Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  OKW and von Rundstedt now lost patience with Darnand. The Glières was becoming a public embarrassment, a cause célèbre on the airwaves and in the local estaminets of the Haute-Savoie.

  The end was swift and brutal. On 23 March 1944 OKW called in the 157th Reserve Division of the Wehrmacht and two German police battalions. Armed with heavy machine guns, mortars, howitzers and armoured cars, they were ordered to clear the plateau. Supported by ground-attack aircraft and artillery, three attack groups were organised into a pincer movement to attack both the rear and front of the plateau. Believing that upwards of a thousand maquis were holding the plateau, the Germans’ own forces numbered 4,000. On 25 March the operation began with an artillery bombardment of the camps that lasted all day. The following morning the barrage opened up again and what remained of the camps was attacked by Stukas and Heinkel 111 and Junkers bombers. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the bombardment ceased and the Wehrmacht went into action. The Gebirgsjäger captured the two main routes of retreat from the plateau. The Spanish defended a hillock and held out to the last man and last round. All were killed, and by 10 p.m. that evening, Anjot was no longer in a quandary. There was no hope of reinforcements and no prospect of defeating the forces encroaching on the plateau. He had done everything possible, and retreat to the valley under cover of the night was the only reasonable course of action. His orders had to be carried to the forces dispersed over the plateau by skiers who struggled through the deep snow. Some of the groups did not receive their orders till the early hours of 26 March. Then, singly or in pairs, the exhausted maquis tried to find their way in the dark down into the relative warmth and safety of the valley. A few made it. Anjot died with five others on the descent of the west side of the plateau. Of the remaining four hundred or so maquis, more than 150 were killed; many of them showed signs of torture. The survivors were deported to the concentration camps, and the injured were shot out of hand. German losses were put at twenty-one.

  General de Gaulle awarded Tom Morel the Croix de la Libération. The citation declared that ‘He will remain the incarnation of French patriotism in the epic of the resistance, and one of the most prestigious martyrs of the Savoie’.21 M. R. D. Foot, the SOE historian, had a different point of view that accorded with received wisdom on irregular warfare. He commented drily of the whole episode, ‘This was magnificent, unforgettable; but tactically unsound.’22 It was certainly nothing like the ‘guerrilla à la Tito’ that Churchill had hoped for as a result of the 27 January meeting, and it unconvincingly answered the question of the value of the maquis.

  Notes

  1. Speer.

  2. Hunt.

  3. Hunt.

  4. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life.

  5. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life.

  6. Rhodes James (ed.).

  7. Maclean.

  8. Maclean.

  9. Maclean.

  10. Maclean.

  11. Maclean.

  12. M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France: An Account of the Work of the British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940–1944 (London: HMSO, 1966).

  13. Charles Messenger, The Last Prussian: A Biography of Field Marshal Gerd Von Rundstedt (London: Brassey’s, 1991).

  14. Churchill, Second World War, Volume V.

  15. Churchill, Second World War, Volume V.

  16. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life.

  17. Patrick de Gmeline, Tom Morel, héros des Glières (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 2008).

  18. Ousby.

  19. De Gmeline.

  20. De Gmeline.

  21. De Gmeline.

  22. Foot, SOE in France.

  ELEVEN

  Arbeit Macht Frei

  Don’t worry about the victims. The work must proceed and be finished in the shortest possible time.

  OBERGRUPPENFÜHRER HANS KAMMLER

  1

  It was 23 May 1944, six weeks after the Glières debacle, and Albert Speer was attending a meeting at Obersalzberg. ‘We were all waiting’, he remembered, ‘in the inhospitable entrance hall of the Berghof for Hitler.’ The chalet itself now had a funereal air, draped as it was in camouflage netting to conceal it from marauding Allied aircraft. The party comprised the head of the OKW, Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, the armaments chief of the air force, Generalfeldmarschall Erhard Milch, Reichsmarschall Göring, Speer himself, and a handful of the Reich’s leading industrialists: ‘Krauch, Pleiger, Bütefisch, and E. R. Fischer’. Krauch represented the chemical industry, Pleiger and Bütefisch coal and oil. Fischer was the chairman of IG Farben, the company that ran Germany’s biggest synthetic oil plant at Leuna in Saxony-Anhalt. Farben was also the patent-holder for Zyklon B, the pesticide that the SS had turned to such imaginative use in the Reich’s extermination camps.

