The Last Battle (18 page)

A group of Weiter’s SS minions slapped together a pine box and hauled it up to his room but found that it was too large to fit through the door. Improvising, they dragged his corpse into the hallway and manhandled it down several flights of stairs and into the garage in the schlosshof.
There they unceremoniously dumped the body into the pine coffin, and one of them left to speak with the priest of Itter village’s small parish church of St. Joseph. At that point Reynaud, Gamelin, Jouhaux, and Clemenceau—wanting to positively identify the dead man as the senior Dachau officer who had inspected Itter months earlier, so as to allow the Allies to cross him off any list of wanted war criminals—demanded to see the corpse. As Reynaud later recalled: “It was a frightful sight. Soldiers had stolen the dead man’s boots. His bloodstained shirt was half opened to show his breast; his head was thrown back; his mouth was wide open and his eyes staring. This torturer looked like one of the damned.”
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Once the Frenchmen had agreed that the corpse was indeed that of Weiter, SS men carried the crude coffin out the castle’s front gate and started toward the village, only to encounter the soldier who had gone off to speak to the priest at St. Joseph’s. The clergyman, to his credit, had categorically refused to let Weiter be interred in holy ground, so the SS men hurriedly buried the “butcher of Dachau” in an unmarked grave in a small clearing just outside the castle’s walls. His only monument was a heap of brush meant to hide the patch of newly turned earth.
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Weiter’s suicide seemed to galvanize Wimmer. Early on May 4—after first asking several of the VIPs to sign a statement saying he had treated them “correctly” and then assuring Reynaud and Daladier that he would find a way to protect the French prisoners against reprisal by the roving bands of Waffen-SS troops active in the surrounding hills—the SS-TV man abruptly fled the castle with his wife. Wimmer was only marginally true to his word, however, since all he did to ensure the promised “protection” for the VIPs was to enlist the aid of an acquaintance, a war-wounded officer recuperating at home in Itter village. And in what Wimmer may have intended as a final irony, the man he tapped to be the French VIPs’ surrogate savior was himself a decorated member of the Waffen-SS.

A
T FIRST GLANCE
SS-C
APTAIN
Kurt-Siegfried Schrader appears to be the very archetype of all the evil Nazis who have goose-stepped across cinema screens for the past seventy years. He peers with frightening intensity from the official photo attached to his personnel file, the highly polished death’s head totem on his peaked officer’s hat almost pulsating with menace and
the double lightning-stroke SS runes on his collar obviously worn with arrogant pride. But it is not simply the uniform and facial expression that speak of his dedication to the cause: the man portrayed in the personalakten—and in Schrader’s own postwar writings
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—was for most of his military career the personification of the dedicated Waffen-SS officer.

Born in Magdeburg in August 1916, Schrader was the third and youngest child of a minor prewar judicial official who at the time of his son’s birth was a soldier serving in France. With the end of World War I Schrader Senior returned to his former post, his position and influence increasing considerably over the years, even as his politics veered sharply to the right. In 1930 the elder Schrader attended a Nazi rally in Leipzig and upon his return proclaimed to his family that Adolf Hitler would be the “savior of Germany.”
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Kurt-Siegfried was soon drawn into his father’s politics, and at the age of fourteen he joined a pro-Nazi youth group. The organization was still illegal in what at the time was the federal state of Prussia, and, when young Schrader was caught handing out Nazi propaganda stickers to his fellow students, he was expelled and thereafter prohibited from attending public schools. Undaunted by the expulsion, Schrader enrolled in a right-wing private school and joined the Hitler Youth movement. He participated in several large Nazi rallies, and, when Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor in January 1933, Schrader remembered that it was as if a bright light had suddenly illuminated what had been a dark and forbidding horizon.

In 1934 Schrader’s considerable intelligence—and his father’s political connections—led to the eighteen-year-old’s admission to a two-year program at an elite military-political school in Berlin. Following his graduation the young man spent a compulsory six months in the civilian Reich Labor Service,
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after which he had expected to do his required two years of military service with the Nürnberg-based Artillerie Regiment 7. When that unit turned down his application, a former teacher suggested that Schrader apply to one of the military units then being formed within the SS. He did, and in April 1937 he joined the field telephone company of the SS-Nachrichtensturmbann (signals battalion).
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As a junior enlisted man in the communications unit Schrader took part in both the March 1938 Austrian Anschluss and the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland the following October. Upon the conclusion of the latter operation Schrader was tapped to attend four weeks of infantry training
provided by the SS regiment Germania, and in April 1939 he entered the SS officer candidate school in Braunschweig. Schrader enjoyed both the military and political aspects of his officer training, later remembering that it was at Braunschweig that he “really got serious” about his professional life.
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And it was after his graduation and commissioning as a second lieutenant that the young officer got serious about his personal life: in January 1940 Schrader married his girlfriend, Annaliese Patales.

The war didn’t initially intrude on the newlyweds. For the first year of their marriage Schrader was assigned to various staff positions in eastern Germany, and in January 1941 he took up a three-month posting to Prague as the adjutant in a replacement battalion. He and Annaliese apparently enjoyed their time in the former Czech capital, for Schrader recalled that they “had everything their hearts could desire.”
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In April the young SS officer received a plum assignment as adjutant in Heinrich Himmler’s newly formed guard unit, the Begleitbataillon Reichsführer SS. After organizing and equipping in Berlin, the battalion moved to Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s field headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia, where it provided perimeter security.

