Strictly speaking the idea of an Alpine Fortress was more a creation of American Intelligence than of Germany’s leaders.

DOUGLAS BOTTING AND IAN SAYER

1

Speer was right, but this was with the benefit of hindsight. In the first few weeks of 1945 this collapse of the Reich was not seen as a likely outcome by the Allied high command.

Although Wacht am Rhein had failed, there was a definite sense that the Allies’ own campaigns both in Italy and on the western borders of Germany had stalled. On 3 January 1945, Churchill had told Roosevelt, ‘There is this brutal fact: we need more fighting troops to make things move.’1 The Western Allied armies were also running very short of ammunition, victims of long supply lines from ports working – largely as a consequence of the Wehrmacht – at very much less than full capacity. Moreover, the final meeting early in February of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta on the Black Sea clearly foreshadowed not so much victory over the Reich as the Cold War. As military issues receded, political ones loomed. Churchill continued, ‘As the victory of the Grand Alliance became only a matter of time it was natural that Russian ambitions should grow. Communism raised its head behind the thundering Russian battle-front. Russia was the Deliverer, and Communism the gospel she brought.’2 The alliance to destroy Hitler was now dissolving at frightening speed, and Churchill justifiably feared that the results of his Herculean labours would see one totalitarian regime in Europe replaced by another: the Red Army was only forty miles from Berlin.

At SHAEF Eisenhower’s responsibility was to address these problems. Having lost around 80,000 US troops in the Ardennes, his military imperative was to strike quickly to still the Nazis’ lifeblood. About this objective there was no question. It had been set out by the Combined Chiefs of Staff with admirable brevity: ‘You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.’3 Eisenhower’s problem was that the heart had moved.

The whispers of the Alpenfestung had been circulating since the autumn. From then there had been an ever-increasing stream of intelligence reports from Germany herself, from neutral countries and from the battlefields of central Europe. Hitler would make the Nazis’ last stand in the crags of Berchtesgadener Land. There had even been stories in the press. On 12 February 1945, the day after the conference in Yalta broke up, the US War Department issued a memorandum that declared: ‘Not enough weight is given the many reports of the probable Nazi last stand in the Bavarian Alps … The Nazi myth which is important when you are dealing with men like Hitler requires a Götterdämmerung. It may be significant that Berchtesgaden itself, which would be the headquarters, is on the site of the tomb of Barbarossa who, in Germany mythology, is supposed to return from the dead.’4 A month later, on 11 March, another SHAEF intelligence report echoed: ‘German defence policy is to safeguard the Alpine Zone … Defences continue to be constructed in depth in the south, through the Black Forest to Lake Constance and from the Hungarian frontier to the west of Graz … In Italy … defence lines are built up in the foothills of the Italian Alps.’5 There was even a story of a frightening new Geheimwaffe (secret weapon) sited in the Redoubt that – even now – would turn the course of the war. Returning to his post of Supreme Commander in Italy following a car crash, ‘smiling Albert’ Kesselring had joked to his staff, ‘I am V3.’6

The drip, drip of such intelligence had now begun to influence military thinking at SHAEF. On 21 March 1945 the principal army group on the Western Front, General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth, issued a note headed ‘Re-Orientation of Strategy’. This stated that the existence of the Redoubt had rendered ‘obsolete the plans we brought with us over the beaches’. Should the focus really be on Berlin? it asked; ‘all indications suggest that the enemy’s political and military directorate is already in the process of displacing to the “Redoubt” in lower Bavaria’.7 Clearly this required the Allied forces to think again. Bradley’s proposal was that rather than pushing on to Berlin, the Twelfth Army Group should dip south and cut through the centre of Germany. This would prevent the forces around the capital retreating south into the Redoubt; rather, it would push them northwards. The Twelfth would then pivot south, meet up with General de Lattre de Tassigny’s French First Army coming in from the west and with Alexander’s forces advancing over the Italian Alps from the south. These three forces would clear up any Wehrmacht forces remaining in the Redoubt.

Bradley, a friend and classmate of Eisenhower from West Point, could hardly be ignored. The Supreme Commander’s immediate superior, the US Chief of General Staff, General George Marshall, had to be obeyed. He had made the same point. It was true that not all the Allied staff were convinced about the redoubt – either US or British. It was a story largely unsupported by Bletchley’s Ultra decrypts, radio intercepts, agents in Austria and Germany, and a simple assessment of the known locations of the Wehrmacht’s remaining forces. Still, intelligence had largely failed to spot the massive preparations for Wacht am Rhein in the Ardennes. In the end SHAEF’s head of intelligence, Major General Kenneth Strong, took what might have seemed a reasonable line. ‘The redoubt may not be there, but we have to take steps to prevent it being there.’8

*

Eisenhower was in any case obliged to act with the information he had to hand at the time. On 29 March 1944 he drafted three cables. One was directly to Stalin, one to General Marshall, and one to Field Marshal Montgomery – the latter leading the 21st Army Group on the thrust of the Western Allies to Berlin. The Supreme Commander copied Churchill on his cable to Stalin.

