CHAPTER 3

Lovers, Friends, And Rivals

PAUL REYNAUD, MAY 12, 1943

We can only imagine the depth of Édouard Daladier’s dismay when, just ten days after his own arrival at Schloss Itter, one of his most bitter political enemies literally turned up on his doorstep. He would soon find that Paul Reynaud’s journey to the fortress in Tyrol had in some ways been even more difficult that his own.

Right up until his June 16, 1940, resignation as prime minister following the success of Germany’s attack on France, Reynaud had been following a carefully charted path to the pinnacle of French politics. Born in southeast France in 1878, he’d studied law expressly to prepare himself for a life in politics. His plans were only temporarily interrupted by World War I, in which he saw army service. In 1919 he won election to the Chamber of Deputies, where he aligned himself with the center-right Democratic Alliance Party. Reynaud held several cabinet posts under various premiers, and in April 1938 he became Daladier’s minister of justice. When the latter resigned on March 19, 1940, Reynaud became premier.

His elevation came less than eight weeks before Germany launched Case Yellow, the first phase of its invasion of France and the Low Countries, on May 10. Like most of his countrymen, Reynaud was stunned by the rapidity of the German advance and by the failure of his nation’s armed forces—and the British Expeditionary Force—to mount an effective defense. Convinced that General Maurice Gamelin was incapable of reversing France’s military fortunes, on May 18 Reynaud replaced him with General Maxime Weygand. That same day Reynaud brought the eighty-four-year-old World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain into the government as minister of state.

The military and political changes could not stop the Nazi juggernaut, however, especially after the Germans launched Case Red, the second phase of their assault, on June 5. After flanking the Maginot Line, the Wehrmacht was slowed only occasionally by successive defensive lines set up by the overwhelmed Weygand. Reynaud and his government left Paris on June 10 for Tours and, ultimately, Bordeaux. German troops occupied the undefended capital on June 14.

Though Reynaud was convinced France could carry on the fight from its North African colonies, the pressure on him to surrender was intense—and much of it came from his mistress, the allegedly pro-German countess Hélène de Portes.¹ When his cabinet voted on June 15 to ask Germany for peace terms, Reynaud resigned and was replaced by Pétain, who immediately announced his intention to seek an armistice.

Reynaud and de Portes stayed in Bordeaux until after the June 22 signing of the armistice and then left for Reynaud’s summer home on the Mediterranean coast. On June 28 their car left the road and hit a tree; de Portes died instantly, and Reynaud suffered a serious concussion. During his recovery at a hospital in Montpellier, German troops occupied northern France, and the Pétain-led government in Vichy proclaimed the elderly marshal “head of state” and replaced the Third Republic with an increasingly fascist regime only too willing to be Berlin’s lapdog. Pétain announced his intention to try members of the former government for their betrayal of France, and on September 6, 1940, agents of the Sûreté took Reynaud into custody.

Pétain ultimately decided that Reynaud and Mandel would not be part of the show trial and ordered them to remain imprisoned at the Fort du Portalet. They stayed there for just over a year, mostly in solitary confinement. Though cheered by visits from his adult daughter, Colette Reynaud Dernis, and his private secretary, twenty-eight-year-old Christiane Mabire, Reynaud knew that Vichy would turn him over to the Germans. That day came on November 20, 1942, when he and Mandel were transported to Berlin. The two Frenchmen were separated, and Reynaud was driven to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg.²

Reynaud spent five months in isolation at Sachsenhausen. In February 1943 he discovered that Mandel was being held in a nearby cell. The two were able to steal a few moments of whispered conversation when one or the other was taken to the shower room. Those moments with Mandel came to a halt in mid-March, when Reynaud was taken to a section of Sachsenhausen known as “the Bunker” and installed in a large hut surrounded by a high-voltage fence. After a few weeks in his new quarters, he was joined by the tennis player and former Vichy official Jean Borotra.

On May 10 the two men were told to pack their few belongings, and within hours they were on the road, headed south toward Austria. When he stepped from the staff car in Schloss Itter’s front courtyard, Reynaud was shocked to see Daladier and Gamelin—both of whom he’d assumed had been executed after the Riom show trial—and Jouhaux, whom he’d known before the war. Looking around at his new home, Reynaud found it far more acceptable than his previous prison. As he later recalled, “Daladier, Jouhaux, and Gamelin had been there for some days. I fear that I must have shocked them when I cried out: ‘This is paradise!’”³

It was an exclamation he’d come to regret.

JEAN BOROTRA, MAY 12, 1943

Though Borotra’s initial impression of Schloss Itter was more restrained than Reynaud’s, he, too, found the castle a vast improvement over Sachsenhausen. And for the tall, lanky tennis star—a man for whom daily strenuous physical activity was as necessary as food and water—the most appealing aspect of this new prison was the pathway that encompassed the rear courtyard just inside its surrounding wall. Borotra realized that if his captors allowed him to run several circuits every day he would soon be back in the superlative physical condition that would be necessary if he was to attempt what he thought constantly about: escape.

Fitness had been a key aspect of Borotra’s life virtually from the day of his birth on August 13, 1898.⁴ Born into a Basque family near Biarritz, he grew up walking the mountainous landscape of France’s border with Spain. At fourteen he discovered tennis while spending the summer of 1912 in England. Fast, agile, and competitive, Borotra took to the sport immediately, though the outbreak of world war brought a temporary halt to his development as a tennis player.

Deeply patriotic, Borotra enlisted in September 1916. As a fit and obviously well-educated young man—he was fluent in Spanish, German, and English as well as French—Borotra was trained as an artillery officer. Following his commissioning in April 1917, he saw extensive combat, won the Croix de guerre, and ended the war as a battery commander. Upon his release from active duty in 1919, he returned to school, graduating with degrees in engineering and law.

