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We study a layered K-user M-hop Gaussian relay network consisting of Km nodes in the m^th layer, where M\geq 2 and K=K1=KM+1. We observe that the time-varying nature of wireless channels or fading can be exploited to mitigate the interuser interference. The proposed amplify-and-forward relaying scheme exploits such channel variations and works for a wide class of channel distributions including Rayleigh fading. We show a general achievable degrees of freedom (DoF) region for this class of Gaussian relay networks. Specifically, the set of all (d1,\ldots , dK) such that di\leq 1 for all i and \sum i=1^{K} di\leq K\Sigma is achievable, where di is the DoF of the i^th source-destination pair and K\Sigma is the maximum integer such that K\Sigma \leq \mathop min\limits m\{Km\} and M/K\Sigma is an integer. We show that surprisingly the achievable DoF region coincides with the cut-set outer bound if M/ \mathop min\limits m\{Km\} is an integer; thus, interference-free communication is possible in terms of DoF. We further characterize an achievable DoF region assuming multi-antenna nodes and general message set, which again coincides with the cut-set outer bound for a certain class of networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]