The Last Battle: When U.S. And German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe

by Stephen Harding

  Life at Schloss Itter remained essentially unchanged for the first few months of the German occupation; the Nazis were too busy absorbing Austria into the “Greater Reich.” One aspect of that absorption—the extension into the former Austria of the Nazi secret police and concentration-camp systems—was to have a direct effect on the castle and those who would later be held there, though it took place outside Itter’s walls.

  While the majority of Austrians welcomed the 105,000 troops of Lieutenant General14 Fedor von Bock’s 8th Army when they rolled across the border at five thirty in the morning on March 12, 1938, other residents of the newly created Ostmark were less inclined to become citizens of the “Greater Reich.” Anti-Nazi resistance cells began forming throughout Austria soon after the Anschluss, and Tyrol—with its staunch Roman Catholicism, compact geography, and traditional sense of regional identity—quickly became a center of ongoing opposition to German rule and its increasingly onerous regulations. Like other nascent resistance groups throughout Austria, those in Tyrol were initially fragmented by suspicion, and rightly so. The Gestapo15 was vigorous in its efforts to quash any opposition to Nazi rule and was often aided by pro-German Austrians who were only too willing to inform on neighbors they suspected of being less than wholehearted in their support of the new order.

  Despite the Gestapo’s best efforts, resistance cells survived, not only in larger cities such as Vienna, Salzburg, and Innsbruck, but also in towns and villages throughout the country. And while the score of resistance members in Wörgl initially had to bide their time and conserve their limited resources, as did most of their compatriots, they were able, over the months and years of German occupation, to slowly and carefully build the organization that would ultimately play a key role in the Schloss Itter story. And ironically, like the Austrian resistance as a whole, the cell in Wörgl was to be helped in its anti-Nazi efforts by no less an organization than the German army.

  Within days of the Anschluss the entire Austrian army, the Bundesheer, was transferred en masse into the Wehrmacht—Nazi Germany’s unified armed forces—an action that for a variety of reasons was welcomed by the majority of Bundesheer troops.16 Moreover, the annexation of Austria created an even larger pool of manpower for Germany; between 1938 and 1945 some 1.3 million Austrian men were drafted into German military service. Austrian soldiers fought in every branch of the German armed forces and on every battlefront, and more than 240,000 of them died in combat or from sickness or accidents.17

  While many Austrians served the Third Reich willingly and even fervently,18 others endured their military duty only because any attempt to avoid conscription or to desert once in the ranks would have resulted in the harshest of punishments. Though the Germans attempted to keep certain Austrians they considered to be unreliable—leftists, nationalists, and others19—out of the military, many young men who secretly abhorred the Nazis ended up as “German” soldiers. And in the process of enduring their Wehrmacht time, many anti-Nazi Austrians learned—and extensively practiced in combat—the military skills that in the final months of the war would prove to be so valuable to the Austrian resistance and to the inhabitants of Schloss Itter.

  SOME SOURCES INDICATE that Castle Itter’s transformation from picturesque schloss-hotel and art venue into formidable prison was ultimately carried out at the direct order of Reichsführer der SS Heinrich Himmler himself. Himmler landed at an airfield outside Vienna just hours after German troops crossed the Austrian frontier on March 12, to personally lead the pacification of Austria—a process that would, in Himmler’s view, require the arrest of anyone who might pose even the slightest threat to the new order. The diminutive former chicken farmer therefore took immediate personal control of all existing police forces and of the Austrian SS, which since 1934 had worked covertly to undermine Austrian independence and lay the groundwork for the Anschluss.20

  Even as the majority of Austrians welcomed incoming German units with cheers and flowers, widespread arrests were already underway of those whose politics, religion, or ethnicity was deemed unacceptable. Himmler needed places to put the masses of new prisoners until they could be moved to established prisons and concentrations camps in Germany,21 and it is entirely possible that Castle Itter’s robust construction and relatively remote location attracted the attention of the notoriously secretive reichsführer. His attention must have wandered, however, for it wasn’t until early 1940 that the German government leased the castle from Dr. Franz Grüner for unspecified official use.

  The exact nature of that use remains unclear for the first two years following the signing of the lease agreement, though some sources indicate that the castle may have been used as an initial detention and interrogation site for high-value prisoners marked for deportation to Germany. We do know for certain that in early 1942 the castle was designated as the Ostmark headquarters for the German Alliance for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco.22

  Despite its strangely ominous name, this Nazi-established and tax-funded organization was indeed dedicated to fighting tobacco use in “greater” Germany. While it might seem exceedingly odd that Adolf Hitler and his minions would be morally opposed to anything, the führer was widely known to abhor smoking. He believed the habit eroded public morals and undermined the health and effectiveness of military personnel. His attitude was by no means outside the mainstream; despite, or perhaps because of, its citizens’ widespread tobacco use, Germany had since the mid-nineteenth century been a leader in researching the medical dangers of smoking. Under Nazi control, the Alliance for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco undertook its mission primarily by issuing pamphlets and press releases outlining the health risks associated with smoking, and the regional headquarters established at Schloss Itter was responsible for disseminating those products throughout the former Austria.

