The Last Battle (2 page)

T
HE WARMTH OF THE SPRING SUN
and Jack Lee’s exhaustion made it difficult for him to focus on the map. He was profoundly tired and hoped, more fervently than he let on to his men, that Kufstein would be Company B’s last battle. Like virtually every other soldier in the European theater of operations, Lee knew that the war could end at any moment—Adolf Hitler had killed himself five days earlier, and organized German opposition was crumbling—and, while the young officer would in some ways hate to see the conflict come to a close, he didn’t want any of his men to be the last American killed in Europe.

As Lee pondered what the war’s end would mean to him and his fellow tankers, events were unfolding literally just down the road that would shatter his men’s dreams of peace. Though he didn’t yet know it, Lee was about to be thrust into an unlikely battle involving the alpine castle whose icon was obscured by a fold in his map, a group of combative French VIPs, an uneasy alliance with the enemy, a fight to the death against overwhelming odds, and the last—and arguably the strangest—ground combat action of World War II in Europe.

CHAPTER 1

A MOUNTAIN STRONGHOLD

T
HE CASTLE THAT WAS SOON
to figure so largely in Jack Lee’s life lay fourteen road miles to the southwest of where the young officer sat perched atop his tank. Schloss Itter, as it’s called in German, sits on a hill that commands the entrance to Austria’s Brixental valley. The structure bestrides a ravine, with a short bridge linking the castle to the flank of the mountain. The village of Itter spreads out to the east from the castle, some 2,300 feet above sea level and nestled beneath Hohe Salve, the 6,000-foot mountain in the middle alpine region historically known as Tyrol.

Though it would be of little concern to Lee and his men in the coming hours, Castle Itter already had a long, rich, and often violent history. The surrounding area had been inhabited at least since the middle Bronze Age (1800 to 1300
BCE
), and the fact that the valleys of the Inn and Brixental Rivers provide a fairly flat and direct route between Central Europe and the Italian peninsula ensured that Tyrol saw more than its share of conflict. Conquered by Rome in 15
BCE
, the region was successively invaded by the Ostrogoths, various German tribes, and Charlemagne’s Franks. In the ninth century
CE
Tyrol came under the sway of the Bavarians, who built two sturdy stone keeps and a surrounding wall atop the hill that would later be home to Schloss Itter, and in 902 a Count Radolt passed ownership of the fortified site to the Roman Catholic diocese of Regensburg.
¹

Seeking to better protect his expanding Tyrolean possessions—and, of course, better enforce the collection of diocesan taxes—Regensburg’s Bishop Totu
²
ordered that the keeps and wall be replaced by a more substantial fortress. Construction of the full-fledged castle was a leisurely and often-interrupted process, however, and took more than a century to complete. In 1239 Rapoto III of Ortenburg, Bavaria’s count palatine,
³
seized the fortress as a result of his vicious feud with the then current bishop of Regensburg, Siegfried. The latter captured Rapoto in 1240, and, in order to win his freedom, the defeated nobleman was forced to cede many of his properties in Bavaria and Tyrol to the Regensburg bishopric. Among the properties passed to Siegfried were the castle at Itter and the village that had grown just outside its walls; the names of both fortress and village first appear in the historical record in 1241.
⁴

Though ostensibly men of both God and peace, the bishops of Regensburg were also princes of the Holy Roman Empire. As temporal rulers the bishops were often heavy-handed and needlessly severe, and Schloss Itter saw frequent service as a base from which the bishops launched punitive expeditions against their sorely oppressed subjects. Though Tyrol came under Hapsburg rule in 1363, Schloss Itter and the nearby village remained within the ecclesiastical control of the Regensburg bishops until 1380, when Bishop Konrad VI von Haimberg sold them to the archbishop of Salzburg—Pilgrim II of Puchein—for 26,000 Hungarian guilders.

Looted and partially destroyed during the 1515–1526 Tyrolean peasant uprising,
⁵
Schloss Itter was rebuilt beginning in 1532. For the last few years of the sixteenth century, the fortress was home to an ecclesiastical court charged with suppressing witchcraft in the region, and local legend holds that in 1590 the last witch to be burned in the Tyrol met her end on a pyre in the schloss’s main courtyard.
⁶
It is also at about this time—and most probably at the order of those whose job it was to root out witches—that the famous phrase from Dante’s fourteenth-century epic poem
Divine Comedy
was first inscribed, in German, on the wall above the doors leading to Schloss Itter’s vaulted entranceway: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The castle changed hands several times over the following two and a half centuries, and by 1782 was part of the personal lands of Joseph II, who had become Holy Roman emperor two years earlier following the death of his mother, Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa. So fond was Joseph of his
Tyrolean fortress that when Pope Pius VI journeyed to Austria shortly after Joseph’s ascension to the throne, the monarch insisted that the pope consecrate the altar in Schloss Itter’s small but exquisite chapel. The pope did so—mainly in an attempt to heal a rift between Joseph and the church—and also left behind at the castle an ornate Gothic crucifix and other ecclesiastical treasures.

