The moment Himmler’s offer was brought to their attention, both Truman and Churchill dismissed it out of hand.25 Yet for reasons that are not clear – possibly because of their disdain for the man they regarded as the second-most brutal war criminal after Hitler – by the morning of 27 April, neither the US president nor the British prime minister had yet replied to Himmler.
Still confident, however, that Eisenhower would negotiate, that afternoon Himmler issued orders for the Prominenten to be moved to a hotel in the Tyrol.
At Reichenau, at around three o’clock, Payne Best noticed a change in the guards’ behaviour. Emerging from the barrack, where they had been closeted for most of the day, they now stood, conferring in groups, at the entrance to the camp. From their conspiratorial stance and the way they kept turning to look over their shoulders at the prisoners, Payne Best sensed something was afoot.
Seeing Stiller, one of the SS officers, on his own, he went over to him. He was on reasonable terms with the young lieutenant, who he judged to be more malleable than the other guards. ‘Button-holing him, I managed to get from him an admission that we were moving again that night to the Italian Tyrol.26 He said that he was taking us to a hotel where we would await the arrival of our troops, and that his orders were to see that our liberation should be effected in an orderly manner. He was, as always, very friendly and polite.’
Lieutenant Stiller was less polite when he spoke to Isa Vermehren. ‘His orders,’ she wrote, ‘were to take us away, to hide us, to bring us to where the enemy wouldn’t find us.’27
These orders were to change overnight.
As the SS loaded the prisoners on to the convoy of buses waiting outside the camp, Count Bernadotte was with General Schellenberg, Himmler’s adjutant, who had flown to Sweden to discuss the contents of the telegram that had arrived from President Truman rejecting Himmler’s offer:
A GERMAN OFFER OF SURRENDER WILL ONLY BE ACCEPTED ON CONDITION THAT IT IS COMPLETE ON ALL FRONTS AS REGARDS GREAT BRITAIN, THE SOVIET UNION AS WELL AS USA. WHEN THESE CONDITIONS HAVE BEEN FULFILLED, THE GERMAN FORCES MUST IMMEDIATELY ON ALL FRONTS LAY DOWN THEIR ARMS TO THE LOCAL ALLIED COMMANDERS. SHOULD RESISTANCE CONTINUE ANYWHERE, THE ALLIED ATTACKS WILL BE RUTHLESSLY CARRIED ON UNTIL COMPLETE VICTORY HAS BEEN GAINED.28
Schellenberg, the bearer of this bad news, was terrified of relaying it to Himmler. He waited until midnight before telephoning his headquarters: ‘I was only able to speak to [Rudolf] Brandt [chief of Himmler’s personal staff], who asked very excitedly what the results were.29 I said that they had been negative, but the Count wanted to meet Himmler in Lübeck to discuss the question of the German armies in the Scandinavian area. This proposal was sharply rejected; I was to report to Himmler alone.
‘I realised that my position with Himmler would now be so difficult that I should have to face the fact that I might be liquidated,’ Schellenberg continued. ‘I therefore arranged for an astrologer from Hamburg to accompany me. Himmler knew this man personally, and thought very highly of him. He could never resist having his horoscope read, and I felt that this would soften his reaction to the disappointment.’
In the event, when Schellenberg met him the following morning, Himmler already knew that Truman had turned down his offer. Recognizing that the approach had been made behind Hitler’s back, the Allies – in the hope of fracturing the relationship between the Führer and his SS chief – had leaked it to Reuters, the international news agency. By dawn on the morning of 28 April, it was dominating newspaper headlines and radio bulletins around the world.
Exactly when Himmler learned that Truman had rejected his offer – whether Brandt told him or whether he was listening to the radio in the dead of that night – it is impossible to know. Nor is there a first-hand account of his reaction to the news. But for the Prominenten, the consequences were catastrophic. Now that there was no opportunity to use them as bargaining chips in possible negotiations with General Eisenhower, their lives were worthless.
At some point between midnight and nine o’clock on the morning of 28 April, Himmler ordered Lieutenant Bader to liquidate all 137 of the prisoners.
Yet Schellenberg’s delay, principally to save his own skin, had given them a stay of execution. Had Himmler learned of Truman’s decision while they were still at Reichenau, they probably would have been killed then and there. As it was, by the time he heard, they had already left the camp and were on their way to the hotel in the Tyrol.
