All during the last months they [the Nazis] had in the most shameful manner persecuted, killed and imprisoned thousands of Jews from all over the country.

MARIA VON TRAPP

1

By mid-October 1940 it had become clear to Shirer in Berlin that the invasions of both Great Britain and Switzerland had indeed been postponed for the remainder of the year. When the spring snows melted, General Guisan might have to remobilise his army. In the meantime, most of his troops could revert to their normal occupations as – in Hitler’s eyes – herdsmen and cheese-makers with some armaments manufacture and spying thrown in. It was a stay of execution, and Shirer won his bets with the Wehrmacht top brass who had been so confident of flying the swastika in Trafalgar Square before the clocks went back. ‘I shall – or should – receive from them enough champagne to keep me all winter.’1 The reprieve, though, had consequences. On 15 October 1940 Shirer noted, ‘This winter the Germans, to show their power to discipline the sturdy, democratic Swiss, are refusing to send Switzerland even the small amount of coal necessary for the Swiss people to heat their homes. The Germans are also allowing very little food into Switzerland, for the same shabby reason. Life in Switzerland this winter will be hard.’2

It was the same throughout the Alps. Six years hence Churchill would remark in his epochal speech in Fulton, Ohio, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.’ For the present just such a totalitarian pall had fallen on the Alps from Mont Blanc to the Grossglockner, the highest peaks in France to the west and in Austria to the east. Only the Alps in Switzerland remained politically free – but they were scarcely unfettered. On 24 October 1940, Shirer was himself in Switzerland on a visit to Berne. ‘A sad, gloomy trip up from Geneva this afternoon. I gazed heavy-hearted through the window of the train at the Swiss Lake Geneva, the mountains, Mont Blanc, the green hills and the marble palace of the League that perished.’3 Darkness had fallen on the Alps, the ‘visible throne of God’.

*

The shadow had fallen over Switzerland’s neighbouring Alpine republic of Austria two and a half years previously. In the Alpine city of Salzburg overlooked by Hitler’s Berghof, a member of the Austrian gentry recalled:

It was March 11, 1938. After supper we went over to the library to celebrate Agathe’s birthday. Someone turned on the radio, and we heard the voice of Chancellor Schuschnigg say:

‘I am yielding to force. My Austria – God bless you!’ followed by the national anthem.

We didn’t understand, and looked at each other blankly.

The door opened and in came Hans, our butler. He went straight to my husband and, strangely pale, said:

‘Herr Korvettenkapitän, Austria is invaded by Germany, and I want to inform you that I am a member of the [Nazi] Party. I have been for quite some time.’

Austria invaded. But that was impossible … At this moment the silence on the radio was broken by a hard, Prussian-sounding voice, saying: ‘Austria is dead: Long live the Third Reich!’.4

So the breaking news of Anschluss was remembered by Maria von Trapp in the city of Mozart.

As the film The Sound of Music portrays with, for Hollywood, surprising fidelity to fact, the von Trapp family was aghast at this turn of events. At first the singers were in a tiny minority. One reason for the invasion was a referendum on Austria’s independence planned by Chancellor Schuschnigg for 13 March 1938. Fearing a pro-Austrian result, Hitler sent in his troops. But when on 15 March the Führer spoke from the balcony of the Hofburg Palace, the seat of the old Habsburg monarchy in Vienna, he was fêted by around a seventh of the country’s population – perhaps a quarter of a million people; when the plebiscite on Anschluss was held three weeks later on 10 April, 4,453,000 of an electorate of 4,481,000 turned out. Of those, 99.73 per cent supported the dissolution of their nineteen-year-old republic.

There were various mitigating circumstances. Not least amongst these was the absence of any opposition party, or indeed support for Austria’s independence from neighbouring Italy or the mother of democracies, Great Britain. It is also more than doubtful as to whether the vote was ‘free and fair’ – as the Austrian resistance leader Fritz Molden later pointed out in his memoirs.5 Still, 99.73 per cent is 99.73 per cent.

