Hitler's Last Witness (30 page)

I was kept locked up for seven weeks. I made several protests at the conditions. I got a severe chill, for which a German doctor treated me. When I mentioned the unreasonable hygienic conditions he said with regret: ‘I am sorry, but I cannot do anything for you. It is beyond my sphere of influence.' Once, during an interrogation by a Soviet lieutenant colonel, I made a complaint. He let me describe the conditions fully and then promised: ‘That should not be. I shall bring those responsible to account and ensure that you receive the treatment you are entitled to as a detainee – not an accused but a witness.' Nothing changed.

I insisted on being allowed to see my wife and daughter, otherwise I would not say anything and let myself be shot. Again and again, I was given the comfort of a promised imminent visitation. Once they even sent a young lady to my cell to shave my face: ‘Your wife will be here soon.' But these promises were all empty.

I understood that they took Linge to what remained of the bunker. Everything was sketched and measured, and forensic scientists examined the blood stains. I was not required to attend.

One day, we were informed that we would not be needed as witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials. I never heard a word during all this time about concentration camps and Hitler's mass murders, nor about how the trials were going. ‘Crown witness –
nix
,
nix
– Allied decision.' I could hardly credit it that I had spent seven weeks only a few kilometres from my family, had not seen them, and would now be taken back to Moscow. By the end, I was totally debilitated, physically and psychologically.

Nine Years' Gulag

Back in Moscow, they took me first to Butyrka prison. There I had some luck in sharing a cell with the ex-diplomat Gotthold Starke. Twenty years older than I, he had served in Moscow under the ambassador and 20 July conspirator Friedrich-Werner Graf von Schulenburg, with whom he had been active. Starke received special rations and got so much that there was enough for me. This time there was no bar on his letting me have a share. He even got cigarettes.

When we heard somebody being put into the neighbouring cell we attempted to make contact by Morse code. I knocked: ‘Please, who there?' No reply. Apparently, the occupant of the neighbouring cell did not understand Morse code. It was ten days – I had kept up my dour attempts – until he understood. Then finally he tapped back: ‘Slow.'

Again I rapped on the cell wall, this time with longer intervals between the individual letters, and several times over. Finally the answer: ‘Here Lithuanian Rittmeister (cavalry captain) von Wolfshausen. Am three years here, last two years alone.'

I was thunderstruck. Starke saw the blank horror in my eyes. ‘What is it? Tell me what he answered.' I told him and he gasped. ‘Three years? What in God's name is going to happen to us here?'

Starke was the son of an evangelical bishop at Runowo in the Posen district, and very devout. He urged me to send the man some words of comfort: ‘Just be patient. God will help.'

Back came: ‘Here no God – here NKVD.' A Russian female physician said something similar to me later when we were talking about religion and belief: ‘Jesus suffered much, but he was never in the Soviet Union.'

We contacted the cavalryman again in Morse code, asking if he was a smoker. Yes, but they did not give him cigarettes. ‘The next toilet visit, watch out,' I tapped. It went well. We left him some cigarettes on the toilet. It apparently amused the guard, for he gave our co-prisoner a light himself.

Diplomat Starke had seen a few things himself after war broke out. In 1939, he had been chief editor of the newspaper
Deutsche Rundschau in Polen
at Bromberg
[4]
and had experienced there the butchery which went down in history as Bromberg Bloody Sunday.
[5]

The cavalryman in the adjoining cell had not exaggerated about spending three years there. That was exactly how long I was kept in the military prison in Moscow. The tortures of my initial period there were luckily over. I now had many long talks with a certain Colonel Stern. He came from Vienna, and this reminded me of my first courier run for Hitler.

Thank God they gave us books. They had brought a whole library from Posen, we were told. A small, dressy woman distributed reading material every ten days. Starke thought she had something to do with the would-be female assassin of Lenin.
[6]
I read books about the Teutonic knights, maybe by Heinrich von Plauen, then Karl Marx, finally poems and dramas by Theodor Körner.
[7]
The poetry was of bombastic style, not really my kind of thing, but under these circumstances I sucked them in, even liked the sentimentality of the words:

In the Night

I am close to you, only a thin wall

Separates me from you.

