The slightest frontier incident could force us to take such countermeasures as would set fire to the powder keg and lead to far-reaching operations.

GENERAL HENRI GUISAN

1

While the republic of Ossola was fighting for its life, one of its supposed supporters, Allen Dulles, was whisked out of Switzerland for a month’s conference with his operational and political masters.

He was now altogether worthy of their attention as the key player in what had become a 15,000-person, $52 million worldwide operation. In the early days of September 1944, his trip took him first over the newly opened Swiss frontier into the Rhône valley – not far from the Vercors – and from there to war-torn London. Then from 14 to 21 September he was in Washington. Here he was reunited with his wife Clover and his brother, John Foster Dulles. His wife quizzed him on his mistresses, word of whom had been hurried to Washington; his brother was working as chief foreign policy adviser to Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate challenging Roosevelt for the presidency. Dulles himself, at the same time as being briefed by his chief ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, played the amused observer of the election campaign, now in full swing. He found Capitol Hill awash with facts, views, gossip, opinions and schemes less for winning the war than the post-war reconstruction of Europe – particularly of Germany.

These plans had many scribes. One of the earliest was Churchill, who had proposed at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 a division of the Reich into two: between Prussia and the Alpine Austria-Bavaria; the industrial Ruhr and Westphalia would be under international control. In Washington, the proposals of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau naturally had greater currency. These called for a more radical demilitarisation, partitioning and deindustrialisation of Germany. This scheme was being vigorously debated by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Octagon conference in Quebec while Dulles was in Washington. Either would have nicely transformed the geopolitics of the Alps.

On the spymaster’s return to Berne in early November 1944, Dulles discovered that all this planning had been somewhat premature. It was true that the reopening of the Swiss border made his journey to Switzerland a very different affair from his hair’s-breadth arrival on 7 November 1942, just as Operation Anton snapped the border shut. But the war in Europe had yet to be won. In London, as Dulles had noticed both on his outbound and inbound visits, the euphoria of late August 1944 experienced by ‘Chips’ Channon had been much dampened by the perpetual whiff of cordite from the Vergeltungswaffen ‘revenge weapons’ raining on the capital. On the Continent itself, the Western Allied armies, having romped through southern and western France, were now finding the going far from good. They were at the end of their long supply chains, short of food and ammunition, slowed by winter weather that had arrived six weeks early, and by finding the rearguard of the Wehrmacht more entrenched every mile it was pushed closer to its home frontiers. Operation Market Garden, the attempt to short-circuit resistance and seize a key bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem, had failed just before Dulles’s return to Switzerland. In Italy, Field Marshal Alexander’s forces were making heavy work of Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s Gothic Line in the Apennines north of Florence. Just as Dulles got back to Berne, on 10 November 1944, Alexander made a controversial public announcement that suggested he was digging in for the winter and would resume hostilities in the spring. For the winter, he and his armies would be en vacances, it seemed.

The implications of Alexander’s difficulties in the Apennines were lost neither in Washington, London nor Berne itself. The extent to which Kesselring had been able to hold up the Allies’ advance first for five months at Monte Cassino and now at the Gothic Line was food for thought. The moral was simple. It was of the extreme difficulty of dislodging a determined defender in mountainous terrain that might have been designed for defence: where he who holds the higher ground can repel a much larger and better-armed force down below. If this was true in the Italian Apennines, it would be doubly so in the far more formidable mountain chain to the north: the 800-mile, 15,000-foot-high rock wall that divided Europe, the great edifice that lay between Alexander’s forces and the Reich. It was for these reasons that the eyes of both General Patton and the Third Army in the west, and the Red Army in the east, were turning increasingly away from Berlin towards Berchtesgaden and Bavaria.