The Nazis – both German and Austrian – then began to put the lamentable affairs of the new Alpine province of the German Reich into order. First came the arrest and imprisonment of those deemed by the new chancellor Arthur Seyss-Inquart as unsympathetic to the Nazi cause. Around 20,000 were seized on the night after Anschluss. Some of these enemies of the Reich would eventually find their way to Dachau in Bavaria. As this was 300 miles away from Vienna, that very month Heinrich Himmler – in his capacity as Reichsführer-SS – had the idea of establishing something comparable on Austrian soil. Since 1934 the SS had managed the concentration camp system under a formation known – after their skull-and-crossbones insignia – as the ‘death’s head unit’: SS-Totenkopfverbände. A granite quarry at the confluence of the Danube and Enns was identified as a possible site. The quarry could usefully provide the raw materials for the rebuilding of the Reich along the grandiose lines envisaged by Hitler and his tame architect Albert Speer. The city fathers in Vienna duly endorsed the idea of a camp to accommodate up to 5,000 prisoners. The one proviso was that it would provide cobblestones for the streets of the city of Mahler, Strauss, Wittgenstein and Freud. Work proceeded apace and the site received its first 300 inmates on 8 August 1938. The camp was Mauthausen, which would spawn a series of subcamps all over the Alps of Austria and Bavaria.

Many of their inmates were of course Jews. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had deprived Semites of their citizenship, banned marriage between Jews and other Germans, and forbidden them to practise various professions, so preventing many of them from earning a living. With Anschluss, these laws applied in Austria. Here there was a Jewish population of around 192,000. Shirer recalled their treatment in Vienna in the immediate aftermath of Anschluss:

At this stage in its gestation, Nazi policy on the Jewish question was to encourage emigration. The focus of this programme was the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration). This was set up on 22 August 1938 by the notorious architect of the Holocaust, the thirty-two-year-old Adolf Eichmann, suitably located in the former Rothschild Palace in Vienna, home of the Jewish banking dynasty. In Salzburg, 250 miles west of the capital, the matriarch Maria von Trapp remarked of that summer, ‘All during the last months they [the Nazis] had in the most shameful manner persecuted, killed and imprisoned thousands of Jews from all over the country.’7

*

Still, some Austrians undoubtedly supposed that the Nazis’ crushing of civil liberties in 1938 was compensated by material advancement. Fascism was a child of the Depression that for Austria was epitomised by the collapse of the Creditanstalt Bank in May 1931. The von Trapps themselves were victims of another bank collapse in 1935, the spur to their careers as professional singers. Inflation and unemployment – Arbeitslosigkeit – were the two great evils of the day. In Austria, unemployment at its height stood at one million out of a population of only six million. At the time of Anschluss, about 10 per cent of the workforce or 400,000 were unemployed. Two years later the figure had fallen to 250,000. Amongst the beneficiaries of the economic upturn were the resorts in which Alpine Austria – Carinthia, Upper Austria, Salzburgerland, Tyrol, Vorarlberg – abounded. Here, visitors from within Austria began to return; so too did those from Germany. Hitherto the Nazis had done their best to strangle tourism in Austria by requiring German citizens – the country’s principal visitors – to buy a 1,000-mark visa. This was dropped, and an exchange rate was agreed between Seyss-Inquart and Hitler that made the major resorts attractive destinations. In the winter and summer seasons that immediately followed Anschluss – winter 1938–9, summer 1939, winter 1939–40 – the resorts flourished.

Frau Inge Rainer was born in the Tyrolese resort of Kitzbühel in 1929, and brought up in the pension run by her family. Her memories are vivid of the poverty of the valley in the thirties. ‘Not everyone had a pair of shoes, and I remember one day my father cutting up a small piece of boiled beef on his plate into five pieces. One for himself, one for my mother, and the three remaining for myself and my siblings.’ Anschluss for her was like day after night. ‘When Anschluss came everything changed for the better. Immediately everyone had a job and I joined – you had to join – the Hitler Youth. This was a lovely thing to do. There were competitions in sport, singing, dancing. We had a uniform, went camping, did things that had never happened before.’ For Frau Rainer, the popular enthusiasm for Hitler was entirely understandable. He brought full employment. ‘That’s why everyone voted for him.’8 The resistance leader Fritz Molden commented, ‘a great many Austrians regarded Hitler as a liberator, if not actually a Messiah’.9

*

For some, though, Austria in her new manifestation remained untenable. Georg Ludwig von Trapp – the Captain in The Sound of Music – had been a distinguished submariner in the old Austro-Hungarian Navy. In the course of the First World War, he completed nineteen war patrols and sank 45,669 tons of shipping. Much of it was British.

