Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

32. The agency charged with conducting intelligence-gathering operations outside the United Kingdom, often referred to as MI6.

33. Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE , 269.

34. There is some confusion in the historical record about the exact date of Jouhaux’s arrest, with some sources mentioning Nov. 12. However, since Jouhaux’s secretary and eventual wife, Augusta, believes it was Nov. 26, I have chosen to use that date.

35. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 11.

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.

37. Room assignments would change several times as new “guests” arrived. See Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 57–59.

38. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 14.

1. As mentioned in the notes to chapter 2, de Portes had been Reynaud’s openly acknowledged mistress for several years, despite his continuing marriage to Jeanne Henri-Robert Reynaud. Often portrayed as the evil genius who controlled Reynaud—and thus, his government—from behind the scenes, de Portes’s actual influence over events during the months of Reynaud’s premiership is both open to debate and outside the scope of this volume. For a fascinating discussion of the countess’s relationship with Reynaud and influence on French politics, see Gates, The End of the Affair .

2. The first concentration camp in Oranienburg was established in 1933 and bore the name of the town but was subsequently closed and replaced by the nearby—and vastly larger—Sachsenhausen complex. In his memoirs, Reynaud refers to the camp by its earlier name.

3. Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight , 652. Though nearly seven hundred pages long, Reynaud’s memoir devotes just four pages to his time at Schloss Itter. He covers that period in exhaustive detail, however, in his Carnets de captivité, 1941–1945 .

4. Details on Borotra’s life are drawn from Smyth, Jean Borotra, the Bounding Basque .

5. Ibid., 103–104.

6. Ibid., 113–115.

7. Ibid., 124.

8. Ibid., 144.

9. Reynaud, Carnets de captivité , 272–273. See also Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight , 651.

10. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 27.

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.

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.

13. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 15.

14. Daladier, Prison Journal , 211–212.

15. As Barnett Singer points out in Maxime Weygand , most historians agree that Weygand was the unintended product of an affair between Belgian Lt. Col. Alfred van der Smissen and Melanie Zichy Ferraris, daughter of Austrian foreign minister and chancellor Klemens von Metternich. Singer also believes that Weygand was actually born in 1865, though I have chosen to use the more widely accepted 1867 date.

16. Daladier, Prison Journal , 252.

17. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 30.

18. Literally the Second Bureau, the organization tracked the strength, capability, and disposition of potential enemies, while the Premier (First) Bureau compiled the same information for French and allied forces.

19. Reynaud, Carnets de captivité , 269.

20. Jacques Nobécourt, author of Le colonel de La Rocque , published by Librairie Artheme Fayard in 1996.

21. Ibid., 193.

22. He used the term in his 1941 volume Disciplines d’Action , 12.

23. Nobécourt, Le colonel de La Rocque , 777.

24. Notably Jacques Nobécourt.

25. This description was offered by her son, Pierre Cailliau, in his introduction to her 1970 memoir, Souvenirs personnels , 12.

26. Ibid., 41–42.

27. Denys was plagued by ill-health throughout his life and, sadly, died of meningitis at the age of twenty-two.

28. Koop, In Hitler’s Hand , 44–45. Most of the VIPs held at the hotel were high-ranking French military officers.

29. Cailliau de Gaulle, Souvenirs personnels , 94–95.

30. Belgian-born Alfred Cailliau had become a French citizen after he and Marie-Agnès moved to the Le Havre area after World War I.

31. Reynaud, Carnets de captivité , 312.

32. The former prime minister’s penchant for taking off his clothes whenever the weather was warm enough is mentioned in the memoirs of both Reynaud and Augusta Léon-Jouhaux. Daladier himself, however, makes no mention of his nudism in his own memoir.

33. Some sources render the cook’s last name as “Korbart” or “Krobet,” but Zvonimir Čučković—who shared a room with him for almost two years and presumably knew best—gives the man’s name as Krobot, so I have chosen to use that spelling. Čučković also says Krobot was transferred to Itter from Dachau in August 1943.

34. Sadly, we know the full names of only two of these unfortunates: Gertrud Seibold and Gisela Sinneck-Barta. For the others, we have only first names: Sofia, Ommi, Luci, Maria, Josefa, and Olma. While Krobot and Čučković shared a room in the castle’s main building, the female inmate-servants slept on straw scattered over the floor of the schlosshof’s cramped upper level.

35. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 10.

36. Ibid. Daladier mentions the radio several times in Prison Journal , as does Augusta Léon-Jouhaux in Prison pour hommes d’Etat . Both indicate that it was capable of picking up stations as far afield as North Africa, the Soviet Union, and, when atmospheric conditions were right, even North America.