Friday, March 29, 2024
Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor
Putin's Plans to Invade Ukraine Have All the Reality of the "National Redoubt" Concern of the U.S. Army, February - April 1945

February 5, 2022 --

Cornelius Ryan, in "The Last Battle," wrote that the War Department, February 12, 1945, "issued  a straight-faced  counterintelligence paper which said: ' Not enough weight is given  the many reports of the probable Nazi last stand in the Bavarian Alps.'"  Ryan continued, "'The Nazi myth when you are dealing with men like Hitlerrequires a Gotterdammerung. It may be significant  that Berchtesgaden itself, which would be the headquarters, is on the site of the tomb of Barbarossa who, in German mythology, is supposed to return from the dead.'"  (Ryan pointed out in a footnote that this was "in error.")

Ryan attributed the reports of a German "National Redoubt" -- or "Alpenfestung" -- consisting of 20,000 square miles in Bavaria, Italy and Austria, to a report by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), September 1944, predicting that the Nazis would evacuate to Bavaria, to make a "last stand" that could last two years. 

He wrote, "By March 21, the [National Redoubt] threat had begun to influence tactical thinking."

Ryan, later in the book, gently quotes General Omar Bradley's acknowledgment "'the Redoubt existed largely in the imagination of a few fanatical Nazis.'"  Largely in the imagination of Nazis -- or in the imagination of intelligence in the service of an excuse to halt at the Elbe river and leave the conquest of Berlin to Stalin's armies?

LPR sees, however, a parallel in the bizarre intelligence reports of the Nazis' National Redoubt and the convenient anti-Russian propaganda of the Biden administration.   Where is the Republican leader, citing Ukraine President Zelensky,  to declare that Biden's anti-Putin comments have no clothes?

(Material on the "myth" of the Nazi "National Redoubt" appears at several places in Ryan's book. This material is taken from pp 206 - 211, and 422 , of the 1967 Pocket Book edition.)