CHAPTER 4
White Gold
“The 2nd U.S. Cavalry put a hold on the war… while we extracted a sliver of culture for the rest of the world.”
Second Lieutenant Louis T. Holz
Three men crouched beside the broad expanse of a large tree trunk, their eyes furtive. On their backs were scruffy-looking homemade backpacks. Their uniforms were grubby, damp and soiled with leaf litter; their lean faces wore nervous expressions. Standing, the trio pushed on through the dripping woodland, constantly scanning the sides and rear. After a while they heard a challenge to their front.
“Halt,” demanded the unseen voice. “Hände hoch!” The men’s hearts sank when they heard those harsh German words. But then their despair turned to surprise when the voice shouted out again, this time in English. “You deaf, Krauts? Get your god-damned hands in the air,” The three men exchanged surprised glances before their arms shot high above their heads and their leader cried out: “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, we’re Allied prisoners-of-war.” A few seconds later American soldiers from Troop C, 42nd Cavalry began to emerge from the undergrowth, as if spontaneously generating from the very earth, their carbines pointed warily at the scarecrow-like figures.
The prisoners, two Brits and one American, could scarcely contain their joy. Their emaciated, starved arms reached out to their saviors. Laughing and crying, they poured forth their story to the sympathetic GIs, of how they had managed to slip away from a long column of prisoners that was resting at the small village of Schmolau,* just west of the town of Weissensulz. The column had numbered well over 300 men.1 The two Brits were in the worst shape—they’d been prisoners on work detail since capture at Dunkirk in 1940. The GIs gave them food and cigarettes and had them sent to the rear for debriefing. Their story, if it were to be believed, would more than corroborate Colonel Holters’ assertion that hundreds of Allied prisoners-of-war were in the vicinity of Hostau.
At the conclusion of the simple breakfast in Captain Sperl’s tent, Colonel Hank Reed announced that he agreed with Colonel Holters that to simply allow the Hostau Stud, its precious horses and the POWs to fall into Soviet hands would be a sacrilegious act.2 He knew, with a conviction that welled up inside of him, that something had to be done, and done fast. Although no firm plans had been made, and he had only a hazy idea of the enemy’s strengths and intentions, he knew that action was required. But what could an American cavalry colonel do on his own initiative? He couldn’t go gallivanting off into enemy territory without specific orders. He would have to inform the chain of command and press his case for immediate action. He could only hope that someone in higher authority would see the importance of saving the horses, not to mention the importance of releasing the POWs. But Reed already had a squirming feeling running through his guts that did not sit well with his breakfast. The Red Army was, according to Sperl’s G-2 intelligence, only forty or fifty miles from Hostau, perhaps even closer. If the Soviets made a concerted push, it would only be two days at most, if the Germans fought stubbornly, before the whole exercise became academic and Stalin’s forces were at the gates of Hostau. Reed was experienced enough to know that military operations took time to plan, to gather units and assign orders. But there just wasn’t enough time. What Reed needed was a superior officer prepared to make a snap decision—today. In the meantime, Reed would try to put into place the necessary groundwork to assist with any putative rescue mission.
First, Reed reached a compromise with Holters. Reed knew the value to the Americans of Holters and his stash of intelligence material. Reed, after a private consultation with Sperl, laid a simple deal on the table: Holters and his men must surrender to the Americans, along with all of the documents in their possession. In return, the German colonel and his men would be kept together and immediately sent to the rear for detailed interrogation. It was hoped that they would agree to cooperate with the Allies concerning their intelligence-gathering activities in the Soviet Union, sharing all of their knowledge and assessments. If Holters agreed to these terms, then Reed would try to help the horses. No sooner had Reed finished outlining his course of action than Holters agreed in full.
What Sperl had christened Operation Sauerkraut on the night of April 25, the mission to snatch Dienststelle Ost, was back on. Captain Sperl would accompany Holters back to his unit and organize their surrender and the recovery of the buried files while Reed reached up the chain of command. Holters and Reed shook hands solemnly. The German colonel had come to the Americans with the intention of saving the horses that he had come to love, and so far the plan was working perfectly. As long as the problem was tackled quickly, there appeared a good chance that everything would come off okay. But the one thing Reed, Sperl, and Holters hadn’t factored into their equation was the reaction of the German Army—it was an unknown quantity, but for how much longer?
