Storming the Eagle's Nest (15 page)

It was this pull that enabled Canaris to appoint the lanky Gisevius as vice-consul at the German legation in Zurich. Here Gisevius’s talents and inclinations might be put to best use. He might also keep Canaris in touch with MI6. This was an organisation with which he had surprisingly long-standing contacts, so much so that some have suggested that Canaris was an MI6 double agent. Gisevius duly made contact with MI6 in Berne in the form of the spry and suave Vanden Heuvel. On introducing himself to Dulles on 9 January 1943, Gisevius disclosed his identity and questioned Dulles as to the Allies’ likely attitude towards Germany in the event of Hitler’s removal. He omitted, though, to mention his contacts with MI6. Vanden Heuvel had taken the precaution of installing his own agent in Herrengasse to keep an eye on Dulles. This was the British butler with the irreproachably English name of Henry Baldwin. Vanden Heuvel was duly tipped off by Baldwin, who could scarcely fail to have noticed the striking, shambling figure of the 6’ 6” Gisevius. Vanden Heuvel warned Dulles of MI6 suspicions that Gisevius was a Nazi plant. Nevertheless, on 14 January 1943, Dulles again met Gisevius at the Herrengasse appartment. Dulles duly reported this meeting to Washington on a cipher.

This was all well and good. However, Canaris had a mistress in the form of a Polish woman called Halina Szymanska, the wife of a Polish officer imprisoned by the Soviets. Vanden Heuvel’s successor, Nicholas Elliot, recalled:

Whether in bed or elsewhere, what Madame Szymanska did discover was that the Germans had broken the Americans’ code. This was duly passed to Andrew King, Vanden Heuvel’s number two, who ran the Polish agent. Dulles was of course himself informed. Three months later in the course of another meeting with Gisevius in Berne, Dulles was told a splendid story. It
concerned the building of forty huge seaplanes in Nazi-occupied Rotterdam. They were to be manned by suicide squads and used to bomb London. Despite the Szymanska warning, Dulles passed this back to Washington not in one but two telegrams. Dansey, who remained highly sceptical of Gisevius, thought this a piece of misinformation or disinformation, designed to deceive. Dansey was beside himself. He told Vanden Heuvel: ‘could you report to the fool [Dulles] who knows his code was compromised if he has used that code to report meetings with anyone, Germans probably identified persons concerned and use them for stuffing. He swallows easily.’
20

All this merely formed a prelude to the Fritz Kolbe affair, the second act of which appears to have taken place on 18 August 1943, just as Italy was falling into chaos. This was the day after Kolbe’s rejection by Cartwright and – as it so turned out – the day after an air raid that showed the power of intelligence: the RAF bombing of the rocket research centre at Peenemünde (Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde) in the Baltic that set back the production of the V-2 rockets by anything up to a year.

According to one account, Kolbe attended mass in Berne cathedral before being taking under the convenient cover of the vineyard up to the Herrengasse apartment – away from the prying eyes of the Gestapo. Ushered into Dulles’s large
ground-floor
office, he held his briefcase in such a way as to catch his eye. His line with Dulles was just as with Cartwright. ‘I want to see Germany defeated in this war,’ Kolbe declared. ‘It is the only way to save my country. I think I can help in securing that defeat. I am an official of the German Foreign Office and I see all the telegrams that pass through the Department. I have copies of them in this briefcase. I brought them into Switzerland in the diplomatic bag, and I am willing to turn them over to you. There are more where these came from.’
21
Kolbe drew a key from his watch chain, unlocked the case, and opened it on Dulles’s desk. Dulles lit his pipe and picked up two reports at random. One was a detailed account of the Japanese army’s plans for an
offensive in Burma. The second – rather topical on that day – was plans for the use of V-weapons against England. ‘Your experts’, Kolbe told Dulles, ‘will need to study them to make sure they are genuine.’
22
Dulles concurred. The only problem was that the experts were British.

