The End of the War in Italy- 80 years ago ( Part 4) Operation Sunrise- The Secret Surrender
Lugano , Switzerland on a chilly late afternoon in February 1945, a single American intelligence officer walks down from Lugano rail station, through the colonnades of the old , occasionally doing some window shopping to check he is not followed. After a final stop by a well-stocked Swiss salumeria, he arrives at the city’s most famous old restaurant. He is shown upstairs to a private dining room , the door is being guarded by a taciturn Swiss intelligence Officer. Ushered in, he is introduced to a short, bearded Neapolitan businessman, a Swiss schoolteacher and two German SS officers in plain clothes. Operation Sunrise is about to start. In the last months of World War Two, the Swiss lakeside cities of Lugano, Ascona and Lucerne , became the locations for some very secret talks , as the Germans heading for almost inevitable defeat opened negotiations with the Allies regrading the separate surrender of all German forces still fighting in Italy,. Against the backdrop of charming Swiss cities, hotels and restaurants- the key protagonists were the head of the OSS in Bern, Allen Dulles and the head of the SS in Italy, Karl Wolff. They were backed by an interesting supporting cast of Italians, Germans, American, Swiss, and Britons as well as well some very pleasant Swiss restaurants. Almost forgot the dachshund named Fritzel.
Allen Dulles graduated from Princeton University and entered the US diplomatic service in 1916. Initially assigned to Vienna, he was transferred to Bern, Switzerland, along with the rest of the embassy personnel shortly before the U.S. entered the First World War. He was on the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, and from 1922 to 1926, he served five years as chief of the Near East division of the Department of State. In 1926, he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at Sullivan & Cromwell, the New York law firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, he served as legal adviser to the delegations on arms limitation at the League of Nations. In April 1933, Dulles met with Hitler in Berlin on State Department duty. In 1935, concerned by the Nazi treatment of German Jews and, despite his brother's objections, he managed to persuade Sullivan & Cromwell to close their Berlin office. Dulles was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services by William J. Donovan in October 1941, and on November 12, 1942, he moved to Bern, where he lived at Herrengasse 23 As Swiss Director of the OSS, Dulles established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers. In Bern, his main assistant was Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz , a German economist. the son of Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz, professor of Political Science at Freiburg University and former member of the Weimar parliament. Gaevernitz was well connected too, one of his sisters, Margiana had married the German entrepreneur and philanthropist Edmund Stinnes, which becomes relevant later in the story.
On the other side to Dulles was Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff. The son of a wealthy district court magistrate in Darmstadt, he graduated from school in 1917 and volunteered to join the Imperial German Army (Leibgarde-Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 115) serving on the Western Front as a lieutenant and winning the Iron Cross Second class and First Class. Forced to leave the army because of the reduction of the German armed forces following the terms imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, he joined the paramilitary Freikorps from December 1918 to May 1920 and then went into banking. 1920s German banking was hardly a stable career and in June 1924 he was laid off and started his own public relations company which he operated in Munich until 1933. Wolff joined the Nazi Party the SS in October 1931. From June 1933, served as personal adjutant to Heinrich Himmler and later as his chief of Personal Staff Reichsführer-SS coordinate all contact and correspondence within the SS at both party and state levels. The eloquent and well-mannered Wolff rose to become one of the key figures in Himmler's power regime. In addition, Wolff oversaw the economic investments made by the SS, was responsible for saving funds among Himmler's circle of friends and for connections to the SS organizations
