After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (29 page)

There had been 8,000 people left in the political prisoners’ section of Sandbostel when the British arrived. Within days 1,500 had died; 2,500 were strong enough to be evacuated. The remaining 4,000 ended up in the hospital. They were first carried into a large marquee in which rows of trestles were placed, supporting stretchers. The camp survivors were washed and covered in anti-louse powder. They were then wrapped in a clean blanket, transferred to a fresh stretcher and delivered to the hospital by ambulance.

British forces – learning that there was a concentration camp at Sandbostel – had sent small medical units in with the troops – but these initial resources were limited. Hugh Johns, a member of one of the ambulance units accompanying the soldiers, recalled: ‘Behind barbed wire, thrusting their hands through in pleas for food, were human skeletons, skin and bone, half-dressed or naked.’ Ambulanceman Dennis Wickham wrote in his diary at the beginning of May:

When we went over to the civilian compound, no words could adequately describe the horror. Typhus was rampant. Large pits were filled with corpses – bodies were piled in mounds about the yards. Others were lying virtually naked in rooms: grotesque figures, crouching in corners too weak to move – awaiting their turn to die. The stench was horrible – there was no sanitation whatsoever. The so-called rooms were far worse than a pig-sty. Within them were piles of skin and bones, with little or no clothing and of an ashen grey colouring. I would never have believed such a thing possible.

As at the camp at Bergen-Belsen, the survivors were of many nationalities. There were Canadians, a man from Jersey; all European countries were represented – there was even someone from Iran. The youngest of them were mere boys. Some had entered the camp at eleven years old. Others were Warsaw resistance fighters – captured almost a year earlier – who were now fourteen or fifteen. The most starved of the skeletal patients weighed only 39 pounds – he died two days after McLaren arrived at the camp.

It was hard to comprehend it all. Ambulanceman Clifford Barnard wrote home early in May: ‘I would rather see a soldier who had been killed in battle than the living dead who crawl around this place. You have probably read about these camps in newspapers and found the details hard to believe. I can tell you that they really do exist. I have seen things I shall never forget.’

The state of the survivors deeply shocked McLaren and the other doctors and nurses – indeed, it was beyond anything that he had previously experienced. More than half the patients were totally apathetic.

‘For the majority,’ McLaren said, ‘news of their liberation brought little or no emotional reaction. They were in a totally depressed state of mind. They just stared dully at us, or would mutter “Water” or “Nothing to eat”. I got the impression that they had descended into such a dark place that the past and the future had almost become blank.’

In this underworld existence, the death of a neighbour was regarded with unnerving sangfroid. Often it was merely a signal to request the crusts or cigarettes under the dead man’s pillow. After a while, McLaren began to find a macabre humour within this horror. One patient beckoned him over and, pointing to the bunk above him, asked whether the man was dead. McLaren examined the man and found that he had indeed just died. ‘Thank God!’ said the patient with a trace of a smile, and he then proceeded to detach the groundsheet he had used to protect himself from the human droppings of his neighbour. Sometimes patients would predict their own death with an eerie calm. ‘Three days, Doctor, and I will be dead.’ They were invariably right.

The few victims who were less passive were usually mentally unbalanced. Sometimes they would be found wandering the corridors in a crazed fashion in search of food. Twice a Russian was found with his head and shoulders in the food pail. ‘He would not respond to our shouts,’ McLaren recalled. ‘A hard smack on his naked backside had some effect, and off he went to his bed streaming with soup. There was little laughter at these incidents; all eyes were on the food pail.’ The most terrifying incident involved a patient who – in a sudden surge of strength – drank his neighbour’s entire blood transfusion.

For three to four days after McLaren’s arrival there was no peace in the hospital at all. The medical staff could not cope with their patients’ thirst. For each hut, McLaren reckoned they required 1,500 cupfuls of water a day – and some of the inmates needed help with their drinking. And practically all had ‘famine diarrhoea’. This would start after the resumption of a basic diet – and would last at least ten days. Finally, hundreds of inmates had typhoid fever. Work had to continue in these conditions – with a real danger to the medical staff and enormous and cumulative psychological distress.

