THE MEN
Fred Hamilton deeply regretted that the demise of the army’s remount program occurred during his tenure as head of the Army Remount Service. He was heartbroken that the horses he had brought from Europe, which he had dreamed would have a lasting effect on American horse breeding, mostly failed to live up to their promise in their adopted country. His disappointment is reflected in his labeling of the rescued horses sold off by the Department of Agriculture as “the war orphans.” Witez’s storybook ending in America was a bright spot in this otherwise mostly unsuccessful attempt to elevate American horse breeding by importing captured European horses.
Wolfgang Kroll was known for his tall tales, so the truth of his exploits before and after the war may never be fully known. After traveling with the horses to America, Kroll returned to Germany, where he got a job working with Lipizzaner horses in the circus. Having managed to secure a letter of recommendation from George Patton himself, he eventually returned to America, where he ended up working at the San Diego Zoo. He then left California and moved to Chicago, where he worked for the Department of Agriculture as an inspector in a meatpacking plant. Along the way, he told people stories about his involvement with the Camel Corps, his days fighting alongside the partisans in Yugoslavia, the hours he spent playing cards with General Patton, and his involvement with the rescue of the Lipizzaner. As incredible as those stories may have seemed, the part about helping to rescue the Lipizzaner was absolutely true.
The large farm where Rudolf Lessing grew up was situated east of the partition between East and West Germany. After the war, his parents’ lands were confiscated and collectivized. His once affluent family lost everything. Lessing remained with his wife and children in West Germany, continuing to work as a veterinarian. Throughout the rest of his life, he donated his time and knowledge to help rebuild the German horse industry, which had been largely destroyed during the hostilities. After the best of the captured horses were shipped to America, Lessing worked to find homes for the ones from Hostau that had been left behind, in particular the rough-and-ready Russian Kabardins and Panje ponies that the Americans were not interested in importing. Lessing remained friends with the men of the 2nd Cavalry Association, especially Quin Quinlivan, even traveling to America to attend one of their reunions. In 1986, he was recognized at a special performance of the Spanish Riding School and given a medal of honor by the Austrian government.
Quin Quinlivan, who ran off at the age of seventeen from his home in East Dubuque, Illinois, to join the cavalry, was one of the army’s last mounted soldiers. After bidding goodbye to his friend Witez at Front Royal in 1946, he was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, then transferred back to Germany in 1947. On the Europe-bound ship, he met his future wife, Rita McDonald. They were married in Augsburg, Germany, in 1947. In 1949, when Witez was sold at auction, Quinlivan was in Germany, serving as a member of one of the army’s last mounted units, fondly known as the Bowlegged Brigade. After he was discharged in 1949, Quinlivan and his wife settled in Los Angeles. He followed the stories about Witez and was delighted by the stallion’s growing fame.
Quinlivan never gave up his love for animals. Throughout his life, he adopted unwanted animals—dogs, a bird, even a Shetland pony. Quinlivan saw the Lipizzaner perform once: In 1964, along with Hank Reed, he was part of the 2nd Cavalry delegation invited to Philadelphia to see Podhajsky and the Spanish Riding School. At Quin’s funeral in 1985, an Austrian military attaché hand-delivered a floral wreath to honor his contribution to the Lipizzaner and the Spanish Riding School. The Quinlivan family paid more than their fair share to the defense of their nation. Quin’s older brother was killed in 1940; his younger brother perished in Korea. Undeterred by their history of sacrifice, Quin’s pride in his time in the army no doubt inspired his children, three of whom followed his footsteps into military service. In 1991, his daughter Maureen Nolen, a nurse and army major, was honored during a performance of the Lipizzaner stallions in Nevada. The ornamental swords that were surrendered to Quin that long-ago day in Hostau are still in the family.
After the war was over, Gustav Rau became one of the most influential horsemen in Germany. He was the first postwar head of the German Olympic Equestrian Committee, and he was revered for discovering the great German horse Halla, the only show jumper ever to win three Olympic gold medals (1956 individual and team, 1960 team). Given credit for rebuilding the German horse industry twice—once after World War I and once after World War II—he was honored repeatedly for his contributions to equestrianism in Germany until his death in 1954. The highest equestrian honor in Germany is called the Rau Medal, and in Munich, there is a street named after him, Gustav Rau Strasse, near the Riem Thoroughbred racecourse. But as recent scholarship has uncovered more about Rau’s role in the stud farm administration during the Third Reich, his legacy has become more controversial. Some defend him for his part in safeguarding horses during the war, and it is true that the horses within Rau’s dominion in general fared better than those in the pathway of Russian troops. More recently, as German scholars have documented his wartime activities, some have demanded that the street and the prize be renamed due to his activities during the National Socialist period.
