Storming the Eagle's Nest (2 page)

Soon the Berghof became the centre of a Nazi settlement. Hitler’s acolytes – Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Reichsleiter Joseph Goebbels and the architect cum arms and war production minister Albert Speer – had chalets within call of the Führer. For Hitler’s fiftieth birthday
in 1939 a lofty retreat known as the Kehlsteinhaus – dubbed ‘the Eagle’s Nest’ by the French ambassador to Germany, André François-Poncet – was constructed by Bormann at the 6,017-foot peak of the Kehlstein. An SS barracks, guest hotel and assorted subsidiary buildings created a community that would eventually number 4,000. Obersalzberg had its own kindergarten, school, swimming pool, theatre and fire station. Guards were provided by the SS (Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel) and the Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSD, Reich Security Service). Their members preferred service at Obersalzberg to elsewhere. The local girls were much attracted to uniforms. Although Hitler also had houses in Munich and Berlin, it was the Berghof that he regarded as his real home. On 17 January 1942 he declared, ‘There are so many links between the Obersalzberg and me. So many things were born there and brought to fruition there. I’ve spent up there the finest hours of my life. It’s there that all my great projects were conceived and ripened.’
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It was fitting, then, that on 19 November 1937 came a meeting there that ushered in Neville Chamberlain’s Alpine mission. This was Hitler’s encounter with Lord Viscount Halifax, former Viceroy of India and shortly to replace Anthony Eden as Britain’s foreign secretary. Halifax was a traditional representative of England’s ruling classes. He leavened inherited wealth, a country estate, Eton and Oxford with a predilection for field sports and High Anglicanism. The latter inspired Churchill’s punning nickname, ‘the Holy Fox’. Under the cloak of attending one of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring’s garish hunting parties – shooting foxes in Pomerania – Halifax had been dispatched by Chamberlain to the Berghof. There in the Alps he was to establish better relations with a renascent Germany, and to attempt to reconcile Hitler’s ambitions for the Third Reich with the interests of a country that in 1937 remained a world power, her empire largely intact.

Hitler was of course an adherent of racial theories about the supremacy of the ‘Aryan’ people that demanded the reunification
of the German-speaking ‘Volk’ of Europe into the Reich. The result would be a Grossdeutsches Reich – Greater German Reich. The difficulty in this modest proposal was that such a plan required existing national borders to be torn up. The Alpine republic of Austria was predominantly German-speaking; so too was the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia – with some 3 million German speakers; so too some 400,000 residents of the Baltic city of Danzig in Poland; so too the majority of the citizens of Switzerland. Hitler was also looking further east for Lebensraum – living space – for his people. Given the experience of France, Great Britain and the United States in the First World War, the Versailles Treaty specifically proscribed the unification or Anschluss of Germany and Austria; it established Danzig as a ‘Free City’ under League of Nations control; it created the new state of Czechoslovakia. It was Germany’s ambitions to rearrange these affairs that Halifax was to explore with Hitler in the Alps.

The meeting at Berchtesgaden nearly began with misfortune. Arriving at the Berghof, the gangling Halifax mistook the 5’ 8” Hitler for a footman, and was on the point of handing the Führer his hat and coat. Happily the gaffe was avoided by a member of the diplomatic corps standing on his tiptoes urging in the Viscount’s ear, ‘Der Führer! Der Führer!’ Thereafter Hitler had very much his own way. He rehearsed the injustices of Versailles and the partiality of the British press. He protested – apparently without irony – that ‘Germany sets great store by good relations with all her neighbours’. Halifax reciprocated by playing what amounted to the opening card of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. He made it clear that Britain was prepared to contemplate reinterpretations of Versailles on the questions of Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Providing, of course, such alterations came through ‘peaceful evolution’ rather than ‘methods … which might cause far-reaching disturbances’. For Hitler this opened a prospect – a mountain path, a Wanderweg – to the high sunlit uplands of a Grossdeutsches Reich. Everything seemed possible. Thus Halifax at Berchtesgaden – in the words of his most recent biographer Andrew Roberts – ‘let Hitler see
his chance’.
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The Führer then relaxed and took it upon himself to advise the former Viceroy of India on the problem of the national aspirations of the subcontinent. ‘Shoot Gandhi,’ he proposed.

