Interesting, actually

4 October 2026 history 10 min read

The Prison Built for Prime Ministers

A fairy-tale castle in the Alps held some of France's most famous prisoners, and when the war's last days arrived, everyone inside had to decide who the enemy really was.

Castle Itter sits on a wooded hill above a village of the same name in the Austrian Tyrol, a few miles from the German border. It has towers, a drawbridge-like approach, and the kind of silhouette that looks designed by someone who had only ever seen castles in picture books. For most of its history it was exactly that: a medieval fortress rebuilt in the nineteenth century into a private estate, then converted into a hotel. In the 1930s a wealthy German heiress bought it and turned it into a fashionable retreat. None of that explains why, on the morning of May 5, 1945, a column of Waffen-SS troops with artillery and anti-tank guns surrounded it, intent on killing everyone inside — and why the people defending it included a dozen American soldiers, a handful of Wehrmacht deserters, one convalescing SS officer, and a tennis champion.

To understand how a storybook castle became the site of the strangest fight of the Second World War, you have to start with what the Nazi regime decided to do with it two years earlier.

A hostage house for the collapse of France

In 1943, the SS requisitioned Castle Itter and placed it administratively under the control of the Dachau concentration camp, about ninety miles away. But Itter was not run like Dachau. It was something stranger: a holding pen for people the regime considered too valuable to kill outright and too dangerous to simply release — insurance, in case the war went badly and hostages were needed for negotiation, or simply trophies kept on hand by a regime that liked collecting famous enemies.

Over the following two years, a rotating cast of “prominent prisoners” arrived at Itter, nearly all of them French and nearly all of them people whose names had meant something before 1940. By the final weeks of the war the roster read like a shadow cabinet of the fallen Third Republic: Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, two former prime ministers of France, the men who had been in charge when the country went to war with Germany and then collapsed beneath it. Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, former commanders-in-chief of the French army, both blamed for the catastrophe of 1940. Jean Borotra, a national hero of French tennis in the 1920s and ’30s — a four-time Wimbledon finalist known as “the Bounding Basque” — who had served briefly as Vichy France’s commissioner for sport before falling out with the regime and being deported. Marie-Agnès Cailliau, the older sister of Charles de Gaulle, arrested for her work with the French Resistance. Michel Clemenceau, son of the First World War premier Georges Clemenceau. A trade-union leader, a former French commander, and others besides — by some accounts as many as a dozen or more “VIP” prisoners in all, guarded by a small detachment of SS men and a single SS commandant, Sebastian Wimmer.

It was an unlikely cross-section of French political life, made more unlikely by the fact that several of these men despised each other. Reynaud and Daladier, the men who’d led France into the disastrous campaign of 1940, were held in the same castle as Weygand and Gamelin, the generals many French held responsible for losing it — old rivals and finger-pointers, now sharing a dinner table under SS guard a few hundred miles from the fighting. Years of mutual blame for the fall of France had not softened with captivity; by most accounts the prisoners split into frosty, barely-speaking factions, united by nothing except the SS men watching them and, eventually, by what was coming up the hill toward all of them regardless of which faction they belonged to.

The castle itself made for a strange backdrop to all this. It had the towers and heavy stonework of a medieval stronghold, but it had spent the years just before the war as a fashionable hotel, not a fortress built for siege. The SS, by converting it into a hostage house, had turned a mountain holiday retreat into one of the odder corners of the concentration-camp system: a prison holding men whose fame was precisely what kept them alive.

The guards who ran before the enemy did

By the spring of 1945, the war the SS had been so sure of winning was finishing in the opposite direction. American and French forces were pushing into Austria and Bavaria; German resistance in the region was dissolving into confusion and improvisation. The prisoners at Itter understood, better than most, what that meant for them. Hostages who have outlived their usefulness tend not to survive regime collapses.

On May 2, as American units closed in on Dachau itself, the mood at Castle Itter curdled. Over the following two days, the guard contingent began slipping away. On the morning of May 4, Commandant Wimmer left with his wife and did not come back. The remaining SS-Totenkopf guards followed his example within hours, abandoning their posts rather than wait to find out what liberation would look like for them personally.

That left the prisoners alone in a castle in hostile territory, with no guards, no protection, and no idea whether the retreating SS units in the surrounding hills would decide to come back and finish the job before the Americans arrived. They broke into the castle armory and took what weapons they could find — rifles, pistols, a couple of submachine guns — distributed among men who were mostly in their sixties and had not fired a gun in years, if ever.

Two of the castle’s non-prisoner staff tried to get word out. On May 3, Zvonimir Čučković, a Yugoslav resistance member who had been working at the castle as a handyman, slipped away under the pretext of running an errand and set off to find Allied troops, eventually reaching an American division near Innsbruck. Separately, a Czech cook named Andreas Krobot borrowed a bicycle and pedaled toward the nearby town of Wörgl, looking for anyone who might help. What he found there would turn out to matter more than anyone could have guessed: a mixed band of Austrian resistance fighters and German army deserters, led by a Wehrmacht major named Josef “Sepp” Gangl.

