Holmes shrugged.
“I could think of no other plan. What I have planted will not influence those motivated only by vengeance on others or their own death, but it might make some of the more level-headed members of the Wehrmacht more willing to take the risk of crossing lines to surrender.”
Roberts had kindly made provision for us to be quartered in the mayor of Münster’s office. I was startled the next morning when Roberts shook us awake. “Mr Holmes, Dr Watson, there has been an astonishing development,” he said. “Here in Münster is the mouth of a salient into Germany. Our eastern front line is one hundred miles on from here although there are German forces holding defensive positions much closer to our north and south. We drove the Germans out of Hanover two days ago and they are holding a line in front of Celle, the next major town to the east. At just after midnight last night our wireless operator received a signal asking for a temporary ceasefire.”
“Is that a common occurrence?” I asked.
“Ceasefires happen occasionally in close combat—particularly in house to house fighting—to allow for the rescue of the wounded and the clearance of bodies. But this message asked for a ceasefire along a four-mile line. It can only be for something big.”
“So why have you woken us?” asked Holmes.
“There is no German speaker in the unit ahead. I need someone I can trust to help with any negotiations. We will be leaving in twenty minutes. I would like you too there, Dr Watson to make a record of events. This may lead to nothing, but it could also be the end of the war in the west.”
I will not detain my reader with an account of our journey east towards Celle or how the negotiations to hold a ceasefire were initiated. Suffice to say that two days later Holmes and I found ourselves with Roberts and Esmond a few hundred yards from the front line. Talks had been fixed for the next day. Having come that far, I remember the mood of the soldiers around us as being bright at the prospect that the end was in sight.
Holmes by contrast was at his gloomiest. He stood facing the battle lines with an utterly downcast expression.
“There’s an east wind blowing, Watson. I fear the worst.”
“When you said that in 1914, it presaged a cataclysmic war, although you foretold that a cleaner brighter England would emerge when the sun came out again.”
Holmes ignored my remark and sniffed the breeze, foreboding etched on his features.
Early next day saw us in a tent that had been set up in an open field face to face with a general who introduced himself to us as Weber. We had heard that the German troops facing us were ill-equipped and ill-supplied. Weber seemed to bear this out. The jacket of his uniform looked threadbare and mottled although his cap looked smart enough. I noticed Holmes having a close look at the general’s uniform although I could not imagine what inference he might be trying to draw from it.
The notes below are a record of what was said.
“As you no doubt know,” said Weber, “we are about six miles west of the Weser river here. We have a prepared defensive line and plentiful supplies. Nevertheless, I would advise you, there is a prison camp two miles behind us. There is a typhus epidemic in the camp and if you attack us it will spread to our men and to yours. Where it might end, I would not hazard to guess but the risk is to be avoided.”
“What do you propose?” asked Roberts.
“If you allow us to withdraw in good order across the river, you can have all the land that is still in our hands to the west of it.”
“Who will handle the typhus outbreak at the camp?”
“We will leave a group of fifty soldiers behind to keep order in the camp until you take it. They will be under the control of the camp’s Kommandant. We would like you to provide us with fifty of your soldiers as a guarantee that you let our soldiers return to our lines once you have secured the twenty-five square miles that we are surrendering to you. When you release these men, we will release yours. What you do after that is up to you.”
“How do I know that you have authority to do this?”
“I have a dispatch here signed by Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer. He has ordered this wholly exceptional surrender of territory for the reasons I have stated.”
Weber handed over a dispatch, and Holmes was able to confirm its contents and its authenticity.
“How long do you need to complete your withdrawal?” asked Roberts.
“We need two days to withdraw to our prepared lines behind the river. When we are complete, we will send up three rockets from the far side of the Weser. We can then meet here, exchange the troops both sides have provided as guarantors of good faith, and make arrangements to resume hostilities.”
This was not the discussion Roberts had been expecting and he turned to Holmes.
“What do you think?” he asked in a murmur.
“If typhus becomes an epidemic,” said my friend, “it will kill more people than fighting ever will. What is proposed will mean that we come into all the territory west of the Weser without firing a shot. If, on the other hand, we fight and win, we will still have to deal with this prison camp, and it will be much harder to do so if hostilities are still continuing.”
“But they will be even harder to engage with, if they are dug in on the other side of a river.”
“It is your decision, but a war-time typhus epidemic normally costs three times as many people’s lives as combat does.”
“He says they are still well-resourced. Do you believe him?”
“Weber is an interesting study. His uniform shows much about where he has been and what he has done. Did you see its markings and its erasu..?”
“Mr Holmes, I need to decide whether to launch an attack and you are focusing on the enemy general’s uniform. If the enemy is weak, it is better to launch an attack to rout him here rather than letting him have the chance to regroup on the other side of the river.”