  These great men were facing a crisis. Ten days earlier on 12 May 1944, General Carl Spaatz’s US Eighth Air Force had launched a mammoth raid of 935 bombers on Leuna and a series of other fuel plants in central and eastern Germany. The results were devastating. This was the opening hand of the Allies’ ‘oil campaign’ to cripple the Reich’s armed forces. Should the Allies persist in the tactic of attacking these plants, the whole German military machine would grind to a halt. ‘On that day’, wrote Speer with an eye to the gallery, ‘the technological war was decided. Until then we had managed to produce approximately as many weapons as the armed forces needed … But with the attack … a new era in the air war began. It meant the end of German armaments production.’1

  The meeting with Hitler at the Berghof was to brief him on precisely this point. It was difficult to predict how the irascible and capricious Führer would respond to this news. His senior advisers, leaders of men in their own right, were clearly nervous. Göring and Keitel were determined to put an optimistic gloss on the situation; the industrialists were as gloomy as Speer himself. Tension rose as the adjutant beckoned the party into the conference room with its spectacular views over the Berchtesgadener Alps, now sprinkled with the wild flowers of the season: the bistort, clematis and gypsophila, all the constituents of a daisy-chain. Hitler shook hands brusquely and the men took their seats. What, asked Hitler, were the results of the raids? The industrialists were firm, remembered Speer: ‘They all testified as to the hopelessness of the situation if the raids were continued systematically.’ Not so the military. Göring and Keitel tried to pooh-pooh the flinty Gradgrinds, according to Speer lest they themselves were blamed for the failure to protect the Reich’s industry. Hitler, often susceptible to the rosy gloss of a sycophantic entourage, for once would have none of it. This was indeed a crisis. ‘In my view the fuel,’ he declared, ‘Buna rubber and nitrogen plants represent a particularly sensitive point for the conduct of the war, since vital materials for armaments are being manufactured in a small number of plants.’ Here, according to Speer, was Hitler the ‘sober, intense man of keen insight’. Then the meeting concluded and the party retired to the Führer’s teahouse on the hill opposite the Berghof: the Mooslahnerkopf. Here, Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) were served and – although it was late May – the fire crackled in the large fireplace. In the cosy domestic environment the Führer’s uncompromising line softened. ‘Hitler let himself be wafted to a friendlier world. It was all too clear how much he needed that. To me, too, he said not another word about the danger hanging over our heads.’ D-Day was just a few days away, but it was still springtime for Hitler.

  Even so, despite the immense challenges posed by the ever-increasing tempo of the RAF and USAAF air raids, Speer had contingency plans – indeed actions. He had proposed the dispersal of the armaments industry away from the cities targeted by the Allied air forces as early as 19 December 1942. This diaspora was bitterly resisted by the Reich’s forty-odd regional leaders, the Gauleiters. Their concern was understandable. It was, as Speer commented, that ‘the almost peacetime quiet of their small towns would be disturbed’.2 Who wanted a munitions factory on his doorstep? By autumn 1943 the intensity of Allied bombing had caused the caution of the
Gauleiters to crumble. By the time of the crisis meeting in the Berghof, a good deal of the German armaments industry had been scattered. Twenty-seven central plants were dispersed into 729 fragments; fifty-one engine factories became 249 smaller plants. The industry fled from great industrial centres like Dortmund, Essen and Wiener Neustadt to towns, and from towns to villages, from villages in some instances to forest clearings. This was one measure. Hitler had also long been urging Speer to transfer industrial production to subterranean shelters. Here the armaments industry could continue altogether unimpeded and unhindered by the attentions of the USAAF and the RAF. It was this underground dispersal scheme that had turned the eyes of the industrialists to the Bavarian and Austrian Alps. Here the high mountains and deep valleys made Bomber Command’s job doubly difficult. Targets were very tricky to identify and, when found, bomb with any accuracy.

