Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  Gysin did indeed know. The ceremonial objects convinced the lieutenant of the bona fides of the pair, and he at once relented:

  My orders are to arrest you, to return all single people to the French. But I will not. No. Absolutely not. I have seen what has happened in the valley, in Le Châtelard, at the border, where Jewish people have been forcibly handed over to the Vichy gendarmes, servants of the Boches, knowing full well what would happen to them. Inhuman indeed. It cannot be believed.14

  Rotenberg was sent by these two good Samaritans to Montreux on the northern shores of Lake Geneva. Here he would be safe because the Swiss authorities would only expel Jews caught within five miles of the frontier. As he had sought sanctuary in Switzerland he was categorised as a ‘Flüchtling’. This meant he would be sent to a labour camp: initially at Girenbad in Canton Zurich.

  Rotenberg was lucky. He joined a group of foreign Jewish refugees in Switzerland that by the time of Operation Anton in November 1942 totalled 14,000. ‘For each one of us,’ Rotenberg wrote of that time, ‘there were tens, hundreds, thousands who we knew had been hounded, tricked, duped, caught, torn from families, killed on the spot …’ As he learned in the course of his stay in the Swiss work camps, his mother and sister Eva were amongst them.

  4

  Rotenberg had managed to escape to Switzerland over the Alps. Other Jews in France at the time of Operation Anton found refuge in the mountains themselves.

  In the south-east of France on the Riviera, the operation had seen the Germans seizing the territory to the west of the Rhône, taking their local headquarters at Marseilles on the river mouth. As we have seen, the Italians had taken over to the east of the river along the coast to Nice itself, and the Alpine border running north to Geneva. This arrangement seemed a very welcome development to the Jewish community in the Alpes-Maritimes and Rhône-Alpes, for it freed them from the strictures of Vichy’s Statut des Juifs that had already seen persecution and deportations. If it was true that some amongst the Italians were themselves anti-Semitic, anti-Semitism was not the centrepiece of Italian Fascism, and Italy’s anti-Semitic laws were relatively lenient. Moreover, in the Alpes-Maritimes the law was exercised without a great deal of vigour: its strictures were tempered both by the humanity of the Catholic Church and the desire of the Italians to have their own way in France. ‘The arrival of Italian soldiers in the departements east of the Rhône was generally received with satisfaction and with a feeling of relief among Jews in southern France.’15

  At first this sentiment seemed well founded. In the first few weeks after Operation Anton, the Italian Carabinieri protected Nice’s Jewish monuments and even broke up a march of French anti-Semites on a synagogue. Yet it soon emerged that the situation was not as clear-cut as it seemed. The demarcation between the Italian and German authorities on the one hand and the remaining Vichy officials on the other was vague, ill-defined and – very shortly – quarrelsome.

  No sooner had the Germans settled themselves in Marseilles in the early winter of 1942 than they began rounding up the local Jewish population. They also urged their Italian counterparts in Nice to do likewise. The Italians proved resistant. On 17 December 1942 Mussolini had heard the simultaneous declaration from the Allies in London, Washington and Moscow condemning the Nazis’ ‘bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’,16 and drew the logical conclusion. That same month the Italian authorities prevented Vichy attempts in Nice to have the Jews’ passports stamped with the letter J for Juif or Juive; they then began interfering with the round-ups being undertaken by the Germans. On 22 February 1943 the Pusteria Division of the Italian Fourth Army had stopped the prefect of Lyons arresting 2,000–3,000 Polish Jews in the Grenoble area to the south-east of France’s second city. There was also an extraordinary stand-off between the Axis allies in Annecy. Here the Vichy authorities had rounded up a group of Jews in the local prison for deportation. The Italians set up a military zone in the prison precincts and got them released.

