by Jim Ring
The substance of the messages was that, as the principal military target of the Western Allies, Berchtesgaden had to be substituted for Berlin. Churchill, on his way to spend Easter weekend at his own Berchtesgaden, the Buckinghamshire country retreat of Chequers, was appalled. He had spoken directly to the Supreme Allied Commander on the scrambler telephone the previous evening. Leaving aside the gross breach of protocol of the simple soldier trespassing in the forbidden country of high political strategy by communicating directly with Stalin, there were the practical consequences for Berlin. On the secure phone line Churchill had not raised the issue of protocol with Eisenhower. Rather, he had ventilated the political importance of the German capital and the imperative of Montgomery’s forces reaching there before the Red Army. At the time Eisenhower, despite his subsequent presidency, was unschooled in high politics. He was obdurate. ‘Berlin’, he had told Churchill, ‘is no longer a major military objective.’ It had been replaced by what the Supreme Commander called ‘the mountain citadel’.9
Churchill could do nothing. As Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower to date had delivered everything demanded of him. The Normandy and Riviera landings, the early joining hands of Patton’s and Patch’s forces in Dijon, the drive towards the Rhine, the scuppering of the Ardennes counteroffensive. The United States forces were in the ascendant, the British an increasingly junior partner. In the past three years, Churchill’s final court of appeal would have been Roosevelt. The President, ailing at Yalta, was now dying. Arriving at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, on Good Friday, he had to be carried from the train by one of his secret service aides. Replies to Churchill’s cabled concerns over the fate of Berlin appeared over the President’s name, but were the work of other hands. The row kindled, poisoning the relationship between the English-speaking Allies. On 31 March 1945, the US military chiefs in Washington gave Eisenhower their unqualified support.
So too did the kindly Marshal Stalin. Meeting in Moscow with the British and American ambassadors, he endorsed Eisenhower’s plan to attack central Germany, and expressed the view that the Nazis’ ‘last stand would probably be in western Czechoslovakia and Bavaria’. Dismissing the ambassadors, the Soviet leader picked up the phone, sent for his top warlords – Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Koniev – and set them a simple task. Eisenhower’s averred plan was a decoy, he told the two marshals: a pretence, a red herring. The Red Army must race to be first in Berlin. He told his western allies at the same time that only second-rank, inferior and reserve Red Army forces would head for the German capital. This was misleading. Antony Beevor comments: ‘It was the greatest April Fool in modern history.’10
By 7 April 1945, the whole matter was resolved. Eisenhower cabled to Churchill, ‘Quite naturally, if at any moment collapse should suddenly come about everywhere along the front we would rush forward, and Lübeck and Berlin would be included in our important targets.’11 This was the best Churchill would get. In these circumstances he cabled to the ailing Roosevelt that he regarded the matter as closed. In a characteristic flourish, he added: ‘to prove my sincerity I will use one of my very few Latin quotations: Amantium irae amoris integratio est’ (Lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love).12 Whether Eisenhower’s decision about the Alpenfestung was momentous – as some hold – is a matter of debate. James Lucas asserts that it ‘altered the course of post-war European history’.13 Max Hastings writes: ‘It is hard, however, to make a plausible case that any of this changed the post-war political map of Europe, as the Supreme Commander’s detractors claimed.’14
A week later, on 15 April 1945, the commander of the US Ninth Army, General William Hood Simpson, was recalled by Omar Bradley to Twelfth Army Group headquarters in Wiesbaden, Hesse. Bradley was waiting for Simpson at the airfield. ‘We shook hands, and there and then he told me the news. “You must stop on the Elbe. You are not to advance any farther in the direction of Berlin.”’ Simpson was flabbergasted. He had led his army from Brest on the French Atlantic coast to within reach of the Reich. ‘All I could think of was, How am I going to tell my staff, my corps commanders and my troops? Above all, how am I going to tell my troops?’15
*
While Simpson was obliged to hold fire, the Allied forces in Italy were pushing up towards the Alpenfestung.
