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

by Stephen Harding

  31. In European usage, “first floor” is the floor above the ground floor— thus in fact “second floor” in American usage.

  32. The Heeresunteroffiziersschule für Gebirgsjäger, as it was known in German, was one of two similar institutions within the Third Reich tasked with training NCOs bound for military units especially trained for mountain warfare. The other was at Mittenwald, Germany.

  33. As far as can be determined, none of the prisoners who served on the Schloss Itter work detail and were returned to Dachau and Flossenbürg in April 1943 survived the war. Nor, apparently, did Petz.

  34. Details on Čučković’s life both before and during the war are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter.”

  35. Ema Čučković, neé Freyberg, was born in 1910 in Nordhausen, Germany. Čučković’s son was born in Yugoslavia in 1933.

  36. In his handwritten memoir, Čučković identifies thirteen of these men by name: SS-Sergeant First Class Oschbald; SS-Staff Sergeants Maschalek, Gilde, and Kunz; and SS-Corporals Euba, Jackl, Nowotny, Delus, Resner, Fischer, Bliesmer, Schulz, and Greiner.

  37. Čučković identifies this woman as Rosel Harmske, “SS-Aufseherin [female auxiliary] aus Ravensbrück.” A second female SS member who occasionally worked at Schloss Itter and whom Čučković identifies only as “Kühn, SS-Aufseherin aus Ravensbrück,” may have been Anna Kühn. When she joined the SS at Ravensbrück in 1942, she was fifty-seven years old, making her the oldest known woman to have served in the SS concentration-camp system.

  38. In German, SS-Sonderkommando. The word “commando,” in this sense, refers to the original South African Boer concept of a special-purpose unit, rather than an individual covert-operations soldier.

  39. Upon joining the SS, Wimmer received the member number (mitgliedsnummer) 264374. Details of Wimmer’s service are drawn from his personnel file, SS Personalakten für Wimmer, Sebastian, SS-Hauptamt.

  40. While he was not the brightest of recruits, Wimmer’s background as a police officer ensured (as it did for many of his former law-enforcement colleagues) an officer’s commission, rather than being relegated to the enlisted ranks.

  41. When the SS took control of all of Germany’s concentration camps in 1934 and established the SS-TV, it organized that group into six named wachtruppen, or guard units. Wachtruppe Oberbayern (Upper Bavaria) was stationed at Dachau, and just before Wimmer joined it in 1935 the unit was enlarged and redesignated Wachsturmbann Oberbayern.

  42. The other two were SS-Totenkopfstandarte 2 Brandenburg at Oranienburg concentration camp and SS-Totenkopfstandarte 3 Thüringen at Buchenwald. A fourth, SS-Totenkopfstandarte 4 Ostmark, was formed in Vienna following the 1938 Anschluss. More than ten additional SS-Totenkopfstandarten were formed during the course of World War II.

  43. The other two Totenkopfstandarten, Brandenburg and Thüringen, were involved in identical activities.

  44. The four thousand Jews who survived the initial shootings were later confined in a ghetto; in 1942 all were sent to Treblinka concentration camp and subsequently killed.

  45. See Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction, 40–42.

  46. By the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the einsatzgruppen had so perfected their murderous technique that they were able to kill more than thirty-three thousand people in two days at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine.

  47. The 3rd SS Panzer Division is also often, and incorrectly, referred to as SS Division Totenkopf.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 25.

  2. Initially mobilized into the local Avignon regiment, Daladier was quickly posted to the 2e Régiment de la Légion Étrangère, the Foreign Legion’s 2nd Regiment. The unit was in need of French noncommissioned officers to lead the many foreign volunteers flocking to France’s aid. When his battalion was essentially destroyed, Sergeant Daladier was transferred to the 209th Infantry Regiment, which saw continuous combat near Verdun. Commissioned in 1916, Daladier proved to be a brave and effective combat leader, and he finished the war as a lieutenant with both the Croix de guerre and the Légion d’honneur. See Daladier, In Defense of France, 12–21.

