Storming the Eagle's Nest
Page 10
Fall Anton – Operation Anton – had been thoughtfully developed by OKW for just such a contingency. This was the completion of the Third Reich’s occupation of France, the seizing of the Zone Libre, the margins of which were the country’s tempting Mediterranean coast and her Alpine border with Italy.
Now Hitler at once directed the plan to be dusted off. At 8.30 on the morning of 10 November – just as Churchill was rehearsing his speech – the Führer gave the order for Axis forces to defy the terms of the armistice with Vichy and occupy the Zone Libre. He excused the action by declaring, ‘After the treachery in North Africa, the reliability of French troops can no longer be guaranteed.’2
The implications for the French Alps along the border that zigzagged north from Nice to Geneva were far-reaching. The Italians had already occupied the fringes of this frontier area during the faltering campaign of June 1940. They had remained there under the terms of the Franco-Italian armistice. Now the Italian Fourth Army under the balding, bespectacled fifty-four-year-old Generale Mario Vercellino marched a further seventy-five miles west to Avignon in the south and Vienne in the north. The Italians assumed control of Nice itself, capital of the Alpes-Maritimes; further north in the Rhône-Alpes they took the capital of the ancient province of Dauphiné, Grenoble; Chambéry, the capital of Savoie; and Annecy, capital of the Haute-Savoie. In all, this was an area comprising eight départements.
Occupied Zones in France
Further north in the Alps, Vichy France’s border with Switzerland between Geneva and Basel – the départements of Ain, Jura, and Doubs – was seized by the German Seventh Army, so closing the fascist ring on the tiny democracy.
Having brazenly assured the junketing Nazis in the Löwenbräukeller that Stalingrad was firmly in the hands of Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army, Hitler had retreated south to the Berghof. Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, head of OKW, and his deputy Generaloberst Jodl were in attendance; also Albert Speer. The quartet ruminated on recent developments. The Allied landings – Operation Torch – were the culmination of the Reich’s setbacks in North Africa that had begun with the defeat of Rommel’s hitherto unvanquished Afrika Korps in the Western Desert at the Second Battle of El Alamein. On the Eastern Front, a counteroffensive from the Red Army was anticipated – though not on a scale that required the presence of Hitler and his entourage at Rastenburg.
It was on 19 November that a phone call came through to Obersalzberg from Rastenburg. The new Chief of Staff Generaloberst Kurt Zeitzler called with grave news. The forecast Russian attack – Operation Uranus – had begun. It was on a much greater scale than OKW had envisaged. Three armies under General Nikolay Vatutin were driving south on a 250-mile front in a transparent attempt to encircle Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad. The choice, said Zeitzler, was stark. Either a retreat to the west or be cut off. Hitler was outraged – not least because the forty-seven-year-old Zeitzler had been chosen to replace Generaloberst Franz Halder on the grounds that he would be both more robust and less dogmatic. Keitel, Jodl and Speer were also aghast.
The thirty-seven-year-old Albert Speer was the man unexpectedly spotlit by Hitler when he saw the architect’s designs for the 1933 Nuremberg party rally. It was Speer’s idea to hold the rallies at night to disguise the fact that many of the leading Nazis were overweight. Soon he became the principal architect to the Reich, the man who would blueprint Hitler’s dreams for a brave new Germany. The Reichskanzlei (Reich Chancellery) in Berlin was his first major triumph, Hitler having dismissed the old building in the Wilhelmstrasse as only ‘fit for a soap company’. Having so distinguished himself, Speer was singled out for a further remarkable promotion to the Reich’s arms and munitions minister. His supposed ignorance of the Final Solution to the Jewish question later led to the cognomen ‘the good Nazi’; and his astutely self-serving memoirs provide an intriguing insight into the upper echelons of the Reich as its narrative steadily unravelled.
