The destination for about 20,000 of the Auschwitz prisoners was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony. As discussed in Chapter 5, Bergen-Belsen is infamous today primarily because of the heartrending film footage that was shot there in the aftermath of the British liberation of the camp on April 15, 1945. These appalling images of emaciated bodies and walking skeletons rightly shocked the world when they were shown. But they also created a perception of the camp that does not reflect the reality of its original conception and, in the process, the film adds to the confusion that exists in many people’s minds about the difference between a concentration camp and a dedicated death camp.
While, at its inception in 1943, Bergen-Belsen had been intended as a place for “privileged” Jews who were to be held as hostages, in the spring of 1944 it took on another function as prisoners considered unable to do useful work were sent there from other camps. These prisoners suffered appallingly at Bergen-Belsen, where they were particularly brutally treated by the German Kapos. The preconditions for the transformation of Bergen-Belsen into the scene of horror the Allies liberated in the spring of 1945 also were subsequently completed by three additional factors: the appointment of Josef Kramer as camp commandant in December 1944; the decision to remove any “privileges” that may have existed in the camp for any “exchange Jews”; and the flood of new arrivals from the death marches in the early months of 1945. An idea of the scale of change at Bergen-Belsen can be gained from simple numbers—at the end of 1944 there were approximately 15,000 inmates at the camp; when the British arrived in April 1945 there were 60,000. Virtually no effort was made by the Germans to house or feed this massive influx.
As always in history, however, statistics give little hint of individual experience—that only can be gained by listening to stories like that of Alice Lok Cahana and her sister Edith who were at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. They had thought Auschwitz at the limits of what human beings could endure—but life here was worse. Alice and Edith arrived at the camp when there was an epidemic of typhoid raging through the huts. Overcrowding meant there were no bunks and scarcely any accommodation of any kind. There was no food and virtually no water. The Auschwitz prisoners had essentially been corralled into this one space and left to die.
Over the next few weeks many lost control mentally. “There’s no vocabulary that can tell what was Bergen-Belsen,” says Alice. Every night a woman who slept near them “went berserk” and stamped on Alice and her sister. The barracks were half built and what had been erected was falling apart: “When you had to go to the bathroom, you had to step over people. Some people fell into the cracks in the corridor.” Day and night they heard the cry of “Water, mother! Water, mother!”
Renee Salt8 was another Auschwitz prisoner who had been transported to Bergen-Belsen—she was sixteen years old in 1945. Her first sight of the camp, after being forced down a road littered with dead bodies from previous transports, was a vision from hell: “We saw skeletons walking, their arms and legs were like matchsticks—the bones protruding through the remains of their skin. The stench that arose from the camp was terribly overpowering. It seemed that, after all we’ve been through already, this was something new and horribly different.”
All traces of the organization of the camp had broken down. Roll-calls were no longer held—people didn’t even have the strength to get up—and without food the prisoners were starving to death. Within three weeks Renee knew that she was dying. Then, as she veered towards unconsciousness, someone pointed out to her a tank in the distance—a British tank. She collapsed and did not regain consciousness for ten days. When she awoke she was in a British delousing center, being washed in disinfectant, utterly weak—but free.
On April 15, 1945, someone shouted, “Liberated! We are liberated!” says Alice Lok Cahana. She immediately leapt up and said to her sister: “What is liberation? I have to find liberation before it melts away.” She staggered out of the barrack and saw Allied soldiers in jeeps. But her joy was short-lived, because by now Edith was sicker than ever, and shortly after the British arrived she was taken to a Red Cross hospital. Alice wanted to stay with her, but the British soldiers insisted that she was not ill enough to remain with her sister. Alice protested: “I said, ‘You don’t understand—we can’t be separated. I can help you here. I can take out the bedpan.’” She tried to lift up the bedpan, but she could barely walk herself. As she reached the door a soldier picked her up, put her in a jeep and took her back to the barrack.
Alice, however, having protected her sister through the torment of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was not to be put off so easily. The next day, despite her own frailty, she walked back to the hospital. She arrived just as Edith was being placed in an ambulance. Quickly she climbed on board herself, announcing: “Here I am. I’m going with you. Wherever they take you.” But the same soldier who had driven her back to the camp the previous day recognized her and said: “Are you here again? You can’t be here. We have to take your sister to another hospital—a military hospital.” Alice was forced to get down from the ambulance and watch as her sister was driven away.
So began Alice’s search for her sister—one which lasted for half a century. She tried to trace Edith through the Red Cross, through any means she could think of, but she heard nothing—not, that is, until fifty-three years after her sister’s disappearance when she discovered in the records of Bergen-Belsen that an Edith Schwartz had died on June 2, 1945. Schwartz was the maiden name of Alice’s mother, and one that Edith had used in the camp so as to pretend not to be Alice’s sister. She had been frightened that if the Nazis had known they were related they would have done their best to separate them.
