CHAPTER 1
THE CASTLE THAT WAS SOON to figure so largely in Jack Lee’s life lay fourteen road miles to the southwest of where the young officer sat perched atop his tank. Schloss Itter, as it’s called in German, sits on a hill that commands the entrance to Austria’s Brixental valley. The structure bestrides a ravine, with a short bridge linking the castle to the flank of the mountain. The village of Itter spreads out to the east from the castle, some 2,300 feet above sea level and nestled beneath Hohe Salve, the 6,000-foot mountain in the middle alpine region historically known as Tyrol.
Though it would be of little concern to Lee and his men in the coming hours, Castle Itter already had a long, rich, and often violent history. The surrounding area had been inhabited at least since the middle Bronze Age (1800 to 1300 BCE), and the fact that the valleys of the Inn and Brixental Rivers provide a fairly flat and direct route between Central Europe and the Italian peninsula ensured that Tyrol saw more than its share of conflict. Conquered by Rome in 15 BCE, the region was successively invaded by the Ostrogoths, various German tribes, and Charlemagne’s Franks. In the ninth century CE Tyrol came under the sway of the Bavarians, who built two sturdy stone keeps and a surrounding wall atop the hill that would later be home to Schloss Itter, and in 902 a Count Radolt passed ownership of the fortified site to the Roman Catholic diocese of Regensburg.1
Seeking to better protect his expanding Tyrolean possessions—and, of course, better enforce the collection of diocesan taxes—Regensburg’s Bishop Totu2 ordered that the keeps and wall be replaced by a more substantial fortress. Construction of the full-fledged castle was a leisurely and often-interrupted process, however, and took more than a century to complete. In 1239 Rapoto III of Ortenburg, Bavaria’s count palatine,3 seized the fortress as a result of his vicious feud with the then current bishop of Regensburg, Siegfried. The latter captured Rapoto in 1240, and, in order to win his freedom, the defeated nobleman was forced to cede many of his properties in Bavaria and Tyrol to the Regensburg bishopric. Among the properties passed to Siegfried were the castle at Itter and the village that had grown just outside its walls; the names of both fortress and village first appear in the historical record in 1241.4
Though ostensibly men of both God and peace, the bishops of Regensburg were also princes of the Holy Roman Empire. As temporal rulers the bishops were often heavy-handed and needlessly severe, and Schloss Itter saw frequent service as a base from which the bishops launched punitive expeditions against their sorely oppressed subjects. Though Tyrol came under Hapsburg rule in 1363, Schloss Itter and the nearby village remained within the ecclesiastical control of the Regensburg bishops until 1380, when Bishop Konrad VI von Haimberg sold them to the archbishop of Salzburg—Pilgrim II of Puchein—for 26,000 Hungarian guilders.
Looted and partially destroyed during the 1515–1526 Tyrolean peasant uprising,5 Schloss Itter was rebuilt beginning in 1532. For the last few years of the sixteenth century, the fortress was home to an ecclesiastical court charged with suppressing witchcraft in the region, and local legend holds that in 1590 the last witch to be burned in the Tyrol met her end on a pyre in the schloss’s main courtyard.6 It is also at about this time—and most probably at the order of those whose job it was to root out witches—that the famous phrase from Dante’s fourteenth-century epic poem Divine Comedy was first inscribed, in German, on the wall above the doors leading to Schloss Itter’s vaulted entranceway: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
The castle changed hands several times over the following two and a half centuries, and by 1782 was part of the personal lands of Joseph II, who had become Holy Roman emperor two years earlier following the death of his mother, Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa. So fond was Joseph of his Tyrolean fortress that when Pope Pius VI journeyed to Austria shortly after Joseph’s ascension to the throne, the monarch insisted that the pope consecrate the altar in Schloss Itter’s small but exquisite chapel. The pope did so—mainly in an attempt to heal a rift between Joseph and the church—and also left behind at the castle an ornate Gothic crucifix and other ecclesiastical treasures.
