The layout of the rooms, even where are usually slept. The man clearly had a number four numbers. He was throwing up so many details freddie worried he wouldnt be able to commit them to memory so freddie carried back to the room where he was staying and wrote down as many of these figures as he could. The dimensions of the walls, the exact locations and scrawled out a message that he would pass along to hans, is number two hiding out in an attic and this ishow it began. Furor headquarters is one and a half kilometers southeast of the rail stationand it went on from there. Details of where hitlers room was, where the guards were, where the planes were that were running Patrol Missions over it so you can imagine the effect this had among allied intelligence officials. It was one of them called a pinstriped and there were tears that went up from the allied intelligence officials when they read this but freddie wasnt done yet. He was also able to gather the exact locations of trains heading to italy to the front lines and to detailed the munitions and number of men and supplies and that led to a Bombing Mission that destroyed a caravan of 80 railcars heading for the front line in italy and probably supported the war by any number of weeks or months. It was one mission after another singlehandedly with the help of mostly of hans who was radioing cables back to italy and in the view of many of his superior officers was one ofthe most remarkable spy missions theyd ever seen during the war. Freddie never wanted to be a spy. Even after the war he felt like he had had his 15 minutes of fame. He had the chance tocontinue in espionage after the war and he turned it down. He felt like he had paid back his obligation to the United States and this was a photo that he took at the end of the war with hans on the ground, ready on the right and franz, the nazi defector on the right to effectuate the surrender of the nazis in innsbruck and i went back there to austria and actually was able to go to that exact same location. There was a local man who i showed the photo from the story i had done on the three of them and he said i know where that is. Thats the backyard of my friend just a few yards away and within 10 minutes we were in that exact same location. And okay, we wont be able to show you that but i was able to to go back to that same spot and i still get chills as i think about that, about standing in that spot in front of the austrian alps where freddie and hans and franz had basically helped to win a war and i dontthink thats overstating it. Later in life freddie gave an interview for a project actually that Steven Spielberg did interviewing Holocaust Survivors and was asked about what it meant to him to flee nazi germany and go back to austria and confront the nazis and help to force their surrender and his words were so powerful, i ended my book with them. And ill read them to youhere. He said that it struck him as both a rare opportunity and a solemn obligation. Quote, i would like people to realize that the refugees who got haven in the us did their best to repay that debt and i think he really did. Many times over. He repay that debt and absolutely heroic fashionso with that id be glad to take any questions that youhave. Thank you very much ,thank you. Yes, please i have a couple questions, did he ever go back to germany and how was he discovered by the nazis as being a spy . Ill take the second one first. His ambitions got grander and grander with his successes and after he had developed such vital intelligence on hitlers bunker on the train lines, he at one point cable back to the allies that he thought he had found enough men willing to help him that he could take innsbruck in his words and he thought he had 500 men willing to help him and they actually arranged to send several tin drums full of guns and ammunition and explosives down to him. And they waited for days to get them. There was a miscommunication, the ammunition never arrived but his plans got so grandiose that the nazis realized something was afoot and they began a massive roundup around innsbruck of possible resistors and he was caught up in that. So after the war, he did go back to germany. He went to work for voice of america, the American Radio Network and he was an engineer with them and in spots all around the world in asia and europe and as part of his stay in europe he did go back to germany and went back even earlier than that immediately after the war, he returned to his hometown and in freiburg germany when he was still with the military, this was just six months after the end of the war in late 1945, early 1946 and he was amazed to see that the whole town had been bombed by allied air raids. Except for his home where he had grown up and where his father had had his hard work witness, the entire street of every house was leveled except for his which seemed like passover with god passing over his house as he talked about it and he sent back a picture ofthat to his parents in brooklyn which i think was very powerful. Hans had a very different experience. His number two man on the ground there. Here are around that same time he returned home to the netherlands. The letters from his parents as i mentioned had stopped several years earlier and he had no idea what to expect so he went back to the netherlands and went back to his house and it was abandoned and he found a neighbor who told him that his mother and father and his little brother would also stay behind. Had tried to free and they had been captured by the nazis and were sent to auschwitz. So his experience was very different in that sense. Thank you. He married in germany or he came here . Fred, he married a woman in europe after the war and they had two children and he divorced later, so at the end of his lifehe was living by himself when i met him in West Virginia , but he had sort of a quiet life after this remarkable couple of years and a couple of months. He lived in anonymity and he liked it that way, i think. He at the end of his life there was a movement by Holocaust Survivors group to get him the medal of honor, the highest congressional honor that there is. And he had actually been put up for that award seven years earlier by the military and they turned it down. He got several, some purple hearts. He got some silver stars and some nice metals which he showed me when i met him there. You see them in this photo. But they passed him over in 1946 four top honors, the congressional medal of honor and at the time of his death, even though he had his local senator in less West Virginia trying to get him that, he didnt get it then either. There was a feeling at the time of the war and even at the time of his death that the medal of honor should be reserved for those in actual combat and that a spy did not fit that criteria. So he died without that recognition which i know you would haveliked that , even though he didnt really mind the anonymity. Part of himcertainly would have liked to be recognized all those years later but it didnt happen, maybe it still will. Did he ever encounter any antisemitism in the oss . Not directly and i asked him that. The jews were certainly in the minority. And he encountered it early on in fact. He wasnt even allowed to join the military because ironically he was considered an enemy alien as a german jew, german jews otherwise were not allowed to join the military and he felt like this was theultimate catch 22. He had fled germany as a jew under intense persecution and now in the United States he was regarded an alien because he was german and he sort of got it comingand going. Once he got past that hurdle in the military did allow people like him into the military , he found himself in some demand at oss because of the spy chiefs realized they needed the Language Skills ofpeople like him. They needed people to speak german and french and dutch as hans could and italian because we didnt have the spy skills, the experience that leadership did in terms of collecting intelligence and didnt have the Language Skills and they were desperate to find peoplelike that and they didnt care what their religion was. Im curious what the process is like because presumably many people were not alive by the time the oss records, no documents or public records. Luckily beginning in the 1970s a lot of these intelligence files from oss were declassified or on file now in Silver Springs maryland of the National Archives so that was an immense help and i was able to not only use those records but rely on some of the earlier work that had been done by interviewers, theres a whole archive at stanford that was done of interviews with fred and with other members of the team and their supervisors at oss and those included not just the witness , but actually the tapes which were enormously helpful. And i mentioned like the Steven Spielberg project interview, some 50,000 holocaust refugees, even what they did with fred was incredibly helpful because in that interview, he discussed not only the Espionage Mission itself but growing up in germany under hitler and what that was like and this news that was tightening around him so there were records like that that were very helpful and my own trips to austria, i mentioned the one survivor, the captain who piloted the flight, john billings, still alive at 96 remarkably. So i was able to pull together different sources and different archives of information. Any other questions . Thankyou very much, thank you for your interest. Thank you eric, thank you for sharing your process and the reading which was incredible. If you would like to get a book and have it signed by eric i presume this would be a good place to sign and you can get it signed first and then get a book on your way out so thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Heres a look at authors who recently appeared or will be appearing soon on book tvs after words, our weekly Author Interview program that includes bestselling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. Recently New York Times contributing opinion writer lindy west discussed the me to movement. Coming up university of maryland Baltimore County president freeman grabowskiwill share his thoughts on building a high achieving and Innovative University this weekend on after words, joe ricketts offers his insight into becoming an entrepreneur and recounts his founding oftd ameritrade. I had to say to myself be ready to fail. Be ready to lose all your dreams. And start over