  3. Daladier’s aggressive response was at least partly the result of his belief—one widely held among France’s left-leaning political parties—that the riots actually constituted an attempted fascist coup.

  4. He also became the first socialist, and the first Jew, to hold the office.

  5. See the introduction to Daladier’s Prison Journal.

  6. Their political differences were exacerbated by the fact that their mistresses were social rivals, despite having known each other since childhood. Daladier’s mistress was Jeanne de Crussol; Reynaud’s was Hélène de Portes. Each woman took every opportunity to publicly and privately malign the other’s man and, of course, to report to her own lover every word spoken against him by his political rival. Daladier’s relationship had originated after the 1932 death of his wife, Madeline. Reynaud, on the other hand, remained legally married to his first wife, the former Jeanne Henri-Robert, until 1948. His relationship with Hélène de Portes was an open secret, one not contested by his wife.

  7. In addition to some twenty-seven politicians, Massilia’s passenger list included thirty-three other passengers, among them Mendès-France’s wife and two sons and Mandel’s mistress.

  8. Le Verdon-sur-Mer was a harbor at the mouth of the Gironde River, some fifty-four miles northwest of Bordeaux. The French government had relocated to Bordeaux on June 10.

  9. Daladier, Prison Journal, 2. Recognizing the irony in the general’s cables, Daladier said on the same page of his journal, “Strange fellow, this General Noguès, who felt he had to ask the government for permission to rebel.”

  10. In the military usage, a rank roughly equivalent to a U.S. general of the armies.

  11. Daladier, Prison Journal, 193.

  12. Buchenwald was built in 1937. Though it was not a designated extermination camp, an estimated fifty-six thousand people died or were executed there before the camp’s April 1945 liberation by elements of the U.S. 6th Armored Division.

  13. For additional details on Daladier’s time in Buchenwald, see both Daladier, Prison Journal, and Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat.

  14. Daladier, Prison Journal, 199. The two men were to have very different fates. Blum spent the remainder of the war in Buchenwald and, briefly, Dachau, and was liberated by Allied troops in May 1945. He returned to politics and was briefly prime minister in 1946–1947. He died in 1950. Mandel, sadly, did not survive the war. He was executed in Paris in July 1944 by the French fascist paramilitary force known as the Milice.

  15. Known in German as Feldgendarmerie, these troops were widely hated within the Wehrmacht because of their habit of summarily executing any soldier they believed to be a deserter or malingerer. They were scornfully referred to as kettenhunde, or chained dogs, because of the gorgets (a flat metal crescent suspended around their necks on a light chain) that were the emblems of their authority.

  16. For an in-depth discussion of Gamelin’s family background and military connections, see Martin S. Alexander’s excellent The Republic in Danger.

  17. Gamelin also ruthlessly put down a revolt by restive Druze tribes in the Syrian hill country. According to a Time magazine account (Aug. 14, 1939), Gamelin was present when French aircraft and artillery killed more than 1,400 civilians in Damascus.

  18. Singer, Maxime Weygand, 65. This book is an excellent in-depth look at Weygand’s life and career.

  19. Alexander, The Republic in Danger, 30.

  20. Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, France’s highest military council, headed by the country’s prime minister.

  21. Italian in origin, “generalissimo” refers to a military commander who has operational control of all of a nation’s armed forces—land, sea, and air—and is subordinate only to the head of state, or is himself the head of state. In addition to Weygand and Gamelin, in the 1930s and 1940s the
term was applied to such disparate individuals as Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco, and Hitler.

  22. “France: Trials, Tribulations,” Time, Sept. 30, 1940.

  23. This was the French national police, formed in 1812. Following the capitulation, the Sûreté—like all of France’s other law-enforcement agencies— became subordinate to the Germans in occupied France and to the Vichy government elsewhere. Following the German occupation of Vichy in November 1942, all Sûreté personnel and resources came under direct German control.

  24. Daladier, Prison Journal, 9.

  25. Both Čučković and Augusta Léon-Jouhaux mention Jouhaux’s health issues, with emphasis on his heart condition.

  26. Details of Jouhaux’s early life are largely drawn from his 1951 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Van Goethem, The Amsterdam International, 100.

