Birds of Prey

II. The science of maps

The aphorism ‘a map is worth a thousand words’ was never more pertinent than in the research behind this book. The conversion to historical GIS (Geographical Information System) was a drawn-out process. Today, GIS is routinely applied to a full range of historical fields, including the Holocaust.12 Before that time, we relied on discussions with the geographers at the Bundesarchiv to try to understand how the maps were used. There was some confusion because there was no working reference to how the Germans had used the maps. In discussions with Bettina Wunderling, a qualified GIS technician, we examined the theory of applying alternative methods to unlock the maps and connect them to the war diary. We agreed upon an experiment that should use the digitized map of Karte des Urwaldes Bialowies as the platform for conducting GIS-based forensic analyses.13 Transferring the research to a scientific basis was not an entirely alien prospect. During my MBA at Aston Business School, assignments involved quantitative analysis of large data sets, computer programming, systems engineering, and design, and had devised a research method for managing large quantities of diverse information. There were hidden benefits that Richard Holmes recognised, that elements of my MBA, which included management systems, organisational theory, and social psychology, would help to broaden the historical research.

In the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, it might appear strange to discuss working with Historical GIS in a large area of Europe, without geo-referencing. The challenge was to combine old map skills with the new science of mapping. The first stage involved learning by doing. Initially, little could be done because the ‘Bialowies’ map lacked spatial coordinates and the projection was unknown. These are common problems when working with historical maps. As a consequence, it was not possible to use the map in a GIS system or make visualizations and analyses. We visited the Mammal Institute, in the UNESCO World Heritage park of Białowieźa in eastern Poland, and Dr. Tomasz Samojlik. He showed us the institute’s collection of historical maps and five highly detailed maps drafted in the 1920s by Polish geographers. After some preliminary examination, we realised the Germans had based their military map on the Polish maps. Tomasz provided the projections and coordinates to digitize these maps. In the search for comparative national/local maps from 1941, we found a consistent absence of borders between Białowieźa and East Prussia to the north, which indicated political annexation. A military map of the Pinsk-Pruzhany area to the south, drafted in July 1943, confirmed a national boundary towards the east. This confirmed the territorial expansion of East Prussia, as the national frontier with a wilderness bastion to the Greater German Reich in the east.14

Digital Map 3: Luftwaffen Karte des Urwaldes Bialowies.

© Bettina Wunderling.15

In 2009, it was virtually impossible to identify the lost villages and the scenes of many incidents in the forest. The preparations for being able to conduct forensic modelling came from comparing the documentary records to the application of historical GIS to research and using textbooks as guidebooks. There were few textbooks about GIS in historical research or how to apply GIS to forensic analysis. One of the few was published by ESRI Press, the in-house publishing arm of the leading GIS software company.16 The chapters were instructive. One chapter examined the importance of maps in GIS.17 The authors explained the values of reliability and accuracy in GIS modelling. They highlighted the visual impact of terrain. A second chapter focused on battlefields and detailed the essential processes from fieldwork to desktop mapping.18 Another important book confirmed the peculiarities of working with both historical data and maps.19A visit to Białowieźa was necessary to log important data into the database: the positions of old photographs, specific map references, and geo-reference points. The processing of the Luftwaffe map sections was a laborious and time-consuming task that involved adjusting different maps to a single useable map. Bettina began an advanced GIS course, and the department allowed the process of digitisation and the GIS mapping to be tested under university conditions. A high degree of expertise emerged that the university endorsed with a letter of commendation.20 Bettina began to incorporate more advanced methods of historical GIS.21To better understand the full breadth of Historical GIS and the basic operating principles, there were online seminars available to beginners. In May 2013, I joined an historical GIS course hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, London University. This involved working through an ArcGIS project in the classroom. This course reinforced the importance of managing several issues, including, digi-maps, geo-referencing, vector data and coordinates, symbolising data, pixelization, spatiality, data parcels, cartograms, and copyright.22 By the completion of the first stage and the preparatory work, we had produced a map (Map 3 below) in a digital, georeferenced form that would make possible a variety of analyses.