The substance of the messages was that, as the principal military target of the Western Allies, Berchtesgaden had to be substituted for Berlin. Churchill, on his way to spend Easter weekend at his own Berchtesgaden, the Buckinghamshire country retreat of Chequers, was appalled. He had spoken directly to the Supreme Allied Commander on the scrambler telephone the previous evening. Leaving aside the gross breach of protocol of the simple soldier trespassing in the forbidden country of high political strategy by communicating directly with Stalin, there were the practical consequences for Berlin. On the secure phone line Churchill had not raised the issue of protocol with Eisenhower. Rather, he had ventilated the political importance of the German capital and the imperative of Montgomery’s forces reaching there before the Red Army. At the time Eisenhower, despite his subsequent presidency, was unschooled in high politics. He was obdurate. ‘Berlin’, he had told Churchill, ‘is no longer a major military objective.’ It had been replaced by what the Supreme Commander called ‘the mountain citadel’.9

Churchill could do nothing. As Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower to date had delivered everything demanded of him. The Normandy and Riviera landings, the early joining hands of Patton’s and Patch’s forces in Dijon, the drive towards the Rhine, the scuppering of the Ardennes counteroffensive. The United States forces were in the ascendant, the British an increasingly junior partner. In the past three years, Churchill’s final court of appeal would have been Roosevelt. The President, ailing at Yalta, was now dying. Arriving at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, on Good Friday, he had to be carried from the train by one of his secret service aides. Replies to Churchill’s cabled concerns over the fate of Berlin appeared over the President’s name, but were the work of other hands. The row kindled, poisoning the relationship between the English-speaking Allies. On 31 March 1945, the US military chiefs in Washington gave Eisenhower their unqualified support.

So too did the kindly Marshal Stalin. Meeting in Moscow with the British and American ambassadors, he endorsed Eisenhower’s plan to attack central Germany, and expressed the view that the Nazis’ ‘last stand would probably be in western Czechoslovakia and Bavaria’. Dismissing the ambassadors, the Soviet leader picked up the phone, sent for his top warlords – Marshals Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Koniev – and set them a simple task. Eisenhower’s averred plan was a decoy, he told the two marshals: a pretence, a red herring. The Red Army must race to be first in Berlin. He told his western allies at the same time that only second-rank, inferior and reserve Red Army forces would head for the German capital. This was misleading. Antony Beevor comments: ‘It was the greatest April Fool in modern history.’10

By 7 April 1945, the whole matter was resolved. Eisenhower cabled to Churchill, ‘Quite naturally, if at any moment collapse should suddenly come about everywhere along the front we would rush forward, and Lübeck and Berlin would be included in our important targets.’11 This was the best Churchill would get. In these circumstances he cabled to the ailing Roosevelt that he regarded the matter as closed. In a characteristic flourish, he added: ‘to prove my sincerity I will use one of my very few Latin quotations: Amantium irae amoris integratio est’ (Lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love).12 Whether Eisenhower’s decision about the Alpenfestung was momentous – as some hold – is a matter of debate. James Lucas asserts that it ‘altered the course of post-war European history’.13 Max Hastings writes: ‘It is hard, however, to make a plausible case that any of this changed the post-war political map of Europe, as the Supreme Commander’s detractors claimed.’14

A week later, on 15 April 1945, the commander of the US Ninth Army, General William Hood Simpson, was recalled by Omar Bradley to Twelfth Army Group headquarters in Wiesbaden, Hesse. Bradley was waiting for Simpson at the airfield. ‘We shook hands, and there and then he told me the news. “You must stop on the Elbe. You are not to advance any farther in the direction of Berlin.”’ Simpson was flabbergasted. He had led his army from Brest on the French Atlantic coast to within reach of the Reich. ‘All I could think of was, How am I going to tell my staff, my corps commanders and my troops? Above all, how am I going to tell my troops?’15

*

While Simpson was obliged to hold fire, the Allied forces in Italy were pushing up towards the Alpenfestung.

In December of 1944 Alexander had been replaced as Supreme Allied Commander in Italy by Mark W. Clark. (Alexander himself had been promoted to Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean.) The forty-eight-year-old US general had distinguished himself by ignoring Alexander’s orders in the aftermath of the capture of Monte Cassino. Clark had thereby captured Rome, but a number of German units had escaped to fight another day – as it so happened on the Gothic Line in the Apennines that was now causing him such trouble. A week before Simpson’s interview with Bradley, Clark had launched the Allies’ final offensive in the Italian peninsula. He sent the British Eighth Army in the east on a drive towards the Argenta Gap just north of Ravenna, and the US IV Corps up from the Apennines to encircle the strategic centre of Bologna. By 15 April, Clark’s offensive was making good progress, a spearhead heading due north for the Alps.

Also heading for the Alps – though southwards rather than northwards – were two trains, Adler and Dohle, that had set out that same day from the rubble of Berlin. They carried an intriguing cargo. A few days earlier at the town of Merkers in Thuringia, the Allies had discovered $238 million in the form of gold and currency. It was hidden in a mine. These were the bulk of the Reichsbank’s reserves, sent there for safe keeping on the orders of the Reichsbank chief, Walther Funk. The trains heading to Bavaria carried the remaining reserves: a smaller but nevertheless useful sum of $15 million.