“Establish your blocking position here at Taus, Captain,” said Brigadier General Baron Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels to the young captain standing beside him in front of a map of Western Czechoslovakia that was pinned to the wall at 11th Panzer Division headquarters. In brackets below the word Taus was the name of the town in Czech—Domazlice. The Germans, totally unbeknown to Colonel Reed and the American command, were making fresh dispositions just in case the US Army decided to plunge deeper into Czechoslovakia. Protecting the important industrial city of Pilsen, where armaments production still continued, was very important. Relying solely upon locally raised troops with inferior training and weapons was not the answer. Instead, highly trained and experienced forces from the 11th Panzer Division would bolster the thin forward line.
“You will reinforce the local defense battalion that controls the crossroads west of the town.3 It is imperative to prevent any further advance by the Americans towards the city of Pilsen,” intoned von Buttlar-Brandenfels, who had recently assumed command of the 11th Panzer, one of the last largely intact German tank formations on the Western Front, from Major General Wend von Wietersheim. “The rest of the division will move up to support you once our supply of petrol has been re-established.”
Nine days previously the tall, handsome 45-year-old von Wietersheim had been relieved of command of the 11th Panzer and ordered to Berlin to take command of a Panzer corps there. None too thrilled at the idea of ending up a Soviet prisoner, von Wietersheim had pleaded illness and instead remained close to his former headquarters.
The German’s thin crust of poorly equipped infantry and Volkssturm constituting the military region’s garrison had some strong units behind it, should the Americans attack. Alongside the 11th Panzer was the 2nd Panzer, and both were excellent formations with plenty of combat experience, but by this stage of the war they were short of men, tanks and, most importantly, gasoline.
The severely depleted 2nd Panzer Division under the command of Colonel Karl Stollbrock was in the worse state of the two, and had been reduced by constant combat to just over 2,000 men and fewer than twenty operational tanks.4
It was the 11th Panzer Division which would be the biggest headache for General Patton if he were to thrust deeper into Czechoslovakia, as he still hoped to do. The 11th was near to its authorized strength, fielding just over 11,000 men.5 Its nickname, eerily close to that of the 42nd Cavalry Squadron, was Gespensterdivision (Ghost Division) and it wasn’t even supposed to be facing the Americans. It had been ordered by Seventh Army to transfer to the Eastern Front, by now just outside Prague, but a lack of fuel left it stranded in Bohemia, just inside the Czech frontier.
Once refueled, the 11th Panzer Division would move up to Taus. Though severely degraded by combat losses, in late March 1945 the 11th reported to German Seventh Army headquarters that it had two Sturmgeschutz IV assault guns, four Pzkpfw IV medium tanks and, most ominously for the Americans, fourteen large Panther tanks ready for action.
On completing the briefing the captain sprang to attention. “At your command, Herr General,” he barked, one gloved hand touching the peak of his crusher cap in a punctilious salute.
Within thirty minutes the German battlegroup was assembled, the captain standing imperiously in the first half-track, which would lead a motley collection of camouflaged armored fighting vehicles, trucks and Kübelwagen field cars, engine exhaust fumes mingling with a low mist that hung over the forested roads. The vehicles, fueled with every last liter of available gasoline, were loaded with 500 men from the 111th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, the 6th Artillery Battery and a pioneer company, and prepared to advance towards Taus.
Inside the vehicles, the grenadiers sat wrapped up in greatcoats or camouflaged smocks, steel helmets and webbing, their rifles and machine guns between their knees ready for instant use. They were a proud bunch. If anyone was going to stop Patton it was going to be the hard young Panzer grenadiers who smoked and joked with each other in the backs of the vehicles, and not the third-rate reservists or home guards that littered every town and village along the frontier.
The war in the West had become a numbers game, pure and simple. The Germans didn’t have enough men and armored vehicles to hold off the Soviet juggernaut and the Western Allies simultaneously—something had to give, and by April 1945 that was the western defenses of the Reich. Facing the Red Army in the east the Germans had 214 divisions. Facing General Eisenhower, Hitler could only spare 26. He could hardly afford to pull a division off the line in the east where the Wehrmacht, despite committing the majority of its strength, was still outnumbered about five to one in men and ten to one in tanks.
