A Great Evening for a Party

It was a beautiful late summer evening in Salzburg, Austria, perfect for a celebration and new beginnings. General Mark Clark, former Commander of 5th U.S. Army, now the Commander of U.S. Occupational Forces in Austria had just revived the Salzburg Music Festival. It was August 1945 and the war in Europe had been over for just a little over two months. Time to get back to normal.

Music festivals had been held in Salzburg at irregular intervals since the late 1800s. The events were interrupted by World War I and again by WWII. Starting the tradition again seemed a perfect way to illustrate the Austrian concept of “Live and let live” and to begin a transition back to some semblance of regular life. There were plays and concerts and of course orchestral music, featuring Austria’s most famous composer, Mozart. The majority of tickets for festival events were passed out to U.S. soldiers. The remainder went to local citizens.

Clark’s special guests included his counterparts, commanders from other allied nations, the U.K., Russia, and France. It was a win-win for the city and for the occupiers – Clark was bringing the allies together, showcasing Austrian music, American hospitality and creating opportunities for not just conversation but cooperation.

He housed the dignitaries at the beautiful Schloss Klessheim in Salzburg. A few years earlier, other guests had stayed at the castle, but then those visitors were Nazi party officials, guests of Hitler, visiting his Bavarian-mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Now the allies were in charge. Clark would host his counterparts several times in the following months as efforts continued to return looted art to the counties from whence it all had been looted.

The Diego Velazquez Painting Philip IV King of Spain, being examined by GEN Mark W. Clark, CG USFA, who was the host to allied leaders, and the Austrian people during a ceremony where art treasures recovered by the U.S. Army were returned to the rightful owners. LT. GEN Emile Marie Bethourart of France, LT. GEN. R.L. McCreery of Britian, Mr. Figl, Chancellor of Austria, and COL. GEN. Alexis Zheltov, Russian Deputy Commander, were guests of GEN Clark. 12/19/48. National Archives photo.

But on this occasion of the festival’s revival, there were several other guests, including two young counterintelligence agents, who arrived in a Mercedes they had appropriated somewhere along their travels across France and Germany in the early days of allied occupation. The women were both agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), based out of London, but attached to the U.S. Forces Headquarters in Salzburg.

Stephanie Czech who spoke both German and French, grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY, the daughter of Polish immigrants. Her parents spoke very little English and young Stephanie’s first language was Polish. She later said she didn’t learn English until she started grade school. Her mother made certain she had an education and with the encouragement of a high school teacher, she received a degree in chemistry from Cornell. When WWII began, one of her brothers worked in a bomb factory. The other was ineligible to join the Army: he was 4F. “I was the only one in my family to go to war,” she later said.

Stephanie joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and later attended Quartermaster School at Fort Lee, VA. She transferred to the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) when she was offered the opportunity. Stephanie was serving as a recruiter for the WAC when her friend Kay told her about how she’d joined the elite Office of Strategic Services (OSS), working in Morale Operations (MO), creating propaganda and psychological warfare campaigns. Stephanie thought the OSS sounded interesting, much more challenging than what she had been doing thus far, so she applied as well.

Captain Stephanie Czech

By that summer evening in August, 1945, Stephanie’s colleague Agnes was awaiting her new assignment, presumably in Czechoslovakia. Stephanie was awaiting new orders too. But that evening, was just a celebration. Stephanie chatted excitedly with General Clark, and somehow let it slip that she had her own staff car. The general frowned; where did she get the gasoline, he wanted to know. Stephanie breezily replied; the two agents ‘borrowed’ gas from various U.S. Army units as they were out and about in the countryside, observing the chaos of displaced persons on the move (DPs), German agents and infiltrators looking for opportunities to defect, and other important events.

None of this mattered to General Clark. “If I find that car I’m going to confiscate it.”

“Sir, you will never find that car,” Stephanie replied. Oops.

A moment later she realized she shouldn’t have challenged the general. But at the time she was young and brash. In a 2006 oral history interview with the Military Women’s Memorial (MWM) Foundation she told the story of that celebratory evening with General Clark and his guests. Maybe she didn’t quite recall the exact date of the event but that conversation was burned into her memory. As was her personal victory. Although General Clark searched and searched, he never did locate where she hid her personal staff car.

Stephanie kept it until it was time for her to pack up her two passports, her uniforms, and civilian clothes and leave the London office of the OSS for her new assignment, reporting to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. There she deposited all of the belongings relating to her true identity and continued on via military aircraft for the destroyed city of Warsaw. Not even her boyfriend, Colonel Bill Rader, an Army Air Corps pilot, knew where she was going.

There she was assigned as X-2, Counterintelligence, her cover: secretary to the U.S. Ambassador. Her mission: report on Nazi sympathizers, Soviet agents, communist party organizers and political unrest. It was going to be the most dangerous assignment of her career.

Warsaw, Poland September 1945