Storming the Eagle's Nest (36 page)

Fifteen months later, Winston Churchill was himself in
Switzerland
. He was staying in the Villa Chiosi on the northern shores of Lake Geneva. ‘For centuries’, said Baedeker, the great lake on the border between Switzerland and France had ‘been a favourite theme with writers of every nationality (Byron, Voltaire, Rousseau, Alex. Dumas, etc.). On the N. side it is bounded by gently sloping hills, richly clothed with vineyards and orchards, and enlivened with smiling villages … The banks of the lake are clothed with rich vegetation and studded with charming villas.’
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The Villa Chiosi was just one such sequestered retreat. Here, on 23 August 1946, Churchill arrived to work on his memoirs – to be called simply
The Second World War
– to paint the idyllic autumn land-and lakescape around him, and to prepare a speech.

He had been dismissed as Prime Minister by an ungrateful British electorate in the khaki election of July 1945, with Hitler defeated but the war with Japan still lingering. The Swiss – or at least some of them – were happier than the British to honour their debts. It was one of the former Prime Minister’s compatriots, Colonel Hugo de Burgh of the Royal Horse Artillery, who had thanked Swiss officers for their help when he had escaped from Italy into Switzerland over the high passes into Zermatt in the autumn of 1943. ‘Why not?’ had been the reply. ‘If it had not been for the Battle of Britain in 1940 there would be no Switzerland.’ General Guisan’s men had had a point. The survival of freedom in
Switzerland
and elsewhere in the Alps was not principally a consequence of the efforts of the Alpine people themselves, either in
Switzerland
herself or in the Alps of France, Italy, Austria, Bavaria or even Yugoslavia. Freedom, where it had been maintained or restored, was the carefree child of events in London’s Downing Street, Baker Street and Broadway, in the skies over England in the epic summer of 1940, in the White House in Washington, in the Kremlin in Moscow, and in places like Berne’s Herrengasse, the bitter suburbs of Stalingrad, and the sands of El Alamein. The dwellers in the Alps had reason for gratitude.

So the University of Zurich had asked the architect of the West’s salvation, the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, Hitler’s nemesis – now merely Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition – to talk about the future of Europe. In a speech less well known than the ‘Iron Curtain’ lecture of six months earlier in Fulton, Ohio, the seventy-one-year-old grandfather sought to draw a line not under one war but under a series of conflicts that had convulsed Europe over more than a century. He was to make proposals that he hoped would prevent another European war in his audience’s lifetime; that, too, of their children and their children’s children. After the First World War it was said with much vehemence, ‘Never again!’ Churchill, as a survivor of the trenches, could hardly have felt this more keenly at the second time of asking, fifteen months after the end of the second war to ruin Europe and decimate her people in thirty years.

