CHAPTER 4
THOUGH THE NAZI WAR EFFORT had already seen some significant reversals by the time Schloss Itter’s first French prisoner arrived on May 2, 1943, the setbacks had largely occurred well beyond the borders of “greater” Germany, primarily on the Eastern Front, in North Africa, and in the Mediterranean. Over the next two years, however, the war got steadily closer to Itter. Allied armies approaching from several directions at once made the future increasingly uncertain for the castle’s garrison troops and, ironically, decidedly more dangerous for its prisoners.
To the east, the Soviet Union’s January 1943 victory at Stalingrad and destruction of the German 6th Army set the stage for the Red Army’s seemingly inexorable advance westward. Soviet forces solidified their strategic advantage by crushing Germany’s final large-scale attack on the Eastern Front—the assault on Kursk in July and August 1943. From that point on, the Germans could manage only local tactical successes, as they were forced to withdraw almost everywhere along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Having recaptured those parts of Ukraine, Belorussia, and Russia proper that had been occupied by German forces, by the spring of 1945 the Red Army had also taken Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltic states, parts of Yugoslavia, and much of eastern Germany. Of more immediate concern to Sebastian Wimmer and those he commanded at Schloss Itter, however, was the fact that by the last day of April 1945 elements of Marshal of the Soviet Union Fyodor Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front1 were rumored to be barely twenty-five miles to the east.
Nor was the military situation to the south of the Austrian Tyrol any less dire. After completing the ouster of German forces from North Africa, the Allies had captured Sicily in August 1943. The following month American and British troops had landed at Salerno on the Italian mainland and then began the hard slog north against determined German resistance. Despite that resistance, the Allied juggernaut rolled on, and Rome fell on June 4, 1944. Bologna was captured on April 21, 1945, followed by Milan six days later, and all German forces in Italy surrendered on April 29. That collapse cleared the way for Lieutenant General Geoffrey Keyes’s U.S. II Corps to advance on the Brenner Pass—the most accessible of the traditional routes from northern Italy into Austria—just forty-seven miles to the southwest of Schloss Itter.
To the west and northwest, the most direct threat to continued German control of Tyrol came from Lieutenant General Alexander M. Patch’s U.S. Seventh Army.2 Having participated in the capture of Sicily3 in July and August 1943, in August 1944 Seventh Army—with attached Free French First Army elements—undertook Operation Dragoon, the amphibious invasion of southern France. After fighting its way through the Vosges Mountains, Seventh Army moved north along the Swiss border toward Alsace and Lorraine, where it met stiff German resistance during the winter of 1944–1945. After crossing the Rhine River in the spring of 1945, the Seventh moved across southern Germany, in the process taking such major population centers as Worms, Saarbrücken, Mannheim, Nürnberg, and Munich. By April 30, lead Seventh Army elements had crossed into Austria, with the bulk of Patch’s force arrayed along some eighty miles of the German-Austrian frontier. The closest American units were less than fifteen miles from Schloss Itter’s front gate.
SEVENTH ARMY’S ADVANCE into Tyrol was in part a response to rumors Allied intelligence had been hearing since 1943 that spoke of an “alpine fortress” allegedly encompassing parts of southern Germany and northwestern Austria to which Hitler and his forces would retreat if the fortunes of war turned against them. There were stockpiles of weapons, ammunition, food, and fuel in vast underground storage complexes, so the rumors said, all protected by well-concealed and interconnected defenses that could hold off attackers for months or even years.
Though by January 1945 most senior Allied intelligence officials did not believe such a formidable and well-provisioned national redoubt actually existed, they realized only too well that Austria’s alpine region—with its rugged mountains, fast-flowing rivers, and narrow, twisting roads—represented an easily defensible natural fortress even without the rumored underground complexes. Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower was concerned enough about the possibility of retreating German units making a final, bloody, and possibly protracted stand in the Alps that he made the blocking of all major passes into Austria—and especially those into Tyrol—a key part of his planning.4
Eisenhower’s plans for securing Austria were built around two forces: General George S. Patton’s Third Army and General Jacob L. Devers’s 6th Army Group.5 The former was to continue its eastward advance across southern Germany and into Austria near Salzburg, secure the city and the passes leading from it southwestward into Tyrol, and then continue northeastward to link up with the advancing Soviets near Linz. Devers’s task was to capture all the other routes into Austria from the northwest and north. These included the pass at Bregenz, east of Lake Constance, which led into the Voralberg, Austria’s westernmost region; those near the Bavarian cities of Füssen and Garmisch-Partenkirchen leading, respectively, toward Landeck and Innsbruck; and at Kufstein, in the Inn River valley.
Devers had at his disposal the eleven divisions of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French First Army and the twelve U.S. divisions of Patch’s Seventh Army. The operational boundary between Devers’s two armies ran generally from northwest to southeast, roughly centered on Füssen, three miles from the Austrian border. This meant that the capture of the more easterly passes from Germany into Tyrol—including the one at Kufstein—became Seventh Army’s responsibility generally, and of Patch’s XXI Corps specifically. Commanded by Major General Frank W. Milburn, by April 30 the corps consisted primarily of the 3rd and 36th Infantry divisions and the 12th Armored Division.6
By this point in the war, XXI Corps’s usual mode of advance was for the armored division to lead, followed by the infantry divisions. Milburn therefore ordered the tankers of the 12th AD to advance southward along the Munich-Salzburg autobahn to the Bavarian city of Rosenheim, at the confluence of the Mangfall and Inn Rivers. After securing the city, the 12th and its accompanying infantry divisions were to cover the roughly twenty-two miles directly south to Kufstein with what Milburn termed “the utmost dispatch.”
Though the German army was in disarray throughout Bavaria, Patch and his subordinate commanders were under no illusions that the move into Austria would be a cakewalk. Intelligence reports indicated that the several German garrison units and training schools in Tyrol were well manned, relatively well equipped, and apparently ready to fight despite their general lack of combat experience. More disturbing, however, were reports that the battered remnants of several battle-hardened Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units were withdrawing into Austria; their presence could significantly stiffen the resistance offered by the garrison and school troops. While the advancing Allied armies were in one sense a noose tightening around Tyrol, they were also inadvertently forcing a buildup of German military strength in a region ideally suited to be Nazism’s last bastion.
