Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  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.’24 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.

  Eventually, on 9 November 1940, President Pilet-Golaz gave in. For Paul Ladame:

  Then came the total darkness into which the whole country was plunged every day as soon as the sun had disappeared … no outside lights were allowed to shine at night across Swiss territory … not one road, not one street, not one place was illuminated … every window of every house was covered with black paper so that not one ray of light could be detected from outside … the few official emergency vehicles that still were permitted on the road drove with headlamps so dimmed that they lit only about 200 metres ahead.26

  The Swiss resorts were no different. In Zermatt, right on the Italian border, the villagers were required to cover their windows with black paper at night – and to store enough food to last for six months.

  The final thing rationed was truth – proverbially the first casualty of war. Naturally enough, Switzerland was awash with newsreels, magazines and newspapers produced by its German, Italian and French neighbours. With the borders closed by the Wehrmacht from the summer of 1940, British and American papers and newsreels – which told a very different story – became virtually unobtainable. Switzerland’s own press was censored as early as 1934, when the federal government had caved in to German demands. It issued a decree enabling the Council to sanction any newspapers that endangered relations between Switzerland and other countries: expressions deemed offensive to foreign leaders were banned. In practice, this was to an extent ignored. With the outbreak of war, the Council redoubled its efforts and directed the army’s division of press and radio to monitor such output, to warn, impose sanctions and if required to suppress publication. The upshot was effectively the suspension of a free and independent press.

  *

  For Shirer, as the winter of 1940–41 got under way, the situation was worse.

  Reichsminister Goebbels’s propaganda ministry officials controlled the production facilities that enabled him to broadcast, and had the power to expel him if he was unduly critical of the regime. On the outbreak of war, they introduced a regime of censorship preventing the dissemination of material that might compromise military operations. When the Luftwaffe’s bombing of England and the reciprocal RAF raids on Germany got going, the position deteriorated. Whereas Shirer’s colleagues in London – notably his boss Ed Murrow – were free to broadcast details of the Blitz, Shirer was unable to report the raids on German cities or to question the veracity of statements issued by the Nazis: for instance, about Luftwaffe and RAF losses during the Battle of Britain, bombing casualties in Hamburg and Berlin – or infringements of Swiss airspace.

  As the autumn of 1940 progressed, Shirer was pressurised to broadcast material issued by Goebbels he knew to be misleading; he was also tipped off that the Gestapo was attempting to ensnare him on a charge of spying. This carried the penalty of death. With his family in jeopardy in Geneva and the emasculation of his job in Berlin, the game was no longer worth the candle. ‘I think my usefulness here is about over. Until recently, despite the censorship, I think I’ve been able to do an honest job of reporting from Germany. But it has become increasingly difficult and at present it has become impossible …You cannot call the Nazis “Nazis” or an invasion an “invasion.” You are reduced to re-broadcasting the official communiqués’.27

  On 23 October 1940, his wife and daughter left Geneva for the United States, via Lisbon. On 5 December, Shirer himself left Germany for good. Following an emotional reunion with Ed Murrow in London, on 13 December he returned to a United States just a year away from Pearl Harbor.

  5

  Early in the New Year of 1941, with Berchtesgaden slumbering under a winter blanket of snow, Hitler summoned his three service chiefs to the Berghof. In the rarefied atmosphere of the Bavarian mountain, he was in a bullish mood. He was anxious to help Italy, embroiled in the Axis campaign in Greece at the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula. Then there was England. Despite the Reich’s failure to invade Britain in the autumn, the Führer was convinced she was at the end of her tether: she would never regain any position on the Continent and was only hanging on in the vain hope of the United States or the Soviet Union entering the war on her side. Hitler thought this situation had grave implications. His own ally Stalin he saw as a pragmatist who would throw Germany to the lions if he regarded it as advantageous to the USSR.

  The Balkans, then, were uppermost in Hitler’s mind; after the Balkans, Russia. Curiously enough, these two concerns keep us in the Alps.

  *

  Since the golden years of the winter sports movement, St Moritz had been the doyen of the resorts. Famed for its waters since the sixteenth century, the little lakeside village in the Engadine in eastern Switzerland had won fame as a climbing centre in the 1850s, and as one of the pioneering winter resorts ten years later. By 1873 the winter season rivalled the summer and in 1885 the famous Cresta toboggan run was founded. In the winter of 1913 the Cresta was patronised by the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. After the war the village reached the apogee of its fame, welcomed Americans exploring Europe in large numbers for the first time, and in 1928 hosted the Winter Olympics.

