The Last Battle: When U.S. And German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe

by Stephen Harding

  As an articulate and decorated former soldier, de La Rocque soon became the Croix de feu’s primary public spokesman, and in 1931 he became its president. Under his leadership the group’s ranks swelled, and he was courted by every important right-wing politician in France. In 1936 the nation voted into office the broad left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front, and one of the new government’s first acts was to outlaw the various right-wing organizations. De La Rocque shrewdly responded to the threat by transforming his group into a political party, the PSF, and announcing he would work within the very parliamentary system he had long criticized.

  De La Rocque’s decision to renounce the violent overthrow of the government put him at odds with other, overtly fascist groups. He was also excoriated by those organizations for his opposition to Germany’s increasing military might and expansionist policies, as well as for his support for the modernization of France’s armed forces. Right-wing and authoritarian de La Rocque might have been, but he also remembered the carnage France had endured at Germany’s hands in World War I.

  When war erupted in 1939, de La Rocque called for all PSF members to rally to the nation’s defense. Even when it became obvious that the German blitzkrieg would result in a French defeat, de La Rocque opposed any armistice or outright surrender. But following France’s fall, he concluded that Pétain was the only man capable of providing France with the postarmistice leadership and stability the nation so desperately needed. De La Rocque threw his support—and that of his PSF—behind Pétain’s government. Nevertheless, de La Rocque’s subsequent refusal to subjugate the PSF to Vichy’s planned single-party system outraged the regime, and, as early as September 1940, he was telling his followers to respect Pétain but display “absolute reserve” toward the Vichy government.21

  While de La Rocque remained politically active in Vichy, his increasing ambivalence about the regime trumped his respect for Pétain. Moreover, de La Rocque’s belief that Germany was France’s “ancestral enemy,”22 coupled with his distaste for the Nazis, led him to be outspoken about his opposition to collaboration, and even before the Germans’ November 1942 takeover of unoccupied France, de La Rocque had openly declared “no collaboration under the occupation.”23

  Given de La Rocque’s dislike of Germany and less than wholehearted support for Vichy—and his politically savvy preference for keeping his options open—it’s no surprise that he established a clandestine relationship with the Allied intelligence services. While some sources24 indicate that he first began gathering information of potential value to the Allies in the summer of 1940, it was not until February 1942 that de La Rocque established contact with the Madrid-based Réseau Alibi, or Alibi Network, which had agents throughout France and reported directly to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

  De La Rocque formalized the ad hoc intelligence-gathering effort he’d been leading and transformed it into an Alibi subnetwork known as the Réseau Klan (Klan Network), which used the PSF’s social-services operations as a cover for intelligence gathering. While the extent and value of the information provided to the SIS by the Klan Network remains difficult to judge, there is no doubt that de La Rocque—a man maligned both during and after the war as a fascist collaborator—knowingly endangered himself, his family, and his followers to pass intelligence to the Allies.

  De La Rocque’s leadership of the Klan Network ended on March 9, 1943, when Gestapo agents dragged him from his home in Clermont-Ferrand. The PSF leader was held briefly in a local jail and then transferred to Fresnes Prison. Kept in solitary confinement in a cramped and filthy cell, he was denied the medications he’d been taking since being wounded in 1916, and his health quickly declined. Things did not improve following his August 31, 1943, transfer—along with Michel Clemenceau and others—to Schloss Eisenberg in Czechoslovakia. Indeed, so ill was de La Rocque that he was unconscious for much of the car journey that carried him and Clemenceau to Schloss Itter.

  Though the Tyrolean fortress was still a prison, transfer to the castle—with its vastly better food and living conditions—would ultimately help save the PSF leader’s life.

  MARIE-AGNÈS AND ALFRED CAILLIAU, APRIL 13, 1945

  The final prisoners to arrive at Schloss Itter were not incarcerated because of their own importance, but—as with Marcel Granger—simply because of a family relationship to someone in whom the Nazis were especially interested. In the Cailliaus’ case, that someone was Marie-Agnès Cailliau’s younger brother, Free French general Charles de Gaulle.

