The Last Battle: When U.S. And German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe
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And worse, for reasons now unknown, the SS planners at Dachau chose to give command of Schloss Itter—a facility intended to house several of the highest-ranking and potentially most valuable prisoners in the Third Reich—to a brutish, unsophisticated, and politically inept officer widely known within the SS as a man almost as cruel to his own troops as he was to those unfortunate enough to become his prisoners.
TO PUT IT SIMPLY, SS-Captain Sebastian “Wastl” Wimmer was a nasty piece of work. A native Bavarian, he was born in 1902 in Dingolfing—a small town some fifty miles northeast of Munich. In 1923 Wimmer joined the latter city’s police department as a patrolman and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant in spite of, or perhaps because of, a reputation for securing quick confessions by beating suspects nearly to death during interrogation. Barely literate, unkempt, and given to violent drunken rages, he was the ideal recruit for the nascent SS. He joined the organization in March 1935,39 having resigned from the Munich police the previous month.
We don’t know Wimmer’s motivation for enlisting in the SS. While it might certainly have been the act of a politically committed man seeking to win martial glory in an elite organization that espoused ideals that mirrored his own, it is more likely that, given what we know of his personality, Wimmer saw the organization as his ticket out of a dead-end job and a way to gain official sanction to continue brutalizing those who in all probability had always made him feel inferior—intellectuals, the wealthy, and, of course, Jews and the others whom the Nazis scornfully referred to as “subhumans.”
Whatever his motivations, Wimmer was soon to see—and become part of—the dark side of Adolf Hitler’s New Germany. After initial training at Dachau, the newly minted SS-TV officer40 was assigned to the camp’s permanent battalion-sized guard staff, known as SS-Wachsturmbann Oberbayern.41 Though Dachau in 1935 was just two years old and still relatively small—its enlargement and the addition of crematoria would not begin until 1937—it nonetheless housed several thousand inmates, largely Jews and political prisoners. And while systematic prisoner executions had not yet begun, Wimmer and the other guards were essentially free to humiliate, brutalize, and, if they could provide a reasonable justification, kill inmates with impunity.
Wimmer was apparently good at his job, for by September 1937 he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant. That same month the director of the concentration-camp system, SS-Major General Theodor Eicke, ordered the single-battalion SS-Wachsturmbann Oberbayern enlarged to five battalions and redesignated as SS-Totenkopfstandarte 1 Oberbayern. Like the two other regiment-sized units42 Eicke formed from concentration camp guard forces in 1937, Oberbayern was intended from the start to be a military organization. It would not engage in direct combat with armed enemy forces, however; all three of the initial Totenkopfstandarten were to be used to conduct what Eicke euphemistically referred to as “police and security duties” behind the battlefront. Given that Eicke was the originator of the “inflexible harshness” doctrine applied to concentration-camp prisoners, it comes as no surprise that the wartime duties of the Totenkopfstandarten would actually consist of rounding up, harshly interrogating, and usually executing enemy political and military leaders, Jews, and other “undesirables.”
Both Totenkopfstandarte Oberbayern and Wimmer first got to practice their new roles during the 1938 German annexation of the Sudeteland. Two Oberbayern battalions preceded regular Wehrmacht units into the disputed region—the northern and western border areas of Czechoslovakia inhabited largely by ethnic Germans—to identify and round up anyone deemed a threat to the annexation effort. While many of these unfortunates ended up in Dachau and other concentration camps in Germany, some didn’t survive their initial seizure by Wimmer and his comrades.
