CHAPTER ONE
1. Some sources date the earliest parts of the castle to 902. Most of the information regarding Schloss Itter’s early history is drawn from “Die Geschichte von Itter,” a pamphlet produced by Austria’s Hohe-Salve Regional Tourist Board, and Castle Hotels of Europe, by Robert P. Long.
2. Reigned 893–930.
3. A palatinate was a territory administered on behalf of a king or emperor by a count. In the Holy Roman Empire, a count palatinate was known in German as a pfalzgraf.
4. Initially a collection of small huts and workshops used by the craftsmen who built the castle, the village of Itter evolved into a community built around the staffing and maintenance of the fortress. In return for their labor, the villagers were offered protection within the schloss in times of civil strife.
5. Led by social and political reformer Michael Gaismayr, the revolt sought to replace the church-dominated feudal system with a republic. While successful in several military engagements against reactionary forces, Gaismayr and his followers were defeated at Radstadt in July 1526. Gaismayr fled to Venice and ultimately Padua, where on April 15, 1532, he was assassinated by Austrian agents.
6. See Augusta Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 23. As noted later in this volume, she was labor leader León Jouhaux’s secretary, companion, and future wife and was imprisoned with him at Itter from 1943 to 1945.
7. Until his coronation in 1806 the king had been styled Maximilian IV Josef, prince-elector of Bavaria.
8. Menter apparently purchased the castle using funds she’d earned on the concert circuit, though a brief article in the Nov. 25, 1885, edition of the New York Times (“Mme. Menter’s Good Fortune”) indicated that the purchase was largely financed by 400,000 rubles left to her in the will of an elderly Russian admirer.
9. Ibid.
10. Liszt, La Mara, and Bache, From Rome to the End, 377.
11. Menter returned to Germany after the castle’s sale and lived near Munich for the remainder of her life. She died on Feb. 23, 1918.
12. Widely referred to as the Wörgl Experiment, the effort was the brainchild of the town’s mayor, Michael Unterguggenberger. He sought to economically empower his town and the surrounding region by replacing standard currency with what’s known as “stamp scrip,” a local currency that would remain in use and in circulation rather than being hoarded by bankers. While the idea managed to revive the local Wörgl economy, it was terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.
13. This translates literally as “Eastern March,” a reference to Austria’s tenth-century status as a “march,” or buffer, between Bavaria and the Slavs.
14. For clarity’s sake, all French, Wehrmacht, and SS ranks in this book are expressed in their U.S. Army equivalents. Von Bock went on to play leading roles in the invasions of Poland, France, and Russia, and was killed on May 4, 1945, when a British fighter-bomber strafed his car.
15. An acronym for the full name of the dreaded Nazi secret police, the Geheime Staatspolizei.
16. See Richard Germann’s excellent essay “Austrian Soldiers and Generals in World War II,” in New Perspectives on Austrians and World War II, ed. Bischof, Plasser, and Stelzl-Marx, for a fascinating discussion of why Austrian soldiers so willingly donned Wehrmacht uniforms.
17. Ibid., 29.
18. Among the willing were Otto Skorzeny, the Waffen-SS commando leader who rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity in September 1943, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reich Main Security Office.
19. Those considered unreliable included between 30 and 50 percent of all officers in the Bundesheer, who were dismissed. All were closely watched by the Gestapo through the end of the war.
20. Luza, The Resistance in Austria, 14.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
25. Koop, In Hitler’s Hand, 32.
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.
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.
28. Details on the conversion are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter” and Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 8–10.
29. The SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), or “Death’s Head Units,” administered the concentration-camp system.
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.
31. In European usage, “first floor” is the floor above the ground floor— thus in fact “second floor” in American usage.
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.
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.
34. Details on Čučković’s life both before and during the war are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter.”
35. Ema Čučković, neé Freyberg, was born in 1910 in Nordhausen, Germany. Čučković’s son was born in Yugoslavia in 1933.
36. In his handwritten memoir, Čučković identifies thirteen of these men by name: SS-Sergeant First Class Oschbald; SS-Staff Sergeants Maschalek, Gilde, and Kunz; and SS-Corporals Euba, Jackl, Nowotny, Delus, Resner, Fischer, Bliesmer, Schulz, and Greiner.
