A Nazi Stronghold That Never Was

In the closing weeks of the Second World War the Allied drive to Berlin was interrupted by a piece of startling news, put out by Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister: that the Nazis had builta huge ‘National Redoubt' on the Alpine border of Austria and Bavaria. The report was a hoax. But as intelligence chiefs warned in March 1945 when the news was passed to General Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander. details of the fortressll true, were too alarming not to be taken seriously.

Under Hitler’s personal command, so the story went, armaments were being manufactured in bomb-proof factories. food and equipment stored in vast caverns. and a whole underground army trained to liberate Germany from the occupying forces. As a result of the hoax. some Allied divisions were diverted to a wasteful advance on the non-existent Redoubt. slowing the Berlin offensive and contributing to the {act that Soviet troops were the first to enter the German capital.

‘Not until after the campaign ended',

wrote Allied commander General Omar Bradly later.

'Were we to learn that this Redoubt existed largely in the imagination of the fanatical Nazi's... I am astonished that we believed it as innocently as we did. But while it persisted the legend of the Redoubt was too ominous a threat to ignore.’