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

by Stephen Harding

  For his part, the arch-conservative Weygand found it virtually impossible to deal with the series of leftist prime ministers who came to power from 1932 onward. He believed their internationalist and optimistic views of foreign relations to be naive and possibly subversive, and he strongly felt that their failure to adequately fund the large-scale weapon purchases he considered essential was making France increasingly vulnerable. Though Gamelin agreed with many of Weygand’s proposals, he also knew that alienating the politicians would be counterproductive. Gamelin was thus conciliatory where Weygand was confrontational, hoping to achieve through logic, persuasion, and compromise what would almost certainly not be gained through acrimonious intransigence. This point of view put him at odds with Weygand, who increasingly saw Gamelin as a dangerously indecisive leader whose beliefs and methods—which Weygand saw as holdovers from Gamelin’s World War I service—were perpetuating the army’s weakness and vastly increasing its risks of defeat in any conflict with Germany.

  Gamelin’s point of view ultimately prevailed for the simple reason that in January 1935 Weygand reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-eight. Upon his departure, Gamelin replaced him not only as army chief of staff but also as both army inspector general and vice president of the Supreme War Council.20 The latter position made Gamelin the peacetime deputy to the minister of war, Louis Maurin. In wartime, the council’s vice president automatically became the commander of all French field armies.

  Unfortunately for France, when the time came for Gamelin to actually take up the latter position—often referred to as “generalissimo”21—he proved consistently unequal to the monumental task facing him. Despite his genuine and consistent efforts during the interwar years to improve the quality of the French army and the cooperation between military men and politicians, he dithered during the first few months of war. He failed to strike aggressively into Germany and preferred a static defense along the border based on the forts of the impressive, but incomplete, Maginot Line. When the so-called Phoney War ended with the German invasion of France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, he was slow to grasp the importance of the German thrust through the Ardennes, a rugged and heavily forested area he firmly believed to be impassable to tanks.

  As French defeats mounted, Gamelin reacted by dismissing several of his field commanders, blaming the nation’s reversals on their “incompetence” rather than on his own strategic and tactical blunders. The man who had made a name for himself during the static, grinding bloodbath of World War I and in subsequent colonial wars ultimately proved incapable of responding effectively to Germany’s fast-paced and flexible combined-arms assault. Completely overwhelmed by blitzkrieg warfare, Gamelin continued to flounder until May 18, when Prime Minister Paul Reynaud sacked him and—adding insult to injury—called back Weygand as generalissimo.

  Contrary to widespread rumors that he’d killed himself or fled the country,22 Gamelin spent the weeks between his dismissal and France’s capitulation to Germany at his home in Paris, tending his roses and listening to the increasingly dire news from the battlefronts. He expected the Nazis to arrest him, of course, when they arrived in the capital; what he hadn’t anticipated was that he’d be taken into custody by fellow Frenchmen. On September 6, 1940—the same day Daladier was seized—Gamelin was visiting his friend Léo-Abel Gaboriaud, editor of the journal L’Ère nouvelle, when agents of the Sûreté Nationale23 appeared at the door. They explained that they were reluctantly working under orders from the Germans to arrest Gamelin and transport him to the Château Chazeron. Gaboriaud walked with his friend to the waiting car, and, as the officers were about to put him in the backseat, the editor looked at them sternly and said, “The man you have taken into custody and who is leaving with you is alive. I assume he will be alive when he gets to Chazeron.”24

  Though Gaboriaud’s concern for Gamelin’s continued well-being was understandable, the diminutive general made it to Chazeron—and through the Riom trial—unscathed. While his subsequent incarceration with Daladier and the others in Buchenwald cannot have been salutary, his daily ritual of vigorous calisthenics followed by a few brisk turns around the inside of the small VIP compound’s perimeter ensured that upon his arrival at Schloss Itter he was in reasonably good health for a man his age.

  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the third man Zvonko Čučković saw step out of the Mercedes staff car in the castle’s courtyard.

  THOUGH JUST SIXTY-FOUR YEARS OLD, Léon Jouhaux looked a good deal older. The secretary-general of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), one of France’s largest trade unions, had for several months been suffering from a flare-up of the arthritis that had plagued him for decades. More seriously, any sort of stress or anxiety brought on increasingly significant chest pain.25 Convinced his heart was beginning to fail him but lacking a diagnosis or any sort of medication, the stout labor leader could do little but stoically accept his worsening condition.

  Such passive acceptance was a trait new to Jouhaux, for his had not been an easy life.26 Born in a poor section of Paris in 1879, he’d always been a fighter: first against childhood illness and schoolyard bullies, and for most of his adult life against social injustice in general and the oppression of working people in particular. He’d learned his radical activism from his father, who in 1871 had taken to the streets during the popular uprising that came to be known as the Paris Commune. When Jouhaux was two years old, his father left his job in a central-city slaughterhouse and moved the family to Aubervilliers, a less-crowded suburb, where work in a match factory offered marginally better pay.

  The conditions in the new workplace were no better than those in the slaughterhouse, however. Workers toiled long hours in dismal and dangerous conditions, unable to escape the pervasive, toxic, and highly explosive fumes produced by the white phosphorous that was the match heads’ main ingredient. The elder Jouhaux ultimately became a leader in the factory’s nascent labor union and several times led the workers out on strikes meant to force the bosses to improve safety and working conditions. When Léon was twelve, his father’s activism finally led to yet another long-term suspension from the match factory, an event that forced his intellectually gifted son to leave school and find a job in order to help support the family.

  The young Jouhaux first went to work at Aubervilliers’s Central Melting House, a foundry where conditions were miserable. When his father regained his position at the match factory, Jouhaux was able to go back to school, but nine months later his father was again laid off, so the boy took a job at a soap works. At the age of sixteen Léon himself went to work at the match factory, where he immediately joined the union his father had worked so hard to create. From that point on—except for a single year he was able to spend at a vocational school—Jouhaux was, as he later said, “completely caught up in the hard life of the industrial worker.”27

  In 1900 Jouhaux exchanged that form of hard life for another when he was called up for military service. After initial training he was dispatched to Algeria, where he served with the 1st Regiment of Zouaves. However, he was sent home and released from service in 1903 because his father—who had lost and regained his job several more times—had gone blind as a result of his long exposure to white phosphorous. Jouhaux went back to work in the match factory, where in addition to laboring on the production line he also replaced his father on the union’s leadership committee. Sincerely dedicated to improving the lot of all workers, he quickly proved himself to be both a natural leader and a tough negotiator who was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with the bosses and the thugs they hired to break strikes.

  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”28—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.29

  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.30 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,31 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),32 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.33 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 26,34 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.35 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.

  FOR SEBASTIAN WIMMER, 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 frontline 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. Flanke
d 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 entrance36 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.37

  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.