The Last Battle (17 page)

It was the appearance of large numbers of these die-hard Waffen-SS troops that prompted Gangl to make his final break with the Wehrmacht. Late on Thursday evening, even as Giehl and his other staff officers were jumping into their vehicles and roaring out of Wörgl, Gangl was meeting with a very concerned Alois Mayr. The resistance leader was understandably concerned that the withdrawal of von Hengl’s troops would allow the
newly arrived Waffen-SS units to wreak havoc on the local people, many of whom had already started putting out white flags in anticipation of the Americans’ arrival. It wasn’t an idle worry: barely ten days earlier, Heinrich Himmler had issued an order stating that “all male persons inhabiting a house showing a white flag will be shot. No hesitation in executing these orders can be permitted any longer. ‘Male persons’ who are to be considered responsible in this respect are those aged 14 years or over.”
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Gangl, fully aware that he and those soldiers who had chosen to join him, as well as Hagleitner’s armed resistance members, were the only force capable of providing any protection for Wörgl’s civilians, decided on the spot to remain in the town as the rest of Giehl’s battle group withdrew.

But on Friday morning, May 4, the artillery officer and newly minted resistance leader was unexpectedly handed another task, one arguably as important as organizing the defense of Wörgl. Just after eleven
AM
, as Gangl was handing out automatic weapons and hand grenades to Hagleitner and some of his men, other resisters appeared, accompanying a disheveled man on a battered bicycle. Walking directly up to Gangl, the new arrival said, in heavily accented German, that his name was Andreas Krobot and he was the bearer of important news from Schloss Itter.

CHAPTER 5

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

T
HAT
A
NDREAS
K
ROBOT
had managed to make it safely from Schloss Itter to Wörgl was nothing short of miraculous. Despite von Hengl’s withdrawal of his battered forces to positions east of the castle, the roads along which the Czech cook had ridden west were not free of danger. Die-hard Waffen-SS troops were increasingly active in the area, setting up roadblocks, searching for deserters, and engaging any Austrian resisters they encountered. Through a combination of good luck and extreme caution Krobot had nonetheless managed to evade the obstacles, arriving in Wörgl with a tale of French honor prisoners in need of immediate rescue.

T
HE CONDITIONS THAT ULTIMATELY
made such a relief mission necessary had been developing for many months. Though the French prisoners had certainly fared far better than the vast majority of the Nazis’ captives, the essentially benign routine at Schloss Itter began to change as Germany’s military fortunes steadily deteriorated throughout the latter half of 1944. Food became increasingly scarce for both the prisoners and their guards, and a growing shortage of fuel for the castle’s generators meant that candles and lanterns ultimately replaced electric lights. More ominously, the
members of the castle’s guard force began taking the threat of enemy action more seriously. On October 7, 1944, Édouard Daladier witnessed an example of this higher level of readiness and recorded in his diary that he’d

watched the SS go rushing about the castle. Red flares went off. It was all either preparation to ward off a commando raid or a positioning exercise in anticipation of an attack from the village or from down in the valley. The maneuvers lasted two hours, and enlisted men and officers alike went through them in dead seriousness.
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Just ten days later, Daladier noted, the decidedly second-string guards—most of whom had never fired a shot in anger—were reinforced by twenty-seven combat-experienced Waffen-SS troops, who arrived at Schloss Itter bearing several additional machine guns and crates of ammunition. The newcomers immediately began reinforcing the castle’s defenses with what the elderly Frenchman described as “speed and discipline,”
²
setting up sand-bagged firing positions and felling trees to be used to block the approach roads. And there were other measures as well. On October 27 Wimmer announced that he was instituting a defensive alarm system. One type of siren would indicate an Allied air attack; when it sounded, the French prisoners could decide for themselves whether to take shelter in the castle’s cellars, with the understanding that if they didn’t, it was at their own risk. The other alarm would sound if a ground attack were imminent; in that case the prisoners were to move immediately to the cellars. If they didn’t, Wimmer said, they would be taken there by force.
³

While the danger of the French prisoners being killed or injured by an errant Allied bomb was real, they were in many ways more vulnerable to the increasingly erratic behavior of Sebastian Wimmer. The castle’s commandant had always been mercurial and subject to fits of unreasoning anger, but his personality swings had become far more pronounced following a mid-July 1944 trip to Munich to attend the funeral of his brother, who had been killed days earlier in an Allied bombing raid. The city had been subjected to another massive air attack the day before Wimmer’s arrival, and on reaching the city the SS-TV officer couldn’t find a taxi or working streetcar. As he was walking through rubble-filled streets toward the makeshift morgue that held his brother’s remains, the air-raid sirens wailed yet again, and falling bombs obliterated the building. Wimmer, Daladier recalled, “returned to Itter totally demoralized.”
⁴

Schloss Itter’s commander increasingly sought to alleviate his demoralization with alcohol, often drinking steadily from morning until late at night. Prisoners and guards alike tried to avoid Wimmer anytime after noon: though he was usually calm for the first few hours after opening a bottle of Asbach Uralt,
⁵
later in the day his true nature would reveal itself in screaming rages and random violence. While the SS-TV officer generally didn’t focus his alcohol-fueled anger on his VIP charges, he had no compunctions about tormenting the number prisoners. One of his favorite targets was Zvonko Čučković; while Wimmer would occasionally treat the Croat handyman with something approaching kindness,
⁶
his more usual attitude is illustrated by two incidents that occurred during the winter of 1944–1945.

