Granddad blogging: Loot

Last week my grandfather managed to get off the front and become a cook in the army. This week he finds a train and gets some booty.

You asked me how I came to have this German silverware that I have. When the war was drawing to an end the Germans were abandoning trains, aeroplanes, buses, cars and tanks and everything else. And I didn’t have any idea why then, but the simple fact was that they were running out of oil. Their sources of oil had all been cut off. The fields that were in Romania and Bulgaria had been bombed. They couldn’t any more from Russia. Their oil fields, limited that they were had been bombed. They didn’t have any tankers that could bring oil into ‘em and they had plenty of tanks and aeroplanes and trains and that sorta stuff but they were all parked and camoflaged.

I remember walking down the autobahn. And I had never seen an autobahn, we call them Interstates here, and there were aeroplanes parked on the right and left and camoflaged. All up and down the autobahn. They used the autobahns for airstrips for the planes to take off and land on. And they were good, new-looking planes sitting there. I knew we hadn’t been strafed or shot at by planes in a long time, and I didn’t understand why. And I didn’t understand why the tanks weren’t running or anything else.

And somewhere between Munich and Nuremberg, I don’t remember where, I probably have it written down somewhere, but I’ve forgotten, we came upon a great long train. It was sittin’ on a track in some woods, and it was covered up with pine trees and everything else. Camoflaged so it couldn’t be seen at all, and when we came up on it we began poking around in it and decided it wasn’t booby-trapped, so we really began poking around then. I was in the cooking end of the outfit at that time, so I was always interested in finding any food that we possibly could. And rattled around in the dining cars and kitchen all along this train. And there were sets of silver and china and crystal, of real fine stuff, I thought. And it was sterling silver, and it was good china and it was real good crystal. And people were lootin’ it pretty fast.

And we could loot it because... Looting’s the wrong word, confiscating it. We could confiscate it because it had DR on it. Deustche Reich. And it had a swastika on it, and it had the German eagle on it, so it was eligible to be taken if we wanted it. And I took a set of silver. Everything that I could get. Knives and forks and spoons and serving spoons and serving pieces and this, that and the other. A whole lot of it.

I had in mind when I took it that I was gonna send it home. And I got it all and wrapped it up the best I could and put it in a tow sack, and took the tow sack or croker sack some people would call it and throwed it in the back of a trailer that was hooked on to a jeep. And the reason I used this trailer is because it was where I carried the crudest of field kitchen stuff that we used to cook for the people that were in this part of battalion headquarters. And I went to one of the officers and asked him if we would sign to let me send this home, because you couldn’t send German contraband home unless it had an officer’s signature on it. And he said, yeah he would sign for it and let me send it home, but he’d have to have all the teaspoons. He wanted them. I gave 12 I believe, I kept a few, but I kept all the rest of it, and I wrapped it up in sacks and got me some boxes and tied strings and paper stuff around it got him to stamp his OK on it and shipped it to [my wife]. And that’s the story of that.

Note: This silverware was used at big gatherings where he and my grandmother didn't have enough sterling to go around. So often we ate Christmas Eve or Thanksgiving Dinner off Nazi silver. The silver is very good quality, but by this time, the German steelmaking capacity was decreased and that steel that there was, I presume was going to the war effort - so the blades of the knives which were stainless steel have not held up over 50 years of use.

This set of silver is now mine, but my brother and I had a little "dispute" over this. He finally agreed that I could have them so long as I never took them out of the country (for use or donation). One spoon was given to my mother-in-law (by my grandfather) so that's now in Europe. The rest will stay in America.

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