Storming the Eagle's Nest
Page 27
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In these circumstances intelligence from the Austrian and Bavarian Alps was suddenly at a premium, so it was timely that a sunburnt young Austrian called Fritz Molden now made his appearance at Dulles’s Herrengasse HQ. The twenty-year-old was a rare thing: a member of a successful resistance cell in the Reich.
By the time of the Normandy and Riviera landings in June and August 1944, resistance in Europe had become virtually a mass movement. There were thought to be 100,000 combatant partisans in Italy, a similar number in France, and perhaps five times that figure in Yugoslavia. Irrespective of the punitive actions of the Nazi occupying forces, resistance was now a major fact of daily life for the inhabitants of the occupied countries; it was an identified priority for the Wehrmacht; it was a focus for active support by the Allies. No such situation existed in the Reich itself, either in the Alpine regions of Austria and Bavaria or elsewhere.
This is not to say there was no dissent. It certainly existed: in the Church, the Left, in the intelligentsia, above all in the Wehrmacht. ‘There was always resistance, both open and covert, in all social and occupational strata.’3 It was muted for three reasons: the fact that most Germans accepted that Hitler’s government was legally legitimate; the fact that it had rescued many of its people from the desperate economic straits of the early thirties; the fact that the Reich’s security services made resistance tantamount to suicide. It was only in the closed society of the armed services that the Gestapo found it difficult to keep the lid on the words, thoughts and deeds of the opponents of the Nazi regime. And of course it was only here that there was resistance of any substance. Before the tragedy of Claus von Stauffenberg’s 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, the White Rose movement had been virtually the only eye-catching effort to repudiate Nazism.
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This had erupted in the Nazis’ heartland, the Bavarian capital of Munich.
Here a handful of students at the university produced and distributed a series of leaflets denouncing the regime and calling for active opposition to tyranny. They were supported by their philosophy professor Kurt Huber. In the first appeal in June 1942 they presciently wrote: ‘Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?’ The leaflets – there were six in all – were distributed in the Alpine cities of Austria and Bavaria: Bregenz, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Graz and of course Munich itself. The defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 inspired the last and most vitriolic denunciation. The ‘day of reckoning’ had come, it announced. It described Hitler as ‘the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured’.4
The leaflets had been passed on by the Gestapo to Paul Giesler, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, and their source as the university of Munich had been identified. It was outrageous that this should happen in the capital of the Nazi movement, indeed within a rifle shot of the site of the legendary Beer Hall Putsch. A call to order was essential.
According to our old friend the American war correspondent William Shirer, that February of 1943 Giesler assembled the student body in Munich. He suggested that the men not already drafted into the Wehrmacht should undertake work supportive of the war, and that the women should bear a child each year to boost the population of the Fatherland. He added tactfully, ‘If some of the girls lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will assign each of them one of my adjutants … and I can promise her a thoroughly enjoyable experience.’5 The Munich students, once enthusiastic Nazis, were incensed, threw out Giesler’s SS and Gestapo minders, and – that afternoon – demonstrated openly against the Reich. This was utterly unprecedented.
On 19 February two of the key members of the group, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were seen by a university caretaker distributing leaflets. They were arrested, interrogated by the Gestapo, tortured, and tried for political offences in the Volksgerichtshof. This was the people’s court, where justice was the last thing dispensed. The Scholls and a handful of others were found guilty of treason in trials on 22 February and 19 April 1943. All – including Huber – were beheaded. Hans Scholl commented during his interrogation: ‘I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by so doing.’6 The Scholls’ parents were invoiced for court and execution expenses.
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Across the old border from Bavaria in Austria, there were also some pockets of resistance in the Alps.
The original Austrian dissenters comprised a motley crew of Catholics – like the Scholls – monarchists, Christian Democrats and communists. All had gone to ground after Anschluss in 1938, the demonstration in Vienna’s Stefansplatz in October 1939 excepted; all were subsequently enthused by the Allies’ Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943. Signed by the foreign secretaries of the Big Three – the USA, UK and USSR – this declared Anschluss null and void, and guaranteed that the union of Germany and Austria would be reversed: that the Alpine state would recover her independence from Germany. This stimulated the development in Austria of ‘O5’, a military resistance movement based in Vienna, the Tyrol and the Vorarlberg, the name standing for OE, i.e. Österreich, Austria (E being the fifth letter in the alphabet).
