Storming the Eagle's Nest (8 page)

Naturally enough, the young Irmgard was thrilled by this encounter and felt herself lucky to live so close to the Führer. Yet there were disturbing undercurrents. Her parents and her grandparents were deeply divided over Hitler. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, the squat, bull-necked convicted murderer who had cast himself as Hitler’s secretary, had had Obersalzberg cleared of many of its old settlements – and inhabitants – to create the Führersperrgebiet, the ‘leader’s territory’. Eighteen farms, three inns, a hospital for children, several hotels and dozens of private homes and small businesses were cleared at the shortest of notice, their owners offered a pittance in
compensation
. Irmgard’s grandfather saw this as a symbol of the Nazis’ greed and power; her father regarded it as a scheme for creating jobs for the Obersalzberg locals: building the new SS barracks, refurbishing the Hotel Platterhof and – down in Berchtesgaden itself – entirely remodelling the railway station on resplendent lines suited to the residence of the head of state.

The story of the Dehmel family played to the grandfather’s side of the argument. The Dehmel children were neighbours and playmates of Irmgard. There were four of them. The youngest was mildly disabled, a ‘somewhat peculiar-looking, slow child with very small eyes and seemingly little response to the world around her’.
15
This was Hildegard, who was treated with great patience and kindness by her two sisters. Another young sibling was too sickly to be allowed out. One day, Irmgard overheard her mother and aunt gossiping: ‘One of the Dehmel children, the
mongoloid one that’s never outside, was picked up by the Health Service a few weeks ago, and now they’ve said she’s dead from a cold.’ This was the story that Shirer had heard in Berlin. Irmgard continued, ‘What I did not know, and what the adults refused to believe or face, was that Hitler’s euthanasia program, while still shrouded in secrecy and as much as possible hidden from the general public, was up and running.’ On 25 November 1940 Shirer noted, ‘I have at last got to the bottom of these mercy killings. It’s an evil tale. The Gestapo, with the knowledge and approval of the German government, is systematically putting to death the mentally deficient population of the Reich.’
16
It was the beginnings of the Nazis’ child euthanasia scheme that would eventually lead to the deaths of up to 6,000 children.

The Dehmels at Obersalzberg were prudent and courageous. After August 1939 doctors were obliged to register with a Reich committee those with serious hereditary and congenital illnesses. Having lost one child in suspicious circumstances, the Dehmels were determined not to lose another. By avoiding sending their remaining disabled daughter to school, using public health facilities, or doing anything else to draw her to the attention of the state, they succeeded. Under Hitler’s nose in Berchtesgaden, Hildegard survived.

As to Irmgard, she will have much to tell us of the next five years.

In the French Alps, many found themselves in comparably precarious positions.

By the terms of the June 1940 armistice between Germany and France, the country was to be governed by Marshal Pétain from Vichy, the spa town in the Auvergne. The watchwords of the revolution – Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – were discarded and in their place came Travail, Famille, Patrie: Work, Family, Fatherland. Pierre Laval commented, ‘Parliamentary democracy has lost the war; it must disappear, ceding its place to an authoritarian, hierarchical, national and social regime.’
17
His
objective, said his rival and sometime Prime Minister Léon Blum, ‘was to cut all the roots that bound France to its republican and revolutionary past’.
18

As well as the centuries being rolled back, the country was hacked in two. The extent of the German advance in the north in the summer of 1940 dictated her division along a line drawn between Tours and Dijon. The Atlantic coast – and its strategic ports soon to be used by U-boats – came under direct Nazi rule. This was the Zone Occupée, representing about
three-fifths
of France. The southern zone or Zone Libre included the Mediterranean coastline, the Rhône valley, and the Alps to the east that ran from Nice on the Riviera coast to Geneva. In both zones, the free press disappeared overnight, civil liberties went the same way, the phone network was cut, and the cost imposed by the Franco-German armistice of paying for the occupying army led at once to the rationing of foodstuffs; motorised transport became a thing of the past and cities and villages that were once neighbours became isolated once more. As to the people, Shirer commented, ‘There was a complete collapse of French society and of the French soul.’

