Operation Greenup: The Real Inglourious Basterds

In Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 historical revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine, played by Brad Pitt, recruits the titular Basterds – a squad of Jewish soldiers – to wreak havoc behind Nazi lines during World War II. In the process, they cross paths with a parallel British mission and a revenge plot by a French Jewish woman and succeed in gunning down Adolf Hitler and most of the Nazi high command in a burning French theatre. Ridiculous Hollywood nonsense, right? Well, not as much as you might think for not only did Allied Intelligence actually concoct a plan – dubbed Operation Foxley – to assassinate Hitler, but they also recruited a large number of Jewish refugees to conduct secret operations behind enemy lines. And by far the most successful of these, carried out in the dying days of the war, succeeded in saving thousands of lives and a key Austrian city from unnecessary destruction. This is the story of Operation Greenup, the real-life Inglourious Basterds.

The real-life ‘Basterds’ in this story comprised three men. The first was Frederick Mayer, born on October 28, 1921 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany to Berthilda Dreyfuss and Heinrich Mayer. Heinrich served in the Imperial German Army during the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross Second Class for gallantry during the 1916 Battle of Verdun. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the family hoped that their patriarch’s wartime service would shield them from antisemitic prosecution, but they were bitterly disappointed. The younger Mayer, who was employed as a mechanic for the Ford Motor Company, often had to fight off antisemitic street gangs on his way to and from work. By 1938 it became clear that Germany was no place for Jews, so Mayer and his wife emigrated to the United States, settling in Brooklyn. They soon discovered that antisemitism was nearly as rife in America as in Germany, though Mayerwas not one to let this slide. On one occasion, he responded to an employer’s antisemitic joke by punching him out cold.

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Mayer enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he quickly displayed a winning combination of daring, initiative, and lateral thinking. During one training exercise in Arizona, he snuck behind enemy lines and captured a number of officers including a Brigadier General, who protested:

“You can’t do that! You’re breaking the rules!”

To which Mayer responded:

“War is not fair. The rules of war are to win.”

At this, the General admitted defeat and raised his hands in surrender. Like. A. Boss.

These qualities, as well as Mayer’s fluency in German, French, Spanish, brought Mayer to the attention of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS – the precursor to today’s CIA – who immediately recruited him as an agent and trained him in demolition, marksmanship, and hand-to-hand combat. In a 2013 documentary, Mayer explained his motivations in a statement that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in Tarantino’s film:

“It felt like I had my chance to do what I set out to do — kill Nazis. That’s why all the Jewish boys joined.”

Whether his goals included collecting 100 Nazi scalps is not recorded.

The second key figure in Operation Greenup was Hans Wijnberg, a Dutch Jew born on November 29, 1922 in Amsterdam. On the eve of the Second World War in 1939, Winberg’s parents sent him and his twin brother Louis to live with his father’s business partner in Brooklyn. In 1943, four years into the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Wijnberg’s parents were rounded up and deported to the Auschwitz Extermination Camp. Distraught and vowing revenge, the now 21-year-old Wijnberg enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was soon approached by an OSS recruiter, who had sought him out for his fluency in German, Dutch, and English. Wijnberg volunteered on the spot, and was trained as a radio operator.

The third and final member of the team was Franz Weber, born in 1920 in Oberperfuss near Innsbruck, Austria. As an officer in the German Wehrmacht, he served on several fronts, including the savage anti-partisan campaigns in occupied Yugoslavia. An avowed and conscientious Catholic, Weber soon grew disgusted by the brutal reprisals inflicted against the local population, and became convinced that the Nazi regime was evil and unsustainable. After transferring to the Italian front in the summer of 1944, he defected to U.S. Forces near Viareggio. Recognizing his willingness to oppose the Nazis and his intimate knowledge of the Tyrol region, the OSS quickly recruited Weber and assigned him to the Operation Greenup team.

