Storming the Eagle's Nest (26 page)

Yet autumn comes early in the Alps. There were 85,000 mouths to feed and the industrial Ossola valley was not a subsistence community. Supported by the Swiss and Italian Red Cross, Dulles and McCaffery brought in food from Switzerland through the Simplon; their efforts were nullified by the Wehrmacht strangling supplies coming from the south. Bread ran out and the people were reduced to living on chestnuts and milk. On 28 September 1944 a Swiss political leader visited the republic and told a Swiss newspaper, ‘The food situation is tragic … there is no winter clothing … there’s nothing … children are starving.’
19
Dissent spread. The discovery of an arms dump led to a stand-off between the communist Garibaldi brigades and those partisans of more moderate persuasion. On 10 October 1944, a month after the declaration of the republic, the Wehrmacht launched Operation Avanti under the leadership of SS-Brigadeführer Willy Tensfeld. His forces supposedly comprised 20,000 well-armed men, supported by artillery. The fragmented forces of the several partisan brigades organised themselves as best they could. Blocks of granite from the quarries were used to obstruct roads, crops cut down to create open fields of fire, barbed wire spread.

On 14 October 1944, Domodossola once again fell. Two days later the partisans elsewhere in the valley were scattering in the face of Tensfeld’s SS. The fairy tale was at an end, just as it had been in Vercors.

Here in the Italian Alps, though, there was a line of escape. Three special trains were chartered to take the republicans north through the Simplon to safety in Switzerland. About 2,000 partisans escaped and around 35,000 civilians – perhaps half of the permanent population. With some justice, the refugees feared reprisals. Earlier in the month in Marzabotto in the Apennines outside Bologna, 800 civilians who supported the partisans had been murdered by the Waffen-SS: the worst massacre in western Europe in the whole war. By 26 October 1944 the mayfly republic of Ossola was back in the hands of the Fascists. It had survived for thirty-five days.

The CLNAI at once blamed McCaffery and Dulles for failing to provide the promised airdrops of materiel and of regular forces. The pair responded that the USAAF and RAF had been all too busy in Warsaw and Arnhem and they had been against the rising in the first place. Some partisans attributed darker, political motives to the Allies. Churchill favoured the new monarchist Ivanoe Bonomi administration in Rome, and would naturally scotch the initiative of the communist brigades:
Domodossola
was much too close to Tito’s Yugoslavia. The partisan leader Ferruccio Parri commented sourly that the episode was ‘the most obvious and painful example of Allied lack of interest in liberating certain frontier areas’.
20

Meanwhile, back in France, a miracle – of sorts – had come to pass.

To the north-east of the Vercors, the newly formed Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur under General Marie-Pierre Koenig had seized control of Annecy and the Haute-Savoie. On 19 August 1944, the
New York Times
correspondent reported that

This triumph threatened General Pflaum’s line of retreat, and he was obliged to withdraw the 157th Reserve from the Vercors and from Grenoble itself. The evacuation was completed by midnight of 21 August 1944, the division hightailing it over the passes on the Franco-Italian border to the relative safety of Fascist Italy, much harassed by the maquis.

In Grenoble the following morning, elements of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur and elements of the 36th Infantry Division of the US Seventh Army entered the city. This was the
liberation of the first of the principal Alpine cities that had fallen to the Nazis; Grenoble erupted in joy.

This deliverance was far, far sooner than the planners of Operation Dragoon had expected or dared dream of; it was only a week after the Riviera landings, only ten weeks after the tricolour had been raised at St-Nizier. A recent historian of Dragoon put the breathtaking achievement of the advance on Grenoble and its early liberation down to two factors: the operation’s planners in Washington and the maquis. Regarding the latter, he says:

Yet the Vercors itself remains a source of controversy. Alain Le Ray, the Vercors’s first military commander, thought that the revolt of the plateau ‘induced in the German war machine a kind of paralysis, both moral and material … The losses were too great, for sure. But Vercors is a page of history of which France can be proud.’
23
Others dwell on the death toll, the decimation of one generation of the plateau’s inhabitants, the scarring of the next, and how soon after the tragedy came liberation. Max Hastings calls the Vercors simply ‘madness’.