It didn’t take a military genius to see that the defense of the remaining portions of the Third Reich in Western Europe could not be sustained for many more weeks with the small forces allotted the task. Hitler’s only hope was that the Americans and their allies would not advance into territories still held by the Germans that were destined, because of the Yalta Agreement, to form part of the postwar Soviet occupation zone.
The 11th Panzer Division captain turned and glowered impatiently back down the column of reconnaissance vehicles and trucks waiting under the leaden sky. It was still cold and wintry, with occasional snow flurries and rain showers. Fortuitously, the bad weather had grounded Allied fighter-bombers, allowing him to move his vehicles by day. His right arm shot into the air and then fell with a cutting gesture. “Kampfgruppe… Marsch!” he bellowed, before turning to face the road in front, adjusting the Knight’s Cross that he wore around his neck beneath a camouflaged jacket. The air was rent by the revving of engines and the peculiar rattle and whine of tracked vehicles as they started on the road to Taus and an uncertain reception. The captain smiled grimly and replaced his field cap with a steel helmet, tugging the strap under his chin as his half-track bumped and lurched along the muddy road. He knew that within days von Buttlar-Brandenfels would be crawling up the same road with the balance of the division, including the dozen or so remaining Panther tanks. The captain had seen to it that his Panzer grenadiers had been liberally supplied with Panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades, making every German soldier a potential tank killer. His left hand gripped the armored glacis of the MG42 machine gun mounted at the front of the half-track to steady him, and he glanced impatiently at his wristwatch. The 11th Panzer was advancing west one final time.
At Hostau the war had yet to become a bloody reality. A week before Captain Sperl launched his mission to Dianahof, on April 20, 1945, Hitler’s 56th birthday had been celebrated with a surreal parade. Some of the Lipizzaner stallions had trotted through streets that were bedecked with swastika flags as the local population applauded and cheered. The white stallions, with riders in their best uniforms, walked imperiously through the little streets, their heads set proudly, their movements graceful and flowing. The locals, used to farm animals and draft nags, gazed in awe at such fine horses. Mixed in among the townspeople were refugees from further east, including a smattering from Vienna who well knew the reputation of the Lipizzaners.
It was a final propaganda gesture to reassure the locals. This region, abutting Bavaria, was known as the Sudetenland, and most of the inhabitants were Sudeten Germans; the parade reassured them that Hostau and its environs was still German and would remain so. The Germans outnumbered the local Czechs by about four to one in the Sudetenland, but they also knew that they were considered to be unwanted interlopers in Slav lands. The Hitler birthday parade was made using Austrian and Yugoslavian horses, which would have struck the worldlier among the crowds as bitterly ironic. But at the end of the parade, as the clattering of hooves died away into the distance and the crowds dispersed to their homes and businesses, the grim reality of total war once more settled like a pall over the town. For all Dr. Goebbels’ undoubted mastery of words, did anyone really believe that Hostau and its inhabitants, human and equine, would remain inviolate?
At Hostau, the war had seemed very far away for most of its duration, and even as forces gathered to intrude on the peace of the stud, the officers and men continued with their tasks as if nothing much had changed. But lately, they had been forced to face some of the realities of Germany’s deteriorating military situation. That reality had been passing in front of the stud’s main gate in depressing little columns of refugees for weeks now, all desperately trying to stay one step ahead of the vengeful Red Army.
The stud’s smart two-storey white stable blocks, neat yards and fenced paddocks had witnessed an influx of animals, not only from Gustav Rau’s outlying breeding stations but also sick horses from the refugee columns.