  This was all too much. Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was obliged to call a meeting with Mussolini, complaining of this outrageous partiality. This was held on 17 March 1943. Il Duce, mindful of the Allies’ views on the extermination camps, diplomatically appointed the former police chief of the Adriatic city of Bari, Guido Lospinoso, as ‘Inspector General of Racial Policy’. His job was to deal with the Jewish question. This, believed Lospinoso, was a matter for the Italian authorities, not the Germans. In any case, he found little to be said in favour of forced deportation of the Jewish inhabitants to ‘the east’. The Allies’ declaration meant that no one could plead ignorance of the likely fate of such people; it was now increasingly uncertain that Italy would continue the struggle on the side of the Axis; and the Sixth Army had been all but annihilated at Stalingrad. Caution was wise.

  Accordingly, on his arrival in Nice, Lospinoso adopted the Vichy practice of ‘assigned residence’, ‘résidence forcée’. This required individuals to live in a particular location under police surveillance. Lospinoso’s difficulty was to find somewhere within his area of jurisdiction where the Jews could be accommodated without excessive preparatory effort, expenditure of human resources and monetary expense. He hit upon the idea of the high Alpine resorts on the Franco-Italian border. These were places that – as the Swiss had realised – had the additional advantage of being prisons without walls. They were remote enough and in inhospitable enough terrain for escape to be impracticable for all but the most determined.

  *

  Lospinoso’s first choices that spring were Megève and nearby St Gervais in the Haute-Savoie. Part of the ancient Duchy of Savoie, this was the Alpine département lying 250 miles north of Nice in the Rhône-Alpes, on the southern side of Lake Geneva. Megève, a 3,369-foot resort ten miles east of Mont Blanc, in a sense selected itself. It was a medieval farming village developed as a skiing resort by the Rothschild family. The Jewish banking dynasty had tired of St Moritz in the years immediately before and after the First World War. Megève showed some promise as a substitute. It commanded a large, sunny bowl below the flanks of Mont Blanc that flattered the skiing of beginners, and it was easily accessible from Geneva. As skiing snowballed in the 1920s, the resort flourished. It attracted just the sort of set to whom St Moritz itself appealed: aristocrats, financiers and film stars: haute volée – high society. Now, in a turn of events not anticipated by the Rothschilds, the bankers were going to be supplanted by refugees.

  The next challenge for Lospinoso was to move the 400 Jews from Nice to the Haute-Savoie. Rail was the obvious option to transport the thousands the Inspector General needed to resettle. However, to avoid the gradients of the Alpine terrain, the line from Nice ran west along the coast through the honeypots of Antibes, Cannes and St Raphael to Marseilles, before turning north to Grenoble and thence north-east to Savoie. All three sides of this rough oblong would take the Jews through territory held by German forces. Neither the Italians nor the refugees themselves would run this risk. Nobody knew how the Germans would react. Morale in the Wehrmacht had been badly hit by the final destruction of Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad at the end of January 1943.

  Fortunately, a committee had been established in Nice to look after the refugees’ affairs and represent the community to the local authorities – now including the Italians. The Comité d’Assistance aux Refugés had provided the Jews with the papers necessary for survival in wartime Europe: identity cards, ration books and housing permits. Now it was able to secure the funding from the community itself to pay for lorries to take the refugees north by road to the Haute-Savoie. These were lumbering gazogènes, developed to run on charcoal in the absence of very heavily rationed petrol. Going uphill, passengers had to get out and push. The first convoys arrived in Megève on 8 April 1943. Just four days previously, a new crematorium – the fifth – had opened at Auschwitz.

  As the days lengthened and the snows melted in the mountains, as the spring flowers blossomed, Lospinoso established simi
lar communities in other Alpine resorts as far from the Germans and as close to the Italian border as possible. These were roughly on the north–south line between Megève and Nice: at Barcelonnette, Vence, Venanson, Castellane and Saint-Martin-Vésubie.

