QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Weisung Nr 1

A truly extraordinary item of Second World War memorabilia resides in Queensland – number two of only eight copies of Hitler’s Directive No.1 for the opening of hostilities – as Brian Kelly told Peter Ludlow. I first became interested in collecting wartime memorabilia when a dealer from Mount Gambier offered to swap two Japanese swords for a wrought iron table and chairs that I had made – I am a boiler maker by trade, you see. When we moved up to Queensland in 1980, we visited all the places that we thought we would like to live in. We stayed at the Pioneer Caravan Park in the Whitsundays for about a year, while we were building a house. One day, a fellow who was travelling around Australia moved into the park, and we began talking about a German machine gun that I had collected. He then said that he had some books – all written in German – which he had picked up at a garage sale somewhere in Brisbane. So I swapped a shotgun, which I thought he might need on his travels, for his books, which he sent to me three days later. Neither of us could speak German so we didn’t know the contents of the books. In 1982 I went across to Hamilton Island where I started work as a boilermaker contractor for Keith Williams at his resort. In 1992 I started the Hamilton Island Target Sports (HITS) centre there, which included archery, clay target shooting, small bore rifles and pistol shooting. At this time, too, I set up a museum on the island to display my collection of war memorabilia. A couple of years ago, after my retirement, my wife and I moved down to Brisbane and I bought all my memorabilia with me, which I had stored in a commercial shed I had purchased. Then I made display cabinets to take my memorabilia around to exhibitions in various parts of the country. One document in the books I had been given was written on a quality parchment paper, and looked interesting, so I took it along to the German Club where Monika Kortz translated it into English for me. It turned out to be an instruction from Adolf Hitler ordering the invasion of Poland in 1939. I didn’t realise the significance until a friend of mine obtained a copy of Hitler’s signatures and how they changed over the years, and it can be seen that his 1939 signature authenticates the document. A worker at Germany’s Göttingen Art Museum who specialises in restoring artworks confirmed that only eight of these documents were every produced, and mine was number two. He had only seen one other – number five – that was used at the Nürnberg Trials. It seems clear now, from the last page, that document # 1 went to the army, # 2 (the one I now have) to the admiralty, # 3 to the air force, etc. Now we are trying to identify the various signatures in the margins of the documents, in the hope that these might give us a lead on who brought the document to Australia after the war. So should the document remain here or go back to Germany? Perhaps it should stay in Australia; after all we have the World War I tank, Mephisto , here in Brisbane.

Brian Kelly reviews perhaps the most significant part of his memorabilia collection – Directive Number 1, copy 2 of 8. Images courtesy of Brian Kelly and Peter Ludlow

162