It was originally anticipated that the Red Army and the Western Allies would eventually join hands on the river Oder. This was the pre-war border between Germany and Poland, around a hundred miles east of Berlin. The Reich would accordingly be split in half by the Allies. For a regime that had already displayed its determination to fight on, this would dictate flight south by the Reich government to what was in any case recognised by the Allies as an established headquarters in Berchtesgaden. It now seemed self-evident that modest German forces could hold such a bastion for some time. According to the Allied headquarters, SHAEF, Kesselring commanded more than a million troops in northern Italy, Bavaria and the Tyrol. Who knew how long the war might last if he disposed his million troops in these Alps? Some Allied planners thought a year; others supposed still longer, perhaps till 1947.

Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was in fact planning this retreat into the mountain fastness just as Dulles was getting his feet back under the desk in the Herrengasse in November 1944. The Reichsführer’s staff worked up the detail with the Gauleiters of the areas concerned: Franz Hofer of the Tyrol, South Tyrol, Trentino and Vorarlberg, and Karl Rainer of Carinthia, Austria’s most southerly and principally Alpine state. The citadel was dubbed the Alpenfestung – the Alpine Fortress.

Goebbels, seizing on rumours already circulating, then set up a publicity unit dedicated to ventilating an idea as yet confined to paper. Blueprints, construction plans, logistical arrangements and troop movements were all leaked to the credulous; sketchy plans were turned into concrete emplacements at absolutely no cost. On 13 December 1944, the readers of the Evening Independent in Florida were told: ‘NAZIS PREPARED FOR FIVE YEARS’ UNDERGROUND WARFARE’. The Associated Press correspondent Wes Gallagher told his readers:

Other papers with rather wider circulations carried similar stories. It was a clever campaign. It was widely believed.

*

For the Swiss in Berne this was obviously a matter a good deal closer to home than it was in either Washington or London. From the point of view of the head of Switzerland’s armed forces, General Guisan, the risk of the Nazi Alpenfestung was that the Reich would invade Switzerland to secure its south-western flank, incorporating Switzerland’s own fortified Redoubt into a larger Alpine defence system. This had been the fear behind the March Alarm of 1943.

This was not Guisan’s only concern. As the Allied armies moved inexorably closer to the borders of the Reich from east, west and south there was little to prevent their onward march into his own country; and there was also some military logic. The principal barrier to General Patton’s forces in the west was the Siegfried Line or Westwall. This was the Wehrmacht’s Maginot Line, a defence system running 390 miles due south from Kleve on the Reich’s border with Holland down to Weil am Rhein – close to Basel – on the frontier with Switzerland. Operation Market Garden was an attempt to leapfrog the Line.

At the Moscow Conference in October 1944, Stalin brightly proposed to Churchill the idea of the Allies invading Switzerland as a way to turn the southern end of the Line. This was firmly repudiated by Churchill. It would both contravene Switzerland’s neutrality and be counterproductive. In the meantime, the idea had sufficient currency for him to write to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on 3 December:

Kind words, Guisan would have thought. But words butter no parsnips nor deflect great armies. The war that had ranged all over the European continent, from Norway’s North Cape to Gibraltar, from Helsinki to Istanbul, now seemed likely to culminate not in the Reich’s capital of Berlin, but in the high Alps. That Christmas of 1944, Switzerland again had to be on its guard.

2

In these circumstances intelligence from the Austrian and Bavarian Alps was suddenly at a premium, so it was timely that a sunburnt young Austrian called Fritz Molden now made his appearance at Dulles’s Herrengasse HQ. The twenty-year-old was a rare thing: a member of a successful resistance cell in the Reich.

By the time of the Normandy and Riviera landings in June and August 1944, resistance in Europe had become virtually a mass movement. There were thought to be 100,000 combatant partisans in Italy, a similar number in France, and perhaps five times that figure in Yugoslavia. Irrespective of the punitive actions of the Nazi occupying forces, resistance was now a major fact of daily life for the inhabitants of the occupied countries; it was an identified priority for the Wehrmacht; it was a focus for active support by the Allies. No such situation existed in the Reich itself, either in the Alpine regions of Austria and Bavaria or elsewhere.