Commanding this ever-expanding equine refugee camp was 48-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Hubert Rudofsky. He was as horse mad as his would-be saviors Colonels Holters and Reed, so horse mad in fact that he had refused to learn to drive a car on principle, but Rudofsky was cut from very different cloth to his American counterpart. Though he wore the field-gray uniform of a Wehrmacht officer, he was a Sudeten German who’d been born close to Hostau and whose elderly mother, niece and nephew still lived nearby. Before the German takeover in 1938, Rudofsky had served in the Czechoslovak Cavalry, and the row of medal ribbons over his left breast pocket testified to his years of experience and service to two nations. He was a tall, bald, bespectacled and somewhat humorless officer and a decorated veteran of the Austro-Hungarian Cavalry in World War I. In the inter-war years Rudofsky had been the preeminent horse-breeding expert in Czechoslovakia, before commanding the great Polish stud at Debica for Rau. His colleagues would remember him as a man who was so conscious of his position and image that he changed his uniform three times a day in order to always appear immaculate before his men. He was usually seen carrying a silver-topped leather carriage driving whip—for his specialty was training carriage drivers. A deeply religious man, and a family friend of Prince von Trauttmansdorff-Weinsberg, whose military stud Rau had appropriated for his experiments at Hostau, Rudofsky was certainly no Nazi, just someone who kept his mouth shut and did his duty with precision. His value to Rau was obvious.
The horses at Hostau were exceptionally well cared for by this correct and conscientious man, and detailed records kept on each. Every Monday morning he personally inspected every horse in the stud, which was led out into the yard where Rudofsky’s keen eye for detail and professional expertise missed nothing. Under his command, the Hostau Stud had produced a bumper crop of new foals for Rau’s program, each being branded with a mark consisting of an “H” pierced by a dagger. Colonel Rudofsky’s relations with the head of the Spanish Riding School, Colonel Podhajsky, were chilly. Rudofsky resented Podhajsky meddling in the welfare of “his” horses, and Podhajsky saw Rudofsky as essentially Rau’s creature, and complicit in the disastrous breeding program.
In March 1945, after much wrangling and logistical problems, the remaining Lipizzaner stallions at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna were moved for their own safety to a stud at Saint Martin im Mühlkreis in Upper Austria, 228km southeast of Hostau and just northwest of the city of Linz, and the treasures of the Spanish Riding School packed up for safekeeping until after the war. Podhajsky stayed with the horses at St. Martin. But having the breeding mares so far away at Hostau, and outside of his supervision, was killing him.
One day in March 1945, Colonel Rudofsky was in his office at Hostau Castle, carefully updating horse records and reviewing the supply situation at the stud, located opposite the castle’s gate, when one of the senior grooms tapped impatiently at the door.
“Well, what is it?” asked Rudofsky, barely glancing up from his paperwork.
“You’d better come at once, sir,” blurted out the groom in an excited tone. “Russians, sir… Russians are in the yard!”
“What?” demanded Rudofsky, jumping up from his chair in astonishment, a bolt of fear lancing through his core. How could Russians have arrived without any word from headquarters? It had to be a mistake.
“Yes, sir, the main yard,” repeated the groom, his eyes wide. “Russians on horses.”
Rudofsky pushed past the groom and looked out of his office window, perhaps fearing a Soviet reconnaissance unit.
“Cossacks!” Rudofsky gasped in a surprised voice as he viewed the strange visitors for the first time. He quickly snatched up his cap from the rack next to the door and strode outside.
There were a couple dozen of them, sitting astride sturdy bay or black Anglo-Kabarda horses, a famous Cossack breed from the Northern Caucasus. Seeing his approach, the Russian officer in charge flicked his riding whip to his tall black Kubanka cap in a casual salute.
“Prince Amassov,” announced the Cossack officer to Rudofsky. The stud commander looked over his exotic visitor with interest. The prince was young and handsome, a blond moustache giving him the look of some silent movie star. He was dressed in the same field-gray German officer’s uniform as Rudofsky, except for colored rank straps indicating a lieutenant colonel and a unit badge on his left sleeve that confirmed he was a Cossack in the pay of the German Army.
Thousands of Terek, Don and Kuban Cossacks were in the German Army. Their reasoning was simple. Stalin had oppressed the Cossacks before the war, and they felt no loyalty to Moscow and the Reds. These men yearned for independence, and when the Wehrmacht had first conquered their lands it had looked as though Hitler might give this to them. But by March 1945 it was painfully clear to the members of the German 1st Cossack Division that they had backed the wrong horse. They could only seek to surrender to the Western Allies and save themselves and their families, as to fall into Soviet hands would mean execution as traitors to the Motherland or banishment to a Siberian labor camp where you were as good as dead anyway.
