by Helen Fry
The conversation highlights that British intelligence was interested in information about SS involvement in war crimes, but also in at least two previously unknown SS mutinies against the regime. The concentration camp is not named, but enquiries by the author to the archivists at Dachau and Sachsenhausen confirmed no trace of a mutiny there. It could possibly have happened at Bergen Belsen which was built as a large military complex from 1935. The workers were housed in camps near Fallingbostel. It became a prisoner-of-war camp, before being extended to be a concentration camp.
The transcript leaves unanswered questions: what provoked the first mutiny? Was there any sense amongst these SS guards that the killing of Jews and political opponents was wrong? Did the mutiny occur for other reasons? What does emerge is that for a short time, some men of an SS battalion in a concentration camp ‘broke out’ emotionally against the situation in which they found themselves. Where the two mutinies took place still remains an open question.
Interrogators were primed to ask about the Nazi killing machine and the concentration camps.32 An example of one such detailed interrogation took place in September 1944 when a Czech POW, who had been conscripted into the German army from Dachau concentration camp, was captured by the Allies at Brettenville in France on 13 August 1944. During interrogation, he gave comprehensive information about conditions in Dachau and, in particular, the experiments that he was subjected to by a German air force experimental station in the camp. It makes for particularly difficult reading.33
British intelligence intended to hold the Nazi regime accountable and ensure justice would be carried out at the end of the war.34 The focus was not limited to gathering military, political and operational intelligence.
Perhaps most surprising amongst MI19 files are the detailed sketches of the layout of concentration camps, drawn by prisoners who had first-hand experience of them. Sketched plans of Dachau and Auschwitz date from September 1944 – at least four to six months before the liberation of the concentration camps.35 It is not known what British intelligence intended to do with these ground plans, but they are comprehensive and show the barracks, prisoners’ huts, the crematoria, SS barracks and brothel, railway lines into the camps and the perimeter fences. The liberation of the concentration camps in 1945 showed these maps to have been remarkably accurate.
WAR CRIMES IN POLAND AND RUSSIA
The flip side of the farcical life and political power-struggles of the generals had a deeply dark and disturbing aspect. The bugged conversations provided further evidence of the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews and killing of Russians and Poles. The unguarded conversations of the generals revealed to the intelligence services that Germany’s military commanders not only knew about the war crimes committed, but some were complicit in it. The transcripts are significant because they dispel the long-held view that the Wehrmacht (German army) played no part in the Holocaust.36 For decades, the German army’s reputation had remained intact. Shockingly, Hitler’s generals did not only boast about the number of people killed, but often spoke in chilling and graphic detail.37
The generals realised that as the Allies advanced through Nazi-occupied territories, it was only a matter of time before they would reach the areas where mass atrocities had been committed. In April 1943, a conversation was recorded between General von Thoma and Crüwell. Von Thoma said: ‘The Poles have been making enquiries about the murdering of the 8,000 officers in Russia. That business will cause a lot more unpleasantness, but that is of no consequence in this war. I expect the Russians will open up the graves of the Jews in Sebastopol and Odessa some time!’38
On 10 July 1943, Neuffer was overheard saying to Bassenge:
What will they say when they find our graves in Poland? The OGPU [Russian Intelligence] can’t have done anything worse than that. I myself have seen a convoy at Ludowice, near Minsk. I must say it was frightful, a horrible sight. There were lorries full of men, women and children – quite small children. It is ghastly, this picture. The women, the little children who were, of course, absolutely unsuspecting – frightful! Of course, I didn’t watch while they were being murdered . . . The German Jews were also sent to the Minsk district and were gradually killed off . . .39
After hearing the BBC Midnight news in German on 19 December 1943, the same two generals were recorded, speculating on the number of Jews killed so far:
BASSENGE: They dished up the mass executions of Jews in Poland. They estimate here that altogether five million Jews – Polish, Bulgarian, Dutch, Danish and Norwegian – have been massacred.
NEUFFER: Really? Not counting the German ones?
