ON THE EVENING OF July 27, 1941, Adolf Hitler lingered over dinner, his eyes glinting with pleasure as he mused upon the future for the benefit of a select audience in his stronghold in the East Prussian forest. Wolfschanze was a dark, dismal, depressing place, more suited to an army of troglodytes or trolls than the triumphant new warlord of Europe. But Hitler liked its Spartan simplicity. He felt invincible there, surrounded as he was by nearly two thousand military personnel, thick windowless concrete walls, barbed-wire fences, sentry posts, and mile upon mile of northern wilderness. His existence at Wolfschanze bore no resemblance to ordinary life, a fact not lost on most of his subordinates. Indeed, one member of the German high command, Alfred Jodl, later described it as “a cross between a cloister and a concentration camp.”1
Hitler, however, had no desire to leave Wolfschanze, no inclination really to step foot into the bloody apocalypse he and his armies had unleashed upon Eastern Europe. Just five weeks earlier, on June 22, 1941, he had launched a mammoth surprise attack on the Soviet Union, the bulwark of what many committed Nazis called “Jewish-Bolshevism.”2 Emboldened by his earlier military successes—the invasions of Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, northern France, Yugoslavia, and Greece—he had hurled nearly three million German troops against the Soviet military in Operation Barbarossa, opening a two-thousand-kilometer-long front that stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.3 In just two and a half weeks, the Wehrmacht had seized Lithuania, Latvia, and parts of Estonia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, capturing hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. German troops were now marching north to Leningrad, a city that Hitler admired, and south to the Crimea, the peninsula that jutted from the north shore of the Black Sea.
Hitler was elated and energized, convinced that his troops would take Moscow in a matter of weeks.4 He now ruled over more of Europe than any man since Napoleon, and often in the evenings, when the spirit took him, he indulged for hours after dinner in meandering monologues that blended dreamy fantasy with monstrous cruelty. The servants would bring the guests tea and cake—chocolate cake being Hitler’s favorite—and as the German leader sipped and nibbled and stared at a large map of the Soviet Union on the far wall, he would begin to talk to the assembled guests: military men, visiting Reichkommissars or Reichministers, members of his inner circle, young secretaries in pretty dresses. Always it was the same. The room would go silent, and a little man sitting discreetly off to the side would bend down over a sheaf of paper and begin taking shorthand notes.5
On these occasions, Hitler would casually hold forth in a lengthy stream of consciousness on whatever was uppermost in his mind at the moment—the perfection of the German army, the inferior nature of English music and theater, the natural aptitude of the Swiss for hotel-keeping, the necessity of eradicating insects and dirt in Vienna.6 But on the evening of July 27, Hitler chose to talk about his future empire in the East. He particularly relished the thought of a new German colony he planned to create in the Crimea. The southern Russia peninsula was blessed with a pleasant Mediterranean air. It possessed forested mountains and splendid seacoasts where dolphins frolicked. It boasted vineyards that produced fine sherry and muscatel, and orchards that yielded apricots and peaches, and it was endowed with the kind of singular beauty that attracted important visitors. The Russian imperial family had built a fine summer palace in the Crimea, and the grand dukes and duchesses of St. Petersburg had followed, putting up lavish dachas. Famous writers and artists took up residence there. In 1903, Anton Chekhov penned one of his most famous plays, The Cherry Orchard, while sitting in his Crimean country home.
Hitler, however, envisioned a very different future for the Crimea. He believed that the sunny region possessed special properties of great importance to the Aryan race. “There are few places on Earth,” he later observed, “in which a race can better succeed in maintaining its integrity for centuries on end than the Crimea.”7 To illustrate this contention, he pointed to the history of the Goths, wandering herdsmen from northern Europe who settled in the Crimea in the third century A.D. and whose language could still be heard on the peninsula some thirteen hundred years later. Hitler, like many other German ultranationalists, regarded the Goths as ancestral Germans and the Crimea as a kind of southern German homeland.8 On the strength of this meager claim, he had decided to transform all of the peninsula into an “exclusively German colony.”9 He planned to rid the Crimea of all those he deemed undesirable—Jews, Tatars, Gypsies, Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Ukrainians—and replace them with racially sound German colonists. “My demands are not exorbitant,” he explained smugly one night. “I’m only interested, when all is said, in territories where Germans have lived before.”10
When news of these plans reached Himmler, he was electrified. The Crimea would be a perfect place for dozens of the feudal SS settlements he had been dreaming about for nearly a decade.
ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1941, the German 11th Army, under the command of Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein, began bearing down on the Crimea.11 Manstein, a West Prussian aristocrat with nearly thirty-five years of experience in the German army, had an excellent reputation as a fighting man, but the Soviet forces put up unexpectedly heavy resistance. All along the eastern front, it was much the same story. Instead of folding and crumbling and buckling under the crushing force of the Wehrmacht, surviving Soviet officers from one battle simply re-formed their units, dragooning reservists and bystanders and arming whoever else they might find quietly tending their crops or walking the streets. Then they threw these makeshift troops back again against Panzer divisions and artillery units, sacrificing ten Russian lives in order to kill one German soldier.12
Over the next seven weeks, Manstein’s troops bludgeoned their way across the Crimea, but they were unable to take the heavily fortified port of Sevastopol, once a thriving link in the region’s grain exports. So on December 17—ten days after the Japanese air force bombed Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to declare war first against Japan and then enter the war against Germany and Italy—Manstein launched a major attack on the port and its thirty-two thousand Soviet soldiers. The German objective was to cut through three major defensive rings that Soviet troops had constructed around the city.
As Hitler and the German high command waited impatiently for Sevastopol’s fall, Himmler directed his forces to begin ethnic-cleansing operations in the Crimea. He ordered Einsatzgruppe D, one of four large roving killing detachments in the Soviet Union, to liquidate all the Jews living in German-occupied Crimea. The first target there was Simferopol. Some twenty thousand Jews had lived in the city before the war, giving it the largest Jewish population in the Crimea. Since then, many Jews had fled for safer quarters, but an estimated eleven thousand remained. So in mid-December, members of three forces—Einsatzgruppe D and the Wehrmacht’s Field Police and Secret Field Police—set about methodically massacring the Simferopol Jews.13 The plan was to liquidate the entire community before Christmas.
Officials informed local Jews that they were to be resettled, and instructed them to gather in a public meeting place. Drivers then conveyed the families to a prearranged kill site some fifteen kilometers outside of Simferopol.14 There, by the side of the road, officers instructed the frightened families to climb down from the truck, take off their jackets and shoes, and leave behind their suitcases. Armed guards then led the bare-footed victims through the snow to an excavated grave, some three hundred meters from the road. Most of the Jewish captives could see at once the fate that lay in store for them. “There were disturbing scenes,” recalled one of the German executioners later. “The Jews cried because they were aware of what was happening.”15
When it came their turn, the victims were lined up opposite their killers, each of whom was armed with a machine pistol, a type of submachine gun. An SS officer gave the order to fire. “Some of the victims immediately fell into the grave,” observed one member of the firing squad after the war, “others fell on the edge. These fallen Jews were then thrown into the grave by the waiting Jews.”16 After several rounds of this, the executioners needed no order to fire: they did so automatically. There was no possible escape for the victims—no opportunity to run or flee. The SS Security Service had cordoned off the area and set up guards around the perimeter. “Some Jews who tried to flee,” noted one of the executioners later, “were shot down by the unit who ensured that the area was closed off.”17
The killing squads were very efficient. On December 15, Einsatzgruppe D reported to the SS command that Simferopol was judenfrei, “free of Jews.”18 And it immediately set about orchestrating similar massacres in other Crimean cities—Feodosia, Yevpatoria, Kerch, Yalta, and Bakhchysaray.19 By then, however, some of the squad members had begun to complain about the psychological stress of shooting such large numbers of women, children, and babies in cold blood. Rather than putting an end to the terrible bloodshed, however, Himmler and the SS leadership suggested a more impersonal method of slaughter—mobile gas wagons. As the massacres continued, Einsatzgruppe D obtained three gas wagons—two large ones capable of killing eighty people at a time, and a smaller one that could execute fifty people at once. Squad members used these to kill women and children.20
In all, German forces were to shoot and gas to death nearly forty thousand Crimean Jews during their occupation.21
THE ASSAULT ON Sevastopol in late December 1941 failed dismally, despite Manstein’s brilliance as a tactician. The Soviet navy succeeded in dispatching reinforcements, ammunition, and food to the city on December 20, bolstering the spirits of the defenders considerably; six days later it pulled off a daring amphibious landing of twenty thousand troops on the eastern tip of the Crimea. With this assistance from the sea, Soviet troops fended off the assault on Sevastopol and they retook the cities of Feodosia and Kerch. News of this disaster so infuriated Hitler that he sentenced to death the German officer who ordered German troops to withdraw from the Kerch region, Count Hans von Sponeck.22
These and other serious setbacks along the eastern front threatened to undermine the morale of German troops. Himmler, the schoolmaster’s son, believed that further political indoctrination was the surest way of rallying the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS. “The longer the war draws out,” he stated in a later order, “the more we have to educate and convince our officers, junior officers and men about the [Nazi] worldview.”23 In Berlin, SS writers dutifully churned out a flurry of articles casting the invasion of southern Russia as a kind of homecoming, where German forces might once again reclaim their ancient territories in the East. At the center of these fables were the ancient Goths, a favorite propaganda tool of SS writers.