‘Capped and gowned in white, and well sprinkled with anti-louse powder, we looked more like bakers than doctors,’ McLaren wrote with wry humour. ‘Most of us wore a body belt on which hung drugs and a stethoscope. Diagnosis was made at speed and in the first week we had to give out such medicines that we had on the spot.’

One of the deepest human urges in adversity is to strike up rapport. But the first conversations with those patients able to talk were halting and difficult. One man told McLaren how he had seen the SS push all Jews in the ‘over 60 years-old category’ out of the second-floor window of the Lublin General Hospital. Stunned unconscious or dead, they were then carted away for burial. Another Polish Jew told the British doctor how he had seen the SS mow down his wife, mother, father and two sisters. ‘I soon learned not to enquire if their people at home had survived,’ McLaren wrote sadly of the Jewish inmates. ‘Strictly medical questions avoided an unbearable emotional pain.’

Royal Ambulanceman Alan Walker tried to convey to his parents in Sheffield the horror of Bergen-Belsen camp in Lower Saxony, 11 miles north of Celle, liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division on 15 April 1945. He was writing three weeks after the event, but the struggle with his own emotions was all too painfully evident:

‘When we first entered the camp,’ Walker began, ‘I saw such terrible sights … the dead bodies lying all over the place – men, women and even little children.’ It was difficult to continue this description. He paused. ‘I can never describe the horrors of this concentration camp.’ Then attempted to begin again: ‘They had been without food and water for ten days and they were so thin that their stomachs were touching their spine. We buried some of them …’ It was too painful to hold this memory. ‘I cannot describe the picture of what I have seen in Belsen because it was so horrible,’ Walker reiterated. ‘How could the Germans have been so cruel?’

Slowly, more of his experiences came out – the sadism of the guards, the desperate, animal-like existence of the inmates, the mass deaths, the unbelievable suffering. ‘I know this letter will read like fiction,’ Walker concluded, ‘and people will say it’s all exaggeration. But I swear it is the Gospel truth.’

Captain Robert Barer wrote a series of letters to his wife about his experiences at Sandbostel. Brief sections of description of the camp were interspersed with attempts to find historical and literary parallels. Such parallels remained elusive – Barer was grasping at something he could not fully comprehend. ‘I am sure there has never been anything quite like this in the history of the world,’ he acknowledged towards the end of one letter. ‘The Middle Ages and Inquisition were probably humane by comparison.’ ‘I suppose people in England will not believe these things,’ he said in another. ‘They’ll say the pictures are faked. But no picture on earth could convey one millionth of the real horror.’ And as for the horror itself: ‘No words of mine can ever really convey what I saw there. A combination of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe might have done so, but I doubt it.’

Others across Germany and Austria were grappling with similar sentiments. On 6 May Private Harold Porter, a medical officer with the US 116th Evacuation Hospital, wrote to his parents about the liberation of Dachau, 10 miles north-west of Munich:

It is difficult to know how to begin. By now I have recovered from my first emotional shock and am able to write without seeming like a hysterical, gibbering idiot. But I know you will find it difficult to believe me, no matter how factual and objective I try to be. I even find myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my own eyes. Certainly, what I have seen in the past few days will affect my personality for the rest of my life.

We were briefed in advance that we were going to be working at Dachau and that it was one of the most notorious concentration camps. We expected things to be pretty ghastly but none of us had any real idea of what was coming. It is easy to read about atrocities – but they have to be seen before they can be really understood.

The trip to Dachau was disarmingly pleasant with neat cottages and country estates lining our route. The Alps were in the distance. It was almost as if we were passing through a tourist resort. And then we reached Dachau. In the centre of the town was a train with a wrecked engine, about fifty cars [carriages] long. Every one of them was loaded with bodies – all starved to death.

Within the camp we came upon a huge stack of corpses, piled up like kindling next to a furnace house … One of the medical staff already present had performed autopsies the day before – wearing a gas mask – on ten bodies chosen at random. Eight of them had advanced tuberculosis and all of them showed extreme malnutrition. The victims included men, women and children.