On 25 February 1945, Allen Dulles was visiting liberated France with the Intelligence Staff of the US 6th Army , when he received an urgent message to contact one of his key contacts, Max Waibel of the Swiss intelligence . Waibel a doctor in Political Sciences, had served on the Swiss General staff and attended the War Academy in Berlin in 1938. When war broke out in 1939, he returned to Switzerland and took over the management of the Rigi/Lucerne signal intelligence centre. In 1940, Waibel was one of the founders of the Officers' League, which wanted to take on the fight against any invading German troops on their own should the Federal Council decide to surrender. He was arrested, but soon released and promoted to Major at the end of 1940. By the time Dulles arrived in Bern, he headed the Intelligence Section 1 (NS-1, Rigi) of the Swiss Armed Forces Intrigued and anxious to be respectful to Waibel, Dulles and von Gaevernitz returned to the Swiss border and caught a train Lucerne. That evening they all met, at a lakeside restaurant on Lake Lucerne, dining on some excellent fresh trout. Waibel recounted that earlier in the day two visitors had called on him, a Polish born Swiss-schoolteacher , Max Hussman who introduced him to Baron Luigi Parrilli, a prominent Italian businessman. Parilli was originally from Naples, the son of Baron Giuseppe Parilli , an Italian Naval officer and sometime Naval historian. He was educated in St Gallen , Switzerland and after serving in the Italian Army in the First world war, he started career representing American companies in Europe, at various times Nash Motors, Nash-Kelvinator and General Electric. Parrilli “married well” to Luisa Poss, the daughter of Alessandro Poss a North Italian Industrialist with substantial interests in cotton manufacturing. In his memoirs Eugen Dollmann describes Parrilli as ”resembling a character from a 19th Century French Novel, although they were not to meet until later , Dollmann knew him by reputation “ rumour had it that he was a great bon-viveur and woman-chaser” On a more positive side , he is also recorded as having sheltered a Jewish boy from Tripoli and eventually getting him out of the country to Switzerland.
Parrilli and Hussmann claimed to be looking for Swiss mediation in opening peace talks with the German Command in Italy. Waibel had to be very discreet. Switzerland was extremely careful of its neutrality, during the early years of the war, it had been completely encircled by the Third Reich and fearful of invasion by the Germans. Although by 1945, the French border was open again-and invasion fears had receded the Swiss still played things cautiously. By early 1945, one of their greatest fears was that a German collapse in northern Italy, would see the Germans trying to retreat through Switzerland. Waibel, therefore had to be seen to be acting as a Swiss private citizen in brokering any talks between the Allies and the Germans. Parrilli was worried about the potential destruction of the family businesses if order collapsed in Northern Italy and the Germans adopted a scorched earth policy , Waibel was worried about the threat to Switzerland from a similar collapse, so their interests coincided. Somewhat skeptical regarding the motivations of this unlikely couple but anxious to keep Waibel happy, Dulles sent von Gaevernitz to meet them at the Hotel Schweizerzhof in Lucerne. Having interviewed the two men during a pleasant if rambling conversation, Gaevernitz reported back that the pair did not really seem to have the authority to discuss matters on behalf of the Germans.
On 2 March , two SS Officers SS colonel Eugen Dollmann and SS captain Guido Zimmer turned up on the Italian Swiss border at Chiasso, Waibel put them up at safe house in Lugano and notified the Americans, Gaevernitz was away on a skiing holiday at Davos, so Dulles sent another OSS agent Paul Blum to meet with them. Dollmann was a well-connected individual, who had served as Hitler’s interpreter during trips to Italy. In the 1920s, Dollmann had graduated and gone to Italy to pursue his studies of Italian art and history. He had a particular interest in the Farnese family and especially cardinal Alessandro Farnese, he moved to an apartment near the Piazza Spagna becoming well connected with Roman society, where he first met Karl Wolff and possibly Himmler also. He appears to have struck up a rapport with Eva Braun, when she accompanied Hitler on his 1938 tour of Italy, by assisting her with her shopping for crocodile skin handbags and Ferragamo shoes. Eva recommended his services to Hitler as an interpreter, Dollmann was supposedly homosexual, so presumably Hitler saw no threat to his relations with Eva and signed him up. So Dollmann who had apparently never been a card-carrying Nazi, nor served in the Army and who in any other circumstances as a homosexual would have been sent to a concentration camp ended up as an SS Standartenfuhrer and trusted interpreter to the Nazi hierarchy. From 1938 his contacts included the German Embassy, the Papal curia and with the Italian Royal family , he took Heydrich on a tour of the bordello’s of Naples, worked at the supreme command of Albert Kesselring and as the Germans retreated north at Wollf’s hq on Like Garda. –he was also on friendly terms with the notable Fascists. However, Dollman was certainly more than a sometime art historian and humble interpreter, his involvement was alleged in the transportation of Rome’s Jewish population and the notorious reprisal murders at the Fosse Ardeatine. Although previously knowing him by reputation, Dollmann had first met Parrilli in December 1944 at a soiree hoisted by the