Storming the Eagle's Nest (19 page)

This was a victory but a heavily qualified one. The Red Cross aligned itself closely with the Swiss government and – like the Federal Council – was reluctant to press its monstrous neighbour too hard. A year previously, on 14 October 1942, several ICRC
board members had proposed a motion condemning Nazi treatment of detainees in the concentration camps, in effect proposing to make a very public international appeal in support of Europe's Jews. It was vetoed by the Swiss Federal Council and the remaining members of the board.

As Caroline Moorhead judged in her history of the ICRC, this failure ‘has caused the organization great and lasting damage, both immediately after the war and in recent years … [Its failure] has haunted it ever since.' Yves Sandoz of the Committee wrote of ‘the greatest defeat in the 125-year history of our humanitarian mission'.
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In any case, in November 1943, the ICRC found it had a good deal to do rather closer to home than Auschwitz.

Since the seizure of the Franco-Swiss border by the Seventh Army in November 1942 the democracy had become an oasis in a fascist desert, and there were accordingly many who aspired to drink at the well. As we have seen, the Swiss categorised those seeking sanctuary as evaders (military personnel in plain clothes), Internierten (military personnel clothed as such) and Flüchtlings – civilian refugees. We also saw how the drizzle of Jewish refugees became a downpour after the German occupation of the French occupied zone in 1942; and how Switzerland was flooded with escaped POWs after Italy changed sides in September 1943. To this line of rather unwelcome guests was added fresh impetus that same autumn in the form of visitors from the skies. On 24 August 1942, a damaged RAF Mosquito fighter-bomber became the first Allied aircraft to find refuge on Swiss soil. It was the first of thirteen RAF aircraft that formed the prologue to the big wing of the USAAF.

To complement the night-bombing campaign against Germany of Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris's RAF Bomber Command, in August 1942 the United States Eighth Air Force under
Major-General
Carl Spaatz had started its own campaign of daylight
raids on Continental Europe. By the spring of 1943 this had gathered momentum, with April seeing a huge raid of 115 heavy bombers on the North Sea port of Bremen. At first these raids concentrated on Germany; later Italy was added to the target list. Crews of aircraft damaged en route to these targets, over the targets, or on their return flights naturally regarded Switzerland as any port in a storm.

On 13 August 1943 the first USAAF aircraft crash-landed in Switzerland. The B-24 Liberator
Death Dealer
had left its base in North Africa on a mission to the industrial city of Wiener Neustadt, some thirty miles south of the sometime capital of Austria. Sustaining damage over the target and with only two of its four engines running, the pilot First Lieutenant Alva Geron realised he would never make it back to base. He headed for Switzerland and crash-landed his craft at Thurau near the city of Wil in St Gallen, in the east of the country. He set fire to the remains of the B-24 and surrendered himself and his crew to the Swiss police.

As the summer turned to autumn, such Allied violations of Swiss airspace became frequent. These infractions meant that General Guisan – with the Nazis breathing down his neck – was obliged to take action. On 25 October the commander of Swiss forces ordered the Swiss air force to shoot down all bombers in Swiss airspace not indicating their willingness to land. A handful were indeed destroyed by the republic's fighters or by Swiss flak; most were safely escorted to the neutral Swiss airfields. Some
airmen
also parachuted from their stricken planes. There were also rumours that, given the familiar attractions of Switzerland even during the war, there were some aircrews who landed in
Switzerland
in planes that were perfectly serviceable. William Joyce was the Irish propagandist who worked for the Nazis. Dubbed ‘Lord Haw Haw' for his nasal ‘Jairmany Calling' accent, he imaginatively suggested that such crews had their golf bags on board.

In reality, few of the young American airmen arriving in
Switzerland
found themselves on the tee reaching for their drivers. They were interrogated by the Swiss, briefly quarantined, then sent
off into internment: a legal requirement, as they were of course wearing military uniform.

At first in that autumn of 1943, their numbers were such that they could be accommodated in a couple of hotels: the Bellevue at Macolin and the Hôtel Trois Sapins at Evilard, both close to Berne. By November it was apparent that something larger would be necessary. The remote resort of Adelboden, forty miles south of Berne, was already being used as a camp for British and Commonwealth POWs who had escaped from Italy. Now it seemed a good solution for the Americans too. There was a large, empty hotel with what might have seemed to a Swiss bureaucrat a suitable name: the Nevada Palace. This formed the nucleus of a camp which the Americans named Camp Moloney. Sergeant Clinton Norby recalled his first impressions:

Picturesque though this might be, the former farmhands from Alabama and clerks from Albuquerque failed to find the experience very congenial. It was a long way from home, Mae West, root beer and other staples of the 1940s American lifestyle; they were subjected to a daily roll-call, an evening curfew, restriction to the immediate surroundings of the village, and generally kept under observation by the Swiss authorities; they were given the same rations as the Swiss army – 1,500 calories – which few found adequate; and above all they did not have enough to do. Lieutenant James D. Mahaffey remembered, ‘In Adelboden, about the only thing we had to do was drink, read a few books, and eventually they had movies twice a week. I did manage to get in about a month of skiing, which I enjoyed quite a bit.'
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If this was not war, neither was it precisely peace.

