The Last Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought the SS Together

COLD OPEN

It is dawn on May fifth, nineteen forty-five. Adolf Hitler has been dead for five days. In forty-eight hours, Germany will sign its unconditional surrender, and the war in Europe will be over.

But no one has told the SS.

High in the Austrian Alps, a medieval castle sits on a forested hilltop above the Inn Valley. Its stone walls are seven hundred years old. And right now, they are the only thing standing between a hundred SS troops and the people trapped inside.

The defenders are loading their last magazines. An American tank lieutenant from New York who arrived six hours ago with fourteen GIs and a Sherman tank called Besotten Jenny. A German major — an Iron Cross veteran of the Eastern Front — who defected to the Austrian resistance because he could no longer stomach what his country had become. A former SS captain who switched sides because he'd rather die with the prisoners than live with the executioners. And the prisoners themselves — two former prime ministers of France, two former commanders-in-chief of the French Army, Charles de Gaulle's older sister, and a man who once played in the Wimbledon finals.

They are outgunned. They are nearly out of ammunition. The Sherman is burning in the courtyard. And the German major has just been shot through the head by a sniper — killed while throwing himself in front of a seventy-six-year-old French statesman.

In two days, the war will be over. But for the people inside Castle Itter, two days might as well be forever.

This is WWII Untold.

ACT ONE

To understand what happened at Castle Itter, you have to understand what the castle was — and who was locked inside it.

Castle Itter sits in Austria's North Tyrol, about sixty miles south of the German border. It is a schloss — a fortified manor perched on a rocky outcrop, surrounded by thick forest, with a single road winding up to its gate. It had stood in various forms since the thirteenth century, passing through the hands of Bavarian nobles, Austrian aristocrats, and, eventually, a Berlin opera singer who used it as a summer retreat. It was beautiful. It was remote. And it was exactly the kind of place Heinrich Himmler was looking for.

In February of nineteen forty-three, SS Lieutenant General Oswald Pohl seized the castle on Himmler's direct orders. Within weeks, it was converted into a special detention facility — technically a sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp, but nothing like Dachau in practice. There were no gas chambers at Itter. No forced labor. No starvation rations. The prisoners were given rooms, not bunks. They had books, wine, access to the grounds. Some even had their wives with them.

But make no mistake — it was still a prison. The guards were SS. The doors were locked. And the prisoners had been brought there for one reason: they were hostages. Bargaining chips. Human shields against the day when the Reich might need leverage against the Allies, or against a future French government.

And these were not ordinary hostages.

Paul Reynaud had been the Prime Minister of France when the Germans invaded in May of nineteen forty. He was the man who had appointed Charles de Gaulle to his cabinet. He was the man who had begged Winston Churchill for more fighter planes as France was falling. When the Vichy government took power, Reynaud was arrested, tried, and imprisoned. By nineteen forty-three, he was at Itter.

Édouard Daladier had also been prime minister — the man who signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler in nineteen thirty-eight, the agreement that was supposed to guarantee peace in our time. It did not. Daladier knew it wouldn't. He reportedly wept on the plane home, not because the agreement was bad — though it was — but because the cheering crowds at the airport didn't understand what they were celebrating. Daladier, too, ended up at Itter.

Maxime Weygand had been the supreme commander of Allied forces during the fall of France. General Weygand was seventy-eight years old by the time the battle came to his prison.

Marie-Agnès de Gaulle — known as Madame Cailliau — was Charles de Gaulle's older sister. She and her husband had been arrested by the Gestapo for their resistance activities.

And then there was Jean Borotra. A French tennis legend. A former Wimbledon finalist, a Davis Cup champion, one of the famous Four Musketeers of French tennis in the nineteen twenties and thirties. He was in his mid-forties, had been imprisoned for two years, and was still, by every account, in remarkable physical condition. That would matter very soon.

These prisoners loathed each other. Reynaud and Daladier blamed one another for the fall of France. Weygand despised them both. The political fault lines of nineteen forty were alive and vicious inside the castle walls. But they agreed on one thing: none of them wanted to die in the last days of a war that was already lost.

