Storming the Eagle's Nest

by Jim Ring

The US Seventh Army was then headquartered in the Bavarian city of Augsburg. Thence Göring was dispatched in a two-man spotter plane, a Piper L-4. Wrote Stack, ‘We had doubts he would fit in the miniature plane but we stuffed him in.’ According to the pilot, Captain Mayhew Foster, when asked when the Reich began manufacturing jets, Göring joked, ‘Too late.’39

  As to Kitzbühel in those early May days, a holiday mood seemed already to have returned to the famous Tyrolese resort. Inge Rainer had returned there in April to find her parents’ pension full of Luftwaffe personnel on crutches. They were turned out to make room for the US servicemen, the victors then demanding nothing but the best. The Seventh Army’s 36th Signals Company soon found itself set up in the Grand Hotel. This

  served free drinks for two days, which did not improve our efficiency, but made the work more pleasant by far … Air Marshal Goering was wheeled into town following his capture, for interrogation and a chicken dinner. It was easy to tell that the war was over, sunbathing signalmen on the Kitzbuhl porches could look down into the streets and see German M.P.’s [military police] directing our military traffic. Finie, la guerre.40

  8

  If this made the war in the Alps indeed seem over, nothing could be further from the case in the south-eastern ranges of Austria and the adjoining areas of Italy and Yugoslavia. Here, Generaloberst Löhr’s Heeresgruppe E was staging a retreat north-west into the Austrian province of Carinthia. The corps was hotly pursued by Tito’s Yugoslav Army of National Liberation. This was intent on redressing the injustices of the past and rewriting national frontiers in the country’s favour.

  Löhr had done well enough until his right flank was exposed by the surrender on 29 April of Vietinghoff’s Army Group C – the surrender so painfully negotiated by Allen Dulles with SS-Obergruppenführer Wolff. The British, all too well aware of Tito’s ambitions, took this opportunity to get their retaliation in first. Units of the British Eighth Army headed across Istria into Alpine Carinthia. Löhr and his staff were in a quandary.

  We had not been advised that negotiations were in progress and when the capitulation came, suddenly we had nobody covering our right flank. The situation had other, more political, considerations, namely, were we of Army Group ‘E’ bound by the surrender in Italy? If we were then further resistance to the Jugoslavs could be interpreted as breaking the armistice conditions. If we were not so bound, how were we to act against those British and American troops who were crossing our Army Group boundary line in north-eastern Italy?41

  With Hitler dead and the OKW command structure dissolving, Löhr personally took the decision to fight on – not least because he believed a managed retreat into Carinthia was the only way of saving his 400,000 men. His army was in any case at the end of its tether. Leaving aside the absence of overall political and military direction, the collapse of the Reich meant the dissolution of the logistics chain for supplying armies in the field. Löhr was desperately short of food, fuel and ammunition. The first week of May was here one of heavy rain. As Group E slowly retreated towards Carinthia, the British Eighth in the west and the JANL in the south closed at its heels.

  Underlying Löhr’s ever-changing military position lay the shifting sands of post-war politics. Vienna had fallen to the Red Army on 13 April 1945 and Austria’s eastern provinces were under Soviet domination. The provisional government in the capital was attempting to reunite the remaining provinces, with the Soviets pushing for a communist Austria. Carinthia had already declared in favour of the provincial government. This was the Red Tide that Churchill had feared. Now the British ambassador in Belgrade hastily called the PM with some disturbing news. ‘A Jugoslav Division is under orders to move into Austria and to take Klagenfurt.’42 This was Carinthia’s capital, Austria’s sixth-largest city, one dominated by the Karawanken Alps that divided Austria from Italy and Yugoslavia. At once the British Eighth Army was ordered to push into Carinthia with all speed. At much the same time the JANL crossed the Austrian border into the province. The race for Klagenfurt – and for the future of eastern Europe – was on. The battle had morphed from one between the Grand Alliance and the Reich to one between elements of the Grand Alliance.

