The Secret Surrender: Operation Sunrise
February–March 1945
On February 9, the representative of the Office of Strategic Services in Berne, Switzerland, sent a telegram to the office of the president in Washington. The Yalta Conference was still ongoing—Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt were meeting in the Crimea to discuss the postwar situation in Europe. The OSS Berne office was receiving information from a high-level and well-connected informant who had intelligence links to the German Wehrmacht in Italy, the SS, Mussolini’s supporters, and the German diplomatic service in Switzerland. The informant reported that the German consul in Lugano, Switzerland, had just returned from a meeting with Field Marshal Kesselring, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, and Rudolf Rahn, the German ambassador to Mussolini’s Salò Republic in northern Italy. The consul, Alexander Konstantin von Neurath, had told the informant that he felt that German units in northern Italy were being kept by Hitler and Himmler specifically for the protection of the Nazis’ last-ditch “inner fortress” based around Austria and Bavaria. Kesselring in Italy and Gerd von Rundstedt in the west did not appear ready to surrender yet. The OSS cables to Washington did not make it immediately clear who was providing the information to them in Switzerland. Neurath? Somebody in the SS? An Italian?1
While the Arguing Allies were discussing the breakup and layout of postwar Europe, the Germans in Italy suddenly started to make overtures for a separate surrender of all their forces there. The Red Army had occupied Budapest, the capital of Hungary, on February 13, and the last German forces, including Major Walter Reder and the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division Reichsführer-SS, were retreating toward Austria. They were hoping to be able to surrender to the British or Americans, not the Russians.
By February 24, the OSS in Berne received information that Kesselring and Ambassador Rahn were “ready to surrender and even to fight against Hitler, if the Allies can make it worth their while.” Kesselring, said the secret informant, felt that he was destined to retire to the Alps as a last stand where, overseen by SS officials, he would die in the final battle against the Allies or instead be killed for not resisting them. The plot thickened. On the same day, the London Daily Dispatch ran a story from its Bern correspondent stating that “Kesselring has offered secretly to the Allies to withdraw under pressure, leaving North Italian cities intact and preventing Fascist destruction, in return for which he has asked for assurances that he would not be considered a war criminal and would be allowed to retire his troops to Germany to maintain order.”
For another two weeks, the office of the OSS was silent on the matter. Both sides were preparing their ground. The German military, SS, and diplomatic community in northern Italy knew that a German military collapse was imminent in Europe and that a surrender deal should be discussed. But with whom? Where? With the Americans? The British? Heinrich Himmler had already made it clear to Karl Wolff that the Italian forces in northern Italy, particularly the SS, should pull back into Austria before the Allies’ long-expected spring offensive could begin, rather than negotiate a surrender deal. Walter Reder and his colleagues from the 16th SS had already gone to Hungary—a German offensive to try to save the capital, Budapest had just failed, and the city had fallen. Reder and his unit were somewhere near the Austrian border.
Then the SS played its hand in Switzerland. On the morning of March 8, Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS Karl Wolff, the Higher SS and Police Leader in Italy, and a German High Command representative from General Kesselring’s staff arrived in Lugano, on the Swiss-Italian border. Dressed in smart civilian clothes, they said they were prepared to make definite commitments in regard to “terminating German resistance in North Italy.”
The OSS representative in Berne believed that Wolff was truthfully working with Kesselring, and that the two generals might actually effect an unconditional surrender. Absolute secrecy, they said, was essential for this to work, and the OSS representative was ready to arrange with complete secrecy for the entry into Switzerland in civilian clothes of fully authorized representatives of the Supreme Allied Mediterranean Command. The operation was given the code name “Sunrise”; the intelligence intermediary, “Crossword.” It was a major intelligence coup for the Americans, but it was simultaneously a success for a relatively low-level SS intelligence officer. For behind it was one of Wolff’s intelligence deputies, the SS-Lieutenant Guido Zimmer, who for three months had been guiding much of the German overture to the OSS.
