Gee, you never know what you’re going to find in the archives. Alex opened a box and found this — a US Army tag for captured World War II prisoners, dated 1942.

Here’s the flip side (in English, German, Italian and Japanese). Get this: “NO TAG –NO FOOD!” Uncle Sam wasn’t fooling around.

We didn’t have many prisoners yet — months after Pearl Harbor, the war was going very badly for the Allies indeed. But we were ready with the tags, just in case.

So how did one end up in the Gulick/IPA Collection? It’s not clear but we know that Luther Gulick traveled to conquered Germany in 1945 with President Truman for the Potsdam Conference to plan the peace with Stalin and Churchill.

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/09/the-berling-corridor/

There were some other interesting artifacts in the box. Laundry lists — printed on the backs of French maps (to save paper). Hey, everyone needs clean underwear.

And here’s the most intriguing thing: a mailing label from 1944, with Hitler stamps of course, addressed to a German diplomat and officer, First Lieutenant Goetz von Flotow. (The back was blank.) The return address looks serious, beginning with Reichsverband, or Imperial Association…for…The Care and Testing of German Warmbloods, Division of the Imperial Food Production Authority. So the von Flotows were keeping or breeding racehorses.

Diligent readers of the blog (you know who you are) will remember the strange episode of “Looter” Gulick’s Max Liebermann painting that he was safekeeping for the family of von Flotow and, after he died in 1947, his widow, Hildegard. That didn’t sit too well later with an Assistant Attorney General in the US Office of Alien Property. There were strict rules about private acquisition of enemy assets. Gulick had an innocent explanation but ended up surrendering it for auction by US authorities.

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ipaprocessing/2014/11/looter-gulick/

But how did Gulick come into a possession of a document from von Flotow from 1944, when the war was raging and well before he had the disputed painting? That we don’t know.

One guess: Gulick liked to collect souvenirs. Perhaps when he was there in 1945, he found, or was given, the label and, with the painting already in hand, held on to the label as well.

Another WWII mystery.