CLASSIC: Castle Itter: When Germans and Americans Joined Forces in World War II

Fellow ridiculous historians we are returning with a classic episode now as any student of history knows uh american and german forces didn't really get along during world war.

Ii no sure didn't uh however sometimes there's a bit of an exception and that in this case is a little something called the battle of.

Castle itter this is a cinematic story so much so that no i almost don't want to spoil it other than just saying the name.

Ben, you couldn't spoil it for me if you tried. No recollection of this one either.

Castle Itter, when Germans and Americans joined forces in World War II.

Sounds nice. Let's roll the tape.

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you for tuning in. If you were ever a fan of video games, you were probably aware at some point of the video game franchise Wolfenstein II. 3D first-person shooter wherein you're obliterating Nazis. It's a lot of fun. It scared me as a kid. Hi, I'm Ben.

Hi, I'm Noel. So, Ben, you played the Wolfenstein? Wolfenstein? Steen?

3D?

Yeah. I can't remember if it was 3D, but it was on a PC, and it was sort of the, in my childhood mind, it was like the lighter version of another similar game called Doom.

Right, right. It's the predecessor. I think it's the predecessor. Yeah, it is.

That's correct.

And that's our super producer, Casey Pegram.

Yeah, Wolfenstein was like pseudo 3D. It's really just 2D. It's just moving a bunch of 2D sprites around to make it feel like 3D. Doom was kind of like.

What is this nerd talk? What is this sprites?

It was a little more two and a half D. And then Quake is where they made the big jump to full 3D.

To actual 3D. Casey on the case. I am also pleasantly surprised that you have some thoughts on this matter, huh?

I was a diehard gamer in the 90s, yeah.

Oh, wow.

I have not cared about it in a long time.

So sprites are just kind of the building blocks of these games.

They're like the characters.

Yeah, yeah. They're like the elements you move around, basically.

But like they're even textures and stuff, right?

Isn't that?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so sprites. this is where my knowledge runs out, but I think, you know, like nowadays it's all about textures. Cause you have like surfaces and you're applying the textures to them. The Sprite was kind of like all in one, like it was the character, but also the texture. Cause it was like a drawing.

That's cool.

Yeah.

This, this is strange because like many people in the West who grew up in a post world war two environment, we, whenever there was like an evil army, uh, Easily, I'm just going to make up the statistic, easily 8.62 times out of 10, that evil army would be represented by the Nazis or something like the Nazi party, which is strange when you look back. But it was very common to have games wherein a person is fighting against Nazi forces just the way that some modern fighting games have people fighting against North Korean forces or somewhere in the Middle East. Today's story is about Nazis, and it's got a lot of cool stuff in here. We've got a spooky castle, right?

Yeah, hence the Wolfenstein reference because I believe Wolfenstein in the parlance of the game was this giant fortress that you're traversing, like all the different floors.

Yes. Thank you. I totally forgot. That is why we're talking about Wolfenstein.

We're also talking about killing Nazis. Ah, yes.

Someone's got to do it. So we can go ahead and set the stage for World War II very, very quickly. It's the global conflict that lasted from 1939 to 1945, and it involved Axis powers and Allied powers. Often, at least in the U.S., it is painted as a war with a few prime actors. You know, they'll say, yes, Japan and the U.S.

Fought.

Yes, Europeans helped out. That's how they'll put it. They'll be like, Europeans helped out American forces, but really it was America versus Germany. That's a vast oversimplification.

It really is, but that's what we do here on Ridiculous History. Vast oversimplification.

Is that it?

That's our bread and butter, my man.

Well, it is painted. You know, a lot of countries do that. If you read a textbook somewhere else, they're going to have their own country's take on World War II, and the American take is, you know, pretty America-centric, right?

Absolutely.

What we have in today's episode, though, is a very rare— case of cooperation between these parties, right? And an unprecedented move to kind of, like, when everything hit.

The fan, right? You know, so the war's coming to an end.

Hitler's eating his suicide pill and shot himself in the face. That's the thing I remember most about Wolfenstein, by the way. You have to fight Hitler in the end. Spoiler alert for a game that's, like, 30, 40 years old. He's in a giant mech suit.

Yeah, it's awesome.

And at the end, when you kill him, he says, Eva, auf Wiedersehen, referring to his wife, Eva Braun.

Right.

So, so Mech Hitler has been annihilated at this point in the, you know, alternate history version of World War II. And this castle becomes the site of an unusual union.

Yes, this is Castle Itter. And today we're exploring the story of the only time that Americans and Germans fought as allies during World War II. So Itter Castle is is a 19th century castle in a village called Itter in Austria. And it looks spooky. It looks like something out of, I don't know, it looks like the kind of castle Hellboy runs into in the Mike Mignola stories. Absolutely.

