A Guest of the Reich

July 29, 2019
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.