On one level Peter Pirker's new book is a compelling adventure story: in April 1945 three Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agents—two of them Jewish—parachute into the deep snow of the Tyrolean Alps, the heart of enemy territory. They hide out in the remote village of Opferperfuss, set up radio communication with HQ in Bari, and with the help of contacts and forged documents build up a network of informants in the Innsbruck Valley—even including members of the police force. They supply details of munitions production and train schedules through Brenner Pass; then, after a bomb explosion on Hitler's birthday, one of the agents (Fred Mayer) is captured. Despite being brutally tortured by the Gestapo, he manages to get through to the Gauleiter (Franz Hofer) and persuades him to surrender to the approaching U.S. forces.
At the center of this fascinating study are sensitive biographies of its three primary figures (as well as those who directed Operation Greenup, like their commander Dyno Löwenstein): Franz Weber was a Tyrolian Catholic who had initially been “fascinated” by the Anschluss, then made a career in the Wehrmacht despite being disturbed by his experience of the Warsaw ghetto, serving in Poland, Croatia, and on the Eastern Front. In September 1944, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he deserted to the partisans near Viareggio. Friedrich Mayer, a Jewish refugee, had left Freiburg with his family in 1938, settling in Brooklyn before he joined the army in 1942. The other Jewish refugee was the radio operator Hans Wihnberg, from Amsterdam, who was so interested in his chemistry studies that he continued to read his textbooks during the operation. Despite their very different backgrounds, all three shared an impatience with Army bureaucracy and a burning desire to help speed up the end of the war. All three were recruited into the OSS in 1942.
For Weber, returning to his home village as a deserter could hardly have been riskier. As Pirker shows, however, without his intimate knowledge of the village and the region, the operation would not likely have succeeded. Equally essential—and perhaps surprising—was the region's level of resistance to the regime and its values. Unlike in the valley, here the Catholic milieu remained largely intact. Even though the presence of the agents was broadly known, there were no denunciations. Even after Mayer (along with several of his contacts) was arrested, the other two were able to survive in hiding. In the end, Pirker sees the key to resistance not in Austrian patriotism or even Tyrolean regional identity, but in the Catholic milieu. Though this included the local priest, it was women of the village who were at its center. In Weber's postwar assessment, “Die Einzigen, denen man wirklich trauen konnte, waren die Frauen, die waren stur wie Eisen” (30). Pirker does not hide his admiration for the redoubtable Anna Niederkircher, who had inherited the village hotel (Krone) from her husband and somehow managed to bypass the patriarchal structures of the village (she even successfully competed in traditional village shooting competitions). After the Anschluss she made no secret of her dislike of the new regime, even refusing to hang Hitler's portrait in her hotel. Along with her daughter and other friends and relations, she helped the agents survive.
Beyond this local and regional story, Pirker also sees the operation as a part of transnational resistance, which included the recruitment of local laborers to supply information about the production of Messerschmitt parts. This and other information about train movements through Brenner Pass confirmed that in military terms the much vaunted “Alpine redoubt” was a fantasy. Yet, as Pirker shows, Tyrolean Nazis, including the Gauleiter clung to surreal fantasies of the Endkampf well into April 1945. Here Pirker adeptly unpacks the complex interaction of “blind fanaticism,” bluff, hesitation, and calculation (not least the potential insurance to be gained by helping an American prisoner) that factored into this period. Even before the situation peaked in the final, feverish sauve qui peut of early May, however, the danger for Mayer as a prisoner of the Gestapo was clearly acute.
The arrival of U.S. forces in Tyrol is not the end of Pirker's story. His final chapter, titled Unrühmliches (“Inglorious things”—an allusion to Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds), pursues some postwar threads. While the Greenup team completed their reports for burial in the OSS archives, Austrian actors—in particular the Molden brothers (Otto and Fritz)—rewrote the handover of Innsbruck as the achievement of the Austrian and Tyrolean national resistance. Part of this was the invention of the Provisorisches Oesterreichische Nationalkommittee, which Fritz Molden made out of thin air at the OSS headquarters in Bern. As he later rather disarmingly admitted, “I said that I was acting on behalf of an Austrian National committee that didn't exist.” Even more opportunistic was Karl Gruber, who had worked as an engineer in Munich for most of the war before returning to make a marginal contribution and later becoming the first foreign minister of the reestablished Austrian Republic. In the 1980s, his fantasies were included in the self-satisfied television series of Hugo Portisch, Österreich II. Operation Greenup was ignored. For slightly different reasons, the one member of the group who stayed in Austria, Franz Weber, also rewrote his own history. As he rose through the ranks of the Tyrolean Bauernbund and People's Party, he saw that being known as a Wehrmacht deserter, spy, or Allied agent would not make him a popular figure. An equally striking erasure was the role of women like Anna Niederkircher and those others who formed “so etwas wie das operative Rückgrat der Operation Greenup.” Another “inglorious” aspect of the postwar story is the lack of interest among police, judges, and prosecutors in bringing guilty Nazis to justice. Here, perhaps surprisingly, Pirker portrays the Innsbruck-based state prosecutors as rather more motivated than their West German counterparts. Gauleiter Franz Hofer survived in West Germany and died in his bed in 1975.
Perhaps Pirker's outstanding achievement is the way he carefully weighs up the (often fragmentary) evidence to weave together different kinds of history around a central narrative: local and transnational resistance, biography, military strategy, and high politics (the OSS and Operation Sunrise). This is accompanied by revealing photos (albeit in much too small a format) and rounded off by black and white pictures of surviving sites of Operation Greenup by Markus Jenewein.
