After the Reich (18 page)

Meanwhile Sante Garibaldi had established contact with the local partisans. They wanted to hang Stiller from a window in the hotel, but Müller talked them out of it. Instead Müller was made a member of the Tridentine Division of the partisans. This involved eating a piece of raw eagle’s flesh, decidedly less palatable than the
Kaiserschmarrn
. On Sunday 30 April the prisoners were finally rescued by the Wehrmacht under the command of a Captain von Alvensleben. On 4 May they were liberated by the Americans, who took them to HQ in Caserta, and thence to Capri.

Disputed Areas

Thuringia

Yalta had decreed it otherwise, but Thuringia was liberated by the Americans. It was here and not in Bavaria that the Americans came face to face with the horrors of the Third Reich. It was not quite the first time they had been exposed to evidence of Nazi barbarity. During their advance through Alsace they had come across Natzwiller camp, but the Nazis had evacuated the buildings. When the French liberated it in November 1944, it had been empty for two months. American reporters had also flown to Lublin in Poland in September 1944 where they were told of a warehouse containing 800,000 shoes, but it did not prepare them for what they were going to see in sleepy Thuringia.
¹⁴⁹
They first came across its Jewish victims in Nordhausen-Dora, working on the V2 rocket. The camp was one of many dependencies of Buchenwald. Among the liberators was an American Jew who was repelled by the sight of his fellows. ‘These people are something else,’ he wrote. ‘I am not one of them.’
¹⁵⁰
Some 12,000 people were living in tunnels, with forty to seventy-five dying daily. The Americans found 3,000 corpses as well as 700 people who were clinging to life by a thread. Many of the Americans were sick. In the town Germans were evicted from their flats
^ak
to make room for clinics, and 2,000 locals were rounded up to bury the dead in long trenches.
¹⁵¹

But Nordhausen was child’s play compared to Ohrdruf. The village near Gotha was the location of another branch of the more famous Buchenwald camp. It was a labour camp, containing around 10,000 slaves. One of the liberators was the Jewish American war reporter Mayer Levin. The first indication that they had chanced on a camp was when they spotted some skeletal figures coming towards them along the road. They said they were Poles, and told the soldiers to enter the town and rescue the camp inmates. They spoke of deep caves and death squads. The Americans feared an attack and waited until daylight. When they finally reached the camp they found heaps of bodies in striped uniforms. Each one had a hole in its skull: a sign that they had been executed by a single
Genicksschuss
. In another place was a stash of naked prisoners, their corpses flat and yellow like planks.
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Many hardened soldiers vomited at the scenes that confronted them, above all on encountering the nauseous smell. The survivors could hardly be classed as humans. They behaved like animals - showing no inkling of goodness or friendship, they merely grabbed at the food they were offered, ran off with it into the corners and lashed out at anyone who approached them. The Nazis had robbed them of their most precious possession, dignity.
¹⁵³
On 12 April the camp was visited by the big three of American army command: Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley. The latter recalled, ‘The smell of death overwhelmed us before we passed through the stockade.’ They were shown the corpses of 3,200 naked, emaciated men. Patton was physically sick.
¹⁵⁴
It was a bad omen: it was the day President Roosevelt died. Patton turned to an aide: ‘Still have trouble hating them?’ Eisenhower ordered all units not in the front line to visit Ohrdruf: ‘We are told the US soldier doesn’t know what he’s fighting for. Now, at least, he will know who he is fighting
against
.’
¹⁵⁵

Ohrdruf established a policy and a gloves-off treatment for all Germans. The most famous city in the hilly region, Weimar, was taken on the 12th. Buchenwald was so close to Weimar that its ancient trees had been the object of Goethe’s daily walks, and yet the Weimarer insisted that they had not known what was happening behind the barbed wire. To some extent this was true, but prisoners were used for menial tasks around the town and had been involved in the often mortal work building the new Adolf-Hitler-Platz between the old town and the railway station. Even if they had been unclear about the extent of the brutality, they knew full well that the prisoners were abused and maltreated. Buchenwald had its soft days in the early 1940s. The Jews were sent east, and the inmates - particularly the ‘greens’ or criminals - tended to look after themselves. The commandant, Koch, was proved to be corrupt, and was executed by the Nazis. His wife was the infamous Ilse: ‘the Beast of Buchenwald’. Saul Padover was shown the famous collection, supposedly assembled for Ilse Koch, of lampshades and trophies made from human skin and organs. He also saw a card index in which the causes of death were dutifully recorded: the victims all died of two ailments, heart or pneumonia.
¹⁵⁶

