Storming the Eagle's Nest (9 page)

Eventually, on 9 November 1940, President Pilet-Golaz gave in. For Paul Ladame:

The Swiss resorts were no different. In Zermatt, right on the Italian border, the villagers were required to cover their windows with black paper at night – and to store enough food to last for six months.

The final thing rationed was truth – proverbially the first casualty of war. Naturally enough, Switzerland was awash with newsreels, magazines and newspapers produced by its German, Italian and French neighbours. With the borders closed by the Wehrmacht from the summer of 1940, British and American papers and newsreels – which told a very different story – became virtually unobtainable. Switzerland’s own press was censored as early as 1934, when the federal government had caved in to German demands. It issued a decree enabling the Council to sanction any newspapers that endangered relations between Switzerland and other countries: expressions deemed offensive to foreign leaders were banned. In practice, this was to an extent ignored. With the outbreak of war, the Council redoubled its efforts and directed the army’s division of press and radio to monitor such output, to warn, impose sanctions and if required to suppress publication. The upshot was effectively the suspension of a free and independent press.

For Shirer, as the winter of 1940–41 got under way, the situation was worse.

Reichsminister Goebbels’s propaganda ministry officials controlled the production facilities that enabled him to broadcast, and had the power to expel him if he was unduly critical of the regime. On the outbreak of war, they introduced a regime of censorship preventing the dissemination of material that might compromise military operations. When the Luftwaffe’s bombing of England and the reciprocal RAF raids on Germany got going,
the position deteriorated. Whereas Shirer’s colleagues in London – notably his boss Ed Murrow – were free to broadcast details of the Blitz, Shirer was unable to report the raids on German cities or to question the veracity of statements issued by the Nazis: for instance, about Luftwaffe and RAF losses during the Battle of Britain, bombing casualties in Hamburg and Berlin – or infringements of Swiss airspace.

As the autumn of 1940 progressed, Shirer was pressurised to broadcast material issued by Goebbels he knew to be misleading; he was also tipped off that the Gestapo was attempting to ensnare him on a charge of spying. This carried the penalty of death. With his family in jeopardy in Geneva and the emasculation of his job in Berlin, the game was no longer worth the candle. ‘I think my usefulness here is about over. Until recently, despite the censorship, I think I’ve been able to do an honest job of reporting from Germany. But it has become increasingly difficult and at present it has become impossible …You cannot call the Nazis “Nazis” or an invasion an “invasion.” You are reduced to re-broadcasting the official communiqués’.
27

On 23 October 1940, his wife and daughter left Geneva for the United States, via Lisbon. On 5 December, Shirer himself left Germany for good. Following an emotional reunion with Ed Murrow in London, on 13 December he returned to a United States just a year away from Pearl Harbor.

Early in the New Year of 1941, with Berchtesgaden slumbering under a winter blanket of snow, Hitler summoned his three service chiefs to the Berghof. In the rarefied atmosphere of the Bavarian mountain, he was in a bullish mood. He was anxious to help Italy, embroiled in the Axis campaign in Greece at the southern end of the Balkan Peninsula. Then there was England. Despite the Reich’s failure to invade Britain in the autumn, the Führer was convinced she was at the end of her tether: she would never regain any position on the Continent and was only hanging on in the vain hope of the United States or the Soviet Union
entering the war on her side. Hitler thought this situation had grave implications. His own ally Stalin he saw as a pragmatist who would throw Germany to the lions if he regarded it as advantageous to the USSR.

The Balkans, then, were uppermost in Hitler’s mind; after the Balkans, Russia. Curiously enough, these two concerns keep us in the Alps.

Since the golden years of the winter sports movement, St Moritz had been the doyen of the resorts. Famed for its waters since the sixteenth century, the little lakeside village in the Engadine in eastern Switzerland had won fame as a climbing centre in the 1850s, and as one of the pioneering winter resorts ten years later. By 1873 the winter season rivalled the summer and in 1885 the famous Cresta toboggan run was founded. In the winter of 1913 the Cresta was patronised by the Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. After the war the village reached the apogee of its fame, welcomed Americans exploring Europe in large numbers for the first time, and in 1928 hosted the Winter Olympics.

