Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  At 5.30 a.m. on 16 December 1944 the storm broke with a ninety-minute artillery barrage on an eighty-mile front. Who could tell how this would pan out for Switzerland – and indeed the West?

  4

  That Christmas of 1944, while the Swiss in Berne and on the borders of Switzerland were discovering that Hitler’s war was not yet over, so too were the Allied guests of the Swiss in the republic’s interior.

  As Allied air activity increased over the beleaguered Reich, we have already seen how the number of airmen who ended up landing, crash-landing or parachuting into Switzerland increased accordingly. As the Hague Convention required, the crews ended up in Swiss internment camps. Following the downing of the B-24 Death-Dealer in August 1943, the USAAF airmen had been dispatched to Adelboden. Here they shared the Canton Berne skiing resort with British and Commonwealth internees, many of whom had escaped from the Italian POW camps. As the numbers of US servicemen swelled in the first months of 1944, they outgrew the resort.

  In Adelboden, officers and enlisted men were all interned at Camp Moloney. In the spring of 1944 the Swiss internment committee agreed with the US military attaché, Brigadier General Barnwell Legge at the American legation in Berne, that two additional camps should be set up: a new officers’ camp in Davos, and a new camp for enlisted men in Wengen. The facilities in the two proposed resorts – Davos in Canton Graubünden and Wengen in the Bernese Oberland – were underutilised because of the collapse of international tourism; the relative remoteness of the resorts also made escape difficult. Camp Davos was opened in June 1944, its equivalent in Wengen two months later in August. From this famous old resort the internees would be able to enjoy the prospect of the Alps’ best-known trio of peaks: the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

  As it turned out, Davos was immediately a cause of friction. The resort had a long-standing German community, was the original seat of the German Nazis in Switzerland, and was the site of the assassination of their leader Wilhelm Gustloff in February 1936. Now, alongside the civilian German community, there were hundreds of convalescent Reich servicemen in the town, making use of the sanatoria that in peace had ministered to victims of tuberculosis. When Davos’s German community heard of the imminent arrival of the American officers, its leaders immediately lodged a protest with the Swiss – to no avail. The Germans then spread the rumour that the airmen were no better than Chicago gangsters. When the first USAAF men arrived on 22 June 1944, they found the shops closed, shutters bolted and the streets deserted. The town returned to normal when the US airmen showed themselves friendly and open-handed. The inhabitants of Davos were then treated to the intriguing sight of uniformed servicemen from the Allies and the Reich rubbing shoulders with a due circumspection on the wide promenade between Davos Dorf and Davos Platz.

  Camp Davos was located in the Palace Hotel on this road between Dorf and Platz. This was barely a hundred yards from the German consulate. It was hardly surprising that on US Independence Day on 4 July 1944 a couple of high-spirited US officers should let off a few fireworks outside the consulate. On the evening of 7 August – a month after the D-Day landings – another pair of officers removed the consulate’s badge of office, a large eagle clutching a swastika that garnished the building’s entrance. The Germans protested, the swastika was recovered, the perpetrators identified, and demands were made to send the guilty men to the Swiss punishment camp at Wauwilermoos. Tipped off, the two officers escaped over the Swiss border into France – with the help of sympathetic Swiss civilians.

  Such diversions aside, life in Camp Davos was not unduly onerous. James Goings had crash-landed near Knutwil, Canton Lucerne, on 27 May 1944. He remembered:

  The days were spent in many various ways. We could walk through the town down to the lake of Davos, up to Parsenn, Schatzalp, Strela-Pass or Jakobshorn, for example. Baseball teams were selected and a playing field set up in the valley below the Belvedere. When the cold weather came, many of us joined ski-classes and went skating … There were five moving picture houses in Davos, two in Platz and three in Dorf. In the late afternoon the finer hotels held tea dances, where many men went to meet local ladies, and built lasting friendships … others did nothing other than plan to escape from Switzerland into France to meet the American troops as they pushed back to Germany.20

  Under the Hague Convention the Swiss were obliged to prevent such escapes. Those guardians in Davos took their duties seriously. The internees were subjected to two daily roll-calls, had an evening curfew, and were forbidden to go further than two miles from the town without express permission. While Switzerland remained an oasis, bordered on all sides by the Axis, escape, in any case, remained next to impossible. Once the border with France reopened in August 1944 and in particular when the US armies reached Geneva, the situation changed drastically. ‘Escape became the first priority for all officers at Davos as well as all enlisted men in the other camps.’21

  The paradox was that Brigadier General Barnwell Legge had announced that those who succeeded in doing their duty by escaping would be court-martialled on their return to the US. This masked delicate negotiations he was undertaking for the wholesale release of all the US internees in Switzerland in exchange for the release of their German counterparts to the Germans. Despite this threat, in the course of the autumn and early winter of 1944, those US internees who could be dragged away from the ski slopes and the women of Adelboden, Wengen and Davos escaped in a very steady stream. About two-thirds of them made it to their own lines, the remainder being recaptured. It was a few of these unfortunates who were destined to spend Christmas of 1944 in the Swiss Straflager (punishment) camps. The most notorious of these was Wauwilermoos, where the airmen were under the care of ‘Captain’ André-Henri Béguin.