Borotra continued playing tennis and began winning tournaments throughout France. His highly athletic style—lightening-fast volleys and crushing overhead smashes intermingled with almost balletic leaps and spins—earned him the nickname “the Bounding Basque,” and he quickly became a crowd-pleasing favorite. And the crowds soon became international, as Borotra began representing both himself and his country in matches worldwide. By the late 1920s he’d won singles and doubles titles in most of the world’s top championships, including Wimbledon.

His athletic success did not keep Borotra from looking for opportunities in the business world. He realized that professional tennis wouldn’t provide a living wage and in 1923 secured a position as an engineer with a Paris-based firm. Over the next seventeen years his language skills, charm, social connections, business acumen, and celebrity allowed him to build a successful career as an international salesman. And by scheduling his international business trips to coincide with the major tennis tournaments, he was able to simultaneously pursue both his chosen careers.

Borotra also found time for politics. In the late 1920s he joined the Croix de feu (“Cross of Fire”), a far-right veterans’ group led by Colonel François de La Rocque. Borotra admired the organization’s espousal of a moral, Roman Catholic France, and his celebrity status was a boon to the group’s recruiting efforts. When in 1936 de La Rocque transformed the Croix de feu into a somewhat more moderate political party called the Parti Social Français (PSF), Borotra remained a loyal member. In 1931 he met de La Rocque’s chief of information, Edmond Barrachin, and his English wife. Borotra was smitten with the immensely attractive Madame Barrachin, and the tennis star was widely assumed to be the cause for her 1934 divorce. She and Borotra were married in 1937 and had one son, Yves.⁵

As if sport, business, and family did not keep him busy enough, Borotra also remained a reserve officer. His unit—5th Squadron, 232nd Divisional Heavy Artillery Regiment—was mobilized a few weeks before Germany’s invasion of Poland. He and his men first saw combat on the Lorraine front but by June 16 had been cut off and completely surrounded. The following day Pétain told the nation of his intention to seek an armistice, an announcement that convinced Borotra he should escape to England to carry on the fight. When the 5th Squadron surrendered to the Germans, Borotra slipped off and made his way toward the French lines in the rugged Massif Central. He ultimately joined forces with a young French air force pilot who had access to a small civilian aircraft, and the two agreed to set off on their clandestine cross-Channel flight on the night of July 3.⁶

Borotra’s escape to England never took place. Hours before the flight was to begin, Radio France announced that Britain’s Royal Navy had attacked French warships in Algeria, an assault that killed more than 1,200 French sailors. Borotra understood the reason for the British strike—to prevent the warships from falling under German control—but was outraged by the destruction meted out by the Royal Navy in an unprovoked surprise attack. He decided to stay in France—though his wife and son were in London—and was determined to do whatever he could for his country. Unfortunately, Borotra’s patriotism and his respect for, and admiration of, both Maxime Weygand and Phillipe Pétain soon led the tennis star to make the worst decision of his life.

Upon Vichy’s 1940 creation, the minister of youth and family affairs, Basque right-winger Jean Ybarnegaray, asked Borotra to become commissioner for sports and help “morally re-educate” France’s young people, to make them “better equipped for life and better prepared to answer all the calls”⁷ their nation might address to them. Though Borotra’s politics were not as conservative as his own, Ybarnegaray felt his fellow PSF member would be the ideal choice for the new post. Though Borotra expressed his misgivings about the job, on July 20 he assumed the post of director of the Commission of General Education and Sports.

Over the following twenty-one months the Bounding Basque sought to implement a national program to improve the physical and moral health of France’s young people. But despite his zeal for the job and his status as a Vichy official, Borotra refused to be a lapdog for the Germans. Soon after the Nazis conducted their first roundup of Parisian Jews in August 1941, he banned all French sports organizations from competing against German teams.

Borotra’s lack of enthusiasm for the collaborationist policies of the Pétain regime and his disdain for the Nazis soon drew official attention. In early April 1942 he was summoned to the German embassy in Paris, where a functionary demanded that Borotra publicly announce his support for collaboration with Germany and exclude “undesirables” from all French sports. The tennis legend refused, adding that it was his job to bring France’s young people together through sports, regardless of their race, religion, or politics. The German warned Borotra that he’d better change his tune or he’d suffer the consequences. Borotra refused to bow to German pressure, and on April 19, 1942, the Germans forced Vichy to fire him.

Borotra went back to work, but over the following months he decided to leave France and join the Allied forces. On November 22, 1942, he went to Paris’s Gare d’Austerlitz intending to take a train south and cross into Spain on foot. Unfortunately, Borotra had told friends of his plan, and, as he was about to board his train, he was arrested by Gestapo agents.⁸

After questioning in Paris Borotra was taken to Berlin and from there to Sachsenhausen. He was kept in solitary in the same cell block as Reynaud and Mandel, though he was unaware of their presence. In late April 1943 he was moved to the Bunker, where Reynaud was already in residence. The two men had known each other for years but, given their differing politics, were not friends. That changed over the weeks they spent together in the Bunker, and on the eve of their departure for Schloss Itter Reynaud recorded in his diary that Borotra had become “an excellent companion.”⁹

Borotra’s first impression of Itter improved considerably when he realized that the rear courtyard would offer him the chance to run. Though still in good physical condition—especially for a man of forty-five—Borotra knew he would have to be far more fit if he were to have any hope of achieving what he’d dreamed about since the moment of his arrest: freedom.

AUGUSTA BRUCHLEN, JUNE 19, 1943

While Borotra hoped to escape from Schloss Itter, Augusta Bruchlen had done all she could to get into the fortress. From the moment she’d learned that Léon Jouhaux had been moved to the castle, she’d lobbied the German authorities to allow her to join him. She knew he was ailing physically and emotionally, and she was convinced that without her presence he would not survive his incarceration. She was determined that Jouhaux, the man she’d loved for many years, would not die in a German prison.

