Return to the reich, a biography of freddy meyern whose life tels incredible story of world war ii heroism area based on research and interviews with meyer himself whom the author was able to meet only once before his death at the age of 94, returned to the right is an eyeopening unforgettable narrative of world war ii heroism and this is one credit will story that i am very excited to hear more about. Eric lichtblau a twotime Pulitzer Prize winning journalist is the best starring author of the nazis next door and first law, the remaking of american justice. He was a washington reporter for the New York Times for 15 years while also writing for the Los Angeles Times the new york yorker, time and other publications. He has been a frequent guest on npr, msnbc, cspan who we have here tonight and other networks as well as the speaker at many universities and institutions. He lives outside washington dc. So, without further ado lets give it up for eric. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you very much for having me at your beautiful new facility. Its wonderful to be surrounded by so many books at a time when we need more people reading. Many of you have never heard of freddy mayer. I myself have never heard of him until just a few h years ago and it was only by chance that i came across his remarkable life story. I was having coffee with source from my last book on the nazis got into america after the war with a man named Eli Rosenbaum who investigated war criminals for many, many years at the Justice Department and i remember as i went into meet eli that morning i read an obituary, short story about a man in europe who had just died and the 90s after saving countless jews from certain death, a inschindlers list type of character but without any of the renowned or International Credit but i remember saying to eli as we sat over coffee and bringing up the obituary how is it that we have never heard of so many of the people who did such brave and heroic things during the worst genocide in human history, during world war ii . I had written a book on the subject but had never heard of this man. I was affairs to admit that to eli. He did not have an immediate answer but tell me someone who is still alive today, before they passed away, before i read their name in an obituary, and wish i could meet and he had an immediate answer to that. He said theres a man named fred mayer and a man not far from washingtons he said he gave mea short synopsis of his life story and a German Jewish refugee who fled germany with his family as a teenager just before kristallnacht in 1938 and who almost immediately joined in the u. S. Military in a sledge lean spy outfits called oss. He led an Amazing Mission parachuting back into austria into the region near innsbruck and collecting vital intelligencenn of the nazis at e end of the war that helped to bring about bloodless surrender of one of the nazis lastof battlegrounds in innsbruck. That had my interest peaked and i went out to see freddy mayer and West Virginia and all by himself and out in agi small cottage in the woods, 94 years old, he was still in Remarkable Health and w both physically and mentally. You see a picture i took of him here when i visited with him and he was still driving a car and in fact he drove meals on wheels for the younger people and he had a girlfriend in his 70s, much younger woman, and shoppe shopped chopped wood, shoveled his own driveway and not only physically but had this mental acumen as we talked about his childhood growing up in germany and the Espionage Mission himself. He could tick off the names and dates from 70 years earlier during the war of critical events during the Espionage Mission of tiny towns in austria where he had hidden out o as a y during this time there and i had never heard of these places and he would take them off without seeing a beat and he gladly recounted for me this incredible time in his life spanning a couple of years as a would be spy. In fact, he trained with oss right up the road from where i lived in bethesda that was training changed into a Training Facility fromm a pga Golf Tournament posh country club at the military blew the place away with bazookas and hand grenades and Training Missions for about two years during the war to train people like freddy. He went through his whole history and i remember telling him how amazed i was that for two months in innsbruck he could have lived under cover ado posing as a nazi officer and dad but he gently corrected me and said i was not a nazi officer the whole time and i will not try to do his actions fully. I cant do it justice but he said after about six weeks he said that he gave up his nazi officer disguise and became a french pow electrician working inside a german nazi factory and told me how he did not even have to change his name from frederick mayor and became and he told me with his big bravad bravado,. [speaking in native tongue] and i said how the words rolled off his tongue and he laughed as he said that but he showed me and told me how the nazis had captured him and tortured him brutally for days on end and strung him up from the ceiling on two beams while pouring water down his mouth and his ears and something he did not know later that it was called waterboarding and whipped him till his back was raw, beat him until a fault until he was on the verge of death and showed this in a room or and showing around house to the chin that knocked six of his teeth out and later looked at the medical reports that verified all of this. It was a memorable afternoon to say the least. I told freddy i wanted to write about his story and i did not think enough people knew about this but he was ambivalent. He said there have been things written over the years in a couple of books on oss missions, including his and there been documentaries some years earlier and he was not sure what is the point and whats the big deal was basically what he was saying and i said its a very big deal but theres a generation