BASSENGE: Including the German Jews, during the whole time. They furnished evidence that an enormous number from camp so-and-so between such-and-such a date, fifteen thousand here, eighteen thousand there, twelve thousand there, six thousand and so on – I must say that if 10 per cent of it is correct, then one ought to –
NEUFFER: I should have thought about three million.
BASSENGE: You know, it really is a disgrace.40
Cavendish Bentinck at the Foreign Office received a copy of the above transcript. In response, he wrote to Norman Crockatt (the head of MI9) with a specific request:
I notice that Generals Neuffer and Bassenge are disquieted at the prospect of the Russians reaching places where the Germans carried out large scale liquidation of Jews, Poles and Russians. We [at Foreign Office] should be grateful if you would try to find out from your guests by the various means at your disposal exactly where these places are. We can then give the Russians some spots to carry out exhumations, and shall perhaps hear less about Katyn, which has begun to pall.41
In a different conversation, General Felbert asked Kittel whether he knew of places where Jews had been taken to be executed. Kittel answered: ‘Yes.’42
Felbert asked whether it was carried out systematically. Kittel again replied: ‘Yes.’ Felbert said: ‘Women and children?’ Kittel replied: ‘Everyone.’ The conversation continued:
FELBERT: Were they loaded into trains?
KITTEL: If only they had been loaded into trains! The things I’ve experienced! For instance in Latvia, near Dvinsk, there were mass executions of Jews carried out by the SS or Security Service. There were about fifteen Security Service men and perhaps sixty Latvians who are known to be the most brutal people in the world . . . Three hundred men had been driven out of Dvinsk; they dug a trench – men and women dug a communal grave and then marched home. The next day along they came again – men, women and children – they were counted off and stripped naked; the executioners first laid all the clothes in one pile. Then twenty women had to take up their position, naked, on the edge of the trench. They were shot and fell down into it.
FELBERT: How was it done?
KITTEL: They faced the trench and then twenty Latvians came up behind and simply fired once through the back of their heads . . . I went away and said: ‘I’m going to do something about this.’ I got into my car and went to this Security Service man and said: ‘Once and for all, I forbid these executions outside, where people can look on. If you shoot people in the wood or somewhere where no one can see, that’s your own affair. But I absolutely forbid another day’s shooting there. We draw our drinking water from deep springs; we’re getting nothing but corpse water there.’
FELBERT: What did they do to the children?
KITTEL (very excited): They seized three-year-old children by their hair, held them up and shot them with a pistol and then threw them in. I saw that for myself.43
Kittel explained that although the orders were given by Germans, the slaughter was executed by the Latvians. He continued: ‘The Jews were brought in and then robbed. There was a terrific bitterness against the Jews at Dvinsk, and the [local] people simply gave vent to their rage.’44
In the common room, after a German radio broadcast about Nazi barbarism in Russia, General Broich admitted to von Choltitz and Rothkirch: ‘We shot women as if they had been cattle.’45 Bro
ich explained how he had seen a large quarry where ten thousand men, women and children were shot the previous day. He commented: ‘We drove out on purpose to see it. The most bestial thing I ever saw.’ Von Choltitz said: ‘One day after Sebastopol had fallen – whilst I was on my way back to Berlin – I flew back with the Chief of Staff, the CO of the airfield was coming up to me, when we heard shots. I asked whether a firing practice was on. He answered, “Good Lord, I’m not supposed to tell, but they’ve been shooting Jews here for days now.”’46 Von Choltitz told the other generals, ‘The Führer gave orders, shouting at me furiously, that a report be sent him every day in which at least a thousand Jews were shot.’
Rothkirch asked, ‘Only in Germany, or where?’
