germans know they had surrendered to a Jewish emigrant from Brooklyn without firing a shot.

Mayer was awarded numerous medals, including the Legion of Merit and a Purple Heart. In 2013, former Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia wrote a letter to President Obama asking him to consider Mayer for the Medal of Honor. Rockefeller later presented a signed letter from Obama to Mayer thanking him for his service.

After the war, Mayer served as a power plant supervisor at Voice of America outposts around the world before retiring to Charles Town, West Virginia in 1977. He volunteered for Meals on Wheels there for more than three decades, and was delivering meals in the area until just a few weeks before his death on April 15, 2016. He was 94.

p.s. This story may sound similar to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” While the movie was fictional, its premise was based in fact.