37. Čučković identifies this woman as Rosel Harmske, “SS-Aufseherin [female auxiliary] aus Ravensbrück.” A second female SS member who occasionally worked at Schloss Itter and whom Čučković identifies only as “Kühn, SS-Aufseherin aus Ravensbrück,” may have been Anna Kühn. When she joined the SS at Ravensbrück in 1942, she was fifty-seven years old, making her the oldest known woman to have served in the SS concentration-camp system.
38. In German, SS-Sonderkommando. The word “commando,” in this sense, refers to the original South African Boer concept of a special-purpose unit, rather than an individual covert-operations soldier.
39. Upon joining the SS, Wimmer received the member number (mitgliedsnummer) 264374. Details of Wimmer’s service are drawn from his personnel file, SS Personalakten für Wimmer, Sebastian, SS-Hauptamt.
40. While he was not the brightest of recruits, Wimmer’s background as a police officer ensured (as it did for many of his former law-enforcement colleagues) an officer’s commission, rather than being relegated to the enlisted ranks.
41. When the SS took control of all of Germany’s concentration camps in 1934 and established the SS-TV, it organized that group into six named wachtruppen, or guard units. Wachtruppe Oberbayern (Upper Bavaria) was stationed at Dachau, and just before Wimmer joined it in 1935 the unit was enlarged and redesignated Wachsturmbann Oberbayern.
42. The other two were SS-Totenkopfstandarte 2 Brandenburg at Oranienburg concentration camp and SS-Totenkopfstandarte 3 Thüringen at Buchenwald. A fourth, SS-Totenkopfstandarte 4 Ostmark, was formed in Vienna following the 1938 Anschluss. More than ten additional SS-Totenkopfstandarten were formed during the course of World War II.
43. The other two Totenkopfstandarten, Brandenburg and Thüringen, were involved in identical activities.
44. 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.
45. See Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction, 40–42.
46. 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.
47. The 3rd SS Panzer Division is also often, and incorrectly, referred to as SS Division Totenkopf.
CHAPTER TWO
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.
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.
CHAPTER THREE
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.
37. Smyth, The Bounding Basque, 154–155.
38. Daladier, Prison Journal, 335.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. World War II Soviet “fronts” were roughly equivalent to army groups in the U.S. Army. Made up of multiple field armies, each of which comprised several corps, the 3rd Ukrainian Front by April 1945 totaled some one million men.
2. In U.S. usage, numbered armies are identified by words, not numerals.
3. Seventh Army was under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton, who relinquished command to Patch following the island’s seizure.
4. For more details on Eisenhower’s overall plan for Austria and southern Germany, see MacDonald, European Theater of Operations, 436–438.
5. Patton was promoted to full general on April 14, 1945. Devers gained four-star rank on March 8, 1945.
6. The individual units assigned to each of Seventh Army’s three corps— the other two being VI and XV—changed fairly frequently, with divisions being moved between corps as the tactical situation demanded.
7. Panzer-grenadier units combined tanks, truck-borne infantry, and artillery, antitank, and engineer elements.
8. Details on von Hengl’s mission, force, and activities are drawn from his 1946 monograph Kampf um die Alpenfestung Nord, prepared as part of the U.S.-government-produced Foreign Military Studies, 1945–1954.
9. Grossdeutschland was the German army’s premier combat division (and not, as widely believed, a Waffen-SS organization). Von Hengl’s belief that elements of the division were present in Tyrol at this point in the war may not be accurate, in that most official histories (both German and American) indicate that Grossdeutschland ended the war in northern Germany. Of course, it is entirely possible that some members of the division had been sent to Austria under circumstances that are no longer clear.
10. Kampf um die Alpenfestung Nord, 2–3.
11. OKW is usually translated as High Command of the Armed Forces, and Führungsstab B was one of two operational headquarters under OKW.
12. In the event, those few units of the two larger organizations that did manage to make it into Tyrol didn’t get far enough east to be of any real help to von Hengl.
13. Born in 1901, Hans Buchner was a highly regarded German-born gebirgsjäger officer. After World War II he joined the West German Bundeswehr, eventually rising to the rank of general. From 1956 to 1959 he commanded the Bundeswehr’s 1st Gebirgsjäger Division.
