National Redoubt - Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

The Alpine Fortress (German: Alpenfestung) was the World War II national redoubt planned by Heinrich Himmler in November/December 1943 for Nazi Germany's retreat to an area from "southern Bavaria across western Austria to northern Italy". The plan was never fully endorsed by Hitler and no serious attempt was made to put the plan into operation.

In the six months following the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the American and British armies advanced to the Rhine and seemed poised to strike into the heart of Germany, while the Soviet Army, advancing from the east through Poland, reached the Oder. It seemed likely that Berlin would soon fall and Germany be cut in half. In these circumstances, it occurred both to some leading figures in the German regime and to the Allies that the logical thing for the Germans to do would be to move the government to the mountainous areas of southern Germany and Austria, where a relatively small number of determined troops could hold out for some time. A number of intelligence reports to the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) identified the area held stores of foodstuffs and military supplies built up over the preceding six months, and could even be harbouring armaments production facilities. Within this fortified terrain, they said, Hitler would be able to evade the Allies and cause tremendous difficulties for the occupying Allied forces throughout Germany.

The Nazi Germany minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, set up a special unit to invent and spread rumours about an Alpenfestung. Goebbels also sent out rumours to neutral governments, thus keeping the Redoubt myth alive and its state of readiness unclear. He enlisted the assistance of the intelligence service of the SS, the SD, to produce faked blueprints and reports on construction supplies, armament production and troop transfers to the Redoubt. For Germans, the Redoubt became part fantasy and part official deception plan.

Although Adolf Hitler never endorsed the plan, he issued an order on April 24 for the evacuation of remaining government personnel from Berlin to the Redoubt; he made it clear that he would not leave Berlin himself, even if it fell to the Soviets, as it did on May 2. When the American armies penetrated Bavaria and western Austria at the end of April, they met little serious resistance, and the National Redoubt was shown to have been a myth.

Nevertheless the National Redoubt had serious military and political consequences. Once the Anglo-American armies had crossed the Rhine and advanced into western Germany, they had to decide whether to advance on a narrow front towards Berlin, or on a broad front, with a view to securing both the North Sea coast and southern Germany before advancing further. The American commander of the southern force, General George S. Patton, had consistently advocated a narrow front ever since D-Day, and did so again at this point. But the Allied commander in chief, U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, took a more cautious view, and the broad front strategy prevailed.

Goebbels' deception plan over the Redoubt was one of the great successes of German intelligence during World War II, albeit one that came too late to alter the outcome of the war. The Allied intelligence services were completely fooled by Goebbels' false trail of rumours.

The Alpine Fortress was one of three reasons associated with SHAEF's movement of forces towards southern Germany rather than towards Berlin (cf. Berlin was planned to be in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the Battle of Berlin would entail unacceptably high Western Allied casualties).