Fascist Prefect of Pavia, Tuinetti, Parrilli had bought along a case of Veuve Clicquot, his preferred tipple and after some copious consumption had confessed to dolman, that he needed some help to cross the frontier into Switzerland “to see some old friend. “ After more champagne, Parrilli loosened up still further. He was concerned by the speech that Mussolini had made at the Teatro Lirico in Milan on 16 December. A visibly aging and unwell Mussolini, who by that time was more or less a prisoner of the Germans, had harangued a faithful audience with a new policy of socialization of industry and a threat to defend northern Italy, street by street until the whole Po Valley was a blood-soaked battlefield. Still dancing around the subject, Parrilli had asked Dollmann what he had thought of the speech. “Crazy” Dollmann replied. Parrilli then asked what Field Marshal Kesselring and General Wolff made of it. Dollmann remained non -committal. After reporting back on his conversation with Parrilli, on 2ndr March Dollmann was summoned to Wolff’s HQ on Lake Garda to meet with Wolff and the German Ambassador Rudolf Rahn. Clearly they were interested in what he had to say, since they instructed him to go to Switzerland the following day. Dollmann was accompanied by Guido Zimmer, a Nazi Party member since 1932, and a member of the SS and SD since 1936. In 1940, he had been assigned as a member of the foreign Intelligence Branch of the RHSA, in Rome. After the Italian armistice in 1943, Zimmer ended up back in Italy working for Walter Rauff, the Head of the SS in Northern Italy. Zimmer apparently also knew Parrilli . and it may have been his idea to use Parilli to initiate contacts with the Swiss and through them, the Americans. Whether Parrilli or Zimmer had made the first move, the two Germans set off to Chiasso from where the Swiss took them in secret to Lugano.
The Germans had time to kill in Lugano, while awaiting the arrival of the American representative , so their Swiss handlers’ gave then a tour of the city and then they holed up in a restaurant for the afternoon to wait for Blum’s arrival. There was not much to do but eat and drink, so Hussmann and Lt Friedrich Rothplatz of Swiss intelligence who were also present, presumably had to rein in the German’s alcohol consumption before the American guest arrived. Across the table was Dulles’s representative Paul Blum. Blum was another interesting character. He was born in Japan, the son of a French Jew, Henri Blum having spent most of his childhood in Japan, , he attended Yale University and then joined the US Army Ambulance Service when the Germans invaded France in 1940. He returned to the United States, where he joined the OSS, serving in Thailand and Portugal before moving to work for Dulles in Bern. Blum was fluent in Japanese, so Bern was not a typical posting. With his Jewish background, it must have been shocking for him to sit down for a late lunch with two semi sloshed Nazis, but he shook hands and listened to what they had to say. He never explicitly said that he represented Dulles, but the inference was pretty clear.
Dulles had given Blum, one specific request to establish the credentials of the German visitors , the release of two important Italian prisoners Ferrucio Parri and Antonio Usmiani. Parri, a former schoolteacher and editor of the Milanese newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, was a noted anti-Fascist . He had been instrumental in the daring motor boast escape of the socialists Filippo Turati, Pietro Nenni, Eugenio Chiesa and Sandro Pertini from Italy. For his role in that he had been sentenced to prison and then a period of internal exile. Following the German invasion of Italy, he had become a resistance leader and as a moderate republican, had gained the confidence of the Americans and particularly Allen Dulles. Dulles was thus extremely concerned when Parri was arrested by the SS on 2 January 1945, while on a mission to Italy. Such was the rivalry between the Americans and British to influence their favoured partisan groups, that some even suggested that the British had given Parri up to the Germans. Parri was locked up in Milan’s notorious San Vittore prison, and then at the SS HQ in the Albergo Regina in central Milan. He managed to go unrecognized for several months, until he was identified possibly by an Italian Police Officer who had arrested him in the past. Identified as one of the most wanted men in Italy he was then whisked off to prison in Verona. Dulles’s other Italian asset, Antonio “Toni” Usmiani, , had been a major in charge of the Italian army’s alpine warfare school in Aosta. After 8 September, he had fled to Switzerland, where he had encountered Dulles and had been convinced to go back to Italy to set up a clandestine information service for the Allies. He had been arrested in February 1945. Blum’s meeting with the Germans lasted only 20 minutes and with the request made, the Germans made their way back to Italy and Blum returned to Bern, where he and Dulles waited to see what would happen.