The last time Hubert Rudofsky ever performed with the Lipizzaner was on Hitler’s birthday, in April 1945, in a grand arena festooned with brilliant scarlet Nazi banners that were wilting in the rain. By the end of the summer of 1945, the American GIs billeted in Bohemia had left, and with them, any semblance of order for the Rudofsky family. The Germans were the hated oppressors during the war. Now the postwar Czech government made the decision to expel all ethnic German citizens, even those, like the Rudofskys, whose families had lived in Bohemia for centuries. All citizens of Bischofteinitz were ordered to leave behind all of their possessions except one suitcase and were herded into a “resettlement camp” in the Czech town of Domazlice. Conditions in the camp were difficult, and Rudofsky’s mother died there; her family blamed her death on medical neglect. Rudofsky avoided the harsh treatment reserved for suspected Nazi collaborators due to his standing in the community and his official paperwork showing that he had cooperated with the Americans. All of Lessing’s predictions had come true. Six months after the horses galloped across the border into Bavaria, everyone involved in the rescue was a free man except Rudofsky.
The stables at Hostau remained silent, eerie, and empty. The coaches, the white horses, the busy riders and grooms, all were like a half-remembered dream that had slipped away. The rooftops of the stables caved in, and nettles grew up around the buildings. Nobody remembered that this was a place where horses once danced. The church in Bischofteinitz where Rudofsky turned heads as he strode down the center aisle in his cavalry uniform had fallen into decrepitude—many of its treasures had been looted, most of its windows were broken. But one delicate stained-glass window improbably survived: Its leaded inscription read, “In the war year 1916, the Rudofsky family offers this window in the hopes that their son will return safely from the war.”
After enduring eighteen months in a resettlement camp, Rudofsky was released without being charged with any crime. By that time, his sister had left for America, taking his nephew and niece with her. He relocated to Germany, but never regained his former status in the horse world. Four years after the war’s end, Rudofsky and Lessing ran into each other at an equestrian event. Rudofsky confided to his friend that his life’s greatest regret was that he had declined Reed’s offer to stay with the Americans. Still, he managed to build a new life for himself, eventually securing employment at the Donnauworth stud farm in Bavaria and loaning his expertise to Arabian horse breeders all over the world. He also amassed an impressive collection of paintings of Arabian horses, most of which are now housed in the German Museum of the Horse in Verden, Saxony. For a long time, Rudofsky’s role in the Lipizzaner rescue was largely unknown. The Germans’ role in securing the horses’ rescue was swept under the rug, and the Spanish Riding School distanced itself from its wartime association with the German military. Finally, those wartime animosities started to lessen. In 1986, Rudofsky and Rudolf Lessing were honored at one of the Spanish Riding School’s performances. Six months later, that performance aired on Austrian TV. That night, perhaps content that his sacrifice had finally been recognized, Hubert Rudofsky died in his sleep.
The world that Ulrich Rudofsky had grown up in was all but obliterated by the war. His father, a physician serving on the Eastern Front, spent close to three years as a prisoner of war. He was released but not long after committed suicide, leaving Ulrich’s mother alone to manage two young children. After the Americans left Czechoslovakia and her brother-in-law Hubert was imprisoned, Ulli’s mother had no choice but to take her two children and flee their home with only a few possessions. She managed to bribe a driver to carry them across the border to Germany. At the border, a Czech border guard tried to stop their departure, but an American military policeman intervened and they were allowed to cross, thus escaping internment in the crowded resettlement camp. But the local Germans did not welcome the refugee mother and children back into Germany proper. They had their papers ripped up by a city official, and the boy and his family spent a terrifying month, March 1946, hiding in a stinking cow stable near Schönsee, Germany.
Ulli and his mother and sister eventually emigrated to the United States. After graduating from college, Ulli served in the American army in Germany, patrolling the border but unable to cross the Iron Curtain to the east to see the home he had been forced to leave behind as a ten-year-old. Now a retired pathologist and miniature-shipbuilding enthusiast, he lives near Albany, New York.
Swiss-American Ferdinand Sperl, a naturalized citizen of the United States, never lost his enthusiasm for the adopted country he had bravely served. After the war was over, he moved to Peoria, Illinois, where he returned to his first profession of hotelkeeper, taking over as managing director of the Pere Marquette Hotel. Sperl retained his fame in the small town of Kötzting in Germany, where he was remembered for having provided rescued Lipizzaner horses for a traditional local festival just after the German surrender. He returned to Kötzting for the fiftieth anniversary of that celebration, and while there, he was stunned to find that two women in the hotel’s restaurant remembered him; when they were schoolgirls, Sperl had come across them as they were fleeing Czechoslovakia on foot with their teachers in April 1945, and he had saved their lives. After this chance meeting, Sperl and the two women remained friends for the rest of his life.
