May 5th, 1945. Austria. The war in Europe had less than three days left, but up in the Tolian Alps, time didn’t feel like it was ending—it felt like it was about to explode.

Hitler was dead. German units were surrendering in waves. Roads all over the Reich were filling with men carrying white flags, trying to outrun the wrath of the advancing Allies and the vengeance of the Soviet front. In most places, the war was collapsing into exhaustion.

But high on a hill, a medieval fortress—stone walls, towers, narrow windows like old scars—stood like a final stubborn fist raised against the sky.

A castle.

And inside that castle, the strangest scene of World War II was forming—so strange that if you watched through binoculars, you would think you were hallucinating from hunger or shock.

On the castle walls, American soldiers fired machine guns.

Right beside them—shoulder to shoulder—stood German soldiers.

Not prisoners. Not captives.

Armed German soldiers, wearing Wehrmacht uniforms, firing down the hillside at other Germans.

And leading this impossible alliance were two men who looked like they belonged in completely different wars: an American tank commander who could have walked off a Hollywood set, cigar clenched in his teeth like it was part of his skeleton, and a German major whose only dream at this point was simple—go home alive with his men and without the SS deciding he deserved to die.

Below them, climbing the hill like angry insects, came the Waffen-SS: fanatical, furious, and still fighting for a Reich that was already dead.

Inside the castle were the most valuable prisoners the Nazis still held—French VIPs, men who used to run France, who had spent years trapped in what the transcript calls a “luxury cage.” They hated the Germans, but they also hated each other. They argued about politics while the SS guarded the doors, like bitter old lions forced into the same enclosure.

Now those old men were holding rifles.

A famous tennis star was preparing to sprint through a hail of bullets.

And the defenders had one tank.

One.

A Sherman tank with a name that sounded like it belonged to a cartoon or a pin-up poster: Besotten Jenny.

They had limited ammunition, no real reinforcements, and a hill full of SS troops who wanted every soul inside the walls dead.

This wasn’t a movie script.

This happened.

It remains the only time in history that the U.S. Army and the German Army fought as allies in World War II.

And it began because a German major did something that, just weeks earlier, would have seemed impossible.

He drove toward the Americans—not to fight them, but to ask them for help.

The castle that wasn’t a prison, but wasn’t freedom either

To understand why any of this happened, you have to understand what the castle was.

This wasn’t a normal POW camp. It wasn’t barbed wire and muddy barracks. It was a medieval stone fortress the Nazis had turned into a special kind of holding pen—an “honor prison,” a place meant to keep high-profile enemies alive, but powerless.

Inside were the French VIPs the Nazis didn’t want to shoot—yet.

Men like:

• Édouard Daladier, former prime minister of France.

• Paul Reynaud, another former prime minister.

• General Maxime Weygand, former head of the French Army.

• Jean Borotra, famous tennis star.

They were famous, influential, symbolic. They had value.

But value doesn’t always equal safety—especially when the SS is involved.

These men had been kept alive for years, but it wasn’t comfort. It was captivity with a coat of polish. A “luxury cage,” as the transcript says. Enough privilege to keep them breathing, enough restraint to keep them broken.

They spent years arguing—about politics, about blame, about who betrayed France and how. The Germans guarded the doors, watching French leaders devour each other with words while the world burned.

But by May 1945, the guards were getting nervous.

Because the war was lost.

And the SS knew what that meant.

The SS commander assigned to the castle—Sebastian Wimmer (as named in the transcript)—understood that if the Americans reached him, he wouldn’t get a polite surrender and a comfortable prison cell. He would be arrested, tried, maybe executed. He had orders from Himmler—cold and absolute:

No prisoner leaves alive.

No VIP survives to tell stories. No famous French leaders walk free and become living proof of SS crimes.

So on May 4th, Wimmer looked at the approaching American lines, looked at the SS units roaming the forests nearby, and made a choice that was both cowardly and revealing.

He ran.

The SS guards fled.

And suddenly, the French VIPs were “free.”

But freedom in a castle surrounded by SS is just a different shape of prison.

Because outside those walls were woods filled with the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division—diehard Nazis, executing anyone who tried to surrender, hunting “traitors,” hunting deserters, hunting the last scraps of obedience.

If the French walked out, the SS would massacre them.

So the prisoners armed themselves with weapons the guards left behind.

But they were old men.

They weren’t soldiers.

They needed help.

And they found it in the last place anyone would have guessed: a German major in a nearby town who was trying to surrender—but not to the SS.

Major Josef Gangl: the German who didn’t want to die for Nazis anymore

A few miles away, in the town of Wörgl (the transcript spells it “Veral”), Major Joseph Gangl was fighting a different war—the war of keeping his men alive while the Reich collapsed.

