Wine And War: The French, The Nazis And The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure Part 11

Among them was a sumptuous watering hole called the Htel Negresco, which the Americans had taken over for their headquarters. The Negresco, located in Nice on the Riviera, was known for its fine cuisine, exquisite wines and one of the best nightclubs in the world. One of those who "checked in" as often as possible was Sergeant Major Virgil West. "We would go out on patrol during the day," he said, "maybe getting into a little firefight, perhaps getting all b.l.o.o.d.y and muddy in the process, then five hours later be sitting in one of the biggest nightclubs in the world with a babe and a bottle of champagne."

But it was not all babes and bubbly. According to another soldier, "The overwhelming thing was the strange character of the combat there. It was hard, it was tough and we lost a lot of men. We didn't destroy the beautiful Riviera, so we'd go back and have a bottle of wine and a bath, then go back up into the mountains for another battle." Even when bullets were flying, however, soldiers described how "women kept trying to give us wine and flowers."

Other gifts were offered as well. Just after arriving, war correspondent Vaughan-Thomas was sitting at an outdoor cafe, rhapsodizing about how the wine he was sipping reminded him of a beautiful woman, when he was suddenly confronted by "a large imposing lady followed by five charming girls." It turned out she was the madame from the local maison de tolerance. Pointing to her girls, she said, "For you, the brave liberator." When Vaughan-Thomas drew back, she quickly added, "Have no fear. My ladies have been patriotic. Only the one with crossed eyes slept with the Germans."

While the Champagne Campaign never captured the public's imagination as D-Day did, it did signal the first time, and probably the only time, that gastronomic considerations had a direct bearing on military planning. It was not by chance that French general Lucien de Monsabert, who helped plan the campaign, made sure that French troops advanced up the western side of the Rhne, where the best vineyards were planted. The Americans went up the other side, where the lesser growths were.

The French general later explained his strategy to Vaughan-Thomas. "Their job was vital," said Monsabert of his American allies, "but the vinously minded historian will note that it did not take them near a single vineyard of quality. Now follow the advance of the French army. Swiftly they possessed themselves of Tavel, and after making sure that all was well with one of the finest vin roses in France, struck fiercely for Chteauneuf-du-Pape. The Cte Rtie fell to a well-planned flanking attack."

Vaughan-Thomas captured the spirit of the Champagne Campaign in a delightful reminiscence ent.i.tled How I Liberated Burgundy. At one point, he described meeting an American officer who was clearly disturbed about something.

"Thomas," he said, "you're going back to see the Frogs this afternoon, I hear. Well, there's a little problem that's got us kinda worried. I've got a feeling that the Frogs are doing a little bit of a go-slow on us. I've a hunch that our friends are staying a bit too long in this place Chalon something or other."

"Chalon something or other" was actually Chalon-sur-Sane, the southern gateway to the famous slopes of the Cte d'Or, or the Golden Escarpment, where Burgundy's greatest vineyards lay. And the American officer was right; the French were doing a "go-slow" in order to avoid turning the vineyards into a battlefield.

"I need hardly tell you," a French intelligence officer told Vaughan-Thomas later that day, "the terrible consequences of such a decision. It would mean war, mechanized war, among the grands crus! Would France forgive us if we allowed such a thing to happen? We must not forget 1870." That was when one of the last battles of the Franco-Prussian War took place around Nuits-Saint-Georges as German troops swept through the vineyards of La Tche, Romanee-Conti and Richebourg.

"This must never be allowed to happen again," the officer said.

Moments later, a young officer burst in, hurriedly saluted and, with a smile illuminating his face, declared, "Great news, mon colonel, we have found the weak point in the German defenses. Every one is on a vineyard of inferior quality."

General de Monsabert was quickly informed and the attack began. Within twenty-four hours, the Germans were "bundled out of Burgundy," Vaughan-Thomas said. "A blown bridge here, a demolished house there, what could these matter beside the great overriding fact of the undamaged vineyards stretching mile after mile before us."

