The Last Battle (8 page)

Indeed, so effective were Jouhaux’s tactics at the match factory that he soon came to the attention of national labor leaders. He was invited to join the executive committee of the CGT in 1906 and was soon working full-time on issues important to workers throughout France. Though he continued to be known as a tough negotiator, he also developed a healthy pragmatism that allowed him to compromise when it helped to ultimately advance the cause of the CGT and its members. Following several early successes, in 1909 he was named the CGT’s secretary-general, a promotion that made him, at just thirty years old, arguably the most powerful labor leader in France.

Among the most pressing problems Jouhaux faced in his first years as head of the CGT was the rising tide of militarism in Europe. Believing that wars made workers suffer solely to further enrich their capitalist bosses, Jouhaux joined with other European labor leaders to endorse disarmament
and universal antimilitarism. Yet when Europe descended into war in 1914—despite what Jouhaux later called the labor leaders’ “best efforts to build a dike against the onrushing sea of blood”
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—union members in each warring nation rallied to the colors and enlisted in droves. The reality of war changed even Jouhaux’s mind: he quickly came to see that a German victory could very well lead to the virtual enslavement of French workers, and thereafter he worked diligently to support the French war effort.

Despite that support, Jouhaux never lost the belief that the working people of the world could ultimately help make war obsolete if they banded together in an international trade-union movement, and he worked diligently to make such an alliance a reality. He was a major player in the post–World War I reconstitution of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and in 1919 became the organization’s vice president even while maintaining his role as head of the CGT. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he tirelessly exerted his considerable influence to bring together Europe’s disparate labor organizations. In November 1937 Jouhaux was one of three IFTU leaders who traveled to Moscow for talks regarding the affiliation of Soviet Russia’s Central Council of Trade Unions with the IFTU. Despite being a staunch anticommunist, Jouhaux maintained that such an affiliation was logical as a reaction to the growing power of fascism in both Germany and Italy, but his recommendation that the IFTU establish close and pragmatic ties with the Soviet organization was rejected by the full board of the IFTU.
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Jouhaux’s efforts to help avert another world war were ultimately in vain, of course. Following France’s June 1940 capitulation, Vichy ordered the CGT dissolved, prompting many of its members to form a nascent resistance movement. Jouhaux’s outspoken criticism of the Pétain regime ensured that his name soon ended up on an arrest list, and a warrant was issued for him in October 1940. He’d already gone underground, however, traveling within unoccupied France on false papers that identified him as a Czech named Bedrich Woves.
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He was referred to as “Mr. Buvot” by the compatriots who helped him move from one safe house to another but signed his own name to the many pamphlets he wrote, urging all true trade unionists to support the Allied cause and pleading for unity among France’s fractious left-wing groups. To pass his writings on to those who would reproduce and distribute them, Jouhaux relied on his secretary and longtime companion (and future wife), Augusta Bruchlen,
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an Alsace-born
Frenchwoman whose fluency in German several times helped her escape detection as she was attempting to contact members of the resistance movement that had grown out of the now-banned CGT.

In January 1940 the IFTU’s London-based executive committee decided that all of the major labor leaders in continental Europe should be evacuated to Britain, and Jouhaux was the first on their list. The organization initially approached the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS),
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which favored the IFTU’s plan but was ultimately unable to put it into operation. Following Britain’s July 1940 creation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE)—a quasi-military organization specifically tasked with undertaking clandestine activities in enemy-occupied territories—the IFTU approached its political head, Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton. A longtime socialist, Dalton wholeheartedly agreed that Jouhaux would be far more valuable to the Allied cause working in London than he would be rotting in a Vichy or German prison.
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Dalton therefore used his considerable influence to ensure that Jouhaux’s escape from France became a top SOE priority.

By early November 1941 SOE had arranged for the labor leader to be smuggled out of France into neutral Portugal, where he was to board a flight for Britain. A double agent within the CGT resistance apparently got wind of the attempted escape, however, and betrayed the plan to the Vichy secret police. Jouhaux was arrested at the port of Marseilles on November 26,
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1941, just as he was about to take ship—using his false papers—for Portugal.

After his arrest Jouhaux was driven to Vals-les-Bains, a small spa town nestled in the Rhône-Alpes, where he was held incommunicado as his Vichy captors pondered what to do with him. At the end of January 1942 he was moved to Cahors, a quaint medieval town some ninety miles northwest of Vals-les-Bains, where he lived under house arrest until the beginning of November. He was then moved yet again, this time to the spa town of Évaux-les-Bains in central France, in which the Vichy regime had established a centralized internment center for top-level political prisoners. The accommodations were relatively civilized—the captives were housed in the town’s former Grand Hotel—and about a month after his arrival Jouhaux was permitted a visit from Augusta Bruchlen. In January 1943 she herself was arrested by the Sûreté, apparently because of her work as a courier between Jouhaux and the CGT resistance. Eventually interned in the same Grand Hotel, she was apparently no longer considered a major threat, because her captors allowed her twice-weekly visits with Jouhaux,
albeit in the presence of a policeman.
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These occasions did much to cheer the labor leader, who had for several months been suffering from a prolonged arthritis flare-up and increasingly severe angina.

