The camp at Belsen was liberated by elements of the British 11th Armoured Division, VIII Corps, 2nd Army, who with Canadian 1st Army formed the left hook of the Allied advance into Germany. In February 1945 the British and Canadians fought their last major battle in and around the Reichswald forest, experiencing conditions comparable to the American battles in the Hurtgen Forest over the previous months. The casualty toll of these battles is the backdrop to the insistence in my novel that a battle be avoided in the fictional forest beside the camp, at all costs. Even in April 1945 there were pockets of German resistance that were able to stall the Allied advance for days, not only remnant Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht but also fresh units such as the 2nd Marine-Infanterie-Division (remustered Kriegsmarine sailors) as well as Hitler-Jugende and the Volkssturm, the boys and old men who were Hitler’s last reserve. German officers interviewed after the war were derisive of the slow pace of the Allied advance along a wide front, and felt the war could have been won months earlier using spearhead ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics similar to those the Germans had used in 1940. There is little doubt that one factor behind Allied decision-making was the need to discover Nazi scientific secrets and technology before it was destroyed, or used against them. The activities of covert units such as 30AU – 30 Commando Assault (later ‘Advance’) Unit, the brainchild of Commander Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels – are still shrouded in secrecy, and there can be no certainty how successful the Allies were in revealing the Nazis’ most deadly secrets, particularly biological and chemical weapons.
Among these units the ‘Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives’ men have been the subject of much interest, not least because their work highlights treasures stolen by the Nazis that remain missing. Among the most extraordinary discoveries in 1945 were caches of art treasures stored in salt mines at Merkers in Germany and Altaussee in Austria, the latter rigged by the local Nazi Gauleiter with 500 kilogram bombs – a particularly fanatical interpretation of Hitler’s so-called ‘Nero Decree’, the order for the destruction of the infrastructure of the Reich. These discoveries inspired my idea that the famous Wieliczka salt mine in Poland could have been used for similar purposes, especially as it is known that one of the deep chambers was converted by the Nazis to an aircraft engine assembly facility employing slave labour. The underwater tunnels beyond the accessible mine in this novel are fictitious, but based on my own experiences diving in submerged mineshafts.
One of the greatest lost masterpieces remains Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, stolen by the Nazis from the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow. Schliemann’s ‘Treasure of Priam’, given by him to the Imperial Museum, Berlin, was stored during the war in the Zoo Flakturm, a vast concrete bunker built on the site of Berlin Zoo. The treasure disappeared in 1945 and was thought lost, but re-emerged in 1993 in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The possibility remains that other artefacts may have been secretly despatched by Schliemann for safekeeping in Germany or elsewhere, and that these may one day be discovered along with other treasures stolen by the Nazis.
An inspiration for the fictional meeting of the three statesmen in 1890 at Troy was my acquisition of a copy of Schliemann’s book Mycenae originally from the library of Senator George Frisbie Hoar (1826-1904), one of the great American politicians and men of letters of the nineteenth century, as well as an ardent antiquarian. In his autobiography Hoar describes visiting England and the House of Commons, where he admired the oratory of the Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898). Friendship with Gladstone was a factor in Schliemann’s fame; Gladstone arranged for Schliemann to speak at the Society of Antiquaries in London, and wrote the long preface to his book Mycenae. As well as his literary passion for Homer, Gladstone had a particular fascination with early metallurgy and discoursed with Schliemann on the subject. He was solicitous of Schliemann’s health, and Schliemann himself finally seemed to acknowledge his own mortality in his final letter to another supporter, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). Bismarck had united Germany but would have been concerned at the new significance of the swastika, and the dark forces of nationalism it was beginning to represent; his famous premonition that the next European war would be sparked by an incident in the Balkans proved horrifyingly correct. These were men who saw archaeology through the prism of the nineteenth-century ‘march of progress’, for whom learning from the past was more than just a cliche. I have imagined them fearful of the future, but sharing with Schliemann a self-confidence and idealism that could have allowed them to stand together one night and imagine how they might prevent a repeat of ‘the first hideous crime of civilized man’, the fall of Troy.
The quote at the beginning of the book is based on a clay tablet (RS 34.165) found at Ugarit in Syria, detailing the leadup to a battle between the Hittites and the Assyrians in the late thirteenth century BC; the lower quote is from Alexander Pope’s The Iliad of Homer (London, 1806). The poems by W.H. Auden mentioned in the novel are in The Shield of Achilles (London, Faber amp; Faber, 1955). In chapter 18, George Hoar’s declamation on war foreshadows his speech in the US Senate in 1902, arguing against war in the Philippines (Jennings, B.W. and Halsey, F.W., eds, The World’s Famous Orations. America III (1861-1905), New York, 1906). The cover illustration is based on the Mask of Agamemnon from Mycenae, now on display in the National Archaeological Museum at Athens. The illustrations in the text are a fourth century BC silver coin of the Greek island of Ios, legendary birthplace of Homer, showing the poet and the Greek letters OMEROU; a reverse swastika based on the decorations on Schliemann’s house in Athens; and the bookplate of George Hoar in his copy of Schliemann’s Mycenae. Other images of sites and artefacts in this novel, including a tour of Troy, Dillen’s blackened potsherd, the books by Schliemann and Pope, shipwreck photographs and Jack’s Webley revolver, are found on my website www.davidgibbins.com.
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