DEBICA, POLAND, 1942
Veterinarian Rudolf Lessing looked out from a train that was paused in the station, en route to a German-run stud farm in Debica, Poland. Lessing served as adjutant to Gustav Rau. In his German Army uniform, he was clean and well fed, a tall, handsome man with light blue eyes, sandy hair, and a long chiseled face. From his train window, Lessing could see black ashes spewing into the air, blackening the gray sky like a spreading blot of ink. He couldn’t help recoiling at the sight of the murky sky, but he could not avert his eyes. Out the window, above the busy platform, the sign read “Auschwitz.” Beyond heavy barbed-wire fences, a huge German industrial complex spread out toward the horizon. Lessing knew that at this “agricultural station,” a gruesome truth was unfolding. On a recent trip home to Mecklenburg, east of Berlin, he had tried to explain what was happening in Poland to his father: “They’re gassing the Jews. So many people know what’s going on.” His father had refused to believe him, but Lessing could not afford the luxury of disbelief. The smell clung to the inside of his nostrils, and the smoky residue settled into his uniform. The train rolled out of Auschwitz station.
If the Germans win this war, there is no God Almighty, he thought.
In 1942, the Axis was at the height of its powers as Hitler’s stranglehold stretched across Europe, from France to the Ukraine, from Norway to Italy. In occupied Poland, Rau’s German-run horse-breeding enterprise was flourishing. The sleek, well-tended horses and the manicured grounds of these stud farms existed, in a through-the-looking-glass juxtaposition, not far from the barbed wire of concentration camps and death camps that latticed occupied Poland after 1939. Karl Koch, the camp commander of Buchenwald, erected on the grounds a riding stable, a racetrack, and an indoor riding hall for himself and his wife. Germans lavished money and attention on breeding farms, horse shows, races, and pleasure riding that they enjoyed during their occupation of Poland. With a cold-blooded hubris, the Third Reich had created a vast kingdom of horses, and Rau was its emperor.
Three years had passed since Gustav Rau first arrived at Janów Podlaski, restoring the stud farm and finding the lost horses. His dominion had spread out across the vast expanse of Poland; he had fourteen stud farms and more than seventy people in his employ. The most notorious was on the grounds of Auschwitz, a four-hundred-acre experimental farm, as well as stables for horses ridden by the SS Totenkopf, or Death’s Head, squadrons, known for perpetrating some of the Third Reich’s most heinous atrocities. The Germans were churning through horses at an astonishing rate—the army demanded six thousand fresh ones per month to replace those killed or lost to disease.
Gustav Rau had limitless funds at his disposal. Together with Lessing and other members of his staff, he traveled all over Europe, attending the largest horse sales, seizing the horses from state-owned stud farms in occupied territories, or “purchasing,” often well below the actual value, from private owners. Rau’s acquisitiveness focused on horses characterized by highly refined pedigrees; he was hoping to capture their vaunted pure blood for his mission to create the quintessentially German warhorse. Soon his interest began to center more and more on the Lipizzaner. He sent one of his adjutants on a buying mission to Yugoslavia, where he procured for the Reich all of the Lipizzaner stock from the royal Yugoslavian stud farms, as well as the private Lipizzaner stud owned by Count Eltz of Vukovar, in Croatia. Rau sent some of these horses to a stud farm in Czechoslovakia for safekeeping. Others were fanned out across Poland and the Ukraine, where Rau proudly oversaw the organization of grand parades that featured imperial carriages pulled by teams of Lipizzaner and driven by his highly trained staff, with uniformed SS riding the elegant white horses in formation.
RUDOLF LESSING, RAU’S ADJUTANT, toured the vast domain alongside him, assisting in veterinary matters. At first, Rau traveled in a chauffeured limousine, but as his territory expanded into the Ukraine, he was given a personal airplane. This posh setup was a far cry from what Lessing was used to. Only twenty-six, Lessing had spent the first years of the war as a field veterinarian on the Eastern Front, where he had tended to sick and injured horses at field hospitals. His every waking moment had been taken up with his duties, blessedly leaving him little opportunity to think about the war’s larger aims.