The reprehensible skills Wimmer demonstrated in the Sudetenland were put to extensive use during Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland. Tasked to operate in the province of Kielce, Upper Silesia, behind the lines of Major General Walter von Reichenau’s 10th Army, Wimmer and the other troops of Totenkopfstandarte Oberbayern43 tortured and killed large numbers of Jews, anti-Nazi Catholic clergy, mental patients, Polish nationalist activists, and Polish soldiers attempting to escape capture. Mass murders were committed at such villages as Ciepielow, Nisko, and Rawa Mazowiecka;44 indeed, so heinous were the atrocities committed by the Totenkopfstandarten troops under the guise of “police and security” operations that several senior Wehrmacht officers complained directly to Himmler. Their pleas were ignored, however, and Wimmer and his accomplices continued their murderous rampage until all three of the original Totenkopfstandarten were withdrawn from Poland in late 1939.45 The units’ withdrawal did not, of course, mean that German atrocities in Poland came to an end. New Totenkopfstandarten moved in to continue the horrific work and were joined by SS einsatzgruppen (special task forces)—units intended solely to carry out systematized mass executions in very short periods of time.46
Following their withdrawal from Poland, the three original Totenkopfstandarten were used to form the 3rd SS Panzer Division,47 commanded by Theodor Eicke. Equipped largely with captured Czech weapons, the division took part in the German invasions of France and the Low Countries, with Wimmer apparently serving in one of the division’s panzer-grenadier (motorized infantry) regiments. Not surprisingly, given its provenance and fanaticism, the 3rd SS Panzer Division committed a variety of war crimes, including the May 1940 murder of ninety-seven captured members of the British army’s 2nd Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, in the French village of Le Paradis.
The SS division’s propensity for committing war crimes only increased following its April 1941 transfer to the Eastern Front, where it saw action with Army Group North in the advance on Leningrad. Russia was harder on the division than France had been: despite initial tactical successes in the spring and summer of 1941, by winter Eicke and his troops were being heavily battered by the Red Army. By the spring of 1942 the 3rd SS Panzer Division was encircled by superior Soviet forces near the town of Demyansk, south of Leningrad, and had lost almost 80 percent of its combat strength.
Wimmer, however, was not among the casualties. In January 1942 he was transferred to the 2nd SS Panzer Division, “Das Reich,” which was itself engaged in fierce combat with the Red Army as part of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center. The reason for the transfer is unclear, as is the exact nature of Wimmer’s duties, but it seems likely that he reverted to the sort of “police and security” tasks he’d earlier undertaken in Poland. This assumption is bolstered by the fact that in September 1942 he was transferred yet again, but this time out of the combat zone to the relative safety of a staff job at a then little-known concentration camp just outside the city of Lublin, in central Poland. Officially referred to as a “prisoner of war camp of the Waffen-SS in Lublin,” it became infamous simply as Majdanek.
Though established in October 1941 primarily as a slave-labor camp—prisoners were put to work in nearby factories producing weapons and vehicles for the German war effort—Majdanek also quickly became a de facto extermination center where Russian POWs, Polish Jews, and political prisoners were shot, hanged, and gassed. Sebastian Wimmer was personally responsible for Majdanek’s day-to-day operations. In that capacity he undertook such mundane tasks as ordering supplies and equipment, overseeing personnel and staffing operations, and managing the warehouses that held the clothing and personal items confiscated from prisoners.
However, Wimmer also played an active role in the camp’s more horrific activities. In addition to deciding which prisoners would be worked to death in the nearby factories and which would be killed outright, he also ruthlessly quashed any sign of resistance from those he and his guards so cruelly oppressed. Any inmate who showed even the slightest hesitation to follow an order or perform a task was made an example of, usually in the most public and painful way. As a true disciple of Theodore Eicke’s “inflexible harshness” doctrine, Wimmer made sure that every prisoner in Majdanek—whether Polish
or Russian, POW or Jew, man, woman, or child—suffered as much as possible.
Wimmer spent some five months at Majdanek, and his performance there so impressed his superiors that in mid-February 1943 he was transferred back to where his SS career had begun: Dachau. Though his position title was the same as the one he’d had at Majdanek—chief of the preventive detention camp—Wimmer’s personal power was even greater than it had been in Poland, because Dachau was literally the center of the concentration-camp universe for SS-TV men. And while he ostensibly answered to camp commandant SS-Lieutenant Colonel Martin Weiss, Wimmer was the man in charge of most of Dachau’s day-to-day operations and, arguably, one of the camp service’s most powerful younger officers.