The documents duly found their way to Claude Dansey’s desk in London. Dulles had of course been duped. A colleague speculated that Dansey concluded: ‘It was clearly impossible that Dulles should have pulled off this spectacular scoop under his nose. Therefore he had not. The stuff was obviously a plant, and Dulles had fallen for it like a ton of bricks.’
23
This particular colleague was Kim Philby, who had by now – in his own words – drifted from the SOE to MI6. Philby, among others, counselled caution, suggesting the documents should be checked. Dansey was outraged. It was out of the question to let Dulles and OSS ‘run riot all over Switzerland, fouling up the whole intelligence field. Heaven knew what damage they wouldn’t do. Such matters had to be handled only by officers with experience of the pitfalls that beset the unwary.’
24
The documents were nevertheless passed on to Philby for verification by the counter-espionage section. This was done by finding if any of them matched intelligence from a different source – in this case from the Ultra decrypts from Bletchley Park. ‘I chose for his scrutiny’, recalled Philby, ‘a striking series of telegrams from the German Military Attaché in Tokyo to the German General Staff which had been transmitted through diplomatic channels.’
25
Commander Alastair Denniston headed up the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. Two days later Denniston called Philby. The telegrams matched.

Dansey of course was appalled. He was only mollified when Philby explained he had not credited the documents to the OSS and that as head of the Swiss section credit might reasonably be attributed to Dansey himself. ‘Carry on,’ Dansey told Philby. ‘You’re not such a fool as I thought.’
26
According to Philby, his motive in verifying the material and ensuring that credit was given where credit wasn’t due was to get himself promoted to a role of greater value to his Soviet masters. ‘I regarded my SIS
appointments purely in the light of cover-jobs, to be carried out sufficiently well to ensure my attaining positions in which my service to the Soviet Union would be most effective.’ Needless to say, the secrets also found their way to Moscow.

Kolbe, though, was a find and a huge one. His second visit to Berne on 7 October 1943 was followed by many. He would later be regarded as one of the most important spies of the Second World War. His rejection by Cartwright and acquisition by Dulles helped the American’s make his mark in the nest of spies in Berne in the early autumn of 1943. Once having done so, the pipe-smoking, avuncular Dulles turned to the matter of conducting extra-marital affairs.

Mary Bancroft was a highly intelligent fellow American who had been living in Switzerland since 1934. The thirty-eight-
year-old
spoke French and German fluently, and had befriended the pioneer Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. She was working for the US legation in Berne on psychological analyses of the speeches of Hitler, Göring and Goebbels. On first meeting Dulles in the Herrengasse, she disclosed to the spymaster that the legation had discovered a homosexual network operating across the foreign offices of Britain, the USA, Switzerland and Greece. Through this fraternity, information was disseminated even more quickly than through the Catholic Church or – in her own words – various Jewish organisations.
27
She was also able to enlighten Dulles on what homosexuals actually did in bed. Bancroft, bored with her second marriage, wanted a job from Dulles and soon rather more. Dulles, separated from his wife Clover by the Atlantic Ocean and temperamentally unfaithful, was of a like mind. He propositioned her with a line well worth remembering by those contemplating office affairs, ‘We can let the work cover the romance and the romance cover the work.’
28
Bancroft complied. Soon, the OSS with its ample money,
joie de vivre
and lax morals began to be called ‘Oh So Social’. Particularly by the British.

When Hitler had met Il Duce at Feltre in the Italian Alps on 19 July 1943, it had been clear to the Führer how close to the end of his tether was his old ally. Yet even Hitler was caught by surprise by the speed of subsequent events in the Italian capital that led to the dismissal of Mussolini. By 24 July he had been replaced by the seventy-two-year-old Pietro Badoglio, former Chief of Staff of ‘Dictator Number One’. Soon the news from Rome filtered through to Hitler in Rastenburg.