Despite his fondness for Schloss Itter, Joseph II—like most of the castle’s previous owners—chose to live elsewhere. In late December 1805 he was replaced by another, though admittedly far grander, absentee landlord, Napoléon Bonaparte. The diminutive French emperor gained title to the schloss as a result of the Treaty of Pressburg, which followed his victories over Austria at Ulm and Austerlitz, in mid-October and early December 1805, respectively. Bonaparte did not long retain title, however, for in 1809 he presented Schloss Itter to his loyal ally King Maximilian I of Bavaria.7 The latter did little to ensure the upkeep of his new fortress, and, when in 1812 the councilors of Itter village offered Maximilian the relatively paltry sum of 15 Austro-Hungarian guldens for the entire edifice, the king accepted with alacrity. The villagers in fact had no intention of rehabilitating Schloss Itter; they intended it merely to be a source of construction materials. Over the following decades stones from the castle’s walls and wooden beams from its interior were used to build the village gasthaus and various other structures.
The castle remained in disrepair even after Tyrol returned to Austrian rule following the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna. But in 1878 the obviously canny village government sold the schloss—by that time little more than a scenic ruin—for an impressive 3,000 guldens to a Munich-based entrepreneur named Paul Spiess, who planned to turn it into a large and presumably very exclusive inn. The would-be hotelier launched a comprehensive renovation, ultimately giving Schloss Itter a central, multistory housing wing with fifty guest rooms, backed by a taller keep-like structure and flanked by smaller wings containing kitchens, servants’ quarters, and storage areas. Spiess also repaired the encircling walls, rebuilt the crumbling gatehouse, landscaped the ravine, and repaved the narrow, 150-yard-long road between the castle and the village. Despite Spiess’s investment, the hotel ultimately failed, and in 1884 the disappointed businessman sold the property to one of Europe’s most acclaimed—and beautiful—musicians, the famed German piano virtuoso and composer Sophie Menter.
Born in Munich in 1846, Menter was something of a prodigy. The child of talented musicians—her father was a cellist and her mother a singer—she played her first public concert while still in her teens. At the age of twenty-three she became a student of Franz Liszt, who often referred to her as his “piano daughter” and ultimately declared her to be the world’s finest living female pianist. In 1872 she married the Bohemian cellist David Popper, with whom she toured for several years. Menter’s purchase8 of Castle Itter was the culmination of a long-held desire for a stately home that would serve as both a private refuge from the rigors of her professional life and a salon for other musicians, and she refurbished several of the ground-floor rooms for use as practice areas and small performance spaces.
Over the eighteen years that Menter owned Castle Itter, she hosted such notable musical guests as Richard Wagner and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and her friend and mentor Liszt was a frequent and very welcome visitor. Indeed, so welcome was he that his several visits always commenced with ceremonial cannon salutes, and his passage up the approach road took him beneath flower-bedecked triumphal arches. While Liszt enjoyed these grand gestures, he used his time as Menter’s guest to work. During a visit in November 1885, for example, he arose each morning at four, worked steadily for three hours, took a brief pause to attend Mass in the castle’s chapel, and then went back to work until midafternoon.9 In letters to Menter he was deeply appreciative of the time he’d spent at her “fairy-like” castle, referring to his time there as “magic memories.”10
Sophie Menter continued to live at Castle Itter following the end of her marriage to Popper in 1886, and she often used the schloss for public events such as her October 1891 benefit performance to support the new choral society forming in the market town of Wörgl, four miles to the northwest of the schloss. She also continued to provide a creative atmosphere for famous visitors. During one two-week visit in September 1892, Tchaikovsky most probably scored Menter’s “Ungarische Zigeunerweisen,” a seventeen-minute work for piano and orchestra based on Hungarian Gypsy melodies that Menter and Tchaikovsky premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February 1893.
Sadly, the costs of keeping up the aging structure forced Menter to sell Schloss Itter in 1902.11 The buyer was one Eugen Mayr of Berlin, a wealthy physician and entrepreneur who equipped parts of the structure with electric lighting and had modern plumbing installed in the kitchens and primary living areas. Mayr used the castle as a suitably majestic venue for his August 1904 wedding to Maria Kunert, and he then spent several years and a small fortune giving the structure a neo-Gothic facelift. The addition of crenellated battlements and extensive interior woodwork—as well as the installation of several huge paintings depicting various stirring scenes from German mythology—left the castle with the fairytale look so popular during the first years of the twentieth century, which allowed Herr Mayr and his bride to achieve some success operating Itter as a boutique hotel.
