CHAPTER 2

Colonel “H”

“We must live for the school. Offer our lives to it. Then, perhaps, little by little, the light will grow from the tiny candle we keep lit here, and the great art—of the haute école—will not be snuffed out.”

Colonel Alois Podhajsky

“I must speak to your commanding officer, at once,” demanded the smartly dressed German air force officer who had just wound down the rear window of his staff car. A young GI had his carbine leveled at the vehicle, while the other members of the small 42nd Cavalry Squadron forward outpost covered him.

“Do you understand, young man,” continued the bespectacled German officer to the young trooper, “it is a matter of the utmost urgency.”

By the early afternoon of April 26, 1945, Captain Sperl and his small IPW team had been almost ready to roll out to Dianahof and the stranded German unit with its small goldmine of intelligence files when a radio message arrived at the 2nd Cavalry’s HQ at Vohenstrauss from a 42nd Squadron outpost reporting a strange encounter.

A German staff car, with a white flag tied to its aerial, had just been flagged down. Far from simply surrendering, the officer in the backseat repeatedly demanded to speak to a senior American officer. Colonel Reed ordered that the car be escorted through to his HQ at once.

A few minutes later the large black Mercedes, its paintwork flecked with mud up to the door handles, sedately swung into the dirt front yard of the farmhouse and stopped. An escorting American jeep pulled alongside, a GI standing in the back covering the German car with his .30 cal. machine gun. A young Luftwaffe driver climbed cautiously from behind the Mercedes’ wheel and gingerly opened a rear door, conscious of the weapon pointed at his chest. Out clambered a short, middle-aged Luftwaffe lieutenant colonel, dressed in a blue greatcoat, cap and dirty jackboots. Reed had called for Sperl, and now the captain strode confidently over and saluted the senior German officer.

“Herr Oberst,” said Sperl formally, using the German form of colonel. The colonel returned his salute.

“I wish to speak to your commanding officer,” announced the German in his own language.

“Please follow me, sir,” replied Sperl fluently, leading him over to where his men had erected the IPW tent the day before. Colonel Reed watched the German suspiciously then turned and went back inside the farmhouse and returned to his paperwork.

“Please, Colonel,” said Sperl politely, indicating that the German should sit on one of the camp chairs set around a small green map table, its surface dominated by a black manual Imperial typewriter and a sheaf of papers in a buff folder. The colonel removed his cap, revealing a receded widow’s peak, and settled himself on the chair stiffly. Sperl looked him over. The German was aged about fifty and sported a little toothbrush moustache similar to Hitler’s.

“How can I help you, Colonel?” began Sperl in a friendly tone.

“I must speak to your commanding officer on a matter of the greatest urgency,” replied the German in an agitated voice.

“Before we get to that, what is your name and rank?”

“Walter H., Oberstleutnant, Luftwaffe,” sighed the German, refusing to divulge his surname.

Sperl, unsatisfied with the German officer’s answer, repeated his question several more times, but he adamantly refused to give his surname. To an experienced interrogator like Sperl it seemed probable that the German’s reticence indicated that he was involved in intelligence work of some sort.

“Turn out your pockets, please,” demanded Sperl. The German sighed, then stood and started rooting through his greatcoat and tunic pockets, tossing various items on to the table in front of him. The German carried no identity papers—another intelligence “flag” in Sperl’s meticulous mind. Picking up the colonel’s leather wallet, Sperl carefully rifled through it. No family snapshots, just some black-and-white photographs, of horses. Sperl was no expert, but the white horses in the pictures looked beautiful and expensive.

“Why do you have these, Colonel?’ asked Sperl. The German shrugged and repeated his demand to speak to Sperl’s commanding officer. The colonel clearly had something to hide. Sperl pressed him for a while until the German finally and rather unwillingly addressed the issue of the photographs. Sperl thought that he had seen and heard a lot of crazy things since landing in Normandy, but the story that poured forth from the agitated and impatient German was both extraordinary and intriguing in equal measure.

Half an hour later Sperl strode across to Reed’s HQ leaving the mysterious Colonel Walter H. under close guard in his tent. In his right hand he carried the collection of horse photographs. Entering Reed’s makeshift office, he placed the photos on the colonel’s desk blotter. “I think you might find these interesting, sir,” said Sperl, straightening up.

Reed put down his pen and stared at the photos.

“Those are some fine steeds, Captain,” said Reed. “Lipizzaners, if I’m not mistaken.” The look on Reed’s face was almost wistful as he gazed at the small images. Reed suddenly snapped out of his reverie and looked up at Sperl sharply.

“Where’d you get these, Captain?” he demanded.

“Off that Kraut air force colonel, sir,” replied Sperl, a broad grin creasing his face. “And there’s a story that goes with them that I think you ought to hear.”