On 27 July 1943 Rommel was summoned to attend the noon conference at the Führerhauptquartier. ‘The Italians are obviously planning to betray us!’ Hitler declared.
1
It was hardly a controversial opinion. He gave the Afrika Korps veteran his top-secret orders to return to his HQ in Munich and prepare for Operation Achse: the infiltration of the Alpine passes, the occupation of northern Italy and – if need be – the disarming of Italian forces. On 29 July Hitler gave the necessary order to Rommel for the first stage of the plan to proceed. The following day, 30 July 1943, a spearhead of the 26th Panzer Division headed south from Innsbruck up towards the Brenner Pass, the ‘great gate of Italy’, the border between the Reich and her increasingly nominal ally. The Italian border guards watched in
astonishment as the motorised infantry column ground its way slowly towards the railway station that marked the border itself, a frontier hemmed in by the high ridges of the Eisack valley. The spearhead was a squadron of Tiger tanks. The column’s weapons were trained, its guns cocked and the turrets of the tanks were traversing. It was ready for anything.

What should be done? Clearly a reference must be made to higher authority.

General Alessandro Gloria was in command of the XXXV Corps at Bolzano, the Alpine capital of South Tyrol. This was some thirty miles south of the Brenner Pass into Italy, a handsome medieval city dominated by the 10,968-foot Marmolada, the highest peak in the Dolomites. The General himself, a veteran of the Italians’ disastrous North African campaign, was as undecided as his border guards on the Brenner. Suspicious though he might be about the purpose of the Panzer division, resistance by force of arms could be personal and professional suicide. By the time he had telephoned Rome to check whether the Wehrmacht had the necessary permission to pass, the 26th Division already held the border. Fait accompli. Forty-eight hours later, on 1 August 1943, the 44th Infantry and the 1st SS Panzer Divisions followed. Rommel had given his commanders strict orders to provoke the Italians no more than the very presence of his troops dictated. General Gloria’s patience had been tried and it was tested further when the 44th Infantry arrived in Bolzano itself. Here Germans and Italians were forever at loggerheads. It will be remembered that the German-speaking inhabitants had been placed under Italian control when the South Tyrol was gifted to Italy after the First World War by the Treaty of Saint-Germain. Now the tables had once again been turned. Gloria protested vehemently and vociferously to Rommel but he restricted himself to words. The Desert Fox was unyielding. As a fighting force he regarded the Italians with contempt. What had they done in North Africa? Nothing. In the end the Axis generals came to terms. Whatever the future might hold, Italy and Germany were not yet at war.

A month later they were. On 3 September 1943 General Giuseppe Gastello signed an armistice with the Allies in Cassibile, Sicily. At 6.30 p.m. on 8 September this agreement was published by the Allies as the Badoglio Declaration. Dwight Eisenhower’s Kansas drawl declared on Radio Algiers, ‘The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally.’
2
The breaking of this news on that stifling airless evening was premature, for it caught the three million men of Italy’s armed forces by surprise: Badoglio had yet to inform the Regia Marina, the Regia
Aeronautica
and the Regio Esercito of the armistice. Orders are the sine qua non of the military. The Italians had none. The three Italian armed services were poleaxed. The Wehrmacht was not. At 7.50 p.m. the OKW phoned the codeword ‘Achse’ to Rommel’s headquarters, a special command train simmering in a siding just south of Munich. The second part of Operation Achse swung smoothly into action.

The very evening of Eisenhower’s announcement, Rommel’s forces seized the French Alps occupied by the Italians. In a lightning operation, all points of strategic importance were taken. These were the Alpine passes of the Little St Bernard, the Great St Bernard, the Mont Cenis, the Col de Montgenèvre and the Col de Larche – all the passes in the Rhône-Alpes and the Alpes-Maritimes where the Italians had fought the French in the Alpine campaign of June 1940. The occupying Italian Fourth Army, amounting to about 100,000, largely disintegrated. In Albertville in the Savoie, in the happier times of 1992 host to the Winter Olympics, the Italians resisted all night. Other units had the initiative to mine the Fréjus tunnel leading from France to Italy under the Col de Fréjus in Savoie. Mostly the Italians simply melted away, a rag, tag and bobtail army scattering arms and equipment and even uniforms in its wake, careering back to Italy. For them the war seemed over. It was a rout.

