Hans-Jürgen Beier 

Teaching — Collecting — Publishing

Festschrift for Hans-Jürgen Beier on his 60th birthday

Edited by Jonas Beran, Ralph Einicke, Volker Schimpff, Karin Wagner and Thomas Weber.

Hans-Jürgen Beier is one of those increasingly rare scholars whose work spans many fields. He has worked as a university lecturer, museum director, archaeologist and publisher. The thirty-three contributions in this volume, written by colleagues and companions from many areas of prehistoric and historical archaeology, were assembled in his honour on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

Thomas Kersting

Dugouts in the Forest: Red Army Soldiers Between War and Peace, 1945

Introduction

Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, Brandenburg's state archaeology began to focus on archaeological remains that had previously been completely unknown: “new” military-historical finds and features in Brandenburg forests. They were reported to the specialist authority by attentive volunteer field workers. Their appearance must in fact have been familiar for decades to foresters, hikers, local residents and other people who move through the countryside; until now, however, no one had recognized them as historical evidence preserved in the ground and therefore as archaeological monuments. We learned of them through our honorary representatives—essentially trained “amateur archaeologists with official ID”—who, like Sieghardt Wolter of Brandenburg an der Havel, travel across the state on behalf of the authority, looking for archaeological sites of every kind and reporting them to us.

For a long time even they did not realize that state archaeology had “recently become interested in such things.” Archaeology of the modern era, and even contemporary archaeology, has nevertheless long since arrived in Brandenburg (Kersting 2015). It took a number of discussions and presentations of finds during the regular training course for volunteers before both sides understood what was involved. This also explains why a few comments must be made here about source criticism, which is indispensable to scholarship. For example, material from different findspots was accumulated over a long period and can no longer be separated today; this applies especially to silver “valuables.” The volunteers simply did not realize that the rules learned in the course for “normal” archaeological sites also apply to material from this period.

As local people, they were familiar with something that is common knowledge in the eastern German states, passed down by older eyewitness generations: “the Russians were camped back there in the woods” is a phrase that almost everyone here has heard from parents or grandparents. Large military formations were quartered in Brandenburg forests in regularly laid-out woodland camps consisting of traditional, partly sunken log huts (Kersting 2016).

Visible remains

In some places entire groups of rectangular pits can be found. Today they are overgrown and sometimes occupied by trees; they measure roughly three by six metres, remain about waist-deep and almost always have an access ramp at one short end (Fig. 1). They are usually arranged with “military precision” along forest roads, often in several rows. At some locations there are only a few, while at others there are several dozen or even hundreds (Fig. 2).

These depressions are the remains of semi-subterranean log huts, known in Russian as zemlyanki (earth huts, or more generally military shelters).

The resemblance to the pit-houses well known from Slavic archaeological contexts is immediately obvious, although those found in this region are at least about 1,200 years older. It is not unlikely—indeed it is quite plausible—that the building tradition draws on the same source. Rare contemporary photographs and the archaeological evidence show, however, that stabilizing posts were used in addition to the log construction. In individual cases, partly decayed posts can still be found in their postholes. Standing trees were also used to anchor the structures with large iron cramps, some of which survive in situ or occur among the finds.

The installations were evidently built “according to regulations.” A military handbook of the period, the Sputnik partisana (“Partisan's Companion”), located on the Russian internet, contains a construction drawing that corresponds closely to the surviving remains.¹

Even without excavation, the precise boundaries of an earth hut, its entrance at the short side and its stepped internal arrangement can therefore be recognized. Several trial excavations made this still clearer in longitudinal and cross-sections and revealed further details, including post settings in the entrance area and in the middle of the long sides.

The distribution of these “woodland camps” has so far been demonstrated mainly in north-western and western Brandenburg and north and east of Berlin; it remains unclear how many sites are still undiscovered in the forests (Fig. 3).

Fig. 1. Remains of an earth hut at Grünefeld, Havelland district (photo: Th. Kersting).

Fig. 2. Digital terrain model of the Grünefeld woodland camp, Havelland district (BLDAM Archaeological Documentation Centre, LGB Brandenburg). A colour version of the figure is included on the CD-ROM accompanying the volume.

Fig. 3. Map of woodland camps in Brandenburg (BLDAM Archaeological Documentation Centre). A colour version of the figure is included on the CD-ROM accompanying the volume.

The dugouts are very distinctive and quite uniform, both in the construction of each individual structure and in the way they are grouped: almost always strictly linear along existing forest roads and in precisely parallel rows. Larger complexes may be divided into groups associated with smaller pits. They can therefore be distinguished relatively reliably, both on the ground and in digital terrain models, from other military earthworks that are common in Brandenburg forests, such as gun positions and dug-in vehicle locations.

A possible connection with older or later military training areas—of which Brandenburg has many—can also be ruled out. All the camps lie outside the known training grounds, and in every case the surrounding woodland is otherwise completely undisturbed, as can also be seen in digital terrain models. No such complexes are known outside forests. Because woodland here almost invariably means uneven, rolling or hilly terrain, this also describes the choice of location: the camps are almost always on slopes, often at their foot near the inner edge of the forest, apparently to provide a view over nearby open fields.

