Storming the Eagle's Nest (16 page)

Through this epic landscape around a thousand Jews – the young and the old, the strong and the weak – headed for the Col de Cerise or the Col de Fenestre – the two routes established just days previously by the young Zionists. It was an exodus. Many carried in small fibre suitcases all that they owned. Most took two days to make the journey, some more. The first day on either route was relatively easy, along mule tracks. That night, the refugees slept under the stars. The second, where the trail – such as it was – ran through a boulder field, was much tougher. There were no yellow waymarks to point to the next mountain restaurant: rather a switchback climb with the rocks shifting underfoot and snow-clad peaks staring down. The two passes themselves were high, windy, bleak places, windows from one valley – one world – to the next. On the third day the exiles
descended
into the Gesso valley and what they believed might be sanctuary.

As the ill-shod, poorly clothed parties – in ones and twos and groups of half a dozen or so – straggled down the rugged paths clutching their suitcases, they were watched with gathering interest by the Italian locals. Men, women and children loitered on their doorsteps and hung around on street corners, observing the refugees with considerable curiosity. One of the footsore, William Blye, ‘thought it was because the Jews were speaking languages other than Italian and wearing city clothes … Only later was he told that the peasants were looking for horns. They thought that Jews had horns on their heads, like Moses and other Old Testament characters they had seen in church.’
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Full of hope and fear, the exhausted refugees wound their way down the paths leading to the communities of Entraque, Valdieri and Borgo
San Dalmazzo in the province of Cuneo. These were medieval villages hewn out of rock, where the peasant community gleaned a subsistence living out of the thin Alpine soil.

The haven the Jews had hoped for they did not find. As in Nice, Rommel’s forces had got there before the persecuted could escape. On 12 September 1943 the a battalion from the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had occupied the provincial capital of Cuneo, within a few miles of all the refugees fleeing from Saint-Martin. On 18 September the battalion commander, SS-Sturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, ordered the Jews in the area to assemble at the barracks close to the railway station in Borgo San Dalmazzo. Two months later, of the 349 who had gathered or who were subsequently captured, 328 were dispatched to Drancy. On 7 December 1943 they were entrained to Auschwitz. Twelve survived.

Most of those who remained in Saint-Martin-Vésubie were captured by SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner’s police, who arrived in the mountain settlement on 21 September 1943. They were deported and gassed. A few remained in hiding, helped by the locals. Only when Allied soldiers reached Saint-
Martin-Vésubie
from the beachheads of the south of France landings on 2 September 1944 did they know they would survive.

Further south in Italy, Operation Achse had similarly momentous consequences for a large group of Allied prisoners of war.

On the day of the armistice between the Allies and Italy, there were around 75,000 British and Dominion POWs in Italian camps. They were mostly infantrymen who had surrendered at Tobruk in 1941, scattered in some fifty-two camps all over the Italian peninsula. One of the terms of the armistice between the Allies and the new Badoglio administration was that the prisoners should be transferred to the care of the Allies. Churchill had demanded ‘the immediate liberation of all British POWs in Italian hands, and the prevention, which can in the first instance
only be by the Italians, of their being transported north towards Germany’.
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The chaos that accompanied the armistice and its announcement, and the rapidity of Rommel’s advance into northern Italy, meant that this was far easier to demand than do. Moreover, some of the more fascistic camp commanders simply ignored Badoglio’s orders and handed their charges over to the Wehrmacht. Others threw open the gates of their camps to let nature take her course. The more enterprising, tougher and more resolute prisoners saw their chance and took it. Ill-prepared,
ill-equipped
, often dressed only in their service clothes, and rarely speaking more than a smattering of Italian, in groups of two or three they headed for freedom.

Where that lay was open to question. Some hoped to join Tito’s partisans to the north-east of Italy in neighbouring
Yugoslavia
; some to join the nascent Italian resistance; some to join the Allied forces in Sicily; some to throw themselves on the mercy of the Vatican in Rome. Still others decided to wait in hiding for the anticipated Allied landings further north on the Italian peninsula: there were rumoured to be assaults planned or actually taking place in Genoa, La Spezia, Leghorn and Trieste.