“I would, good general, refer you to my previous answers about the wisdom of launching an attack before a camp stricken with typhus.”
Again I will not detain my reader with an account of the details of the parleying but a few hours later, having sealed an agreement very much on the term proposed by Weber, Holmes and I were in the front jeep with Roberts and Esmond leading the Division’s senior officers driving east from our lines.
My reader will probably know what we found but I will relate events as they happened to us.
One thousand yards behind the lines that had previously been held by the Germans, we came to a sign for a village now synonymous with history’s greatest crime against humanity—Belsen. It was about another quarter of a mile after the sign that that the stench hit my nostrils and another quarter of a mile brought us to the source of the stench. There was a barbed wire fence and behind the fence stood thousands upon thousands of people in striped uniforms. As we got closer, we noticed that their bodies were in the last stages of starvation. Depending on when this work is read, my reader may wonder at our surprise as, since the war has ended, the horrors of the giant prison camps built by the Germans have become well-known. But by the April of 1945, there had only been confused rumours from the Soviet front, and no one in the West had known whether to believe them.
We looked for the entrance to the camp which turned out to be on a side-road from the main through-face. All the way round to the entrance, pallid faces stared at us from behind the barbed wire. Yet though they stared, their gaze seemed incurious, as though their senses were so blunted by their condition that they were impervious to stimulation.
At the entrance to the camp was a guard of soldiers in Wehrmacht uniform. One of them saluted us smartly as we approached. He said something I did not understand but which Holmes translated to Roberts and me as an offer to take us to meet the camp’s Kommandant.
We drove into the camp and the guard climbed into our Jee
p.
If we were in a state of shock from what we had seen from outside the camp, it was as nothing compared to what we felt when we entered. Piles of bodies were stacked high by the side of the road. Walking amongst them were more prisoners whose advance emaciation meant they were scarce distinguishable from the corpses. And the same stench of death and human waste that had assailed our nostrils at the hospital in Münster now almost overwhelmed us.
We soon came to the Kommandant’s office and were ushered inside.
Josef Kramer. He had dark hair, deep set eyes, and the air of a clerk. He was to become known in the British press as the “Beast of Belsen” and was hanged eight months later but, when we entered his office he stood up and saluted. “I am sorry for the disagreeable nature of what you see here, gentlemen,” he said. “I can assure you, based on my experiences further east, that things are much worse in camps there.”
We learned afterwards that he had previously been at Auschwitz where deaths had run into the millions. We had no way of knowing at this point how many deaths there had already been at Belsen but that was not our priority for now.
Esmond took his pistol out of its holster and was, I am sure, going to shoot Kramer on the spot. Roberts dashed the pistol out of his hand.
“All this, Esmond,” he said, “must be done by due process. Kramer,” he said, “you are under arrest. We have a job now to save what lives we can here.”
“You know perfectly well that you cannot arrest me,” replied Kramer calmly, “if you want to do things by due process. I will serve you for two days until you are securely in control of this camp. Then, under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, you must then allow me and the troops under my command to return to German-held territory. Otherwise you will not get back the men you have handed over as guarantors of your good faith.”
There was a silence which Kramer himself broke.
“In any case, I was only doing what I was told to do. As the extremities of the German empire have been taken by the enemy, we have had to accommodate more and more prisoners here from other camps. And I have been given no extra resources to deal with them. I have received personal orders from the Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, to do what I have done. And what are we going to do now? The camp needs to be run. There are thousands of prisoners.”
“Very well,” said Roberts, “your men will assist mine in running the camp. I want your men to start digging burial pits. I will arrange for the delivery of food and for the arrival of medical staff.”
“You want my men to dig burial pits? But I only have fifty men here. That is a complete waste of resources.”
“What do you propose?”
“The prisoners can dig the pits under the supervision of my men. You will not get pits of a sufficient size dug in a short time by any other means.”
“You want the prisoners to help dig pits?”
“You have an alternative source of manpower for a task as big as what you have in mind?”
“But the prisoners here are in many cases in the last stages of starvation.”
Kramer gave a chilling smile, “They are used to doing what they are told.” When he saw the look of horror that came over the faces of Roberts, Esmond, Holmes, and me, he quickly added, “But of course I am only the administrator here. I personally have never killed anybody.”
This was too much even for the patient Roberts. He dragged Kramer to the window. Holmes and I followed and Roberts, losing all self-possession shouted, “How many corpses to do you see out there? Do you feel no responsibility for these?”
“I repeat I have never personally killed anyone, and I have had to deal with an unsustainable number of new arrivals following our defeats in the east.”
“So, how many prisoners are here?” asked Roberts, I think nonplussed by Kramer’s calm.
“It is hard to say. This camp was designed for about ten thousand, but I think there are about sixty thousand here now. Our records have been destroyed so we have no clear idea of how many people we have.”