In December of 1944 Alexander had been replaced as Supreme Allied Commander in Italy by Mark W. Clark. (Alexander himself had been promoted to Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean.) The forty-eight-year-old US general had distinguished himself by ignoring Alexander’s orders in the aftermath of the capture of Monte Cassino. Clark had thereby captured Rome, but a number of German units had escaped to fight another day – as it so happened on the Gothic Line in the Apennines that was now causing him such trouble. A week before Simpson’s interview with Bradley, Clark had launched the Allies’ final offensive in the Italian peninsula. He sent the British Eighth Army in the east on a drive towards the Argenta Gap just north of Ravenna, and the US IV Corps up from the Apennines to encircle the strategic centre of Bologna. By 15 April, Clark’s offensive was making good progress, a spearhead heading due north for the Alps.
Also heading for the Alps – though southwards rather than northwards – were two trains, Adler and Dohle, that had set out that same day from the rubble of Berlin. They carried an intriguing cargo. A few days earlier at the town of Merkers in Thuringia, the Allies had discovered $238 million in the form of gold and currency. It was hidden in a mine. These were the bulk of the Reichsbank’s reserves, sent there for safe keeping on the orders of the Reichsbank chief, Walther Funk. The trains heading to Bavaria carried the remaining reserves: a smaller but nevertheless useful sum of $15 million.
2
It was at this point that Allen Dulles in Berne appeared to make a contribution to the culmination of the war in the Alps. This was Operation Sunrise, according to his biographer James Srodes ‘one of the most dramatic and controversial intelligence triumphs of his career and his last major coup of World War II’.16
Since the autumn of 1944, Dulles had been getting feelers for peace from Kesselring’s forces in Italy. This was scarcely surprising. The Wehrmacht was between a rock and a hard place. The rock was the southern flank of the Alps and the hard place was Mark Clark’s US Fifth and British Eighth Armies, which were poised to embark on their assault on the Gothic Line in the Apennines. In theory, the Alps represented the lifeline of the German Tenth and Fourteenth Armies that together constituted Kesselring’s Heeresgruppe C, its escape route back to Germany. In practice, the story of the partisan republics of the autumn of 1944 had shown that safe passage through the high Alpine passes infested with partisans now looked an increasingly remote possibility. The alternative was a pitched battle between these four armies on the plain of Lombardy that lay between the foothills of the Alps to the north and the northernmost ridges of the Apennines in the south.
As the prospect of Clark’s inevitable spring assault neared, German appetite for a negotiated surrender increased daily. Professional soldiers like the Wehrmacht would not deign to parley with the partisans, whom they regarded as bandits and criminals and against whom they had committed numerous atrocities. They would negotiate with the regular Allied forces, members of which at least would not shoot them on sight, castrate them, gouge their eyes out or lock them in burning churches: all brutalities that the Wehrmacht and SS had visited on the partisans and their supporters. For their part, the Allies themselves were far from averse to a surrender that would avoid either a German retreat into the supposed Redoubt or a bitter battle in Lombardy with a battle-hardened and far from demoralised opponent. The lives of hundreds of thousands of men were at stake.
Nothing concrete had materialised from the expressions of interest from the Germans floated over the New Year. Then, through the good offices of the Swiss intelligence chief Colonel Max Waibel – Fritz Molden’s contact – in early February came a fresh approach. The whole thing was done very nicely. There were no hurried phone c
alls or clandestine meetings in Berne’s Herrengasse. Waibel and Dulles had dinner together at an excellent restaurant close to Lake Lucerne, in fact quite close to the punishment camp of Wauwilermoos. They ate trout washed down with hock and discussed the virtues of the Italian partisan movement, possibly of women too. Dulles enjoyed his evening but thought Waibel’s proposal that he should meet yet another couple of go-betweens, an Italian and a Swiss, was unenticing. When he eventually met the pair, he was even more sceptical of their claims to be in touch with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. This was the SS general in charge of all the SS forces in Italy and – it was to be assumed – a diehard Nazi. All such officers in Heinrich Himmler’s thug force had taken personal pledges of allegiance to the Führer. They were surely the last people to give peace a chance. Dulles was most surprised when the go-betweens returned within the week with two real live Waffen-SS officers: Standartenführer Eugen Dollmann and Obersturmführer Guido Zimmer. They were in Lugano, the charming lakeside resort where, in November 1944, Dulles had first met Ferruccio Parri, the CLNAI partisan leader.
