More paintings from the Dresden Gallery were found at Pockau-Lengefeld by the Czech border in the fortress at Königstein and some modern masters in a house in Barnitz. In Meissen orders were given to restart production of the famous porcelain. This was not possible, however, as the demontagniki had made off with the equipment. The contents of the Porcelain Museum as well as some valuable paintings were stored in the old castle at the top of the hill. Also in Saxony, Leipzig’s most valuable collections had been placed in the strongrooms of banks. Nearly a hundred were found in a vault on the Friedrich-Tröndlin-Ring in October. Thirty more were found in a bank in the Otto-Schill-Strasse. The Russians took only 10 per cent of their find home, but that still amounted to over a hundred paintings. Another fifty-two came from the Coburgs’ Jagdschloss Reinhardsbrunn and the palace in Dessau. Added to the pictures were whole libraries from Friedenstein, Gotha and Leipzig. These were taken to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, together with the university libraries from Leipzig and Halle.17
At the beginning of May a search had been made for the vanished treasures of Danzig after the Russian shelling of the old city. The hunt began in the Arsenal, where the Trophy Brigade had to brave the stench of decomposing corpses to locate their quarry. After two days they found the hiding place and unearthed treasures from the town hall and the museum. The best bits went to Russia. A few odds and ends were given to the new Polish director of the museum. In the ruins of the famous Artushof, they looked in vain for the fifteenth-century wooden relief of St George. It had been destroyed in the fire following the shelling. In the wreckage of a bank, however, they unearthed the coin collection from Marienburg, the fortress of the Teutonic Knights.18
The Soviet forces perpetrated all sorts of theft. The most common was the pillaging which accompanied their arrival and which has never been accurately assessed. When it is considered that virtually every sewing machine, every gramophone and every wireless set went east, it can only be described as looting on a staggering scale. The trophy battalions followed on the heels of the soldiers who pinched anything that took their fancy. By 2 August 1945 these had seized 1,280,000 tons of material and 3,600,000 tons of equipment. This way they hoped to make good the losses they had incurred in the war. Officially they claimed the Germans had destroyed $168 milliard’s worth of equipment, but that figure must also have included items they destroyed themselves in their retreat.19
It was not always the Russians who arrived first. The art historian Paul Ortwin Rave guided the MFAA to Ransbach where the Berlin State Theatre and the Opera House had stored their costumes. They found the remains of an orgy that had been enjoyed by Russian and Polish workers and prisoners together. Once their German guards had run off they had broken into the cases and dressed themselves up in costumes from Aïda and Lohengrin. They had also found a hidden fund of champagne and cognac. In their drunken state they had broken into cases containing Dürers and Holbeins, but at the sight of the saints they had fled in holy terror. The Americans took the prize to Frankfurt in their zone. It was they who located the treasure in Altaussee, as well as parts of Göring’s collection, including the sixteen cases which the Reichsmarshall had grabbed from among the pictures stored in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino and which the Germans had taken into safe keeping before the British destroyed the building.20
Franz Sayn-Wittgenstein recalled examples of the Americans’ cupidity in their zone. He was staying in his wife’s family mansion, Budingen, when the US governor of Hessen, Newman, sent word to requisition silver and furniture for his palace. They fobbed him off with tableware, which was later returned. In June 1946 Clay rebutted a charge of looting made against some of his soldiers who were accused of stealing six paintings. 21 Easier to verify was the theft of the Quedlinburg Bibles by American soldiers in Thuringia.22 The American commander in Budingen was a Captain Robinson, who swiped five pictures from the Städel Gallery in Frankfurt. ‘Robinson revealed himself as nothing more than a common thief.’ They were traced as far as Holland, whence they were in all probability shipped to the United States. They were put up for sale many years later, and the Städel was able to buy them back.23 Most American cases were restricted to petty larceny out of a desire for souvenirs, though occasionally a shop was looted for objects like cameras. GIs had a passion for Nazi artefacts only equalled by the Soviet soldateska - as they advanced through Germany they trashed each SS barracks in the pursuit of flags and swastikas. There was also a celebrated case when two officers of the Women’s Army Corps were tried for stealing $1,500,000 worth of jewellery from Princess Mary of Hesse, a fantastic sum then.24