2

It was at this point that Allen Dulles in Berne appeared to make a contribution to the culmination of the war in the Alps. This was Operation Sunrise, according to his biographer James Srodes ‘one of the most dramatic and controversial intelligence triumphs of his career and his last major coup of World War II’.16

Since the autumn of 1944, Dulles had been getting feelers for peace from Kesselring’s forces in Italy. This was scarcely surprising. The Wehrmacht was between a rock and a hard place. The rock was the southern flank of the Alps and the hard place was Mark Clark’s US Fifth and British Eighth Armies, which were poised to embark on their assault on the Gothic Line in the Apennines. In theory, the Alps represented the lifeline of the German Tenth and Fourteenth Armies that together constituted Kesselring’s Heeresgruppe C, its escape route back to Germany. In practice, the story of the partisan republics of the autumn of 1944 had shown that safe passage through the high Alpine passes infested with partisans now looked an increasingly remote possibility. The alternative was a pitched battle between these four armies on the plain of Lombardy that lay between the foothills of the Alps to the north and the northernmost ridges of the Apennines in the south.

As the prospect of Clark’s inevitable spring assault neared, German appetite for a negotiated surrender increased daily. Professional soldiers like the Wehrmacht would not deign to parley with the partisans, whom they regarded as bandits and criminals and against whom they had committed numerous atrocities. They would negotiate with the regular Allied forces, members of which at least would not shoot them on sight, castrate them, gouge their eyes out or lock them in burning churches: all brutalities that the Wehrmacht and SS had visited on the partisans and their supporters. For their part, the Allies themselves were far from averse to a surrender that would avoid either a German retreat into the supposed Redoubt or a bitter battle in Lombardy with a battle-hardened and far from demoralised opponent. The lives of hundreds of thousands of men were at stake.

Nothing concrete had materialised from the expressions of interest from the Germans floated over the New Year. Then, through the good offices of the Swiss intelligence chief Colonel Max Waibel – Fritz Molden’s contact – in early February came a fresh approach. The whole thing was done very nicely. There were no hurried phone calls or clandestine meetings in Berne’s Herrengasse. Waibel and Dulles had dinner together at an excellent restaurant close to Lake Lucerne, in fact quite close to the punishment camp of Wauwilermoos. They ate trout washed down with hock and discussed the virtues of the Italian partisan movement, possibly of women too. Dulles enjoyed his evening but thought Waibel’s proposal that he should meet yet another couple of go-betweens, an Italian and a Swiss, was unenticing. When he eventually met the pair, he was even more sceptical of their claims to be in touch with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. This was the SS general in charge of all the SS forces in Italy and – it was to be assumed – a diehard Nazi. All such officers in Heinrich Himmler’s thug force had taken personal pledges of allegiance to the Führer. They were surely the last people to give peace a chance. Dulles was most surprised when the go-betweens returned within the week with two real live Waffen-SS officers: Standartenführer Eugen Dollmann and Obersturmführer Guido Zimmer. They were in Lugano, the charming lakeside resort where, in November 1944, Dulles had first met Ferruccio Parri, the CLNAI partisan leader.

It was now that Dulles showed his mettle. Dollmann claimed he was an emissary from Wolff, and that his superior officer wanted a face-to-face meeting with Dulles to negotiate a surrender. Unlike his compatriot General Eisenhower, Dulles was attuned to political nuances and fully aware of the delicacy of any such negotiations. The relationship between the Eastern and Western Allies was now such that Stalin would – and very soon did – take a jaundiced view of a surrender that could speed the passage eastwards of the Western Allied armies. As Churchill said later of these early contacts, ‘I realised at once that the Soviet Government might be suspicious of a separate military surrender in the South, which would enable our armies to advance against reduced opposition as far as Vienna and beyond, or indeed towards the Elbe or Berlin.’17 So if Dulles was to risk such contacts, he needed, in his own words, ‘concrete evidence both of their seriousness and of their authority’. He needed proof positive.18

Now Ferruccio Parri was one of the many partisans who had been seized by the Gestapo in the winter breathing space so unhappily granted to Kesselring’s forces by Field Marshal Alexander’s 10 November 1944 broadcast. So too had Parri’s lieutenant, Antonio Usmiani. The pair were not being at all well treated by their captors, not least because of a bungled attempt by the partisans to rescue Parri from Gestapo HQ in Milan. Wrote Dulles:

I proposed, therefore, that General Wolff, if he wanted to see me, should give evidence of the seriousness of his intentions by releasing these two prisoners to me in Switzerland. In asking for Parri I realized that I was asking for probably the most important Italian prisoner the SS held … I knew that in asking for his release I was asking for something that would be very difficult for Wolff to do, and in fact I was putting the stakes high – almost too high, as it later turned out. Yet if these men could be released, the seriousness of General Wolff’s intentions would be amply demonstrated.19

Dulles did not trouble himself to go to Lugano on 4 March 1945. He was suffering from gout. Thoughtfully, he delegated the initial negotiations to an American Jew with the telltale name of Paul Blum. When Dollmann asked whether Dulles would meet Wolff on the neutral territory of Switzerland, Blum set out Dulles’s conditions. He handed the Waffen-SS officers a slip of paper. It bore two names: Ferruccio Parri and Antonio Usmiani. Dollmann blenched.

