The Only Time U.S. Soldiers Fought Beside German Soldiers Against the SS in WWII

May 5, 1945. Europe had less than forty-eight hours of war remaining. Adolf Hitler was dead. Berlin was in ruins. Yet high in the Austrian Alps, inside a twelfth-century fortress called Castle Itter, one final battle was about to unfold—unlike anything in military history. Twenty-three-year-old Captain John C. Lee of the U.S. 12th Armored Division drove through the darkness with a single Sherman tank and a small force of infantry. His mission began with a desperate handwritten plea delivered by Zvonimir Čučković, a Yugoslav resistance courier and former soccer player who had escaped the castle and crossed the mountains to find American troops. At a lonely crossroads, beneath a makeshift white flag, Lee encountered an unlikely ally: Major Josef Gangl, a decorated Wehrmacht officer who had secretly turned against the Nazi regime. Only days earlier they had been enemies. Now they would fight together. Inside Castle Itter, the SS had received a chilling order: execute the Ehrenhäftlinge—the "honor prisoners"—before the Americans arrived. Leave no witnesses. These were no ordinary captives. Among them were Marie-Agnès Cailliau, sister of Charles de Gaulle; Generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin; former French Prime Ministers Paul Reynaud and Édouard Daladier; and Wimbledon champion Jean Borotra. France's most prominent political and military figures—once divided by blame over the nation's collapse in 1940—now found themselves trapped together behind medieval walls. Then Waffen-SS troops under Hauptsturmführer Georg Bünger advanced up the castle road. The prisoners took up rifles. Sergeant Kurt Schrader positioned his Sherman tank at the main gate. Bullets tore through the stone walls as American soldiers, Wehrmacht troops loyal to Gangl, Austrian resistance fighters, and French VIP prisoners fought side by side against the Waffen-SS. It became the only known battle of World War II in which American and German soldiers fought together against a common Nazi enemy. Lee later admitted that nothing he had experienced—not the fighting in France, the Battle of the Bulge, or the crossing of the Rhine—had prepared him for the surreal moment of issuing orders to German soldiers and watching them carry them out without hesitation. 👍 If stories like this deserve to be remembered, subscribe. We uncover the extraordinary moments history almost forgot. Further Reading & Historical Sources U.S. Army after-action reports, 12th Armored Division (May 1945) Austrian resistance records from the Tyrol, 1944–1945 French government archives on political prisoners under German occupation Postwar testimonies from Castle Itter survivors and interrogation reports of captured SS personnel #WWII #CastleItter #WorldWarII