Following their return from Lugano, Parilli had gone to stay at Zimmer’s apartment in Milan , while Dollmann and had gone to Wolff’s HQ at Fasano on Lake Garda. Zimmer was the summoned to Fasano , to be followed later in the day by Parilli. They were all asked to debrief on the Lugano meeting. Between them they managed to convince Wolff that talks with the Americans were worthwhile and that Parri and Usmiani, should be released as a goodwill gesture.. Initially Wolff suggested that an allied emissary come to meet him In Italy, but it would appear better if he went to Switzerland, One further problem remained , the conspirators had to find some way of releasing Parri and Usmiani, without alerting the Head of the police in Italy Wilhelm Harster. In the convoluted German chain of command , Harster as BdS, Befehlsteber der Sicherheitspolizei und se SD , reported to Ernst Kaltenbrunner , the head of the SD, as well as to Wolff. Kaltenbrunner had been putting out his own peace feelers to the Allies in Switzerland, without telling Wolff. Wolff was rightly preoccupied that if Harster found out they had released the Italian prisoners for no good reason , he, Dollmann and Zimmer were on a one-way ticket to Dachau- if they even got that far. So they cooked up some excuse about exchanging the Italian for a German held by the Allies, unfortunately the prisoner they had in mind was on his way to a POW camp in Canada, so they had to rethink that one. The SS took Parri from Verona back to Milan to the Hotel Regina, where Zimmer apparently arranged for Parri’s wife to visit and celebrated his release with a glass of champagne. They had a harder time locating Usmiani, who was a a prisoner of the ehermach, but Zimmer tracked him down to the San Vittore. Both men were then spirited out of Milan in secret, presumably thinking that they were about to be disappeared for good. Zimmer bought the former prisoners to the SS HQ at villa Locatelli in Cernobbio, where he met with Wolff, Dollmann and Wolff’s adjutant Wenner. The SS men changed into civilian clothes and headed for the border at Ponte Chiasso.
Zimmer accompanied Parri and Usmiani by car over the border, while Wolff, Dollmann and Wenner took the train to Zurich, Wolff who despite his civilian attire, was notoriously well-known in Italy, struggled to remain incognito from Italian who were travelling on the train. After their four-hour train trip from Chiasso, the German party holed up at Hussmann’s apartment in Zurich and waited for the Americans to arrive. Dulles was keen to call the shots and insisted the meeting was to be in his own Zurich safe house. Dulles met Wolff alone, over a few glasses of Scotch and then returned to Bern. The next day Dollmann joined Wolff for further talks with Gaevernitz Things went quiet until on 17 March, word arrived from Parilli that Wolff would be returning to Switzerland in a day or two to present a concrete plan for the surrender of the German forces in Italy. Dulles was a civilian and negotiating the surrender of the 800,000-man army in north Italy required some military expertise, so two representatives from Allied HQ in Caserta were sent to join the negotiations. The British General Terence Airey was intelligence chief for General Harold Alexander at AFHQ in Caserta, General Lemnitzer held a similar role in the US Army. They were both career soldiers who had seen overseas duties, Airey in Egypt and Lemnitzer in the Philippines. Since they could not travel direct from Caserta to Switzerland the two generals flew to liberated France and then met with Dulles at Annemasse in France to travel into Switzerland. Here they encountered a problem although Waibel was helping, Uniformed British and American generals could not just walk in and out of the country. However, the Swiss were allowing US enlisted men in on transit to the US Legation. So the two generals became privates for the day. They swapped IDs with two US enlisted men and had to memorize their dog tag numbers. Fortunately for Lemnitzer, passing as a US enlisted man was easier than for the Sherbourne school educated Airey – Lemnitzer was the first to be questioned and managed to remember his new ID number. Airey got waved through, without much of a fuss. Waibel or his men, had probably fixed matters with the border guards, but the could not be too careful. When they got to Bern, Dulles stashed them away n his apartment. Being scrupulously fair and neutral, the Swiss tolerated the presence of both Allied and Gwerm spies, so long as they did nothing detrimental to Swiss interests. So with the probability that German spies were watching his apartment , Dulles kept them hidden and only let them out to exercise at night.
