The Imperial War Museum in London holds one of the most striking trophies brought back by Allied troops from World War II: a massive bronze eagle. It came from the New Reich Chancellery, the vast government complex built by Albert Speer in the late 1930s. By the end of the war, that complex lay as a battered, burned ruin, destroyed by Allied bombing and then by the brutal ground campaign for Berlin in April and May 1945. Everyone knows Berlin was captured by the Red Army, so I’ve often wondered how this enormous eagle ended up in London.
I’ve spent months trying to find out, and it has been a frustrating search. Berlin fell to Soviet forces on May 2, 1945. British and American troops, apart from a few advanced parties, did not reach the city until early July to take control of their respective occupation sectors. The Reich Chancellery itself remained firmly in Soviet hands, located as it was in what became the Soviet sector, later East Berlin.
Between the arrival of the Red Army and the later arrival of British and American troops, Soviet soldiers had thoroughly looted the government buildings of the defeated Third Reich—both informally as personal souvenirs and officially, as trophy units gathered material to be shipped back to Moscow and displayed as markers of victory over fascism. Yet, for some reason, this particular eagle remained in place throughout that period from May to July 1945. The Reich Chancellery contained several large bronze eagles. Some experts suggest there were as many as twelve scattered throughout the complex, and they were not all identical in design or size.
The eagle now in London, for example, stood on a plinth above the main door where visitors would climb the steps to enter from the Court of Honor, a large open-air rectangular area. By July 1945, this particular eagle had been knocked down and was lying on the ground. A British Army photographer captured it in that state. Later, the Soviets ordered it to be taken as a trophy.
Photographs show Red Army troops and German civilians loading it onto a truck for shipment to Moscow. That specific eagle, a near-twin of the London one, is now on public display at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow. The eagle in London was sculpted by Kurt Schmidt-Ehmen and cast in parts: the body, the wings, and the plinth. It has a wingspan of 113 inches, stands 75 inches tall, and weighs 550 pounds.
Through my research, I believe I’ve located exactly where this eagle was displayed inside the Reich Chancellery. Photographs from the late 1930s show an identical eagle mounted above a doorway in a room called the Mosaic Hall, which led into the Rotunda, or Round Hall. The eagle looks over its right shoulder, just as the one in London does. That identifies it as a Reichsadler, a state eagle, as opposed to a Nazi Party eagle, which looked over its left shoulder.
Photographs and film footage show that this eagle remained in place for some weeks after Berlin surrendered, perched high on its pedestal above the ravaged rooms of the Reich Chancellery. Given such an important historical object, I assumed there would be a clear chain of custody attached to it, reaching all the way from the Reich Chancellery in July 1945 to the Imperial War Museum in London today. Frankly, the Imperial War Museum itself has virtually no information about it. Speaking to the archivists there yielded nothing.
So I decided to dig through the Imperial War Museum archives myself, but first I tried to approach the problem logically. At some point in July 1945, the eagle must have been removed from the Reich Chancellery, presumably by Soviet troops, since the building was entirely under their control. The NKVD secret police were investigating the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden and the mysterious death of Hitler. Access to the Chancellery was carefully controlled.
Small groups of British and American soldiers were permitted inside, but only to fill their pockets with small souvenirs, notably Nazi medals from the building’s huge metal vault. I recently made a video about a War Merit Cross First Class I obtained, which had a chain of evidence showing it had been picked up as a souvenir by a British Army corporal inside the Reich Chancellery in 1945. But I find it highly doubtful that the Soviets would have allowed British troops to bring in the heavy equipment needed to wrench this enormous eagle off its wall mounting and haul it away as a personal souvenir. It clearly must have been given to the British by the Soviets as some form of goodwill gesture.
But then some unit must have driven over to collect the thing. In July 1945, the British occupation force in Berlin was the famous Desert Rats, the 7th Armoured Division. I obtained a list of all the units that made up that division at the time and contacted every regimental museum, asking if any records or photographs of the eagle existed. Those that replied had nothing.
If the eagle had been presented as a gift, it would have made sense that it was received by the senior British general in Berlin at the time, Major General L. O. Lyne. I searched his extensive archive at the Imperial War Museum for any clues.
Again, nothing. In fact, the first reference to this eagle appears only in 1946, in the records of the Control Commission for Germany and Austria, connected to an interesting exhibition titled “Germany Under Control” set up in the British Zone. That exhibition was designed to show how Britain was administering its part of Germany, and it showcased an array of top-quality historical items. An officer named Brigadier Lionel Cross was instructed to cooperate and produce material from stores for the display.
Despite extensive searching, I couldn’t locate any of Brigadier Cross’s private papers. At the time, Cross was running public relations for the new British Army of the Rhine. Alongside the eagle, the exhibition also displayed Hitler’s personal standard, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s personal flag, and one of the death masks taken after Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler died in British captivity in late May 1945. When the exhibition concluded, the trustees of the Imperial War Museum wrote to the Control Commission, asking whether the Army might consider giving these interesting exhibits to the museum for display in London.
Records from 1948 show that is exactly what happened. Incidentally, while researching, I came across the 7th Armoured Division scrapbook among General Lyne’s papers. It makes for fascinating reading. It’s full of original German orders and documents, including an order signed by Heinrich Himmler, documents concerning the surrender of Hamburg—the last city to fall to the Western Allies in Germany—and a great deal of original documentation concerning the German surrender to Field Marshal Montgomery on May 4, 1945, including material signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and others.
There were also blank sheets of notepaper taken from Hitler’s office inside the Reich Chancellery, which again shows the souvenir hunting that went on among British soldiers newly arrived in the city in 1945, alongside many photographs showing the Allied victory parade. In 1948, the eagle was loaded aboard a ship, the SS Selby, in Germany. It arrived at the docks in Hull on July 27, 1948, and was then taken, presumably by train along with the other museum exhibits, to London. It has remained there ever since, for the past 78 years.
So now we know where the eagle came from, at least in terms of its final journey. But still, frustratingly, we don’t know how it was initially gifted or obtained by the British Army in 1945. So I’m throwing this one out to my audience. Do any of you know how the eagle came into British possession?
Perhaps a grandfather or great-grandfather was involved in some way in taking it from the Reich Chancellery, or in dealing with the Soviets during those uncertain early weeks of the occupation. If you know anything, please contact me at the email address on the screen. Anyway, the eagle is certainly one of the most visually striking relics of World War II. It stands as a visceral reminder of the abject failure of Nazism.
And incidentally, if you’re wondering what became of the Reich Chancellery, the Soviet authorities demolished it in 1949. The space where it once stood remained waste ground through most of the Cold War, until the East Germans built apartment blocks on the site in the 1980s. Many thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share, and also visit my audiobook channel, War Stories with Mark Felton.
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