This is not to say there was no dissent. It certainly existed: in the Church, the Left, in the intelligentsia, above all in the Wehrmacht. ‘There was always resistance, both open and covert, in all social and occupational strata.’3 It was muted for three reasons: the fact that most Germans accepted that Hitler’s government was legally legitimate; the fact that it had rescued many of its people from the desperate economic straits of the early thirties; the fact that the Reich’s security services made resistance tantamount to suicide. It was only in the closed society of the armed services that the Gestapo found it difficult to keep the lid on the words, thoughts and deeds of the opponents of the Nazi regime. And of course it was only here that there was resistance of any substance. Before the tragedy of Claus von Stauffenberg’s 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, the White Rose movement had been virtually the only eye-catching effort to repudiate Nazism.

*

This had erupted in the Nazis’ heartland, the Bavarian capital of Munich.

Here a handful of students at the university produced and distributed a series of leaflets denouncing the regime and calling for active opposition to tyranny. They were supported by their philosophy professor Kurt Huber. In the first appeal in June 1942 they presciently wrote: ‘Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day?’ The leaflets – there were six in all – were distributed in the Alpine cities of Austria and Bavaria: Bregenz, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Graz and of course Munich itself. The defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 inspired the last and most vitriolic denunciation. The ‘day of reckoning’ had come, it announced. It described Hitler as ‘the most contemptible tyrant our people has ever endured’.4

The leaflets had been passed on by the Gestapo to Paul Giesler, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, and their source as the university of Munich had been identified. It was outrageous that this should happen in the capital of the Nazi movement, indeed within a rifle shot of the site of the legendary Beer Hall Putsch. A call to order was essential.

According to our old friend the American war correspondent William Shirer, that February of 1943 Giesler assembled the student body in Munich. He suggested that the men not already drafted into the Wehrmacht should undertake work supportive of the war, and that the women should bear a child each year to boost the population of the Fatherland. He added tactfully, ‘If some of the girls lack sufficient charm to find a mate, I will assign each of them one of my adjutants … and I can promise her a thoroughly enjoyable experience.’5 The Munich students, once enthusiastic Nazis, were incensed, threw out Giesler’s SS and Gestapo minders, and – that afternoon – demonstrated openly against the Reich. This was utterly unprecedented.

On 19 February two of the key members of the group, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were seen by a university caretaker distributing leaflets. They were arrested, interrogated by the Gestapo, tortured, and tried for political offences in the Volksgerichtshof. This was the people’s court, where justice was the last thing dispensed. The Scholls and a handful of others were found guilty of treason in trials on 22 February and 19 April 1943. All – including Huber – were beheaded. Hans Scholl commented during his interrogation: ‘I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by so doing.’6 The Scholls’ parents were invoiced for court and execution expenses.

*

Across the old border from Bavaria in Austria, there were also some pockets of resistance in the Alps.

The original Austrian dissenters comprised a motley crew of Catholics – like the Scholls – monarchists, Christian Democrats and communists. All had gone to ground after Anschluss in 1938, the demonstration in Vienna’s Stefansplatz in October 1939 excepted; all were subsequently enthused by the Allies’ Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943. Signed by the foreign secretaries of the Big Three – the USA, UK and USSR – this declared Anschluss null and void, and guaranteed that the union of Germany and Austria would be reversed: that the Alpine state would recover her independence from Germany. This stimulated the development in Austria of ‘O5’, a military resistance movement based in Vienna, the Tyrol and the Vorarlberg, the name standing for OE, i.e. Österreich, Austria (E being the fifth letter in the alphabet).

One of the leaders of O5 was the Viennese publisher and historian Ernst Molden. His son Fritz, born in 1924, was a counterpart of the Scholls in Vienna: a member of an anti-fascist student group. Rather than beheading, Molden’s reward for dissent was to be sent to a punishment battalion on the Eastern Front. He deserted, convinced the military authorities that he was dead, assumed a new identity, got himself sent to the Italian front and eventually crossed into the Swiss canton of Ticino in March 1944. Just as he was settling down in a railway carriage to enjoy the Swiss newspapers, he was picked up by the Swiss border police. When he eventually persuaded his interrogators of his bona fides as a member of the Austrian resistance, a deal was struck.

