Storming the Eagle's Nest (33 page)

SHAEF had actually designated two units for the purpose: the French 2nd Armoured (part of the French First Army) and the American 101st Airborne (part of the US Seventh). At the eleventh hour, the fall of the city of Salzburg to the 3rd Infantry Division of VI Corps thrust Major General John O'Daniel's forces into the frame. Mozart's city had surrendered without much of a fight, and Berchtesgaden was only twenty miles away to the south-west. General Patch ordered O'Daniel to make a dash for the Berghof.

The General found little resistance en route, and his troops reached Berchtesgaden at 15:58 on 4 May. The commander of L Company, Lieutenant Sherman Pratt, seems to have been the first Allied officer to enter the town. He was surprised to find the Bavarian resort so untouched by the hand of war, and
relieved to discover no signs of resistance: the buildings were festooned with white flags of surrender, most of them
bed-sheets
. ‘Berchtesgaden', he declared, remembering the
snow-capped
Kehlstein, Untersberg and Watzmann, the evergreen woods, the gingerbread houses with their colourful frescos, and the peasants in their lederhosen and dirndls, ‘looked like a village from a fairy tale.'
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Kesselring, having been charged with keeping the advancing Allied forces at bay on the Western Front, had established a main base at Pullach, close to Munich. He had been persuaded by Berchtesgaden's Landrat (mayor) Karl Theodor Jakob that defence of the town would be inhumane given the numbers of civilian and military hospitals and children's homes that he had managed to introduce to the valley in the course of the war. Resistance would be only symbolic, and Jakob was allowed by Kesselring to simply surrender the town to the Allies.

On the evening of 4 May 1945, O'Daniel's 3rd Infantry Division was followed by the French (partly composed of French colonial forces from Morocco). Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne arrived at about 10:00 the following day. They had come from the Normandy beaches to wake up to a sunny spring day, fresh, sharp, clear, and full of hope. Here in Berchtesgaden, in the aftermath of Hitler's death, and with a general surrender of the Third Reich's forces imminent, morning had broken in the Alps. After nearly five and three-quarter years of war, peace had finally dawned on Berchtesgaden, the Bavarian township that had played such a strange part in Hitler's war.

Irmgard Paul crept out of Haus Linden in Obersalzberg to spy on the Allied occupiers. She had never seen an American before, and watched curiously as the tanks and armoured cars rumbled and screeched watchfully up and down the steep roads and narrow streets of the mountain town. She thought the Americans looked very young. Meeting her friend Wiebke, with whom she had sheltered from the RAF bombs ten days earlier, the same thought hit both girls at once. ‘On an impulse we took each
other's crossed-over hands and began to whirl around on the gravel road, singing and shouting, “Der Krieg ist aus! Der Krieg ist aus! Der Krieg ist aus!” (The war is over!) We were giddy with happiness, swirling in a wild dance until we fell to the ground.'
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The French and US forces had some clearing up to do.

On their arrival they had to take charge of a motley collection of around 2,000 German military personnel: Heer, Waffen-SS and Luftwaffe, all anxious to surrender and prepared to be relieved of their valuables. Harvard-educated David Webster of the 101st Airborne wrote unapologetically to his parents, ‘we obtained pistols, knives, watches, fur-lined coats, camouflaged jump jackets. Most of the Germans take it in pretty good spirit, but once in a while we get an individual who does not want to be relieved of the excess weight of his watch. A pistol flashed in his face, however, can persuade anybody.'
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This was small change, complemented by a collection of silverware from the town's main hotel, the Berchtesgadener Hof. It was here that Neville Chamberlain had stayed on the night of 15 September 1938 when deploying Plan Z at his first, momentous meeting with Hitler. Although the ruined Obersalzberg had already been ransacked by the locals, the Allied troops wandering around the Nazis' holy mountain, the homes of Göring, Speer, Goebbels and Bormann, still found a few souvenirs: Hitler's photo albums featuring fine studies of visiting dignitaries like David Lloyd George and the Duke of Windsor; a Mercedes fire engine, one of Göring's bulletproof Mercedes, and all sorts of other vehicles; the contents of the wine cellar at the officers' club. ‘It looks to me', said a wide-eyed infantry colonel, ‘like they were expecting to defend this place with wine bottles.'
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Contemporary photos show battle-stained GIs gaping at the blackened terrace of the Berghof where once Hitler had lorded it over his
Generalfeldmarschalls
.

