Storming the Eagle's Nest (20 page)

It was Christmas in Berchtesgaden. Snow had come early to Bavaria that year and would stay late. In the streets of the old town it lay deep, crisp and even, and at Obersalzberg itself the snow had drifted around the chalets of Bormann, Goebbels and Göring and about the Berghof itself. Here, preparations were in hand to welcome the Führer for the break from his labours in Rastenburg. It was his neighbour on the mountain, Albert Speer, who described the restorative effect of the Alpine headquarters on the Führer: ‘After staying at Obersalzberg for a few weeks he would appear more relaxed. His eyes would be brighter, his capacity for reaction would have increased, and he would recover his pleasure in state business.'
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It was the magic of the Alps that continues to cast its spell on all and sundry, even dictators.

Yet by Christmas 1943, Berchtesgaden had changed. Much as the Swiss were troubled by Allied overflights to targets east, south and north of their small democracy, so too were the more beleaguered citizens of Berchtesgaden. The Lockstein, a small steep mountain, rose virtually from the centre of the
picture-postcard
town. Into its roots a rough tunnel had been blasted to provide shelter for the inhabitants from hard rain. Irmgard Paul, who had been dandled on Hitler's knee six years previously, now found herself spirited away from school and taking cover in this mole hole for two, three or four hours every day.

Across the valley of the river Ache at Obersalzberg, similar precautions were now necessary. By the summer of 1943 – the months of the fall of Mussolini – it had become very apparent to the controller of the complex, the bull-necked murderer
Reichsleiter
Martin Bormann, that Hitler's sanctuary needed some form of air-raid protection. The skies were becoming all too crowded with Allied aircraft and the Luftwaffe was failing to do its job – even to protect the air force chief Hermann Göring's own luxurious Obersalzberg chalet. Under Bormann's direction anti-aircraft guns were installed on the Kehlstein mountain, a chemical system for creating artificial fog to shroud the complex was developed, Hitler's chalet was camouflaged, and the construction of a bunker system put in hand. This symbolism of impending attack compromised the calming atmosphere of the Nazis' private mountain.

Work on a shelter beneath Hitler's Berghof began in August 1943, just as the first USAAF Liberator crash-landed in
Switzerland
. It was planned to be completed on 24 December 1943, in time for Hitler's arrival and the exchange of presents traditional on Christmas Eve in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In late October there was a crisis at Obersalzberg when movement of the surrounding soil caused the central corridor of the system to collapse. The only solution was to provide a concrete lining. Men had to be taken off dozens of other jobs to meet the deadline, yet met it was. On Christmas Eve the 400-foot bunker was ready for a gala opening. The steel blast doors swung smoothly on their hinges, the inlaid floor was polished, rugs garnished the floors, the air conditioning was running, the dog kennel had been sourced for Hitler's Alsatian, pictures graced the walls, tasteful
furniture – or at least furniture regarded by Nazis as tasteful – was installed. It was home from home.

Of Hitler, though, there was still no sign.

After the recapture of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev by the Soviets on 6 November 1943, he had briefly left Rastenburg to visit Munich – for the annual celebration of the Beer Hall Putsch – and Breslau in western Poland. Then he returned to Rastenburg to direct operations on the Eastern Front. The outlook was poor. The winter was one such as only Russia can provide, and the line of the Dnjepr was proving impossible to hold. On Christmas Eve the First Ukrainian Front struck Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schörner's Army Group South along the river Teterev. It was a signal for the beginning of a long retreat that would only end fifteen months later in Berlin. The grim news from the East was trumped on 26 December 1943 by another story filtering through to the gloomy woodland HQ. It was of the sinking of the 32,000-ton
Scharnhorst
at the Battle of North Cape, Norway. All but thirty of her two-thousand-strong crew perished when the convoy raider fell to the fourteen-inch guns of the British battleship
Duke of York
.

That Christmas there was no rest at the Berghof for the wicked. Hitler appeared neither for Christmas nor Silvester, the traditional New Year's Eve celebrations. Irmgard Paul remembered, ‘On New Year's day, Mutti [her mother] wrote in her new diary for 1944: “We all look with a heavy heart to the future.”'
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Churchill was now taking a very similar line on the likely outcome of the war. Five weeks earlier on 28 November 1943 he had met Marshal Stalin and President Roosevelt in Tehran. This was the first of the great wartime meetings between the three principal Allies. It was held to resolve uncertainties over a unified Allied strategy for victory, over the future of Europe after the war, and – particularly – over plans for the Second Front. After a good deal of wrangling, a date of May 1944 was agreed for the Allied
invasion of France, for D-Day. The Big Three also discussed the breaking up of Germany after the war into a series of smaller states, from whence she came. Churchill, mindful of history, sought to isolate Prussia and its inveterate warmongers. He proposed merging Alpine Germany and Austria with Hungary to form a federation coalescing around the river Danube. It would, he said wistfully, be a ‘broad, peaceful, cow-like confederation'.
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Stalin and Roosevelt differed, but agreement was reached that the Reich would certainly no longer exist in her current bloated state.

