Thus in the late summer of 1944, some 40,000 Jews selected in Auschwitz and Stutthof had been shipped to two major satellite camps of Dachau—Kaufering and Mühldorf (in the vicinity of Munich)—where Organization Todt used them to build the heavily protected, semiunder-ground halls needed for the production of aircraft. Somewhat later, mainly in the wake of the Auschwitz evacuation, other Jewish workers would be marched to the Harz Mountains, to slave in the tunnels of Dora-Mittelbau where, some Germans still believed, the ongoing production of V-2 rockets would save the Reich.160
The Jewish workers shipped to the Dachau satellite camps were joined by thousands of Hungarian Jews marched directly from Budapest to the Bavarian construction sites.161 OT rapidly proved itself equal to the SS in its mistreatment of the slave laborers, and by the fall of 1944, hundreds had been killed or were too weak to continue working. At this point the Dachau commandant decided to send these Jews back to Auschwitz for gassing.162 Some of these transports left Bavaria at the end of September, others in October 1944.163
It is at this point, in late 1944, that Himmler’s hesitant search for a way out becomes apparent. It seems that at some stage the Reichsführer countermanded the steps taken by his underlings (and approved by his master) to pursue the “Final Solution” but was unable to sustain this alternative, afraid as he was of Hitler’s reaction. Nonetheless, from early 1945 on, in order to find an opening to the West, Himmler was ready to give up some small groups of Jews to prove his goodwill.
During his earlier forays into secret diplomacy, the Reichsführer was represented by the head of the Foreign Intelligence Department of the SD, Walter Schellenberg, who in 1944 had taken over the operations and most of the agents of the disbanded Abwehr. Apart from Schellenberg and his outfit, Himmler’s main delegate had been and continued to be, until the fall of 1944, the business-savvy Becher and, at times, Becher’s colleagues in Budapest, Gerhard Clages, Wisliceny, and Hermann Krumey. Himmler would allow contacts with representatives of Jewish organizations in Switzerland, the War Refugee Board delegates in Bern and various Swiss personalities, without giving any firm commitment about what he was ready to undertake. Simultaneously he would be in touch with Jewish and non-Jewish personalities in Sweden.
According to Becher’s postwar testimony, sometime in the fall of 1944, he convinced Himmler to order an end to the deportations, as an opening to further negotiations with representatives of the Joint and, more specifically with its representative in Switzerland, Sally Mayer. The Jewish representatives were asked to transfer money.164 It seems that in reciprocation, along the lines suggested by Becher, Himmler did indeed issue some order both to Kaltenbrunner and to Pohl; it also appears that in response Mayer, with the agreement of the representative of the War Refugee Board in Switzerland, was ready to set up a blocked account for the Germans in a Swiss bank. But Himmler, who must have sensed that Hitler would not agree to any major compromise in Jewish matters, probably backed down.
Yet, other negotiations went on between the Reichsführer and an old friend of his, the Swiss Federal Councillor Jean-Marie Musy, aiming at the release of tens of thousands of Jews as an opening to negotiations with the Western Powers. As already mentioned, a first train carrying 1,200 Jews from Theresienstadt arrived in Switzerland in January 1945. Informed of the deal, Hitler put an immediate end to it.165 At that stage a third channel appeared more promising: negotiations by way of Sweden. The Swedes informed Himmler in February 1945 that they were ready to undertake a series of humanitarian missions, which, if agreed to by the Germans, could possibly open the way for wider contacts. To that effect Count Folke Bernadotte was dispatched to Germany.166
Bernadotte’s mission, ostensibly under the banner of the Swedish Red Cross but, as in Wallenberg’s case backed in fact by the Swedish government, aimed first at liberating Scandinavian internees from Neuengamme (near Hamburg) and transfering them to Sweden. Himmler agreed. The Swedes then pushed for the release of Jews from Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen, while during the previous months Raoul Wallenberg had extended his activities in Budapest. During March and April 1945 initiatives to save Jews still alive in the camps multiplied, and groups of internees were indeed released as chaos spread throughout Germany.