Perhaps you are dreaming of me already in the soft shivers of sleep . . .

It was your spirit, and sacred on my cheek

I felt your kiss;

I knew the greeting

Of the kissing song on your lips.

It was your spirit! It was the breath of love!

You were thinking of me!

O, that it remain eternal, eternal, eternal,

The glorious night!

Thus at least my thoughts could wander a little. Once I tried counting up how many books I had read and gave up when I reached two hundred.

For some time I shared the cell with Dr Richter, the former business director of the Adam-Opel Works – they had finally separated me from Starke. Dr Richter never returned home and died in Soviet captivity. After my return to Germany I visited his widow at Rüsselsheim. She invited me to spend a couple of days in the firm's guest house. I told her of the time her husband and I were together.

For a while a Japanese general was my cellmate. He was not the only Japanese there. I made an effort to learn a few words of Japanese so that I could at least say ‘please' and ‘thank you' and such like. We got on quite well. I remember an Estonian chess master. I have no idea how many games I played with him, and on the occasion when he saw that I could mate him in three moves – it was pure coincidence – he refused to speak to me for three days.

After three years in Moscow I was transported by cattle truck to a camp near the town of Jezkazgan.
[8]
The trip took thirty-two days and nights, and whoever survived it to reach this steppe prison in central Kazakhstan had withstood a journey under the most inhuman conditions. It was not possible to sit upright in the wagon– one had to lie the whole time with the head drawn in. I had terrible stomach pain. Moreover, my travelling companions were exclusively convicted Russian criminals, and so I had no chance of conversation.

I spent two months in the special camp, then I was taken on to Karaganda in Kazakhstan. The word ‘Karaganda', which translates as ‘black stone', comes from a particular light, porous coal which is abundant locally.

In POW camp 7099/1 at Spassk, the main camp of the Karaganda Gulag, I was declared capable of work. With eleven other prisoners I lived in a stretch of prison territory in which one could move about more or less freely. We twelve made up a repair squad. We were transported by narrow-gauge railway several hundred kilometres into the town of Rudnik. On the way we heard continual shooting. Our supervisors were amusing themselves shooting snow hares. At Rudnik we repaired public buildings, and I worked as a painter. It was a comparatively pleasant activity. We twelve were watched by only one supervisor and we had enough to eat. We were able to prepare semolina or similar for ourselves on a small stove.

Then I was confined to camp and could not travel out to work. Why, I have no idea. I succeeded in getting round the ban by borrowing the work card of another prisoner who remained in camp. The guards were constantly being changed, and nobody knew who was who. We were counted off in fives and that was it. At the work sites I was often given signwriting. ‘Caution – crane swinging round' and such things I painted on sign boards in the finest script in German and Russian. It was almost as if I was employed in a Russian gulag in my profession of artistic painter. We were even paid 460 roubles. Of this 400 roubles was retained by the camp administration, but the rest was paid out. With this money one could buy things in the camp shop – margarine, for example. Margarine was important, for ‘Butterbrot' – the Russians actually used this German word – was paradoxically only dry bread without butter. An almost pure Butterbrot was ‘Butterbrot mit Margarine'. It was German margarine, a Russian at the till told me, but expensively wrapped in Russian paper.

Here in Karaganda I met Sepp Platzer, the former valet of Rudolf Hess, and heard the whole story of his former chief's flight to Britain.

I received mail for the first time in October 1948: a letter from my wife and one from my aunt. In September, I had written to Aunt Sofia for her birthday on a double-sided card, which had been handed out to us and on which we had to write our return address. This was the first sign of life from me that anybody in my family had received. Now finally I had a reply.

In a judgement of 21 December 1949, based on a mass trial of German POWs in their absence, I was sentenced to death.
[9]
I cannot remember exactly how I received the news since I had not been informed of any trial or hearings, and so it provoked no emotion. To be threatened with death in the camps was nothing unusual. One judgement here, another there. In 1950, the penalty was commuted to twenty-five years' forced labour. My crime was ‘supporting the Nazi regime'.

