The Day American Soldiers Shocked the SS by Fighting Beside German Soldiers

May 5th, 1945. Three days before the war in Europe ends, somewhere in the Austrian Alps, an American tank lieutenant from Norwich, New York, is about to do something that no American officer has done before him, and none has done since. He is about to give an order to a German Wehrmacht major, and the German major is going to obey.

Together, they will defend a medieval castle full of French prisoners against an SS battalion that has come to kill everyone inside before the Americans can arrive. This is the only battle in the history of the United States Army where American soldiers and German soldiers fought side by side. It happened on the last morning of the war, and for 50 years, almost nobody knew it had happened at all.

The night before that battle, a man on a bicycle was descending a mountain road in the Austrian Tyrol. His name is Andreas Kroboth. He is a cook, a Czech in his 30s, thin from years of captivity, wearing the threadbare clothes of a kitchen servant in a medieval castle that was never meant to be a prison. He is pedaling as fast as his legs will move him, and his legs are not strong.

He has not eaten properly in weeks. The road is steep. The headlamp on his bicycle has been blacked out with tape, leaving only a thin slit of yellow light. The valley below him is dark. The sky above him is dark. Somewhere in the woods to either side, men with guns are hunting deserters. In his pocket, wrapped in oilcloth, there is a letter. The letter is short.

It is written in three languages. It begs whoever finds it to come quickly. It is signed by men whose names, two years ago, were on the front page of every newspaper in Europe. Now, they are signatures on a smuggled note carried by a cook on a bicycle into a valley full of SS patrols who have orders to shoot anyone they do not recognize.

Crowbot pedals harder. He does not know if the war is ending or beginning. He only knows that the people he has been feeding for the last 2 years will be dead by sunrise if he does not reach the town below before the wrong man stops him on the road. To understand why a check cook is risking his life on a mountain bicycle in the last week of the Second World War, you have to go back.

Not far, just 2 years and up. Up to the castle on the rock, Schloss Itter. Castle Itter. It has stood on that promontory above the village since the 13th century, although the structure you would see today was rebuilt in 1878. And most of what makes it look like a fortress is decorative. The real walls are old. The position is older still.

The road up is single track and steep and easily defended by men with rifles at the top. The Nazi regime noticed this. In late 1940, the castle was leased from its owner, an Austrian named Franz Gruber, who had been running it as a hotel. In February 1943, under direct orders from Heinrich Himmler, the SS seized it outright.

By April of that year, Schloss Itter had been formally attached to the Dachau concentration camp system as a satellite installation. But it was not a death camp. It was something stranger. It was a Sonderlager, a special camp, a place for what the regime called Ehrenhäftling, honor prisoners. The Reich kept these people alive for the same reason a gambler keeps his last chip. They were currency.

They might be useful at the bargaining table when the war turned bad. They were too valuable to kill and too dangerous to release. So they were sent to a castle in the mountains and they were watched. By the spring of 1945, the people inside that castle were among the most extraordinary collection of human beings ever assembled in one prison.

Paul Reynaud was 66 years old. He had been the Prime Minister of France in May of 1940 when the German army poured across to the Meuse and broke a nation in 6 weeks. He had refused to sign the armistice. He had wanted to keep fighting from North Africa. He had been overruled, arrested, handed to the Germans, and locked in this castle to wait out the war he had failed to win.

In the room next to his, separated by a stone wall and a bitterness that had not faded in 5 years, was the man who had preceded him in the office of Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, 60 years old. The man whose signature was on the Munich Agreement of 1938. The man who had stood next to Neville Chamberlain and tried to buy peace with Czechoslovakia and had been called a coward for it ever since. He and Reynaud were enemies.

They had been enemies before the war. They had been enemies during the war. And now, locked in adjacent rooms in the same prison, they refused to speak to each other. Down the hall lived two generals. Maxime Weygand was 78 years old. He had been the supreme commander of French forces during the catastrophe of 1940, brought out of retirement at the last possible moment to save a war that was already lost.

His wife, Marine Weygand, was imprisoned with him. They had grown old together. They had grown old in this castle. Maurice Gamelin was 72. He was the man Weygand had replaced. He was the man most often blamed in French books and French newspapers for the speed of the collapse. He and Weygand also refused to speak.

