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

by Stephen Harding

  Christiane Dolorès Mabire was born in Paris on February 17, 1913, to an upper-middle-class family. She received an excellent education and grew into what one observer called a “remarkably elegant” young woman, a “tall, slender girl with the hands and feet of a thoroughbred, a narrow face and aquiline nose” who “dressed with unusual care and good taste.”11 She was also intelligent and fluent in English. Reynaud appreciated all of the young woman’s qualities when Mabire was introduced to him by his daughter, Colette, soon after he became prime minister. Indeed, so impressed was Reynaud that he hired the then twenty-seven-year-old Mabire as his secretary despite the opposition of the thirty-eight-year-old countess Hélène de Portes.

  Mabire was among the staffers who accompanied Reynaud to Tours and then Bordeaux when the French government left Paris. But when the former prime minister suggested to de Portes that his secretary accompany them to the Mediterranean coast—in order to help him begin work on a book about France’s defeat, he said—the countess refused to allow it. That refusal probably saved Mabire’s life, since she was not in Reynaud’s car when it struck the tree that injured him and killed de Portes.

  Though Mabire was unable to see Reynaud in Montpellier, she and Dernis visited him in Le Portalet prison. While Mabire’s presence was often in a professional capacity, it is clear from his diary entries that Reynaud was delighted every time she appeared. Those appearances increased considerably after Mabire took a room at a hotel in a nearby town, where she lived for most of the year that Reynaud spent in Le Portalet. Mabire’s visits eased the discomfort of Reynaud’s imprisonment, and the friendship between the former prime minister and his secretary evolved into something deeper, despite the thirty-five-year age difference.

  Mabire was understandably alarmed when she arrived at Le Portalet on November 21, 1942, only to be told that Reynaud had been transferred the night before. The authorities would not tell her where he’d been taken, and she was herself arrested by Gestapo agents on November 22. Three days later Mabire arrived at Fresnes Prison. Immediately upon her arrival she was locked into a bare room and left alone for several hours.

  After a brief interrogation Mabire was moved to a cell and remained in solitary confinement until December 10, when she was transported to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women some fifty miles north of Berlin, where she was to spend nearly six months. The young Frenchwoman was assigned the cover name Frau Müller and confined, alone, in a cell block for high-value prisoners. Since she did not read or speak German and was not allowed to interact with other prisoners, her isolation was nearly complete.

  Until, that is, the day when she was taking her usual fifteen minutes of exercise in the cell block’s small courtyard. Lost in thought, she was startled by a woman’s whispered voice calling “Madame!” in slightly accented French. The greeting came from another prisoner, the Polish countess Karolina Lanckoronska, speaking through the bars of her cell window. Lanckoronska had caught sight of Mabire and knew from her bearing that she must be French. A guard’s inattentiveness allowed the women a few moments together two days after their first contact. They “chattered away” in French, said Lanckoronska, and over the following weeks the Polish countess and the elegant Parisienne quickly became close friends.

  That friendship was interrupted, however, during the last weeks of June 1943, when Wimmer arranged to have Frau Müller transferred to his custody. It was not an act of kindness, of course, for the SS-TV officer believed that having a former prime minister of France indebted to him might pay some future dividend.

  Wimmer’s intervention had an immediate effect on Christiane Mabire’s life. On the last day of June two SS-TV men drove her south into Austria, and during the trip Mabire became convinced that Reynaud was responsible for her departure from Ravensbrück. As the miles passed she allowed herself to hope that she might be reunited with the man who had come to mean so much to her.

  When that reunion occurred, just before noon on July 2,12 Reynaud warmly embraced the gaunt but laughing Mabire as she stepped from the staff car, kissed her on both cheeks, and led her by the hand toward the castle’s main entrance. Though still incarcerated, the elderly politician and his young companion could now face the uncertain future together.

