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

by Stephen Harding

  THE CONDITIONS THAT ULTIMATELY made such a relief mission necessary had been developing for many months. Though the French prisoners had certainly fared far better than the vast majority of the Nazis’ captives, the essentially benign routine at Schloss Itter began to change as Germany’s military fortunes steadily deteriorated throughout the latter half of 1944. Food became increasingly scarce for both the prisoners and their guards, and a growing shortage of fuel for the castle’s generators meant that candles and lanterns ultimately replaced electric lights. More ominously, the members of the castle’s guard force began taking the threat of enemy action more seriously. On October 7, 1944, Édouard Daladier witnessed an example of this higher level of readiness and recorded in his diary that he’d

  watched the SS go rushing about the castle. Red flares went off. It was all either preparation to ward off a commando raid or a positioning exercise in anticipation of an attack from the village or from down in the valley. The maneuvers lasted two hours, and enlisted men and officers alike went through them in dead seriousness.1

  Just ten days later, Daladier noted, the decidedly second-string guards—most of whom had never fired a shot in anger—were reinforced by twenty-seven combat-experienced Waffen-SS troops, who arrived at Schloss Itter bearing several additional machine guns and crates of ammunition. The newcomers immediately began reinforcing the castle’s defenses with what the elderly Frenchman described as “speed and discipline,”2 setting up sand-bagged firing positions and felling trees to be used to block the approach roads. And there were other measures as well. On October 27 Wimmer announced that he was instituting a defensive alarm system. One type of siren would indicate an Allied air attack; when it sounded, the French prisoners could decide for themselves whether to take shelter in the castle’s cellars, with the understanding that if they didn’t, it was at their own risk. The other alarm would sound if a ground attack were imminent; in that case the prisoners were to move immediately to the cellars. If they didn’t, Wimmer said, they would be taken there by force.3

  While the danger of the French prisoners being killed or injured by an errant Allied bomb was real, they were in many ways more vulnerable to the increasingly erratic behavior of Sebastian Wimmer. The castle’s commandant had always been mercurial and subject to fits of unreasoning anger, but his personality swings had become far more pronounced following a mid-July 1944 trip to Munich to attend the funeral of his brother, who had been killed days earlier in an Allied bombing raid. The city had been subjected to another massive air attack the day before Wimmer’s arrival, and on reaching the city the SS-TV officer couldn’t find a taxi or working streetcar. As he was walking through rubble-filled streets toward the makeshift morgue that held his brother’s remains, the air-raid sirens wailed yet again, and falling bombs obliterated the building. Wimmer, Daladier recalled, “returned to Itter totally demoralized.”4

  Schloss Itter’s commander increasingly sought to alleviate his demoralization with alcohol, often drinking steadily from morning until late at night. Prisoners and guards alike tried to avoid Wimmer anytime after noon: though he was usually calm for the first few hours after opening a bottle of Asbach Uralt,5 later in the day his true nature would reveal itself in screaming rages and random violence. While the SS-TV officer generally didn’t focus his alcohol-fueled anger on his VIP charges, he had no compunctions about tormenting the number prisoners. One of his favorite targets was Zvonko Čučković; while Wimmer would occasionally treat the Croat handyman with something approaching kindness,6 his more usual attitude is illustrated by two incidents that occurred during the winter of 1944–1945.

  In the first, Čučković was working on Wimmer’s staff car in the small courtyard between the castle’s front gate and the schlosshof when the SS-TV officer staggered up to him and without saying a word punched the Croat in the face. Knowing well that any reaction would only further enrage the drunken Wimmer, Čučković said nothing and quickly snapped to attention. The castle’s commandant nevertheless hit him again and was about to punch the Croat a third time when he realized that Maurice Gamelin—out for his daily constitutional—had walked up behind him. Wimmer saluted the French general, who returned a withering glare and said, “You cannot beat a prisoner,” before turning his back and walking away. Wimmer staggered off, muttering to himself, and didn’t leave his suite for two days.

