May 5, 1945. The war in Europe had forty-eight hours left. Hitler was dead. Berlin was burning. And in a twelfth-century castle on a rocky outcrop in the Austrian Tyrol, a battle was about to begin that had no precedent in military history.
Captain John Lee, twenty-three years old, commanding a company of the 12th Armored Division, drove through the night with a single Sherman tank and a handful of infantry — to answer a handwritten plea he could barely read, delivered by a Yugoslav soccer player named Zvonimir Čučković who had slipped out of the castle and run through the mountains to find help. At a crossroads, under a makeshift white flag, a Wehrmacht major named Josef Gangl was waiting. A decorated German officer who had spent a year quietly betraying the regime he served. Yesterday’s enemy. Now the only man Lee could trust.
Inside Castle Itter, the SS had already received the order: liquidate the Ehrenhäftlinge before the Americans arrived. No witnesses. No trophies. The prisoners behind those stone walls were not ordinary people. Marie-Agnès Cailliau, sister of Charles de Gaulle. General Maxime Weygand. Former Prime Minister Paul Reynaud. Édouard Daladier, the man who signed Munich. General Gamelin, blamed by an entire nation for six weeks of catastrophe in 1940. Wimbledon champion Jean Borotra. The collapsed political and military leadership of France, locked together in a medieval prison — arguing about whose fault it all was, until the morning Waffen-SS troops under Hauptsturmführer Georg Bünger came up the access road and they picked up rifles.
Sergeant Kurt Schrader’s Sherman blocked the gate. Fire came from every wall. American soldiers, Wehrmacht regulars, and French prisoners of war, fighting side by side against the SS in the final hours of the deadliest war in human history.
Lee wrote afterward that nothing — not France, not the Bulge, not the Rhine — had prepared him to give orders to German soldiers and have them obey.
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📚 Further context / historical background:
— U.S. Army after-action reports, 12th Armored Division, May 1945
— Austrian resistance records, Tyrol region, 1944–1945
— French government archives on political prisoners held under German occupation
— Post-war testimonies from Castle Itter survivors and interrogation reports of captured SS personnel
#WWII #CastleItter #WorldWarII
Credit to : America’s Glory