According to history, the Goths were a tribe of wanderers who originated in a place called Scandza—quite likely in Scandinavia or possibly northern Poland.24 They spoke one of the Germanic languages, as did just about all the inhabitants of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.25 The Goths, however, did not remain in Scandza. Being of a particularly footloose disposition, they wandered south looking for greener pastures. They eventually ended up along the Sea of Azov, a gulflike body of water that adjoins the Black Sea. And in A.D. 238 they made a rather dramatic entrance into the histories of the ancient world.26 From settlements along the Black Sea coast, they began attacking and pillaging Roman cities to the west. They seized ships moored in Black Sea harbors and became full-fledged pirates, raiding even into the Aegean. They were formidable foes, and according to the old Roman histories, they built a city alternately called Doros or Dorys or even Doras, somewhere in the Crimea. They also converted to Christianity, and one of their bishops, Ulfilas, whose name means “little wolf,” invented the Gothic alphabet so he could translate the Bible into his native tongue.
The fiery arrival of the Huns, nomadic horsemen from the Central Asian steppes, convinced many Gothic families that it was time to search for safer homes. They fled across the Danube in A.D. 370 and headed north and west on a lengthy odyssey that eventually ended for some in Spain. But a small group remained behind, clinging to their homes along the Black Sea. Travelers to the region took note of them, remarking in the thirteenth century upon inhabitants who spoke a German-sounding language and who lived side by side with their Tatar neighbors.27 In 1475, the Turks invaded the region, bringing Islam and a new way of life to the Crimea. As the centuries passed, the speakers of Gothic converted to Islam and dressed as the Turks did. They forgot the old ways, and by the middle of the sixteenth century, the Gothic tongue had all but vanished from the Crimea.
German ultranationalists made a great deal of this slender history. They brazenly claimed the Goths as their own ancestors, although there was not a single shred of evidence to support this contention.28 Moreover, they grandly portrayed the Goths as the founders of a mighty German empire in the East that once stretched all the way from the Black Sea to the Baltic, and from the Carpathian mountains of Slovakia to the Urals of Russia.29 To tease out the truth about the Goths, Soviet archaeologists in the 1920s and 1930s began studying Crimean ruins.30 They combed sun-bleached coasts and thyme-scented plateaus and pored over several ancient mountain fortresses and cave cities, places clearly designed to repel invaders and help a badly frightened people sleep a little easier at night. They surveyed remote cave cities where members of the Gothic tribes had lived, and ancient churches where the Goths prayed, but they uncovered not a trace of a mighty German empire in the East.31 The story was a fantasy, pure and simple.32
Nevertheless, tales of the Goths and their magnificent empire in the East continued to circulate in Nazi circles. SS writers wasted little time in capitalizing on them. SS magazines sported cover photos of sparkling Gothic diadems and ran colorful articles with pseudo-scholarly titles such as “Germanic Empire on the Black Sea” or “Gothic Art—Proof of Culture.”33 They recounted tales of Gothic empire-builders and remarked upon the instinctive German need for Lebensraum. All these stories, they insisted, were fully rooted in facts, and they left little doubt of the importance that the SS placed on this history. “The arrival of the Goths,” concluded one article, “marked the first time in history that an organizing power of the highest kind appeared in the still undeveloped and unshaped east of Europe.”34
This doctored history was clearly intended to inspire the soldiers of the Waffen-SS to new and greater heights in the Crimea.