And this may be one possible answer to the question about how a man like Wimmer—a textbook sociopath with a penchant for violence and a reputation for brutality toward both prisoners and his own soldiers—obtained such a plum and politically sensitive job as commandant of Schloss Itter. Crude Wimmer might have been, but he most obviously was not stupid. Despite its importance within the camp system, Dachau was a decidedly unpleasant place to work. Why put up with masses of unwashed prisoners and the pervasive stench of burning human flesh when by pulling some strings and calling in a few personal favors he could get himself a cushy posting at a castle-hotel turned VIP prison? Why, his wife, Thérèse, who’d spent most of the war years living with her parents in southern Germany, could even join him, and they could both spend the remainder of the war in safety and relative luxury. And if part of the price he had to pay for such good fortune was to be civil to a bunch of VIP prisoners, why not? After all, he could still brutalize his own men whenever he chose.
There is, of course, one other possibility. It might well have been that the planners at Dachau tapped Wimmer for the Schloss Itter command not in spite of his proven record of brutality but because of it. While the VIPs soon to be incarcerated in the hotel-turned-prison would have to be relatively well cared for as long as there was a chance they could be exchanged for important Germans held by the Allies, they might also need to be eliminated should the tide of war turn against Germany. The man in charge at Schloss Itter would therefore have to be ready, willing, and able to kill the VIP prisoners at a moment’s notice, without compunction and without remorse. And “Wastl” Wimmer had certainly proven that he could be that man.
HOWEVER WIMMER’S ASSIGNMENT as commandant of Schloss Itter came about, we know (from Zvonimir Čučković’s meticulous notes) that he arrived at the castle on the morning of Wednesday, April 28, 1943. His deputy, Stefan Otto of the SD, and the members of the permanent guard force had reached the castle two days earlier and were drawn up at attention in the small courtyard just inside the front gate. Wimmer and his wife had been driven down from Dachau in an open-top Opel staff car, which pulled up in front of the assembled guard troops, followed by a small truck whose cargo bay was packed with suitcases, boxes, and small pieces of furniture. The staff car’s enlisted SS driver leapt out and dashed around to open the car’s right-side door; Wimmer stepped down, his eyes scanning the soldiers before him.
Discreetly watching the scene through a closed window on the second floor of the schlosshof, Čučković could not hear what Wimmer then said to the gathered SS men. But from the officer’s gestures and the grim looks on the faces of the troops, the Croat assumed the brief address concerned the need for discipline and the certainty of punishment should Wimmer in any way find that discipline to be lacking. Having finished speaking, the SS-TV officer undertook a brief inspection of the men, Otto trailing at his side, and then barked an order that sent the soldiers rushing to the rear of the truck to begin unloading what were apparently the Wimmers’ luggage and personal effects. After waiting a moment to ensure his goods were being handled with the proper respect, the new commandant of Schloss Itter strode purposefully toward the castle’s main entrance, his wife hurrying to keep up.
Wimmer’s urgency stemmed from the fact that he had just days to ensure that Schloss Itter was ready to receive its first prisoners. While he had not yet been told exactly who those notables would be, he knew that their value to the Reich—as either hostages or pawns in complex diplomatic maneuverings of which he had no knowledge and in which he most probably had absolutely no interest—would require that they be kept alive and well. He also undoubtedly understood that he would be held personally responsible for any harm that came to any of his VIP captives, a situation we might assume caused a fairly high level of anxiety in a man who had thus far spent his SS career humiliating, brutalizing, and murdering the prisoners put in his charge.
In the days immediately following Wimmer’s arrival at Schloss Itter, Čučković noted that the new commandant kept his troops hopping with surprise inspections and practice alerts. During the latter the SS guards responded to mock prisoner escapes—announced by the blaring of a klaxon fixed to the roof of the castle’s gatehouse—primarily by manning the MG-42 machine guns overlooking the courtyards. Čučković noted dryly that the guards didn’t seem to realize that an escaped prisoner would be on the outside of the walls, headed for the cover of the nearby forests, rather than hanging about inside the castle waiting to be shot.
