Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

  … Jeangrand, Warrant Officer Gay and a private were killed, three others wounded. All the groups withdrew under fire and took refuge in the center block. The attackers screamed and charged with submachine guns and hand grenades. The French chasseurs alpins defended themselves energetically. Facing a volley of bullets, the enemy had to step back, but it attacked quickly again and arrived at close range. Several French soldiers were killed or wounded, but the others, singing the Chant du départ, opened a running fire. As dawn was breaking, the attackers retired … Shortly afterwards, a snowstorm raged. It was freezing hard. Most men were exhausted, many men had frozen feet, the weapons were frozen … On the 9th of April, the 4th company of the 6th BCA was relieved at last.21

  Three days later, the 3rd Battalion briefly recaptured the bitterly contested redoubt. Le Ray’s men were later described as ‘forcing the Germans from their last mountain-top strongholds’ in the French Alps.22 The war had less than a month to run.

  4

  20 April 1945. It was Hitler’s birthday, his fifty-sixth. Hitherto, the Führer’s intention had been to withdraw to Berchtesgaden as the Soviet army closed on Berlin. Ten days earlier his domestic staff had followed in the wake of many of the Reich ministries, various senior officials, camp followers and the $15 million Reichsbank’s reserves to the relative safety of Bavaria. In the Berghof, Hitler’s staff busied themselves with spring-cleaning the chalet to make the place fit for a king. In the circumstances they were particularly careful to dust down the extensive bunker complex. Air raids were anticipated.

  Hitler, though, was wavering. On the eve of his birthday he had quietly given in to Goebbels’s request that such military reserves as the Wehrmacht still possessed should be committed to the defence of the capital, deployed around the very gates of Berlin. On his birthday itself, in the Führerbunker under the Chancellery dutifully designed by Speer for a contingency never seriously anticipated, congratulations seemed slightly misplaced. ‘No one knew quite what to say,’ remembered the armaments minister. ‘Hitler received the expressions of good wishes coolly and almost unwillingly, in keeping with the circumstances.’23 All the leading Nazis were there, including Speer himself, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Bormann and the military chiefs Dönitz, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs. Göring, doubtless anticipating events, was wearing a rather surprising new uniform plastered across his broad frame. It was olive-green. One of the entourage whispered to Speer, ‘Like an American general!’ Discussion eventually turned to the military situation. The sounds of Soviet artillery could be heard all too clearly, even fifty-five feet under the Chancellery garden. When Hitler announced his decision to defend Berlin there was an outcry. ‘At once everyone began clamoring that it was essential to shift the headquarters to Obersalzberg, and that now was the last moment remaining.’ Göring then chimed in. There was only one route still open south to Berchtesgaden, he said. It might be lost at any moment; now was surely the time to stage a retreat south. This inflamed Hitler: ‘How can I call on the troops to undertake the decisive battle for Berlin if at the same moment I myself withdraw to safety! … I shall leave it to fate whether I die in the capital or fly to Obersalzberg at the last moment!’24

  For the present, Hitler would stay.

  Göring thought it best – wisest – to do otherwise. Once the conference was over he turned to Hitler and explained that he had a lot to do in Bavaria. He would leave for the south that very evening. Speer says, ‘I was standing only a few feet away from the two and had a sense of being present at a historic moment: The leadership of the Reich was splitting asunder.’25

  It was in fact the night of the final exodus to Bavaria. Bormann as usual had been efficiency itself. He had arranged for a motorcade of cars, buses, armoured vehicles and trucks to take the leaders’ closest ministers, aides and their families south to safety. His attention to detail went right down to the allocation of seats. Göring himself left with a large escort and a truck full of booty from Carinhall, his country estate to the north of Berlin. Two trainloads of other treasures – paintings, sculptures, tapestries, fine wines, cigars, morocco-bound books – had preceded him.

  Meanwhile, the two other trains, Adler and Dohle, carrying the $15 million of Reich reserves, trundled slowly south along what remained of the Reich’s railway network.

  *

  The military situation discussed in the Führerbunker conference was utterly irretrievable. The Allied vice had now so tightened on the Reich that its frontiers were largely defined by the Alps. It held the west of Czechoslovakia, Austria west of Vienna, northern Italy, north-western Yugoslavia and southern Bavaria. From all points of the compass the Allies were now closing on the mountains.

