Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

Even as the majority of Austrians welcomed incoming German units with cheers and flowers, widespread arrests were already underway of those whose politics, religion, or ethnicity was deemed unacceptable. Himmler needed places to put the masses of new prisoners until they could be moved to established prisons and concentrations camps in Germany, [21] Ultimately, many Austrians arrested by the Nazis would be imprisoned—and many would perish—in concentration and labor camps established within Austria itself, including the infamous Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex near Linz, some 120 miles northeast of Schloss Itter. and it is entirely possible that Castle Itter’s robust construction and relatively remote location attracted the attention of the notoriously secretive reichsführer. His attention must have wandered, however, for it wasn’t until early 1940 that the German government leased the castle from Dr. Franz Grüner for unspecified official use.

The exact nature of that use remains unclear for the first two years following the signing of the lease agreement, though some sources indicate that the castle may have been used as an initial detention and interrogation site for high-value prisoners marked for deportation to Germany. We do know for certain that in early 1942 the castle was designated as the Ostmark headquarters for the German Alliance for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco. [22] The German name is Deutscher Bund zur Bekämpfung der Tabakgefahren. For a fascinating discussion of the Nazis’ antismoking activities, see Bachinger, McKee, and Gilmore, “Tobacco Policies in Nazi Germany.”

Despite its strangely ominous name, this Nazi-established and tax-funded organization was indeed dedicated to fighting tobacco use in “greater” Germany. While it might seem exceedingly odd that Adolf Hitler and his minions would be morally opposed to anything, the führer was widely known to abhor smoking. He believed the habit eroded public morals and undermined the health and effectiveness of military personnel. His attitude was by no means outside the mainstream; despite, or perhaps because of, its citizens’ widespread tobacco use, Germany had since the mid-nineteenth century been a leader in researching the medical dangers of smoking. Under Nazi control, the Alliance for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco undertook its mission primarily by issuing pamphlets and press releases outlining the health risks associated with smoking, and the regional headquarters established at Schloss Itter was responsible for disseminating those products throughout the former Austria.

As important as the antismoking crusade might have been to Hitler, however, Himmler never lost his initial interest in using Schloss Itter for more nefarious purposes. On November 23, 1942, he got Hitler to sign an order directing SS-Lieutenant General Oswald Pohl, who as director of the SS Main Economic Administration Department (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshaupamt) was in charge of administering the concentration-camp system, [23] For his part in the horrors of the Nazis’ Final Solution, Pohl was charged by the Allies with crimes against humanity and a staggering array of war crimes. Found guilty, he was hanged on June 7, 1951. to begin the process of acquiring the castle outright for “special SS use.” Himmler intended to convert Schloss Itter into a detention facility for ehrenhäftlinge , “honor prisoners” whom the Germans considered famous enough, powerful enough, or potentially valuable enough to be kept alive and in relatively decent conditions.

On February 7, 1943, members of Pohl’s staff officially requisitioned the castle and all its outbuildings on Himmler’s direct orders, abruptly terminating the lease arrangement that had provided Grüner with a respectable income for the previous three years. Officially referred to as an evacuation camp ( Evakuierungslager ), the castle was put under the operational control of the regional concentration-camp command at Dachau, [24] Known as Konzentrationslager-Hauptlager, shortened in German to KZ-Hauptlager, Dachau was located about ten miles northwest of Munich and established in March 1933 as the first regular Nazi concentration camp. It was the administrative and operational model for all subsequent camps, both within and outside Germany. some ninety miles to the northwest. As one of that sprawling camp’s 197 satellite facilities in southern Germany and northern Austria, Schloss Itter was to draw its funding, guard force, and support services directly from its soon-to-be-infamous parent facility.

The castle’s transformation from an antismoking administrative center into a high-security facility for honor prisoners began immediately following its requisitioning. Plans for the conversion were apparently overseen by no less a personage than architect Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, [25] Koop, In Hitler’s Hand , 32. with the actual construction supervised by SS-Second Lieutenant Petz. [26] Sources vary on whether this officer’s name was Petz or Peez, and in his handwritten postwar memoir, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter” (in the archive collection of the KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau), Zvonimir Čučković refers to him as the latter. While the names would sound very similar to a nonnative German speaker like Čučković, the spelling “Petz” would be the more common German usage, and I have chosen to favor it. A member of Dachau’s facilities branch, he arrived at Itter on February 8 with twenty-seven prisoners—twelve from Dachau and fifteen from Flossenbürg [27] Sited about 112 miles northeast of Dachau, hard on the Czech border, Flossenbürg was opened in 1938. It initially held common criminals and Jews but ultimately housed political prisoners and Soviet POWs. Its inmates were used as slave laborers in nearby granite quarries. —all of whom had before their arrests been carpenters, plumbers, and the like. [28] Details on the conversion are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter” and Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 8–10. Petz also took along some ten members of Dachau’s SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) unit [29] The SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), or “Death’s Head Units,” administered the concentration-camp system. to act as a security detail during the conversion work; they would be replaced by permanent guards once the castle’s transformation was completed.

The first order of business for Petz and his slave laborers was to pack up most of Schloss Itter’s remaining quality furnishings and artworks, a task that was carried out under the watchful eye of the owner. We don’t know how Grüner felt about the outright expropriation of his castle and the cessation of the lucrative lease that had been in force for the previous three years, but we do know that for the official handover of the structure to Petz, Grüner wore a Nazi Party membership pin in his lapel. Once the furnishings and art had been crated, Petz ordered his prisoner-workers to begin dismantling the altar, consecrated by Pope Pius VI, in the schloss’s small chapel. He also ordered the removal of the Gothic crucifix and all other Christian symbols; this may have been out of an excess of Nazi zeal on his part, or it may have been to deny the castle’s future prisoners any chance of spiritual succor. Once the chapel had been stripped, its accoutrements were crated and joined the furnishings and artworks on trucks bound for a Salzburg warehouse owned by Grüner.

With the decks cleared, Petz was ready to put his prisoners to work on the castle’s conversion. As was common in the concentration-camp system, the SS officer usually did not interact with the workers directly; he passed on his orders through a prisoner-functionary known as a kapo, a title with essentially the same meaning as the American prison term “trusty.” Though prisoners themselves, kapos often received better treatment than those they oversaw, and many were notoriously brutal to their fellow inmates in an attempt to curry even greater favor with their SS overlords. Fortunately for the prisoners on the Schloss Itter work party, their appointed kapo, a German political prisoner named Franz Fiedler, [30] Thanks to Čučković’s memoirs, we know that twenty-two of the twenty-seven members of the work detail were political prisoners, four were classed as “common criminals,” and one was an “asocial,” a term the Nazis used to refer to such groups as homosexuals and the mentally ill. We also know that the prisoner work detail included five Germans, eight Austrians, a Yugoslav, a Czech, seven Russians, and five Poles. was by all accounts a decent man who did all he could to shield his charges from the worst of Petz’s frequent rages.