So, after a fifty-three-year wait—fifty-three years in which every time the phone rang or every time a letter was delivered Alice had prayed it was news of Edith—having endured all this emotional suffering, she discovered that her sister had lived for only a few days after they had parted. Alice had protected her sister through the deportation from Hungary and Auschwitz, on the death march and amidst the starvation and disease of Bergen-Belsen, but in the end the Nazis had still killed her. “Liberation came too late for you, my beloved sister,” wrote Alice in a poem shortly after she learned the news of Edith’s death. “How could they do it? How? Why?”
One of the men most responsible for Edith’s death, Heinrich Himmler, would, in the early days of the implementation of the “Final Solution,” have had no difficulty in answering the two questions posed by Alice Lok Cahana in the most brutal and simplistic way: The Jews were to die because he and his Führer perceived they were a threat. But his actions during the last months of the war were a good deal less straightforward. Himmler’s approval of the “Jews for trucks” scheme in Hungary in 1944, and his use of Bandi Grosz to open a channel through which peace feelers could be explored, have already been discussed. These schemes came to little, but they show the way Himmler’s mind was now working. Pragmatism, rather than ideological rigidity, was the way forward as far as the Reichsführer SS was concerned.
In February 1945, Himmler’s more flexible attitude found expression in the transporting of 1,200 Jews from Theresienstadt to Switzerland. It was a release arranged with the American Union of Orthodox Rabbis via a series of intermediaries—and this time it was not Jews for trucks but Jews for hard currency. Rita Reh9 was one of the inmates of Theresienstadt who made the journey: “When we were on the train the SS [men] came and told us to put on some make-up, comb our hair and dress up so we’d look all right when we arrived. They wanted us to make a good impression on the Swiss.”
The first Adolf Hitler learned of the release of the Theresienstadt Jews was seeing it reported in a Swiss newspaper. He was beside himself with rage. It was true that, as far back as December 1942, Himmler had secured Hitler’s agreement in principle that selected Jews might be ransomed for hard currency—the use of prominent Jews as “hostages” was in line with established Nazi thinking—but the release of the Theresiensta
dt Jews had occurred without Hitler’s knowledge or approval and, now that the war was clearly in its final stages, must have smacked to the Nazi leader of defeatism. Hitler expressly forbade any more such transfers.
Himmler was to go against Hitler’s instructions once again, however, when he allowed Bergen-Belsen to be captured by the Allies in April. Hitler had ordered that all concentration camps be destroyed before the Allies arrived. Yet Himmler expressly disobeyed. It is likely that he permitted Bergen-Belsen to be taken intact as a “concession” to the Allies and that he was ignorant about the true nature of the conditions that existed in the camp. Himmler’s actions backfired dramatically as pictures of the appalling conditions flashed around the world.
“The things in this camp are beyond describing,” said one British soldier interviewed for a newsreel. “When you actually see them for yourselves, you know what you’re fighting for. Pictures in the paper can’t describe it all. The things they have committed—well, nobody would think they were human at all.”
Despite this disastrous attempt to curry favor with the Allies, Himmler still continued to act against Hitler’s wishes. On April 20, he had a meeting with Norbert Masur, an emissary of the World Jewish Congress, and agreed to release 1000 Jewish women from Ravensbrück concentration camp. Himmler’s only stipulation was that they be categorized as “Poles,” not Jews—that way he hoped Hitler would never get to hear of his actions. Later that night, after Masur had gone, Himmler confided to Felix Kersten, his masseur: “If I could have a fresh start I would do many things differently now. But as a loyal soldier I had to obey, for no state can survive without obedience and discipline.”10
It was not just Himmler who was disobeying the German leader during the last moments of the war, but entire SS units. Deep in the Führer’s bunker in Berlin, Hitler was woken on April 21 by the noise of artillery. It was the moment he must have believed was inconceivable—the Red Army had reached Berlin. Hitler ordered SS General Felix Steiner to make a counter-attack against the soldiers of Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front who were advancing through the capital’s northern suburbs. Steiner refused. “When the order came in,” says Franz Riedweg,11 General Steiner’s adjutant, “he said, ‘I will not launch another attack on this Russian avalanche. I’d be sending men to their death. I won’t sacrifice my troops for a senseless command.’” When he heard of Steiner’s refusal, Hitler shouted and screamed in the worst display of anger that anyone in the bunker had ever seen. The SS had deserted him. All that was left to do now, he said openly, was for him to take his own life.
On April 23, the news of Hitler’s outburst was passed to Himmler, who that day was meeting Count Folke Bernadotte, a representative of the Red Cross. Himmler believed that, because Hitler had announced he was going to commit suicide (and might even be dead already), he was now empowered to act on behalf of the Reich. He told Bernadotte that he could take a proposal with him to the Western Allies—Germany would surrender unconditionally to Britain and the United States, but not to the Soviet Union.
Himmler’s plan for partial surrender was rejected by the Allies, but news of his attempt to end the war in the West was broadcast on BBC Radio and Hitler learned of it. The German leader was not dead—far from it. When he heard the news Hitler was still able to feel one of the most powerful emotions of all—betrayal. “Of course Hitler was outraged in the extreme,” says Bernd Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven,12 who was a member of the General Staff of the German army and was in the bunker at the time.