In November 1944, there was a meeting of RSHA foreign intelligence officials in Verona, which had been convened by their resident expert on Switzerland, Klaus Huegel. Lieutenant Zimmer was present at the meeting, as he had good intelligence contacts with both the Swiss and the Italian partisans. What none of the three sides—American, German, or Italian—then knew was that Zimmer was keeping a diary throughout the negotiation process. At the November meeting, he suggested contacting Allied intelligence in Switzerland through one Baron Luigi Parrilli, an aristocratic Fascist businessman from Genoa. Parrilli had worked with Zimmer in his intelligence work and was also well connected with the Italian partisans not just in his native Liguria but around Milan as well. It was in Parrilli’s interests as a business owner in northern Italy that the SOE and OSS anti-scorch plans worked. He didn’t want to lose hundreds of millions of lire of property and assets to either the Germans or the partisans. As a Fascist sympathizer, he could see the end coming and knew that he needed some powerful new allies, fast. Zimmer’s boss, Colonel Rauff, and other RSHA officials contacted Berlin, and the plan to contact the Americans was given the go-ahead in February 1945, reportedly by Himmler. Karl Wolff approved of it too. The operation to approach the Allies via Luigi Parrilli was code-named “Operation Wool.”
At the beginning of February, Zimmer made the following entry in his notebook:
P[arrilli] was invited to my place for a meal today in order to discuss quietly once more the Swiss trip which he is to begin on the 20th of February. Apart from the tasks already laid down in writing, I went one step further today with reference to the conversation with Mr. Von F[ische] and SS. Col. R[auff], and am having P. make an official visit to the English and American ambassadors. There to set forth our common view on the Communist danger and in this connection to intimate that SS 1st Lt. Zi[mmer] has already tried more than once to make contact with influential Englishmen, since he is of the firm conviction that he has things to say which are most certainly of interest to England. He should further intimate that Zi, without the knowledge of his office belongs to some circles of influential people who are pursuing a definite political course that is of importance to Englishmen, provided that the decision has not already been settled to destroy Germany at any cost and leave the field open for Russia.2
Zimmer, Wolff, Parrilli, and three others then met with the OSS representative in Berne on March 8, where the Americans duly reported back that Karl Wolff was willing to try to take the German forces out of the war in northern Italy, but that he had not yet “won over” Kesselring to the plan. Wolff also claimed that Heinrich Himmler in Germany had no idea of what he was doing, although the Americans were not sure whether to believe this, given the close friendship and working methods Wolff and Himmler had developed since 1933. The Germans needed to persuade the Allies that they meant business. So they brought with them to Switzerland a well-known Italian partisan leader named Ferruccio Parri. He was a famous ex-soldier, journalist, antifascist activist, and partisan leader. He was the head of the Action Party partisan groups in northern Italy; the Germans had arrested him in January 1945 in Milan, and tortured him in prison. Parri had no idea what was happening when the SS came to his cell in March and took him away in a car. He thought he was going to be shot. At the meeting in Switzerland on March 8, Zimmer and two other SS officers, Colonels Eugen Dollmann and Eugen Wenner, accompanied Wolff along with Baron Parrilli. Following the meeting, Allen Dulles, the OSS station chief in Switzerland, made the following notes about Karl Wolff: “He is a distinctive personality, and evidence indicates that he represents the more moderate elements in Waffen SS combined with a measure of romanticism. He is probably the most dynamic personality in North Italy and, next to Kesselring, the most powerful.”
Wolff stated that the time had come for some Germans with the power to act to lead Germany out of the war in order to end the useless human and material destruction. He said he was willing to act and felt he could persuade Kesselring to cooperate, and that between the two of them they controlled the situation in North Italy. As far as the SS was concerned, Wolff stated that he also controlled western Austria, since his authority included Vorarlberg, Tyrol, and the Brenner Pass with both its northern and southern approaches. Wolff said that joint action by Kesselring and himself would leave Hitler and Himmler powerless to take effective countermeasures like the ones employed after the July 20 assassination attempt. Wolff felt that all they needed was one German general to take the lead. The Americans reported that he “made no request concerning his personal safety or privileged treatment from the war criminal viewpoint.” Nobody said or noted anything about what terms Zimmer might have put forward to protect himself from possible prosecution after the war.
By this point, the British could only assume that Moscow had seen the newspaper story from Berne and that, paranoid and suspicious to the core, Stalin would have believed it. They also knew that Stalin had a number of agents operating in northern Italy, some of them inserted by the SOE itself at the request of Pavel Fitin’s NKVD (the Soviet secret police) in Moscow, on an operation code-named “Pickaxe.” They had to assume the Russians knew about the German approach: if Zimmer had included the SS, a leading Fascist businessman, the Americans, the RSHA, and two separate groups of Italian partisans in his plan, who else knew about it? The British believed it was likely the Italian Communists knew, and that they had passed the information to the Russians.
