Storming the Eagle's Nest (31 page)

Dulles at once cabled AFHQ in Caserta to allow him to reopen the negotiations that he had so reluctantly closed. AFHQ cabled Washington. Truman, still fearful of compromising relations with Stalin, refused. The Joint Chiefs of Staff could only suggest to Dulles that Wolff should be kept in play by using Waibel as an intermediary.

Like Hitler in his bunker, Dulles was incensed. He broke two of his best pipes in his anger. In jeopardy were the lives of tens
of thousands of Mark Clark’s Allied troops, similar numbers of Vietinghoff’s Germans, and his own great coup. The JCS suggestion also placed Waibel in an impossible situation. The Swiss were keen enough to see a brokered armistice, but as a statutory neutral it was difficult for them to be seen to engage in peace negotiations on behalf of one of the belligerents. Waibel knew that his political masters would be aghast at the prospect. Nevertheless, he agreed to meet Wolff in Lucerne and start talks. He could not reveal that Dulles himself was under orders not to treat with them. On meeting Waibel on 24 April, the
hawk-nosed
Wolff not unreasonably enquired, ‘Where is Herr Dulles?’

The following morning, 25 April 1945, shortly after dawn, 359 Lancasters from Bomber Groups 1, 5 and 8 in Lincolnshire could be seen to the north of the Alps over Basel, carefully skirting Swiss airspace. They were heading east, escorted by RAF and USAAF Mustang long-distance fighters and an RAF Mosquito Pathfinder squadron. One of the bomber pilots logged:

Irmgard Paul was at school in Berchtesgaden. Over the past three months the air-raid sirens had screamed no fewer than forty-eight times to clear the pleasant streets of the Bavarian resort of humanity. This time, at 09:30, Irmgard and four of her school friends – Else, Wiebke, Barbel and Ingrid – were caught out in the open on the slopes of Obersalzberg. ‘Let’s run to my house, it’s the nearest!’ she shouted to her friends. They dashed up the sandy, tree-lined road toward Haus Linden, still covered in patches of snow. They were too late. The bombs were already plummeting down towards them. After each detonation of the 500-kilogram bombs a Pentecostal blast funnelled down the narrow valley. The five girls had to grab the spruce trees to avoid being blown off their feet. ‘The earth shook, and the air was filled with the rumble of airplane motors, the whistle of falling bombs, the detonations, and the wind that followed.’

After forty-five minutes of terror, it was all over. Irmgard was able to see how fortunate – blessed – the town of Berchtesgaden itself had been.

Usually when the sirens wailed the Obersalzberg complex was shrouded in the acrid smoke of the chemical smokescreen system installed in 1943. With the Reich’s industry and communications in ruins, the supplies of the chemical had run out. The RAF Lancasters were able to bomb Obersalzberg with – for 1945 – pinpoint accuracy and to avoid collateral damage to the town of Berchtesgaden on the far side of the river Ache. The town and its inhabitants were all safe. Irmgard commented, ‘There were those who considered this a miracle; the Lord Himself had protected us, evidenced by the sign of a cross they saw in the sky. I, however, was puzzled, and would be for a long time. Why of all places should He protect Berchtesgaden, when all of Europe was in ashes?’
33

Obersalzberg itself was quite another story. ‘The plateau had become a chaotic brown and black mess of tree-stumps resembling charred matchsticks, irregular dark craters and ruins
that still smoked.’ Remembered Irmgard: ‘“It’s all gone”, I said to no one in particular.’
34

The Berghof lay in ruins. Hitler’s mountain headquarters, the haven where he had conceived the European war, where he had entertained the Duke of Windsor, berated Schuschnigg, Daladier, Halifax and Chamberlain, where he had toyed with Mussolini, where he had given the directives for the invasion of Great Britain, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, where he had developed Operation Achse with Rommel, where he had been told of the impending siege of Stalingrad, where he had first heard the news of the Normandy landings, where he had so enjoyed Bergfried – the peace of the mountains – was no more.

Only the Kehlstein itself, the great Watzmann and – still capped with snow – the Untersberg remained. It was surprising that Barbarossa had not been awakened from his long sleep.

In the aftermath of the bombing of Obersalzberg, the inhabitants of Berchtesgaden ventured out to pick over the ruins of the Nazi headquarters.

Hitherto much of the plateau had been sealed off, closely guarded and discouragingly designated the Führersperrgebiet (‘leader's territory'). Now these arrangements were no longer enforced by the SS. They seemed pointless. The locals edged past the gates swinging idly on their hinges, past the empty
guard-houses
and into the forbidden land. Everywhere was a smell of burning, of scorched earth, of cordite. Obersalzberg had been devastated. Besides the Berghof, the Hotel Platterhof, three farms, the chalets of Bormann and Göring, and the SS headquarters at the Hotel zum Türken had received direct hits. Around forty people had died. The wooded mountainside looked like a tornado had swept through: the trees uprooted, smashed and tossed aside. In the remains of the SS barracks, Irmgard Paul found some of the SS troops demob-happy, distributing ‘champagne, cigars, and specialty foods we had not seen in years' to the astonished villagers. Yet in the barracks yard, ‘a group of diehards was still practicing goose-stepping to an officer's commands'. The community was in flux, not knowing which way to turn. ‘I asked Mutti [her mother] again what would happen to us when the war was over. She didn't answer – how could she when she didn't
know? Suddenly my fear gave way to an intense anger at her ignorance, impotence and sadness. She should not have let all this happen.'
1