Ten years later, Vaughan-Thomas wrote, "Time softens controversy and the history of distant wars grows mellow like '49 Burgundy." The controversy he was alluding to involved a gift the French military gave to their American allies as their drive up the Rhne reached its end.

To show their appreciation, the French decided to present the Americans with an a.s.sortment of the finest wines Burgundy had to offer. Vaughan-Thomas volunteered to help collect wine for the occasion, a mission that led him to at least twenty wine cellars and enabled him to fill his jeep with some of the rarest treasures of Burgundy. These he then handed over to the Americans.

"All of them? Let me be honest," Vaughan-Thomas wrote. "Some of them, by an unaccountable chance of wartime transport, found their way to my cellar in the year after the war." The rest, he dutifully surrendered to a young officer.

"These are the greatest wines of France," he said. "Guard them with care; rest them; then make certain they are at room temperature before they are served."

"Don't worry," the American replied. "The Doc knows all about this Frog liquor, and while we are about it, we'll invite them over to drink it."

The party took place in an eighteenth-century palace with the French guests advancing up a flight of stairs while the American command, as Vaughan-Thomas noted, "awaited them in a salon worthy of a reception for Madame de Pompadour." As trumpets sounded, a column of waiters marched in bearing the bottles on silver trays. Immediately, Vaughan-Thomas sensed something was wrong. "My heart gave a warning thump-the bottles of Burgundy were bubbling gently. 'We're in luck,' my American colonel whispered to me, 'the Doc's hotted up this stuff with medical alcohol!' "

As Vaughan-Thomas later described it, "A look of incredulous horror flickered over the faces of the French. All eyes were turned on General de Monsabert. He had led them through the deserts of North Africa and over the snow-clad mountains of Italy. Faced with the greatest crisis so far in Franco-American relations, how would he behave? He fixed his staff with the stern glare of command. 'Gentlemen, take up your gla.s.ses.' Reluctantly the French reached out their hands. 'To our comrades in arms, les braves Americains,' he ordered in a ringing tone. He drained his gla.s.s with panache-every drop. Then, in a quieter voice that only the nearest Frenchmen and myself could hear, he murmured, 'Liberation, liberation, what crimes have been committed in thy name!' "

Despite that hiccup, there is no denying that the Champagne Campaign was one of the most successful operations of the war. Meeting only token resistance, the French and American armies moved faster up the Rhne Valley than anyone dreamed was possible. Along the way, they were aided by an unusual kind of early-warning system: if towns and villages were decorated with flowers and flags, and people were standing along the roadside holding out bottles of wine, they knew the Germans had fled and the way ahead was clear.

"Of course, we drank some very good wine, but not as much as we would have liked because we were pretty busy and moving quite fast," Jean Miailhe said. A few months earlier, Jean had been making copper sulfate under the noses of the Germans. When Bordeaux was liberated, he joined the French army as it fought and imbibed its way up the Rhne. Sometimes people would invite Jean and his buddies into their cellars and uncork a few bottles they had hidden away. "One thing I remember was finding a lot of bad bottles with good labels," Jean said. "This was the wine people had been pa.s.sing off to the Germans. They saved the good stuff for us."

During the night of September 6, Robert Drouhin was awakened by something he had not heard for days: silence. He, his mother and sisters had been spending most of their time in their wine cellar because of heavy bombing and sh.e.l.ling near Chalon-sur-Sane. That night, however, the bombing suddenly stopped. They all sat up on their mattresses on the floor of the cave and listened. There was no doubt about it. The bombing had ceased. When they verified that it was safe, the family emerged from the cellar and went upstairs to bed.

Around six o'clock in the morning, they were awakened again, this time by a different sound. Robert jumped from his bed, went to the window and peeked out. There, he saw an American jeep make a U-turn in the square in front of the church, then leave. A short time later, another vehicle arrived and soldiers got out. They were wearing American uniforms. Robert watched as they undid a large roll of white fabric on the paving stones and made a cross with it. The cross was a sign to let Allied planes know Beaune had been liberated.