Amassov’s Cossack hat was adorned with the Nazi eagle and German national cockade, but he wore a Russian-style shashka sword hanging from his belt. His twenty-six men were dressed in an assortment of German Army uniforms and traditional Cossack clothing, including long black kaftans with cartridge pouches across their chests. They had Mauser rifles or Russian PPSh sub-machine guns slung across their backs, making them look more like a gang of brigands than professional soldiers.6
“Where have you come from?” enquired Rudofsky, admiring the Cossacks’ fine horses.
“From Poland,” replied Amassov without elaboration. “We have brought our horses with us.”7 Rudofsky was soon informed by his staff that as well as twenty-seven armed Cossacks, and their families, they had brought with them sixty Kabarda and Anglo-Kabarda mares with four stallions, eighty Don and Anglo-Don mares, also with four stallions, and a herd of thirty Polish ponies. Rudofsky was exasperated, but Prince Amassov was adamant—he demanded refuge for his men, families and horses at Hostau. With Amassov was his wife and fourteen-year-old daughter.
The Cossacks had fought honorably for the Germans, and now it was time for the Nazis to repay that service. Rudofsky’s precise mind sensed disaster: adding another 178 horses to an already overcrowded facility was asking for trouble and feeding the horses and finding them places in the paddocks and in the stables would prove difficult. Plus there was the question of all these strange Russians to accommodate. But Prince Amassov and his band didn’t look like the kind of men who could be easily refused. The prince’s hard gaze betrayed a man of immense combat experience and toughness. Rudofsky would have to find room.
The stud now housed over 600 horses, far more than could be realistically stabled and fed, and the small staff of German soldiers and Allied prisoners-of-war was hard pressed caring for them. The Lipizzaners, Thoroughbreds, Arabians and Cossack horses were housed at the main stud at Hostau and at the facilities at the adjacent villages of Hassatitz, Taschlowitz and Zwirschen.*
Life at Hostau was an endless schedule of feeding, mucking out, exercising and grooming. The prisoners worked alongside the Germans, and many had formed close bonds with the animals that they cared for. Some labored with one goal in mind—the welfare of the horses, and their feelings for the animals often transcended the traditional enmities of war. Others, particularly Soviet and Eastern European prisoners, hated the Germans and yearned for release, and perhaps revenge.
Colonel Rudofsky’s most important subordinate officers were the Hostau Stud’s two German Army veterinary surgeons. Captain Dr. Rudolf Lessing was a tall, lean and handsome man in his early thirties,8 with fair hair slicked back from his forehead and piercing blue eyes. He was a man who knew horses intimately, and a hard-working and loyal subordinate. He had been appointed senior veterinary officer at Hostau in January 1944. Previously, Lessing had been Gustav Rau’s adjutant in Poland in 1942 at the great Debica stud farm. Lessing had assisted Rau with veterinary matters on the Eastern Front and had seen action there, dealing with wounded horses in the mud and filth, an experience that had marked him for life.
After the east, Hostau was an oasis for Lessing, though perhaps a mirage may have been a more apt analogy. His wife and young daughter lived on site, along with Rudofsky’s spouse and many other civilian non-combatants. In this strange reality, the officers went home each evening to spend time with their wives and children. But the cozy domesticity was proving to be an illusion—the families were now close to the front lines and vulnerable, bringing no peace in the minds of the officers at the stud. They performed their duties with one eye always on home and hearth and with a growing sense of unease.
Lessing’s close colleague and deputy, Captain Dr. Wolfgang Kroll, was twenty-six and possessed of a gregarious personality and a strong appetite for adventure. That last attribute was about to be fully tested in ways that he could never have imagined. Working under these men were the grooms and stable hands tending to the horses and grounds, dealing with supplies, machinery and general maintenance. Aside from the noise of horses, any visitor to the facility would have heard a multitude of languages being spoken: German, Czech, French, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Russian and English.
The problem for Rudofsky and his staff was the encroachment of the war in all its ugliness into what had been an equine paradise far from the realities of the conflict. Lessing and Kroll met with the refugees from the East daily, as they tended to the civilians’ horses as well as the remnants of Rau’s Nazi breeding program. The distress and exhaustion of both the civilians from the East and their horses were harrowing. “So far we had been completely unaware,” recalled Lessing in later years. “We thought: well, we sit here relatively well. We really did not suffer any distress and were basically spared from the war, because we had not been bombed. But now… we got for the first time a concrete idea of the things that were happening outside.”9
For the veterinarians, the state of the refugees’ horses was gut-wrenching. Many had lost shoes, while others had terrible suppurating sores from hauling overloaded wagons. Ill-fitting harnesses on emaciated horses meant dreadful wounds caused by incessant rubbing and slipping. Many of the horses were lame or partly lame, while some had inflamed pressure points on their withers (the ridge between a horse’s shoulder blades). Pistol shots were heard at the stud on a daily basis, as the veterinarians put down the worst cases.