In assessing the threat XXI Corps would face during the advance into Austria, Milburn’s intelligence staff first concentrated on known enemy facilities and garrison units. And unfortunately for the Americans, most of the German formations believed to be stationed in and around the Inn River valley were specialized mountain-warfare units known as gebirgstruppen, comprised of soldiers who were used to maneuvering in—and making excellent tactical use of—the region’s rugged terrain. Worse still, most of these units were former Bundesheer organizations absorbed into the Wehrmacht after the 1938 Anschluss, meaning the majority of their members were native Austrians who would literally be defending their homes and families.
Kufstein, the first major Austrian city XXI Corps would enter, was believed to be garrisoned by a battalion of front-line gebirgsjäger, or mountain infantry, and was also thought to house several replacement battalions for other infantry and artillery units. Further south, Wörgl had long been home to two mountain-infantry replacement units and, of possibly greater concern, the Wehrmacht training center for noncommissioned officers assigned to mountain-warfare units. The school’s staff and instructors were all combat veterans, as were many of its several hundred students, and all could be expected to put to good use the skills they had so ably demonstrated in the mountains of Norway, Russia, and the Ukraine.
Then, of course, there were the frontline units thought to be retreating into Tyrol. The XXI Corps intelligence staffers were most worried by reports that elements of two Waffen-SS panzer-grenadier divisions7—the 12th “Hitlerjugend” and 17th “Götz von Berlichingen”—were thought to be operating to the east, west, and south of Kufstein. In addition, the remnants of at least one infantry division—its designation unknown—were rumored to be moving northeastward from Innsbruck along the Inn River valley. If the units were actually present, they and the garrison and school troops could number upwards of ten thousand men. And if the divisional units retained even limited numbers of armored vehicles, antitank guns, and artillery, they would pose a serious threat, not only to XXI Corps’s ability to seize and hold the pass at Kufstein, but also to the Americans’ plans to secure all of Tyrol.
Fortunately for XXI Corps, the actual number of German troops in the Inn Valley was far smaller than Allied intelligence estimates indicated. When Lieutenant General Georg Ritter von Hengl took over as commander of Alpine Front, Northwest, on April 20, he was ordered to defend the mountain passes along a seventy-mile sector anchored in the east at Lofer, in the center at Kufstein, and in the west at Innsbruck.8 To accomplish that task he had barely three thousand men—a number roughly corresponding to a single regiment.
While this force did indeed include several hundred battle-hardened Wehrmacht infantrymen (whom von Hengl identifies as belonging to Panzer-Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland9) and about two hundred highly motivated Waffen-SS troops (likely from “Götz von Berlichingen”), the majority of von Hengl’s ad hoc force consisted of rear-area support personnel, stragglers from various units, and even deserters rounded up by field police. Though relatively well provided for in terms of small arms and ammunition, von Hengl’s new command had no aircraft, no armor, few wheeled vehicles, and just nine 88mm anti-aircraft guns that could be used as direct-fire artillery.10 When von Hengl complained about his lack of men and firepower to his higher headquarters—in this case, Major General August Winter on the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) command staff at Führungsstab B in Berchtesgaden11—he was told that he would also be able to dragoon elements of the German 1st and 19th armies as they retreated into Austria.12
A tough, highly decorated, Bavarian-born professional soldier of aristocratic lineage, von Hengl had led mountain troops in combat in Poland, Finland, and Russia. Though he privately believed his mission to defend the alpine passes into Austria was ultimately hopeless, he was determined to do what he could to slow the Allied advance into Tyrol. Having established his headquarters in Wörgl, von Hengl quickly set about organizing five kampfgruppen, or battle groups, each of which was named after its commander. Four of the units would each be responsible for a different pass leading into the Inn Valley, with the fifth held in reserve. All of the battle group commanders—Colonels Buchner,13 Schirowski, Drück, and Forster, and Lieutenant Colonel Johann Giehl14—were combat-proven gebirgsjägers.
Since Innsbruck itself was to be defended by Brigadier General Joannes Böhaimb’s Division Group North,15 von Hengl established his most westerly task force, Battle Group Drück, at Schwaz. Jenbach, five miles to the northeast, was to be the base of operations for Battle Group Schirowski. Twenty-three miles downriver,16 Battle Group Buchner was centered on Kufstein, and seven miles almost directly north from there, just over the German border in Neideraudorf, Battle Group Giehl established itself on both banks of the Inn. The reserve task force, Battle Group Forster, remained in the armory at Wörgl.
Because intelligence reports indicated that the main American advance into the Inn Valley would be through Kufstein, von Hengl ensured that battle groups Buchner and Giehl were the most robust of his five task forces. The two groups shared four hundred crack troops from Grossdeutschland;17 one hundred Waffen-SS soldiers (again, most probably from “Götz von Berlichingen”); several dozen officers and men from the NCO school in Wörgl; four hundred gebirgsjägers; two hundred field police; sixty combat engineers; and two of the 88mm flak guns, each with thirty rounds of ammunition.18 Since Giehl’s mission was to slow the American advance using hit-and-run tactics, his was the slightly smaller and more mobile of the two battle groups.
By April 30 von Hengl’s four frontline battle groups were deployed in or near the Alpine passes. The Buchner and Giehl task forces were astride both routes into Kufstein—the major highway leading almost directly south from Rosenheim, just over the border and some eighteen miles downriver, and the two-lane road leading southeast from Bavaria’s Schliersee (Lake Schlier) toward Landl, Austria, and on to Kufstein. Though von Hengl was still understandably concerned about his insufficiency in men, armor, and artillery, he was confident that Alpine Front, Northwest, was as ready as it would ever be to resist the American advance into the Inn River valley.
Unfortunately for von Hengl, it wasn’t just the Americans he had to worry about.