The second stage involved identifying data from the documents or qualitative content to form into specific layers. In a sense, this was akin to unpicking the spaghetti of data and trying to isolate common data sets. The significance of GIS is the integration of seemingly unrelated data and its reordering into meaningful information. Layers were identified from different sources. Infrastructure like roads, swamps, railways, roads, bridges, farms, and estates were digitized from the original Polish maps. The Luftwaffe had drawn information on their maps, such as the position of strongpoints, companies, and Jagdkommando. This data was integrated with the Polish maps and digitized. The next task involved data mining from the surviving diaries of the Luftwaffe. There were two defined periods with different commanders, tactics, and dogma. This was a very time-consuming process because of the form of handwriting. Sütterlin is not taught in German schools today, but was widely utilised during the war. Once the barrier of the handwriting was overcome, page by page, line by line, (about 120 pages) we were able to present the results for review by a German veteran, who explained more nuances about that writing form under combat conditions. The overall outcome was a wealth of details and data. This led to multiple complex layering and we began to compare colour pixelization against the black-white map format. We opted for the latter. There were so many map options we decided to compile a series of test maps. Copies of these maps were sent to the late Dr. Joe White and his team, at the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington DC in 2013 for an evaluation. We also began to examine the nature of time and its impact on the events. A partial experiment, involving multiple modelling was used to test the visualisation of progressive troop movement and patrols through segments of the forest. The outcome came down to tracking platoon, squad, and Jagdkommando movements, by minutes, hours, or days, depending upon the detail of supporting data.

Stage three involved formulating forensic analyses based upon the findings from the GIS layering tests. The key forensic mappings was classified under: the orders of battle or deployment of companies; the Bandenbekämpfung actions; population engineering; Judenjagd or Jew hunts; and larger operations. A 3-D model was drawn from the isolines of the maps. The outcomes of the analyses confirmed the working value of Historical GIS in a forensic dimension. How we presented and organized this evidence became crucial because the format selected would profile the narrative. The choices were: a military history format, the judgemental form of a war crime investigation, or a socio-cultural study of violence. In discussions about Bandenbekämpfung with retired US Army General Richard Trefry, comparisons emerged from Vietnam and Iraq.23 He recommended the US Army’s official report on My Lai as a structural model. The report incorporated a full schedule of maps and movement diagrams, which enabled comparisons with the logic behind the GIS mapping.24 Comparing post-war atrocities, such as My Lai, with Bandenbekämpfung was not the intention, but following the structure of the report of integrating maps in the narrative did seem appropriate. In 2013, a test of the mapping and narrative was made of the area where Siegfried Adams was killed in combat in June 1943 (see epilogue). The geo-data, geo-references, and qualitative content proved complete for Adams. The results were spectacularly successful.

A final test was to compare the findings to the content from Geographies of the Holocaust. This book had set the benchmark for applying historical GIS to the Holocaust. The book revealed the potential for a multidisciplinary approach to the Holocaust, but also the limitations when applied to military matters, and both are due to issues of spatiality. In a chapter about hunting Jews, the application of GIS was focused on time and space. The base data required a large body of data statistics including names, homes, mass deportations, and camps. In another chapter devoted to the killing grounds, the authors attempted to reconstruct the specialities of hunting Jews in Belarus. The chapter highlighted the formulation of ‘locational models of killing’, with GIS applied to map the movement patterns of killing units. There was graphical presentation of killings, a diagrammatic schedule of killings by time, and functional images of soldiery duties, which culminated in the summary—testimony, technology, and terrain. In both chapters there was an absence of integration and limited forensic outcomes. If the same methods had been applied to Białowieźa, they would have produced only minimal results.25 This did not reflect against the authors, but rather explained how different documentary evidence requires different historical GIS methods. We concluded that Historical GIS had unlocked the Luftwaffe’s mission and methods in Białowieźa. Historical GIS served three purposes: firstly, it had highlighted the prominent geographical features of the forest. Secondly, it recreated all military movements by timelines, operations, and outcomes, such as individual crimes. A deeper forensic analysis was achieved from mapping and visualising the effects of discipline, the routine, and orderliness of the killings. Thirdly, GIS exposed how a national political frontier divided responsibilities, but also explained the internal rivalries. In conclusion, GIS had exposed a grandiose Nazi scheme, Göring’s ambitions, and the soldiers’ behaviour—probably for the first time since 1945.

