Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (12 page)

People had heard rumours about the existence of the concentration camps, of course. It is now assumed that everybody knew about them all the time, that there were no Germans who didn’t know, but I think that is absolutely wrong. They forget that news travelled very much more slowly in those days and was never confirmed. There was no television. Since there were very few survivors and since from the beginning of the war very few people who went into a camp came out again, I think very few people did know. The notion that everyone knew is extremely exaggerated and very unfortunate because it makes a consciousness of war crimes almost co-evil with their occurrence and I don’t think that’s true.

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THE GOOD NEWS
was that the dead had finally been buried—among them Anne Frank from Amsterdam, who had recorded in her diary as early as October 1942 that Jews were being taken away and gassed. The last of the bodies had been bulldozed into a mass grave on April 28. Inmates were continuing to die in hundreds every day, but they weren’t being left to rot anymore. They were being taken away instead and buried at once, not just abandoned where they lay. There were no more corpses in Belsen. They had all been cleared away and the effect on camp morale was palpable.

The delousing was almost complete, too. One more day and everybody in the camp would have been squirted with DDT powder, their clothes fumigated and their bodies scrubbed clean. The first of the contaminated huts had already been destroyed, their occupants removed to more sanitary quarters and the huts incinerated with a flamethrower. Adding to the good news, some genius had introduced lipstick to the camp. A large consignment had just arrived, enough for every woman at Belsen to paint her lips if she wished. Huge numbers were doing so, happily recalling that they had once been feminine and might be so again one day. Lipstick had turned out to be an enormous morale booster, making all the difference between life and death for some of the women in the camp.

But the Union Jack still didn’t fly over Belsen. The British had been there for two weeks, yet they refused to fly their flag over so much evil. They intended to raise it once, symbolically, when the inmates had been restored to health and the camp had been cleansed of all shame. Until then, the Union Jack remained firmly in its locker. No British symbol of any kind flew over the horror of Bergen-Belsen.

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WHILE RANK-AND-FILE GERMAN GUARDS
assisted in the clearing up at Belsen, the camp’s commandant was being interrogated by the British. Josef Kramer had been taken in irons to the nearby prison camp at Celle, where dumbfounded British officers had been interviewing him for days, trying to fathom the mind of a man so blind to the realities of what had happened at Belsen.

The only consensus they could reach was that Kramer was a man of ox-like stupidity. Because of the typhus, Belsen had been handed over to the British under a flag of truce. Ordered to supervise the handover, Kramer had done exactly what he was told, remaining at his post to meet the British instead of escaping while he had the chance, as the worst of the SS had done. It had never crossed his mind that the British might not be happy about what they found at the camp.

Kramer had been unemployed before the war, an electrician looking for work. The SS had later made him an officer and given him a good job in camp administration. He had risen rapidly through the system, working at Auschwitz and other places before transferring to Belsen. He was a member of the Nazi Party, but only because it was necessary for his job. He had no interest in politics, nor any great animosity toward the Jews, although he had gassed plenty. It was all just a job to him. He did what he was told and got his meal ticket in return.

The British had been outraged at his indifference to the suffering in the camp. Under the terms of the truce, Kramer had expected to return to his own lines after the handover, but the British had clapped him in irons instead, shackling his legs and beating him with rifle butts. They had imprisoned him in the cooler at first, the cold storage room at the officers’ mess. Then they had sent him to the prison camp at Celle, assisted on his way by a shower of stones from Wehrmacht troops as outraged as the British at what they had seen in Belsen. Kramer wasn’t going to rejoin his own side, now that the camp had been handed over. He was going to stand trial for war crimes instead.

So was Irma Grese, his erstwhile lover. They had met at Auschwitz, where she had been known for her striking blond looks and her cruelty. Irma Grese had apparently derived sexual satisfaction from the beatings, arbitrary shootings, and random selections for the gas chamber that she had administered at Auschwitz. Her mother had committed suicide when Irma was a child, and her father had beaten her repeatedly. He had refused to allow her to join the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth, and had beaten her again when she joined the concentration camp service. He wouldn’t have the uniform in the house.