The place was used as a distribution centre for labour, and a lot of French and Belgian prisoners were brought in. The saddest cases were confined to the Little Camp where they were left to die in their own filth. In the last ten months the camp had filled up with 20,000 or so inmates from the east, bringing numbers up to 45,000-50,000. Another 20,000 were transferred to other camps - Flossenbürg, Theresienstadt and Dachau. Meanwhile communist prisoners conspired to take over the camp. Shortly before the Americans arrived the order had been given to kill the prisoners, but Himmler had failed to carry them out. He was still hoping to use the Jews to save his own skin. Hitler appears to have ordered Himmler to kill all the prisoners in Germany. There was plenty of evidence around to show that some of his men took these instructions seriously.
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The prisoners Himmler had failed to kill broke out of the camp after the liberation and began to plunder Weimar. Hitler was furious when he heard this, and renewed the orders to kill the concentration camp inmates. It was the beginning of the end of Hitler’s relations with his SS chief.
¹⁵⁸
Some of the leaders of this small-scale revolt were roving around when the Americans arrived on 11 April. Padover treated the German communists with disdain. They weren’t real prisoners, being the aristocracy of the camp, and they looked down on the others. ‘Being Germans, they had been made trusties by the SS.’ Some prisoners had pinned guards to the ground with stakes. About eighty of the guards were massacred, ‘sometimes with the aid and encouragement of the Americans’. It was reported that the Americans looked on while a prisoner beat a German soldier to death with a four-foot log.
¹⁵⁹

The Allies were slow to liberate the Little Camp. The stench was appalling. They found a number of children there when they finally braved it, including a three-year-old boy. The inmates died in large numbers even after the Americans began to feed them. The liberators learned that they could function only by repressing all emotion. On 16 April George Patton decided that the inhabitants of Weimar should know what had been happening on the Ettersberg. His men made a thousand or so inhabitants line up in the Paulinenstrasse and marched them off to the camp a kilometre away. Among them were some of the Nazi bigwigs of the city. American cameramen were on hand to film their reactions. The Americans wanted the full propaganda effect, and news of the site-inspection spread as far as Vienna.
¹⁶⁰
On the way to the camp there was much amused talk, particularly from the women and girls dressed for the occasion in their last finery. They showed no sign of knowing what to expect.

Their cheerful mood vanished when they saw the heaps of bodies covered with quick-lime. Women began to weep and faint. The men covered their faces and turned their heads away. Many of them huddled together for comfort. One of the inmates who had been spared Hitler’s order to murder the last inhabitants of the camp was Imre Kertész, the Hungarian writer, then aged fifteen. He remembered the scene: the Americans had given him some chewing gum, which he belaboured with his jaw while he gazed lazily from the typhus isolation huts to the mass graves in the distance. Suddenly he was aware of the:

society of ladies and gentlemen. Coats were flapping in the wind. There were flamboyant ladies’ hats and dark suits. Behind the society were a few American uniforms. They reached the mass-grave and fell silent, assembling slowly around the ditch. The gentlemen’s hats came off one after another. Handkerchiefs were pulled out. There were one, two minutes of mute stillness, then life came back to the stunned group portrait. The heads turned to the American officers. Arms lifted and spread out at shoulder height, then fell again to the upper thigh before coming up again. The heads shook in denial . . . they knew nothing about it. No one knew anything about it.
¹⁶¹

That the Weimarer knew nothing was the message delivered in Superintendent Kuda’s homily in church that Sunday, the church where the enlightened philosopher Herder once officiated, and where Goethe and Schiller had once been parishioners. ‘In Buchenwald events have come to light about which we knew absolutely nothing before now . . . so we must confess to God that we played no part whatsoever in this atrocity.’
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On 1 May the Americans appointed Fritz Behr, a Buchenwald man, as mayor.