  To the west, the Allied forces approaching the Alps were General de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French and the US Seventh Armies, together comprising General Jacob Devers’s Sixth Army Group. This was tasked with forcing its way through Bavaria into Austria to destroy the Alpine Redoubt. The French, setting out from Lake Constance, were to confront the enemy forces in the western Austrian province of Vorarlberg, at the west end of which lay the resort of St Anton. The US army was to head further east to Innsbruck, capital of the Tyrol, the province adjoining Vorarlberg to the east. A third thrust was to take the form of Patton’s Third Army, on loan from General Bradley. This was to head for Salzburg, rather over a hundred miles east of Innsbruck. It, too, was thought to be part of the Alpine Redoubt.

  Coming up from the south towards the Italian Alps were General Mark Clark’s US Fifth and British Eighth Armies. By 18 April, the Eighth Army was now through Argenta and its armour was racing to meet the US forces advancing from the east. The objective was to stop SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff and Army Group C in Bologna at the northern foot of the Apennines, the southern edge of the Po plain. By 23 April both Allied armies had reached the river Po, in Italy a natural barrier of similar significance to the Rhine. Beyond lay the foothills of the Italian Alps. The Italian partisans – the National Liberation Committee – called for a general rising. At long last, the hour of liberation really had come.

  To the east, Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia amounted to 800,000. They were now dubbed the Yugoslav Army of National Liberation (JANL), and were a formidable threat. Tito’s ambitions for the Fourth Army of the JANL were not restricted to driving out the remains of Generaloberst Löhr’s Heeresgruppe E from the old borders of Yugoslavia. His plan was to go beyond those frontiers and seize the southern provinces of Austria, including the cities of Fiume, Trieste and Pola. The Yugoslav leader also had ambitions for joining forces with the communist partisans to the west in Italy, even those in France.26

  The JANL offensive opened on 12 April 1945. Ten days later, just as the British Eighth and the US Fifth Armies reached the Po, and just as the US Seventh Army headed for Innsbruck, the JANL was within reach of Trieste. It was also casting its eyes towards Klagenfurt, capital of the eastern Austrian Alpine province of Carinthia.

  It was also on that day of 23 April that Speer returned to the bunker under the Chancellery to say goodbye to Hitler. Stepping down into that Stygian world, Speer came across Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, who had masterminded the creation of the Nazi headquarters at Berchtesgaden. Like Göring and the other high party officials who had already fled to the ‘redoubt’, Bormann thought the caution represented by Berchtesgaden better than the valour embodied in the shambles that remained of Berlin. He urged Speer to persuade Hitler to fly – even at this eleventh hour – to Obersalzberg.

  When Speer was ushered into Hitler’s presence deep in the bunker, the Führer was busy with the succession planning now so much the vogue amongst business chief executives. He cross-questioned Speer on the merits of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, a submariner who in happier days had conceived the devastatingly successful ‘wolf-pack’ U-boat tactics in the Battle of the Atlantic. Speer might have been excused for thinking the question academic. Germany’s principal cities lay in ruins, her industry was shattered, her armies over
run, her population on the point of starvation. What the Germans later called Stunde Null (zero hour) of the complete and unconditional surrender was only a fortnight away. With Germany cut in two by the Allies, Dönitz – Hitler explained – would be charged with setting up an administration in the north from his headquarters in Plön, Schleswig. The loyal Kesselring was to be Dönitz’s opposite number in the south. Then Hitler turned to his own fate. ‘What do you think? Should I stay here or fly to Berchtesgaden? Jodl has told me that tomorrow is the last chance for that.’ Speer advised Hitler to remain in Berlin. ‘It seems to me better, if it must be, that you end your life here in the capital as the Fuehrer rather than in your weekend house.’