14. Giehl was the commandant of the Heeresunteroffiziersschule für Gebirgsjäger in Wörgl.
15. Also referred to in some records as “Reserve Division Innsbruck.”
16. The source of the Inn River is in Switzerland, and it flows northeastward through Tyrol and into Germany.
17. See note 9 above. If these troops were not from Grossdeutschland, it is likely they were drawn from various Wehrmacht units that had retreated into Austria from Bavaria.
18. Kampf um die Alpenfestung Nord, 2–3.
19. Details on the formation, organization, and operations of the Austrian resistance are drawn primarily from Luza, The Resistance in Austria, and the Austrian Federal Press Service’s Resistance and Persecution in Austria, 1938–1945.
20. In German, Provisorisches Österreichisches Nationalkomitee.
21. Established by presidential military order on June 13, 1942, the OSS was both an intelligence-collection and analysis agency and a covert-operations organization. Headed by World War I hero William J. Donovan, the OSS saw service in both the European and the Pacific theater.
22. “O5” was a clever rendering of the first letter of the German word for Austria, Österreich, which when typed without the umlaut is printed as “Oe.” Thus, the capital letter O followed by the number 5 (indicating the fifth letter of the alphabet, e) equals Ö for Austria. The symbol was created by a young Austrian medical student, Jörg Unterreiner. Resistance members would daub the symbol in paint on the sides of buildings, on streetcars, and, if they were particularly brave (or foolhardy), on the sides of German military vehicles.
23. For two especially engrossing accounts of OSS operations in Austria, see Schwab, OSS Agents in Hitler’s Heartland, and O’Donnell, The Brenner Assignment.
24. Luza, The Resistance in Austria, 245–246.
25. Between 1935 and 1937, for example, the German-born socialist Waldemar von Knoeringen (1906–1971) established small anti-Nazi cells in Wörgl and several nearby towns.
26. The Feb. 22 attack and one the following day were part of the 15th Air Force’s contribution to Operation Clarion, a joint U.S.-British effort to completely paralyze the Third Reich’s already much-degraded rail and communications networks by specifically targeting smaller cities and towns that might not have been heavily attacked thus far. Several thousand aircraft participated, flying from bases in France, England, and Italy. For details, see Craven and Cate, Europe, 731–732.
27. Personalakten für Gangl, Josef.
28. Biographical information for Gangl is drawn primarily from his personalakten and from data provided by the Stadtarchiv Ludwigsburg in Germany and the Tiroler Landesarchiv in Innsbruck, Austria.
29. While details about Sepp Gangl’s siblings are sketchy, it appears that he had at least two brothers and one sister.
30. I have been unable to determine the name or gender of their second child.
31. A play on the German term blitzkrieg or “lightning war,” sitzkrieg literally means “sitting war.”
32. Taus, now Domažlice, is in the Plzen Region of the Czech Republic.
33. “Combined-arms,” in this context, means a coordinated and integrated operation by mutually supportive armor, infantry, and artillery units backed by tactical aircraft.
34. Werfer means “thrower,” and nebelwerfer is literally translated as “fog thrower.” The term originally was used to describe single-barrel, cannon-like weapons used to fire smoke or gas shells.
35. And the numbers were even more impressive with larger werfer units. According to Rocket Projectors in the Eastern Theater, a postwar history written as part of the U.S. government’s Foreign Military Studies series, in ten seconds a werfer regiment could fire 324 rockets, and a brigade 648.
36. Formally designated 15cm Panzerwerfer 42 auf Selbstfahrlafette Sd.Kfz.4/1, the Opel-built Maultier weighed just over nine tons, carried between twenty and forty werfer rounds, and had a top speed on paved roads of about twenty-five miles per hour.
37. Organizational and equipment details drawn from Die Nebel-und Werfertruppe (Regimentsbögen), vol. 1, 322, as listed on the excellent German research site Lexikon der Wehrmacht.
38. The award—an eight-pointed star with a swastika in the center—was given in recognition of the recipient’s bravery and outstanding achievement in combat. Awardees had to have already received both the Iron Cross Second Class and First Class.
39. Paape had taken command of the brigade in late March. He wrote a fascinating postwar account of the unit’s final days, 7th Werfer Brigade, 24 March–30 April 1945, as part of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies series.
40. On March 10, 1945, Hitler had issued a “Führer Order” directing the creation of mobile courts-martial units whose task was to find and punish any member of the Wehrmacht or SS, regardless of rank, who was neglecting his duty. Negotiating with Allied forces or collaborating with local resistance organizations was grounds for immediate execution.
