Bailey Catherine - A castle in wartime: one family, their missing sons, and the fight to defeat the Nazis

Innsbruck, Austria, 16 December 1944

Monika calling steamboat.

This cryptic announcement, broadcast to Austria over the Voice of America, was received with relief by the handful of people able to decipher it. The coded message signalled that the Allies were still trying to infiltrate agents into Innsbruck to make contact with members of the Austrian Resistance.

It was seven oclock on a winters morning, the grey old city walled in by snow-covered mountains. A roof of dense cloud hung over the domes and spires, cutting out the sky and the summit of the Nordkette. Towering 7,000 feet above the city, the sheer face of the mountain rose like a wall, blocking the north end of the fine baroque streets. The illusion of being confined in a small space was maintained in the alleys and passageways in the medieval quarter. On a chill, gloomy day such as this, passing the tall, narrow-fronted Gothic houses, the sensation was of walking along the bottom of a ravine.

Thick wreaths of smoke spiralled beneath the clouds. The day before, American planes had bombed the city, killing 259 people. In Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse, a protective shroud covered the famous golden roof of the balcony, designed for Emperor Maximilian in 1500. Beneath the bombed-out buildings, parties of children, drafted in from the villages along the valley, worked to clear the rubble. They were watched by small groups of SS soldiers who stood on the street corners, guarding the defusing crews. Forcibly recruited from the nearby concentration camp at Reichenau, it was their job to deactivate the bombs that had failed to explode.

The Allies were now convinced that Innsbruck, rather than the Reich capital of Berlin, was where the war was likely to culminate. Recent intelligence reports indicated that Hitler was building an Alpenfestung an Alpine fortress in the mountains that encircled the city. Blueprints obtained by OSS was beaten. From here, they would carry on the fight, defended by elite SS troops and sustained by huge stores of supplies that had been carefully stockpiled in bombproof caves.

With Hitler holding the high ground, Allied military commanders were predicting that the battle to take the fortress could extend the war by up to two years and exact more casualties than all the previous fighting on the Western Front.

In these circumstances, intelligence from Innsbruck, the capital of the Alpenfestung, was suddenly at a premium. Allen Dulles, the OSS station chief in Switzerland, hoped to recruit a network of agents from within the city. Their job would be to supply hard military intelligence and assist the passage of US and British forces when they reached the western borders of Austria. But, as Dulles recognized, Innsbruck was not fertile ground. That autumn, the Gestapo had arrested all known anti-Nazis. Moving from house to house, the mopping-up operation signalled their determination to suppress all resistance operations in an area they looked upon as their last bastion.