by Helen Fry
He [von Thoma] describes the Warsaw ghetto, where every presentable Jewish woman was pregnant, and talks of the brutalisation of German youth. Atrocities by the SS against the population of Kiev, Minsk, and in the Crimea were mentioned today (shooting of women and children). Von Thoma saw one man himself who said: ‘Today I’ve killed 400 people. I can’t go on, I’ve had enough.’4
The bulk of detailed information on war crimes came in bugged conversations from 1943. MI19 amassed substantial evidence that covered most of what is known today about the Holocaust and concentration camps.5
Horst Minnieur, a 21-year-old seaman gave an eye-witness account of executions in Lithuania to his cellmate (a U-boat crewman): ‘They had to strip to their shirts and the women to their vests and knickers and then they were shot by the Gestapo. All the Jews there were executed . . . Believe me, if you had seen it, it would have made you shudder.’6
Kendrick’s summary reports noted that a German prisoner spoke about 300,000 civilians shot; another that boys and girls had been killed.7 There was talk of ‘armed conflict between the SS and members of the other armed forces because the latter would not commit atrocities, and mention too of the suffering of Jews in the Lodz ghetto’.8 One prisoner, whose sister had worked in a hospital in Lodz, spoke about ‘the poverty and disease amongst the people, their complete disillusionment and the rigid control exercised by the SS who supervised the hospital’.9
A German parachutist (A1373) told his cellmate that 80,000 Jews were shot at Lublin in Poland: 50,000 were shot first, followed by 30,000 more Jews who had been brought in from Germany.10 Pilot Dette (a blockade runner, captured 29 December 1943) relayed the story that he was
. . . driving back in his car from visiting some staff near Lvov and at the side of the road they heard shots. They approached and found about two hundred Jews, the men in just their pants and the women in knickers and brassieres . . . Some of the women had children in their arms. They were all shot in the back of the head, two rounds with a tommy-gun. We shall have to pay for that.11
EVIDENCE FROM PRISONER HAUPTMANN
German parachutist Hauptmann, who was captured in Italy on 18 October 1943, provided the most information from a single prisoner about the extent of the Nazi genocide. Many transcripts survive of his conversations with a British army officer who was a fluent German speaker. Hauptmann was given the codename M350 by MI19.12 All that was noted about him was his claim to have been a fugitive after shooting a Nazi official in Hamburg. MI19 was not sure what to make of some of his statements in interrogation and, unusually, added to his transcripts: ‘He has given a certain amount of information, some of which appears to be accurate and some highly improbable. His statements should therefore be treated with reserve.’
With the benefit of hindsight, it can now be shown that Hauptmann was remarkably accurate. He spoke to a British army officer about Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, and told him that Sachsenhausen had seven to eight thousand people there and considerably more in Dachau.13 The British officer asked him if there were only three concentration camps, to which Hauptmann replied, ‘Oh, there are a lot.’
In a separate conversation that day, possibly with the same British officer, Hauptmann talked about Hitler’s use of ‘stud farms’ to breed a pure Aryan German race.14 This was part of the regime’s Lebensborn programme to create a perfect master race. Such breeding camps or ‘farms’ existed across Nazi-occupied Europe. Hauptmann explained that good German girls agreed to conceive a child with an SS officer. A few days before the girl went into labour, she was taken to one of the special ‘stud farms’ where the baby was born. The baby was immediately surrendered to the Nazi regime and the mother never saw her child again. Hauptmann commented that ‘[the baby] is looked upon as a child of the Führer’.15
The British army officer (below, BAO) probed further: ‘Are these SS men specially selected?’
M350: It’s a thoroughbred stud farm. They are the military stallions. I know a BdM leader [League of German Girls] who has already presented the Führer with two children.
BAO: Are only SS men employed as ‘stallions’?
M350: Yes.
BAO: Is there no ‘stud fee’?
M350: No.
BAO: Can the SS man select the girl?
M350: Hmm. That’s of no importance.
Hauptmann confirmed that the girls were examined beforehand to see if they were suitable breeding stock. The British army officer asked, ‘Was there a parade of “stallions” beforehand or afterwards, in order to entice the girls?’
Hauptmann laughed. ‘Unfortunately not. They are men from the Führer’s bodyguard. They do that as a single line. While other men go to brothels, they go to this stud farm. There’s a better selection.’
The above transcripts lay in classified government files at the National Archives until the late 1990s. In the 1980s, the first details of these breeding farms became public knowledge from a different source, when some of the children who had been fathered by SS officers and had lived a life of shame and trauma, decided to reveal their shocking past. What the MI19 files demonstrate is that British intelligence knew of the existence of ‘stud farms’ long before the survivors came forward. The transcripts also independently corroborate the testimonies of the women who had succumbed to the Nazi breeding programme.
The significance of these conversations is that British intelligence knew of this shocking ‘breeding programme’ at the time it was happening – something that would not be known by the public for some forty years. It serves to underline, too, that the information in the bugged conversations was remarkably accurate and not fabricated by the prisoners. MI19’s bugging operation proved to be reliable not just for military and technical information, but also regarding the lives of Germans.