  The second incident was potentially more dangerous for Čučković. Just after a particularly heavy snowfall, a seriously inebriated Wimmer summoned the Croat to the guardroom and began screaming at him for not repairing a leaking toilet in the commandant’s suite. Čučković tried to explain that he’d ordered the necessary rubber washer from the supply depot at Dachau, but it hadn’t yet arrived. Wimmer shrieked that he wasn’t interested in excuses and ordered the Croat to spend the next two nights shoveling snow in the rear courtyard from six PM until six AM. Had it not been for the occasional help provided by the two SS enlisted men who’d been tasked to watch him—their assistance most probably an attempt to curry favor as Germany spiraled ever closer to defeat—Čučković might well have died of exhaustion or exposure.

  Wimmer’s outbursts increased in both frequency and virulence as the Allied armies got closer to Schloss Itter. Fortunately for Čučković, one of the worst wasn’t aimed at him. On March 20, 1945, the Croat was again working on the commandant’s staff car when Gertrud, one of the female number prisoners, ran up to him with the news that Wimmer was about to shoot Andreas Krobot. Rushing to the castle’s scullery, Čučković found a scene of pandemonium: An obviously drunken Wimmer was pointing his Walther P-38 pistol out an open window at the terrified Czech cook, who was standing in the middle of the castle’s small vegetable garden. All of the female prisoners who worked in the kitchen were standing to one side, sobbing loudly, as Wimmer screamed at Krobot, “You dog, come one step forward and one to the left,” apparently trying to line up a better shot. Čučković grabbed a large knife from a nearby rack, determined to kill the commandant if he shot Krobot, but the sudden appearance of Wimmer’s wife defused the situation before any blood was spilled.7

  By the first month of 1945, the Waffen-SS troops who’d temporarily bolstered Schloss Itter’s defenses had moved on, leaving behind a guard force infected with what Daladier called “utter consternation” because of Germany’s clearly terminal military condition. In a January 30 diary entry, the Frenchman wrote:

  This is the twilight of the gods… . All the radios have been locked up in the Commandant’s office for the last few days, probably to keep the garrison’s morale from caving in, but in spite of all the precautions, disastrous news reports continue to filter through. The SS [men] can see the clenched jaws and the faces of [Wimmer and Otto]; their strained and downcast looks tell them just as much as they could ever learn from listening to the field communiqués… . I could see the dejection on the faces … of the soldiers… . [Čučković] told me that we had to be on our guard. Some of the SS troops were talking about suicide. Others planned to seize all the food supplies … get drunk and shoot us.8

  The last possibility was of real concern to Daladier and his fellow honor prisoners, for they knew all too well that their lives might not be worth much to Nazis intent on covering up their crimes. Reynaud was seen as especially vulnerable, and during the last days of April, Clemenceau—who spoke fluent German—took it on himself to summon Wimmer to a meeting with Reynaud and Gamelin. In their presence, Clemenceau reminded the castle’s commandant that the lives of Reynaud and indeed all the French prisoners were in the SS officer’s hands.

  “It is possible that you may shortly be told to hand over President Paul Reynaud,” Clemenceau said. “If President Reynaud is taken away, you know for what purpose it will be. You also know the Allies will hold responsible all those who help in an action of this nature. What do you mean to do?”

  Recounting this conversation in his memoirs, Reynaud said that Wimmer replied that he was only accountable to his conscience (an attrib
ute, it must be said, that was completely absent during the SS-TV officer’s time in Poland and at Majdanek and Dachau). Wimmer also said, however, that the deaths of Reynaud and the other prisoners would not be compatible with Germany’s postwar interests and that he would aid in their escape if it became necessary.9

  Despite Wimmer’s pledge, the arrival at the castle of a nearly constant stream of senior SS-TV officers kept the French on edge. Often accompanied by their families and always loaded down with weapons, baggage, and booty, the SS men used Itter as a way station as they attempted to escape the advancing Allies.10 Most of the fleeing Nazis stayed only long enough to requisition what food and water they could, but on the night of April 30 SS-Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, the last commander of Dachau, settled in with a retinue of his subordinates and their wives and children.