In 1936 he was approached by the Kriegsmarine to command a new U-boat, and eventually to establish a submarine base on the Adriatic. This he had the courage to turn down. Then in August 1938, the family was told they had been chosen as representatives from the new Ostmark to sing to the Führer on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in April 1939. In a sense this was wonderful news. As Maria von Trapp candidly recorded: ‘This meant we were made. From then on we could sing morning, noon and night and make a fortune!’10 The family spurned the honour. Contrary to Hollywood’s account, they did not set off at night over the Alps to Switzerland – which were inconveniently 180 miles away. To avoid arousing suspicion, they did in fact leave the house in Salzburg in their traditional Austrian garb of lederhosen and dirndls, saying they were going climbing in the Tyrol. In fact they took the train to Italy, then to England. In October 1938 the von Trapps set sail on the SS American Farmer from London for New York, fame and fortune.

They were the lucky ones. When war broke out in September 1939, the Austrians’ unbridled enthusiasm for Hitler had somewhat cooled. A mass anti-Nazi protest of 10,000 in Stephansplatz in Vienna on 7 October 1939 was the beginning and end of such demonstrations. The rally was broken up and the leaders ended up in Mauthausen and Dachau. A year later, as the reality of war began to settle on the Austrian people, a carpenter’s apprentice in Herzogenburg was brave enough to tell the Gestapo, ‘The English have never lost a war, and they are going to win this one as well.’11

2

Back in Berlin, Shirer was beginning to be of the same opinion, for there was wonderful news from the United States. On 6 November 1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected as President for a third term.

For Shirer, the news was particularly welcome because of a story that had been brought to his ears the previous month and which he was now investigating. It had horrified a man inured to the evil of the country he was covering, and it was entirely emblematic of the Nazis’ rape of the Alps.

Irmgard Paul was born in 1934 and brought up in Berchtesgaden. In 1930 her father had taken a job in the Bavarian resort in a workshop for hand-painted porcelain. Her mother had followed him there, and the couple married in 1932. At the time, the place where they settled – Obersalzberg – knew Hitler and his Berghof but had yet to become subsumed into the Nazi HQ. In 1933 Hitler became chancellor and the Nazis’ grip on the country tightened very quickly. Irmgard remembered that

when I was born into our mountain paradise the Nazis were in full control of all branches of government, the military, and the media. And they had begun to infiltrate all aspects of life and to dictate the everyday details of family decisions: our education, the books and the news we read, how we greeted one another – even the names parents gave their children.13

As a three-year-old in the summer of 1937 Irmgard was taught by her father the straight-armed Nazi salute and the greeting ‘Heil Hitler’. This was fortuitous. That autumn the family took the opportunity of a blissfully warm day to walk up to Obersalzberg to see the newly enlarged Berghof. When they reached the fence that divided the Führer from his people, they joined a crowd of pilgrims hoping for a glimpse of their leader.

Naturally enough, the young Irmgard was thrilled by this encounter and felt herself lucky to live so close to the Führer. Yet there were disturbing undercurrents. Her parents and her grandparents were deeply divided over Hitler. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, the squat, bull-necked convicted murderer who had cast himself as Hitler’s secretary, had had Obersalzberg cleared of many of its old settlements – and inhabitants – to create the Führersperrgebiet, the ‘leader’s territory’. Eighteen farms, three inns, a hospital for children, several hotels and dozens of private homes and small businesses were cleared at the shortest of notice, their owners offered a pittance in compensation. Irmgard’s grandfather saw this as a symbol of the Nazis’ greed and power; her father regarded it as a scheme for creating jobs for the Obersalzberg locals: building the new SS barracks, refurbishing the Hotel Platterhof and – down in Berchtesgaden itself – entirely remodelling the railway station on resplendent lines suited to the residence of the head of state.