  As important as the antismoking crusade might have been to Hitler, however, Himmler never lost his initial interest in using Schloss Itter for more nefarious purposes. On November 23, 1942, he got Hitler to sign an order directing SS-Lieutenant General Oswald Pohl, who as director of the SS Main Economic Administration Department (SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshaupamt) was in charge of administering the concentration-camp system,23 to begin the process of acquiring the castle outright for “special SS use.” Himmler intended to convert Schloss Itter into a detention facility for ehrenhäftlinge, “honor prisoners” whom the Germans considered famous enough, powerful enough, or potentially valuable enough to be kept alive and in relatively decent conditions.

  On February 7, 1943, members of Pohl’s staff officially requisitioned the castle and all its outbuildings on Himmler’s direct orders, abruptly terminating the lease arrangement that had provided Grüner with a respectable income for the previous three years. Officially referred to as an evacuation camp (Evakuierungslager), the castle was put under the operational control of the regional concentration-camp command at Dachau,24 some ninety miles to the northwest. As one of that sprawling camp’s 197 satellite facilities in southern Germany and northern Austria, Schloss Itter was to draw its funding, guard force, and support services directly from its soon-to-be-infamous parent facility.

  The castle’s transformation from an antismoking administrative center into a high-security facility for honor prisoners began immediately following its requisitioning. Plans for the conversion were apparently overseen by no less a personage than architect Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production,25 with the actual construction supervised by SS-Second Lieutenant Petz.26 A member of Dachau’s facilities branch, he arrived at Itter on February 8 with twenty-seven prisoners—twelve from Dachau and fifteen from Flossenbürg27—all of whom had before their arrests been carpenters, plumbers, and the like.28 Petz also took along some ten members of Dachau’s SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV) unit29 to act as a security detail during the conversion work; they would be replaced by permanent guards once the castle’s transformation was completed.

  The first order of business for Petz and h
is slave laborers was to pack up most of Schloss Itter’s remaining quality furnishings and artworks, a task that was carried out under the watchful eye of the owner. We don’t know how Grüner felt about the outright expropriation of his castle and the cessation of the lucrative lease that had been in force for the previous three years, but we do know that for the official handover of the structure to Petz, Grüner wore a Nazi Party membership pin in his lapel. Once the furnishings and art had been crated, Petz ordered his prisoner-workers to begin dismantling the altar, consecrated by Pope Pius VI, in the schloss’s small chapel. He also ordered the removal of the Gothic crucifix and all other Christian symbols; this may have been out of an excess of Nazi zeal on his part, or it may have been to deny the castle’s future prisoners any chance of spiritual succor. Once the chapel had been stripped, its accoutrements were crated and joined the furnishings and artworks on trucks bound for a Salzburg warehouse owned by Grüner.

  With the decks cleared, Petz was ready to put his prisoners to work on the castle’s conversion. As was common in the concentration-camp system, the SS officer usually did not interact with the workers directly; he passed on his orders through a prisoner-functionary known as a kapo, a title with essentially the same meaning as the American prison term “trusty.” Though prisoners themselves, kapos often received better treatment than those they oversaw, and many were notoriously brutal to their fellow inmates in an attempt to curry even greater favor with their SS overlords. Fortunately for the prisoners on the Schloss Itter work party, their appointed kapo, a German political prisoner named Franz Fiedler,30 was by all accounts a decent man who did all he could to shield his charges from the worst of Petz’s frequent rages.

  One source of those outbursts was the fact that Petz was under intense pressure from his superiors at Dachau to finish the work at Schloss Itter as quickly as possible. The SS officer knew that any delay could well mean his immediate reassignment to some location vastly more dangerous than the Austrian Tyrol, so his anxiety level was in all probability intense from the start. He thus wasted no time in putting his prisoners to work on the castle’s transformation, and he directed them to start at basement level and work their way up.

  Schloss Itter’s cellars were extensive and, as might be expected, both cold and damp. This was not necessarily a disadvantage, however, because none of the existing five large rooms in the basement area were intended for use as living spaces. The two driest were converted into bulk food-storage areas—one for fruit and the other for potatoes and other vegetables—while the other three became, respectively, carpentry, plumbing, and electrical workshops. The stone staircase leading up to the ground floor was repaired and fitted with a handrail, and the already stout door leading into the cellar was reinforced and fitted with intricate double locks.

  The ten rooms converted on the ground floor were largely given over to living and working areas for the SS-TV troops who would ultimately form the castle’s permanent guard force. Using lumber trucked in from SS supply depots in Bavaria, the inmate-artisans constructed a dormitory meant to house up to thirty-five troops: a facility boasting individual lockers for each soldier, an arms room with a stout door secured with multiple locks, latrines with toilets and showers, and a kitchen with sinks, stoves, and pantry. Sophie Menter’s delightful music room was divided in half; one side was turned into a day room for the enlisted troops and the other into an orderly room that would be the domain of the guard detachment’s senior noncommissioned officer.

  The prisoner-workers then set about converting the first floor’s31 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” Čučković34 (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 allo
w 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 members36 of that camp’s SS-TV unit, as well as one member of the organization’s female auxiliary37 (and six Alsatian guard dogs), were tapped to form the castle’s guard force, officially referred to as SS-Special Commando38 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.