41. Named after Fritz Todt, the engineer and high-ranking Nazi who founded it, the Organization Todt (OT) was the Third Reich’s primary civil-and military-construction agency. In the prewar years OT constructed Germany’s autobahns and frontier fortifications, and after September 1939 it expanded into military construction throughout the Reich and the occupied territories. The organization used “compulsory” workers almost exclusively; initially these were German citizens unfit for military service, but, as the war progressed, the workforce was predominantly made up of slave laborers: prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration-camp inmates.
42. Details on the meeting are drawn from Resistance and Persecution in Austria, 1938–1945, 594–595.
43. Though Battle Group Forster was in reserve at Wörgl, the actual defense of the city and its environs had been made part of Giehl’s responsibility.
44. According to von Hengl’s postwar account, the initial American attack was followed by an intense artillery barrage aimed at the next town to the south, Oberaudorf, which was packed with refugees and from which all German military units had already withdrawn. Von Hengl called a brief truce, crossed the front lines under a white flag, and convinced the Americans not to shell any town in which German forces were not actually visible. His mission accomplished, the general crossed the front lines once again and resumed the fight.
45. The full text of the message, translated in Headquarters, 103d Infantry Division, Operations in Germany, Austria and Italy, May 1945, 4, read: “At the present juncture of the war, everything depends on a stubborn and inflexible determination to hold on at all costs. The display of white flags, the removal of an antitank barrier, desertion from the Volksturm or similar manifestations are offenses which must be ruthlessly punished. All male persons inhabiting a house showing a white flag will be shot. No hesitation in executing these orders can be permitted any longer. ‘Male persons’ who are to be considered responsible in this respect are those aged 14 years or over.”
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Prison Journal, 292.
2. Ibid., 294.
3. Ibid., 296.
4. Ibid., 283.
5. A fiery, 80-proof German brandy.
6. For example, in the summer of 1944 Čučković was able to repair a small electric motor that Wimmer intended to use in the farmhouse he and his wife were renovating (possibly as a postwar hideout) about 1.5 miles northeast of Schloss Itter. The SS-TV officer gave the Croat 30 Reichsmarks and allowed him to spend time with his wife, Ema, and son, Zvonimir, who had traveled down from the outskirts of Munich and were staying with a family in Itter village. For five nights Čučković was allowed to leave the castle by himself after dark but had to be back in each morning by six. See Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 40.
7. All three incidents are described in Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 39–41.
8. Daladier, Prison Journal, 317–318.
9. Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 653.
10. Even after the war the area around Schloss Itter continued to be a way station for former Nazis seeking to escape Allied justice. Among the most infamous was Adolf Eichmann, one of the primary organizers of the Holocaust. As part of his escape to Argentina in 1950, the former SS-TV officer crossed into Austria at Kufstein and, with the help of local sympathizers, made his way to Innsbruck. From there he crossed into Italy and then traveled on to South America. Abducted by Israeli agents in 1960, he was taken to Israel, tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and executed in 1962.
11. Daladier, Prison Journal, 336. Among those accompanying Weiter was his adjutant, whom Daladier described as “tall and fat, a real thug.”
12. Reynaud’s postwar account says May 1, but Weiter killed himself sometime between one AM and six AM on May 2. Nor was Weiter the only senior SS man to commit suicide in the vicinity of Schloss Itter. Just days after the Dachau commandant killed himself, SS-Major Hermann Müller-John, commander and bandmaster of the ninety-six-man orchestra of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler—the führer’s bodyguard regiment—killed his wife, his nineteen-year-old daughter, and himself in a farmhouse within a few miles of Itter. He apparently wished to avoid postwar prosecution for his involvement—and that of the band members he led—in the murder of some fifty Jews on the night of Sept. 18–19, 1939, in Blonie, Poland.
13. Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 653.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. The bulk of the information used in this volume concerning Schrader’s early life and wartime career is drawn from his ultimately unpublished postwar memoir, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse” (“Memories, Thoughts, Insights”), and from Schrader’s entry in John P. Moore’s excellent Signal Officers of the Waffen-SS.
17. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 5.
18. Known in German as the Reichsarbeitdienst, or R.A.D., the organization had been created in 1931 as the Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst (Voluntary Labor Service) as a way to provide work for Germany’s many unemployed people. Structured along military lines, it undertook civic construction projects. Following the Nazis’ assumption of power, service in the renamed R.A.D. was made compulsory for all German males between eighteen and twenty-five. Upon completion of that service young men entered the military for two years.