  In 1937, Béguin had been dismissed from the army on various counts including financial fraud occasioned by the charges of keeping four mistresses; now in his new guise at Wauwilermoos he sported Nazi uniform and signed his correspondence ‘Heil Hitler’. His camp in Lucerne was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers and guarded by dogs, its inmates a mixed bunch of Swiss criminals and Allied internees: French, British, Italians, Poles, Russians, Americans. The Allied servicemen were kept without due legal process, representation, trial, sentence or indication of the time of their likely release. They were allowed no mail, and they slept on dirty straw along with the lice and the rats. The camp had no proper sanitation facilities – showers or lavatories – and the food was atrocious: it was served from slop pails into tin cans, sometimes into a trough. There was little medical attention: dysentery, pyorrhoea and boils went untreated and unchecked. When the men complained to members of the International Red Cross on the Committee’s occasional visits, no action was taken. The US mission in the form of Barnwell Legge was of little help, supposedly because he felt the camp’s notoriety discouraged escapes. The US airman James Misuraca commented, ‘The guards were coarse and crude. The officials treated us like scum. This was purely and simply a concentration camp.’22

  A handful of Allied servicemen spent Christmas of 1944 and celebrated the New Year of 1945 as guests of Béguin. It was not their happiest festive season.

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  By Christmas, the likely fate of Operation Wacht am Rhein had become apparent. ‘On December 23,’ wrote Speer, ‘Model [Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, one of the architects of the operation] told me that the offensive had definitely failed – but Hitler had ordered it to continue.’23 Churchill, who on Christmas Day had flown from London to Naples, then from the southern Italian city to Athens, was drawing similar conclusions. Shortly before flying out of the Greek capital on 28 December 1944, he received a telegram from Field Marshal Montgomery in France confirming the collapse of the operation.

  The same day, in Berne, Fritz Molden once again met Allen Dulles. Besides the good tidings from the Ardennes, the spymaster had some news of more personal interest for the young Austrian. The United States had decided to give provisional recognition to POEN, the Provisio
nal Austrian National Committee. Molden himself was to be appointed liaison officer between the Allies and POEN. Dulles said, ‘You are the first Austrian to be accredited as liaison officer at Allied HQ.’ It was, recorded Molden, ‘a solemn moment’.24

  *

  For Speer, who had been close to the German front in the Ardennes until 30 December, diplomacy dictated that he deliver his New Year wishes personally to the Führer. Although Hitler had intended to spend Christmas in Berchtesgaden, Wacht am Rhein required his presence at a more westerly headquarters at Kransberg Castle in Hesse. When Speer eventually reached Hitler’s bunker in the castle, it was already two hours into the happy new year of 1945. The armaments and war production minister was relieved to find he was not too late to wish the Führer glückliches neues Jahr.

  Hitler was looking his age, indeed rather more. The five years of war – not to mention the 20 July 1944 bomb – had aged him brutally. He was suffering from spells of dizziness, shaking of limbs he could not control, and periodic fits of deafness. Soon the once worshipped leader, the man who had mesmerised the Nuremberg rallies and struck fear into the hearts of European leaders, would be seen by all as a physical wreck. ‘All witnesses of the final days agree when they describe his emaciated face, his grey complexion, his stooping body, his shaking hands and foot, his hoarse and quavering voice, and the film of exhaustion that covered his eyes.’25 On that New Year’s Day of 1945, Speer remembered:

  adjutants, doctors, secretaries, Bormann – the whole circle except for the generals attached to the Fuehrer’s headquarters, were gathered around Hitler drinking champagne. The alcohol had relaxed everyone, but the atmosphere was still subdued. Hitler [for long teetotal] seemed to be the only one in the company who was drunk without having taken any stimulating beverage. He was in the grip of a permanent euphoria.

  Although the beginning of a new year in no way dispelled the desperate situation of the year past … Hitler made optimistic forecasts for 1945.

  Speer thought otherwise. ‘The failure of the Ardennes offensive meant that the war was over. What followed was only the occupation of Germany, delayed somewhat by a confused and impotent resistance.’26

  Notes

  1. www.newspaperarchive.com.

  2. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

  3. Peter Hoffman, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  4. Dumbach, Annette E., Sophie Scholl and the White Rose (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).

  5. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

  6. Dumbach.

  7. Molden.

  8. Molden.

  9. Molden.

  10. Molden.

  11. Molden.

  12. Molden.

  13. Molden.

  14. Interview with author, 2012.

  15. Schwarz.

  16. Schwarz.

  17. Roberto Battaglia, The Story of the Italian Resistance (London: Odhams Press, 1957).

  18. Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

  19. Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

  20. Tanner.

  21. Fredy Peter, Jump Boys Jump (Ilfracombe: Arthur H. Stockwell, 2003).

  22. Tanner.

  23. Speer.

  24. Molden.

  25. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (London: Papermac, 1995).

  26. Speer.

  FOURTEEN

  The Redoubt That Never Was

  Strictly speaking the idea of an Alpine Fortress was more a creation of American Intelligence than of Germany’s leaders.

