A Guest of the Reich
The Story of American Heiress Gertrude Legendre's Dramatic Captivity and Escape from Nazi Germany
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4.1 • 16 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A Guest of the Reich is the incredible true story of Gertrude “Gertie” Legendre, an American heiress taken prisoner by the Nazis. Born into a wealthy family, Legendre lived a charmed life in Jazz Age America. But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she joined the OSS—the wartime spy organization that preceded the CIA—and headed to Europe. In 1944, while on leave, Legendre accidentally crossed the front lines along the Luxembourg–Germany border and was captured. The Nazis treated her as a “special prisoner” of the SS and moved her from city to city throughout Germany, where she witnessed the collapse of Hitler’s Reich as no other American did, before escaping into Switzerland. A gripping portrait of a multifaceted and deeply fascinating woman, A Guest of the Reich is a propulsive account of a little-known chapter in the history of World War II.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Finn (coauthor, The Zhivago Affair), national security editor at the Washington Post, keenly draws a portrait of the wartime derring-do of Gertrude "Gertie" Legendre (1902 2000), socialite, heiress, and teenage big-game hunter who inspired the Broadway play Holiday. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, while her husband Sidney was stationed in Hawaii and their daughters were being cared for by nannies, Legendre insinuated herself into the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence agency that preceded the CIA. In September 1944, on leave outside recently liberated Paris and "against all common sense and training," she accidentally crossed enemy lines. The Nazis arrested her, and she was interrogated often, but she remained undaunted and, after six months, escaped into Switzerland. Finn wisely depends on Legendre's diaries, which exhibit not only her wit and pluck but her racism, anti-Semitism, entitlement, and ego (of stealing hot water rations intended for fellow prisoners' baths , she writes, "I felt classed with the other wily women of the ages, but unashamed I was keeping cleaner than the others"), and ably fills in historical context. Legendre was an extraordinary woman, whose "journey through Hitler's collapsing Reich" will appeal to anyone equally enamored of glamour and wartime adventure.
Customer Reviews
An OK Read
The prose and story is fine, but the protagonist (a real person and very wealthy socialite) was so loathsome and morally bankrupt that I found the book to be a challenging read, even though the author handled everything admirably.