AS NOTED EARLIER IN THIS VOLUME, many Austrians had no desire to become citizens of “greater” Germany, and nascent anti-Nazi resistance cells began coalescing in Austria soon after the Anschluss. As in other occupied countries, these groups spanned the political and philosophical spectra: nationalists, monarchists, Socialists, Communists, Jews, even organized criminal groups. Though all shared a desire to oust the Nazi invaders from Austrian soil, their reasons for wishing to do so varied widely and were often at odds.19
In addition, the burgeoning Austrian resistance faced challenges with which the anti-Nazi movements in other nations—save that in Germany itself—did not have to contend. Because they had the same culture, the same language, and much of the same history as their oppressors, most Austrians did not experience the resistance-inducing brutality and radical social and ethnic changes that occurred in France, Poland, or Russia. And, of course, the unfortunate fact that a huge number of Austrians were ardent Nazis who fully supported the beliefs and goals of the Third Reich—and enthusiastically participated in their implementation—made it extremely difficult for the resistance-inclined to establish effective cells or avoid betrayal by friends, neighbors, or even family members.
Those Austrians who nonetheless chose to oppose the Nazis also faced daunting operational challenges. Since there was no Austrian government in exile, well into 1944 there was no conduit through which to gain Allied recognition and support. The various movements that did evolve therefore did not initially receive the weapons, money, or guidance provided to underground groups in France and the Low Countries. Poorly armed, isolated, and under constant threat of exposure and arrest, Austrian resisters thus originally avoided the type of armed guerilla warfare practiced by their French, Dutch, and Norwegian counterparts.
The various Austrian resistance groups instead adopted a pragmatic approach that emphasized nonviolent measures, including the distribution of anti-Nazi propaganda and the gathering of intelligence they hoped would be of value to the advancing Allies. At the same time, the groups sought to recruit and train new members—activities that became easier as Germany’s military fortunes declined—and patiently worked to build the command structures necessary to make the disparate cells militarily effective. This latter effort received a significant boost with the December 1944 establishment of the Provisional Austrian National Committee (POEN),20 a loose confederation of the leaders of the various resistance groups. POEN was able to make contact with the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS)21 station in Bern, Switzerland. This quickly led to a mutually rewarding partnership; the resistance groups—now collectively referred to as the O522 organization—provided OSS with valuable intelligence about German military operations and dispositions throughout Austria, and in return OSS provided weapons, funding, and liaison officers.23 Given their proximity to Switzerland, the various resistance groups in Tyrol were among the earlier recipients of the OSS’s largesse.
As elsewhere in Austria, the Tyrolean groups were of varying ideological and political slants. The cells had evolved both in the Innsbruck-Hall urban region and in small rural communities scattered in the river and mountain valleys. Though initially focused on local, rather than regional, activities, most of the groups had been brought into the POEN-O5 fold by mid-1944. While they were increasingly well armed, in order to avoid prompting savage German reprisals aimed at the civilian population, the Tyrolean groups did not generally undertake direct attacks on German forces. Instead, they focused their energies on planning and preparing for a popular uprising intended to coincide with the arrival in Tyrol of Allied forces. Their goals included preventing retreating German units from destroying key bridges and other structures, capturing and disarming enemy troops whenever possible, and, most important, protecting Austrian civilians from revenge attacks by the Gestapo and SS.
The resisters in Tyrol came from all walks of life—educators, students, farmers, housewives—and, not surprisingly, their ranks also included Austrian-born Wehrmacht officers and enlisted soldiers. The majority of these latter men were assigned to garrison, reserve, and replacement units, such as the Gebirgsjäger-Ersatz-Bataillon (Mountain Troops Replacement Battalion) 136, whose companies were based in Landeck and Wörgl and whose senior commanders were all members of the resistance; the Reserve-Gebirgsjäger-Bataillon 137 in Kufstein; and the Gebirgs-Artillerie-Ersatz-Abteilung (Mountain Artillery Replacement Detachment) 118, also in Kufstein. In addition, several Austrian-born instructors and students at the mountain troops’ NCO school in Wörgl were also sympathetic to the resistance.
Austrian-born military personnel who supported the anti-Nazi resistance did so for the same panoply of reasons—political, moral, and cultural—that motivated civilian resisters. But those in uniform were often in far better positions than their nonmilitary counterparts to undertake concrete, meaningful acts against the Third Reich. Among the earliest and most effective resisters, for example, was Friedrich Würthle. A prewar liberal journalist, he was called up for army service in 1940 and assigned to the main Military Registration Office in Innsbruck. As a noncommissioned officer in the organization’s administrative office, he was able to provide fellow anti-Nazis serving in the Wehrmacht with doctored identity cards and travel documents, allowing them to move more freely throughout Tyrol and even into Germany itself. In addition, Würthle was able to help establish communications and forge alliances among the various nascent resistance groups, in the process becoming a key resistance leader himself.24
As happened elsewhere throughout Austria, the anti-Nazi Austrians serving in Wehrmacht units in Tyrol established strong—though obviously covert—ties to local civilian resistance groups. These were mutually beneficial alliances; the military resisters supplied their civilian counterparts with weapons, ammunition, and information about German troop dispositions and operations, while the civilians in turn provided shelter for Austrian deserters, safe houses for clandestine planning sessions, and intelligence on those local citizens who were most likely to betray resistance members to the Gestapo.
The Kufstein-Wörgl area had produced several early anti-Nazi resistance cells, some of which even predated the Anschluss.25 Though several of these groups were broken up by the Gestapo after 1938, Germany’s declining military fortunes from 1942 onward—combined with an increasingly meaningful resurgence of Austrian nationalism—spurred the renewed growth of civilian resistance groups. That these cells not only survived but flourished is especially noteworthy given that their members had to contend with both the threat posed by the Gestapo and the very real danger that they would be killed by Allied air attacks. From 1943 on, the H. Krieghof munitions factory in Kufstein and the major railroad marshaling yard in Wörgl were frequent targets for U.S. 15th Air Force B-17 and B-24 bombers flying from bases in Italy, and strafing attacks by P-38 and P-51 fighters made road and rail travel in the Inn Valley increasingly hazardous. Civilian casualties were inevitable; in a particularly tragic incident, many of the bombs intended for the Wörgl yards during a raid on February 22, 1945, instead hit the town center, killing thirty-nine civilians, injuring more than a hundred, and severely damaging or destroying scores of buildings.26
Despite the death and destruction caused by the Allied air attacks, the resisters in the eastern Inn River valley continued to organize and plan for the arrival of advancing U.S. forces. By March 1945 the various cells in and around Wörgl totaled some eighty people, including local government and business leaders, craftsmen, clergy, laborers, police officers, physicians, and homemakers. The titular leader of the combined movement was a well-to-do Wörgl business leader named Alois Mayr (who steadfastly maintained his pro-Allied stance despite the fact that his fifty-three-year-old sister and seventeen-year-old niece had been killed in the February 22 bombing). Mayr’s deputy, and the head of the civilian movement’s twenty to thirty armed fighters, was thirty-one-year-old local politician Rupert Hagleitner.