Despite his fondness for Schloss Itter, Joseph II—like most of the castle’s previous owners—chose to live elsewhere. In late December 1805 he was replaced by another, though admittedly far grander, absentee landlord, Napoléon Bonaparte. The diminutive French emperor gained title to the schloss as a result of the Treaty of Pressburg, which followed his victories over Austria at Ulm and Austerlitz, in mid-October and early December 1805, respectively. Bonaparte did not long retain title, however, for in 1809 he presented Schloss Itter to his loyal ally King Maximilian I of Bavaria.
⁷
The latter did little to ensure the upkeep of his new fortress, and, when in 1812 the councilors of Itter village offered Maximilian the relatively paltry sum of 15 Austro-Hungarian guldens for the entire edifice, the king accepted with alacrity. The villagers in fact had no intention of rehabilitating Schloss Itter; they intended it merely to be a source of construction materials. Over the following decades stones from the castle’s walls and wooden beams from its interior were used to build the village
gasthaus
and various other structures.

The castle remained in disrepair even after Tyrol returned to Austrian rule following the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna. But in 1878 the obviously canny village government sold the schloss—by that time little more than a scenic ruin—for an impressive 3,000 guldens to a Munich-based entrepreneur named Paul Spiess, who planned to turn it into a large and presumably very exclusive inn. The would-be hotelier launched a comprehensive renovation, ultimately giving Schloss Itter a central, multistory housing wing with fifty guest rooms, backed by a taller keep-like structure and flanked by smaller wings containing kitchens, servants’ quarters, and storage areas. Spiess also repaired the encircling walls, rebuilt the crumbling gatehouse, landscaped the ravine, and repaved the narrow, 150-yard-long road between the castle and the village. Despite Spiess’s investment, the hotel ultimately failed, and in 1884 the disappointed businessman sold the property to one of Europe’s most acclaimed—and beautiful—musicians, the famed German piano virtuoso and composer Sophie Menter.

Born in Munich in 1846, Menter was something of a prodigy. The child of talented musicians—her father was a cellist and her mother a singer—she played her first public concert while still in her teens. At the age of twenty-three she became a student of Franz Liszt, who often referred to her as his “piano daughter” and ultimately declared her to be the world’s finest living female pianist. In 1872 she married the Bohemian cellist David Popper, with whom she toured for several years. Menter’s purchase
⁸
of Castle Itter was the culmination of a long-held desire for a stately home that would serve as both a private refuge from the rigors of her professional life and a salon for other musicians, and she refurbished several of the ground-floor rooms for use as practice areas and small performance spaces.

Over the eighteen years that Menter owned Castle Itter, she hosted such notable musical guests as Richard Wagner and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and her friend and mentor Liszt was a frequent and very welcome visitor. Indeed, so welcome was he that his several visits always commenced with ceremonial cannon salutes, and his passage up the approach road took him beneath flower-bedecked triumphal arches. While Liszt enjoyed these grand gestures, he used his time as Menter’s guest to work. During a visit in November 1885, for example, he arose each morning at four, worked steadily for three hours, took a brief pause to attend Mass in the castle’s chapel, and then went back to work until midafternoon.
⁹
In letters to Menter he was deeply appreciative of the time he’d spent at her “fairy-like” castle, referring to his time there as “magic memories.”
¹⁰

Sophie Menter continued to live at Castle Itter following the end of her marriage to Popper in 1886, and she often used the schloss for public events such as her October 1891 benefit performance to support the new choral society forming in the market town of Wörgl, four miles to the northwest of the schloss. She also continued to provide a creative atmosphere for famous visitors. During one two-week visit in September 1892, Tchaikovsky most probably scored Menter’s “Ungarische Zigeunerweisen,” a seventeen-minute work for piano and orchestra based on Hungarian Gypsy melodies that Menter and Tchaikovsky premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February 1893.

Sadly, the costs of keeping up the aging structure forced Menter to sell Schloss Itter in 1902.
¹¹
The buyer was one Eugen Mayr of Berlin, a wealthy physician and entrepreneur who equipped parts of the structure with electric lighting and had modern plumbing installed in the kitchens and primary
living areas. Mayr used the castle as a suitably majestic venue for his August 1904 wedding to Maria Kunert, and he then spent several years and a small fortune giving the structure a neo-Gothic facelift. The addition of crenellated battlements and extensive interior woodwork—as well as the installation of several huge paintings depicting various stirring scenes from German mythology—left the castle with the fairytale look so popular during the first years of the twentieth century, which allowed Herr Mayr and his bride to achieve some success operating Itter as a boutique hotel.

The Schloss-Hotel Itter, as it was known, gained both prestige and increasing numbers of well-heeled guests following the end of World War I. The growing popularity of downhill skiing ensured that formerly sleepy villages throughout the Tyrol became popular holiday destinations, and the hamlet of Itter—which enterprising locals quickly dubbed “the Pearl of Tyrol”—was no exception. The castle was far and away the toniest place to lodge while enjoying the area’s winter sports and gradually became almost as popular during the off-season. In 1925 the First Austrian Republic’s deputy governor of Tyrol, Dr. Franz Grüner, bought Schloss Itter, primarily as a venue in which to display his impressive—and vast—collection of artwork and sculpture. Ironically, in 1932 Édouard Daladier, who during World War II would be one of Itter’s VIP prisoners, stayed at the castle while visiting Wörgl to explore the growing city’s experimental issuance of local currency as a way to stimulate economic recovery from the worldwide depression.
¹²

That depression ultimately helped bring about Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, of course, which in turn led in March 1938 to the Anschluss—Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. And that sad event ultimately led directly to Schloss Itter’s transformation from fairytale castle and hotel into something decidedly more sinister.