After the Reich (17 page)

There had been reports of a band of Werewolves under a Hans Zöberlein, who had recently killed German civilians he considered had lost some of their National Socialist zeal. The town, however, was undefended, and filled with hospitals, but it may be that the French were unaware of that; or it may be that the very absence of soldiers gave them the idea of getting their revenge for countless barbaric acts committed by the Germans during their occupation of France.
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One of the French officers is supposed to have said, ‘We are the avengers, the SS of the French Army.’
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On 17 April they shelled the small town, completely destroying the centre. The units that entered Freudenstadt were made up of French soldiers from the 5th Armoured Division, Foreign Legionaries and Moroccan and Algerian troops from the 2nd Moroccan and the 3rd Algerian Infantry Divisions. It is reported that local Polish workers joined in. From the first the French made it clear that the people were going to be properly punished. There would be three days of plunder. A sergeant said that the troops would be released from discipline, and a quartermaster added, ‘In the next few nights no woman will go untouched.’
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The patients were robbed of their watches in the hospitals, and a Frenchman they found there was gunned down in his bed. The surviving houses were systematically destroyed with benzene: 649 were burned down in this way. It was now open season for any women aged between sixteen and eighty. It is generally said that the Moroccans behaved worst.
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Anyone who tried to stand in the way was simply shot. One of the victims was a stout lady lorry-driver called Sofie Hengher who tried to stop the soldiers assaulting her children. After the French passed on, some 600 women reported to the local hospital. Ten per cent of those examined were pregnant. Seventy people had been killed. Freudenstadt was certainly the most prominent example of a breakdown of discipline in the French army, but there were others, and the French were not above threatening Königsfeld and the university town of Tübingen with similar treatment.

French soldiers’ behaviour in Stuttgart, where perhaps 3,000 women and eight men were raped, was thought to have added to American fury at their overstepping their lines.
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A further 500 women were raped in Vaihingen, where the French army found a large number of dead and dying in a satellite concentration camp. The villagers in nearby Neuenbürg were cleared out to make way for the sick and the French garrison.
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In all these instances the Moroccans were blamed.
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The American general Devers wrote to complain to de Lattre. Freudenstadt had not added to the reputation of the French army.
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Later the Germans wanted to know who had allowed the troops to run riot in this way. The commander in Freudenstadt appeared to have been a swarthy southern type called Major Deleuze; but a Captain de l’Estrange was also mentioned, as well as a Major Chapigneulles and his adjutant, Poncet from Lorraine, who was a famous beater. Tortures were carried out by one Guyot and an alleged former Jesuit called Pinson. The British press blamed the atrocities on a Major de Castries, a scion of one of France’s oldest families.

The French dug in at Stuttgart and refused to budge. On 13 May they held a provocative Joan of Arc Festival.
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It was just a leap and a bound to the old university town of Tübingen. The 5th Tank Division arrived on 19 April. Tübingen had been saved by declaring itself a hospital town, but there was rape and pillage before the French calmed down. One of the first men to beard the French in the town hall was the professor of law, Carlo Schmid. His mother was a Catalan from near Perpignan and his perfect French must have made the invaders feel at home. He probably spoke less about his time in the administration of Lille during the war. On the 23rd he was denounced as a Werewolf, however, and locked up in a lavatory for two days. The French searched his house and found the texts of his Baudelaire translations.
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On 9 November that year a Frenchman came home to Germany. It was the anniversary of both the Beer-Hall Putsch and Reichskristallnacht. Alfred Döblin had left Germany on 3 March 1933 and, after a harrowing escape, spent the war years in Hollywood. His ship docked in Le Havre. From the deck he watched ‘a body of men, all dressed the same, disappearing into the belly of the vessel; they reappeared dragging casks and cases . . . They were Germans, prisoners of war. That is how I saw them again.’
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He had become a French citizen after leaving Germany. One of his sons had died fighting in the Vosges. After he had seen his friends he crossed the Rhine at Strasbourg. In the waters of the river ‘there lay a felled elephant: the shattered railway bridge’. He was now in Germany. ‘You see the fields, well laid out in an orderly land. They had cleaned up the meadows and swept the paths. The much lauded German woods: the trees were bare, a few still wearing the colourful autumn foliage . . . But now it became more clear: heaps of rubble, holes, grenade or bomb craters, the remaining backs of houses, then fruit trees again, bare with supports. A saw mill intact, but the houses next to it in ruins.’ His train passed though the Black Forest: ‘Then I see your misery and I see that you have not yet learned from what you have learned. It isn’t easy. I’d like to help.’
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Upper Austria