Much as General Guisan was concerned with the Allies trespassing on Swiss territory, so too he remained on his guard against the Wehrmacht. Leaving aside the threat of being incorporated into the rumoured Nazi Alpenfestung, there was also the danger of German troops taking a short cut home from Italy. As Molden himself put it in his memoirs, ‘The further the Allies advanced in Italy, the greater was the danger that the German forces, and in particular the German South West Army Group in Italy, would simply ignore Switzerland’s neutrality and march across the country.’7 After all, for Kesselring’s Heeresgruppe C (Army Group C), the country was the shortest and most direct route between north-west Italy and Germany. Guisan was accordingly hungry for information on German troop movements to the west, south and east: in France, Italy and Austria. The agreement made between Molden and the head of Swiss intelligence Colonel Max Waibel was simple. The Swiss would facilitate the movement of Molden and his O5 associates across the Alpine border into Switzerland in exchange for military intelligence. This, Molden held, ‘marked a crucial turning point in the history of the Austrian resistance movement. For it provided us with our first opportunity of maintaining regular and reliable contact with the free world.’8

For Molden this was the beginning of a desperately dangerous year. In the guise of Sergeant Hans Steinhauser of the Wehrmacht’s 133rd Infantry Regiment he undertook a series of trips into Austria. His task was to establish a network of O5 recruits to assist the passage of the Western Allies when they reached the southern and western borders of Austria. Over the summer and autumn of 1944, as the Allies landed in Normandy and the Riviera, Molden set up links in Vienna. He also established cells in the more westerly Alpine cities of Salzburg and Innsbruck, both of which were major communication hubs and therefore strategic targets for the Allies. Just before Dulles’s trip to London and Washington, Molden was introduced to the pipe-smoking US spymaster in the Herrengasse. ‘My first impression of Allen Welsh Dulles was that of a somewhat delicate but wiry grey-haired man, broad featured, with a trim moustache and a lofty forehead. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses his clear, grey-blue eyes were alive with interest’.9

Like the Swiss, Dulles was certainly interested in forging links with the Austrian resistance, not least because of the prospect of the Nazis decamping south from Berlin to the Reich’s Alps. According to Molden, ‘Like everyone else, whether in the Allied, the German or the Swiss camp, he [Dulles] believed that the Nazis would make a last stand in the “Alpine redoubt”.’10 At the same time, Dulles was a spymaster who regarded an Austrian army deserter with a degree of reserve. He cautiously commissioned Molden to seek out intelligence on behalf of OSS. ‘First,’ Molden said of his talk with Dulles, ‘we must show we could produce results.’11

On Dulles’s return from London in November 1944, the pair met again. Dulles was now convinced of Molden’s integrity and proposed sending him to SHAEF headquarters to be debriefed – and then to be briefed – on Austria. This would reveal the doings of MI6 in the country. Claude Dansey was still number two to Sir Stewart Menzies at MI6 headquarters in London’s Broadway. ‘Colonel Z’ strenuously objected to disclosing such intelligence to an ‘Austrian deserter’. He continued to regard Dulles as naive.

This was another nice inter-Allied row, one that appears to have culminated in the proposal by Dansey of an acid test. According to Molden,

I know, because Allen [Dulles] told me much later, that the British wanted to let me go back into Austria on a mission and then they would tip off the SS. If the Germans let me go back across the border into Switzerland then that would be proof that I was a Nazi agent. And the British would shoot me. If the Germans shot me immediately, it would be proof that the British had been wrong about me but – poof – that was not such a big loss.12

Dulles led Molden to believe that he himself had scotched the plan. In the meantime Molden became OSS source K28.

