OSS Agents in Hitler's Heartland: Destination Innsbruck

Gerald Schwab

May 1996 · Greenwood Publishing Group

About this ebook

This book tells the history of one of the most successful OSS operations of World War II. Three OSS agents—two young immigrants, one from Germany, the other from Holland, and a former Austrian Wehrmacht officer—in the midst of winter make a night jump into the Austrian Alps, landing hip-deep in snow at 10,000 feet. William Casey—then an OSS official and later head of the CIA—called it by far the most successful of the operations mounted from the OSS base at Bari. Thanks to this intrepid threesome, rail and road communications between the Italian front and Germany were seriously hampered and the city of Innsbruck in the heart of the Nazi's vaunted stronghold called the National Redoubt, fell to American troops without a shot being fired.

About the author

GERALD SCHWAB was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1940. After military service in Italy with the 10th Mountain Division and in Austria with a military intelligence unit, he served as translator-interpreter with the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, followed by a career in the Department of State and the UN's International Labor Organization until his retirement.