PRISONER M320
On 31 October 1943, an SS officer was brought to Latimer House after capture in Italy. He was no ordinary SS officer, but from one of Hitler’s infamously brutal and merciless death squads – Einsatz-Kommando 3, Sicherheits-Polizei (Security Police). Holding a rank equivalent to sergeant major, this SS Hauptscharführer came from one of the highest positions in Hitler’s Secret Police. Special reports generated from the M Room merely give him the codename M320. In an unguarded conversation with another POW (named M322) he spoke about Auschwitz. His cellmate appears not to have heard of it, but certainly knew about other concentration camps.
M320: I know the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland by hearsay. Actually you can see it from the train. It is a hutted camp for Jews. I heard say that there’s a crematorium there, and that no one who enters the camp comes out alive.
M322: I heard a lot in Vienna about Mauthausen.
M320: I personally haven’t seen any concentration camp, apart from Auschwitz, which I saw from the train. It’s not far from Cracow.
M322: Oh, down there.
M320: Yes. When you go through by train you can see it.
M322: Were mainly Jews sent there?
M320: Yes. I should be interested to know what they have done with all the Jews in the Reich, and then the ones from Austria, since they started to get rid of the Jews. I wonder whether they’ve slaughtered them?16
In a different conversation, this time with a British army officer (below, BAO), M320 spoke at length about mass executions by firing squads in the village of Ananyev in the province of Kherson, and referred to the shooting of as many as 5,000 Jews there in a single day.17
BAO: How many people were shot at a time?
M320: They were always shot in groups of ten.
BAO: With tommy-guns?
M320: With rifles. One man to each. Ten men with rifles to ten –
BAO: Did they simply fall down into trenches or what?
M320: Yes. They had to get down into a trench – it was a kind of anti-tank trench. It was about two and a half to three metres deep and wide as this room, we’ll say. You had to shoot down at them from above.
BAO: Were they all ki
lled instantaneously?
M320: Yes. There were men with tommy-guns who finished them off. The cars drove away one after the other and they could see the others being taken up and shot, and they knew that it might be their turn next. You’d see a woman holding a little child on each of her arms, and she might be pregnant as well – and there were whole families.18
M320 was one of the longest-held lower-rank prisoners at Latimer House, possibly because of his position in the SS death squad. He was still being questioned by British intelligence into 1944.
MOBILE GAS TRUCKS
Bugged conversations revealed that the Nazi regime used mobile gas trucks to kill Jews before the gas chambers were constructed in the concentration camps.19 In 1942, Luftwaffe officer Heimer told his cellmate:
They [Jews] were taken right through to Poland, and just before they reached their destination they pumped in some sort of stuff, some sort of gas, cool gas or nitrogen gas – anyway some odourless gas. That put them all to sleep. It was nice and warm. Then they were pulled out and buried. That’s what they did with thousands of Jews! (laughs)20
On 12 October 1943, a conversation was recorded between a naval lieutenant and transport officer (of a Panzer Regiment) which provided one of the earliest references to mobile gas trucks amongst lower-rank prisoners. The transport officer had visited a concentration camp and witnessed the mass deportation of Jews from Berlin in 1940. He said:
In Poland, they are called reprisal measures for atrocities . . . Killed off indiscriminately, some shot in the neck and with some they did it more simply, they pretended to drive them to work in closed lorries and on the way they all died of the exhaust gases which filled the lorry . . . The Polish intelligentsia also, and the great landowners and so on, were decimated in revenge.21
On Christmas Day 1943, British forces captured a lieutenant of Nebeltruppe, 56 Regiment, in Italy. By March 1944, he had been brought to one of Kendrick’s centres and a British army officer primed to converse with him about war crimes. The prisoner was designated M363 in reports and spoke about a special SS Kommando unit at Simferopol. He revealed that the SS unit ordered Jews to hand over their belongings and were told that they were being transferred by truck to another location.22 In reality, he explained, they were going to be ushered into the mobile gas lorries. This corroborated information already given by other prisoners and was held to be reliable.
Prisoner M320 told the British army officer that he had seen the use of mobile gas trucks to kill Jews at Theodosia and Sudak:
BAO: How many do you think were killed there?
M320: There was talk of about fifteen hundred at Theodosia.
BAO: A great many were said to have been killed at Simferopol, weren’t they?
M320: They even spoke of sixteen thousand there.23
On 23 February 1944, another important conversation about the gas trucks was recorded. This time, M320 spoke in detail of exactly how the early Nazi killing machine worked. He had first noticed it when he was stationed at Sudak and travelled to Theodosia to collect stores. He told a British army officer:
M320: I saw the gas lorry there for the first time and how the people were shoved in, and then I was interested to find out what kind of a lorry it was. It was explained to me that it was a gas lorry – that exhaust gases were used in it. There had been some talk earlier of the existence of such a lorry, but I hadn’t seen it before. The people were told some tale about being taken to another place, so they climbed into the back of the truck.24
BAO: Were they men, women and children?
M320: Yes. Once they were inside they were shut in, the engine was turned on, and in a few minutes they are dead.
BAO: How long does the engine run?
M320: Ten minutes, and in four, or at most five minutes, they should be dead.
