After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (30 page)

And yet that warning went to a large extend unheeded – it was all too difficult to grasp. On 23 July 1944 Red Army soldiers liberated the death camp at Majdanek near Lublin in Poland. The SS had marched away most of its inmates, but had lacked time to destroy the infrastructure. It was the first functioning extermination camp captured intact by the Grand Alliance. What was found there stunned its liberators. Political commissar Vasily Yeremenko, with the Soviet 2nd Tank Army, said: ‘When we saw what it contained, we felt dangerously close to going insane.’

Konstantin Simonov, the first Soviet war correspondent to visit the camp, warned his readers in an article for the army newspaper
Red Star
that his mind still refused to accept the reality of what his eyes and ears took in, and that they were about to uncover something immense, terrifying and incomprehensible. Russian soldiers could scarcely believe it all. ‘We had read about the existence of these camps, but to actually see one was completely different,’ said Captain Anatoly Mereshko of the Soviet 8th Guards Army. ‘We found warehouses full of belongings taken from the prisoners,’ Mereshko continued. ‘One of them was full of shoes, hundreds of thousands of them, piled up to the ceiling. We asked each other – “What has been going on here?”’

The killing had been done with clinical efficiency. It was the crematorium which had the greatest impact. Red Army troops filed past it in utter silence. ‘The ovens were still warm,’ Mereshko said bluntly.

Here was an opportunity to come to grips with what the Nazis had unleashed on Europe. British war reporter Paul Winterton had entered Majdanek with its Russian liberators. Profoundly shocked, he recorded a report for the BBC. ‘Here is the most horrible story I shall ever have to tell you,’ Winterton began. ‘I have just been down to Lublin in Poland to see the concentration camp at Majdanek …’ Winterton tried to bring home the terrible reality of what he was seeing by avoiding sensationalism and relaying the information in a matter-of-fact way. ‘The furnaces are big enough to hold from four to six bodies,’ he continued. ‘Together, they are capable of dealing with some two thousand corpses a day.’

The BBC was unable to relate to it all. ‘I was given a kind of reprimand,’ Winterton remembered. ‘They told me they didn’t want this atrocity stuff. They seemed to think that it was Russian propaganda.’ Winterton’s dispatch was broadcast only at the end of August 1944, over a month after it had been submitted. It was heavily edited and transmitted solely on the overseas service. The British Foreign Office dampened down reaction to the news even further. One official minuted that they should avoid responding directly to the news of Majdanek, adding: ‘The Russians will manage this more efficiently than us.’

The Russians were in fact struggling to digest what they had uncovered. On 27 November a trial of the camp officials at Majdanek began. It received little publicity in the Western press. And on 27 January 1945 Red Army soldiers liberated Auschwitz, near the town of Oswiecim in Poland, the principal death camp of the Holocaust. ‘I had seen a lot in this war,’ said Captain Anatoly Shapiro of the Soviet 1085th ‘Tarnopol’ Rifle Regiment. ‘I had seen many innocent people killed. I had seen hanged people. I had seen burned people. But I was still unprepared for Auschwitz.’

The regimental combat journal stated: ‘The German leadership has turned Auschwitz into a death factory. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of all nationalities have been held here. They are now trying to eradicate all evidence of their crime before they pull back.’ The 1085th Regiment, part of the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division, broke into Auschwitz I at about 2.00 p.m. Two hours later, Lieutenant Vasily Gromadsky’s 472nd Regiment (of the Soviet 100th Rifle Division) fought its way into Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the end of 27 January Gromadsky wrote in his diary: ‘Battle for Auschwitz. Met with prisoners of this camp. Huge numbers of people were taken to this place, including children. Twelve train wagonloads of children’s pushchairs were despatched from here.’

