Storming the Eagle's Nest (29 page)

As the prospect of Clark’s inevitable spring assault neared, German appetite for a negotiated surrender increased daily. Professional soldiers like the Wehrmacht would not deign to parley with the partisans, whom they regarded as bandits and criminals and against whom they had committed numerous atrocities. They would negotiate with the regular Allied forces, members of which at least would not shoot them on sight, castrate them, gouge their eyes out or lock them in burning churches: all brutalities that the Wehrmacht and SS had visited on the partisans and their supporters. For their part, the Allies themselves were far from averse to a surrender that would avoid either a German retreat into the supposed Redoubt or a bitter battle in Lombardy with a battle-hardened and far from demoralised opponent. The lives of hundreds of thousands of men were at stake.

Nothing concrete had materialised from the expressions of interest from the Germans floated over the New Year. Then, through the good offices of the Swiss intelligence chief Colonel Max Waibel – Fritz Molden’s contact – in early February came a fresh approach. The whole thing was done very nicely. There were no hurried phone calls or clandestine meetings in Berne’s Herrengasse. Waibel and Dulles had dinner together at an excellent restaurant close to Lake Lucerne, in fact quite close to the punishment camp of Wauwilermoos. They ate trout washed down with hock and discussed the virtues of the Italian partisan movement, possibly of women too. Dulles enjoyed his evening but thought Waibel’s proposal that he should meet yet another couple of go-betweens, an Italian and a Swiss, was unenticing. When he eventually met the pair, he was even more sceptical of their claims to be in touch with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. This was the SS general in charge of all the SS forces in Italy and – it was to be assumed – a diehard Nazi. All such officers in Heinrich Himmler’s thug force had taken personal pledges of allegiance to the Führer. They were surely the last people to give peace a chance. Dulles was most surprised when the go-betweens returned within the week with two real live Waffen-SS officers: Standartenführer Eugen Dollmann and Obersturmführer Guido
Zimmer. They were in Lugano, the charming lakeside resort where, in November 1944, Dulles had first met Ferruccio Parri, the CLNAI partisan leader.

It was now that Dulles showed his mettle. Dollmann claimed he was an emissary from Wolff, and that his superior officer wanted a face-to-face meeting with Dulles to negotiate a
surrender
. Unlike his compatriot General Eisenhower, Dulles was attuned to political nuances and fully aware of the delicacy of any such negotiations. The relationship between the Eastern and Western Allies was now such that Stalin would – and very soon did – take a jaundiced view of a surrender that could speed the passage eastwards of the Western Allied armies. As Churchill said later of these early contacts, ‘I realised at once that the Soviet Government might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the South, which would enable our armies to advance against reduced opposition as far as Vienna and beyond, or indeed towards the Elbe or Berlin.’
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So if Dulles was to risk such contacts, he needed, in his own words, ‘concrete evidence both of their seriousness and of their authority’. He needed proof positive.
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Now Ferruccio Parri was one of the many partisans who had been seized by the Gestapo in the winter breathing space so unhappily granted to Kesselring’s forces by Field Marshal Alexander’s 10 November 1944 broadcast. So too had Parri’s lieutenant, Antonio Usmiani. The pair were not being at all well treated by their captors, not least because of a bungled attempt by the partisans to rescue Parri from Gestapo HQ in Milan. Wrote Dulles:

Dulles did not trouble himself to go to Lugano on 4 March 1945. He was suffering from gout. Thoughtfully, he delegated the initial negotiations to an American Jew with the telltale name of Paul Blum. When Dollmann asked whether Dulles would meet Wolff on the neutral territory of Switzerland, Blum set out Dulles’s conditions. He handed the Waffen-SS officers a slip of paper. It bore two names: Ferruccio Parri and Antonio Usmiani. Dollmann blenched.

