The castle’s conversion into a high-security prison didn’t take long. It already had massive walls; a deep, dry moat; and a virtually impregnable gatehouse. The addition of tangles of concertina wire and dozens of intricate locks rendered the castle virtually escape-proof. Twenty of the existing guest rooms in the central housing structure were converted into secure, if unusually roomy, cells; others were turned into guardrooms and offices.

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SS planners at the camp command at Dachau tapped Sebastian Wimmer, an equivalent of a captain in the SS, as commander of the new prison and assigned him some twenty-five members from the SS’s concentration camp guard service. These soldiers were for the most part older, less capable troops with no combat experience. Most had served as guards at the larger camps, and were happy to spend whatever was left of the war guarding VIP prisoners in an alpine redoubt far removed from the horrors of the Final Solution.

Within days of the completion of its conversion into a prison, Castle Itter welcomed the first of what would become a veritable “Who’s Who” of VIP captives: Albert Lebrun, who had been president of France until he was replaced by Philippe Pétain in July 1940; former Italian prime minister and dedicated anti-Fascist Francesco Saverio Nitti; and André François-Poncet, former French ambassador to both Germany and Italy.

These three didn’t stay long at Castle Itter; they were quickly supplanted by the entirely French cast of characters that would remain there through the end of the war. Among them were former prime ministers Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud; trade union leader Léon Jouhaux; generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin; tennis star Jean Borotra; right-wing leader Col. François de La Rocque; and Michel Clemenceau, politician and son of World War I–era prime minister Georges Clemenceau.

Also present were Alfred Cailliau, a relatively minor politician who was being held at Itter only because his wife, imprisoned along with him, was the sister of Free French leader Charles de Gaulle; Reynaud’s thirty-one-year-old secretary (and future wife) Christiane Mabire; Jouhaux’s secretary, Madame Brucklin; the wives of Borotra and Weygand; and Marcel Granger, a relative of Free French general Henri Giraud.

While all were French, the prisoners at Itter could not possibly have been more politically diverse or more determinedly irascible. Reynaud and Daladier were bitter political enemies, and both former prime ministers detested General Weygand who—having replaced Gamelin as supreme commander of French forces in May 1940—surrendered to, and initially collaborated with, the occupying Germans. Gamelin, for obvious reasons, was not at all fond of Weygand, and sided with Reynaud against Daladier. La Rocque, who in the early 1930s had led the rabidly anticommunist Croix-de-Feu (“Cross of Fire”) organization, could not abide Jouhaux, whose Confédération Générale du Travail was France’s largest trade-union group. And, finally, there was Borotra, who was at Itter not for his fame as the tennis world’s “Bounding Basque,” but because, after resigning as Vichy’s commissioner for sport and physical education in April 1942, he was later caught attempting to flee the country to join Allied forces.

The VIP prisoners quickly segregated themselves by political persuasion, avoiding each other as much as possible. They even took to eating at separate tables in the small dining room: the Weygands, the Borotras, and La Rocque at one; Reynaud, Mabire, Gamelin, and Clemenceau at another; and the others—who were seen as “neutrals”—at a third. One can only imagine the heated exchanges that must have occurred among these once-powerful, still resentful personages, and the perverse joy their captors must have taken in their internecine squabbling.

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