The bigger game in Berchtesgaden was Göring's booty. Although the Allies would soon discover a stupendous cache of
more than 6,500 paintings in a salt mine at Altaussee in the
Salzkammergut
(the nucleus of Hitler's planned national collection in Linz), the Reichsmarschall's collection was still worth writing home about.

The trains carrying most of the treasures of Carinhall had safely reached Berchtesgaden on 11 April. Then there had been a hitch in the safe and secret disposal of the valuables. Göring's original intention had been to store the treasures in the unfinished underground command post at Schwab, a village on the road from Berchtesgaden to Königsee. The job was only half completed when news of the Allies' approach brought a halt to the curatorship and the hasty sealing of the entrance to the cache with cement. As the Allies neared on 3 May some of the remaining railway cars were sent a couple of stops down the line to Unterstein. Here – and it was an indication of how far the orderly Austrian society had broken down – the cars were ransacked by the villagers. The locals may have found few uses for the paintings but gold coins, cigarettes, sugar and all sorts of alcohol were quickly given new homes. When the Allies arrived, some of the more responsible officers had been briefed to keep their eyes open for significant caches of Nazi loot. They saw the number of empty, heavily gilded picture frames lying around the town as a clue. Captain Harry Anderson of the 101st Airborne made some local enquiries and soon trotted down to Schwab. He found the tunnels of the concrete emplacement empty but surmised that there might be some sealed chambers. These his men located using a sounding device. Loath to use explosives, the sappers spent three days chipping away at a sealing wall that proved to be eighteen inches thick. Within was an Aladdin's cave of antique furniture, rare gramophone records, Old and New Masters – including a Renoir, a van Gogh and five Rembrandts. Anderson's men erected a placard over the cache: ‘Hermann Goering's Art Collection Through the Courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division'.
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Other valuables found by the Allies in Berchtesgaden were the head of the Reich Chancellery Dr Hans Lammers, the former
Nazi governor general of Poland Hans Frank, the propagandist Julius Streicher, the German Labour Front leader Robert Ley, various members of the Führer's personal staff including his physician Dr Theodor Morell, the RSHA security chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler's wife and daughter, and – reportedly – the family of Albert Speer. It was quite a bag.

The Allies also found some women. The eleven-year-old Irmgard Paul had been armed by her mother with pepper as a deterrent to the soldiers' attentions. Some of the Western Allied troops were certainly not above using force. According to Paul, a sixteen-year-old Berchtesgaden girl was gang-raped by US troops, and French and Moroccan forces were given free licence by their officers, ‘because this was Berchtesgaden'.
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Comments Max Hastings, ‘The American and British armies in Germany looted energetically and raped occasionally, but few men sought explicit revenge from the vanquished. The French, however, saw many scores to be paid.'
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Webster of the 101st remarked, ‘In Austria, where the women were cleaner, fairer, better built, and more willing than in any other part of Europe, the G.I.s had their field day.'
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Meanwhile, ‘smiling Albert' Kesselring had more serious matters in hand.

He had sought the advice of SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, a man now familiar with the Allies' surrender procedures. Kesselring reluctantly accepted that the time had come for him to surrender the ever fewer troops under his command, principally Army Group G. He delegated the job to General Hermann Foertsch. An arrangement was made for Foertsch and General Dever's Sixth Army Group to meet on the outskirts of Munich. Foertsch arrived in the course of the night of 4–5 May at the Thorak estate in Haar. US forces in the area were alerted to watch out for for a vehicle bearing a white flag and with its bonnet covered in white. At about 15:30 on 5 May 1945, Foertsch and General Devers formally signed the surrender terms. They were to come into force from noon of the following day, and would see the surrender of about 100,000 square miles of territory.