By late April of nineteen forty-five, the Reich was in its death throes. Hitler killed himself on April thirtieth. The news rippled outward in waves — confusion, denial, and then, among the true believers, a kind of feral rage. Across southern Germany and Austria, SS units that had been fighting a losing war for months now had nothing left to fight for — except their ideology. Roving SS squads executed deserters, hanged civilians who showed white flags, and hunted anyone they considered a traitor to the Reich.

At Castle Itter, the collapse came fast. On May second, the castle's former commandant, an SS officer named Sebastian Wimmer, simply fled. The guards followed. The prisoners woke up to find their cell doors open and their captors gone.

They were free. And they were terrified.

Because freedom, in the Austrian Alps in early May of nineteen forty-five, meant nothing without protection. The prisoners knew that SS death squads were roaming the valleys below. If those squads found a castle full of France's most prominent political figures — unguarded, defenseless — the result would be a massacre. A final act of spite from a dying regime.

The prisoners armed themselves with weapons the guards had left behind. But they were politicians and generals and tennis players — not infantrymen. They needed soldiers. And so two men volunteered to go find some.

The first was Zvonimir Čučković, a Yugoslav man who had been working at the castle as a handyman. On May third, he slipped out the gate and began walking. He walked sixty-four kilometers — nearly forty miles — through territory crawling with SS patrols and Wehrmacht stragglers, all the way to Innsbruck, where he found the American Hundred and Third Infantry Division. He told them what was happening at Itter. A heavily armored rescue column was dispatched — but it was stopped by artillery fire and jurisdictional confusion. The Hundred and Third's sector ended before the castle. Itter was someone else's problem.

The second messenger was Andreas Krobot, a Czech cook at the castle. On May fourth, Krobot climbed on a bicycle and rode down the mountain to the town of Wörgl, about five miles away. He was looking for the Austrian resistance. He found something better.

He found Major Josef Gangl.

ACT TWO

Josef Gangl — known to everyone as Sepp — was a career Wehrmacht officer. He had served on both the Western and Eastern Fronts. He had earned the German Cross in Gold, one of the Third Reich's highest military decorations. He was, by every measure, a loyal German soldier.

Until he wasn't.

What Gangl saw on the Eastern Front — the atrocities, the reprisals, the machinery of annihilation — broke something in him. By the war's final months, he had made contact with the Austrian resistance in Wörgl and quietly defected. He still wore his Wehrmacht uniform. He still commanded a small unit of soldiers — artillerymen, mostly, men who trusted him. But his loyalties had shifted. His mission now was protecting the civilians of Wörgl from the very SS units that were supposed to be on his side.

When Krobot the cook arrived in Wörgl on his bicycle, gasping out the story of the prisoners at Castle Itter, Gangl understood immediately. This was exactly the kind of atrocity the SS would commit — killing high-value prisoners rather than letting them be liberated. But Gangl also knew he didn't have the firepower to take on a full SS assault. He needed the Americans.

So Major Josef Gangl — a decorated officer of the German Wehrmacht — climbed into his Kübelwagen, tied a white flag to the antenna, and drove north to the town of Kufstein, where the American Twelfth Armored Division had arrived just hours earlier.

He found Lieutenant John C. Lee Jr.

Jack Lee was a reconnaissance officer with the Twenty-Third Tank Battalion. He was from New York. He was aggressive, confident, and — by the accounts that survive — the kind of officer who made decisions fast and worried about paperwork later. When a German major appeared under a white flag and told him that France's former prime ministers were trapped in a castle surrounded by SS troops, Lee didn't convene a staff meeting. He didn't radio for authorization.

He said yes.

Lee personally reconnoitered the castle, riding in Gangl's Kübelwagen up the narrow mountain road to see the terrain for himself. Then he assembled his force. Fourteen American GIs. One Sherman tank — the crew had nicknamed it Besotten Jenny. A truck carrying Gangl and ten of his German artillerymen, men who hours earlier had been enemy combatants. And one more volunteer: Kurt-Siegfried Schrader.

