Storming the Eagle's Nest (34 page)

Mauthausen itself was liberated by the 11th Armored Division of the US Seventh Army on the same day as its subcamp. The death toll here has been put as high as 320,000. The other major camp in the foothills of the Alps was of course Dachau – the very first of the camps – in Munich. Here, in accordance with Hitler's orders that none of the Dachau inmates should be left to the Allied armies, on 26 April a party of 7,000 Russians, Poles and German Jews set out south on a Todesmarsch (death march) into the Tyrol. Thousands died on the route south to Tegernsee, some freezing to death.

The camp was liberated three days later, on 29 April, by the 42nd Infantry Division of XV Corps of the US army: 32,000 prisoners were freed. On the outskirts of Dachau, the 42nd
discovered
an abandoned train that had arrived two or three days earlier bringing 2,300 evacuees from Buchenwald, the camp on the Etter Mountain near Weimar. All were dead.

The day after Ebensee was liberated. In Kufstein, a medieval Alpine town in the broad valley of the Inn, some fifty miles downstream from Innsbruck. It is dominated by a symbol of impregnability, a magnificent thirteenth-century fortress set
on a rock above the fast-flowing river, swollen with meltwater from the Vorarlberg and Tyrol. The cellars of the castle have been pressed into service as air-raid shelters for the last eighteen months. Three days earlier the city, the second-largest in the Tyrol, surrendered to the US Seventh Army's 12th Armored Division. Now it is Monday 7 May. In Rheims in the early hours, the instrument of general surrender has been signed by a representative of the Reich's new leader, Grossadmiral Dönitz, by Generaloberst Alfred Jodl on behalf of the OKW, by General Walter Bedell Smith on behalf of the Western Allies, and by General Ivan Susloparov for the Soviets. The armistice is set to come into force at 23:01 on the following day, Tuesday 8 May: Victory in Europe Day, VE Day.

Kufstein is now a command post of the US 36th Infantry Division of the Seventh Army. Part of Operation Dragoon, the 36th has fought its way up from the Riviera landings, past Grenoble and the Vercors, and is now battling with the retreating German forces in western Austria. That Monday morning the assistant division commander, Brigadier General Robert Stack, is brought a letter. It comes by hand of officer and purports to be from Reichsmarschall Göring. It has been delivered under truce through the German lines by Göring's ADC, Oberst Berndt von Brauchitsch. Addressed to General Eisenhower himself, it is Göring's misplaced attempt to come to terms with the Supreme Allied Commander: ‘to arrange for me to have a man-to-man, soldier-to-soldier talk … as one Marshal to another'.
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Göring wants to negotiate a surrender, and then use his standing to set Germany back on its feet. The letter is duly copied and dispatched by plane to headquarters of XXVI Corps, thence to SHAEF and Eisenhower's bulging ‘in tray'.

Shortly afterwards, Stack's divisional commander appeared, General John Dahlquist. As part of the Allied plan to capture the perpetrators of the war, the General's unit had already seized Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt and
Generalfeldmarschall
Hugo Sperrle. Now Stack proposed to Dahlquist that they should go after Göring himself, by far the most important
remaining prize amongst the Nazi leaders. Said Stack, ‘John, let's go get him.' Dahlquist replied, ‘You go get him', so Stack, as he recounted, was stuck with the job.
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Since leaving his ruined chalet at Obersalzberg in the aftermath of the bombing on 25 April, Göring and a considerable entourage had been on the move. He had first been driven by the SS some seventy miles south-east to Mauterndorf Castle. This was a picture-postcard Bavarian schloss that the Reichsmarschall had inherited in 1939. Here Göring had enjoyed an ambiguous position with SS-Obersturmbannführer Frank, halfway between captive and host. Here, too, news had reached the ill-assorted house party of the death of the Führer. Göring was galled. ‘Now I'll never be able to convince him I was loyal to the end!'
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Still, for Frank this turn of events put a fresh complexion on things. If actually freeing Göring seemed injudicious, his rescue by the Americans now swarming all over the supposed Redoubt might not be altogether inconvenient. Providing the whole thing was not too blatant. It would never do for Himmler to hear of such disloyalty, should he still be in power!