The Schloss-Hotel Itter, as it was known, gained both prestige and increasing numbers of well-heeled guests following the end of World War I. The growing popularity of downhill skiing ensured that formerly sleepy villages throughout the Tyrol became popular holiday destinations, and the hamlet of Itter—which enterprising locals quickly dubbed “the Pearl of Tyrol”—was no exception. The castle was far and away the toniest place to lodge while enjoying the area’s winter sports and gradually became almost as popular during the off-season. In 1925 the First Austrian Republic’s deputy governor of Tyrol, Dr. Franz Grüner, bought Schloss Itter, primarily as a venue in which to display his impressive—and vast—collection of artwork and sculpture. Ironically, in 1932 Édouard Daladier, who during World War II would be one of Itter’s VIP prisoners, stayed at the castle while visiting Wörgl to explore the growing city’s experimental issuance of local currency as a way to stimulate economic recovery from the worldwide depression.12
That depression ultimately helped bring about Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, of course, which in turn led in March 1938 to the Anschluss—Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. And that sad event ultimately led directly to Schloss Itter’s transformation from fairytale castle and hotel into something decidedly more sinister.
FOLLOWING THE ANSCHLUSS, Nazi Germany set about erasing all vestiges of independent Austria—a process that began with the former nation being renamed the German province of Ostmark.13 The country was divided into seven administrative districts, the Reichsgaue, with Itter and the rest of Tyrol governed by a Nazi functionary based in Vorarlberg, some ninety miles to the southwest.
Life at Schloss Itter remained essentially unchanged for the first few months of the German occupation; the Nazis were too busy absorbing Austria into the “Greater Reich.” One aspect of that absorption—the extension into the former Austria of the Nazi secret police and concentration-camp systems—was to have a direct effect on the castle and those who would later be held there, though it took place outside Itter’s walls.
While the majority of Austrians welcomed the 105,000 troops of Lieutenant General14 Fedor von Bock’s 8th Army when they rolled across the border at five thirty in the morning on March 12, 1938, other residents of the newly created Ostmark were less inclined to become citizens of the “Greater Reich.” Anti-Nazi resistance cells began forming throughout Austria soon after the Anschluss, and Tyrol—with its staunch Roman Catholicism, compact geography, and traditional sense of regional identity—quickly became a center of ongoing opposition to German rule and its increasingly onerous regulations. Like other nascent resistance groups throughout Austria, those in Tyrol were initially fragmented by suspicion, and rightly so. The Gestapo15 was vigorous in its efforts to quash any opposition to Nazi rule and was often aided by pro-German Austrians who were only too willing to inform on neighbors they suspected of being less than wholehearted in their support of the new order.
Despite the Gestapo’s best efforts, resistance cells survived, not only in larger cities such as Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck, but also in towns and villages throughout the country. And while the score of resistance members in Wörgl initially had to bide their time and conserve their limited resources, as did most of their compatriots, they were able, over the months and years of German occupation, to slowly and carefully build the organization that would ultimately play a key role in the Schloss Itter story. And ironically, like the Austrian resistance as a whole, the cell in Wörgl was to be helped in its anti-Nazi efforts by no less an organization than the German army.
Within days of the Anschluss the entire Austrian army, the Bundesheer, was transferred en masse into the Wehrmacht—Nazi Germany’s unified armed forces—an action that for a variety of reasons was welcomed by the majority of Bundesheer troops.16 Moreover, the annexation of Austria created an even larger pool of manpower for Germany; between 1938 and 1945 some 1.3 million Austrian men were drafted into German military service. Austrian soldiers fought in every branch of the German armed forces and on every battlefront, and more than 240,000 of them died in combat or from sickness or accidents.17
While many Austrians served the Third Reich willingly and even fervently,18 others endured their military duty only because any attempt to avoid conscription or to desert once in the ranks would have resulted in the harshest of punishments. Though the Germans attempted to keep certain Austrians they considered to be unreliable—leftists, nationalists, and others19—out of the military, many young men who secretly abhorred the Nazis ended up as “German” soldiers. And in the process of enduring their Wehrmacht time, many anti-Nazi Austrians learned—and extensively practiced in combat—the military skills that in the final months of the war would prove to be so valuable to the Austrian resistance and to the inhabitants of Schloss Itter.