Captain Tom Stewart returned to private life after the war. He met his beloved wife, Anne, and together they raised three children. Always humble, he never demanded credit for his daring midnight ride on King Peter’s horse in the company of Rudolf Lessing. Throughout the following years, he demurred whenever he was asked to stand in the limelight, especially when it came to his role in rescuing the horses. Finally, in 1996, the modest veteran allowed the Spanish Riding School to honor him for his contributions to preserving the Lipizzaner. During an American tour, he was invited to one of their performances, and in the stables, he was able to visit the descendants of the beautiful animals he had saved. In 2001, he was awarded a National Gold Award by Austria for his wartime role in rescuing the Lipizzaner. One of the longest-lived of the main players in the horse rescue, he passed away in 2006 at the age of ninety-six, more than sixty years after he made that fateful moonlit ride. “The little minister” taught Sunday school at his local church throughout his life.
THE HORSES
Lotnik was auctioned off by the Department of Agriculture in 1948 and purchased by a man who intended to use him as a pleasure horse. When the buyer got divorced, Lotnik was abandoned, eventually housed in squalid conditions in an ill-kept stable. Fortunately, several years later, the retired former head of the Pomona Remount Depot stumbled across the stallion and recognized him as the pearl of Hostau. Purchased by Bob Aste of the Scottsdale Arabian ranch in 1963, Lotnik lived out the rest of his life on Aste’s farm and was a successful sire.
The chieftain never left his final home at Calarabia except for a brief stay at the ranch of Arabian horse breeder Burr Betts in Colorado from 1960 to 1964. He lived a few months past his twenty-seventh-birthday bash before he died peacefully while sleeping in his pasture. The sign from his days at the Mansbach Stud Farm that reads “Witez, Field Headquarters” hangs in the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky.
THE PLACES
Once the preeminent horse cavalry locale in America and one of the best in the world, Fort Riley, Kansas, is now home to the 1st Infantry Division, known as “the Big Red One.” Horses remained at Fort Riley until 1950, when the last few were led off the base and given refuge for life at the personal ranch of Colonel John Wofford, a member of the 1932 Olympic equestrian team. As these last horses left the hallowed stables at Fort Riley, grown men in uniform, most of them hard-bitten veterans of World War II, lined the streets with tears in their eyes to bid these last chargers, the tail end of a centuries-old tradition, a final farewell. But the spirit of horses remains at Fort Riley. As a fitting tribute to the contribution of horses to the American military, the U.S. Cavalry Memorial Foundation offers individuals the opportunity to memorialize their favorite equine companion with a plaque bearing its name mounted and displayed at the U.S. Cavalry Memorial Research Library located in Fort Riley.
The green-roofed stables of Janów Podlaski are peaceful now, still home to some of the finest Arabians in the world. The town fills up every year for the sale of purebred Arabians that draws horse lovers from around the world. Eighty percent of Poland’s Arabians perished between 1938 and 1945, but the stallions Stained Glass and Grand Slam, after fleeing Rau’s stud farm in 1944, passed through Dresden during the bombing and were saved by two brave Poles. At the end of the war, the stallions were returned to Poland, forming the nucleus from which the country rebuilt its Arabian breeding program. The stables of Janów Podlaski reopened in the autumn of 1950. Old-timers may still say how much they mourn the loss of their favorite son, Witez, but they probably also know that the stallion was an ambassador for the Polish Arabian and helped increase the breed’s renown all over the world.
The stud farm at Hostau (now called Hostouň in the Czech language) has been divided up and no longer serves as a horse farm. The mansion where Rudofsky made his home is now a school for delinquent juveniles, and the once elegant horse stables have fallen into disrepair. Shortly after the war, all ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia either fled or were forcibly evicted from their homes, leaving behind the majority of their possessions, which were seized by the Czech government and redistributed to its citizens. The ethnic Germans, for complicated reasons that had much to do with history that predated the war, had shown enthusiastic support when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, annexing the Sudetenland as the first step in his brutal war of expansion. The local Czech and Jewish populations suffered greatly under Nazi rule. Because the Germans fought a war of aggression, little sympathy was reserved for their hardship in the aftermath. The loss of the Bohemian Germans’ homeland, where their families had lived for centuries, was painful. For many years, due to the closed border between Czechoslovakia and Germany, families who had fled were unable to return to their childhood homes. But with the loosening of restraints after the end of the Soviet era, there has been renewed interest on both sides, Czech and German, in exploring their shared history. There has been increasing interest in the story of the magical Lipizzaner who once lived there, and just a few years ago, a bronze memorial plaque was installed that tells that story in three languages: Czech, German, and English. Citizens in Hostouň dream of restoring the horse farm to its original grandeur and attracting tourists to visit this place where, in the middle of a terrible war, a few men reached past their natural enmity, their different-colored uniforms, and their warring countries to try to do something that was simply good.