There were others. Marie-Agnès Caillaux, 55 years old, the older sister of General Charles de Gaulle himself, arrested for working in the Resistance and sent here as leverage against her brother. Michel Clemenceau, 71, the son of the legendary prime minister who had led France through the First World War. Leon Jouhaux, 65, the leader of France’s largest labor union, imprisoned with his partner Augusta Bruchlen.

Years later he would win the Nobel Peace Prize. None of that was visible yet from inside the castle. François de La Rocque, 59, a political figure with a complicated past who had been both a collaborator and a resistance contact, depending on which month you asked. Christian Maistre, the personal secretary and partner of Paul Reynaud, who shared his confinement, and Jean Borotra, 46 years old, a man who had won Wimbledon twice in the 1920s and was still, by every account that survives, in extraordinary physical condition. He had served briefly in the

Vichy government before defecting. He had been caught trying to flee France. He had ended up here. These were the prisoners of Castle Itter. They had failed publicly. They had failed in ways that history was still measuring. They blamed each other. They argued in the corridors. They sat at the long wooden table at meals and they did not look at each other.

And the SS guards who watched them learn to read the silences in the room more carefully than any spoken word. That is what the cook on the bicycle was riding to save. Three miles down the mountain, in the town of Wörgl, there was a man who had spent the past year of his life lying to almost everyone he knew. His name was Josef Gangl, although his soldiers called him Sepp. He was 34 years old.

He was a major in the Wehrmacht. He commanded what was left of the 25th Nebelwerfer Artillery Regiment, which by May of 1945 was not really a regiment anymore. It was the survivors, a few dozen men with empty supply trucks and dwindling ammunition and the haunted expressions of soldiers who knew exactly how the war was going to end and had decided not to die in its final minutes for nothing.

Gangl was a decorated combat officer. He had served in France in 1940. He had served on the Eastern Front. He had earned the Iron Cross for combat. He had done the things that German officers were asked to do in those campaigns and he had been promoted for doing them well. But somewhere in the last year, something in him had changed.

He had begun quietly, carefully to make contact with the Austrian resistance. There was a man in Wörgl named Rupert Haglittner who led a small underground cell and Gangl began passing him information. He began sheltering his own soldiers from orders he considered murderous. When SS units in the area began executing Austrian civilians for hanging white sheets from their windows, Gangl positioned his men in the town to make those executions harder.

He did not desert. He did not run. He did something more dangerous. He stayed in uniform and he used the uniform as cover. Every morning he gave orders in the name of a regime he had decided to betray. Every evening he waited to see whether the next knock at his door would be the Gestapo coming to arrest him. By May 4th, 1945, his situation had become impossible.

The town of Wörgl was surrounded by roving SS units that no longer answered to any central command. The Wehrmacht had effectively ceased to exist as a coordinated force in the area. Gangl had perhaps 20 men he could trust. He had decided to surrender to the Americans the moment they reached the town. He was waiting. And then a Czech cook on a bicycle was brought to him by the local resistance, exhausted, soaked in sweat, carrying a letter in his pocket signed by Edouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud and Maxime Weygand.

Gangl read the letter. He understood immediately what it meant. The SS would not let those prisoners be liberated. The SS would kill them first. There were units in the area capable of doing it. There was no time. He made a decision. He would go to the Americans himself. Five miles to the north, in the town of Kufstein, a 27-year-old American officer named John Lee was waiting for the war to end.

He was a first lieutenant in the 23rd Tank Battalion of the 12th Armored Division attached to the U.S. Army’s 20th War Corps. His friends called him Jack. The men who served under him described him later as energetic, profane, fearless, and somewhat impulsive. He chewed cigars without lighting them. He swore constantly. He had fought across France and Germany, survived the Battle of the Bulge, crossed the Rhine, and by early May of 1945, he was sitting in a Tyrolean village with his Sherman tank parked outside and nothing to do.

The German army in front of him had effectively stopped existing. Villages were surrendering without firing a shot. The 36th Infantry Division was on its way to relieve his position. He was tired. His men were tired. The war was 3 days from ending and everyone knew it. He had no idea that a major in the Wehrmacht was driving toward him at that moment under a white flag improvised from feed sheet in a Kübelwagen with the names of French politicians written on a piece of paper in his coat pocket.

