Storming the Eagle's Nest

Everybody knows the Alps. Nobody knows how Europe’s
playground
became its battlefield.

Virtually from the Fall of France in June 1940 to Hitler’s suicide in April 1945, the swastika shadowed the peaks of the Haute-Savoie in the western Alps to the passes above Ljubljana in the east. The Alps as much as Berlin were the heart of the Third Reich. ‘Yes,’ Hitler declared of his headquarters in the Bavarian Alps, ‘I have a close link to this mountain. Much was done there, came about and ended there; those were the best times of my life … My great plans were forged there.’

In 1940, Mussolini’s troops pitched battle with the French on the Franco-Italian Alpine border, skiing resorts all over the Alps were turned into training centres for mountain warfare, and Switzerland prepared to be invaded. Concentration camps were seeded in the Alpine valleys, Gauleiters were installed in the resorts, and secret rocket factories established; in the southern Alps of Switzerland, St Moritz and Zermatt welcomed escaping Allied PoWs, whilst further north Berne grew fat on looted Nazi gold, and guards turned away Jewish refugees at the country’s borders.

Yet as the war progressed, the occupied Alps became the cradle of resistance to totalitarian rule. Backed by Churchill’s brainchild, the Special Operations Executive and its US equivalent, the Office for Strategic Services, the mountain terrain spawned the French maquis and the Italian and Yugoslav partisans. From Slovenia to the Savoie, ski-runs became battlegrounds, the upper and lower stations of téléphériques fell to opposing forces, and
atrocities were committed with Mausers, bowie knives, mortars and grenades where once winter sports enthusiasts sipped Glühwein. In the spring of 1945, with the Red Army nearing Berlin, Goebbels propagated the myth of the Reich’s Alpine Redoubt. Here, Hitler and his diehards would supposedly hold out for years. Eisenhower’s armies were diverted south away from the German capital, leaving the city open to Stalin. After the Führer’s death the Allies discovered hoards of looted Nazi treasures, banknotes and bullion secreted in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps.

I was attracted to this story partly because in its entirety it had been told only tangentially and parenthetically before in broader studies of the European war; partly because of the paradox of fascism engulfing such a potent symbol of freedom as the Alps; and partly because of the richness of the personalities it involves, its sheer human drama.

Adolf Hitler, the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, the SS mastermind Heinrich Himmler and the prototypical spin doctor Joseph Goebbels are familiar enough; less so are the Nazis’ leader in Switzerland Wilhelm Gustloff, the Alpine concentration camp commandant Obersturmführer Otto Riemer, and the
perpetrator
of the Glières tragedy, Waffen-SS Sturmbannführer Joseph Darnand. Similarly, the figures of Churchill, Roosevelt and Eisenhower are complemented by the Swiss general Henri Guisan who stepped in where his country’s politicians feared to tread, Conrad O’Brien-ffrench (the model for James Bond), the German spy Fritz Kolbe, the hundreds of charismatic Frenchmen who rose above the country’s 1940 fall – one of whom rejoiced in the fanciful name of Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie – and the US spymaster and Don Juan, Allen Welsh Dulles. There are also those with two faces: Josip Broz aka Marshal Tito, the ‘good Nazi’ Albert Speer, and France’s Charles de Gaulle. The General was the man who accepted such large quantities of Anglo-American blood and treasure – resulting in the freeing of his own country – with such admirably regal disdain. ‘La France, c’est moi!’

There were also the everyday people of the Alps drawn by the vortex of fascism into the denouncements, betrayals and atrocities that rendered them inhuman: the agents, above all, of the Holocaust. These were countered by tales of courage, heroism and self-sacrifice, of the ordinary people doing extraordinary things, that characterise conflict wherever and whenever it occurs.

For the Alps, the years under the swastika really were both the best and the worst of times. This is the story that – for the first time – this book tells.

Burnham Overy Staithe,

June 2013                      

On 14 September 1938 an Englishman was getting ready to leave London for the Alps.