BAO: What happens then?
M320: They are then driven away, buried and –
BAO: Where were they buried, do you know?
M320: Generally in anti-tank ditches.
BAO: Where were the anti-tank ditches?
M320: They were in various places. One was between Starikrim and Saaly and then there were some more in the direction of Kerch . . . I saw a large anti-tank ditch about 3 or 4 km away from Kherson. There was a hell of a lot of corpses there.
BAO: When was that?
M320: That was round about August/September, 1942. The Teilkommando was then disbanded and others from Einsatzgruppe C then took over the area and Einsatzgruppe D moved on further . . .
This transcript provides a source of evidence about the mobile SS death squads ‘Einsatzgruppe C’ and ‘Einsatzgruppe D’ that carried out mass executions of Jews in Nazi-occupied areas.
At Trent Park, information about the mobile gas trucks was also picked up from the unguarded conversations of the generals. On one occasion Köhncke spoke about the trucks and said, ‘Would you ever have thought it possible, sir, that the German people would fit up gas cars in order to kill people?’25 Cramer replied: ‘I didn’t believe that at first either, but one must believe it now. It is true.’
In a different conversation, Generals Rothkirch and Ramcke said that ‘all the gassing institutions’ were near Lvov in Poland.26 He admitted that the gassings were by no means the worst and that he had been interrogated about them by British officers at Trent Park. Rothkirch denied responsibility, but the conversations showed that he did nothing to prevent them either. He told Ramcke:
To start with the people dug their own graves . . . Thousands of people were shot. Afterwards they gave that up and gassed them. Many of them weren’t dead and a layer of earth was shovelled on in between. They had packers there who packed the bodies in, because they fell in too soon. The SS did that, they were the people who packed the corpses in.27
He explained to Ramcke how children were taken by the neck and shot with a revolver and said: ‘in Lvov, just like people catching fish with a net, ten SS men would walk along the street and simply grab any Jews who happened to be walking along. If you happened to look Jewish, you were just added to their catch (laughs).’28
These particular conversations are historically significant because they demonstrate that British intelligence knew about the mobile gas trucks being used to kill Jews at least three to four years before their terrible use became public knowledge. Until the declassification of these files, the only knowledge of the mobile gas trucks came after the liberation of the camps in 1945.
SS MUTINY AGAINST THE REGIME
The involvement of the SS and death squads in the annihilation of Jews has been well documented; but the M Room material has revealed something previously unknown. In early July 1943, secret listeners at Latimer House recorded a conversation between a British army officer and a prisoner in the rank of lance corporal, codenamed M222, who had been captured in Tunisia. M222 described two separate mutinies amongst SS guards in an unnamed concentration camp prior to 1937. Nothing like this has ever come to light before and, if true, requires a re-evaluation of previous knowledge about the SS and resistance to the atrocities. The two attempted mutinies occurred in the period before Hitler’s formulation of the Final Solution and before the concentration camps in Poland were constructed. Because of the importance of the conversation, it is quoted at length below. A British army officer asked M222:
BAO: What sort of people were these SS men? Had they been criminals or – ?
M222: No. They were people from outside, who happened to be in the SS; they had all volunteered as guards. I have sometimes spoken to some of them. They said they didn’t all get work immediately. Several were there for three or four days or a week and then went off again. Others felt really happy there . . . In 1936, at Easter, or I believe it was 1937, some of the guards even fired on each other.
BAO: Why was that?
M 222: We were told that this is what happened. There were three guard platoons with 100 men in each, making 300 in all. It was the turn of one platoon to be on guard every third day, the second had to go
out with the working party, and the third was off duty. It was, so to speak, standing-by. It was resting. Round about midday shooting suddenly started: one platoon was trying to disarm the guards and let us out, but that wouldn’t have succeeded in any case.29
The exact identity of M222 is not given in the files. He appears to have been a guard or SS officer in the camp. There was a similar incident a couple of years prior to that. There are gaps in the conversation where the listeners were unable to distinguish some of the words.
M222: Shortly before Christmas 1935, we had sixty men killed. It happened like this. It was pretty cold and had snowed a little too, and, as sometimes happens, for we only had on our thin blue uniforms . . . When a sentry saw that, he said: ‘Come here, if you’re cold!’ Then he had some sort of things erected on the grass and they had to get on them with their caps off and stand at attention with their faces to the wall. In the course of time, there may have been about twelve figures standing there. I don’t know how it happened, but at any rate one man said: ‘That’s too much of a good thing in this cold.’ Then one of the sentries said. ‘They are mutinying!’ and as soon as he shouted: ‘They are mutinying!’ they fired into them with their machine guns. Then the camp commandant came out. A whole number of us had been killed. You can well imagine that when you are all working bunched together one beside the other and they fire into you with machine guns, there are bound to be some killed. The camp commandant had a look at things and then he said: ‘The remainder will be shot.’ The remainder, there may have been about a hundred of them or a little more, I can’t remember exactly, were to be shot too. He said it was mutiny.30
M222 said that in another camp: ‘Many of them [SS] were killed; you have no idea how many SS men were shot there [in the camps].’31