It was the beginning of what Robert would later call "a day when everything was extraordinary." Church bells began ringing as Beaune filled up with tanks and other military vehicles. People poured into the streets to celebrate what the local newspaper called "this blessed and magnificent hour of liberation. French and Allied flags bloomed from the windows. Long-hidden in the attics, they now came out to float on the wind of liberation."

Bottles and barrels of wine also came floating out as residents toasted and cheered their liberators. The cheers, said one person, could be heard forty kilometers away.

"Beaune was liberated with American equipment and American chewing gum," recalled Robert Drouhin. "It was a scene cla.s.sique, like something out of the movies."

Yet while celebrations were happening in one place, fighting was still going on in another. Mademoiselle Yvonne Tridon, secretary for the Syndicat des Negociants in Beaune, was dancing in the street with an American soldier when someone stopped and began berating her. "Aren't you ashamed to be celebrating when people are still fighting?" the person asked. Tridon was taken by surprise. It had never occurred to her that the war was still going on.

Less than twenty kilometers to the north, German troops were trying to escape from the Chteau du Clos de Vougeot, a Burgundian landmark which they had seized at the beginning of the war to store their ammunition. They had loaded the ammunition on a train and were trying to get it back to Germany. A few hundred meters from the chteau, the Resistance opened fire on the train, setting off the ammunition it was carrying. The explosion blew the roof off the chteau, scattering its 200,000 ancient tiles over a three-acre area. The sound was heard all the way to Beaune.

But it was the sound of a quiet knock on the door that Robert Drouhin remembers most. He ran down the stairs to see who it was. Standing there was his father. Nine months after fleeing through his wine cellar to escape the Gestapo, Maurice Drouhin, who apparently had been hiding in the Hospices de Beaune, had come home.

"Hey, Al, get over here! We need you right away."

Al Ricciuti, a boy from Baltimore and lifelong Orioles fan, was a translator in Patton's Third Army. He had been drafted and landed on Utah Beach just after D-Day. Now he was partic.i.p.ating in the liberation of France. His unit was bivouacked outside the Champagne village of Avenay-Val-d'Or, a town his father had marched through in World War I.

Al was planning to do some sightseeing and take a few pictures for his father, when his buddies suddenly hollered at him. He rushed over to see what they wanted. "These girls are trying to tell us something and we can't understand a thing they're saying." There were three girls and they were all talking at once, and pointing back toward a house. Al, whose mother was French, listened and then explained, "These girls are sisters. They say they've hidden two U.S. airmen from a B-17 in their house."

Al and the others followed the girls to their house to get the airmen who had been shot down. After the fliers had been taken to the American camp, Al went back to talk to the girls and their parents. They described how they had found the men and took care of them during the last days of the German occupation.

The Revoltes, a family of small champagne growers, invited Al to stay for dinner. Paulette, one of the daughters, took him on a tour of their vineyards. "We were lucky this time," she told Al. "No real battles here, not like World War I, but we're still worried." Like many throughout Champagne, the Revoltes had heard that the Germans had planted dynamite in some of the cellars of the big champagne houses. Paulette wondered if it were true.

Al confessed he was not sure. He said the Germans had mined some of the bridges but did not have time to detonate them because Patton came in so fast. Patton, he said, laughing, would be very upset to see any champagne ruined. "He is a man with a terrific palate," Al said. "He usually drinks the best whiskeys, but he loves champagne too, and he knows his stuff."

Champagne, however, was something Al knew nothing about. He admitted he had never even tasted it. At dinner, the Revolte family made sure he could never say that again as they brought out the whole range of champagnes for him, from the sweetest to the driest. It proved to be a revelation to the young man from Baltimore, who had, until then, considered himself a beer man. "I tried some, and I thought, 'Hey, this is for me.' "

But there was little time to savor it. Patton was moving swiftly, and the following morning the U.S. Third Army was on the march again. Paulette came to see Al off. "I'll write," he promised as they moved out.