  In Klagenfurt itself on Tuesday 8 May – just as Göring was being entertained to chicken dinner in Kitzbühel’s Grand Hotel – there was chaos. Political power was still nominally in the hands of the Reich Gauleiter Rainer. Told by Kesselring in Graz on 6 May that the war – or at least this war – was over, Rainer was prepared to cede power to what amounted to the local resistance. This was a left-leaning, although not completely communist, group.

  These political virgins now had on their hands two ardent and powerful suitors, each with designs on Klagenfurt: the JANL pushing up from the south and the British Eighth Army from the west. It was assumed that the JANL would impose not only a communist regime in the city but one that would incorporate Carinthia into Yugoslavia. On the other hand, it was by no means clear – as in the Tyrol – whether the British would act as conquerors or liberators. One Austrian put it rather presciently: ‘Even if the British are harsh, at least one day they will leave Austria. It does not matter how accommodating the Jugoslavs may be to us, they will be with us for ever. The choice is clear. It is essential to do everything to speed the British entry.’43 Happily the decision was made on the Carinthians’ behalf. The British Eighth Army beat the JANL to Klagenfurt by a short head. Its units then occupied all the town’s principal buildings. When the JANL arrived it had to make do with such two-and one-star accommodation as was left.

  The following day was Wednesday 9 May. The Rheims surrender document committed all German forces to a complete capitulation – unconditional surrender – by 23:01 on Tuesday 8 May. This midnight hour found Löhr’s Army Group still in limbo, and Carinthia occupied by two armies. When the capitulation came into force, Field Marshal Alexander requested Marshal Tito to withdraw the JANL. The Marshal refused, arguing that the Germans had invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 and that his armies were merely pursuing them back to their own territory.

  In the face of this impasse and as relations between the JANL and the British Eighth deteriorated, plans were made to turn the forces of the Anglo-Saxon Allies on the JANL. An amphibious assault of Istria was put in hand, RAF and USAAF bomber groups were briefed, and Churchill asked Alexander, as Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean, whether his armies would be prepared to fight the JANL. It was by no means an open-and-shut case. Eventually Alexander cabled Churchill: ‘My soldiers will obey orders, but I doubt whether they will fight against Tito with as much enthusiasm as they did against the hated Germans.’44 Churchill attempted to resolve the matter through President Truman and Marshal Stalin. The former stated that the US would not support territorial claims pursued by force; Stalin advised Tito to withdraw his troops. The Yugoslav leader was by now his own man, less mindful of Moscow. He artfully offered to place the JANL troops under British command. Meanwhile, tension grew on the ground between the British and Yugoslav forces.

  There had been an English tank positioned outside the Landhaus [a picturesque medieval government building] since the English arrived. The Jugoslav soldiers were very excited and when their two dusty tanks arrived they began to cheer. An English officer went across and spoke to the Titoist commander. It was clear that an argument had developed.

  The English officer stopped talking, turned round, climbed onto his tank and disappeared inside it. He reappeared and stood up in the turret. I can see him now, with earphones on and a microphone round his throat. He spoke into this and very slowly the gun on the English tank, which had been pointing up towards the sky, began to lower and then the turret began to turn towards the first Jugoslav vehicle. There was an absolute silence. The gun was brought right down and was aimed directly at the Jugoslavs. Suddenly the partisans started their tank engines and drove out of the square. We Austrians went wild and we all applauded as if it had been an entertainment. Looking back I realize how naive we all were. A war might have
broken out in that square on that day.45

  Churchill refused to take the JANL under Eighth Army command, and Tito thought better of pushing the point. On 18 May 1945, the JANL trooped out of Klagenfurt, defiantly singing partisan songs. They headed south, and had soon crossed the river Drau and the frontier with Yugoslavia. A similar impasse between Alexander’s and Tito’s forces in the Adriatic city of Trieste was settled when JANL forces left on 12 June 1945. Both incidents are sometimes billed as the last battles of the Second World War and the first of the Cold War.