Soviet war correspondents were in the camp within days, and on 2 February 1945 one of their best-known journalists, Boris Polevoy, wrote a major piece on Auschwitz in
Pravda
, describing the camp as a ‘giant factory of death’
.
‘It was an enormous industrial plant,’ he related, ‘having its own special facilities … In one, the processing of arrivals took place – separating those who, before death, could be put to work for a while, while the elderly, the children and infirm were sentenced to immediate execution …’

However, Polevoy’s report received little coverage in Western newspapers. And very quickly the Soviet authorities realised it contained serious inaccuracies. Polevoy had referred to an electric conveyor belt ‘on which hundreds of people were simultaneously killed’ that was in fact non-existent – and he did not properly understand the function of the gas chambers either, and he placed them in the wrong part of the camp. Fellow war correspondent Sergei Krushinsky wrote of the difficulty of forging deeply disturbing information, of varying degrees of credibility, into a coherent narrative: ‘The wildest rumours are floating around here,’ he warned, ‘and most of the prisoners we talk to are more or less mentally ill.’ Rather than risk more inaccurate reports, the First Ukrainian Front set up a detailed commission at the beginning of February 1945 to examine a wide range of evidence on the working of the camp. Its findings were published a little over three months later, on 6 May.

British and American troops were largely unaware of Majdanek and Auschwitz when they encountered the death camps of Germany and Austria, and the shock was all the greater. And yet the reactions of Soviet troops who liberated these camps or visited them afterwards strongly echo those of the Western Allies. ‘We believed the Nazis had sullied humanity itself,’ exclaimed Lieutenant Vasily Gromadsky. ‘We resolved to finish the war as quickly as possible and send them all to hell.’

Auschwitz had exacted the same toll on the Russian medical teams that had followed the soldiers into the camp. The new Soviet camp commander there, Colonel Georgi Elisavestsky, wrote: ‘We knew immediate action had to be taken to try and save the survivors – people who had been crippled physically and psychologically. It is impossible to describe how our doctors and nurses worked – without sleep or food – to try and help these unfortunates, how they fought for every life. Unfortunately, many were beyond help.’ The military hospital – mobile unit no. 2962 – run by Dr Maria Zhilinskaya, nevertheless managed to save 2,819 inmates. This was the shared bond endured by all the soldier-liberators of the Grand Alliance and the medical support teams which followed them.

The Soviet report on Auschwitz of 6 May 1945 represented a darkly symbolic moment. It was the most detailed study yet compiled on the functioning of a death camp. It was based on interviews with more than 2,000 camp survivors, a review of all the German documents found in the camp, inspection of its physical remains – including the crematoria and gas chambers – and autopsies performed on the bodies of the victims. And yet, even with the mass of information presented within it, there was an aspect that remained elusive.

Soviet war journalist Vasily Grossman had tried to describe the death camp at Treblinka, but the experience of writing about the camp had caused him to suffer a nervous breakdown. When he returned to the front he remained obsessed by its evil. Grossman was a writer who had lost his own mother in a massacre of Jews at Berdichev in the Ukraine. He felt that he was looking over the edge of an abyss. ‘Grossman was deeply shaken by the death camps,’ recalled Mark Slavin, editor of the 8th Guards Army newspaper, ‘and this worsened after the liberation of Auschwitz. He would refer to it all the time in conversation, saying “The horror, the horror of these Fascist camps”. We all knew that they were terrible, but he felt another dimension to their evil, a dimension that we could not fully grasp.’

Now that struggle was being replayed in the west. Richard Dimbleby had reported on Bergen-Belsen on 19 April 1945. Initially the BBC refused to transmit his report, then – uncertain of the reaction from the public – they heavily edited and shortened it. The boundaries of presenting the war’s horror and deprivation were being challenged. Dimbleby spoke with the voice of someone profoundly changed by what he had witnessed:

‘I wish with all my heart,’ Dimbleby had said, ‘that everyone fighting in this war and above all those whose duty is to direct it, from Britain and America, could have come with me through the barbed wire that leads to the inner compound of the camp … I passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of a nightmare.’

It became clear that Bergen-Belsen would need to be fully filmed. British army cameramen worked in two-day shifts, such was the difficulty of the material they were dealing with. Many were physically sick during the filming.

At the war’s end the British public was shown newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps liberated by the Allies. The so-called ‘atrocity films’ produced stunned reactions in some of the audiences who saw them, but others seemed unable to engage.