IN THE EARLY spring of 1942, German troops prepared for a massive new attack on Sevastopol, assembling an enormous siege train of 670 artillery guns, including one behemoth that required the work of two thousand men over a period of six weeks to prepare for its firing.35 As Himmler waited for the campaign to begin, he carefully examined a detailed proposal for the future German colonization of the Soviet Union. Hitler had named him Reichskommissar für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums, or the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German Race, placing him in charge of resettling ethnic Germans from outside the Reich in the new Eastern lands. It was work that Himmler had embraced enthusiastically, and in late January 1942, he had begun working closely with a senior planner and agricultural scientist, Konrad Meyer, to draw up a proposal for the future of the Soviet Union.36 The Crimea figured prominently in these proposals, which Himmler called the Master Plan East, and which he intended to present to Hitler at an opportune moment.
Himmler hoped to found three large colonies in desirable parts of the East, each of which would undergo what he and Meyer euphemistically termed “Germanization.” One of the colonies would encompass Leningrad and the lands directly south. The second would straddle northern Poland, Lithuania, and southeastern Latvia. And the third would embrace the Crimea and the rich fields of southeastern Ukraine.37 Himmler intended to call this southernmost colony Gotengau, a name that roughly translates as “Goth region.”38 He also intended to rechristen Simferopol as Gotenburg.
Himmler estimated that it would take twenty years to completely “Germanize” all of Gotengau.39 As a first step, he planned to round up the region’s inhabitants. Examiners from RuSHA would perform anthropological measurements on those who appeared to be racially valuable to the Nazis, and men, women, and children thought to possess Nordic blood would be permitted to stay in Gotengau. Himmler’s various security forces would then forcibly expel the Slavs and other “racially unwanted” groups from their homes in the Crimea. They would kill most, and enslave the remainder as “helots.”40 When this was done, the undesirables would be replaced with ethnic German settlers and with SS settlers who would inhabit defensive villages along the borders of Gotengau. Such settlements would be the preserves of Wehrbauern, or “soldier-farmers”—blond, blue-eyed men of the SS—and their wives and children.
The defensive villages of the proposed German colonies clearly reflected all Himmler’s fervent dreams for the SS. He proceeded to draw up detailed blueprints for a prototypical farmer-soldier village in the East and showed them with immense pride to his personal physician, Felix Kersten, in the summer of 1942. “Such a village,” he explained to Kersten, “will embrace between thirty and forty farms. Each farmer receives up to 300 acres of land, more or less according to the quality of the soil. In any case a class of financially powerful and independent farmers will develop. Slaves won’t till this soil; rather, a farming aristocracy will come into being, such as you still find on the Westphalian estates.”41
His plans called for settlements closely resembling those that the SS had already built in Germany. Dominating each would be a “manor house” occupied by an SS or Nazi party leader.42 In addition, each settlement would feature a local party headquarters that Himmler envisioned as a “center for general intellectual training and instruction”; a Thingplatz, where inhabitants could hold outdoor celebrations for the summer solstice and other important Nazi holidays; and a special graveyard, where families could honor their ancestors.43
Himmler was not content, however, with simply Germanizing the Crimean population. He also planned to turn the landscape of Gotengau into his vision of a Teutonic homeland.44 “Germanic man,” he explained to Kersten, “can only live in a climate suited to his needs and in a country adapted to his character, where he will feel at home and not be tormented by homesickness.”45 To soothe the new settlers and supply better cover for their defense, Himmler intended to plant hundreds of thousands of oak and beech trees to reproduce the ancient forests of northern Germany. “We’ll create a countryside something like that of Schleswig-Holstein,” he boasted.46
Himmler also planned to develop hardy new varieties of crops in order to boost the agricultural yields of colonies across the Eastern territories.47 He ordered the Ahnenerbe to found a teaching and research institute in plant genetics, assigning the task to Dr. Ernst Schäfer, the headstrong young German zoologist who had led the Tibet expedition.48 Schäfer set to work with characteristic vigor. He obtained a staff of seven research scientists, including a British prisoner of war, and set up an experimental station at Lannach, near the town of Graz in Austria. There the new institute set to work, experimenting with samples of grains that Schäfer had acquired from the granaries of the Tibetan nobility.
