by Jim Ring
The bigger game in Berchtesgaden was Göring’s booty. Although the Allies would soon discover a stupendous cache of more than 6,500 paintings in a salt mine at Altaussee in the Salzkammergut (the nucleus of Hitler’s planned national collection in Linz), the Reichsmarschall’s collection was still worth writing home about.
The trains carrying most of the treasures of Carinhall had safely reached Berchtesgaden on 11 April. Then there had been a hitch in the safe and secret disposal of the valuables. Göring’s original intention had been to store the treasures in the unfinished underground command post at Schwab, a village on the road from Berchtesgaden to Königsee. The job was only half completed when news of the Allies’ approach brought a halt to the curatorship and the hasty sealing of the entrance to the cache with cement. As the Allies neared on 3 May some of the remaining railway cars were sent a couple of stops down the line to Unterstein. Here – and it was an indication of how far the orderly Austrian society had broken down – the cars were ransacked by the villagers. The locals may have found few uses for the paintings but gold coins, cigarettes, sugar and all sorts of alcohol were quickly given new homes. When the Allies arrived, some of the more responsible officers had been briefed to keep their eyes open for significant caches of Nazi loot. They saw the number of empty, heavily gilded picture frames lying around the town as a clue. Captain Harry Anderson of the 101st Airborne made some local enquiries and soon trotted down to Schwab. He found the tunnels of the concrete emplacement empty but surmised that there might be some sealed chambers. These his men located using a sounding device. Loath to use explosives, the sappers spent three days chipping away at a sealing wall that proved to be eighteen inches thick. Within was an Aladdin’s cave of antique furniture, rare gramophone records, Old and New Masters – including a Renoir, a van Gogh and five Rembrandts. Anderson’s men erected a placard over the cache: ‘Hermann Goering’s Art Collection Through the Courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division’.26
Other valuables found by the Allies in Berchtesgaden were the head of the Reich Chancellery Dr Hans Lammers, the former Nazi governor general of Poland Hans Frank, the propagandist Julius Streicher, the German Labour Front leader Robert Ley, various members of the Führer’s personal staff including his physician Dr Theodor Morell, the RSHA security chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s wife and daughter, and – reportedly – the family of Albert Speer. It was quite a bag.
The Allies also found some women. The eleven-year-old Irmgard Paul had been armed by her mother with pepper as a deterrent to the soldiers’ attentions. Some of the Western Allied troops were certainly not above using force. According to Paul, a sixteen-year-old Berchtesgaden girl was gang-raped by US troops, and French and Moroccan forces were given free licence by their officers, ‘because this was Berchtesgaden’.27 Comments Max Hastings, ‘The American and British armies in Germany looted energetically and raped occasionally, but few men sought explicit revenge from the vanquished. The French, however, saw many scores to be paid.’28 Webster of the 101st remarked, ‘In Austria, where the women were cleaner, fairer, better built, and more willing than in any other part of Europe, the G.I.s had their field day.’29
Meanwhile, ‘smiling Albert’ Kesselring had more serious matters in hand.
He had sought the advice of SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, a man now familiar with the Allies’ surrender procedures. Kesselring reluctantly accepted that the time had come for him to surrender the ever fewer troops under his command, principally Army Group G. He delegated the job to General Hermann Foertsch. An arrangement was made for Foertsch and General Dever’s Sixth Army Group to meet on the outskirts of Munich. Foertsch arrived in the course of the night of 4–5 May at the Thorak estate in Haar. US forces in the area were alerted to watch out for for a vehicle bearing a white flag and with its bonnet covered in white. At about 15:30 on 5 May 1945, Foertsch and General Devers formally signed the surrender terms. They were to come into force from noon of the following day, and would see the surrender of about 100,000 square miles of territory.
It was very nearly over, very nearly Stunde Null.