X
Sometime in January 1945, after preparations had already started several months earlier (including the destruction of crematoriums, the emptying of burial pits, the clearing of ashes, the shipment of hundreds of thousands of items of clothing, and so on), Himmler gave the order for the complete evacuation of all the camps in the East with, according to several testimonies, an ominous warning to the camp commanders: “The Führer holds you personally responsible for…making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy.”167 Other testimonies indicate that the decision about the fate of the inmates was left to the camp commanders.168 Moreover, in a basic directive that had already been issued in July 1944, Glücks had stated clearly that in an “emergency situation” (evacuation) the camp commanders were to follow the directives of the regional HSSPFs. In other words nobody seemed to know who was in charge of the evacuations. But in the rapidly increasing chaos, the marches westward started.
Not all the 700,000 to 800,000 camp inmates lurching along the roads or stranded in open railroad cars during these last months of the war were Jews. A mixed sample of all of Germany’s victims had been herded together; yet, as a reflection of the camps’ population, the Jews ultimately represented a majority of these final victims of the monstrous Reich. During the marches approximately 250,000 of these Jewish prisoners perished from exhaustion, freezing, shooting, or being burned alive.
On January 18, columns of Auschwitz detainees—some 56,000 inmates, including those of satellite camps—started on their way westward toward Gleiwitz from where part was to be sent off by rail to camps in the interior of the Reich and others were to be marched farther on to Gross-Rosen and other camps in Upper Silesia. Hundreds of “stragglers” were shot during the earliest phase of the evacuation.169 In this respect—and regarding the spreading chaos—the rendering of the situation in Höss’s memoirs appears credible: “On all the roads and tracks in Upper Silesia west of the Oder, I now met columns of prisoners, struggling through the deep snow. They had no food. Most of the noncommissioned officers in charge of these stumbling columns of corpses had no idea where they were supposed to be going. They only knew that their final destination was Gross-Rosen. But how to get there was a mystery. On their own authority they requisitioned food from the villages through which they passed, rested for a few hours, then trudged on again. There was no question of spending the night in barns or schools, since these were all crammed with refugees. The route taken by these miserable columns was easy to follow, since every few hundred yards lay the bodies of prisoners who had collapsed or been shot…. I saw open coal trucks, loaded with frozen corpses, whole trainloads of prisoners who had been shunted on to open sidings and left there without food or shelter.”170
Not all evacuees ordered to clamber onto the open train cars stayed in or around Gleiwitz. Some trains actually departed with their human load. Paul Steinberg, whom we already met in Buna, was in one of them. While the Jews marching through German villages mostly remembered indifference from the population or additional brutality, Steinberg tells of a different event, “a precise, detailed, overwhelming memory.” The train had reached Prague in the early hours of a winter day and was crawling with its open load of “vaguely human creatures” under bridges while the Czechs were marching overhead on their way to work. “As one man,” Steinberg recalls, “the Czechs opened their satchels and tossed their lunches down to us without a moment’s hesitation…. We were showered with rolls, slices of bread and butter, potatoes.” Then on the railroad cars the fighting erupted: “A terrible struggle broke out as everyone fought to grab a morsel, a mouthful…. I witnessed a scene of complete degradation…. Three or four men died around a crumbled loaf of bread…. I waited
twelve hours, until night came and my neighbors were only half-conscious, before I ate my bread, silently hiding my face, and my mouth savored my survival. I do not think I would have made it without that bread.” A few days later the surviving passengers reached Buchenwald.171
While the camp inmates were moving westward on foot or in open railroad cars, SS officers, camp staff members, and guards, were of course traveling in the same direction, but under better conditions. At times, however, the camp evacuations linked staff and detainees in unexpected ways. Thus during the last days of the war, on April 28, 1945, a Red Cross member watched some 5,000 detainees and their male and female SS guards moving westward out of Ravensbrück. At the head of one of the columns, a small cart pulled by six skeletal females carried the wife of one of the SS officers of the camp and her mounds of belongings. The lady, it seems, had to be particularly well attended to, as she was suffering from the consequences of an excessive binge of raisins.172
During the marches the guards usually decided on their own to kill the stragglers. However, some notorious decisions to murder the prisoners were taken at higher levels. Thus, during the second half of January between 5,000 and 7,000 Jewish inmates were assembled in Königsberg from various Stutthof satellite camps and sent marching to the northeast along the Baltic coast. Most were women. As the column reached the fishing village of Palmnicken, and could not move on overland, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, together with local SS officers, members of Organization Todt, and the commanders of the satellite camps from which the inmates had arrived, decided to liquidate the entire group.173 Only two to four hundred of the prisoners survived the massacre on the seashore.