The story of the Dehmel family played to the grandfather’s side of the argument. The Dehmel children were neighbours and playmates of Irmgard. There were four of them. The youngest was mildly disabled, a ‘somewhat peculiar-looking, slow child with very small eyes and seemingly little response to the world around her’.15 This was Hildegard, who was treated with great patience and kindness by her two sisters. Another young sibling was too sickly to be allowed out. One day, Irmgard overheard her mother and aunt gossiping: ‘One of the Dehmel children, the mongoloid one that’s never outside, was picked up by the Health Service a few weeks ago, and now they’ve said she’s dead from a cold.’ This was the story that Shirer had heard in Berlin. Irmgard continued, ‘What I did not know, and what the adults refused to believe or face, was that Hitler’s euthanasia program, while still shrouded in secrecy and as much as possible hidden from the general public, was up and running.’ On 25 November 1940 Shirer noted, ‘I have at last got to the bottom of these mercy killings. It’s an evil tale. The Gestapo, with the knowledge and approval of the German government, is systematically putting to death the mentally deficient population of the Reich.’16 It was the beginnings of the Nazis’ child euthanasia scheme that would eventually lead to the deaths of up to 6,000 children.

The Dehmels at Obersalzberg were prudent and courageous. After August 1939 doctors were obliged to register with a Reich committee those with serious hereditary and congenital illnesses. Having lost one child in suspicious circumstances, the Dehmels were determined not to lose another. By avoiding sending their remaining disabled daughter to school, using public health facilities, or doing anything else to draw her to the attention of the state, they succeeded. Under Hitler’s nose in Berchtesgaden, Hildegard survived.

As to Irmgard, she will have much to tell us of the next five years.

3

In the French Alps, many found themselves in comparably precarious positions.

By the terms of the June 1940 armistice between Germany and France, the country was to be governed by Marshal Pétain from Vichy, the spa town in the Auvergne. The watchwords of the revolution – Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – were discarded and in their place came Travail, Famille, Patrie: Work, Family, Fatherland. Pierre Laval commented, ‘Parliamentary democracy has lost the war; it must disappear, ceding its place to an authoritarian, hierarchical, national and social regime.’17 His objective, said his rival and sometime Prime Minister Léon Blum, ‘was to cut all the roots that bound France to its republican and revolutionary past’.18

As well as the centuries being rolled back, the country was hacked in two. The extent of the German advance in the north in the summer of 1940 dictated her division along a line drawn between Tours and Dijon. The Atlantic coast – and its strategic ports soon to be used by U-boats – came under direct Nazi rule. This was the Zone Occupée, representing about three-fifths of France. The southern zone or Zone Libre included the Mediterranean coastline, the Rhône valley, and the Alps to the east that ran from Nice on the Riviera coast to Geneva. In both zones, the free press disappeared overnight, civil liberties went the same way, the phone network was cut, and the cost imposed by the Franco-German armistice of paying for the occupying army led at once to the rationing of foodstuffs; motorised transport became a thing of the past and cities and villages that were once neighbours became isolated once more. As to the people, Shirer commented, ‘There was a complete collapse of French society and of the French soul.’