On this occasion Speer pictured Hitler pacing back and forth like a caged animal in the great hall of the Berghof:
Our generals are making their old mistakes again. They always overestimate the strength of the Russians. According to all the front-line reports, the enemy’s human material is no longer sufficient. They are weakened; they have lost far too much blood. But of course nobody wants to accept such reports. Besides, how badly Russian officers are trained! No offensive can be organized with such officers. We know what it takes!3
The matter simmered for three days as the news from the east became worse and worse. Then Hitler, Keitel and Jodl once again entrained at Berchtesgaden on the Führersonderzug and rushed back to Rastenburg.
It was 22 November 1942. Ahead lay the siege of Stalingrad.
2
So to Switzerland. The complete closing of the Swiss border by Operation Anton ten days earlier meant that the republic was now completely surrounded by the Axis, all its frontiers effectively closed. This brought a series of problems in the country to a head. Principal amongst them was that of the Jewish refugees.
Like Great Britain, Switzerland had a long tradition of offering asylum to the oppressed. This was partly as a consequence of her geographical position at the crossroads of Europe, partly because of her traditional neutrality, partly – perhaps – because of the humanity of the Swiss people. The state had given sanctuary from religious persecution to the Huguenots and the Waldenses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Geneva becoming known as the ‘Protestant Rome’. In the years of the French Revolution she had provided homes for her western neighbour’s royalists. In 1815 the international guarantee of her neutrality by the Congress of Vienna had cemented her reputation as the capital for asylum; in 1848, the European year of revolution, she had given sanctuary to politicians of all colours – this despite having undergone her own turmoil in the form of the Sonderbund civil war the previous year. In the twentieth century, Russian revolutionaries including Vladimir Lenin had found exile in the mountain state.
Yet despite this record, and despite being a multilingual and multicultural nation, it was often said that the Swiss had a strong sense of their own identity and no particular enthusiasm for outside influences or people. Alexander Rotenberg was a twenty-one-year-old Jew from Antwerp who escaped to Switzerland at the time of Operation Anton in autumn 1942. For Rotenberg, ‘The Swiss were not particularly anti-Semitic, but they tended to be xenophobic. They liked their own ways; foreigners, with the exception of tourists, made them feel uncomfortable.’4 Much more recently, in 2002, this perspective was echoed by Switzerland’s own landmark Bergier commission into the country’s wartime record: ‘Anti-Semitism was mostly unspoken and kept below the surface, but clearly ingrained in the social fabric.’5 This low-grade xenophobia, at the time commonplace throughout Europe, was manifested in a concern about ‘foreignerisation’, Überfremdung.
This debate was given increasing force as the number of refugees grew in the years preceding the outbreak of war. After the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that deprived German Jews of their citizenship, the Reich had actively encouraged Jewish emigration. By 1938, one in four German Jews – some 150,000 – had left Germany, fleeing to where they could. Great Britain took 50,000, France 30,000, Poland 25,000, Belgium 12,000, the Scandinavian countries 5,000. Switzerland herself accepted 5,000. With the annexation of Austria in March 1938, Nazi policy became more concerted, and saw the establishment of ghettos and forced emigration. Pressure on Switzerland grew.
*
In the face of this policy and the practical implications for the liberal democracies that might be inclined to accept the Jews, in 1938 President Roosevelt had called an international conference on the question. Switzerland, at the time still the host country of the League of Nations, and in the immediate proximity of Germany, was the obvious venue. The Swiss declined the suggestion, supposedly fearing to offend Hitler. Évian-les-Bains, the French Alpine watering-place south across Lake Geneva from Lausanne, was chosen as a sub
stitute. It was hoped that charity and justice would be dispensed along with the mineral water.
Here, from 6 to 14 July 1938, the liberal democracies disgraced themselves. The French hosts set the tone by stating that their country had reached ‘the extreme point of saturation as regards the admission of refugees’. Lord Winterton, leading the British delegation, followed suit: ‘the United Kingdom is not a country of immigration. It is highly industrialised, fully populated and is still faced with the problem of unemployment.’ The United States could do no better: it would not relax its strict immigration quota. The Swiss head of the police force responsible for foreigners, Dr Heinrich Rothmund, unapologetically told delegates that ‘Switzerland, which has as little use for these Jews as Germany, will take measures to protect herself from being swamped by Jews.’6
The consequence was that – at least officially – the enlightened democracies would do precious little to find new homes for the displaced Jews. In their defence, the extermination of the race first threatened by the Nazi SS chief, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, before the end of that year of 1938 was hardly an outcome imagined by the delegates. Nevertheless, the fact was that after Évian, as Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first head of state, commented, ‘The world seemed divided into two parts – those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.’7
*
With the outbreak of war the pressure of Jewish refugees on the Swiss borders had risen.