On his return to England, Halifax reported on the meeting to the British Cabinet; he ‘would expect beaver-like persistence in pressing their claims in central Europe, but not in a form to give others cause – or probably occasion – to interfere.’
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For his part, Hitler dismissed Halifax as ‘the English parson’, sacked a couple of generals – Blomberg and Fritsch – who amongst other lapses he felt lacked an appetite for war, consolidated his hold over the armed forces, and on 20 February 1937 made an inflammatory speech at the Reichstag dismissive of British concerns. According to Winston Churchill, Hitler now ‘regarded Britain as a frightened, flabby old woman, who at worst would only bluster, and was, anyhow, incapable of making war’.
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On 12 March 1938 Hitler duly invaded Austria, replacing the nationalist chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg with the Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart. This was Anschluss, as forbidden by Versailles. The American war correspondent William L. Shirer was in the Austrian capital, covering the story for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) radio. The thirty-four-year-old Chicago-born Shirer was one of the ‘Murrow’s boys’, CBS journalists hired by the legendary Ed Murrow. He has much to tell us of the first months of the Nazis in the Alps, not least in his classic account of the era,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
:

When Versailles brought the curtain down on the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was joked that the rump republic of Austria comprised an imperial city and a handful of Alpine
valleys. Amongst the vestiges of the empire were the two western Alpine provinces of the Vorarlberg and Tyrol. They hinged on the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck, the gateway to Italy. Together, the provinces boasted two resorts with international reputations: St Anton am Arlberg, close to the border with Switzerland, and Kitzbühel, the medieval Tyrolean town patronised by the Duke of Windsor in his earlier days as the playboy Prince of Wales. With Anschluss, these resorts became the southern outposts of the Third Reich, their streets decked in swastikas and their chalets cleared of political opponents, the disabled, gypsies and Jews alike. The Gestapo soon moved in.

As the French and the British, the guarantors of Versailles, did little but wring their hands at this turn of events, Hitler matured his plan for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. This was a scheme much more practicable via neighbouring Austria than from Germany. In late May 1938 the shooting by a Czech official of two Sudeten farmers precipitated the Czech crisis. It bubbled throughout the summer, stoked by pronouncements from both the British and the French in favour of redrawing the Czech border to the benefit of Germany. At the annual Nazi rally in Nuremberg on 12 September 1938, Hitler declared, ‘I have stated that the Reich would not tolerate any further oppression of these three and a half million Germans, and I would ask the statesmen of foreign countries to be convinced that this is no mere form of words.’

On 13 September the Czech government under Edvard Beneš was obliged to declare martial law; the Czechs themselves, France and Britain mobilised. Europe seemed closer to a general war than at any time since 1918. Chamberlain, feeling – with his gift for cliché – that desperate times called for desperate measures, unveiled Plan Z to Foreign Secretary Halifax. Conceived by the Director of the Conservative Research Department Sir Joseph Ball, this was in the days long before ‘shuttle diplomacy’, G8 and G20 conferences, and long before the world’s leaders met on anything other than a very occasional basis – normally at the League of Nations in Geneva. The plan, according to the Prime
Minister, ‘was so unconventional and daring it fairly took his [Halifax’s] breath away’.
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At the time Chamberlain was almost seventy, and had been Prime Minster since May 1937. He was part of a political dynasty: the son of the Cabinet minister Joseph Chamberlain and
half-brother
of Austen Chamberlain. His premiership was defined by the European crisis brought about by the Depression and the rise of fascism, and in fathering the policy of appeasement he was the counterpoint to Churchill, who summarised his rival’s position: ‘The Prime Minister wished to get on good terms with the European dictators, and believed that conciliation and the avoidance of anything likely to offend them was the best method.’
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For Lloyd George, Chamberlain would have made ‘a good mayor of Birmingham in an off year’; it was also said that he ‘looked at Foreign Policy through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe’.