Hermann Göring and his family had survived the air raid, sheltered in the Obersalzberg bunker. When the dust had settled he had emerged from the shelter and looked around. The sight was displeasing, indeed it was all too reminiscent of Berlin. Feeling that the complex no longer offered the comforts of the past, the Marshal thought he should move to another property of his nearby, Mauterndorf Castle. He raised the matter with Obersturmbannführer Frank, head of the SS guard, his captor. Frank had just received another cable from Bormann. It was threatening. ‘The situation in Berlin is more tense. If Berlin and we should fall, the traitors of April 23 [Göring and his complicit ADCs] must be exterminated. Men, do your duty. Your life and honour depend on it.'
2
Frank felt on consideration that Berlin and Bormann were far way, the Allies were nearer, and Göring was closer still. The Generalfeldmarschall was surely the best man to strike a deal with the Allies. Frank glanced at the ruins of the SS barracks, latched the safety catch on his pistol and told Göring that he thought Mauterndorf an excellent idea.

Not far away in Mittenwald, preparations were also in hand for a move. Although the Allies knew nothing of the Messerschmitt factory at Oberammergau or the location of the Reich's gold reserves, the road and rail communications through the region of Garmisch-Partenkirchen ran south into the Inn valley to Innsbruck itself and the Tyrol, thence across the Brenner Pass into Italy. They were of strategic importance, and they were now in the sights of the 10th Armored Division of General Patch's Seventh Army. Between sunrise and sunset of 23 April the Division had captured twenty-eight towns. Garmisch-Partenkirchen was next stop. Forewarned by the local commander at the resort, Oberst Pfeiffer scratched his bald head. The bowling alley in the officers' mess scarcely passed muster as a place of concealment for the reserves. On the afternoon of 25 April a fatigue party was
once more at work in Mittenwald, loading the Opel trucks. The next destination for the gold was a remote spot called Ensiedl, some fourteen miles north of Mittenwald. As Göring set off for Mauterndorf, Pfeiffer jumped aboard the leading truck and headed north.

Meanwhile, 280 miles to the west in Lucerne, Colonel Max Waibel had been having trouble with Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. There was the SS general, anxious to come to terms with the Allies, and the chief Allied negotiator – Allen Dulles – was nowhere to be seen. After twenty-four hours, Wolff and his fellow officers were becoming testy, suspicious. General Mark Clark's two armies were pushing into the Alps and – in a bitterly contested ten-day battle – had now taken the regional capital and communications hub of Bologna. This was 225 miles south from the vital Brenner Pass, Wolff's principal remaining line of escape back to the Reich. The general began to suspect that he was being strung along to prevent him achieving any sort of managed retreat for the Army Group C forces. As he pointed out to Waibel, the Allies were also hazarding all the major industrial complexes in northern Italy, including the port of Genoa – Switzerland's lifeline. This was earmarked for destruction under Hitler's ‘scorched earth' policy. Where the hell was Dulles?

Actually, the spymaster was remarkably close. Anticipating that Truman's order banning the negotiations would be lifted, he had shifted camp to Lucerne. He was being briefed daily, sometimes hourly, by Waibel. Dulles was pressurising AFHQ in Caserta and AFHQ in turn pressurising the Chiefs of Staff in Washington. On the day of the Berchtesgaden bombing, 25 April, Wolff's patience ran out and he caught the train back to the Italian frontier. According to Dulles, he returned ‘to keep order and avert ruthless violence and destruction in northern Italy'.
3

If the Wehrmacht's Army Group C in Italy was fighting on, so too were the forces to the north in Austria. This was the challenge for General Devers's Sixth Army Group, comprising General de Lattre de Tassigny's First French Army and General Patch's Seventh US Army.

On 29 April 1945, units of the French Eighth Armoured Division crossed the border from Germany into Austria. German resistance was stiff. First there was Bregenz on the eastern shores of the Bodensee. Attempts at negotiating an armistice with the city commander Generalleutnant Valentin Feurstein failed, and the capital of the Vorarlberg was heavily bombed. It had survived six years of war unscathed. After this westernmost Austrian city fell, the French were able to advance eastwards only very slowly into the Alpine Vorarlberg itself. The German rearguard, sometimes comprising only machine-gun groups, slowed the French enough to allow other Wehrmacht forces to reinforce the front to the north-east. Here Patch's Seventh Army was pushing into Munich. On 29 April the 45th Division was engaged in house-to-house fighting against the Munich SS Standarte in the grounds of the university – the home of the White Rose martyrs. Meanwhile the French, following the valley of the Inn east down towards Innsbruck, were so hampered by the rearguard that Fritz Molden's O5 resistance forces were brought into play. They led General de Lattre de Tassigny's forces through the Wehrmacht positions by mountain paths, high passes still knee-, waist-and shoulder-deep in snow, to cut off the Germans from behind.