Militarily, there was no hope left. And now this move had been made by the man he probably had trusted most. This man had deserted him and approached the Allies. As a result, Hitler took the logical step and dictated his political and personal wills. And within two days he was dead.
Hitler killed himself just before 3.30 P.M. on April 30, 1945, as Red Army soldiers approached the German parliament building, the Reichstag. He died leaving a political testimony composed the previous night—one which blamed the Jews for causing the war. Hitler died as he had lived, consumed with hatred for all Jewish people, and without a hint of remorse. As we have seen, through the twists and turns of the development and implementation of the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” Hitler could be closely involved in the detail of the policy at one moment, more distant at another. But, as Hitler’s last dealings with Himmler demonstrate, it was the Führer who was consistent to the end in his fanatical hatred of the Jews. He was the most ideologically driven of all the leading Nazis.
Himmler revealed himself to be more malleable to events than the man he served: not just negotiating to hand over Jews for cash, but even trying to arrange a secret peace settlement. For Himmler, unlike Hitler, appears to have believed in the last days of the war that there was a future beyond the conflict; and by acting as he did he caused consternation among members of his SS entourage. On May 5th, at Admiral Doenitz’s headquarters at the Muerwick Navy School in Flensburg in northern Germany, Himmler held a last meeting with senior figures in the SS—among them Rudolf Höss. “Destiny has a great new task for me,” announced Himmler. “I will have to undertake this task alone. So now I give you my last order. Disappear into the Wehrmacht!”
Höss was astonished. He had clearly been expecting some symbolic last act—not this tawdry instruction to run off and hide. “This was the farewell message from the man to whom I had looked up so much,” wrote Höss, “in whom I had had such firm faith, and whose orders, whose every word had been gospel to me.” Nonetheless, Höss followed Himmler’s instructions to “disappear” into the armed services. He picked up a naval uniform and tried to pass himself off as an ordinary member of the German Kriegsmarine.
Himmler’s confidence that “destiny” had a great new task for him was, like so many of his beliefs, a fantasy. Just more than two weeks after his last meeting with Höss, on May 23, he committed suicide, having finally realized that there was no possibility that the Allies would do business with a man responsible for the murder of millions. That he ever did entertain such thoughts reveals much about the man: his capacity for delusion, his inflated sense of self-importance, his crazed optimism. Above all, however, it shows his opportunism—how, despite having been Hitler’s loyal creature for so many years, when the situation changed he was prepared to be someone else’s.
With Hitler and Himmler dead, and other, lesser perpetrators scurrying for cover, the days immediately after the end of the war ought to have been a time of comfort and recuperation for all those who had suffered in the camps—but they were not.
Helena Citrónová and her sister wandered around newly liberated Germany in confusion during May and June 1945, mingling on the crowded roads with German refugees trying to escape to the West. They slept in barns or bombed out houses, and scavenged food wherever they could. It was not long before they encountered soldiers of the Red Army. As far as Helena and her sister were concerned, however, these men behaved not as liberators but as conquerors. There were occasions when the Soviet soldiers sought out the refugees wherever they were spending the night. “They were drunk—totally drunk,” says Helena. “They were wild animals.” The soldiers entered the places where they slept and “looked for cute girls and raped them.” Helena hid under her sister as this was happening, hoping that the sight of her sister, ten years older than she was and often mistaken for her mother, would cause the soldiers to look elsewhere. It was a ploy that worked, but she still heard everything that the Red Army soldiers did to the other women.
I heard screaming until they were quiet and had no more strength left. There were cases where they were raped to death. They strangled them. I turned my head because I didn’t want to see because I couldn’t help them—I was afraid they would rape my sister and me. They were animals. No matter where we hid they found our hiding places and raped some of my girlfriends—they did horrible things to them. Right to the last minute we couldn’t believe that we were still meant to survive. We thought if we didn’t die of the Germans we’d die of
the Russians.
Helena herself had one especially narrow escape. One morning she went for a bike ride and “became ecstatic with riding. I loved to ride a bicycle as a child at home—the freedom and the quiet.” She rode off far into the bright spring countryside. Then, when she stopped for a rest by a deserted warehouse,[A] Russian man came along with a motorcycle. He’d seen a young woman—Jewish, not Jewish, it didn’t matter. He threw his motorcycle down and a terrible battle began. I don’t know how I managed to get away from this cruel Russian soldier, this criminal. He hadn’t seen sex in a long time and he could not manage to rape me. I kicked and I bit and I screamed and he asked me all the time if I was German. I said, “No, I am Jewish from the camp.” I showed him the number on my arm. And at that moment he recoiled. Maybe he himself was Jewish. I don’t know what he was. He turned, stood up and ran.
The exact number of sexual attacks perpetrated by Soviet soldiers as they advanced through Germany and then in the immediate aftermath of the war will never be known, but the figure is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. In recent years much publicity has been given to the suffering of German women in cities like Berlin. The revelation that women who had already endured so much mistreatment in camps like Auschwitz were then subsequently raped by their liberators, however, adds a level of nausea to the history that did not exist before.
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