A Guest of the Reich

by Peter Finn

  The camp at Luckenwalde held seventeen thousand men, including more than six thousand Americans, their numbers swollen by POWs transported to the facility from the east, many force-marched there. The prisoners endured “mediaeval conditions of filth,” and the camp’s few medics were overwhelmed by rampant dysentery, pneumonia, frostbite, and depression, all compounded by malnutrition. Thousands of Russians were buried in mass graves on the camp’s perimeter, the victims of typhus and willful brutality. Frantic prisoners, acutely aware of how close the Red Army was, prayed for liberation before they too were killed by disease, starvation, or Nazi zealots.

  One measure of the increasing desperation of the regime was an attempt to distribute pamphlets soliciting fighters from among the POWs at Luckenwalde. “Soldiers of the British Commonwealth! Soldiers of the United States of America!” the missive began, before declaring that a final conflict with the Russians was also “the decisive battle for England, the United States and the maintenance of western civilization…Are you for the culture of the West or the barbaric asiatic East?”

  It asked the POWs “as white men to other white men” to volunteer to fight with the Nazis in return for repatriation via Switzerland when the offensive was won. There were no takers.

  The Wehrmacht was being decimated by the Russian advance; losses on the eastern front in the first two months of 1945 numbered 450,000. Regular forces were being supplemented with the poorly equipped and untrained older men of the Volkssturm, a recently formed national militia, and the boys of the Hitler Youth movement for the final defense of Berlin. Hitler would not contemplate surrender or even the possibility, however remote, of a negotiated end to the war. On February 4, 1945, the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—gathered at Yalta for several days of meetings and reaffirmed the policy of unconditional surrender. Germany would be divided, the Nazi Party would be abolished, and its leadership would be prosecuted for war crimes. “I’ve always said there can be no question of capitulation,” Hitler said in response to the announcement.

  The Anglo-American bombing campaign intensified. Just before Yalta, on February 3, Berlin was struck by fifteen hundred American planes that dropped more than twenty-two hundred tons of bombs, the heaviest raid of the war on the capital. In the government district, the Reich Chancellery, Gestapo headquarters, and the Foreign Ministry were hit. Nearly three thousand people were killed; Allied planners had hoped for thousands more dead.

  The firebombing of Dresden, killing twenty-five thousand, occurred on February 13 and 14. Separately, Operation Clarion targeted small-town Germany that month to remind its burghers they were not immune to the destruction. Goebbels wanted to kill thousands of Allied prisoners of war in retaliation for the relentless aerial bombardment.

  Among those prisoners was Doyle Dickson, still recovering from his wounds. Like Papurt, the other casualty of Gertie’s joyride to Wallendorf, Dickson first was taken to the POW hospital at Limburg but was subsequently moved east to Stalag III-B. That was a camp for enlisted men in Fürstenberg, about seventy-five miles east of Berlin on the Oder River. It was a vast facility that held over twenty thousand Russians, French, Serbs, and other nationalities, including nearly five thousand Americans captured in North Africa or on the western front.

  The camp was evacuated on January 31, 1945, as the Red Army closed in, and most of the prisoners were moved to Luckenwalde, where Beattie was being held. Dickson, however, was housed some distance away, in a makeshift hospital in the city of Brandenburg, just west of Berlin. The Germans were using the facility to treat wounded POWs, and it was staffed mostly with American, Yugoslav, and French POWs who were either doctors or medics.

  On March 31, the hospital was struck by bombs in an Allied air attack on Brandenburg. Dickson was among eighteen American prisoners killed. He had just turned twenty-one that January.

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  By the second week of March, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White was up in one of the twin spires of Cologne Cathedral looking down on the ruined city and across the Rhine to its eastern bank, still held by German forces. The iron arches of the Hohenzollern Bridge lay crumpled in the water beneath her. On the door of the cathedral, a sign read, “YOU ARE NOW IN COLOGNE, COMPLIMENTS 1st Bn. 36th Armd. Inf. Reg., Texas Spearhead.”