The Italian high command had spent weeks planning the defence of these Alpine choke points against the anticipated German ambush. It had not had the will to put the plans into action. Goebbels commented in his diary that had the Italians
blown the Alpine bridges and tunnels, the forces engaging Eisenhower’s armies in Sicily would have been trapped.
3
How fortunate that the Italians were Italian!

And the Italians were not the only ones to be caught out by Eisenhower’s broadcast.

One of the first things on the Germans’ agenda in the old Italian zone was the Jews. The most vulnerable were those in the communities perched along the Alpine Franco-Italian border. These were the five thousand or so refugees in Megève, St Gervais, Barcelonnette, Vence, Venanson, Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Nice: those enjoying assigned residence under the protection of Guido Lospinoso, Il Duce’s Inspector General of Racial Policy.

Six weeks earlier in the last week of July, the news of Mussolini’s fall had been received by these refugees in the Alps with outbursts of joy. The wildest of hopes sprang up that the collapse of the whole Axis was at hand. In Nice, a young refugee recorded that 26 July 1943 ‘was a night of delirium. People celebrated the event as though it was 14 July [Bastille Day, when the French celebrate the storming of the prison-fortress in Paris], the cafés remained open all night. It seemed that the nightmare was nearing an end and the war would be over any moment.’
4

Over the following few days in early August 1943, more sober counsels prevailed. The Italians had been the bulwark between the Jewish communities and the combined anti-Semitic forces of the Vichy French and the Germans in the interlocking and overlapping administration of the Italian zone. Now it was said that the Italians would withdraw and leave the Jews to fend for themselves. In the first few hours of his administration Badoglio had tactfully declared that ‘The war continues on the side of our Germanic ally.’
5
Who knew how long this might last?

On 15 August 1944, a deal had been struck in Bolzano between Generals Rommel and Gloria, between the German and Italian forces. The Regio Esercito would cede the territory to the west of the Var and Tinée rivers to the Germans and continue to hold the
Alpine foothills and the Alpes-Maritimes themselves to the east. This meant not much more than a small enclave around Nice itself and was obviously a fragile, temporary arrangement, and from Annecy and Megève in the north to Saint-Martin-Vésubie and Nice in the south there was growing panic. Those Jews who had prospects of legally entering neighbouring Italy or
Switzerland
desperately sought the necessary papers to do so. Those without such hopes made other arrangements. In Saint-
Martin-Vésubie
, the Alpine settlement high above Nice, the Movement of Zionist Youth defied the orders of the Italian authorities to stay within the confines of the town. It sent scouts eastwards from Saint-Martin up to explore the two high passes over into Italy, the 8,342-foot Col de Cerise and the 8,106-foot Col de Fenestre. How practicable were these tracks for the very young and very old? These were their escape routes should the need arise.

In Rome, there was also action. At the end of August 1943 a ministerial meeting took the decision that the Jews in the assigned residence settlements should be returned to the small Nice haven. Lospinoso was duly instructed to make the necessary arrangements. Some were to be taken by train, some by truck. Meanwhile, in Nice itself, the Comité d’Assistance aux Refugés had conceived an ambitious plan to rescue all 30,000 Jews in the Alps by chartering four ships –
Duilio, Giulio Cesare,
Saturnia
and
Vulcania
. This was the brainchild of one of the less sung heroes of the war, a fifty-eight-year-old Jewish banker called Angelo Donati. These ships would ferry the Jews from all the assigned residence communities from the port of Nice to mainland Italy, thence to Allied North Africa. Here they would be placed in US and British camps.

Not knowing that the armistice between Badoglio and the Allies had already been signed, during the course of the second week of September, Lospinoso’s Jews from the north – from Barcelonnette to Vence – set off. Many of them actually arrived in Nice on 8 September itself, returning – as they thought – to the Italian sanctuary. That evening they heard to their horror
Eisenhower’s announcement of the armistice. They knew what it meant.