Captain Frank M. Dunbaugh took the 50,000 tin and lead soldiers that were the pride of the Hirtenmuseum in Hersbruck in Franconia. They represented the armies that went to war in 1914. In an effort to relocate the soldiers the town contacted President Eisenhower, who promised his support. Some 500 of the figures were tracked down in Texas. When Dunbaugh was asked his excuse for ‘liberating’ them he replied that it was to ‘deglamorize the Hitler war machine in every way possible’. Theft was therefore justified by JCS 1067. In 1958 another 20,000 of the soldiers were located and eventually shipped back to Hersbruck. An attempt to force the Americans to compensate the museum for the rest fell on deaf ears.25
The Americans were not all thieves. In Wiesbaden they organised a Central Collecting Point for Jewish paintings and books stolen by the Nazis. It was run by Theodor ‘Ted’ Heinrich, later professor of art history at the University of Toronto. Surviving Jews could apply to retrieve their belongings there. The Americans also located a favourite grey that had belonged to Queen Wilhelmina of Holland and which had been seized by the Germans during the occupation of her country. In the confusion at the end of the war, the horse had been given to a circus. The Americans returned the animal to its mistress who had it saddled in order to form part of a parade. When the music struck up, the horse got up on its hind legs and began to dance, a trick it had learned in the circus. Her majesty was not amused and the horse was put out to grass.26 Queen Wilhelmina might have been more grateful that the horse had not been eaten by hungry Germans or DPs. In Munich Carl Zuckmayer reported that Poles had stolen the world’s sole porcine tightrope walker, once the pride of Althof’s travelling circus - they had then slaughtered it and had it for dinner. When the owner tried to prevent the Poles from killing his beloved pig he nearly lost his own life as well. Althof had had the hog insured abroad and apparently received no compensation for his loss.27
There were acts of common theft perpetrated by the British too. At the Krupp residence, Villa Hügel in Essen, an inquiry carried out in 1952 revealed that property valued at two million marks had been purloined during the occupation. Much of it was later found in Holland, where it was waiting to cross the Channel. The greatest scandal surrounding the British Zone was the use of Schloss Bückeburg, home of the Schaumburg-Lippe family, by the RAF. The process was begun by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, whom the art historian Ellis Waterhouse compared to Göring in his acquisitiveness. Coningham removed and distributed enormous quantities of valuable silver, furnishings and objets d’art from the Schloss, and much of it later remained unaccounted for. The affair led to the resignation of the military governor, Marshal of the RAF Sir Sholto Douglas.28
The British lagged behind the Russians and the Americans in purloining art works, but they had their own brand of organised theft in T-Force, which sought to glean any industrial wizardry hatched under the Nazis and bring it home to Britain. The Russians and the Americans were equally guilty on this score, but, as George Clare puts it, they ‘preferred the inventors to the inventions’, while the British were too hard up to feed their boffins. In Cuxhaven, however, they learned what they could about the workings of the V2, and they made off with all the German naval equipment they could find. One of the things that Clare saw at the Askanier Works when he was interpreting there was a prototype tape recorder.29 In January 1947 the British launched Operation Matchbox designed to
lure German scientists to their zone, but they were even less efficient than the French; and the Americans had the pick of them.30 As one American put it, ‘The British and the Russians have got hold of a few German scientists . . . but there can be no doubt that we have captured the best.’31
The Allies stole men and women who for one reason or another were useful for their projects. Under the pretext of accusing them of seeking to develop an atomic bomb, bacterial warfare, space travel and guided missiles, the British and Americans arrested a number of nuclear physicists and had them brought to England in what was meant to be a species of joint enterprise. 32 These included Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Otto Hahn, Werner Heisenberg and Max von Laue. With the exception of Heisenberg, the men were found in Hechingen in Württemberg, where they had been working on their uranium piles, drawn from the mines of Joachimsthal in the Sudetenland. Heisenberg was discovered in his family skiing chalet in Upper Bavaria. Others, such as Richard Kuhn and Wolfgang Gertner, were apprehended in Heidelberg. Some of the smaller fry were taken by the British in Hamburg.
