American troops receive a warm welcome to Innsbruck on May 3, 1945; the next day some were diverted to Itter. (National Archives)

While all were French, the prisoners at Itter could not have been more politically diverse or more determinedly irascible

On the morning of May 4, 1945, 1st Lt. John C. “Jack” Lee Jr. sat cross-legged atop the turret of his M4 Sherman tank, comparing the Austrian countryside before him with the map that lay on his lap. For the last five months, Lee, a stocky twenty-seven-year-old from Norwich, New York, had led Company B of the 23rd Tank Battalion on a headlong advance across France, into Germany, and now—in what would turn out to be the last days of World War II in Europe—into the Austrian Tyrol.

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His tank, nicknamed “Besotten Jenny,” was parked on a low hill on the south bank of the Inn River, overlooking the village of Kufstein, three miles southwest of the German border. All three of the 23rd’s tank companies had crossed the frontier the day before, leading the 12th Armored Division’s Combat Command R on its drive southward from the suburbs of Munich. Lee’s company had spearheaded the drive into Kufstein, and had fought its way through a formidable German roadblock before clearing the town of its few defenders. Now, with the lead elements of the 36th Infantry Division moving in to assume responsibility for the area, Lee and his men could catch a few minutes’ rest.

Lee was profoundly tired and hoped that Kufstein would be Company B’s last battle. Like every other soldier in the European theater, he knew that the war could end at any moment—Berlin had surrendered two days earlier and organized German opposition was crumbling—and the young officer didn’t want any of his men to be the last American killed in “Krautland.”

Yet even as he pondered what the war’s end would mean to him and his fellow tankers, events were unfolding literally just down the road that would shatter his dreams of immediate peace. Lee was about to be thrust into an unlikely battle that would involve a mountain castle, a group of combative French VIPs, an uneasy alliance with the enemy, a fight to the death against overwhelming odds, and one of the last combat actions of World War II in Europe.

The castle that was soon to figure so largely in Lee’s life lay fourteen miles to the southwest of where he sat perched atop his tank. Topped with storybook crenelations and accompanied by a rich history, Schloss Itter, as it’s called in German, was first mentioned in land records as early as 1240. Since then, Itter has passed through a number of hands. After Germany’s March 1938 annexation of Austria, the castle’s robust construction and relatively remote location attracted the attention of the notoriously secretive Nazis. Within months of absorbing Austria into the Greater Reich, the German government requisitioned Castle Itter for unspecified “official use”—which included housing for several months in 1942 an organization called the “German Association for Combating the Dangers of Tobacco.” On February 7, 1943, it fell into new hands yet again, for on that day, the structure and all its outbuildings were requisitioned by the Wehrmacht on behalf of the SS.

Surviving records indicate that from the moment of its 1943 requisitioning, Itter was planned as a detention facility for VIP prisoners—those whom the Germans considered potentially valuable enough to be kept alive and housed in relatively decent conditions. Officially referred to as an Evakuierungslager, or evacuation camp, the castle was put under the operational control of the regional concentration camp command at Dachau, ninety miles to the northwest. As one of that sprawling death camp’s 197 satellite facilities in southern Germany and northern Austria, Itter drew its funding, guard force, and support services directly from its soon-to-be-infamous parent facility.

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