Lee was about to be handed the strangest order of his military career, and he was going to be handed it by an enemy. But before any of that, something else had to happen first. The man who ran Castle Itter as a prison was named Sebastian Wimmer. He was an SS officer. He had been the camp commandant for nearly 2 years. He had treated his prisoners with the practiced contempt of a man who knew that one day, perhaps, he would have to answer for them and had decided in advance not to.

On the afternoon of May 4th, 1945, Wimmer received the news every SS officer in southern Germany had been waiting for. Hitler was dead. The war was lost. Allied units were closing in from the west. Wimmer did the math. He gathered his most important documents. He burned what he could. He loaded his wife into a car and then, without a word to his prisoners, without a final inspection, without any of the rituals of departure, he drove out of the courtyard of Castle Itter and disappeared down the mountain.

The guards followed him. Some left in trucks, some left on foot. By evening, the castle was empty of its keepers. The prisoners realized this slowly. There was no announcement. There was no opened door. There was simply, gradually, the absence of any voice giving orders and the realization that the men who had been holding them for 2 years were gone.

For a few hours, they believed they were free. They were wrong. The forests around Castle Itter were not empty. They were full of Waffen-SS units cut off from command, fanatical, armed, and looking for anyone in a white flag or an Austrian uniform to hang from a lamppost. A man trying to walk down the mountain to the village below would not survive the trip.

A prisoner with a French accent and no papers would be shot on sight. The prisoners of Castle Itter were free of their guards and trapped in their castle. That was when they sent out Zvonimir Čučković. He was a Yugoslav, a Croatian, a communist resistance fighter who had ended up at Itter as a forced laborer and had earned through the strange logic of long captivity a kind of semi-free status.

He could move around the castle. He could move outside it. He was the messenger. Two days before Krobath’s bicycle ride on May 3rd, Tschutschkowitsch had slipped out of the castle with a letter sewn into his clothes. He had walked through the night. He had walked the next day. He had covered nearly 40 mi on foot, climbing through the Inn Valley in the direction of Innsbruck.

And by the evening of May 3rd, he had found them, the Americans, an advanced party of the 409th Infantry Regiment, part of the 103rd Infantry Division, U.S. Sixth Corps. He had told them everything. He had begged them to come. At dawn on May 4th, a heavily armored rescue column began driving from Innsbruck toward Castle Itter. It did not arrive.

About halfway to its destination, near the town of Jenbach, the column came under shell fire from an SS position. It stopped. It called for instructions. And the instructions, when they came back over the radio, were not what anyone in that column expected. The column was ordered to turn around. The reason was bureaucratic.

It was administrative. It was, in any moral sense, almost obscene. The 103rd Infantry Division belonged to Sixth Corps. The territory south of Jenbach belonged to Twenty Corps. The rescue column had crossed an invisible line on a map that the U.S. Army cared about, and the prisoners of Castle Itter did not know existed.

Senior officers, somewhere in a headquarters, decided that the violation could not be allowed. The mission was canceled. The American tanks turned around. They drove back to Innsbruck. The prisoners in the castle had no idea any of this had happened. They sat in the empty corridors of Schloss Itter listening for sounds in the valley and they waited for help that was never coming.

That was the moment Andreas Krobot got on a bicycle and that was the moment in a town 5 miles away that a German major in a borrowed Kubelwagen drove toward an American checkpoint under a white flag made from a bed sheet carrying in his coat the only thing he had left to offer himself. The American checkpoint at Kufstein on the afternoon of May 4th, 1945 was not expecting visitors.

The men on duty were tired in a way that goes deeper than sleep. They had been moving for weeks. They had stopped believing in the enemy. The roads they patrolled were full of surrendering Germans walking west with their hands raised and their eyes empty. The villages were quiet. The countryside was beautiful in the way that places become beautiful at the end of long wars when no one is shooting anymore and the trees are in leaf.

Then down the road a vehicle appeared. It was a Kubelwagen, a German army staff car. It was driving slowly and on its hood, tied to the radio antenna, there was a white sheet flapping in the morning air. The American soldiers raised their rifles. They watched it come on. The driver was a German soldier. The man in the passenger seat was a German officer in full uniform, the silver braid of a Wehrmacht major visible on his shoulders.