36.
The convoy of seven buses, carrying 137 prisoners and fifty SS and Gestapo guards, had left Innsbruck just after sunset. The mountains were silhouetted against the darkening sky as they drove up through the Wipp Valley to the Brenner Pass. The road, an old carriageway built in the eighteenth century, climbed steeply. Leaving the spring landscape of the Inn Valley behind, they could feel the temperature drop as the buses crawled round the sharp bends, climbing higher and higher towards the snow line.
Unwitting of the true purpose of the journey, Fey stared blankly out of the window. She had come full circle; it was six months since she had left Innsbruck without the children. The memory of that day, which she had tried so hard to shut out of her mind, was made the more vivid by the passing landscape. Looking across the valley, seeing the mountains she had seen from the train on the journey east, reminded her of how she had felt then.
Hundreds of Italians lined the route, slowing the convoy’s progress. Deported to Germany after the Nazis occupied Italy in 1943, they had walked from concentration camps and labour camps that had been liberated by the Allies and were following the mountain road home. Some were pushing carts; others were driving a few cattle, pigs or donkeys. ‘We didn’t need to feel sorry for them,’ SOE officer Peter Churchill noted grimly.1 ‘They were going in the right direction.’
It took three hours, grinding up the old carriage road, to reach the Brenner Pass, which marked the border between Austria and Italy. Here, at the frontier post, the drivers stopped the buses to allow the engines to cool, and the SS got off and disappeared into the ruins of a concrete blockhouse.
There was a full moon and the prisoners could make out tides of rubble and the gaping shell of a bombed-out chapel. All the mountain passes through the Alps were being bombed by the Allies to prevent any large-scale movements of troops and munitions to the Southern Redoubt and, as Falconer described, the prisoners’ overriding fear was that they would be killed by a British or American bomb. ‘We all got out and stood around … We could hear the almost incessant bursting of bombs and rattle of machine guns and shellfire coming from the southern side of the pass.2 Germans moving north told us that traffic was under constant attack from bombers and low-flying aircraft.’
Though it was the dead of night and the snow thick on the ground, the oncoming traffic was heavy. On the other side of the Alps, in a line stretching across the north of Italy from Genoa to Trieste, the Wehrmacht was fighting a rear-guard action against the Allies. Within four days, the German Army in Italy would surrender and, already, soldiers were fleeing across the Brenner to avoid being taken prisoner. ‘Germans in Italy who could raise a car and the necessary petrol were trying desperately to get back to Germany with the intention of submerging into the civilian population,’ Falconer wrote.3 ‘There were lots of superior-looking staff cars, usually filled with five or six very young officers.’
After a few hours, the SS reappeared and the convoy set off again. ‘The main preoccupation for us all,’ Fey recalled, ‘was where were we going? Did the SS even know where we were going? We could see the motorcycle outrider at the head of the convoy. We watched him weaving through the traffic; sometimes he disappeared, accelerating ahead to reconnoitre. Then he would return, stopping the convoy at a crossroads or a turning, where Bader and his sidekick, Lieutenant Stiller, would join him. Much shrugging of shoulders and shaking of heads followed.’ Isa’s verdict was that the SS had no idea of their destination and were making it up as they went along. British POW ‘Jimmy’ James thought Bader�
�s indecision was due to the fact that he ‘had lost touch with his headquarters’.4
But Bader knew exactly where he was taking them. The numerous discussions with the motorcycle outrider were due to the difficulty in pinpointing the hotel’s remote location.
‘His orders were to take us away, to hide us, to bring us to where the enemy wouldn’t find us,’ Isa was told by Lieutenant Stiller before leaving Reichenau. If ever a place fitted these requirements, it was the Hotel Pragser Wildsee – Bader’s destination. Situated deep in the Pustertal (Puster Valley), it stood at the end of a 5-mile no-through road overlooking a small lake. Mountains walled the hotel in on all sides, the sheer rock rising from the lake to the summits – a Cretaceous fortress of sharp points, broken crests and jagged angles.
A perfect hiding place, the Hotel Pragser Wildsee was also the perfect site for a mass execution. Earmarked until the previous evening as a hideout where the Prominenten were to be held while Himmler negotiated with General Eisenhower, now the 180-room hotel was to be Bader’s killing ground.