I stood there looking at it all – but just couldn’t believe it. The reality of this horror is only beginning to dawn on me …

‘I could not immediately comprehend all that I saw,’ John McConally, a doctor with the US 90th Division, said of Flossenbürg concentration camp, in southern Bavaria.

Harold Porter began and ended his letter acknowledging that for people back in America, such descriptions would remain utterly unreal. At Gunskirchen Lager, a sub-camp of Mauthausen in northern Austria, Major General Willard Wyman, commander of the US 71st Infantry Division, was also struggling to convey to the wider world the reality of what they had just encountered. ‘The horror of Gunskirchen must not be repeated,’ Wyman wrote. On 6 May he ordered one of his soldiers, Norman Nichols – who had been an art student in Detroit before the war – on a roving assignment to sketch the conditions in the camp.

Nichols recalled:

The buildings, the roads and nearby woods, were choked with bodies. I first set up my easel in a stretch of woodland. It was a sunny May morning – but my surroundings stank of death. Bodies were everywhere – jumbled in grotesque postures. The half-dead and dying were being carried from one of the stinking huts to a truck for transportation to a hospital. We made the Germans do the burying. One group carried the bodies out to a clearing; the other dug the graves. As I sketched the scene, a young boy knelt by the holes, sobbing quietly, and asking that his dead brother be given an individual grave. Cynics disbelieve these episodes and put them down to ‘atrocity propaganda’. But for me, ‘atrocity’ is too mild a word for what I am witnessing here.

A terrible smell surrounded the camps. Captain John Pletcher of the US 71st Infantry Division said of Gunskirchen: ‘It was a smell I will never forget – completely different from anything else I have ever encountered. It could almost be seen – and hung over the camp like a fog of death.’ It was a fog of which local inhabitants were completely unaware.

On 12 April 1945 General Dwight Eisenhower – accompanied by Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton – had visited the concentration camp of Ohrdruf, 33 miles south-west of Weimar, liberated eight days earlier by troops of the US 4th Armored and 89th Infantry Divisions. Ohrdruf was the first German camp US troops had encountered.

‘The things I saw beggared description,’ Eisenhower related. ‘The visual evidence and verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality was so overpowering it left me physically sick. In one room were piled 30 naked men – all killed by starvation.’

Significantly, Eisenhower then added: ‘I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of such things, if ever in future there develops a tendency to describe such incidents as mere “propaganda”.’

Sergeant Eugene Schultz wrote to his sister on 14 April after a visit to the camp. ‘You will say nothing like this could ever happen,’ he began. Schultz confessed that he had always regarded Nazi atrocity stories as works of imaginative embellishment. His visit to Ohrdruf changed everything.

On 19 April inhabitants of Weimar were made to tour Ohrdruf camp in groups of a hundred. On the same day General Eisenhower contacted General George Marshall, the US Army chief of staff, and asked that members of Congress and groups of journalists be taken round the newly liberated camps. The request was approved by the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and by President Harry Truman himself. And still the incredulity remained.

In October 1939 the British government had published a White Paper on the treatment of prisoners in German concentration camps. The White Paper contained reports of British consuls in various German cities on the Jewish pogroms of November 1938 and reports of escaped prisoners submitted to the Foreign Office between March 1938 and February 1939, including a statement from a former inmate at Buchenwald. The report had been suppressed for months – so as not to engender hatred between Britain and Germany, and perhaps because it was feared that many would not believe it. Now, as war began, it was released.

The White Paper had declared bluntly that neither the consolidation of the Nazi regime nor the passage of time had in any way mitigated its savagery. The attitude of the Nazis towards imprisoned Jews was that the biblical Pharaoh had not gone nearly far enough. ‘The National Socialist regime is taking a terrible revenge on all who oppose it,’ the report continued, before issuing the stark warning that what was happening in the concentration camps ‘was reminiscent of the darkest ages in the history of man’.