He and his fighters faced a daunting task. Not only were they supposed to prevent the retreating Germans from destroying key bridges, buildings, and other infrastructure, they were also charged with protecting the local civilians against reprisals by the Gestapo and SS. Though initially armed only with hunting rifles and fowling pieces, close cooperation with anti-Nazi Austrians in the various local military units eventually allowed Hagleitner and his men to begin adding the occasional Wehrmacht-issue Kar-98 rifle to their secret armory in the basement of Wörgl’s Neue Post Inn.
While the accurate and mechanically reliable bolt-action Kar-98s were a welcome addition to the resisters’ arsenal, Hagleitner and his fighters desperately needed more significant weaponry if they were to have any hope of surviving a firefight with frontline Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS units. Though Austrian deserters from the German forces provided one or two MP-40 submachine guns and the odd hand grenade, it was not until early March 1945 that Hagleitner and the Wörgl resistance cell were contacted by someone in a position to provide both advanced weapons and men trained and experienced in their use. Much to the resisters’ surprise, that man was a highly decorated German major named Josef Gangl, and he was destined to play a pivotal, heroic, and ultimately tragic role in the events soon to unfold at Schloss Itter.
AT FIRST GLANCE, JOSEF GANGL—known to friends and family by the nickname Sepp—seems an unlikely anti-Nazi resister. Indeed, a review of his Wehrmacht service record, his personalakten,27 portrays a dedicated career soldier, one who worked his way up from the enlisted ranks to company-grade officer and was highly regarded by both his superiors and the men he led. On the fourth page of his personnel file a grainy black-and-white photo taken in May 1940 depicts him as a newly commissioned thirty-year-old second lieutenant, the very model of a steely-eyed, square-jawed, ramrod-straight German officer. What the image cannot show us, of course, are the events and experiences that led a man to ultimately betray his nation and violate his solemn oath, all in the service of a far greater good.
Sepp Gangl was born September 12, 1910, in Obertraubling, a small Bavarian town on the southeast outskirts of Regensburg.28 His origins, if not exactly humble, were certainly not exalted, either: at the time of Gangl’s birth his twenty-four-year-old father had just secured a job as a low-level bureaucrat in the Regensburg regional office of the Royal Bavarian State Railways, and his twenty-three-year-old mother—until her pregnancy—had worked part-time in a shop near their modest home. A few years after Sepp’s birth, his father was transferred to a railway facility in Peissenberg, some thirty-five miles southwest of Munich. The Gangls had more children after the move;29 all had strictly conventional upbringings, attending local secular schools despite their parents’ nominal Roman Catholicism. Though the elder Gangl’s work for the railways was deemed important enough by the government to keep him out of the kaiser’s army during World War I, the stagnant economy and high unemployment rate in postwar Germany ensured that military service was one of the few job choices available to Sepp when he finished his formal education. On November 1, 1928—less than two months after his eighteenth birthday—Gangl did what young men with no other viable prospects have done throughout history: he joined the army.
Known at that time as the Reichsheer, the German army was one half of the Reichswehr, the unified military that also included the navy, the Reichsmarine. Neither was the mighty force it had been during World War I. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles severely restricted the size of both services, with the Reichsheer limited to no more than one hundred thousand men. There were also significant restraints on the number and types of weapons the army could possess and the sorts of operations it could undertake. While these restrictions guaranteed that soldiers would spend the vast majority of their careers trapped in the cyclic, mindless drudgery of peacetime garrison life—training, drilling, cleaning weapons, maintaining uniforms and barracks, training some more—enlistment in the Reichswehr offered young men like Sepp Gangl several advantages that were becoming increasingly important as the worldwide Great Depression began to pummel an already battered Germany: a roof over their heads, a small but steady income, and regular meals. And it could well be that Gangl—like many who grew up amid the social and political chaos that wracked Germany in the decade after the war—craved the discipline, order, and camaraderie inherent in military service.
Whatever his reasons for enlisting, Gangl quickly proved himself to be a motivated and highly competent soldier. Assigned to the artillery—whether by his choice or the army’s isn’t clear—he underwent initial training with the Nürnberg-based Artillerie-Regiment 7. He remained with that unit until September 1929, garnering the first of many glowing efficiency reports, and over the next ten years rose steadily in the ranks while serving with, successively, Artillerie-Regiment 5 in Ulm and Artillerie-Regiment 25 in Ludwigsburg. By November 1938 Gangl was a master sergeant and had been tapped to attend officer candidate school. He was also a husband and father: he’d married the former Walburga Renz, a Ludwigsburg shopgirl, in 1935, and the first of two children,30 daughter Sieglinde, was born the following year.
While the initial years of Gangl’s military career had followed the dull peacetime cycle, Germany’s clandestine rearmament during the 1930s and the Nazi Party’s rise to power ensured that by the time he became a senior noncommissioned officer, the Heer—as the Reichsheer had been renamed in 1935, at the same time the Reichswehr became the Wehrmacht—was a far larger and more active force. It was also a vastly more political one, in that promotions and choice assignments for enlisted men and officers alike tended to go to those who embraced, at least publicly, the führer and the party. Like many German soldiers of his generation, Gangl was politically adaptable. While we don’t know how he truly felt about Adolf Hitler or the rise of Nazism in his native land, we do know that from 1935 onward Gangl’s efficiency reports referred to him as “a dedicated National Socialist” with “correct political views.”