Von Choltitz replied, ‘No – everywhere. I presumed he meant Poland. 36,000 Jews from Sebastopol were shot.’47
General von Thoma spoke about atrocities perpetrated by the SS and mass executions at Minsk. He confessed to Crüwell that he would not have believed it if he had not seen the executions himself, and added, ‘No one can accuse me of having been in any way responsible for it . . . Orders were actually given that all Jews were [to be cleared out of] the occupied territories – that is the great idea, but, of course, there are so many in the east that you don’t know where to start.’48
Reimann talked about being present when the Russians were being transported from Korosten, outside Lvov:
They were driven like cattle from the trucks to the drinking troughs and bludgeoned to keep their ranks. There were troughs at the stations; they rushed to them and drank like beasts; after that they were given just a bit of something to eat. Then they were again driven into the wagons. There were sixty or seventy men in one cattle truck! . . . [At the stations] children came up and brought them pumpkins to eat. They threw the pumpkins in, and then all you heard was a terrific din like the roaring of wild animals in the trucks. They were probably killing each other. That finished me.49
Elfeldt and Meyer spoke about the shooting of whole innocent Russian families. Elfeldt called it ‘an outrageous business!’50
ADMISSION OF GUILT
In an astonishing turn of events, the generals divulged their own guilt to each other. In a conversation recorded on 29 August 1944, von Choltitz confessed to von Thoma: ‘The worst job I ever carried out – which, however, I carried out with great consistency – was the liquidation of the Jews. I carried out this order down to the very last detail.’51
Von Thoma’s reply laid the blame on Hitler for issuing the orders, as he sniggered: ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! It’s a good thing that you can now produce such unimpeachable proofs.’ Even von Thoma’s laughter was written on the transcript of the conversation.
Two months later, the secret listeners picked up another frank admission from von Choltitz: ‘We are also to blame. We have cooperated and have almost taken the Nazis seriously . . . I’ve persuaded my men to believe in this nonsense . . . I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself. May be we are far more to blame than those uneducated cattle [the Nazis].’52 Von Choltitz appeared only to express remorse after he knew he could face charges of war crimes and the death penalty.
General Liebenstein told von Thoma, ‘We once shot forty thousand Poles in a concentration camp.’53 Von Thoma replied, ‘Out at Dachau in 1940 were a great part of the Polish intelligentsia, university professors, doctors, lawyers – that’s the pathological part of it, this mania.’ In a separate conversation, von Thoma said the killings were committed on Hitler’s orders.54
Neuffer and Bassenge discussed crimes committed by the German army.55 Bassenge told Neuffer that the Goering Regiment was a wild lot.
‘I know officially,’ Bassenge said, ‘because part of the paratroops were formed from the Goering Regiment.’
‘Did they commit murders?’ asked Neuffer.
‘Yes,’ replied Bassenge. ‘They secretly condemned and murdered people in the barracks and the officers took part.’
In September 1944, General Eberbach and his son discussed the killing of Jews in these terms:
EBERBACH (senior): In my opinion, one can even go so far as to say that the killing of those million Jews or however many it was, was necessary in the interests of our people. But to kill women and children wasn’t necessary. That is going too far.
EBERBACH (junior): Well, if you are going to kill off the Jews, then kill the women and children too, or the children at least. There is no need to do it publicly, but what good does it do me to kill off the old people?
EBERBACH (senior): Well, simply that it is contrary to humanity, in the end it hits back at you, simply because it instils a certain brutality into the people.56
Other senior officers spoke about the struggle to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto. Seyffardt commented to Heyking and Admiral Tresckow: ‘For three whole weeks, they [a Panzer division] fought behind the front, with tanks and everything, against the Jews. The Jews had 8.8 anti-tank guns and everything . . . A whole division. In order to suppress the Jews in the ghetto!’57
How much did the generals know about the concentration camps and how early? Their discussion in May 1945 reveals the true extent of their knowledge:
DITTMAR [re. concentration camps]: What did we know about them?
SCHLIEBEN: Everybody knew that dreadful things happened in them – not exactly what, but just that dreadful things happened – every one of us knew that as far back as ’35.
ELFELDT: We knew [what happened] in Poland to the hundreds and thousands of Jews who, as time went by, disappeared, were sent away from Germany and who after ’39 were said to be accommodated in ghettos and settlements in Poland.