This harrowing reality extended to the dirty, ill and destitute human refugees, and Rudofsky allocated what little space he could spare for them to rest in barns or outside in the yards. Most didn’t want to linger too long at Hostau—they knew the Red Army was only a few days behind. Most limbered up their tired horses after an inadequate rest and pushed on to the American lines and safety. More than one among them warned Rudofsky and his staff that if they had any sense they would follow on before “Ivan” arrived at the gates. The “safe world” of bucolic Hostau was now a thing of the past.
But the escape routes to the West were becoming progressively blocked by the German military. Shortly after the Hitler birthday parade, Colonel Rudofsky, as ranking officer in the town, was ordered to inspect the erection of anti-tank barriers close to the Bavarian border and in Hostau. Their object was to stop the American advance. Some Reich Labor Service (RAD) troops were assigned the task of building the barriers,10 but Rudofsky, knowing that militarily they presented little impediment to American tanks, convinced the local Nazi officials overseeing the work to leave the barriers open for the time being—Rudofsky needed the large numbers of refugees and their horses that were building up at Hostau Stud to keep moving west to relieve the overcrowding and strain on resources.
Colonel Podhajsky and the Spanish Riding School stallions faced as dire a situation as that at Hostau in their billets at Arco Castle outside Saint Martin im Mühlkreis. Refugees had flooded the village from the east, and in common with Colonel Rudofsky’s command, the area was full of Soviet and Polish prisoners-of-war and displaced persons who had no love for the Germans or their allies. The food situation was so dire that several refugees had told Podhajsky that the prized Lipizzaner stallions should be shot and used for food. Podhajsky could only turn away ashen-faced and fearful. If push came to shove he and his handful of twenty barely armed men could do little to protect the horses from a hungry mob. Discipline was holding, but for how much longer? Like Colonel Rudofsky at Hostau, it was uncertain which army would arrive first—the Americans or the Soviets. Vienna had fallen to Stalin’s forces on April 13, but the US Army in Bavaria was less than 100 miles to the west. There was nowhere left to run to—Podhajsky had to face the reality that the Spanish Riding School would fall into enemy hands—the only question was whether the Americans would beat the Soviets to the castle and the horses and staff would be spared. Communications with the stud at Hostau, where nearly all the Spanish Riding School’s breeding mares were situated, had been intermittent until they completely failed due to enemy action, leaving Podhajsky with no idea of what was happening. It would be a disaster of historical magnitude if the Americans liberated Saint Martin im Mühlkreis and saved the stallions, only for the Soviets to capture Hostau and kill or haul off east the School’s mares, without which no new stallions could be bred, leaving the ancient Lipizzaner bloodlines severed and the School to wither and perish.
“Mein Gott,” exclaimed Colonel Rudofsky, ducking involuntarily as he sat behind his desk in his office at Hostau Castle on April 26, 1945. The loud detonation caused the windows to rattle in their frames. He jumped up quickly, wrenched open the door and stumbled outside in time to see a plume of black smoke rising from one of the nearby paddocks. Horses were whinnying in terror and crashing about inside their stalls or charging madly around the paddocks. Several grooms and prisoners were lying flat on the ground, covering their heads with their hands, buckets and brooms abandoned in haste nearby. Rudofsky dashed through the castle gates and across the road to the stud.
“Alarm!” yelled a sergeant at the top of his voice. He ran over to where Rudofsky was standing wide-eyed.
“Take cover, Colonel. We are under artillery fire!”
The sergeant’s words were barely out of his mouth when a ripping noise filled the air, sounding like an express train coming on at full speed.
“Take cover!” screamed the sergeant, pushing Rudofsky down as another shell arrived with a terrific detonation. The war had finally arrived at Hostau.
* Now Smolov.
* Now Svržno.