  The Life magazine journalist was back at the center of the action. After she did penance in Italy, where she again demonstrated her skill and grit, the army lifted its ban on her covering the invasion of Germany, though not without some caveats. “Never let that woman out of your sight,” the commanding officer of the division she was assigned to warned her minder, a young rifleman. She was traveling with part of Patton’s Third Army, and Bourke-White photographed the general at his headquarters. “Don’t show my jowls,” Patton shouted. “Stop taking pictures of my teeth.” Bourke-White did make sure to show the newly acquired third star on Patton’s steel helmet as the general looked away to the left, his preferred profile.

  Patton sent his forces across the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz, on March 22, stealing a march on British field marshal Bernard Montgomery as the main American and British thrusts began the following day. “I want the world to know that Third Army made it before Monty starts across,” said Patton, who took a symbolic piss from a pontoon bridge as he traversed the river and then picked up some souvenir dirt on the far side “in emulation of William the Conqueror.”

  The Allies—ninety divisions facing what was in effect two dozen German divisions—now began to sprint across Germany. The fighting was still intense, with more than ten thousand U.S. soldiers killed in action in April 1945, a monthly total higher than in June 1944 after the D-day landing. But the outcome was certain. “We correspondents were hard-pressed to keep up with the march of events,” Bourke-White recalled. “No time to think about it or interpret it. Just rush to photograph it; write it; cable it.”

  When she entered Frankfurt, she had to drive carefully to avoid the “mangled remains of the dead on the street.” She observed German women emerging from their cellars, picking magnolias and lilacs from among the city ruins. “It was a sense of return to life that had impelled them to fill their arms with all the pink and purple boughs they could carry.”

  The Griemes, too, survived to see the blooms of spring. They managed to hand Gertie’s note to Patton’s troops and, in turn, sent a message to their former guest via the American soldiers who had overrun their town. The message was passed to a Chicago Sun reporter who wrote a story about Gertie and the Germans. “We hope you arrived in Switzerland all right and are well,” the Griemes wrote in early April. “The Cherry trees are blossoming here now and Spring has come in full. How about spending Easter here in the ‘House under the Trees’?”

  A week later, Bourke-White entered Buchenwald, the concentration camp whose main entrance displayed the words “Recht oder Unrecht, mein Vaterland”—“Right or Wrong, My Fatherland.” Bourke-White suddenly wished that the bright April sun would melt away so that she wouldn’t have to confront the horror before her. She photographed the skeletal figures staring back at her with little or no reaction amid the sickening charnel: the heaped corpses; the lines of hooks on the walls where prisoners were garroted and hung; the block for gruesome medical experiments; the dissecting room where gloves for the commander’s wife were fashioned from human skin; the ovens to dispose of the dead. “Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me,” Bourke-White wrote in her book on Germany, “Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly,” which was published in 1946. Its dedication read, “For M.J.P. who died too soon.”

  Buchenwald was the first major concentration camp liberated by American troops, and Patton, enraged, ordered one thousand citizens of nearby Weimar to be brought to the facility to bear witness, and his GIs, equally disgusted, forced twice that number to walk through the camp. Bourke-White captured
them covering their noses and mouths from the stench, turning their faces away as they passed the stacks of corpses.

  “We didn’t know. We didn’t know,” the Germans insisted, forming what Bourke-White said was the beginning of “a national chant.”

  “You did know,” the camp survivors replied.

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  Jennings was among the first American POWs to be liberated. After the last of his interrogations, he had been transferred to a prisoner of war camp at Wetzlar, about thirty miles northeast of Diez Castle. He survived a long bout of pneumonia that winter as well as the bombing of the hospital where he was being treated. While he was ill, his weight fell to 105 pounds. When he recovered, Jennings served as camp librarian and executive officer to the senior American officer at the facility.

