The Wehrmacht and the Americans fought side by side in 1945

Fourteen American soldiers, ten Wehrmacht soldiers and a group of French prisoners fired in the same direction on 5 May 1945, at Castle Itter, a medieval keep in the Austrian Tyrol.

Itter ran as a luxury prison under the Dachau camp. Inside were two former prime ministers of France, Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud; generals Maurice Gamelin and Maxime Weygand; the union leader Léon Jouhaux; and Jean Borotra, the tennis player who had won Wimbledon. When the SS guards fled, the prisoners were left on their own, armed with whatever they could find, and with a Waffen-SS unit coming up the road.

Captain John C. Lee turned up with one Sherman tank and fourteen men: not much to hold a castle with. He was joined by Major Josef Gangl, a German officer who had spent weeks passing information to the Austrian resistance, along with ten of his own soldiers. They handed out ammunition, put the French at the windows and held out for some twelve hours, until the American infantry arrived and the SS surrendered.

Gangl died that morning, shot by a sniper, while pulling Reynaud away from a window. A street in Wörgl, the town next door, carries his name. It is the only known battle of the Second World War in which German and American soldiers fought on the same side.