I mean, it definitely haunted as hell seeming.

And just for fun, let's see what Forvo says about the pronunciation of this castle. Itta.

I got it.

Itta.

I love the German intensity. And we're going to get into some fun German words in this episode.

But it's true.

It looks like something out of, like, a fractured, haunted, grim, grim, grim fairy tale. It's topped with those cool little, you know, crenellations that are the separated little turrets in between the walls where you can shoot, you know, arrows or whatever.

The pattern that looks like one side of a zipper.

That's exactly right. And it has a very, very.

Rich history at first shows up in around 1244 in German land records. And then it's been passed through several different owners, different hands. In 1938, when Germany annexed Austria, the castle became a very sought-after site for all the secret weird stuff that Nazis were getting into.

It's true. The Reich government officially leased the castle in 1940. from its owner at the time, one Franz Gruner. And the castle went through some weird things because after they had leased it or requisitioned it for their very vaguely phrased official use, it went through a couple of iterations. It was, for a while, it was the swank offices of an organization called the German Association for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco. Because say what you will about Nazis.

They understood that tobacco was dangerous. True.

They were sticklers for health, although it doesn't take away from the image of the, you know, imperially slim SS officer with a cigarette holder and an eye patch, you know.

But I could still be hearkening back to our video game.

And then, like, think about this, though. How amazing is that to have your office be a castle? It didn't last. On February 7th, 1943— The entire structure and all the accompanying buildings were requisitioned by SS Lieutenant General Oswald Pohl under the orders of Heinrich Himmler. And then it was transformed into a prison, but not just any prison.

No, not just any prison.

And it was associated with probably the most notorious site ever. in all of, like, Nazi involvement in World War II, which would be the Dachau Concentration Camp, which operated the facility, which they referred to as a— oh, boy, I'm going to do my best on this one— evacuee rungschlager, which means an evacuation camp.

I love how the etymology is so interesting.

Like, evacuee is spelled E-V-A-K-U-I-E, and then the American word is, you know, evacuation, evacuate. So the castle was already— you know, an impenetrable fortress. I mean, with these high walls and those turrets we talked about, but they transformed it even further, adding on to features that already existed, like these huge walls.

They had a moat.

It had this gatehouse that was very, very difficult to penetrate. And they added these tangles of multi-layers of barbed wire, or they call it concertina wire, which I guess is the really, really skinny, like, razor wire that'll slice right through you. and then they refitted it with these very complex locks and essentially rendered the facility absolutely impregnable to either get into or get out of.

Twenty of the existing guest rooms in the central housing structure were converted into secure but pretty roomy cells. Others were turned into guard rooms and offices. These were not cells for your typical office. a political protester or petty criminal. This became a home for VIP French prisoners of war. Yeah.

Folks like, uh, the two former prime ministers of France. There was, uh, Paul Renault, Renault, Casey on the case.

Renault.

Oh, Renault.

And then we have Eduard, uh, Daladier, D-A-L-A-D-I-E-R, huh? Daladier. Yeah. Daladier. Got it. Uh, And I know this one, General Charles de Gaulle. Charles de Gaulle. Yeah, see, Charles. I love this.

It's my favorite part of the show when Casey gets to correct our pronunciations. The older sister, in fact, of General Charles de Gaulle. Not a hard S on the end, just a Charles.

That's right. Okay. And her name was Marie Agnes Callelou.

Marie Agnes Callelou, probably.

Casey on the case.

Oh.

So we have a firsthand account about the conversion of the castle into a prison by Hans Fuchs. Hans saw every— he was growing up in the area. Hans says, we saw everything from our school window, the double barbed wire fence, the floodlights, so that the whole night was lit up like the day. But again, Schloss Itter, or the Castle Itter, was a subunit of the Dachau concentration camp's And they wanted the people who were imprisoned in this castle to be relatively well cared for so that they could be used as bargaining chips. We will give you one of the former prime ministers if you give us this other stuff.

But the problem here for Castle Itter was that they were existing in the last days of the war, like May 1945. It's pretty clear how things are going to shake out. The German guards at the prison run away, but the French prisoners are trapped, and the woods around the castle are full of roaming, desperate units of SS and Gestapo.

Not necessarily in mech suits, but we weren't there.

Mech suits are amazing. I'm just going to say. I know that they've been used for evil purposes in fiction, but they're just, they're like one of my favorite things.

You've got some figures on your desk, don't you? Models. Yeah, from Pacific Rim. Oh, no. Okay.

From Pacific Rim. And those are huge mechs. But, you know, I'm a sucker for it. Tell me your favorite mechs. Ridiculous at iHeartRadio.com.

