The Last Battle, page 26
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13
This translates literally as “Eastern March,” a reference to Austria’s tenth-century status as a “march,” or buffer, between Bavaria and the Slavs.
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14
For clarity’s sake, all French, Wehrmacht, and SS ranks in this book are expressed in their U.S. Army equivalents. Von Bock went on to play leading roles in the invasions of Poland, France, and Russia, and was killed on May 4, 1945, when a British fighter-bomber strafed his car.
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15
An acronym for the full name of the dreaded Nazi secret police, the Geheime Staatspolizei.
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16
See Richard Germann’s excellent essay “Austrian Soldiers and Generals in World War II,” in New Perspectives on Austrians and World War II, ed. Bischof, Plasser, and Stelzl-Marx, for a fascinating discussion of why Austrian soldiers so willingly donned Wehrmacht uniforms.
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17
Ibid., 29.
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18
Among the willing were Otto Skorzeny, the Waffen-SS commando leader who rescued Benito Mussolini from captivity in September 1943, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reich Main Security Office.
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19
Those considered unreliable included between 30 and 50 percent of all officers in the Bundesheer, who were dismissed. All were closely watched by the Gestapo through the end of the war.
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20
Luza, The Resistance in Austria, 14.
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21
Ultimately, many Austrians arrested by the Nazis would be imprisoned—and many would perish—in concentration and labor camps established within Austria itself, including the infamous Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex near Linz, some 120 miles northeast of Schloss Itter.
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22
The German name is Deutscher Bund zur Bekämpfung der Tabakgefahren. For a fascinating discussion of the Nazis’ antismoking activities, see Bachinger, McKee, and Gilmore, “Tobacco Policies in Nazi Germany.”
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23
For his part in the horrors of the Nazis’ Final Solution, Pohl was charged by the Allies with crimes against humanity and a staggering array of war crimes. Found guilty, he was hanged on June 7, 1951.
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24
Known as Konzentrationslager-Hauptlager, shortened in German to KZ-Hauptlager, Dachau was located about ten miles northwest of Munich and established in March 1933 as the first regular Nazi concentration camp. It was the administrative and operational model for all subsequent camps, both within and outside Germany.
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25
Koop, In Hitler’s Hand, 32.
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26
Sources vary on whether this officer’s name was Petz or Peez, and in his handwritten postwar memoir, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter” (in the archive collection of the KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau), Zvonimir Čučković refers to him as the latter. While the names would sound very similar to a nonnative German speaker like Čučković, the spelling “Petz” would be the more common German usage, and I have chosen to favor it.
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27
Sited about 112 miles northeast of Dachau, hard on the Czech border, Flossenbürg was opened in 1938. It initially held common criminals and Jews but ultimately housed political prisoners and Soviet POWs. Its inmates were used as slave laborers in nearby granite quarries.
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28
Details on the conversion are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter” and Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat, 8–10.
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29
The SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), or “Death’s Head Units,” administered the concentration-camp system.
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30
Thanks to Čučković’s memoirs, we know that twenty-two of the twenty-seven members of the work detail were political prisoners, four were classed as “common criminals,” and one was an “asocial,” a term the Nazis used to refer to such groups as homosexuals and the mentally ill. We also know that the prisoner work detail included five Germans, eight Austrians, a Yugoslav, a Czech, seven Russians, and five Poles.
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31
In European usage, “first floor” is the floor above the ground floor— thus in fact “second floor” in American usage.
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32
The Heeresunteroffiziersschule für Gebirgsjäger, as it was known in German, was one of two similar institutions within the Third Reich tasked with training NCOs bound for military units especially trained for mountain warfare. The other was at Mittenwald, Germany.
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33
As far as can be determined, none of the prisoners who served on the Schloss Itter work detail and were returned to Dachau and Flossenbürg in April 1943 survived the war. Nor, apparently, did Petz.
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34
Details on Čučković’s life both before and during the war are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter.”
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35
Ema Čučković, neé Freyberg, was born in 1910 in Nordhausen, Germany. Čučković’s son was born in Yugoslavia in 1933.
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36
In his handwritten memoir, Čučković identifies thirteen of these men by name: SS-Sergeant First Class Oschbald; SS-Staff Sergeants Maschalek, Gilde, and Kunz; and SS-Corporals Euba, Jackl, Nowotny, Delus, Resner, Fischer, Bliesmer, Schulz, and Greiner.
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37
Čučković identifies this woman as Rosel Harmske, “SS-Aufseherin [female auxiliary] aus Ravensbrück.” A second female SS member who occasionally worked at Schloss Itter and whom Čučković identifies only as “Kühn, SS-Aufseherin aus Ravensbrück,” may have been Anna Kühn. When she joined the SS at Ravensbrück in 1942, she was fifty-seven years old, making her the oldest known woman to have served in the SS concentration-camp system.
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38
In German, SS-Sonderkommando. The word “commando,” in this sense, refers to the original South African Boer concept of a special-purpose unit, rather than an individual covert-operations soldier.
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39
Upon joining the SS, Wimmer received the member number (mitgliedsnummer) 264374. Details of Wimmer’s service are drawn from his personnel file, SS Personalakten für Wimmer, Sebastian, SS-Hauptamt.
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40
While he was not the brightest of recruits, Wimmer’s background as a police officer ensured (as it did for many of his former law-enforcement colleagues) an officer’s commission, rather than being relegated to the enlisted ranks.
