HOSTAU, CZECHOSLOVAKIA,
APRIL 27, 1945, TWO A.M.
No Americans! Lessing quickly heeded Wolfgang Kroll’s whispered warning: He pushed Stewart through the door of his apartment, alerting his wife in hushed tones to keep the American captain well hidden. Lessing’s wife did not ask questions but immediately filled her husband in on what had transpired in his absence, whispering so as not to wake their sleeping girls. Then she quickly busied herself making hot coffee for the bone-chilled and saddle-weary Stewart while Lessing headed back to the barn to put up the horses.
Kroll accompanied Lessing, relating further details. Colonel Rudofsky had been in favor of this secret negotiation with the Americans, but in Lessing’s absence, militia leader General Schulze had come into town in a big Mercedes, accompanied by his Volkssturm troops—a ragtag band of citizen soldiers consisting mostly of teenage boys. Schulze planned to set up a last-ditch German defense using Hostau as his base, and he was now the ranking officer.
Lessing wondered how to interpret Kroll’s news. His fellow veterinarian was not formally a part of the Hostau staff. He had arrived just six weeks earlier, accompanying the White Russian refugees; he had a dramatic air and a reputation for telling tall tales—of his exploits fighting with partisans in Yugoslavia and training camels in the desert in North Africa. But this time, Lessing could see that he was deadly serious. In a few short hours, the situation had deteriorated from fragile to downright precarious.
AS SOON AS LESSING had settled the horses, he rushed off to the big house to find Rudofsky. Although it was the middle of the night, the stud farm director was waiting for him. Rudofsky confirmed that General Schulze was now the highest-ranking officer at Hostau and was dead set against surrender.
Lessing looked at his commandant in disbelief. Unspoken between the two men was the obvious fact that any attempt at defense against either the Russians or the Americans would end in a brutal defeat and would put the horses directly in the line of fire.
“My hands are tied,” Rudofsky said. “If I try to negotiate with the Americans, or let on that one of them is here, then all three of us risk being shot for treason.”
In the past twelve hours, Lessing had ridden more than thirty miles, been held at gunpoint by the Americans, escorted an American captain through woods studded with pockets of SS snipers, and now here he stood at a complete impasse. Weary but not daunted, he tried to keep his head.
As the two men talked urgently, neither could know exactly how close they were to the end. On Hitler’s birthday just a week earlier, the entire town had come out in the pouring rain to “celebrate,” lining the streets to watch the Lipizzaner in their fine harnesses on parade. On that day, in his speech to the party faithful, Hitler’s Reich minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had made a clear case for how Germans were supposed to face impending defeat: “Our misfortune has made us mature, but not robbed us of our character. Germany is still the land of loyalty. It will celebrate its greatest triumphs in the midst of danger. Never will history record that in these days a people deserted its führer or a führer deserted his people. And that is victory.”
But Goebbels was dead wrong. The führer would indeed desert his people. Lessing and Stewart arrived at Hostau on April 28. In just two days, Hitler would commit suicide in his bunker, leaving the body of his terrible empire gasping for its final breaths. Even now, communication from Berlin was uncoordinated and sporadic, and panicky regional authorities were unsure where to turn. Everyone was improvising.
A mere twenty-four hours before, Rudofsky and Lessing had a viable plan—surrender was necessary to defend the horses. But if the Americans had to fight their way in, the horses’ safety could not be guaranteed. If they waited and did nothing, the Russians would arrive in a matter of days anyway. Exhausted and frustrated, Lessing returned to his apartment, filling Stewart in on the near-hopeless situation as the two shared a late-night meal.
MOONLIGHT GLEAMED OVER THE STABLES; the coats of the white Lipizzaner glowed softly in the light. Somewhere in the barn, the broodmare Madera dozed, her rest interrupted by the wobbly newborn foal nudging her belly, looking for milk. Witez was watchful, pacing in his stall, exquisitely sensitive to any tension in the air. Indigo munched on his hay, tired from his long romp through the woods. The stables were peaceful, the nighttime hush of swishing tails and hooves on straw no different than any other night, but the war was about to overrun Hostau. This peace would soon be violently shattered.
When Lessing left the American headquarters with the congenial American riding alongside, the triplicate notes in his breast pocket had promised protection, but now he pondered—protection from whom, from what? The moment he had set off toward the unknown on horseback, a fundamental certainty had shifted. Who were his allies now? he wondered. The answer, he realized, was anyone who wanted to help the horses. The only things that stood between these animals and their annihilation were the choices he was about to make.
Lessing didn’t sleep at all that night. At the cock’s first crow, he went to speak to the new ranking officer at Hostau: General Schulze. But when he entered Schulze’s presence, he did not have a chance to open his mouth before the red-faced commander started screaming at him. “How is it that you are negotiating with Americans?”
Lessing felt a dread chill creep through him as he realized that the general had somehow gotten wind of his trip across the border.
“How dare you deceive the Germans?” Schulze continued. “What right had you to do that?”
Lessing said nothing.
“I’m going to have you shot! You must be crazy!”
Lessing could see from the furious officer’s face that he was not going to consider a compromise no matter how many lives were destroyed in the process.
General Schulze was not alone in his fanatical fight-to-the-death plans. Residents of Hostau could already hear the drone of the American trucks starting to patrol near the Bohemian border, and the rumors they exchanged had placed the Russians not over a day or two’s trek away. The idea of fighting on when defeat was inevitable seems, looking back, to be illogically self-destructive, but General Schulze’s attitude was not unusual. According to historian Ian Kershaw, “Whatever their varying attitudes towards Hitler and National Socialism, from fanatical commitment to little more than contempt—no general, and the same applied to the vast majority of the rank and file in their command, wanted to see Germany defeated, least of all, to be subjugated by the Bolsheviks.”
Lessing felt his horror at the general’s suicidal stance turn first into anger, then into resolve. The veterinarian was only twenty-eight, and he had a lot more experience dealing with supposedly dumb beasts than with certifiably crazy, angry generals, but Lessing decided that even in the face of a death threat, it was time to speak his mind. He was all too aware that a clock was ticking up at American headquarters, and if Stewart didn’t reappear on schedule, American guns would be pointing straight at the stables.
“Sir, discipline, obedience—all that is orderly and honorable. However, at Hostau, we are, first and foremost, here to maintain the horses. And it is thus our first duty to do everything in our powers to save them. We don’t care about who wins the war on April twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth, because we should have won years ago. Now it is too late.”
Lessing waited, expecting the general to explode again. But to his surprise, Schulze responded in a calmer voice—he had decided to pass the buck. He couldn’t make a decision on this matter with the Americans. Lessing would have to go find his superior officer, the brigade commander, to ask for permission. With that, the general dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
Lessing glanced anxiously at the clock and explained to the general that there was no time. Colonel Reed had made it clear: If the American had not been returned unharmed by noon on April 27, they would take “repressive measures” against Hostau.
“I will not let the American leave again. He stays!” the general said. “He’s my POW.”
As the morning haze cleared, the rising sun crept across the small village, illuminating the spire of St. James Church, then casting its golden rays across the long white rows of stables where the horses were munching contentedly on their morning’s ration of oats. The rays illuminated flecks of gold and silver in their coats as it passed over each one. Though the scene was still tranquil, it was clear to Lessing that something had to be done—and fast.