  30. Ibid., 260.

  31. Various writers have rendered her last name in different forms— including Brücklin, Broukhlin, and Brucklen—usually depending on the language in which they were writing. Since she and Jouhaux most often used Bruchlen, I have chosen to use that spelling in this volume.

  32. The agency charged with conducting intelligence-gathering operations outside the United Kingdom, often referred to as MI6.

  33. Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE, 269.

  34. There is some confusion in the historical record about the exact date of Jouhaux’s arrest, with some sources mentioning Nov. 12. However, since Jouhaux’s secretary and eventual wife, Augusta, believes it was Nov. 26, I have chosen to use that date.

  35. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 11.

  36. Though he’d decided to be as “correct” as conditions allowed, it apparently didn’t occur to Wimmer to have the chilling quotation from Dante’s Inferno removed from the wall in the castle’s entrance hall. Virtually every VIP prisoner confined at Schloss Itter mentioned seeing the grim greeting upon first arrival.

  37. Room assignments would change several times as new “guests” arrived. See Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 57–59.

  38. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 14.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. As mentioned in the notes to chapter 2, de Portes had been Reynaud’s openly acknowledged mistress for several years, despite his continuing marriage to Jeanne Henri-Robert Reynaud. Often portrayed as the evil genius who controlled Reynaud—and thus, his government—from behind the scenes, de Portes’s actual influence over events during the months of Reynaud’s premiership is both open to debate and outside the scope of this volume. For a fascinating discussion of the countess’s relationship with Reynaud and influence on French politics, see Gates, The End of the Affair.

  2. The first concentration camp in Oranienburg was established in 1933 and bore the name of the town but was subsequently closed and replaced by the nearby—and vastly larger—Sachsenhausen complex. In his memoirs, Reynaud refers to the camp by its earlier name.

  3. Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 652. Though nearly seven hundred pages long, Reynaud’s memoir devotes just four pages to his time at Schloss Itter. He covers that period in exhaustive detail, however, in his Carnets de captivité, 1941–1945.

  4. Details on Borotra’s life are drawn from Smyth, Jean Borotra, the Bounding Basque.

  5. Ibid., 103–104.

  6. Ibid., 113–115.

  7. Ibid., 124.

  8. Ibid., 144.

  9. Reynaud, Carnets de captivité, 272–273. See also Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 651.

  10. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 27.

  11. Lanckoronska, Michelangelo in Ravensbrück, 219. Christiane Mabire is described by the volume’s author, the Polish countess Karolina Lanckoronska, following their first meeting in the German concentration camp.

  12. In “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter” Zvonimir Čučković lists Mabire’s arrival date as June 17, but other sources—including both Reynaud and Bruchlen—cite July 2. Given that Mabire did not arrive at Itter until after Bruchlen, who reached the castle on June 19, I believe the July date to be correct.

  13. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 15.

  14. Daladier, Prison Journal, 211–212.

  15. As Barnett Singer points out in Maxime Weygand, most historians agree that Weygand was the unintended product of an affair between Belgian Lt. Col. Alfred van der Smissen and Melanie Zichy Ferraris, daughter of Austrian foreign minister and chancellor Klemens von Metternich. Singer also believes that Weygand was actually born in 1865, though I have chosen to use the more widely accepted 1867 date.

  16. Daladier, Prison Journal, 252.

  17. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 30.

  18. Literally the Second Bureau, the organization tracked the strength, capability, and disposition of potential enemies, while the Premier (First) Bureau compiled the same information for French and allied forces.

  19. Reynaud, Carnets de captivité, 269.

  20. Jacques Nobécourt, author of Le colonel de La Rocque, published by Librairie Artheme Fayard in 1996.

  21. Ibid., 193.

  22. He used the term in his 1941 volume Disciplines d’Action, 12.

  23. Nobécourt, Le colonel de La Rocque, 777.

  24. Notably Jacques Nobécourt.

  25. This description was offered by her son, Pierre Cailliau, in his introduction to her 1970 memoir, Souvenirs personnels, 12.