One woman commented at the end of April 1945:

I saw the atrocity film at the New Gallery today. Of course, I expected it to be terrible – but it’s worse than I imagined. Not because of the pile of corpses – after all, they’re dead, but because of the survivors. They just aren’t human anymore. I think the worst moment of all was when one of these almost skeletons tried to smile at an American soldier. You know his face couldn’t express a smile any more. The audience were deathly quiet, not a whisper. Some of it was shown without a commentary, and I have never heard such a hush as there was all over the cinema.

But another reacted differently to a screening a few days later, on 2 May: ‘The atrocity film was followed by a Walt Disney – Donald Duck – people are laughing again within a minute. And it’s all mixed up with a propaganda film about noble London and how wonderful Londoners were during the Blitz. It felt as if the whole show was propaganda.’

There was a huge difference, however, between the incredulity of some of the American and British public and the denial of the camps by many Germans. Private Ralph Dalton of the US 89th Infantry Division said of Ohrdruf: ‘I do not believe anyone could live close to such a place and not know what was going on.’ Staff Sergeant Paul Lenger questioned people living close to Ohrdruf: ‘When we talked to the inhabitants they told us they had no idea that there was a camp of this sort, despite the fact that when the inmates had to work in the nearby castle they actually walked through the outskirts of the town.’

Allied soldiers and medical staff were left with searing images, of a kind never experienced before. Lieutenant William Loveday, who liberated Nordhausen with the US 3rd Armored Division, said: ‘When I entered the camp I saw a man who had died on his hands and knees in a praying position – apparently, he had been left there for days.’

Amid such horror, any sign of humanity was greeted with joy and relief. At Sandbostel camp, a first indication of recovery was the desire to wear clothes again. Major McLaren remembered one incident: ‘A Russian amused us by tottering about the corridor quite naked but for an old hat. On being ordered away from the kitchen he would make an attempt at a smart salute.’ After a week of regular food and sleep, McLaren noted that signs of animal-like behaviour among patients began to disappear. Human dignity was returning. ‘When pyjamas arrived, the whole face of the camp changed,’ the doctor said. ‘Those who could walk were like schoolboys in their first long trousers. They made improvised cloth shoes and almost strutted with pride.’

Another doctor at Sandbostel wrote:

A few days of hospital treatment and kindness could produce, in some at least, a dramatic change – although the men continued to hoard food. After every meal the nurses found bread or even bowls of soup hidden away under pillows or mattresses. The first issue of pyjamas was always a great occasion. The men had not really been clean, shaved or had fresh clothing for several months. One of them, still too weak to stand alone, insisted on being helped by an orderly to stagger across the ward, to show himself off to others in his new pyjamas.

He added: ‘When the Ward Sister brought a vase of flowers and green leaves into the room for the first time, it had to be placed in the centre so everyone could see it. By next morning a number of the leaves were missing. Several of the patients had crawled out of bed and taken them, and put them on their pillows. The Sister asked a man why he had done this. “They are so pretty – I wanted to have them close by me,” he replied.’

McLaren would sometimes ask the German women who were recruited as auxiliary helpers whether they felt ashamed of the camp. The question was invariably deflected with ‘Well, what could we do?’ But one – a Fräulein Bittner – proved more forthcoming. McLaren jotted down some of the questions and answers:

‘Fraulein Bittner, you have helped us well at the camp – do you mind answering a few questions on political matters?’

‘No.’

Question 1: ‘Do you feel ashamed of this camp?’

‘No – our Führer had good reason for doing this.’

Question 2: ‘Do you approve of the starving of these camp inmates?’

‘Our Führer has said: “First I feed my soldiers, then my mothers and children.” The others will have to fend for themselves.’

Question 3: ‘Do you condone Hitler’s killing of three million Polish Jews?’

‘Yes – the National Socialist Party had this policy carried out, and for good reason.’

Question 4: ‘Do you really agree with the gassing of Jewish children?’

[Hesitation] ‘If they grow up they will come at us later – it is better that they die now.’