Čučković watched the Germans’ preparations carefully, recording his observations in a small notebook that he had managed to steal from the SS guardroom and kept hidden behind a loose board in the schlosshof. He had to be extremely careful, of course, since he was still the only prisoner in a castle full of SS troops, but he hoped that his notes would someday prove useful in some way to the Allied cause.
And then, on the morning of Sunday, May 2, 1943, two Mercedes staff cars flying SS pennants from their fenders rolled through Schloss Itter’s main gate and into the small triangular courtyard just behind it. From his vantage point in the schlosshof Čučković watched Wimmer rush out to meet the vehicles; the Croat was trying to get a better look at the first car’s uniformed occupants when he saw three men alight from the second vehicle. Though the men were all dressed in drab and threadbare civilian suits, they seemed somehow familiar to Čučković. With a shock of recognition, he realized that the first VIP prisoners had arrived, and Schloss Itter was now officially open for business.
CHAPTER 2
FIRST ARRIVALS
ZVONKO ČUČKOVIĆ’S SHOCK on seeing the three men step from the Mercedes staff car in Schloss Itter’s lower front courtyard that May day was understandable. Though the Croat had been incarcerated in one German prison or another for sixteen months, he easily recognized the newly arrived prisoners—Édouard Daladier, General Maurice Gamelin, and Léon Jouhaux—because their faces had regularly appeared on the front pages of newspapers across Europe even before the 1939 outbreak of war.
The fact that he was now seeing three of the most influential men in prewar France in the hands of the SS was somehow even more disturbing than his own initial arrest had been.1 And while Čučković did not know the details of how the men had come to be prisoners, he was certain that their journey from the various halls of power in Paris to the decidedly colder and less hospitable halls of Schloss Itter had not been an easy one.
AT SIXTY-ONE, THE STOCKY, barrel-chested, and pugnacious Édouard Daladier was the youngest of the newly arrived prisoner trio. Arguably one of France’s most important and prominent politicians in the years between the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second, he’d been born in 1884, the son of a baker. Intelligent and ambitious, he’d first worked as a history teacher and then made the leap into politics in 1912, when at the age of twenty-eight he won his first elected office: mayor of his hometown of Carpentras, near Avignon, in the Vaucluse department of France’s Mediterranean southeast. His political rise was interrupted by World War I, during which he saw four years of brutal trench warfare, first as an enlisted soldier and then as a decorated officer.2
Following the armistice Daladier had returned to politics, serving in a series of increasingly important positions in the left-leaning
Radical Socialist Party. He’d been named the organization’s leader in 1927 and served in several interwar governments as a minister responsible for, among other things, the foreign affairs and defense portfolios. In the latter position he pressed for the reform and modernization of the French army, an effort he continued when he was first named premier in January 1933; his government lasted just nine months, however, and was swept from power when it proved incapable of forming a coherent policy to deal with the continuing effects of the Great Depression. Daladier’s second stint as premier, which began on January 30, 1934, lasted less than two weeks because his overly firm response on February 6 to widespread antiparliamentarist riots in Paris organized and led by right-wing groups resulted in sixteen deaths and thousands of injuries.3
While Daladier’s response to the riots led to the fall of his government, the fascist threat inherent in the street fighting prompted him to take his Radical Socialist Party into a leftist coalition with the French Communist Party and its longtime rivals, the Socialists. Known as the Popular Front, the alliance won power in the 1936 elections and the leader of the Socialists, Léon Blum, became premier.4 He named Daladier his minister of national defense and war, a position the latter held until Blum resigned in June 1937. Daladier again served as minister of national defense and war when Blum briefly returned to the premiership in March and April 1938. The quick collapse of the second Blum ministry led French president Albert Lebrun to turn to Daladier, whose third and final term as France’s premier began on April 10, 1938.