As the Americans crossed into Austria they were able to paint a bigger picture of the Nazi death camps. In the last months of the war Jews had also been shipped from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen to Mauthausen in Upper Austria. A large number of them died or were put to death on the way. Up to now Mauthausen had been a criminal and political camp,
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and many Austrian opponents of Nazism had been sent there from Dachau. Apart from Stutthof, which the Russians allowed to fester until 9 May, Mauthausen was the last big camp to be liberated, when the Americans went in on 5 May.
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The most appalling sight in Mauthausen was the deadly quarry, where many prisoners lost their lives. It was called the ‘Wiener Graben’ after the thoroughfare in Vienna, because from here the stone was excavated for the streets of the capital.
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The Americans found a fully formed committee waiting for them composed of Hans von Becker of the Fatherland Front, the communists Ludwig Soswinski and Heinz Duermayer - who had fought in Spain and was later chief of police in Vienna - Hans Maršálek of the Vienna Czechs, Bruno Schmitz, the son of the mayor of Vienna, and the former minister of justice Baron Hammerstein-Equord. Once again the concentration camp had formed a cadre for later Austrian political life.
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The Americans also liberated the camp at Gusen on the 5th. Gusen was part of the wider Mauthausen complex, which had around fifty satellites including Ebensee. There were between eight and ten thousand inmates including some 1,200 Jews housed in a separate compound. Roughly 3,000 of the prisoners were made up of the ‘work-shy’. The Americans found evidence that inmates had been killed with gas: Russian typhus victims had been sealed up in their huts and gas canisters had been thrown in.
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The third big shock for American forces was Hartheim, which had been used principally for the extermination of the mentally ill. Some of the victims were housed in Niedernhart near Linz, but they were taken to Hartheim to be killed. The Americans compiled a report on the activities in Hartheim, and found evidence that the mental patients often fought their warders after their arrival in the Schloss, and that the Nazis suffered minor injuries at their hands.
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Tyrol

One dramatic discovery made by the Allies was the location of a clutch of
Prominenten
at Schloss Itter near Kitzbühel. This had been the prison for the French presidents Reynaud and Daladier and the generals Weygand and Gamelin, as well as trade-union leader Léon Jouhaux, Michel Clemenceau, the son of the statesman, the tennis star Jean Borotra, the politician and
résistant
Colonel de La Rocque and Madame Alfred Cailliau, sister of Charles de Gaulle. The Luftwaffe picket guarding the French had run away at the approach of the Americans, but it was feared that some local SS would harm the prisoners or seek to use them as bargaining tools to ensure a safe passage out of Austria. On 5 May the Schloss was indeed attacked by an SS unit that blew up an American tank. The prisoners helped defend the building. An Austrian, Major Gangl, was killed in the attack.
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One of the most bizarre liberations that April took place in the South Tyrol, Italian since 1919, but whose population was still largely German speaking. On 24 April a lorry - one of several - left Dachau concentration camp for Munich. It contained the former Abwehr officer and Munich lawyer Josef ‘Ochsensepp’
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Müller. Müller looked at the others squashed on to the benches in the back of the lorry: there were Hungarians like the former prime minister Miklós Kállay, his interior minister Peter Baron von Schell, the Dutch minister Dr van Dyck, the Greek field marshal Pagagos and his staff officer, the German generals Halder and Thomas, the former president of the Reichsbank Schacht, Stalin’s nephew Kokorin, General Pjotr Privalov and eight RAF officers.

