On May 5, 1945, just days before the war in Europe ended, an American captain, a Wehrmacht major, and a former SS officer fought side by side against a Waffen-SS assault at Castle Itter in Austria. Inside the medieval fortress were 14 of France’s most prominent political prisoners, men the SS had been ordered to ensure would never leave alive. Outside, more than 100 Waffen-SS troops were closing in. The defenders had one damaged tank, fewer than 40 fighters, and almost no ammunition.
It was one of only two known battles in World War II where American and German forces fought on the same side. Castle Itter sat on a wooded hill in Austria’s Brixental Valley. In early 1943, Heinrich Himmler ordered the property seized and converted into a prison under the Dachau camp system, designated for high-value French prisoners. Among those held were Édouard Daladier, the former prime minister who signed the 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler; Paul Reynaud, who attempted to keep France fighting before the government collapsed; and Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, both of whom had commanded the French Army during the invasion of France.
The captive group also included trade union leader Léon Jouhaux, right-wing politician François de La Rocque, Michel Clemenceau, son of the World War I premier, and Marie-Agnès Carriau, sister of Charles de Gaulle. Perhaps the most unlikely prisoner was Jean Borotra, a Grand Slam tennis champion arrested after trying to flee Vichy France to join the Allies. The prisoners were deeply divided along political lines. Reynaud and Daladier, whose rivalry stretched back to pre-war cabinets, barely spoke.
They ate at separate tables and avoided conversation. The Reich had achieved what French politics never could: putting Daladier and Reynaud in the same room. Yet all of them shared one thing—they were worth more to the Reich alive than dead, and they knew that could change overnight. For two years, the routine held.
But in the final days of April 1945, the chain of command that had kept Castle Itter functioning disintegrated. On May 2, Eduard Weiter, a former Dachau commandant who had fled to the castle, died under suspicious circumstances. The next morning, a Yugoslav resistance member named Zvonimir Čuković slipped out under the pretext of running an errand. When he failed to return and word of Weiter’s death spread, prison commander Sebastian Wimmer panicked and fled.
The SS guards followed, abandoning the castle for the first time since 1943. The prisoners moved quickly, gathering rifles, pistols, and ammunition left behind by the guards, and posted armed lookouts along the walls. But Waffen-SS units still roamed the surrounding hills, and the nearest Allied forces were days away. Čuković bypassed the town of Wörgl entirely, where SS patrols controlled the streets, and pressed on toward Innsbruck, 64 kilometers to the west, moving on foot through territory still crawling with German troops.
By nightfall on May 3, he reached elements of the American 103rd Infantry Division and handed over a letter describing the prisoners trapped inside Castle Itter. A rescue column rolled out at dawn but was recalled before reaching the castle—the area had been assigned to another division’s territory. Čuković’s gamble had briefly succeeded only to be undone by a line on a map. On the morning of May 4, Czech cook Andreas Krobot volunteered to try a different route.
Armed with a note and a bicycle, he rode down the mountain toward Wörgl, pedaling past SS roadblocks and patrols. He reached the town and made contact with the Austrian resistance, who brought him to Major Josef Gangl. Gangl was a 34-year-old Bavarian artillery officer who had fought across Europe with Werfer Regiment 83, from the Battle of the Bulge to the defense of Saarbrücken. By April 1945, his launchers had been destroyed and fewer than 30 men remained under his command.
Ordered to withdraw to the Alps, Gangl refused. He stayed in Wörgl with 10 of his soldiers, joined the local resistance, and began shielding civilians from SS units that were executing men suspected of desertion. When Krobot arrived with news of the prisoners, Gangl knew he lacked the numbers to take the castle alone. Driving under a white flag to Kufstein, he found Captain John C.
“Jack” Lee Jr. of the 23rd Tank Battalion, 12th Armored Division, waiting in the town square with four Sherman tanks. Lee, a 27-year-old from Norwich, New York, did not hesitate. After scouting the castle’s defenses with Gangl, Lee tried to bring up tanks and infantry from the 142nd Infantry Regiment, but a bridge along the route could not bear the weight.