One of the leaders of O5 was the Viennese publisher and historian Ernst Molden. His son Fritz, born in 1924, was a counterpart of the Scholls in Vienna: a member of an anti-fascist student group. Rather than beheading, Molden’s reward for dissent was to be sent to a punishment battalion on the Eastern Front. He deserted, convinced the military authorities that he was dead, assumed a new identity, got himself sent to the Italian front and eventually crossed into the Swiss canton of Ticino in March 1944. Just as he was settling down in a railway carriage to enjoy the Swiss newspapers, he was picked up by the Swiss border police. When he eventually persuaded his interrogators of his bona fides as a member of the Austrian resistance, a deal was struck.
Much as General Guisan was concerned with the Allies trespassing on Swiss territory, so too he remained on his guard against the Wehrmacht. Leaving aside the threat of being incorporated into the rumoured Nazi Alpenfestung, there was also the danger of German troops taking a short cut home from Italy. As Molden himself put it in his memoirs, ‘The further the Allies advanced in Italy, the greater was the danger that the German forces, and in particular the German South West Army Group in Italy, would simply ignore Switzerland’s neutrality and march across the country.’7 After all, for Kesselring’s Heeresgruppe C (Army Group C), the country was the shortest and most direct route between north-west Italy and Germany. Guisan was accordingly hungry for information on German troop movements to the west, south and east: in France, Italy and Austria. The agreement made between Molden and the head of Swiss intelligence Colonel Max Waibel was simple. The Swiss would facilitate the movement of Molden and his O5 associates across the Alpine border into Switzerland in exchange for military intelligence. This, Molden held, ‘marked a crucial turning point in the history of the Austrian resistance movement. For it provided us with our first opportunity of maintaining regular and reliable contact with the free world.’8
For Molden this was the beginning of a desperately dangerous year. In the guise of Sergeant Hans Steinhauser of the Wehrmacht’s 133rd Infantry Regiment he undertook a series of trips into Austria. His task was to establish a network of O5 recruits to assist the passage of the Western Allies when they reached the southern and western borders of Austria. Over the summer and autumn of 1944, as the Allies landed in Normandy and the Riviera, Molden set up links in Vienna. He also established cells in the more westerly Alpine cities of Salzburg and Innsbruck, both of which were major communication hubs and therefore strategic targets for the Allies. Just before Dulles’s trip to London and Washington, Molden was introduced to the pipe-smoking US spymaster in the Herrengasse. ‘My first impression of Allen
Welsh Dulles was that of a somewhat delicate but wiry grey-haired man, broad featured, with a trim moustache and a lofty forehead. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses his clear, grey-blue eyes were alive with interest’.9
Like the Swiss, Dulles was certainly interested in forging links with the Austrian resistance, not least because of the prospect of the Nazis decamping south from Berlin to the Reich’s Alps. According to Molden, ‘Like everyone else, whether in the Allied, the German or the Swiss camp, he [Dulles] believed that the Nazis would make a last stand in the “Alpine redoubt”.’10 At the same time, Dulles was a spymaster who regarded an Austrian army deserter with a degree of reserve. He cautiously commissioned Molden to seek out intelligence on behalf of OSS. ‘First,’ Molden said of his talk with Dulles, ‘we must show we could produce results.’11
On Dulles’s return from London in November 1944, the pair met again. Dulles was now convinced of Molden’s integrity and proposed sending him to SHAEF headquarters to be debriefed – and then to be briefed – on Austria. This would reveal the doings of MI6 in the country. Claude Dansey was still number two to Sir Stewart Menzies at MI6 headquarters in London’s Broadway. ‘Colonel Z’ strenuously objected to disclosing such intelligence to an ‘Austrian deserter’. He continued to regard Dulles as naive.
