TWENTY-THREE
THE PANZER GRAF’S FIRST EXPERIENCE OF CAPTIVITY was benign. As a general he was quickly separated from his men and treated with a great deal of respect, the more so because of his high decorations. The US front-line soldiers could respect a highly decorated combat officer, and identify with one who was also a front-line soldier. It would have been different had his captors recently liberated a concentration camp; after seeing the horrors within the camps, liberators often shot the SS guards out of hand and were none too merciful to any subsequent prisoners they took.
Soon after his capture, von Strachwitz was interrogated by his captors, who wanted to find out whether he was a political general or a fighting soldier, and whether he had committed any war crimes. If he had committed war crimes, he would have been handed over to the Russians for justice. It is probably correct to assume that during these interrogations he didn’t mention his party or SS membership. US interrogators were a very mixed bag, with quite a few inflicting what would by any standard be regarded as torture. For instance SS General Kurt “Panzer” Meyer was subjected to several mock executions, threats and sleep deprivation, and his was not an isolated case. Beatings and other forms of harassment were frequent, calculated to wear a prisoner down.
Being an anti-Nazi certainly didn’t provide any extra privileges, as Baron Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff found out, recounting an encounter with the prison commandment after the release of Hitler’s former adjutant and now general, Gerhard Engel. When asked his thoughts on Engel’s release, von Gersdorff replied, “I was happy for his freedom … however I was amazed that such proven resistance fighters as Colonel-General Baron von Falkenhausen or myself, for example, had not at least been released at the same time.”
The commandant explained that Engel had always only carried out the orders he had been given, would likely put up no resistance in civilian life, and therefore posed no danger. By contrast, von Gersdorff’s behaviour showed that he would, if necessary, follow his own conscience, “Therefore people like you, or General von Falkenhausen, are dangerous to us. That’s why we need to keep you in custody for a while longer.”1
So the Graf’s anti-Nazism might have kept him from being labelled a true Nazi, but might possibly kept him incarcerated for a lot longer. It is of interest to note that when it became known that von Gersdorff had been an active anti-Hitler conspirator he was ostracised by most of the other prisoners. The senior German prisoner, General Hollidt, told von Gersdorff that a group of generals had approached him to have von Gersdorff removed from the camp, and failing that they wanted him killed.2
Von Strachwitz’s conditions deteriorated, as they did for all captive soldiers, when US General Eisenhower declared them to be disarmed enemy persons and not POWs, therefore putting them outside the protections of the Geneva Convention. Almost at once food rations were drastically cut and treatment became distinctly harsher. The least fortunate were the 400,000 POWs in the Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadows camps), with no shelter, little or no food, non-existent medical attention and arbitrary brutality. Totals for deaths through sickness, hunger and neglect are not known and have been quoted to be as high as 40,000, but were probably closer to half that figure. The Americans did eventually improve conditions, assisted by large-scale releases, while the French on the other hand continued to starve and abuse their prisoners for years afterwards.3
Eventually von Strachwitz was sent to the prison camp at Allendorff, which housed a great many generals who were incarcerated for longer terms. Many were tasked with recording their experiences and comments on the war and to provide other useful information for the Western Allies. Graf von Strachwitz was required to provide information on tank tactics and his impressions of the Red Army, now rapidly becoming the USA’s new enemy. Von Gersdorff thought that the Americans also had a penchant for collecting war heroes, particularly Diamonds winners, which is why fighter ace General Adolf Galland was also sent there.
The barracks in which the prisoners were housed were basic and primitive, having been used at one time for Soviet POWs, then later for disarmed Italian soldiers taken after Italy’s capitulation. Jewish workers had been housed there when it had been a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. As time went by conditions improved and the prisoners were housed in more solid accommodations in the nearby city of Neustadt.
On 8 May 1946 Hyazinth von Strachwitz received some shattering news. Alda, Countess Saurma-Jeltsch, his wife of over 28 years had been run over and killed by an American truck in a tragic accident. He had now lost his wife and youngest son. His mother had died on 26 January 1940, and his father on 28 April 1942. He had some family left: his eldest son was still alive, though traumatised; his brother Manfred had come through unscathed having earned the Iron Cross First and Second Class; and his three sisters, Aloysia, Elizabeth, and Margarethe, had survived the war, but it was little consolation. He was denied permission to attend his wife’s funeral.
His captivity finally came to an end in June 1947. On 30 July he married Nora von Stumm in Holzhausen near Marburg. She was descended from the minor nobility, not that ancestry mattered much in the new Germany. She loved the Graf dearly, and they had two sons and two daughters.