6
The 80th Infantry Division was part of General George Patton’s Third Army. It had landed at Utah Beach on 4 August 1944, a month after D-Day, helped created the Falaise pocket that saw the surrender of perhaps 50,000 troops from Army Group B, crossed the Rhine on 27–8 March 1945, and in late April pushed into Bavaria – to Nuremberg and Regensburg. On 6 May, units of the Division reached the Ebensee concentration camp in the Salzkammergut mountains, a few miles due east of Berchtesgaden.
It will be remembered that Ebensee was a subcamp of Mauthausen. The main camp on the Danube just downstream from Linz was now the last remaining major concentration camp in the ever smaller area controlled by the Reich. In the first months of 1945 it was flooded with the inmates of those camps evacuated by the SS before they could be overrun by the Allies. Some of the overflow from Mauthausen was pushed on to Ebensee. The wooden-hutted barracks in the Salzkammergut were designed to hold around a hundred prisoners. Within a few weeks of the end of the war, the actual figure had risen to 750; the total in the small camp to around 18,500. By no means all the prisoners survived the continuing brutality of their captors, the barbarity of their working conditions, and their ever shorter rations. Deaths peaked at about 380 a day. At this level the crematorium, opened in June 1944 by the dutiful Obersturmführer Otto Riemer, was unable to keep up with the rate of mortality. The bodies – some inmates not quite dead – were piled up inside and outside the furnace building.
On 1 May 1945 the camp’s work of constructing tank gears and lorry parts was suspended: a rumour had flown round that Hitler was dead. No work was done over the next forty-eight hours. On Friday 4 May, the day US forces reached Berchtesgaden, the inmates were told by some of the leaders amongst the prisoners that there would be a roll-call the following morning. They would be instructed by the SS guards to go into the great tunnels they had themselves excavated to shelter from Allied bombs and shells. They were to refuse.
The following day the Appell (roll-call) was duly held. According to the inmate Moshe Ha-Elion, the camp commander SS-Obersturmführer Anton Ganz announced, ‘“The Americans are approaching the camp and we have decided to deliver you into their hands … You are in danger of being hurt by shelling or enemy planes. We propose that you should go into the tunnels.” Before he finished ending his words, all of us shouted in one loud voice. “We don’t want to go! We don’t want to go!”’ Ganz, at the end of his reign of terror, appeared to concede. The following night the tunnels were blown up. The intended fate of the inmates was clear: an attempt by the SS guards to conceal their dirty work from the Americans, from the forces of a justice that was rough.
On Sunday 6 May 1945, at a little after noon, two or three tanks rumbled through the open gates of the camp. The SS guards – Ganz included – had fled during the night. A cry went up. ‘They are Americans. They are Americans!’30
Robert B. Persinger was a platoon tank sergeant of the 3rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron.
As we approached on the gravel road to the camp we saw masses of human beings that appeared almost like ghosts standing in mud and filth up to their ankles behind the high wire fence. They were dressed in their filthy striped clothes and some in partial clothing, barely covering their bodies. They appeared so thin and sickly, it was evident that they were starving … We were taken … to the crematorium where there were stacks of bodies piled like cordwood one on top of the other completely around the inside walls … We had seen terrible sights from combat across Europe but what we were observing was a climax to the things human beings do to their fellow man.31
In scenes repeated at other concentration camps across what was left of the Reich, the inmates of Ebensee then turned against those who remained of their captors. Moshe Ha-Elion recounted that one of these was a Kapo – a prisoner in charge of supervising the camp labour. Gypsy Kapo – as he was known – was notorious for hi
s cruelty. He was captured by a group of Russian-Ukrainian Jews who were then joined by a lynch mob. They beat the Kapo to the ground and stoned him till he seemed dead. They then set off carrying him to the camp’s crematorium through the cordon of cadavers. The Kapo regained consciousness and began to struggle. Someone shouted, ‘Let’s burn him alive!’ He cried in horror, seeing the end that awaited him. He was dragged to the crematorium and thrown onto the iron stretcher used for offering up the bodies to the furnace, shouting and screaming at the top of his voice. ‘Someone took a long bar, which served for the purpose of pushing the corpses from the carriage into the oven and thrust the hook into the Capo’s groin and pushed his body into the oven … the door of the oven was shut. The cries were no more heard.’32
Mauthausen itself was liberated by the 11th Armored Division of the US Seventh Army on the same day as its subcamp. The death toll here has been put as high as 320,000. The other major camp in the foothills of the Alps was of course Dachau – the very first of the camps – in Munich. Here, in accordance with Hitler’s orders that none of the Dachau inmates should be left to the Allied armies, on 26 April a party of 7,000 Russians, Poles and German Jews set out south on a Todesmarsch (death march) into the Tyrol. Thousands died on the route south to Tegernsee, some freezing to death.
