The Last Battle (10 page)

Born in 1899 in German-owned Alsace-Lorraine—it had been annexed following the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War—Bruchlen believed the region was rightfully French. But it was her fluency in German (and her reasonable command of English) that won her a job after she moved to Paris. In 1924 she was hired as Jouhaux’s secretary and primary translator, a role that required her to accompany the labor leader on his extensive travels. They developed a romantic relationship, and by the early 1930s Bruchlen was widely acknowledged as Jouhaux’s “companion” as well as his indispensable executive assistant.

When Jouhaux went underground following the outbreak of war, Bruchlen was a vital link between him and the CGT resistance movement. In addition to editing and passing on his pamphlets, she coordinated his movements. After Jouhaux’s arrest in November 1941, Bruchlen heard nothing for a year. In November 1942 she discovered he was in Évaux-les-Bains and began visiting him whenever possible. That became easier following her own arrest in January 1943; Bruchlen was sentenced to “enforced residence” in the same Grand Hotel in which Jouhaux was being held.
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Though under house arrest, Bruchlen came and went from the Grand Hotel virtually at will—the only restrictions were that she sleep in the hotel and that she not leave Évaux-Les-Bains without police permission. Neither regulation proved difficult to follow until Jouhaux was moved at the end of March 1943. Fearing for her companion’s life and not knowing where he’d been taken, Bruchlen left Évaux-Les-Bains—without permission—and set off for Vichy. There she demanded to be allowed to join Jouhaux, wherever he was. Told that the labor leader had been transferred to a concentration camp in Germany, this remarkable woman insisted on being allowed to join him.

On May 29 Bruchlen was summoned to Gestapo headquarters in Paris and informed that she could join Jouhaux—on one condition. She would have to agree, in writing, to accept indefinite imprisonment without privileges and to absolve Vichy and Germany of responsibility for any harm that might befall her while incarcerated. Having signed the documents, she was told to be at Paris’s Gare du Nord on June 17. Two days later she was in a Gestapo car driving up the Itterstrasse, and when the castle came into
view, Bruchlen felt a tremor of foreboding: the schloss looked to her like something from a Gothic horror story. Her outlook improved considerably, however, when the car pulled into the front courtyard and she saw Jouhaux, a smile on his face and a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

CHRISTIANE MABIRE, JULY 2, 1943

While Augusta Bruchlen’s arrival at Itter was an answered prayer for both her and Léon Jouhaux, it was a call to action for Paul Reynaud. Soon after he was transferred to Sachsenhausen, he’d learned that Christiane Mabire had been arrested. Bruchlen’s appearance emboldened Reynaud to demand that Wimmer find out if Mabire was still alive and, if so, have the young woman transferred to Itter. As Wimmer discerned, Reynaud’s concern for Mabire’s welfare was more than simple humanity.

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.”
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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 arrival 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,
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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 front-line 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.