He stopped the car 10 yards from the checkpoint. He raised his hands. He got out. His name was Sepp Gangl. He spoke enough English to make himself understood. He asked, very politely, to speak with the commanding officer. A few minutes later, he was face to face with Lieutenant Jack Lee. Lee was 27 years old.

He had a cigar in his mouth that he had not bothered to light. He had been at war for nearly 2 years. He had seen what German officers looked like in defeat, and this one did not look like the others. This one had not come to surrender. This one had come to ask for something. There was no interpreter at first.

Gangel’s English was halting, but functional. He explained in short sentences what was happening in a castle 8 miles to the south. He named the prisoners. He used the names because the names mattered. He said Paul Reynaud. He said Edouard Daladier. He said Maxime Weygand. >> [music] >> He said Maurice Gamelin. He said the sister of Charles de Gaulle.

He watched Lee’s face as he said each one. He explained that the SS was coming for them. He explained that the castle would not hold. He explained that he had soldiers. Wehrmacht soldiers, real ones, 10 men, perhaps 12, veterans, armed, ready to fight, and he explained that those soldiers would do what he told them to do.

He said he was offering them. He was offering himself. He wanted nothing in return except permission to do this thing. Lee listened. He did not interrupt. When Gangel was done, Lee looked at him for a long moment without speaking. There was no manual that covered this. There was no precedent. There was no senior officer in the room he could ask.

There was only a German major and an empty cigar and a story that, if it was true, meant that men whose names were in history books were about to be murdered in a stone castle in the mountains because the United States Army had drawn the wrong line on the wrong map. Lee asked one question. He asked whether Gangel would lead him to the castle himself right now, today.

Gangel said yes. They got in the Kübelwagen. Gangel drove. Lee sat in the passenger seat with his side arm on his lap. They went together to look at what was there. The drive took less than half an hour. The road climbed through plain forest and alpine meadow and the kind of breathtaking scenery that men who were about to die in combat do not have time to notice. They passed two checkpoints.

At the first German soldiers loyal to Gangle waved them through. >> [music] >> At the second, two Wehrmacht men in the road simply stared at the American officer in the passenger seat and stepped aside without a word. They reached the castle in the late morning. Lee got out and looked up at the walls and made his calculations the way tank officers make calculations.

He saw the single approach road. He saw the height of the position. He saw how the windows would have to be defended. He saw in his mind the SS coming up that road in numbers he could not yet estimate. He did not go inside the castle. Not yet. He went back to Kufstein. He had work to do. Lee was a junior officer.

He had no authority to commit American forces to a mission like this on his own. But there were units in motion all over the area and there was an opportunity. The 142nd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Infantry Division, the Texas Division, had just arrived in Kufstein. They were fresh. They had armor.

They had ammunition. They were what Lee needed. He went to their commanders. He told the story. He kept it short. He asked for tanks and infantry. He got five Sherman tanks and a company of riflemen. He had what he needed. The column rolled out in the early afternoon. It got perhaps 4 mi down the road before it stopped.

There was a bridge. A small one. A wooden bridge over a mountain stream that had not been built to carry the weight of five Sherman tanks and a supporting infantry column. Lee got out and looked at it. The lead tank driver got out and looked at it. They walked across it on foot. The boards groaned. The supports below were thin and old.

The math was simple. The bridge would hold one Sherman, perhaps. It would not hold five. And even if it held five going in, it would not hold them coming back out under fire with damaged vehicles, with wounded. Lee made his second decision of the day. He left one tank at the bridge to guard the crossing.

He sent the rest of the column back. He kept his own Sherman. The men called her Besotten Jenny. The name was painted on the side in messy white letters. The crew loved her the way tank crews love their tanks, which is to say the way a man loves the thing that has kept him alive for a year. He kept 14 American soldiers. He kept Gangle.

He kept the truck carrying 10 Wehrmacht veterans. Men who had served under Gangle in the artillery. Men who had agreed in a barracks the night before to drive into a battle on the wrong side of the war they had spent five years fighting. That was the force that drove the last six miles to Castle Itter. 26 men, one tank, one truck, one officer chewing on an unlit cigar, one German major in the passenger seat of his own staff car leading the way.

