• As it turned out, the Nazis' Berchtesgaden Redoubt, also known as the National Redoubt or the Alpenfestung (mountain fortress), didn't exist. Hitler had a personal mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in the Alps near the Swiss border, but the Nazis never developed it -- or any site -- into an underground fortress in which to evade the Allies.



• According to Stephen G. Fritz in the book Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich, rumours about Hitler's hideaway began in November 1944 with a short article in the New York Times. The paper's London correspondent reported that the Nazis had already dug a winding system of tunnels and storage spaces under the Alps and cleared out civilians from the area.



• Without any intelligence on the matter the Allies would normally have rejected the story as unreliable. But after the Allies were badly burned by faulty intelligence in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, they began to pay closer attention to rumours of an Alpenfestung.

• The Nazis had, in fact, begun fortifying sites in the Alps, but for routine military and strategic purposes. It was never their intention to build a hideaway for Hitler and half a million elite Nazis.



• German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels got wind of the Allies' belief that Nazis were building an Alpine fortress. He reinforced the faulty information by planting stories in German newspapers and leaking false rumours to neutral governments. When German soldiers were taken prisoner, rumours of the redoubt would make their way to Allied intelligence.

• The story then made its way into a newspaper in Switzerland (a neutral country) and magazines in the United States.



• According to author Stephen J. Fritz, in late February 1945 the Allied Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) concluded that the Alpenfestung didn't exist. Fritz called it "merely a dubious product of Nazi propaganda."

• But the rumours refused to die. By March 1945 the head of intelligence at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was "receiving a continuous flow of reports that the Nazis intended to stage a final prolonged resistance" from a mountain fortress. None of the rumours could be confirmed.