  The last of these was only half a day’s drive north of Nice, a remote 2,346-foot settlement where the village and its stone houses seemed to cling to the edge of a precipice. Between the wars Saint-Martin had been fashionable among the English escaping from the heat of the summer Riviera; in nearby Roquebillière in 1939, Arthur Koestler wrote his masterly critique of totalitarianism, Darkness at Noon. Now, courtesy of Lospinoso, the 1,650 locals were joined by more than 1,200 Jews. In the words of a Polish refugee:

  Saint Martin, a small settlement in the mountains some sixty kilometres from Nice, was before the war a holiday and convalescence resort. There the Italian occupation authorities have set up one of the places of résidence forcée for the Jewish refugees who have reached France during the war from countries occupied by the Germans. Here the refugees were accommodated in houses and villas. Twice daily they have to report to the police officers; they are also not allowed to go outside the village or to leave it … They are well organized: a Jewish committee elected by the refugees is responsible to the Italian authorities. They have schools for their children and there is also a Zionist youth movement. Despite the state of emergency life goes on normally, and thanks to the young Zionists cultural life is very well developed. Of course the refugees do not have the right to take jobs. The rich ones live off the money they have succeeded in saving from the Germans and the poor receive assistance from the committee.17

  Somehow these communities maintained a sense of normality, even happiness, in the face of death. They had been dispatched like the unwanted goods they were into the high Alps to eke out an existence in that epic country, never knowing when a change in the fortunes of war would bring catastrophe.

  There was another warning just as the first of the refugees settled into Megève in that spring of 1943. Following the extraordinary stand-off in February in nearby Annecy, the Italians had prevented a similar round-up of Jews in Chambéry in the Savoie. Should the French or indeed the Germans gain the upper hand, the refugees would obviously be on their way to Auschwitz. Who could tell what might happen next?

  5

  Over the nearby border in Switzerland, Alexander Rotenberg in his work camp was in a place of greater safety, but that spring of 1943 Switzerland was once again by no means secure.

  In March 1943, four months after his abrupt departure from Berchtesgaden to save Paulus’s army at Stalingrad, Hitler was to return from Rastenburg to Bavaria. In preparation for his stay in Obersalzberg the Berghof was given a spring clean, the terrace that overlooked the Alps of Berchtesgadener Land was cleared of snow, and the colourful parasols were dusted off. The Führer would be accompanied by his entourage: Generalfeldmarschall Keitel and Generaloberst Jodl were to be joined by the staffs of Göring, Himmler and von Ribbentrop. With patchy snow still on the ground, the Nazi leaders would settle themselves into Obersalzberg, spreading out into the nearby resort of Bad Reichenhall and the city of Salzburg. Here, warming themselves in front of blazing log fires, they would once again plot Switzerland’s demise.

  Yet first – on their arrival – they discovered that Obersalzberg was beginning to reflect the deteriorating course of the Reich’s war. It was no longer quite the sanctuary they sought. Berchtesgaden, hitherto considered inviolable, was now thought to be increasingly vulnerable to Allied air raids. By the time of Hitler’s return to the Berghof that March of 1943, Reichsleiter Bormann was already drawing up plans for an elaborate bunker system. The underground accommodation included quarters for the Führer’s Alsatian, Blondi. (According to Speer, ‘The dog probably occupied the most important role in Hitler’s private life; he meant more to his master than the Führer’s closest associates … I avoided, as did any reasonably prudent visitor to Hitler, arousing any feelings of friendship in the dog.’)18

  Equally unsettling were the wounded. The pressure on army hospitals throughout the Reich was now such that the Hotel Platterhof, intended to accommodate dignitaries visiting the Führer at the Berghof, had been converted into a hospital. Irmgard Paul, the girl who, as a three-year-old, had been dandled on Hitler’s knee, was one of the Kindergruppe invited to put on a play that spring for the injured. The children performed Sleeping Beauty to great applause, but Irmgard remembered that she ‘could not take my eyes off the young men with their thick, white head bandages, moving along slowly on crutches, arms in slings and legs in casts or missing entire limbs. I felt slightly sick and hoped fervently they would all get well, but wondered what on earth they would do with only one arm, one leg, or no legs.’19

  It was in this atmosphere that Hitler’s general staff began to scheme and plan.