This time Zurich was deemed to be too public for a meeting with Wolff. it was now that Gaevernitz connections with his wealthy Stinnes in-laws proved useful as we was able to arrange the use of the family’s isolated lakeside estate at Ascona on Lake Maggiore as a venue for the talks. . The whole party head across to Ascona. The Generals were accommodated in one part of the Stinnes family estate up on the hill. Dulles and Gaevernitz met with Woolf at the family’s lakeside villa The aides remained in the garden. The meeting broke foe a picnic lunch, at which point the Americans walked back up the hill to consult with the generals. In the afternoon, all of them went back down to the villa to discuss the technical terms for the surrender.
Although a deal had been arranged that would have ended the war in Italy five or six weeks early and saved large numbers of lives, the Allies were now compelled to invite the Soviets to the official surrender at Caserta. Stalin had long been convinced that the Allies were trying to negotiate a separate peace with the Germans and pressurized the Allies to cease the discussions. The Soviets were worried that a quick German surrender in northern Italy would allow the Allies to get to Trieste and the Adriatic unopposed. A delay in the German surrender would allow the Soviets or Titoist forces in Yugoslavia to get to Trieste first. Stalin encouraged Tito to get as far into Italy as possible. Dulles believed that the Soviet plan was for the Soviets to cut across northern Italy and link with French Communist partisans, something that would also have been inimical to Swiss interests. There was a lot riding on the sunrise talks. By 21 April, circumstances had materially changed. The Allied Spring offensive in Italy had started and was proceeding faster than anticipated. Having broken out of the Apennine Mountains, the Fifth Army had taken Bologna on 21 April and were now reaching the River Po. On 24 April, units of the Fifth Army crossed the Po and drove a wedge between the German Armies in western and eastern Italy.
On 23 April, Wolff retuned to Lucerne, together with his adjutant Wenner and Lt Col Viktor von Schweintz . That met at Waibel’s house, an imposing gentleman’s resident at Derikin,, just outside Lucerne. Heading back to Italy through his normal Chiasso route, Wolff ended up back at the villa Locatelli only to find that the villa was bow surrounded by Italian Partisans. He managed to get word to Waibel, possibly through cardinal Schuster in Milan. The Americans sent a rescue party over from the mountains from Campione d’Italia and managed to exfiltrate Wolff back into Switzerland, from where he was able to travel across the country into Austria and down to his new HQ in Bolzano. Wenner and Von Schweintz remained at Waibel’s house in Lucerne awaiting for further developments.
On the 27 April, the two Germans crossed into France accompanied by Gaevernitz and were taken to an American air force base at Annecy from where they were flown to AFHQ at Caserta. On 29th April the Von Schweintz and Wenner signed the surrender instrument for all German Forces in Italy. This would came into effect on 2 May. Even then it was not plain sailing, they needed to take copies back to Italy for Vietinghoff and Wolff. The OSS man who was supposed to meet them at the Franco- Swiss border did not turn up and Gaevernitz had to use his powers of persuasion on the Swiss border guards to let them all back in. They arrived in Bern, just before midnight . They then had to travel all the way across Switzerland to Feldkirch on the Swiss – Austrian border. -here they ran into another issue, In view of the rapidly deteriorating situation in north Italy and Austria the Swiss had closed the border. When they finally arrived in Austria, they had to travel across half the country and down through the Brenner Pass into Italy. Progress was slow and they finally reached Wolff’s HQ in Bolzano at 12.30 am on 1st May.
