The Last Battle

by Stephen Harding

  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,[150] 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.[151] 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;[152] 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,[153] 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.[154] 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.[155]

  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-arms[156] 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 werfer[157] 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.[158] 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 S
oviet 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.