Please do.

Yeah.

We should just have an email box just for favorite mechs. at iHeartRadio.com. The newer iterations, I know we keep harping on this, but the newer iterations of the Wolfenstein games are super cool and involve a lot more of this future tech that we're talking about, like the big robot suits, and they have robot SS dogs and all this stuff, and they get really intense.

The last few were quite difficult, in fact.

I haven't played it in years and years and years. To me, this story feels like something... very Inglorious Bastards-esque, you know? It feels like there's some Tarantino inspiration here because the French prisoners know that if they try to escape, they will be discovered. So through some internal mechanism, perhaps they're drawing straws or maybe some brave souls volunteered, the French prisoners send out two prisoners on bicycles to try to find help. According to Stephen Harding, author of a book called The Last Battle, One of these French prisoners found a German major, Josef, I'm just going to spell the last name, G-A-N-G-L, Gangl.

I like it.

He was a highly decorated Wehrmacht officer, and he had become opposed to the Nazis and was collaborating with the local resistance in Austria.

That is so interesting. Can we discuss a little bit the difference between the Nazis and the Wehrmacht Republic?

Oh, good question. Yeah, because there is a difference and it gives us a little insight into the motivation of this major.

It does.

And again, a little bit of a surfacy discussion of this, but the Nazi party, you know, essentially took over a pre-existing Germany with the attempt to make it a one-party system. But the Wehrmacht... soldiers were already, you know, in place before the Nazis took over. The Nazis, like including like the SS and the Gestapo and the Nazi soldiers were required to really have this ethnic cleansing kind of ideology, you know, in a very fanatical way. Whereas the Wehrmacht soldiers, some of them might have been whole hog into the Nazi way of thinking. Some of them might have been, you know, a little more old school or like, or the way they liked things before the Nazis came in.

So that totally makes sense that this guy would have, been one of the ones who maybe wasn't as fanatical at all and was into helping the resistance.

Absolutely. You can picture him saying the German army used to stand for something noble. Long story short, this was the perfect guy for these French prison scouts to meet. And the major thinks, well, I can't protect these prisoners. I only have 20 soldiers that I can count on.

That's right.

So, He takes a huge white flag, which is, you know, the universal symbol for coming in peace. And he finds the closest American unit, the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division. led by a guy named Captain Jack Lee.

Oh, Captain Jack.

Well, led by a guy named Jack Lee, who was a captain. His first name was not Captain Jack Lee, though that would be really cool. I still will refer to him henceforth as Captain Jack.

And Lee was down. He was like, okay, let's do this.

And he offered to lead a rescue mission.

Very daring.

Rescue mission to the impenetrable Castle Ita. Yeah, so this is strange.

The Americans, as you said, Noel, they go with this Wehrmacht major and they park their tank close to the castle entrance. On May 5th in the morning, the SS finally attacks. They blow up the tank, but they're unable to storm the castle and And this is about five days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30th. So things are already very, very desperate on the German side.

You know what? Before we go too, too far, we should examine those two people they sent out for help and learn a little bit more about them. Because I had said earlier that two of the French prisoners went out on bicycle, right? That's not entirely true. One of the guys was their Yugoslavian handyman, and he actually, he's the first guy who went out. He found some U.S.

troops in Innsbruck, but because the castle was outside of their jurisdiction, they didn't all go. Major John T. Kramers had a crisis of conscience and sent a small rescue group, but the French VIP folks in Itter had not heard back from him So the person they sent who actually found Gungle and Captain Jack C. Lee, that was their cook.

So they were sending out the help.

Yeah, exactly.

Because let's not forget, these were, let's call them. high value prisoners, right? Folks that they could leverage. They wanted to keep alive and they wanted them to live in at least relatively comfortable environments, almost like Julian Assange in the embassy kind of situation. Free to move around the facilities, adequate, you know, comfortable quarters and food and all of that.

But at this point, these folks were very much in fear of their lives. They could either be executed summarily just to get rid of any witnesses or whatever. You know, at this point, it was like a scorched earth kind of situation for the Germans, right?

They're trying to, like, get rid of any evidence.

Point being is you would not have felt very safe with all of these Nazis in full freak-out mode, right?

Agreed.

And the battle that takes place is terrifying. in some ways astonishing because the defenders were vastly outnumbered. They were fighting about 100 to 150 SS troops. Eventually, the attackers shoot and kill the Wehrmacht Major Gangl. As I mentioned, they destroyed the tank. They damaged the castle walls. Even the prisoners are joining in with small arms they found after the guards ran away originally. The battle lasts for about six hours, and things are looking increasingly dire. The Allied forces, that would be the German forces and the prisoners and the U.S. forces, are running out of ammunition.