  Now it was Christmas 1945, and at the Palace Hotel in Via Serlas the sun was back in the heavens and all seemed right with the world. Outside the foyer stood a young man in a brass-buttoned outfit who might have been taken as a porter – and certainly was by the American who was driven up in the taxi from the railway station. According to the historian of the Palace Hotel:

  ‘Hey there!’ snapped the new arrival. ‘Don’t stand there doing nothing. Can’t you see those bags need to be taken in?’ The young man dutifully carried them through the revolving doors and put them down in the lobby. The American handed him a tip and was surprised when it was refused. ‘Why won’t you take it?’ he asked. ‘Because’, replied the young man, ‘I am the King of Yugoslavia.’28

  Yugoslavia was created on 1 December 1918 by the union of a ragbag of provinces of the dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire and the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. It bordered on Italy and Austria in the north, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to the east, Greece and Albania to the south. It was here that the Alps ceased to be a continuous range but rather became a series of eruptions that ran through what are now Croati
a, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania: the Balkans. When the young King Peter encountered the American in St Moritz, he had just been deposed by the begetter of some of the bitterest fighting in the Alps in the course of the entire war. This was Marshal Tito, otherwise Josip Broz.

  *

  It had all begun in the Berghof.

  There the regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul – Peter’s uncle – had been summoned by the Führer on 4 March 1941. The Prince was an Anglophile, educated in Oxford, married to a sister of the Duchess of Kent, and a close student of Tatler. Yugoslavia, he knew, was like Switzerland: it lay between the Reich and an object of its interest, in this case Greece. There, British forces were threatening both the Italian troops in Albania and the joint Italian and German forces in North Africa. Hitler also feared that an Allied front above Salonika in northern Greece could jeopardise the grandest of his designs, Barbarossa: the plan to invade the Soviet Union.

  With just such threats and blandishments as Chancellor Schuschnigg had been subjected to on the eve of Anschluss, the regent reluctantly agreed to join the common cause of the Axis. On 25 March 1941, in Vienna, the agreement was duly signed by the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Dragiša Cvetković.

  Yet not all was well in the state of Yugoslavia. Twenty-four hours after the signing, the regency found itself deposed by the seventeen-year-old King Peter, who had led a popular uprising supported by the air force and the army – and largely engineered by the British. He had escaped the attentions of his uncle’s conspirators by sliding down a drainpipe. ‘Chips’ Channon was an old friend of the regent. His diary for 27 March reads:

  News reached the Foreign Office of more extraordinary events in Belgrade. There was a coup d’état in the small hours of this morning. Little Peter was proclaimed King [in reality as opposed to merely nominally], the Ministers who signed the pact have been arrested and the three Regents have resigned: Paul is reported to have fled; some say he has been arrested too. No-one knows what to think but there is much jubilation here. I can see the dramatic happenings in that Palace which I know so well; the boy King awakened; the generals taking control; the Regent at bay; it is pure Ruritania; and certainly a blow to German prestige.29

  Although King Peter’s new regime proposed a non-aggression pact with Germany, it would not be a puppet of Hitler’s desires. Hitler was beside himself with rage at the coup, and rushed out Directive No. 25 on the invasion of Yugoslavia, Operation Marita. Executed on 6 April 1941, the Luftwaffe razed Belgrade to the ground, killing thousands. Within a week the Wehrmacht – allied to Italian and Hungarian forces – had secured the capital, the country, and the twenty-eight-division Yugoslav army. The King escaped to Greece, and his country was divided. Croatia became a Nazi state ruled by the fascist Ustaše, the Wehrmacht occupied Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the sweepings were taken by Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

  In this way the eastern outworks of the Alps fell to Hitler, and his domination of the chain became virtually complete. With it came the cold, hunger, repression, persecution, restriction of freedom of expression, speech and movement, concentration camps and euthanasia programmes that the Reich had already brought to much of the Alps. Yet one of the consequences of Operation Marita was less expected. ‘The beginning of the Barbarossa operation’, Hitler informed his warlords, ‘will have to be postponed for up to four weeks.’30 It was a delay of incalculable and perhaps even fatal results for the Third Reich.

  Notes

  1. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  2. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  3. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  4. Maria Augusta Trapp, The Sound of Music: The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (London: White Lion, 1976).

  5. Fritz Molden, Exploding Star: A Young Austrian Against Hitler (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978).

  6. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

  7. Trapp.

  8. Interview with author, 2012.

  9. Molden.

  10. Trapp.

  11. Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Austrians (London: HarperCollins, 1996).