SOME SOURCES INDICATE that Castle Itter’s transformation from picturesque schloss-hotel and art venue into formidable prison was ultimately carried out at the direct order of Reichsführer der SS Heinrich Himmler himself. Himmler landed at an airfield outside Vienna just hours after German troops crossed the Austrian frontier on March 12, to personally lead the pacification of Austria—a process that would, in Himmler’s view, require the arrest of anyone who might pose even the slightest threat to the new order. The diminutive former chicken farmer therefore took immediate personal control of all existing police forces and of the Austrian SS, which since 1934 had worked covertly to undermine Austrian independence and lay the groundwork for the Anschluss.20
Even as the majority of Austrians welcomed incoming German units with cheers and flowers, widespread arrests were already underway of those whose politics, religion, or ethnicity was deemed unacceptable. Himmler needed places to put the masses of new prisoners until they could be moved to established prisons and concentrations camps in Germany,21 and it is entirely possible that Castle Itter’s robust construction and relatively remote location attracted the attention of the notoriously secretive reichsführer. His attention must have wandered, however, for it wasn’t until early 1940 that the German government leased the castle from Dr. Franz Grüner for unspecified official use.
The exact nature of that use remains unclear for the first two years following the signing of the lease agreement, though some sources indicate that the castle may have been used as an initial detention and interrogation site for high-value prisoners marked for deportation to Germany. We do know for certain that in early 1942 the castle was designated as the Ostmark headquarters for the German Alliance for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco.22
Despite its strangely ominous name, this Nazi-established and tax-funded organization was indeed dedicated to fighting tobacco use in “greater” Germany. While it might seem exceedingly odd that Adolf Hitler and his minions would be morally opposed to anything, the führer was widely known to abhor smoking. He believed the habit eroded public morals and undermined the health and effectiveness of military personnel. His attitude was by no means outside the mainstream; despite, or perhaps because of, its citizens’ widespread tobacco use, Germany had since the mid-nineteenth century been a leader in researching the medical dangers of smoking. Under Nazi control, the Alliance for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco undertook its mission primarily by issuing pamphlets and press releases outlining the health risks associated with smoking, and the regional headquarters established at Schloss Itter was responsible for disseminating those products throughout the former Austria.
As important as the antismoking crusade might have been to Hitler, however, Himmler never lost his initial interest in using Schloss Itter for more nefarious purposes. On November 23, 1942, he got Hitler to sign an order directing SS-Lieutenant General Oswald Pohl, who as director of the SS Main Economic Administration Department (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshaupamt) was in charge of administering the concentration-camp system,23 to begin the process of acquiring the castle outright for “special SS use.” Himmler intended to convert Schloss Itter into a detention facility for ehrenhäftlinge, “honor prisoners” whom the Germans considered famous enough, powerful enough, or potentially valuable enough to be kept alive and in relatively decent conditions.
On February 7, 1943, members of Pohl’s staff officially requisitioned the castle and all its outbuildings on Himmler’s direct orders, abruptly terminating the lease arrangement that had provided Grüner with a respectable income for the previous three years. Officially referred to as an evacuation camp (Evakuierungslager), the castle was put under the operational control of the regional concentration-camp command at Dachau,24 some ninety miles to the northwest. As one of that sprawling camp’s 197 satellite facilities in southern Germany and northern Austria, Schloss Itter was to draw its funding, guard force, and support services directly from its soon-to-be-infamous parent facility.
The castle’s transformation from an antismoking administrative center into a high-security facility for honor prisoners began immediately following its requisitioning. Plans for the conversion were apparently overseen by no less a personage than architect Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production,25 with the actual construction supervised by SS-Second Lieutenant Petz.26 A member of Dachau’s facilities branch, he arrived at Itter on February 8 with twenty-seven prisoners—twelve from Dachau and fifteen from Flossenbürg27—all of whom had before their arrests been carpenters, plumbers, and the like.28 Petz also took along some ten members of Dachau’s SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) unit29 to act as a security detail during the conversion work; they would be replaced by permanent guards once the castle’s transformation was completed.
