World War II’s Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together

A very interesting book review of a true story in world war 2, son. For such an enlightened continent, with a history proclaiming the birthplace of amazing ideas like democracy, enlightenment, liberalism, rights of man, sculpture, painting, theatre, opera, music, science, and and and, it's quite ironic that they also have been one of the most violent continents. 

They never learn. One would have thought that after the sheer disaster and genocide of world war 2, it would be learn to be more liberal and less of drooling pitchfork wielding xenophobic tribesmen. 

Look around the European landscape. Each and every country, from Finland with true Finns to Greece with golden dawn to France with the national front and the uk with the BNP and ukip is full of right wing swivel eyed loons. Xenophobic bastards. 

Love

Baba

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World War II’s Strangest Battle: When Americans and Germans Fought Together - The Daily Beast
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/12/world-war-ii-s-strangest-battle-when-americans-and-germans-fought-together.html

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The most extraordinary things about this truly incredible tale of World War II are that it hasn’t been told before in English, and that it hasn’t already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others. Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?

AP

The battle for the fairytale, 13th century Castle Itter was the only time in WWII that American and German troops joined forces in combat, and it was also the only time in American history that U.S. troops defended a medieval castle against sustained attack by enemy forces. To make it even more film worthy, two of the women imprisoned at Schloss Itter—Augusta Bruchlen, who was the mistress of the labour leader Leon Jouhaux, and Madame Weygand, the wife General Maxime Weygand—were there because they chose to stand by their men. They, along with Paul Reynaud’s mistress Christiane Mabire, were incredibly strong, capable, and determined women made for portrayal on the silver screen.