As the convoy left the Brenner Pass, turning on to the SS 49 – the main road, running in an easterly direction through the Pustertal – the prisoners, still unaware of Bader’s orders, continued to speculate about their destination. Fey was sitting next to Uncle Moppel: ‘He was convinced that the SS were taking us to Bolzano, a provincial capital in South Tyrol where the Nazis were apparently preparing to make a last stand. It seemed a bitter irony if, having survived for so long, we should be killed in the last battle of the war.’
The British POWs were also convinced that Hitler’s famous Alpine Redoubt was the most likely destination and, as the convoy progressed along the valley, Falconer was relieved that the Wehrmacht’s defences were unmanned: ‘As soon as we entered the Pustertal, we could see that it had been prepared to withstand a siege.5 There were tank traps across the valley; pillboxes had been built at strategic points and the mouths of each of the side valleys were similarly defended. But there was no sign of any garrison, SS or otherwise, manning these defences.’
Then, on an open stretch of road between Monguelfo-Tesido and Villabassa, the convoy came to a stop. Turning off to the right, the buses pulled up in a lay-by. On one side, fields, dotted with pretty chalet-style farmhouses, sloped up to conifer woods; on the other, the forest came down to the road and was separated only by a railway track. Some 1,200 feet above, the peaks of the mountains edged the valley.
Bader ordered the SS to form a security cordon around the convoy, and the guards, armed with machine guns, drifted down the road and took up positions at intervals of about 10 yards. Then Bader and Stiller got out.
Fey could see them from where she was sitting: ‘I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they seemed to be arguing. At a certain point, they must have reached a decision since Bader suddenly turned and walked off, leaving Stiller with us.’
The convoy had pulled up just short of a busy crossroads. The signpost pointing in one direction – ‘Pragser Wildsee 8 km’ – was of no significance to Fey and the other 136 prisoners. But the reason for the stop – and the argument between Bader and Stiller – was that the Hotel Pragser Wildsee was full. The day before, despite the fact that Franz Hofer, the Nazi Gauleiter of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg, had assigned the building to Bader’s unit, three Wehrmacht generals and their staff had occupied it and the hotel was now overrun with soldiers.6
It was another stroke of luck for the Prominenten. Just as Schellenberg’s failure to communicate the content of President Truman’s telegram to Himmler before the move from Reichenau had brought a stay of execution, so the Wehrmacht’s occupation of the Hotel Pragser Wildsee prevented Lieutenant Bader from transporting the prisoners to the place where he intended to kill them.
Without that destination, Bader was about to lose control.
No sooner had he set off to contact SS headquarters than two of the prisoners demanded to be let off the bus immediately. They were Colonel von Bonin, a Wehrmacht officer arrested for ordering his troops to retreat during the Soviet winter offensive, and Wilhelm Flügge, a German aerospace engineer considered ‘politically unreliable’. Fey was not aware at the time but, as she later described, the two men now had wind of Bader’s plans to liquidate the group: ‘During the journey over the mountains, Bonin and Flügge, who were sitting at the front behind two SS Sergeants, overheard a conversation between them. Assuming the prisoners were asleep, after a quick glance round, they began discussing the plans to execute us. In fact, Bonin and Flügge were only feigning sleep, and so heard these words: “When are they going to be executed?” Although neither of the two could make out the rest of the conversation, they had heard enough to realise that something had to be done urgently.’
The spire of a church rose from the village of Villabassa, which was about a mile away from the crossroads. Bader was walking in that direction and, waiting until he had rounded a bend in the road, Bonin and Flügge followed him. To their surprise, neither Stiller nor the other guards stopped them. Other prisoners, recognizing that the SS seemed indifferent, were stepping cautiously from the buses. As Bonin and Flügge walked past, they quickly relayed the conversation they had overheard. They also told the men to keep it to themselves for fear of spreading panic.
Their concern meant that Fey, together with other women and children, would spend the greater part of the next thirty-six hours waiting in the lay-by, all of them unaware their lives were hanging in the balance.
