Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

FOR SEBASTIAN WIMMER, the arrival of the castle’s first three honor prisoners marked the beginning of what he fervently hoped would be a very rewarding phase in his career. He was, after all, commandant of what was planned to be arguably the most important and high-profile subcamp in all of Nazi Germany’s sprawling concentration-camp system and would be responsible for some of the Third Reich’s most valuable captives. If Wimmer played his cards right, he could win promotion, decorations, and, with luck, even personal recognition from the führer. And, perhaps most important, if his performance in this key post managed to sufficiently please his superiors in both Dachau and Berlin, he’d be able to avoid returning to a vastly less comfortable life working in one of the death camps or, far worse, actual front-line combat duty.

Though a brutal thug by both nature and training, Wimmer understood that his success as commandant of Schloss Itter would result in large part from his ability to treat his important prisoners with a level of “correctness” that was wholly outside his realm of experience. Because the führer might have future plans for the VIP captives—perhaps handing them over to the Allies as part of some political accommodation or even releasing them as a gesture of magnanimity after Germany’s ultimate victory—Wimmer would have to do his best to keep them healthy and secure. And though he was certainly not the most intelligent man in the SS, even Wimmer understood that a German victory was not guaranteed: the Fatherland had already suffered a string of battlefield reversals, and Allied aircraft were turning the nation’s industrial centers into smoking rubble with almost monotonous regularity. Wimmer realized very clearly that should Germany lose the war, having a few French VIPs testify that he treated them well might be the only thing that would save him from an Allied firing squad.

Attempting to strike a balance between correctness and the proper level of stern aloofness he felt his position required, Wimmer nodded to Daladier, Gamelin, and Jouhaux as they walked toward him after alighting from the staff car that had brought them to Itter, but he did not attempt to shake their hands. Flanked by members of the castle’s SS guard detachment, the three Frenchmen followed Wimmer through the arched portal in the center of the schlosshof and across the large enclosed terrace that led to the vaulted entrance [83] 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. to the castle’s main hall. Stefan Otto of the SD was waiting, and, as Wimmer looked on, the younger officer assigned each of the Frenchmen a room—Otto was careful not to use the word “cell”—Jouhaux in number 9 on the second floor, and Gamelin and Daladier in numbers 10 and 11, respectively, on the third floor. [84] 37. Room assignments would change several times as new “guests” arrived. See Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 57–59.

Otto then solemnly read the new arrivals the decidedly relaxed rules of their captivity. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner would be served in the ground-floor dining hall, and they could take the meals back to their rooms if they chose or, in good weather, eat at tables on the adjoining terrace. Each man would receive a hundred liters of wine per month, as well as a monthly allowance of 500 Reichsmarks with which to purchase tobacco, writing paper, pens, and other sundries from a small kiosk tucked beneath the stairs on the ground floor. The prisoners would be able to send mail to, and receive it from, members of their immediate families, though all mail would, of course, be censored. The men would have free access to the castle’s library and would even be permitted to listen to the large radio that graced the main hall—though the device was tuned exclusively to Radio Berlin. And, finally, each man could exercise in the large courtyard to the rear of the castle, which encompassed a thirteenth-century garden and fountain, in the morning and afternoon.

Lest the three Frenchmen somehow forget that they were indeed prisoners, Otto then spelled out a few harder facts. They were under the absolute control of the Third Reich and would obey the orders of Commandant Wimmer immediately and without question or argument. The men would each be locked into their rooms from eleven at night until seven in the morning. They would not be permitted to leave the castle without an SS escort, and, if discovered outside the schloss alone at any time, they would be considered escapees and could be shot on sight.

With the reading of the regulations completed, the Frenchmen were escorted to their rooms and locked in so that Wimmer could gather all his troops in the 150-foot-by-100-foot rear courtyard. He wanted to make a brief but pointed announcement, one probably largely intended to ensure that none of the SS men inadvertently violated the correctness Wimmer hoped would either be good for his career or save his neck:

The three people who have just arrived to be imprisoned in the castle are French. They will be joined by others. By command of the führer, these prisoners are to be viewed as hostages. Upon meeting one of them you should salute them with a regular military salute, and not with the führer salute. If one of these gentlemen should attempt to speak to you, your response should be the following: “Your Excellence, would you please speak to Commandant Wimmer?” Understood? [85] 38. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 14.

The ground rules firmly established, the guards and their prisoners began settling into a daily routine. For the former this revolved around the usual on- and off-duty periods, interspersed with the occasional recreational foray into Itter or Wörgl. For the latter, the days were primarily built around mealtimes—breakfast at eight, lunch at two, and dinner at seven. The food—prepared by the guard detachment’s supply sergeant, Oschbald, and two junior soldiers—was plain but plentiful and was the same as that served to the SS troops. Between meals the three Frenchmen passed the time reading, talking, or walking around the inner courtyard. After dinner the men would share a cognac—from a bottle presented to them by Wimmer in a transparent attempt to curry favor—and some conversation; then each would repair to his own room to work on the notes and journals intended to form the basis for their exculpatory postwar memoirs.

But Schloss Itter had not been converted into a high-security prison in order to house just Daladier, Gamelin, and Jouhaux. The bureaucrats at Dachau intended to fill as many of the cells as possible, and over time the Tyrolean castle welcomed an additional fifteen “honor” prisoners, each with his or her own story.

We can only imagine the depth of Édouard Daladier’s dismay when, just ten days after his own arrival at Schloss Itter, one of his most bitter political enemies literally turned up on his doorstep. He would soon find that Paul Reynaud’s journey to the fortress in Tyrol had in some ways been even more difficult that his own.

Right up until his June 16, 1940, resignation as prime minister following the success of Germany’s attack on France, Reynaud had been following a carefully charted path to the pinnacle of French politics. Born in southeast France in 1878, he’d studied law expressly to prepare himself for a life in politics. His plans were only temporarily interrupted by World War I, in which he saw army service. In 1919 he won election to the Chamber of Deputies, where he aligned himself with the center-right Democratic Alliance Party. Reynaud held several cabinet posts under various premiers, and in April 1938 he became Daladier’s minister of justice. When the latter resigned on March 19, 1940, Reynaud became premier.