Lieutenant Colonel “Walter H.” stared at the small badge consisting of a tiny “2” over a pair of crossed sabres that Reed wore pinned to one collar of his olive-drab shirt showing his cavalry arm of service. The opposite side displayed the silver eagle of a US Army colonel.

“Do you like horses, Colonel?”¹ asked Walter H. in excellent though strongly accented English.

“I do,” replied Reed, meeting Walter H.’s keen gaze.

“Do you know anything about the famous Spanish Riding School of Vienna? The Lipizzaner stallions?”² asked the German, smiling slightly.

Reed nodded slowly, holding up two of the photographs that Sperl had taken from the German’s wallet. “I know of them,” replied Reed simply.

“Excellent,” replied Walter H., rubbing his tired eyes. “They are the purest breed of horse in existence today, Colonel.”

Reed, who had ridden just about every breed of horse in creation, could easily visualize the Lipizzaner. The name conjured in Reed’s equestrian mind the noble white prancing stallions of Vienna, a unique and precious equine artefact that reached back to a far nobler age of warfare.

The Lipizzaner is not an especially big horse, but it is strong and compact, with a wide, deep chest, broad croup and muscular shoulders of the Baroque type. It has to be compact and strong in order to perform the difficult and unnatural moves of Haute École, the highest form of classical dressage that survives in the world. Their line of descent goes all the way back to the primeval ancestors of the Arabs. The Moors brought their horses with them to Spain and crossbred them with the ancient race of Spanish horses to create the Iberian Horse known as the “Andalucían.” The cleverest, sturdiest and noblest of spirit, and the quickest to learn, they were soon renowned all over Europe. These were the horses from which the Lipizzaner is descended.

Years of intensive training of both rider and mount is necessary to reach a standard deemed good enough for public performance. And what a performance. The level of training is startling to outsiders, but necessary to train a Lipizzaner stallion for the arena. It consists of three distinct stages, each lasting several years.

The first stage is called Remontenschule or Forward Riding. The four-year-old stallion is taught to be saddled and bridled. He begins on the lunge to teach him obedience and strengthen his muscles for the moves to come. He learns how to walk, trot and perform counter-transitions, but it is two or three months before a rider gets on him. Once mounted, the rider teaches the horse to walk in straight lines in the arena, to teach him to respond correctly to the rider’s aides: his spurs, bridle and whip. The goal is to develop free forward movement in the ordinary gaits. This process takes about one year to complete.

Next comes Campagneschule or Campaign School. The young stallions are placed with experienced riders. They are taught how to ride in turns and circles in all gaits. The purpose is to develop impulsion, improve the stallion’s natural paces, promote self-carriage, and make the horse supple and flexible, and gradually develop his muscles. The stallion learns to bend correctly in the neck and body. He learns to shorten and lengthen his gait and perform lateral movements, mostly at the trot. Before the end of this phase of his training, the horse is introduced to the Spanish Riding School’s famous double bridle, which gives the rider much greater control over the horse’s movements.

The final and most difficult stage in the stallion’s training, taking several years, is Hohe Schule or High School. The rider gradually pushes the horse to perfection in straightness, contact, suppleness, collection, and impulsion, to produce improved gaits. The horse learns some of the famous moves of the Spanish Riding School—the pirouette, passage, and piaffe. The stallion is then assessed to see if he is suitable for “airs above the ground,” the most famous “dancing” moves performed by Spanish Riding School Lipizzaners. Not every stallion reaches this pinnacle of training, but for those that do, the amount of time and effort that has been channeled into the horse represents many years of intense study. The Lipizzaners of the Spanish Riding School are living, delicate treasures—the white gold of Vienna.

Lieutenant Colonel Walter H. abruptly decided to drop the pretense and told Colonel Reed his surname—Holters. He revealed that he was the commanding officer of Dienststelle Ost, a secret air force intelligence outfit that had retreated from the Eastern Front carrying years of files, reports and photographs about the Red Army. Ordered south to the Alps by headquarters in imperiled Berlin, Holters’ unit was stopped by a severe lack of fuel at Dianahof, just inside the Czech frontier near the town of Waier. Holters had ordered his men to bury packing cases stuffed full of valuable records in the grounds of a hunting lodge that he had commandeered at Dianahof while he tried to decide how best to proceed. It was while visiting local German units in the area that Holters had stumbled upon an extraordinary find. As Captain Sperl listened, he realized that Dienststelle Ost was the very unit that he had been ordered by XII Corps to capture intact—incredibly, the Germans had reached out to the Americans first, saving him the trouble.

“You have looked at these, Colonel?” asked Holters, pointing at the photographs of the horses. Reed nodded. “You will agree that they are quite remarkable animals?”