of people who dont know about the sacrifices the people like you made that and refugees like you made. I thought this was a story that really needed to be told. It showed not only this untold chapter most people knew nothing about and world war ii but had modern lessons going up about heroism and hatred and about the contributions for the people like fred mayer, jews and non jews alike made to america, a lesson that resonates today, perhaps more than ever during these fraught times. So, we agreed to talk about it later and i would come back out and visit him soon and two months later freddy died. It was a bit of a shock to me and i did end up writing about him far more quickly than i thought for the New York Times where i was working as a reporter then and worked and wrote his obituary for the New York Times in t16. Frederick mayor, do who spied on maxis after after freeing germany, dies at 94. I knew immediately that writing 700, 800 words for an obituary, the type i wrote that morning, that when eli first mentioned his name did not do justice and i thought that this really has the makings of a much fuller treatment in a book and eventually i did decide to write a book and i took several trips to austria where the mission to place and went through thousands of pages of records in the National Archives and i stopped in washington and Silver Spring where were there were reports not only on the mission itself but the beating of a freddy by his nazi interiors and the gestapo men who carried out these beatings and i looked at and photographs and talk to survivorsnd and one survivor frm the mission itself who, believe it or not, is 96 years old, the pilot who flew the plane and still lives in virginia and at 96 still flying a plane. He had these Amazing Stories about flyingnd the mission and dropping fred and his two compatriots onto a glacier, 13000 feet high, in innsbruck in tyrol in the austrian alps after three attempts and they were barely able to make it but finally they were able to put them in a position to parachute down but i also knew i did not want this book to be simply a Espionage Mission, or jason bourne, what have you. I wanted it to be about immigrant experience and that involves not only fred but his second in charge on the left ear you see hans [inaudible] and his twin brother who came to the United States right around the same time and also to brooklyn as did a freddy in 1939. They were fleeing the netherlands and became very different path than did freddy and i got to that in a minute but i wanted this to be about the experience m of someone you see here in the kid at age 11 so let me read to you the prologue of the book if you will which is set in february 1945 and airborne over the australian alps, february 25, 1945. The snowcapped alpine mountains look deceptively quiet, even peaceful, as freddy mayor crouched to the back of a b24 gaze down at the majestic peaks whizzing by in the frigid night air. Close your eyes and you can almost forget there was a brutal war being waged on the ground, 10000 feet below. S peering through the narrow hole on the floor of the bombay he waited for the final signal from the cockpit. Seven years earlier when freddy said nazi germany as a teenager return trip to the hellfire adolf hitler had made of europe but it seemed unthinkable. Here he was now at the age of 23, a parachute on his back and lflky bags strapped to his leg with the pistol and ammunition and supplies inside it preparing to dive back into the nazi stronghold in austria and doing it brought the americans know less on a new probable spy mission into boarding hitlers last stand in the alps. This was a life on a tight robe adventure that the barrel chested refugee head been craving for months. This fits him against man he once called countryman and somewhere below him the rugged mountain terrain were not the soldiers and anti aircraft designed to shoot down planes just like this one. The chances of success for the 23 man spy man team where one in 100 and that was good enough for freddy. Anything to defeat the fascistsd he said but he waited so long for this chance and he was desperate to make the jump. The mission had already been scuttled twice for the last five days because of bad weather. Less than half an hour earlier the flight creww had almost been forced to turn back yet again for italy. Freddy was determined that this was the night, the moonlit sky that separated him from the nasis on the ground below now would be calm and inviting, gorgeous he thought to himself and he felt tranquility wash over him. The cockpit relayed the signal, ready, ready, ready, go. Seated at the edge of the whole freddy pushed away and jumped. Now, fred and his family almost did not make it out of germany. Not just because of the discriminatory policies in the United States and in britain they kept out hundreds of thousands, even millions of refugees who ultimately perished in the holocaust but also because of the experience of his own father. Heinrich mayor who was a world war i hero as was and many other jews in germany who fought for the kaiser and earned an ir cross for his efforts in france during world war i. Heinrich perhaps naively and perhaps not thought that even while this nazi vice grip was tightening around his family after the rise of hitler in 1933 and his family would be okay. There are hard workers and their business would survive and his family was basically untouchable and so he refused to leave. Awrite about that at length in the book. I will read a passage from that but other people were fleeing for his friends, playmates were aing into hiding and fleeing to switzerland and other parts of europe because they feared the worst from hitler in the mid 1930s but heinrich remained resolute. No matter what your coney and policies the not season forests would not be run out of his homeland. Is freddy was expelled from dean a jew. Not when they [inaudible] not when the nuremberg laws planned jews from mixing with german blood and not