Storming the Eagle's Nest by Jim Ring Page B

previously, and with Anglo-American forces from the Operation Torch landings now pushing back strongly against Rommel’s Axis forces in Tunisia, the German army was in retreat. On 14 March – just before his return to Obersalzberg – Hitler had voiced his fear that ‘the loss of Tunisia will also mean the loss of Italy’. 20 This in turn might give the Allies easy access to the Alps – and thence to Germany herself.
    His staff had accordingly conceived the idea of a strategic retreat into those parts of central and western Europe that could be easily defended. This was the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’. Of this, Switzerland and her mountains formed an integral part. The plan would incorporate the Swiss Alps into a defensive system joining General Guisan’s Alpine Redoubt with the Black Forest, the Austrian Arlberg with the Bavarian Alps, the Brenner Pass with the Italian Dolomites. As to its practical execution in terms of seizing Switzerland, one imaginative option dated from July 1941. This was Operation Wartegau. 21 It called for a commando force assembled in flying boats on the Bodensee (Lake Constance)to be flown south-west the short distance to the Swiss lakes of Lucerne, Thun and Zurich. That would surprise the Swiss!
    The Swiss had a source of intelligence actually within the German high command. On 19 March 1943, the agent known as the ‘Wiking line’ dispatched the most alarming of news to Berne. General Guisan was immediately alerted. German mountain troops, the Gebirgsjäger, were massing in Bavaria; General Eduard Dietl, a mountain warfare specialist, had been flown from occupied Finland to a specially established HQ in Munich to mastermind the operation. Invasion yet again seemed imminent, and Guisan at once mobilised his civilian army. The Swiss called it the
März-Alarm.
    Notes
    1 . Martin Gilbert,
Churchill: A Life
(London: Heinemann, 1991).
    2 . Wilhelm Deist,
Germany and the Second World War
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
    3 . Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich
(New York: Macmillan, 1970).
    4 . Alexander Rotenberg,
Emissaries: A Memoir of the Riviera, Haute-Savoie, Switzerland, and World War II
(Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1987).
    5 . Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War (ICE),
Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War: Final Report
(Munich: Pendo, 2002)
    6 . Christopher Sykes,
Crossroads to Israel
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973).
    7 . Sykes.
    8 . ICE.
    9 . Kimche.
    10 . Kimche.
    11 . ICE.
    12 . Rotenberg.
    13 . Rotenberg.
    14 . Rotenberg.
    15 . Daniel Carpi,
Between Mussolini and Hitler: The Jews and the Italian Authorities in France and Tunisia
(Hanover, NH, and London: Brandeis University Press, 1994).
    16 . Gilbert,
Churchill: A Life.
    17 . Susan Zuccotti,
Holocaust Odysseys
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
    18 . Speer.
    19 . Hunt.
    20 . Deist.
    21 . Halbrook,
Swiss and the Nazis.

SIX
Setting the Alps Ablaze
    Guerrilla warfare is even more cruel than conventional war, the chances of surviving slimmer. Whoever joined up as a patriot or partisan signed their own death warrant.
    MAX SALVADORI
1
    In the spring of 1943 Switzerland was once again teetering on the brink of invasion. At the same time to the south-east of the republic in Yugoslavia and to the south-west in France, other Alpine dramas were unfolding. Long heralded and coming to pass much later than Churchill – amongst many others – had hoped, this was the story of resistance in the Alps.
    It had begun with the ignominious evacuation from Dunkirk of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, the first summer of the war. Thence, in Hitler’s eyes, there would be no return of a British army to Continental shores. General Gort’s forces would sit impotently on the sidelines of Nazi-occupied Europe for the next thousand years.
    Even during the chaotic days that followed the Fall of France, the