Itter Castle

Stand still for a moment and listen. Below you, the Brixentaler Ache runs fast and cold over its stones, a steady hiss that never quite stops. Above, on a rocky spur, grey walls and a squat tower rise out of the trees. The air smells of pine and cut grass. Cows bells may carry from a meadow somewhere up the slope. It looks like a storybook castle, quiet and a little sleepy. But this small fortress holds one of the strangest stories of the Second World War.

This is Itter Castle, Schloss Itter in German. It sits just outside Wörgl, at the point where the Brixen valley opens toward the wide Inn valley of Tyrol. That position explains why anyone built here at all. A tower on this rock could watch the route into the valley and the traffic moving along it. Castles in the Alps were rarely about romance. They were about control of roads, river crossings and the people who used them.

The fortress has medieval roots. Records point to a castle on this site by the high Middle Ages, and over the following centuries it passed between different lords and church authorities. Like many Tyrolean strongholds, it lost its military purpose as warfare changed. Walls crumbled, and owners came and went. For long stretches it was more ruin than residence. The building you see today is largely the result of a later rebuilding, not an untouched medieval survivor.

That rebuilding came in the late nineteenth century, when wealthy Europeans fell in love with the idea of the Gothic castle. New owners restored and expanded Itter in a historicist style — meaning a style that imitates older periods rather than copying them exactly. So look at those neat battlements and tidy towers with a slightly sceptical eye. They are a Victorian-era dream of the Middle Ages, built with real stone on real foundations.

And here is the first surprise. In the 1880s the castle was bought by Sophie Menter, a celebrated German concert pianist. She had been a favourite pupil of Franz Liszt, and according to popular accounts Liszt himself came to visit. Most remarkably, the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky stayed here in 1892 as Menter's guest. Picture it for a second — piano music drifting out of these windows, across this quiet valley, played by some of the finest musicians of the age.

The twentieth century brought a much darker chapter. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the castle fell into the hands of the Nazi state. In 1943 the SS turned it into a special prison, officially administered as a sub-camp of Dachau concentration camp. But this was no ordinary camp. Itter was designed to hold prominent prisoners — people the regime considered valuable as hostages or bargaining chips.

The guest list was extraordinary. Two former prime ministers of France, Paul Reynaud and Édouard Daladier, were held here. So were the generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin, who had once commanded French armies. The tennis champion Jean Borotra, the trade union leader Léon Jouhaux and Marie-Agnès Cailliau, the older sister of Charles de Gaulle, were also imprisoned in these rooms. Many of these prisoners disliked each other intensely, and they did not hide it.

Then came the first days of May 1945. Hitler was dead, the Reich was collapsing, and the SS guards at Itter fled. The prisoners were suddenly alone in the castle, but not safe. Units of the Waffen-SS, the armed branch of the SS, were still active in the area. Some were determined to fight to the end. The prisoners sent out messengers to find help before those troops arrived.

Help came from a very unexpected direction. A small American tank unit under Captain John Lee reached the castle. With them came a group of German army soldiers led by Major Josef Gangl, a Wehrmacht officer who had turned against the Nazi regime and joined the local Austrian resistance. Austrian resistance fighters were also part of the story. Together this odd force prepared to hold the walls.

On the fifth of May 1945, the Waffen-SS attacked. And here is the second surprise. Inside the castle, American soldiers and German soldiers fought side by side against the SS. It is often described as the only battle of the war in which the two armies fought on the same side. Even some of the elderly French prisoners took up rifles. The fight lasted for hours, and the walls took heavy fire.

The defenders held until more American troops arrived from the direction of Kufstein and broke the attack. The French prisoners were freed. But there was a price. Major Gangl was killed during the battle, reportedly while trying to move one of the prisoners out of the line of fire. Today he is remembered in Austria as a resistance hero. Captain Lee's own Sherman tank, parked near the gate, was destroyed in the fighting.

After the war, the castle returned to quieter uses. It has served at times as a hotel and has changed hands more than once. Today it is in private ownership, and the interior is generally not open to visitors. That is worth knowing before you arrive. For most people, the experience of Itter is from the outside — the walk up, the view of the walls, and the knowledge of what happened behind them.

So take a last look from where you stand. Notice how small the castle really is, and how close the trees come to the walls. Try to imagine the noise of gunfire in a valley that now carries only water and birdsong. As you walk back down toward the village, listen again for the river. It has run past this rock through every chapter of the story — the lords, the pianists, the prisoners, and the strange alliance of one spring day in 1945.