4 miles from the castle they found the first SS roadblock. It was a small one, hastily assembled. Trees dragged across the road, a few men with rifles in the trees. The Sherman’s machine gun opened up first, and the German soldiers in the truck behind dismounted and moved through the woods on the flank in the disciplined way that good infantry move, and the SS men in the roadblock either died or ran. It was over in minutes.

That was the first time in the recorded history of the Second World War that American soldiers and German soldiers fired their weapons at the same target. There was no time to think about it. The column moved on. They arrived at Castle Itter in the late afternoon. The gate was open. The courtyard was empty.

The prisoners had been watching from the windows. They came out slowly in small groups because they did not yet entirely believe what they were seeing. They saw an American Sherman tank rolling into the courtyard. That was the thing they had been praying for. And then they saw getting out of the staff car behind the tank, a Wehrmacht major in full German uniform, alive and armed and giving directions to the American soldiers as if he had every right to be there.

Some of them stopped walking. They did not know what to make of it. Then a third thing happened that they were not expecting. The prisoners had already organized their own defense. They had done it the day before. When the guards had vanished, when Wimmer had fled, they had realized very quickly that they were not safe.

They had looked around for someone who could lead a defense, someone with military training, someone they could trust. The man they had asked was an SS officer. His name was Kurt Siegfried Schrader. He was a Hauptsturmführer, a captain in the Waffen SS. He had been wounded earlier in the war and had been convalescing at a house near the castle.

And during his recovery, he had become friendly with the French prisoners. They had eaten meals together. They had walked in the garden together. He had treated them not as captives, but as people, and they had remembered it. When the guards left, they sent for him. He came. He brought his wife and children with him into the castle, into the cellars where he believed they would be safest.

He had agreed to organize the defense before any American or any Wehrmacht officer had arrived. When Lee and Gangl walked into the great hall of Castle Itter on the afternoon of May 4th. What they found was not a group of helpless prisoners waiting for rescue. What they found was a defense already half organized by an SS officer who had decided, somewhere in his own head, that this was the line he was not going to cross.

Three uniforms, three armies, three men who were supposed to be killing each other, standing in the same room trying to figure out how to keep the same people alive. The prisoners were grateful, but they were not satisfied. They had been expecting an army. They had received 26 men. Paul Reynaud, 66 years old, dignified, formal, asked Lee how many more were coming. Lee told him the truth.

There were no more coming today. Édouard Daladier stood in the corner. He did not approach. Lee made his dispositions. He was a tank officer, not an infantry commander, but he had been in the army long enough to know what a defense looked like. He put Besson and Jenny in front of the main gate, blocking the only approach road, her main gun pointed down the valley.

He put his American riflemen at the high windows of the keep, where they had clear fields of fire across the open ground. He put Gangel’s Wehrmacht veterans on the south wall, which was the longest stretch of exposed perimeter. He let Schräder run his own sector with his own men. He had one more problem to solve, the prisoners. The castle had an armory.

The SS guards had left in such a hurry that they had not bothered to empty it. There were submachine guns. There were rifles. There were some grenades. There was ammunition. Lee did not want to give the prisoners weapons. They were old. Most of them had never been combat soldiers. Reynaud was a politician.

Daladier was a politician. Jouhaux was a union man. Borotra was an athlete. Clemenceau was the son of a great man, not a soldier himself, but the two generals asked for weapons. Maxime Weygand was 78 years old. He had been the supreme commander of French forces. He had spent five years in this castle thinking about the country he had failed to save.

He asked Lee for a rifle. He said it without any drama. He said it the way an old man asks for a chair. Maurice Gamelin was 72. He had been the man before Weygand. They had spent five years in the same building blaming each other. He asked for a weapon, too. Lee gave them weapons. He gave weapons to the others who asked.

He gave a submachine gun to a man who had won Wimbledon in 1924 and could not work the action properly. He gave a rifle to Leon Jouhaux who had spent his life negotiating labor contracts and now stood at a stone window with a German rifle in his hands and a calm expression that no one in the room understood. Augusta Brooklyn, his partner, stood next to him.

