Storming the Eagle's Nest (32 page)

Back in Berchtesgaden, it was first rumoured that Hitler had died leading his troops in defence of the Chancellery. It was a Heldentod – a hero's death; the German people expected nothing less. A later rumour was more widely credited: that the creator of the Third Reich had taken his own life. Radio reception was poor, remembered Irmgard Paul. ‘A rare clear voice on the radio confirmed Hitler's death. Profoundly shocked, Mutti absorbed the news, not so much because she mourned
Hitler but because she felt so deeply betrayed. Our only hope now was that the Führer's suicide would speed up the end and stop the bloodshed.'
14
The question now was whether the Red Army or the Western Allies would be the first to reach
Berchtesgaden
. The prospect of the Soviets petrified the people. They had been taught by Goebbels that the Red Army were little better than animals. This was entirely borne out by the Soviet troops' behaviour in Vienna – which they had reached on 13 April – and subsequently Berlin. In both the capitals looting was the order of the day, the inhabitants were shot at random, and rape was endemic. ‘Our fear mounted when we heard that the Russians were approaching from Vienna at about the same rate as the U.S. troops from the northwest.'
15

It was May Day, and in Mittenwald Colonel Pfeiffer had endured a vexing seventy-two hours. On the night of 25–6 April he had safely supervised the movement of the Reichsbank's $15 million to Einsiedl under cover of darkness. For twenty-four hours the reserves had been under armed guard in a chalet on the wooded slopes of the Steinriegel above the village. A fatigue party had then prepared a cache further up the mountain: on the Steinriegel itself and the adjoining Klausenkopf. The Mittenwald mountain warfare school was – for obvious reasons – less mechanised than the armoured units that had brought blitzkrieg to western Europe precisely five years previously. Pfeiffer had at his disposal 5,000 mules – smarter and more sure-footed in the Alps than men, horses or indeed Panzers. Eight of these beasts were shepherded over from Mittenwald and loaded up. ‘By dawn on 28 April the gold and currency reserves … lay snug in their watertight holes in the frost-rimed ground of the Bavarian Alps'.
16
Although the OSS now had a scent of the plunder, they would be there for some time.

If Pfeiffer expected congratulations for a difficult job well executed in double-quick time, he was disappointed. On 29 April Patch's 10th Armored Division reached Oberammergau,
and the valley down to the Tyrol and the vital Brenner Pass – via Mittenwald – was at its mercy. Pfeiffer's orders from on high were abrupt. ‘Do everything possible to block the route between Garmisch and the Tyrol … the fate of the Alpine Fortress lies in your hands!'
17

It was too late. Not only was the 10th Armored an unstoppable force, the USAAF was thundering down in support. The local commander in Garmisch-Partenkirchen was a Gebirgsjäger officer called Sturmbannführer Michael Pössinger. Recognising the inevitable, he went to meet the Americans at Oberammergau. All he could do now was to try to save the valley, not least the 80,000 wounded and refugees now crowded into
Garmisch-Partenkirchen
. The American commander was obdurate. A 200-bomber strike force was – as he spoke – on its way to flatten everything between Oberammergau and Innsbruck. The bombers could not be turned back. At his wits' end, Pössinger went down on his knees to the American. At last a message was patched through to the USAAF, the strike force turned back, and the valley was saved. Pössinger was then seized as a hostage and tied to the turret of the leading US tank. At 6.45 on the evening of 29 April, Garmisch-Partenkirchen fell to the Allies.

Four days later on 3 May, a curious scene was enacted at the bulging twin town. It was a photo opportunity with captured German rocket scientists, led by Wernher von Braun. As part of the dispersal programme that had followed the RAF raid on Peenemünde in August 1943, the research station's wind tunnel and much of the technical support staff had been removed to Kochel am See, forty-five miles south of Munich. In the first two months of 1945, von Braun and his team were even more mindful than the Nazi leaders of the approaching end. Hitherto the Nazi Party had been an admirable supporter of von Braun's appliance of science to his rocket ambitions. Now it seemed he might have to find new benefactors.

Following the liberation of the Mittelbau-Dora V-2 works in the Harz mountains by US forces on 11 April, von Braun's team
was hastily dispatched from Kochel by Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler to Oberammergau. The Allies might be interested in the man whose rocket plant had consumed 20,000 lives – leaving aside the rather more modest numbers of the victims on the receiving end of the weapon, mainly in London and Antwerp. In Oberammergau, where the Passion Play had once been staged, von Braun persuaded the SS guards that his valuable team would be safer somewhere less conspicuous than the Messerschmitt works. He settled at Haus Ingeburg in Oberjoch on the old border between Germany and Austria, a once fashionable skiing resort about thirty miles west of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Here, right at the end of the skiing season, von Braun's group enjoyed a pleasant limbo between one life and the next: Kammler had finally abandoned the scientists to their own devices, concerning himself with his own safety. On 2 May, two days after Hitler's death, with the US forces everywhere, von Braun thought it time to surrender to the Allies. He sent out his young brother Magnus, who spoke a smattering of English, to surrender. Cycling down the hill from the resort on a fine spring morning, Magnus – looking like he had just come off the piste – came across a unit of an Anti-Tank Company, 324th Infantry Regiment, 44th Infantry Division. He claimed that the inventor of the infamous V-2 was within hailing distance and wanted to surrender. The interpreter Private First Class Fred Schneikert was sceptical of this sunburned young man: ‘I think you're nuts,' he told von Braun, ‘but we'll investigate.'