The first order of business for Petz and his slave laborers was to pack up most of Schloss Itter’s remaining quality furnishings and artworks, a task that was carried out under the watchful eye of the owner. We don’t know how Grüner felt about the outright expropriation of his castle and the cessation of the lucrative lease that had been in force for the previous three years, but we do know that for the official handover of the structure to Petz, Grüner wore a Nazi Party membership pin in his lapel. Once the furnishings and art had been crated, Petz ordered his prisoner-workers to begin dismantling the altar, consecrated by Pope Pius VI, in the schloss’s small chapel. He also ordered the removal of the Gothic crucifix and all other Christian symbols; this may have been out of an excess of Nazi zeal on his part, or it may have been to deny the castle’s future prisoners any chance of spiritual succor. Once the chapel had been stripped, its accoutrements were crated and joined the furnishings and artworks on trucks bound for a Salzburg warehouse owned by Grüner.
With the decks cleared, Petz was ready to put his prisoners to work on the castle’s conversion. As was common in the concentration-camp system, the SS officer usually did not interact with the workers directly; he passed on his orders through a prisoner-functionary known as a kapo, a title with essentially the same meaning as the American prison term “trusty.” Though prisoners themselves, kapos often received better treatment than those they oversaw, and many were notoriously brutal to their fellow inmates in an attempt to curry even greater favor with their SS overlords. Fortunately for the prisoners on the Schloss Itter work party, their appointed kapo, a German political prisoner named Franz Fiedler,30 was by all accounts a decent man who did all he could to shield his charges from the worst of Petz’s frequent rages.
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’s31 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
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
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” Čučković34 (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 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.
With Schloss Itter ready to receive prisoners, it only remained for the administrators at Dachau to staff the new facility. Fourteen members36 of that camp’s SS-TV unit, as well as one member of the organization’s female auxiliary37 (and six Alsatian guard dogs), were tapped to form the castle’s guard force, officially referred to as SS-Special Commando38 Itter. The men were for the most part older, less capable troops with no combat experience. Most had served as guards at the larger camps and were happy to be posted to the relatively comfortable schloss. We might also assume that the more forward-looking of the guards assigned to the castle—those who had begun to realize that an Allied victory would probably mean execution for anyone connected with the operation of the death camps—welcomed the opportunity to spend whatever was left of the war guarding VIP prisoners in an alpine redoubt far removed from the horrors of the Final Solution.
If the guards believed they would be able to pass the rest of the war in an oasis of relative calm, however, they were sorely mistaken, for the two officers assigned as their superiors were definitely not of the laissez-faire school of military leadership. The junior of the two and the man tapped to serve as the second in command of Special Commando Itter, SS-Second Lieutenant Stefan Otto, was a member of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security and intelligence arm of the SS. While his primary duty would be to glean useful information from any VIP prisoner ultimately remanded to Schloss Itter, every member of the castle’s guard force knew he would also be closely watching them for any sign of laxness, either military or ideological. Any soldier unlucky enough to get on Otto’s bad side could well end up reassigned to a frontline combat unit or even a penal battalion.
And worse, for reasons now unknown, the SS planners at Dachau chose to give command of Schloss Itter—a facility intended to house several of the highest-ranking and potentially most valuable prisoners in the Third Reich—to a brutish, unsophisticated, and politically inept officer widely known within the SS as a man almost as cruel to his own troops as he was to those unfortunate enough to become his prisoners.
TO PUT IT SIMPLY, SS-Captain Sebastian “Wastl” Wimmer was a nasty piece of work. A native Bavarian, he was born in 1902 in Dingolfing—a small town some fifty miles northeast of Munich. In 1923 Wimmer joined the latter city’s police department as a patrolman and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant in spite of, or perhaps because of, a reputation for securing quick confessions by beating suspects nearly to death during interrogation. Barely literate, unkempt, and given to violent drunken rages, he was the ideal recruit for the nascent SS. He joined the organization in March 1935,39 having resigned from the Munich police the previous month.