Schrader was an SS-Hauptsturmführer — a captain in the Waffen-SS. He had been convalescing at Castle Itter from wounds sustained on the Eastern Front and had spent his recovery getting to know the French prisoners. He had come to admire them. When the guards fled and the castle was left defenseless, Schrader made a choice that appears to be unique in the history of the Second World War. He placed his own family — his wife and children — inside the castle alongside the French prisoners, picked up a weapon, and prepared to defend them against his own comrades.

He is believed to be the only known active Waffen-SS member to fight on the Allied side during the entire war. Not a defector who sat out the fighting. Not a prisoner who cooperated. An SS officer who picked up a rifle and shot at other SS troops. It is an extraordinary individual act — and it should be understood as exactly that. Individual.

On the evening of May fourth, Lee's scratch force rolled out of Kufstein toward Castle Itter. Americans and Germans in the same convoy. A Sherman tank, a truck, and a Kübelwagen flying a white flag. They hit an SS roadblock on the road south and fought through it — their first shots fired together, American and German muzzle flashes lighting the same treeline.

They reached the castle as darkness fell. Lee positioned Besotten Jenny in the courtyard, facing the main gate. Gangl deployed his Germans along the walls. The French prisoners — Reynaud, Daladier, Weygand, Borotra, and the others — took up positions at the windows with whatever weapons they could find. Schrader moved among them, showing them how to clear jams and conserve ammunition.

For a few hours, the castle was quiet. Below, in the valley, they could hear vehicles moving. Engines. Orders shouted in German. The Seventeenth SS Panzergrenadier Division — Götz von Berlichingen, named after a medieval German knight — was assembling.

Lee had requested reinforcements. A second column had been dispatched from Kufstein, but it was turned back when a bridge on the approach road proved too weak for armor. The castle was on its own.

Dawn. May fifth, nineteen forty-five.

They came out of the trees.

An estimated one hundred to one hundred and fifty SS troops, some of them barely older than boys, many of them fanatics who had sworn personal oaths to a man who had been dead for five days. They attacked from the south and east, using the forest as cover, pouring fire into the castle walls.

The defenders fired back. Lee directed the Americans from the upper floors. Gangl coordinated his Germans on the lower walls. The French politicians — men in their sixties and seventies who had not fired weapons in decades, if ever — crouched at narrow windows and pulled triggers. Schrader, the SS captain who had changed sides, fought beside them.

In the courtyard, Besotten Jenny answered the SS assault with her seventy-six-millimeter gun, the concussion shaking stone dust from the castle's medieval walls. But the SS had brought up an eighty-eight — the feared German anti-aircraft gun that had been repurposed throughout the war as a devastating anti-tank weapon. An eighty-eight-millimeter shell hit Besotten Jenny squarely. The tank shuddered, caught fire, and died. The crew scrambled out, singed but alive. The castle's heaviest weapon was gone.

The fighting ground on through the morning. Ammunition dwindled. The SS pressed closer. Small arms fire chipped at the ancient stone. And then, in a moment that eyewitnesses would remember for the rest of their lives, Major Josef Gangl saw Paul Reynaud standing near a window.

Reynaud was seventy-six years old. He was a politician, not a soldier. He did not understand the geometry of a sniper's sight line. Gangl did. The major lunged forward and shoved the former prime minister out of the way — and a seven-point-nine-two-millimeter bullet struck Gangl in the head.

He died instantly. He was thirty-five years old.

A German soldier. A decorated veteran of the Wehrmacht. Killed while shielding a French prime minister from a German sniper's bullet. In the last days of a war that was already over.

The defenders were running out of time. Lee was wounded. Ammunition was critically low. The SS showed no signs of pulling back. Someone needed to break out and reach the American relief column that they had to believe was still coming.

Jean Borotra volunteered.

