Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

HOWEVER WIMMER’S ASSIGNMENT as commandant of Schloss Itter came about, we know (from Zvonimir Čučković’s meticulous notes) that he arrived at the castle on the morning of Wednesday, April 28, 1943. His deputy, Stefan Otto of the SD, and the members of the permanent guard force had reached the castle two days earlier and were drawn up at attention in the small courtyard just inside the front gate. Wimmer and his wife had been driven down from Dachau in an open-top Opel staff car, which pulled up in front of the assembled guard troops, followed by a small truck whose cargo bay was packed with suitcases, boxes, and small pieces of furniture. The staff car’s enlisted SS driver leapt out and dashed around to open the car’s right-side door; Wimmer stepped down, his eyes scanning the soldiers before him.

Discreetly watching the scene through a closed window on the second floor of the schlosshof, Čučković could not hear what Wimmer then said to the gathered SS men. But from the officer’s gestures and the grim looks on the faces of the troops, the Croat assumed the brief address concerned the need for discipline and the certainty of punishment should Wimmer in any way find that discipline to be lacking. Having finished speaking, the SS-TV officer undertook a brief inspection of the men, Otto trailing at his side, and then barked an order that sent the soldiers rushing to the rear of the truck to begin unloading what were apparently the Wimmers’ luggage and personal effects. After waiting a moment to ensure his goods were being handled with the proper respect, the new commandant of Schloss Itter strode purposefully toward the castle’s main entrance, his wife hurrying to keep up.

Wimmer’s urgency stemmed from the fact that he had just days to ensure that Schloss Itter was ready to receive its first prisoners. While he had not yet been told exactly who those notables would be, he knew that their value to the Reich—as either hostages or pawns in complex diplomatic maneuverings of which he had no knowledge and in which he most probably had absolutely no interest—would require that they be kept alive and well. He also undoubtedly understood that he would be held personally responsible for any harm that came to any of his VIP captives, a situation we might assume caused a fairly high level of anxiety in a man who had thus far spent his SS career humiliating, brutalizing, and murdering the prisoners put in his charge.

In the days immediately following Wimmer’s arrival at Schloss Itter, Čučković noted that the new commandant kept his troops hopping with surprise inspections and practice alerts. During the latter the SS guards responded to mock prisoner escapes—announced by the blaring of a klaxon fixed to the roof of the castle’s gatehouse—primarily by manning the MG-42 machine guns overlooking the courtyards. Čučković noted dryly that the guards didn’t seem to realize that an escaped prisoner would be on the outside of the walls, headed for the cover of the nearby forests, rather than hanging about inside the castle waiting to be shot.

Čučković watched the Germans’ preparations carefully, recording his observations in a small notebook that he had managed to steal from the SS guardroom and kept hidden behind a loose board in the schlosshof. He had to be extremely careful, of course, since he was still the only prisoner in a castle full of SS troops, but he hoped that his notes would someday prove useful in some way to the Allied cause.

And then, on the morning of Sunday, May 2, 1943, two Mercedes staff cars flying SS pennants from their fenders rolled through Schloss Itter’s main gate and into the small triangular courtyard just behind it. From his vantage point in the schlosshof Čučković watched Wimmer rush out to meet the vehicles; the Croat was trying to get a better look at the first car’s uniformed occupants when he saw three men alight from the second vehicle. Though the men were all dressed in drab and threadbare civilian suits, they seemed somehow familiar to Čučković. With a shock of recognition, he realized that the first VIP prisoners had arrived, and Schloss Itter was now officially open for business.

ZVONKO ČUČKOVIĆ’S SHOCK on seeing the three men step from the Mercedes staff car in Schloss Itter’s lower front courtyard that May day was understandable. Though the Croat had been incarcerated in one German prison or another for sixteen months, he easily recognized the newly arrived prisoners—Édouard Daladier, General Maurice Gamelin, and Léon Jouhaux—because their faces had regularly appeared on the front pages of newspapers across Europe even before the 1939 outbreak of war.

The fact that he was now seeing three of the most influential men in prewar France in the hands of the SS was somehow even more disturbing than his own initial arrest had been. [48] 1. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 25. And while Čučković did not know the details of how the men had come to be prisoners, he was certain that their journey from the various halls of power in Paris to the decidedly colder and less hospitable halls of Schloss Itter had not been an easy one.

AT SIXTY-ONE, THE STOCKY, barrel-chested, and pugnacious Édouard Daladier was the youngest of the newly arrived prisoner trio. Arguably one of France’s most important and prominent politicians in the years between the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second, he’d been born in 1884, the son of a baker. Intelligent and ambitious, he’d first worked as a history teacher and then made the leap into politics in 1912, when at the age of twenty-eight he won his first elected office: mayor of his hometown of Carpentras, near Avignon, in the Vaucluse department of France’s Mediterranean southeast. His political rise was interrupted by World War I, during which he saw four years of brutal trench warfare, first as an enlisted soldier and then as a decorated officer. [49] 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.

Following the armistice Daladier had returned to politics, serving in a series of increasingly important positions in the left-leaning Radical Socialist Party. He’d been named the organization’s leader in 1927 and served in several interwar governments as a minister responsible for, among other things, the foreign affairs and defense portfolios. In the latter position he pressed for the reform and modernization of the French army, an effort he continued when he was first named premier in January 1933; his government lasted just nine months, however, and was swept from power when it proved incapable of forming a coherent policy to deal with the continuing effects of the Great Depression. Daladier’s second stint as premier, which began on January 30, 1934, lasted less than two weeks because his overly firm response on February 6 to widespread antiparliamentarist riots in Paris organized and led by right-wing groups resulted in sixteen deaths and thousands of injuries. [50] 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.