  As to the armaments themselves, besides fuel production there were two seen as of pivotal importance to the Reich. First the Luftwaffe’s revolutionary Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter; second Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rocket, the creation of which would eventually write a new chapter in the history of mankind. As the Battle of Narva on the borders of Estonia ebbed and flowed between Generaloberst Johannes Friessner’s Panzer Corps and Marshal Leonid Govorov’s Leningrad Front, as the grey-coated guardians of the Atlantic Wall anxiously awaited the Allied invasion from Great Britain, these were two of the Wunderwaffen (wonder-weapons) that Hitler hoped might yet break the claws of the Allied pincer to the east and to the west.

  2

  Messerschmitt AG was the aircraft manufacturer that had won the favour of the Nazis by being rooted in the Party’s Bavarian heartland. Heinkel was based in Warnemünde on the Baltic, Junkers in Saxony-Anhalt, Dornier at Friedreichshafen on the Bodensee (Lake Constance) and Focke-Wulf in Bremen on the North Sea coast. For the Austrian Hitler and his Munich-based Nazi movement, these places were nigh on enemy territory.

  The man behind Messerschmitt, the forty-six-year-old Wilhelm Emil (‘Willi’) Messerschmitt, was the son of a wine merchant who had his eyes turned upwards on first seeing the grace and magic of a Zeppelin airship floating without visible means of suspension in the azure high skies above him. He had studied in Munich and set up his own aircraft company in 1923 in the Bavarian city of Augsburg. At a time at which some manufacturers were still designing open-cockpit, fabric-covered biplanes like the Fairey Swordfish, Messerschmitt had identified the advantages of all-metal monocoques. By 1934 he was working for the Bavarian Aircraft Works (Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, BFW). There he conceived the machine that became the famous Bf 109. It was a triumph of modernism: a closed-cockpit, low-wing monoplane with a retractable undercarriage and inverted V12 liquid-cooled engine. It looked like an angular Spitfire or Hurricane, and was more or less the match of the Royal Air Force’s principal Battle of Britain fighters in terms of top speed, climb rate and manoeuvrability. In 1936 the 109 had beaten off competition from Arado, Heinkel and Focke-Wulf for a Reichsluftfahrtministerium (Reich Air Ministry) brief for a single-seat fighter. It was a bid helped by Willi Messerschmitt’s friendship with two leading Nazis: the beetle-browed deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, and the ever more portly head of the Luftwaffe and discerning art collector, Hermann Göring. In 1938 Messerschmitt himself became chairman and managing director of BFW and the company was renamed Messerschmitt in his honour. Up until 1943 Messerschmitt AG was supplying around half the Luftwaffe’s fighters: principally the Bf 109 itself and the far less gainly twin-engine Me 110, which had proved easy meat for the Few. Messerschmitt’s competitors grumbled of favouritism.

  Like the British jet engine pioneer Frank Whittle, Willi Messerschmitt was also looking ahead. His compatriot Hans von Ohain’s revolutionary turbojet had first run in September 1937, just five months after Whittle’s own turbine. Ohain’s ideas were developed by Heinkel, Junkers and the leading Bavarian engine manufacturer, Bayerische Motoren Werke or BMW. Willi Messerschmitt immediately saw the potential of this novel form of propulsion. His company started work before the outbreak of war on an airframe coded P3302. The result was a single-seater with high tailplane and a low main wing, on which were mounted two turbojets. This elegant and futuristic machine was dubbed the Me 262 or Schwalbe – the Swallow. The machine’s development was much delayed by problems with BMWs new jets. It eventually flew under turbine power in July 1942. When the craft finally entered Luftwaffe service in March 1944 it was the world’s first operational jet, pre-dating Whittle’s Gloster Meteor by four months. With a top speed of 530 mph, the Schwalbe was very nearly 100 mph faster than any of the Allied piston-driven fighters operating in the European theatre. It clearly signalled their demise. For the Swallow, USAAF B-17 Flying Fortresses were sitting ducks. Not surprisingly, here was a weapon on which the Reich set great store. Speer described it as ‘the most valuable of our “secret weapons”’. The general staff, he wrote, ‘had been counting on this new type of fighter to bring about a decisive turning point in the air war’.3 The challenge for Messerschmitt was to produce this revolutionary weapon in substantial numbers.