Born in 1899 in German-owned Alsace-Lorraine—it had been annexed following the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War—Bruchlen believed the region was rightfully French. But it was her fluency in German (and her reasonable command of English) that won her a job after she moved to Paris. In 1924 she was hired as Jouhaux’s secretary and primary translator, a role that required her to accompany the labor leader on his extensive travels. They developed a romantic relationship, and by the early 1930s Bruchlen was widely acknowledged as Jouhaux’s “companion” as well as his indispensable executive assistant.

When Jouhaux went underground following the outbreak of war, Bruchlen was a vital link between him and the CGT resistance movement. In addition to editing and passing on his pamphlets, she coordinated his movements. After Jouhaux’s arrest in November 1941, Bruchlen heard nothing for a year. In November 1942 she discovered he was in Évaux-les-Bains and began visiting him whenever possible. That became easier following her own arrest in January 1943; Bruchlen was sentenced to “enforced residence” in the same Grand Hotel in which Jouhaux was being held.¹⁰

Though under house arrest, Bruchlen came and went from the Grand Hotel virtually at will—the only restrictions were that she sleep in the hotel and that she not leave Évaux-Les-Bains without police permission. Neither regulation proved difficult to follow until Jouhaux was moved at the end of March 1943. Fearing for her companion’s life and not knowing where he’d been taken, Bruchlen left Évaux-Les-Bains—without permission—and set off for Vichy. There she demanded to be allowed to join Jouhaux, wherever he was. Told that the labor leader had been transferred to a concentration camp in Germany, this remarkable woman insisted on being allowed to join him.

On May 29 Bruchlen was summoned to Gestapo headquarters in Paris and informed that she could join Jouhaux—on one condition. She would have to agree, in writing, to accept indefinite imprisonment without privileges and to absolve Vichy and Germany of responsibility for any harm that might befall her while incarcerated. Having signed the documents, she was told to be at Paris’s Gare du Nord on June 17. Two days later she was in a Gestapo car driving up the Itterstrasse, and when the castle came into view, Bruchlen felt a tremor of foreboding: the schloss looked to her like something from a Gothic horror story. Her outlook improved considerably, however, when the car pulled into the front courtyard and she saw Jouhaux, a smile on his face and a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

CHRISTIANE MABIRE, JULY 2, 1943

While Augusta Bruchlen’s arrival at Itter was an answered prayer for both her and Léon Jouhaux, it was a call to action for Paul Reynaud. Soon after he was transferred to Sachsenhausen, he’d learned that Christiane Mabire had been arrested. Bruchlen’s appearance emboldened Reynaud to demand that Wimmer find out if Mabire was still alive and, if so, have the young woman transferred to Itter. As Wimmer discerned, Reynaud’s concern for Mabire’s welfare was more than simple humanity.

Christiane Dolorès Mabire was born in Paris on February 17, 1913, to an upper-middle-class family. She received an excellent education and grew into what one observer called a “remarkably elegant” young woman, a “tall, slender girl with the hands and feet of a thoroughbred, a narrow face and aquiline nose” who “dressed with unusual care and good taste.”¹¹ She was also intelligent and fluent in English. Reynaud appreciated all of the young woman’s qualities when Mabire was introduced to him by his daughter, Colette, soon after he became prime minister. Indeed, so impressed was Reynaud that he hired the then twenty-seven-year-old Mabire as his secretary despite the opposition of the thirty-eight-year-old countess Hélène de Portes.

Mabire was among the staffers who accompanied Reynaud to Tours and then Bordeaux when the French government left Paris. But when the former prime minister suggested to de Portes that his secretary accompany them to the Mediterranean coast—in order to help him begin work on a book about France’s defeat, he said—the countess refused to allow it. That refusal probably saved Mabire’s life, since she was not in Reynaud’s car when it struck the tree that injured him and killed de Portes.

Though Mabire was unable to see Reynaud in Montpellier, she and Dernis visited him in Le Portalet prison. While Mabire’s presence was often in a professional capacity, it is clear from his diary entries that Reynaud was delighted every time she appeared. Those appearances increased considerably after Mabire took a room at a hotel in a nearby town, where she lived for most of the year that Reynaud spent in Le Portalet. Mabire’s visits eased the discomfort of Reynaud’s imprisonment, and the friendship between the former prime minister and his secretary evolved into something deeper, despite the thirty-five-year age difference.

Mabire was understandably alarmed when she arrived at Le Portalet on November 21, 1942, only to be told that Reynaud had been transferred the night before. The authorities would not tell her where he’d been taken, and she was herself arrested by Gestapo agents on November 22. Three days later Mabire arrived at Fresnes Prison. Immediately upon her arrival she was locked into a bare room and left alone for several hours.

After a brief interrogation Mabire was moved to a cell and remained in solitary confinement until December 10, when she was transported to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women some fifty miles north of Berlin, where she was to spend nearly six months. The young Frenchwoman was assigned the cover name Frau Müller and confined, alone, in a cell block for high-value prisoners. Since she did not read or speak German and was not allowed to interact with other prisoners, her isolation was nearly complete.

Until, that is, the day when she was taking her usual fifteen minutes of exercise in the cell block’s small courtyard. Lost in thought, she was startled by a woman’s whispered voice calling “Madame!” in slightly accented French. The greeting came from another prisoner, the Polish countess Karolina Lanckoronska, speaking through the bars of her cell window. Lanckoronska had caught sight of Mabire and knew from her bearing that she must be French. A guard’s inattentiveness allowed the women a few moments together two days after their first contact. They “chattered away” in French, said Lanckoronska, and over the following weeks the Polish countess and the elegant Parisienne quickly became close friends.

