to the minimum, making the German situation in Italy highly precarious. The initial purpose behind the talks in Switzerland, as proposed by Wolff, was not to have Army Group C surrender to the Allies, but rather to surrender northern Italy to the Allies in order to allow the 800,000 men of Army Group C to withdraw over the Brenner Pass to defend Vienna against the Red Army. On 23 February 1945, Dulles accepted Wolff's offer to explore terms of a local surrender. In an 8 March meeting in Lucerne organized by Swiss intelligence officer Max Waibel, Wolff offered the following plan: Army Group C goes into Germany, while Allied Forces Commander Harold Alexander advances in the direction of the South of France. Wolff believed at first that the Anglo-American acceptance of his plan just might break up the "Big Three" alliance of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States. Karl Wolff, the Higher SS Police Chief for Italy, had committed numerous war crimes during the struggle against the CLN guerrillas. With the defeat of the Reich a certainty by early 1945, Wolff was looking for immunity for himself and the other SS and Wehrmacht officers in Italy. Aside from the war crimes committed against the Italian people during the anti-guerrilla war, Wolff had been deeply involved in the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", as he triumphantly wrote in a letter to a friend in 1942 stating his "special joy that now five thousand of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka every day". For his part, Dulles wanted to see an orderly surrender in Italy, which would ensure the Allies, rather than the Italian guerrillas, many of whom belonged to the Italian Communist Party, would control northern Italy. Dulles rejected Wolff's demand that Army Group C be allowed to cross over to Austria to continue the war, insisting that the men of Army Group C surrender to the Allies, but also agreed that the men of Army Group C would surrender to the Allied armies rather than the guerrillas of CLN and be allowed to keep their weapons for an interim period after surrendering. The Wehrmacht leaders in Italy were only interested in Operation Sunrise as a means to move Army Group C into Austria, and once they learned that was not possible, they lost interest. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the departing German commander in Italy, told