Chamberlain’s Berchtesgaden party comprised himself, a senior civil servant and adviser, Sir Horace Wilson, the British ambassador to the Reich, Sir Nevile Henderson, and a secretary. Foreign Secretary Halifax had been left in London because his presence – in terms of protocol – would demand that of his counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop at the meeting with Hitler. The former wine salesman was not regarded by the British as a constructive contributor to debate. Halifax had remarked that he was ‘so stupid, so shallow, so self-centred and self-satisfied, so totally devoid of intellectual capacity that he never seems to take in what is said to him’.
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Collected at the Berchtesgadener Hof, the British party was driven fifteen minutes through the rain up to the Berghof. There they were greeted by an eighty-man
black-uniformed
SS guard of honour and, at the bottom of the flight of steps leading up to the chalet’s terrace, by Hitler himself. The Führer was flanked by Generaloberst Wilhelm Keitel, resplendent in field grey. Here was a symbol of Germany’s renewed military prowess. Chamberlain was clutching his hat and umbrella, but
did not try to give them to the Führer. The party then entered the Berghof. Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary at Obersalzberg, remembered:

Tea was served in the reception room with its great window looking across to the Untersberg. Hitler had a limited aptitude for small talk. The preliminary conversation concerned the room, the splendours of the view – marred by the rain – and the idea of the Führer visiting England. Chamberlain’s priggish eye was caught by the paintings of nude women scattered around the chalet, and he raised the subject with the Cabinet on his return to England. The Prime Minister and the chancellor then removed themselves with the Führer’s interpreter, Dr Paul Schmidt, to the study upstairs in which Hitler had entertained Halifax the previous year. The room, Chamberlain later complained, was bare of ornament. ‘There was not even a clock, only a stove, a small table with two bottles of mineral water (which he didn’t offer me), three chairs and a sofa.’
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Hitler’s approach with Chamberlain was much the same as with Halifax: a litany of the injustices served on Germany and a complementary catalogue of demands. As Schmidt recorded, Hitler declared that he ‘did not wish that any doubts should arise as to his absolute determination not to tolerate any longer that a small second-rate country should treat the mighty
thousand-year
-old German Reich as something inferior … he would be sorry if a world war should arise from this problem … [but] he would face any war, even world war, for this’. He worked himself into a lather. Such, indeed, was the Führer’s tenor that the Prime Minister asked him why he had agreed to the visit if
he was so determined to take action – most immediately against Czechoslovakia. ‘I soon saw’, wrote Chamberlain to his sisters, ‘that the situation was much more critical than I had anticipated. I knew that his troops and tanks and guns and planes were ready to pounce, and only awaiting his word, and it was clear that rapid decisions must be taken if the situation was to be saved.’ Hitler’s precise formulation, in the words of the debonair Sir Nevile Henderson – twiddling his thumbs downstairs as the rain and darkness fell – was that ‘the only terms on which he could agree to a peaceful solution were on the basis of the acceptance of the principal of self-determination’.
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This Chamberlain provisionally accepted. Because the results of a plebiscite in the Sudetenland were a foregone conclusion, he went considerably further than Halifax. He effectively told Hitler that Britain was prepared to see the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain concluded by agreeing to seek consent to this concession from the British Cabinet, the French and – last and least – the Czech government itself.

Business concluded, dinner was served. The British party was joined by some of Hitler’s neighbours in Obersalzberg: the convicted murderer Reichsleiter Martin Bormann and his wife Gerda, Margarete, the wife of the Reich’s architect Albert Speer, and Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun. This was an honour for the Prime Minister. Braun was normally kept under wraps – indeed confined to her room – when dignitaries were visiting the Berghof. It was pitch-dark before Chamberlain got back to the Berchtesgadener Hof, and close to midnight before his short report to the Cabinet in England had been drafted, enciphered and telegraphed.