ON JUNE 2, 1942, after struggling for more than eight months to capture the entire Crimean peninsula, Manstein ordered a massive artillery attack on Sevastopol, determined this time to take the Crimean port. At his command, a deafening bombardment of five-ton high-explosive shells shattered the Soviet fortifications with the force of a high-magnitude earthquake. A prolonged aerial attack by German dive-bombers followed, flattening the city. Manstein’s troops then began their final assault. Over-whelming the Soviet gunners in their heavily fortified hill positions in weeks of heavy fighting, they stole the guns of the dead and began fighting their way to Sevastopol’s outskirts. By July 2, they had captured the city’s airfields. The Soviet casualties were staggering. “I have never seen such a battlefield in all of my life,” reported one veteran SS officer. “Thousands of totally destroyed vehicles lie in the area. Heavy weaponry of all kinds, guns and ammunition—in short, everything that an army requires to fight—are simply strewn haphazardly on the ground. The earth is all churned up and shell craters cover the ground between the enemy field positions. Tens of thousands of dead Russians, and uncounted horse cadavers contaminate the air.”49 Manstein’s forces finally captured the city on July 4.
Two and a half weeks later in Berlin, Sievers organized the necessary paperwork to send a small Ahnenerbe scientific team to the region.50 An eminently practical man, Sievers regarded the battle of Sevastopol not as a human tragedy, but as a prime opportunity for new research and plunder. Despite the terrible devastation wreaked by the war, the Ahnenerbe’s most senior archaeologist, Dr. Herbert Jankuhn, was anxious to travel to south Russia in order to secure for the Reich the great Gothic treasures of the Crimea and to locate Gothic sites for excavation. For years, SS archaeologists and scholars had enthused over the beauty of the famous “Gothic crown of the Crimea,” a small garnet-encrusted diadem discovered in an ancient grave near the city of Kerch and exhibited in one of Berlin’s most famous museums.51 Jankuhn hoped very much to find more of the Kerch treasure. He also yearned to find proof of what he called the “Gothic empire in southern Russia.”52 Such evidence would help build a case for Germany’s claim to the future colony of Gotengau.
Jankuhn was one of the most respected archaeologists in Germany. He was a short, muscular barrel of a man whose sturdy physique was strangely at odds with a fine-boned, almost delicate face. Raised in East Prussia, not far from the border of Lithuania, he believed implicitly in Greater Germany and the ultranationalist cause. His own schoolteacher father had played an active part in local politics, publishing a small book entitled Is There a Prussian Lithuania? and Jankuhn had inherited his father’s conservative views.53 At university, he had become fascinated by the history of the Knights of the Teutonic Order, a religious group that colonized Prussia in the thirteenth century, founding German towns and market-places throughout the region.54 And these studies led Jankuhn directly into the field of historical archaeology, a discipline he excelled at.
At twenty-six, Jankuhn became the director of one of the most important excavations in Germany—Haithabu, a Viking trading post located just south of the Danish border. It was there he first met Himmler, who toured the dig in March 1937.55 The SS chief took a keen interest in the site, offering to heavily subsidize the excavation. He confirmed Jankuhn as the leader.56 A few months later, Jankuhn joined both the SS and the Ahnenerbe.57 Himmler came to prize his careful scientific approach and his extensive knowledge of the ancient world. The senior scientific staff at the Ahnenerbe also welcomed Jankuhn into their midst. Bruno Schweizer, Himmler’s childhood friend, picked him as the leading archaeologist for the ill-fated Iceland expedition.
In 1940, Himmler appointed Jankuhn head of the Ahnenerbe’s prehistory and excavations department, making him, as one scholar recently observed, “the most powerful archaeologist in the Third Reich.”58 From this august position, Jankuhn supervised German scientific research at major archaeological sites throughout the Reich. And as Hitler’s empire expanded, so, too, did Jankuhn’s field of activity. Just weeks after German forces invaded Norway in 1940, Jankuhn traveled to Oslo to inspect the nation’s rich Viking sites and assist the SS Security Service in its futile attempt to win over the Norwegian population.59 Soon after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, and the fall of France in June 1940, he toured the new occupied zone, examining the major archaeological sites and gathering information for the Security Service on the degree to which French peasants accepted German political ideas.60 Like many Germans, Jankuhn believed that Britain was on the verge of capitulation. The end of the war, he concluded, was imminent, so he confidently proposed postponing the “stock-taking” of French museums and private collections until after the armistice, when he would have more workers and greater financial resources at his disposal.61
But Britain did not capitulate. The Luftwaffe’s devastating blitz on London had failed to break the British spirit as Hitler had hoped. Moreover, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had brought the United States into the war, greatly adding to the strength of the Allies. German casualty lists grew longer by the day, and in recognition of this fact, Himmler had recently urged his senior SS officers to send all able-bodied men on their staffs to military duty at the front.62 But he did not apply this injunction to the senior scientists of the Ahnenerbe, who were spared military service. In the summer of 1942, Himmler dispatched Jankuhn and two colleagues—Dr. Karl Kersten, an expert on the northern European Bronze Age, and Baron Wolf von Seefeld, a young ethnic German archaeologist from Latvia who spoke some Russian—to the Black Sea region to search for the treasures of the Goths.