  12. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  13. Irmgard Hunt, On Hitler’s Mountain: My Nazi Childhood (New York: William Morrow, 2005).

  14. Hunt.

  15. Hunt.

  16. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  17. Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944 (London: John Murray, 1997).

  18. Ousby.

  19. Pierre Giolitto, Grenoble 1940–1944 (Paris: Perrin, 2001).

  20. Peter Leslie, The Liberation of the Riviera (London: Dent, 1981).

  21. Jim Ring, Riviera (London: John Murray, 2004).

  22. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  23. Paul Ladame, Defending Switzerland: Then and Now (Caravan Books, 1999).

  24. Ladame.

  25. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  26. Ladame.

  27. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

  28. Raymond Flower, The Palace: A Profile of St Moritz (London: Debrett’s Peerage, 1982).

  29. Rhodes James (ed.).

  30. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

  PART TWO

  FIVE

  ‘The lifeboat is full’

  The world seemed divided into two parts – those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.

  CHAIM WEIZMANN

  1

  On 19 November 1942 Hitler was once again at the Berghof. The first snows of the year had fallen and – as ever – cast a blanket of peace over the enchanted Alpine landscape. From the terrace the eye was seized by the crystalline masses of the Watzmann and the Untersberg – where Barbarossa still dozed. In the valley the dusk came early, and from Obersalzberg the lights of Berchtesgaden glittered warmly below. There was no blackout here, and from the night sky the constellations of Orion, Sagittarius and Cassiopeia shone down on the narrow valley.

  Yet the recent weeks had been disturbing for the Führer. Indeed the whole tenor of the war had changed since his precipitate decision to invade the eastern Alps, those of Yugoslavia, twenty months earlier in April 1941. Operation Barbarossa, delayed partly because of the operation in the Balkans, had begun with such high hopes and dazzling victories. The fall of Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa, the besieging of Leningrad, the spearheads of the 7th Panzer Division in the suburbs of Moscow. Then had come the setbacks, culminating in a most reluctant Hitler suspending the assault of Heinz Guderian’s Panzers on the Soviet capital. This was coupled with the entry of the United States into the conflict in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the final abandonment of the plan to invade Great Britain, the first USAAF bombing raids on Germany, and Grossaktion Warschau of the summer of 1942. This had seen more than a quarter of a million Jews dispatched from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, the extermination camp sixty miles north of the Polish capital. Then had come the shocking news of Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein. After this maelstrom, more than ever Hitler relished the restorative powers of his Alpine retreat. The Germans called it Bergfried, the peace of the mountains.

  Thirteen days earlier he had been at his eastern HQ in Rastenburg, Prussia, directing the deteriorating situation around the industrial centre of Stalingrad in south-western Russia. It was at this point – 6 November 1942 – that the first intelligence had filtered through of a large Allied naval force setting sail from Gibraltar. It was steaming east. Two days later Hitler was scheduled to be in Munich, the fount of the Nazi movement, to address the Party on the nineteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Setting out in the command train after lunch on 7 November, Hitler arrived in the Bavarian capital at 3.40 p.m. – much delayed by stopping at every major station to hook up the train to the railway telegraph system to glean the latest news from the Mediterranean. By the time the Führersonderzug reached Munich’s main station, the Allied landings in French North Africa had begun. This was Operation Torch, under the overall command of the fifty-two-year-old from Kansas, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  Opposition should have c
ome in the form of 120,000 Vichy French troops under Admiral François Darlan. Their loyalty was questionable, the Allies even supposing that some Vichy elements would support the landing. Resistance in Morocco and Algiers proved tenacious in some places, sporadic elsewhere, but enough to see a death toll of just under 2,000 accruing to the two sides, the sinking of a number of ships, and Darlan himself declaring for the Allies, before the bridgeheads were established.

  For Hitler, as he was driven to the Löwenbräukeller to address the Party faithful, the implications of the landings were obvious. With Rommel in retreat after Montgomery’s desert victory, the Axis forces in the whole North African theatre were now threatened: the balance of power in the Mediterranean had shifted dramatically in the Allies’ favour. Seven hundred miles away in Downing Street, Churchill took a similar line. On 10 November 1942 he famously told the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon at the Mansion House in the City of London, ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’1 Both leaders saw that even Germany herself was imperilled if the Allies seized the opportunity to invade unoccupied southern France, the Zone Libre under the control of Pétain’s Vichy administration. From Algiers, the French Riviera was just a hop across the wine-dark Mediterranean. From the Riviera, Germany was virtually in sight.