  On the morning of March 27, 1945, the camp’s guard force abandoned their posts, taking eighty-three prisoners and leaving behind the sick and wounded with a handful of officers, including Jennings. Later that morning some German troops who had been fighting in the vicinity retreated into the camp and surrendered to the remaining prisoners. Sporadic, heavy fighting continued into the night, but the following morning an American officer drove a jeep into the camp. The gates were already open and the watchtowers were manned by U.S. troops.

  By April 3, Jennings was at OSS headquarters in Paris. Donovan, still furious about the Wallendorf incident, ordered him immediately returned to the navy and recommended that he be held in the brig until disciplined. “His actions exposed OSS to great criticism and discredit and gravely reflects on his suitability to continue holding a Naval commission,” Donovan wrote. Jennings was formally reprimanded by the OSS, but it was not included in his navy record. He returned to the United States, where he was honorably discharged.

  Jennings and Gertie met for lunch at the River Club in Manhattan in early May 1945 to reminisce but then fell out of touch. “I guess we both got away awfully lucky,” Gertie concluded.

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  The war ended badly for Gosewisch; his mother was killed, shot through the head and back, in early April 1945, and the family home in Eitzendorf, near Bremen, was destroyed. Gosewisch was captured by Americans who were curious about his background in the United States. An FBI report from an agent accompanying troops in the field noted that he “acted as an interrogator in a case of considerable importance,” referring to Gertie, but said “there is presently no reason to believe that Subject played the role of an espionage agent while located in the U.S.” American officials didn’t deem him important enough to hold, and he was released in early June, returning to his destitute wife and two children.

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  On the morning of April 21, the day after Hitler’s birthday, when Soviet guns first began to shell Berlin, German guards abandoned the Luckenwalde camp, leaving the prisoners to manage themselves. The following morning a small Russian armored car pulled in, sparking raucous celebrations. The driver was mobbed, kissed, and tossed repeatedly in the air to shouts of “U-rah! U-rah!” from his compatriots. To the immense frustration of many of the prisoners, however, it took another two weeks before the various militaries began to organize their evacuation. There were still large pockets of German forces in the region, and the POWs were forced to sit on their hands as the Russians conducted mop-up operations—“free men unable to taste freedom,” Beattie lamented.

  At dawn on May 4, Beattie was driven out of the camp by two American reporters, one from his own service, United Press, and the other from The Baltimore News-Post. They crossed into a U.S.-controlled zone near Wittenberg and within minutes, as Beattie recorded with glee, were eating a breakfast of grapefruit juice, pancakes, bacon, and real coffee from a GI chuck wagon. Three hours later Beattie was on a military shuttle plane that touched down in Weimar, Nuremberg, and Regensburg before finally heading for Paris.

  By evening, he was drinking champagne cocktails with friends. He had burned his lice-ridden uniform, taken a long bath, and eaten “three good American meals” over the course of the day. “My hotel bed,” Beattie noted, “has a thick soft mattress, and sheets.”

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  Madame Cailliau’s liberation and return to France took longer and involved one of the last and more unusual engagements of the war, a battle that saw U.S. and regular German soldiers together fight troops from the Waffen-SS, the military arm of Himmler’s organization.

  Hours after Gertie’s departure to Kronberg and the Griemes’ house, Cailliau and her husband were also separated from the group of French officers, along with the German prisoner who claimed to have been Hitler’s friend and the man’s invalid sister. Under guard, they traveled slowly by train, truck, and foot into southern Germany.

  On April 13, they arrived in Munich, where the two Germans were released. The Cailliaus, escorted by four soldiers, continued on to the village of Itter, about sixty miles south of Munich, just over the border in Austria.

  Dominating the village was a thirteenth-century castle that had been a hotel before the war but was seized by the SS and turned into another facility for French VIP prisoners. It was designated a satellite facility of the Dachau concentration camp, just outside Munich, and drew its guard force as well as forced laborers from there.

