Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

One source of those outbursts was the fact that Petz was under intense pressure from his superiors at Dachau to finish the work at Schloss Itter as quickly as possible. The SS officer knew that any delay could well mean his immediate reassignment to some location vastly more dangerous than the Austrian Tyrol, so his anxiety level was in all probability intense from the start. He thus wasted no time in putting his prisoners to work on the castle’s transformation, and he directed them to start at basement level and work their way up.

Schloss Itter’s cellars were extensive and, as might be expected, both cold and damp. This was not necessarily a disadvantage, however, because none of the existing five large rooms in the basement area were intended for use as living spaces. The two driest were converted into bulk food-storage areas—one for fruit and the other for potatoes and other vegetables—while the other three became, respectively, carpentry, plumbing, and electrical workshops. The stone staircase leading up to the ground floor was repaired and fitted with a handrail, and the already stout door leading into the cellar was reinforced and fitted with intricate double locks.

The ten rooms converted on the ground floor were largely given over to living and working areas for the SS-TV troops who would ultimately form the castle’s permanent guard force. Using lumber trucked in from SS supply depots in Bavaria, the inmate-artisans constructed a dormitory meant to house up to thirty-five troops: a facility boasting individual lockers for each soldier, an arms room with a stout door secured with multiple locks, latrines with toilets and showers, and a kitchen with sinks, stoves, and pantry. Sophie Menter’s delightful music room was divided in half; one side was turned into a day room for the enlisted troops and the other into an orderly room that would be the domain of the guard detachment’s senior noncommissioned officer.

The prisoner-workers then set about converting the first floor’s [31] In European usage, “first floor” is the floor above the ground floor— thus in fact “second floor” in American usage. existing nine rooms. Two were fitted out as offices for the future commander of the permanent SS-TV detachment and his executive officer; a third was made into a small, private lounge for the two officers; a fourth was a latrine; and the remaining five became the first of an eventual nineteen cells for the VIP prisoners soon to be incarcerated at Schloss Itter.

Because the prisoner accommodations were intended to house personages of great value to the Reich, they were decidedly more comfortable than the cells most of the Nazis’ captives were forced to inhabit. The schloss’s VIP cells—1 through 5 on the first floor, 6 through 9 on the second, and 10 through 19 on the third—were based on the existing guest rooms, and each was intended to house no more than two prisoners. Exterior bars were fitted over the windows in any room that had them, and the door of each room was fitted with two stout exterior locks. In anticipation of the possible need to completely isolate certain prisoners, about half of the room-cells had rudimentary sinks and toilets.

Conditions were far better in the fourth-floor suite to be occupied by the man picked to command the SS troops assigned to the castle. That officer—and his spouse, should he be accompanied—would enjoy an exquisitely furnished living room, bedroom, private kitchen, and dining room. In addition to the usual amenities, the commander’s suite also boasted a telephone system that would enable him to speak directly with the regional command authorities in Dachau and, in case he needed immediate military assistance, with the commandant of the Wehrmacht’s Mountain Warfare Noncommissioned Officer School in nearby Wörgl. [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.

Once finished with the conversion of the castle’s main building, the prisoner-workers moved on to the structure known as the schlosshof, a freestanding second gatehouse some fifty feet behind the smaller first structure and separated from it by a triangular enclosed courtyard used as a parking area. Built of the same stone used for the castle, the schlosshof was pierced in the center by an arched entryway whose steps led up to a walled terrace and the main building. In addition to the entryway, the schlosshof housed a garage, a stable, and a storage area for gardening and landscaping equipment and supplies. The slave laborers—who slept in the building’s cramped upper floor at the end of each long, hard workday—added a small medical clinic, consisting of a waiting room, an examination room, an office for an enlisted medic, and a rudimentary dental office.

The final task Petz assigned to his prisoner-workers was to install those systems that would make the castle escape-proof. Because Schloss Itter already had massive walls, steep-sided ravines on its west, north, and east sides, and what was essentially a dry moat on its south side, it required only the addition of strategically placed tangles of concertina wire and a large, intricate lock on the front gate. To further discourage any freedom-minded prisoner, Petz had some of his SS-TV men install floodlights around the inside perimeter of the main wall. The troops also constructed three small, wooden-sided positions for MG-42 machine guns overlooking the castle’s front and rear courtyards.

Schloss Itter’s conversion into a VIP detention facility was essentially completed on April 25, 1943, though final modifications to the castle’s electrical system had not been finished by the date Petz’s original orders directed him to return to Dachau with his prisoner-workers and their guards. Not wanting to delay his departure—and, we can assume, anxious not to thereby incur the wrath of his superiors—Petz took his prisoner-workers and most of their guards back to Dachau but ordered the inmate who’d been overseeing the electrical work to stay behind and finish the job, with two SS-TV men as overseers. [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.

While the names of the two guards are lost to history, we do know the identity of the prisoner-electrician—a man destined to play an important role in later events at Schloss Itter. He was thirty-six-year-old Zvonimir “Zvonko” Čučković [34] Details on Čučković’s life both before and during the war are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter.” (pronounced Kook-o-vich), a Roman Catholic and native of Sisak, Croatia, who before the April 1941 German invasion of Yugoslavia had been an electrical technician living in Belgrade with his wife, Ema, and son, also named Zvonimir. [35] Ema Čučković, neé Freyberg, was born in 1910 in Nordhausen, Germany. Čučković’s son was born in Yugoslavia in 1933. Following his nation’s capitulation, Čučković joined the anti-German resistance but was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941. After spending time in prisons in Belgrade, Graz, Vienna, and Salzburg, he was transferred to Dachau on September 26, 1942.

Though initially destined for liquidation, Čučković was saved from death when during his arrival interrogation he stressed—in accented but fluent German—that his background as an electrical technician might allow him to be of some service to his captors. They agreed, and he was allotted to Petz’s camp-maintenance crew. From November 1942 to February 1943 Čučković was assigned to an external work detail at Traunstein, a Dachau subcamp some fifty miles southeast of Munich, but he was returned to Dachau specifically to join Petz’s expedition to Schloss Itter. There, he and an Austrian prisoner named Karl Horeis were responsible for upgrading the castle’s entire electrical system, as well as for various other tasks. Petz’s decision to allow the Croat to remain behind when the rest of the slave laborers were returned to Dachau was a testament to Čučković’s skill; ultimately, it would also save his life.