Himmler considered this work to be of prime importance. Indeed, he asked that Jankuhn’s reports be forwarded directly to him, although he was mired in work—supplying Waffen-SS and police divisions to the great summer offensive in the East, eliminating political opposition within the Reich, administering his vast empire of concentration camps and lucrative SS business enterprises, and proceeding as quickly as he could with the extermination of the Jews.
JANKUHN INFORMED HIS two colleagues that they would be traveling light—with knapsacks rather than suitcases, and with steel helmets rather than SS hats.63 The three archaeologists departed on July 21, 1942, for the field headquarters of the SS-Panzerdivision Viking. Jankuhn had learned that the major Crimean museums had crated up their most important collections and shipped them to the northern Caucasus before the arrival of the German army, hoping to protect them from theft.64 Jankuhn was stubbornly determined to find and seize them, however, even if this meant traveling to the front itself, for he believed the artifacts to be “of great scientific worth.”65 He hoped to catch a ride with Viking Division, which was advancing across the northern Caucasus toward the rich oil fields of Maikop.
The three archaeologists endured a hot and dusty train trip to the eastern front, reaching the Viking command post at Starobesheve in the Ukraine on August 1. To Jankuhn’s disappointment, however, the division commander, SS-Gruppenführer Felix Steiner, had just departed on a mission to the front, forcing the archaeologists to cool their heels for five days at Starobesheve. While marking time at the camp, Jankuhn, an immensely intelligent and observant man, must have discovered that the division was traveling with Einsatzkommando 11—one of the roving killing units in Einsatzgruppe D—as well as a gas wagon to facilitate the slaughter of Jews.66 If Jankuhn found these traveling companions repulsive, he gave no indication of it in his surviving letters to the Ahnenerbe. Indeed, Jankuhn seems to have befriended some of the senior officers of the murder squad. The new head of Einsatzgruppe D, for example, made a point of passing on information and advice to Jankuhn concerning the holdings of museums in the region.67
Jankuhn yearned to get to work tracking down the treasures of the Crimea. Tired of marking time at Starobesheve, he ventured off to find Steiner at the front. When the two finally met, the commander explained that the Caucasus campaign had reached a critical stage. He did not want any distractions from the work at hand, but he reluctantly agreed to cooperate with Jankuhn. He advised the archaeologist to be cautious.68 The military situation in the region, he noted, remained volatile and required “clarification.” Jankuhn, however, was not deterred by the prospect of danger. He, Kersten, and Seefeld prepared to head south immediately with the Viking division and its accompanying Einsatzkommando.
THE JOURNEY TO Maikop must have been memorable for Jankuhn. Viking Division took few prisoners, generally executing captives and suspected partisans on the spot.69 Its tank drivers tended merely to run over refugees and others on the roads, instead of stopping or going around them.70 And if the senior officers of the accompanying Einsatzkommando behaved like those of better-known killing groups, they made little secret of their work, even casually posting notices of their murderous assignments on bulletin boards in their quarters for anyone to see.71 Traveling with the division did not appear to disturb Jankuhn, however. As the tanks fought their way toward Maikop, Jankuhn and his two colleagues searched the passing countryside for ancient grave mounds, secured local museum collections, and kept their ears open for rumors about the Kerch treasure.
On August 9, German forces captured Maikop as Hitler had directed, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Before retreating, the Soviets had sabotaged the oil refineries, shutting down their production. As Jankuhn waited to enter the city, he received a radiogram from Sievers, relaying urgent orders from Himmler. Himmler had recently obtained from Ludolf von Alvensleben, the SS and Police Leader of Taurien, a description of an ancient Crimean site known as Manhup-Kale.72 Alvensleben had toured the Crimean mountain fortress with two companions, a historical novelist and a physician, and the trio had become convinced that Manhup-Kale was once the residence of Gothic princes.73 Himmler wanted an immediate investigation. Jankuhn, however, was loath to abandon his search for the Goth treasures that the Soviet army had spirited away from Kerch. So he ordered Kersten to depart immediately for the Crimea to start archaeological surveys of Manhup-Kale and other possible Gothic sites.