In the Alps themselves, Vichy joined forces with the Italians. As part of the Franco-Italian armistice that had followed Mussolini’s Alpine campaign, a ten-mile demilitarised zone was set up along the 300-mile Alpine border of the Rhône-Alpes and the
Alpes-Maritimes
, and the Italians were allowed to retain the modest advances into French territory that they had made. For many of the French in the Alps, faced with the cataclysm of defeat and these two new grim faces of authority, it was a time for the deepest of soul-searching. In the Dauphiné capital of Grenoble it was observed that ‘Il s’établit alors sur Grenoble et sa région, une sorte de grand calme, où vont s’étouffer les échos du dehors. La stupeur de l’effondrement national dissipée, la plupart des jeunes hommes retenus captifs, toute vie obéit à une tentation de repliement, à un besoin de méditation, peut-être de pénitence.’
19

To the Alps also came the Jews. In the early days of the occupation, to be Jewish in France meant the confiscation of
property, denial of the use of radios and visits to the cinema or theatre, and the requirement to wear a yellow star. Following the granting by the Reich of full powers to Pétain on 10 July 1940, this had precipitated a great exodus from the Occupied Zone to the Zone Libre; of the 350,000 Jews then living in France, around four out of five fled to where they supposed they would be safer under the jurisdiction of Vichy. Nice, capital of the
Alpes-Maritimes
, was the seaside city that at the time still retained some
belle époque
charm; it was also a port, an emergency exit to North Africa and the French Arab colonies of Syria, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Likewise, the settlements further north up the Alpine chain in the Rhône-Alpes – Grenoble, Chambéry and Annecy – were conveniently close to Italy and Switzerland. For the French Jews, the Alps seemed to mean safety.

Then, in the autumn of 1940, Pétain had met Hitler at Montoire-sur-le-Loire. It was from here that the Marshal made his infamous broadcast of his intention to co-operate – collaborate – with the Nazis. Indeed, by the time of the meeting on 30 October 1940, his new regime had already begun to show itself in its true colours. Jews had been denaturalised in the first few days of Vichy. The Statut des Juifs, promulgated in the month of the meeting, excluded Jews from the press, commerce, industry, and government administration. For some Frenchmen this was a perfectly welcome development, a riposte to the failure of the Third Republic, liberalism and the Left. Shortly after France’s capitulation, one of the men who would lead the resistance in Nice, Ange-Marie Miniconi, overheard a comment in the city’s railway station that was not unrepresentative: ‘Thank Christ we lost the war – otherwise we might still be governed by those left-wing motherfuckers of the Front Populaire.’
20
For others the new authoritarianism was far less welcome. From the centre of Orthodox Jewry in Nice, the Hotel Roosevelt, a newspaper reported: ‘One could see rabbis in their traditional apparel walking through the streets, listen to Talmudic discussions and hear the old tunes of Hebrew prayer and Talmudic study.’
21
By November of 1940, these people in the Alpes-Maritimes and
their co-religionists further north in the Rhône-Alpes felt, day after day, the steady closing of a vice.

Shirer was now reaching the end of his tether as a war correspondent in Berlin. His experience of covering the rise to power of the Nazis since 1934 had given him what he described as a ‘deep, burning hatred of all that Nazism stands for’.
22
As a foreign correspondent and US citizen he was not in principle in danger, but the Nazis kept a close and increasingly watchful ear on his CBS broadcasts. His wife and daughter in Geneva seemed equally vulnerable, especially as rumours of the invasion plans of OKW for Switzerland ebbed and flowed over the summer and autumn of 1940. There was also the increasing difficulty of
day-to
-day life in Switzerland. As elsewhere in the Alps, life in the democracy was indeed getting hard.