  MARCEL GRANGER, JULY 2, 1943

  Barely an hour after Mabire’s arrival a second car rolled into the castle’s front courtyard bearing another “special prisoner.” Bruchlen, Jouhaux, Gamelin, and Borotra drifted down through the schlosshof’s arched gateway to see who their new companion might be. Though none of them recognized the man, they were all struck by his attire: riding breeches, knee-high leather boots, a cotton shirt with a North African motif, and—much to Borotra’s delight—a Basque beret set at a jaunty angle.13 Later, at lunch, the man introduced himself as Marcel Granger and then told his listeners how his brother’s wife had saved him from death in Dachau.

  Born in Toulon in 1901, Granger settled in French Tunisia and established a successful agricultural estate. He was a reserve officer in the French colonial forces, and upon the 1939 outbreak of war he’d been mobilized. He remained on duty after the French capitulation and Vichy’s takeover of Tunisia, but by December 1940 he had joined a resistance cell. Granger’s fluency in Arabic and his knowledge of the country and its people made him an ideal intelligence agent, and he was put in charge of establishing secret arms dumps to support Allied forces should they invade Tunisia.

  The Allied landings in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 seemed to indicate that Granger’s hard work was about to come to fruition, but the Germans’ decision to funnel reinforcements through Tunisia’s ports and airfields made a swift Allied liberation unlikely. The infusion of Wehrmacht troops—and the increased vigilance of the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary anti-resistance force—further complicated Granger’s task. In early April 1943 he was captured by Milice troops and handed over to the Gestapo. Within days he’d entered the living hell of Dachau.

  Granger was put to work in the fields surrounding the camp, where between interrogations he labored eighteen hours a day with little food or water. Conditions were made worse for Granger by periodic beatings intended to loosen his tongue. In late June 1943 the Frenchman was summoned to the camp headquarters, where, to his amazement, an officer announced that Granger was to be transferred to a “special facility” where conditions would be far more to the Frenchman’s liking. Granger asked the reason for his unexpected good fortune and was dumbfounded when the SS-TV man replied, “Because of your sister-in-law.”

  The Frenchman’s brother, Pierre, was married to Renée, one of the daughters of French army general Henri Giraud, who had escaped from German captivity after the fall of France and was now cooperating with the Allies. Hitler ordered Himmler to arrest any members of Giraud’s family who were within reach, the intent being to hold them hostage in an attempt to sway the general’s allegiance to the Allied cause. Himmler’s dragnet brought in seventeen members of Giraud’s extended family, including Renée and her four children. The sweep missed Pierre Granger, however, who was serving as his father-in-law’s aide. When a routine file review revealed the connection between Marcel Granger and the Giraud clan, Granger was marked for “special handling” and tapped for transfer to Schloss Itter.

  Granger’s story—told as he wolfed down as much food as he could—fascinated his small audience. Their fascination turned to horror, however, when Granger told them of the hellish scenes he’d witnessed at Dachau.14 Though each of his listeners had endured the rigors of German captivity, none had experienced the horrific conditions described in Granger’s grim recitation. It was a sobering reminder that the conditions at Schloss Itter could change in an instant and that none of them should forget what the hated Germans were capable of.

  MAXIME AND MARIE-RENÉE-JOSÉPHINE WEYGAND, DECEMBER 5, 1943

  Daladier’s distress at Reynaud’s appearance within Schloss Itter’s walls was nothing compared to the horrified disbelief that Maxime Weygand’s arriv
al generated in both Gamelin and Reynaud. While the source of Gamelin’s discomfort was professional embarrassment—he had been replaced by Weygand at the most critical point in France’s history—Reynaud’s reaction was more visceral. Despite having elevated Weygand, Reynaud blamed the general more than anyone else for France’s defeat in 1940. On seeing the former army chief and his wife striding through Itter’s entrance hall, Reynaud muttered, quite audibly, “Traitor, collaborator!”

  Stinging epithets were nothing new to the then seventy-six-year-old Weygand. Indeed, from the day of his birth in January 1867 the man had had to deal with derision. Born illegitimately in Brussels,15 he was brought up in France as the ward of David de Léon Cohen, a wealthy, Italian-born, Jewish merchant. The young bastard became a staunch Roman Catholic and a fiery French nationalist, and he ultimately decided on a military career. Still officially Belgian, he entered the St. Cyr military academy as a foreign student, but following his adoption by Cohen’s accountant—a paperwork-only event Cohen engineered to allow his ward to become “fully French”—the young man adopted the name Maxime Weygand.

