The Last Battle (36 page)

Reynaud, Paul.
Carnets de captivité, 1941–1945
. Paris: Fayard, 1997.

———.
In the Thick of the Fight, 1930–1945
. Translated by James D. Lambert. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.

Ross, Alex.
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century
. New York: Picador, 2008.

Schwab, Gerald.
OSS Agents in Hitler’s Heartland: Destination Innsbruck
. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.

Singer, Barnett.
Maxime Weygand: A Biography of the French General in Two World Wars
. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Smyth, Sir John.
Jean Borotra, the Bounding Basque: His Life of Work and Play
. London: Stanley Paul, 1974.

Steinböck, Erwin.
Österreichs Militärisches Potential im März, 1938
. Wien: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1988.

Sydnor, Charles W.
Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1939–1945
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Turner, Barry.
Countdown to Victory: The Final European Campaigns of World War II
. New York: William Morrow, 2004.

Van Goethem, Geert.
The Amsterdam International: The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945
. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.

von Steiner, Kurt.
Resistance Fighter: Anti-Nazi Terror Tactics of the Austrian Underground
. Boulder: Paladin Press, 1986.

Weygand, Maxime.
Recalled to Service: The Memoirs of General Maxime Weygand
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1952.

Williamson, Gordon.
Gebirgsjäger: German Mountain Trooper 1939–45
. Oxford: Osprey, 2003.

N
EWSPAPER
A
RTICLES

Note: The articles in this section are listed in chronological order.

Binghamton Press
(Binghamton, NY):

“Norwich Lieutenant Proves Hero in Reich War-End Rescue Fight.” June 7, 1945.

“Captain Lee in Chenago Sheriff Race.” July 23, 1945.

“17 Tier Men Are on Latest Returnee List.” Jan. 25, 1946.

“John C. Lee, Jr., Ordered Held for Jury.” Feb. 25, 1953.

“Lee Fined $50 in Assault, Sister Freed.” Mar. 10, 1953.

“Lee Indicted by Chenango Grand Jury.” Apr. 10, 1953.

“Lee Vacates New Berlin Hotel.” July 3, 1953.

Evening Sun
(Norwich, NY):

“John C. Lee Dies, Freed de Gaulle Kin.” Jan. 15, 1973.

New York Times:

“Mme. Menter’s Good Fortune.” Nov. 25, 1885.

“Freed: Daladier, Blum, Reynaud, Niemoller, Schuschnigg, Gamelin.” May 6, 1945.

“Reynaud Relates Reich Prison Life.” Aug. 15, 1945.

“Borotra Relates War Experiences.” March 18, 1947.

“Paul Reynaud Married.” May 14, 1950.

“Gen. Gamelin Dead.” Apr. 19, 1958.

“Gen. Maxime Weygand Dead.” Jan. 29, 1965.

“Paul Reynaud Dies; Led France in 1940.” Sept. 22, 1966.

“Daladier, Signer of Munich Pact, Dies at 86.” Oct. 12, 1970.

Norwich Record
(Northfield, VT):

“Capt. Jack Lee, ’42, Rescues Daladier in Castle Battle.” June 22, 1945.

Norwich Sun
(Norwich, NY):

“Lee Receives Award.” Mar. 17, 1945.

“Lee Receives Promotion.” May 28, 1945.

“Capt. John C. Lee Jr., Led Rescuers of Daladier, Ex-French Premier.” June 4 and 7, 1945.

“Thrilling Story About Captain John C. Lee Appears in ‘Post.’” July 18, 1945.

“Capt. Lee Seeks Democratic Nomination for Sheriff.” July 21, 1945.

M
AGAZINE
/J
OURNAL
A
RTICLES

Bachinger, Eleonore, Martin McKee, and Anna Gilmore. “Tobacco Policies in Nazi Germany: Not as Simple as It Seems.”
Public Health
122, no. 5 (May 2008): 497–505.

Distel, Barbara. “KZ-Kommandos an Idyllischen Orten: Dachauer Aussenlager in Österreich.”
KZ Aussenlager—Geschichte und Erinnerung
(1999).