That friendship was interrupted, however, during the last weeks of June 1943, when Wimmer arranged to have Frau Müller transferred to his custody. It was not an act of kindness, of course, for the SS-TV officer believed that having a former prime minister of France indebted to him might pay some future dividend.

Wimmer’s intervention had an immediate effect on Christiane Mabire’s life. On the last day of June two SS-TV men drove her south into Austria, and during the trip Mabire became convinced that Reynaud was responsible for her departure from Ravensbrück. As the miles passed she allowed herself to hope that she might be reunited with the man who had come to mean so much to her.

When that reunion occurred, just before noon on July 2,¹² Reynaud warmly embraced the gaunt but laughing Mabire as she stepped from the staff car, kissed her on both cheeks, and led her by the hand toward the castle’s main entrance. Though still incarcerated, the elderly politician and his young companion could now face the uncertain future together.

MARCEL GRANGER, JULY 2, 1943

Barely an hour after Mabire’s arrival a second car rolled into the castle’s front courtyard bearing another “special prisoner.” Bruchlen, Jouhaux, Gamelin, and Borotra drifted down through the schlosshof’s arched gateway to see who their new companion might be. Though none of them recognized the man, they were all struck by his attire: riding breeches, knee-high leather boots, a cotton shirt with a North African motif, and—much to Borotra’s delight—a Basque beret set at a jaunty angle.¹³ Later, at lunch, the man introduced himself as Marcel Granger and then told his listeners how his brother’s wife had saved him from death in Dachau.

Born in Toulon in 1901, Granger settled in French Tunisia and established a successful agricultural estate. He was a reserve officer in the French colonial forces, and upon the 1939 outbreak of war he’d been mobilized. He remained on duty after the French capitulation and Vichy’s takeover of Tunisia, but by December 1940 he had joined a resistance cell. Granger’s fluency in Arabic and his knowledge of the country and its people made him an ideal intelligence agent, and he was put in charge of establishing secret arms dumps to support Allied forces should they invade Tunisia.

The Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 seemed to indicate that Granger’s hard work was about to come to fruition, but the Germans’ decision to funnel reinforcements through Tunisia’s ports and airfields made a swift Allied liberation unlikely. The infusion of Wehrmacht troops—and the increased vigilance of the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary anti-resistance force—further complicated Granger’s task. In early April 1943 he was captured by Milice troops and handed over to the Gestapo. Within days he’d entered the living hell of Dachau.

Granger was put to work in the fields surrounding the camp, where between interrogations he labored eighteen hours a day with little food or water. Conditions were made worse for Granger by periodic beatings intended to loosen his tongue. In late June 1943 the Frenchman was summoned to the camp headquarters, where, to his amazement, an officer announced that Granger was to be transferred to a “special facility” where conditions would be far more to the Frenchman’s liking. Granger asked the reason for his unexpected good fortune and was dumbfounded when the SS-TV man replied, “Because of your sister-in-law.”

The Frenchman’s brother, Pierre, was married to Renée, one of the daughters of French army general Henri Giraud, who had escaped from German captivity after the fall of France and was now cooperating with the Allies. Hitler ordered Himmler to arrest any members of Giraud’s family who were within reach, the intent being to hold them hostage in an attempt to sway the general’s allegiance to the Allied cause. Himmler’s dragnet brought in seventeen members of Giraud’s extended family, including Renée and her four children. The sweep missed Pierre Granger, however, who was serving as his father-in-law’s aide. When a routine file review revealed the connection between Marcel Granger and the Giraud clan, Granger was marked for “special handling” and tapped for transfer to Schloss Itter.

Granger’s story—told as he wolfed down as much food as he could—fascinated his small audience. Their fascination turned to horror, however, when Granger told them of the hellish scenes he’d witnessed at Dachau.¹⁴ Though each of his listeners had endured the rigors of German captivity, none had experienced the horrific conditions described in Granger’s grim recitation. It was a sobering reminder that the conditions at Schloss Itter could change in an instant and that none of them should forget what the hated Germans were capable of.

MAXIME AND MARIE-RENÉE-JOSÉPHINE WEYGAND, DECEMBER 5, 1943

Daladier’s distress at Reynaud’s appearance within Schloss Itter’s walls was nothing compared to the horrified disbelief that Maxime Weygand’s arrival generated in both Gamelin and Reynaud. While the source of Gamelin’s discomfort was professional embarrassment—he had been replaced by Weygand at the most critical point in France’s history—Reynaud’s reaction was more visceral. Despite having elevated Weygand, Reynaud blamed the general more than anyone else for France’s defeat in 1940. On seeing the former army chief and his wife striding through Itter’s entrance hall, Reynaud muttered, quite audibly, “Traitor, collaborator!”

Stinging epithets were nothing new to the then seventy-six-year-old Weygand. Indeed, from the day of his birth in January 1867 the man had had to deal with derision. Born illegitimately in Brussels,¹⁵ he was brought up in France as the ward of David de Léon Cohen, a wealthy, Italian-born, Jewish merchant. The young bastard became a staunch Roman Catholic and a fiery French nationalist, and he ultimately decided on a military career. Still officially Belgian, he entered the St. Cyr military academy as a foreign student, but following his adoption by Cohen’s accountant—a paperwork-only event Cohen engineered to allow his ward to become “fully French”—the young man adopted the name Maxime Weygand.

Over the years following his commissioning, Weygand excelled in increasingly challenging assignments and along the way married Marie-Renée-Joséphine de Forsanz, with whom he had two sons. By the time World War I erupted, Weygand was a lieutenant colonel, and after a brief stint of front-line duty he became chief of staff to French XX Corps commander General Ferdinand Foch. Excellent staff work and the ability to adapt to military necessity ensured Weygand’s rapid rise through the ranks. By the end of the war he was a major general.