The dispositions were complete by evening. Then they waited. Gangel tried the telephone. The castle had a working line, an absurd piece of infrastructure left over from the days when the SS guards had needed to call down to the village for supplies. He got through to the Austrian resistance in Vergil. He told them what was happening.

He asked for everything they could send. The answer came back. They could send three men. Two German soldiers who had defected, one Austrian teenager who had walked into the resistance office that afternoon and asked to fight. They were already on the way. Three more bodies. That was the entire reinforcement available in the last days of the Third Reich for a battle that had not yet officially begun. Night came.

It was cold in the castle. The walls were stone and the wind moved through the corridors. Men sat at their positions and tried not to fall asleep. The prisoners gathered in one of the great halls, the men with weapons sitting separately from the men without. There was very little conversation. Renault sat by a window with Christian Mabire next to him.

He had a pistol on the table in front of him. He looked at it from time to time, and then he looked out the window at the dark mountains, and Mabire put her hand on his arm, and he did not move. Daladier sat by himself. Borotra sat on the floor with his back against the wall and his eyes closed, breathing slowly the way an athlete breathes before a long race.

He was 46 years old. He still had the body of a tennis player. He was going to need it. Marie Agnes Caillau, the sister of de Gaulle, walked among the wounded and the elderly and made sure they had blankets. She was 55 years old. She had survived two years in this castle as an instrument of leverage against her own brother.

She moved through the corridors with the calm of a woman who had decided, somewhere along the way, that fear was not useful to her. Outside in the dark, the SS was moving. The unit that came up the mountain toward Castle Itter at dawn on May 5th, 1945, belonged to the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, the Götz von Berlichingen Division.

They were commanded by an Obersturmbannführer named Georg Bochmann, and they were not stragglers. They were not deserters. They were not isolated fanatics who had missed the order to stand down. They were an organized formation of Waffen SS infantry, supported by mortars, supported by machine guns, supported by at least one 88-mm gun, a weapon that could destroy any tank in the American inventory at the ranges they would be fighting.

There were perhaps a hundred of them. Some accounts say 200. The defenders, when they counted later, said it felt like more. The attack began at first light. The first shots came from the tree line below the castle. Machine gun fire across the open ground in front of the gate. The Sherman tank in the gateway opened up first.

Her 75 mm gun firing twice. The explosions of the shells in the woods loud enough that villagers in the valley below would later say the mountains themselves were shaking. The SS infantry pulled back. They reorganized. They moved laterally through the woods trying to find the dead ground where the tanks gun could not reach them.

They began climbing toward the castle’s flanks. Gangel moved between positions on the walls. Witnesses who lived through that morning all said the same thing about him afterward. He was calm. He was not performing calm. He was not the kind of calm that hides fear underneath. He was simply calm, the way a man becomes calm when he has already made his decision and there is nothing left to be afraid of.

He moved between his soldiers correcting their firing positions, telling them where the SS was likely to come from next, speaking quietly so that he did not have to repeat himself over the noise. Lee was on the wall with him for part of the morning. He would say later that watching Gangel work was one of the strangest experiences of his entire war.

He had spent two years learning to hate German officers. He had killed men who looked exactly like this one. And here was a Wehrmacht major in full uniform running a defense alongside him with a competence that Lee could not help admiring. The fight went on through the morning. The SS brought up the 88 mm gun. They positioned it on the slope below the castle.

It was the heaviest weapon on the battlefield. It outranged everything the defenders had. The first shell from the 88 hit the courtyard. The second hit the wall. The third found the Sherman. The “Sutton Jenny” was sitting in the gateway where Lee had positioned her the night before. She took the 88 round directly through her hull. The interior caught fire.

The crew bailed out, some of them wounded, dragging each other clear before the ammunition cooked off inside the burning tank. The only armored vehicle the defenders had was gone. Inside the castle, the situation was getting worse. The ammunition was running low. The American riflemen at the high windows were firing more carefully now, picking their targets.

The Wehrmacht veterans on the south wall had taken casualties. The telephone line had been cut somewhere down the mountain by SS troops who had finally figured out it was being used. Gangel moved to a position near the main gate where the fire was heaviest. He needed to see where the SS was massing for the next push.