In the Alps themselves, Vichy joined forces with the Italians. As part of the Franco-Italian armistice that had followed Mussolini’s Alpine campaign, a ten-mile demilitarised zone was set up along the 300-mile Alpine border of the Rhône-Alpes and the Alpes-Maritimes, and the Italians were allowed to retain the modest advances into French territory that they had made. For many of the French in the Alps, faced with the cataclysm of defeat and these two new grim faces of authority, it was a time for the deepest of soul-searching. In the Dauphiné capital of Grenoble it was observed that ‘Il s’établit alors sur Grenoble et sa région, une sorte de grand calme, où vont s’étouffer les échos du dehors. La stupeur de l’effondrement national dissipée, la plupart des jeunes hommes retenus captifs, toute vie obéit à une tentation de repliement, à un besoin de méditation, peut-être de pénitence.’19

To the Alps also came the Jews. In the early days of the occupation, to be Jewish in France meant the confiscation of property, denial of the use of radios and visits to the cinema or theatre, and the requirement to wear a yellow star. Following the granting by the Reich of full powers to Pétain on 10 July 1940, this had precipitated a great exodus from the Occupied Zone to the Zone Libre; of the 350,000 Jews then living in France, around four out of five fled to where they supposed they would be safer under the jurisdiction of Vichy. Nice, capital of the Alpes-Maritimes, was the seaside city that at the time still retained some belle époque charm; it was also a port, an emergency exit to North Africa and the French Arab colonies of Syria, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Likewise, the settlements further north up the Alpine chain in the Rhône-Alpes – Grenoble, Chambéry and Annecy – were conveniently close to Italy and Switzerland. For the French Jews, the Alps seemed to mean safety.

Then, in the autumn of 1940, Pétain had met Hitler at Montoire-sur-le-Loire. It was from here that the Marshal made his infamous broadcast of his intention to co-operate – collaborate – with the Nazis. Indeed, by the time of the meeting on 30 October 1940, his new regime had already begun to show itself in its true colours. Jews had been denaturalised in the first few days of Vichy. The Statut des Juifs, promulgated in the month of the meeting, excluded Jews from the press, commerce, industry, and government administration. For some Frenchmen this was a perfectly welcome development, a riposte to the failure of the Third Republic, liberalism and the Left. Shortly after France’s capitulation, one of the men who would lead the resistance in Nice, Ange-Marie Miniconi, overheard a comment in the city’s railway station that was not unrepresentative: ‘Thank Christ we lost the war – otherwise we might still be governed by those left-wing motherfuckers of the Front Populaire.’20 For others the new authoritarianism was far less welcome. From the centre of Orthodox Jewry in Nice, the Hotel Roosevelt, a newspaper reported: ‘One could see rabbis in their traditional apparel walking through the streets, listen to Talmudic discussions and hear the old tunes of Hebrew prayer and Talmudic study.’21 By November of 1940, these people in the Alpes-Maritimes and their co-religionists further north in the Rhône-Alpes felt, day after day, the steady closing of a vice.

4

Shirer was now reaching the end of his tether as a war correspondent in Berlin. His experience of covering the rise to power of the Nazis since 1934 had given him what he described as a ‘deep, burning hatred of all that Nazism stands for’.22 As a foreign correspondent and US citizen he was not in principle in danger, but the Nazis kept a close and increasingly watchful ear on his CBS broadcasts. His wife and daughter in Geneva seemed equally vulnerable, especially as rumours of the invasion plans of OKW for Switzerland ebbed and flowed over the summer and autumn of 1940. There was also the increasing difficulty of day-to-day life in Switzerland. As elsewhere in the Alps, life in the democracy was indeed getting hard.

*

Here, Switzerland had much in common with Britain. Both populations consumed considerably more than they produced, and both were dependent on supplies from elsewhere to keep the body and soul of their populations together; Switzerland was also deficient in virtually all raw materials. With Europe now closed for business, Britain became dependent on the Atlantic convoys for sustenance, Switzerland on her – now uniformly hostile – neighbours. Coal was the country’s principal source of energy. Before the war, Switzerland had bought almost 300,000 tons per annum from Britain, some 1.8 million tons from Germany. Immediately war broke out, the Allies instituted a blockade against the neutral European countries, assuming that anything that reached the neutrals would or could eventually find its way to Germany. Trade to these countries was controlled by requiring that all shipments destined for them were issued with a stamp of authority known as a navigation certificate. Allied agents in the world’s ports enforced this regime. Coal supplied from Britain to Switzerland ceased, and the Swiss became wholly dependent on the Germans.

