Spanish Riding School

In spring 1945, hundreds of priceless Lipizzaner stallions belonging to Vienna's Spanish Riding School stood in Nazi-held territory, with Soviet troops closing in and twenty miles of contested ground between them and safety. The guide follows director Alois Podhajsky's appeal to General George Patton, a horseman himself, and the American soldiers, freed prisoners, and defected German troops who set out to move the herd across enemy lines. Stand beneath the baroque galleries built here for Emperor Charles VI in the 1730s.