  After the calamity at Stalingrad of barely a month previously, and with Anglo-American forces from the Operation Torch landings now pushing back strongly against Rommel’s Axis forces in Tunisia, the German army was in retreat. On 14 March – just before his return to Obersalzberg – Hitler had voiced his fear that ‘the loss of Tunisia will also mean the loss of Italy’.20 This in turn might give the Allies easy access to the Alps – and thence to Germany herself.

  His staff had accordingly conceived the idea of a strategic retreat into those parts of central and western Europe that could be easily defended. This was the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’. Of this, Switzerland and her mountains formed an integral part. The plan would incorporate the Swiss Alps into a defensive system joining General Guisan’s Alpine Redoubt with the Black Forest, the Austrian Arlberg with the Bavarian Alps, the Brenner Pass with the Italian Dolomites. As to its practical execution in terms of seizing Switzerland, one imaginative option dated from July 1941. This was Operation Wartegau.21 It called for a commando force assembled in flying boats on the Bodensee (Lake Constance) to be flown south-west the short distance to the Swiss lakes of Lucerne, Thun and Zurich. That would surprise the Swiss!

  The Swiss had a source of intelligence actually within the German high command. On 19 March 1943, the agent known as the ‘Wiking line’ dispatched the most alarming of news to Berne. General Guisan was immediately alerted. German mountain troops, the Gebirgsjäger, were massing in Bavaria; General Eduard Dietl, a mountain warfare specialist, had been flown from occupied Finland to a specially established HQ in Munich to mastermind the operation. Invasion yet again seemed imminent, and Guisan at once mobilised his civilian army. The Swiss called it the März-Alarm.

  Notes

  1. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991).

  2. Wilhelm Deist, Germany and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  3. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970).

  4. Alexander Rotenberg, Emissaries: A Memoir of the Riviera, Haute-Savoie, Switzerland, and World War II (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1987).

  5. Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War (ICE), Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War: Final Report (Munich: Pendo, 2002)

  6. Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973).

  7. Sykes.

  8. ICE.

  9. Kimche.

  10. Kimche.

  11. ICE.

  12. Rotenberg.

  13. Rotenberg.

  14. Rotenberg.

  15. Daniel Carpi, Between Mussolini and Hitler: The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia (Hanover, NH, and London: Brandeis University Press, 1994).

  16. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life.

  17. Susan Zuccotti, Holocaust Odysseys (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

  18. Speer.

  19. Hunt.

  20. Deist.

  21. Halbrook, Swiss and the Nazis.

  SIX

  Setting the Alps Ablaze

  Guerrilla wa
rfare is even more cruel than conventional war, the chances of surviving slimmer. Whoever joined up as a patriot or partisan signed their own death warrant.

  MAX SALVADORI

  1

  In the spring of 1943 Switzerland was once again teetering on the brink of invasion. At the same time to the south-east of the republic in Yugoslavia and to the south-west in France, other Alpine dramas were unfolding. Long heralded and coming to pass much later than Churchill – amongst many others – had hoped, this was the story of resistance in the Alps.

  It had begun with the ignominious evacuation from Dunkirk of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, the first summer of the war. Thence, in Hitler’s eyes, there would be no return of a British army to Continental shores. General Gort’s forces would sit impotently on the sidelines of Nazi-occupied Europe for the next thousand years.

  Even during the chaotic days that followed the Fall of France, the British thought otherwise. If it was true that the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg victories in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France had been delivered through military might, they had been aided and abetted by fifth columnists in the defeated countries. These were the agents of sabotage, propaganda and subversion who had bombed civilians in Vienna, faked the attack on the radio station in Gleiwitz that had given Hitler the pretext for invading Poland in September 1939, and spread defeatism in France on the eve of her Fall. Commonplace today, at the outbreak of war these tactics were something of a novelty. It was true that in the wake of Anschluss, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service or MI6 had created a special unit for just such a purpose. Section D was based in Caxton Street in the medieval lanes around Westminster Abbey. It had dreamed up some wonderful schemes. They included sabotaging Swedish iron ore exports to the Reich, blowing up the oilfields in Romania and – best of all – blocking the blue Danube. None had come to fruition.