Those views may well have contributed to his selection for officer candidate school, which he was initially scheduled to begin in October 1939. The outbreak of World War II the preceding month disrupted that timetable, however, because, in the weeks before Germany’s September 1 invasion of Poland, Gangl’s entire regiment deployed from Ludwigsburg to the Saarpfalz region bordering France. Attached to the 25th Infanterie-Division, Gangl’s Artillerie-Regiment 25 dug in several miles behind the frontier and prepared to help repulse any Allied invasion of the Reich. That attack came on September 7, when eleven French divisions crossed the border on a twenty-two-mile front. The invasion was intended to help relieve the pressure on Poland by forcing the Germans to shift forces to the west, but the attack was poorly planned and timidly executed. Though the invaders managed to advance about five miles into Germany and occupy some small towns from which German troops had already withdrawn, the incursion was a dismal failure, and the French forces withdrew within two weeks—without forcing the transfer of any German units from Poland to the west.
The brief conflict, which marked Sepp Gangl’s first combat action, was soon followed by a period of military stalemate on the Western Front that became known as the Phoney War and the sitzkrieg.31 The phase, roughly from mid-September 1939 until the May 1940 German invasion of France and the Low Countries, also marks something of a mysterious time in Gangl’s life. Though his personnel file makes no mention of a wound or injury received during the brief French incursion, it does clearly indicate that from September 13, 1939, through March 13, 1940, Gangl was assigned to four successive military hospitals—in Landau, Ludwigshafen, Schrobenhausen, and Ludwigsburg. While there are only a few possible reasons for this unexplained interlude—Gangl had been wounded in some way, had fallen ill or was injured in a noncombat accident, or was serving in some undisclosed administrative capacity—we simply can’t be sure why the Bavarian artilleryman spent some six months in military hospitals. We do know, however, that Gangl returned to his regiment on March 14, 1940. Less than two months later he was commissioned a second lieutenant, and in the photo taken immediately after that event he looks hale and hearty.
Within days of his promotion Sepp Gangl was putting his leadership skills to work in combat. Artillerie-Regiment 25 under Brigadier General Hermann Kruse took part in Case Yellow, the German invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands that opened what soon became the Battle of France. Gangl spent the entire campaign as the leader of a forward-observation team attached to one of 25th Infanterie-Division’s assault regiments, calling in artillery fire on enemy troop concentrations, fortifications, and any other target the advancing infantrymen deemed a threat. Constantly on the move and always far forward of the guns he was directing, Gangl’s initial combat performance as an officer won him praise from his superiors, who cited his “excellent gunnery knowledge” and “calmness under fire.”
Though the German conquest of France and the Low Countries was both rapid and brilliantly executed, it was not without cost to the invaders. The Allied armies managed to inflict significant casualties on the advancing German units, and Gangl’s Artillerie-Regiment 25 was no exception. The replacement of the regiment’s dead and wounded with properly trained troops was the task of Artillerie Ersatz Abteillung (Artillery Replacement Battalion) 25, and within weeks of France’s capitulation Gangl was tapped to join the unit for temporary duty as a training officer. It was a position for which he was obviously well suited: as a combat-proven officer who’d spent most of his military career as an enlisted man, he would presumably have been able to connect with the young replacement troops in a way that other, more hidebound officers might not have. Moreover, coming up through the ranks, he had mastered virtually every aspect of the gunner’s art, and his unusually comprehensive skill set would have been especially valuable to neophyte artillerymen, who would almost certainly have to put their training to combat use sooner rather than later. Gangl left France on August 7, 1940, and, after a few brief days at home with his family, traveled on to Artillerie Ersatz Abteillung 25’s base in Taus in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a section of occupied Czechoslovakia administered by the Nazis as part of the greater Reich.32
After spending roughly three months with the replacement battalion—and in the process garnering still more highly complimentary efficiency reports from his commanders—Sepp Gangl went back to school himself. On November 25, 1940, he started a monthlong course at the Artillery School in Jüterbog, some forty miles southwest of Berlin. The training qualified him to serve as a battery commander, and upon completion of the course Gangl returned to his home unit. By that point the regiment had been withdrawn from France to Ludwigsburg to reorganize with a larger number of motor vehicles, after which it had been redesignated Artillerie-Regiment (Motorisiert) 25. The unit’s increased mobility would soon come in handy, for Gangl and his comrades were about to become part of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia.
While the larger details of that massive onslaught—and its eventual, catastrophic failure—are beyond the scope of this volume, Gangl’s nearly four years on the Russian Front are not. And yet we know frustratingly little about a period that was undoubtedly crucial in shaping the man who would later play so important a role in the events at Schloss Itter. Though the basic outlines of his service are contained in his Wehrmacht personnel file, the exacting detail with which that document chronicled the first fifteen years of his military career is missing. The reason isn’t hard to fathom: as the war progressed, one of the many aspects of Wehrmacht efficiency that declined was the keeping of accurate, complete, and up-to-date personnel records. In Gangl’s case the result is akin to watching a full-color portrait fading to black and white before our eyes.
So, what do we know about his time in Russia?
When Operation Barbarossa kicked off on June 22, 1941, Artillerie-Regiment (Motorisiert) 25 was attached to General Ewald von Kliest’s Panzergruppe 1, which attacked into Ukraine as part of Army Group South. For the following ten months Gangl commanded a battery of 10.5 cm (105mm) howitzers in the regiment’s 3rd Battalion during the advance to and capture of Kiev. The fighting was fierce and constant, as the Germans sought to destroy the several Russian armies they’d managed to encircle. Gangl’s battery was constantly on the move, employing a tactic that is known in the U.S. Army as “shoot and scoot”: stopping to unlimber the guns and fire hurried barrages on targets either preplanned or called in by forward observers, reattaching the guns to their tow vehicles, then moving on. This tactic ensures that the spearhead units—in this case tanks and motorized infantry—always have supporting artillery as they advance, and it also prevents the enemy from undertaking effective counterbattery fire. By the time the Russians had determined the location from which the German howitzers were firing, Gangl and his men had packed up and moved on.
