By May 1945, Lester Leggett had seen his fair share of combat. As a member of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion, an element of the 36th Infantry Division, the grizzled GI had fought all the way up the Italian Peninsula and into southern France. Along the way he was wounded by shell fragments, buzzed by a pair of Messerschmitt Me-109s in farm country, ran headlong into a German convoy in woods and tumbled down a steep mountain embankment when the road gave way under his jeep. Still, it was an unexpected mission to seize Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring in the days immediately after the shooting stopped that he remembers as among his most tense and potentially hazardous. In an interview with David Lesjak, Leggett shares his memories of the raid to bag the bigwig and the controversy over his capture that lingers to this day.

World War II: Where were you when you received word the war was over?

Leggett: My reconnaissance platoon was six miles south of Bad Tölz, where we had earlier fired at a German convoy traversing a road at a higher elevation. The night of May 5 we were out of the vehicles walking on gravel trying not to make any noise. As we were walking, the radio came on and said: ‘All companies. German Army Group G has surrendered effective 1200, 06 May 1945. All units halt in place. Do not fire unless fired upon.’ We were stunned. We made a radio transmission asking if we could come on in. They said affirmative; so we turned the lights on and drove in to Kufstein.

WWII: What happened when you reached Kufstein?

Leggett: Each of our platoons was given a small hostel. They had sleeping rooms and a place to eat. Two Austrian women said they had beer in the basement. The guys got that beer up in a hurry, and with the beer and being tired, it didn’t take long before everybody but the guards were out.

WWII: What was it like knowing the war was over?

Leggett: The next morning it was a beautiful day. Austria had not been torn up like Germany had. It was really beautiful. I crawled out on the roof and was looking at the colors. I didn’t hear any birds singing, but the sounds of war were nonexistent. It was just a new day.

WWII: Your unit was quickly given a new assignment. How did that come about?

Leggett: On May 7, our acting first sergeant, Staff Sgt. Hank Probst, told us to get three to five days of rations and ammunition together and be sure we had plenty of gas and water. He said we had a mission.

WWII: You had just found out that the war was over. How did these new orders make you feel?

Leggett: That surprised us. We had no idea what they were talking about. They said to be ready to go in two hours. Well, in one hour we left. Probst went with us on this mission. He came down to the hostel and told us what to do. He got the information from 1st Lt. Golden Sill, our company commander.

WWII: Who gave Sill his orders?

Leggett: Sill was called in by the 36th Infantry Division’s assistant division commander, Brig. Gen. Robert I. Stack. He briefed Sill that he needed a combat unit to go with him. Stack said we were going to follow a senior German officer farther into Austria to accept a surrender.

WWII: Did you have any idea at that time who your target was?

Leggett: The enlisted men in the platoon didn’t know who we were going after. We knew he was a senior officer. It could have been a general, it could have been a colonel, we didn’t know. They didn’t tell us. The rumor got started that it was Heinrich Himmler.

WWII: Were you excited about the possibility of arresting a high-ranking Nazi?

Leggett: No. There were all kinds of them being picked up. It was sort of a feeding frenzy. They were really groping around trying to get as many as they could.

WWII: What happened to you next?

Leggett: We took off following a Mercedes. It turns out a Mercedes came in under a white flag with letters from Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. They couldn’t get through to the north so they came our way. Göring was interested in surrendering. He thought he would sit down with Eisenhower and work out the means of surrendering the rest of the German forces and revitalize Germany to assist the Allies, because the Germans thought we’d be fighting the Russians.

WWII: Who was the man in the Mercedes?

Leggett: Göring’s senior aide Oberst [Colonel] Berndt von Brauchitsch. He left with his Mercedes leading with himself, a captain and a driver. General Stack followed in the staff car with his aide, 1st Lt. Harold Bond, and then a jeep following him.

WWII: Who else was in the group that set out?

Leggett: Sill was given command of the escort. There was a 2nd Lt. Shapiro with two jeeps. A total of five men begged to go along. General Stack told Sill, ‘If you want them to go it’s all right.’ Sill said that he told him, ‘We’re going to need all the help we can get,’ and he let them come along. Shapiro followed the general in the staff car. My company commander and his jeep driver, Pfc Jewel Wright, got in behind them and then my platoon followed: two M-8 armored cars and four jeeps. The entire party went 84 kilometers into occupied territory the day before the war was officially over.

WWII: It must have been eerie moving so deep into territory still held by an enemy you had fought for so long.