So on March 12, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, the British ambassador in Moscow, told the Russian Foreign Ministry that, along with the Americans, they had received tentative approaches from the Germans in Italy who were interested in discussing a possible surrender. He told the foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, that no further contact would be made with the Germans until the Russians had indicated how they wanted to proceed; Clark-Kerr made it very clear that a Russian presence at the meetings in Switzerland would be welcome. And that the British and Americans were prepared to help smuggle a plainclothes Russian representative into the country.
On March 16, Molotov in Moscow went to see the British ambassador. He was furious. He told Clark-Kerr that the Soviet government found the attitude of the British government “entirely inexplicable and incomprehensible in denying facilities to the Russians to send a representative to Berne.”
Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr tried to reassure the furious Russian, a Bolshevik of the old school. He said that the British and Americans were trying, in the first instance, to see if the German approaches were genuine before they took them any farther, and before they set up a formal meeting to which they would of course invite the Russians. Molotov was completely unconvinced and left the British embassy in Moscow in a temper, shouting about Allied duplicity.
Whoever had devised and was running Operation Sunrise had achieved something unintended: engineering a split of confidence between the Allied leadership at precisely the moment when the three leaders thought they had negotiated a compromise about postwar Europe at Yalta.
In Switzerland, Wolff further tried to reassure the Americans. Not only had he brought the partisan leader, Ferruccio Parri, with him to Switzerland, he had also delivered back to the Americans a leading OSS intelligence asset, Major Antonio Usmiani, whom the Germans had arrested in Milan. Zimmer commented that Wolff “had given up our two biggest hostages.” The SS general went further: he said he would discontinue active warfare against the partisans, except that required to keep up a pretense of ongoing conflict while Operation Sunrise was finalized. He agreed to release several hundred Italian Jews who were in a detention center at Bolzano near the Swiss border—he denied that he had taken any ransom money from the Jewish families to make this offer, but Rauff and Zimmer almost certainly did. Wolff also offered to free one of Major Oliver Churchill’s two key partisan links, who had also been arrested. Edgardo Sogno ran La Franchi and had protected Churchill in Milan—Sogno himself was the Liberal Party representative at the CLNAI. He was also heavily involved in smuggling Jews out of Italy into Switzerland, so the fact that Wolff and Zimmer offered both him and the Bolzano Jews as part of the deal was no coincidence.
On March 19, Wolff, Zimmer, and Dollmann met with representatives of Field Marshal Harold Alexander near Lugano. Alexander’s officers, theatrically, wore plain clothes and did not give their names or ranks but simply described themselves as “advisers of the OSS representative.” Wolff said that Kesselring had been assigned to Marshal von Rundstedt’s command in the west and had not even been allowed by Hitler’s headquarters to return to Italy to pack up his effects. Thus Wolff had not been able to see Kesselring since the field marshal’s first meeting with the OSS representative at the beginning of March. General Vietinghoff, who acted as deputy commander in Italy for Kesselring, had gone to Germany on leave in mid-January, and subsequently had held a brief command in Kourland on the Baltic Eastern Front. After a short conference at Hitler’s headquarters, he was ordered to return to Italy to assume command. It appeared that Hitler was none the wiser about Operation Sunrise.
If neither of these officers wanted to act with him, Wolff said that he could bring with him the assets he commanded in Italy at that point. These included some 15,000 Germans and 20,000 Soviets, mostly Don and Kuban Cossacks and Turkomans. He had 10,000 Serb monarchists, 10,000 Slovenes, 5,000 Czechs, parts of an Indian SS legion, and 100,000 Italians. He also had 65,000 subsidiary Wehrmacht supply and service troops, so some 225,000 men in all.
After this meeting, the Allies waited impatiently to learn what news Wolff bought of Kesselring. In Russia, meanwhile, Molotov had furiously assigned his NKVD network the specific task of finding out what the Americans, the Germans, and the British had been doing. It didn’t take his men long to present their answer. He told Stalin—who sent a telegram to Churchill to the same effect—that “negotiations have been going on for two weeks behind the Soviet Union’s back.” Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr still tried to say it was just sounding things out. Molotov then laid down another card of diplomatic insult: “In this instance the Soviet government sees not just a misunderstanding but something worse.” Operation Sunrise was splitting the Allied alliance.3
By the evening of March 26, the OSS in Switzerland had heard nothing further from Wolff. The strategic situation in Europe was becoming more desperate for the Germans—Field Marshal Montgomery’s troops had crossed the Rhine on March 24 at Wesel. Then Lieutenant Zimmer recontacted the OSS: Hitler had recalled his senior officers from Italy to a conference in Berlin, where he was now running operations from his bunker under the Reich Chancellery. Wolff had not left to join the meeting. Zimmer reported simply that Hitler wanted to use the remainder of German forces in Italy to defend Austria and Bavaria.