After a few moments’ consideration he said he would see what he could do. Dollmann and Zimmer returned to Milan, Blum to Berne to report to Dulles. The American in turn passed on what he thought fit to Colonel Max Waibel. The Swiss were not entirely disinterested. Their principal lifeline was the Ligurian port of Genoa, through which such essentials as the Allies thought fit to grant them were shipped. The speedy cessation of hostilities before the port was wrecked by the Germans under Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy was, Waibel thought, desirable.

Chiasso, four days later. Picture the scene at the windswept Alpine town on the Ticino border where Switzerland stretches an arm into Italy. An SS car is seen approaching the border checkpoint. It bears the familiar lightning logo of the SS. It draws up rather sharply. Smartly, an officer dressed as a captain alights from the car. It is Captain Zimmer. His arrival has been anticipated. One of Waibel’s representatives steps forward. Passwords are exchanged. ‘I have two men for you,’ announces Zimmer, with the air of a conjurer. ‘Please take them to Allen Dulles with the compliments of General Wolff.’ Zimmer returns to the car. From the rear doors he helps two dazed and dishevelled figures onto the tarmac. Uncertainly, encouraged by Zimmer, half expecting a shot in the back, they shuffle across the border. Parri and Usmiani are free, a couple of characters out of a John le Carré thriller.

Two hours later the car returns. Captain Zimmer emerges once again, followed by Colonel Dollmann. Then comes an SS adjutant, Sturmbannführer Wenner. They form a guard of honour for a man of the notably ‘Aryan’ features so favoured in the Reich: tall, bronzed, blue-eyed, blond-haired. The hawklike nose is his signature. It is Heinrich Himmler’s personal representative in Italy, Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Within hours Wolff and Dulles are chatting in front of the log fire in the OSS Herrengasse apartment in Berne, the spymaster puffing away at his pipe. He liked to put his guests at ease.

Up until this time, Dulles had not troubled Washington or indeed anyone outside the immediate circle of those concerned with these developments. Now he called Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) in the Royal Palace at Caserta, some twenty-five miles north of Naples. He outlined Wolff’s proposals. These included the public disavowal of Hitler and Himmler by all senior German officers in Italy, and the release of hundreds of Jews interned at Bologna. AFHQ was electrified by this news, dispatched the British and US Chiefs of Staff to talk to Dulles and Wolff and – in the way of a bureaucracy – gave the operation a name: Sunrise. With the prospect of the surrender of Heeresgruppe C – around 200,000 men – Dulles seemed to be on the brink of a huge coup. He was told to pursue the talks. ‘[O]n March 19,’ wrote Churchill, ‘a second exploratory meeting was held with General Wolff.’ Here the idea of calling off General Mark Clark’s spring offensive was tabled. During the remainder of March the negotiations proceeded. Dulles even rented a chalet in the lakeside resort of Ascona in Canton Ticino. It would act as a convenient and secure base for the talks, a ‘safe house’. The shores of Lake Maggiore would surely prove conducive to surrender.

Then three things went wrong. Wolff’s superior Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring suddenly moved headquarters and distanced himself from negotiations of which he had tacitly approved. Second, Himmler got word of the talks and threatened Wolff with holding his wife and family hostage against his loyalty to the Reich; unbeknownst to Hitler, the former chicken farmer was pursuing his own surrender negotiations with the Allies, using the Swede Count Folke Bernadotte as a middleman. Third, Stalin, well served by his own intelligence service, abruptly accused Roosevelt and Churchill of negotiating a separate surrender with the Reich behind his back. The Marshal demanded the talks be called off. In his last message to the Soviet leader, Roosevelt firmly rebuked his ally. Harry S. Truman, his successor, was less robust. Lobbied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), who – apparently correctly – felt that both Dulles and AFHQ in Caserta were being economical with the truth about the talks, the new president bowed to Stalin’s demands.

Dulles, having nursed the negotiations with imagination and tenacity, turned up at the Herrengasse on 20 April 1945 to be confronted by a telegram from Washington. It read in part, ‘especially in view of complications which have arisen with the Russians, the U.S. and British governments have decided OSS should break off [Sunrise] contacts; that JCS are so instructing OSS; that the whole matter is to be regarded as closed and that Russians be informed.’20 It was a bombshell.

3

And despite the fact that for practical purposes the war was now virtually over, in the Alps the fighting went on.