Very soon the scientists found themselves in front of the cameras of the world's press in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
18

There were now no fewer than three Allied armies heading for Innsbruck, capital of the Tyrol. The city was still supposed by SHAEF to be the headquarters of the Alpine Redoubt. There was the French First Army still driving south-east from Bregenz, and the US Seventh Army advancing south from Munich (the latter knocking on the door of Mittenwald). Then there was the British
Eighth Army coming up from Italy and the south.

In Italy, the surrender at Caserta on 29 April engineered by Dulles had certainly not brought an immediate end to hostilities in the country's Alps. Vietinghoff's Army Group C units were scattered, communications were poor, and there were still SS and Wehrmacht officers who felt their loyalty to Hitler stretched beyond his shallow grave. Moreover, the surrender of forces in Italy did not apply to Army Group G in neighbouring Austria, imminent though a surrender there – and indeed a general surrender of all German forces – might well be.

Accordingly, General Mark Clark ordered the 88th Division of the British Eighth Army to head for Innsbruck through the Brenner Pass – the gateway from Italy to Austria, where Mussolini and Hitler had been wont to meet to discuss the dismemberment of Europe in the early months of the war. The Eighth had crossed the river Po on 25 April and now had the southern flanks of the Brandenberg Alps in its sights. The Brenner was around two hundred miles due north, and the second half of the route would be literally and figuratively an uphill struggle. Bill Morgan of the 351st Infantry Regiment commented:

As it so turned out, the 88th was saved the trouble – at least in the Tyrolese capital – by the Austrian resistance, O5. Led by thirty-six-year-old Karl Gruber, this was a force in Innsbruck of only eighty-five men. On 2 May Gruber's partisans seized the Wehrmacht's Innsbruck HQ, capturing the commander of the whole southern front, General Johannes Böheim. Gruber then took the city's radio station by the ruse of pretending to be German reinforcements. In the bright dawn of the communications age,
this was one of the levers of power.

Final operations, 1945

By way of forcing the pace of events, O5 announced that at 17:00 on the following day, 3 May, a regional armistice would come into effect in the Tyrol and Vorarlberg, Salzburg, parts of Carinthia and the Steiermark. This was virtually the whole of Alpine Austria. The populace was to offer no resistance to the advancing Allied forces, to placard their houses with the old Austrian flag or white sheets, and to wear armbands in the old colours of Austria: red and white. The Nazi salute so deplored by Maria von Trapp was henceforth abolished. The finale in the broadcast was the trumpet call that had brought down the walls of Jericho: ‘The hour of liberation has come'.
20

The wording was interesting. The US Seventh Army had been told to treat Austria as a conquered country. The Austrians saw the Western Allies as liberators, buoyed as they were by the Moscow Declaration of 1943 that promised Austria a return to independence. On the evening of 3 May units of the US 103rd
Infantry Division, guided by liaison officers from O5, entered the Alpine city. It was snowing heavily, but Innsbruck was
en fête
, the US forces embraced by the Tyrolese. There was a good deal of yodelling and singing of Austrian folk songs. O5 had diplomatically hoisted the Stars and Stripes over the town hall, one of the buildings to have survived the concerted Allied raids on the city. Here it fluttered alluringly in the breeze.

For Innsbruck, the bridge on the river Inn, the war was over.

To complete the rout of the Germans, the US 411th Regiment was then ordered by General Patton due south from Innsbruck twenty-five miles to the Brenner Pass. The Seventh Army's last combat mission in Europe was to link up with the 88th Division of the British Eighth Army. At 10:51 on 4 May 1945 units of the 411th ran across the 88th at Sterzing, about twelve miles south of the Brenner. This was Bill Morgan's unit. The Tyrol was free.

So too – or very nearly – was Europe. As Churchill put it, ‘And so all three “fronts”, Western, Eastern, and Southern, once thousands of miles apart, at last came together, crushing the life out of the German armies. Their encirclement had been completed by Montgomery in the north … The end was near.'
21

On 5 May, another of the O5 liaison officers reached Innsbruck. This was Fritz Molden, Dulles's agent K28. The streets were full of partying Tyrolese, and the government offices safely in the hands of Molden's old friend, Karl Gruber.

Molden's work with Dulles, his midnight tramps over the high Alps dodging SS patrols, had borne fruit.

And that same day – Saturday 5 May – units of General Devers's Sixth Army Group reached Berchtesgaden in force.

By now it was beginning to be accepted by Eisenhower and his staff at SHAEF that there was little substance to the Alpine Redoubt and that, in the aftermath of Hitler's death, only fragments of the Wehrmacht and SS retained the will to fight. On 22 April Goebbels had broadcast Hitler's decision to remain in Berlin. The claim might or might not be true. Dönitz's announcement of the Führer's death fell into the same category of a statement unverified. More persuasive was the intelligence both from captured German officers and from the Allied armies in the Redoubt area. The Germans denied the existence of the Alpenfestung and the Allies had found the Bavarian and Austrian Alps only sporadically defended. This all meant that the importance of Berchtesgaden as a strategic objective was diminishing day by day.

It was still one of immense prestige. It was a location far more personally associated with Hitler than Berlin, it was the second HQ of the Reich, and it was the one remaining plum as the capital fell to the Soviets. Every military unit in the immediate area on the old border between Austria and Bavaria wanted to capture Berchtesgaden.