Switzerland, too, promised freedom, but it lay beyond the Alps. Not for nothing were they the natural frontier between the two countries. Those POWs trekking from Italy into Switzerland had far more on their hands and under their feet than the refugees from Saint-Martin-Vésubie, for the Alps on the frontier here were much higher than in the Alpes-Maritimes. In the Pennine Alps they would have to climb, not walk; here they had to face the challenges of glaciers and crevasses, not just steep mountain paths. Few of the escapers from Italy had any experience of such places and conditions, and many of them had never even seen snow. Fewer still were properly equipped with warm jackets, thermal underwear, tough mountaineering boots, alpenstocks and crampons: some even tried to cross 10,000-foot passes in shorts. Hazards were human, too. The men on the run often
had to throw themselves on the mercy of the inhabitants of the uplands through which they journeyed. Many were treated with great humanity by their former enemies, who risked exemplary punishment from the new occupiers: their chalets burned, their menfolk deported or executed. Others were more venal. The Italian peasants on the frontier soon spotted the opportunity to guide the POWs over the border. These men, the
passatori
, were incentivised by the British government to ply their trade. Once the scale of POWs seeking safety was understood, a bounty of £20 was offered for every man taken to safety in Switzerland. The Germans at once countered this with an offer of a similar sum of 1,800 lire. At the time the weekly wage for industrial workers in Milan was 200 lire. Robert Thomson, a South African who escaped over the passes, remembered, ‘Even though the Italian guides were being well paid to take us to Switzerland, they wouldn’t think twice about handing us over, instead, to the Germans, who would also reward them.’
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Prisoners in the camps close to the border began to arrive in Switzerland within days of the September armistice. The weather was still relatively good. As the weeks drew on conditions became more difficult, the routes more clogged with snow. In Zermatt, where the Matterhorn straddles the Swiss–Italian border, the escapers’ problems were compounded by the fact that the three closest towns on the Italian side of the frontier were garrisoned by SS forces. Nevertheless, in the month after the Badoglio declaration more than one thousand Allied POWs crossed the high border by the passes above Zermatt and neighbouring
Saas-Fee
. One of them was the senior officer at Camp 49, Fontanellato, near Parma: Colonel Hugo de Burgh of the Royal Horse Artillery. This veteran of the North-West Frontier in British India thanked the Swiss patrol that welcomed him. ‘Why not?’ was the reply. ‘If it had not been for the Battle of Britain in 1940 there would be no Switzerland.’
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Paul Schamberger’s
Interlude in Switzerland
tells the story of South African Commonwealth troops who escaped from the
POW camps over the Alps in the wake of Operation Achse.
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William ‘Billy’ Marais was a thirty-four-year-old corporal in the 4th South African Armoured Cars. Seconded to the Eighth Army, he was captured by Rommel’s forces in the Western Desert in November 1941 and sent to an Italian POW camp. When the armistice was signed, he was at once dispatched north to Germany. Two days after the armistice he escaped from a train close to the Brenner Pass and spent twelve days in the foothills of the Dolomites trying to find a way into Switzerland. He lived by stealing fruit from orchards. After a few days on the run he was recaptured by a Fascist border patrol. He escaped once again by jumping down a precipice. Surviving this desperate remedy, he hunted up and down the border for a crossing point. Everywhere it seemed closely guarded by Italian troops. At last, utterly at the end of his tether, frozen stiff and exhausted, he managed to cross the frontier at the unguarded Stelvio Pass. At 9,045 feet, this was the second-highest paved pass in the Alps, where Switzerland jutted out between Austria to the north and Italy to the south, north of Bormio in the province of Sondrio and south of Stilfs in South Tyrol. There Marais collapsed. Before doing so he left a note in his diary.