On 12 December 1944, Molden was in the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck. This was the medieval city set in the wide valley of the river Inn, dominated by the peaks of the Nordkette, the Patscherkofel, and the Serles. There, in the university, in the strictest of secrecy, a complex political agreement was being hammered out. Present were seven Austrian men: liberals, monarchists and Christian Socialists – soon to be joined by communists. At last the deal was struck. The work to which Molden had been contributing had culminated in the foundation of the political wing of O5, the Provisorisches Österreichisches Nationalkommitee (Provisional Austrian National Committee or POEN). This was fifteen months after the creation of its equivalent in Italy, Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, and two and a half years after its counterpart in France, Conseil National de la Résistance. It was, though, within the Reich itself. Molden perhaps not unreasonably regarded this as a ‘glorious achievement’.13

Three days later, Innsbruck received its twelfth visit from the USAAF. The B-24 Liberators from the 336th Heavy Bomb Group were targeting the marshalling yards that served the line over the Brenner Pass. Soon Inge Rainer, the teenager from Kitzbühel, found herself drafted to the city. ‘I was sent to near Innsbruck, to learn to shoot small-bore weapons. In the morning we went to Innsbruck to clear the bombing and in the afternoon to shoot. If they sent children back to Innsbruck and taught girls to shoot, this made me think, “The war is over, we have lost.” It was a terrible shock.’14

3

As Christmas 1944 approached, the situation on and around Switzerland’s borders became more and more tense.

To the west, the Germans were making a stand just on the Swiss border at the Belfort Gap. This was one of the Achilles heels in the republic’s defences, a corridor of flat terrain between the Vosges mountains in France and the north-western corner of Switzerland. It was the gateway to the Rhine, one of Germany’s most important natural defences.

Here in mid-September, the 11th Panzer Division, led by Generalleutnant Wend von Wietersheim, found itself confronted by the I French Army Corps. This force, led by Lieutenant General Emile Béthouart, had been part of the 15 August landings on the French Riviera. Béthouart had pushed steadily up the east bank of the Rhône, slowed by adding other formations to the Corps and by the unseasonably poor weather. His thrust into south-western Germany along the northern Swiss border was now blocked. The Panzer division could be bypassed only by attempting the Vosges mountains on his left flank or by breaching Swiss territory – and neutrality – on his right. As General Guisan appreciated, the Vosges were virtually impenetrable; he saw how tempting Switzerland must have looked to his French opposite number. In 1946, Guisan wrote:

By which he meant that open warfare with the Allies might have undesirable political consequences.

In practice Guisan had little choice. To add to the French and the German forces around Belfort he brought up a whole division of his own men, dug in just inside Switzerland’s border. Béthouart himself waited until the supply situation had improved before giving battle. Responding to Eisenhower’s autumn call from SHAEF for a general offensive, on 13 November 1944 Béthouart launched his attack. Believing that the French I Corps had dug in for the winter, the Panzer division was under strength. Caught by surprise, the Panzer forces retreated to the fortified city of Belfort. Respecting the Swiss border, Béthouart pushed through the German lines. On 19 November, the French I Corps reached the Rhine at Huningue, a northern suburb of Basel, where France, Germany and Switzerland met. The journalist-turned-soldier Urs Schwarz was a witness:

The 11th Panzer Division was by no means finished. It retreated only to Colmar, forty miles north of Basel on the Alsatian plain. Guisan’s troops remained on guard, mindful of the danger of a counter-attack.

This was the first of the General’s problems.

*

On the border with Italy, the situation was similarly precarious. Here the country’s natural defences, the Alps, were far better. Here, too, was Switzerland’s own Alpine redoubt: completed; stored, manned and ready for war; yet not necessarily a match for the German armies desperate to return to the Fatherland, anxious to get home.

Here Guisan’s de facto allies were the partisans, but the Italian resistance was enduring the bitterest of winters. Autumn had seen the collapse of the high hopes inspired by the twenty free republics of a mass rising that would see the early end of the war. Then had come Alexander’s broadcast of 10 November 1944, suspending major operations. The partisan leader Roberto Battaglia commented:

This was a grave set-back for the Resistance. To the Germans, on the contrary, it was a tonic. Having received the assurance that they would not be subjected to a major attack by the Allies during the winter, they decided to make the most of the respite and deal the Partisans a crushing blow.17

The Wehrmacht and its Fascist allies in northern Italy were very largely successful. They seized a number of prominent partisans including Ferruccio Parri, committed wide-scale atrocities against the civilian population supportive of the partisans, and smoked out tens of thousands from the partisan mountain camps, both in the Apennines on Italy’s spine and further north in the Alps themselves. Bletchley Park decrypts in January 1945 suggested that as many as 70,000 partisans surrendered; an SOE report gives a similar flavour of the winter. ‘Enemy activity has continued to be forceful,’ noted No. 1 Special Force. ‘Communications with the field have been irregular and many missions have been forced to change location frequently and to live and work in conditions of extreme hardship.’18 For Guisan, here too lay danger.