When the German occupying forces in the French Alps had withdrawn in the face of the Allied armies forcing their way up the Rhône valley from the Riviera landings in August 1944, they had left a rearguard in place. This was at the northern end of the Alpine frontier between France and Italy, where in June 1940 the Armée des Alpes had successfully resisted Mussolini’s forces. In the Tarentaise valley in the Savoie lay the village of Val d’Isère. Before the war it was barely acknowledged as a skiing resort, boasting just one primitive drag lift. Eight or nine miles south towered the 9,252-foot Mont Froid. Here in some of the old Petit Ligne Maginot casemates were around 1,500 fascist troops: the 3rd Battalion of the 100. Gebirgsjägerregiment, and a company of the Italian Folgore Regiment. They guarded the route over the frontier ridge between France and Italy: the Col du Mont Cenis into the Susa valley and beyond into Piedmont.

To support the last push of General Mark Clark’s Fifth and Eighth Armies into northern Italy, the French planned an assault. Around 3,000 men were assembled by Alain Le Ray. This was the former military head of the Vercors, now a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel. His forces were members of the 27th French Mountain Division, largely former maquisards, now the FFI. On 5 April, the chasseurs seized the middle and western strongpoints despite bitter winds and snow. The following day the eastern casemate fell, and with it Mont Froid. Then came counter-attacks, three in all.

Three days later, the 3rd Battalion briefly recaptured the bitterly contested redoubt. Le Ray’s men were later described as ‘forcing the Germans from their last mountain-top strongholds’ in the French Alps.22 The war had less than a month to run.

4

20 April 1945. It was Hitler’s birthday, his fifty-sixth. Hitherto, the Führer’s intention had been to withdraw to Berchtesgaden as the Soviet army closed on Berlin. Ten days earlier his domestic staff had followed in the wake of many of the Reich ministries, various senior officials, camp followers and the $15 million Reichsbank’s reserves to the relative safety of Bavaria. In the Berghof, Hitler’s staff busied themselves with spring-cleaning the chalet to make the place fit for a king. In the circumstances they were particularly careful to dust down the extensive bunker complex. Air raids were anticipated.

Hitler, though, was wavering. On the eve of his birthday he had quietly given in to Goebbels’s request that such military reserves as the Wehrmacht still possessed should be committed to the defence of the capital, deployed around the very gates of Berlin. On his birthday itself, in the Führerbunker under the Chancellery dutifully designed by Speer for a contingency never seriously anticipated, congratulations seemed slightly misplaced. ‘No one knew quite what to say,’ remembered the armaments minister. ‘Hitler received the expressions of good wishes coolly and almost unwillingly, in keeping with the circumstances.’23 All the leading Nazis were there, including Speer himself, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Bormann and the military chiefs Dönitz, Keitel, Jodl and Krebs. Göring, doubtless anticipating events, was wearing a rather surprising new uniform plastered across his broad frame. It was olive-green. One of the entourage whispered to Speer, ‘Like an American general!’ Discussion eventually turned to the military situation. The sounds of Soviet artillery could be heard all too clearly, even fifty-five feet under the Chancellery garden. When Hitler announced his decision to defend Berlin there was an outcry. ‘At once everyone began clamoring that it was essential to shift the headquarters to Obersalzberg, and that now was the last moment remaining.’ Göring then chimed in. There was only one route still open south to Berchtesgaden, he said. It might be lost at any moment; now was surely the time to stage a retreat south. This inflamed Hitler: ‘How can I call on the troops to undertake the decisive battle for Berlin if at the same moment I myself withdraw to safety! … I shall leave it to fate whether I die in the capital or fly to Obersalzberg at the last moment!’24

For the present, Hitler would stay.

Göring thought it best – wisest – to do otherwise. Once the conference was over he turned to Hitler and explained that he had a lot to do in Bavaria. He would leave for the south that very evening. Speer says, ‘I was standing only a few feet away from the two and had a sense of being present at a historic moment: The leadership of the Reich was splitting asunder.’25

It was in fact the night of the final exodus to Bavaria. Bormann as usual had been efficiency itself. He had arranged for a motorcade of cars, buses, armoured vehicles and trucks to take the leaders’ closest ministers, aides and their families south to safety. His attention to detail went right down to the allocation of seats. Göring himself left with a large escort and a truck full of booty from Carinhall, his country estate to the north of Berlin. Two trainloads of other treasures – paintings, sculptures, tapestries, fine wines, cigars, morocco-bound books – had preceded him.

Meanwhile, the two other trains, Adler and Dohle, carrying the $15 million of Reich reserves, trundled slowly south along what remained of the Reich’s railway network.

*

The military situation discussed in the Führerbunker conference was utterly irretrievable. The Allied vice had now so tightened on the Reich that its frontiers were largely defined by the Alps. It held the west of Czechoslovakia, Austria west of Vienna, northern Italy, north-western Yugoslavia and southern Bavaria. From all points of the compass the Allies were now closing on the mountains.

To the west, the Allied forces approaching the Alps were General de Lattre de Tassigny’s First French and the US Seventh Armies, together comprising General Jacob Devers’s Sixth Army Group. This was tasked with forcing its way through Bavaria into Austria to destroy the Alpine Redoubt. The French, setting out from Lake Constance, were to confront the enemy forces in the western Austrian province of Vorarlberg, at the west end of which lay the resort of St Anton. The US army was to head further east to Innsbruck, capital of the Tyrol, the province adjoining Vorarlberg to the east. A third thrust was to take the form of Patton’s Third Army, on loan from General Bradley. This was to head for Salzburg, rather over a hundred miles east of Innsbruck. It, too, was thought to be part of the Alpine Redoubt.