On 19 September 1946, Churchill told his listeners at the university that ‘In this last struggle crimes and massacres have been committed for which there is no parallel since the invasions of the Mongols in the fourteenth century and no equal at any time in human history.’ Forty million people had died in Europe and perhaps the same number were now refugees, displaced persons. ‘[O]ver wide areas a vast quivering mass of tormented, hungry, care-worn and bewildered human beings gape at the ruins of their cities and homes, and scan the dark horizons for the approach of some new peril, tyranny or terror.’ Europe, ‘home of all the great parent races of the western world … fountain of Christian faith and Christian ethics … origin of most of the culture, arts, philosophy and science both of ancient and modern
times’, had been laid waste. But for the succour of the ‘great Republic across the Atlantic Ocean’ the Dark Ages would have returned. ‘They may still return,’ Churchill warned.
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In the Alps, matters as yet were not that much better.
Switzerland
had survived militarily and materially but by no means morally unscathed. The rapacity of her bankers and the failures of her humanitarian mission would gradually emerge to stain and sully her once lofty reputation. In 1946 the Bavarian and Austrian Alps still laboured under Allied military rule: AMGOT – Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory. Bavaria was under US control, and the western Alpine areas of Austria with its better-known resorts like Kitzbühel, Lech and St Anton were in the hands of France; she had thoughtfully provided an abortion service for those inhabitants of the two provinces raped by her armed forces. In the eastern Tyrol, the British occupying forces in Lienz forcefully repatriated more than 2,000 Cossacks to the Red Army – most to their deaths. Bavaria and Austria were also well supplied with displaced persons camps, and Vienna was in the era of Carol Reed’s masterpiece
The Third Man
. With anti-Semitic persecution still lingering in Europe, in 1947 the Krimmler Tauern Pass close to Zell am Zee saw the extraordinary escape of 5,000 Jews from Austria into Italy, en route to a nascent Israel. The Italian Alps were gingerly emerging from AMGOT, coming to terms with the legacy of Mussolini, Salò, of more than twenty years of Fascism: Ferruccio Parri was briefly Prime Minister. Bavaria, Austria and Italy were all subsisting on US aid. In the Alps of France, the Third Republic and then the Etat Français – Vichy – had of course collapsed. The Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) was still struggling to come to terms with the Fall of 1940, the years of widespread collaboration, and the purges – one spontaneous and the other sanctioned by the state – that followed Liberation in the late summer of 1944. These had seen the execution of almost 10,000, including the author of the Glières tragedy, SS-Sturmbannführer Joseph Darnand. In
Yugoslavia
, on 29 November 1945, King Peter had been deposed to
usher in a communist republic. Marshal Tito and the iron forces of communism he represented were the ‘new peril, tyranny or terror’ to which Churchill alluded.

For this desecration and destruction of the pre-war order in Europe – its Alps included – the guilty must be punished. So Churchill declared in Zurich. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann were already dead, the first three by their own hands. Reichsleiter Bormann had apparently been killed in Berlin on 1 May 1945, trying to filter his way through Soviet lines as the Red Army closed on the Führerbunker and Hitler’s charred remains. As Churchill was speaking in Zurich in September 1946, Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Alfred Jodl were amongst those being tried at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In Berchtesgaden, Irmgard Paul was

Of Hitler’s inner circle, only Speer would escape the death sentence; only Göring would cheat the hangman by swallowing poison within hours of his intended execution.

Churchill in his speech looked back not just to Hitler’s war, but to the First World War in which he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards; and before that to the 1870–71
Franco-Prussian
War that had ended three years before his birth. All
three great conflicts had been rooted in the nationalistic rivalries between the peoples of Europe. If yet another war was to be prevented, Churchill was not the only statesman to see a solution in a political and economic union of Europe. As he put it,

It was the boldest of ambitions. It proposed reconciliation between two great European nations that had been at best rivals and at worst at each other’s throats since before the
Franco-Prussian
War. ‘I am now going to say something that will astonish you,’ continued Churchill. ‘The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany … There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.’ This was akin to a joint venture between Israel and Hamas. Still, as Churchill remarked, the leader of the free world, President Truman, ‘had expressed his interest and sympathy with this great design’. Moreover, one of the President’s underlings, the former Berne spymaster Allen Dulles, was working on a complementary project to rebuild Europe with US aid, soon to be known as the Marshall Plan. (Dulles’s OSS – for some ‘Oh So Social’ – had been disbanded by Truman on 20 September 1945. It had been a little profligate. A US government report on the intelligence organisation had uncovered ‘poor security, incompetence, waste, nepotism, inadequate training, extravagance, corruption, alcoholism, orgies, foreign penetration’.
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The indictment might have been written by Dulles’s British counterpart and old rival, Claude Dansey, who would die in 1947.)

At first Churchill’s proposals fell like frost in May. General de Gaulle, briefly out of power, wrote to him to say that the idea had been badly received in France. Countries desperately in need
of such basics as food, clothing and medical supplies found it difficult to raise their eyes to the horizon.