  Hitler concurred: ‘I too have resolved to stay here. I only wanted to hear your view once more.’ Perhaps there were other reasons. As Antony Beevor comments, ‘The Fall of Berchtesgaden did not have quite the same ring as the Fall of Berlin.’27

  5

  Hitler, though, had not quite done with Berchtesgaden, the resort where all his great thoughts had germinated. Scarcely had the matter been settled when the omnipresent Bormann scuttled in. He was bearing a telegram from Göring. The Generalfeldmarschall had been as good as his word. He had now reached Berchtesgaden with his looted goods and opened up his chalet at Obersalzberg; the mountain complex was still deep in the late winter’s drifting snow. There he had indeed been busy. He had scrupulously reviewed the arrangements for the safe storage of his collection from Carinhall, including works by Botticelli, Rembrandt, Dürer, Gobelin and Picasso. He had then returned to his chalet, opened his safe in the study, and drawn out a steel box. Within this lay a copy of Hitler’s decree of 29 June 1941. This had been the upshot of Rudolf Hess’s strange flight to England on 10 May 1941. As Hitler’s deputy could no longer discharge his duties from confinement in England (initially in the Tower of London), Göring had then been promoted to replace him. Göring had this in writing.

  In the chalet’s study the Marshal pondered the document. It designated Göring himself – creator of the Luftwaffe, Reichsminister of aviation, Reichsminister of forestry and President of Prussia – as Hitler’s successor. It was to come into effect should the Führer die or become incapacitated. Even at this late hour, Göring’s appetite for power was unbounded. Given the imminent fall of the capital to the Soviet forces, Göring’s telegram posed an innocent question. On the assumption that Hitler was to remain in Berlin – therefore to be captured or die a Heldentod, a hero’s death – should Göring assume the leadership of the Reich? This missive was followed by another cable addressed to Joachim von Ribbentrop but copied to Hitler.

  I have asked the Fuehrer to provide me with instructions by 10 p.m. April 23. If by this time it is apparent that the Fuehrer has been deprived of his freedom of action to conduct the affairs of the Reich, his decree of June 29, 1941, becomes effective, according to which I am heir to all his offices as his deputy. [If] by 12 midnight April 23, 1945, you receive no other word either from the Fuehrer directly or from me, you are to come to me at once by air.28

  Speer was now at a loose end, for he had no armaments industry to manage. As a result of the toils of the USAAF, RAF and various Allied armies, there was none. All ‘the good Nazi’ could do was to try to sabotage Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy. He followed these dramatic events as a disinterested observer. Bormann and Göring had never agreed. Here was Bormann’s opportunity to worst – preferably annihilate – the portly air marshal. Göring, claimed the bull-necked Bormann to Hitler, was launching a coup d’état. This latest cable was obviously an ultimatum. ‘Goering is engaged in treason!’ he raged to Hitler and Speer, his face empurpled. ‘He’s already sending telegrams to members of the government and announcing that on the basis of his powers he will assume your office at twelve o’clock tonight, mein Führer.’ Hitler, hitherto calm, was incensed. Bormann had played his cards well. ‘I’ve known it all along,’ Hitler blazed. ‘I know that Goering is lazy. He let the air force go to pot. He was corrupt. His example made corruption possible in our state. Besides he’s been a drug addict for years. I’ve known it all along.’29

  With that, Hitler at once had Göring stripped of his succession to the Third Reich and gave orders that he should be arrested for high treason. This carried the death penalty. In the light of Göring’s long services to the Nazi Party, this – Hitler decreed – would be commuted: provided he at once resigned from all his offices. He was to answer yes or no, nein or ja. Immediately.

  Bormann himself kindly drafted the cable to Obersalzberg to this effect. This was excellent. The outcome was predictable. But the Reichsleiter felt it wise to go one step further entirely on his own initiative. The SS detachment based at Obersalzberg was still on guard in its barracks. These were at the Hotel zum Türken, a few hundred yards uphill from the Berghof. By this time perhaps little could have surprised the leaders of the detachment, Obersturmbannführer Hans Frank and Obersturmführer von Bredow. In ten years Berchtesgaden had changed from a remote resort in the Bavarian Alps to the epicentre of a movement that defined the first half of the twentieth century and gave a new twist to the term ‘civilisation’. The cable the pair received from Bormann on the evening of 23 April 1945 ordered them to arrest Göring for high treason. They would answer with their lives if they failed.