Coming up from the south towards the Italian Alps were General Mark Clark’s US Fifth and British Eighth Armies. By 18 April, the Eighth Army was now through Argenta and its armour was racing to meet the US forces advancing from the east. The objective was to stop SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff and Army Group C in Bologna at the northern foot of the Apennines, the southern edge of the Po plain. By 23 April both Allied armies had reached the river Po, in Italy a natural barrier of similar significance to the Rhine. Beyond lay the foothills of the Italian Alps. The Italian partisans – the National Liberation Committee – called for a general rising. At long last, the hour of liberation really had come.

To the east, Tito’s forces in Yugoslavia amounted to 800,000. They were now dubbed the Yugoslav Army of National Liberation (JANL), and were a formidable threat. Tito’s ambitions for the Fourth Army of the JANL were not restricted to driving out the remains of Generaloberst Löhr’s Heeresgruppe E from the old borders of Yugoslavia. His plan was to go beyond those frontiers and seize the southern provinces of Austria, including the cities of Fiume, Trieste and Pola. The Yugoslav leader also had ambitions for joining forces with the communist partisans to the west in Italy, even those in France.26

The JANL offensive opened on 12 April 1945. Ten days later, just as the British Eighth and the US Fifth Armies reached the Po, and just as the US Seventh Army headed for Innsbruck, the JANL was within reach of Trieste. It was also casting its eyes towards Klagenfurt, capital of the eastern Austrian Alpine province of Carinthia.

It was also on that day of 23 April that Speer returned to the bunker under the Chancellery to say goodbye to Hitler. Stepping down into that Stygian world, Speer came across Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, who had masterminded the creation of the Nazi headquarters at Berchtesgaden. Like Göring and the other high party officials who had already fled to the ‘redoubt’, Bormann thought the caution represented by Berchtesgaden better than the valour embodied in the shambles that remained of Berlin. He urged Speer to persuade Hitler to fly – even at this eleventh hour – to Obersalzberg.

When Speer was ushered into Hitler’s presence deep in the bunker, the Führer was busy with the succession planning now so much the vogue amongst business chief executives. He cross-questioned Speer on the merits of Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz, a submariner who in happier days had conceived the devastatingly successful ‘wolf-pack’ U-boat tactics in the Battle of the Atlantic. Speer might have been excused for thinking the question academic. Germany’s principal cities lay in ruins, her industry was shattered, her armies overrun, her population on the point of starvation. What the Germans later called Stunde Null (zero hour) of the complete and unconditional surrender was only a fortnight away. With Germany cut in two by the Allies, Dönitz – Hitler explained – would be charged with setting up an administration in the north from his headquarters in Plön, Schleswig. The loyal Kesselring was to be Dönitz’s opposite number in the south. Then Hitler turned to his own fate. ‘What do you think? Should I stay here or fly to Berchtesgaden? Jodl has told me that tomorrow is the last chance for that.’ Speer advised Hitler to remain in Berlin. ‘It seems to me better, if it must be, that you end your life here in the capital as the Fuehrer rather than in your weekend house.’

Hitler concurred: ‘I too have resolved to stay here. I only wanted to hear your view once more.’ Perhaps there were other reasons. As Antony Beevor comments, ‘The Fall of Berchtesgaden did not have quite the same ring as the Fall of Berlin.’27

5

Hitler, though, had not quite done with Berchtesgaden, the resort where all his great thoughts had germinated. Scarcely had the matter been settled when the omnipresent Bormann scuttled in. He was bearing a telegram from Göring. The Generalfeldmarschall had been as good as his word. He had now reached Berchtesgaden with his looted goods and opened up his chalet at Obersalzberg; the mountain complex was still deep in the late winter’s drifting snow. There he had indeed been busy. He had scrupulously reviewed the arrangements for the safe storage of his collection from Carinhall, including works by Botticelli, Rembrandt, Dürer, Gobelin and Picasso. He had then returned to his chalet, opened his safe in the study, and drawn out a steel box. Within this lay a copy of Hitler’s decree of 29 June 1941. This had been the upshot of Rudolf Hess’s strange flight to England on 10 May 1941. As Hitler’s deputy could no longer discharge his duties from confinement in England (initially in the Tower of London), Göring had then been promoted to replace him. Göring had this in writing.

In the chalet’s study the Marshal pondered the document. It designated Göring himself – creator of the Luftwaffe, Reichsminister of aviation, Reichsminister of forestry and President of Prussia – as Hitler’s successor. It was to come into effect should the Führer die or become incapacitated. Even at this late hour, Göring’s appetite for power was unbounded. Given the imminent fall of the capital to the Soviet forces, Göring’s telegram posed an innocent question. On the assumption that Hitler was to remain in Berlin – therefore to be captured or die a Heldentod, a hero’s death – should Göring assume the leadership of the Reich? This missive was followed by another cable addressed to Joachim von Ribbentrop but copied to Hitler.

