The Day U.S. Soldiers Fought Beside German Soldiers Against the SS

May 5th, 1945. The war in Europe is over in 48 hours. Everyone knows it. The German High Command has already collapsed. Hitler is dead. Berlin is burning. And somewhere in the Austrian Alps, in a medieval castle perched on a rocky outcrop above a quiet valley, the most bizarre battle of World War II is about to begin.

On one [clears throat] side, a handful of American soldiers from the 12th Armored Division, exhausted, running low on ammunition, holding a position they never expected to defend. On the other side, Waffen SS troops, fanatical, disciplined, still fighting a war the rest of Germany has already lost. And standing in the middle, manning the castle walls alongside the Americans, rifles in hand, willing to die for what they believed was their only chance at survival, Wehrmacht soldiers, German army regulars, yesterday’s enemy.

One American captain named John Lee would later describe that morning with a kind of stunned disbelief. MXP. He said, and this is documented in the after-action reports, that he had fought across France and Germany, survived the Bulge, and crossed the Rhine. And nothing, absolutely nothing in his military training had prepared him to give orders to German soldiers and have them obey.

This is not a story about the war ending cleanly. This is a story about what happens at the exact edges of history, when ideology collapses and survival becomes the only language left. This is the story of the Battle of Castle Itter, the only engagement in American military history where United States forces fought shoulder to shoulder with German soldiers against a common enemy.

And it happened on the last day of the war. To understand what converged on that castle on May 5th, 1945, you have to go back, not weeks, not months, but years. Because Castle Itter did not become a fortress prison overnight. It was transformed methodically and deliberately into one of the most unusual detention facilities in the entire Third Reich.

The Schloss Itter, to use its German name, was built in the 12th century on a rocky promontory in the Tyrol, the kind of medieval structure that looks designed for exactly this kind of final stand. Thick stone walls, a single access road, a position that commands the surrounding valley.

The SS requisitioned it in 1943 and converted it into a high-value prisoner facility, a place to house what the Nazi regime called Ehrenhäftlinge, honor prisoners, political hostages whose symbolic value was too high to simply shoot and too dangerous to leave free. The prisoners they sent to Itter were not ordinary men and women.

They were, by any measure, extraordinary. Marie-Agnès Caillau, the sister of Charles de Gaulle himself, had been arrested in 1943 and had survived years of German captivity. Général Maxime Weygand, the former supreme commander of French forces, a man whose decisions in 1940 had shaped the entire trajectory of the French defeat, sat in those stone rooms wondering if history would ever give him a verdict.

Paul Reynaud, the last prime minister of the French Third Republic, the man who had refused to sign the armistice and fled to London before his arrest, paced the castle corridors alongside his former political rival. Édouard Daladier was there, the prime minister who had signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, the man whose name had become synonymous in France with appeasement, now sat imprisoned by the very regime he had tried to appease.

Général Gustave Gamelin, the commander-in-chief blamed for the catastrophic fall of France in 6 weeks, occupied a cell three floors from the man who had replaced him. Jean Borotra, the tennis champion who had won Wimbledon, was there. Augustin Reynaud, former prime minister, and a Czech tennis star named Jaroslav Drobný, who would go on to win Wimbledon himself after the war, was held in the same castle with the entire collapsed political and military leadership of a nation.

Two Think about what this room would have felt like. These men and women had not simply failed, they had failed publicly, spectacularly, in the most consequential moment in French history in living memory. And now they sat together in a medieval Austrian castle guarded by SS men who treated them with a contempt that was almost theatrical, waiting for a war to end that might kill them before it did.

One of the German guards, a young Untersturmführer whose name appears in only one post-war testimony, described the atmosphere in the castle in the final months as electric with fear. He said the prisoners argued constantly among themselves. The generals blamed the politicians, the politicians blamed the generals.

And he said, “And this is a remarkable admission, that listening to them he sometimes thought France had lost the war in those rooms long before a single tank crossed the Meuse.” That observation, bitter and incomplete as it is, contains something real. Because the prisoners of Castle Itter were not simply the victims of German aggression, they were the embodiment of a French political and military culture in crisis.

Men whose rivalries and failures had contributed to the disaster of 1940. And now they were about to get one more chance, not to redeem France, but simply to survive. The man who would change everything arrived at Castle Itter not as a liberator, but as a prisoner himself. And then, in one of the most improbable reversals in the history of the war, as an armed defender.