Marais was found alive by a Swiss border patrol. Hearing the German spoken by his rescuers, he took them to be the
Wehrmacht
. Marais bit, yelled and screamed, and had to be subdued by being sat upon. He was taken a couple of days’ march to the Kreisspital in Samedan, four miles north of the skiing resort St Moritz. Here he was cared for for some weeks with what he
later remembered as incomparable kindness and humanity. On his recovery he was dispatched to Berne. There he was
interrogated
on his escape by the British military attaché, our friend Colonel Henry Cartwright. On falling ill once again, Marais was returned to Samedan. At 2 a.m. on 25 December 1943, he noted in his diary that he had there spent ‘the most wonderful Christmas eve of my life’.
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Marais was followed by more than 5,000 Allied escapers from Italy who found their way over the Alps into Switzerland in the autumn and early winter of 1943. The vast majority of these men were British and Commonwealth servicemen. Provided they were not in military uniform, they fell into the Swiss category of ‘evaders’, which meant they were not interned. The Swiss had agreed to accept these men at the time when they were still turning away Jews because of a deal struck just three days after the announcement of the armistice. On 12 September 1943, the British envoy Sir Clifford Norton and his opposite number, Marcel Pilet-Golaz (foreign minister now rather than federal president), had agreed that the POWs would be accepted on three conditions: that they left as quickly as possible; that they were subject to Swiss military law; and that they were paid for by the British. The Swiss called this episode the ‘invasion’ or Grosseinbruch.

To cope with the numbers of POWs who arrived that autumn of 1943 the Swiss Internment Commissariat set up a special headquarters for the Allies. This was conveniently close to the Italian border in the Schwaner Hotel in Wil, Canton St Gallen. The unit provided an occupation in itself for those POWs with office skills. Each escaper had to be interviewed: his unit, POW camp, means of escape and identity of those who had helped or hindered his passage were recorded, assessed and passed on. For the remainder of the POWs, handier with tommy guns than typewriters, something else had to be done. Once they had recovered from the rigours of the passage over the Alps, the
men behaved as might have been expected of servicemen in the prime of life. They devoted themselves to sport, alcohol, fighting among themselves, and pursuing Swiss women. Norton and Pilet-Golaz were at one that this was best done as far as possible out of sight of Swiss citizens, and especially their Swiss military counterparts. Accordingly, like the Jews of south-eastern France in the happy days of Guido Lospinoso, the men were dispatched to the country’s largely deserted skiing resorts.

Adelboden in the Bernese Oberland, only forty miles south of the capital, was one of the very first resorts developed by the British in the early years of the twentieth century. Perched on a sunny, south-facing terrace at the end of the Engstlige valley, it was high – 4,430 feet – and surrounded by the snowfields of the Lohner, Steghorn and Wildstrubel mountains. Its proximity to Berne, coupled with its remoteness, made it a good location for the evaders. Not all of them wished to forgo the struggle and a number still thought it their duty to try to rejoin their units. Escape from Adelboden – approached during winter by only one road – was exacting. The village of Frutigen was the only door in the wall and that was guarded. Under the terms of the Hague Convention, the Swiss were required to prevent the evaders’ flight.

The camp was opened by an advance party on 8 November 1943, the evaders themselves following three days later. The first snows of the season had come more than a month before and for most their new quarters compared favourably with the Italian POW camps and the billets at Sandhurst and the Salisbury Plain. ‘The men marvelled at the spring mattresses, linen sheets, pillows and feather duvets on all the beds. All bedrooms had hot and cold running water’.
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They also took up skiing, a sport that – according to the pre-war skiing ace James ‘Jimmy’ Riddel – was ‘the most fun you can have with your trousers on’. Yet it was still Switzerland. One evader in Adelboden was Rommel’s future biographer, Desmond Young. Attached to the 4th Indian Division, he had been captured at the Battle of Bir Hacheim in
the Libyan desert. He reflected, ‘We were, in effect, still in prison, though the bars were golden.’
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