This was another nice inter-Allied row, one that appears to have culminated in the proposal by Dansey of an acid test. According to Molden,
I know, because Allen [Dulles] told me much later, that the British wanted to let me go back into Austria on a mission and then they would tip off the SS. If the Germans let me go back across the border into Switzerland then that would be proof that I was a Nazi agent. And the British would shoot me. If the Germans shot me immediately, it would be proof that the British had been wrong about me but – poof – that was not such a big loss.12
Dulles led Molden to believe that he himself had scotched the plan. In the meantime Molden became OSS source K28.
On 12 December 1944, Molden was in the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck. This was the medieval city set in the wide valley of the river Inn, dominated by the peaks of the Nordkette, the Patscherkofel, and the Serles. There, in the university, in the strictest of secrecy, a complex political agreement was being hammered out. Present were seven Austrian men: liberals, monarchists and Christian Socialists – soon to be joined by communists. At last the deal was struck. The work to which Molden had been contributing had culminated in the foundation of the political wing of O5, the Provisorisches Österreichisches Nationalkommitee (Provisional Austrian National Committee or POEN). This was fifteen months after the creation of its equivalent in Italy, Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, and two and a half years after its counterpart in France, Conseil National de la Résistance. It was, though, within the Reich itself. Molden perhaps not unreasonably regarded this as a ‘glorious achievement’.13
Three days later, Innsbruck received its twelfth visit from the USAAF. The B-24 Liberators from the 336th Heavy Bomb Group were targeting the marshalling yards that served the line over the Brenner Pass. Soon Inge Rainer, the teenager from Kitzbühel, found herself drafted to the city. ‘I was sent to near Innsbruck, to learn to shoot small-bore weapons. In the morning we went to Innsbruck to clear the bombing and in the afternoon to shoot. If they sent children back to Innsbruck and taught girls to shoot, this made me think, “The war is over, we have lost.” It was a terrible shock.’14
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As Christmas 1944 approached, the situation on and around Switzerland’s borders became more and more tense.
To the west, the Germans were making a stand just on the Swiss border at the Belfort Gap. This was one of the Achilles heels in the republic’s defences, a corridor of flat terrain between the Vosges mountains in France and the north-western corner of Switzerland. It was the gateway to the Rhine, one of Germany’s most important natural defences.
Here in mid-September, the 11th Panzer Division, led by Generalleutnant Wend von Wietersheim, found itself confronted by the I French Army Corps. This force, led by Lieutenant General Emile Béthouart, had been part of the 15 August landings on the French Riviera. Béthouart had pushed steadily up the east bank of the Rhône, slowed by adding other formations to the Corps and by the unseasonably poor weather. His thrust into south-western Germany along the northern Swiss border was now blocked. The Panzer division could be bypassed only by attempting the Vosges mountains on his left flank or by breaching Swiss territory – and neutrality – on his right. As General Guisan appreciated, the Vosges were virtually impenetrable; he saw how tempting Switzerland must have looked to his French opposite number. In 1946, Guisan wrote:
In case we were attacked, even if it was only in this small projection of our territory, we had the duty to reply immediately with very effective measures. Our reaction at this very place was of great symbolic value for our own position vis-à-vis the world and for our own domestic situation. The slightest frontier incident could force us to take such countermeasures as would set fire to the powder keg and lead to far-reaching operations.15
By which he meant that open warfare with the Allies might have undesirable political consequences.
In practice Guisan had little choice. To add to the French and the German forces around Belfort he brought up a whole division of his own men, dug in just inside Switzerland’s border. Béthouart himself waited until the supply situation had improved before giving battle. Responding to Eisenhower’s autumn call from SHAEF for a general offensive, on 13 November 1944 Béthouart launched his attack. Believing that the French I Corps had dug in for the winter, the Panzer division was under strength. Caught by surprise, the Panzer forces retreated to the fortified city of Belfort. Respecting the Swiss border, Béthouart pushed through the German lines. On 19 November, the French I Corps reached the Rhine at Huningue, a northern suburb of Basel, where France, Germany and Switzerland met. The journalist-turned-soldier Urs Schwarz was a witness:
I watched as the last German trucks departed in an easterly direction. A group of German officers and soldiers had been left behind; they came across the border, at first refused to lay down their arms, and then surrendered to the Swiss soldiers. I watched as a French flag went up at the customs-house at the border, while the shells still exploded over the roofs.16
The 11th Panzer Division was by no means finished. It retreated only to Colmar, forty miles north of Basel on the Alsatian plain. Guisan’s troops remained on guard, mindful of the danger of a counter-attack.