Reed looked again at one of the photos and felt his stomach flutter. Staring at the proud white Lipizzaner stallion, his graceful lines and strong stance betraying his noble heritage, Reed felt a fierce wave of nostalgia sweep unexpectedly over him. How long had it been since he had been in the saddle? Nine months. Holters passed him the other snapshot. “Beautiful,” murmured Reed wistfully. In that moment he could have reached into the photo and touched the stallion’s warm coat, run his hand along his back, feeling the strong muscles moving just below the skin. He would feel the great chest rising and falling under his flat palm. He would lay his ear against the stallion’s flank and listen to the steady drumming of his big heart and breathe deeply the smell of him, that odor of horse that was at once as familiar to Reed as fresh air and as comforting as the happiest of childhood memories, a smell that had seemingly always been a part of his life until the dark nightmare of the last nine months. Reed discovered that he ached for that smell, to run his hand down the stallion’s forehead to his big soft black nose, to murmur pleasant inanities into his ears instead of issuing orders and directions to men, orders that so often resulted in their deaths. At this moment, hunched over black-and-white photographs of horses in a musty green tent halfway across Europe, Hank Reed had never felt so far from home or so far from his life’s passion.

“Colonel?” Reed was suddenly jolted out of his private thoughts by Holters’ voice. He looked up at the German officer, a sad half-smile on his war-weary face, his eyes slightly misty and far away.

Holters told Reed that he had taken the photographs himself.³ He explained that since evacuating his unit to the hunting lodge at Dianahof, he had grown friendly with the local German stud commander and visited the stables regularly to view the animals and to chat about horses.⁴

For Holters, his visits to the army stud had been a reawakening of his own long cherished enthusiasm for horses. After years on the Eastern Front, the stress and responsibility of his job had suddenly found an outlet as he had stood watching the horses being exercised or had wandered through the stables breathing deeply the glorious smells of hay, dung and polished leather tackle. During those private moments he had been back on his family estate, riding across the rolling East Prussian countryside, a powerful mount carrying him forward confidently and gracefully, the fresh Baltic wind blowing in his face as he urged the horse into a wild gallop. Like Reed, Holters’ enforced separation from horses had been a difficult adjustment to make. The stud had become an oasis for the German, and he had drunk deeply from its equine waters, thoughts of war and duty slipping to the back of his overburdened mind for a few precious hours. He had begun to care deeply for this private time away from his responsibilities, and to take an active interest in the stud and its occupants. What had begun as a hobby, snapping away with his small Leica camera, had soon become an obsession as he had faithfully recorded each extraordinary horse for his private files. His intelligence officer’s mind had soon grasped both the significance of these particular horses as well as their beauty and dignity. There was also something else—their innocence attracted Holters after six long years of war. These horses represented something as yet unsullied by the degradation of combat and suffering. They were of the world of peace and harmony, living relics of a far saner age.

Holters leaned closer to Reed and began to tell him about the Lipizzaner breed, of which he now considered himself an expert.⁵

“Where were these photographs taken?” asked Reed, interrupting Holters.

“At Hostau,” replied Holters.

“Hostau?” asked Reed, his eyes turning to Captain Sperl.

“Yes, sir,” said Sperl. “It’s a German Army remount depot.” The town of Hostau was small, with barely a thousand residents, its pretty German-style houses clustered along a narrow and steep main street that led up to a small plaza beside St. Jakobus Church, a yellow-colored building with a red-tiled roof and pointed steeple. Just beyond the church stood the princely castle—really more of a French château than a medieval fortress, an opulent two-storey white mansion arranged in two wings forming an L shape with a formal courtyard and garden. The castle had been commandeered by the local German military command for use as a headquarters. Opposite the castle was the stud, first established in 1915. Comprising 460 hectares, it was privately owned by the princely family Trauttmansdorff.The Austro-Hungarian government had leased the land in order to house parts of its official stud, and later, when the land became part of Czechoslovakia, the state had used the farm for its horse-breeding program. The German Army had taken over the horse stud at Hostau in October 1938, initially using it to supply horses to its cavalry regiments. All that soon changed.

“The Germans have moved hundreds of horses there from all across Europe, including the breeding Lipizzaner mares,” said Captain Sperl.

“For what purpose?” asked Reed, fascinated.

“To create the perfect horse, Colonel” replied Colonel Holters simply. “As our armies advanced across Europe scientists gathered only the most pure examples with the intention of creating the finest horse that ever existed for the Reich.”⁶

Colonel Hank Reed was both astounded and mystified. He knew that the Germans held strong and troubling beliefs about race, but hadn’t realized this extended to animals. An “Aryan horse”—the idea seemed preposterous to him, but it was clear that Holters was sincere.

Reed leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, one eyebrow raised quizzically at the German. Holters didn’t look fazed by Reed’s reaction. In fact, it was soon clear that he believed completely in what he said.