Weygand’s career following World War I was eventful and successful, and he became the army’s chief of staff in 1930. This ushered in the period of his initial collaboration with, and eventual antagonism toward, Gamelin. Following his mandatory retirement in January 1935, Weygand took up a senior administrative position with the Suez Canal Company. But as the clouds of war again gathered over Europe, Weygand hoped to be called back into military service, and in August 1939 he was. Much to his surprise, his old nemesis Gamelin—at Daladier’s prompting—asked if Weygand would take command of French forces in the eastern Mediterranean. He jumped at the opportunity and took up his new post within weeks.

Gamelin’s ineffectual response to the 1940 German invasion prompted Reynaud to call Weygand back to Paris from Syria, and upon his arrival Weygand replaced Gamelin as commander in chief of all French military forces. Weygand realized that France had no hope of halting the German juggernaut and decided that the way to avert widespread destruction of the nation’s infrastructure and of preserving some semblance of French sovereignty was to achieve an immediate armistice. Reynaud’s June 16 resignation—and Pétain’s appointment of Weygand as defense minister the following day—cleared the way for Weygand and others who saw a cessation of hostilities as France’s only hope for survival.

While it can be said that the actions of Weygand and other armistice-minded French leaders saved their nation from further destruction and allowed half the country to remain unoccupied—at least initially—it is also obvious why many on both sides of the Channel considered France’s capitulation to be premature. Nor is it difficult to understand how Weygand’s participation in the Vichy government appeared to many as collaboration with the Germans, though the general later explained that he was simply attempting to preserve as much of the nation’s military power as possible in order to fight “another day.”

In September 1940 Weygand became commander in chief of French forces in Africa, but the perception in both Vichy and Berlin that the general was not a wholehearted team player ultimately led to his downfall. On November 17, 1941, he was recalled to France and removed from his position at the Germans’ insistence. Weygand and his wife retired to the south of France, where the general set about writing his memoirs. But following the November 1942 Allied landings in North Africa and Germany’s subsequent invasion of unoccupied France, Hitler ordered Weygand’s arrest.

Taken into custody on November 12, Weygand was in Germany within days. He was ultimately moved to Schloss Garlitz, a VIP prison southwest of Hamburg. In January 1943 his wife was allowed to join him, and the couple settled into a relatively comfortable routine. That routine was disrupted on December 2, 1943, when the Weygands were told to pack their belongings. Three days later they walked through Schloss Itter’s front gate, to be greeted by Reynaud’s purposely audible mutterings.

MICHEL CLEMENCEAU, JANUARY 9, 1944

New prisoners next arrived at Schloss Itter on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of a heavy snowfall. The swirling flakes blotted out the view of the surrounding alps and muted the engine noise of the car that had transported Michel Clemenceau, François de La Rocque, and Wimmer from Wörgl’s train station to the castle’s front courtyard.

Reynaud and Borotra—both of whom were acquainted with the new guests—braved the snow to greet the men.¹⁶ They were stunned, however, by de La Rocque’s haggard appearance. Barely fifty-nine, he looked twenty years older and was having difficulty standing. The seventy-one-year-old Clemenceau, on the other hand, seemed to be both healthy and fascinated by his new surroundings. As he shook hands with Reynaud, Clemenceau smiled slightly and said, “So, Paul, another adventure, eh?”¹⁷

That Clemenceau could describe imprisonment in an Austrian castle as an “adventure” says much about his earlier life. Born November 24, 1873, in France’s Pays-de-la-Loire region, he was the third child of physician-turned-politician Georges Clemenceau. Something of a hellion in his youth, Michel bounced from school to school in Paris until his exasperated father—who would ultimately twice be France’s prime minister—finally had enough and packed his fifteen-year-old wild child off to study with a tutor in Zurich. The boy soon settled down and in 1894 graduated from the Swiss city’s Agronomy Institute with an engineering degree and a remarkable fluency in German.

With lucrative interests in a variety of businesses, by 1914 the forty-one-year-old Michel Clemenceau seemed set to enjoy his early middle age—but then he became one of the millions of Frenchmen called up as World War I loomed. On August 21, 1914, his unit encountered a formation of German lancers; Lieutenant Clemenceau was hit by a bullet from an enemy’s pistol but managed to kill the man before losing consciousness. After an extended convalescence Clemenceau was promoted to captain, and he finished the war as a decorated battalion commander.

By the late 1930s Clemenceau was a prosperous entrepreneur with his hand in a variety of profitable businesses. Following Germany’s September 1, 1939, invasion of Poland, the sixty-five-year-old volunteered for military service. Clemenceau’s distinguished World War I record and political connections won him a major’s commission despite his age, and he was assigned to the army’s foreign-intelligence branch, the Deuxième Bureau.¹⁸ Briefly detained by the Germans following France’s surrender, he was released and returned to Paris.

Though a longtime admirer of Pétain, Clemenceau opposed the aged general’s collaboration with the Germans, and his views drew the attention of the Gestapo. In November 1940 Clemenceau convinced his wife to leave France for America, but he stayed. His political connections kept him safe from official retribution until May 1943, when Gestapo agents arrested him. He spent several months in French prisons, and, on August 31, 1943, he was transferred to Schloss Eisenberg, a castle-turned-VIP prison in Czechoslovakia. Clemenceau held up well despite poor food and spartan conditions; unlike de La Rocque, he maintained a relatively optimistic attitude throughout his imprisonment. He was therefore able to accept the sudden transfer to Schloss Itter with a calm self-possession that prompted Reynaud to note that Clemenceau’s arrival brought the castle’s other VIP prisoners “the reassurance of his unshakable confidence.”¹⁹

Sadly, Clemenceau’s traveling companion, de La Rocque, could boast neither health, nor self-confidence, nor optimism.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCQUE, JANUARY 9, 1944

While Reynaud and Borotra were stunned by de La Rocque’s appearance upon his arrival at Schloss Itter, they were even more shocked that he was a prisoner of the Germans.