III. The GIS maps

This book contains more than twenty maps, the majority are from the Historical GIS analyses. The map below (uncaptioned) is an example of our first results. This is a composite map and although highly detailed it’s also a picture of information overload caused by the density of layering and grayscale. The ‘buffers’, or roundels, represent patrol distances within company areas and also radio signals ranges for small wireless devices. Arrow lines give general directions of patrols and deportations. The Germans incorporated the Jagen system, which represented a square kilometre ground—reflected in the grid pattern. This was an old Tsarist form of measurment used in Białowieźa for forestry management. The squares were mapped into the German maps and renamed Jagen. All of these factors have remained constant. However, in an effort to reduce the sense of clutter, we experimented with single layer maps and then with specific theme maps.

The solution we finally decided to accept were specific to the general findings from the research and forensic in design. The maps were finalised after series of experiments with colour, black and white, multiple layering, and single layer analysis. The GIS maps are in a specific set of representations: the orders of battle or deployment of companies (maps: 3, 4, 12, 13, 14, 20); the Bandenbekämpfung actions (6, 10, 16, 17); population engineering (5); Judenjagd (7,8,9, 11, 18); and larger operations (19, 21).

Alongside the GIS maps, the number of photographs were selected to contrast contemporary images of war with postwar memory. The aim was to visualize the concept of 'victims, bystanders and perpetrators' so prominent in Holocaust literature.

The conjunction of memory and mapping represents how communities co-exist within a landscape scarred by war and the Holocaust. Memories cast in the stone memorials stand in all Eastern European and Russian communities; this is an aspect of the Holocaust that is unique to the landscape. Maps and memories are germane to any microhistory of the region.26

1 A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History Since 1815, (London, 1961), p. 2.

2 Dan G. Cox and Thomas Bruscino (ed), Population-Centric Counterinsurgency: A False Idol? SAMS Monograph Series, CSIP, US Army CAC, (Kansas, 2011).

3 AŠarūnas Liekis, 1939: The Year That Changed Everything in Lithuania’s History, (Amsterdam, 2010), pp. 82–83; see also Norman Davies, Europe: A History, (London, 1996), p. 904.

4 Walter Frevert, ‘Zehn Jahre Jagdherr in Rominten’, Wild und Hund, (1943), pp. 148–153.

5 Robert T. Foley, Alfred von Schlieffen’s Military Writings, (London, 2003).

6 Discussions with archivists of the Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv. At the time of writing, there is uncertainty over the numbers of maps produced by the Wehrmacht.

7 Edward P.F Rose, Dierk Willig, ‘German Military Geologists and Geographers in World War II’, in Studies in Military Geography and Geology, 2004, pp. 199–214.

8 TNA, WO 208/3619, Interrogation Reports, CSDIC (UK), SIR 1706–1718, interrogation number 1709, German Army Warrant Officer Dr. Bartz 19 July 1945. He was described as a university geography lecturer, who returned to Germany after working in the USA and was conscripted into the army.

9 Sören Flachowsky und Holger Stoecker (Hg), Vom Amazona an die Ostfront. Der Expeditionsreisende und Geograph Otto Schulz-Kampfhenkel (1910–1989), (Köln, 2011).

10 Hermann Häusler, ‘Forschungsstaffel z.b.V. Eine Sondereinheit zur militärgeografischen Beurteilung des Geländes im 2. Weltkrieg.’ Schriftenreihe, MILGEO Institut für Militärisches Geowesen, Heft 21/2007.

11 Eric Hobsbawm, On History, (London, 1997), p. 201.

12 Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano (ed), Geographies of the Holocaust, (Bloomington, 2014). See also the essential secondary source was Ian N. Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship, (Cambridge, 2007); also, Anne Kelly Knowles (ed), Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, (California, 2002).

13 Bettina Wunderling BSc. Geology (Göttingen), a certification in GIS (Kiel), and has studied at Aachen-RWTH. The GIS modelling was carried out with ARC GIS version 10.0 by ESRI Software.