On 25 August, when Paris followed the Rhône-Alpes, the Vichy administration collapsed: with France falling to Allied control, Pétain and his ministers were seized by the Germans and taken to Sigmaringen on the Danube. The Free French, fearful of the Allied military control discussed with such ill temper by de Gaulle and Churchill during their picnic in Marrakesh in January 1944, hastily set up the Gouvernement provisoire de la République française (Provisional Government of the French Republic, GPRF). This was officially recognised by the British and the Americans on 25 October 1944.

Two weeks later, on 5 November 1944, de Gaulle, in his role as head of the new provisional government, visited Grenoble to bestow on the city a signal honour. It was the Compagnon de la Libération, so recognising the community as the inspiration of the resistance and kingpin of liberation. The General was received by the Grenoblois as a conquering hero. In his memoirs he recalled, ‘The ardour that swept over the “Allobroges” [the ancient people of Dauphiné and Savoie] in the Place de la Bastille, which I covered on foot, and in the Place Rivet, where the crowd gathered to hear speeches was indescribable.’

As to the Ossola republic and its nineteen siblings, by early December 1944 all were back in the hands of the Fascists. This does not mean they lack political and historical significance as emblems of a people recovering their self-confidence, ambition and desire for autonomy, indeed far from it. This, though, is from the comfortable armchair of hindsight.
24
In the short term, the lesson for Alexander, Eisenhower at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and Churchill himself was sharper. Whatever was happening in France, the
Wehrmacht
would fight bitterly to keep open its lines of retreat for Kesselring’s forces on the Gothic Line.

The mainspring was Hitler. The Führer had left Berchtesgaden on 17 July 1944. As the Red Army approached the borders of Germany to the east, and as the US generals Patton and Patch drove their forces up to the Reich from the west and the south of France, the Führer thought he could best direct events from Berlin. In some respects he recognised the inevitability of defeat, certainly in his orders to destroy the Reich’s industrial and
communications
infrastructure ahead of the arrival of the Allies. (This was the ‘scorched earth’ policy, which has a bearing on the story henceforth.) In other respects he was obdurate. On the last day of August 1944 he told his warlords, ‘If necessary we’ll fight on the Rhine. It doesn’t make any difference. Under all circumstances we will continue this battle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more.’
25
The message from Warsaw was a final echo of this
determination to fight to the last. On 2 October 1944, Churchill was visited by Premier Mikolajczyk, the leader of the exiled Polish government in London. The news was bad. After sixty days of fighting, his compatriots in the Polish capital were about to surrender to the forces of Generaloberst Heinz Guderian. The Warsaw Rising was over.

Chips Channon’s hopes for the collapse of the Reich and an early end to the war had been entirely dispelled.

While the republic of Ossola was fighting for its life, one of its supposed supporters, Allen Dulles, was whisked out of
Switzerland
for a month’s conference with his operational and political masters.

He was now altogether worthy of their attention as the key player in what had become a 15,000-person, $52 million
worldwide
operation. In the early days of September 1944, his trip took him first over the newly opened Swiss frontier into the Rhône valley – not far from the Vercors – and from there to war-torn London. Then from 14 to 21 September he was in Washington. Here he was reunited with his wife Clover and his brother, John Foster Dulles. His wife quizzed him on his mistresses, word of whom had been hurried to Washington; his brother was working as chief foreign policy adviser to Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate challenging Roosevelt for the presidency. Dulles himself, at the same time as being briefed by his chief ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, played the amused observer of the election campaign, now in full swing. He found Capitol Hill awash with facts, views, gossip, opinions and schemes less for winning the war than the post-war reconstruction of Europe – particularly of Germany.

These plans had many scribes. One of the earliest was Churchill, who had proposed at the Tehran Conference in November 1943
a division of the Reich into two: between Prussia and the Alpine Austria-Bavaria; the industrial Ruhr and Westphalia would be under international control. In Washington, the proposals of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau naturally had greater currency. These called for a more radical demilitarisation, partitioning and deindustrialisation of Germany. This scheme was being vigorously debated by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Octagon conference in Quebec while Dulles was in Washington. Either would have nicely transformed the geopolitics of the Alps.