  The castle sits at a height of 7,500 feet, and it was a tough hike up. The Cailliaus were exhausted when they finally crossed the bridge to the gatehouse entrance on April 15. They were almost denied admission by an SS lieutenant who at first refused to accept the transfer of more prisoners into his custody. Madame Cailliau said they looked like “vagabonds.” The name de Gaulle, however, quickly opened the prison gates.

  The wall above the castle’s entryway had been inscribed with a famous line from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” It was a salutary warning. The SS captain and commander at Schloss Itter was Sebastian Wimmer, a thuggish former police officer from Bavaria who joined the SS in 1935 and went on in 1939 to operate behind the German lines in Poland as part of a unit killing Jews, Polish nationalists, Catholic clergy, and other resisters. He also served at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland before he transferred to Dachau and from there to Itter in 1943.

  The Cailliaus found an astonishing who’s who of French politics at the castle: the three-time former French premier Édouard Daladier—Chamberlain’s co-signer at Munich—and the man who replaced Daladier as premier, Paul Reynaud. They despised each other with a spitting vehemence. Also present and unhappy to share the same prison were General Maurice Gamelin, the French army chief when war broke out, and the man who preceded and succeeded him in that position, General Maxime Weygand.

  Gamelin, a Daladier appointment, was fired by Reynaud on May 18, 1940—eight days after the German blitzkrieg began to overrun French forces. Reynaud replaced Gamelin with Weygand, a decision he later regretted after the general joined the government of Philippe Pétain and sued for peace rather than keep fighting. “Traitor, collaborator!” Reynaud greeted Weygand when he saw him at the castle.

  The Itter group also included some former members of the Vichy government—François de La Rocque and Jean Borotra—as well as their ideological opposites, the French trade unionists Léon Jouhaux and Augusta Bruchlen.

  Unlike at the Rheinhotel Dreesen, where political differences were stifled for the overall comity of the group, the castle at Itter was a nest of open enmities. Fourteen prisoners in all with the arrival of the Cailliaus, the French VIPs “could not possibly have been more politically diverse, more determinedly irascible, or more obstinately quarrelsome,” as the historian Stephen Harding put it.

  They were in the end forced to cooperate with one another to ensure their collective survival. On April 30, 1945—the day Hitler committed suicide in Berlin—Eduard Weiter, the commandant of Dachau, arrived at the castle. He had ordered the execution of
two thousand prisoners before fleeing the death camp, and the prisoners at Itter became aware of the atrocity when he drunkenly boasted of it to Wimmer. They began to fear for their own lives. Weiter’s plan, however, was to emulate his führer; he did so with a shot to the heart that failed to kill him. He finished himself off with another shot to the head.

  The castle’s guard force fled on the morning of May 4, and the French armed themselves with weapons the Germans left behind. The nearest Allied troops were still more than a dozen miles away, and Waffen-SS units were in the immediate vicinity—troops who might seize the castle as a last redoubt and execute its French occupants.

  Two of the castle’s forced laborers—a Yugoslav named Zvonimir Čučković and a Czech cook named Andreas Krobot—volunteered to go out and alert any American forces they could find to the castle’s stranded prisoners. Čučković eluded the Waffen-SS units and found his way to U.S. forces in Innsbruck. Krobot was also fortunate and stumbled into Wehrmacht soldiers who were intent on surrendering to the Americans. Their commander accompanied Krobot to the U.S. lines.

  Instead of detaining the Germans, U.S. forces pressed them back into action, and a small joint U.S.-German group of troops fought their way into the castle. “The arrival of the eagerly anticipated rescue force left Castle Itter’s French ‘guests’ decidedly unimpressed,” wrote Harding, especially at the sight of armed Germans.

  The French and their unlikely allies were soon fighting together, however, as Waffen-SS troops attacked the castle. They kept them at bay until a second group of American soldiers, drawn by Čučković’s pleas, arrived and the SS troops were scattered. It was among the last skirmishes of the war and the first combat in which U.S. and German soldiers fought together.