Gangl was Wehrmacht, regular army. He wasn’t SS. He wasn’t one of the fanatics who wanted to die screaming “Heil Hitler” in the rubble. The transcript calls him a hero of the Russian front, but also something dangerous in Nazi Germany:

Anti-Nazi.

He had been secretly helping the Austrian resistance.

He understood what the SS was planning. Blow bridges, fight to the death, punish any talk of surrender. Drag civilians into the grave with them.

Gangl didn’t want that.

He wanted to save the town.

He wanted to save his men.

He wanted to surrender to someone who wouldn’t shoot him for surrendering.

Then a messenger arrived from the castle—a Czech cook who had ridden a bicycle through SS lines, carrying a message that turned Gangl’s situation into a moral trap.

“The French leaders are trapped,” the cook told him. “The SS is coming to kill them.”

Gangl faced a dilemma that would have sounded ridiculous just months earlier:

He couldn’t fight the SS alone.

He didn’t have enough men.

But he also couldn’t let the SS murder those French VIPs, not now, not when the war was already ending. The transcript frames it in a way that reveals something about Gangl’s inner compass: it would be a stain on Germany’s honor.

Maybe that sounds naive—talking about honor when the Reich had become a machine of atrocity. But for a Wehrmacht officer who wasn’t SS, there was still a line in his mind: not everything done in Germany’s name was Germany.

And if the SS slaughtered French prime ministers in a castle while the Americans were practically at the doorstep, history would not just condemn the SS. It would condemn Germany as a whole.

Gangl decided he couldn’t allow that.

So he did something insane.

He grabbed a white flag.

He climbed into his Kübelwagen jeep.

And he drove toward the American lines.

Not to fight.

To find a friend.

Captain John “Jack” Lee and the Sherman named Besotten Jenny

Eight miles away in the town of Kufstein (“Kushstein” in the transcript), the U.S. 12th Armored Division had just arrived. Their reconnaissance was led by a man who sounded like he belonged in a war movie even before the castle battle turned into one.

Captain John “Jack” Lee.

Cigar-chomping. Loud. Tough. The kind of commander who seemed to radiate confidence and danger at the same time. The transcript describes him like a Hollywood set walked into the Alps and recruited a tank commander.

His tank was resting—a Sherman named Besotten Jenny.

Then a German vehicle approached with a white flag.

Lee put his hand on his pistol.

This could be a trick. A trap. An SS deception.

But the German officer didn’t shoot.

He saluted.

It was Major Gangl.

Gangl explained the situation in broken English, words carrying urgency but also something else—something rare in May 1945.

Captain, we have French VIPs trapped.

The SS is coming.

I want to help you save them.

A German major asking Americans to join forces against the SS.

It sounded unreal.

Lee looked at Gangl and, in any other situation, the correct response would have been simple: detain him, disarm him, interrogate him. Do not trust the enemy.

But Lee was a gambler.

He chewed his cigar.

He looked at the map.

And he said the line that, in the transcript, marks the moment history bends:

“All right, Fritz… let’s go get ’em.”

Then he radioed headquarters: he was taking a rescue mission to the castle—and he was taking the German major with him.

His superiors thought he was crazy.

But they gave him the green light.

Because the war was ending, and sometimes endings create windows where impossible things can happen.

Lee gathered a small force:

• Two tanks,

• Seven infantrymen,

• And Gangl’s truckload of Wehrmacht soldiers.

A convoy that looked like a hallucination: an American tank leading, a German truck behind it, driving together into SS territory.

Fighting uphill into a fairy tale that wanted to become a massacre

The road to the castle wound through the mountains. It should have been quiet, but nothing was quiet in May 1945. The forests were full of SS units, some still believing in victory, others believing only in vengeance.

They ran into SS roadblocks.

Besotten Jenny blasted them out of the way.

The German soldiers in the truck fired their Mauser rifles at the SS.

Enemy and enemy—now fighting side by side because the SS had become the common predator.

They pushed uphill until the castle rose ahead, dark against the sky.

The French VIPs came out to meet them.

They expected a massive American army.

Instead, they saw one tank, seven Americans, and a bunch of Germans.

Confusion rippled through the French group like wind.

“Where is the rest of the army?” they asked.

Captain Lee climbed out of his tank, grinning.

“I am it.”

Then he took command.

He was only a captain, but he ordered French prime ministers around like privates.

“Get inside,” he told them.

“Stay away from the windows.”

He placed Besotten Jenny right in front of the main gate, aimed down the road like a metal fist. He put the Germans on the walls. He put his American infantry in the towers.

And he told Major Gangl:

“You watch the south wall. I’ll watch the gate.”

Gangl saluted.

For the first time in five years, German and American soldiers shared cigarettes.

Shared food.

Checked each other’s weapons.

They knew that when the sun came up, they might all die together.

Fog lifts. The SS arrives.

Morning of May 5th.