When the Germans in Alsace realized how fast the Allies were moving, they began raiding the cellars of winegrowers. People including Georges Hugel watched in dismay as soldiers went from one cellar to another, loading as much wine as they could carry onto trucks and driving it to an airstrip outside Riquewihr. Some of the cargo was then transferred to airplanes, which began revving up their engines. The first plane lurched forward fifty meters, then came to a stop, as if someone had thrown out an anchor. None of the other planes, their engines groaning under the exertion, could take off either.

"Their planes were too light," Georges said, "and they didn't have enough fuel to take off fully loaded. Even the trucks were short of fuel, so, fortunately, most of our wine remained in the country."

Alsace was the last part of France to be liberated, and it happened just as the harvest was getting under way.

"It was a huge harvest but also a sad one," said Georges's brother Andre. Their father, fearing arrest by the Gestapo, had gone into hiding, and their brother Johnny was still in the German army. Georges himself was still recuperating from the wounds he suffered in Russia and could get around only on crutches.

Bringing in the grapes was nearly impossible. Many vineyards had been sewn with ant.i.tank mines in antic.i.p.ation of an Allied attack. There were also unexploded bombs that had been dropped by the Allies, a few of which went off when vineyard workers stepped on them. As grape picking got under way, Allied planes began attacking departing German convoys. Georges and Andre were bringing in a load of grapes when a plane, its machine guns firing, pa.s.sed just yards over their heads. Georges pushed Andre down and fell beside him. Grapes and chunks of earth flew everywhere as bullets from the plane riddled the vineyard. When the two brothers got up, the first thing they saw was a German truck a short distance away in flames. Several German soldiers were killed.

When Georges and Andre returned home, their mother told them that a German officer had just been there. She said she had been reluctant to let him in, but he had insisted. "I have a message for you," he told her. "Madame, you may tell your husband that it is safe to come home." Fearing a trap, Madame Hugel replied that she did not understand what the officer was talking about and that, in any case, she had no idea where her husband was. The German smiled grimly. "Madame, you understood me perfectly. There is no longer any risk of him being arrested. The air is pure now. Everything here has changed."

As the rumble of Allied artillery became louder, the Hugels and others huddled for protection in their wine cellars. On the night of December 3, mortar and artillery sh.e.l.ls began landing in Riquewihr.

Two days later, the streets of Riquewihr were full of Texans, some in tanks, some herding German prisoners and others conducting house-to-house searches.

"We were stunned by how laid-back the Americans were and the absence of noise," Andre Hugel said. "The sound of their rubber-soled boots was such a change from the hob-nailed boots the Germans wore."

It was 7:30 in the morning when the Americans, part of the 36th Infantry Division, based near Houston, arrived. Grandpa Emile Hugel had awakened an hour earlier. When he realized Riquewihr had been liberated, he decided to put on his best suit to greet the Americans. As he was pulling on his pants, however, a nervous young GI looking for Germans burst into the room. At first, the nearly eighty-year-old Hugel, whose eyesight was weak, did not realize who it was, but his grandson Andre, who accompanied the soldier, quickly explained. The old man was so overjoyed that he rushed across the bedroom and threw his arms around the American. As he did so, his pants dropped to the floor. The soldier was so startled that he leveled his gun at Hugel. The misunderstanding was quickly cleared up and the now impeccably dressed Emile soon joined the jubilant throngs outside.

The celebration was even more special for the Hugel family because Jean Hugel had emerged from hiding. He had been ensconced in a hotel in nearby Colmar, pretending to be one of the staff, when a friendly telephone operator called him and said, "Monsieur Hugel, you can quit hiding now. The Americans are here."

