The Last Battle of a War Already Lost

In the final days of World War II, a medieval Austrian castle held some of France's most famous prisoners — and the soldiers who showed up to save them were not the ones anyone expected.

By May 1945, the war in Europe was over in every way that mattered. Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his Berlin bunker eight days earlier. American, British, and Soviet armies had cut Germany into shrinking pockets, and the formal surrender was days away. And yet, on May 5, 1945, in the Austrian Tyrol, a battle broke out that involved American tanks, German soldiers, Austrian resistance fighters, and a handful of elderly French politicians who picked up rifles for the first time in their lives — all fighting on the same side, against the same enemy: the SS.

It is, by the account of multiple military historians, the only battle of the war in which American and German troops fought side by side against Nazi forces. It happened at a medieval castle called Schloss Itter, and it happened because a group of Nazi Germany’s most valuable hostages had been left behind by their guards, with an SS division bearing down on them and nobody left to defend them — until, improbably, defenders arrived from every direction at once.

A Castle Full of Enemies of the Reich

Castle Itter sits above the town of Wörgl in North Tyrol, a fairy-tale structure of stone towers first documented in the 13th century. The German government began leasing it in 1938, and in February 1943, SS Lieutenant General Oswald Pohl, acting on orders from Heinrich Himmler, had it converted into a prison. By April of that year it was operating as a satellite facility of the Dachau concentration camp system — but unlike Dachau itself, Itter was not built for mass death. It was built to hold a small number of people the Reich considered too politically valuable to kill outright, at least not yet.

The prisoner list read like a roll call of the men the Nazis blamed for France’s defeat and the men who had refused to accept it. Édouard Daladier, the French prime minister who had signed the 1938 Munich Agreement, was there, arrested after fleeing into North African exile. So was Paul Reynaud, the prime minister who had replaced him and who — unlike Daladier — had never wavered in opposing Germany, right up until France’s collapse in 1940. The two men, who had spent years as political rivals, now shared a prison. Alongside them were two former French army commanders, Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, both blamed in different ways for the military catastrophe of 1940; Jean Borotra, a national tennis hero who had won Wimbledon in the 1920s and later served as Vichy France’s minister of sport before falling out of favor with the regime; and Marie-Agnès Cailliau, sister of Charles de Gaulle, the exiled leader of the Free French who by 1945 was already being treated as France’s coming head of state. Holding his sister was, for the SS, a potential bargaining chip of the highest order.

For two years, these prisoners lived a strange, tense captivity — better fed and housed than concentration camp inmates elsewhere, but fully aware that as the Reich collapsed, they might become liabilities to be eliminated rather than assets to be traded. That fear was not paranoid. Himmler had, at various points in the war’s final months, ordered the killing of hostages rather than let them fall into Allied hands.

The captivity produced its own odd social dynamics. Daladier and Reynaud, forced to share close quarters after years of blaming each other, at least in part, for France’s political and military failures, reportedly kept a wary distance even as prisoners. Weygand and Gamelin, two generals whose rival strategies had both failed to stop the German invasion of 1940, were likewise confined together. Whatever tensions persisted between them, none of it changed the basic fact of their situation: by early May 1945, they were unguarded men in a warzone, sitting on a piece of political capital that both the collapsing Reich and the advancing Allies had reasons to want intact.

The Guards Vanish

By the start of May 1945, the SS garrison assigned to guard Castle Itter began to melt away, as German units across Austria and Bavaria disintegrated or fled rather than face advancing American forces. The prisoners realized they had, in effect, been abandoned — guarded by almost no one, but also protected by almost no one, in a region still crawling with SS troops who had not surrendered and, in some cases, had explicit orders to make sure high-value prisoners never reached the Allies alive.

The prisoners and the remaining castle staff decided their only chance was to get word out and find help before an SS unit decided to finish what the guards had abandoned. Two men set out separately, on bicycles, in opposite directions. Zvonimir Čučković, a Yugoslav resistance member who had been imprisoned at the castle and worked there as a handyman, left first, on May 3, pedaling roughly 40 miles up the Inn River valley toward Innsbruck. Late that night he found an advance patrol of the American 103rd Infantry Division and told them what was happening at the castle. A day later, the castle’s Czech cook, Andreas Krobot, made a shorter ride to the town of Wörgl, hoping to find help closer at hand. What he found there was a small, battered detachment of Wehrmacht soldiers under the command of a major named Josef Gangl.

The Major Who Switched Sides

Gangl was not a defector in the ordinary sense. He was a decorated German army officer who had fought on both the Eastern and Western fronts, and by the war’s final days he had made a decision that would define how he was remembered: rather than retreat with what was left of his unit, he threw in with the local Austrian resistance, using his remaining soldiers to protect civilians in the Wörgl area from SS reprisals as the front collapsed around them. When Krobot arrived with news of the trapped prisoners at Itter, Gangl didn’t hesitate. He knew his small force couldn’t hold the castle alone against a determined SS attack. So he did something that, a few weeks earlier, would have gotten him shot for treason: he went looking for the Americans.