Until his arrest ten months earlier de La Rocque had been a member of the Vichy government, a confidant of Pétain, and a man widely viewed both at home and abroad as one of France’s leading fascists. While the fact that someone with de La Rocque’s right-wing credentials could so quickly fall from political grace certainly surprised both Reynaud and Borotra, they would have been thunderstruck to learn that de La Rocque was also the head of a resistance movement that funneled information to Britain’s intelligence service.

Born October 6, 1885, in Lorient, Annet-Marie-Jean-François de La Rocque de Sévérac was the scion of one of France’s noble families and, according to one biographer,²⁰ the hereditary viscount of Chateaubriand. The young man attended St. Cyr military academy and in 1907 was commissioned a lieutenant of cavalry. In North Africa he commanded a mounted company that saw action against Moroccan guerillas. Severely wounded during a 1916 battle with insurgents, he refused medical attention and continued to lead his unit until a relief force arrived.

Cited for bravery and promoted, de La Rocque returned to France for convalescence. Once again fit, he was assigned to an infantry unit and spent the remainder of World War I on the Western Front. Twice promoted and much decorated, he ended the war as a lieutenant colonel. Upon his retirement from the army in 1928, he was lauded as a highly effective leader concerned with the welfare of his troops.

Given his strict Catholicism, aristocratic lineage, and intense patriotism, it’s no surprise that de La Rocque’s postwar politics veered toward the right. At thirty-eight he became the vice president of the extreme right-wing Croix de feu veterans’ group, which advocated the replacement of France’s admittedly chaotic form of parliamentary government with an authoritarian regime that would emphasize the “traditional French values” of work, family, and country.

As an articulate and decorated former soldier, de La Rocque soon became the Croix de feu’s primary public spokesman, and in 1931 he became its president. Under his leadership the group’s ranks swelled, and he was courted by every important right-wing politician in France. In 1936 the nation voted into office the broad left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front, and one of the new government’s first acts was to outlaw the various right-wing organizations. De La Rocque shrewdly responded to the threat by transforming his group into a political party, the PSF, and announcing he would work within the very parliamentary system he had long criticized.

De La Rocque’s decision to renounce the violent overthrow of the government put him at odds with other, overtly fascist groups. He was also excoriated by those organizations for his opposition to Germany’s increasing military might and expansionist policies, as well as for his support for the modernization of France’s armed forces. Right-wing and authoritarian de La Rocque might have been, but he also remembered the carnage France had endured at Germany’s hands in World War I.

When war erupted in 1939, de La Rocque called for all PSF members to rally to the nation’s defense. Even when it became obvious that the German blitzkrieg would result in a French defeat, de La Rocque opposed any armistice or outright surrender. But following France’s fall, he concluded that Pétain was the only man capable of providing France with the postarmistice leadership and stability the nation so desperately needed. De La Rocque threw his support—and that of his PSF—behind Pétain’s government. Nevertheless, de La Rocque’s subsequent refusal to subjugate the PSF to Vichy’s planned single-party system outraged the regime, and, as early as September 1940, he was telling his followers to respect Pétain but display “absolute reserve” toward the Vichy government.²¹

While de La Rocque remained politically active in Vichy, his increasing ambivalence about the regime trumped his respect for Pétain. Moreover, de La Rocque’s belief that Germany was France’s “ancestral enemy,”²² coupled with his distaste for the Nazis, led him to be outspoken about his opposition to collaboration, and even before the Germans’ November 1942 takeover of unoccupied France, de La Rocque had openly declared “no collaboration under the occupation.”²³

Given de La Rocque’s dislike of Germany and less than wholehearted support for Vichy—and his politically savvy preference for keeping his options open—it’s no surprise that he established a clandestine relationship with the Allied intelligence services. While some sources²⁴ indicate that he first began gathering information of potential value to the Allies in the summer of 1940, it was not until February 1942 that de La Rocque established contact with the Madrid-based Réseau Alibi, or Alibi Network, which had agents throughout France and reported directly to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

De La Rocque formalized the ad hoc intelligence-gathering effort he’d been leading and transformed it into an Alibi subnetwork known as the Réseau Klan (Klan Network), which used the PSF’s social-services operations as a cover for intelligence gathering. While the extent and value of the information provided to the SIS by the Klan Network remains difficult to judge, there is no doubt that de La Rocque—a man maligned both during and after the war as a fascist collaborator—knowingly endangered himself, his family, and his followers to pass intelligence to the Allies.

De La Rocque’s leadership of the Klan Network ended on March 9, 1943, when Gestapo agents dragged him from his home in Clermont-Ferrand. The PSF leader was held briefly in a local jail and then transferred to Fresnes Prison. Kept in solitary confinement in a cramped and filthy cell, he was denied the medications he’d been taking since being wounded in 1916, and his health quickly declined. Things did not improve following his August 31, 1943, transfer—along with Michel Clemenceau and others—to Schloss Eisenberg in Czechoslovakia. Indeed, so ill was de La Rocque that he was unconscious for much of the car journey that carried him and Clemenceau to Schloss Itter.

Though the Tyrolean fortress was still a prison, transfer to the castle—with its vastly better food and living conditions—would ultimately help save the PSF leader’s life.

MARIE-AGNÈS AND ALFRED CAILLIAU, APRIL 13, 1945

The final prisoners to arrive at Schloss Itter were not incarcerated because of their own importance, but—as with Marcel Granger—simply because of a family relationship to someone in whom the Nazis were especially interested. In the Cailliaus’ case, that someone was Marie-Agnès Cailliau’s younger brother, Free French general Charles de Gaulle.