This was the first of the General’s problems.
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On the border with Italy, the situation was similarly precarious. Here the country’s natural defences, the Alps, were far better. Here, too, was Switzerland’s own Alpine redoubt: completed; stored, manned and ready for war; yet not necessarily a match for the German armies desperate to return to the Fatherland, anxious to get home.
Here Guisan’s de facto allies were the partisans, but the Italian resistance was enduring the bitterest of winters. Autumn had seen the collapse of the high hopes inspired by the twenty free republics of a mass rising that would see the early end of the war. Then had come Alexander’s broadcast of 10 November 1944, suspending major operations. The partisan leader Roberto Battaglia commented:
This was a grave set-back for the Resistance. To the Germans, on the contrary, it was a tonic. Having received the assurance that they would not be subjected to a major attack by the Allies during the winter, they decided to make the most of the respite and deal the Partisans a crushing blow.17
The Wehrmacht and its Fascist allies in northern Italy were very largely successful. They seized a number of prominent partisans including Ferruccio Parri, committed wide-scale atrocities against the civilian population supportive of the partisans, and smoked out tens of thousands from the partisan mountain camps, both in the Apennines on Italy’s spine and further north in the Alps themselves. Bletchley Park decrypts in January 1945 suggested that as many as 70,000 partisans surrendered; an SOE report gives
a similar flavour of the winter. ‘Enemy activity has continued to be forceful,’ noted No. 1 Special Force. ‘Communications with the field have been irregular and many missions have been forced to change location frequently and to live and work in conditions of extreme hardship.’18 For Guisan, here too lay danger.
Finally, to the east of Switzerland beyond the buffer of the Italian Alps lay Yugoslavia. Given Stalin’s modest proposals about the Alpine republic, the news for Guisan from the far eastern Alps was in some respects the most alarming of all.
Since the failure of the Axis’s Fifth Enemy Offensive in June 1943, Tito’s partisans had gone from strength to strength; they now numbered perhaps half a million, and Tito was formally recognised by the Allies as the commander-in-chief of Yugoslav armed forces. On 17 June 1944 the Treaty of Vis attempted to merge Tito’s administration with that of King Peter, still exiled in London; on 12 September 1944, just as Dulles reached Washington, the King called for his people to rally round Tito’s leadership. Then, three weeks later on 28 September 1944, an announcement was made that Tito had agreed to ‘temporary entry’ of Soviet troops into north-eastern Yugoslavia. Their role was officially to support the partisans’ effort to drive out the Wehrmacht. By 20 October the Red Army had occupied Belgrade.
For the Swiss the message was clear. A crimson tide was fast rising towards their tiny democracy, a tide that might reach anywhere.
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Of Guisan’s three potential crises, in France, Italy and Yugoslavia, it was the one to the west that erupted.
In his last great throw of the dice, Hitler had assembled a total of seventy divisions comprising four armies: the Sixth and Fifth Panzer Armies, the Seventh Army and the Fifteenth Army. They were earmarked for the Ardennes offensive. This was Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine, named after a popular German song). ‘This great force,’ Churchill recounted, ‘led by its armour, was intended to break through our weak centre in the Ardennes to the river Meuse, swing north and northwest, cut the Allied line in two, seize the port of Antwerp, and sever the lifeline of our northern armies.’19 The ultimate hope was that the Western Allies would sue for peace, enabling the Wehrmacht to about-face and to concentrate all its forces on the Eastern Front. Hitler’s plan in the proximity of Belfort on the Swiss border was to smash through the lines of the US Seventh Army and the French First Army in the Upper Vosges mountains.