Like the Allies, the Reich used this situation as a tactic in warfare. On 18 June 1940, just as France was falling, the Reich cut off coal supplies to Switzerland entirely. This was a negotiating move to get the Swiss to settle on terms favourable to Germany. Ultimately the Reich would supply coal to Switzerland because it needed the products of that energy, not least in the form of armaments, chemicals, precision instruments. The results of the Allies’ and the Axis’s combined efforts were nevertheless as Shirer predicted. The Swiss that winter of 1940–41 were cold. Paul Ladame was a Swiss army officer whose job was to boost morale by producing weekly newsreels. ‘My wife, Andreina, who was then a young mother with two babies, remembers that coal was so severely rationed that they [herself and her neighbours] would not heat their houses any more, and that their children were freezing. They remember how difficult it was to heat the kitchen oven with paper and wood – there was no gas, no electricity.’23

Like the British, the Swiss also went hungry. This was an issue addressed by the distinguished Swiss agronomist Friedrich Wahlen in a speech in Zurich on 15 November 1940. Before the war the Swiss nation had imported about half its food, largely from willing partners in trade at its borders: France, Italy, Germany and Austria. Now the Swiss were in danger of starvation, and were obliged to dig not so much for victory as for neutrality. Wahlen proposed increasing the area under cultivation from 180,000 to 500,000 hectares, so raising the country’s self-sufficiency from 52 per cent to 75 per cent over a period of five years. When the plan was unveiled in Zurich it was billed as the Anbauschlacht or growing battle. Football fields, town squares, public gardens, private yards and even window boxes were to be put under the plough; flower beds were to be turned into tomato or potato fields; hens, rabbits and goats were to be found lodgings on balconies and verandas in cities; and labour from cities was to be drafted to the fertile central midlands and to the Alps. With many of the men drafted into the army, some of the workers would be women, the equivalent of the British Land Girls.

In due course, Wahlen’s plan would blossom. In the meantime there was rationing. It had begun on 30 October 1939, when coupons were introduced for commodities including sugar, pasta, rice, wheat, flour, oats, butter and oil. On 1 December 1940, shortly after Wahlen’s speech, textiles, shoes, soap and detergent were added. When Wahlen’s plan began to bite, cheese, eggs, fresh meat and milk would follow. Ladame recalled, ‘Everything was so severely rationed to about a third of regular peacetime consumption. Rations went down to one pound of meat a month per person, one egg every two weeks, one pound of black bread a week, no sugar, no salt, no fruit.’24 This was privation rather than starvation, but it had a psychological impact too. As Shirer noted in Berlin on 12 November 1940, ‘Coffee, ever since it has become impossible to buy it in Germany, has assumed weird importance in one’s life. The same with tobacco.’25

With rationing came the blackout. Like the country itself, Swiss airspace was technically neutral. In practice it was violated by both the Luftwaffe and the Allies. During the Battle of France in 1940 there were a series of encounters between the Luftwaffe and Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters rather rashly sold by the Germans to the Swiss before the war. Planes on both sides were shot down in real or imagined violations of Swiss airspace. By the autumn the RAF had begun small-scale raids on targets in both Germany and Italy. A flight of Whitleys bombed Italy on 10 June 1940, on 23 September 119 bombers hit Berlin, and on 16 November 131 bombers targeted Hamburg. The bombers occasionally overflew Switzerland partly because it was the most direct route, and partly because her still illuminated cities were aids to navigation. Naturally the Luftwaffe objected, demanding a blackout. In the course of the autumn RAF overflights became more numerous and German demands became noisier.

Eventually, on 9 November 1940, President Pilet-Golaz gave in. For Paul Ladame:

The Swiss resorts were no different. In Zermatt, right on the Italian border, the villagers were required to cover their windows with black paper at night – and to store enough food to last for six months.