  Born May 27, 1899, in Paris, Marie-Agnès was the second child—and only daughter—of Henri and Jeanne de Gaulle. Her father imbued his five children with an intense Roman Catholicism and a love for French history and culture, and Marie-Agnès—eighteen months older than Charles—was throughout her life “an ardent patriot and fervent Christian.”25

  After World War I Marie-Agnès and her Belgian husband, engineer Alfred Cailliau, settled in a suburb of Le Havre on the Normandy coast. Over the years the couple prospered, raising six sons and a daughter. Unfortunately, a resurgent Germany eventually cast a pall over the Cailliaus’ life; four of their sons—Joseph, Michel, Henri, and Charles—fought the invading Wehrmacht in 1940. Joseph and Henri escaped to England to join the Free French effort, Michel was captured and sent to a POW camp in Germany, and twenty-four-year-old Charles was killed.26 A fifth son, eighteen-year-old Pierre, ultimately made his way to Algeria and joined the Free French.

  Understandably devastated by the death of one son and the uncertain fates of four others, Alfred and Marie-Agnès Cailliau did what they could to ensure the safety of their sixth son, ten-year-old Denys.27 The Cailliaus moved in with their daughter, Marie-Thérèse, and her husband in the town of Roche-la-Molière, some thirty-five miles southwest of Lyon. When the area became part of Vichy, the Cailliaus stayed, renting a house in nearby Saint-Étienne. And they might have lived out the remainder of the war there in comfortable obscurity, had it not been for their son Michel’s March 1942 escape from German captivity and their own desire to resist the occupiers of their beloved France.

  During his time in the POW camp Michel Cailliau had joined the National Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees, a fledgling resistance movement. Though not members of Michel’s growing network, Alfred and Marie-Agnès hid documents and kept Michel informed about the activities of local German units. The elderly couple continued their low-level resistance work through the winter of 1942, and in April of the following year they moved back to northern France. The couple and their son Denys moved in with Alfred’s sister, Madeleine, in a village southwest of Rouen. They had only been in their new home a few days, however, when disaster struck.

  While eating a family lunch one day, Marie-Agnès saw two German military police officers getting out of a car in front of the house. The men knocked on the door, and when Marie-Agnès opened it, one of the agents politely told her that she and Alfred were to accompany them for routine questioning, though he declined to tell them the subject.

  After initial processing in Rouen and Paris, Marie-Agnès and Alfred were sent to Fresnes Prison, where they were separated. While both had assumed that their arrests were the result of their resistance activities, it quickly became apparent that Marie-Agnès’s relationship to the leader of the Free French was the real reason they’d been picked up. Though the Cailliaus were treated marginally better than most of the prisoners at Fresnes, neither had an easy time of it. Marie-Agnès was fifty-three, and Alfred was sixty-six; both suffered from the restricted diet and squalid living conditions, as well as from their forced separation. Alfred’s conditions were destined to worsen—in January 1944 he was transferred to Buchenwald.

  Marie-Agnès, on the other hand, saw a marked improvement in her own circumstances following her July 1944 deportation to the Rhinehotel Dreesen in a suburb of Bonn. The Nazis had converted the old lodge on the west bank of the Rhine into a VIP detention center, a satellite installation of Buchenwald. Though still prison
ers, Marie-Agnès and the others slept in furnished rooms rather than cells, could walk in the large enclosed garden, and had access to decent food.28

  Things changed dramatically when Allied forces neared Bonn in early 1945. On February 27 the German garrison herded the prisoners onto a barge and took them across to the east bank of the Rhine, where they boarded trucks that carried them to Buchenwald. There Marie-Agnès was reunited with Alfred, who was in poor health after his months in the camp. On March 8 they and about fifty other VIP prisoners were crowded into railway cattle cars and taken to Munich, where Marie-Agnès and Alfred—both now ill—were separated from the others and put in the back of a covered truck. Three young Wehrmacht soldiers climbed in with them, as did an older corporal. The truck drove through the night, with Marie-Agnès and Alfred sleeping on the hard metal floor of the vehicle’s cargo area.

  Then, on the afternoon of April 13, the truck halted before the sentry box at the foot of the short drive leading from Itter village to the castle’s main gate. The corporal walked over to speak with the two soldiers standing guard, both of whom were wearing full combat gear and seemed surprised by the truck’s arrival. When the guards refused to raise the barricade, the corporal demanded that they use the telephone in the sentry box to call for an officer.

