Storming the Eagle's Nest Read Online Free PDF

. Halbrook,
Target Switzerland.
    7 . Halbrook,
Target Switzerland.
    8 . Cicely Williams,
Zermatt Saga.
    9 . Shirer,
Rise and Fall.
    10 . Richard Lamb,
Mussolini and the British
(London: John Murray, 1997).
    11 . Lamb,
Mussolini and the British.
    12 . Richard Collier,
Duce! The Rise and Fall of Benito Mussolini
(London: Collins, 1971).
    13 . Pietro Badoglio,
Italy in the Second World War
(
L’Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale
), tr. Muriel Currey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948).
    14 . Badoglio.
    15 . Conrad Black,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003).
    16 . Claire Eliane Engel,
Mountaineering in the Alps: An Historical Survey
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1971).
    17 . Galeazzo Ciano,
The Ciano Diaries 1939–1943
, ed. Hugh Gibson (New York: Fertig, 1973).
    18 . Neville Stephen Lytton,
Life in Unoccupied France
(London: Macmillan, 1942).
    19 . Ciano.
    20 . Winston S. Churchill,
The Second World War, Volume V: Closing the Ring
(London: Cassell, 1952).
    21 . Shirer,
Berlin Diary.
    22 . Kimche.
    * Wehrmacht is commonly used as the term for the German Army, but actually means ‘defence force’ or ‘armed forces’. When used in this latter sense it covers all three armed services – Heer, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe – but excludes the Waffen-SS.

FIVE
‘The lifeboat is full’
    The world seemed divided into two parts – those places where Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.
    CHAIM WEIZMANN
1
    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 Warschauof 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