Born May 27, 1899, in Paris, Marie-Agnès was the second child—and only daughter—of Henri and Jeanne de Gaulle. Her father imbued his five children with an intense Roman Catholicism and a love for French history and culture, and Marie-Agnès—eighteen months older than Charles—was throughout her life “an ardent patriot and fervent Christian.”²⁵

After World War I Marie-Agnès and her Belgian husband, engineer Alfred Cailliau, settled in a suburb of Le Havre on the Normandy coast. Over the years the couple prospered, raising six sons and a daughter. Unfortunately, a resurgent Germany eventually cast a pall over the Cailliaus’ life; four of their sons—Joseph, Michel, Henri, and Charles—fought the invading Wehrmacht in 1940. Joseph and Henri escaped to England to join the Free French effort, Michel was captured and sent to a POW camp in Germany, and twenty-four-year-old Charles was killed.²⁶ A fifth son, eighteen-year-old Pierre, ultimately made his way to Algeria and joined the Free French.

Understandably devastated by the death of one son and the uncertain fates of four others, Alfred and Marie-Agnès Cailliau did what they could to ensure the safety of their sixth son, ten-year-old Denys.²⁷ The Cailliaus moved in with their daughter, Marie-Thérèse, and her husband in the town of Roche-la-Molière, some thirty-five miles southwest of Lyon. When the area became part of Vichy, the Cailliaus stayed, renting a house in nearby Saint-Étienne. And they might have lived out the remainder of the war there in comfortable obscurity, had it not been for their son Michel’s March 1942 escape from German captivity and their own desire to resist the occupiers of their beloved France.

During his time in the POW camp Michel Cailliau had joined the National Movement of Prisoners of War and Deportees, a fledgling resistance movement. Though not members of Michel’s growing network, Alfred and Marie-Agnès hid documents and kept Michel informed about the activities of local German units. The elderly couple continued their low-level resistance work through the winter of 1942, and in April of the following year they moved back to northern France. The couple and their son Denys moved in with Alfred’s sister, Madeleine, in a village southwest of Rouen. They had only been in their new home a few days, however, when disaster struck.

While eating a family lunch one day, Marie-Agnès saw two German military police officers getting out of a car in front of the house. The men knocked on the door, and when Marie-Agnès opened it, one of the agents politely told her that she and Alfred were to accompany them for routine questioning, though he declined to tell them the subject.

After initial processing in Rouen and Paris, Marie-Agnès and Alfred were sent to Fresnes Prison, where they were separated. While both had assumed that their arrests were the result of their resistance activities, it quickly became apparent that Marie-Agnès’s relationship to the leader of the Free French was the real reason they’d been picked up. Though the Cailliaus were treated marginally better than most of the prisoners at Fresnes, neither had an easy time of it. Marie-Agnès was fifty-three, and Alfred was sixty-six; both suffered from the restricted diet and squalid living conditions, as well as from their forced separation. Alfred’s conditions were destined to worsen—in January 1944 he was transferred to Buchenwald.

Marie-Agnès, on the other hand, saw a marked improvement in her own circumstances following her July 1944 deportation to the Rhinehotel Dreesen in a suburb of Bonn. The Nazis had converted the old lodge on the west bank of the Rhine into a VIP detention center, a satellite installation of Buchenwald. Though still prisoners, Marie-Agnès and the others slept in furnished rooms rather than cells, could walk in the large enclosed garden, and had access to decent food.²⁸

Things changed dramatically when Allied forces neared Bonn in early 1945. On February 27 the German garrison herded the prisoners onto a barge and took them across to the east bank of the Rhine, where they boarded trucks that carried them to Buchenwald. There Marie-Agnès was reunited with Alfred, who was in poor health after his months in the camp. On March 8 they and about fifty other VIP prisoners were crowded into railway cattle cars and taken to Munich, where Marie-Agnès and Alfred—both now ill—were separated from the others and put in the back of a covered truck. Three young Wehrmacht soldiers climbed in with them, as did an older corporal. The truck drove through the night, with Marie-Agnès and Alfred sleeping on the hard metal floor of the vehicle’s cargo area.

Then, on the afternoon of April 13, the truck halted before the sentry box at the foot of the short drive leading from Itter village to the castle’s main gate. The corporal walked over to speak with the two soldiers standing guard, both of whom were wearing full combat gear and seemed surprised by the truck’s arrival. When the guards refused to raise the barricade, the corporal demanded that they use the telephone in the sentry box to call for an officer.

Within a few minutes Stefan Otto appeared; he, too, was obviously surprised to see the French couple. Looking at their disheveled clothes and drawn faces, he barked, “We have no room for you,” turned on his heel, and was about to start back toward the castle gate when Marie-Agnès called out, “But I am the sister of General De Gaulle!”

Otto turned and hurried back, his entire demeanor changed. “Madame, my sincere apologies, we weren’t expecting you yet!” Taking Alfred gently by the arm, the officer led the French couple toward the castle gate. “Madame, you shall have my quarters this evening, and monsieur, you shall sleep in Colonel de La Rocque’s room. At the moment he is away at a clinic. Tomorrow we will make other arrangements.”²⁹

Pleased at the change in Otto’s attitude, Marie-Agnès was equally delighted by the realization that there was at least one other Frenchman resident in the castle looming before her. She knew who de La Rocque was and that he had served Vichy in some capacity. While their politics might differ, she believed that as French prisoners of the Germans, they—and any other of their countrymen held in the schloss—would put aside such petty concerns and draw together in solidarity, finding strength in each other’s company and their shared nationality.

She would soon find out just how wrong she was.