In the first, Čučković was working on Wimmer’s staff car in the small courtyard between the castle’s front gate and the schlosshof when the SS-TV officer staggered up to him and without saying a word punched the Croat in the face. Knowing well that any reaction would only further enrage the drunken Wimmer, Čučković said nothing and quickly snapped to attention. The castle’s commandant nevertheless hit him again and was about to punch the Croat a third time when he realized that Maurice Gamelin—out for his daily constitutional—had walked up behind him. Wimmer saluted the French general, who returned a withering glare and said, “You cannot beat a prisoner,” before turning his back and walking away. Wimmer staggered off, muttering to himself, and didn’t leave his suite for two days.

The second incident was potentially more dangerous for Čučković. Just after a particularly heavy snowfall, a seriously inebriated Wimmer summoned the Croat to the guardroom and began screaming at him for not repairing a leaking toilet in the commandant’s suite. Čučković tried to explain that he’d ordered the necessary rubber washer from the supply depot at Dachau, but it hadn’t yet arrived. Wimmer shrieked that he wasn’t interested in excuses and ordered the Croat to spend the next two nights shoveling snow in the rear courtyard from six
PM
until six
AM
. Had it not been for the occasional help provided by the two SS enlisted men who’d been tasked to watch him—their assistance most probably an attempt to curry favor as Germany spiraled ever closer to defeat—Čučković might well have died of exhaustion or exposure.

Wimmer’s outbursts increased in both frequency and virulence as the Allied armies got closer to Schloss Itter. Fortunately for Čučković, one of
the worst wasn’t aimed at him. On March 20, 1945, the Croat was again working on the commandant’s staff car when Gertrud, one of the female number prisoners, ran up to him with the news that Wimmer was about to shoot Andreas Krobot. Rushing to the castle’s scullery, Čučković found a scene of pandemonium: An obviously drunken Wimmer was pointing his Walther P-38 pistol out an open window at the terrified Czech cook, who was standing in the middle of the castle’s small vegetable garden. All of the female prisoners who worked in the kitchen were standing to one side, sobbing loudly, as Wimmer screamed at Krobot, “You dog, come one step forward and one to the left,” apparently trying to line up a better shot. Čučković grabbed a large knife from a nearby rack, determined to kill the commandant if he shot Krobot, but the sudden appearance of Wimmer’s wife defused the situation before any blood was spilled.
⁷

By the first month of 1945, the Waffen-SS troops who’d temporarily bolstered Schloss Itter’s defenses had moved on, leaving behind a guard force infected with what Daladier called “utter consternation” because of Germany’s clearly terminal military condition. In a January 30 diary entry, the Frenchman wrote:

This is the twilight of the gods. . . . All the radios have been locked up in the Commandant’s office for the last few days, probably to keep the garrison’s morale from caving in, but in spite of all the precautions, disastrous news reports continue to filter through. The SS [men] can see the clenched jaws and the faces of [Wimmer and Otto]; their strained and downcast looks tell them just as much as they could ever learn from listening to the field communiqués. . . . I could see the dejection on the faces . . . of the soldiers. . . . [Čučković] told me that we had to be on our guard. Some of the SS troops were talking about suicide. Others planned to seize all the food supplies . . . get drunk and shoot us.
⁸

The last possibility was of real concern to Daladier and his fellow honor prisoners, for they knew all too well that their lives might not be worth much to Nazis intent on covering up their crimes. Reynaud was seen as especially vulnerable, and during the last days of April, Clemenceau—who spoke fluent German—took it on himself to summon Wimmer to a meeting with Reynaud and Gamelin. In their presence, Clemenceau reminded the castle’s commandant that the lives of Reynaud and indeed all the French prisoners were in the SS officer’s hands.

“It is possible that you may shortly be told to hand over President Paul Reynaud,” Clemenceau said. “If President Reynaud is taken away, you know for what purpose it will be. You also know the Allies will hold responsible all those who help in an action of this nature. What do you mean to do?”

Recounting this conversation in his memoirs, Reynaud said that Wimmer replied that he was only accountable to his conscience (an attribute, it must be said, that was completely absent during the SS-TV officer’s time in Poland and at Majdanek and Dachau). Wimmer also said, however, that the deaths of Reynaud and the other prisoners would not be compatible with Germany’s postwar interests and that he would aid in their escape if it became necessary.
⁹

Despite Wimmer’s pledge, the arrival at the castle of a nearly constant stream of senior SS-TV officers kept the French on edge. Often accompanied by their families and always loaded down with weapons, baggage, and booty, the SS men used Itter as a way station as they attempted to escape the advancing Allies.
¹⁰
Most of the fleeing Nazis stayed only long enough to requisition what food and water they could, but on the night of April 30 SS-Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, the last commander of Dachau, settled in with a retinue of his subordinates and their wives and children.

It was not Weiter’s first visit to Itter; he had inspected the castle and its prisoners in October 1943 and at that time had spoken with Reynaud and several of the other French captives. On this, his final visit, Weiter—whom Daladier later described as “obese and apoplectic, with the face of a brute”
¹¹
—drunkenly bragged to Wimmer that he had ordered the execution of some two thousand prisoners before leaving Dachau for the last time. Hearing of Weiter’s boast, the French captives at Itter were therefore understandably concerned that his arrival signaled their own executions. As it turned out, however, the only death Weiter had on his mind was his own. As Reynaud later recounted, early on the morning of Wednesday, May 2,
¹²
“I heard in the room next to mine a couple of shots: [Weiter] had just shot himself near the heart, and then finished himself off with a second shot behind the ear.”
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