The Battle of Castle Itter

Enemies fighting side by side

The last battle of World War II in Europe also happened to be one of the strangest. A 19th century Austrian castle became the site where American troops, German Wehrmacht (Army) soldiers, political prisoners and an SS-officer fought side by side against a numerically superior, desperate and vengeful Waffen-SS unit in the last days of the war in Europe. This article is about the Battle of Castle Itter, fought 78 years ago, on May 5, 1945.
 
Castle Itter overlooks the village of the same name from atop a 2,185 ft (666 m) tall hill at the entrance of the Brixental valley in the Tyrolean Alps in Austria, near the German border. The current edifice was erected from 1879 onward, though earlier fortification had stood on the same site since at least 1241.
 
When Nazi Germany annexed Austria with the Anschluss in 1938, the German government leased the castle from its owner. It was first used as the administrative headquarters of a Nazi anti-smoking ad campaign, but it was seized by the SS in February 1943 and turned into a prison for French political prisoners. Notable inmates included Jean Borotra, a champion tennis player and former official in Vichy France; former prime ministers Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynauld; former commanders-in-chief Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin; François de La Rocque, a French fascist politician who also collaborated with British Intelligence; trade union leader Léon Jouhaux; Marie-Agnès Cailliau, the elder sister of Free French leader Charles de Gaulle; and Michel Clemenceau, the son of World War I French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. Some of the prisoners were allowed to bring family members or a secretary with them. The prison fell under the administrative authority of the Dachau concentration camp, and several Eastern European inmates were transported to the castle to act as servants and maintenance men.

The prisoners often squabbled over political differences, but they were generally treated well and were granted access to the castle library and the courtyard. They also managed to hide a radio with which they could listen to the BBC and follow the course of the war. In early 1945, with the Nazi state crumbling around them, they grew afraid that the many Waffen-SS units roaming the countryside might kill them out of spite rather than let them be liberated. In fact, they knew that the castle’s commander, SS Captain Sebastian Wimmer, had orders to do exactly that should the Allies arrive in unstoppable force. Wimmer earned a reputation for cruelty and brutality in his earlier postings, but he promised the prisoners to keep them safe even against his orders.

Many SS officers passed through the castle in late April while fleeing from advancing Allied forces. One of these men was Lieutenant Colonel Eduard Weiter, the former commander of Dachau. Weiter committed suicide on May 2 to avoid capture. The prisoners realized there was no guarantee that Wimmer would be around to protect them for long. They wrote a letter in English describing their plight and asking for help, and entrusted it to the care of Zvonimir Čučković, a Croatian handyman transferred from Dachau. Čučković left the castle on the morning of May 3 under the pretense of running an errand for Wimmer; this was a common occurrence, and the guards at the gate let him through.

On the same day, the 4th, Wimmer and his men decided to abandon the castle. The prisoners were left without any protection, no matter how dubious, and had not heard back from Čučković. Afraid for their lives, they wrote a second letter, which Czech cook Andreas Krobot agreed to take with him while he left on a bicycle in a second attempt to find Allied troops. The Germans have left the town of Wörgl by this point, and Krobot managed to make contact with the local Austrian resistance. They in turn took him to Wehrmacht Major Josef Gangl. Gangl was a veteran of the Eastern Front and of Normandy, who grew disillusioned with the Nazis. Once he was posted to Wögl with the last of his men, he contacted the local resistance and started supplying them with information and weapons. Gangl was sympathetic to the prisoners’ plight, but he only had 20 to 30 men still under his command and felt that any attempt to protect the castle would be suicidal. He did the only thing he could: he got in his Kübelwagen command car and set out in search of Americans who could help.

Meanwhile, the prisoners at the castle recruited another ally. Captain Kurt-Siegfried Schrader was a Waffen-SS officer. He was recuperating from his wounds in the village of Itter just below the castle, and was a frequent visitor who befriended some of the inmates. His friends reached out to him, and he agreed to go up to the castle with his wife and two daughters.

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