After a few moments’ consideration he said he would see what he could do. Dollmann and Zimmer returned to Milan, Blum to Berne to report to Dulles. The American in turn passed on what he thought fit to Colonel Max Waibel. The Swiss were not entirely disinterested. Their principal lifeline was the Ligurian port of Genoa, through which such essentials as the Allies thought fit to grant them were shipped. The speedy cessation of hostilities before the port was wrecked by the Germans under Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy was, Waibel thought, desirable.

Chiasso, four days later. Picture the scene at the windswept Alpine town on the Ticino border where Switzerland stretches an arm into Italy. An SS car is seen approaching the border checkpoint. It bears the familiar lightning logo of the SS. It draws up rather sharply. Smartly, an officer dressed as a captain alights from the car. It is Captain Zimmer. His arrival has been anticipated. One of Waibel’s representatives steps forward. Passwords are exchanged. ‘I have two men for you,’ announces Zimmer, with the air of a conjurer. ‘Please take them to Allen Dulles with the compliments of General Wolff.’ Zimmer returns to the car. From the rear doors he helps two dazed and dishevelled figures onto the tarmac. Uncertainly, encouraged by Zimmer, half expecting a shot in the back, they shuffle across the border. Parri and Usmiani are free, a couple of characters out of a John le Carré thriller.

Two hours later the car returns. Captain Zimmer emerges once again, followed by Colonel Dollmann. Then comes an SS adjutant, Sturmbannführer Wenner. They form a guard of honour
for a man of the notably ‘Aryan’ features so favoured in the Reich: tall, bronzed, blue-eyed, blond-haired. The hawklike nose is his signature. It is Heinrich Himmler’s personal representative in Italy, Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Within hours Wolff and Dulles are chatting in front of the log fire in the OSS Herrengasse apartment in Berne, the spymaster puffing away at his pipe. He liked to put his guests at ease.

Up until this time, Dulles had not troubled Washington or indeed anyone outside the immediate circle of those concerned with these developments. Now he called Allied Forces
Headquarters
(AFHQ) in the Royal Palace at Caserta, some
twenty-five
miles north of Naples. He outlined Wolff’s proposals. These included the public disavowal of Hitler and Himmler by all senior German officers in Italy, and the release of hundreds of Jews interned at Bologna. AFHQ was electrified by this news, dispatched the British and US Chiefs of Staff to talk to Dulles and Wolff and – in the way of a bureaucracy – gave the operation a name: Sunrise. With the prospect of the surrender of Heeresgruppe C – around 200,000 men – Dulles seemed to be on the brink of a huge coup. He was told to pursue the talks. ‘[O]n March 19,’ wrote Churchill, ‘a second exploratory meeting was held with General Wolff.’ Here the idea of calling off General Mark Clark’s spring offensive was tabled. During the remainder of March the negotiations proceeded. Dulles even rented a chalet in the lakeside resort of Ascona in Canton Ticino. It would act as a convenient and secure base for the talks, a ‘safe house’. The shores of Lake Maggiore would surely prove conducive to surrender.

Then three things went wrong. Wolff’s superior
Generalfeldmarschall
Kesselring suddenly moved headquarters and distanced himself from negotiations of which he had tacitly approved. Second, Himmler got word of the talks and threatened Wolff with holding his wife and family hostage against his loyalty to the Reich; unbeknownst to Hitler, the former chicken farmer was pursuing his own surrender negotiations with the Allies, using the Swede Count Folke Bernadotte as a middleman. Third, Stalin,
well served by his own intelligence service, abruptly accused Roosevelt and Churchill of negotiating a separate surrender with the Reich behind his back. The Marshal demanded the talks be called off. In his last message to the Soviet leader, Roosevelt firmly rebuked his ally. Harry S. Truman, his successor, was less robust. Lobbied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), who – apparently correctly – felt that both Dulles and AFHQ in Caserta were being economical with the truth about the talks, the new president bowed to Stalin’s demands.

Dulles, having nursed the negotiations with imagination and tenacity, turned up at the Herrengasse on 20 April 1945 to be confronted by a telegram from Washington. It read in part, ‘especially in view of complications which have arisen with the Russians, the U.S. and British governments have decided OSS should break off [Sunrise] contacts; that JCS are so instructing OSS; that the whole matter is to be regarded as closed and that Russians be informed.’
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It was a bombshell.