SCHLIEBEN: They all disappeared.
ELFELDT: Whoever got to know that millions of these people – as the Russians now assert – perished or were burnt in Auschwitz and whatever these small places are called?
BROICH: Certainly none of us.
ELFELDT: We heard about Auschwitz when we were in Poland.
BROICH: I visited Dachau personally in ’37.58
Lieutenant General Feuchtinger, who was captured in Hamburg on 3 May 1945, had not previously believed it possible for mass shootings in the thousands to have been carried out until he himself visited Pinsk (now in Belarus) where he was told that:
The previous year there had still been 25,000 Jews living there and within three days, these 25,000 Jews were fetched out, formed up on the edge of a wood or in a meadow – they had been made to dig their own graves beforehand – and then every single one of them from the oldest grey-beard down to the new-born infant was shot by a police squad.59
Apparently that was the first time Feuchtinger had heard about mass executions. Likewise, Bodenschatz said that he knew about the expulsion of Jews from Germany in the 1930s but not of the concentration camps and killings.60 He spoke about the looted works of art and where they were being taken and how.61
It became apparent that ordinary Germans knew much more about what was going on than they were prepared to admit to the Allies after the war:
HEYDTE: There’s another camp which is even worse than Lublin. It’s in Czechoslovakia. Half-a-million people have been put to death there for certain. I know that all the Jews from Bavaria were taken there. Yet the camp never became over-crowded.
WILDERMUTH: Yes, I’ve heard of that too.
HEYDTE: But I don’t only know that all the Jews from Bavaria were taken there. I know that all the Jews from Austria were taken there, and still the camp wasn’t over-crowded.
WILDERMUTH: From all over Germany. It appears that most of the Jews from Germany were either sent to Lublin or to that place.62
The generals unwittingly revealed how far Hitler was prepared to go to create his vision of a pure Aryan race. Those who did not fit the Nazi ideal of racial perfection were singled out for annihilation. Wildermuth, Broich, Elfeldt and Wahle had an intense discussion on the subject. Wildermuth said he had evidence at his disposal that led him to estimate that ‘70,000 to 80,000 mental defectives had been put to de
ath’.63
Seyffardt said he ‘knew about the liquidation of the insane’.64 Secret listeners overheard him telling other generals:
There was a provincial lunatic asylum near Baden-Baden where there were harmless lunatics who worked in the vineyards, but who were no use for anything else. Then one day, they all suddenly died. Then, after they had turned it into a hospital for people who had limbs amputated, they put up a huge notice board: From lunatic asylum to a home for cripples – Adolf Hitler.65
Even today, decades later, it is alarming to read the transcripts of eye-witnesses describing in such detail how the Final Solution was carried out. The evidence from prisoners’ conversations raises pertinent questions today. With such a knowledge of the Final Solution and genocide, why did the Allies not bomb the railway lines to the camps? It is a legitimate question that requires further scholarship. The M Room intelligence establishes firmly on record precisely what information was being picked up by British intelligence, and how early – namely, as early as 1940.66 Gathering intelligence had moved beyond the realm of political judgment and military secrets to cataloguing Hitler’s annihilation programme for the Jews of Europe in readiness for the Nuremberg Trials at the end of hostilities. There was every expectation that the perpetrators would face justice for their war crimes.
CHAPTER 13
Breaking the German
Will to Resist
On New Year’s Day 1945, the German air force mounted Operation Bodenplatte – an attack by 700 German fighter aircraft, aimed at crippling the Allied air forces stationed in liberated Belgium, Holland and France. The German objective was to regain air supremacy that had been lost earlier in the war. It failed and was to be the last major air offensive by Germany. At the time, Allied forces were making preparations for the final push towards the invasion of Germany. At CSDIC headquarters at Latimer House, there was a frenzy of activity as a German Group Commodore captured during Operation Bodenplatte was imminently expected on site.1