He found them in the person of Captain John C. “Jack” Lee Jr., a 27-year-old tank company commander from Norwich, New York, leading Company B of the 23rd Tank Battalion, part of the U.S. 12th Armored Division. Lee had already been fighting his way across Bavaria and Austria for months. Whatever Lee made of being approached by an armed German major offering to fight alongside him against other Germans, he agreed. It was, on paper, an absurd proposition — allying with enemy soldiers, on the enemy’s own soil, days before the war’s official end. In practice, it was the only option that gave the castle’s prisoners any real chance.

Lee assembled a small relief force: a handful of Sherman tanks, including one nicknamed “Besotten Jenny,” a squad of American infantry, and Gangl’s remaining Wehrmacht soldiers, who now found themselves fighting under an American captain against their own former chain of command. Together, they pushed toward Castle Itter, reaching it on the evening of May 4. Inside, the French prisoners — men who had spent years as government ministers, generals, and a tennis champion, not soldiers — were handed whatever weapons could be found and told they might need to use them.

Under Siege

They did not have to wait long. In the early hours of May 5, a force from the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division — estimated by various accounts at somewhere between 100 and 200 men — surrounded the castle and opened fire with machine guns, mortars, and at least one 88mm gun, one of the most feared anti-tank and anti-personnel weapons of the war. Defending the castle was a force that, by most tallies, numbered around 30 to 40: a dozen-plus American soldiers, Gangl’s Wehrmacht volunteers, a few Austrian resistance fighters, and the armed French prisoners themselves, manning the walls of a structure built for medieval sieges, not 20th-century artillery.

Lee’s Sherman tank, positioned to cover the castle’s approach, was knocked out early in the fighting by the 88mm gun, removing the defenders’ strongest weapon and leaving them dependent on rifles, a few machine guns, and the thick stone walls themselves. The fighting stretched on for hours. At one point, with communications to the outside world cut and the situation deteriorating, Jean Borotra — the tennis champion, now approaching 50 years old — volunteered to do what his athletic career had once trained him for: he vaulted the castle wall under fire and ran through contested ground to try to reach American forces and hasten reinforcements. It was not his first escape from captivity during the war, and it would not be his most dangerous moment, but running a gauntlet of SS positions on foot in the middle of an active firefight was, by any measure, an extraordinary risk for a civilian prisoner to take.

Sometime during the battle, Major Gangl spotted a sniper’s line of fire aimed at former prime minister Paul Reynaud and moved to shield him. The bullet found Gangl instead. He became the only fatality among the castle’s defenders — a German officer killed protecting a French statesman whose government he had, until recently, been at war with.

Relief Arrives

By mid-afternoon, the defenders’ ammunition and options were both running low. Then, at around 4 p.m., a relief column from the U.S. 142nd Infantry Regiment arrived, alerted by the messages Čučković and Borotra had helped carry through. The additional American firepower broke the SS attack decisively; the remaining attackers scattered into the surrounding woods or surrendered, and more than 100 SS soldiers were ultimately taken prisoner in the battle’s aftermath.

When it was over, the defenders had lost one man — Gangl — with roughly four wounded. The SS force had taken far heavier losses in killed, wounded, and captured. The prisoners who had been guarded, then abandoned, then armed and put on a castle wall to fight for their own lives, were free.

What Happened After

Captain Jack Lee was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the U.S. Army’s second-highest decoration for combat valor, for his role in organizing and leading the defense. The French former prisoners were evacuated from the castle and made their way home, reaching Paris by May 10, 1945 — just three days after Germany’s formal surrender took effect. Daladier and Reynaud, the two rival ex-premiers who had shared a cell and then a battlefield, both went on to resume political careers in postwar France, still holding many of the same disagreements that had divided them before the war. Borotra returned to public life in French sport and diplomacy for decades afterward.

Josef Gangl is remembered today in Austria as one of the very few German officers of the era honored for actively turning against the SS rather than following orders to the end. The town of Wörgl later named a street after him, and Austrian accounts of the battle treat him not as a defector but as a man who chose, in the war’s final week, which side of history he wanted to be on. Jack Lee’s own account of the fight was well known in the United States within months: his exploits were profiled in The Saturday Evening Post before he was honorably discharged in January 1946 and returned to civilian life in New York, where he died in 1973.

Historians who study the battle tend to agree on what makes it worth remembering, beyond its obvious strangeness. It wasn’t a battle that changed the war’s outcome — the outcome was already settled. What makes it remarkable is that it happened at all: that soldiers on the losing side of a war, days from its official end, chose to keep fighting not for their collapsing government but against the part of it they considered indefensible, standing shoulder to shoulder with the army that had been trying to kill them a week earlier. Castle Itter is sometimes called the strangest battle of the Second World War. It might be more accurately described as one of its last acts of conscience — a reminder that even in a war’s final, chaotic hours, individual choices about which side to stand on were still being made, sometimes at the cost of a life.