Once he was back, he began doing a little horse trading, bartering wine for fuel, one jerry can of wine for two jerry cans of fuel. The Texans considered it a bargain. So did Jean, who now could drive his car and truck again.

A week after Riquewihr's liberation, the Germans launched a counterattack to retake the town. As they raced through the village, the Texans fired at them from the windows of homes and buildings. Soon the cobblestone streets were filled with dead and wounded. Casualties were carried to the courtyard of the Hugels' winery, which the Americans had converted to a first-aid station and morgue.

Vineyards suffered as well. American tanks ground through fences and vines, some setting off land mines and unexploded sh.e.l.ls as they attempted to drive the Germans back.

Similar scenes were taking place in towns and villages throughout Alsace. In Ammerschwihr, heavy bombardment by Allied planes sent residents scurrying to their wine cellars for safety. Dozens found shelter in the cellar of the Kuehn wine firm, whose name, ironically, was the Cave de l'Enfer, the Cellar of h.e.l.l. They were not alone, because the cave had already been filled with statues of saints from one of Ammerschwihr's churches. The statues had been placed there for safety. (People still refer to it as the time when the saints went to h.e.l.l.) The real inferno was upstairs. Fires burned everywhere as American planes, having spotted two German tanks, repeatedly bombed the sixteenth-century town in the belief that the Germans still held it. The Americans did not realize that the tanks had been abandoned and that all of the Germans had left.

As terrified residents tried to put out the fires, the water suddenly stopped as wells ran dry. A bomb had hit the reservoir. In desperation, people began hauling bottles and barrels of wine from their cellars, hooking hoses to the casks and spraying the contents on the fires. Jean Adam was thirteen years old as he helped his mother and father try to save the family winery. "The wine we were using was pretty generic, very low in alcohol because harvests had been so bad, so it didn't cause any explosions," Jean said. "But it might have been different if we had been using Gewrztraminer."

With their wine, the Adams were able to save their stable and animals but very little else. It was the same throughout Ammerschiwihr. Eighty-five percent of the town and many of the surrounding vineyards were destroyed.

In Riquewihr, Georges Hugel looked at the destruction with sadness and pain. He had witnessed the brutality of war as a German soldier on the Russian front, and nothing, he felt, could ever be as bad as that. But seeing his own home threatened and his friends and neighbors under attack convinced him there was something more he had to do. "I'm going back to war," he told his family. "I'm joining the French army."

It was the worst news his parents could have imagined: one son still fighting for the Germans, and now one with the Allies.

NINE.

Eagle's Nest WHERE ARE THE FRENCH?.

That was the question nearly every American soldier was asking as Allied forces moved through Germany.

With the war in its final days, the Allies were moving swiftly toward Berlin. Everyone, the Americans, British, French, Canadians and Russians, wanted to get there first.

Another race was under way as well, this one across southern Germany toward Berchtesgaden, Hitler's retreat in the Bavarian Alps. For the French, the route held deep historical significance. It was the same path Napoleon took when his armies scored a great victory over the Austrians in Ulm in 1805. For a brief time, from 1809 to 1810, the region, including Berchtesgaden, had been under French rule.

History, however, was only part of the reason Berchtesgaden was so important. Of far greater importance was the treasure everyone knew was there. It included gold, currency from a dozen countries, priceless jewelry, masterpieces of art, luxury cars and something the French could hardly wait to get their hands on: hundreds of thousands of bottles of the world's greatest wine, wine that had been stolen from their country.

Berchtesgaden may have been Hitler's hideaway and the place where Himmler, Gring, Goebbels and others of the n.a.z.i leaders.h.i.+p had flocked for vacations, but it was also a storehouse, a veritable maze of underground cellars and pa.s.sages that had been carved out for salt mines in the twelfth century. Now it served as a vast warehouse for loot the n.a.z.is had collected during the war.