And then, the last moment, the way that all great battles go in works of fiction and so on, just as they were getting down to their last bullets, a column of tanks, that small rescue party, organized by John Kramers, arrives in the afternoon and scatters the SS forces. And this Hans Fuchs kid, who's 14 at the time, was watching it all from his family's farm. He's seen clouds of dust and smoke and machine gun fire that goes on and on for hours. That's the battle. Oh, they take prisoners.

Well, you got to take some prisoners. They got a castle at their disposal. I mean, they might as well make good use of it, right?

I know, right?

It's like you have to have a moat.

They called it a dry moat though, Ben. What does that mean? that doesn't sound as scary as a wet moat full of like alligators right.

Yeah i guess a dry moat is just a circular ditch.

Yeah but i guess it would it would certainly make it you know you couldn't like cross it with a tank or something like that right it limits your path Right.

Into and out of the facility.

The incline is probably so steep and so wide that you can only cross over a bridge.

That's it. That makes perfect sense. So about 100 SS.

Troops are taken prisoner. That's according to a report from the BBC. And the only fatality on the Allied side there was Major Gongle, who later was buried in a nearby town and had a street named after him.

Did we talk about the commander who killed himself?

We did not.

So this is backtracking just a little bit, but I just think it's interesting because this is, you know, a very dramatic end, right? So, I mean, once it was very clear that things were not going their way, they were losing ground, you know, by the second, the actual commander of Dachau turned tail and ran to Castle Ytter as it was being liberated by the troops, and then he killed himself on May the 2nd. And that's when the castle's own commandant, and the guards took off, and that was what left the prisoners in charge of their own destiny, kind of, right?

So then they were able to, you know, but they were still locked inside, right?

Yes. So later, after they start picking up the pieces of the conflict, caring for the wounded, getting rid of the dead, the French VIPs are driven off. They're on their way back to Innsbruck, and then they're going to be met by senior Allied officers, and then they would return to France to resume their careers. But for the U.S. forces, this was a little bit, not a letdown, an anticlimactic ending.

The seven Americans and their surviving soldiers of the Vermont, because remember, Gongle commanded 20 soldiers. They all piled in the back of a truck, And they took a ride back to a place called Kufstein. And once there, the Germans are marched off to a POW camp. The soldiers rejoin their unit. And you should mention these are African-American soldiers.

And Lee, Harry Bass, and the other tankers just, like, called it a day. They did eventually get recognized for their leadership. Captain Jack Lee received the Distinguished Service Cross. And Harry Bass received the Silver Star.

And it did turn some heads over in the States.

On July 1945, there was a piece that ran in the Saturday Evening Post. And there's a lovely quote that summed up the whole thing, I think, remarkably well. It was from Lee himself, the American tank commander.

And he referred to it as being, quote, just the damnedest thing ever.

Aw, shucks. And that is where we will leave the story. I think that Lee summed it up best. We want to hear your strange stories about wartime, you know, because war is a terrible, terrible thing, but they're also inspiring and sometimes beautiful moments that happen in the midst of all that chaos. Like the time, the times that opposing forces stop fighting each other and go hang out for Christmas, right?

That's actually happened before. So let us know what sort of moving or strange or just downright ridiculous stories you have encountered in your own reading or in your own experience. And let us know on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can find us as a show. You can find us individually. I am at Ben Bullen on Instagram.

I am at HowNowNoelBrown on Instagram as well.

And if you want to check out our Facebook community, you can do so at The Ridiculous Historians.

All you have to do is name me, Ben, or Casey on the case or make us laugh.

Big, big thanks, as always, to super producer Casey Pegram, research associates Gabe Luzia, and Ryan Barish.

Huge thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Our pal Christopher Haciotis, here always in spirit. Damn you, the quizster.

Damn your eyes. And we hope to see you again back on the show.

Very soon, because I really enjoyed those segments, despite putting up a tough front.

We're overdue. I'd love to have him back on the show.

Absolutely. And you know who else I'd love to have back on the show, Ben?

Who's that?

You.

Because you're the co-host of the show, and you do a great job, and I really appreciate you.

Wait, who's not going to get on the show?

What?

What, are you firing people?

You can't fire people. I'm not firing anybody. I'm just saying I look forward to the next time we do this.

That was a roundabout way of saying that. And I look forward to you folks, you fine folks out there in podcast land joining us.

Yeah, it's no smoke when we say reach out. We would love to hear your thoughts. You are our favorite part of the show, so thank you for tuning in.

See you next time, folks.

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CLASSIC: Castle Itter: When Germans and Americans Joined Forces in World War II

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