  26. Ibid., 41–42.

  27. Denys was plagued by ill-health throughout his life and, sadly, died of meningitis at the age of twenty-two.

  28. Koop, In Hitler’s Hand, 44–45. Most of the VIPs held at the hotel were high-ranking French military officers.

  29. Cailliau de Gaulle, Souvenirs personnels, 94–95.

  30. Belgian-born Alfred Cailliau had become a French citizen after he and Marie-Agnès moved to the Le Havre area after World War I.

  31. Reynaud, Carnets de captivité, 312.

  32. The former prime minister’s penchant for taking off his clothes whenever the weather was warm enough is mentioned in the memoirs of both Reynaud and Augusta Léon-Jouhaux. Daladier himself, however, makes no mention of his nudism in his own memoir.

  33. Some sources render the cook’s last name as “Korbart” or “Krobet,” but Zvonimir Čučković—who shared a room with him for almost two years and presumably knew best—gives the man’s name as Krobot, so I have chosen to use that spelling. Čučković also says Krobot was transferred to Itter from Dachau in August 1943.

  34. Sadly, we know the full names of only two of these unfortunates: Gertrud Seibold and Gisela Sinneck-Barta. For the others, we have only first names: Sofia, Ommi, Luci, Maria, Josefa, and Olma. While Krobot and Čučković shared a room in the castle’s main building, the female inmate-servants slept on straw scattered over the floor of the schlosshof’s cramped upper level.

  35. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 10.

  36. Ibid. Daladier mentions the radio several times in Prison Journal, as does Augusta Léon-Jouhaux in Prison pour hommes d’Etat. Both indicate that it was capable of picking up stations as far afield as North Africa, the Soviet Union, and, when atmospheric conditions were right, even North America.

  37. Smyth, The Bounding Basque, 154–155.

  38. Daladier, Prison Journal, 335.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. World War II Soviet “fronts” were roughly equivalent to army groups in the U.S. Army. Made up of multiple field armies, each of which comprised several corps, the 3rd Ukrainian Front by April 1945 totaled some one million men.

  2. In U.S. usage, numbered armies are identified by words, not numerals.

  3. Seventh Army was under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton, who relinquished command to Patch following the island’s seizure.

  4. For more details on Eisenhower’s overall plan for Austria and southern Germany, see Mac
Donald, European Theater of Operations, 436–438.

  5. Patton was promoted to full general on April 14, 1945. Devers gained four-star rank on March 8, 1945.

  6. The individual units assigned to each of Seventh Army’s three corps— the other two being VI and XV—changed fairly frequently, with divisions being moved between corps as the tactical situation demanded.

  7. Panzergrenadier units combined tanks, truck-borne infantry, and artillery, antitank, and engineer elements.

  8. Details on von Hengl’s mission, force, and activities are drawn from his 1946 monograph Kampf um die Alpenfestung Nord, prepared as part of the U.S.-government-produced Foreign Military Studies, 1945–1954.

  9. Grossdeutschland was the German army’s premier combat division (and not, as widely believed, a Waffen-SS organization). Von Hengl’s belief that elements of the division were present in Tyrol at this point in the war may not be accurate, in that most official histories (both German and American) indicate that Grossdeutschland ended the war in northern Germany. Of course, it is entirely possible that some members of the division had been sent to Austria under circumstances that are no longer clear.

  10. Kampf um die Alpenfestung Nord, 2–3.

  11. OKW is usually translated as High Command of the Armed Forces, and Führungsstab B was one of two operational headquarters under OKW.

  12. In the event, those few units of the two larger organizations that did manage to make it into Tyrol didn’t get far enough east to be of any real help to von Hengl.

  13. Born in 1901, Hans Buchner was a highly regarded German-born gebirgsjäger officer. After World War II he joined the West German Bundeswehr, eventually rising to the rank of general. From 1956 to 1959 he commanded the Bundeswehr’s 1st Gebirgsjäger Division.

  14. Giehl was the commandant of the Heeresunteroffiziersschule für Gebirgsjäger in Wörgl.