It was now that Dulles showed his mettle. Dollmann claimed he was an emissary from Wolff, and that his superior officer wanted a face-to-face meeting with Dulles to negotiate a surrender. Unlike his compatriot General Eisenhower, Dulles was attuned to political nuances and fully aware of the delicacy of any such negotiations. The relationship between the Eastern and Western Allies was now such that Stalin would – and very soon did – take a jaundiced view of a surrender that could speed the passage eastwards of the Western Allied armies. As Churchill said later of these early contacts, ‘I realised at once that the Soviet Government might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the South, which would enable our armies to advance against reduced opposition as far as Vienna and beyond, or indeed towards the Elbe or Berlin.’17 So if Dulles was to risk such contacts, he needed, in his own words, ‘concrete evidence both of their seriousness and of their authority’. He needed proof positive.18
Now Ferruccio Parri was one of the many partisans who had been seized by the Gestapo in the winter breathing space so unhappily granted to Kesselring’s forces by Field Marshal Alexander’s 10 November 1944 broadcast. So too had Parri’s lieutenant, Antonio Usmiani. The pair were not being at all well treated by their captors, not least because of a bungled attempt by the partisans to rescue Parri from Gestapo HQ in Milan. Wrote Dulles:
I proposed, therefore, that General Wolff, if he wanted to see me, should give evidence of the seriousness of his intentions by releasing these two prisoners to me in Switzerland. In asking for Parri I realized that I was asking for probably the most important Italian prisoner the SS held … I knew that in asking for his release I was asking for something that would be very difficult for Wolff to do, and in fact I was putting the stakes high – almost too high, as it later turned out. Yet if these men could be released, the seriousness of General Wolff’s intentions would be amply demonstrated.19
Dulles did not trouble himself to go to Lugano on 4 March 1945. He was suffering from gout. Thoughtfully, he delegated the initial negotiations to an American Jew with the telltale name of Paul Blum. When Dollmann asked whether Dulles would meet Wolff on the neutral territory of Switzerland, Blum set out Dulles’s conditions. He handed the Waffen-SS officers a slip of paper. It bore two names: Ferruccio Parri and Antonio Usmiani. Dollmann blenched.
After a few moments’ consideration he said he would see what he could do. Dollmann and Zimmer returned to Milan, Blum to Berne to report to Dulles. The American in turn passed on what he thought fit to Colonel Max Waibel. The Swiss were not entirely disinterested. Their principal lifeline was the Ligurian port of Genoa, through which such essentials as the Allies thought fit to grant them were shipped. The speedy cessation of hostilities before the port was wrecked by the Germans under Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy was, Waibel thought, desirable.
*
Chiasso, four days later. Picture the scene at the windswept Alpine town on the Ticino border where Switzerland stretches an arm into Italy. An SS car is seen approaching the border checkpoint. It bears the familiar lightning logo of the SS. It draws up rather sharply. Smartly, an officer dressed as a captain alights from the car. It is Captain Zimmer. His arrival has been anticipated. One of Waibel’s representatives steps forward. Passwords are exchanged. ‘I have two men for you,’ announces Zimmer, with the air of a conjurer. ‘Please take them to Allen Dulles with the compliments of General Wolff.’ Zimmer returns to the car. From the rear doors he helps two dazed and dishevelled figures onto the tarmac. Uncertainly, encouraged by Zimmer, half expecting a shot in the back, they shuffle across the border. Parri and Usmiani are free, a couple of characters out of a John le Carré thriller.
Two hours later the car returns. Captain Zimmer emerges once again, followed by Colonel Dollmann. Then comes an SS adjutant, Sturmbannführer Wenner. They form a guard of honour for a man of the notably ‘Aryan’ features so favoured in the Reich: tall, bronzed, blue-eyed, blond-haired. The hawklike nose is his signature. It is Heinrich Himmler’s personal representative in Italy, Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Within hours Wolff and Dulles are chatting in front of the log fire in the OSS Herrengasse apartment in Berne, the spymaster puffing away at his pipe. He liked to put his guests at ease.
