© MGMThe myth of Nazis setting themselves up on snowy mountaintops later became a staple of such films as Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton.
The myth that the Nazis were amassing weapons and crack units of 100,000 fanatical soldiers in the spring of 1945 for a last stand in the Austro-Bavarian Alps was without any basis in fact but had a powerful hold on the imagination of American and British military leaders, who feared it could prolong the war for years.
Thomas Boghardt, a German historian at the US Army Center of Military History in Washington DC, argues in a new book that the myth of an Alpine Nazi fortress was not a crucial factor behind American forces abandoning the race to Berlin in favour of a southward push but was one that US spycraft had a hand in making.
The Nazi leadership first got wind of allied fears of a mountaintop last stand in 1944, after the SS's intelligence service intercepted a cable sent from the US embassy in Berne, Switzerland. As Boghardt shows in Covert Legions: US Army Intelligence in Germany 1944-1949, the message had most likely been sent by Allen Dulles, later the head of the CIA during the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco but at the time the Berne station chief for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
© Associated PressAllen Dulles, pictured in 1954, when he was the director of the CIA.
Comment: Dulles, who went on to be the first civilian Director of the CIA, who also it's longest serving director to date, who over saw the Iranian coup of 1953, the Guatemalan coup of 1954, who over saw Project MKUltra, the CIA's mind control program, and who was fired by John F. Kennedy, ostensibly for the Bay of Pigs invasion: Did Israel Kill The Kennedys?
"[C]ould you report to the fool [Dulles] who knows his code was compromised if he has used that code to report meetings with anyone, Germans probably identified persons concerned and use them for stuffing [disinformation]", the agent vented to his station chief. "He swallows easily."
As the British had feared, Goebbels's propaganda ministry would spend the following months building up the myth of a German defence effort in Austria and Bavaria via disinformation and media reports, hoping a sidetracked US military leadership could be drawn into separate peace talks or even an alliance against the Soviets.
"Dulles was a very capable case officer who excelled at working with human sources, but when it came to signals intelligence he was indeed highly negligent," Boghardt told the Guardian.
As Covert Legions shows, allied forces were extremely susceptible to disinformation campaigns in the final stages of the war, with Field Marshal Montgomery arrested at one point as an impostor by American guards following a rumour that the Germans were planning to impersonate the British commander.
After the end of the war, Nazis setting themselves up on snowy mountaintops became a staple of swashbuckling war movies, such as 1968's Where Eagles Dare, starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood.
However, while some allied intelligence reports explicitly cited the Alpine redoubt theory as an argument for an allied push into southern Germany in 1945, Boghardt rejects the idea that it played a crucial part in shaping the second world war endgame and setting the ground for cold war tensions with the Soviet Union, as Winston Churchill later claimed.
The US decision not to back a British plan for a "pencil-like thrust" to Berlin likely owed more to the fact that the Red Army was already within 20 miles of the German capital while Anglo-American forces were still 300 miles away, he said, and a deal to divide up the city had already been agreed.
"My impression is that the US command ultimately didn't really believe in the Alpine redoubt myth, but may have kept it alive to persuade the British of their overriding strategy."
There was never a chance of a "separate peace." Hitler would have never agreed to such a thing, especially after his foolish gamble at the Battle of the Bulge failed. After April 30 there would have been no one to make a separate peace with anyway.
In fact, Montgomery did have a double who looked almost exactly like him. It worked for a while, the double would be seen at Gibraltar while Montgomery was in Belgium, etc., but the double began showing up drunk, so they fired him.
Patton and others were already agitating for a continued war against the Soviets well before the end of WWII. Patton wanted to rebuild and re-arm select Nazi forces and ally them with his Third Division and hit the Soviets in Austria and eastern Germany. In the movie "Patton," he (George C. Scott) is shown crudely insulting a Russian high-ranker at a victory celebration after the Americans met the Russians at the Elbe River.
Dulles was a fool and a Nazi himself. This story outlines one of his more famous blunders. He couldn't tell his ankle from his elbow. He thought the Cuban people were "opposed" to Castro, who had just thrown off the corrupt yoke Batista had on them. He told Kennedy they would rise in unison once the CIA's rag-tag "brigade" of waiters, barbers, students and ex-Batista goons went ashore at Bay of Pigs. Instead they landed in jail and he was cannned by JFK.