  Frank and von Bredow hastily buckled on their pistols and routed out the SS guard. It was a cold night. Göring’s chalet was uphill, through the snow. At shortly after midnight there was a thunderous knock at the door of the chalet and Göring found himself under house arrest. The Generalfeldmarschall was apparently unperturbed, confident, serene. To his wife Emmy, he remarked, ‘Everything will be cleared up by tomorrow. It’s simply a matter of a misunderstanding. Sleep peacefully, as I am going to do. Can you imagine for a single moment that Adolf Hitler would have me arrested today – I who have followed him through thick and thin for the last twenty-three years? Come now! It’s really unthinkable!’30

  *

  The Reichsbank gold and currency reserves dispatched from Berlin on the trains Adler and Dohle had now finally reached their destination.

  This was Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps, a short way south of the secret Messerschmitt factory in Oberammergau, itself the neighbour of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The reserves had been transferred to Opel Blitz trucks, a convoy of which drew up at the officers’ mess of the Mountain Infantry Training School on the afternoon of 23 April. It was here that the late Generalfeldmarschall Rommel – a victim of the aftermath of the 20 July bomb plot – had sought advice about Operation Achse, the seizure of the Italian Alpine passes. Now his adviser, General der Gebirgstruppe Valentin Feurstein, was commanding the defence of Bregenz, the city just inside the Austrian–Swiss border, 125 miles west. The matter of the Reichsbank’s reserves was placed in the hands of the school’s current commanding officer, the forty-year-old Oberst Franz Wilhelm Pfeiffer. The responsibility for the reserves lay ultimately with the Reichsbank chief, Walther Funk. His officials accompanying the booty told Pfeiffer they were putting him in charge of concealing the reserves until the whirlwind of the Allied advance had passed by. When a new Bavarian state rose from the ashes of the Reich, it could then be financed. This was foresight. Pfeiffer, a tall, balding and dutiful career army officer, was not best pleased with the enormity of the task that had been foisted on him. Nevertheless, he found somewhere to store the reserves: the bowling alley of the officers’ mess. Then, under the watchful eyes of the Reichsbank officials, Pfeiffer and his men duly unloaded the sacks of currency and 364 bags of gold.

  6

  Meanwhile, the story of the surrender of the Wehrmacht and SS forces in Italy continued to unfold. Just as Hitler in the Berlin bunker was dealing with Göring’s high treason, Dulles in the Herrengasse in Berne received a phone call. It was his friend Colonel Max Waibel, the Swiss intelligence chief. It placed Dulles in a conundrum. ‘He had astounding news,’ remembered Dulles.

  General Wolff, his adjutant, Major We
nner, and one of Vietinghoff’s [Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff, who had now replaced the promoted Kesselring] high staff officers, Lt. Col. Viktor von Schweinitz, were on their way to Switzerland. They were coming to surrender … Wolff and Schweinitz were ready to go to Caserta immediately to arrange for the capitulation of all the German forces, Wehrmacht and SS, in North Italy. They proposed an immediate meeting with me in Lucerne to arrange the details of the trip to Allied headquarters. And I was under the strictest military orders to have no dealings with them!31

  Dulles at once cabled AFHQ in Caserta to allow him to reopen the negotiations that he had so reluctantly closed. AFHQ cabled Washington. Truman, still fearful of compromising relations with Stalin, refused. The Joint Chiefs of Staff could only suggest to Dulles that Wolff should be kept in play by using Waibel as an intermediary.

  Like Hitler in his bunker, Dulles was incensed. He broke two of his best pipes in his anger. In jeopardy were the lives of tens of thousands of Mark Clark’s Allied troops, similar numbers of Vietinghoff’s Germans, and his own great coup. The JCS suggestion also placed Waibel in an impossible situation. The Swiss were keen enough to see a brokered armistice, but as a statutory neutral it was difficult for them to be seen to engage in peace negotiations on behalf of one of the belligerents. Waibel knew that his political masters would be aghast at the prospect. Nevertheless, he agreed to meet Wolff in Lucerne and start talks. He could not reveal that Dulles himself was under orders not to treat with them. On meeting Waibel on 24 April, the hawk-nosed Wolff not unreasonably enquired, ‘Where is Herr Dulles?’