He climbed up to a window that gave him a view of the approach road. Paul Reynaud was already at that window. The former prime minister had been firing his rifle from the position, badly, with the help of one of the American soldiers. He was 66 years old and he was tired, and he was exposed to the SS sniper who had been working the slope above the castle for the last hour.

Gangel saw the sniper’s position before Reynaud did. He reached out to pull the old man down, away from the window, into cover. That was when the bullet found him. Inside the great hall, men who had spent the morning firing from the windows began to count their rounds. There were not many left. The American riflemen had perhaps half a magazine each.

The Wehrmacht men on the south wall were down to their pistols. The SS was no longer being pushed back. The SS was coming up the walls. Lee gathered his officers, what was left of them, in the courtyard near the burning hulk of his tank. He gave the order that no American commander wants to give.

He told them to fall back into the keep. They would fight room by room. They would hold the inner castle as long as they could. He believed they had perhaps an hour left. That was when a 46-year-old man who had won Wimbledon in 1924 walked up to him and offered to do something insane. Jean Borotra said he would go over the wall.

He would run down the mountain. He would find the Americans. He would bring them back. Lee looked at him. Lee looked at the wall. Lee looked at the woods full of SS infantry between Borotra and any chance of reaching the American lines. Lee said yes. Borotra went over the wall on the backside of the castle, away from the main road, where the slope dropped away into woods so steep that the SS had not bothered to post men there.

He was wearing the clothes he had been imprisoned in. He had no weapon. He carried nothing except the directions Lee had given him and the knowledge of where the nearest American unit was likely to be. He hit the ground running. He was 46 years old. He had spent 2 years in a castle with limited exercise and bad food.

He had not run for distance in a long time. But the muscles remembered. The lungs remembered. He had won Wimbledon twice in the 1920s on legs like these. And now those same legs were carrying him through pine forest in the Austrian Alps with German soldiers somewhere in the trees on either side of him. He did not stop. He could not afford to stop.

If he stopped, he would be seen. Behind him in the castle, the defense was collapsing. The SS had pushed all the way up to the outer walls. They were beginning to throw grenades over them. Lee had pulled most of his men back into the keep, into the inner sanctum of the castle, where the corridors were narrow and the SS would have to come at them one or two at a time.

He had set up firing positions at the heads of staircases. He had put the prisoners in the deepest cellars behind locked doors, where they could not be reached easily. Sepp Gangl was lying where he had fallen, near the window, where the sniper’s bullet had found him. There had been no time for last words. There had not even been time for him to know he was dying.

One moment he had been reaching for Paul Reynaud. The next moment he had been on the floor. Reynaud, who had survived because Gangl had pulled him down, stood for a long time looking at the body of the German officer who had saved his life. He did not say anything that anyone wrote down. There was nothing to say.

Marie Agnes Cailloux was working through the rooms with bandages and water, moving among the wounded, finding the men who needed help the most and giving it to them. She was the sister of the man who would soon lead France, and she was on her knees in a stone corridor in an Austrian castle, washing blood off the face of a wounded American she did not know.

The fight in the keep went on for what felt like a very long time and was probably less than an hour. Down in the valley, Jean Borotra had reached the main road. He flagged down a vehicle. It happened to be an American Jeep. The men in it were from the 142nd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Infantry Division, the Texas Division.

They had been moving toward Castle Itter all morning on their own initiative, working from information they had received the previous day from other sources. They had been slowed by SS resistance along the way. Borotra explained what was happening up the mountain. He did it quickly. He did it clearly.

He told them about the prisoners. He told them about the size of the SS force. He told them about Lee. He asked for an American uniform. They gave him one. He put it on. He got into the lead Jeep. He pointed up the road. The column began to move. It was led on the ground by an officer named Harry Stiller, a captain in the 142nd with the regimental intelligence work coordinated by a Major John T.

Kramer’s, all of it under the overall authority of Colonel George Lynch, the commander of the 142nd. These names mattered to the army afterward when the after-action reports were written. They did not matter at that moment to the men in the castle. What mattered was the sound of American armor coming up the mountain road. The relief column hit the SS from the rear.

The Waffen SS troops who had spent the morning trying to break into Castle Itter found themselves suddenly trapped between the defenders above and a fresh American column below. The 88-mm gun crew fled. The infantry on the walls tried to pull back and discovered they had nowhere to go.