  Over the years following his commissioning, Weygand excelled in increasingly challenging assignments and along the way married Marie-Renée-Joséphine de Forsanz, with whom he had two sons. By the time World War I erupted, Weygand was a lieutenant colonel, and after a brief stint of frontline duty he became chief of staff to French XX Corps commander General Ferdinand Foch. Excellent staff work and the ability to adapt to military necessity ensured Weygand’s rapid rise through the ranks. By the end of the war he was a major general.

  Weygand’s career following World War I was eventful and successful, and he became the army’s chief of staff in 1930. This ushered in the period of his initial collaboration with, and eventual antagonism toward, Gamelin. Following his mandatory retirement in January 1935, Weygand took up a senior administrative position with the Suez Canal Company. But as the clouds of war again gathered over Europe, Weygand hoped to be called back into military service, and in August 1939 he was. Much to his surprise, his old nemesis Gamelin—at Daladier’s prompting—asked if Weygand would take command of French forces in the eastern Mediterranean. He jumped at the opportunity and took up his new post within weeks.

  Gamelin’s ineffectual response to the 1940 German invasion prompted Reynaud to call Weygand back to Paris from Syria, and upon his arrival Weygand replaced Gamelin as commander in chief of all French military forces. Weygand realized that France had no hope of halting the German juggernaut and decided that the way to avert widespread destruction of the nation’s infrastructure and of preserving some semblance of French sovereignty was to achieve an immediate armistice. Reynaud’s June 16 resignation—and Pétain’s appointment of Weygand as defense minister the following day—cleared the way for Weygand and others who saw a cessation of hostilities as France’s only hope for survival.

  While it can be said that the actions of Weygand and other armistice-minded French leaders saved their nation from further destruction and allowed half the country to remain unoccupied—at least initially—it is also obvious why many on both sides of the Channel considered France’s capitulation to be premature. Nor is it difficult to understand how Weygand’s participation in the Vichy government appeared to many as collaboration with the Germans, though the general later explained that he was simply attempting to preserve as much of the nation’s military power as possible in order to fight “another day.”

  In September 1940 Weygand became commander in chief of French forces in Africa, but the perception in both Vichy and Berlin that the general was not a wholehearted team player ultimately led to his downfall. On November 17, 1941, he was recalled to France and removed from his position at the Germans’ insistence. Weygand and his wife retired to the south of France, where the general set about writing his memoirs. But following the November 1942 Allied landings in North Africa and Germany’s subsequent invasion of unoccupied France, Hitler ordered Weygand’s arrest.

  Taken into custody on November 12, Weygand was in Germany within days. He was ultimately moved to Schloss Garlitz, a VIP prison southwest of Hamburg. In January 1943 his wife was allowed to join him, and the couple settled into a relatively comfortable routine. That routine was disrupted on December 2, 1943, when the Weygands were told to pack their belongings. Three days later they walked through Schloss Itter’s front gate, to be greeted by Reynaud’s purposely audible mutterings.

  MICHEL CLEMENCEAU, JANUARY 9, 1944

  New prisoners next arrived at Schloss Itter on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of a heavy snowfall. The swirling flakes blotted out the view of the surrounding alps and muted the engine noise of the car that had transported Michel Clemenceau, François de La Rocque, and Wimmer from Wörgl’s train station to the castle’s front courtyard.

  Reynaud and Borotra—both of whom were acquainted with the new guests—braved the snow to greet the men.16 They were stunned, however, by de La Rocque’s haggard appearance. Barely fifty-nine, he looked twenty years older and was having difficulty standing. The seventy-one-year-old Clemenceau, on the other hand, seemed to be both healthy and fascinated by his new surroundings. As he shook hands with Reynaud, Clemenceau smiled slightly and said, “So, Paul, another adventure, eh?”17

  That Clemenceau could describe imprisonment in an Austrian castle as an “adventure” says much about his earlier life. Born November 24, 1873, in France’s Pays-de-la-Loire region, he was the third child of physician-turned-politician Georges Clemenceau. Something of a hellion in his youth, Michel bounced from school to school in Paris until his exasperated father—who would ultimately twice be France’s prime minister—finally had enough and packed his fifteen-year-old wild child off to study with a tutor in Zurich. The boy soon settled down and in 1894 graduated from the Swiss city’s Agronomy Institute with an engineering degree and a remarkable fluency in German.