It was very nearly over, very nearly Stunde Null.

The 80th Infantry Division was part of General George Patton's Third Army. It had landed at Utah Beach on 4 August 1944, a month after D-Day, helped created the Falaise pocket that saw the surrender of perhaps 50,000 troops from Army Group B, crossed the Rhine on 27–8 March 1945, and in late April pushed into Bavaria – to Nuremberg and Regensburg. On 6 May, units of the Division reached the Ebensee concentration camp in the
Salzkammergut
mountains, a few miles due east of Berchtesgaden.

It will be remembered that Ebensee was a subcamp of
Mauthausen
. The main camp on the Danube just downstream from Linz was now the last remaining major concentration camp in the ever smaller area controlled by the Reich. In the first months of 1945 it was flooded with the inmates of those camps evacuated by the SS before they could be overrun by the Allies. Some of the overflow from Mauthausen was pushed on to Ebensee. The wooden-hutted barracks in the Salzkammergut were designed to hold around a hundred prisoners. Within a few weeks of the end of the war, the actual figure had risen to 750; the total in the small camp to around 18,500. By no means all the prisoners survived the continuing brutality of their captors, the barbarity of their working conditions, and their ever shorter rations. Deaths peaked at about 380 a day. At this level the crematorium, opened in June 1944 by the dutiful Obersturmführer Otto Riemer, was unable to keep up with the rate of mortality. The bodies – some inmates not quite dead – were piled up inside and outside the furnace building.

On 1 May 1945 the camp's work of constructing tank gears and lorry parts was suspended: a rumour had flown round that Hitler was dead. No work was done over the next forty-eight hours. On Friday 4 May, the day US forces reached
Berchtesgaden
, the inmates were told by some of the leaders amongst the prisoners that there would be a roll-call the following morning. They would be instructed by the SS guards to go into the great
tunnels they had themselves excavated to shelter from Allied bombs and shells. They were to refuse.

The following day the Appell (roll-call) was duly held. According to the inmate Moshe Ha-Elion, the camp commander SS-Obersturmführer Anton Ganz announced, ‘“The Americans are approaching the camp and we have decided to deliver you into their hands … You are in danger of being hurt by shelling or enemy planes. We propose that you should go into the tunnels.” Before he finished ending his words, all of us shouted in one loud voice. “We don't want to go! We don't want to go!”' Ganz, at the end of his reign of terror, appeared to concede. The following night the tunnels were blown up. The intended fate of the inmates was clear: an attempt by the SS guards to conceal their dirty work from the Americans, from the forces of a justice that was rough.

On Sunday 6 May 1945, at a little after noon, two or three tanks rumbled through the open gates of the camp. The SS guards – Ganz included – had fled during the night. A cry went up. ‘They are Americans. They are Americans!'
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Robert B. Persinger was a platoon tank sergeant of the 3rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron.

In scenes repeated at other concentration camps across what was left of the Reich, the inmates of Ebensee then turned against those who remained of their captors. Moshe Ha-Elion recounted that one of these was a Kapo – a prisoner in charge of supervising the camp labour. Gypsy Kapo – as he was known – was notorious
for his cruelty. He was captured by a group of Russian-Ukrainian Jews who were then joined by a lynch mob. They beat the Kapo to the ground and stoned him till he seemed dead. They then set off carrying him to the camp's crematorium through the cordon of cadavers. The Kapo regained consciousness and began to struggle. Someone shouted, ‘Let's burn him alive!' He cried in horror, seeing the end that awaited him. He was dragged to the crematorium and thrown onto the iron stretcher used for offering up the bodies to the furnace, shouting and screaming at the top of his voice. ‘Someone took a long bar, which served for the purpose of pushing the corpses from the carriage into the oven and thrust the hook into the Capo's groin and pushed his body into the oven … the door of the oven was shut. The cries were no more heard.'
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