He crossed with a single Sherman nicknamed Besotten Jenny, 14 American soldiers, and a truck carrying Gangl’s 10 artillerymen. Six kilometers from the castle, they scattered an SS roadblock with machine gun fire and reached the gates at nightfall. The relief force was far smaller than anyone had hoped. But Lee found an unlikely ally inside.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt Siegfried Schrader, a 29-year-old combat veteran who had once served in Hitler’s headquarters guard, had taken charge of the castle’s defenses days earlier. After being seriously wounded in France, he was sent to Itter to recover, befriended the French prisoners during his convalescence, and broke with the regime entirely. When the guards fled, Schrader moved his own wife and family into the castle alongside the men he had been expected to help imprison. Lee and Schrader organized the defense together, posting men along the walls and positioning Besotten Jenny at the main gate where its machine guns could cover the approach road.
Lee ordered the prisoners to stay inside, but they refused. Men who had spent two years locked behind those walls were not going to hide while others fought for them. Overnight, SS reconnaissance patrols probed the perimeter. Gangl managed to reach a resistance contact by telephone and asked for reinforcements.
Only two additional Wehrmacht soldiers and a teenage Austrian resistance member named Hans Waltl could be spared. They drove through the darkness and reached the castle before dawn, bringing the total number of defenders to fewer than 40. At first light on May 5, the assault began. Between 100 and 150 Waffen-SS troops from the 17th Panzergrenadier Division, commanded by SS-Oberführer Georg Bochmann, attacked from the wooded hills surrounding the castle.
Machine gun fire raked the walls, and 88-mm anti-aircraft shells struck the stone with enough force to crack masonry and send debris flying across the courtyard. The Sherman returned fire until an 88-mm round knocked it out. The radio operator inside escaped without injury, but the garrison had just lost its heaviest weapon. The fighting continued through the morning.
French generals, former prime ministers, and politicians fired from windows and doorways alongside American tankers and German artillerymen. Ammunition dropped with every exchange, and there was no resupply. Lee began pulling his men deeper into the castle’s interior, preparing for a last stand. Then Gangl spotted Reynaud exposed in the courtyard as SS fire intensified.
He rushed forward and pushed the former prime minister out of the line of fire. A sniper’s bullet struck him before he could reach cover. Gangl had disobeyed his commanders, surrendered to the enemy, and walked into a fight he had no obligation to join. He died protecting a French politician he had known for less than a day.
He was 34. With ammunition nearly exhausted and the SS pressing closer, Lee knew the castle could not hold. Jean Borotra, the 46-year-old tennis champion, volunteered to vault the castle wall and sprint through the SS lines to reach the 142nd Infantry Regiment. Lee had no other option.
Borotra climbed the wall and dropped into open ground. Using the terrain and tree cover to stay ahead of the gunfire behind him, he reached Wörgl and found elements of the 142nd Infantry Regiment, which had already received word of the castle situation but lacked a guide through the narrow mountain roads. Borotra asked for an American uniform, a rifle, and directions back to the fight. The regiment dispatched a relief column, and Borotra led it toward the castle.
Inside the walls, the remaining fighters were close to being overrun. Lee had concentrated his men in the castle’s inner rooms, and the SS had pushed close enough to bring a panzerfaust into position near the gatehouse. Then around 4:00 in the afternoon, the sound of heavy engines reached the valley. American armor appeared on the road below.
Machine gun fire tore into the SS positions from the south. The attackers broke. Faced with tanks and fresh infantry, the Waffen-SS troops scattered into the surrounding forest. Approximately 100 were captured in the aftermath.
The siege had lasted less than 24 hours. Every French prisoner survived. They were evacuated the same evening and flown from Innsbruck to Paris, arriving by May 10. Daladier and Reynaud both returned to political life.
Léon Jouhaux received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951 for his decades of work in the trade union movement. Borotra resumed competitive tennis and lived until 1994, dying at the age of 95. Lee received the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest American decoration for combat valor. After the war, he returned to civilian life and died in 1973 at the age of 55.
Gangl was buried in Wörgl’s war cemetery. A street in the town bears his name, and Austria recognizes him as a national hero. Schrader was arrested after the battle and sentenced to two years for his former party membership, a term later shortened in recognition of what he had done at the castle. The battle lasted a single day and cost one life among the defenders.
It saved 14 people from a war that was already over.