The Battle for Castle Itter, 1945: Americans and Germans against the SS

It is often called the strangest battle of the Second World War. In its last week, American and German soldiers fought side by side, with French statesmen at their elbows, to hold a castle in the Austrian Alps against the SS.²

A prison for important people

Schloss Itter stands on a hill above the village of Itter in the Tyrol. In 1943 the SS made it a special prison under the administration of Dachau, not a death camp but a place to keep prisoners considered too important or too troublesome for the ordinary camps. Its inmates included two former French prime ministers, Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, the generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, the tennis champion turned politician Jean Borotra and Charles de Gaulle's sister, along with a handful of Czech and Yugoslav prisoners who worked in the castle.³

The French had brought their quarrels with them. Inside the walls, the Wright Museum notes, the old arguments about who was to blame for the defeat of 1940 went on as before.⁴

The guards leave

By the start of May 1945 Hitler was dead and the Reich was collapsing, but roving SS units were still at large in the Tyrol, killing anyone they considered a traitor. Around 2 or 3 May the guards and the commandant, Sebastian Wimmer, fled; Wimmer warned the prisoners about the die-hard units in the area before he went. The prisoners now held the castle and its armory, but they were alone.⁵ › The end of the war in Austria, 1945

They sent for help. A Yugoslav prisoner, Zvonimir Čučković, slipped away with a letter in English addressed to any American soldiers he might meet. Then a Czech cook, Andreas Krobot, rode off on a bicycle to the nearby town of Wörgl. There he found Major Josef "Sepp" Gangl, a Wehrmacht officer who had turned against the regime and was working with the Austrian resistance to protect the townspeople from SS reprisals.⁶

An American and a German

Gangl, who had just under two dozen men, took the risk of being shot as a traitor and drove out under a white flag to find the Americans. He met tanks of the 23rd Tank Battalion, 12th Armored Division, commanded by Jack Lee, at Kufstein. Lee agreed to go. With his own Sherman, nicknamed Besotten Jenny, a few other tanks and infantry, and Gangl's soldiers, he set off for Itter, bluffing through at least one SS roadblock on the way, and reached the castle on the afternoon of 4 May.⁷

Lee's force was small, and he had no vehicles to carry the prisoners away. Rather than risk the elderly Frenchmen on open roads, he decided to hold the castle until reinforcements came. He placed the Sherman at the gate to cover the approach road, and the prisoners armed themselves from the armory. The sources even disagree on his rank: the Wright Museum calls him First Lieutenant, Task & Purpose Captain.⁸

The attack

At dawn on 5 May the Waffen-SS came out of the woods. The Wright Museum puts them at 100 to 200 men of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division with machine guns, mortars and at least one 88 mm gun, against barely 30 defenders. Gangl, who spoke English, and Lee used the castle's working telephone to call the resistance in a nearby village and ask for American help. Then the 88 hit Besotten Jenny and set it on fire; its crew got out.⁹

The French prisoners who had not already taken up arms now did. Accounts recall General Weygand helping at a machine gun, though Task & Purpose adds that not all the Frenchmen handled their MP 40s well. As the SS closed in, Gangl went to move Paul Reynaud away from an exposed position and was shot dead by a sniper. With the telephone cut and ammunition running low, Jean Borotra volunteered to vault the wall and run for help. Against all odds he made it through the SS lines to an American column that was already fighting its way toward the castle.¹⁰

Relief

By early afternoon Lee was pulling his men back into the inner keep, and the SS were bringing up a gun to blow in the gate, when cries of "American tanks!" came from the attackers' own lines. The relief force swept the slopes with fire, and the SS broke and fled. Gangl was the only defender killed; four others were wounded.¹¹

The French prisoners went home, and Lee received the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism, with a citation that said nothing of the strange company he had kept. Within days Germany surrendered. The story of Itter, retold in Stephen Harding's book The Last Battle, has endured because it shows the war's last days at their most confused and most human: enemies of five years making common cause against men still fighting for a regime that no longer existed.¹²