Despite the huge losses in men and materiel the Germans inflicted on the Soviet forces opposing them, the advance into Ukraine was not a walk in the park. Though many Russian units quickly disintegrated when subjected to the Germans’ overwhelming combined-arms33 attack, others held their ground and fought furiously. German artillery units were often instrumental in breaking up Soviet counterattacks, and, during one such Russian push in July 1941, Gangl and his battery prevented an enemy unit from overrunning a company of German infantrymen. While details of the fight are scarce, we know that for his actions that day Gangl was awarded—on August 20, 1941—the Iron Cross Second Class. Five months later he was promoted to first lieutenant, and, on February 12, 1942, Gangl was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. Though the reasons for the second medal are apparently lost to history, we can assume that the young artillery officer was decorated for having demonstrated the requisite “extraordinary bravery” in combat. From that point on he wore the black, white, and red ribbon of the first award in a buttonhole of his tunic, and the iconic silver and black medal of the second centered on his breast pocket.
Just over two months after pinning on his second Iron Cross, Sepp Gangl underwent a career change that probably seemed relatively unimportant at the time but would prevent him from dying in Russia and ultimately result in his presence at Schloss Itter. That change was his reassignment from traditional, single-barrel artillery to his regiment’s independent werfer34 battery. The unit consisted of six Nebelwerfer 41 six-barreled rocket launchers, each mounted on a two-wheeled carriage and pulled by a half-track. The weapon could ripple-fire all of its spin-stabilized, unguided rockets in seconds, and a full-battery barrage could saturate a target area with high-explosive or incendiary projectiles.35 The Nebelwerfer 41 had its drawbacks—primarily its limited range and a telltale smoke signature that made it unusually vulnerable to counterbattery fire—but when properly employed, it was a devastating weapon more than capable of decimating Soviet troops and soft-skinned (nonarmored) vehicles. While it is unclear whether Gangl had had any previous experience with the weapon, on April 24, 1942, he was put in command of the werfer battery, a job he held for the remainder of his time with Artillerie-Regiment (Motorisiert) 25.
And that time was all too eventful. Though the Germans were initially able to capture vast swaths of Russia—in the process destroying entire Soviet armies and taking millions of prisoners—by the time Gangl took command of the werfer battery, things had already begun to turn against the Wehrmacht. German forces had been unable to capture Moscow, begun an ultimately unsuccessful siege of Leningrad, and suffered through their first ferocious Russian winter. Soviet resistance stiffened as German supply lines lengthened, and units like Gangl’s found themselves increasingly on the defensive. Artillerie-Regiment (Motorisiert) 25, like virtually every other German unit on the Russian Front, was steadily ground down by two years of constant combat. The wounded and dead were not replaced, supplies were inadequate, and by February 1944 the unit was on the verge of collapse.
Fortunately, Captain Gangl—he’d been promoted the previous April—did not have to participate in the unit’s inexorable disintegration. In November 1943 he’d been assigned to a werfer-related position on the staff of 4th Army, a post in which he helped develop policy and tactics for the wider and more effective use of the multibarreled rocket launchers. Gangl again impressed his superiors with his knowledge and capabilities, so much so that in January 1944 he was tapped to take command of one of the new werfer battalions then being formed in Germany. That selection proved to be his ticket out of Russia and away from the Götterdämmerung the Soviets would soon inflict on the Wehrmacht’s Eastern Front armies.
Gangl’s first stop was in Höchstädt an der Donau, some sixty miles northwest of Munich. The city was home to Werfer Ersatz Ausbildungs Abteilung (Werfer Replacement Training Battalion) 7, and for almost two months the Russian Front veteran shared his expertise with soldiers who in far too many cases had been civilians just weeks earlier. On weekends Gangl was able to travel to Ludwigsburg to spend time with his wife and children, though Allied bombing attacks on Germany’s rail hubs often made the two-hour train ride a far longer ordeal. In early February he was on the move again, this time headed to Belgium for a month of training at the Army School for Battalion and Detachment Leaders in Antwerp.
Upon his March 4 completion of the course, Gangl traveled to Celle, in north-central Germany, where he joined the then-forming Werfer-Regiment 83. The unit consisted of three battalions, two of which (1st and 2nd) were each equipped with eighteen 15cm Nebelwerfer 41s divided among three firing batteries; the 3rd Battalion had eighteen of the larger 21cm (210mm) Nebelwerfer 42s. The regiment also included sixteen armored half-tracks, known as Maultiers36 (“mules”), each of which carried a 15cm launcher. The vehicles were evenly divided between the 1st and 2nd Battalions; those in the former were designated “21. Batterie” and those in the latter as “22. Batterie.” Gangl was given command of one of the 3rd Battalion’s Nebelwerfer 41 batteries, apparently with the understanding that he’d take over the entire battalion in due time. Gangl’s organization and a second identically equipped unit, Werfer-Regiment 84, made up Werfer-Brigade 7.37
By this point in the war it was clear that the Allies would soon attempt the invasion of western Europe, most probably on the Normandy coast of France, and after several weeks of training Gangl’s new brigade began moving west to become part of the force the German High Command hoped would repulse that offensive. It wasn’t an easy journey: because the rail networks of western Germany and northern France were subject to increasingly frequent strikes by Allied heavy bombers, Werfer-Brigade 7’s troop trucks, tow vehicles, launchers, and Maultier half-tracks had to make the trip by road. Not only did this expose them to the very real threat of attack by low-flying Allied fighter-bombers, it imposed severe mechanical strains—especially on the Maultiers’ tracks—and breakdowns were frequent. And there were other hazards as well: as part of the buildup to the invasion, French resistance groups were stepping up their activities. These ranged from the relatively benign, such as switching road signs to lead German convoys astray, to such decidedly more violent activities as sniping attacks and full-blown ambushes.