“France: Trials, Tribulations.”
Time
, Sept. 30, 1940.

“Gamelin Speaks.”
Time
, Nov. 13, 1939.

Harding, Stephen. “The Battle for Castle Itter.”
World War II
(Aug.–Sept. 2008).

“Kampf um Schloss Itter.”
Neue Illustrierte
, Mar. 26, 1961.

Kennedy, Sean. “Accompanying the Marshal: La Rocque and the
Progrès Social Français
Under Vichy.”
French History
15, no. 2 (2001).

Levin, Meyer. “We Liberated Who’s Who.”
Saturday Evening Post
, July 21, 1945.

“Maurice Gamelin: Good Grey General.”
Time
, Aug. 14, 1939.

“Reynaud Marriage Revealed.”
Time
, May 22, 1950.

“Where Is Gamelin?”
Time
, June 10, 1940.

NOTES

C
HAPTER
O
NE

1
. Some sources date the earliest parts of the castle to 902. Most of the information regarding Schloss Itter’s early history is drawn from “Die Geschichte von Itter,” a pamphlet produced by Austria’s Hohe-Salve Regional Tourist Board, and
Castle Hotels of Europe
, by Robert P. Long.

2
. Reigned 893–930.

3
. A palatinate was a territory administered on behalf of a king or emperor by a count. In the Holy Roman Empire, a count palatinate was known in German as a
pfalzgraf
.

4
. Initially a collection of small huts and workshops used by the craftsmen who built the castle, the village of Itter evolved into a community built around the staffing and maintenance of the fortress. In return for their labor, the villagers were offered protection within the schloss in times of civil strife.

5
. Led by social and political reformer Michael Gaismayr, the revolt sought to replace the church-dominated feudal system with a republic. While successful in several military engagements against reactionary forces, Gaismayr and his followers were defeated at Radstadt in July 1526. Gaismayr fled to Venice and ultimately Padua, where on April 15, 1532, he was assassinated by Austrian agents.

6
. See Augusta Léon-Jouhaux,
Prison pour hommes d’Etat
, 23. As noted later in this volume, she was labor leader León Jouhaux’s secretary, companion, and future wife and was imprisoned with him at Itter from 1943 to 1945.

7
. Until his coronation in 1806 the king had been styled Maximilian IV Josef, prince-elector of Bavaria.

8
. Menter apparently purchased the castle using funds she’d earned on the concert circuit, though a brief article in the Nov. 25, 1885, edition of the
New York Times
(“Mme. Menter’s Good Fortune”) indicated that the purchase was largely financed by 400,000 rubles left to her in the will of an elderly Russian admirer.

9
. Ibid.

10
. Liszt, La Mara, and Bache,
From Rome to the End
, 377.

11
. Menter returned to Germany after the castle’s sale and lived near Munich for the remainder of her life. She died on Feb. 23, 1918.

12
. Widely referred to as the Wörgl Experiment, the effort was the brainchild of the town’s mayor, Michael Unterguggenberger. He sought to economically empower his town and the surrounding region by replacing standard currency with what’s known as “stamp scrip,” a local currency that would remain in use and in circulation rather than being hoarded by bankers. While the idea managed to revive the local Wörgl economy, it was terminated by the Austrian National Bank in 1933.

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.

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.

15
. An acronym for the full name of the dreaded Nazi secret police, the Geheime Staatspolizei.

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.

17
. Ibid., 29.

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.

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.

20
. Luza,
The Resistance in Austria
, 14.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

25
. Koop,
In Hitler’s Hand
, 32.

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.

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.

28
. Details on the conversion are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter” and Léon-Jouhaux,
Prison pour hommes d’Etat
, 8–10.

29
. The SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), or “Death’s Head Units,” administered the concentration-camp system.

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.

31
. In European usage, “first floor” is the floor above the ground floor— thus in fact “second floor” in American usage.

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.

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.

34
. Details on Čučković’s life both before and during the war are drawn from “Zwei Jahren auf Schloss Itter.”

35
. Ema Čučković, neé Freyberg, was born in 1910 in Nordhausen, Germany. Čučković’s son was born in Yugoslavia in 1933.

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.

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.