Finally, to the east of Switzerland beyond the buffer of the Italian Alps lay Yugoslavia. Given Stalin’s modest proposals about the Alpine republic, the news for Guisan from the far eastern Alps was in some respects the most alarming of all.

Since the failure of the Axis’s Fifth Enemy Offensive in June 1943, Tito’s partisans had gone from strength to strength; they now numbered perhaps half a million, and Tito was formally recognised by the Allies as the commander-in-chief of Yugoslav armed forces. On 17 June 1944 the Treaty of Vis attempted to merge Tito’s administration with that of King Peter, still exiled in London; on 12 September 1944, just as Dulles reached Washington, the King called for his people to rally round Tito’s leadership. Then, three weeks later on 28 September 1944, an announcement was made that Tito had agreed to ‘temporary entry’ of Soviet troops into north-eastern Yugoslavia. Their role was officially to support the partisans’ effort to drive out the Wehrmacht. By 20 October the Red Army had occupied Belgrade.

For the Swiss the message was clear. A crimson tide was fast rising towards their tiny democracy, a tide that might reach anywhere.

*

Of Guisan’s three potential crises, in France, Italy and Yugoslavia, it was the one to the west that erupted.

In his last great throw of the dice, Hitler had assembled a total of seventy divisions comprising four armies: the Sixth and Fifth Panzer Armies, the Seventh Army and the Fifteenth Army. They were earmarked for the Ardennes offensive. This was Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine, named after a popular German song). ‘This great force,’ Churchill recounted, ‘led by its armour, was intended to break through our weak centre in the Ardennes to the river Meuse, swing north and northwest, cut the Allied line in two, seize the port of Antwerp, and sever the lifeline of our northern armies.’19 The ultimate hope was that the Western Allies would sue for peace, enabling the Wehrmacht to about-face and to concentrate all its forces on the Eastern Front. Hitler’s plan in the proximity of Belfort on the Swiss border was to smash through the lines of the US Seventh Army and the French First Army in the Upper Vosges mountains.

At 5.30 a.m. on 16 December 1944 the storm broke with a ninety-minute artillery barrage on an eighty-mile front. Who could tell how this would pan out for Switzerland – and indeed the West?

4

That Christmas of 1944, while the Swiss in Berne and on the borders of Switzerland were discovering that Hitler’s war was not yet over, so too were the Allied guests of the Swiss in the republic’s interior.

As Allied air activity increased over the beleaguered Reich, we have already seen how the number of airmen who ended up landing, crash-landing or parachuting into Switzerland increased accordingly. As the Hague Convention required, the crews ended up in Swiss internment camps. Following the downing of the B-24 Death-Dealer in August 1943, the USAAF airmen had been dispatched to Adelboden. Here they shared the Canton Berne skiing resort with British and Commonwealth internees, many of whom had escaped from the Italian POW camps. As the numbers of US servicemen swelled in the first months of 1944, they outgrew the resort.