  DOUGLAS BOTTING AND IAN SAYER

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  Speer was right, but this was with the benefit of hindsight. In the first few weeks of 1945 this collapse of the Reich was not seen as a likely outcome by the Allied high command.

  Although Wacht am Rhein had failed, there was a definite sense that the Allies’ own campaigns both in Italy and on the western borders of Germany had stalled. On 3 January 1945, Churchill had told Roosevelt, ‘There is this brutal fact: we need more fighting troops to make things move.’1 The Western Allied armies were also running very short of ammunition, victims of long supply lines from ports working – largely as a consequence of the Wehrmacht – at very much less than full capacity. Moreover, the final meeting early in February of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta on the Black Sea clearly foreshadowed not so much victory over the Reich as the Cold War. As military issues receded, political ones loomed. Churchill continued, ‘As the victory of the Grand Alliance became only a matter of time it was natural that Russian ambitions should grow. Communism raised its head behind the thundering Russian battle-front. Russia was the Deliverer, and Communism the gospel she brought.’2 The alliance to destroy Hitler was now dissolving at frightening speed, and Churchill justifiably feared that the results of his Herculean labours would see one totalitarian regime in Europe replaced by another: the Red Army was only forty miles from Berlin.

  Extent of supposed National Redoubt, 1945

  At SHAEF Eisenhower’s responsibility was to address these problems. Having lost around 80,000 US troops in the Ardennes, his military imperative was to strike quickly to still the Nazis’ lifeblood. About this objective there was no question. It had been set out by the Combined Chiefs of Staff with admirable brevity: ‘You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.’3 Eisenhower’s problem was that the heart had moved.

  The whispers of the Alpenfestung had been circulating since the autumn. From then there had been an ever-increasing stream of intelligence reports from Germany herself, from neutral countries and from the battlefields of central Europe. Hitler would make the Nazis’ last stand in the crags of Berchtesgadener Land. There had even been stories in the press. On 12 February 1945, the day after the conference in Yalta broke up, the US War Department issued a memorandum that declared: ‘Not enough weight is given the many reports of the probable Nazi last stand in the Bavarian Alps … The Nazi myth which is important when you are dealing with men like Hitler requires a Götterdämmerung. It may be significant that Berchtesgaden itself, which would be the headquarters, is on the site of the tomb of Barbarossa who, in Germany mythology, is supposed to return from the dead.’4 A month later, on 11 March, another SHAEF intelligence report echoed: ‘German defence policy is to safeguard the Alpine Zone … Defences continue to be constructed in depth in the south, through the Black Forest to Lake Constance and from the Hungarian frontier to the west of Graz … In Italy … defence lines are built up in the foothills of the Italian Alps.’5 There was even a story of a frightening new Geheimwaffe (secret weapon) sited in the Redoubt that – even now – would turn the course of the war. Returning to his post of Supreme Commander in Italy following a car crash, ‘smiling Albert’ Kesselring had joked to his staff, ‘I am V3.’6

  The drip, drip of such intelligence had now begun to influence military thinking at SHAEF. On 21 March 1945 the principal army group on the Western Front, General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth, issued a note headed ‘Re-Orientation of Strategy’. This stated that the existence of the Redoubt had rendered ‘obsolete the plans we brought with us over the beaches’. Should the focus really be on Berlin? it asked; ‘all indications suggest that the enemy’s political and military directorate is already in the process of displacing to the “Redoubt” in lower Bavaria’.7 Clearly this required the Allied forces to think again. Bradley’s proposal was that rather than pushing on to Berlin, the Twelfth Army Group should dip south and cut through the centre of Germany. This would prevent the forces around the capital retreating south into the Redoubt; rather, it would push them northwards. The Twelfth would then pivot south, meet up with General de Lattre de Tassigny’s French First Army coming in from the west and with Alexander’s forces advancing over the Italian Alps from the south. These three forces would clear up any Wehrmacht forces remaining in the Redoubt.

  Bradley, a friend and classmate of E
isenhower from West Point, could hardly be ignored. The Supreme Commander’s immediate superior, the US Chief of General Staff, General George Marshall, had to be obeyed. He had made the same point. It was true that not all the Allied staff were convinced about the redoubt – either US or British. It was a story largely unsupported by Bletchley’s Ultra decrypts, radio intercepts, agents in Austria and Germany, and a simple assessment of the known locations of the Wehrmacht’s remaining forces. Still, intelligence had largely failed to spot the massive preparations for Wacht am Rhein in the Ardennes. In the end SHAEF’s head of intelligence, Major General Kenneth Strong, took what might have seemed a reasonable line. ‘The redoubt may not be there, but we have to take steps to prevent it being there.’8

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  Eisenhower was in any case obliged to act with the information he had to hand at the time. On 29 March 1944 he drafted three cables. One was directly to Stalin, one to General Marshall, and one to Field Marshal Montgomery – the latter leading the 21st Army Group on the thrust of the Western Allies to Berlin. The Supreme Commander copied Churchill on his cable to Stalin.