Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

“Nevertheless,” I said, “I would like to hear more about Operation Noah. I’m still just a little sheepish that I didn’t have more faith in you, General.”

“Faith has never been your strong suit, has it, Gunther?”

“Faith is for people who believe in something. I don’t believe in anything very much. Not anymore. After all, look where belief has got us now.”

Schellenberg and Meyer looked at each other. “Do you want to tell him?” asked the Swiss.

“You’re the storyteller, Paul,” said Schellenberg. “You tell him.”

“All right. Well, as Napoleon himself observed—”

Schellenberg grinned. “Paul is a great student of Bonaparte.”

“He said that nature had destined Switzerland to become a league of states and that no wise man would attempt to conquer it.”

“That lets Hitler out, then,” said Eggen. “He hasn’t acted like a wise man since the summer of 1940.”

“We’ve always had the largest percentage of soldiers in the world compared to overall population — six hundred thousand soldiers out of a population of just four million. Quite possibly we could mobilize the entire population in our defense. Everyone in this country knows how to shoot. Hitler knows to his cost just how stubborn the people of Russia have been in their country’s defense. Switzerland has always maintained that we would be no less stubborn. You can see this demonstrated in the way that we have set up the defenses of our country’s key mountain passes: Sargans in the east, Gotthard in the south, and Saint-Maurice in the west. Each area has a series of huge fortifications stretching across some of the most rugged and impassable mountain terrain in Europe. Any invader would be greeted by heavy artillery fire over many kilometers. In short, this is not panzer country. No more are these defenses vulnerable to Luftwaffe attacks. And as if all this were not enough, there is also the threat that we would blow up these mountain passes to deny them to the enemy. In other words, the very thing that makes this country worth invading — namely, as an easy route to Italy — would be rendered useless. Germany’s would be a Pyrrhic victory of epic proportions. And having sacrificed many thousands of troops to secure Switzerland, the German Army would find itself landlocked with nowhere to go. And not just landlocked, but quite literally bogged down. You see, all of the land you can see between here and Lake Constance was once swampland and a system of canals was constructed to drain it. But these same canals can release all of that water back onto the floodplain. Three years ago — and much to the irritation of local farmers, myself included — this was actually tried as an experiment by the Swiss Army. It was very successful, too. It became clear that an invading German army would soon find itself unable to move.

“Schelli and I simply decided to take those plans a stage further. What we’ve done is create some fictitious but entirely feasible and convincing plans — code-named Operation Noah — which amount to nothing less than a Swiss doomsday scenario that is based on the dynamiting of Switzerland’s biggest glacier lakes, including Geneva, Zurich, Neuchâtel, Maggiore, Lucerne, Lugano, and Constance. The idea is that by destroying the terminal moraines of all these glacier lakes, we would turn Switzerland’s only major natural resource — water — into a weapon that would devastate the whole country, in much the same way that the RAF achieved a few months ago when they bombed and breached your Möhne and Edersee dams, causing catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley. A moraine is a sort of glacial bath plug that keeps all the water in the lake. There are over fifty Swiss lakes occupying an area of more than one square kilometer. We estimate that if the terminal moraine of just the biggest lake — Geneva — were destroyed, then almost ninety cubic kilometers of water would be released over the surrounding area. If the moraines of the largest ten lakes were blown at the same time as the major passes, then we could turn Switzerland into one vast European sea. No army on earth could deal with something on that kind of scale.”

“The trick,” added Schellenberg, “will be to convince Hitler that the Swiss really would go through with a plan like this. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the generals in Berlin believe that the Swiss would go ahead and blow up the passes, which is why Operation Province-in-Waiting was shelved. But with Mussolini gone, it’s clear to me that we’re going to need something else to dissuade them more finally — something even more determined that will convince them that any kind of lake-landing by German seaplanes would be suicide, not just for them, but for the Swiss, too. So, I shall simply tell Hitler and the generals that my bravest and most resourceful agent — code-named Tschudi — who is employed in the Technical War Unit of the Swiss General Staff, in Bern — has stolen these plans from the office of Colonel von Wattenwyl. Plans that could make the whole Russian campaign look like a stroll in the Tiergarten.”

“We have compiled a feasibility study of Operation Noah,” said Meyer, “as if written by Colonel von Wattenwyl himself. I’ve met this man. He’s a member of one of Switzerland’s most distinguished families; he’s also a very highly gifted military tactician. We also have a memorandum from the chief of the Swiss General Staff, General Henri Guisan, which describes this operation as part of the National Redoubt or mountain fortress concept that he outlined in an address to the Swiss Officer Corps in 1940. We even have fake reports from the army’s maritime branch on Lake Zurich which purport to indicate the underwater mining of the lake’s terminal moraine at Zurich and plans for the partial evacuation of the city, which would of course be inundated. The report describes the previous effect of the breach of the moraine that runs between Pfäffikon and Rapperswil and which can be seen in the shallow upper part — the Obersee — and the lower part — the Untersee.”

“We certainly hope we’ve thought of absolutely everything,” said Schellenberg. “If we haven’t, then I’ve a feeling that they won’t need a ruler to measure the depth of the hole in the ground I make in the forest at Rastenburg. That swine Ernst Kaltenbrunner will dig my grave himself.”

The next day Schellenberg and Eggen returned to Germany. Meyer and I drove them to a small private jetty in an extensive pear orchard on Meyer’s estate. A Swiss Army motorboat was waiting to take them quietly back across Lake Constance to the island of Reichenau, where an SS staff car was ready to drive the general to an airfield in Konstanz. From Konstanz, Eggen was going by road to Stuttgart to catch a train back to Berlin, while the general had arranged to fly straight to the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg. I didn’t envy Schellenberg that journey. Quite apart from my fear of flying, which had been hardly helped by the severe electrical storm we had encountered on my trip back from Zagreb, deceiving Hitler and all his staff generals was a task that would have given any ordinary man considerable pause. Deceiving Dalia’s husband, Stefan Obrenovic, felt like something I was much more equal to. Him, and perhaps the minister of Propaganda, for whom, of course, I was still working; otherwise I might have chosen to accompany Eggen back to Germany. After the events at Uetliberg, I’d had enough of Switzerland. But there was still the matter of Dalia’s future to consider, for, although she seemed to have given me a definitive answer to the question of her own return to Germany, I knew it was a question that I was obliged to put to her again, if only because of who my client was. Goebbels wasn’t the kind of man who would have allowed me to take Dalia at her word. I could almost hear his brittle sarcasm now, wiping the floor with me like a rag in that mocking Westfalish accent of his, for not even trying to talk her out of it.