  The company had major plants in the Bavarian cities of Regensburg and Augsburg itself. These were attended to by the RAF and the USAAF on 17 August 1943 and 25 February 1944 respectively. There was also a Messerschmitt factory in the eastern Austrian city of Wiener Neustadt, mainly producing Me 109s. This was subjected to a series of raids from August 1943 onwards. Dispersal was the obvious solution. As early as the summer of 1943 the company was producing its aircraft from twenty-five different locations. The Me 262 was put together from fuselages and tails in Regensburg, engines – eventually from Junkers – in Leipzig, wings and final assembly in Augsburg. Commonplace today in the airline industry, at the time the system was a novelty. After the war, an American inquiry into Messerschmitt reported:

  Over an area from Stuttgart to Linz in northern Austria and from Nuremberg south into the Bavarian Alps, sub-assemblies were made in caves, tunnels in the Autobahn, clearings in the forests, small buildings etc. Many small assembly lines, just a small steel building with one pair of rails for conveying and an overhead crane, were set up in woods for final assembly. Some of these were near the Autobahn which was used as a runway after concreting the centre grass strip and painting it green.4

  If dispersal solved one problem, it created another. In removing the industrial plants from major conurbations, it robbed the factories of their workforce. Fortunately from Messerschmitt’s point of view, less so from that of others, a solution was at hand. There were Konzentrationslager (KZ) – concentration camps – all over the Reich, but there were three major ones in or close to Bavaria. Dachau, ten miles north-west of Munich, has been introduced. This was the very first of the camps in the Reich, opened in March 1933. Flossenbürg in eastern Bavaria had followed in May 1938. The third was 190 miles east in Austria, just where the northern fork of the Alps peters out at the Wienerwald. This was Mauthausen on the banks of the Danube, fourteen miles downstream from Hitler’s childhood home of Linz.

  Originally the concentration camps were what their name denoted: places in which those deemed undesirable by the state could be imprisoned, most obviously political dissidents. No sooner had the camps been taken over by Heinrich Himmler’s SS than the role of a number of them changed and their inmates became sources of labour for the Reich. Sachsenhausen just north of Berlin (1936), Buchenwald near Weimar (1937) and Flossenbürg in Bavaria were sites all chosen because of their proximity to quarries. Mauthausen was such a camp from the very beginning, its inmates forced to labour in the granite quarry that adjoined it. Soon the use of forced labour – Zwangsarbeit – became much more widespread, in recognition of the simple fact that Germany alone lacked the population to win a war against the combined might of Britain and her Dominions, the United States and the Soviet Union.

  As a consequence, the concentration camps spawned a series of subcamps for the purpose of providing slave labour at sites all over th
e Reich. Or, in the case of Mauthausen and Dachau (to a much lesser extent Flossenbürg), all over the Alps. By the early summer of 1944 the pair between them had more than 150 such subcamps smeared all over Austria and Bavaria. These included sites in the cities of Salzburg and Innsbruck, and in Alpine resorts including Ebensee, Bad Ischl, Oberammergau and Garmisch-Partenkirchen. For many of the Reich’s industrialists, for the Krauchs, Pleigers and Messerschmitts, the camp inmates proved a godsend.

  *

  The first Dachau inmates arrived at the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg in March 1943. This was a critical time for the company as mass production of the Me 262 got under way. The company management – perhaps understandably – was sceptical of the merits of slave labour. How skilled would the workforce be? How hard would they work? Would they upset the other workers?

  In practice all went well. The new system actually saw an increase in productivity at the Bavarian plant. It was also of course cheaper for Messerschmitt than paying wages, though the labourers were not supplied free of charge. The concentration camps were run by the SS along brisk commercial lines, and they charged Messerschmitt for the services of the prisoners. The great thing was that inmates themselves were either paid nominal amounts or nothing at all. Perhaps this gave meaning to the motto to be seen on the gates of a number of the concentration camps and first of all at Dachau: Arbeit Macht Frei. Work makes you free. Either way, on 20 July 1943 Willi Messerschmitt himself was moved to write to the camp commandant at Dachau, SS-Sturmbannführer Martin Gottfried Weiss, voicing his satisfaction with the arrangement and asking for more workers. He expressed the hope that this would lead to ‘a larger mutual success in the future’.5