  It was not Weiter’s first visit to Itter; he had inspected the castle and its prisoners in October 1943 and at that time had spoken with Reynaud and several of the other French captives. On this, his final visit, Weiter—whom Daladier later described as “obese and apoplectic, with the face of a brute”11—drunkenly bragged to Wimmer that he had ordered the execution of some two thousand prisoners before leaving Dachau for the last time. Hearing of Weiter’s boast, the French captives at Itter were therefore understandably concerned that his arrival signaled their own executions. As it turned out, however, the only death Weiter had on his mind was his own. As Reynaud later recounted, early on the morning of Wednesday, May 2,12 “I heard in the room next to mine a couple of shots: [Weiter] had just shot himself near the heart, and then finished himself off with a second shot behind the ear.”13

  A group of Weiter’s SS minions slapped together a pine box and hauled it up to his room but found that it was too large to fit through the door. Improvising, they dragged his corpse into the hallway and manhandled it down several flights of stairs and into the garage in the schlosshof. There they unceremoniously dumped the body into the pine coffin, and one of them left to speak with the priest of Itter village’s small parish church of St. Joseph. At that point Reynaud, Gamelin, Jouhaux, and Clemenceau—wanting to positively identify the dead man as the senior Dachau officer who had inspected Itter months earlier, so as to allow the Allies to cross him off any list of wanted war criminals—demanded to see the corpse. As Reynaud later recalled: “It was a frightful sight. Soldiers had stolen the dead man’s boots. His bloodstained shirt was half opened to show his breast; his head was thrown back; his mouth was wide open and his eyes staring. This torturer looked like one of the damned.”14

  Once the Frenchmen had agreed that the corpse was indeed that of Weiter, SS men carried the crude coffin out the castle’s front gate and started toward the village, only to encounter the soldier who had gone off to speak to the priest at St. Joseph’s. The clergyman, to his credit, had categorically refused to let Weiter be interred in holy ground, so the SS men hurriedly buried the “butcher of Dachau” in an unmarked grave in a small clearing just outside the castle’s walls. His only monument was a heap of brush meant to hide the patch of newly turned earth.15

  Weiter’s suicide seemed to galvanize Wimmer. Early on May 4—after first asking several of the VIPs to sign a statement saying he had treated them “correctly” and then assuring Reynaud and Daladier that he would find a way to protect the French prisoners against reprisal by the roving bands of Waffen-SS troops active in the surrounding hills—the SS-TV man abruptly fled the castle with his wife. Wimmer was only marginally true to his word, however, since all he did to ensure the promised “protection” for the VIPs was to enlist the aid of an acquaintance, a war-wounded officer recuperating at home in Itter village. And in what Wimmer may have intended as a final irony, the man he tapped to be the French VIPs’ surrogate savior was himself a decorated member of the Waffen-SS.

  AT FIRST GLANCE SS-CAPTAIN Kurt-Siegfried Schrader appears to be the very archetype of all the evil Nazis who have goose-stepped across cinema screens for the past seventy years. He peers with frightening intensity from the official photo attached to his personnel file, the highly polished death’s head totem on his peaked officer’s hat almost pulsating with menace and the double lightning-stroke SS runes on his collar obviously worn with arrogant pride. But it is not simply the uniform and facial expression that speak of his dedication to the cause: the man portrayed in the personalakten—and in Schrader’s own postwar writings16—was for most of his military career the personification of the dedicated Waffen-SS officer.

  Born in Magdeburg in August 1916, Schrader was the third and youngest child of a minor prewar judicial official who at the time of his son’s birth was a soldier serving in France. With the end of World War I Schrader Senior returned to his former post, his position and influence increasing considerably over the years, even as his politics veered sharply to the right. In 1930 the elder Schrader attended a Nazi rally in Leipzig and upon his return proclaimed to his family that Adolf Hitler would be the “savior of Germany.”17 Kurt-Siegfried was soon drawn into his father’s politics, and at the age of fourteen he joined a pro-Nazi youth group. The organization was still illegal in what at the time was the federal state of Prussia, and, when young Schrader was caught handing out Nazi propaganda stickers to his fellow students, he was expelled and thereafter prohibited from attending public schools. Undaunted by the expulsion, Schrader enrolled in a right-wing private school and joined the Hitler Youth movement. He participated in several large Nazi rallies, and, when Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor in January 1933, Schrader remembered that it was as if a bright light had suddenly illuminated what had been a dark and forbidding horizon.

