The Last Battle (4 page)

The prisoner-workers then set about converting the first floor’s
³¹
existing nine rooms. Two were fitted out as offices for the future commander
of the permanent SS-TV detachment and his executive officer; a third was made into a small, private lounge for the two officers; a fourth was a latrine; and the remaining five became the first of an eventual nineteen cells for the VIP prisoners soon to be incarcerated at Schloss Itter.

Because the prisoner accommodations were intended to house personages of great value to the Reich, they were decidedly more comfortable than the cells most of the Nazis’ captives were forced to inhabit. The schloss’s VIP cells—1 through 5 on the first floor, 6 through 9 on the second, and 10 through 19 on the third—were based on the existing guest rooms, and each was intended to house no more than two prisoners. Exterior bars were fitted over the windows in any room that had them, and the door of each room was fitted with two stout exterior locks. In anticipation of the possible need to completely isolate certain prisoners, about half of the room-cells had rudimentary sinks and toilets.

Conditions were far better in the fourth-floor suite to be occupied by the man picked to command the SS troops assigned to the castle. That officer—and his spouse, should he be accompanied—would enjoy an exquisitely furnished living room, bedroom, private kitchen, and dining room. In addition to the usual amenities, the commander’s suite also boasted a telephone system that would enable him to speak directly with the regional command authorities in Dachau and, in case he needed immediate military assistance, with the commandant of the Wehrmacht’s Mountain Warfare Noncommissioned Officer School in nearby Wörgl.
³²

Once finished with the conversion of the castle’s main building, the prisoner-workers moved on to the structure known as the schlosshof, a freestanding second gatehouse some fifty feet behind the smaller first structure and separated from it by a triangular enclosed courtyard used as a parking area. Built of the same stone used for the castle, the schlosshof was pierced in the center by an arched entryway whose steps led up to a walled terrace and the main building. In addition to the entryway, the schlosshof housed a garage, a stable, and a storage area for gardening and landscaping equipment and supplies. The slave laborers—who slept in the building’s cramped upper floor at the end of each long, hard workday—added a small medical clinic, consisting of a waiting room, an examination room, an office for an enlisted medic, and a rudimentary dental office.

The final task Petz assigned to his prisoner-workers was to install those systems that would make the castle escape-proof. Because Schloss
Itter already had massive walls, steep-sided ravines on its west, north, and east sides, and what was essentially a dry moat on its south side, it required only the addition of strategically placed tangles of concertina wire and a large, intricate lock on the front gate. To further discourage any freedom-minded prisoner, Petz had some of his SS-TV men install floodlights around the inside perimeter of the main wall. The troops also constructed three small, wooden-sided positions for MG-42 machine guns overlooking the castle’s front and rear courtyards.

Schloss Itter’s conversion into a VIP detention facility was essentially completed on April 25, 1943, though final modifications to the castle’s electrical system had not been finished by the date Petz’s original orders directed him to return to Dachau with his prisoner-workers and their guards. Not wanting to delay his departure—and, we can assume, anxious not to thereby incur the wrath of his superiors—Petz took his prisoner-workers and most of their guards back to Dachau but ordered the inmate who’d been overseeing the electrical work to stay behind and finish the job, with two SS-TV men as overseers.
³³

While the names of the two guards are lost to history, we do know the identity of the prisoner-electrician—a man destined to play an important role in later events at Schloss Itter. He was thirty-six-year-old Zvonimir “Zvonko” Čučković
³⁴
(pronounced Kook-o-vich), a Roman Catholic and native of Sisak, Croatia, who before the April 1941 German invasion of Yugoslavia had been an electrical technician living in Belgrade with his wife, Ema, and son, also named Zvonimir.
³⁵
Following his nation’s capitulation, Čučković joined the anti-German resistance but was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941. After spending time in prisons in Belgrade, Graz, Vienna, and Salzburg, he was transferred to Dachau on September 26, 1942.

Though initially destined for liquidation, Čučković was saved from death when during his arrival interrogation he stressed—in accented but fluent German—that his background as an electrical technician might allow him to be of some service to his captors. They agreed, and he was allotted to Petz’s camp-maintenance crew. From November 1942 to February 1943 Čučković was assigned to an external work detail at Traunstein, a Dachau subcamp some fifty miles southeast of Munich, but he was returned to Dachau specifically to join Petz’s expedition to Schloss Itter. There, he and an Austrian prisoner named Karl Horeis were responsible for upgrading
the castle’s entire electrical system, as well as for various other tasks. Petz’s decision to allow the Croat to remain behind when the rest of the slave laborers were returned to Dachau was a testament to Čučković’s skill; ultimately, it would also save his life.

With Schloss Itter ready to receive prisoners, it only remained for the administrators at Dachau to staff the new facility. Fourteen members
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of that camp’s SS-TV unit, as well as one member of the organization’s female auxiliary
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(and six Alsatian guard dogs), were tapped to form the castle’s guard force, officially referred to as SS-Special Commando
³⁸
Itter. The men were for the most part older, less capable troops with no combat experience. Most had served as guards at the larger camps and were happy to be posted to the relatively comfortable schloss. We might also assume that the more forward-looking of the guards assigned to the castle—those who had begun to realize that an Allied victory would probably mean execution for anyone connected with the operation of the death camps—welcomed the opportunity to spend whatever was left of the war guarding VIP prisoners in an alpine redoubt far removed from the horrors of the Final Solution.