On the spymaster’s return to Berne in early November 1944, Dulles discovered that all this planning had been somewhat premature. It was true that the reopening of the Swiss border made his journey to Switzerland a very different affair from his hair’s-breadth arrival on 7 November 1942, just as Operation Anton snapped the border shut. But the war in Europe had yet to be won. In London, as Dulles had noticed both on his outbound and inbound visits, the euphoria of late August 1944 experienced by ‘Chips’ Channon had been much dampened by the perpetual whiff of cordite from the Vergeltungswaffen ‘revenge weapons’ raining on the capital. On the Continent itself, the Western Allied armies, having romped through southern and western France, were now finding the going far from good. They were at the end of their long supply chains, short of food and ammunition, slowed by winter weather that had arrived six weeks early, and by finding the rearguard of the Wehrmacht more entrenched every mile it was pushed closer to its home frontiers. Operation Market Garden, the attempt to short-circuit resistance and seize a key bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem, had failed just before Dulles’s return to
Switzerland
. In Italy, Field Marshal Alexander’s forces were making heavy work of Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s Gothic Line in the Apennines north of Florence. Just as Dulles got back to Berne, on 10 November 1944, Alexander made a controversial public announcement that suggested he was digging in for the winter and would resume hostilities in the spring. For the winter, he and his armies would be
en
vacances
, it seemed.

The implications of Alexander’s difficulties in the Apennines were lost neither in Washington, London nor Berne itself. The extent to which Kesselring had been able to hold up the Allies’ advance first for five months at Monte Cassino and now at the Gothic Line was food for thought. The moral was simple. It was of the extreme difficulty of dislodging a determined defender in mountainous terrain that might have been designed for defence: where he who holds the higher ground can repel a much larger and better-armed force down below. If this was true in the Italian Apennines, it would be doubly so in the far more formidable mountain chain to the north: the 800-mile, 15,000-foot-high rock wall that divided Europe, the great edifice that lay between Alexander’s forces and the Reich. It was for these reasons that the eyes of both General Patton and the Third Army in the west, and the Red Army in the east, were turning increasingly away from Berlin towards Berchtesgaden and Bavaria.

It was originally anticipated that the Red Army and the Western Allies would eventually join hands on the river Oder. This was the pre-war border between Germany and Poland, around a hundred miles east of Berlin. The Reich would accordingly be split in half by the Allies. For a regime that had already displayed its determination to fight on, this would dictate flight south by the Reich government to what was in any case recognised by the Allies as an established headquarters in Berchtesgaden. It now seemed self-evident that modest German forces could hold such a bastion for some time. According to the Allied headquarters, SHAEF, Kesselring commanded more than a million troops in northern Italy, Bavaria and the Tyrol. Who knew how long the war might last if he disposed his million troops in these Alps? Some Allied planners thought a year; others supposed still longer, perhaps till 1947.

Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was in fact planning this retreat into the mountain fastness just as Dulles was getting his feet back under the desk in the Herrengasse in November 1944. The Reichsführer’s staff worked up the detail with the Gauleiters
of the areas concerned: Franz Hofer of the Tyrol, South Tyrol, Trentino and Vorarlberg, and Karl Rainer of Carinthia, Austria’s most southerly and principally Alpine state. The citadel was dubbed the Alpenfestung – the Alpine Fortress.

Goebbels, seizing on rumours already circulating, then set up a publicity unit dedicated to ventilating an idea as yet confined to paper. Blueprints, construction plans, logistical arrangements and troop movements were all leaked to the credulous; sketchy plans were turned into concrete emplacements at absolutely no cost. On 13 December 1944, the readers of the
Evening
Independent
in Florida were told:
‘
NAZIS
PREPARED FOR FIVE YEARS
’
UNDERGROUND WARFARE
’
. The Associated Press correspondent Wes Gallagher told his readers:

Other papers with rather wider circulations carried similar stories. It was a clever campaign. It was widely believed.

For the Swiss in Berne this was obviously a matter a good deal closer to home than it was in either Washington or London. From the point of view of the head of Switzerland’s armed forces, General Guisan, the risk of the Nazi Alpenfestung was that the Reich would invade Switzerland to secure its south-western flank, incorporating Switzerland’s own fortified Redoubt into a
larger Alpine defence system. This had been the fear behind the March Alarm of 1943.