Like all such camps, Adelboden was subject to ICRC inspection. The Committee helped the internees make contact with home, and checked up on their hygiene and health, their clothing, lodging and food. It arranged for such matters as dental treatment, medicines, spectacles, and the other incidentals of life beyond the interest or remit of the Swiss internment authorities. The inspectors were subjected to complaints about the facilities and duly passed these on to the central committee in Geneva. The ICRC then duly made enquiries: normally of another office in Geneva, or sometimes Zurich. It could do little about keeping the Americans suitably occupied, and a number of these idle hands tried to escape. Those that did and were recaptured were dispatched to the Swiss punishment camps. These included one that became notorious: Wauwilermoos in Lucerne. Here, as we will see, the ICRC really did have a job to do.

The final aspect of Switzerland's humanitarian story lies with individual Swiss citizens.

Samedan was the village close to St Moritz where the South African corporal Billy Marais had been taken after escaping from Italy. The pastor at Samedan was a remarkable man. Fortunat Guidon was born in 1910 in Latsch, a medieval hamlet seven hundred feet above the 4,485-foot railway village of Bergün, on the line between St Moritz and Davos. He had met his wife Trudi Manz in 1935 while studying theology at the University of Bonn. There, perforce, the couple also studied the Nazi movement: many of their friends were Jews. In 1939, Guidon was appointed to the benefice of the reformed Protestant church at Samedan. He was twenty-nine, and this was only his second job. A man with a rigorous sense of right and wrong, he heard that the Swiss government was contravening the terms of its own neutrality by letting arms pass from Germany to Italy through the St Gotthard railway tunnel. He denounced the authorities from his pulpit. A local girl whom he had confirmed wrote from Berlin announcing her engagement to an SS officer. She sought testimony from him of the purity of her Aryan descent, a necessary procedure
under the Nuremberg Laws. He refused. When the request was repeated and again turned down, Fortunat was told that his family had been earmarked for extermination. It was not surprising that refugees of all stripes threw themselves on the mercy of this man. These included old friends from Bonn, who turned up on his doorstep having escaped the Reich over the border with Austria, some twenty-five miles north. Guidon and his wife were determined to do what they could to help these people reach the safety of the Swiss interior. This placed them in a vulnerable position with regard to the cantonal authorities. The Samedan apartment in which the family lived was in a block that also housed both the police station and the cantonal authorities themselves.

The pastor's eldest son was Matteus. Born in 1936, he was a strong, intelligent, lively boy. He had often accompanied his father up the tracks north of Samedan across the 9,419-foot Fuorcla Pischa (Pischa pass). This led to his grandfather's little farmhouse in Chants. Five miles east up the Val Tours from Bergün, this was a remote spot where the Swiss police never ventured. From the autumn, Matteus had new companions on his climbs in the form of his parents' old friends. Soon they found themselves guided towards the Swiss interior by a boy of an age that would surely not excite the interest of the authorities. It was a journey from jeopardy to safety that took about eight hours. From the farmhouse in Chants, the boy's grandfather would take the refugees to Latsch, then further north-west towards safety. Matteus, now seventy-six, comments:

As the year 1943 drew to a close, from his desk in the Herrengasse Dulles was able to note the progress of a number of affairs with some satisfaction.

Despite Sulzer's protestations, his own firm, Gebrüder Sulzer AG, had been added to the British blacklist in September. On 19 November, Washington had followed suit. As a consequence of this sort of pressure, a month later on 19 December 1943, Switzerland signed a landmark agreement with the Allies that went a very fair way to addressing the concerns of Washington and London over the Swiss financial and industrial contribution to the Nazis' war effort. Deliveries of arms and ammunition to Germany would be virtually halved; exports of optical instruments, rocket components and other items of precision engineering would be cut by 60 per cent, and Swiss loans would also be reduced. As the scholar Gerhard Weinberg interpreted, ‘By this time it was obvious that the Allies would win the war, and the exclusion of Swiss firms from a world dominated by the United Nations would end the country's prosperity permanently. The policy of government changed.'
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Dulles also – at last – had a little good news for the Italian partisans. Despite the goodwill established at the meeting in Lugano and the promises made of immediate aid, nothing had materialised. The OSS as yet had little lien on the USAAF, and its dedicated Special Operations 801st Bombardment Group – the Carpetbaggers – had not yet been formed. SOE had a better relationship with the RAF, but not that much better. The plan also became embroiled in politics. Once the British Foreign Office had got wind of the SOE/OSS scheme to assist leftward-leaning partisans, the procrastination in which government departments excelled was deployed. The four immediate airdrops promised were reduced to one, and that would equip only a fraction of the partisans Parri and Pizzoni claimed to have at their disposal. The drop was eventually made by the RAF on 23 December 1943, just in time for Christmas. It comprised arms for just thirty men.