Zvonimir Čučković, known to the other prisoners as Zvonko, was a Yugoslav soccer player who had somehow ended up in the castle’s orbit as a laborer and eventually as a semi-free servant of the prisoners. His role was ambiguous, his status precarious, but he was mobile. He could move.

And in the final days of April 1945, as the sounds of American artillery began echoing through the Alpine valleys, Zvonko became the prisoners’ only connection to the outside world. But the figure who truly anchors the human drama of Castle Itter is the man who was supposed to be guarding it. Wehrmacht Major Josef Gangl had spent the final year of the war in a private moral crisis that had transformed him step by step from a decorated German officer into a member of the Austrian resistance.

Gangl was not a natural rebel. He was a professional soldier. The kind of man who had believed in Germany, if not in Hitler, and who had served effectively enough to reach major’s rank by 1944. But, the Eastern Front had done something to him. He had seen enough to understand that the war was not only lost, it was wrong.

By late 1944, he was in quiet contact with Austrian resistance cells, passing intelligence, undermining SS supply lines in small ways that could not yet be traced back to him. He was a man living a double life in the most dangerous possible circumstances. Every day he gave orders in the name of a regime he had decided to betray.

Every night he wondered whether the next morning would be the one where someone noticed. By early May 1945, the situation in the Austrian Tyrol had become apocalyptic. Not from Allied bombing, not yet, but from within. Isolated SS units, cut off from command, were executing civilians accused of defeatism.

Deserters were being hanged from lamp posts with cardboard signs around their necks reading, “Ich bin ein Feigling.” “I am a coward.” The regime was consuming itself in its final spasm of violence. And Gangl understood that the prisoners in Castle Itter were at the center of that danger. Because the order had come through, through channels that Gangl could not officially ignore, that the Ehrenhäftlinge were to be liquidated before they could be liberated.

No witnesses, no trophies for the Americans. The SS unit tasked with the execution, a detachment under Waffen SS Hauptsturmführer Georg Böhmel, was already moving toward the castle. Gangl made a decision. He would find the Americans. He was not the only one moving. Zvonko had already slipped out of Castle Itter and was making his way through the mountains toward American lines carrying a handwritten message from the prisoners begging for rescue.

The two men were converging on the same conclusion from different directions. And the American who would receive both of them was not a general, not a liberator with a cavalry division. He was a tank company commander named John Lee. Captain John Lee of the 12th Armored Division was exactly the kind of officer who appears in the middle of the 20th century’s military history and disappears from it almost immediately afterward.

Not because his actions were unworthy of memory, but because what he did was so strange, so outside the normal categories of the war, that the army itself seemed unsure what to do with the story afterward. Lee was 23 years old. He commanded a company of Sherman tanks and had spent the past weeks in the confused, exhilarating chaos of the war’s final collapse in Germany and Austria.

Towns were surrendering without firing a shot. Soldiers were throwing down weapons and simply going home. The front, in any meaningful sense, had ceased to exist. Lee’s unit was moving through a landscape where the enemy was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. When Zvonko appeared at an American checkpoint on the evening of May 4th, half exhausted, speaking broken German and fragments of English, carrying a letter in French that no one could immediately read, Lee was called in to deal with the situation.

He listened. He asked questions through an interpreter. He looked at the letter. And then he did something that was either profoundly brave or genuinely insane, depending on how you choose to read it. He decided to go. Not with his full company. He did not have authorization for that kind of commitment.

He did not have authorization for any of what he was about to do. He took one platoon of infantry, a handful of Shermans, and drove toward Castle Itter in the dark. And somewhere on that mountain road, driving in the opposite direction, came Josef Gangl. The meeting between Lee and Gangl is documented in Lee’s after-action report and in Gangl’s own accounts, which survived him.

It took place at a crossroads under a white flag that Gangl had improvised from a bed sheet by the light of Jeep headlamps in the early hours of May 5th. Lee spoke no German. Gangl spoke almost no English. They communicated through a Wehrmacht soldier who had spent time before the war working in a hotel in Switzerland and had picked up enough of both languages to serve as a terrified interpreter.

Lee later wrote that the meeting felt completely unreal. Here was a German officer in uniform offering to fight alongside American troops, offering not just information, but his own soldiers, his own weapons, his own willingness to die alongside men who had been his enemies two days before. Lee had no doctrine for this.

