Old Guns, April 28, 2006
Drove to Somerset today for lunch with Oliver and Colette Barnham.  Oliver is the son of Denis Barnham, a Malta Spitfire ace who I wrote about in my Malta book, and we’ve kept in touch ever since.  Their farmhouse is lovely with large outhouses and barns – and which are full of Oliver’s collections of militaria.  He’s the most unlikely person to have this stuff, but used to supply films and so on with props as well as collecting things for other people – he even has a complete submarine torpedo in his garage.  Very kindly, he asked me whether I’d like to have a German MG34, complete with oil cans, bipod and wooden box.  I’d love to, I told him.  By the time I left I had a complete Bren and Sten gun and a number of other bits and pieces.  Incredibly generous of him – and a delicious and very entertaining lunch as well.

Basel, Switzerland, April 26, 2006
There are still some files we have ordered that have not appeared.  Only after repeatedly questioning this were we finally told that permission to use them has been refused – this includes a memoir by someone who had served in the Fallschirm Panzerkorps Hermann Goering.  Very annoying, but as it happens we had more than enough to keep us busy and all in all I feel it’s been a good trip.  Some of the material I now have is really good, and it was also good to delve into some of the non-personal records as well.  Interestingly, there is a quite a lot of cross-over between the records here and those in the Military History Institute in the US; the files on Von Senger, for eg, were almost identical.

Took Sarah into town by the train station then headed south to Basel and ran into a torrential downpour. 

Freiburg, Germany, April 25, 2006
We now had a few files to look at and more arrived during the day, although there were also a number that did not materialise.  We eventually got to the bottom of it: apparently, when a request arrives to see ones of these files, the Bundesarchiv staff have to ring up the person who donated the memoir/diary/papers etc in the first place – or a relative – and ask their permission for me to look at it.  They usually agree, but not always.  And, of course, it can take time to get hold of these people.  It’s a crazy system, but at least we began to get some really good material.    One memoir was by a chap called Hans Sitka, an Austrian Czech.  Having been wounded a number of times in Russia, he was posted to Italy and joined the ‘Ost-Regiment.’  This immediately rung a bell because there was an ‘Ost-Regiment’ that took part in the rastrellamento on Monte Sole.  Sitka never mentioned which Ost Regiment it was, but by cross-referencing with German army lists and orders of battle, we were able to prove conclusively that Sitka’s Ost Regiment and that on Monte Sole were one and the same – which was an amazing piece of serendipity.

We also found an amazing diary by a German major and battalion commander.  Very human, very detailed and rather heartbreaking – and which I will definitely use in the book.  Feel much happier today.

Went into the hills in the evening, which were stunning, and had an incredibly filling and supposedly traditional Black Forest supper.
 

Freiburg, Germany, April 24, 2006
Met Sarah at breakfast. She had taken the train from Berlin and had reached Freiburg much earlier than me.  We then drove into Freiburg and found the Bundesarchiv without too much difficulty.  It’s a strange place  - tiny really – and slightly chaotic, with shelves full of bulging files and a computerised search engine that seems fantastically out of date.   We quickly went through MSg1 and MSg2, the part of the archive in which personal accounts and memoirs are stored, and soon drew up a long list of those that looked as though they might have potential.  We then had to wait for the rest of the day before anything turned up, which was deeply frustrating.  I couldn’t understand why it was taking so long.  We found other files to look at in the meantime, but I hadn’t realised that getting to see what I really wanted to look at was going to be such a palaver.  When the archives closed that evening we both felt as though we’d wasted half the day.  Still, we found some good material in the 16th SS files, and also a photograph of the 16th SS veteran we met two months ago.

In the evening, we had a look around the town.  It’s lovely – very pretty and just what I’d imagined Black Forest towns would look like.

Freiburg, Germany, April 23, 2006
German archives week.  Am now in a hotel just outside Freiburg in the Black Forest of Southern Germany and am feeling extremely relieved to be here.  The flight to Basel was fine, although delayed by over an hour, so I was late picking up the car.  First of all I ended up on the Swiss rather than the French side, so had to cross the back over the border within the airport.  Then when I eventually reached Freiburg, I realised that the maps I’d printed off the internet were completely inadequate and I soon became horrendously lost.  To make matters worse, my German is almost non-existent and the night porter at the hotel didn’t speak any English.  I’m not quite sure how I got here – fluke, really.