  *

  Yet it was not quite over. If an expansionist policy in the Alps was to be expected of Tito, it was not entirely anticipated of de Gaulle. As the General – now very much in charge in France as Prime Minister of the provisional government – had remarked when conferring the Compagnon de la Libération in Grenoble, he had plans for his Alpine specialists. These turned out to be the seizure of the Italian province of Cuneo in the Alpes-Maritimes. It was from here in December 1943, from Borgo San Dalmazzo, that the 328 refugees from Saint-Martin-Vésubie had been sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

  In the closing days of the fighting in early May 1945, de Gaulle had ordered units of the French First Army to cross the Alpine border into Cuneo. The frontier here between France and Italy had long been disputed, not least in June 1940 when Mussolini’s troops had invaded the Alpes-Maritimes. Here, towards the end of the month of May 1945, the French were surprised by the US IV Corps. This was charged with setting up military government in north-west Italy. Lieutenant General Paul-André Doyen, the commander of the French Armée des Alpes, was most put out. He wrote a surprising letter to the commander of the IV Corps, Major General Willis D. Crittenberger, objecting to the US Corps’s presence in Cuneo.

  France cannot consent that a modification against her will should be made in the existing state of affairs in the Alpes-Maritimes. This would be contrary to her honour and her security. I have been ordered by the Provisional Government of the French Republic to occupy and administer this territory. This mission being incompatible with the installation of an Allied military agency in the same region, I find myself obliged to oppose it. Any insistence in this direction would assume a clearly unfriendly character, even a hostile character, and could have grave consequences.46

  On 2 June 1945 the moustached Doyen followed this with another letter to Crittenberger in which he stated that he had been ordered by General de Gaulle to prevent the setting up of an Allied military government in Cuneo ‘by all necessary means without exception’. Meaning that – like the case of JANL and the British Eighth Army in Carinthia – the supposed Allies were poised to become foes.

  In Cuneo the job of resolving the matter once again fell to Alexander. The Field Marshal called in Churchill. The Prime Minister wrote to President Truman with nice understatement, ‘Is it not rather disagreeable for us to be addressed in these terms by General de Gaulle, whom we have reinstated in liberated France at some expense of American and British blood and treasure?’ Truman wrote at once to de Gaulle. The General climbed down, Doyen withdrew the French First Army and Cuneo remained Italian.

  9

  Endsieg at last had come, final victory, but not for the Third Reich. In Germany, Victory in Europe Day was Stunde Null: zero hour. A vivid picture has been painted of this German apocalypse:

  It was a land of ruins peopled by ghosts, a land without government, order or purpose, without industry, communications or proper means of existence, a nation that had entirely forfeited its nationhood and lay entirely at the beck and call of foreign armies … The almost complete cessation of the means of communication … seemed to have brought civilised life itself to a halt.47

  Out of the 18.2 million men in Germany’s armed services, 5.3 million had died: a million more than the total population of Switzerland.

  London was a rather different story. ‘Chips’ Channon recorded the occasion of VE Day – 8 May 1945 – in the House of Commons:

  Every seat was occupied; the Ambassadors were all present, peers queued up. At three o’clock, in the Whips’ Room, I heard the PM make the official announcement over the wireless that the war in Europe was at an end … At last Winston, smiling and bent, appeared, and had a tremendous reception. Everyone (except the recently elected cad for Chelmsford) rose and cheered and waved handkerchiefs and Order Papers … Winston smiled and half bowed – as he often does, and turning towards the Speaker, read out the same short announcement of the surrender of Germany which he had already given over the wireless. The House was profoundly moved, and gave him another great cheer … Then Winston, in a lower voice, added his personal thanks and praise for the House of Commons and the Democratic System: some Members wept, and the PM moved that we repair to St Margaret’s to offer thanks to Almighty God using the identical phraseology employed by Lloyd George in 1918.48