To this end, with Frank's agreement, Göring now tore a page out of the script of Jack Higgins's
The Eagle Has Landed
. He sent first his wife's niece, and then Emmy Göring herself out through the castle's secret passages. These led to the town of Mauterndorf. Here, disappointingly, the ladies found no one who could help them. Accordingly, with an eye to the less than friendly Soviet forces advancing from the east, Göring thought he might shift base again. He could go seventy-five miles west to Fischhorn, another castle fit for a Reichsmarschall in Zell am See. This enchanting resort on Lake Zell, surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains – the Schmittenhöhe and the Hundstein – owed its popularity to the opening of the Salzburg–Tyrol railway in 1875. In spring 1945 it was the furthest point south possible for the Nazis to reach before the high passes to Italy were clear of snow; some 25,000 troops would soon surrender there. In the meantime Göring dispatched Oberst von Brauchitsch to find the Supreme Allied Commander. Brauchitsch had eventually found
his way through the German and into the US lines to Kufstein. In the absence of Eisenhower he accepted as a substitute Brigadier Stack.

The Brigadier's headhunting party duly set out from Kufstein, making for Mauterndorf. For obvious reasons this was a hazardous operation. The general surrender of all German forces had been signed in Rheims but was not yet in force. German troops might perfectly reasonably take exception to a small US party on a manhunt. Care – and good luck – would be needed.

The party comprised a staff car, a jeep, and the Divisional Reconnaissance Troop in a handful of other jeeps and cars, led by Oberst von Brauchitsch in an army vehicle. Brigadier General Stack's group crossed from US into German lines just south of the resort of Kitzbühel. The posse was much delayed by the poor mountain roads, the remains of the winter snow, and
never-ending
streams of refugees and retreating troops. In the absence of petrol, many of the conveyances were horse-drawn.

Meanwhile, Göring had got bored waiting and had decided to effect his own rescue. He joked to his wife, ‘If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, then Mahomet must come to the mountain!'
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After some confusion, Stack eventually caught up with Göring's twenty-five-car convoy stuck in a traffic jam on the road from Mauterndorf to Zell am Zee. The convoy was facing west, seemingly on its way to the fashionable lakeside resort and Fischhorn Castle. According to the Brigadier, what with his wife, sister-in-law, daughter, guards, butler, aides and chef, Göring had an entourage of seventy-five. Göring himself was seated comfortably in his bulletproof Mercedes. The Reichsmarschall saluted, Stack returned the salute, and asked the Marschall if he wished to surrender. Göring agreed, with the proviso that he was brought back to US – not Soviet – lines. Brigadier Stack said that this was just where he would like to go himself.

The 36th Division headquarters had now moved forward to Kitzbühel, basing itself at the Grand Hotel. Wrote Stack,

Göring was given chicken for lunch at the Grand Hotel and photographed with the US top brass in convivial poses soon reproduced in the world's press. The pictures made his captors unpopular. There was a storm of protest over such fraternisation with the Nazi leader. One American who had lost two sons in the war wrote to Dahlquist, ‘Why don't you resign the Army and stay over there and suck the hind tit of Goering??'
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The US Seventh Army was then headquartered in the Bavarian city of Augsburg. Thence Göring was dispatched in a two-man spotter plane, a Piper L-4. Wrote Stack, ‘We had doubts he would fit in the miniature plane but we stuffed him in.' According to the pilot, Captain Mayhew Foster, when asked when the Reich began manufacturing jets, Göring joked, ‘Too late.'
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As to Kitzbühel in those early May days, a holiday mood seemed already to have returned to the famous Tyrolese resort. Inge Rainer had returned there in April to find her parents' pension full of Luftwaffe personnel on crutches. They were turned out to make room for the US servicemen, the victors then demanding nothing but the best. The Seventh Army's 36th Signals Company soon found itself set up in the Grand Hotel. This