The final thing rationed was truth – proverbially the first casualty of war. Naturally enough, Switzerland was awash with newsreels, magazines and newspapers produced by its German, Italian and French neighbours. With the borders closed by the Wehrmacht from the summer of 1940, British and American papers and newsreels – which told a very different story – became virtually unobtainable. Switzerland’s own press was censored as early as 1934, when the federal government had caved in to German demands. It issued a decree enabling the Council to sanction any newspapers that endangered relations between Switzerland and other countries: expressions deemed offensive to foreign leaders were banned. In practice, this was to an extent ignored. With the outbreak of war, the Council redoubled its efforts and directed the army’s division of press and radio to monitor such output, to warn, impose sanctions and if required to suppress publication. The upshot was effectively the suspension of a free and independent press.

*

For Shirer, as the winter of 1940–41 got under way, the situation was worse.

Reichsminister Goebbels’s propaganda ministry officials controlled the production facilities that enabled him to broadcast, and had the power to expel him if he was unduly critical of the regime. On the outbreak of war, they introduced a regime of censorship preventing the dissemination of material that might compromise military operations. When the Luftwaffe’s bombing of England and the reciprocal RAF raids on Germany got going, the position deteriorated. Whereas Shirer’s colleagues in London – notably his boss Ed Murrow – were free to broadcast details of the Blitz, Shirer was unable to report the raids on German cities or to question the veracity of statements issued by the Nazis: for instance, about Luftwaffe and RAF losses during the Battle of Britain, bombing casualties in Hamburg and Berlin – or infringements of Swiss airspace.

As the autumn of 1940 progressed, Shirer was pressurised to broadcast material issued by Goebbels he knew to be misleading; he was also tipped off that the Gestapo was attempting to ensnare him on a charge of spying. This carried the penalty of death. With his family in jeopardy in Geneva and the emasculation of his job in Berlin, the game was no longer worth the candle. ‘I think my usefulness here is about over. Until recently, despite the censorship, I think I’ve been able to do an honest job of reporting from Germany. But it has become increasingly difficult and at present it has become impossible …You cannot call the Nazis “Nazis” or an invasion an “invasion.” You are reduced to re-broadcasting the official communiqués’.27

On 23 October 1940, his wife and daughter left Geneva for the United States, via Lisbon. On 5 December, Shirer himself left Germany for good. Following an emotional reunion with Ed Murrow in London, on 13 December he returned to a United States just a year away from Pearl Harbor.

5

Early in the New Year of 1941, with Berchtesgaden slumbering under a winter blanket of snow, Hitler summoned his three service chiefs to the Berghof. In the rarefied atmosphere of the Bavarian mountain, he was in a bullish mood. He was anxious to help Italy, embroiled in the Axis campaign in Greece at the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula. Then there was England. Despite the Reich’s failure to invade Britain in the autumn, the Führer was convinced she was at the end of her tether: she would never regain any position on the Continent and was only hanging on in the vain hope of the United States or the Soviet Union entering the war on her side. Hitler thought this situation had grave implications. His own ally Stalin he saw as a pragmatist who would throw Germany to the lions if he regarded it as advantageous to the USSR.

The Balkans, then, were uppermost in Hitler’s mind; after the Balkans, Russia. Curiously enough, these two concerns keep us in the Alps.

Since the golden years of the winter sports movement, St Moritz had been the doyen of the resorts. Famed for its waters since the sixteenth century, the little lakeside village in the Engadine in eastern Switzerland had won fame as a climbing centre in the 1850s, and as one of the pioneering winter resorts ten years later. By 1873 the winter season rivalled the summer and in 1885 the famous Cresta toboggan run was founded. In the winter of 1913 the Cresta was patronised by the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. After the war the village reached the apogee of its fame, welcomed Americans exploring Europe in large numbers for the first time, and in 1928 hosted the Winter Olympics.

Now it was Christmas 1945, and at the Palace Hotel in Via Serlas the sun was back in the heavens and all seemed right with the world. Outside the foyer stood a young man in a brass-buttoned outfit who might have been taken as a porter – and certainly was by the American who was driven up in the taxi from the railway station. According to the historian of the Palace Hotel:

Yugoslavia was created on 1 December 1918 by the union of a ragbag of provinces of the dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire and the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. It bordered on Italy and Austria in the north, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to the east, Greece and Albania to the south. It was here that the Alps ceased to be a continuous range but rather became a series of eruptions that ran through what are now Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania: the Balkans. When the young King Peter encountered the American in St Moritz, he had just been deposed by the begetter of some of the bitterest fighting in the Alps in the course of the entire war. This was Marshal Tito, otherwise Josip Broz.