14 Hein Klemann & Sergei Kudryashov, Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939–1945, (London, 2012), plate 1.

15 This digital map represented the longest period of research and analysis prior to the full application of historical GIS.

16 Anne Kelly Knowles (ed), Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History, (Redland, 2002).

17 David Rumsey and Meredith Williams, ‘Historical Maps in GIS’, in Knowles (ed), ibid., pp. 1–18.

18 David W. Lowe, ‘Telling Civil War Battlefield Stories with GIS’, in Knowles (ed), ibid., pp. 51–63.

19 Ian N. Gregory and Paul S.Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies Methodologies and Scholarship, (Cambridge, 2007).

20 Geographisches Institut, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, May 2009–March 2010.

21 Jonathan Raper, Multidimensional Geographic Information Science, (London, 2000).

22 Institute of Historical Research, Historical Mapping and GIS, (research training), May 2013.

23 Association of the US Army, Annual Conference, October 2006.

24 US Army Colonel Roger Cirillo, PhD retired supplied a copy: ‘Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident’, Volume 1: Report of the Investigation, 14 March 1970.

25 Alberto Giodano and Anna Holian, ‘Retracing the “Hunt for Jews”: A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy’, and Waitman Wade Beorn and Knowles, ‘Killing on the Ground and in the Mind’ in Knowles et al, Geographies of the Holocaust, (Bloomington, 2014).

26 For an example of this, see the travelogue in Omer Bartov, Erased.

1. The Ogre of Rominten

Knuff was a crafty and cuddly stag as his name implied, but he was elderly, and his days numbered. Although this mighty stag had large antlers he was reduced to the status of a commoner. There were too many weak points in his vital statistics that denied him a place in the regal stock book. Regardless of Knuff’s less than noble pedigree, Hermann Göring had honoured the beast by selecting him for his hunting record. In his last hours, Knuff led Göring on a merry dance across der Romintener Heide. Göring stalked the stag for a week but the ‘old gentleman’ simply refused to surrender. For only the briefest moments Knuff tantalisingly presented his flanks but never long enough to be shot. After five hours of fruitless stalking in the morning, Göring was resigned to failure and trundled off to breakfast. Just about to tuck into a hearty platter, the mighty hunter received a telephone call from a forester that Knuff had been sighted. Leaving his continental breakfast behind, he dashed off eager for the kill. Göring mounted a shooting stand, took aim, and with a masterful shot he killed Knuff. This was the supreme moment—the sublime one-shot kill, a ‘… staggering phenomena that successful fighter pilots are good shots’, wrote Göring’s biographer.1 While anecdote has shaped the myths about Göring, the tale of Knuff represents a narrative about the hunt and the Luftwaffe lost from history.

Hermann Göring is a complicated character, with a façade that is not always reflected in the literature. In the past, his biographers have been compelled to condemn rather than delve beyond the superficial. In this literature, Göring is painted as the Nazi archetype of failure. This notion is also reflected in the balance of books on the man: mostly about Göring and the Luftwaffe; a few books about Göring and the Nazi economy; and a handful of books about Göring and forestry. Consequently, we know more than we need to know about his failings with the Luftwaffe but know less than is necessary to fully comprehend his part in the Holocaust. These depictions do not give us a rounded view of Göring. For example, in 1945 when examined by allied psychiatrists, he was regarded as the most intelligent and unscrupulous of the Nazi war criminals held in the Nuremberg cells. In the courtroom, he rallied from apathy to become the last champion of Nazism and the guardian of his legacy. To start at the end, therefore, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that he was a deviant, unscrupulous, clever, dogged by physical issues, had an addiction to morphine, but ultimately cheated the hangman with suicide.2

