The castle sat on a wooded hill above the Austrian valley, but inside it, fourteen men and women were worth more to the Reich alive than dead. For two years, the SS had kept them locked in the ancient fortress, separated by political hatreds that French politics had never managed to heal. Then, in the last days of April 1945, the Reich began to collapse. Hitler killed himself on April 30th, and the chain of command holding the prison together shattered with him.
On May 3rd, a Yugoslav resistance member named Zvonimir Čuković slipped out of the castle under the pretext of running an errand. He never came back. When word of his disappearance spread, the prison commander panicked and fled, and the SS guards who had patrolled the walls since 1943 vanished into the countryside, leaving the gates unguarded for the first time in two years. The prisoners moved fast.
They gathered the rifles, pistols, and ammunition the guards had left behind, and posted armed lookouts along the walls. But they were still trapped. Waffen-SS units roamed the hills around them, and the nearest Allied forces were days away. Čuković, meanwhile, had bypassed the nearest town, Wörgl.
SS patrols controlled its streets, and any man caught without papers risked being shot as a deserter. Instead, he pressed westward, moving on foot through territory still crawling with German troops. By nightfall on May 3rd, he reached elements of the American 103rd Infantry Division and handed over a letter describing the prisoners 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. Čuković’s sixty-four-kilometer gamble had succeeded, only to be undone by a line on a map. Back at the castle, no one knew whether he had made it. On the morning of May 4th, a Czech cook named Andreas Krobot volunteered to try a different route.
Armed with a note and a bicycle, he rode down the mountain, pedaling past SS roadblocks and patrols. He reached Wörgl and made contact with the Austrian resistance, who brought him to Major Josef Gangl. Gangl was a thirty-four-year-old Bavarian artillery officer who had fought across Europe, 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, he had refused. He stayed in Wörgl with ten 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, 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 was a twenty-seven-year-old from Norwich, New York, and he 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.
He 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. When Lee reached the castle that evening, he found that the 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 defenses days earlier. After being badly wounded in France, he had been sent to Itter to recover, befriended the French prisoners during his convalescence, and broken with the regime entirely. When the guards fled, he 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 the resistance leader 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 May 5th, the assault began. Between 100 and 150 Waffen-SS troops from the 17th Panzergrenadier Division attacked from the wooded hills surrounding the castle.
Machine gun fire raked the walls, and 88-millimeter 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-millimeter round knocked it out. The radio man 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 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 the SS lines to reach the 142nd Infantry Regiment. Lee had no other option.
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 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 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 twenty-four hours. Every French prisoner survived. They were evacuated the same evening and flown from Innsbruck to France, reaching Paris by May 10th.
Daladier and Reynaud both returned to political life. Léon Jouhaux went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951. 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. It was one of only two confirmed instances in the Second World War where American and German soldiers fought on the same side.
And it saved fourteen people from a war that was already over.