Now it was Christmas 1945, and at the Palace Hotel in Via Serlas the sun was back in the heavens and all seemed right with the world. Outside the foyer stood a young man in a
brass-buttoned
outfit who might have been taken as a porter – and certainly was by the American who was driven up in the taxi from the railway station. According to the historian of the Palace Hotel:

Yugoslavia was created on 1 December 1918 by the union of a ragbag of provinces of the dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire and the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. It bordered on Italy and Austria in the north, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria
to the east, Greece and Albania to the south. It was here that the Alps ceased to be a continuous range but rather became a series of eruptions that ran through what are now Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania: the Balkans. When the young King Peter encountered the American in St Moritz, he had just been deposed by the begetter of some of the bitterest fighting in the Alps in the course of the entire war. This was Marshal Tito, otherwise Josip Broz.

It had all begun in the Berghof.

There the regent of Yugoslavia, Prince Paul – Peter’s uncle – had been summoned by the Führer on 4 March 1941. The Prince was an Anglophile, educated in Oxford, married to a sister of the Duchess of Kent, and a close student of
Tatler
. Yugoslavia, he knew, was like Switzerland: it lay between the Reich and an object of its interest, in this case Greece. There, British forces were threatening both the Italian troops in Albania and the joint Italian and German forces in North Africa. Hitler also feared that an Allied front above Salonika in northern Greece could jeopardise the grandest of his designs, Barbarossa: the plan to invade the Soviet Union.

With just such threats and blandishments as Chancellor Schuschnigg had been subjected to on the eve of Anschluss, the regent reluctantly agreed to join the common cause of the Axis. On 25 March 1941, in Vienna, the agreement was duly signed by the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Dragiša Cvetković.

Yet not all was well in the state of Yugoslavia. Twenty-four hours after the signing, the regency found itself deposed by the seventeen-year-old King Peter, who had led a popular uprising supported by the air force and the army – and largely engineered by the British. He had escaped the attentions of his uncle’s conspirators by sliding down a drainpipe. ‘Chips’ Channon was an old friend of the regent. His diary for 27 March reads:

Although King Peter’s new regime proposed a non-aggression pact with Germany, it would not be a puppet of Hitler’s desires. Hitler was beside himself with rage at the coup, and rushed out Directive No. 25 on the invasion of Yugoslavia, Operation Marita. Executed on 6 April 1941, the Luftwaffe razed Belgrade to the ground, killing thousands. Within a week the Wehrmacht – allied to Italian and Hungarian forces – had secured the capital, the country, and the twenty-eight-division Yugoslav army. The King escaped to Greece, and his country was divided. Croatia became a Nazi state ruled by the fascist Ustaše, the Wehrmacht occupied Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the sweepings were taken by Italy, Bulgaria and Hungary.

In this way the eastern outworks of the Alps fell to Hitler, and his domination of the chain became virtually complete. With it came the cold, hunger, repression, persecution, restriction of freedom of expression, speech and movement, concentration camps and euthanasia programmes that the Reich had already brought to much of the Alps. Yet one of the consequences of Operation Marita was less expected. ‘The beginning of the Barbarossa operation’, Hitler informed his warlords, ‘will have to be postponed for up to four weeks.’
30
It was a delay of incalculable and perhaps even fatal results for the Third Reich.

On 19 November 1942 Hitler was once again at the Berghof. The first snows of the year had fallen and – as ever – cast a blanket of peace over the enchanted Alpine landscape. From the terrace the eye was seized by the crystalline masses of the Watzmann and the Untersberg – where Barbarossa still dozed. In the valley the dusk came early, and from Obersalzberg the lights of
Berchtesgaden
glittered warmly below. There was no blackout here, and from the night sky the constellations of Orion, Sagittarius and Cassiopeia shone down on the narrow valley.

Yet the recent weeks had been disturbing for the Führer. Indeed the whole tenor of the war had changed since his precipitate decision to invade the eastern Alps, those of Yugoslavia, twenty months earlier in April 1941. Operation Barbarossa, delayed partly because of the operation in the Balkans, had begun with such high hopes and dazzling victories. The fall of Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa, the besieging of Leningrad, the spearheads of the 7th Panzer Division in the suburbs of Moscow. Then had come the setbacks, culminating in a most reluctant Hitler suspending the assault of Heinz Guderian's Panzers on the Soviet capital. This was coupled with the entry of the United States into the conflict in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the final abandonment of the plan to invade Great Britain, the first USAAF bombing raids on Germany, and Grossaktion Warschau
of the summer of 1942. This had seen more than a quarter of a million Jews dispatched from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka, the extermination camp sixty miles north of the Polish capital. Then had come the shocking news of Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel's defeat at El Alamein. After this maelstrom, more than ever Hitler relished the restorative powers of his Alpine retreat. The Germans called it Bergfried, the peace of the mountains.