There was nothing unusual in this as such, for the English, as well as other Europeans and North Americans, had been seeking adventures in the Alps for more than two hundred years. First as Grand Tourists en route to the classical remains of Italy and Greece; then as ‘scientific travellers’, trying to unravel puzzles like the movement of glaciers and the impact of altitude on human physiology; later, in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, as artists. The Romantic poets – Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth – had defined Romanticism in their response to the Alps; J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich did likewise in paint; Mary Shelley had created
Frankenstein
on the shores of Lake Geneva. In their wake came the mountaineers who were the first to actually climb the high peaks of Europe’s great mountain range: from Mont Blanc in the west, the Matterhorn and the Monte Rosa towering above Zermatt, the famous trio of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in the Bernese Alps high above the Swiss capital of Berne, to the Piz Bernina, the Ortler and the Grossglockner in the east. In the second half of the nineteenth century the clean, dry Alpine air was identified as a palliative and even a cure for tuberculosis. Sufferers from a disease at the time widespread flocked to the mountains for the ‘Alpine cure’. Amongst them were Thomas Mann, A. J. A. Symons, Robert Louis
Stevenson and the wife of Arthur Conan Doyle, her husband in train. With the coming of the railways, the travel entrepreneurs Thomas Cook and Henry Lunn introduced tourism to the summer Alps. In the early years of the twentieth century, Henry’s son Arnold for the first time brought skaters, tobogganers and skiers to the Alps in winter, hitherto closed season. By the
outbreak
of the First World War a handful of remote villages had won worldwide fame as Alpine holiday resorts. Amongst them were Chamonix, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Davos, Grindelwald, Kitzbühel, St Anton, St Moritz, Wengen and Zermatt. After the war skiing established itself as a major international sport, and in 1936 the Bavarian resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen joined the winners’ circle as the venue for the Winter Olympics. In an age defined by industrialisation, the Alps had become the
playground
of Europe. Here the upper and – later – the middle classes escaped from their dark satanic mills to a purer, older and less material world.

For Switzerland in particular at the heart of the Alps, the English had an affection based on shared liberal constitutional principles and a tradition of personal freedom. Charles Dickens, writing to Walter Savage Landor at the height of the vogue for European revolutions in 1848, declared of the Swiss: ‘They are a thorn in the side of the European despots, and a good and wholesome people to live near Jesuit-ridden kings on the brighter side of the mountains. My hat shall ever be ready to be thrown up, and my glove ever ready to be thrown down for Switzerland!’
1
Yet the appeal of the Alps ran deeper. In an age that was beginning to question the conventional tenets of Christianity, thinkers like John Ruskin seized upon the Alps as a visible expression of the work of a deity. The Alps were ‘the best image the world can give of Paradise’.
2
This was echoed in 1878 by Mark Twain:

Switzerland, though often taken as a byword for the whole
eight-hundred
-mile range, was of course buttressed to the west by the massif forming the border with France that included Mont Blanc, the greatest peak in western Europe; to the east and south by those ranges that formed the frontiers with and between Austria, Italy, Germany and – in 1938 – Yugoslavia.

Here, in the 1930s, dark forces were at work. It was true that Switzerland was still a democratic state whose permanent neutrality had been reaffirmed at Versailles in 1919; true that France, under Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, was the
democratic
Third Republic. But Yugoslavia under the regent Prince Paul was riven by vicious rivalry between its constituent parts, the Banovinas; the de facto dictator King Alexander had been assassinated in 1934. Italy had fallen under the shadow of Fascism as early as 1922 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini – dubbed by his Chief of General Staff Pietro Badoglio ‘Dictator Number One’. Free speech, freedom of association and political opposition had been abjured. Austria became a fascistic state on the Italian model after the end of the First Republic in 1933 and the accession of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Germany, the southern province of which was largely Alpine, had become a totalitarian state after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933 – for Badoglio ‘Dictator Number Two’. The Bavarian capital of Munich was the ideological centre of Nazism, the Hauptstadt der Bewegung, and the first of the concentration camps was opened in the Munich suburb of Dachau on 22 March 1933. A year later came Hitler’s purge of Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Nazis’ militia, the SA (
Sturmabteilung
, storm battalion), and his confederates at
the Alpine resort of Wiessee. This was the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934. Wiessee lies between Munich and the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck. For Winston Churchill, at the time out of office and languishing as a backbencher in the House of Commons, it was also the road to Damascus:

Even the mountains themselves saw trouble. As a surrogate for war, they were exploited for the purposes of national vainglory. The conquest of Alpine peaks became less a sporting achievement than an expression of Aryan ‘racial’ pride. The most notorious case was the north face (Nordwand) of the Eiger, in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. Wall was the right word for a 5,900-foot face much of which was angled at 85 degrees, some overhanging, the climb bedevilled with ice, snow and rockfall. In 1935 two young German climbers, Karl Mehringer and Max Sedlmeyer, froze to death in an attempt on the face. In 1936 another group of Austrian and German climbers made an assault that left four of them dead. In July 1938 the wall was finally beaten by an Austro-German team. Their leader was Heinrich Harrer, later to win fame for
Seven Years in Tibet
. The four were given heroes’ welcomes by Hitler as heralds of the New Germany.

This was the shadow under which the ‘visible throne of God’ had fallen by 1938. It was to Munich that the Englishman was heading.

He had been advised that September can be a wonderful month in Bavaria, but that it is often wet. An umbrella was as likely to be as useful as a panama. He was a dressy man who so affected
stuffy Edwardian costume that he was nicknamed by some of his colleagues ‘the coroner’. As to getting to the German Alps, he chose to fly. Commercial aviation was a sickly child of the years after the First World War, and the height of the Alps – in places they rose to 15,000 feet – challenged the early passenger aircraft. The first commercial flights between England and
Switzerland
were established in 1923 and by the summer of 1938 the enthusiasm of the English for Alpine pleasures justified two flights a day to both Basel and Zurich. Still, flying was far from commonplace and the Englishman had taken nothing other than a joyride before. A train would have brought him from London to the Alps in a day and a half. Time, though, was of the essence.