The fight was over in minutes. About 100 Waffen SS men surrendered. The rest were dead or in the woods running for cover. The American tanks rolled into the courtyard of Castle Itter at approximately 4:00 in the afternoon. It was finished. When the firing stopped, the men inside the castle came out into the courtyard slowly.

They came out the way people come out of cellars after a long bombing raid, blinking, deafened, not entirely sure that the silence was real. Lee was there. He was unhurt. He had a cigar in his mouth that he had still not lit. The American soldiers and the Wehrmacht soldiers stood in the same courtyard. They did not look at each other very much.

They did not know what to say to each other. Some of them shook hands. Most of them just stood there. Paul Renault walked out into the courtyard and looked at the body of Sepp Gangl, which had been brought down and laid out under a blanket. He stood there for a while. He took off his hat. Édouard Daladier stood across the courtyard from him.

For the first time in 2 years, the two old enemies were in open air together without walls between them. They still did not speak. The total casualties on the defending side after 3 hours of combat against an organized SS battalion supported by an 88 were four men wounded and one man dead. The one man dead was Josef Gangl. The French prisoners were evacuated within hours.

They were driven down the mountain in American vehicles. They reached Paris on May 10th. By then, the war in Europe was over. Hitler had been dead for a week. The German surrender had been signed 2 days after the battle. Jack Lee was promoted to captain and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest decoration the United States Army can give to a soldier.

The citation, written in the spare official language of military commendations, does not really describe what he did. It says he led a small force in the defense of a castle. It does not say that he gave orders to German soldiers and they obeyed. It does not say that he trusted a Wehrmacht major on the strength of a conversation at a checkpoint.

The army did not have the language for what he had done. The army has never quite had the language for it since. Sepp Gangl was buried in Tyrol. The Austrian government later honored him as a national hero of the resistance. A street in Wörgl, the town where he had spent the last year of his life lying to almost everyone, was renamed Sep Gangl Straße.

It is still called that today. Kurt Siegfried Schrader, the SS officer who had taken charge of the prisoners’ defense before Lee arrived, who had moved his own wife and children into the castle cellars to protect them, who had stood on a wall and fired his weapon at men in the same uniform he was wearing, was arrested by American forces in the months after the war for his previous membership in the SS.

He was sentenced to two years in prison. The sentence was eventually shortened in recognition of what he had done at Itter. He went home. He lived a quiet life. He died in 1995. Paul Reynaud returned to politics. He served in the Fourth Republic. He died in 1966. Édouard Daladier served in the National Assembly. He died in 1970.

He and Reynaud never reconciled. Maxime Weygand was put on trial for his collaboration with the Vichy government. He was acquitted. He lived to 98. Maurice Gamelin spent the rest of his life writing memoirs that explained why the fall of France in 1940 had not been his fault. Léon Jouhaux won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951 for his work in international labor.

Marie-Agnès Caillaux, the sister of Charles de Gaulle, wrote a memoir of her captivity and died in 1982. Jean Borotra returned to tennis. He played senior tournaments into his late 70s. He died in 1994. He was 95 years old. Jack Lee went home to Norwich, New York. He gave a few interviews over the years to historians who could not quite believe what they were reading in the after action reports.

He was always modest. He said he had made the only decision he could have made. He died in 1973, 55 years old. For decades, the battle was almost completely unknown. It did not fit the categories of the war. It didn’t fit the categories of the books. The story of a German major dying to save a French prime minister defended by an American lieutenant who trusted him on site with an SS captain organizing the prisoners last stand from a castle cellar was not the story anyone had been told about how the Second World War ended. But it is the story of how it

ended in one place, on one mountain, on one morning in May. It is the story of men who decided, with the war already lost and the world already on fire, that there was still a choice to make. That the uniform did not decide. That the orders did not decide. That the only thing left to decide was who you stood next to when the shooting started.

A German major chose a French prime minister and died for him. A young American officer chose a German enemy and won a battle with him. A tennis champion chose a run through enemy lines and saved a castle full of strangers. That is the day American soldiers fought beside German soldiers against the SS. The last day of the war in Europe, the strangest morning of the strangest year, a medieval castle on a rock in the Austrian Alps, and a handful of men who decided at the very end to be on the same side.