Lessing hailed from Mecklenburg, an area well known for its horse farms. He grew up on a farm, clambering on horseback as soon as he could walk and spending much of his childhood there. As a young man, he was persuaded by the National Socialist rhetoric and, against his own father’s wishes, joined the Hitler Youth. At eighteen, he decided to attend the veterinary school in Hamburg—the military demand for veterinarians was great and the army would pay his tuition. His father advised him not to accept the offer of tuition, telling him that the Nazis wanted war, but Lessing brushed aside his father’s admonitions. Later, he would characterize his own and his contemporaries’ enthusiasm for Hitler as inexplicable.
After graduating from the veterinary academy in 1939, Lessing was first sent to Norway, then to Russia, where the Germans were engaged in a bitter fight against Red Army forces. His father’s prophecy had come true. The experience had marked Lessing deeply—he had witnessed the misery of suffering men, wounded and killed, and had also seen up close the agony of horses on the battlefield. Lessing had nursed feverish horses as epidemics of strangles, also known as equine distemper, filled their tracheas with so much pus they could barely breathe. He had rigged a metal detector to find embedded bullets in their flesh, and operated on twelve-hundred-pound beasts in improvised field hospitals that lacked proper equipment. He had seen exhausted horses, pulling artillery wagons, stuck in the mud and lacking the will to pull themselves out. While most people tend to associate warhorses with World War I, during World War II, the German Army used 2,750,000 horses, double the number in World War I. Over sixty percent of them ended up as casualties—the average life expectancy of a horse was only about four years. On the front lines, Lessing worked in the mud and cold to alleviate the horses’ suffering.
In spite of his father’s objections, Lessing never questioned the legitimacy of the purpose they were fighting for—he had accepted Hitler’s aims without questioning them, too immersed in his daily struggles to consider the dark side of the fanatical ideology of the Nazi Party. As a veterinary officer, he was occupied with the animals and had never seen the Nazi leadership up close. This all changed when Gustav Rau recruited Lessing to work in his horse-breeding domain. For the young veterinarian, it was a dream job. But as he later described in his memoirs, it was not possible to work in Poland without realizing the horrific truth of what was going on there.
The social and sporting realm that swirled around the horses included some of the most heinous elements of the Nazi state. For over a decade, the SS, with Heinrich Himmler at the helm, had pursued prestige for their organization by becoming involved in riding competitions through their equestrian arm, the Rider SS. The German Army—an entirely separate organization—had not been quick to embrace the rival SS riders, who had not been allowed to compete in the Berlin Olympics in 1936. By 1939, however, the German Olympic Committee had promised to include SS riders on the German equestrian teams, marking their increased legitimacy within the equestrian world.
Just as before the war, the army and SS kept up a friendly rivalry in the field of equine sport. In 1940, the Polish occupation police force organized a four-day riding, jumping, and driving competition in Kraków, in which 438 riders competed: Competitors were drawn from the army, the SS, the police force, the air force, and even the railway guards. The four-man team of judges was made up of the best-known equestrian names in German-occupied Poland: the head of the SS Cavalry and close Hitler confidant Hermann Fegelein; two of the most celebrated equestrian SS riders; and the chief equerry, Gustav Rau. The Black Corps, an official publication of the SS, reported that this tournament provided “a demonstration of German war readiness…a great proof of the German pacifying work in the East of the German realm of power.” Gustav Rau had come to Poland to breed horses, but what mattered to the High Command were the prestige and propaganda power his activities lent to the occupying forces.
Rudolf Lessing had been at his new job only a few months when he started to see the truth that lay behind the Nazi occupation. One day in 1942, he and Rau set off on a horse-buying expedition to the Ukraine. Traveling with them was Erich Koch, a barrel-chested, mustached Nazi who controlled the Gestapo and police as Reichskommissar of the Ukraine. The group was journeying in great luxury on a train that had been seized from Poland’s deposed leader. During a pause while they were held in the Brest-Litovsk station in the middle of the war zone, Koch, whose uniform was studded with medals and had the vaunted cluster of oak leaves on his lapels, poured out champagne. The mood in the train car was light and pleasant as the travelers were joined by several high-ranking German officers, all chatting and sipping from their crystal flutes. Lessing was by far the youngest and felt thoroughly intimidated, being more accustomed to spending his time in stable yards than hobnobbing with the top brass.