He called his adventure ‘Plan Z’. He wrote to his sisters Ida and Hilda melodramatically: ‘If it comes off it would go far beyond the present crisis and might prove the opportunity to bring about a complete change in the international situation.’
5
The news of the plan was broken on the evening of 14 September 1938 at a banquet attended by one of his contemporaries, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. Ecstatically, the diarist recorded: ‘It is one of the finest, most inspiring acts of all history. The company rose to their feet electrified, as all the world must be, and drank his health. History must be ransacked to find a parallel.’
6
The Poet Laureate John Masefield was moved to write a poem on the mission published in
The Times.

The Englishman, bearing his umbrella, was duly cheered by crowds en route to the airport at Heston in west London. His party took off at 8.36 a.m. in a ten-seat Lockheed Electra. Four hours later on his arrival in Munich he was met by a gaggle of German diplomats. They were the German ambassador to the Court of St James’s, Dr Herbert von Dirksen, and his superior the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. This was a man vilified by Dirksen himself as an ‘unwholesome, half-comical figure’. An open car took the party from the airfield to Munich station. A special train on which Ribbentrop presided over a lunch took the group ninety miles south from Munich to their final destination of Berchtesgaden.

This was a picturesque little resort of a few thousand souls, nestling at 1,500 feet in the south-eastern Bavarian Alps. Its quiet streets were cobbled, its houses painted with Luftmalerei frescos in the traditional Bavarian style, and it was surrounded by the high mountains that lift the human heart. The Untersberg lay to the north, the Kehlstein to the east, and to the south soared the Watzmann – at almost 9,000 feet the third-highest peak in Germany. There was skiing in the long winter and in the summer mountain hiking in the surrounding mountains and at the Königssee to the south. At the newly enlarged station at Berchtesgaden the party was met by a black Mercedes and whisked the few hundred yards to the Berchtesgadener Hof, the resort’s principal hotel. Here the delegates were allowed just half an hour’s respite before being collected once again and driven across the river Ache a mile uphill to a mountain plateau: Obersalzberg. Their host stood awaiting them on the steps of a mountain chalet called without much originality the Berghof.

The Englishman was the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. He observed of his host, ‘His hair is brown, not black, his eyes blue, his expression rather disagreeable, especially in repose and altogether he looks entirely undistinguished.’
7
These were Chamberlain’s first impressions of Adolf Hitler, chancellor of Germany and leader of the Third Reich. Mahomet had come to the mountain.

Berchtesgaden might have seemed an odd choice. Hitler’s new Chancellery in Berlin was a more obvious venue for the sort of meeting that Chamberlain’s parliamentary colleague Winston Churchill would later dub a ‘summit’. In practice, the palace in Vossstrasse – constructed quite literally regardless of cost – was at present unfinished. In any case, Hitler, like Mark Twain, drew inspiration from the Alps. It was in Berchtesgaden that legend placed Barbarossa. There in the Untersberg overlooking Berchtesgaden lay the medieval German Kaiser in an enchanted sleep, awaiting the day on which he would awake to bring Germany
back to its golden age. Barbarossa was a Teutonic King Arthur and a secular messiah. Wagner, Hitler’s favourite composer, had popularised the myth in the Ring Cycle, and the Führer had identified himself with it. ‘You see the Untersberg over there,’ he once remarked in conversation at the Berghof. ‘It is no accident that I chose my residence opposite it.’
8

Hitler had first visited Berchtesgaden with his sister Paula in April 1923. This was a few months before the failed putsch in Munich, the first milestone of his political career. After his release from Landsberg prison in 1925 – a spell that had been the upshot of the putsch – the politician spent two years living in the Deutsches Haus in Berchtesgaden. Displaying the sensibilities of the failed artist that he was, Hitler described this as ‘a countryside of indescribable beauty’.
9
Here he wrote the second volume of his prospectus for the Third Reich,
Mein Kampf
. In 1928 he first rented and then bought Haus Wachenfeld. This was a small chalet situated on the Obersalzberg plateau halfway up the Kehlstein, across the valley from Berchtesgaden. Two years after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the Haus Wachenfeld was considerably enlarged by the architect Alois Delgado. A terrace was added to the front and the roof was raised to provide an additional floor. Garages and storage rooms were created in the basement, above which was a large conference room with a huge picture window – twenty-five feet by twelve – opening onto the Alps of Berchtesgadener Land. On the second floor were Hitler’s study, bedroom and living room, and several rooms for guests; above were a further fifteen rooms. The Berghof was garnished with the most expensive materials, including marble from Carrara and the Untersberg itself. It was Hitler’s Camp David, his Chequers, his dacha – or in Churchill’s case, his Chartwell.