It had all begun in the Berghof.

There the regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul – Peter’s uncle – had been summoned by the Führer on 4 March 1941. The Prince was an Anglophile, educated in Oxford, married to a sister of the Duchess of Kent, and a close student of Tatler. Yugoslavia, he knew, was like Switzerland: it lay between the Reich and an object of its interest, in this case Greece. There, British forces were threatening both the Italian troops in Albania and the joint Italian and German forces in North Africa. Hitler also feared that an Allied front above Salonika in northern Greece could jeopardise the grandest of his designs, Barbarossa: the plan to invade the Soviet Union.

With just such threats and blandishments as Chancellor Schuschnigg had been subjected to on the eve of Anschluss, the regent reluctantly agreed to join the common cause of the Axis. On 25 March 1941, in Vienna, the agreement was duly signed by the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Dragiša Cvetković.

Yet not all was well in the state of Yugoslavia. Twenty-four hours after the signing, the regency found itself deposed by the seventeen-year-old King Peter, who had led a popular uprising supported by the air force and the army – and largely engineered by the British. He had escaped the attentions of his uncle’s conspirators by sliding down a drainpipe. ‘Chips’ Channon was an old friend of the regent. His diary for 27 March reads:

Although King Peter’s new regime proposed a non-aggression pact with Germany, it would not be a puppet of Hitler’s desires. Hitler was beside himself with rage at the coup, and rushed out Directive No. 25 on the invasion of Yugoslavia, Operation Marita. Executed on 6 April 1941, the Luftwaffe razed Belgrade to the ground, killing thousands. Within a week the Wehrmacht – allied to Italian and Hungarian forces – had secured the capital, the country, and the twenty-eight-division Yugoslav army. The King escaped to Greece, and his country was divided. Croatia became a Nazi state ruled by the fascist Ustaše, the Wehrmacht occupied Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the sweepings were taken by Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

In this way the eastern outworks of the Alps fell to Hitler, and his domination of the chain became virtually complete. With it came the cold, hunger, repression, persecution, restriction of freedom of expression, speech and movement, concentration camps and euthanasia programmes that the Reich had already brought to much of the Alps. Yet one of the consequences of Operation Marita was less expected. ‘The beginning of the Barbarossa operation’, Hitler informed his warlords, ‘will have to be postponed for up to four weeks.’30 It was a delay of incalculable and perhaps even fatal results for the Third Reich.

Notes

1. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

2. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

3. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

4. Maria Augusta Trapp, The Sound of Music: The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (London: White Lion, 1976).

5. Fritz Molden, Exploding Star: A Young Austrian Against Hitler (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978).

6. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

7. Trapp.

8. Interview with author, 2012.

9. Molden.

10. Trapp.

11. Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Austrians (London: HarperCollins, 1996).

12. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

13. Irmgard Hunt, On Hitler’s Mountain: My Nazi Childhood (New York: William Morrow, 2005).

14. Hunt.

15. Hunt.

16. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

17. Ian Ousby, Occupation: The Ordeal of France, 1940–1944 (London: John Murray, 1997).

18. Ousby.

19. Pierre Giolitto, Grenoble 1940–1944 (Paris: Perrin, 2001).

20. Peter Leslie, The Liberation of the Riviera (London: Dent, 1981).

21. Jim Ring, Riviera (London: John Murray, 2004).

22. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

23. Paul Ladame, Defending Switzerland: Then and Now (Caravan Books, 1999).

24. Ladame.

25. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

26. Ladame.

27. Shirer, Berlin Diary.

28. Raymond Flower, The Palace: A Profile of St Moritz (London: Debrett’s Peerage, 1982).

29. Rhodes James (ed.).

30. Shirer, Rise and Fall.