To the east of the French, some units of Patch's Seventh Army then headed south from Munich towards Innsbruck. Others were driving due south towards Berchtesgaden. Both spearheads found the country descending into chaos. There were legions of surrendering German troops, there were villages where the Austrians and Bavarians broke into applause, waved flags and showered kisses on the advancing troops, and yet there was also sporadic and in some cases fanatical resistance to the onward march of the Allies. This came from the German equivalents of the French maquis and the Italian partisans, dubbed by Goebbels the Werewolves. A Seventh Army GI observed:

Dulles, at least, was determined to stop the slaughter. On 27 April his calls to AFHQ in Caserta and thence to Washington were at last answered. Churchill and Truman had conferred. The Prime Minister had then carefully cabled Stalin.

For his part, President Truman had girded himself and given Dulles permission to resume negotiations with Wolff. The SS Obergruppenführer still had his own ideas. Taking his life in his hands, he flew north to the little that remained of Berlin to seek a final audience with Hitler. The Führer, Wolff said, ‘seemed in low spirits but had not given up hope'. He told Wolff, ‘We must fight on to gain time; in two more months, the break between the Anglo-Saxons and the Russians will come about and then I shall join the party which first approaches me. It makes no difference which.'
6

Wolff returned to his headquarters in Bolzano, the capital of the South Tyrol seized nineteen months earlier by Rommel in the course of Operation Achse. Here wiser counsels prevailed. Hitler, as he had told Speer, had now put Kesselring in charge of the whole of the defence of the Reich's west. This had left Italy to Generaloberst Heinrich von Vietinghoff. This change in leadership and – in Churchill's words – ‘the force of facts
overcome
German hesitancies'.
7
On 29 April at AFHQ in Caserta, two of Vietinghoff's representatives effected the final, formal and unconditional surrender of the General's forces in Italy. So ended Operation Sunrise, and with it the prospect of a full-scale confrontation in the Italian Alps between Army Group C and the Allies' Fifth and Eighth Armies. Now, for Eisenhower at SHAEF, the prospect of a general surrender seemed ever closer.

Dulles was invited to witness the ceremony at AFHQ in Caserta. He refused, claiming that ‘My presence at the surrender ceremony might well have been discovered by the press and have blown the security of the operation we had so carefully preserved up to this point.'
8
The truth was that he was once again suffering from gout. As to this being a major coup for Dulles, it was all a little late. ‘The main impact of the surrender negotiations … was to be on relations between the Allies.'
9

That same day Hitler married Eva Braun in Berlin. The
thirty-three
-year-old had had to wait some time: the couple had been lovers since 1932. Addressed by one of the bunker staff as ‘Gnädiges Fräulein' (gracious lady), Braun corrected, ‘You may safely call me Frau Hitler.'
10
The Führer then busied himself with dictating a political testament and his will. The testament placed the blame for the debacle of the previous few years firmly in the hands of ‘international Jewry'. In thanking his secretaries for this work, Hitler said that he wished his generals had been equally reliable.

The following morning was 30 April 1945. The news was bad. Mussolini was dead – he who, in Hugh Trevor-Roper's words in
The Last Days of Hitler
, was the Führer's ‘partner in crime, the herald of Fascism, who had first shown to Hitler the possibilities of dictatorship in modern Europe'.
11
Il Duce had been captured by Italian partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade at the village of Dongo near Lake Como. He had abandoned the collapsing Italian Social Republic in Salò and was attempting to escape over the Alps to Switzerland. Badoglio's ‘Dictator Number One' was
shot the following day. He and his mistress Clara Petacci were strung up in an Esso petrol station in Milan's Piazzale Loreto for the edification of the newly liberated Milanese. Closer to home in Berlin, the situation was no better. Soviet forces had now reached the Potsdamer Platz, the Weidendammer Bridge over the river Spree, the Tiergarten and the underground railway tunnel in the Vossstrasse. The Chancellery itself was within hours of being broached. Mussolini's end was now smiling at the Führer himself.

After lunch that day, Hitler and Eva Braun withdrew into their suite. Their purpose was obvious, disclosed, agreed. On hearing a single shot, the remaining members of Hitler's court discovered the pair lying dead. Hitler had shot himself, his wife had taken poison. ‘Dictator Number Two' was presumably on his way to Valhalla, the Teutonic ‘hall of the slain'.

It was the early evening of 30 April 1945 and the loyal
Reichsleiter
Bormann had a job. He cabled Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz in Plön in Schleswig with the news that, in place of Göring, Hitler had appointed the Grand Admiral himself his successor. This came as a complete surprise to Dönitz. At 10.20 the
following
evening, he broadcast on Hamburg radio. Hitler had died fighting at the head of his troops in Berlin, he said. In Washington, President Truman, asked about the reported deaths of Hitler and Mussolini, commented, ‘I am very happy they are out of the way.'
12
Churchill, asked in the House of Commons whether he wished to comment, replied drily, ‘No, other than that the situation is more satisfying than it was five years ago.'
13