American GIs And German Defectors Fought Side By Side Against The SS In WWII's Strangest Battle

Discover how the structural assumption of total war between the American and German armies, an assumption built across three and a half years of continuous combat from North Africa to the Elbe River and reinforced by hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides, was briefly suspended on a single afternoon at a medieval Austrian castle three days before the German surrender, when fourteen American soldiers of the 23rd Tank Battalion, ten Wehrmacht soldiers of a defected German Army detachment, a defected Waffen-SS captain, and a group of armed French former heads of state fought together against an attacking Waffen-SS unit that had been ordered to execute the prisoners and burn the castle before the Allied advance could arrive. The American Army's institutional categories did not contain a slot for joint operations with Wehrmacht soldiers, the German Army's institutional categories did not contain a slot for white-flag requests for American assistance, and the war as a whole did not have a category for what the men present at Schloss Itter on May 5 of 1945 were about to do. This meticulously researched 7,294-word historical account traces the convergence of facts that produced the strangest engagement of the European war: the seizure of Schloss Itter by the SS in February 1943 as a special prison administered under the Dachau concentration camp system, the assembly of French political prisoners including former Prime Ministers Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, former Army Commanders Maurice Gamelin and Maxime Weygand, future Nobel laureate Léon Jouhaux, Charles de Gaulle's sister Marie-Agnès Cailliau, the son of Georges Clemenceau, and the Wimbledon tennis champion Jean Borotra, the secret Resistance work of Wehrmacht Major Josef Sepp Gangl in the Tyrolean town of Wörgl, the independent defection of Waffen-SS Captain Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, the white-flag meeting between Gangl and American Captain John C. Lee Jr. on a country road outside Wörgl on the afternoon of May 4 1945, Lee's decision to commit his M4 Sherman Besotten Jenny and fourteen men to the relief of the castle, the dawn attack on May 5 by elements of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, the destruction of Besotten Jenny by an 88-millimeter anti-tank gun, the death of Major Gangl by an SS sniper while protecting former Prime Minister Reynaud, the cross-country run of tennis champion Jean Borotra to American lines, and the arrival of the 142nd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Infantry Division in the late afternoon to break the siege, ultimately proving that the categories of total war, however thoroughly built across years of mutual destruction, are not the deepest level at which soldiers operate, and that men confronted with specific moral situations make specific moral decisions that institutional structures do not predict.

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