The camp was liberated three days later, on 29 April, by the 42nd Infantry Division of XV Corps of the US army: 32,000 prisoners were freed. On the outskirts of Dachau, the 42nd discovered an abandoned train that had arrived two or three days earlier bringing 2,300 evacuees from Buchenwald, the camp on the Etter Mountain near Weimar. All were dead.
7
The day after Ebensee was liberated. In Kufstein, a medieval Alpine town in the broad valley of the Inn, some fifty miles downstream from Innsbruck. It is dominated by a symbol of impregnability, a magnificent thirteenth-century fortress set on a rock above the fast-flowing river, swollen with meltwater from the Vorarlberg and Tyrol. The cellars of the castle have been pressed into service as air-raid shelters for the last eighteen months. Three days earlier the city, the second-largest in the Tyrol, surrendered to the US Seventh Army’s 12th Armored Division. Now it is Monday 7 May. In Rheims in the early hours, the instrument of general surrender has been signed by a representative of the Reich’s new leader, Grossadmiral Dönitz, by Generaloberst Alfred Jodl on behalf of the OKW, by General Walter Bedell Smith on behalf of the Western Allies, and by General Ivan Susloparov for the Soviets. The armistice is set to come into force at 23:01 on the following day, Tuesday 8 May: Victory in Europe Day, VE Day.
Kufstein is now a command post of the US 36th Infantry Division of the Seventh Army. Part of Operation Dragoon, the 36th has fought its way up from the Riviera landings, past Grenoble and the Vercors, and is now battling with the retreating German forces in western Austria. That Monday morning the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Robert Stack, is brought a letter. It comes by hand of officer and purports to be from Reichsmarschall Göring. It has been delivered under truce through the German lines by Göring’s ADC, Oberst Berndt von Brauchitsch. Addressed to General Eisenhower himself, it is Göring’s misplaced attempt to come to terms with the Supreme Allied Commander: ‘to arrange for me to have a man-to-man, soldier-to-soldier talk … as one Marshal to another’.33 Göring wants to negotiate a surrender, and then use his standing to set Germany back on its feet. The letter is duly copied and dispatched by plane to headquarters of XXVI Corps, thence to SHAEF and Eisenhower’s bulging ‘in tray’.
Shortly afterwards, Stack’s divisional commander appeared, General John Dahlquist. As part of the Allied plan to capture the perpetrators of the war, the General’s unit had already seized Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt and Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle. Now Stack proposed to Dahlquist that they should go after Göring himself, by far the most important remaining prize amongst the Nazi leaders. Said Stack, ‘John, let’s go get him.’ Dahlquist replied, ‘You go get him’, so Stack, as he recounted, was stuck with the job.34
Since leaving his ruined chalet at Obersalzberg in the aftermath of the bombing on 25 April, Göring and a considerable entourage had been on the move. He had first been driven by the SS some seventy miles south-east to Mauterndorf Castle. This was a picture-postcard Bavarian schloss that the Reichsmarschall had inherited in 1939. Here Göring had enjoyed an ambiguous position with SS-Obersturmbannführer Frank, halfway between captive and host. Here, too, news had reached the ill-assorted house party of the death of the Führer. Göring was galled. ‘Now I’ll never be able to convince him I was loyal to the end!’35 Still, for Frank this turn of events put a fresh complexion on things. If actually freeing Göring seemed injudicious, his rescue by the Americans now swarming all over the supposed Redoubt might not be altogether inconvenient. Providing the whole thing was not too blatant. It would never do for Himmler to hear of such disloyalty, should he still be in power!