The race to recover that treasure began on April 22, 1945, when General Philippe Leclerc got the green light to take his 2nd Armored Division back to Germany. Earlier that month, he had been pulled back to France by Charles de Gaulle, who decided he did not want to have any part of the country in the hands of Germans when Germany finally surrendered.

There were still several pockets of resistance, the main one around Royan on the tip of the Medoc peninsula, where German troops had orders to hold out until the last bullet. Royan was a vital piece of real estate because it controlled traffic entering and leaving the port of Bordeaux. Without it, the Bordelais would have no way of s.h.i.+pping their wine to the rest of the world. Leclerc's orders were to clean it out.

He was furious. This was not where he wanted to be; the main action was in Germany. Leclerc, who had liberated Paris and Strasbourg, wanted to be there for the kill. He got de Gaulle to agree that as soon as his forces captured Royan, he would be sent right back to Germany.

Royan surrendered on April 18. Four days later, Leclerc and his men were on their way. Their dash across France was unprecedented. In a letter to his wife, Leclerc wrote, "It will be terrible for my men if we miss this epic moment by only a few meters." He was determined that would not happen. In just five days, Leclerc and his division had covered more than a thousand kilometers and crossed the Rhine into Germany.

To get into the action as quickly as possible, Leclerc agreed to break his division into separate units and attach them to American forces. His 5th Tactical Group was a.s.signed to the American 21st Army Corps, whose destination was Berchtesgaden.

Side by side, like horses in a starting gate, they set off for the Bavarian town, each side determined to get there first.

Fearing the French might beat them, American commanders a.s.signed the 5th Tactical Group a more distant objective, Salzburg, which was across the river from Berchtesgaden.

Not to be outmaneuvered, Leclerc ostensibly accepted the orders but broke his group into three subgroups. Two went to Salzburg as the Americans instructed. The third kept moving toward Berchtesgaden. Its mission: get there before the Americans.

It did not take long for the Americans to realize that something was not quite right. The French unit that was supposed to be advancing on their right flank, the third subgroup, kept popping in and out of sight. Then it vanished altogether. When the Americans tried to make radio contact, there was only silence.

"After begging to hook up with us, they just disappeared," grumbled one GI. "One minute they were here, the next they were gone."

By the time the Americans realized what had happened, the French were 200 kilometers down the road and closing in on their destination.

On May 4, with Berchtesgaden tantalizingly close-it was only fifty kilometers away-the Americans finally caught up. The French, they saw, had been held up at a ravine, pinned down by long-range fire from the SS. This was their big chance, the Americans decided. Turning their convoy around, they decided to take a more roundabout route to Berchtesgaden, the autobahn, gambling that the new fast highway Hitler had built to move his troops more quickly to the front would get them there first.

It was a bad decision. Late that afternoon, they ran into a bridge that had been blown out and were forced to spend the night there while engineers struggled to repair the structure.

The French, not wanting to take casualties at this late stage of the war, sat patiently at their position and waited out the SS. When the Germans ran out of ammunition and scattered, the French were on the move again.

Late that afternoon, a French tank column entered Berchtesgaden without firing a shot. It was led by a young man from Champagne. Bernard de Nonancourt could hardly believe he was there.

His first sight of Berchtesgaden on that fourth of May took his breath away. It was just as another visitor had described, "a fairy-tale land with snowcapped mountains, dark green woods, tinkling icy creeks and gingerbread houses which were a delight for the eye." According to legend, somewhere in the crags of those mountains were Barbarossa and his knights, lying in an enchanted sleep. One day, it was said, Barbarossa would awake and usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity for Germany. That time had not yet come. As Barbarossa slept on, Adolf Hitler plunged the country into war and ruin.

It was at Berchtesgaden that many of his plans for a Thousand-Year Reich were first conceived. Over the years, the idyllic setting was converted into a fortress. His rustic little chalet became a monumental retreat bristling with antiaircraft guns and even a smoke-generating machine that enveloped the area in a vast cloud whenever there was danger of an air raid. Trees were chopped down so that forest paths could be turned into paved roads. Tiny votive chapels and villas were ripped out to make room for ugly concrete buildings that housed troops, guests and a fleet of fancy cars.