The OSS may have heard nothing from Wolff, but the telegram traffic between Stalin and the dying President Roosevelt had been daily. Franklin Roosevelt’s response to Stalin was simple: “I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment towards your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”
Churchill, insulted and stung by Molotov’s remarks, had adopted a silent, sulking approach. Stalin, petulant, paranoid, feeling betrayed, realized this. And so he communicated with the Americans, and not Churchill, in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Western allies. Over and above the question of whether the Germans had or hadn’t sued for peace, and whether the Americans and British had or had not tried to exclude the Russians, Stalin felt bruised and deceived by Churchill, particularly over what should happen in Poland. Churchill had been convinced since the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, when Stalin had refused to rescue the Poles, that the Soviet leader would occupy Poland and deny the Poles any remote form of autonomy and self-government. They would be a Communist satellite. Churchill and Roosevelt had argued strongly at Yalta that Poland should be divided between the inhabitants of that country and Russia. From 1940 onward, Churchill’s diaries and telegrams to Roosevelt and his ministers reverberate with his concerns about Poland. Stalin, of course, was intending to simply occupy the country. And Operation Sunrise was the last straw—here, for Stalin, was finally consummate proof that Churchill in particular was deceiving him. Of what use were such allies? Stalin asked.
Churchill’s telegrams to Roosevelt were being answered by his chief of staff, General George Marshall. The last time Churchill was to see the dying Roosevelt was post-Yalta, when the two Western leaders had a meeting on a naval ship in Alexandria harbor in Egypt. Churchill said that Roosevelt seemed “to have a slender contact with life.” Churchill followed up this sad encounter with a lunch meeting at an Egyptian desert oasis at Fayoum with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The oasis’s residents were simply removed for the day to the surrounding desert. The British prime minister was the host of the meeting. On being told that Prince Ibn Saud did not drink or smoke, Churchill took it upon himself to say that “if it was the religion of His Majesty to deprive himself of smoking and alcohol, I must point out that my rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.” The Saudi prince accepted this position. In return, Churchill gave him a Rolls-Royce.4
On April 1, the OSS office in Switzerland was suddenly in contact with Washington again. Wolff had sent Zimmer to see the Americans, to say that the SS general had tried to meet with Kesselring, but the field marshal had left Italy before he could get to him. By this time, Allied troops were only six miles away from Kesselring’s headquarters. The Luftwaffe field marshal told Wolff to go through with the plan, and he in turn had told Zimmer to go to Berne to tell the OSS that a full German delegation was ready to meet with the Allies. Zimmer also transmitted the message that Wolff had been in Germany and had told Himmler about the state of negotiations. Himmler ordered him not to go to Switzerland again, but then left in a furious hurry for Hungary, which had just fallen to the Red Army, which was preparing for an onward attack on Austria and Vienna. Zimmer finished his presentation of his superiors’ deliberations with a flourish: Kesselring had told Wolff that Hitler was still determined to hold out to the last, trusting in secret weapons.
The meetings with Karl Wolff to discuss a German surrender never took place. So divided were the Americans, Russians, and British by Stalin and Molotov’s accusations of treachery that the matter was dropped, deemed far more damaging than beneficial to the Allies’ joint position. On April 20, a telegram from Washington was forwarded to the OSS in Switzerland:
The Joint Chiefs of Staff have today directed that all contact with the German emissaries mentioned in my memorandum to you of 18 April 1945 be terminated. This action came about as the result of dispatch by the Combined Chiefs of Staff of a message to the Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean Theater, stating that in view of (1) their belief that the German Commander in Chief, Italy did not at this time intend to surrender on acceptable terms and (2) complications which had arisen with the Russians on the matter it had been decided by the Governments of the United States and Great Britain that the contact should be broken off.
It led to huge complications with the Russians. So who did benefit from Operation Sunrise? Karl Wolff? Or Guido Zimmer and his Italian and SS colleagues?