Irma Grese had wanted to be a nurse, originally. Bullied at school for her lack of intelligence, she had embraced Nazism instead. Some of the Jewish women at Belsen had been doctors in their previous lives, making a good living out of medicine while an Aryan girl like Irma couldn’t even get a job as a nurse. But she had shown them who was boss in Belsen. She had had the power of life or death over them, and she had exercised it at will.

So had Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath, a hairdresser in her previous life but a monster at Belsen. So had other female guards, former secretaries and typists who had turned into strutting sadists in German uniform. The word at Celle was that they, too, would be put on trial after the war, held to account for what they had done instead of going free. There was talk of the death penalty for some of them, although they found it hard to believe. They had broken no German laws, and the Allies were civilized people. The British didn’t hang young girls. Whatever penalties they imposed, they would surely never hang the female guards at Belsen for something that had happened in wartime.

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WHILE THE GUARDS AWAITED THEIR FATE,
other Germans were still working at Belsen—mostly nurses or civilians who had had nothing to do with the atrocities in the camp and were continuing with their duties under the British. Among them was Georg Will, a professional cinema manager from Berlin.

Will had moved to Belsen the previous year after cinemas in the capital had been forced to close. He had run the camp cinema for the guards while his wife, Liesel, ran the canteen. The two of them had quickly become part of the Belsen machine, supplying comforts for the SS and keeping them entertained when they were off duty. The Wills had lived well as a result, with a pleasant flat above the cinema and a private supply of tinned food that they had kept carefully to themselves at a time when thousands were starving to death only a few hundred yards away.

Now that the British had arrived, however, the Wills were wondering if they, too, might have to pay a price to pay for their involvement with Belsen. They had seen Josef Kramer taken away in shackles, terrified out of his wits as the Wehrmacht stoned him and the prisoners bayed for his blood. They had seen guards manhandled and Fritz Klein, the camp doctor, thrown into a burial pit by furious British soldiers. The Wills had committed no atrocities themselves, but they remained uneasy, nevertheless. They were worried that they had been on the wrong side at a time when the Allies were evidently in no mood to forgive and forget.

There was, however, a redeeming factor that they hoped would work in their favor. Liesel Will’s younger sister was an officer in the U.S. Army. Appalled by the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, Captain Marlene Dietrich had renounced her German citizenship before the war and become a naturalized American instead. She had spent the war years singing to the troops of her adopted country, supporting them in their struggle against the land of her forefathers. She had done so with mixed feelings, aware that the Americans had right on their side, but aware, too, that every bomb or shell that fell on Berlin posed a threat to her widowed mother, particularly now that the Russians were closing in on the capital.

Dietrich was with the American army as it advanced into Bavaria. She had been with the army since the previous September, so close to the front line that she had sometimes been shelled by German eighty-eights and had had to be evacuated in a hurry from the Battle of the Bulge. She had cheerfully traded her movie-star status for the life of a soldier, sheltering in stables and bombed-out houses, sharing her sleeping bag with lice and rats, washing herself from a bucket. She had made a point of never grumbling or complaining.

The troops had loved her for it, Germans as well as Americans. Surprised to find herself a Wehrmacht pinup, she had sung “Lili Marlene” to wounded German prisoners and had encountered little hostility on the streets as she advanced into her native land. Instead of reviling her as a traitor, many ordinary Germans had come to her with their problems, asking her to put in a good word for them with the Americans.