In Adelboden, officers and enlisted men were all interned at Camp Moloney. In the spring of 1944 the Swiss internment committee agreed with the US military attaché, Brigadier General Barnwell Legge at the American legation in Berne, that two additional camps should be set up: a new officers’ camp in Davos, and a new camp for enlisted men in Wengen. The facilities in the two proposed resorts – Davos in Canton Graubünden and Wengen in the Bernese Oberland – were underutilised because of the collapse of international tourism; the relative remoteness of the resorts also made escape difficult. Camp Davos was opened in June 1944, its equivalent in Wengen two months later in August. From this famous old resort the internees would be able to enjoy the prospect of the Alps’ best-known trio of peaks: the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

As it turned out, Davos was immediately a cause of friction. The resort had a long-standing German community, was the original seat of the German Nazis in Switzerland, and was the site of the assassination of their leader Wilhelm Gustloff in February 1936. Now, alongside the civilian German community, there were hundreds of convalescent Reich servicemen in the town, making use of the sanatoria that in peace had ministered to victims of tuberculosis. When Davos’s German community heard of the imminent arrival of the American officers, its leaders immediately lodged a protest with the Swiss – to no avail. The Germans then spread the rumour that the airmen were no better than Chicago gangsters. When the first USAAF men arrived on 22 June 1944, they found the shops closed, shutters bolted and the streets deserted. The town returned to normal when the US airmen showed themselves friendly and open-handed. The inhabitants of Davos were then treated to the intriguing sight of uniformed servicemen from the Allies and the Reich rubbing shoulders with a due circumspection on the wide promenade between Davos Dorf and Davos Platz.

Camp Davos was located in the Palace Hotel on this road between Dorf and Platz. This was barely a hundred yards from the German consulate. It was hardly surprising that on US Independence Day on 4 July 1944 a couple of high-spirited US officers should let off a few fireworks outside the consulate. On the evening of 7 August – a month after the D-Day landings – another pair of officers removed the consulate’s badge of office, a large eagle clutching a swastika that garnished the building’s entrance. The Germans protested, the swastika was recovered, the perpetrators identified, and demands were made to send the guilty men to the Swiss punishment camp at Wauwilermoos. Tipped off, the two officers escaped over the Swiss border into France – with the help of sympathetic Swiss civilians.

Such diversions aside, life in Camp Davos was not unduly onerous. James Goings had crash-landed near Knutwil, Canton Lucerne, on 27 May 1944. He remembered:

Under the Hague Convention the Swiss were obliged to prevent such escapes. Those guardians in Davos took their duties seriously. The internees were subjected to two daily roll-calls, had an evening curfew, and were forbidden to go further than two miles from the town without express permission. While Switzerland remained an oasis, bordered on all sides by the Axis, escape, in any case, remained next to impossible. Once the border with France reopened in August 1944 and in particular when the US armies reached Geneva, the situation changed drastically. ‘Escape became the first priority for all officers at Davos as well as all enlisted men in the other camps.’21

The paradox was that Brigadier General Barnwell Legge had announced that those who succeeded in doing their duty by escaping would be court-martialled on their return to the US. This masked delicate negotiations he was undertaking for the wholesale release of all the US internees in Switzerland in exchange for the release of their German counterparts to the Germans. Despite this threat, in the course of the autumn and early winter of 1944, those US internees who could be dragged away from the ski slopes and the women of Adelboden, Wengen and Davos escaped in a very steady stream. About two-thirds of them made it to their own lines, the remainder being recaptured. It was a few of these unfortunates who were destined to spend Christmas of 1944 in the Swiss Straflager (punishment) camps. The most notorious of these was Wauwilermoos, where the airmen were under the care of ‘Captain’ André-Henri Béguin.

In 1937, Béguin had been dismissed from the army on various counts including financial fraud occasioned by the charges of keeping four mistresses; now in his new guise at Wauwilermoos he sported Nazi uniform and signed his correspondence ‘Heil Hitler’. His camp in Lucerne was surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers and guarded by dogs, its inmates a mixed bunch of Swiss criminals and Allied internees: French, British, Italians, Poles, Russians, Americans. The Allied servicemen were kept without due legal process, representation, trial, sentence or indication of the time of their likely release. They were allowed no mail, and they slept on dirty straw along with the lice and the rats. The camp had no proper sanitation facilities – showers or lavatories – and the food was atrocious: it was served from slop pails into tin cans, sometimes into a trough. There was little medical attention: dysentery, pyorrhoea and boils went untreated and unchecked. When the men complained to members of the International Red Cross on the Committee’s occasional visits, no action was taken. The US mission in the form of Barnwell Legge was of little help, supposedly because he felt the camp’s notoriety discouraged escapes. The US airman James Misuraca commented, ‘The guards were coarse and crude. The officials treated us like scum. This was purely and simply a concentration camp.’22

A handful of Allied servicemen spent Christmas of 1944 and celebrated the New Year of 1945 as guests of Béguin. It was not their happiest festive season.