DESPITE MARIE-AGNÈS CAILLIAU’S hope that Schloss Itter’s French prisoners would band together in the face of shared hardship and live in supportive camaraderie, just the opposite was true. For while all of the castle’s prisoners were French³⁰ and all considered themselves patriots, they could not possibly have been more politically diverse, more determinedly irascible, or more obstinately quarrelsome.

The fault lines that developed among Schloss Itter’s VIP prisoners were, in a sense, completely understandable. Reynaud and Daladier were bitter political enemies, and both detested Weygand, who, having replaced Gamelin as supreme commander of French forces in May 1940, surrendered to and initially collaborated with the occupying Germans. Following the December 1943 arrival of Weygand and his wife, Reynaud’s snubs of the couple were so obvious and so continuous that at one point Weygand followed Reynaud down a corridor screaming, “Hooligan!” at him.³¹ Gamelin, for obvious reasons, was not at all fond of Weygand and sided with Reynaud against Daladier. An authoritarian right-winger, de La Rocque could not abide the leftist Jouhaux. As a former member of the Croix de feu and of Pétain’s Vichy government, Borotra was shunned by Daladier, Jouhaux, and Gamelin but embraced by Weygand and de La Rocque—and by Reynaud, despite their differing politics. And understandably, Schloss Itter’s female prisoners—Marie Weygand, Christiane Mabire, and Augusta Bruchlen—reflected the opinions and prejudices of their male partners.

We can only imagine the heated exchanges that occurred among these once powerful and still resentful personages, and the perverse joy their German captors took in both the French prisoners’ squabbling and the fact that they segregated themselves by political persuasion, avoiding each other as much as possible within the castle’s confines. They even ate at separate tables in the dining room—the Weygands, Borotra, and de La Rocque at one; Reynaud, Mabire, Gamelin, and Clemenceau at another; and the “neutrals”—Daladier, Jouhaux, Bruchlen, and, later, the Cailliaus—at a third. And as Marie-Agnès Cailliau later noted, several of the “great men” incarcerated in Schloss Itter did more than just snub each other during meals; each spent hours every day penning the memoirs he hoped would explain his own wartime actions in the best light while vilifying those of his rivals.

There were, of course, activities other than the writing of self-aggrandizing memoirs in which the French prisoners could participate—activities that would have been incomprehensible to captives not fortunate enough to be classed as honor prisoners. The schloss’s three-hundred-volume library was available to Itter’s involuntary guests, and in good weather they could stroll much of the castle’s walled grounds or pass the time playing ring tennis or, in Daladier’s case, practicing solo nudism.³² Those of a spiritual bent could attend Mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Itter village—under guard—and the female prisoners were driven to nearby Hopfgarten for regular appointments with a hairdresser. Anyone requiring medical attention beyond what the garrison’s medic could provide was transported to a suitable medical facility; Reynaud, for example, underwent eye surgery at the military hospital in Innsbruck, and Daladier had oral surgery at Dachau.

And then there was the food and drink. The prisoner-cook—a Czech named Andreas Krobot,³³ known to the French as André—used flour, fruit, vegetables, and dairy products from surrounding farms to turn out wholesome and plentiful meals for the captives. And there was even wine with which to wash down the food: each French prisoner was authorized two liters of local Austrian wine a week, one of red and one of white. To their credit, most of the VIPs ensured that André and Zvonimir Čučković passed on any leftover food and wine to the handful of far less fortunate female concentration-camp inmates—referred to as “number” prisoners because each had a number tattooed on her forearm—whom the SS had brought to work at Schloss Itter as servants.³⁴

The French captives also had a link to the outside provided by Čučković, who organized—read “stole”—a small short-wave radio from one of the castle’s guards.³⁵ Since the guard himself wasn’t supposed to have the radio—its possession could have gotten him sent to the Russian Front, or worse—he couldn’t report its theft. The radio was hidden in Reynaud’s room, and Čučković and Christiane Mabire would keep watch while the former prime minister huddled under a blanket, listening to the BBC and other Allied stations. In a rare show of cooperation, Reynaud would share important news with his fellow captives via Mabire and Borotra.³⁶

As cushy as life might have been for the French prisoners at Schloss Itter, Borotra remained determined to escape. From the moment of his arrival in May 1943, he exercised every morning, increasing the duration of his runs within the rear courtyard until he could do ninety circuits—roughly nine miles—nonstop. In addition to his physical preparations, Borotra tracked the movement and schedules of the guards and noted several areas where the barbed wire atop the schloss’s walls seemed loosely secured.

The Bounding Basque made three escape attempts, each time going over the wall. While the dates of his first two tries are unclear, it appears that one occurred in the fall of 1943 and another in late March 1945. On both occasions he got several miles before being recaptured.³⁷ His only punishment following these first two excursions seems to have been a few days’ confinement in his room.

Thanks to Daladier, we have more precise information regarding Borotra’s third attempt, on April 29, 1945. At about six thirty that evening Daladier was strolling in the castle’s rear courtyard when he encountered the tennis player, who greeted him with “Have a nice walk, prime minister.” Borotra then ran to the closest section of the south wall, and as Daladier recounts:

he scaled it and started running madly down the hill. The SS [guards] began firing at him from a few yards away. He took the barbed wire [rolls a few meters from the bottom of the castle’s outer wall] in stride as more and more shots rang out and the SS began their pursuit. [At] 7:20 P.M. Borotra was brought back. He had probably twisted an ankle, given the way he was limping.³⁸

Once again, Borotra’s only punishment seems to have been a few days’ house arrest. He was fortunate he’d been recaptured by castle guards sent out by Wimmer—by April 1945, the world outside Schloss Itter’s gates had become a very dangerous place, crawling with Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units to whom the life of a French honor prisoner meant absolutely nothing.