when all his employees and families had to stop working for him because he was aeo jew. When it became almost impossible for him to buy Raw Materials like lead and t copper for his business and not when he and freddy dismayed watched the footage of hitler presiding over the 1930 olympics after banning non aryans from joining squad. Not even when word began to spread that the nasis were rounding up communists, homosexuals and other undesirables in the jews might be next. Not even then heinrich stayed firm but nothing bad will happen to us he kept repeating to his son as a matter of faith. You seea freddy here at about ae 11 with a belt around his waist and that is not just any belt. Bat was a military belt that his father had worn during the war and freddy used to prance around the house wearing it dreaming about fighting for the germans himself because he thought of himself first as a german and then as a jew growing up as a kid and its easy to forget that the golden time that the jews and other minorities went through beginning in the early 1900s this was a time when jews were at the top of their fields and business and in literature and in a theater and in science. Riyoung physicist named Albert Einstein won a nobel prize ten years before the rise of hitler and that all came crashing down. His father who built the hardware business that his own father had built and they belong to a synagogue that his father and this was a time when they thought it was growing not being taken away and it was so hard to give that up and they almost didnt make it out because the window of opportunity for visas should be blacked in with so narrow and i mentioned the secondincommand on the mission was on cons on the left and he got [inaudible] he got to the netherlands almost the same time as freddy but they had a different experience than freddy. Beginning with the hitlers assumption of power in 1933 he feared the worst for all of europe. His father leo was warning people when this was still germanys problem about the rise of fascism and political campaigns against Nazi Alliance and canada and in 1937 he began looking at visas for members of his family and cannot afford for the mall to get out and cannot get visas for them all to get out but he sent his two twin sons, again hans on the left and luke on the right to america, basically to escaped hitler and to escape the [inaudible] his friends and family members thought he wasas crazy and said this is not our problem and this is germanys problem and you will send your boys away to america with cowboys and indians and they saw this as a rash step. And they sought as an overreaction to a political problem that was still hundreds of miles away but obviously leo, in hindsight was quite present. He would write these letters which the family shared with me long typewritten letters which were both passionate and dutiful in the telling of mundane daily events at work but also the political mood of the day before and after thehe nasis invaded te netherlands. He would talk about Neville Chamberlain in england who thought was way too much of a pacifist and he would talk about hitler and hitler allies in the United States like Charles Lindbergh who he considered a traitor and was a known antisemite at that time and he would talk about business down the street that would pledge allegiance to hitler as he wrote them letters and did not realize what a threat he was but then he would talk about the kids schoolwork because they wrote letters back to him and how were they doing with their grades at school and like a typical father he said at one point to hans, please, please whatever you do do not overwork yourself and he said excessive exercise is going to do you win and theres no reason to risk energy. You are already a representative of the [inaudible] group and isnt that enough . Its amazing how even in the time just historic political crisis he was still dealing with the same mundane thing that apparent today might deal with. Then the letters to brooklyn simply stopped. By that time both hans and luke or fred were in the military. That is hans on the left and freddy on the right. They met first at the oss facility in bethesda were the military was blown to smithereens with hand grenades and bazookas in a quickly bonded. I love this story because you can see the affection and almost all in which hans held his friend freddy. He was 7 inches taller than him but he followed him everywhere but he was almost like a puppy dog as he would admit and he saw freddy as a fearless bit freddy was someone who did not follow ddlitary rules. He was always or never quite closely shaven enough issues were never strained enough and there were stories where the wargames he would break the rules and in one case, capture the Commanding Officers by outranking all the other men and busting through the military procedureses and demanding the surrender of the top general of the base. The next day that Commanding Officer called and said what freddy thought would be a chewing out over how badly he had violated the rules of the wargames but instead the general saw a grittiness and freddy today moxie, a daring joubert he said arent you glad to get out of thehe infantry and freddy was tired of endless training and [inaudible] he wanted to be in europe fighting the nasis who had driven them out of his homeland. Very much like to get out of the infantry and said you speak german and he said yes and do you speak french and he said yes and he said well pow would you like to join up with oss and freddy immediately but up his hand and said i would love stupid as this one problem, freddy had no idea what oss was. But he soon found out that this was a spy agency been set up by a man by the names of bill donovan, wild bill donovan as he was known. Before the cia was in existence this was an agency that meant to collect intelligence and do sabotage missions and it was a flight by the seat of his pants type agency that was put together, very quickly after pearl harbor b