Leggett: It was a little strange taking off down that dusty road and seeing German units in the field, parking vehicles, bringing up artillery pieces. I saw a lot of armored self-propelled guns. We fought them as much as we fought tanks. Some of the Germans closer to the road waved at us and others saluted us with an army salute.

WWII: Did you sense any hostility as you drove past them?

Leggett: They weren’t antagonistic. We turned the turret on the M-8 to the rear and elevated the gun. The guys also stood up in the turrets so that their bodies were halfway out.

WWII: I understand you lost contact with the forward elements of your group as it moved along.

Leggett: We were going pretty fast trying to stay up with those automobiles. The road started climbing. Eventually we went through the Thurn Pass, which had an elevation of 1,274 meters. We had lost all the vehicles in front of us, including the jeeps. They left our 9-ton armored cars in the dust.

WWII: How did you know which roads to stay on?

Leggett: The strange thing was, at every intersection there was a German guard with his rifle slung. Some of them had white armbands on. We would later find out that General Karl Koller of the Luftwaffe had gone ahead and prepared this route. He also requisitioned Fischhorn Castle, deciding that would be the best place for Göring to meet with General Stack for the surrender. We got a radio message to keep on rolling until we saw a guard at a castle entrance — at a road entrance is the way they put it.

WWII: Where was the castle?

Leggett: If you have a map of Austria find Salzburg. South of that is Berchtesgaden and still farther south you’ll see a lake and Zell am See. Fischhorn Castle is near the south end of the lake.

WWII: What happened when you arrived at the castle?

Leggett: A guide waved us through a gap in a stone fence and we followed a little dirt road. The road went in a straight line past a stone house that was not right at the road but back farther. The road turned and went behind the castle. The road on the castle grounds was in the shape of a question mark that hooked around the backside of the castle. We saw some outbuildings.

WWII: I understand you had a bit of a shock when you arrived at the castle?

Leggett: When we turned that corner and went into the little clearing behind the castle, we realized we were right smack in the middle of an SS headquarters. There were maybe 50 or 60 men. All of them had their weapons.

WWII: You were all experienced soldiers, many with years in combat. How did you react?

Leggett: We thought we might have some problems there. We were just stunned. Nobody had told us on the radio to expect that. It was real fortunate that we didn’t have somebody start shooting.

WWII: How did your former foes react?

Leggett: There was no aggressiveness. These people were not aiming anything at us. They weren’t drawn up in ranks. They were walking between buildings, just going about their business, which in itself was strange. Our first sergeant went into the castle to find out what was going on. He found out that all the SS were sent from the castle except an old caretaker.

WWII: What did you find out about the SS unit you were now sharing space with?

Leggett: SS Colonel Waldemar Fegelein was there. He was the brother of SS Lt. Gen. Hermann Fegelein, who had been in Adolf Hitler’s bunker and was executed by the Führer for his alleged treachery. The unit at the castle was the SS Florian Geyer Cavalry Division that had been cut up pretty badly on the Eastern Front. Supposedly they had pulled back to this area and this was the division headquarters. Fegelein was the division’s chief of staff. He had quite a few headquarters type troops around there.

WWII: How did you find out what your role would now be in this unusual scenario?

Leggett: When Probst came out of the castle, he said we were to set up at least three guard posts. The person on the guard post at that big door into the courtyard was to keep notes on who came in and who left. The only vehicles in the courtyard were the Mercedes that von Brauchitsch had led in, General Stack’s Plymouth staff car and three jeeps — the one belonging to Lieutenant Sill and two from the 142nd Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon that belonged to Shapiro.

WWII: Where were the armored cars and the jeeps from your platoon positioned?

Leggett: We originally had three guard posts: the castle road gate, courtyard entrance and a steel-door entrance around a corner from the castle entrance. The two M-8s were at entrances near the castle. The gate at the road — it really wasn’t a gate that had to be opened, it was just an opening in a wall at the main highway — had one of the jeeps with a radio and a machine gun on it at night. The M-8s were sited in to give us the best protection. There would not be any SS coming and going into the castle at all. The only real entrance into the castle was that big double gate into the courtyard. The castle was a thick-walled fortress, and we were prepared to pull inside the courtyard and man the walls. My job and first section sergeant Richard Snell’s job was to run the guard posts and to keep note of what went on outside. We had to stand guard like everyone else.

WWII: What about Shapiro’s men?

Leggett: Shapiro’s people never helped us. They stayed to themselves and hung around their vehicles in the courtyard.

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