An American captain, a Wehrmacht major, and
a former SS officer stood side by side on the walls of an Austrian castle, firing at the
same enemy.

Inside were fourteen of France’s most important political prisoners, men the SS had
orders to ensure would never leave alive.

Outside, more than a hundred Waffen-SS troops were
closing in.

The defenders had one damaged tank, fewer than forty fighters, and almost no
ammunition.

The war would end in three days.

It was one of only two battles in the war where
Americans and Germans fought on the same side.

Hostages
Castle Itter sat on a wooded hill in Austria’s Brixental valley,
overlooking the village below.

For centuries it had been a fortress, then a hotel.

In early 1943,
Heinrich Himmler ordered SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl to seize the property, and by April
of that year it had been converted into a prison under the administration of the Dachau camp
system, designed for high-value French prisoners.

Among the captives were Édouard Daladier,
the prime minister who had signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938.

Paul Reynaud, the
man who had tried to keep France fighting before the government collapsed around him.

General
Maxime Weygand, who had commanded the French army during the invasion.

And Maurice Gamelin,
the general Weygand had replaced after France’s defenses crumbled in six weeks.

Trade union leader Léon Jouhaux, right-wing politician François de La Rocque,
and Michel Clemenceau — son of the premier who had won the First World War — filled out the
political ranks.

Charles de Gaulle’s elder sister, Marie-Agnès Cailliau, was imprisoned there too,
but the most unlikely captive was Jean Borotra, a Grand Slam tennis champion arrested after
trying to flee Vichy France to join the Allies.

These men and women would never have shared
the same room by choice.

The prisoners divided themselves by political loyalty, eating at
separate tables and avoiding conversation when possible.

Reynaud and Daladier, whose
rivalry stretched back to the prewar cabinets of the Third Republic, barely spoke.

The Reich
had managed what French politics never could: putting Daladier and Reynaud in the same room.

Yet they shared one thing: all of them were worth more to the Reich alive than dead, and
all of them knew it could change overnight.

SS-Totenkopfverbände guards patrolled
the castle grounds while Eastern European prisoners transferred from Dachau performed forced
labor.

For two years the routine held, but in the final days of April 1945, everything unraveled.

When Hitler took his own life on 30 April the chain of command that had kept Castle Itter
functioning disintegrated with the Reich.

On 2 May, Eduard Weiter, a former commandant
of Dachau who had fled to the castle, died under suspicious circumstances.

The
following morning, Zvonimir Čučković, a Yugoslav resistance member who had worked as a
handyman inside the castle, slipped out under the pretext of running an errand for prison commander
Sebastian Wimmer.

The nearest town, Wörgl, lay eight kilometers down the mountain.

When
Čučković failed to return and word spread of Weiter’s death, Wimmer panicked, abandoned his
post, and the Totenkopfverbände guards followed, vanishing into the surrounding
countryside and leaving the gates unguarded for the first time since 1943.

The prisoners moved quickly, gathering rifles, pistols, and ammunition the guards had
left behind and posting armed lookouts along the walls.

But Waffen-SS units
still roamed the hills around Itter, and the nearest Allied forces were days away.

The prisoners had weapons now, but no way out.

Defiance
Čučković had bypassed Wörgl entirely — Waffen-SS patrols controlled its
streets and any man caught without papers risked being shot as a deserter.

Instead he pressed on up
the Inn River valley toward Innsbruck, sixty-four kilometers to the west, moving on foot through
territory still crawling with German troops.

By nightfall on 3 May he had 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.

Its commanders had been told the area fell within another division’s territory.

Čučković’s
sixty-four-kilometer gamble had succeeded, and then been undone by a line on a map.

Back at the castle, no one knew whether he had made it.

On the morning of 4 May, 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 thirty-four-year-old artillery officer from Bavaria 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 thirty men remained under
his command.

Ordered to withdraw to the Alps, Gangl refused.

He stayed in Wörgl with ten of his
soldiers, joined the local resistance under Alois Mayr, and began shielding civilians from SS units
that were executing men suspected of desertion and firing on any window that displayed a white flag.

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, thirteen kilometers north, 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 twenty-seven-year-old from Norwich, New York,
did not hesitate.

After scouting the castle’s defenses with Gangl, he tried to bring tanks and
infantry from the 142nd Infantry Regiment, but a bridge along the route could not bear the weight.

Lee crossed with a single Sherman, nicknamed “Besotten Jenny”, fourteen American
soldiers, and a truck carrying Gangl’s ten 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.

Siege
When Lee reached the castle that evening, the French prisoners
had already found their own unlikely protector.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, a
twenty-nine-year-old combat veteran from Magdeburg who had once served in Hitler’s headquarters
guard, had taken charge of the castle’s defense days earlier.

After being badly wounded fighting
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 once 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, testing for weak points.

Gangl managed to reach Alois Mayr in Wörgl 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 forty.

At first light on 5 May, the assault
began.

Between one hundred and one hundred and fifty Waffen-SS troops from
the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division “Götz von Berlichingen,” commanded by SS-Oberführer
Georg Bochmann, attacked from the wooded hills surrounding the castle.

Machine gun fire raked the
walls, and 88mm 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 88mm round knocked it out.

The radioman inside escaped without injury, but the garrison had just lost its heaviest weapon.

The fighting continued on 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 in the keep.

Then Gangl spotted former Prime Minister Paul Reynaud exposed in the courtyard as SS
fire intensified.

He rushed forward and pushed Reynaud 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 back 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 thirty four.

With ammunition nearly exhausted and the SS pressing closer, Lee knew the castle could not
hold.

Jean Borotra, the forty-six-year-old tennis champion, volunteered to vault the castle wall
and sprint through SS lines to reach the 142nd Infantry Regiment.

Lee had no other option.

Breakthrough Borotra climbed the castle wall and dropped
into open ground.

SS troops were positioned across the slopes below, but the former champion
used 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’s 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 142nd dispatched a relief column with tanks and
infantry, and Borotra led them 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 four
o’clock in the afternoon, the sound of heavy engines reached the valley.

American armor
appeared on the road below, and 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 one hundred were captured in the aftermath.

The
siege had lasted less than twenty-four hours.

Every French prisoner survived.

They were
evacuated the same evening and flown from Innsbruck to France, reaching Paris by 10
May.

Daladier and Reynaud both returned to political life.

Léon Jouhaux went on to
receive 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 ninety-five.

Lee received the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest American decoration for
combat valor.

After the war, he returned to civilian life in the United States and
died in 1973 at the age of fifty-five.

Gangl was buried in Wörgl’s war cemetery.

The
inscription on his headstone describes a man who joined the local resistance and died a
heroic death during the liberation of the French prisoners at Castle Itter.

A street in Wörgl bears his name, and Austria recognizes him as a national hero.

Schrader, the SS officer who had fought beside him, 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, one of only two confirmed instances in
the Second World War where American and German soldiers fought on the same side.

It saved
fourteen people from a war that was already over.

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