19. Schrader’s SS-number was 353 103.
20. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 16.
21. Ibid., 20.
22. The date usually observed for the official formation of the Waffen-SS as a distinctly military organization is August 1940.
23. Ibid., 28–29.
24. Ibid., 30.
25. Essentially the German equivalent of the U.S. jeep, the kübelwagen was an inexpensive, four-door convertible-top military utility vehicle designed by Ferdinand Porsche.
26. Ibid., 31.
27. Schrader takes pains to point out that it was a regular passenger train, not a military troop train.
28. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 36.
29. Čučković’s reference to “Mühltal” can be confusing, as there are several small villages by that name within twenty miles of Schloss Itter. The Wimmers’ farmhouse was actually in an area now known as Itter-Mühltal, just east of Niederau.
30. This exchange and the account of Čučković’s ride to Innsbruck are drawn from Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 51–53.
31. As commander of the 101st Airborne Division when it was encircled by the Germans at Bastogne, Belgium, in December 1944, McAuliffe famously responded to a demand for surrender with a one-word reply: “Nuts!”
32. This man was apparently part of the 103rd Infantry Division’s military-government section; unfortunately, his name is lost to history.
33. Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 654.
34. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 36.
35. This incident is recounted in Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 654.
36. Unfortunately, we have no first names for most of the soldiers who chose to join Sepp Gangl in protecting the people of Wörgl.
37. While the vast majority of German military personnel who surrendered to U.S. forces in Europe survived the process, it was certainly not unheard of for GIs to summarily execute prisoners—most notably in the days after the June 1944 Normandy landings and in the wake of the December 1944 Waffen-SS murder of eighty-four American POWs in Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. However, the Allied liberation of the Nazis’ concentration, extermination, and slave-labor camps led to a spike in the number of German prisoners—especially Waffen-SS and SS-TV members—killed while attempting to surrender or following surrender. On April 29, 1945, the day Dachau was liberated by elements of the U.S. 42nd and 45th Infantry divisions, between sixteen and approximately fifty of the camp’s SS-TV guards were killed by American troops, many after surrendering.
38. Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945, 68–70.
CHAPTER SIX
1. An 1806 graduate of West Point—and its superintendent from 1814 to 1818—Partridge came to believe that the national military academy system exemplified by his alma mater had created and was perpetuating a closed military elite. He strenuously advocated the establishment of state militias led by officers trained in private, regional military colleges. He established seven such institutions himself, with Norwich being the first and ultimately most successful.
2. Indeed, because its founder established the principles of what evolved into the Reserve Officer Training Corps program, Norwich University bills itself as the birthplace of ROTC, though there is some disagreement as to where the first ROTC unit was constituted.
3. Though most Norwich graduates were commissioned into the cavalry branch, such an assignment was not a foregone conclusion. Graduates could request assignment to another branch, or their first branch choice might be turned down by the army if officers were needed in other fields. Of the seventy-nine graduates in Lee’s class of 1942, sixty—including Lee— were assigned to the cavalry, thirteen to the army air forces, and two each to the engineer corps, signal corps, and chemical warfare service.
4. The U.S. War Department’s 1930 establishment of the mechanized force ensured that the horse’s days in army service were numbered. Mounted cavalry units were converted to mechanized organizations as quickly as funding and vehicles could be provided. While military horsemanship was taught in all four years of Lee’s time at Norwich, he and his fellow students also received instruction in the operation and use of armored cars and other military vehicles during their junior and senior years. As it happened, Lee and the other members of his Class of 1942 were the last Norwich cadets to receive horse-cavalry training. In March 1943 the school’s entire corps of cadets was taken directly into military service, and from then until the end of the war Norwich did not accept students, instead acting as an auxiliary training school for army aviation cadets. By the time regular instruction resumed in 1946, the university had disposed of all its horses and officially discontinued cavalry training. From then on Lee and his classmates were referred to as the Horsemen of ’42.
5. The woman’s maiden name remains unclear.
6. Construction had begun in January 1942. The post was renamed Fort Campbell in 1950, and as of this writing remains the home installation of the 101st Airborne Division, the 5th Special Forces Group, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
7. Organizational details for both the 12th AD and 23rd TB are drawn from Ferguson, Hellcats, and Francis, A History of the 23rd Tank Battalion.