Just then a medical train car rolled up on a track alongside. Through the windows, Lessing could see wounded soldiers from the Eastern Front, stacked three deep on tiered bunks inside the train car. The men, pitiful and exhausted, wrapped in tattered bandages sodden with blood, looked only half-alive. Lessing glanced down at the champagne flute in his hand, and his face turned scarlet as he imagined what the wounded men must have been thinking when they gazed inside the saloon car and watched the officers smoking and drinking.
Koch turned his ice-blue eyes toward the wounded soldiers and then turned away without any expression. “Johann,” he barked to his white-uniformed valet, “close the curtains. Those men have no understanding of the National Socialist lifestyle.” But Lessing could not get the memory of the wounded soldiers out of his thoughts. For the first time, he had seen up close with what ruthless contempt the party leaders viewed even their own men who were suffering and dying.
Rudolf Lessing, who had made it his life’s work to care for animals, had a front-row seat for the depredations being visited upon Poland. After the war, Lessing was adamant that during his time there, he had been well aware of the atrocities being committed. Speaking about Auschwitz, he said, “I just don’t understand that today anyone can say that it is in doubt that the Jews were killed there. This is all documented. There are thousands of contemporary witnesses who know this.”
Lessing’s job as a veterinarian took him all over Rau’s realm, including frequent visits to the stables at Janów Podlaski, where the friendly face of Witez was a familiar sight as he toured through the stallion barns. During that time, Lessing’s home base was another one of Rau’s stud farms, located in Debica, in eastern Poland near the Ukraine. One day, Hermann Fegelein, an Obersturmbannführer in the SS, came to see him. Fegelein’s thin blond hair swooped back from his high forehead in a pronounced widow’s peak. He was a skilled equestrian but a brutal and fanatical henchman of the Nazi regime. Fegelein was part of Hitler’s inner circle—a protégé of Heinrich Himmler; he was married to Gretl Braun, the sister of Hitler’s mistress.
Lessing had recently been issued new leather for riding boots, and Fegelein started questioning him about it.
“Have you received the boots yet?” Fegelein asked.
“Not yet,” Lessing said, as the boots weren’t due to be finished for a few days. “But there’s no rush.”
“Tell the Polack that if the boots are not ready the day after tomorrow, I will have him hanged,” Fegelein said.
“The man is doing his work, and everything is going well,” Lessing replied nervously.
The Nazi focused his cool blue eyes on the veterinarian and said without a trace of compassion, “Yes, but we need to show the Polacks how it’s done.”
Lessing was overwhelmed with anger as he regarded Fegelein’s expression; he saw that the man had nothing but utter contempt for these human beings. Lessing had made it his life’s work to care for those who could not speak for themselves—his quiet ways and deft hands had soothed and quieted panicked horses who were in pain after being put in harm’s way by the plans of men that these beasts knew nothing about. Lessing had a natural sympathy for those who could not protect themselves—yet now he found himself working within a system that made brutality its central premise.
Despite the mayhem that rocked Poland, Rau’s horse-breeding enterprise continued unimpeded—he had ample resources not just to care for the horses but to move them around in style. Because horse breeding was a specialized task requiring skilled labor, Rau and his staff had made few enemies. None of them would be directly implicated in the criminal activities that swirled around them. They worked closely with the highly skilled local horsemen and craftspeople they needed to keep their farms running. But the truth was still unpleasant and bleak. Lessing realized that Rau was not encouraging Polish horse breeding for the benefit of the Polish nation but only for the glorification of the Third Reich. While human beings were being transported in cattle cars, horses moved about in plush padded train cars, specially equipped for their protection, always accompanied by grooms who cared for their every need. After working with Rau for under a year, Lessing had given up believing in the Nazi cause. His vow of loyalty, in his own mind, was no longer to the führer but only to the horses.