And despite the fact that for practical purposes the war was now virtually over, in the Alps the fighting went on.

When the German occupying forces in the French Alps had withdrawn in the face of the Allied armies forcing their way up the Rhône valley from the Riviera landings in August 1944, they had left a rearguard in place. This was at the northern end of the Alpine frontier between France and Italy, where in June 1940 the Armée des Alpes had successfully resisted Mussolini’s forces. In the Tarentaise valley in the Savoie lay the village of Val d’Isère. Before the war it was barely acknowledged as a skiing resort, boasting just one primitive drag lift. Eight or nine miles south towered the 9,252-foot Mont Froid. Here in some of the old Petit Ligne Maginot casemates were around 1,500 fascist troops: the 3rd Battalion of the 100. Gebirgsjägerregiment, and a company of the Italian Folgore Regiment. They guarded the route over the frontier ridge between France and Italy: the Col du Mont Cenis into the Susa valley and beyond into Piedmont.

To support the last push of General Mark Clark’s Fifth and Eighth Armies into northern Italy, the French planned an assault. Around 3,000 men were assembled by Alain Le Ray. This was the former military head of the Vercors, now a thirty-five-
year-old
lieutenant colonel. His forces were members of the 27th French Mountain Division, largely former maquisards, now the FFI. On 5 April, the
chasseurs
seized the middle and western strongpoints despite bitter winds and snow. The following day the eastern casemate fell, and with it Mont Froid. Then came counter-attacks, three in all.

Three days later, the 3rd Battalion briefly recaptured the bitterly contested redoubt. Le Ray’s men were later described as ‘forcing the Germans from their last mountain-top strongholds’ in the French Alps.
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The war had less than a month to run.

20 April 1945. It was Hitler’s birthday, his fifty-sixth. Hitherto, the Führer’s intention had been to withdraw to Berchtesgaden as the Soviet army closed on Berlin. Ten days earlier his domestic staff had followed in the wake of many of the Reich ministries, various senior officials, camp followers and the $15 million Reichsbank’s reserves to the relative safety of Bavaria. In the Berghof, Hitler’s staff busied themselves with spring-cleaning the chalet to make the place fit for a king. In the circumstances they were particularly careful to dust down the extensive bunker complex. Air raids were anticipated.

Hitler, though, was wavering. On the eve of his birthday he had quietly given in to Goebbels’s request that such military reserves as the Wehrmacht still possessed should be committed to the defence of the capital, deployed around the very gates of Berlin. On his birthday itself, in the Führerbunker under the Chancellery dutifully designed by Speer for a contingency never seriously anticipated, congratulations seemed slightly misplaced. ‘No one knew quite what to say,’ remembered the armaments minister. ‘Hitler received the expressions of good wishes coolly and almost unwillingly, in keeping with the circumstances.’
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All the leading Nazis were there, including Speer himself, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Bormann and the military chiefs Dönitz, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs. Göring, doubtless anticipating events, was wearing a rather surprising new uniform plastered across his broad frame. It was olive-green. One of the entourage whispered to Speer, ‘Like an American general!’ Discussion eventually turned to the military situation. The sounds of Soviet artillery could be heard all too clearly, even fifty-five feet under the Chancellery garden. When Hitler announced his decision to defend Berlin there was an outcry. ‘At once everyone began clamoring that it was essential to shift the headquarters to Obersalzberg, and that now was the last moment remaining.’ Göring then chimed in. There was only one route still open south to Berchtesgaden, he said. It might be lost at any moment; now was surely the time to stage
a retreat south. This inflamed Hitler: ‘How can I call on the troops to undertake the decisive battle for Berlin if at the same moment I myself withdraw to safety! … I shall leave it to fate whether I die in the capital or fly to Obersalzberg at the last moment!’
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