There was no field manual that covered this scenario. He made his decision the way soldiers at the edge of history always make their decisions. He looked at the man across the table, decided he was telling the truth, and said yes. They drove to the castle together. Dawn on May 5th, 1945, the castle at Itter was not a comfortable place to defend.

This is important to understand because Castle Itter looked impressive from a distance and its stone walls gave an illusion of impregnability, but walls are only as good as the men behind them and the weapons in their hands. And what Lee had was desperately thin. He had the single Sherman tank he had managed to get up the narrow road commanded by a sergeant named Kurt Schrader.

He had a handful of infantrymen. He had Gangl’s Wehrmacht soldiers armed with standard German rifles and submachine guns. He had the castle’s Austrian caretaker, Alois Huber, who knew every room and corridor. And he had the prisoners themselves, some of whom had decided, with a lucidity that must have surprised even them, that they were going to fight.

Jean Borotra had already slipped out of the castle in the night to find help, running through the mountains in the dark in an act of physical courage that seems almost impossible for a man his age. Gamelin, old and ill, had asked Lee for a weapon. Reynard had organized the non-combatant prisoners into shelter positions.

These men, who had spent years in the prison’s corridors arguing about whose fault France’s defeat had been, were now in agreement about one thing. They would not go quietly. The SS arrived at roughly 9:00 in the morning. The unit that came up the road toward Castle Itter was not a remnant. It was not a few scattered fanatics who had missed the memo about the war’s end.

It was an organized, armed, functional Waffen SS detachment under Bunger, supported by infantry and at least one anti-tank weapon. They had one objective. They knew the castle’s layout, and they expected the prisoners to be defenseless. What they found instead was a Sherman tank blocking the gate road and small arms fire from the castle walls.

The first assault on the gate was turned back. The Sherman’s main gun fired twice, and the echoes rolled back and forth between the valley walls loud enough that residents in the village below would later say they thought the mountains were collapsing. The SS infantry pulled back to the tree line and began preparing a second approach.

An SS officer captured in the initial exchange, a young lieutenant who had never in his career encountered anything remotely like what he was seeing, is quoted in American after-action debriefs as saying that he could not initially determine who was firing from the castle. He said the smoke and the angle of the walls made it impossible to distinguish uniforms.

He assumed, reasonably, that he was facing a larger American force than was actually there. That assumption, that small tactical miscalculation, bought the defenders time they desperately needed. Inside the castle, the situation was already critical. The Sherman tank, Schrader’s tank, the only armored vehicle the defenders had, took an anti-tank hit at mid-morning.

The shell penetrated the hull. The tank was no longer mobile, but its guns still worked, and Schrader, bleeding from his left arm, climbed back in and kept firing. Gangl was moving between positions on the castle walls, directing his own soldiers with a calm that several witnesses, both American and prisoner, later described as almost eerie in its steadiness. He had made his choice.

He was not performing loyalty to a cause. He was simply doing the thing in front of him, which was keeping these people alive. At approximately 10:30 in the morning, a bullet found him. The accounts differ slightly on exactly where Gangl was standing. Some place him on the south wall. One American infantryman’s memoir puts him near the main gate.

What everyone who was there agrees on is the moment itself. There was no dramatic last stand. He was moving between soldiers, correcting a firing position, and then he was down. The Wehrmacht major who had spent a year betraying his regime in secret, and his final morning defending its prisoners, died on a castle wall in the Austrian Alps fighting alongside Americans and French generals in a battle that would not be officially acknowledged for decades.

Paul Reynaud, who had watched from a window, wrote about Gangl afterward with a formality that could not entirely conceal his emotion. He described him as a man who had chosen, at the last possible moment, the right side of history. The battle lasted less than 3 hours in total, but those hours had a quality that survivors consistently described as timeless, a bubble of intense focused violence that seemed to exist outside of normal duration.

The defenders held the walls. The prisoners stayed in their positions. Barotra kept running. Because Barotra, the tennis champion, the man who had escaped the castle in the night, had not stopped running. He had found a German unit willing to pass his message. He had found a roadblock. He had talked his way through it.

And eventually, he had reached another American column, and the message he carried, urgent, clear, factual, had moved up the chain fast enough that a relief force was now driving toward Itter at speed. The relief arrived at around noon. A larger American armored force came up the road below the castle, encountered the SS detachment from behind, and the fight was over in minutes.