  Within a few minutes Stefan Otto appeared; he, too, was obviously surprised to see the French couple. Looking at their disheveled clothes and drawn faces, he barked, “We have no room for you,” turned on his heel, and was about to start back toward the castle gate when Marie-Agnès called out, “But I am the sister of General De Gaulle!”

  Otto turned and hurried back, his entire demeanor changed. “Madame, my sincere apologies, we weren’t expecting you yet!” Taking Alfred gently by the arm, the officer led the French couple toward the castle gate. “Madame, you shall have my quarters this evening, and monsieur, you shall sleep in Colonel de La Rocque’s room. At the moment he is away at a clinic. Tomorrow we will make other arrangements.”29

  Pleased at the change in Otto’s attitude, Marie-Agnès was equally delighted by the realization that there was at least one other Frenchman resident in the castle looming before her. She knew who de La Rocque was and that he had served Vichy in some capacity. While their politics might differ, she believed that as French prisoners of the Germans, they—and any other of their countrymen held in the schloss—would put aside such petty concerns and draw together in solidarity, finding strength in each other’s company and their shared nationality.

  She would soon find out just how wrong she was.

  DESPITE MARIE-AGNÈS CAILLIAU’S hope that Schloss Itter’s French prisoners would band together in the face of shared hardship and live in supportive camaraderie, just the opposite was true. For while all of the castle’s prisoners were French30 and all considered themselves patriots, they could not possibly have been more politically diverse, more determinedly irascible, or more obstinately quarrelsome.

  The fault lines that developed among Schloss Itter’s VIP prisoners were, in a sense, completely understandable. Reynaud and Daladier were bitter political enemies, and both detested Weygand, who, having replaced Gamelin as supreme commander of French forces in May 1940, surrendered to and initially collaborated with the occupying Germans. Following the December 1943 arrival of Weygand and his wife, Reynaud’s snubs of the couple were so obvious and so continuous that at one point Weygand followed Reynaud down a corridor screaming, “Hooligan!” at him.31 Gamelin, for obvious reasons, was not at all fond of Weygand and sided with Reynaud against Daladier. An authoritarian right-winger, de La Rocque could not abide the leftist Jouhaux. As a former member of the Croix de feu and of Pétain’s Vichy government, Borotra was shunned by Daladier, Jouhaux, and Gamelin but embraced by Weygand and de La Rocque—and by Reynaud, despite their differing politics. And understandably, Schloss Itter’s female prisoners—Marie Weygand, Christiane Mabire, and Augusta Bruchlen—reflected the opinions and prejudices of their male partners.

  We can only imagine the heated exchanges that occurred among these once powerful and still resentful personages, and the perverse joy their German captors took in both the French prisoners’ squabbling and the fact that they segregated themselves by political persuasion, avoiding each other as much as possible within the castle’s confines. They even ate at separate tables in the dining room—the Weygands, Borotra, and de La Rocque at one; Reynaud, Mabire, Gamelin, and Clemenceau at another; and the “neutrals”—Daladier, Jouhaux, Bruchlen, and, later, the Cailliaus—at a third. And as Marie-Agnès Cailliau later noted, several of the “great men” incarcerated in Schloss Itter did more than just snub each other during meals; each spent hours every day penning the memoirs he hoped would explain his own wartime actions in the best light while vilifying those of his rivals.

  There were, of course, activities other than the writing of self-aggrandizing memoirs in which the French prisoners could participate—activities that would have been incomprehensible to captives not fortunate enough to be classed as honor prisoners. The schloss’s three-hundred-volume library was available to Itter’s involuntary guests, and in good weather they could stroll much of the castle’s walled grounds or pass the time playing ring tennis or, in Daladier’s case, practicing solo nudism.32 Those of a spiritual bent could attend Mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Itter village—under guard—and the female prisoners were driven to nearby Hopfgarten for regular appointments with a hairdresser. Anyone requiring medical attention beyond what the garrison’s medic could provide was transported to a suitable medical facility; Reynaud, for example, underwent eye surgery at the military hospital in Innsbruck, and Daladier had oral surgery at Dachau.