In the Alps, Bavaria had been profoundly hostile to Jews since the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. In the resort of Garmish-Partenkirchen anti-Jewish posters were removed only on the occasion of the Winter Olympics in February 1936 – when they might be seen by international visitors; the twin towns’ remaining forty Jews were expelled at two hours’ notice during Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938. Two of them, turned back at the Swiss border, committed suicide. Austria’s Alpine provinces had kowtowed after Anschluss in March 1938, the resort of Kitzbühel seeing its Jewish community disappear virtually overnight. After the Fall of France, Vichy had required no prompting from Berlin to pass the Statut des Juifs: the internment camp in the Paris suburb of Drancy had opened on 21 August 1941. Following the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 in Berlin which formulated ‘die Endlösung der Judenfrage’ (the Final Solution to the Jewish question), the persecution of the French Jewish population became more concerted. The Vel d’Hiv round-up of Jews in central Paris in July 1942 saw the first 13,000 of a total of 67,400 sent to Auschwitz. The French Alpine regions of the Rhône-Alpes and the Alpes-Maritimes soon followed. Nice lost 600 Jews on 26 August 1942; in Grenoble, capital of the Dauphiné, the community of around 3,000 Jews also found themselves persecuted, then – eventually – deported. In the Italian Alps, Mussolini’s pale imitation of the Nuremberg Laws, the Manifesto della razza, held sway from September 1938. In Piedmont, persecution was sufficient to drive families into hiding in the surrounding mountains; deportations to Auschwitz began in 1942. In the Yugoslav Alps, Nazi anti-Semitic policies were pursued with their usual vigour after the Axis invasion of April 1941, though those parts of the country held by the Italians were less harsh in their treatment. By 1942, much of the Alps had become a place where Jews could not live.
Switzerland therefore became the obvious destination for the persecuted. Yet despite its tradition of offering asylum for the oppressed, the Swiss were cautious. They categorised those trying to enter Switzerland as Evaders (military personnel in plain clothes), Internierten (military personnel clothed as such) and Flüchtlinge – civilian refugees. They filtered and they sifted. In the aftermath of the Évian Conference the Swiss successfully petitioned the Nazis to stamp the passports of Jews with a J, a decision approved by the Federal Council on 4 October 1938. This was to enable them to be singled out at the border. As the Bergier commission pointed out, this meant that Switzerland was ‘making anti-semitic laws the basis of its entry practices’.8
By 1941 the country was playing host to 19,429 Jews, of whom 9,150 were classed as ‘foreign’. Some were en route to other countries, others had nowhere else to go. As the consequences of Wannsee became apparent, the refugees’ problem became desperate. By the summer of 1942, the fate of Jews sent east in the railway cattle cars – the story of Treblinka – had found its way into the press. Both the Daily Telegraph in England and the Washington Post in the United States carried stories of the mass exterminations. On 25 August 1942 the story was splashed all over the Swiss newspapers, and the Swiss found themselves besieged. Already, in late July 1942, Heinrich Rothmund had written to his superior, the Justice and Police Minister Eduard von Steiger,
What are we to do? We admit deserters as well as escaped prisoners of war as long as the number of those who cannot proceed further [to other countries] does not rise too high. Political fugitives … within the Federal Council’s 1933 definition are also given asylum. But this 1933 ordinance has virtually become a farce today because every refugee is already in danger of death … Shall we send back only the Jews? This seems to be almost forced upon us.9
To avoid the appearance of persecuting the Jews, on 13 August 1942 Steiger agreed to Rothmund ordering the closing of Swiss borders to all refugees, irrespective of nationality or race. In a speech at the end of the month, von Steiger explained,
Whoever commands a small lifeboat of limited capacity that is already quite full, and with an equally limited amount of provisions, when thousands of victims of a sunken ship scream to be saved, must appear hard when he cannot take everyone. And yet he is still humane when he warns early against false hopes and tries to save at least those he has taken in.10
This was generally interpreted in the headline ‘DAS BOOT IST VOLL’ (The boat is full), a phrase used both by the Swiss President and by Rothmund himself.