Despite the difficulties and potential hazards, Werfer-Brigade 7 managed to reach its initial forward-assembly point in Beauvais—some fifty miles northwest of Paris—on May 18. Over the following weeks the brigade’s troops did what they could to prepare for the coming battle: loading ammunition and fuel, maintaining the vehicles, and trying their best to avoid the attention of Allied aircraft. While no documents survive that might give us insight into Sepp Gangl’s frame of mind during this period—was he frightened? resigned? sick to death of the war?—we can safely assume that he did his best to prepare the men in his battery for the storm that was about to engulf them.
That storm arrived early on June 6, of course, in the form of some 156,000 airborne and seaborne Allied troops. The next day Werfer-Brigade 7 was ordered to move toward the Normandy coast, where British and Canadian forces were threatening the city of Caen. The 116-mile trip took three days and Allied aircraft inflicted losses on both men and materiel. Upon arrival in Caen the brigade was subordinated to the 12th SS Panzer Division “Hitlerjugend,” and for the next two months the two werfer regiments were constantly in action. Though Gangl and his fellow gunners were able to play a key role in the stubborn German defense of Caen, by the third week of August Werfer-Regiment 7—along with virtually all of Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B—had been squeezed into the Falaise Pocket south of Caen. Some 100,000 German troops were in danger of being completely encircled by American units advancing from the south and British-Canadian-Polish forces from the north, but the surviving members of Gangl’s brigade were among the 25,000 to 45,000 who were able to escape before the jaws of the trap snapped shut on August 20.
While Werfer-Brigade 7 managed to escape to fight another day, it did so only by leaving all of its launchers and vehicles behind. The unit was reassembled and partially reequipped in Prüm, in the Eifel region of western Germany, and in mid-November it was redesignated Volks-Werfer-Brigade 7. On December 16 both its regiments contributed to the massive barrage that immediately preceded the last-ditch German offensive that quickly became known as the Battle of the Bulge. As the attacking forces surged forward, Volks-Werfer-Brigade 7 followed to provide fire support for 5th Panzer-Armee and eventually settled on the eastern outskirts of St. Vith, Belgium. But as American resistance stiffened on the ground and clearing weather allowed Allied attack aircraft to once again range freely over the snow-covered battlefield, the brigade joined the general German withdrawal eastward.
In January and February 1945 Volks-Werfer-Brigade 7 took part in the ultimately futile defense of Saarbrücken against Alexander Patch’s U.S. Seventh Army, a fight during which Sepp Gangl was again cited for extreme bravery in combat. Though the details of his heroism are lost to history, we know that he was awarded the German Cross in Gold38 on March 8. Days later Gangl was promoted to major and given command of his regiment’s 2nd Battalion, though by that point the battalion could muster barely enough men to constitute a single battery. Gangl wouldn’t have had much time to savor the promotion, for by that point the battered brigade—at barely half strength and with few working vehicles and no remaining launchers—was engaged in almost constant retreat. Moving only at night in order to avoid roving Allied aircraft, Volks-Werfer-Brigade 7 headed steadily southeastward, and by the first week of April what was left of the unit was spread across several miles of Bavaria in the area of Peissenberg, the town where Gangl had grown up. The regiment was no longer a coherent fighting force, and its commander, Brigadier General Dr. Kurt Paape,39 broke it up into independent battalions, ordering the commanders of each to take their remaining men into the Austrian Tyrol and offer their services to whoever was organizing the defense of the Alpine Fortress.
While we’re not certain of the route Sepp Gangl and the thirty or so men that by now constituted his entire battalion took on their journey into Austria, it seems likely that the rapid advance of American forces across lower Bavaria would have dictated an initial move directly east from Peissenberg toward Bad Tölz, then a turn south down the Isar River valley. Some twelve miles on, where the Isar flows north out of the Sylvensteinsee, Gangl and his men would have turned east and crossed into Austria. Once across what until 1938 had been the frontier, they would have headed south through the Achental Valley, along the east side of the Achensee and into the Inn Valley at Jenbach. Immediately upon their mid-April arrival within von Hengl’s Northwest Alpine Front, Gangl and the few surviving members of his 2nd Battalion were dragooned into service with Battle Group Giehl, whose headquarters’ elements were by then in Wörgl.
We will likely never know with any certainty whether Sepp Gangl took his remaining soldiers into Austria seriously intending to join the last-ditch fight against the Americans or was simply looking for a quiet backwater where he and his men could safely wait out the last weeks of the war. Nor can we be sure whether the Wehrmacht artillery officer—a career soldier three times decorated for bravery in combat against his nation’s enemies—had ever actually believed in the führer to whom he’d sworn a solemn oath of obedience. But we can infer much about Gangl’s true character from the fact that within days of his arrival in Wörgl, he made contact with Alois Mayr’s resistance cell and offered to provide both weapons and his unreserved assistance. It was a blatant act of treason against both führer and fatherland, one punishable by death not only for Gangl40 but by that point in the war for his wife and children as well.
And yet, despite the risks to himself and his loved ones, Sepp Gangl ultimately made the decision that within weeks would lead him to put his life in even more direct peril in order to help save a querulous group of French VIPs locked away in a fairytale castle.
WHILE WE DON’T KNOW how Gangl made initial contact with the Wörgl resisters, we can make a few educated guesses.
The first is that upon joining the staff of Battle Group Giehl, Gangl gained access to intelligence reports that identified Mayr, Hagleitner, and other key members of the organization and, acting on his own, sought them out. This is the least likely scenario, given the simple fact that had the resistance members’ identities been known and recorded in any official file, they would almost certainly already have been arrested. Even during the last weeks of the war SS and Gestapo units were active throughout Tyrol, summarily executing real or suspected anti-Nazis and “defeatists” in the military and civilian populations. Von Hengl’s Alpine Front, Northwest, staff included (quite possibly against the aristocratic general’s will) members of both organizations, and they would have demanded and received access to any information that might identify resisters.
Another possibility is that in the course of his work on Giehl’s staff, Gangl somehow learned the identity of one or more of the Wörgl resistance members and reached out to them. While plausible, this is also doubtful. Given the continuing predations of the SS and Gestapo, no resister in his right mind would have considered the advances of a highly decorated, non-Austrian Wehrmacht officer to be anything but a fairly clumsy attempt at entrapment. In the best-case scenario Gangl would have been politely brushed off with fulsome protestations of innocence; in the worst, he could well have ended up floating down the Inn River with a bullet in the back of his head.
