Storming the Eagle's Nest (27 page)

On 19 February two of the key members of the group, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were seen by a university caretaker
distributing leaflets. They were arrested, interrogated by the Gestapo, tortured, and tried for political offences in the
Volksgerichtshof
. This was the people’s court, where justice was the last thing dispensed. The Scholls and a handful of others were found guilty of treason in trials on 22 February and 19 April 1943. All – including Huber – were beheaded. Hans Scholl commented during his interrogation: ‘I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by so doing.’
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The Scholls’ parents were invoiced for court and execution expenses.

Across the old border from Bavaria in Austria, there were also some pockets of resistance in the Alps.

The original Austrian dissenters comprised a motley crew of Catholics – like the Scholls – monarchists, Christian Democrats and communists. All had gone to ground after Anschluss in 1938, the demonstration in Vienna’s Stefansplatz in October 1939 excepted; all were subsequently enthused by the Allies’ Moscow Declaration of 30 October 1943. Signed by the foreign secretaries of the Big Three – the USA, UK and USSR – this declared Anschluss null and void, and guaranteed that the union of Germany and Austria would be reversed: that the Alpine state would recover her independence from Germany. This stimulated the development in Austria of ‘O5’, a military resistance
movement
based in Vienna, the Tyrol and the Vorarlberg, the name standing for OE, i.e. Österreich, Austria (E being the fifth letter in the alphabet).

One of the leaders of O5 was the Viennese publisher and historian Ernst Molden. His son Fritz, born in 1924, was a counterpart of the Scholls in Vienna: a member of an anti-fascist student group. Rather than beheading, Molden’s reward for dissent was to be sent to a punishment battalion on the Eastern Front. He deserted, convinced the military authorities that he was dead, assumed a new identity, got himself sent to the Italian front and eventually crossed into the Swiss canton of Ticino in March 1944. Just as he was settling down in a railway carriage to enjoy the Swiss newspapers, he was picked up by the Swiss
border police. When he eventually persuaded his interrogators of his bona fides as a member of the Austrian resistance, a deal was struck.

Much as General Guisan was concerned with the Allies
trespassing
on Swiss territory, so too he remained on his guard against the Wehrmacht. Leaving aside the threat of being incorporated into the rumoured Nazi Alpenfestung, there was also the danger of German troops taking a short cut home from Italy. As Molden himself put it in his memoirs, ‘The further the Allies advanced in Italy, the greater was the danger that the German forces, and in particular the German South West Army Group in Italy, would simply ignore Switzerland’s neutrality and march across the country.’
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After all, for Kesselring’s Heeresgruppe C (Army Group C), the country was the shortest and most direct route between north-west Italy and Germany. Guisan was accordingly hungry for information on German troop movements to the west, south and east: in France, Italy and Austria. The agreement made between Molden and the head of Swiss intelligence Colonel Max Waibel was simple. The Swiss would facilitate the movement of Molden and his O5 associates across the Alpine border into Switzerland in exchange for military intelligence. This, Molden held, ‘marked a crucial turning point in the history of the Austrian resistance movement. For it provided us with our first opportunity of maintaining regular and reliable contact with the free world.’
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For Molden this was the beginning of a desperately dangerous year. In the guise of Sergeant Hans Steinhauser of the
Wehrmacht
’s 133rd Infantry Regiment he undertook a series of trips into Austria. His task was to establish a network of O5 recruits to assist the passage of the Western Allies when they reached the southern and western borders of Austria. Over the summer and autumn of 1944, as the Allies landed in Normandy and the Riviera, Molden set up links in Vienna. He also established cells in the more westerly Alpine cities of Salzburg and Innsbruck, both of which were major communication hubs and therefore strategic targets for the Allies. Just before Dulles’s trip to London
and Washington, Molden was introduced to the pipe-smoking US spymaster in the Herrengasse. ‘My first impression of Allen Welsh Dulles was that of a somewhat delicate but wiry
grey-haired
man, broad featured, with a trim moustache and a lofty forehead. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses his clear, grey-blue eyes were alive with interest’.
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Like the Swiss, Dulles was certainly interested in forging links with the Austrian resistance, not least because of the prospect of the Nazis decamping south from Berlin to the Reich’s Alps. According to Molden, ‘Like everyone else, whether in the Allied, the German or the Swiss camp, he [Dulles] believed that the Nazis would make a last stand in the “Alpine redoubt”.’
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At the same time, Dulles was a spymaster who regarded an Austrian army deserter with a degree of reserve. He cautiously commissioned Molden to seek out intelligence on behalf of OSS. ‘First,’ Molden said of his talk with Dulles, ‘we must show we could produce results.’
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On Dulles’s return from London in November 1944, the pair met again. Dulles was now convinced of Molden’s integrity and proposed sending him to SHAEF headquarters to be debriefed – and then to be briefed – on Austria. This would reveal the doings of MI6 in the country. Claude Dansey was still number two to Sir Stewart Menzies at MI6 headquarters in London’s Broadway. ‘Colonel Z’ strenuously objected to disclosing such intelligence to an ‘Austrian deserter’. He continued to regard Dulles as naive.

This was another nice inter-Allied row, one that appears to have culminated in the proposal by Dansey of an acid test. According to Molden,

Dulles led Molden to believe that he himself had scotched the plan. In the meantime Molden became OSS source K28.