To this end, with Frank’s agreement, Göring now tore a page out of the script of Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed. He sent first his wife’s niece, and then Emmy Göring herself out through the castle’s secret passages. These led to the town of Mauterndorf. Here, disappointingly, the ladies found no one who could help them. Accordingly, with an eye to the less than friendly Soviet forces advancing from the east, Göring thought he might shift base again. He could go seventy-five miles west to Fischhorn, another castle fit for a Reichsmarschall in Zell am See. This enchanting resort on Lake Zell, surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains – the Schmittenhöhe and the Hundstein – owed its popularity to the opening of the Salzburg–Tyrol railway in 1875. In spring 1945 it was the furthest point south possible for the Nazis to reach before the high passes to Italy were clear of snow; some 25,000 troops would soon surrender there. In the meantime Göring dispatched Oberst von Brauchitsch to find the Supreme Allied Commander. Brauchitsch had eventually found his way through the German and into the US lines to Kufstein. In the absence of Eisenhower he accepted as a substitute Brigadier Stack.
*
The Brigadier’s headhunting party duly set out from Kufstein, making for Mauterndorf. For obvious reasons this was a hazardous operation. The general surrender of all German forces had been signed in Rheims but was not yet in force. German troops might perfectly reasonably take exception to a small US party on a manhunt. Care – and good luck – would be needed.
The party comprised a staff car, a jeep, and the Divisional Reconnaissance Troop in a handful of other jeeps and cars, led by Oberst von Brauchitsch in an army vehicle. Brigadier General Stack’s group crossed from US into German lines just south of the resort of Kitzbühel. The posse was much delayed by the poor mountain roads, the remains of the winter snow, and never-ending streams of refugees and retreating troops. In the absence of petrol, many of the conveyances were horse-drawn.
Meanwhile, Göring had got bored waiting and had decided to effect his own rescue. He joked to his wife, ‘If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, then Mahomet must come to the mountain!’36 After some confusion, Stack eventually caught up with Göring’s twenty-five-car convoy stuck in a traffic jam on the road from Mauterndorf to Zell am Zee. The convoy was facing west, seemingly on its way to the fashionable lakeside resort and Fischhorn Castle. According to the Brigadier, what with his wife, sister-in-law, daughter, guards, butler, aides and chef, Göring had an entourage of seventy-five. Göring himself was seated comfortably in his bulletproof Mercedes. The Reichsmarschall saluted, Stack returned the salute, and asked the Marschall if he wished to surrender. Göring agreed, with the proviso that he was brought back to US – not Soviet – lines. Brigadier Stack said that this was just where he would like to go himself.
The 36th Division headquarters had now moved forward to Kitzbühel, basing itself at the Grand Hotel. Wrote Stack,
I questioned Goering at length … particularly about the “Austrian Redoubt.” Our Intelligence, including Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, were convinced that the die-hard Nazis ha
d constructed underground factories, hangars, armories, etc., in the Austrian Alps and that they would carry on a last ditch stand there, perhaps for years. Goering said, “No, there had been some talk of such a plan a year before but that nothing at all had been done to implement the plan.” He was telling the truth although our Intelligence had been completely taken in by the story.37
Göring was given chicken for lunch at the Grand Hotel and photographed with the US top brass in convivial poses soon reproduced in the world’s press. The pictures made his captors unpopular. There was a storm of protest over such fraternisation with the Nazi leader. One American who had lost two sons in the war wrote to Dahlquist, ‘Why don’t you resign the Army and stay over there and suck the hind tit of Goering??’38