That relatively safe assignment didn’t last long. Soon after Germany’s June 1941 invasion of Soviet Russia, Schrader’s unit was sent to join the forces besieging Leningrad. In late November Schrader, the battalion commander, their driver, and two escorting motorcyclists were ambushed by Russian partisans while inspecting unit dispositions. The Waffen-SS
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men escaped with their lives, but Schrader was wounded in the ankle. He was first sent to a military hospital in Tosno (a Leningrad suburb) and then evacuated west by hospital train. It was a slow trip, mainly because Russian partisans kept blowing up sections of the track. He finally arrived in East Prussia and was put on another hospital train to Prague, where he was reunited with his wife in mid-December. Within days of that reunion the Schraders welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Heidi. Because of his wounds, in early 1942 Schrader was temporarily released from active duty and allowed to enroll in Berlin’s Humboldt University; for two semesters he studied biology and geography while living with his wife and daughter.

Schrader put his uniform back on in October 1942, when he was assigned as the battalion adjutant in the 7. SS-Freiwilligen Gebirgsdivision (volunteer mountain division) “Prinz Eugen,” which was fighting partisans near Pancevo, in the southern Banat area of Serbia. In February 1943 he was
tapped to be the adjutant of the 22nd SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment, part of the 10th SS-Panzer Division “Frundsberg,” then being formed in Angoulême, in France’s Charente department. While he was thus engaged, Annaliese gave birth to their second child, daughter Birgit, in Berlin. Concerned for the safety of his family, he took advantage of a proclamation by Reichsminister Josef Goebbels that mothers with small children could leave the capital to avoid the increasingly heavy Allied bombing. Annaliese and her daughters first moved in with her parents near Bielefeld, some 200 miles southwest of Berlin; when the bombing got worse there, they moved to Augsburg, another 350 miles to the southeast.

At the end of 1943 Schrader decided to move his family yet again, this time to a place he assumed was unlikely to attract the attention of Allied bombers—the Austrian Tyrol. He had heard that an officer he’d known in Prague, none other than “Wastl” Wimmer, had just taken command of the Special Prisoner Facility at Schloss Itter. Schrader contacted Wimmer, who offered to find a place for Annaliese and the girls in Itter village. The castle’s commandant obtained a small but comfortable house (probably by requisitioning it from its rightful owners), and Schrader was apparently able to get time off to move his family from Augsburg to Itter. Soon after that move, in January 1944, the Schraders’ Berlin apartment was destroyed by an Allied bomb.
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In March 1944 “Frundsberg” was deployed to Ukraine, and in April it underwent its baptism of fire near Tarnopol. The division was rushed back to France in response to the Allied landings in Normandy in June and immediately went into action southwest of Metz. Beginning on June 29 “Frundsberg” took part in the German counteroffensives near Caen, and the fighting was intense—Schrader called it “an inferno” and “murderous.”
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His unit was subjected to constant attack by Allied aircraft, naval gunfire, and artillery, and within just a few weeks 22nd SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment had been effectively destroyed. In early July Schrader himself fell victim to Allied aircraft: a fighter-bomber strafed the kübelwagen
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in which he was riding, and he suffered severe wounds to his head and right leg. Indeed, so grievous were his injuries that at the field aid station where he was initially treated, someone crossed out his name on the first page of his soldbuch (the twenty-four-page personal identity document carried by all German soldiers) and then rewrote it in very black ink, an indication that he was not expected to live.

Schrader did survive, however, and was transferred first to a field hospital in Dijon and then by train to a larger hospital in Munich. Within days of his arrival there, word came of the July 20 attempted assassination of Hitler. Apparently already disillusioned with Nazism, the bedridden Schrader had lots of time to think. He ultimately came to a conclusion that was especially momentous, given his SS oath: he “mentally broke” with the führer, the Nazi Party, and the Third Reich. His only goal now was to protect his family and make it through the rest of the war unscathed.
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While Annaliese Schrader was able to visit her husband once a week, taking the train from Wörgl to Munich, Allied air attacks on Germany’s rail networks were making the trip increasingly time-consuming and significantly more dangerous. In January 1945 Schrader was able to get himself transferred to the small military hospital in Wörgl, and within days of his arrival in Austria he had convinced his doctors to let him live with his family in Itter village. This marked the start of a time of relative peace for Schrader: he had no military duties, wore no uniform, and was able to spend quality time with his wife and young daughters. Indeed, his only official task during this time was to make twice-weekly trips to the Wörgl hospital for examinations and consultations with his doctor.

Schrader made the journeys as a passenger in a staff car provided by his old comrade Wimmer. In order to exercise his damaged leg, the injured Waffen-SS man would walk the several hundred yards from his home in the village to Schloss Itter, where the guards would usher him into the courtyard. While waiting for the staff car to be readied, Schrader would often fall into conversation with some of the German-speaking French VIPs, to whom he apparently made known his disgust with the Nazi regime. His views earned him such a warm welcome among the schloss’s French guests that Schrader began making regular social visits to the castle, sharing cigarettes and rough Tyrolean red wine with the likes of Clemenceau, Jouhaux, and Bruchlen during wide-ranging discussions of politics and philosophy. Schrader would sometimes bring his wife and daughters along during his visits to the castle, and the children made such an impression on Andreas Krobot that he would make small cakes, torts, and other sweets for them. The Czech cook’s kindness to Heidi and Birgit touched Schrader, and the unlikely friendship that developed between the political prisoner and the Waffen-SS officer would ultimately save the latter’s life.