The major who switched sides

Gangl was a decorated Wehrmacht officer, not SS — a regular army man who had spent the war’s final weeks increasingly convinced that further fighting for the Nazi cause was senseless and that his job now was to protect Austrian civilians from the SS units still roaming the collapsing front, units that were, by that point, as dangerous to German soldiers who wanted to surrender as they were to the Allies. By early May, Gangl had thrown in with the local resistance and was coordinating efforts to keep the retreating SS from torching villages or executing people on their way out.

When Krobot reached him with news that a castle full of VIP French prisoners sat undefended and within reach of vengeful SS troops, Gangl recognized the danger immediately — and recognized that he didn’t have the firepower to handle it alone. He needed armor, and armor meant finding the Americans.

He found them in the form of Captain John C. “Jack” Lee Jr., an officer with the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division, who had a single Sherman tank at his disposal — nicknamed, memorably, “Besotten Jenny.” It was an odd pitch: a German Wehrmacht major asking an American tank captain to drive toward a castle, alongside German soldiers, to rescue French prisoners of the Nazis from an attack by other Germans. Lee agreed anyway. On the afternoon of May 4, his small, oddly-assembled column — Americans, Austrian resistance fighters, and Wehrmacht deserters together — rolled up to Castle Itter.

Waiting inside, alongside the French prisoners, was one more unlikely participant: SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, a highly decorated SS officer who had served in Hitler’s own headquarters guard before being severely wounded on the Western Front. Schrader had been convalescing near the castle and had, like Gangl, broken with the regime in the war’s final weeks. The French prisoners — who had every reason to fear an SS officer — instead asked him to help organize their defense. He agreed.

By nightfall on May 4, the castle held an assortment of people who, four years earlier, would have been trying to kill one another on sight: a dozen or so American soldiers, several Wehrmacht deserters, one SS officer, and a cluster of elderly French statesmen and generals, several of whom still weren’t speaking to each other, now all holding rifles in the same hallway.

The siege

They did not have long to wait. A probing attack came that night from an SS reconnaissance patrol, testing the castle’s defenses. The real assault arrived the next morning, May 5: remnants of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division, somewhere on the order of a hundred to two hundred men, backed by anti-tank and artillery fire — vastly outnumbering and outgunning the defenders inside.

Just before the attack began in earnest, Gangl managed to reach the Austrian resistance by telephone and scrape together three more fighters — two German soldiers and an Austrian teenager — who made it to the castle in time to join the fight. It was not nearly enough. German anti-tank fire knocked out Lee’s Sherman early in the battle, removing the defenders’ only heavy weapon. Major Gangl was killed by a sniper’s bullet while trying to shield former prime minister Paul Reynaud from fire — the only fatality among the castle’s defenders that day, and a death that would later be commemorated with a street named for him in Wörgl, where he is remembered as an Austrian national hero.

With the tank gone and ammunition running low, someone needed to reach the Americans and bring reinforcements before the SS found a way through the walls. Jean Borotra — the tennis champion, now in his late forties — volunteered to do it himself. He climbed out of the castle, ran through open ground under fire, and made his way to a nearby American unit, the 142nd Infantry Regiment, to report the castle’s position and the desperation of its situation. The relief force that his sprint set in motion arrived in the early afternoon: a column of American tanks that broke through to the castle, scattered the remaining SS attackers, and took roughly a hundred of them prisoner.

What was left of the war

The battle for Castle Itter lasted most of a day and ended just three days before Germany’s formal surrender in Europe on May 8, 1945 — making it one of the last engagements of the war on the Western Front, and, by the account of most historians who have studied it, the only documented instance of American and German soldiers fighting side by side against other Germans in the entire conflict.

In the aftermath, Captain Lee was promoted and later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role in the defense. Schrader, the SS officer who had helped organize the resistance, was briefly detained as a matter of course given his SS record, but was released early in recognition of what he had done at the castle. The French prisoners — the prime ministers, the generals, the tennis champion, de Gaulle’s sister, and the rest — were evacuated in the following days and had reached Paris by around May 10, free for the first time in years, just as the war that had imprisoned them was ending.

Josef Gangl is the one person in this story who didn’t get to see how it turned out. He had spent the war’s final weeks trying to protect people from a cause he no longer believed in, switched sides when it mattered, and died doing it three days before the fighting stopped for good. There is no tidy moral to draw from a battle fought by men who, months earlier, would have been enemies and, within the space of a single day, had become something closer to comrades out of nothing more than a shared understanding of which direction history was now moving — only the fact that it happened, in a storybook castle in the Alps, in the war’s last, strange, improvised hours.

The battle was obscure enough for decades that it barely registered outside specialist military histories, overshadowed by VE Day arriving just three days later. It took until 2013 for it to get a full book-length account, The Last Battle by military historian Stephen Harding, drawing on American, German, and French records along with surviving participants’ own testimony. Even now, it remains the kind of story that sounds invented until you check it against the paper trail: a Sherman tank named Besotten Jenny, a tennis champion sprinting through gunfire, and a cast of French statesmen who hated each other right up until the moment they had to share a rifle rack.

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