“Sixty thousand people?” gasped Roberts. “But that’s the size of a small town.”
Kramer smiled nervously. “I repeat, I followed my instructions and I do the best that I can. I was not able to refuse to accept prisoners even though I had no resources to deal with them. If I had refused, I would have ended up a prisoner myself.”
In the end matters were concluded very much as suggested by the representative of the enemy and Roberts, followed by Esmond, Holmes, and me, egressed from Kramer’s office.
“I must address my officers,” Roberts, “before we start our work.” Our party numbered twenty who were gathered before the circle of jeeps.
“Men,” began Roberts, “I am often asked why we soldier. I say to you now, look around. This is why we soldier. We have a solemn duty to our comrades who have fallen so that we can get this far, and to the people here, who have lost everything, to save as many people as we can.”
Under the supervision of British troops, the German guards organized work gangs to bury the dead from among those prisoners strong enough to dig. We tried to help the prisoners with the resources that we had but what our division had for itself was scarcely enough. When Roberts radioed London asking for immediate medical assistance and supplies, he was told that there was nothing available for anything that was not directly related to advancing the war effort.
“What do you think I should do about Kramer?” Roberts asked Holmes. “He has been in charge here for a year and he should be made to face justice. I do not want to hand him back to the Germans even though that was part of the agreement we struck with them. Who knows whether we would get him in front of a court after the war?”
“I have already given the matter some thought. Let us wait until we see the German general again.”
“And how can I get the resources I need to deal with the prisoner camp?”
“I am dealing with that matter as well. Let us make do with what we have for now,” replied my friend.
Right on schedule a day later, three rockets went up on the other side of the river and Roberts, Esmond, Holmes, and I met the same party of Germans as we had done previously.
Weber started. “We have moved our troops across the river, and we are ready to end the ceasefire as long as you are securely in control of the prison camp.”
Roberts replied, “We too are ready to restart the fighting. I have been to the prison camp and seen the conditions there. I want to keep Kramer as a prisoner along with the troops guarding the camp. Kramer is a war criminal.”
“You know that you cannot do that,” countered Weber. “I do not know anything about the conditions in the camp, but I am sure that Kramer was doing the best he could with what he had available.”
“You know nothing about the conditions in the camp?” asked Roberts, eyes wide in disbelief. “It is only two miles behind your front-line, you knew there was a typhus outbreak there, and you were tasked with securing a wholly unprecedented ceasefire as a result of those conditions?”
“As a military man you will know that securing your own front-line is quite enough of a responsibility without worrying about a prison camp. And I have nothing like the resources that you do. I will not renege on a deal and, if you try to do so, there will be nothing similar offered ever again. You might like to think about that as the Russians advance unchecked on our eastern front.”
“I find you an interesting case-study, general,” broke in Holmes. “The word uniform is something of a misnomer as each soldier’s uniform is slightly different depending on where he served. Your uniform is a good example of this.”
“I have been where my country has asked me to go, and I have served it to the best of my abilities,” said Weber stiffly.
“I note that your general’s cap had an interesting insignia last time we met.” My friend pull
ed a notebook out of his pocket and started to draw. I was standing next to Holmes and saw him sketch out the following device.
He handed it to Weber with the words. “And I noted your jacket’s speckled appearance last time we met which could only mean you had had various devices, badges, and stripes removed from it. But you had failed to pay sufficient attention to your cap which had this device on it which you have wisely seen to remove. It was the wolf’s hook or the Wolfsangel you had on it last time. It shows me that you are from the 2nd Panzer Division which was responsible for the massacres at Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glan in France. And you are a general, so I know your real name is Lammerding.”
Weber flushed angrily. “I do not answer personal questions. I repeat, I do what my political masters order me to do to the best of my ability. I do not query my orders and I do not look to the left nor right to see what else is going on around me. Besides, I only arrived at Tulle after the killings were over.”
“We may choose to arrest you here for war-crimes”
“If you do that, you will never get your fifty men back.”
“But we will keep Kramer and his crew. And you will face the justice of the French.”
There was a long pause and Weber, whom I will now called Lammerding, spoke with all the assurance out of his voice. “You can keep Kramer, though not the others, on condition that at the end of the war, the British give me a guarantee that I will not be released from their custody into the hands of the French. They will want to pass a death sentence on me but, if the British protect me, I can go about my normal life as an engineer once the war ends in a few weeks. And I want the same deal for Felder and Grau here,” he added nodding at his translator and adjutant.
I could see that this was something that Roberts was most reluctant to allow. I think that Lammerding also saw that he had to make an additional offer.
“Behind us is the city of Celle. It is a garrison town with the most modern and best protected barracks in Germany. It would be very easy to mount a sturdy defence of it which would cost you many men. But if you give me another two days, I will draw my next defensive line behind Celle so that you can have the city without firing a shot.”
The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6 Page 14