8. A coaxial machine gun is mounted inside the tank’s turret, alongside and parallel to the main gun. The machine gun fires in the same direction as the main gun and is used against such “soft” targets as unarmored vehicles and troops in the open.
9. Armored Force Field Manual, 10.
10. “Capt. Jack Lee, ’42, Rescues Daladier in Castle Battle,” Norwich Record (Northfield, VT), June 22, 1945, 5.
11. Basse by all accounts was a very nice man. In a 2012 interview with the author, Calbert Duvall, a driver in Company B’s 2nd Platoon, related an example of Basse’s kindness: while the 23rd was still at Camp Barkley, Duvall’s young wife and infant daughter arrived from upstate New York for a very brief visit. Duvall was supposed to have guard duty, but Basse pulled the eight-hour detail in the young soldier’s place so Duvall could spend the time with his family.
12. Built between 1913 and 1919 by Germany’s Vulcan AG shipyard and originally intended for service with the Hamburg-Amerika Line, the twenty-two-thousand-ton vessel was transferred in 1920 to Britain as part of the war reparations the Allies awarded themselves at the Paris Peace Conference. The ship passed to Canadian Pacific in 1921 and was initially named Empress of China but became Empress of Australia the following year. It reentered transatlantic passenger service after World War II and was scrapped in 1952.
13. Francis, History of the 23rd Tank Battalion, 10–12.
14. Some sources give the name as Besotten Jinny, but the version used in this volume is the one most commonly cited. The actual origin of the name is lost to history, but it may be a reference to the nickname of Lee’s first wife, Virginia.
15. LST stands for “Landing Ship, Tank.” The large, flat-bottomed vessels carried their cargo of armored vehicles right up onto the beach and offloaded them through large bow doors. The modern U.S. Army uses an even larger variant known as an LSV (Logistics Support Vessel) to move armored vehicles and other cargo.
16. See Francis, History of the 23rd Tank Battalion, 18, and Ferguson, Hellcats, 57–60.
17. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs, a 1940 graduate of West Point, was twenty-four when he was killed. The scion of a family with a long military history, Meigs was the son of a naval officer. His own son, the future General Montgomery C. Meigs, was born one month after Lt. Col. Meigs’s death.
18. Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945. For a full account of the Herrlisheim battle, see Edward Monroe-Jones’s excellent Crossing the Zorn.
19. The “Easy 8” moniker came from the fact that the M4A3(76)W was also referred to as the M4A3E8. Second-generation examples of the Easy 8 were built with the Horizontal Volute Spring Suspension (HVSS) system and had wider tracks and other detail changes.
20. Earlier Sherman models had carried the projectiles in the side sponsons above the tracks; the rounds would almost always detonate if the hull was breached by antitank fire, so in later-model M4s the main-gun ammunition was stored in bins under the turret floor. The bins were surrounded by a water-antifreeze mixture that greatly reduced the risk of the ammunition cooking off and catastrophically destroying the tank.
21. General Orders 33, HQs., 12th Armored Division, April 19, 1945. Lee was also awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received sometime in March 1945, but the nature of the wounds and exactly how and where they were inflicted remain unclear.
22. As World War II ground on in Europe, the army needed immediate reinforcements in its infantry units. When the numbers of white soldiers pulled from other tasks failed to fill the gap, the still-segregated army allowed black soldiers in Europe-based service and support units to volunteer. Some two thousand men did, and after truncated infantry training in France they were allocated to white-officered units in the 12th and 14th Armored divisions. While the black soldiers in the 17th AIB’s Company D proved themselves to be both brave and highly competent infantrymen, they did not—as some sources (including the author’s own 2005 magazine article) have erroneously indicated—participate in the Schloss Itter operation.
23. Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945, 84.
