Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

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

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.

See Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction , 40–42.

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.

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

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.