[WAPO] Frederick Mayer was a person, a friend once observed, whose "fear nerve is dead." A German-born Jew, he fled his home in the Black Forest in 1938 and made a new life in the United States, then ventured back into Nazi Europe as a U.S. spy.His exploits -- parachuting onto an Alpine glacier, infiltrating enemy lines, posing as a German officer to gather vital intelligence, and enduring lengthy torture sessions before essentially negotiating the surrender of the city of Innsbruck, Austria -- seemed in hindsight the stuff of movies. "Inglourious Basterds" (2009), director Quentin Tarantino’s historical fiction about justice-seeking Jewish American soldiers during World War II, could have been modeled after Mayer and his comrades.
Mr. Mayer, who was described at times as a "real inglorious bastard," died April 15 at his home in Charles Town, W.Va. He was 94 and had been diagnosed with pancytopenia, a blood deficiency, said a daughter, Claudette Mayer.
Mr. Mayer once told an interviewer that he had a "good combination of hatred and love" -- a "hatred of the Nazis and a love for America." The son of a decorated World War I veteran, he had seen his family pushed from its homeland by a regime that would slaughter six million European Jews in the Holocaust.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Mayer enlisted in the U.S. Army. "It felt like I had my chance to do what I set out to do -- kill Nazis," he said in the TV film "The Real Inglorious Bastards" (2012). "That’s why all the Jewish boys joined."
Mr. Mayer, disguised in a German uniform. (Frederick Mayer/Courtesy Patrick K. O’Donnell )