Once the team had been assembled they were brought first to France, initially to Rheims and Versailles, before being lodged in a villa in the Paris suburb of Le Vésinet. They were eventually delivered to Farm Hall near Cambridge, where they were perceived to have nothing in common bar the title Herr Doktor ‘by which they punctiliously addressed one another’.33 Once the Anglo-Americans had learned everything they could about the Nazi atom-bomb programme they were released in Hamburg and Göttingen, but told not to stray into the Soviet Zone. That was also for their own safety. The Russians were keen to abduct or simply tempt away scientists and technicians who might have been useful to them. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gustav Hertz was taken to Russia to help them develop nuclear weapons. On 21 October 1945 a large number of skilled workers, technicians and scientists were freighted out by train. The Western powers made a weak protest, which the Russians simply ignored.34
15
Where are our Men?
The only thing I know for certain is that the prisoners-of-war are dying of hunger and that the field in which they have to sleep is hellish damp.
Ernst von Salomon, The Answers, London 1954, 423
The Status of German POWs
The history of the German POWs is murky, largely because the West, by acting in an inhumane manner, lost the moral high ground they had achieved by fighting a moral crusade against the Nazis, but also because the German Federal Republic has allowed it to remain shrouded in darkness.
Around eight million German soldiers were captured at the end of the war - making a total, if you add those taken before May 1945, of around eleven million. This meant that every household in Germany was affected in some way; and the women were asking, ‘Where are our men?’1 The Western Allies captured some 7.6 million, while the rest fell into the hands of the Red Army. About five of the eleven million were released within a year. A million and a half, however, never came home, giving rise to a number of stories of how they met their end. Some writers have averred that they were all killed in captivity, and that it was a deliberate policy on the part of the Allies. The only figures that exist refer to the ‘missing’. The Red Cross gives their number as 1,086,000. A more reliable tally would be 1.3 million in the east (including Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland) and around 100,000 in the west.2
Until 8 May 1945, the Swiss had been responsible for German prisoners of war. On that day they packed their bags - the Allies had decided that the German Empire had ceased to exist. The German army had ‘unconditionally surrendered’ and the new prisoners were now at the mercy of their captors, without recourse to protection by a neutral state. Two new terms - strange to the Geneva Convention - were created to describe the newly captured soldiers: they were ‘Surrendered Enemy Persons’ and ‘Disarmed Enemy Persons’. POW status, as regulated by the Geneva and Hague Conventions, accounted for 4.2 million men who had been caught in the net earlier. The other 3.4 million in the West were SEPs or DEPs and were not entitled to the same levels of shelter and subsistence.3 The Soviet Union had never signed the Geneva Convention, so the Red Cross never had any jurisdiction there; they were not POWs, or anything else for that matter. Their fate was often a matter of complete indifference to the Soviet authorities. The change in terminology is significant. The men had been robbed of their status as combatants, which left them open to prosecution, an outcome excluded by the Geneva and Hague Conventions. It presaged new uses for the men, who were to be put to work. With the exception of the Americans, the Allies all envisaged a prolonged use of German slave labour. While the International Red Cross had a right to inspect POW camps, the barbed wire surrounding SEPs or DEPs was impenetrable.4
The idea of using the POWs as slaves was aired at Moscow in 1943. The originators of the proposal were the British. At Yalta it was decided that the men could be made to repair the damage Germany had caused to the Allies. They were to be a ‘work force’ and were to be retained for an indefinite period. It was at that moment that it became clear that their status would have to be changed to get round the Geneva Convention. Once again it was the British who were most keen - the proposal was put forward before the full horror of the concentration camps was known. It was to have another advantage - the British could evade another of the Convention’s stipulations, the requirement that they provide 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day. From the first day of peace the British would have had immense problems supplying that amount, and for most of the time levels fell below 1,500 calories. The more prosperous Americans were for rapid demobilisation and for adherence to the Convention.5 There was no precedent either for the rough treatment of high-ranking officers. In the view of the Allies, German generals were complicit in war crimes and thereby lost their usual privileges. This was decided before any crime had been proven. There were generals’ camps in South Wales and Russia, and there was rumoured to be a third near Nuremberg,dh in close proximity to the courthouse. 6 They were not treated as badly as the hoi polloi, however. In dh Wales the German general officers had a small number of privileges, and in Soviet Russia they were exempted from work.