Saxony

As the Americans advanced they found more and more evidence of lawless bands of DPs who were terrorising the countryside in the absence of Nazi law. In Brunswick there were more alluring women waiting to tempt Padover up to their lairs. ‘I live all by myself, would you like to come up and see me?’
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Lower Saxony was, like Mecklenburg, originally taken by the Western Allies. It was the Americans who crossed the Harz Mountains and seized the ruins of Halberstadt and Magdeburg, which the Anglo-American air forces had only recently reduced to heaps of ashes.

Padover and his men had a comic exchange with a ten-year-old boy on a scooter in Magdeburg. He explained that his mother was a schoolmistress and that his father had fallen in Russia. Padover began his usual interrogation-banter, but was possibly surprised by the reply to the question ‘What did he think of the Führer?’ The boy said: ‘Der Führer kann mir den Arsch lecken’ (He can lick my arse). They supposed he was unaware that it had been the Anglo-Americans who had levelled his home town, but the boy was ready for them: ‘The Führer made you do it . . . and he is prolonging the war when everybody knows it’s hopeless.’ The boy told them he wanted to go to America and join the ‘American Luftwaffe’. Then he would come back and bomb Germany. They asked him why he wanted to bomb his fatherland: ‘Oh . . . the Russians will be here then.’
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In Gernrode the people had some weeks to study the Americans at close range. When the Russians arrived in July they compared the Red Army to the American Negroes. The latter were ‘less like victors and more like fellow sufferers of aggression and humiliation’.
¹⁶⁵
The American armies discovered yet more evidence of Hitler’s last-minute orders to exterminate concentration camp inmates and slave labourers. In Gardelegen they had driven the men into a barn and set it alight. At Wolfsburg, where the big Volkswagen factory was located, the prisoners had been able to free themselves at the last moment, and had seized weapons from their guards. Some had died from eating raw flour in desperation; others had raided a vermouth factory and made themselves hopelessly drunk. They were so light and weak that when they tried to fire their weapons they fell over backwards. They nonetheless managed to kill a number of German civilians, including a mayor.
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There had been another bloodbath in Thekla, a suburb of Leipzig. It had been a labour camp staffed with political prisoners. When the SS left they had shot and set fire to the men, some of whom had been burned alive. There was the usual rage directed at the locals, but at Thekla the Germans proved helpful and showed how appalled they were by the massacre. As one of the Americans put it, ‘ninety-nine out of a hundred Germans seem to eat and breathe as we do, seem to react to the same emotions, seem to be perfectly human and responsive.’
¹⁶⁷

Marianne Günther was a schoolmistress in Penig near Chemnitz, close to the Czech border, when the small town was taken by the Americans on 15 April. The US troops found a camp there too, filled with starving Hungarian Jewesses. They immediately imposed a curfew. Polish and Russian forced labourers ran wild in the streets. A month later Marianne Günther was able to continue her diary - her illusions had been shattered: ‘The monstrosities that we have heard about the concentration camps - I didn’t want to believe it. The atrocities are far worse than I imagined. Who could have planned such devilishness? . . . And now the ghastly stories from Bohemia! When the war ended on 8 May the horrors began. A whole nation [has been] driven homicidal mad, [they are] murdering innocent women, murdering children. You can see the terror on the faces of the refugees.’
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Before coming to Saxony she had been at the school in Gertlauken, an exceptionally quiet village in East Prussia. She got out before the Russian breakthrough. Gradually she learned the fate of her pupils and colleagues as rare letters broke through. Fifteen-year-old Christel Beckmann had made it across the frozen Nehrung to Danzig, and then walked through Pomerania to Mecklenburg, where she and her family believed they had found comparative safety. Then on 3 May, the Russians arrived. The girl wrote: ‘For four weeks we found a place in the hayloft and stayed put. We looked dreadful. Herta’s face was covered with scales. In the night we heard the screaming and wailing of the village women. No man could protect his wife, he would have been beaten half dead had he tried, and the women were threatened with guns, they had to obey. We were almost crazy . . .’
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