5

By Christmas, the likely fate of Operation Wacht am Rhein had become apparent. ‘On December 23,’ wrote Speer, ‘Model [Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, one of the architects of the operation] told me that the offensive had definitely failed – but Hitler had ordered it to continue.’23 Churchill, who on Christmas Day had flown from London to Naples, then from the southern Italian city to Athens, was drawing similar conclusions. Shortly before flying out of the Greek capital on 28 December 1944, he received a telegram from Field Marshal Montgomery in France confirming the collapse of the operation.

The same day, in Berne, Fritz Molden once again met Allen Dulles. Besides the good tidings from the Ardennes, the spymaster had some news of more personal interest for the young Austrian. The United States had decided to give provisional recognition to POEN, the Provisional Austrian National Committee. Molden himself was to be appointed liaison officer between the Allies and POEN. Dulles said, ‘You are the first Austrian to be accredited as liaison officer at Allied HQ.’ It was, recorded Molden, ‘a solemn moment’.24

*

For Speer, who had been close to the German front in the Ardennes until 30 December, diplomacy dictated that he deliver his New Year wishes personally to the Führer. Although Hitler had intended to spend Christmas in Berchtesgaden, Wacht am Rhein required his presence at a more westerly headquarters at Kransberg Castle in Hesse. When Speer eventually reached Hitler’s bunker in the castle, it was already two hours into the happy new year of 1945. The armaments and war production minister was relieved to find he was not too late to wish the Führer glückliches neues Jahr.

Hitler was looking his age, indeed rather more. The five years of war – not to mention the 20 July 1944 bomb – had aged him brutally. He was suffering from spells of dizziness, shaking of limbs he could not control, and periodic fits of deafness. Soon the once worshipped leader, the man who had mesmerised the Nuremberg rallies and struck fear into the hearts of European leaders, would be seen by all as a physical wreck. ‘All witnesses of the final days agree when they describe his emaciated face, his grey complexion, his stooping body, his shaking hands and foot, his hoarse and quavering voice, and the film of exhaustion that covered his eyes.’25 On that New Year’s Day of 1945, Speer remembered:

adjutants, doctors, secretaries, Bormann – the whole circle except for the generals attached to the Fuehrer’s headquarters, were gathered around Hitler drinking champagne. The alcohol had relaxed everyone, but the atmosphere was still subdued. Hitler [for long teetotal] seemed to be the only one in the company who was drunk without having taken any stimulating beverage. He was in the grip of a permanent euphoria.

Although the beginning of a new year in no way dispelled the desperate situation of the year past … Hitler made optimistic forecasts for 1945.

Speer thought otherwise. ‘The failure of the Ardennes offensive meant that the war was over. What followed was only the occupation of Germany, delayed somewhat by a confused and impotent resistance.’26

Notes

1. www.newspaperarchive.com.

2. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

3. Peter Hoffman, German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

4. Dumbach, Annette E., Sophie Scholl and the White Rose (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).

5. Shirer, Rise and Fall.

6. Dumbach.

7. Molden.

8. Molden.

9. Molden.

10. Molden.

11. Molden.

12. Molden.

13. Molden.

14. Interview with author, 2012.

15. Schwarz.

16. Schwarz.

17. Roberto Battaglia, The Story of the Italian Resistance (London: Odhams Press, 1957).

18. Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

19. Stafford, Mission Accomplished.

20. Tanner.

21. Fredy Peter, Jump Boys Jump (Ilfracombe: Arthur H. Stockwell, 2003).

22. Tanner.

23. Speer.

24. Molden.

25. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (London: Papermac, 1995).

26. Speer.