The same murderous conditions surrounded the evacuation of the Buchenwald inmates. Of the 3,000 Jews sent to Theresienstadt, barely a few hundred reached it in early April.174 As for the 22,000 inmates sent marching to Bavaria at the same time, around 8,000 were murdered, while the others reached Dachau and were liberated by the Americans. From the 45,000 inmates of the satellite camps of Buchenwald, 13,000 to 15,000 lost their lives during the evacuation.175
None of the major camps was entirely emptied of inmates in the evacuations. In Auschwitz, for example, sick inmates remained in each of the three camps after the January 19 mass evacuation. And SS units, still sporadically battling the Soviets in the area, also remained for a full week. Although the Breslau HSSPF had given the order to murder all the remaining inmates, the SS units rather concentrated on the destruction of what remained of the gas chambers and the crematoriums and the burning of archives. Yet one such unit murdered 200 female inmates in Birkenau before Himmler’s men finally left the camp.
“We all said to each other that the Russians would arrive soon, at once,” Primo Levi, who in those days was an inmate in the Monowitz infirmary block, reminisced. “We all proclaimed it, we were all sure of it, but at bottom nobody believed it. Because one loses the habit of hoping in the Lager [the camp], and even of believing in one’s own reason. In the Lager it is useless to think, because events happen for the most part in an unforeseeable manner; and it is harmful, because it keeps alive a sensitivity which is a source of pain, and which some providential natural law dulls when suffering passes a limit.”176
As Levi was waiting for the Soviet troops to liberate the camp—which they did on January 29—Ruth Kluger and Cordelia (Edvardson) had already left Auschwitz for some time. Kluger and her mother had been transferred to the small Christianstadt labor camp, a satellite camp of Gross-Rosen, also in Upper Silesia; Cordelia had been shipped off to a camp near Hamburg (probably Neuengamme). In early 1945 Ruth and her mother started marching in the mass of inmates, but after a few days they escaped from the march and survived by moving from farm to farm, then by blending into the stream of German refugees fleeing westward, until they reached Straubing, in Bavaria. Soon thereafter the Americans arrived.177 Cordelia was among the sick inmates (mainly children and youngsters) saved by the arrangement between Himmler and the Swedish government; a new life started for her, too, in Sweden.178
As for Filip Müller, his chances of survival were slim: Members of the Sonderkommando were not to be left alive. He did escape nonetheless, marching, then ferrying, then marching again to Mauthausen, then to Melk, and farther to Gusen 1, and by early April 1945, out of Gusen again. The SS did not give up: All stragglers were shot; yet, instead of leaving the corpses by the roadside, they ordered Müller and some of his companions to load them on a horse-drawn vehicle, take them to a local cemetery, and bury them in a mass grave; traces had to be effaced as thoroughly as possible.179 Finally the group reached some small camp near Wels: starving prisoners lay there on the floors of the barracks: The guards were gone. Müller settled on a rafter and waited. A few days later shouting inmates spread the news: “We are free!”
