Lawlessness and plundering were widespread that spring and summer and went on at all levels, from the lowest German or Displaced Person to the highest levels of Allied authority. Some of the Displaced Persons, or DPs—foreign nationals liberated from forced labor or concentration camps—turned out to be the most violent, persistent and intimidating lawbreakers, and who could blame them? They had endured more than six years of brutal oppression. Others, whether GIs or German housewives, became (for drastically different reasons) small-scale smugglers and petty operators, part of the hordes of minor black marketeers. Meanwhile, the Americans with the power operated with shameless greed and impunity, a few punished only when matters got out of hand or made public. Among many such instances, the closest to this book is that of the Hungarian Gold Train. Sent west by Hungarian Nazis in the last year of the war to prevent confiscation by the Red Army, the train carried far more than gold; it held the expensive belongings and art of Hungarian Jews. This load was not the known museum collections and pieces that the US Army’s vaunted Monuments Men units sought to secure, and as such proved all the more tragic. According to Kenneth D. Alford in Allied Looting in WWII (2011), at one point the train “consisted of 52 railroad cars, of which 29 were freight cars containing items of great value. The cars were sealed, locked with large padlocks, and guarded by Hungarian soldiers and gendarmes … [The cars] contained cases of gold, 60 chests of jewelry, and chests of the finest collections of Meissen, Dresden, and Chinese ivory figurines. There were over 5,000 handwoven Persian rugs, exceptional works of art, five large trunks full of stamps, over 300 complete sets of silverware and 28 large boxes of mink and sealskin furs. Other personal effects of the murdered victims included American dollars, Swiss francs, gold coins, small bags of gold dust, watches, rings, Bibles, skis, musical instruments, cameras, typewriters and—for some unknown reason—a solitary box of coal. One freight car contained diamonds; assigned to it was a special three-man guard detail … In 1945 terms, the value of the train’s contents was estimated at $206 million, which would translate to several billion dollars today.” Under constant threat of attack from ground and air, the train made it into Austria as the war ended, where the SS and the trains’ Hungarian guards fought for control. The train was meant for Switzerland, for anonymous bank accounts and profit-taking. It ended up in a train tunnel near Salzburg, Austria, where it fell into the hands of the US Army. Over the next couple years, certain unscrupulous American officers, empowered by victory and lured by easy wealth, began appropriating the contents from storage as the original ownership remained disputed between puffed-up policymakers. Much of the haul found its way to the states through boats and planes and back doors wide open.
Elsewhere, deserted GIs got in on the game and early, having found crime rackets the only way to stay free if not alive. It’s known that certain crafty and determined deserters were able to set themselves up quite nicely and securely, especially in Paris and Brussels. About 50,000 American soldiers total had deserted in the European theater, many returning to duty, some never. Most had been broken by combat duty, given no respite from the front line, doomed “for the duration” (before the Army had instituted rest rotations) in units with casualty rates well over 100 percent counting replacement cannon fodder. Hell creates its own type of hero. It’s not hard to imagine an enterprising sociopath like Virgil Tercel aka Eugene Spanner rising to the occasion, death wish and all.
And then there were men like Harry Kaspar, with special skills for MG, something big to prove, and a lot to dread down deep. Among the chaos, gangs of Jewish partisans and Holocaust survivors had their own agenda, with an eye to Palestine. I would like to think that, in real life, a man like Abraham Beckstein had actually survived to score his peoples’ train.
Acknowledgements
THIS STORY FIRST EMERGED from research I performed on a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellowship in Munich from 1993-94 for a masters in history from Portland State University. For that formative experience I must thank the Germanistic Society of America, the Fulbright-Kommission in Bonn, and the overall promise of Senator J. William Fulbright’s vision—may his grants always continue to be funded. Heartfelt gratitude also goes to Christa Rohnke (Niklas-Falter) and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Falter and family for making me feel at home in Munich. I remain indebted to the great and departed PSU professor and historian Franklin C. West, who advised me to follow my gut. As for the novel, I’m deeply grateful for all those who read and reviewed and put their faith in versions of this manuscript over the years—you know who you are. My agent Peter Riva stood behind this book through thick and thin and never stopped encouraging. Most of all, much love and thanks to my wife and reader-editor René for supporting me.
Suggested Reading
A NUMBER OF BOOKS COVER the early period of the US occupation, but few deviate from official history to stress the tough and at times scandalous tasks of MG detachments or reveal the realms of plundering and crime, greed and amorality. Edward N. Peterson’s classic The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory (1977), introduced the grotesque yet emblematic Major Towle. Allied Looting in World War II (2011) by Kenneth D. Alford has many examples of US officers liberating finer goods, drawing from Alford’s earlier works. Giles MacDonogh’s hard-hitting After the Reich (2009) gives a broader look at the tragedies and offenses produced by the overall Allied occupation. In German, Klaus-Dietmar Henke’s Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands (1995) provides a detailed overview of that tense no-man’s land between Germany’s surrender and US occupation. For those eager to look, true accounts in various archives and contemporary books, magazines and newspapers offer buried surprises from a wild and brutal time that’s been glossed over by idealized, selective and biased retellings of the history. For fiction, a little known novel by Steven Linakis, In the Spring the War Ended (1966), recreates the life of a bitter American deserter with no refuge left but crime, while another book, The Spoils of the Victors (1964) by Paul Edmondson, tells of American occupiers left to their own amoral devices in a far-flung corner of occupied Germany. The myriad challenges of reestablishing local administration and politics remains a vast topic in itself. Saul Padover’s Experiment in Germany (1946) gives a contemporary, on-the-ground view of getting things going again. There are many other works, of course. Nevertheless, I imagine that an enterprising historian could find new ground to cover—a historian who doesn’t switch to fiction, as I had.
Liberated Page 29