  With lucrative interests in a variety of businesses, by 1914 the forty-one-year-old Michel Clemenceau seemed set to enjoy his early middle age—but then he became one of the millions of Frenchmen called up as World War I loomed. On August 21, 1914, his unit encountered a formation of German lancers; Lieutenant Clemenceau was hit by a bullet from an enemy’s pistol but managed to kill the man before losing consciousness. After an extended convalescence Clemenceau was promoted to captain, and he finished the war as a decorated battalion commander.

  By the late 1930s Clemenceau was a prosperous entrepreneur with his hand in a variety of profitable businesses. Following Germany’s September 1, 1939, invasion of Poland, the sixty-five-year-old volunteered for military service. Clemenceau’s distinguished World War I record and political connections won him a major’s commission despite his age, and he was assigned to the army’s foreign-intelligence branch, the Deuxième Bureau.18 Briefly detained by the Germans following France’s surrender, he was released and returned to Paris.

  Though a longtime admirer of Pétain, Clemenceau opposed the aged general’s collaboration with the Germans, and his views drew the attention of the Gestapo. In November 1940 Clemenceau convinced his wife to leave France for America, but he stayed. His political connections kept him safe from official retribution until May 1943, when Gestapo agents arrested him. He spent several months in French prisons, and, on August 31, 1943, he was transferred to Schloss Eisenberg, a castle-turned-VIP prison in Czechoslovakia. Clemenceau held up well despite poor food and spartan conditions; unlike de La Rocque, he maintained a relatively optimistic attitude throughout his imprisonment. He was therefore able to accept the sudden transfer to Schloss Itter with a calm self-possession that prompted Reynaud to note that Clemenceau’s arrival brought the castle’s other VIP prisoners “the reassurance of his unshakable confidence.”19

  Sadly, Clemenceau’s traveling companion, de La Rocque, could boast neither health, nor self-confidence, nor optimism.

  FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCQUE, JANUARY 9, 1944

  While Reynaud and Borotra were stunned by de La Rocque’s a
ppearance upon his arrival at Schloss Itter, they were even more shocked that he was a prisoner of the Germans.

  Until his arrest ten months earlier de La Rocque had been a member of the Vichy government, a confidant of Pétain, and a man widely viewed both at home and abroad as one of France’s leading fascists. While the fact that someone with de La Rocque’s right-wing credentials could so quickly fall from political grace certainly surprised both Reynaud and Borotra, they would have been thunderstruck to learn that de La Rocque was also the head of a resistance movement that funneled information to Britain’s intelligence service.

  Born October 6, 1885, in Lorient, Annet-Marie-Jean-François de La Rocque de Sévérac was the scion of one of France’s noble families and, according to one biographer,20 the hereditary viscount of Chateaubriand. The young man attended St. Cyr military academy and in 1907 was commissioned a lieutenant of cavalry. In North Africa he commanded a mounted company that saw action against Moroccan guerillas. Severely wounded during a 1916 battle with insurgents, he refused medical attention and continued to lead his unit until a relief force arrived.

  Cited for bravery and promoted, de La Rocque returned to France for convalescence. Once again fit, he was assigned to an infantry unit and spent the remainder of World War I on the Western Front. Twice promoted and much decorated, he ended the war as a lieutenant colonel. Upon his retirement from the army in 1928, he was lauded as a highly effective leader concerned with the welfare of his troops.

  Given his strict Catholicism, aristocratic lineage, and intense patriotism, it’s no surprise that de La Rocque’s postwar politics veered toward the right. At thirty-eight he became the vice president of the extreme right-wing Croix de feu veterans’ group, which advocated the replacement of France’s admittedly chaotic form of parliamentary government with an authoritarian regime that would emphasize the “traditional French values” of work, family, and country.