The work of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), subsequently that of the Marshall Plan, nevertheless encouraged imagination. As the former US Chief of Staff George Marshall – now Truman’s secretary of state – said in June 1947, ‘It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.’ The Plan became known as the European Recovery Programme. It bred a series of agencies devoted to the cause of reconstruction, the most important of which was the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). In 1949 this was complemented by the creation of the Council of Europe that Churchill had proposed in Zurich. That same year AMGOT in Germany – including Bavaria – ended with the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany. This was followed in 1951 by the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the principal members of which actually were West Germany and France. The twain had met.

This organisation was intended to be a first step towards the federation of Europe. In 1957 the six members of the Coal and Steel Community signed the Treaty of Rome. This created the European Economic Community, or EEC. Twenty years after the momentous visit of Viscount Halifax – the ‘Holy Fox’ – to Hitler in the Berghof, the meeting that ushered in Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, an organisation had been founded that really would mean ‘peace for our time’.

This template for European political and economic union meant peace and freedom in western Europe. It also meant manna in the Alps of France, Switzerland, Austria, Bavaria and Italy – if not Yugoslavia.

By the time of the creation of the EEC, Italy was enjoying what was actually described as an economic miracle. The counterpart in France under the Fourth Republic was
les trentes glorieuses
. Switzerland, which had enriched rather than pauperised itself
during the war, was sufficiently prosperous to contribute to rather than benefit from the Marshall Plan. Austria rebuilt her economy under Allied occupation and regained her independence in 1955. All these states were now democracies and most – in the immediate aftermath of the war – had even given women the vote. God was once again in his heaven and all was right with the world.

The Alps and their principal resorts were indices of this stability and prosperity. In 1956 Cortina d’Ampezzo, briefly the capital of the mayfly republic of Carnia, hosted the Winter Olympics. Over the border in France, Val d’Isère – close to the site of the Battle of Mont Froid – was being rapidly developed into one of France’s most successful skiing resorts, albeit the most architecturally depraved. Megève, in the war the temporary haven for Jewish refugees, soon forgot its past. Easier to reach than many of its competitors, the resort had become so popular with the French capital’s socialites, said Jean Cocteau, that it was ‘the twenty-first arrondissement of Paris’. In Kitzbühel in the Tyrol, the golden vein of the Hahnenkamm downhill race had been reopened as early as 1945. Ten years later, with the ending of AMGOT and the restitution of the republic, the old mining village was once again attracting the wealthy and fashionable, some of whom skied. In Switzerland, St Moritz had enjoyed a post-war revival and found its slopes studded with stars, amongst them Audrey Hepburn, Aristotle Onassis and the Aga Khan. Zermatt, which had been so welcoming to POWs escaping from Italy, was attracting 200,000 visitors a year; the village elders had induced the cellist Pablo Casals to broaden its appeal beyond the philistine and – like many of the resorts – the community was investing in new cable car systems. Adelboden, in the absence of its US enlisted airmen at Camp Moloney, was exploring the possibilities of opening up the Silleren as a skiing area. Davos, bereft of its US officers, would soon be establishing its annual World Economic Forum. In Bavaria, Garmish-Partenkirchen had found itself the repository for the Reich’s $15 million reserves, secreted away in nearby Einsiedl and eventually discovered by the Allies on 6 June
1945. By 1953 the town was sufficiently rehabilitated to host the world bobsleigh championships. Its neighbour Oberammergau once again staged the Passion Play in 1950, albeit only with the permission of the US occupying forces. St Anton, once so busy with SS troops guarding the Arlberg Pass, in 1953–4 turned its energies to constructing the Vallugabahn cable way up to the Valluga Grat. As to Obersalzberg itself, in some strange way it once again became Führersperrgebiet, ‘leader’s territory’. It was turned over to the US occupying forces, its buildings were requisitioned by the US army, and the old Hotel Platterhof was rebuilt as the Hotel General Walker to form the centrepiece of the US Armed Forces Recreation Center. The remains of the Berghof were demolished in 1953.