If this made the war in the Alps indeed seem over, nothing could be further from the case in the south-eastern ranges of Austria and the adjoining areas of Italy and Yugoslavia. Here,
Generaloberst
Löhr's Heeresgruppe E was staging a retreat north-west into the Austrian province of Carinthia. The corps was hotly pursued by Tito's Yugoslav Army of National Liberation. This was intent on redressing the injustices of the past and rewriting national frontiers in the country's favour.

Löhr had done well enough until his right flank was exposed by the surrender on 29 April of Vietinghoff's Army Group C – the surrender so painfully negotiated by Allen Dulles with
SS-Obergruppenführer
Wolff. The British, all too well aware of Tito's ambitions, took this opportunity to get their retaliation in first. Units of the British Eighth Army headed across Istria into Alpine Carinthia. Löhr and his staff were in a quandary.

With Hitler dead and the OKW command structure dissolving, Löhr personally took the decision to fight on – not least because he believed a managed retreat into Carinthia was the only way of saving his 400,000 men. His army was in any case at the end of its tether. Leaving aside the absence of overall political and military direction, the collapse of the Reich meant the dissolution of the logistics chain for supplying armies in the field. Löhr was desperately short of food, fuel and ammunition. The first week of May was here one of heavy rain. As Group E slowly retreated towards Carinthia, the British Eighth in the west and the JANL in the south closed at its heels.

Underlying Löhr's ever-changing military position lay the
shifting sands of post-war politics. Vienna had fallen to the Red Army on 13 April 1945 and Austria's eastern provinces were under Soviet domination. The provisional government in the capital was attempting to reunite the remaining provinces, with the Soviets pushing for a communist Austria. Carinthia had already declared in favour of the provincial government. This was the Red Tide that Churchill had feared. Now the British ambassador in Belgrade hastily called the PM with some disturbing news. ‘A Jugoslav Division is under orders to move into Austria and to take Klagenfurt.'
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This was Carinthia's capital, Austria's sixth-largest city, one dominated by the Karawanken Alps that divided Austria from Italy and Yugoslavia. At once the British Eighth Army was ordered to push into Carinthia with all speed. At much the same time the JANL crossed the Austrian border into the province. The race for Klagenfurt – and for the future of eastern Europe – was on. The battle had morphed from one between the Grand Alliance and the Reich to one between elements of the Grand Alliance.

In Klagenfurt itself on Tuesday 8 May – just as Göring was being entertained to chicken dinner in Kitzbühel's Grand Hotel – there was chaos. Political power was still nominally in the hands of the Reich Gauleiter Rainer. Told by Kesselring in Graz on 6 May that the war – or at least this war – was over, Rainer was prepared to cede power to what amounted to the local resistance. This was a left-leaning, although not completely communist, group.

These political virgins now had on their hands two ardent and powerful suitors, each with designs on Klagenfurt: the JANL pushing up from the south and the British Eighth Army from the west. It was assumed that the JANL would impose not only a communist regime in the city but one that would incorporate Carinthia into Yugoslavia. On the other hand, it was by no means clear – as in the Tyrol – whether the British would act as conquerors or liberators. One Austrian put it rather presciently: ‘Even if the British are harsh, at least one day they will leave Austria. It does not matter how accommodating the Jugoslavs
may be to us, they will be with us for ever. The choice is clear. It is essential to do everything to speed the British entry.'
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Happily the decision was made on the Carinthians' behalf. The British Eighth Army beat the JANL to Klagenfurt by a short head. Its units then occupied all the town's principal buildings. When the JANL arrived it had to make do with such two-and one-star accommodation as was left.