The tennis champion. The Wimbledon finalist. Forty-six years old. Two years a prisoner. Borotra borrowed an American uniform — or parts of one — and, with a speed and athleticism that defied his age and circumstances, vaulted the castle wall. He dropped to the ground outside, picked himself up, and sprinted through SS positions. Bullets cracked past him. He ran the way he had once chased drop shots at Roland Garros — with total commitment and an apparent belief that he was faster than whatever was coming at him.

He made it. He reached the approaching column of the Hundred and Forty-Second Infantry Regiment, Third-Sixth Infantry Division, and gave them precise intelligence about the castle's defenses, the attackers' positions, and the desperate state of the defenders inside.

At four o'clock that afternoon, the Hundred and Forty-Second Infantry arrived in force. They hit the SS attackers from the rear. The assault collapsed. Approximately one hundred SS troops were captured. The rest melted into the forest.

The battle of Castle Itter was over. It had lasted roughly ten hours.

ACT THREE

The French VIPs were evacuated almost immediately. Within days, Reynaud, Daladier, Weygand, Borotra, and the others were flown to Paris. Their war — the long, grinding captivity that had begun with the fall of France in nineteen forty — was finally over. Reynaud would go on to serve in the French National Assembly and live until nineteen sixty-six. Daladier returned to politics as well. Weygand, the old general, retired and lived to ninety-eight. Borotra went back to tennis. He competed at Wimbledon again in nineteen forty-six — one year after vaulting a castle wall under machine gun fire — and continued playing competitive tennis into his seventies.

Lieutenant Jack Lee received the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions at Castle Itter. He had volunteered for a mission with no authorization, no guarantee of reinforcement, and no particular reason to trust the German major who had driven up under a white flag asking for help. He trusted him anyway.

Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, the SS captain who fought for the prisoners, survived the battle. His story remains one of the war's most confounding individual decisions — an act of conscience from within an organization defined by its absence of conscience. He was an exception, not a redemption. But he was a real one.

And Josef Gangl.

Sepp Gangl was buried in Wörgl — the town he had worked to protect in the war's final weeks. The Austrian resistance honored him. The townspeople mourned him. In the years after the war, the town renamed a street after him. A memorial was erected. The inscription reads simply: "He died a hero's death at thirty-five years of age."

Two days after the battle of Castle Itter — on May seventh, nineteen forty-five — Germany signed its unconditional surrender. The war in Europe was over.

The battle at Itter has been called, by the historian Stephen Harding and by popular accounts since, the strangest battle of World War Two. It is one of only two documented instances in which American and German soldiers fought on the same side during the conflict. The other — a similar engagement at Schloss Grub, also in Austria, also in the war's final days — is far less well known.

For decades, the story of Castle Itter was itself a kind of prisoner — locked away in scattered unit histories, Austrian local archives, and the fading memories of participants. It was not until Harding's twenty-thirteen book, "The Last Battle," that the full story reached a wide English-speaking audience. Many World War Two historians had never heard of it. Many still haven't.

That obscurity is, in some ways, understandable. The battle was tiny — a skirmish by the standards of a war that killed sixty million people. It produced no strategic consequences. It changed no borders. It shortened the war by exactly zero days.

But it did something else. It proved that even at the end — even after six years of industrialized hatred, even after the camps and the firebombings and the millions of dead — individual human beings could still look across the battle lines and see people instead of enemies. A German major could die for a French prime minister. An SS officer could choose his conscience over his uniform. An American lieutenant could trust a stranger because the cause was right. And a tennis player could vault a wall.

CLOSING

History remembers the great battles. Stalingrad. Normandy. The Bulge. The ones that turned the tide, that broke the armies, that redrew the map.

But sometimes the battles that matter most are the small ones. The ones fought not for territory or strategy but for the stubborn, impractical belief that certain things — certain people — are worth protecting, even when the war is already won, even when the cost might be your life.

Josef Gangl did not have to drive to Kufstein. Jack Lee did not have to say yes. Jean Borotra did not have to vault that wall. None of them had to be there.

They chose to be.

In the war's final hours, the lines didn't just blur — they disappeared entirely, and the only side left was the human one.

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