The most likely way that Gangl made contact with Mayr’s cell, then, was through a trusted intermediary. As noted earlier in this chapter, key Austrian-born officers in several of the second-line Wehrmacht units in the Kufstein-Wörgl area—including Gebirgsjäger-Ersatz-Bataillon 136, Reserve-Gebirgsjäger-Bataillon 137, and Gebirgs-Artillerie-Ersatz-Abteilung 118—are known to have been active in, or at the very least sympathetic to, the resistance. Since those organizations, and for that matter the mountain troops’ NCO school, were expected to provide men or materiel to von Hengl’s battle groups, it’s entirely possible that Gangl came into contact with one or more of their anti-Nazi members during the course of his official duties. Did Gangl make the first move, or did someone approach him? While we can’t know who reached out to whom, we can be certain that the initial contact would have constituted a tremendous leap of faith: an ill-considered overture to the wrong person could very well have ended in front of a firing squad.
However Gangl gained an introduction to the Mayr-Hagleitner resistance organization, we know that his position as one of Battle Group Giehl’s senior officers made him extremely valuable to the anti-Nazi movement. In the course of his official duties Gangl moved freely throughout the Rosenheim-Kufstein-Wörgl area, ostensibly coordinating with the other battle groups and overseeing the Organization Todt’s41 construction of roadblocks and placement of demolition charges on key roads and bridges. He made careful notes on the location of the obstacles and the strength and armament of Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS units deployed in the region, which he passed to Hagleitner for transmission up the POEN-O5 chain. In addition to providing the resisters with weapons and ammunition, Gangl supplied details on which of his fellow battle-group officers were die-hard Nazis and which could be trusted to aid the resistance when the time came. In the latter category were a dozen of the former Werfer-Regiment 83 comrades—both officers and enlisted soldiers—who’d accompanied Gangl into Austria and who he’d determined shared his views.
In the days since his initial contact with the Wörgl resistance cell, Gangl had shown himself to be both a dedicated anti-Nazi and a highly competent soldier, and, at a meeting on Monday, April 30, Alois Mayr put the Wehrmacht officer in charge of the group’s military operations.42 Gangl’s first decision was that the resisters would have to prevent the execution of two orders issued by Giehl.43 The first command dictated that Wörgl be vigorously defended against the advancing Americans, and the second that all of the town’s bridges and its major roads be obstructed or destroyed with explosives.
Gangl’s second decision concerned the French prisoners being held at Schloss Itter, whom he’d been told of shortly after his initial contact with the Wörgl resisters. The VIPs obviously had to be secured, he said, but any attempt to rescue them would have to be carried out covertly to avoid a full-scale battle with Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht troops still loyal to the führer. Gangl ordered that weapons and ammunition for the rescue be cached somewhere outside Wörgl, and the following day Mayr and a local mechanic named Hans Scheffold removed two carloads of the necessary items from the basement of the Neue Post Inn and drove them via back roads to an abandoned farmhouse in Kelchsau, some six miles southeast of Wörgl.
Though Gangl had intended to secure the French prisoners sooner rather than later, the rapidly changing military situation in the Inn Valley kept him from launching an immediate rescue. On Tuesday morning, May 1, even as Mayr and Scheffold were on their way to cache the weapons, Giehl ordered Gangl to inspect those elements of the battle group deployed on either side of the main road leading south from Rosenheim to Kufstein. The next day Gangl was tied up in meetings all day with Colonel Forster, the commander of the Wörgl-based reserve task force. And any hopes Gangl might have had of securing the French VIPs on Thursday, May 3, disappeared when elements of Battle Group Giehl came under attack by the U.S. 12th Armored Division in and around Niederaudorf, Germany, seven miles north of Kufstein.44
The appearance of American forces just over the German border sparked a flurry of activity in and around Wörgl. In the early afternoon von Hengl dispatched Forster’s reserve task force to Schwaz to help block the Inn River valley, but the unit was decimated by American air strikes and artillery fire before it had gone five miles. By late afternoon those elements of Battle Group Giehl north of Kufstein had been effectively destroyed, and by early evening von Hengl had decided to pull his remaining forces—now totaling fewer than 1,400 men—out of Wörgl to new positions east of Schloss Itter. His order didn’t affect the various independent Waffen-SS units that had retreated into the area, however, and they filtered into Wörgl and the surrounding area as von Hengl’s men moved out.
It was the appearance of large numbers of these die-hard Waffen-SS troops that prompted Gangl to make his final break with the Wehrmacht. Late on Thursday evening, even as Giehl and his other staff officers were jumping into their vehicles and roaring out of Wörgl, Gangl was meeting with a very concerned Alois Mayr. The resistance leader was understandably concerned that the withdrawal of von Hengl’s troops would allow the newly arrived Waffen-SS units to wreak havoc on the local people, many of whom had already started putting out white flags in anticipation of the Americans’ arrival. It wasn’t an idle worry: barely ten days earlier, Heinrich Himmler had issued an order stating that “all male persons inhabiting a house showing a white flag will be shot. No hesitation in executing these orders can be permitted any longer. ‘Male persons’ who are to be considered responsible in this respect are those aged 14 years or over.”45 Gangl, fully aware that he and those soldiers who had chosen to join him, as well as Hagleitner’s armed resistance members, were the only force capable of providing any protection for Wörgl’s civilians, decided on the spot to remain in the town as the rest of Giehl’s battle group withdrew.
But on Friday morning, May 4, the artillery officer and newly minted resistance leader was unexpectedly handed another task, one arguably as important as organizing the defense of Wörgl. Just after eleven AM, as Gangl was handing out automatic weapons and hand grenades to Hagleitner and some of his men, other resisters appeared, accompanying a disheveled man on a battered bicycle. Walking directly up to Gangl, the new arrival said, in heavily accented German, that his name was Andreas Krobot and he was the bearer of important news from Schloss Itter.