On August 26, Jankuhn obtained a truck from the division and set off into Maikop. Already, the Einsatzkommando had set up a killing facility in the city.74 As eyewitnesses later recalled in court depositions, the SS and police forces had plastered notices on lampposts and storefronts, ordering Jews to gather in the courtyard of a building formerly belonging to the Soviet state security service, a place of ominous reputation. They were told to pack one suitcase in preparation for resettlement. In the courtyard, an Einsatzkommando officer greeted the crowd in a friendly way, patting one of the Jewish girls on the shoulder. This helped break the tension in the air. Someone then asked the assembled families to enter the building. Inside, men in uniforms ordered the crowd to strip and submit to an inspection to ensure they concealed no valuables. When this terrible indignity was over, the troops herded the frightened families into a gas wagon hidden away in a smaller courtyard.75 By such assembly-line methods, the Einsatzkommando methodically murdered the city’s Jewish men, women, and children.
Jankuhn and Seefeld made their way across Maikop to the museum, where they proceeded to conduct a leisurely inspection. Jankuhn was very pleased. The Red Army had failed to ship off to safety some of the most important valuables, and while the building had sustained some damage, much of its collection escaped unscathed. The display cases still gleamed with the splendid grave goods of an ancient Scythian noble—a bronze helmet, basin, and cauldron—which delighted Jankuhn, for he considered the Scythians, like the Goths, to be ancestors of the Germans.76 He and Seefeld also spotted dozens of other desirable antiquities, including a Greek bronze helmet, decorated bronze mirrors, bronze equestrian gear, two war axes, two iron swords, bronze figurines, and Paleolithic stone tools.77 To Jankuhn’s disappointment, however, he could see nothing made by Goth craftsmen. Nevertheless, after sizing up the value of the collection, he decided to ship off the most important antiquities to Berlin.
He discussed the problem of transporting these valuables with Dr. Werner Braune, the commander of Einsatzkommando 11b and the man who had supervised the massacre of Jews at Simferopol six months earlier.78 Braune took an avid amateur interest in archaeology and had even worked with the Ahnenerbe at one time on educational reforms in Germany.79 He had often talked to his troops about finding the “Gothic treasure of Kerch” and was clearly delighted that Jankuhn had turned up something valuable. He ordered his men to assist Jankuhn. They found a large crate, and Jankuhn proceeded to pack up the objects that were “scientifically and artistically the most important.”80 Jankuhn was immensely grateful for Braune’s help, praising in his final report the “total support” of the Einsatzkommando.81 When Sievers learned of this assistance, he sent Braune a photo of the bronze helmet that Jankuhn had seized at Maikop. This memento, wrote Sievers in an accompanying note, was “supposed to serve as a nice reminder of this part of his work in the mission.”82
Jankuhn was still anxious, however, to locate the prize museum collections from Kerch. He and Seefeld kept their eyes and ears open, hoping that they might track down the hiding place, but increasingly Jankuhn worried that the treasure had been shipped off beyond reach. On August 28 in Armavir, an important railway junction in the northern Caucasus, Seefeld received a key piece of intelligence. A medical warehouse in the city had received a transport of seventy-two wooden crates. They were reputedly filled with museum treasures from Simferopol, Sevastopol, and Kerch.83
Seefeld hurried to track down the crates, greatly excited by the thought of the treasure he was about to find. When he arrived at the warehouse, however, his heart fell. The depot had been reduced to a smoldering ruin. He got out of his car and took a look around. Out in the courtyard, he discovered twenty sealed crates and several others that had been pried open and plundered.84 He notified Jankuhn of his discovery, and when the senior archaeologist arrived, they proceeded to pore over the contents of the sealed crates, artifact by artifact. They unwrapped ancient Greek vases, Greek terra-cotta statuettes, pearl necklaces, important Stone Age artifacts, ancient coins, a marble relief, valuable geography books on south Russia, Tatar mother-of-pearl chests, and carved marble reliefs.85
But there was not a single Gothic artifact to be found amid the rubble there. Jankuhn gazed up with immense disappointment and frustration. The precious boxes concealing the treasure of Kerch had eluded him. Nevertheless, he and Seefeld packed up fourteen crates of the most valuable antiquities and dispatched them back to the Ahnenerbe offices in Berlin.86