In Bader’s absence, the male prisoners were able to scatter. Some, including British POW Jack Churchill, opted to save themselves and disappeared. But the majority selflessly elected to stay in order to protect the vulnerable members of the group. In the search to find a fast means of rescue or escape, five men quickly emerged as leaders. They were Italian partisan Sante Garibaldi; British POW ‘Wings’ Day; General Georg Thomas, implicated in Operation Valkyrie; and Colonel Bonin and Payne Best.
A number of significant, though separate, initiatives were set in train that morning.
The first was a rescue plan, devised by Garibaldi and ‘Wings’ Day.7 Exploiting Bader’s absence, they struck out in the opposite direction to Flügge and Bonin. The convoy had stopped near a level crossing and, by chance, they discovered that the crossing keeper was a sergeant in the South Tyrol Resistance; further, in the forest, a few hundred yards from where the buses were parked, there was a force of 1,000 partisans who could attack the convoy immediately and liberate the prisoners if called upon to do so.
But after the attack, would there be any prisoners left alive to liberate? With the SS guards ringed around the exposed convoy, and the large numbers of women, children and elderly in the group, ‘Wings’ Day and Garibaldi decided that an immediate daylight attack was too risky.8 Instead, they agreed that the ambush would take place the following night, once they had had the chance to work out how they could overpower the SS and give maximum protection to the prisoners when the partisans made their move.
While ‘Wings’ Day and Garibaldi were working out the details of the ambush in the crossing keeper’s hut, Payne Best, who was with the convoy, was pursuing a different tack. Sensing that some of the guards seemed nervous and on edge, he decided to sound them out. ‘I was by this time on pretty good terms with quite a number of our guards, including some of Bader’s men who had been with us at Schönberg, and although they would have shot us if ordered to, they did not seem at all keen to begin – one or two to whom I talked seemed to think that it would not be a bad idea to make a start by shooting Stiller and Bader.’9 Payne Best also spoke to Stiller himself: ‘He was quite obviously scared and inclined to favour our survival in the hope that we might put in a good word for him if he were captured by our troops. He was senior in rank to Bader and had thirty of his own men to Bader’s twenty.’fn1
By the murderous standards of the SS, the two units were of a very different calibre. Bader’s squad, formed of fanatical Nazis, had been set up as a liquidation unit from the be
ginning, whereas Stiller’s men were mostly ex-Wehrmacht soldiers, drafted into the SS after recovering from wounds. Payne Best had consulted a number in Stiller’s unit and was of the view that none of them had ‘the slightest wish to be involved in mass murder’. If Stiller himself could be bribed, he thought it would be possible to persuade the men to help the prisoners escape.
After speaking to the guards, Payne Best sought out industrialist Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht, previously Hitler’s minister of economics. Both men were travelling in the Sippenhäftlinge’s bus and, taking them aside, Payne Best persuaded the two to put up 100,000 Swiss francs as a reward for Stiller if he agreed to direct the convoy to the Swiss frontier and help the prisoners over the border. But Thyssen and Schacht were too frightened to put the offer to Stiller themselves, and Payne Best thought it too dangerous to approach the SS lieutenant with a proposal based on anonymous guarantors.
Into this tense situation, with the rain pouring down, came Anton Ducia. The convoy, now stationary for some hours and parked as it was by the side of the road, had drawn the attention of passing locals. ‘Slowly, the first peasants approached,’ Schuschnigg remembered.10 ‘They kept a certain distance as the rather unfriendly SS guards did not encourage them to come nearer. But secretly they waved to us. Here and there a light of recognition went over their faces. Soon they knew what was going on.’
Schuschnigg was a well-known figure in this part of the Tyrol, which until the end of the First World War had belonged to Austria. Someone had recognized him and alerted Ducia. Ducia immediately left his office in the centre of Villabassa and walked the mile or so out to the convoy.
‘A youngish alert-looking man’, as British POW ‘Jimmy’ James described him, Ducia introduced himself to Lieutenant Stiller as the official billeting officer for the region, with the authority of Franz Hofer, the Nazi Gauleiter.11 What he did not tell him, however, was that he also happened to be the regional commander of the South Tyrol Resistance Movement. Producing his Nazi identity papers, he offered to arrange accommodation in Villabassa for the SS troops and the prisoners. While Stiller cautiously accepted him as an ally, Ducia was obliged to make two more journeys on foot to the village and back before Stiller agreed to a general move to Villabassa.12
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