Meanwhile things had not been going to plan in Bolzano either, Having arrived back from Switzerland on the night of 28/29 April, Wolff had been engaged in discussions regarding the surrender.
The German surrender on 2 May did not bring an automatic end to hostilities in Italy. German headquarters were not in touch with all of their subordinate units, and American notification of advance units was not everywhere accomplished by 1400, some groups of Nazi die- hard fanatics were reluctant to surrender even after being informed of the capitulation at Caserta. The US II Corps had sent out orders to its divisions late on 2 May to halt in place wherever resistance was encountered; on the following day it reported that the German 1 Parachute Division west of Borgo was unwilling to give in. Some elements stated they had no orders to surrender and would continue to oppose yje Allied advance. During the 3rd medium bombers dropped leaflets in areas where the terms of surrender were likely to be unknown to the enemy, and even the most stubborn Nazis realised that the battle in Italy was over. Despite a few skirmishes most Germans engaged in no further fighting after 2nd May and were willing,to obey any orders issued by Allied commanders. On 3rd May the 85th and 88th Divisions sent task forces north to seal the Austrian frontier and to gain contact with the American Seventh Army, driving southward from Germany. The 339th Infantry under Lt. Col. John T. English reached Austrian soil east of Dobbiaco at 0415 on 4th May; the Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon, 349th Infantry, met troops from VI Corps of Seventh Army at Vipiteno, nine miles south of Brennero. The 338th Infantry came up Highway 12 later in the day and placed a frontier guard at Brennero on the Austro-Italian frontier. The Eighth Army had met Marshal Tito's forces on 1 May at Monfalcone and the US 473d Infantry had encountered French troops on 30 April near Savona on the Italian Riviera. The Allied armies in Italy had now reached the western, northern, and eastern frontiers of Italy and controlled all major routes of egress.
The German protagonists all did well after Sunrise. Although implicated in serious war crimes, Wolff, Dollmann and Zimmer were all able to disappear, they were joined by Rauff and his evil sidekick Saevecke who despite playing a minimal role in Sunrise magged to acquire some of the benefits. Wollf was arrested on 13 May 1945, he was imprisoned in Schöneberg and rather than being prosecuted appeared as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, He was released by the Americans and then indicted by the post-war German government and sentenced to five years in prison in November 1948, for his membership in the SS. In June 1949, he was released from prison after his sentence was reduced to 4 years. After his release, he went back into advertising. During the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, evidence emerged that Wolff had organized the deportation of Italian Jews in 1944 and he was arrested again and put on trial in West Germany. In 1964, he was convicted of deporting 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp, which led to their murders. Sentenced to 15 years in prison, he served only part of his sentence and was released in 1971 following a heart attack. After his release, Wolff retired to Austria. frequently lecturing on the internal workings of the SS and his relationship with Himmler, including an appearance on the landmark British TV seres The World At War. Ferruccio Parri who had been part of the prisoner exchange ended up as Prime Minister of Italy .
Allen Dulles ended up as head of the CIA. Sunrise was a potentially huge prize and all the participants stood to gain something. Dulles could potentially save American lives and block a communist advance into North Italy . Parilli got to save the family businesses and those of his fellow Italian industrialists, Waibel to protect Switzerland from a disorganized German retreat into the country and Wolff , Dollmann and Zimmer to whitewash their bad reputation and potentially save their own skins. The question remains as to what ould have happened if Sunrise had been acted on earlier. If the Germans had surrendered in March or early April the Allies would have been able to rapidly move into Northern and north east Italy, saving thousands of allied, Italian and German lives. They would have got to Triste first, saving the city from years of Yugoslav occupation ad saving the lives of thousands of Italians murdered as the Titoists occupied Istria, and parts of Friuli Venezia Giulia. But in the end Dulles enhanced his reputation, Wolff escaped the hangman’s noose, Switzerland stayed inviolate, and Parilli went back to being a bon-viveur Italian businessman, so most of the players got most of what they set out to do in the first place. Who lost ? Possibly the British whose dreams of hegemony in Italy evaporated while they backed various wrong Italian horses and the Soviets and Titoists who got no more than a toehold in North East Italy.