Within thirty-six hours of the broadcast – on 10 September 1943 – a commando unit of German security forces arrived in Nice. It was led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner. This brave fellow was the right-hand man of one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann: he who had set up the office for Jewish emigration in Vienna. The thirty-one-year-old Brunner had already distinguished himself in his merciless treatment of Jews in Salonika, Greece’s second city, and at the Paris holding camp at Drancy.

At 3.30 p.m. on the day of his arrival Brunner unleashed a manhunt. It was led by the Gestapo, energetically aided and abetted by the French fascists, the Parti Populaire Français. Word went round the Jewish community like wildfire. A few of the refugees – some of whom had only just arrived – gathered up their portable possessions, rushed to the railway station in the Avenue Thiers, and found places on the last train from Nice. This steamed slowly east along the spectacular Riviera coast, the azure seas glittering in the autumn sunshine, through the
belle époque
resorts of Beaulieu, Monaco and Menton, across the border at Ventimiglia into the Italian province of Cuneo. Other refugees, the less fortunate, were seized in their homes and hotels, on the roads to the north and east and in the city itself. According to one witness, Léon Poliakov, ‘Those official black Citroëns cruised the streets of Nice, and passengers attentively scrutinized passers-by. At any moment, a pedestrian would be asked to get into a car … The car went to the synagogue. There the victim was undressed and, if he was circumcised, he automatically took his place in the next convoy to Drancy.’
6
Brunner’s Gestapo also headed for the offices of the
département
prefect Jean Chaigneau and the Italian consul-general Augusto Spechel. These two men held the names and addresses of the Jews in Nice itself and all the assigned residence communities on the Alpine border. Prefect Chaigneau was a courageous man. He had burned his lists.
Spechel had taken the precaution of transferring his to Rome. The Gestapo left empty-handed and furious.

As the manhunt progressed over the following thirty-six hours, two other groups of Jewish refugees were still on their way to Nice. One was a party of two hundred elderly, children and young mothers from Megève. They had been brought by truck from the resort to Chambéry, there to take a train to Nice via Grenoble. As the train neared the Dauphiné capital, so too did the
Wehrmacht
approaching from the west. Somehow word was passed to the train and it was diverted to the relative safety of Turin, over the Italian border. The younger and fitter from the community in Megève were to undertake the whole journey by road. On the morning of 11 September 1943, a long line of charcoal-burning gazogènes could be seen heading east along the coast road from Cannes. As the convoy approached the Var to the west of Nice, a roadblock barred its way. At first no one could make out by which forces it was manned. Soon it became apparent. Field grey: it was the Wehrmacht. A few of the Jews had the energy and strength of will to jump out of the trucks and disappear into the stony Provençal countryside. The rest were captured.

For them it was Drancy, Auschwitz and the gas chambers.

Meanwhile, in Saint-Martin-Vésubie the contingency plan of escape over the border to Italy was put into effect. It had been an agonising decision for these benighted people. They could stay where they were: perhaps the Germans would not trouble themselves with such a remote place. They could seek refuge in the immediate – and inhospitable – surroundings. Or they could head for Italy: another country with another language and another people, where they had no idea of what they would find. Most chose to head over the two passes for Italy, perhaps feeling that it was better to act than to await events. Few had any experience of the high Alpine world: of hanging glaciers, loose screes, of precipices and rockfalls, of foot- and handholds that could crumble at a touch.

The first of them set out within hours of Eisenhower’s
announcement, on the evening of 8 September 1943. Autumn was already closing its fist on the terrain, turning the leaves in the lower valley around Saint-Martin-Vésubie to russet and yellow, the light shading upwards to the evergreen spruce and fir, and then to the bare rock above the treeline. Snow was in the air, ibex and chamois grazing in the middle distance, birds of prey circling high above.