Germany's hash having been settled, on 11 December 1943 Churchill arrived in Carthage for a meeting with General Dwight Eisenhower, then masterminding the Allies' push for Rome. On the following day the Prime Minister was diagnosed with pneumonia and on 15 December he suffered a mild heart attack. At the height of his illness he remarked to his daughter Sarah, ‘If I die, don't worry – the war is won.'
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Unhappily for Hitler, Churchill did not succumb. By the morning of 18 January 1944 he was back in London, entirely recovered and answering Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons. The diarist Chips Channon noted:

Nine days later, on 27 January 1944, the PM was chairing a ministers' meeting to which he had invited Lord Selborne, head of the SOE.

Now that the date for the D-Day landings had been set, the PM was pondering the role that the French resistance might play in this great gamble. Hitherto, critics of SOE had been
disappointed in the expectations that Churchill – amongst others – had entertained about its role in fostering resistance in Europe and overturning its Nazi occupiers. SOE, they said, had largely failed to set Europe ablaze and the resistance movements had done either less than was expected or – in the critical cases of Austria and Germany itself – nothing concrete at all. After all, Hitler was still in power, apparently unchallenged. The only exception to these conclusions was arguably in the Alps of France and certainly in those of Yugoslavia.

It will be remembered that it was Churchill's former historical research assistant Captain William Deakin who had been parachuted into Montenegro in May 1943. His mission had been to try to judge the rival claims of the communist Tito and the monarchist Mihailović: of the partisans and the patriots fighting to free Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. Deakin's admiration of the fighting spirit of Tito's forces in the course of the Battle of the Sutjeska had induced Churchill to dispatch a much more senior figure to resolve the matter once and for all. This was Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, who was parachuted into Bosnia in September 1943. He was an astute choice, for the thirty-three-year-old Scot was the sort of derring-do adventurer who flourished in wartime.

Born into the Scottish landed gentry in 1911, Maclean was educated at Eton and Cambridge. He joined the diplomatic service in 1933, spent two and a half years in the Soviet Union, and when war broke out resigned to join the ranks in the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders. Commissioned in 1941, he was sent to North Africa and at once distinguished himself with the newly formed Special Air Service (SAS). Later, in the Middle East, he kidnapped the pro-Axis commander of forces in Persia, Fazlollah Zahedi. The general was believed to be planning an uprising supported by the Germans. This hypothesis was supported by Maclean finding in his bedroom correspondence from a German agent, ‘a collection of automatic weapons of German manufacture, a good deal of silk underwear, some opium [and] an illustrated register of the prostitutes of Isfahan'.
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As to the mission in Yugoslavia, this, Maclean wrote candidly, was ‘to find
out who was killing most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them kill more'.
8

He spent six weeks fact-finding in the autumn of 1943 in the whirligig of the Balkan Alps. Like Deakin, he was impressed by the firebrand Tito and his new form of warfare. He wrote after the war in his classic
Eastern Approaches
:

Naturally enough, this was a modus operandi and an outcome that greatly appealed to Churchill. It struck a chord with the man who had made his name in the Boer War, the conflict in which the guerrilla tactics of the Dutch settlers had proved so surprisingly effective against a lumbering and hidebound British army. Mafeking, Ladysmith and Colenso were hard lessons well learned by a leader who understood the meanings of history.

Having reached his conclusions in the late autumn of 1943, Maclean was extracted from Yugoslavia and hastily dispatched to British headquarters in Cairo. Here he could make his report before Churchill's summit with Stalin and Roosevelt in Tehran.

On 6 November 1943, Maclean duly presented his findings to the foreign secretary Anthony Eden. Naturally enough, he told Eden that the partisans' effectiveness could be considerably increased by Allied help. He also gave a caution: ‘whether we gave such assistance or not, Tito and his followers would exercise decisive influence in Yugoslavia after the liberation'.
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In short, although with Josip Broz would come victory over the
Wehrmacht, so would a communist state after the war. Churchill, a monarchist through and through, was as pragmatic here as he was in his dealings with Stalin. At a meeting with Maclean shortly after the Tehran Conference he asked first whether the Brigadier wore a kilt when he parachuted from a plane, subsequently of the government of post-war Yugoslavia. ‘Do you intend', he asked Maclean, ‘to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?' ‘No Sir.' ‘Neither do I. And that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of Government they set up, the better. That is for them to decide. What interests us is, which of them [partisans or patriots] is doing most harm to the Germans?'
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As part of the horse-trading at Tehran, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had agreed that Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia should be supported with supplies and equipment to the greatest
possible
extent. At the beginning of December 1943, British support was also withdrawn from Mihailović. At much the same time the Wehrmacht opened the sixth anti-partisan offensive. Operation Kugelblitz was a drive by the V SS Mountain Corps to destroy partisan units in eastern Bosnia. Most of Tito's forces slipped through the closing SS ring, but at the price of some 9,000 casualties. Hard on its heels came Operation Schneesturm: two drives from Bosnia, one towards Italy and the other to the Adriatic coast. When the operation was called off in late December 1943 the partisans had lost another 2,000 men, but had still survived as a fighting force.

These events seemed to justify the wisdom of the British decision and the accuracy of Maclean's observations. Mihailović – and with him the young King Peter and the monarchy in
Yugoslavia
– would soon be consigned to the tides of history.