24. A few days earlier, as the 103rd had moved into Garmisch-Partenkirchen in southern Germany, Kramers had led his group of jeepborne civil-military government soldiers up the driveway of a particularly imposing villa. Intending to use the home as a command post, Kramers informed the residents that they had fifteen minutes to pack a single bag and leave. An elderly man walked slowly out of the house and up to Kramers, who was bent over the hood of his jeep studying a map. “I am Richard Strauss, the composer,” the man said, proffering part of the manuscript of his Der Rosenkavalier and a certificate proclaiming him to be an honorary citizen of Morgantown, West Virginia. Kramers, a fan of classical music in general and Strauss’s work in particular, decided he could find a suitable command post elsewhere. After posting an “Off Limits” sign in front of Strauss’s villa, Kramers and his men moved on. This incident is recounted in Alex Ross’s excellent The Rest Is Noise, 373–374. Kramers also related this event to the author in a June 8, 2012, telephone interview. And, according to a postwar history of the 103rd Infantry Division, Strauss’s son, Franz, his Jewish wife, and their two teenaged sons had spent the entire war in the composer’s home. The elder Strauss told Kramers and his men that Franz’s wife “was the only free Jewess in Germany during Hitler’s reign.” Her safety, it seems, stemmed from the fact that Strauss’s popularity with the German people was so great that even the Nazis couldn’t touch them. See Mueller and Turk, Report After Action, 140.
25. The actual term used in the Free French forces was Enseigne de vaisseau de première classe, but since Lutten was attached to an American unit, he went by “lieutenant.”
26. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.
27. Pronounced “Simzik.”
28. The basic account of Lee’s initial recon to Wörgl and Schloss Itter is drawn from Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945, 68–70, and from Resistance and Persecution in Austria, 594–598.
29. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 36.
30. It remains unclear which two men they were.
31. Demey, Paul Reynaud, 144.
32. Daladier, Prison Journal, 337.
33. Unfortunately I have been unable to determine the names of the other two members of Boche Buster’s crew.
34. The account of the 753rd’s actions in support of the Schloss Itter operation is drawn from Battalion Diary for Month of May 1945, 1–3, and Company History, 1–8 May 1945, 1–2.
35. Designed during World War I by John Browning, the Browning Automatic Rifle was chambered for a .30–06 round. In World War II the Model 1918A2 was normally the sole automatic weapon in each eight-man infantry squad.
36. Interview with Arthur P. Pollock.
37. While not perhaps as lethal as the famed German 88mm anti-aircraft/ antitank gun, the more mobile 75mm Panzerabwehrkanone (Pak) 40 was more than capable of knocking out a Sherman under most circumstances.
38. Interview with Pollock.
39. Tall, narrow openings in a castle’s defensive walls originally intended to allow defenders to fire arrows at attackers while remaining protected. The embrasures were wider on the inside than on the outside, allowing the defender a wide field of fire despite the narrowness of the exterior opening.
40. A common feature in medieval castles, a sally port allowed the troops of the castle’s garrison to mount quick raids outside the walls without having to open the main gate.
41. Interview with Edward J. Seiner.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Introduced in 1942, the Maschinengewehr-42’s readily identifiable sound resulted from a rate of fire of more than one thousand rounds per minute.
2. The red lens provides illumination in low light without revealing the user’s position as a white light would.
3. Daladier, Prison Journal, 337.
4. The 142nd’s actions in support of the Schloss Itter rescue operation are drawn from Operations in Germany and Austria, 1–10 May 1945, 4–6.
5. Battalion Diary for Month of May 1945.
6. Levin was speaking in comparative terms: the high temperature in the area that day, according to the weather forecast included in the 103rd Infantry Division’s daily operations report for May 5, was 38 degrees F.
7. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 96.
8. Ibid.
9. As it happened, Kramers’s small force was not the only 103rd ID unit operating in the 36th ID’s area. A small element of the division’s 103rd Reconnaissance Troop under the command of Lieutenant Herbert had reached the outskirts of Wörgl on the afternoon of May 4, spent the night, and was making its way back toward Innsbruck even as Kramers was arguing with the division’s chief of staff. The recon troops did not know about the French VIPs at Itter; the GIs’ only mission was to establish contact with the lead elements of the 36th ID and then return to Innsbruck to report that contact. How the two groups failed to encounter each other on the road along the Inn River remains a mystery. See Regimental History, 409th Infantry Regiment, 1–10 May 1945, 68–71.
10. Levin, “We Liberated Who’ss Who,” 96.
11. Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945, 70.
12. According to the account of the action in Resistance and Persecution in Austria, 1938–1945 (597), the weapon was a 2cm Flak 30.
13. Operations in Germany, 1–10 May 1945, 70.
14. Ibid.
15. Paul Reynaud, in his In the Thick of the Fight (655), says that after the event he was informed by General Émile Antoine Béthouart, then commander of the French 1st Army Corps and postwar French high commissioner in Austria, that the Waffen-SS soldiers were there specifically to kill the French VIPs.
