The Siege of Castle Itter

The Untold Shocking True Story of a US and German Alliance in WWII

By: Gary Covella

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Five days after Hitler put a pistol to his head. Two days before Germany surrendered. On a lonely crag in the Austrian Alps, sworn enemies seized the same rifles and aimed them in the same direction.

And every word of it is true.

On May 5, 1945, in the dying hours of the Third Reich, an American tank lieutenant, a defecting German major, a battle-hardened SS captain, a handful of Black GIs from a segregated army, Austrian rebels, and some of the most famous prisoners in France were trapped together inside a thirteenth-century fortress, surrounded by a fanatical Waffen-SS force with a single order: leave no one alive.

This is the strangest battle of the Second World War. It may be the only time in the entire war that American and German soldiers fought side by side. And almost no one has ever heard of it.

A Cast History Could Not Invent

Behind the walls waited two former French prime ministers who despised one another, two feuding generals, a fiery union leader, and Jean Borotra, the "Bounding Basque," a Wimbledon champion about to play the most dangerous match of his life.

Defending them stood the unlikeliest garrison ever assembled:

• Lt. Jack Lee — a hard-drinking, cigar-chewing American tanker who refused to retreat
• Major Josef "Sepp" Gangl — a Wehrmacht officer who turned his guns on his own side and died for strangers
• An SS captain who chose, at the very end, to defend the people he was sworn to destroy
• One lone Sherman tank named Besotten Jenny, parked across the gate as a final steel door

German and American. Captor and captive. Black and white. For one impossible day, every line the war had drawn between them simply vanished.

One Man. One Wall. One Desperate Run.

As the SS dragged an 88mm gun into position to blow the doors apart, ammunition nearly gone and the defenders falling back to make their last stand, a forty-six-year-old tennis champion did the unthinkable. He vaulted the castle wall and sprinted straight through enemy fire to bring help.

Would he make it in time? Would anyone be left alive when he returned?

What You'll Discover Inside

• How a prison for France's elite became the war's most astonishing rescue
• Why German soldiers risked everything to fight against their own SS
• The forgotten heroism of Black American GIs the histories pushed to the margins
• The minute-by-minute siege: the burning tank, the falling major, the relief column clawing up the mountain
• What became of every survivor in the decades that followed

The True Story Behind the Legend

In the propulsive, cinematic tradition of Mark Bowden, Cornelius Ryan, and Stephen Harding's The Last Battle, this is a meticulously researched, edge-of-your-seat account of a rescue so extraordinary that Hollywood could never have scripted it.

It is a story of courage and conscience: of flawed, ordinary, divided men who, in the darkest hour of the worst war in history, chose decency when looking away would have been far easier.

Five days after Hitler died, on a hilltop in the Alps, the war's every rule was broken. This is how it happened, and why it should never be forgotten.

Boy, this author is cheesy

Good story, but done by an author
that is horribly repetitive. I've listened
to half a dozen of his books and
repetitive is his common theme in
his books. He should be writing
for Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia.

A two hour story stretched out ad nausea to 8

A good story reuined by unbearable repeated details,and speculations, armchair philosophy, and awkward psychology. I couldn’t wait for it to end.