The SS, caught between the castle above and the Americans below, either fled or surrendered. Ganga himself was captured. The prisoners were free. There is a photograph from that afternoon taken by an American military photographer who arrived with the relief column. In it, you can see the courtyard of Castle Itter. American soldiers, former prisoners, some of them still wearing the shabby civilian clothes they had lived in for years, and among them, visible if you look carefully, Wehrmacht soldiers.

Former enemies, men who had spent the morning firing alongside the Americans and were now standing in the same space under the same sky in the strange aftermath of a battle that had no precedent and would have no successor. Captain Lee, in one of his later interviews, said something that has always struck me as exactly right.

He said he had expected liberation to feel like a clear moment, victory on one side, defeat on the other. Instead, it felt like something much messier and much more human. He said that looking at Gangl’s body and then at the men Gangl had died to protect, he understood for the first time that the war was not simply a conflict between nations.

It was a conflict within them. The prisoners of Castle Itter returned to France and to history with varied fates. Weygand, Gamelin, Daladier, Reynaud, they had all been architects of French failure in 1940, and none of them would escape that verdict entirely. The post-war tribunals and memoirs and recriminations that followed would consume them for the rest of their lives.

Marie-Agnès Caillaux, de Gaulle’s sister, returned to her family and lived quietly, almost entirely absent from the public record of her own extraordinary ordeal. Jean Borotra became, inevitably, a figure of some controversy. His wartime record was complicated, as so many were, by the ambiguities of Vichy collaboration and resistance.

The night run through the Austrian mountains, the act of physical courage that had helped save the castle, existed alongside other choices he had made in other years. Kurt Schrader, the tank commander who had kept firing from a damaged Sherman with a wounded arm, received a Silver Star. His name appears in the official citation with the kind of spare military language that simultaneously honors and diminishes what a man actually did.

Josef Gangl was posthumously recognized as an Austrian resistance hero. There is a street named after him in the village below the castle. There is a memorial. For decades, the battle itself was so strange, so contrary to the clean narratives of the war, that it was barely discussed. The army did not suppress it exactly.

It simply had nowhere to put it. Stories that do not fit the categories do not get told. John Lee survived the war, came home, and lived a long life. He gave a handful of interviews about Castle Itter over the decades, mostly to historians who had stumbled across the after-action reports and could barely believe what they were reading.

He was consistently modest. He made the decision he made, he said, because it was the right decision. He did not claim to have known it would work. He simply did not see another choice. The Battle of Castle Itter was eventually rediscovered by military historians in the 1990s and early 2000s, and it has since accumulated a modest literature.

A detailed book by Stephen Harding, several documentary treatments, scattered academic articles. But it has never entered the popular consciousness the way it should have. Partly because it resists simplification. It is not a story about American heroism alone. It is not a story about German redemption alone.

It is not a story about French prisoners finally saved by the cavalry. It is all of those things simultaneously, tangled together in ways that resist the clean framing that popular history demands, which may be exactly why it matters. We tell the story of World War II through clear lines. The Allies were right.

The Axis was wrong. Victory was deserved. These things are true and they matter, but they are not the whole truth. The whole truth contains men like Josef Gangl, who served a wrong cause honorably until he found a way to serve a right one, and who died in the act of that service. It contains men like Gamelin and Weygand, who had helped lose the war in 1940 and now held rifles on a castle wall to survive it.

It contains John Lee, who looked at a German officer across a jeep’s headlamps in the dark and decided, without a manual, without a precedent, without authorization, that this was a man he could trust. The last day of the war in Europe, May 5th, 1945, somewhere in the Austrian Alps, the most improbable alliance in American military history held a medieval castle against an SS assault for 3 hours.

The men who fought together that morning would spend the rest of their lives being asked to explain it. Most of them found the question difficult to answer, not because the facts were complicated, but because the feelings were. One of the prisoners, in a memoir published years later, described the moment the relief column arrived and the firing stopped.

He described standing in the castle courtyard with an American soldier on one side of him and a Wehrmacht soldier on the other, all three of them looking at the smoke rising from the valley below. And he wrote that in that moment, in the sudden silence after hours of gunfire, he had a thought he said he was almost ashamed to admit.

He thought that this, exactly this, this strange and improbable alliance on the wrong side of the last morning of the war, was what peace was going to feel like. Not clean, not simple, not the way anyone had planned it, just people choosing, at the last possible second, to be on the same side.