Here, Switzerland had much in common with Britain. Both populations consumed considerably more than they produced, and both were dependent on supplies from elsewhere to keep the body and soul of their populations together; Switzerland was also deficient in virtually all raw materials. With Europe now closed for business, Britain became dependent on the Atlantic convoys for sustenance, Switzerland on her – now uniformly hostile – neighbours. Coal was the country’s principal source of energy. Before the war, Switzerland had bought almost 300,000 tons per annum from Britain, some 1.8 million tons from Germany. Immediately war broke out, the Allies instituted a blockade against the neutral European countries, assuming that anything that reached the neutrals would or could eventually find its way to Germany. Trade to these countries was controlled by requiring that all shipments destined for them were issued with a stamp of authority known as a navigation certificate. Allied agents in the world’s ports enforced this regime. Coal supplied from Britain to Switzerland ceased, and the Swiss became wholly dependent on the Germans.

Like the Allies, the Reich used this situation as a tactic in warfare. On 18 June 1940, just as France was falling, the Reich cut off coal supplies to Switzerland entirely. This was a negotiating move to get the Swiss to settle on terms favourable to Germany. Ultimately the Reich would supply coal to
Switzerland
because it needed the products of that energy, not least in the form of armaments, chemicals, precision instruments. The results of the Allies’ and the Axis’s combined efforts were nevertheless as Shirer predicted. The Swiss that winter of 1940–41 were cold. Paul Ladame was a Swiss army officer whose job was to boost morale by producing weekly newsreels. ‘My wife, Andreina, who was then a young mother with two babies, remembers that coal was so severely rationed that they [herself and her neighbours] would not heat their houses any more, and that their children were freezing. They remember how difficult it was to heat the kitchen oven with paper and wood – there was no gas, no electricity.’
23

Like the British, the Swiss also went hungry. This was an issue addressed by the distinguished Swiss agronomist Friedrich Wahlen in a speech in Zurich on 15 November 1940. Before the war the Swiss nation had imported about half its food, largely from willing partners in trade at its borders: France, Italy, Germany and Austria. Now the Swiss were in danger of
starvation
, and were obliged to dig not so much for victory as for neutrality. Wahlen proposed increasing the area under cultivation from 180,000 to 500,000 hectares, so raising the country’s
self-sufficiency
from 52 per cent to 75 per cent over a period of five years. When the plan was unveiled in Zurich it was billed as the Anbauschlacht or growing battle. Football fields, town squares, public gardens, private yards and even window boxes were to be put under the plough; flower beds were to be turned into tomato or potato fields; hens, rabbits and goats were to be found lodgings on balconies and verandas in cities; and labour from cities was to be drafted to the fertile central midlands and to the Alps. With many of the men drafted into the army, some of the workers would be women, the equivalent of the British Land Girls.

In due course, Wahlen’s plan would blossom. In the meantime there was rationing. It had begun on 30 October 1939, when coupons were introduced for commodities including sugar, pasta, rice, wheat, flour, oats, butter and oil. On 1 December 1940, shortly after Wahlen’s speech, textiles, shoes, soap and detergent were added. When Wahlen’s plan began to bite, cheese, eggs, fresh meat and milk would follow. Ladame recalled, ‘Everything was so severely rationed to about a third of regular peacetime consumption. Rations went down to one pound of meat a month per person, one egg every two weeks, one pound of black bread a week, no sugar, no salt, no fruit.’
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This was privation rather than starvation, but it had a psychological impact too. As Shirer noted in Berlin on 12 November 1940, ‘Coffee, ever since it has become impossible to buy it in Germany, has assumed weird importance in one’s life. The same with tobacco.’
25

With rationing came the blackout. Like the country itself, Swiss airspace was technically neutral. In practice it was violated by both the Luftwaffe and the Allies. During the Battle of France in 1940 there were a series of encounters between the Luftwaffe and Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters rather rashly sold by the Germans to the Swiss before the war. Planes on both sides were shot down in real or imagined violations of Swiss airspace. By the autumn the RAF had begun small-scale raids on targets in both Germany and Italy. A flight of Whitleys bombed Italy on 10 June 1940, on 23 September 119 bombers hit Berlin, and on 16 November 131 bombers targeted Hamburg. The bombers occasionally overflew Switzerland partly because it was the most direct route, and partly because her still illuminated cities were aids to navigation. Naturally the Luftwaffe objected, demanding a blackout. In the course of the autumn RAF overflights became more numerous and German demands became noisier.