For the second time Hyazinth von Strachwitz emerged from captivity to a much-altered Germany. He faced a bleak future without a home, job, and very few prospects, so for Nora it had been a true love match. Conditions in Germany were still grim; food was scarce, and the 1946 official ration was 1,275 calories per person per day, barely sufficient to maintain reasonable health. Women were still selling themselves for food or cigarettes to trade on the black market, while men stole, operated the black market, or did whatever they could to feed themselves and their families. Most were having to rebuild their homes and lives. It was particularly hard for the Graf to adjust. He had been transformed from a wealthy, respected count, decorated general and war hero to a jobless, homeless ex-prisoner. His war record and high decorations now meant less than nothing. In fact they labelled him as a warmonger, his exploits and heroism putting him at a disadvantage in the new Germany. The inherited title of which he was so proud—which had been already been devalued after the fall of the Kaiser but still had some cachet in the Third Reich—was now totally meaningless.
He was eventually given a small pension and left to adjust to post-war life as best he could. However, an opportunity presented itself in 1949. The president of Syria, Jhukri-al-Quwatli, needed someone to put the Syrian Army, and particularly its armoured corps, into shape, after its ignominious defeat by the Israelis in the Arab–Israeli war of 1948. A good salary and accommodations were offered, along with the opportunity to be involved with what he did best—train and organise an armoured formation. It was also an opportunity to leave drab, depressing Germany for a new and brighter beginning. As a cover he was listed as an adviser on agricultural affairs.
He arrived in Syria with his wife on January 1949 and quickly went to work. His ideas and plans were well received by the Defence Ministry, but their enthusiasm quickly died when they saw the costs involved. The Syrian government was a shambolic mess, with systemic corruption and nepotism rampant. Government ministers, generals and officials were only concerned with enriching themselves, as much and as quickly as possible. No one knew how long the money supply would last and any cash for new equipment and armaments quickly vanished into private bank accounts. The CIA-sponsored coup of June 1949 put von Strachwitz out of a job, and possibly in some danger as an official of the previous regime.
Graf von Strachwitz and Nora hurriedly fled to Lebanon, then quickly moved on to Italy. They settled in the Tuscan wine-growing area near Livorno where the Graf started a business as a wine merchant. He wasn’t very successful in this new and strange line of work, so in 1951, travelling on Red Cross passports, his family returned to Germany.
Life settled down to a leisurely pace and they bought an estate from his wife’s inheritance in Winkl near Grabenstatt in the district of Chiemsee in Catholic Bavaria, a very pleasant place to live. His focus—apart from his family—became the Upper Silesian refugees for whom he founded the Upper Silesian Refugee Foundation.
It had been agreed at the Teheran conference that Russia would keep the Polish territory conquered in the stab-in-the-back invasion of 1939 that everyone had conveniently forgotten about. Poland would be compensated with German territory, namely Danzig, Pomerania and Silesia. As a result some 7,000,000 Germans were, or would be, displaced. Those who did not flee on the earlier refugee treks in the winter of 1944/45 were later forcibly evicted. The Russians later annexed East Prussia, calling it Kaliningrad, bringing the total of displaced Germans to some 10,000,000. His work helping the refugees gave von Strachwitz some real purpose.
His son Hyazinth had taken control of his life after his divorce, becoming a businessman working for a machinery company owned by his brother-in-law. He remarried and adopted a boy, while his daughter from his first marriage stayed with her mother, who had married an American involved in the Dachau concentration camp trials. The younger Hyazinth died in 2003 in Germany.
The Graf’s new family was healthy and flourishing, so his later years were calmer and fulfilled. He became a Knight of Devotion of the Catholic branch of the Order of St John4 and no doubt tied this in with his work for refugees. His Catholic faith also sustained him over the years.
Like most soldiers he had been a heavy smoker, and he died of lung cancer in the hospital of Trostbergin, Upper Bavaria, on 25 April 1968. His funeral was attended by an honour guard of the Bundeswehr, and he was laid to rest next to his first wife in the family plot in Grabenstatt.
His life had been a full, and indeed an honourable one, carried out under extremely difficult circumstances. He had done nothing that brought shame, and indeed a great deal that brought honour to his name, and to his country. Obliged to serve an evil cause, he answered the higher call of his conscience when he agreed to arrest Hitler, but at no time did he betray the duty he owed to the men with whom he fought, or to his country. However, he remains best known for being the most dashing and successful panzer regiment commander of the war, the last great cavalryman and true cavalier. He was indeed the Panzer Lion.
NOTES
1. Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff (trans. Anthony Pearsall), Soldier in the Downfall, (Aberjona Press, USA, 2012), p. 156.
2. Von Gersdorff tried to join the post-war German Army, but was blocked by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s chief bureaucrat, a pro-Nazi who had been responsible for drafting many of the anti-Semitic laws. His actions were purely for revenge, because of Gersdorff’s attempts to kill Hitler. Soldier in the Downfall.
3. Joining the French Foreign Legion offered a way out, which is why so many Germans went on to fight and die in Indo-China.
4. The second military order of monks to be founded during the Crusades, the Hospitallers of St. John were named for the hospital they had established in Jerusalem. The Hospitallers went on to take Rhodes, then Malta after the fall of the Holy Land, from where Napoleon ousted them in 1798. Tsar Paul of Russia, took them over briefly, ending their existence as a Catholic knightly order. They were revived in the 19th century as a gentlemen’s club for Europe’s Catholic nobility.