Up until this time, Dulles had not troubled Washington or indeed anyone outside the immediate circle of those concerned with these developments. Now he called Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) in the Royal Palace at Caserta, some twenty-five miles north of Naples. He outlined Wolff’s proposals. These included the public disavowal of Hitler and Himmler by all senior German officers in Italy, and the release of hundreds of Jews interned at Bologna. AFHQ was electrified by this news, dispatched the British and US Chiefs of Staff to talk to Dulles and Wolff and – in the way of a bureaucracy – gave the operation a name: Sunrise. With the prospect of the surrender of Heeresgruppe C – around 200,000 men – Dulles seemed to be on the brink of a huge coup. He was told to pursue the talks. ‘[O]n March 19,’ wrote Churchill, ‘a second exploratory meeting was held with General Wolff.’ Here the idea of calling off General Mark Clark’s spring offensive was tabled. During the remainder of March the negotiations proceeded. Dulles even rented a chalet in the lakeside resort of Ascona in Canton Ticino. It would act as a convenient and secure base for the talks, a ‘safe house’. The shores of Lake Maggiore would surely prove conducive to surrender.
Then three things went wrong. Wolff’s superior Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring suddenly moved headquarters and distanced himself from negotiations of which he had tacitly approved. Second, Himmler got word of the talks and threatened Wolff with holding his wife and family hostage against his loyalty to the Reich; unbeknownst to Hitler, the former chicken farmer was pursuing his own surrender negotiations with the Allies, using the Swede Count Folke Bernadotte as a middleman. Third, Stalin, well served by his own intelligence service, abruptly accused Roosevelt and Churchill of negotiating a separate surrender with the Reich behind his back. The Marshal demanded the talks be called off. In his last message to the Soviet leader, Roosevelt firmly rebuked his ally. Harry S. Truman, his successor, was less robust. Lobbied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), who – apparently correctly – felt that both Dulles and AFHQ in Caserta were being economical with the truth about the talks, the new president bowed to Stalin’s demands.
Dulles, having nursed the negotiations with imagination and tenacity, turned up at the Herrengasse on 20 April 1945 to be confronted by a telegram from Washington. It read in part, ‘especially in view of complications which have arisen with the Russians, the U.S. and British governments have decided OSS should break off [Sunrise] contacts; that JCS are so instructing OSS; that the whole matter is to be regarded as closed and that Russians be informed.’20 It was a bombshell.
3
And despite the fact that for practical purposes the war was now virtually over, in the Alps the fighting went on.
When th
e German occupying forces in the French Alps had withdrawn in the face of the Allied armies forcing their way up the Rhône valley from the Riviera landings in August 1944, they had left a rearguard in place. This was at the northern end of the Alpine frontier between France and Italy, where in June 1940 the Armée des Alpes had successfully resisted Mussolini’s forces. In the Tarentaise valley in the Savoie lay the village of Val d’Isère. Before the war it was barely acknowledged as a skiing resort, boasting just one primitive drag lift. Eight or nine miles south towered the 9,252-foot Mont Froid. Here in some of the old Petit Ligne Maginot casemates were around 1,500 fascist troops: the 3rd Battalion of the 100. Gebirgsjägerregiment, and a company of the Italian Folgore Regiment. They guarded the route over the frontier ridge between France and Italy: the Col du Mont Cenis into the Susa valley and beyond into Piedmont.
To support the last push of General Mark Clark’s Fifth and Eighth Armies into northern Italy, the French planned an assault. Around 3,000 men were assembled by Alain Le Ray. This was the former military head of the Vercors, now a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel. His forces were members of the 27th French Mountain Division, largely former maquisards, now the FFI. On 5 April, the chasseurs seized the middle and western strongpoints despite bitter winds and snow. The following day the eastern casemate fell, and with it Mont Froid. Then came counter-attacks, three in all.
A short time before midnight, after a violent shelling, an enemy detachment (one German company and two Italian platoons), composed of five groups, silently approached the eastern casemate: while three groups made a frontal attack, the two others tried to outflank the position. Apocalyptical scene with flashes of fire and tracer bullets, bursts of gunfire, mortar shells, grenades and Panzerfaust projectiles in a hell of a row … The small French garrison was overwhelmed and on the verge of being annihilated. Under the command of Chief Warrant Officer Jeangrand, a platoon of the 4th company of the 6th BCA (with Sergeant Roger Cerri and Senior Corporal Jean Gilbert) came immediately to the rescue …