  One final task in Europe remained for Churchill as war leader. This was to attend the last of the great Allied war conferences, held two and a half months after VE Day in Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin. The ambitions of Hitler for a new European order were perfectly symbolised by the smoking rubble and human detritus of the Reich’s sometime capital. A new order had arisen nonetheless. As President Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson would later put it, ‘The whole world structure and order that we had inherited from the nineteenth century was gone.’49 The United States – as Truman himself observed – ‘emerged from this war the most powerful nation in the world’;50 and both Great Britain and France had been reduced to the rank of second-class powers. Potsdam was not a rerun of Versailles, where Lloyd George for Great Britain, Georges Clemenceau for France, and Woodrow Wilson for the United States had between them divided up Europe’s plum pudding. To Potsdam the French were not even invited.

  Two topics dominated the July conference: the war with Japan and the post-war future of what was once the Reich – within which lay her Alps.

  At Potsdam the three principal Allies agreed on the aims of their joint occupation of Germany. She was to be demilitarised, denazified, democratised, decentralised and decartelised – the last the process of replacing monopolies with a free-market economy. In short, Germany was to be turned into a liberal democracy, based on the models of Great Britain and the United States. At the same time all her annexations in Europe were to revert to their former identities, these including Austria. Both Germany and Austria would be partitioned into four, thence to be governed by the Americans, the British, the Soviets and the French. The Reich’s Alps, Bavaria and Alpine Austria, were to exchange totalitarianism for occupation, albeit largely under democratic governance.

  As to the rest of the Alps, those in the east in Yugoslavia were now firmly under Tito’s communist control, those to the south in Italy under Allied military control, and those in France under the impress of General de Gaulle’s provisional government.

  This left Switzerland, the heart of the Alps. The great stone walls that formed her eastern, western and southern borders had been the shields of her democracy. In July 1945, as Churchill left London for Potsdam, General Henri Guisan finally demobilised the Swiss citizen army. For the Swiss, the war that in some sense had never begun was over.

  That same month the British Alpinist Arnold Lunn returned to Switzerland for the first time since May 1940. He was travelling to Zermatt to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the first ascent of the Matterhorn by the Englishman Edward Whymper. It was Lunn who in 1940 had been horrified by the prospect of the swastika flying over the roofs of Berne. Five years had passed:

  I walked to the terrace at Berne, and against the ebbing twilight I saw my beloved mountains Wetterhorn, Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau, serene and untroubled, untainted by the cruel and evil things which we had been fighting, and still bearing witness to the eternal loveliness which man cannot mar, and which time cannot diminish.51

  The shadow of the swastika had been lifted from the Alps. The Third Reich, as William Shirer would later put it, had passed into h
istory.

  Notes

  1. Hunt.

  2. Mosley, The Reich Marshal.

  3. R. Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Lyons Press, 2005).

  4. Lucas, Last Days.

  5. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

  6. Srodes.

  7. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

  8. Mosley, Dulles.

  9. Weinberg.

  10. Trevor-Roper.

  11. Trevor-Roper.

  12. Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, ‘The President’s News Conference’ (2 May 1945), http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/view-papers.php?pid=29.

  13. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life.

  14. Hunt.

  15. Hunt.

  16. Sayer and Botting.

  17. Sayer and Botting.

  18. Biddle.

  19. Lucas, Last Days.

  20. Molden.

  21. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

  22. John C. McManus, ‘World War II: Race to Seize Berchtesgaden’, World War II, May 2005.

  www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-

  race-to-seize-Berchtesgaden.htm.

  23. Hunt.

  24. Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).

  25. Kenneth Alford, Nazi Plunder: Great Treasure Stories of World War II (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo; London: Eurospan, 2001).

  26. Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1994).

  27. Hunt.

  28. Hastings, All Hell Let Loose.

  29. Ambrose.

  30. Ha-Elion.

  31. Robert B. Persinger, ‘Remembering Ebensee 1945’.

  www.memorial-ebensee.at/