We don’t know Wimmer’s motivation for enlisting in the SS. While it might certainly have been the act of a politically committed man seeking to win martial glory in an elite organization that espoused ideals that mirrored his own, it is more likely that, given what we know of his personality, Wimmer saw the organization as his ticket out of a dead-end job and a way to gain official sanction to continue brutalizing those who in all probability had always made him feel inferior—intellectuals, the wealthy, and, of course, Jews and the others whom the Nazis scornfully referred to as “subhumans.”
Whatever his motivations, Wimmer was soon to see—and become part of—the dark side of Adolf Hitler’s New Germany. After initial training at Dachau, the newly minted SS-TV officer40 was assigned to the camp’s permanent battalion-sized guard staff, known as SS-Wachsturmbann Oberbayern.41 Though Dachau in 1935 was just two years old and still relatively small—its enlargement and the addition of crematoria would not begin until 1937—it nonetheless housed several thousand inmates, largely Jews and political prisoners. And while systematic prisoner executions had not yet begun, Wimmer and the other guards were essentially free to humiliate, brutalize, and, if they could provide a reasonable justification, kill inmates with impunity.
Wimmer was apparently good at his job, for by September 1937 he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant. That same month the director of the concentration-camp system, SS-Major General Theodor Eicke, ordered the single-battalion SS-Wachsturmbann Oberbayern enlarged to five battalions and redesignated as SS-Totenkopfstandarte 1 Oberbayern. Like the two other regiment-sized units42 Eicke formed from concentration camp guard forces in 1937, Oberbayern was intended from the start to be a military organization. It would not engage in direct combat with armed enemy forces, however; all three of the initial Totenkopfstandarten were to be used to conduct what Eicke euphemistically referred to as “police and security duties” behind the battlefront. Given that Eicke was the originator of the “inflexible harshness” doctrine applied to concentration-camp prisoners, it comes as no surprise that the wartime duties of the Totenkopfstandarten would actually consist of rounding up, harshly interrogating, and usually executing enemy political and military leaders, Jews, and other “undesirables.”
Both Totenkopfstandarte Oberbayern and Wimmer first got to practice their new roles during the 1938 German annexation of the Sudeteland. Two Oberbayern battalions preceded regular Wehrmacht units into the disputed region—the northern and western border areas of Czechoslovakia inhabited largely by ethnic Germans—to identify and round up anyone deemed a threat to the annexation effort. While many of these unfortunates ended up in Dachau and other concentration camps in Germany, some didn’t survive their initial seizure by Wimmer and his comrades.
The reprehensible skills Wimmer demonstrated in the Sudetenland were put to extensive use during Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland. Tasked to operate in the province of Kielce, Upper Silesia, behind the lines of Major General Walter von Reichenau’s 10th Army, Wimmer and the other troops of Totenkopfstandarte Oberbayern43 tortured and killed large numbers of Jews, anti-Nazi Catholic clergy, mental patients, Polish nationalist activists, and Polish soldiers attempting to escape capture. Mass murders were committed at such villages as Ciepielow, Nisko, and Rawa Mazowiecka;44 indeed, so heinous were the atrocities committed by the Totenkopfstandarten troops under the guise of “police and security” operations that several senior Wehrmacht officers complained directly to Himmler. Their pleas were ignored, however, and Wimmer and his accomplices continued their murderous rampage until all three of the original Totenkopfstandarten were withdrawn from Poland in late 1939.45 The units’ withdrawal did not, of course, mean that German atrocities in Poland came to an end. New Totenkopfstandarten moved in to continue the horrific work and were joined by SS einsatzgruppen (special task forces)—units intended solely to carry out systematized mass executions in very short periods of time.46
Following their withdrawal from Poland, the three original Totenkopfstandarten were used to form the 3rd SS Panzer Division,47 commanded by Theodor Eicke. Equipped largely with captured Czech weapons, the division took part in the German invasions of France and the Low Countries, with Wimmer apparently serving in one of the division’s panzer-grenadier (motorized infantry) regiments. Not surprisingly, given its provenance and fanaticism, the 3rd SS Panzer Division committed a variety of war crimes, including the May 1940 murder of ninety-seven captured members of the British army’s 2nd Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, in the French village of Le Paradis.