On 12 December 1944, Molden was in the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck. This was the medieval city set in the wide valley of the river Inn, dominated by the peaks of the Nordkette, the
Patscherkofel
, and the Serles. There, in the university, in the strictest of secrecy, a complex political agreement was being hammered out. Present were seven Austrian men: liberals, monarchists and Christian Socialists – soon to be joined by communists. At last the deal was struck. The work to which Molden had been contributing had culminated in the foundation of the political wing of O5, the Provisorisches Österreichisches
Nationalkommitee
(Provisional Austrian National Committee or POEN). This was fifteen months after the creation of its equivalent in Italy, Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, and two and a half years after its counterpart in France, Conseil National de la Résistance. It was, though, within the Reich itself. Molden perhaps not unreasonably regarded this as a ‘glorious achievement’.
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Three days later, Innsbruck received its twelfth visit from the USAAF. The B-24 Liberators from the 336th Heavy Bomb Group were targeting the marshalling yards that served the line over the Brenner Pass. Soon Inge Rainer, the teenager from Kitzbühel, found herself drafted to the city. ‘I was sent to near Innsbruck, to learn to shoot small-bore weapons. In the morning we went to Innsbruck to clear the bombing and in the afternoon to shoot. If they sent children back to Innsbruck and taught girls to shoot, this made me think, “The war is over, we have lost.” It was a terrible shock.’
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As Christmas 1944 approached, the situation on and around Switzerland’s borders became more and more tense.

To the west, the Germans were making a stand just on the Swiss border at the Belfort Gap. This was one of the Achilles heels in the republic’s defences, a corridor of flat terrain between the Vosges mountains in France and the north-western corner of
Switzerland. It was the gateway to the Rhine, one of Germany’s most important natural defences.

Here in mid-September, the 11th Panzer Division, led by Generalleutnant Wend von Wietersheim, found itself confronted by the I French Army Corps. This force, led by Lieutenant General Emile Béthouart, had been part of the 15 August landings on the French Riviera. Béthouart had pushed steadily up the east bank of the Rhône, slowed by adding other formations to the Corps and by the unseasonably poor weather. His thrust into south-western Germany along the northern Swiss border was now blocked. The Panzer division could be bypassed only by attempting the Vosges mountains on his left flank or by breaching Swiss territory – and neutrality – on his right. As General Guisan appreciated, the Vosges were virtually impenetrable; he saw how tempting Switzerland must have looked to his French opposite number. In 1946, Guisan wrote:

By which he meant that open warfare with the Allies might have undesirable political consequences.

In practice Guisan had little choice. To add to the French and the German forces around Belfort he brought up a whole division of his own men, dug in just inside Switzerland’s border. Béthouart himself waited until the supply situation had improved before giving battle. Responding to Eisenhower’s autumn call from SHAEF for a general offensive, on 13 November 1944 Béthouart launched his attack. Believing that the French I Corps had dug in for the winter, the Panzer division was under strength. Caught by surprise, the Panzer forces retreated to the fortified city of Belfort. Respecting the Swiss border, Béthouart pushed through the German lines. On 19 November, the French I Corps reached
the Rhine at Huningue, a northern suburb of Basel, where France, Germany and Switzerland met. The journalist-
turned-soldier
Urs Schwarz was a witness:

The 11th Panzer Division was by no means finished. It retreated only to Colmar, forty miles north of Basel on the Alsatian plain. Guisan’s troops remained on guard, mindful of the danger of a counter-attack.

This was the first of the General’s problems.

On the border with Italy, the situation was similarly precarious. Here the country’s natural defences, the Alps, were far better. Here, too, was Switzerland’s own Alpine redoubt: completed; stored, manned and ready for war; yet not necessarily a match for the German armies desperate to return to the Fatherland, anxious to get home.

Here Guisan’s de facto allies were the partisans, but the Italian resistance was enduring the bitterest of winters. Autumn had seen the collapse of the high hopes inspired by the twenty free republics of a mass rising that would see the early end of the war. Then had come Alexander’s broadcast of 10 November 1944, suspending major operations. The partisan leader Roberto Battaglia commented:

The Wehrmacht and its Fascist allies in northern Italy were very largely successful. They seized a number of prominent partisans
including Ferruccio Parri, committed wide-scale atrocities against the civilian population supportive of the partisans, and smoked out tens of thousands from the partisan mountain camps, both in the Apennines on Italy’s spine and further north in the Alps themselves. Bletchley Park decrypts in January 1945 suggested that as many as 70,000 partisans surrendered; an SOE report gives a similar flavour of the winter. ‘Enemy activity has continued to be forceful,’ noted No. 1 Special Force. ‘Communications with the field have been irregular and many missions have been forced to change location frequently and to live and work in conditions of extreme hardship.’
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For Guisan, here too lay danger.

Finally, to the east of Switzerland beyond the buffer of the Italian Alps lay Yugoslavia. Given Stalin’s modest proposals about the Alpine republic, the news for Guisan from the far eastern Alps was in some respects the most alarming of all.

Since the failure of the Axis’s Fifth Enemy Offensive in June 1943, Tito’s partisans had gone from strength to strength; they now numbered perhaps half a million, and Tito was formally recognised by the Allies as the commander-in-chief of Yugoslav armed forces. On 17 June 1944 the Treaty of Vis attempted to merge Tito’s administration with that of King Peter, still exiled in London; on 12 September 1944, just as Dulles reached Washington, the King called for his people to rally round Tito’s leadership. Then, three weeks later on 28 September 1944, an announcement was made that Tito had agreed to ‘temporary entry’ of Soviet troops into north-eastern Yugoslavia. Their role was officially to support the partisans’ effort to drive out the Wehrmacht. By 20 October the Red Army had occupied Belgrade.