The fog lifted.

And then the first shot.

About 150 men from the 17th SS Panzer Grenadiers appeared—mortars, machine guns, anti-tank weapons. They were furious, not just because Americans were there, but because they saw German soldiers—Gangl’s men—shooting at them from the walls.

To the SS, Gangl wasn’t a fellow German officer.

He was a traitor.

The SS focused fire on the castle. Bullets chipped ancient stone. Mortar rounds thumped into the hillside. The defenders returned fire from windows, towers, and parapets.

The French VIPs, to their credit, didn’t hide.

Reynaud and Daladier grabbed rifles and started shooting from windows.

Even Jean Borotra, the tennis star, joined the fight.

But the SS had a bigger weapon.

An 88mm anti-tank gun.

They aimed it at the gate.

At Besotten Jenny.

The shell hit.

The Sherman burst into flames.

The American crew bailed out just in time.

And in one violent moment, the defenders lost their only heavy weapon.

Now it was rifles against an army.

Captain Lee ran from position to position, calm in a way that felt almost unreal. He cut the fuse on his last cigar, as if the act itself was a ritual that told the world he wasn’t afraid.

“Don’t worry,” he told his men. “They have to come through the gate—and we’ll pile them up like cordwood.”

The battle raged for hours.

Ammunition dwindled.

The SS crawled closer, using cover, probing for weakness, preparing to storm the walls.

And on the wall, Major Gangl directed fire like a man who knew exactly what the SS would do once they broke through.

Then he saw something that made him abandon caution.

Paul Reynaud—prime minister, VIP, a man who had spent years arguing in captivity—was standing in the open, exposed to fire.

Gangl ran to him.

“Get down!” he shouted.

He shoved Reynaud out of the line of fire.

A sniper’s bullet caught Gangl in the chest.

He fell.

The German major died saving a French politician.

He died fighting for the Americans against his own country’s fanatics.

And he was the only defender killed in the battle.

A German became the hero of the defense.

And the defenders were nearly out of bullets.

The tank was destroyed.

The SS were preparing the final assault.

The moment that decides whether everyone dies

It was noon.

Captain Lee checked ammunition.

Almost dry.

The radio in the tank was destroyed, so he couldn’t call the main American force.

The castle was running out of time.

Then Jean Borotra stepped forward.

“I will go,” he said. “I am fast. I can run.”

It sounded suicidal.

But Borotra didn’t wait for permission.

He vaulted over the wall.

Sprinted across an open field.

The SS fired at him. Bullets kicked dirt around his feet.

He dodged.

He weaved.

And he vanished into the woods.

He ran for miles until he found an American relief column coming up the road. He ran up to the lead tank, breathless, and gasped out the only words that mattered:

“The castle… they are dying… you must hurry.”

Back at the castle, the SS launched their final attack.

They reached the gate.

They began blowing it open.

Captain Lee told his men to fix bayonets.

Hand-to-hand in the courtyard was next.

The Germans checked their magazines—empty.

And then a sound arrived that didn’t belong to the SS.

Engines.

Heavy engines.

Around the bend came the 142nd Infantry Regiment—Sherman tanks, hundreds of soldiers.

They opened fire.

The SS realized they were trapped, suddenly the hunted instead of the hunters.

They scattered into the woods.

The siege was broken.

American relief soldiers poured into the castle and found Captain Lee—tired, face blackened with smoke, cigar still there like an insult to death itself.

Lee looked at the relief commander, pulled the cigar from his mouth, and said:

“What took you so long?”

The prisoners were saved.

The French VIPs were driven to safety.

Within days, the war in Europe was officially over.

Captain Jack Lee received the Distinguished Service Cross. He went home to New York, opened a hotel, and never bragged about the battle.

Major Joseph Gangl was buried in the town of Wörgl (Veral in the transcript). He is remembered as a hero in Austria—so much so that a street bears his name. The German soldier who died fighting Nazis.

And the battle for the castle became one of history’s strangest proofs of something people don’t like to admit during war:

Humanity can survive even inside madness.

Enemies can become friends.

Men can choose to do the right thing, even when everything around them says the right thing is useless.

Years later, when people asked Jack Lee about it, he would smile and say:

“It was the weirdest thing I ever saw. Me and the Krauts fighting side by side.”

And the question remains—because it’s the kind of question history leaves like a thorn:

Was Major Gangl a traitor to Germany… or a hero to humanity?

On that hill, under SS fire, the answer didn’t live in flags.

It lived in what he did.

He raised a white flag not to surrender to evil, but to stop it.

He asked the enemy for help because the real enemy had become the fanatics in his own uniform.

And when the moment came, he died pushing a French prisoner out of a sniper’s line—an act that made no sense in Nazi logic, and perfect sense in human logic.

That’s what he “said,” in the end.

Not with words.

With his choice.