Free The Last Battle by Stephen Harding Page A

into an unlikely battle involving the alpine castle whose icon was obscured by a fold in his map, a group of combative French VIPs, an uneasy alliance with the enemy, a fight to the death against overwhelming odds, and the last—and arguably the strangest—ground combat action of World War II in Europe.

Sited atop a hill that commands the entrance to Austria’s Brixental Valley, Schloss Itter is first mentioned in the historical record in 1241. Damaged, rebuilt, and enlarged over the centuries, before its 1941 conversion into a VIP prison it had served successively as a military fortress, a private home, and a boutique hotel. (Author’s collection)

German police march into Tyrol following Germany’s March 12, 1938, annexation of Austria. The Anschluss led directly to Schloss Itter’s transformation from fairytale castle and hotel into something decidedly more sinister. (National Archives)

The network of “special prisons” maintained by the Nazis grew from Adolf Hitler’s belief that important prisoners might prove of value in negotiations with the Allies. Ehrenhäftlinge —honor prisoners—were housed in reasonably good conditions in castles, hotels, and similar facilities throughout the Reich, though their continued good health relied solely on the führer’s whim. (National Archives)

    Though Hitler fully supported the work of the Schloss Itter–based “Alliance for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco,” Reichsführer der SS Heinrich Himmler believed the Austrian castle was ideal for more nefarious purposes. On November 23, 1942, he got Hitler to sign an order to begin the process of acquiring the castle outright for “special SS use,” and Schloss Itter was officially requisitioned by the SS in February 1943. (National Archives)

SS Major General Theodor Eicke, the director of the Nazis’ concentration camp system and originator of the “inflexible harshness” doctrine applied to KZ prisoners, directed that Sebastian Wimmer and the commanders of other honor prisoners’ facilities treat their prisoners well but stand ready to execute the VIPs at a moment’s notice, without compunction and without remorse. (National Archives)

    Plans for Schloss Itter’s conversion from an antismoking administrative center into a high-security honor prisoner facility were apparently overseen by no less a personage than Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production. (National Archives)

By the time he arrived at Schloss Itter, General Maurice Gamelin had spent more than fifty of his seventy-one years as an officer in his nation’s army. His career was marred, however, when his poor response to Germany’s May 1940 invasion of France led Prime Minster Paul Reynaud to replace him as supreme military commander with archrival General Maxime Weygand. (National Archives)

    Stocky, barrel-chested, and pugnacious, sixty-one-year-old Édouard Daladier was the youngest of the three VIPs whose arrival at Schloss Itter on May 2, 1943, marked the castle’s official opening as a prison. (National Archives)

Seen here during a prewar visit to the United States, labor leader Léon Jouhaux and his colleague and longtime companion Augusta Bruchlen both ended up imprisoned in Schloss Itter; Bruchlen’s incarceration in the Tyrolean fortress was voluntary, Jouhaux’s was not. (National Archives)

    Sent to Schloss Itter in May 1943, Paul Reynaud was horrified to discover that his arch political rival Édouard Daladier had preceded him but was relieved to find conditions at the castle far better than those he’d experienced at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (National Archives)

Though Jean Borotra—the famed “Bounding Basque”—willingly joined Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist Vichy government following France’s capitulation, the tennis star’s less-than-discrete disdain for the Nazis led to his dismissal and ultimate arrest. Borotra encountered Paul Reynaud at Sachsenhausen, and the two