Thirteen days earlier he had been at his eastern HQ in
Rastenburg
, Prussia, directing the deteriorating situation around the industrial centre of Stalingrad in south-western Russia. It was at this point – 6 November 1942 – that the first intelligence had filtered through of a large Allied naval force setting sail from Gibraltar. It was steaming east. Two days later Hitler was scheduled to be in Munich, the fount of the Nazi movement, to address the Party on the nineteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Setting out in the command train after lunch on 7 November, Hitler arrived in the Bavarian capital at 3.40 p.m. – much delayed by stopping at every major station to hook up the train to the railway telegraph system to glean the latest news from the Mediterranean. By the time the Führersonderzug reached Munich's main station, the Allied landings in French North Africa had begun. This was Operation Torch, under the overall command of the fifty-
two-year
-old from Kansas, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Opposition should have come in the form of 120,000 Vichy French troops under Admiral François Darlan. Their loyalty was questionable, the Allies even supposing that some Vichy elements would support the landing. Resistance in Morocco and Algiers proved tenacious in some places, sporadic elsewhere, but enough to see a death toll of just under 2,000 accruing to the two sides, the sinking of a number of ships, and Darlan himself declaring for the Allies, before the bridgeheads were established.

For Hitler, as he was driven to the Löwenbräukeller to address the Party faithful, the implications of the landings were obvious. With Rommel in retreat after Montgomery's desert victory, the Axis forces in the whole North African theatre were now threatened: the balance of power in the Mediterranean had
shifted dramatically in the Allies' favour. Seven hundred miles away in Downing Street, Churchill took a similar line. On 10 November 1942 he famously told the Lord Mayor's Luncheon at the Mansion House in the City of London, ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.'
1
Both leaders saw that even Germany herself was imperilled if the Allies seized the opportunity to invade unoccupied southern France, the Zone Libre under the control of Pétain's Vichy administration. From Algiers, the French Riviera was just a hop across the wine-dark Mediterranean. From the Riviera, Germany was virtually in sight.

Fall Anton – Operation Anton – had been thoughtfully developed by OKW for just such a contingency. This was the completion of the Third Reich's occupation of France, the seizing of the Zone Libre, the margins of which were the country's tempting Mediterranean coast and her Alpine border with Italy.

Now Hitler at once directed the plan to be dusted off. At 8.30 on the morning of 10 November – just as Churchill was rehearsing his speech – the Führer gave the order for Axis forces to defy the terms of the armistice with Vichy and occupy the Zone Libre. He excused the action by declaring, ‘After the treachery in North Africa, the reliability of French troops can no longer be guaranteed.'
2

The implications for the French Alps along the border that zigzagged north from Nice to Geneva were far-reaching. The Italians had already occupied the fringes of this frontier area during the faltering campaign of June 1940. They had remained there under the terms of the Franco-Italian armistice. Now the Italian Fourth Army under the balding, bespectacled fifty-
four-year
-old Generale Mario Vercellino marched a further
seventy-five
miles west to Avignon in the south and Vienne in the north. The Italians assumed control of Nice itself, capital of the
Alpes-Maritimes
; further north in the Rhône-Alpes they took the capital of the ancient province of Dauphiné, Grenoble; Chambéry, the capital of Savoie; and Annecy, capital of the Haute-Savoie. In all, this was an area comprising eight
départements
.

Occupied Zones in France

Further north in the Alps, Vichy France's border with
Switzerland
between Geneva and Basel – the
départements
of Ain, Jura, and Doubs – was seized by the German Seventh Army, so closing the fascist ring on the tiny democracy.

Having brazenly assured the junketing Nazis in the
Löwenbräukeller
that Stalingrad was firmly in the hands of
Generalfeldmarschall
Friedrich Paulus's Sixth Army, Hitler had retreated south to the Berghof. Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, head of OKW, and his deputy Generaloberst Jodl were in attendance; also Albert Speer. The quartet ruminated on recent developments. The Allied landings – Operation Torch – were the culmination of the Reich's setbacks in North Africa that had begun with the defeat of Rommel's hitherto unvanquished Afrika Korps
in the Western Desert at the Second Battle of El Alamein. On the Eastern Front, a counteroffensive from the Red Army was anticipated – though not on a scale that required the presence of Hitler and his entourage at Rastenburg.

It was on 19 November that a phone call came through to Obersalzberg from Rastenburg. The new Chief of Staff
Generaloberst
Kurt Zeitzler called with grave news. The forecast Russian attack – Operation Uranus – had begun. It was on a much greater scale than OKW had envisaged. Three armies under General Nikolay Vatutin were driving south on a 250-mile front in a transparent attempt to encircle Paulus's Sixth Army in Stalingrad. The choice, said Zeitzler, was stark. Either a retreat to the west or be cut off. Hitler was outraged – not least because the forty-seven-year-old Zeitzler had been chosen to replace Generaloberst Franz Halder on the grounds that he would be both more robust and less dogmatic. Keitel, Jodl and Speer were also aghast.

