Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

On May 29 Bruchlen was summoned to Gestapo headquarters in Paris and informed that she could join Jouhaux—on one condition. She would have to agree, in writing, to accept indefinite imprisonment without privileges and to absolve Vichy and Germany of responsibility for any harm that might befall her while incarcerated. Having signed the documents, she was told to be at Paris’s Gare du Nord on June 17. Two days later she was in a Gestapo car driving up the Itterstrasse, and when the castle came into view, Bruchlen felt a tremor of foreboding: the schloss looked to her like something from a Gothic horror story. Her outlook improved considerably, however, when the car pulled into the front courtyard and she saw Jouhaux, a smile on his face and a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

While Augusta Bruchlen’s arrival at Itter was an answered prayer for both her and Léon Jouhaux, it was a call to action for Paul Reynaud. Soon after he was transferred to Sachsenhausen, he’d learned that Christiane Mabire had been arrested. Bruchlen’s appearance emboldened Reynaud to demand that Wimmer find out if Mabire was still alive and, if so, have the young woman transferred to Itter. As Wimmer discerned, Reynaud’s concern for Mabire’s welfare was more than simple humanity.

Christiane Dolorès Mabire was born in Paris on February 17, 1913, to an upper-middle-class family. She received an excellent education and grew into what one observer called a “remarkably elegant” young woman, a “tall, slender girl with the hands and feet of a thoroughbred, a narrow face and aquiline nose” who “dressed with unusual care and good taste.” [96] 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. She was also intelligent and fluent in English. Reynaud appreciated all of the young woman’s qualities when Mabire was introduced to him by his daughter, Colette, soon after he became prime minister. Indeed, so impressed was Reynaud that he hired the then twenty-seven-year-old Mabire as his secretary despite the opposition of the thirty-eight-year-old countess Hélène de Portes.

Mabire was among the staffers who accompanied Reynaud to Tours and then Bordeaux when the French government left Paris. But when the former prime minister suggested to de Portes that his secretary accompany them to the Mediterranean coast—in order to help him begin work on a book about France’s defeat, he said—the countess refused to allow it. That refusal probably saved Mabire’s life, since she was not in Reynaud’s car when it struck the tree that injured him and killed de Portes.

Though Mabire was unable to see Reynaud in Montpellier, she and Dernis visited him in Le Portalet prison. While Mabire’s presence was often in a professional capacity, it is clear from his diary entries that Reynaud was delighted every time she appeared. Those appearances increased considerably after Mabire took a room at a hotel in a nearby town, where she lived for most of the year that Reynaud spent in Le Portalet. Mabire’s visits eased the discomfort of Reynaud’s imprisonment, and the friendship between the former prime minister and his secretary evolved into something deeper, despite the thirty-five-year age difference.

Mabire was understandably alarmed when she arrived at Le Portalet on November 21, 1942, only to be told that Reynaud had been transferred the night before. The authorities would not tell her where he’d been taken, and she was herself arrested by Gestapo agents on November 22. Three days later Mabire arrived at Fresnes Prison. Immediately upon her arrival she was locked into a bare room and left alone for several hours.

After a brief interrogation Mabire was moved to a cell and remained in solitary confinement until December 10, when she was transported to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women some fifty miles north of Berlin, where she was to spend nearly six months. The young Frenchwoman was assigned the cover name Frau Müller and confined, alone, in a cell block for high-value prisoners. Since she did not read or speak German and was not allowed to interact with other prisoners, her isolation was nearly complete.

Until, that is, the day when she was taking her usual fifteen minutes of exercise in the cell block’s small courtyard. Lost in thought, she was startled by a woman’s whispered voice calling “Madame!” in slightly accented French. The greeting came from another prisoner, the Polish countess Karolina Lanckoronska, speaking through the bars of her cell window. Lanckoronska had caught sight of Mabire and knew from her bearing that she must be French. A guard’s inattentiveness allowed the women a few moments together two days after their first contact. They “chattered away” in French, said Lanckoronska, and over the following weeks the Polish countess and the elegant Parisienne quickly became close friends.

That friendship was interrupted, however, during the last weeks of June 1943, when Wimmer arranged to have Frau Müller transferred to his custody. It was not an act of kindness, of course, for the SS-TV officer believed that having a former prime minister of France indebted to him might pay some future dividend.

Wimmer’s intervention had an immediate effect on Christiane Mabire’s life. On the last day of June two SS-TV men drove her south into Austria, and during the trip Mabire became convinced that Reynaud was responsible for her departure from Ravensbrück. As the miles passed she allowed herself to hope that she might be reunited with the man who had come to mean so much to her.

When that reunion occurred, just before noon on July 2, [97] 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. Reynaud warmly embraced the gaunt but laughing Mabire as she stepped from the staff car, kissed her on both cheeks, and led her by the hand toward the castle’s main entrance. Though still incarcerated, the elderly politician and his young companion could now face the uncertain future together.

Barely an hour after Mabire’s arrival a second car rolled into the castle’s front courtyard bearing another “special prisoner.” Bruchlen, Jouhaux, Gamelin, and Borotra drifted down through the schlosshof’s arched gateway to see who their new companion might be. Though none of them recognized the man, they were all struck by his attire: riding breeches, knee-high leather boots, a cotton shirt with a North African motif, and—much to Borotra’s delight—a Basque beret set at a jaunty angle. [98] 13. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 15. Later, at lunch, the man introduced himself as Marcel Granger and then told his listeners how his brother’s wife had saved him from death in Dachau.

Born in Toulon in 1901, Granger settled in French Tunisia and established a successful agricultural estate. He was a reserve officer in the French colonial forces, and upon the 1939 outbreak of war he’d been mobilized. He remained on duty after the French capitulation and Vichy’s takeover of Tunisia, but by December 1940 he had joined a resistance cell. Granger’s fluency in Arabic and his knowledge of the country and its people made him an ideal intelligence agent, and he was put in charge of establishing secret arms dumps to support Allied forces should they invade Tunisia.

The Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 seemed to indicate that Granger’s hard work was about to come to fruition, but the Germans’ decision to funnel reinforcements through Tunisia’s ports and airfields made a swift Allied liberation unlikely. The infusion of Wehrmacht troops—and the increased vigilance of the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary anti-resistance force—further complicated Granger’s task. In early April 1943 he was captured by Milice troops and handed over to the Gestapo. Within days he’d entered the living hell of Dachau.