Speer was now at a loose end, for he had no armaments industry to manage. As a result of the toils of the USAAF, RAF and various Allied armies, there was none. All ‘the good Nazi’ could do was to try to sabotage Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ policy. He followed these dramatic events as a disinterested observer. Bormann and Göring had never agreed. Here was Bormann’s opportunity to worst – preferably annihilate – the portly air marshal. Göring, claimed the bull-necked Bormann to Hitler, was launching a coup d’état. This latest cable was obviously an ultimatum. ‘Goering is engaged in treason!’ he raged to Hitler and Speer, his face empurpled. ‘He’s already sending telegrams to members of the government and announcing that on the basis of his powers he will assume your office at twelve o’clock tonight, mein Führer.’ Hitler, hitherto calm, was incensed. Bormann had played his cards well. ‘I’ve known it all along,’ Hitler blazed. ‘I know that Goering is lazy. He let the air force go to pot. He was corrupt. His example made corruption possible in our state. Besides he’s been a drug addict for years. I’ve known it all along.’29

With that, Hitler at once had Göring stripped of his succession to the Third Reich and gave orders that he should be arrested for high treason. This carried the death penalty. In the light of Göring’s long services to the Nazi Party, this – Hitler decreed – would be commuted: provided he at once resigned from all his offices. He was to answer yes or no, nein or ja. Immediately.

Bormann himself kindly drafted the cable to Obersalzberg to this effect. This was excellent. The outcome was predictable. But the Reichsleiter felt it wise to go one step further entirely on his own initiative. The SS detachment based at Obersalzberg was still on guard in its barracks. These were at the Hotel zum Türken, a few hundred yards uphill from the Berghof. By this time perhaps little could have surprised the leaders of the detachment, Obersturmbannführer Hans Frank and Obersturmführer von Bredow. In ten years Berchtesgaden had changed from a remote resort in the Bavarian Alps to the epicentre of a movement that defined the first half of the twentieth century and gave a new twist to the term ‘civilisation’. The cable the pair received from Bormann on the evening of 23 April 1945 ordered them to arrest Göring for high treason. They would answer with their lives if they failed.

Frank and von Bredow hastily buckled on their pistols and routed out the SS guard. It was a cold night. Göring’s chalet was uphill, through the snow. At shortly after midnight there was a thunderous knock at the door of the chalet and Göring found himself under house arrest. The Generalfeldmarschall was apparently unperturbed, confident, serene. To his wife Emmy, he remarked, ‘Everything will be cleared up by tomorrow. It’s simply a matter of a misunderstanding. Sleep peacefully, as I am going to do. Can you imagine for a single moment that Adolf Hitler would have me arrested today – I who have followed him through thick and thin for the last twenty-three years? Come now! It’s really unthinkable!’30

*

The Reichsbank gold and currency reserves dispatched from Berlin on the trains Adler and Dohle had now finally reached their destination.

This was Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps, a short way south of the secret Messerschmitt factory in Oberammergau, itself the neighbour of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The reserves had been transferred to Opel Blitz trucks, a convoy of which drew up at the officers’ mess of the Mountain Infantry Training School on the afternoon of 23 April. It was here that the late Generalfeldmarschall Rommel – a victim of the aftermath of the 20 July bomb plot – had sought advice about Operation Achse, the seizure of the Italian Alpine passes. Now his adviser, General der Gebirgstruppe Valentin Feurstein, was commanding the defence of Bregenz, the city just inside the Austrian–Swiss border, 125 miles west. The matter of the Reichsbank’s reserves was placed in the hands of the school’s current commanding officer, the forty-year-old Oberst Franz Wilhelm Pfeiffer. The responsibility for the reserves lay ultimately with the Reichsbank chief, Walther Funk. His officials accompanying the booty told Pfeiffer they were putting him in charge of concealing the reserves until the whirlwind of the Allied advance had passed by. When a new Bavarian state rose from the ashes of the Reich, it could then be financed. This was foresight. Pfeiffer, a tall, balding and dutiful career army officer, was not best pleased with the enormity of the task that had been foisted on him. Nevertheless, he found somewhere to store the reserves: the bowling alley of the officers’ mess. Then, under the watchful eyes of the Reichsbank officials, Pfeiffer and his men duly unloaded the sacks of currency and 364 bags of gold.

6

Meanwhile, the story of the surrender of the Wehrmacht and SS forces in Italy continued to unfold. Just as Hitler in the Berlin bunker was dealing with Göring’s high treason, Dulles in the Herrengasse in Berne received a phone call. It was his friend Colonel Max Waibel, the Swiss intelligence chief. It placed Dulles in a conundrum. ‘He had astounding news,’ remembered Dulles.

Dulles at once cabled AFHQ in Caserta to allow him to reopen the negotiations that he had so reluctantly closed. AFHQ cabled Washington. Truman, still fearful of compromising relations with Stalin, refused. The Joint Chiefs of Staff could only suggest to Dulles that Wolff should be kept in play by using Waibel as an intermediary.