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41
When the SS took control of all of Germany’s concentration camps in 1934 and established the SS-TV, it organized that group into six named wachtruppen, or guard units. Wachtruppe Oberbayern (Upper Bavaria) was stationed at Dachau, and just before Wimmer joined it in 1935 the unit was enlarged and redesignated Wachsturmbann Oberbayern.
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42
The other two were SS-Totenkopfstandarte 2 Brandenburg at Oranienburg concentration camp and SS-Totenkopfstandarte 3 Thüringen at Buchenwald. A fourth, SS-Totenkopfstandarte 4 Ostmark, was formed in Vienna following the 1938 Anschluss. More than ten additional SS-Totenkopfstandarten were formed during the course of World War II.
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43
The other two Totenkopfstandarten, Brandenburg and Thüringen, were involved in identical activities.
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44
The four thousand Jews who survived the initial shootings were later confined in a ghetto; in 1942 all were sent to Treblinka concentration camp and subsequently killed.
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45
See Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction, 40–42.
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46
By the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the einsatzgruppen had so perfected their murderous technique that they were able to kill more than thirty-three thousand people in two days at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine.
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47
The 3rd SS Panzer Division is also often, and incorrectly, referred to as SS Division Totenkopf.
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48
1. Čučković, “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter,” 25.
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49
2. Initially mobilized into the local Avignon regiment, Daladier was quickly posted to the 2e Régiment de la Légion Étrangère, the Foreign Legion’s 2nd Regiment. The unit was in need of French noncommissioned officers to lead the many foreign volunteers flocking to France’s aid. When his battalion was essentially destroyed, Sergeant Daladier was transferred to the 209th Infantry Regiment, which saw continuous combat near Verdun. Commissioned in 1916, Daladier proved to be a brave and effective combat leader, and he finished the war as a lieutenant with both the Croix de guerre and the Légion d’honneur. See Daladier, In Defense of France, 12–21.
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3. Daladier’s aggressive response was at least partly the result of his belief—one widely held among France’s left-leaning political parties—that the riots actually constituted an attempted fascist coup.
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4. He also became the first socialist, and the first Jew, to hold the office.
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52
5. See the introduction to Daladier’s Prison Journal.
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53
6. Their political differences were exacerbated by the fact that their mistresses were social rivals, despite having known each other since childhood. Daladier’s mistress was Jeanne de Crussol; Reynaud’s was Hélène de Portes. Each woman took every opportunity to publicly and privately malign the other’s man and, of course, to report to her own lover every word spoken against him by his political rival. Daladier’s relationship had originated after the 1932 death of his wife, Madeline. Reynaud, on the other hand, remained legally married to his first wife, the former Jeanne Henri-Robert, until 1948. His relationship with Hélène de Portes was an open secret, one not contested by his wife.
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54
7. In addition to some twenty-seven politicians, Massilia’s passenger list included thirty-three other passengers, among them Mendès-France’s wife and two sons and Mandel’s mistress.
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55
8. Le Verdon-sur-Mer was a harbor at the mouth of the Gironde River, some fifty-four miles northwest of Bordeaux. The French government had relocated to Bordeaux on June 10.
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56
9. Daladier, Prison Journal, 2. Recognizing the irony in the general’s cables, Daladier said on the same page of his journal, “Strange fellow, this General Noguès, who felt he had to ask the government for permission to rebel.”
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10. In the military usage, a rank roughly equivalent to a U.S. general of the armies.
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58
11. Daladier, Prison Journal, 193.
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12. Buchenwald was built in 1937. Though it was not a designated extermination camp, an estimated fifty-six thousand people died or were executed there before the camp’s April 1945 liberation by elements of the U.S. 6th Armored Division.
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13. For additional details on Daladier’s time in Buchenwald, see both Daladier, Prison Journal, and Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat.
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14. Daladier, Prison Journal, 199. The two men were to have very different fates. Blum spent the remainder of the war in Buchenwald and, briefly, Dachau, and was liberated by Allied troops in May 1945. He returned to politics and was briefly prime minister in 1946–1947. He died in 1950. Mandel, sadly, did not survive the war. He was executed in Paris in July 1944 by the French fascist paramilitary force known as the Milice.
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15. Known in German as Feldgendarmerie, these troops were widely hated within the Wehrmacht because of their habit of summarily executing any soldier they believed to be a deserter or malingerer. They were scornfully referred to as kettenhunde, or chained dogs, because of the gorgets (a flat metal crescent suspended around their necks on a light chain) that were the emblems of their authority.
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63
16. For an in-depth discussion of Gamelin’s family background and military connections, see Martin S. Alexander’s excellent The Republic in Danger.
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17. Gamelin also ruthlessly put down a revolt by restive Druze tribes in the Syrian hill country. According to a Time magazine account (Aug. 14, 1939), Gamelin was present when French aircraft and artillery killed more than 1,400 civilians in Damascus.
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18. Singer, Maxime Weygand, 65. This book is an excellent in-depth look at Weygand’s life and career.
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66
19. Alexander, The Republic in Danger, 30.
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20. Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, France’s highest military council, headed by the country’s prime minister.
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21. Italian in origin, “generalissimo” refers to a military commander who has operational control of all of a nation’s armed forces—land, sea, and air—and is subordinate only to the head of state, or is himself the head of state. In addition to Weygand and Gamelin, in the 1930s and 1940s the term was applied to such disparate individuals as Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco, and Hitler.