“At Hostau are the brood mares for the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, Colonel,” said Holters, his eyes alive with happy memories. “There are other Lipizzaners, including stallions, from Italy and Yugoslavia. Also, about two hundred of the most famous racehorses from across Europe, and a hundred of the finest Arab stallions.”⁷ Holters paused. “One such is Brantome, the French racehorse,” he said. Brantome was a thoroughbred, one of several seized from Baron de Rothschild’s stud outside Paris in 1940, explained the German. “Brantome was winner of the French 2,000 Guineas, the Prix Royal-Oak, and France’s premier race, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe.” Holters reeled off his facts expertly. “He has also raced in the Ascot Gold Cup in England several times.” The Germans had established all of these horses at Prince von Trauttmansdorff-Weinsberg’s stud opposite his family castle in Hostau.⁸

For Reed, the idea of selectively breeding horses was nothing new, it had been occurring for thousands of years, but the scale and goal of the program appeared superficially impressive. The brains behind it, explained Holters, was Gustav Rau, an equine expert who had convinced the Nazi leadership that he could create a “super horse” for Europe’s new “master race.”

The small and balding Rau had served in the cavalry in World War I. A horse breeder rather than a scientist, the sharp-tongued Rau had ingratiated himself with the Nazis soon after their seizure of power and actually toured the United States in 1938, inspecting American horse-breeding facilities. But his theories had been worked out in the 1920s, before Hitler came to power, when he seized upon a plan to revitalize the German horse-breeding program that had languished following the depredations and horrors of the Great War, which had killed half of all the horses in Germany.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the resultant Great Depression that followed had ushered Hitler into power in Germany, but it had also caused the export of much of Germany’s remaining horse stock. It was Rau’s belief that the Nazis could stop the rot and get Germans back interested in breeding horses, and that he would be the man to show them the way. Rau had received no scientific training. His theory was simply to breed closely related horses with each other in order to create excellent offspring. The new Nazi Minister of Food and Agriculture, Richard Darré, an ideologue who promulgated a theory of “blood and land,” appointed Rau Chief Equerry of the state of Prussia in 1934. Slowly but surely climbing the greasy pole of Nazi politics, Rau set about putting his theory to paper, publishing Horsebreeding in the National Socialist State in 1934. His theory appealed strongly to the social Darwinism of the Nazis—horses, like people, could be bred to create the finest specimens. If Britain bred the finest Thoroughbreds, and Poland the greatest racehorses, then Germany would excel and create the finest warhorse. Rau’s trip to the United States in 1938 confirmed what he already suspected—that European horses, like its people, were “superior.”⁹

In 1939 the 65-year-old Rau was given the opportunity of putting theory into practice on a national scale when he was appointed Oberlandstallmeister or “Chief Equerry” of the Reich and tasked with requisitioning, breeding and developing the warhorse of the future.¹⁰ German expansion across Europe would provide Rau with the bloodstock needed to fulfil his plan. Rau had also been appointed a colonel in the army’s quartermaster department. He had an undeniable talent for working the system to his own advantage, and it was commented that “Rau’s decisions were often prompted by what was going on behind the scenes, and he often sacrificed his expert knowledge to diplomatic intrigue.”¹¹ One such example was the Nazi equine eugenics program.

“Rau is not well liked,” grimaced Colonel Holters, tapping ashes from his cigarette onto the floor of Sperl’s tent, “but he is quite brilliant when it comes to horses.” Rau had quickly identified the Lipizzaner as the “purest” horse in Europe. He had decided that it would form the base bloodstock from which the new horse would be created. Rau and his special army unit of veterinary surgeons, geneticists and technicians had plundered the great horse collections of Europe for material to experiment on. He had also re-established the Polish horse-breeding industry in 1940, centered on the great stud at Debica.

Eventually Rau’s empire encompassed fourteen stud farms across Europe, with one even built on the grounds of Auschwitz Concentration Camp. SS officers from the camp, on their rest days from genocide, rode the Arabians on the 400-acre site. The horse-breeding program was massive—the German Army required 6,000 fresh horses each month during the height of the war, and with increasing fuel shortages, more and more horses were pressed into service hauling supplies and ammunition.

Rau had focused in on the Lipizzaners early in his program after a visit to the Piber Stud, where he was unimpressed by the facilities and felt that the potential of the animals was far from being realized. The stud, established at Piber Castle in 1920, provided all new stallions to the Spanish Riding School. Before the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, Lipizzaner horses had been bred at Lipica in present-day Slovenia. The evolution of the empire into many separate countries had meant that the large herd of mares at Lipica was broken up and sent to form new studs in Austria, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. Through their occupation of most of these countries, the Germans had gained access to fresh stocks of Lipizzaner horses to augment those of the Spanish Riding School. Rau had brought in stocks of Lipizzaners from Yugoslavia and Italy and established a carefully worked-out breeding plan. This move had brought him into direct conflict with the director of the Spanish Riding School: Colonel Alois Podhajsky.