The thirty-seven-year-old Albert Speer was the man
unexpectedly
spotlit by Hitler when he saw the architect's designs for the 1933 Nuremberg party rally. It was Speer's idea to hold the rallies at night to disguise the fact that many of the leading Nazis were overweight. Soon he became the principal architect to the Reich, the man who would blueprint Hitler's dreams for a brave new Germany. The Reichskanzlei (Reich Chancellery) in Berlin was his first major triumph, Hitler having dismissed the old building in the Wilhelmstrasse as only ‘fit for a soap company'. Having so distinguished himself, Speer was singled out for a further remarkable promotion to the Reich's arms and munitions minister. His supposed ignorance of the Final Solution to the Jewish question later led to the cognomen ‘the good Nazi'; and his astutely self-serving memoirs provide an intriguing insight into the upper echelons of the Reich as its narrative steadily unravelled.

On this occasion Speer pictured Hitler pacing back and forth like a caged animal in the great hall of the Berghof:

The matter simmered for three days as the news from the east became worse and worse. Then Hitler, Keitel and Jodl once again entrained at Berchtesgaden on the Führersonderzug and rushed back to Rastenburg.

It was 22 November 1942. Ahead lay the siege of Stalingrad.

So to Switzerland. The complete closing of the Swiss border by Operation Anton ten days earlier meant that the republic was now completely surrounded by the Axis, all its frontiers effectively closed. This brought a series of problems in the country to a head. Principal amongst them was that of the Jewish refugees.

Like Great Britain, Switzerland had a long tradition of offering asylum to the oppressed. This was partly as a consequence of her geographical position at the crossroads of Europe, partly because of her traditional neutrality, partly – perhaps – because of the humanity of the Swiss people. The state had given sanctuary from religious persecution to the Huguenots and the Waldenses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Geneva becoming known as the ‘Protestant Rome'. In the years of the French Revolution she had provided homes for her western neighbour's royalists. In 1815 the international guarantee of her neutrality by the Congress of Vienna had cemented her reputation as the capital for asylum; in 1848, the European year of revolution, she had given sanctuary to politicians of all colours – this despite having undergone her own turmoil in the form of the Sonderbund civil war the previous year. In the twentieth century, Russian revolutionaries including Vladimir Lenin had found exile in the mountain state.

Yet despite this record, and despite being a multilingual and multicultural nation, it was often said that the Swiss had a strong sense of their own identity and no particular enthusiasm for outside influences or people. Alexander Rotenberg was a
twenty-one
-year-old Jew from Antwerp who escaped to Switzerland at the time of Operation Anton in autumn 1942. For Rotenberg, ‘The Swiss were not particularly anti-Semitic, but they tended to be xenophobic. They liked their own ways; foreigners, with the exception of tourists, made them feel uncomfortable.'
4
Much more recently, in 2002, this perspective was echoed by
Switzerland
's own landmark Bergier commission into the country's wartime record: ‘Anti-Semitism was mostly unspoken and kept below the surface, but clearly ingrained in the social fabric.'
5
This low-grade xenophobia, at the time commonplace throughout Europe, was manifested in a concern about ‘foreignerisation', Überfremdung.

This debate was given increasing force as the number of refugees grew in the years preceding the outbreak of war. After the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that deprived German Jews of their citizenship, the Reich had actively encouraged Jewish emigration. By 1938, one in four German Jews – some 150,000 – had left Germany, fleeing to where they could. Great Britain took 50,000, France 30,000, Poland 25,000, Belgium 12,000, the Scandinavian countries 5,000. Switzerland herself accepted 5,000. With the annexation of Austria in March 1938, Nazi policy became more concerted, and saw the establishment of ghettos and forced emigration. Pressure on Switzerland grew.

In the face of this policy and the practical implications for the liberal democracies that might be inclined to accept the Jews, in 1938 President Roosevelt had called an international conference on the question. Switzerland, at the time still the host country of the League of Nations, and in the immediate proximity of Germany, was the obvious venue. The Swiss declined the suggestion, supposedly fearing to offend Hitler. Évian-les-Bains, the French Alpine watering-place south across Lake Geneva from
Lausanne, was chosen as a substitute. It was hoped that charity and justice would be dispensed along with the mineral water.