In 1950, I went from Karaganda to Borovichi which, bearing in mind the great distances in this country, was not far from Leningrad.
[10]
There I met Flight Captain Baur again, but was soon separated from him after it was noticed that we knew each other. Baur was transferred to a neighbouring prison.

At the beginning of my stay at Borovichi, I came into close contact with the Knights Cross holder de la Rocca of the Spanish Blue Division.
[11]
The conduct of the Spanish in captivity impressed me very much. They were composed of two groups of enemies. The first was the so-called Red Spanish, anti-Fascist, who had fled to the East at the end of the Spanish Civil War or, perhaps as children, had been taken off there by their guardians. Their lot in Russia was a hard one, locked up in camps and put to forced labour.
[12]
The Spanish from the Blue Division, with a fascist and anti-communist background, had fought for the Germans as volunteers. Nevertheless, when any Spaniard was taken off for interrogation, then the others accompanied him and also reported. Without exception. There were no Blue or Red Spanish any more, only Spanish. They stuck together. The Japanese too. There was little the Russians could do about it – they could hardly shoot them all. The same kind of thing did not exist among the Germans. If one of us was taken off for questioning, he went alone; no compatriot bothered himself about him.

I saw another death sentence looming when I was accused along with de la Rocca of having fomented a mutiny. For weeks they gave us only maize pulp to eat. Maize pulp, maize pulp and more maize pulp. Despite the memory of worse times of hunger which we experienced in Borovichi, we could not bear to smell, see or eat maize. The very sight of the pulpy serving made us want to throw up. The other prisoners got the same. Somebody had pointed to de la Rocca and myself as the troublemakers. Shortly before a real revolt broke out, the camp administration had a change of heart; the maize pulp came to an end and they served up something else.

At Borovichi I met Rommel's former chief of the general staff Alfred Gause. I have already mentioned what I learned from him about Rommel's involvement in the attempted assassination of 20 July.

As had been the case at Karaganda previously, mostly I was not able to leave the Borovichi camp. I was given a job as nurse in the camp hospital. A young Jewish female doctor worked there. It was thanks to her that a small camp orchestra could practise in the hospital. One day, she had a patient who said he was a lead violinist. She knew how to prove it, she said, and felt for a gristly area on the neck. Violinists developed this gristle, she explained. She found the proof, and from then on the violinist could practise with his musician colleagues in the hospital. One day, after we had just finished treating a patient with a serious boil on his back, I saw tears in the eyes of our female surgeon. When Dr Schwarzer, a German colleague, asked her what the problem was, for the little operation had gone off well, she broke down: she would not be coming back. ‘They are deporting all of us to the Amur where there are only swamps and mosquitoes,' she cried. Still in tears she went on to say that Stalin was forcibly resettling all Jews in that region. I never saw her again.

After that, I went right through the country, spending years in various special camps. From Borovichi I was taken to Tushino near Moscow. There I spent a summer building wooden sheds. After a while, we noticed these were surrounded by small, symmetrically arranged flower beds. Somebody pointed to them and said: ‘Just look at those, only Germans make them like that. They can only be Germans working there.' We decided that after our shift we would leave a note under a beam. ‘We are German prisoners of war – who are you?' We turned the beam in such a way that it would have to be repositioned to continue working on it, and the other prisoners would be bound to find it. Next day we had the answer: ‘We are also Germans.' Not until some time later did we learn more details about these camp inmates: the Russians had brought a number of important scientists to Tushino. Every morning a bus took them to an institute or university to spend the day researching. Towards evening they would return to the camp to work a little at building sheds. They were a group of atomic physicists who had once assisted the Nobel Prize winner Gustav Hertz.
[13]
Once the Russians had sucked them dry of all their knowledge, many were simply tossed back into camp life. At Karaganda I had come across discarded researchers whom one could always recognise by their elegant dress, and they all wore hats.