That the Allies should conspire to rob prisoners of their status was outrageous; to treat them with so little care that a million and a half died was scandalous. The Russian attitude is understandable, though not forgivable: the Germans had systematically killed three million of their Russian prisoners. di But this could not be claimed for Western POWs. Indeed the Malmédy trial of those accused of massacring American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge and the quest for the killers of the fifty British airmen who had taken part in the Great Escape from a Silesian POW camp show quite clearly how rare it was that the Germans ill-treated American and British POWs. That the Americans should have pursued the perpetrators of the killing of a hundred or so soldiers with such ruthlessness while at the same time allowing anything up to 40,000 German soldiers to die from hunger and neglect in the muddy flats of the Rhine was an act of mind-boggling hypocrisy.
In parts of Europe the sight of a German POW became an everyday occurrence. In Britain these dishevelled figures often prompted acts of generosity, despite the fact that only a few months before British towns and cities were being wrecked by German bombs. In France and elsewhere German slave-labourers sometimes had a quite different effect. It was not money the local people threw at them but bricks, stones and - in at least one instance - grenades. The horrors of the war were fresh in the minds of the people. Many had been wounded themselves, physically or emotionally. ‘What did the hunger, misery, sickness or death of a German POW matter?’ In Russia that feeling would have been particularly widespread.7
Another novelty was the leasing of prisoners to other powers. The Anglo-Americans handed over around a million German soldiers to the French to help rebuild their country. The Belgians were given 30,000 by the Americans and another 34,000 by the British, the Dutch had 10,000 and the Luxembourgeois 5,000.8 The Soviet Union gave about 80,000 Germa
ns to the Poles, who hung on to some of them until as late as 1953. Germans worked Europe’s mines and sawmills and factories; they laid roads and did menial chores in France, Poland and Yugoslavia. In Britain they harvested potatoes and turnips. German soldiers were imprisoned in some twenty countries around the world.
Those left on German soil after the summer of 1945 were only a small fraction of the total number of POWs. The Americans, for example, used their German camps for political prisoners and those awaiting trial or denazification. Like the British and the Russians, they tended to use the old concentration camps to house prisoners. Usually there was decent accommodation for the GIs in the neighbouring SS barracks. Any attempt to feed the prisoners by the German civilian population was punishable by death. It is not clear how many German soldiers died of starvation. Very soon people were comparing the conditions in American and French camps with those in the Nazi concentration camps. The psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, who examined former POWs, learned that they were prone to compare themselves to Hitler’s victims, and to accuse the Allies of hypocrisy in their stories of German atrocities.9
On 10 December 1946, the industrious Cardinal Frings (he had received his red hat earlier that year) delivered a petition to the Control Council in Berlin. Ten million people had demanded the release of the POWs or Kriegsgefangener. At the Moscow Conference in 1947 it was decided that the Allies would send all prisoners home by the end of 1948. At that point the Soviets admitted to holding 890,532 (although the real figure might have been nearer to three million), the French 631,483; there were 435,295 in British hands, 300,000 in the Balkans, 54,000 in Belgium, 30,976 in American custody and 10,000 in Holland.10 In the middle of 1948 the number of POWs yet to come home stood at one million. The return was agreed by the Western Allies, the Czechs and the Yugoslavs (who subsequently reneged on the deal), but not by the Russians and the Poles. That Christmas 1948 date decided the category of prisoner in the minds of the German public: a Spätheimkehrer (late homecomer) was released between 1949 and 1950. A Spätestheimkehrer (latest homecomer) returned between 1950 and 1956.11 In 1979 there were believed to be 72,000 prisoners still alive in - chiefly Russian - custody.12
After the Reich Page 53