Jouhaux’s idyll in Évaux-les-Bains ended abruptly on the night of March 31, 1943. A squad of German soldiers hustled him from his room with little more than the clothes on his back, handcuffed him, and shoved him into the back of a waiting military ambulance. With a German guard sitting on either side of him, he was driven to the airport in Clermont-Ferrand, where he joined Daladier and Gamelin for the journey to Buchenwald and, ultimately, Schloss Itter.

F
OR
S
EBASTIAN
W
IMMER
, the arrival of the castle’s first three honor prisoners marked the beginning of what he fervently hoped would be a very rewarding phase in his career. He was, after all, commandant of what was planned to be arguably the most important and high-profile subcamp in all of Nazi Germany’s sprawling concentration-camp system and would be responsible for some of the Third Reich’s most valuable captives. If Wimmer played his cards right, he could win promotion, decorations, and, with luck, even personal recognition from the führer. And, perhaps most important, if his performance in this key post managed to sufficiently please his superiors in both Dachau and Berlin, he’d be able to avoid returning to a vastly less comfortable life working in one of the death camps or, far worse, actual front-line combat duty.

Though a brutal thug by both nature and training, Wimmer understood that his success as commandant of Schloss Itter would result in large part from his ability to treat his important prisoners with a level of “correctness” that was wholly outside his realm of experience. Because the führer might have future plans for the VIP captives—perhaps handing them over to the Allies as part of some political accommodation or even releasing them as a gesture of magnanimity after Germany’s ultimate victory—Wimmer would have to do his best to keep them healthy and secure. And though he was certainly not the most intelligent man in the SS, even Wimmer understood that a German victory was not guaranteed: the Fatherland had already suffered a string of battlefield reversals, and Allied aircraft were turning the nation’s industrial centers into smoking rubble
with almost monotonous regularity. Wimmer realized very clearly that should Germany lose the war, having a few French VIPs testify that he treated them well might be the only thing that would save him from an Allied firing squad.

Attempting to strike a balance between correctness and the proper level of stern aloofness he felt his position required, Wimmer nodded to Daladier, Gamelin, and Jouhaux as they walked toward him after alighting from the staff car that had brought them to Itter, but he did not attempt to shake their hands. Flanked by members of the castle’s SS guard detachment, the three Frenchmen followed Wimmer through the arched portal in the center of the schlosshof and across the large enclosed terrace that led to the vaulted entrance
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to the castle’s main hall. Stefan Otto of the SD was waiting, and, as Wimmer looked on, the younger officer assigned each of the Frenchmen a room—Otto was careful not to use the word “cell”—Jouhaux in number 9 on the second floor, and Gamelin and Daladier in numbers 10 and 11, respectively, on the third floor.
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Otto then solemnly read the new arrivals the decidedly relaxed rules of their captivity. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner would be served in the ground-floor dining hall, and they could take the meals back to their rooms if they chose or, in good weather, eat at tables on the adjoining terrace. Each man would receive a hundred liters of wine per month, as well as a monthly allowance of 500 Reichsmarks with which to purchase tobacco, writing paper, pens, and other sundries from a small kiosk tucked beneath the stairs on the ground floor. The prisoners would be able to send mail to, and receive it from, members of their immediate families, though all mail would, of course, be censored. The men would have free access to the castle’s library and would even be permitted to listen to the large radio that graced the main hall—though the device was tuned exclusively to Radio Berlin. And, finally, each man could exercise in the large courtyard to the rear of the castle, which encompassed a thirteenth-century garden and fountain, in the morning and afternoon.

Lest the three Frenchmen somehow forget that they were indeed prisoners, Otto then spelled out a few harder facts. They were under the absolute control of the Third Reich and would obey the orders of Commandant Wimmer immediately and without question or argument. The men would each be locked into their rooms from eleven at night until seven in the morning. They would not be permitted to leave the castle without an SS escort,
and, if discovered outside the schloss alone at any time, they would be considered escapees and could be shot on sight.

With the reading of the regulations completed, the Frenchmen were escorted to their rooms and locked in so that Wimmer could gather all his troops in the 150-foot-by-100-foot rear courtyard. He wanted to make a brief but pointed announcement, one probably largely intended to ensure that none of the SS men inadvertently violated the correctness Wimmer hoped would either be good for his career or save his neck:

The three people who have just arrived to be imprisoned in the castle are French. They will be joined by others. By command of the führer, these prisoners are to be viewed as hostages. Upon meeting one of them you should salute them with a regular military salute, and not with the führer salute. If one of these gentlemen should attempt to speak to you, your response should be the following: “Your Excellence, would you please speak to Commandant Wimmer?” Understood?
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The ground rules firmly established, the guards and their prisoners began settling into a daily routine. For the former this revolved around the usual on- and off-duty periods, interspersed with the occasional recreational foray into Itter or Wörgl. For the latter, the days were primarily built around mealtimes—breakfast at eight, lunch at two, and dinner at seven. The food—prepared by the guard detachment’s supply sergeant, Oschbald, and two junior soldiers—was plain but plentiful and was the same as that served to the SS troops. Between meals the three Frenchmen passed the time reading, talking, or walking around the inner courtyard. After dinner the men would share a cognac—from a bottle presented to them by Wimmer in a transparent attempt to curry favor—and some conversation; then each would repair to his own room to work on the notes and journals intended to form the basis for their exculpatory postwar memoirs.