The catalogue currently includes sites recognized and reported by volunteers, usually corroborated by relevant finds, as well as further sites discovered “on the screen” that can be assigned to this type with near certainty. More than a year of intensive searching, together with making the characteristic appearance of these sites known to all volunteers and local monument-protection authorities, has greatly increased the number known, but it has not changed their strikingly uneven distribution across Brandenburg.

Finds

Brandenburg state archaeology has recently acquired numerous finds from these Red Army woodland camps of 1945, where objects from everyday life, items of equipment and other material were evidently left behind. In these “woodland camps”—a term coined by analogy with the established military term “field camp”—the soldiers' everyday life took place away from the fighting around the “Reich capital,” which may still have been continuing, and certainly for some time afterward.

On the one hand, relatively few specifically military objects occur: insignia and decorations, signs, technical objects, occasionally a helmet, and vehicle or weapon parts. On the other hand, objects connected with the structures and everyday life are more common: tools, door and window fittings, “furnishings” such as lamps improvised from shell cases, sheet metal of many kinds, military mess kits, jugs, cups, pots, cutlery and much else.

Some pieces bear scratched Cyrillic inscriptions and appear to have been personal everyday objects, such as spoons or mess tins. Small aluminium tags with names were probably attached to horse harness, since, rather touchingly, they seem to record horses' names.

Other material, apparently appropriated, was sometimes overmarked with scratched Soviet stars. Special stencils were made from thick sheet metal for this purpose (Fig. 4). A typical example is a Wehrmacht belt buckle whose swastika was erased before the buckle was worn by a Soviet soldier, as contemporary photographs show. Soviet stars were also frequently punched or sawn out of sheet metal. What was done with them is unclear: were they worn, given away, or perhaps simply made to pass the time?

Civilian material also appears regularly. It ranges from bicycle parts and dismantled bathroom fittings such as taps and shower heads, through numerous remains of watches, to all kinds of valuables—silver cutlery, shaving and cigarette lighters, cigarette cases and jewellery (Fig. 5)—and other small objects that clearly came from the civilian population. Porcelain occurs occasionally, as do glass beer mugs with pewter lids, irons, fragments of musical instruments, gramophone horns and records.

Relics of the Nazi regime are also present: badges and decorations, including Mother's Crosses, and, as already mentioned, Wehrmacht belt buckles.

That the finds belong to the period around the end of the war is shown by German, Polish and, more rarely, Soviet coins minted in the 1930s and 1940s, and by a sign bearing a Cyrillic inscription and the date 22 April 1945.

The finds—evidently including discarded “war booty,” inscribed everyday objects, improvised and regular equipment, and the remains of the shelters themselves with fittings apparently requisitioned nearby, such as door hardware—raise a multitude of questions, very few of which can yet be answered. Probably only material that no longer had value remained in the forests, and that is what we now find. After the troops withdrew, people from nearby villages presumably recovered everything that was still reasonably usable, above all the construction timber (see Stieger 2015).

From the standpoint of source criticism, it is striking that the finds consist almost exclusively of metal, unlike the material from all other “conventional” archaeological periods. This undoubtedly also reflects the preferences and methods of volunteer metal-detectorists, who may regard “broken” porcelain as uninteresting. Trial excavations, however, have likewise produced only small amounts of non-metallic material. Isolated porcelain and glass from civilian households and from the Reich Labour Service do occur, while the Red Army apparently normally carried only sheet-metal or enamel tableware. The interests of the volunteers therefore acted as a selection filter before it was made clear to them that state archaeology is interested in all categories of finds.

Fig. 4. Belt buckles and star stencil (photo: Th. Kersting).

Fig. 5. Selection of silver valuables (photo: Th. Kersting).

The 70th anniversary of the end of the war

During the previous year's 70th-anniversary commemorations of the end of the war, these finds were naturally especially topical. Public reaction was correspondingly strong. Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg reported on them several times, as did the German Press Agency (DPA), the Märkische Allgemeine and other print media. The well-known science journalist Guido Knopp also used the opportunity to film current excavation scenes for his production Die Stunde Null (“Zero Hour”) for the television channel Phoenix.

Only since 2014, more than sixty such woodland camps have become known, and many have already yielded finds. Many of the sites have probably also been visited for years by illegal metal-detectorists, for whom decorations bearing swastikas appear to be especially attractive objects. The sites are consequently being unsystematically “plundered” and destroyed before state archaeology can classify them as monuments and place them under protection. Ordinary forestry is already causing damage as well: once a forestry plough has driven across such a camp, everything is destroyed.

There is therefore no reason to postpone research to the future; soon there may be nothing left to investigate. This principle applies to archaeological monuments generally: only once we know a new category of monument—such as these Red Army woodland camps—reasonably well can we justify protecting it and preserve it for the future.

Historical background

The new finds and features date from the historical moment of the “Battle for Berlin.”

Today the Brandenburg forests preserve, as archaeological finds, the traces and possessions of the “ordinary man.” They tell of a time shaped by combat and violence, appropriation and erasure, overcoming and overwriting, both on the large and small scale and in both a concrete physical and a symbolic ideological sense.