The lorries went south after Munich, crossing the old Austrian border near Kufstein before proceeding to Innsbruck and the concentration camp at Rosenheim. There the prisoners were taken out. In all, the lorries contained 136 people from seventeen nations. There were fourteen Britons, including a captain bearing the name of Churchill, although no relation, and a ‘Wadim Greenewich’ from the Passport Control Office - that is, MI6 - as well as his colleagues from the 1939 Venlo Incident, Stevens and Payne Best; there were five Russians; the French included the former prime minister Léon Blum and his wife, Gabriel Piquet, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma and the writer Joseph Joos; the Poles included a Zamoyski; there were four Czechs; the Greeks sported their field marshal and no fewer than four major-generals; there was the Dutch minister and six Danes, a Norwegian, a Swede, a Swiss, a Latvian and four Italians, including the partisan Garibaldi - a descendant of the Risorgimento leader - and his chief of staff Ferrero; in the Hungarian team there was not only the prime minister but Admiral Horthy’s son and his secretary; the Austrians numbered the former chancellor Schuschnigg and his wife and the pre-Anschluss mayor of Vienna, Schmitz, as well as the writer Konrad Praxmarer. The biggest delegation was naturally from Germany: State Secretary Pünder, Prince Philip of Hesse, Halder and his wife, the former military governor of Belgium General von Falkenhausen, the pastor Martin Niemöller, Prince Frederick Leopold of Prussia, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Fritz Thyssen. Another group was made up of
Sippen
, that is relatives of the 20 July plotters: various Goerdelers, Stauffenbergs, Hammersteins, Lüttwitzes, Plettenbergs and one Gisevius (Hans Bernd had managed to escape), together with relatives of Jakob Kaiser, Isa Vermehren and Fey Pirzio-Biroli, the daughter of the hanged former ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell.
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The men and women were hostages of the SS: so-called
Prominenten
to be killed or bartered for freedom as the Allies tightened their grip on Germany. At Rosenheim the Austrian
Prominenten
in particular were horrified to see Austrian SS guards mercilessly beating members of the Tyrolean freedom movement. The Austrians had themselves been in captivity since March 1938. For Schuschnigg it was ‘difficult to keep one’s self-control’, but there was the pleasure of seeing Schmitz again and meeting the two ‘saints’ on the transport: Niemöller and Piquet.
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After three days at Rosenheim the prisoners were reloaded on to buses and driven to the Brenner Pass. Their guards amounted to thirty more or less docile SS men under the command of Obersturmführer Stiller, and another twenty or so heavily armed ‘sinister types’ led by Untersturmführer Bader. Bader had instructions to liquidate the prisoners. Müller had been singled out as one to die. The SS showed Schuschnigg the list, with the names of himself and his wife neatly inscribed.
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The buses entered Italian territory in driving rain, passing Bruneck and the Pustertal before coming to a halt before the village of Niederdorf. Stiller allowed some of the prisoners to go into the village with him where Müller soon ran into a Wehrmacht general in full uniform. This led the prisoners to hope that the SS might respond to a superior officer, so they went back to fetch Falkenhausen: he was another general, after all. Meanwhile Müller was shouting, ‘Schuschnigg is behind me! Schuschnigg is behind me!’, knowing that the South Tyroleans had an affection for the former Austrian leader.
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The general had few soldiers with him, but a ‘prisoner of honour’ Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin was able to put through a call to General Heinrich von Vietinghoff in Bolzano. When he informed the commander of the presence of the
Prominenten
, Vietinghoff despatched troops to protect them. They were not due before dawn, however, and Bader’s men were still eager for blood. The prisoners went to a hotel on the market square where Frau Heiss, manager of the Hotel Elefant in Brixen, regaled them with
Kaiserschmarrn
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- a great treat after the food they had eaten in their various concentration camps. Bader, however, had not given up: ‘Müller raus!’ (Come out, Müller!). Colonel von Bonin, however, had been allowed to go into captivity with his pistol. He drew it and aimed it at the SS man: ‘Ich zähle bis drei, bei zwei sind sie eine Leiche!’ (I’ll count to three. On two you are a dead man). Bader’s men took the hint.
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