Mayer, Wijnberg, and Weber’s mission was, simply put, to determine how the war in Europe would end. For years, rumours abounded that the Nazi high command was building an Alpenfestung or “Alpine Redoubt”: a large, heavily-fortified area in the Alps where the last, fanatical Nazi holdouts would make their last stand – potentially extending the war by months and costing thousands more lives. Operation Greenup called for the trio to be parachuted into the Tyrol near Innsbruck, where they would report on the movement of troops and equipment through the Brenner pass between Austria and Italy and determine whether the Alpenfestung actually existed. Meanwhile, they were to cause as much chaos as possible behind enemy lines. The OSS had already sent 30 teams into the area, but all had either been captured or failed to gather any useful intelligence. However, Operation Greenup had an ace up its sleeve: Franz Weber, who not only knew the area intimately but whose family in Oberperfuss had bravely volunteered to shelter the agents and run messages for them.

On February 26, 1945, the team made their jump over a frozen mountain lake 10,000 feet up in the air – the only viable drop zone in the area not crawling with German troops. While mercifully the lake was frozen solid and no-one was injured or drowned, unfortunately all but one supply canister were lost – including the one holding the team’s skis. They were thus forced to hike for miles through waist-deep snow until they reached Franz Weber’s house. There, they set up camp and began preparing for their mission. Brooklynites through and through, the team created a system of codenames to disguise their operations by laying a map of their home borough over a map of the Tyrol and renaming each location after its corresponding New York street name or intersection.

As soon as the team was organized, Mayer descended into Innsbruck and posed as a Wehrmacht officer, even sleeping for a while in the Officer’s Barracks. There he gathered a windfall of intelligence from his unsuspecting fellow officers and kept an eye on troop and supply movements through the city. He even organized an underground resistance movement among local Army and Gestapo personnel who had grown disillusioned with the Nazis and wished to bring a swift end to the war. Franz Weber’s sisters bravely volunteered as couriers, carrying information gathered by Mayer back to Wijnberg, who, using a radio hidden the the Webers’ attic, transmitted it to the OSS listening post in Bari, Italy. This intelligence allowed the U.S. Army Air Force to bomb dozens of trains, blocking the Brenner Pass for weeks on end and severely disrupting German supply lines.

Three weeks into the operation, Mayer learned of a secret underground munitions plant in the area, and decided to pose as a French electrician fleeing the Russians in order to infiltrate it. Unfortunately, Mayer’s luck suddenly took a turn for the worse when one of his local contacts, a black marketeer, was captured by the Gestapo and promptly ratted out the rest of his resistance network. Mayer was immediately captured and brutally tortured, being stripped naked and thrashed with a bullwhip for hours. Still, he maintained his story – that is, until the informant was brought into the torture chamber. His cover blown, Mayer admitted he was an American agent, but, in a bid to save his team, maintained that he worked alone. At this point Mayer should have been dragged outside and executed as a spy, but once again fate intervened.

At the same time, the Gestapo was interrogating another American OSS agent, Hermann Matull, whom they showed a picture of Mayer for identification. Thinking quickly, Matull claimed that Mayer was a high-ranking intelligence officer, and that American forces would execute anyone caught harming him. The ruse worked, and instead of being executed, Mayer was brought before the highest official in the area: Franz Hofer, the Gauleiter or regional governor of Tyrol. Convinced that the Third Reich’s defeat was inevitable and not wanting to be tried as a war criminal, Hofer treated Mayer humanely and allowed him to contact his OSS handlers via neutral Switzerland. The message they relayed was a masterclass in hard-boiled understatement, reading:

“Fred Mayer reports he is in Gestapo hands but cabled ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m not really bad off.’”

With Hofer’s help, Mayer organized the peaceful surrender of Innsbruck, preventing the city from unnecessary destruction. On the morning of May 3, 1945, as the US 103rd Infantry Division was preparing to advance on the city, Mayer drove out in a car flying a a white flag improvised from a bedsheet and informed the American forces that the German garrison in Innsbruck was prepared to surrender without resistance. Though only a sergeant, Mayer claimed to be a Lieutenant in the hopes he would be taken more seriously by both German and American officers. It worked, and Innsbruck was captured without a shot being fired. Thus ended Operation Greenup.