This is vividly illustrated by objects such as Wehrmacht belt buckles whose swastikas were erased and replaced by scratched Soviet stars, and by the very numerous Soviet stars cut, filed, punched or sawn from sheet metal. They seem to express a strong need among the soldiers to adorn themselves with the symbol of their victory as a form of self-affirmation, and to stamp that symbol on war booty as well.

The material is therefore highly interesting evidence that can be interpreted in terms of appropriation and overcoming, both literally and metaphorically. For years the Red Army soldier had been trained and psychologically prepared to overcome and destroy the Nazi regime. He had come all the way to Berlin for that purpose and had endured inhuman hardship and suffering. Those who had “made it” this far believed themselves entitled to compensation at the expense of both the military enemy and the civilian population.

Eyewitnesses and historical research have documented and studied these processes extensively. Yet historical scholarship seems to have almost nothing to say about the temporary billeting of large bodies of troops in forests, at least insofar as conventional and digital research methods currently reveal. There must, for example, have been traceable and documentable military decisions to place troops—apparently temporarily—in woodland, but this category of military sources is presently beyond our reach. It therefore seemed natural to ask the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, as a custodian of the history of the Red Army on German soil, for help, as well as colleagues at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich/Berlin.

The British historian Catherine Merridale's book Ivan's War provides some information, though only in general terms based on authentic eyewitness testimony. It contains a revealing photograph of regular Soviet troops building a zemlyanka in 1943, still on Soviet soil (Merridale 2006, p. 191). Properly equipped soldiers can be seen in a forest using felled trees to construct a substantial, semi-sunken log hut that corresponds in every visible detail to the features found in Brandenburg.

Vladimir Gelfand's Germany Diary 1945–1946 likewise contains information about the situation and living conditions of ordinary soldiers at the time (Gelfand 2008). He says less about shelters, but much more, for example, about the familiar efforts of Red Army men to “organize” watches and bicycles—both activities documented in particularly expressive photographs because Gelfand was a handsome young officer with a passion for photography.²

Research questions

Open questions that must be investigated in the near future, also with the help of historian colleagues, include the following:

— Why were these woodland camps established? Perhaps to avoid confrontations with the civilian population in towns?

— What explains their very uneven distribution in Brandenburg? Interestingly, they occur not only east of Berlin, in the principal line of advance of the 1st Belorussian Front, but also frequently north-west of Berlin toward the Elbe. South of Berlin, where the 1st Ukrainian Front advanced from the south-east, no such woodland camps are known so far. Surely the distribution cannot simply reflect the different forces conducting the advance—the Belorussian Front in the north and the Ukrainian Front in the south?

— Why were objects that were sometimes by no means worthless “sorted out” and left behind? Was this done on orders?

— Why is so much improvised, self-made equipment found? Evidently the Red Army, unsurprisingly, was at the limit of its resources.

— How can it be that, alongside the regulation in the Sputnik partisana, identical construction drawings occur in the contemporary German 1942 field manual for winter warfare (Taschenbuch für den Winterkrieg 1942, p. 78)? Is this evidence of the intensive cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army between 1918 and 1933? There are, however, parallels to “our” features clearly associated with the Red Army in distant areas where such an explanation can be ruled out—for example at Erding in Bavaria near the large forced-labour camp there (Irlinger 2015), and around the “Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Field” at Bückeberg (communication from the Lower Saxony state archaeology service). Other dug-in positions, such as those made by American troops under combat conditions in the Rhineland, look different (Wegener 2014).

— How long did these woodland camps exist? Given their “improvised” character, most were probably used only in 1945. Yet aerial photographs from the first systematic Soviet survey of 1953³ show what appear to be intact structures, particularly tent camps.

Despite—or perhaps precisely because of—these unanswered questions, a special exhibition entitled Between War and Peace at the Brandenburg State Archaeological Museum in the former St Paul's Monastery in Brandenburg an der Havel presented the newly discovered remains of the Red Army from 22 April to 24 July 2016. The exhibition was produced in cooperation with the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, the Seelow Heights Memorial and the Küstrin Fortress Museum in Poland, and was subsequently to be shown by all of these partner institutions.

Between War and Peace — Red Army Woodland Camps in Brandenburg, 1945

More than seventy years after the end of the war, finds dating from the time of Germany's capitulation in May 1945 have emerged in Brandenburg's forests.

Following military regulations with great precision, dugouts were built there along forest roads. Their remains preserve traces of the Red Army soldiers' everyday life: equipment, badges, identification tags, tableware and cutlery, canteens, and shell cases converted into lamps, some bearing Cyrillic inscriptions. Wehrmacht belt buckles whose swastikas were erased and replaced with Soviet stars testify to the desire to adorn oneself with the symbol of victory. Material of civilian origin—jewellery, watches, water taps and bicycle parts—confirms familiar accounts of the period. These finds are evidence of appropriation and overcoming in both a concrete and a symbolic sense and raise many questions; research has only begun.

Notes

Literature

Dr Thomas Kersting
thomas.kersting@bldam-brandenburg.de