This was not Guisan’s only concern. As the Allied armies moved inexorably closer to the borders of the Reich from east, west and south there was little to prevent their onward march into his own country; and there was also some military logic. The principal barrier to General Patton’s forces in the west was the Siegfried Line or Westwall. This was the Wehrmacht’s Maginot Line, a defence system running 390 miles due south from Kleve on the Reich’s border with Holland down to Weil am Rhein – close to Basel – on the frontier with Switzerland. Operation Market Garden was an attempt to leapfrog the Line.

At the Moscow Conference in October 1944, Stalin brightly proposed to Churchill the idea of the Allies invading Switzerland as a way to turn the southern end of the Line. This was firmly repudiated by Churchill. It would both contravene Switzerland’s neutrality and be counterproductive. In the meantime, the idea had sufficient currency for him to write to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on 3 December:

Kind words, Guisan would have thought. But words butter no parsnips nor deflect great armies. The war that had ranged all over the European continent, from Norway’s North Cape to Gibraltar, from Helsinki to Istanbul, now seemed likely to culminate not in the Reich’s capital of Berlin, but in the high Alps. That Christmas of 1944, Switzerland again had to be on its guard.

In these circumstances intelligence from the Austrian and Bavarian Alps was suddenly at a premium, so it was timely that a sunburnt young Austrian called Fritz Molden now made his appearance at Dulles’s Herrengasse HQ. The twenty-year-old was a rare thing: a member of a successful resistance cell in the Reich.

By the time of the Normandy and Riviera landings in June and August 1944, resistance in Europe had become virtually a mass movement. There were thought to be 100,000 combatant partisans in Italy, a similar number in France, and perhaps five times that figure in Yugoslavia. Irrespective of the punitive actions of the Nazi occupying forces, resistance was now a major fact of daily life for the inhabitants of the occupied countries; it was an identified priority for the Wehrmacht; it was a focus for active support by the Allies. No such situation existed in the Reich itself, either in the Alpine regions of Austria and Bavaria or elsewhere.

This is not to say there was no dissent. It certainly existed: in the Church, the Left, in the intelligentsia, above all in the
Wehrmacht
. ‘There was always resistance, both open and covert, in all social and occupational strata.’
3
It was muted for three reasons: the fact that most Germans accepted that Hitler’s government was legally legitimate; the fact that it had rescued many of its people from the desperate economic straits of the early thirties; the fact that the Reich’s security services made resistance
tantamount
to suicide. It was only in the closed society of the armed services that the Gestapo found it difficult to keep the lid on the words, thoughts and deeds of the opponents of the Nazi regime. And of course it was only here that there was resistance of any substance. Before the tragedy of Claus von Stauffenberg’s 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, the White Rose movement had been virtually the only eye-catching effort to repudiate Nazism.

This had erupted in the Nazis’ heartland, the Bavarian capital of Munich.

Here a handful of students at the university produced and distributed a series of leaflets denouncing the regime and calling for active opposition to tyranny. They were supported by their philosophy professor Kurt Huber. In the first appeal in June 1942 they presciently wrote: ‘Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?’ The leaflets – there were six in all – were distributed in the Alpine cities of Austria and Bavaria: Bregenz, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Graz and of course Munich itself. The defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 inspired the last and most vitriolic denunciation. The ‘day of reckoning’ had come, it announced. It described Hitler as ‘the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured’.
4

The leaflets had been passed on by the Gestapo to Paul Giesler, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, and their source as the university of Munich had been identified. It was outrageous that this should happen in the capital of the Nazi movement, indeed within a rifle shot of the site of the legendary Beer Hall Putsch. A call to order was essential.

According to our old friend the American war correspondent William Shirer, that February of 1943 Giesler assembled the student body in Munich. He suggested that the men not already drafted into the Wehrmacht should undertake work supportive of the war, and that the women should bear a child each year to boost the population of the Fatherland. He added tactfully, ‘If some of the girls lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will assign each of them one of my adjutants … and I can promise her a thoroughly enjoyable experience.’
5
The Munich students, once enthusiastic Nazis, were incensed, threw out Giesler’s SS and Gestapo minders, and – that afternoon – demonstrated openly against the Reich. This was utterly unprecedented.