  In 1934 Schrader’s considerable intelligence—and his father’s political connections—led to the eighteen-year-old’s admission to a two-year program at an elite military-political school in Berlin. Following his graduation the young man spent a compulsory six months in the civilian Reich Labor Service,18 after which he had expected to do his required two years of military service with the Nürnberg-based Artillerie Regiment 7. When that unit turned down his application, a former teacher suggested that Schrader apply to one of the military units then being formed within the SS. He did, and in April 1937 he joined the field telephone company of the SS-Nachrichtensturmbann (signals battalion).19

  As a junior enlisted man in the communications unit Schrader took part in both the March 1938 Austrian Anschluss and the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland the following October. Upon the conclusion of the latter operation Schrader was tapped to attend four weeks of infantry training provided by the SS regiment Germania, and in April 1939 he entered the SS officer candidate school in Braunschweig. Schrader enjoyed both the military and political aspects of his officer training, later remembering that it was at Braunschweig that he “really got serious” about his professional life.20 And it was after his graduation and commissioning as a second lieutenant that the young officer got serious about his personal life: in January 1940 Schrader married his girlfriend, Annaliese Patales.

  The war didn’t initially intrude on the newlyweds. For the first year of their marriage Schrader was assigned to various staff positions in eastern Germany, and in January 1941 he took up a three-month posting to Prague as the adjutant in a replacement battalion. He and Annaliese apparently enjoyed their time in the former Czech capital, for Schrader recalled that they “had everything their hearts could desire.”21 In April the young SS officer received a plum assignment as adjutant in Heinrich Himmler’s newly formed guard unit, the Begleitbataillon Reichsführer SS. After organizing and equipping in Berlin, the battalion moved to Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s field headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia, where it provided perimeter security.

  That relatively safe assignment didn’t last long. Soon after Germany’s June 1941 invasion of Soviet Russia, Schrader’s unit was sent to join the forces besieging Leningrad. In late November Schrader, the battalion commander, their driver, and two escorting motorcyclists were ambushed by Russian
partisans while inspecting unit dispositions. The Waffen-SS22 men escaped with their lives, but Schrader was wounded in the ankle. He was first sent to a military hospital in Tosno (a Leningrad suburb) and then evacuated west by hospital train. It was a slow trip, mainly because Russian partisans kept blowing up sections of the track. He finally arrived in East Prussia and was put on another hospital train to Prague, where he was reunited with his wife in mid-December. Within days of that reunion the Schraders welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Heidi. Because of his wounds, in early 1942 Schrader was temporarily released from active duty and allowed to enroll in Berlin’s Humboldt University; for two semesters he studied biology and geography while living with his wife and daughter.

  Schrader put his uniform back on in October 1942, when he was assigned as the battalion adjutant in the 7. SS-Freiwilligen Gebirgsdivision (volunteer mountain division) “Prinz Eugen,” which was fighting partisans near Pancevo, in the southern Banat area of Serbia. In February 1943 he was tapped to be the adjutant of the 22nd SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment, part of the 10th SS-Panzer Division “Frundsberg,” then being formed in Angoulême, in France’s Charente department. While he was thus engaged, Annaliese gave birth to their second child, daughter Birgit, in Berlin. Concerned for the safety of his family, he took advantage of a proclamation by Reichsminister Josef Goebbels that mothers with small children could leave the capital to avoid the increasingly heavy Allied bombing. Annaliese and her daughters first moved in with her parents near Bielefeld, some 200 miles southwest of Berlin; when the bombing got worse there, they moved to Augsburg, another 350 miles to the southeast.

  At the end of 1943 Schrader decided to move his family yet again, this time to a place he assumed was unlikely to attract the attention of Allied bombers—the Austrian Tyrol. He had heard that an officer he’d known in Prague, none other than “Wastl” Wimmer, had just taken command of the Special Prisoner Facility at Schloss Itter. Schrader contacted Wimmer, who offered to find a place for Annaliese and the girls in Itter village. The castle’s commandant obtained a small but comfortable house (probably by requisitioning it from its rightful owners), and Schrader was apparently able to get time off to move his family from Augsburg to Itter. Soon after that move, in January 1944, the Schraders’ Berlin apartment was destroyed by an Allied bomb.23