Like Hitler in his bunker, Dulles was incensed. He broke two of his best pipes in his anger. In jeopardy were the lives of tens of thousands of Mark Clark’s Allied troops, similar numbers of Vietinghoff’s Germans, and his own great coup. The JCS suggestion also placed Waibel in an impossible situation. The Swiss were keen enough to see a brokered armistice, but as a statutory neutral it was difficult for them to be seen to engage in peace negotiations on behalf of one of the belligerents. Waibel knew that his political masters would be aghast at the prospect. Nevertheless, he agreed to meet Wolff in Lucerne and start talks. He could not reveal that Dulles himself was under orders not to treat with them. On meeting Waibel on 24 April, the hawk-nosed Wolff not unreasonably enquired, ‘Where is Herr Dulles?’

The following morning, 25 April 1945, shortly after dawn, 359 Lancasters from Bomber Groups 1, 5 and 8 in Lincolnshire could be seen to the north of the Alps over Basel, carefully skirting Swiss airspace. They were heading east, escorted by RAF and USAAF Mustang long-distance fighters and an RAF Mosquito Pathfinder squadron. One of the bomber pilots logged:

Irmgard Paul was at school in Berchtesgaden. Over the past three months the air-raid sirens had screamed no fewer than forty-eight times to clear the pleasant streets of the Bavarian resort of humanity. This time, at 09:30, Irmgard and four of her school friends – Else, Wiebke, Barbel and Ingrid – were caught out in the open on the slopes of Obersalzberg. ‘Let’s run to my house, it’s the nearest!’ she shouted to her friends. They dashed up the sandy, tree-lined road toward Haus Linden, still covered in patches of snow. They were too late. The bombs were already plummeting down towards them. After each detonation of the 500-kilogram bombs a Pentecostal blast funnelled down the narrow valley. The five girls had to grab the spruce trees to avoid being blown off their feet. ‘The earth shook, and the air was filled with the rumble of airplane motors, the whistle of falling bombs, the detonations, and the wind that followed.’

After forty-five minutes of terror, it was all over. Irmgard was able to see how fortunate – blessed – the town of Berchtesgaden itself had been.

Usually when the sirens wailed the Obersalzberg complex was shrouded in the acrid smoke of the chemical smokescreen system installed in 1943. With the Reich’s industry and communications in ruins, the supplies of the chemical had run out. The RAF Lancasters were able to bomb Obersalzberg with – for 1945 – pinpoint accuracy and to avoid collateral damage to the town of Berchtesgaden on the far side of the river Ache. The town and its inhabitants were all safe. Irmgard commented, ‘There were those who considered this a miracle; the Lord Himself had protected us, evidenced by the sign of a cross they saw in the sky. I, however, was puzzled, and would be for a long time. Why of all places should He protect Berchtesgaden, when all of Europe was in ashes?’33

Obersalzberg itself was quite another story. ‘The plateau had become a chaotic brown and black mess of tree-stumps resembling charred matchsticks, irregular dark craters and ruins that still smoked.’ Remembered Irmgard: ‘“It’s all gone”, I said to no one in particular.’34

The Berghof lay in ruins. Hitler’s mountain headquarters, the haven where he had conceived the European war, where he had entertained the Duke of Windsor, berated Schuschnigg, Daladier, Halifax and Chamberlain, where he had toyed with Mussolini, where he had given the directives for the invasion of Great Britain, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, where he had developed Operation Achse with Rommel, where he had been told of the impending siege of Stalingrad, where he had first heard the news of the Normandy landings, where he had so enjoyed Bergfried – the peace of the mountains – was no more.

Only the Kehlstein itself, the great Watzmann and – still capped with snow – the Untersberg remained. It was surprising that Barbarossa had not been awakened from his long sleep.

Notes

1. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

2. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

3. Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle (London: New English Library, 1980).

4. Ryan.

5. Ryan.

6. James Lucas, Last Days of the Third Reich: The Collapse of Nazi Germany, May 1945 (London: Cassell, 2000).

7. Ryan.

8. Ryan.

9. Ryan.

10. Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (London: Viking, 2002).

11. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

12. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

13. Lucas, Last Days.

14. Hastings, Max, All Hell Let Loose (London: HarperPress, 2011).

15. Ryan.

16. Srodes.

17. Churchill, Second World War, Volume VI.

18. Dulles, Germany’s Underground.

19. Mosley, Dulles.

20. Mosley, Dulles.

21. Alain Cerri, ‘The Battle of Mount Froid’,
http://worldatwar.net/article/
mountfroid/index.html.

22. Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2007.

23. Speer.

24. Speer.

25. Speer.

26. Halbrook, Target Switzerland.

27. Beevor.

28. Speer.

29. Speer.

30. Leonard Mosley, The Reich Marshal: A Biography of Hermann Göring (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).

31. Mosley, Dulles.

32. ‘Raid on Berchtesgaden’,
www.polishsquadronsremembered.
com/300/Berchtesgaden. html.

33. Hunt.

34. Hunt.