  And then there was the food and drink. The prisoner-cook—a Czech named Andreas Krobot,33 known to the French as André—used flour, fruit, vegetables, and dairy products from surrounding farms to turn out wholesome and plentiful meals for the captives. And there was even wine with which to wash down the food: each French prisoner was authorized two liters of local Austrian wine a week, one of red and one of white. To their credit, most of the VIPs ensured that André and Zvonimir Čučković passed on any leftover food and wine to the handful of far less fortunate female concentration-camp inmates—referred to as “number” prisoners because each had a number tattooed on her forearm—whom the SS had brought to work at Schloss Itter as servants.34

  The French captives also had a link to the outside provided by Čučković, who organized—read “stole”—a small short-wave radio from one of the castle’s guards.35 Since the guard himself wasn’t supposed to have the radio—its possession could have gotten him sent to the Russian Front, or worse—he couldn’t report its theft. The radio was hidden in Reynaud’s room, and Čučković and Christiane Mabire would keep watch while the former prime minister huddled under a blanket, listening to the BBC and other Allied stations. In a rare show of cooperation, Reynaud would share important news with his fellow captives via Mabire and Borotra.36

  As cushy as life might have been for the French prisoners at Schloss Itter, Borotra remained determined to escape. From the moment of his arrival in May 1943, he exercised every morning, increasing the duration of his runs within the rear courtyard until he could do ninety circuits—roughly nine miles—nonstop. In addition to his physical preparations, Borotra tracked the movement and schedules of the guards and noted several areas where the barbed wire atop the schloss’s walls seemed loosely secured.

  The Bounding Basque made three escape attempts, each time going over the wall. While the dates of his first two tries are unclear, it appears that one occurred in the fall of 1943 and another in late March 1945. On both occasions he got several miles before being recaptured.37 His only punishment following these first two excursions seems to have been a few days’ confinement in his room.

  Thanks to Daladier, we have more precise information regarding Borotra’s third attempt, on April 29, 1945. At about six thirty that evening Daladier was strolling in the castle’s rear c
ourtyard when he encountered the tennis player, who greeted him with “Have a nice walk, prime minister.” Borotra then ran to the closest section of the south wall, and as Daladier recounts:

  he scaled it and started running madly down the hill. The SS [guards] began firing at him from a few yards away. He took the barbed wire [rolls a few meters from the bottom of the castle’s outer wall] in stride as more and more shots rang out and the SS began their pursuit. [At] 7:20 P.M. Borotra was brought back. He had probably twisted an ankle, given the way he was limping.38

  Once again, Borotra’s only punishment seems to have been a few days’ house arrest. He was fortunate he’d been recaptured by castle guards sent out by Wimmer—by April 1945, the world outside Schloss Itter’s gates had become a very dangerous place, crawling with Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units to whom the life of a French honor prisoner meant absolutely nothing.

  CHAPTER 4

  A GROWING PERIL

  THOUGH THE NAZI WAR EFFORT had already seen some significant reversals by the time Schloss Itter’s first French prisoner arrived on May 2, 1943, the setbacks had largely occurred well beyond the borders of “greater” Germany, primarily on the Eastern Front, in North Africa, and in the Mediterranean. Over the next two years, however, the war got steadily closer to Itter. Allied armies approaching from several directions at once made the future increasingly uncertain for the castle’s garrison troops and, ironically, decidedly more dangerous for its prisoners.

  To the east, the Soviet Union’s January 1943 victory at Stalingrad and destruction of the German 6th Army set the stage for the Red Army’s seemingly inexorable advance westward. Soviet forces solidified their strategic advantage by crushing Germany’s final large-scale attack on the Eastern Front—the assault on Kursk in July and August 1943. From that point on, the Germans could manage only local tactical successes, as they were forced to withdraw almost everywhere along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Having recaptured those parts of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Russia proper that had been occupied by German forces, by the spring of 1945 the Red Army had also taken Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltic states, parts of Yugoslavia, and much of eastern Germany. Of more immediate concern to Sebastian Wimmer and those he commanded at Schloss Itter, however, was the fact that by the last day of April 1945 elements of Marshal of the Soviet Union Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front1 were rumored to be barely twenty-five miles to the east.