“It was, incredibly, a complete anti-climax,” Müller reminisced. “The moment, on which all my thoughts and secret wishes had been concentrated for three years, evoked neither gladness nor, for that matter, any other feelings inside me. I let myself drop down from my rafter and crawled on all fours to the door. Outside I struggled along a little further, but then I simply stretched out on a woodland ground and fell fast asleep.” The final image, whether precise or not, was a necessary finale to his memoir and, in one form or another, to many individual stories of liberation: “I awoke to the monotonous noise of vehicles rumbling past. Walking across to the nearby road I saw a column of American tanks clanking along in the direction of Wels. As I stared after the convoy of steel giants I realized that the hideous Nazi terror had ended at last.”180
XI
During the last months of the war, while one German city after another suffered catastrophic damages, while transportation was becoming increasingly chaotic, the Gestapo sent out new deportation summonses. In January 1945 many of the 200 Mischlinge or partners in mixed marriages who still lived in Stuttgart were ordered to be ready for deportation to Theresienstadt.181
Sent on January 27, 1945, the Stuttgart Gestapo summonses ordered recipients “to report to the Transit Camp Bietigheim (Ludwigsburg County) on Monday February 12, 1945, for assignment to an external work commando.” The usual list of food rations and items to be taken along followed, and so did the usual administrative orders: “You must report your departure as well as relinquish any food ration cards to the police by February 10, 1945. Children [mainly Mischlinge of the first degree] under the age of 16 are to be placed in the care of relatives.”182
Similar summonses were being sent out, approximately at the same time, throughout the entire Reich. On February 13, in the afternoon (“perfect spring weather”), Klemperer recorded: “Today at eight o’clock [in the morning] I was at Neumark’s. Frau Jährig came out of his room weeping. Then he told me: Evacuation of those capable of work, it’s called outside work duty; as I myself [i.e., Klemperer] am released from duty, I remain here. So, the end is more likely for me than for those who are leaving. He: That is not the case; on the contrary, remaining here is a privilege…. The circular to be delivered stated that one had to present oneself at 3 Zeughausstrasse early on Friday morning, wearing working clothes and with hand luggage, which would have to be carried for a considerable distance, and with provisions for two to three days travel…. The whole thing is explicitly no more than outside work duty—but is without exception regarded as a death march.”183
A few hours later the bombing of Dresden started. At first Victor and Eva lost contact with each other in the pandemonium…. By chance they met again on the Elbe riverbank. They took off Victor’s star and, as non-Jews now, they hid with other refugees at the house of acquaintances outside the burning city, before moving westward.
The last opinion reports of the SD collected in the Reich in early 1945 confirm the generalized obsession with the Jewish issue in the crumbling Reich. They mainly indicate various (fragmentary) aspects of the depth of anti-Jewish hatred both among wide segments of the populace and the elites. The belief in the Jewish resp
onsibility for the war had taken root. According to historian Robert Gellately, during the last two years of the war, letters (including some from academics) were sent to the Ministry of Propaganda suggesting that the Jews remaining in Germany be collected at likely bombing targets. The number of Jews killed would be announced after each raid. One of these letters suggested that even if this measure did not stop Allied bombings, at least many Jews would be exterminated; another proposal was to threaten the Americans and the British that a tenfold number of Jews would be shot for each German civilian killed in a bombing raid.184 The Volksgenossen had forgotten that essentially there were no Jews in the Reich anymore.
During the last weeks of 1944 people in the Stuttgart region criticized the publicity given to Soviet atrocities and argued that the Germans had done much worse in their treatment of the Jews;185 others believed that whatever was befalling Germany was the result of Jewish vengeance.186 All in all, it seems that Nazi indoctrination was keeping its hold. On April 12, 1945, the British chief of military intelligence reported: “The Germans…caution us against appointment of Jewish burgomeisters which [they say] is a psychological mistake and which militates against cooperation of German civilian population.”187
The persistence of such deep-rooted anti-Semitism was confirmed by various opinion polls conducted in the Western zones of Germany shortly after the surrender.188 This in turn indicates that, after a certain point, the decline of Hitler’s popularity did not necessarily lead to a fading of anti-Jewish hatred. It has been argued that Hitler still had much popular support at the beginning of 1945.189 This may have been true in January and February 1945 but was probably changing around March and April, according to the well-informed yet traditionally optimistic entries in Goebbels’s diaries.
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