If the guards believed they would be able to pass the rest of the war in an oasis of relative calm, however, they were sorely mistaken, for the two officers assigned as their superiors were definitely not of the laissez-faire school of military leadership. The junior of the two and the man tapped to serve as the second in command of Special Commando Itter, SS-Second Lieutenant Stefan Otto, was a member of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the security and intelligence arm of the SS. While his primary duty would be to glean useful information from any VIP prisoner ultimately remanded to Schloss Itter, every member of the castle’s guard force knew he would also be closely watching them for any sign of laxness, either military or ideological. Any soldier unlucky enough to get on Otto’s bad side could well end up reassigned to a frontline combat unit or even a penal battalion.

And worse, for reasons now unknown, the SS planners at Dachau chose to give command of Schloss Itter—a facility intended to house several of the highest-ranking and potentially most valuable prisoners in the Third Reich—to a brutish, unsophisticated, and politically inept officer widely known within the SS as a man almost as cruel to his own troops as he was to those unfortunate enough to become his prisoners.

T
O PUT IT SIMPLY
, SS-Captain Sebastian “Wastl” Wimmer was a nasty piece of work. A native Bavarian, he was born in 1902 in Dingolfing—a small town some fifty miles northeast of Munich. In 1923 Wimmer joined the latter city’s police department as a patrolman and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant in spite of, or perhaps because of, a reputation for securing quick confessions by beating suspects nearly to death during interrogation. Barely literate, unkempt, and given to violent drunken rages, he was the ideal recruit for the nascent SS. He joined the organization in March 1935,
³⁹
having resigned from the Munich police the previous month.

We don’t know Wimmer’s motivation for enlisting in the SS. While it might certainly have been the act of a politically committed man seeking to win martial glory in an elite organization that espoused ideals that mirrored his own, it is more likely that, given what we know of his personality, Wimmer saw the organization as his ticket out of a dead-end job and a way to gain official sanction to continue brutalizing those who in all probability had always made him feel inferior—intellectuals, the wealthy, and, of course, Jews and the others whom the Nazis scornfully referred to as “subhumans.”

Whatever his motivations, Wimmer was soon to see—and become part of—the dark side of Adolf Hitler’s New Germany. After initial training at Dachau, the newly minted SS-TV officer
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was assigned to the camp’s permanent battalion-sized guard staff, known as SS-Wachsturmbann Oberbayern.
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Though Dachau in 1935 was just two years old and still relatively small—its enlargement and the addition of crematoria would not begin until 1937—it nonetheless housed several thousand inmates, largely Jews and political prisoners. And while systematic prisoner executions had not yet begun, Wimmer and the other guards were essentially free to humiliate, brutalize, and, if they could provide a reasonable justification, kill inmates with impunity.

Wimmer was apparently good at his job, for by September 1937 he had risen to the rank of first lieutenant. That same month the director of the concentration-camp system, SS-Major General Theodor Eicke, ordered the single-battalion SS-Wachsturmbann Oberbayern enlarged to five battalions and redesignated as SS-Totenkopfstandarte 1 Oberbayern. Like the two other regiment-sized units
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Eicke formed from concentration camp guard forces in 1937, Oberbayern was intended from the start to be a military organization. It would not engage in direct combat with armed enemy
forces, however; all three of the initial Totenkopfstandarten were to be used to conduct what Eicke euphemistically referred to as “police and security duties” behind the battlefront. Given that Eicke was the originator of the “inflexible harshness” doctrine applied to concentration-camp prisoners, it comes as no surprise that the wartime duties of the Totenkopfstandarten would actually consist of rounding up, harshly interrogating, and usually executing enemy political and military leaders, Jews, and other “undesirables.”

Both Totenkopfstandarte Oberbayern and Wimmer first got to practice their new roles during the 1938 German annexation of the Sudeteland. Two Oberbayern battalions preceded regular Wehrmacht units into the disputed region—the northern and western border areas of Czechoslovakia inhabited largely by ethnic Germans—to identify and round up anyone deemed a threat to the annexation effort. While many of these unfortunates ended up in Dachau and other concentration camps in Germany, some didn’t survive their initial seizure by Wimmer and his comrades.

The reprehensible skills Wimmer demonstrated in the Sudetenland were put to extensive use during Germany’s September 1939 invasion of Poland. Tasked to operate in the province of Kielce, Upper Silesia, behind the lines of Major General Walter von Reichenau’s 10th Army, Wimmer and the other troops of Totenkopfstandarte Oberbayern
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tortured and killed large numbers of Jews, anti-Nazi Catholic clergy, mental patients, Polish nationalist activists, and Polish soldiers attempting to escape capture. Mass murders were committed at such villages as Ciepielow, Nisko, and Rawa Mazowiecka;
⁴⁴
indeed, so heinous were the atrocities committed by the Totenkopfstandarten troops under the guise of “police and security” operations that several senior Wehrmacht officers complained directly to Himmler. Their pleas were ignored, however, and Wimmer and his accomplices continued their murderous rampage until all three of the original Totenkopfstandarten were withdrawn from Poland in late 1939.
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The units’ withdrawal did not, of course, mean that German atrocities in Poland came to an end. New Totenkopfstandarten moved in to continue the horrific work and were joined by SS einsatzgruppen (special task forces)—units intended solely to carry out systematized mass executions in very short periods of time.
⁴⁶

Following their withdrawal from Poland, the three original Totenkopfstandarten were used to form the 3rd SS Panzer Division,
⁴⁷
commanded by
Theodor Eicke. Equipped largely with captured Czech weapons, the division took part in the German invasions of France and the Low Countries, with Wimmer apparently serving in one of the division’s panzer-grenadier (motorized infantry) regiments. Not surprisingly, given its provenance and fanaticism, the 3rd SS Panzer Division committed a variety of war crimes, including the May 1940 murder of ninety-seven captured members of the British army’s 2nd Battalion, the Royal Norfolk Regiment, in the French village of Le Paradis.