Deep within Göring’s psychology, was a story of violence that began with hunting and continued through soldiering. As a child, he was taught to hunt by his Jewish godfather on palatial estates. Then he was removed from this opulent lifestyle at an impressionable age and sent to a military academy with its strict discipline. Göring became an army officer and was posted to a Bavarian regiment garrisoned in Mulhouse in the Alsace, an area annexed after the Franco-Prussian war 1870/1. Göring experienced occupation first hand. He served in the disputed frontier area and was present in the region during the political unrest that led to the Zabern Affair (1913).3 In 1914 he served in the trenches and later transferred to become a pilot. Göring was a fighter ace, served in and then commanded the famous Richthofen Circus and was awarded the Pour Le Mérite. Although Göring politicised his war record, it was not until he came to power that it became the central core of a radical political-military idea. In November 1918, Göring gave the farewell address as commanding officer of the Richthofen Circus, he recalled their combat victories and casualties. Fourteen years later, as President of the Reichstag, Göring recalled saying Germany would once again be allowed to fly, and ‘I would be the Scharnhorst of the German air force.’ Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755–1813) was the driving force behind the reforms of the Prussian Army. An interesting role model since Scharnhorst was known to be, ‘silent and withdrawn, a man who looked more like a schoolteacher than an officer of the king.’ His ‘calm tenacity in adversity’ was in stark contrast with Göring’s temperament.4 When the Great War ended, Göring was at the peak of his physicality, a war hero with attitude, but unemployment forced him to search for direction—he met Hitler in 1922.

Göring’s Nazi biographer called him the ‘Führer’s paladin’ and pitched the narrative to his master’s achievements in rebuilding the nation. He had come a long way from his squalid street battles in Munich after the war. ‘From hero to zero’, in modern parlance informs a trajectory of violence that culminated in a bullet wound during Hitler’s Munich putsch (1923). The wound changed his physical being and the rest of his life. Göring saw himself as broken like Germany. His mission to create a Greater German Reich was as much a reflection of his condition as it was his endorsement of Hitler’s ambitions. Göring’s Nazism was different to that of Himmler, Rosenberg and Goebbels because it had been born in pre-war nationalism and fuelled by the events of 1918–1923. His belief in a Nazi military revolution was wholly different to both the SS and the army. His ideas were grounded in his self-constructed Germanic-romanticized-renaissance, bound by honour codes, Nazi etiquette, privilege and patronage. Richard Overy has argued that as the leading Nazi defendant at the Nuremburg war crimes, he bullied, chided and coaxed his fellow inmates. His inflated self-importance, egomania and ebullience left little room for contrition. In 1939 the allied politicians had believed Göring to be a moderate but at Nuremburg he proved to be as extreme as the rest of Hitler’s circle. Overy believed Göring was an old-fashioned nationalist with a radical personality.5 In 1933, as Prime Minister of Prussia, Göring enforced police regulations to smash Germany’s left-wing movement. From 1933, under his guidance, the forestry and hunting fraternities examined future legislation and regulations, which led to the National Hunting Law (1934) and the National Nature Law (1935). These ecological laws were subtle devices that conformed to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and the evolving police state. In March 1935, Hitler agreed to the formation of an independent Luftwaffe, within the Wehrmacht following rearmament, and Göring was made its supreme commander. The forestry service would incubate the birth of the Luftwaffe.

Göring’s Nazism was motivated towards restoring German national honour, but his institutional ambitions reached deeper into Third Reich society. Peter Uiberall was Göring’s official interpreter during the Nuremburg trial, and claimed the prosecutors were unable to reach deep inside Göring. Uiberall argued that confronting Göring with crimes committed in the name of Nazi Germany was pointless. He labelled Göring a ‘Condottieri type of personality’ who didn’t recognize right or wrong or know the difference between good and bad. As far as Göring was concerned the nation was an organism, a ‘body politic’ that had to be secured and protected by any means.6 Göring the Condottiero is an enduring image of corruption, Machiavellianism, and capriciousness. He was an enigma of countless variations. The political ambition, to make Germany great again—a political tract with remarkable durability—fused his ideas across the breadth of Nazi orthodoxy. Shaping a modern military institution out of forestry, hunting and aviation, which combined the elements that were most Germanic in spirit to raise a frontier police with the capability to strike at enemies from long distance. This was a breath-taking strategic concept even by Nazi standards. Frontier security reinforced with a hard punch was fundamentally defensive, but also colonialist and nation-building. The killing of Knuff, therefore, can be seen as symbolic of Göring’s representations of Germany—past, present and future.