But Hitler's most self-indulgent fantasy was an elevator that could carry him to Eagle's Nest, his private mountaintop retreat several thousand feet above Berchtesgaden. According to biographer Robert Payne, "It occurred to Hitler that the mountain could be tunneled in such a way that he could be propelled up to the summit in an elevator, thus permitting him to survey the surrounding landscape like a G.o.d surveying all the kingdoms of the earth."

It took workmen three years to cut the shaft out of solid rock. The elevator they installed had a gold-plated door, carpeted floor and cus.h.i.+oned seats. A bank of phones linked it with Berlin, Paris, London and every other important city in the world. Although the project cost 30 million marks, Hitler was pleased. It was a present he had given himself for his fiftieth birthday.

Unfortunately, by the time Bernard de Nonancourt and his men arrived, the elevator was out of order. The retreating Germans had sabotaged it.

Perched on the rim of his tank, Bernard gazed toward the mountain peak, mesmerized by the beauty. Eagles flew in slow circles above the 8,000-foot summit, their wings glowing in the fading sunlight. It had been a long day, but it was not quite over.

"You, de Nonancourt, over here!" It was his commanding officer. Bernard slid down from his tank and hurried over to report. "You're from Champagne, right? So you must know something about wine." Bernard nodded and was about to answer when the officer continued, "We have a special a.s.signment for you. You're going mountain climbing tomorrow." The officer explained that military intelligence believed that much of the wine the n.a.z.is had stolen from France had been stashed in Eagle's Nest. "I want you to take a team up and see what's there. Get some rest since you'll be starting early. It won't be an easy climb."

It took a few moments for the officer's words to sink in. Then Bernard realized he was about to enter a place where few others had ever set foot. No one knew for certain what was there or what condition it was in. The retreating SS had already flooded the cellars of several villas with gasoline and set them on fire. What had they done to Eagle's Nest? he wondered.

Although Berchtesgaden had been the target of Allied bombing runs in recent days, Bernard and several other soldiers found a chalet that was still intact and began unloading their equipment. For the first time in weeks, they would be sleeping in beds.

But Bernard could not sleep. Instead, he pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing a letter to his mother. So much had happened that it had been difficult to stay in touch. Now he found there was so much he could not tell her. How could he explain the things he had to do as a commando in the Resistance? How could he ever describe the horrors he had seen at Dachau when his army unit helped liberate that camp? "I know how you felt after we lost Maurice," he wrote. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about my brother and what this struggle has cost all of us, but I can now say for certain that fighting in this war was the right thing for me to do."

Bernard woke his men before dawn. General Leclerc had arrived during the night and he had one more order for the men who would be scaling the mountain. He wanted the French flag raised over Eagle's Nest.

The first part of the journey was the easiest. Bernard and his team drove from Berchtesgaden to a teahouse further up the mountain, about twenty minutes away. There was a parking lot there and an entrance to the elevator Hitler had built. Bernard double-checked with engineers who had been sent up earlier to see if there was any way of repairing it. It is impossible, they told him.

Bernard and his team began climbing. It was warm and the going was slow in the early morning light. Often, the men had to stop while an advance group checked the slope for mines and b.o.o.by traps.

Within a couple of hours, the men were finding it difficult to breathe. That was one of Hitler's complaints and why he himself rarely visited Eagle's Nest. The air, he said, was too thin.

A few hundred feet from the summit, the path became steeper. Bernard sent a squad of Alpine climbers ahead to drop ropes. Then, one by one, the men hauled themselves up the face of the cliff.

All were exhausted by the time they reached the top. Even at an alt.i.tude of 8,000 feet, it was still warm. The view, however, was magnificent and the men paused to take in the sight while they tried to catch their breath.