Battle of Castle Itter
battle year 1945 in which U.S. infantry and armour, Wehrmacht Heer, French prisoners and Austrian partisans took Castle Itter from the occupying Waffen SS
The Battle of Castle Itter was fought on 5 May 1945, in the Austrian village of Itter in the North Tyrol region of the country, during the last days of the European Theater of World War II.
Troops of the 23rd Tank Battalion of the 12th Armored Division of the US XXI Corps led by Lieutenant John C. "Jack" Lee Jr, a number of Wehrmacht soldiers led by Major Josef "Sepp" Gangl, SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt-Siegfried Schrader, and recently freed French prisoners of war defended Castle Itter against an attacking force from the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division until relief from the American 142nd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Division of XXI Corps arrived.
The battle is one of two known times during the war in which Americans and Germans fought side by side, the other being Operation Cowboy, and the only known time where an active member of the Waffen-SS fought on the Allied side. Popular accounts have called it the strangest battle of World War II.
Background
Itter Castle is a small castle on a hill near the village of Itter in Austria. After the 1938 Anschluss, the German government officially leased the castle in late 1940 from its owner, Franz Grüner.
The castle was seized from Grüner by SS Lieutenant General Oswald Pohl under the orders of Heinrich Himmler on 7 February 1943. The transformation of the castle into a prison was completed by 25 April 1943, and the facility was placed under the administration of the Dachau concentration camp.
The prison was established to contain high-profile French prisoners valuable to the Reich. Notable prisoners included tennis player Jean Borotra, former prime ministers Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, former commanders-in-chief Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, Charles de Gaulle’s elder sister Marie-Agnès de Gaulle, right-wing leader and French resistance member François de La Rocque, and trade union leader Léon Jouhaux. Besides the VIP prisoners, the castle held a number of Eastern European prisoners detached from Dachau, who were used for maintenance and other menial work.
Prelude
On 3 May 1945, Zvonimir Čučković, an imprisoned Yugoslav communist resistance member from Croatia who worked as a handyman at the prison, left the castle under the pretext of performing an errand for the prison's commander Sebastian Wimmer.
The public source identifies “Battle of Castle Itter” as battle year 1945 in which U.S. infantry and armour, Wehrmacht Heer, French prisoners and Austrian partisans took Castle Itter from the occupying Waffen SS. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Battle, Castle and Itter.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14303815. Authority coordinates are 47.471, 12.140. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1938, 1940 and 1943.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Castle Itter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.