Dietrich knew her sister was in Belsen. As she liked to imagine it, the Wills had been taken there as hostages to discourage her from entertaining Allied troops. The truth was rather more complicated. Like millions of other Germans, the Wills were just trying to survive. They had been part of the regime at Belsen when the Nazis were in command. Now that the Allies had arrived, though, they wanted to make the most of their American connection. They were expecting Marlene to visit them in the next few days, just as soon as she could get hold of a Jeep. They were hoping she would take care of them when she appeared, see them right with the British. The Wills were going to need all the help they could get with the British, now that awkward questions were beginning to be asked about exactly who had done what at Belsen.

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IN LONDON,
it was Sunday afternoon. Crowds were flocking to see the first pictures from the camps, the ones that had been too dreadful to print in the newspapers. Photographs from Belsen, Buchenwald, and Nordhausen had just been put on display instead, publicly exhibited at various places around the capital so that people could see for themselves that Dimbleby and others had not been exaggerating their reports from Germany.

Like the BBC, the British public had been deeply skeptical about the concentration camps at first. German atrocities of the Great War had all too often proved to be nothing more than Allied propaganda. The British had assumed that the same was true of the camps. They had imagined that the reports of living skeletons in Belsen, of a paperweight at Buchenwald made from a shrunken head, of lampshades made from the skin of prisoners killed for their tattoos, were exaggerated, to say the least, if not outright invention. But the exhibition sponsored by the
Daily Express
that week was entitled “Seeing Is Believing.” Scales had fallen from the public’s eyes with the release of the first photographs from the camps.

Mollie Panter-Downes was one of those in London that day to see the photographs. Like millions of others over the next few days, at exhibitions all over Britain and the United States, she understood at once just why the war against Germany had been so necessary:

It has taken the camera to bring home to the slow, good-natured, sceptical British what, as various liberal journals have tartly pointed out, the pens of their correspondents have been unsuccessfully trying to bring home to them since as far back as 1933. Millions of comfortable families, too kind and too lazy in those days to make the effort to believe what they conveniently looked upon as a newspaper propaganda stunt, now believe the horrifying, irrefutable evidence that even blurred printing on poor wartime paper has made all too clear. There are long queues of people waiting silently wherever the photographs are on exhibition. The shock to the public has been enormous.
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That wasn’t all. Britain was full of well-fed Germans, prisoners of war who received the same rations as British servicemen, under the Geneva Convention. The British themselves were half starved after five years of war, but the enemy in their midst were getting twice as much, sleek SS men shoveling away the calories while British civilians could only stand and watch. After seeing the photographs from the concentration camps, the British wanted to know why the Germans were being fed so well, and how long it ought to continue, when they had treated their own prisoners with such inhumanity and contempt.

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OPERATION MANNA

FOOD WAS SHORT IN BRITAIN,
but in some parts of occupied Europe it was almost nonexistent as the war entered its final stages. In the skies above Holland, an air drop had begun that afternoon, a mass delivery of supplies to the people of the Netherlands. Over the next few days, Allied bombers were scheduled to drop hundreds of tons of food and more than fourteen million individual ration packs to the famished Dutch, enough to keep them going until the war ended and the roads could be reopened to normal transport.

After months of disruption as the fighting came closer, Holland had finally run out of food. Thousands had already died of hunger, and tens of thousands more would follow within a week or two if the situation were not urgently addressed. The occupying Germans had just cut the ration for Dutch civilians from 400 calories a day to 230, not nearly enough to sustain life. The many Dutch who could find no food at all had long since eaten their family pets and were subsisting on grass, sugar beets, and tulip bulbs. In Amsterdam, one church alone housed fifteen hundred bodies in moldering piles, urgently awaiting burial.

The German starvation of the Dutch had been deliberate at first, a sharp reduction in the food supply to punish them for the help they had given the Allies at Arnhem in 1944, when a mass rail strike had prevented German reinforcements from hurrying to the battlefield. But the policy was no longer deliberate. Cut off from home by the Allied advance, the German forces in Holland had recently developed a keen interest in the welfare of the civilians under their control. They had secretly approached the Allies for help in feeding them.