16. Resistance and Persecution in Austria, 1938–1945, 598.
17. Cailliau de Gaulle, Souvenirs personnels, 101.
18. Interview with Arthur P. Pollock.
19. Ibid.
20. Fortunately for all concerned, Besotten Jenny’s “wet” storage kept its 76mm main-gun ammunition from detonating.
21. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse.”
22. Ibid., and Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 154.
23. Reynaud is using “tommy-gun” in the generic sense, to mean any type of submachine gun. The weapon he wielded during the fight for the castle was actually a German MP-40 machine pistol.
24. Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 655.
25. Cailliau de Gaulle, Souvenirs personnels, 101.
26. Interview with Edward J. Seiner.
27. Interview with Pollock.
28. Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight, 655.
29. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Gill was himself a bona fide hero; just over two weeks earlier he’d personally led an attack on an enemy position that ultimately resulted in his being decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest military award for valor.
33. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.
34. Ibid.
35. Operations in Germany and Austria, 1–10 May 1945, 2. Mühltal, as mentioned earlier in this volume, is about a mile northeast of Schloss Itter, on the road from Wörgl east to Söll.
36. Unit Journal, 1–10 May 1945, 53.
37. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. Indeed, the Brixentaler Ache is still a popular destination for whitewater kayakers.
42. He was also the postwar founder of the separatist Parti Québécois and a prime mover in his province’s attempts to gain political independence from the Canadian Confederation.
43. Lévesque, Memoires, 96–99.
44. Ibid., 98.
45. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 156. See also Smyth, Jean Borotra, the Bounding Basque, 157–158.
46. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 157.
47. Operations in Germany and Austria, 1–10 May 1945.
48. Ibid.
49. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.
50. Daladier, Prison Journal, 338.
51. Ibid.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.
2. Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 36. The reason for Čučković’s outburst is unclear; he almost certainly would have encountered Schrader—both in civilian clothes and in uniform—during the latter’s earlier visits to Schloss Itter. We can only assume that the now-free Čučković felt that he could display his true feelings about the man wearing the death’s-head collar insignia that was the symbol of so much horror and tragedy throughout Europe.
3. Levin, “We Liberated Who’s Who,” 98.
4. Lévesque, Memoires, 98–99.
5. A nickname given to the solidly built Daladier years earlier by the Parisian press.
6. Lévesque, Memoires, 98–99.
7. Ibid.
8. Operations in Germany and Austria, 1–10 May 1945, 3.
9. Cailliau de Gaulle, Souvenirs personnels, 102–105, and Daladier, Prison Journal, 340–341.
10. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 68–69.
11. Late in 1945 Schloss Itter was purchased by Wilhelm Woldrich, an Innsbruck hotelier who completely refurbished the castle and added an outdoor swimming pool and a larger garage. In 1964 the Hotel Schloss Itter was sold to a Frau Bettina McDuff, who in 1972 sold it to a Lichtenstein-based company, which, according to some sources, was owned at least in part by one-time Austrian Formula 1 race driver Niki Lauda. In the late 1980s the castle was purchased by Dr. Ernst Bosin, an Austrian attorney with offices in Kufstein, Wörgl, and Orlando, Florida. The hotel ceased operation about that time and has been closed to the public since then.
12. The DSC is awarded for extreme gallantry and risk of life in combat; it is second in order of precedence only to the Medal of Honor. The Silver Star is the third-highest U.S. military decoration for valor in combat.
13. General Order 212. I am indebted to Robert Lee for providing the original document.
14. The other being Carnets de captivité.
15. I am indebted to Mr. Reynaud’s daughter, Evelyne Demey Paul-Reynaud, for information on her mother’s later life.
16. Daladier, Prison Journal, 244.
17. Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 149.
18. The letter is quoted in Schrader, “Erinnerungen, Gedanken, Erkenntnisse,” 40.
19. Lee remained in the inactive reserve until his honorable discharge on December 20, 1952.
20. It has proven impossible to determine the child’s name or birth date, or to discover what ultimately happened to him and his mother. Jack Lee apparently never saw either of them again.
21. I am indebted to James Dunne, Norwich sports writer and local historian, for details on Jack Lee’s later life.