Nazi surrender order to be auctioned in New York

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/28/nazi-surrender-order-to-be-auctioned-in-new-york

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Marooned on a naval base in north-west Germany, pinned down by advancing Allied forces and with Adolf Hitler dead, the last leader of the Third Reich hammered out a surrender order.

Seventy years later his telex will be auctioned in New York, the flimsy sheet of pink expected to fetch US$20,000 to US$30,000 as rare a relic from the world’s deadliest conflict.

In it, Karl Dönitz tells the head of the Luftwaffe, Field Marshal Robert von Greim, that he has signed an unconditional surrender and that all hostilities will cease at 1am on 9 May 1945.

“This was unavoidable in order to prevent the complete destruction of certain parts of the front, which was expected to occur in a short time, and, in so doing, to save as many people as possible for Germany,” the telegram explains.

Tom Lamb, history expert and curator of Wednesday’s sale at Bonhams, said it was the first German telegram he had ever seen.

“The Germans had a scorched-earth policy as they pulled out so they burnt, destroyed every piece of paper they had,” he said. “And if they didn’t do it, the Russians did it, so the survival of this is extraordinary.”

Von Greim received the telegram at 10.40pm on 8 May. He fled Germany and was arrested by US forces outside Prague. The telegram was found in his attache case.

It was kept by the interrogating US army officer and is being offered for sale by a private American collector.

Von Greim was to be swapped in a prisoner exchange with the Soviets but took cyanide and killed himself on 24 May 1945.

Lamb expects significant interest in the document, not only from US collectors but from German and British ones as well. “This is a very important historical document and it could go to any country that values that,” he said.

More than 300 lots of second world war memorabilia, the majority collected by veterans, are up for grabs. There are flags, uniforms, recordings, notes, cigarette cases and mementos of all kinds from Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Russia and the US, as well as India, China and Japan.

The most expensive lot is two logbooks valued at US$150,000 to US$200,000 and owned by Robert Lewis, the US co-pilot of the Enola Gay B-29 bomber that dropped the world’s first atomic bomb.

Lewis, who shunned the spotlight during his lifetime, wanted the items sold only after his death, a wish his youngest son is working to honor, and to find a publisher for his father’s book.

“He didn’t want of this stuff to sit in a basement, in a dark room on a shelf in a cardboard box with the door marked museum archives,” Steven Lewis said. “He wanted the public to know.”

The Lewis collection includes his flying logs from 1942-47, plans for the 6 August 1945 Enola Gay mission, and photographs.

The atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima killed 140,000 people by December 1945. When Lewis saw the huge mushroom cloud, he uttered the famous remark, “My God, what have we done?”

Japan eventually surrendered on 15 August 1945 after the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki.

Steven Lewis says his father was never conflicted about the mission despite the catastrophic loss of life. “He said, ‘Steven, I couldn’t get over the power,’ and he said, ‘I hoped that it would be enough to end the war,’ and that’s the way he felt.

“That was a mission that he got chosen because he was the best at what he did and everyone on that crew was.”

War memorabilia auctions are a relatively new field, but Lamb expects interest to grow as the last veterans pass away and collections shift into second and third generations. “What I’m trying to do here is to bring to the public attention that this is a valid field,” he said.

It was “an extraordinary, extraordinary conflict”, he said. “There has never ever been a struggle or a battle as long, as involved, as expensive in lives, in money, in the history of mankind.”