The SS division’s propensity for committing war crimes only increased following its April 1941 transfer to the Eastern Front, where it saw action with Army Group North in the advance on Leningrad. Russia was harder on the division than France had been: despite initial tactical successes in the spring and summer of 1941, by winter Eicke and his troops were being heavily battered by the Red Army. By the spring of 1942 the 3rd SS Panzer Division was encircled by superior Soviet forces near the town of Demyansk, south of Leningrad, and had lost almost 80 percent of its combat strength.
Wimmer, however, was not among the casualties. In January 1942 he was transferred to the 2nd SS Panzer Division, “Das Reich,” which was itself engaged in fierce combat with the Red Army as part of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center. The reason for the transfer is unclear, as is the exact nature of Wimmer’s duties, but it seems likely that he reverted to the sort of “police and security” tasks he’d earlier undertaken in Poland. This assumption is bolstered by the fact that in September 1942 he was transferred yet again, but this time out of the combat zone to the relative safety of a staff job at a then little-known concentration camp just outside the city of Lublin, in central Poland. Officially referred to as a “prisoner of war camp of the Waffen-SS in Lublin,” it became infamous simply as Majdanek.
Though established in October 1941 primarily as a slave-labor camp—prisoners were put to work in nearby factories producing weapons and vehicles for the German war effort—Majdanek also quickly became a de facto extermination center where Russian POWs, Polish Jews, and political prisoners were shot, hanged, and gassed. Sebastian Wimmer was personally responsible for Majdanek’s day-to-day operations. In that capacity he undertook such mundane tasks as ordering supplies and equipment, overseeing personnel and staffing operations, and managing the warehouses that held the clothing and personal items confiscated from prisoners.
However, Wimmer also played an active role in the camp’s more horrific activities. In addition to deciding which prisoners would be worked to death in the nearby factories and which would be killed outright, he also ruthlessly quashed any sign of resistance from those he and his guards so cruelly oppressed. Any inmate who showed even the slightest hesitation to follow an order or perform a task was made an example of, usually in the most public and painful way. As a true disciple of Theodore Eicke’s “inflexible harshness” doctrine, Wimmer made sure that every prisoner in Majdanek—whether Polish or Russian, POW or Jew, man, woman, or child—suffered as much as possible.
Wimmer spent some five months at Majdanek, and his performance there so impressed his superiors that in mid-February 1943 he was transferred back to where his SS career had begun: Dachau. Though his position title was the same as the one he’d had at Majdanek—chief of the preventive detention camp—Wimmer’s personal power was even greater than it had been in Poland, because Dachau was literally the center of the concentration-camp universe for SS-TV men. And while he ostensibly answered to camp commandant SS-Lieutenant Colonel Martin Weiss, Wimmer was the man in charge of most of Dachau’s day-to-day operations and, arguably, one of the camp service’s most powerful younger officers.
And this may be one possible answer to the question about how a man like Wimmer—a textbook sociopath with a penchant for violence and a reputation for brutality toward both prisoners and his own soldiers—obtained such a plum and politically sensitive job as commandant of Schloss Itter. Crude Wimmer might have been, but he most obviously was not stupid. Despite its importance within the camp system, Dachau was a decidedly unpleasant place to work. Why put up with masses of unwashed prisoners and the pervasive stench of burning human flesh when by pulling some strings and calling in a few personal favors he could get himself a cushy posting at a castle-hotel turned VIP prison? Why, his wife, Thérèse, who’d spent most of the war years living with her parents in southern Germany, could even join him, and they could both spend the remainder of the war in safety and relative luxury. And if part of the price he had to pay for such good fortune was to be civil to a bunch of VIP prisoners, why not? After all, he could still brutalize his own men whenever he chose.
There is, of course, one other possibility. It might well have been that the planners at Dachau tapped Wimmer for the Schloss Itter command not in spite of his proven record of brutality but because of it. While the VIPs soon to be incarcerated in the hotel-turned-prison would have to be relatively well cared for as long as there was a chance they could be exchanged for important Germans held by the Allies, they might also need to be eliminated should the tide of war turn against Germany. The man in charge at Schloss Itter would therefore have to be ready, willing, and able to kill the VIP prisoners at a moment’s notice, without compunction and without remorse. And “Wastl” Wimmer had certainly proven that he could be that man.
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.