The Last Battle (14 page)

A
S 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.
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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),
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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 O5
²²
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

A
T FIRST GLANCE
, J
OSEF
G
ANGL
—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,
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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.
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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;
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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.