RETURN TO THE REICH

A Holocaust Refugee’s Secret Mission to Defeat the Nazis

By Eric Lichtblau

How many fearless, foolhardy heroes did World War II produce? The answer, judging from the number of nonfiction titles about them, is … a lot. It qualifies as its own genre: Warriors of the Greatest Generation Who Make the Rest of Us Look Like Weenies. In the last few months alone, these pages have featured books about the leader of France’s biggest spy network, intrepid pilots of the Soviet Air Force and “the coolheaded, one-legged spy who changed the course of World War II.”

And those are just the ones about women.

So with a title like “Return to the Reich: A Holocaust Refugee’s Secret Mission to Defeat the Nazis,” you can see where things are headed. The book’s hero was first memorialized in a 2016 New York Times obituary: “Frederick Mayer, Jew Who Spied on Nazis After Fleeing Germany, Dies at 94.” Eric Lichtblau, the reporter who wrote the obit, has now given Mayer’s story the feature-length treatment it deserves, drawing on a rich trove of oral histories, letters, government archives, captured German records, and personal accounts from surviving witnesses and their families. The book doesn’t distinguish itself from others in the genre — it’s an epic poem rendered in workmanlike prose — but the details are astonishing nonetheless.

To borrow from the Passover Seder: If Freddy Mayer had merely escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager, then enlisted in the United States Army and gone back to fight, it would have been enough. But Mayer also parachuted into Nazi-occupied Austria, impersonated a Wehrmacht officer, tracked enemy troop movements and helped Allied bombers target Nazi supply trains. Which also would have been enough.

But Mayer also discovered the whereabouts of Hitler’s secret Führerbunker in Berlin, facilitated the sabotage of a secret Messerschmitt airplane factory, and was captured and tortured by the Gestapo. That surely would have been enough.