The judgement of history on this decision has been harsh. The Bergier commission noted the democracy’s failure to distinguish between war and genocide. It also judged that the country ‘rarely chose’ to use its position ‘for the defence of basic humanitarian values’.11
For the Swiss, Operation Anton, less than three months after Steiger’s August decision, was a body blow. From 1940 onwards the republic’s ambivalence towards refugees had been coupled with the practical difficulty of the shortage of food for an increasing number of mouths, together with fears of social and political unrest. While the refugees remained birds of passage, this was not an overwhelming problem even for a small country with limited food for its own population. The closure of the border caused by Operation Anton exacerbated the crisis, both in terms of perception and reality. It was one thing to be a staging post for refugees. It was another to accept them at the frontier without any prospect of their eventual departure. As Alexander Rotenberg put it, when Switzerland was encircled, ‘Refugees, at first a novelty, were also by now streaming in from wherever they could find leaks in the border … And now, surrounded and closed off from free world trade, sharing short rations with illegal foreigners was not a popular option.’ Switzerland would soon be full, complet, besetzt, pieno.
In the autumn of 1942, in a country averse to strangers, in a nation whose very existence was in jeopardy, in a land where the population was on rations, they were the unwanted.
3
In practice the reception of Jews of any age or status often depended on the charity – or otherwise – of the border officials whom they encountered. Some refugees were turned away at the Swiss frontier and sent to their deaths. Others were formally admitted. To yet others a blind eye was turned. Rotenberg recorded his experience in Emissaries: A Memoir of the Riviera, Haute-Savoie, Switzerland, and World War II.12
In 1940 he had flown a Nazi round-up of Jews in his newly occupied home city of Antwerp. He had escaped first into occupied northern France, subsequently to the first port of call for many European Jews that summer: the Alpes-Maritimes capital of Nice. Here he lived for eighteen months working for the Jewish underground. Forewarned of the general round-up of Je
ws in the city of 26 August 1942, he took a train north into the Haute-Savoie in the Rhône-Alpes.
Then, as summer turned to autumn, he and a companion, Ruth Hepner, took the steep, rough mountain paths that led up to the Franco-Swiss border close to the French hamlet of Barbère. This was ten miles north-east of the famous old Savoie resort of Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc, and at a height of more than 4,000 feet. It was a bleak and forbidding place, a world of bare rock and broken stones, bereft of vegetation, of human habitation and of pity.
Sucessfully avoiding the Swiss police patrols on the frontier, the pair scrambled down the mountainside towards what they hoped would be the safety of the Swiss village of Finhaut, Canton Valais. There they intended to throw themselves on the mercy of the occupants of the first chalet they could find. This, as they knew, was risky, for – in Rotenberg’s words – ‘The border patrols had grown more hardened.’13
As it so happened, Rotenberg and Hepner chanced upon the home of an army officer, First Lieutenant Emile Gysin. His wife Marguerite was welcoming and plied the pair with café au lait in front of the fire; when her husband returned – complete with a giant mastiff – he was furious. He at once assumed the refugees were German spies and threatened to turn them back to Vichy. ‘Why shouldn’t I arrest you right now? Can you prove to me you are not spies? And even at that – if you are refugees as you claim – I am supposed to turn you back.’ Rotenberg was cornered. How could Gysin be convinced? With a flash of inspiration, the answer came to him. He burrowed in his knapsack and brought out two prizes. These were a Hebrew prayer book and his tefillin, the set of phylacteries – boxes containing parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah – with which he prayed. ‘Have you seen these before?’ demanded Rotenberg of his host. ‘Do you know what they are?’