In addition to trying up German logistics, Greenup’s greatest achievement was deflating the myth of the Alpenfestung once and for all. Though the plan for an Alpine Redoubt had seriously been proposed and provisionally approved by both Adolf Hitler and Gauleiter Hofer, due to a lack of resources no serious attempt was ever made to implement it. Nonetheless, in 1945 Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels created a special unit to spread false intelligence about the hypothetical redoubt, going so far as to draft fake blueprints and troop movement orders and leak rumours to neutral countries. This deception operation was enormously successful, forcing the Allies to expend considerable resources trying to establish the scale and readiness of Alpenfestung. It was not until Allied troops actually crossed into Austria that they finally learned that the dreaded Alpine Redoubt was nothing but a mirage.

After the war, Mayer moved back to Brooklyn, where he worked at a power plant until his retirement in 1977. He then moved to Charles Town, West Virginia, where he volunteered as a driver for Meals on Wheels for 38 years. In 2013, Senator Jay Rockefeller presented Mayer with 10 decorations for his wartime service, including the Prisoner of War Medal, Good Conduct Medal; American Campaign Medal; European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three Bronze Stars; World War II Victory Medal; World War II Honorable Service Lapel Button; and the Parachutist Badge. During the awards ceremony, Rockefeller opined on Mayer’s wartime contributions, stating:

“Mr. Mayer is a remarkable but incredibly humble man whose bravery in World War II is only now getting the attention it deserves. I am truly honored to be here today, and to share his story.”

Frederick Mayer died on April 15, 2016 at the age of 94.

Hans Wijnberg, Operation Greenup’s radio operator, left the Army in 1946 and studied chemistry, obtaining his bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1949 and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1952. He served on the faculties of the University of Minnesota, Grinnell University, the University of Tulain, the University of Leiden, and the Rijksuniversitet Groningen before retiring and founding a successful chemical company. He died in 2011 at the age of 89.

Finally, Franz Weber remained in his hometown of Innsbruck, where he became Chief of Police. He later headed the Tyrol Farmers’ Union before going into politics and serving in both the Tyrolean and national Austrian legislatures. He died in 2001 at the age of 81.

While Operation Greenup was the most successful operation of the war conducted by Jewish operatives, it was far from the only one. At the outbreak of war, Jews who had fled Germany and occupied Czechoslovakia for Britain and her colonies were rounded up and interned as enemy aliens. In 1942, however, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, desperate for any means of striking back against the Germans, approved the formation of a special Commando Unit, code-named No.3 Troop or X-Troop, whose members were to be recruited from among the interned Jewish refugees. Numbering some 130 men and commanded by Captain Bryan Hilton-Jones, X-Troop participated in a number of daring operations. For example, during the disastrous Dieppe Raid on August 19, 1942, five members of the unit, all former Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia, infiltrated a German headquarters to capture an Enigma cipher machine. Later, in the lead-up to the Operation Overlord landings in Normandy, X-Troop operative and German-born Jew Stefan Rosenberg – code-named Stephen Rigby or “Nimrod” – took part in the vast deception operation designed to convince the Germans that the invasion would take place in the Pas-de-Calais region – and to learn more about this, please check out our previous video The Bizarre Story of the Massive Fake Army That Defeated the Nazis and Helped End WWII. Rosenberg’s mission involved sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as a German intelligence officer disguised as a member of the French Resistance (take that, Robert Downey Jr.) and briefing his “superiors” on the alleged Allied invasion plans. In the end, he succeeded in securing an audience not only with Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, commander of German defences in Normandy, but Adolf Hitler himself before escaping back to British lines. How Rosenberg restrained himself from killing the hated Fuhrer then and there remains a mystery for the ages. Over the course of the war, X-troop lost 21 men killed and 22 wounded – but that, dear viewers, is a story for another day.

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