by Larry Loftis
Her body gave up.
Everything went black.
* * *
34. “Poetic knowledge,” the ancients called it; truths that are grasped intuitively, such as another’s love, or a mother’s intuition that something awful had happened to a child far away.
35. The female guards, or Aufseherinnen, technically were not members of the SS, which was an all-male organization, but of the SS Women’s Auxiliary (weibliche SS-Gefolge).
36. Beginning in 1943, prison uniforms were not always issued, and by 1944, inmates were allowed to keep their own clothes.
37. An assistant for administrative or menial tasks, such as supervising labor.
38. Convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, Gebhardt was sentenced to death on August 20, 1947, and executed on June 2, 1948.
39. The women were tricked into the procedure, either by statement that it was an examination or by the promise of release if they consented. Many women became ill from the X-rays, and some died.
40. Sentenced at the Ravensbrück war crimes trial in 1947 to ten years in prison.
41. Corrie ten Boom, who could hear the cries from a punishment room near her Barrack 8, described it as such. These were “the sounds of hell itself,” she wrote later. “They were not the sounds of anger, or of any human emotion, but of a cruelty altogether detached: blows landing at a regular rhythm, screams keeping pace. We would stand in our ten-deep ranks with our hands trembling at our sides, longing to jam them against our ears, to make the sounds stop.”
CHAPTER 18
THE SLAUGHTER
The body was limp and still. Was she dead?
The guard called for help and Frau Schurer was carried to the infirmary.
She was alive, they found, but unconscious; she had slipped into a semicoma. A camp doctor gave her an injection and Odette was revived.
And returned to the Bunker.
Paris
MEANWHILE IN PARIS, THE Allies battled for control. The city was liberated on August 25 when Prussian general Dietrich von Choltitz, in defiance of Hitler’s order, refused to level it and surrendered to the Free French forces.
Major Buckmaster flew in the following day to celebrate with F Section agents, and as he crossed the Champs-Élysées, a young boy—only five or six—marched up to him.
“Permit me,” the boy said in perfect English, “to shake hands with a gentleman. We have not seen any gentlemen for four years.”
Ravensbrück
ON THE LAST DAY of August Sühren stopped by to check on Odette.
“Have you any complaints?”
Odette maintained her composure. “Yes, I have. For no reason that I know, the central heating was turned on in my cell, and for a week I was left without food.”
“There was a reason,” Sühren said. “The British and the Americans landed in the South of France where you worked as a British spy. Because of this, you were punished by order of the Gestapo.”
Indeed, the efforts by SPINDLE and Cammaerts’s JOCKEY circuit had been highly effective; when the Allies landed at Provence and moved north, there was little resistance. “Peter Churchill and Odette had both been caught somewhat earlier,” Major Buckmaster later explained, “but the organization in which they had been most concerned was still able to continue without them, so well had they done their work.”
Odette held Sühren’s eye. “You are aware that it is almost a year and a half ago since I was arrested?”
He said he was.
It was no use arguing; the commandant had his orders.
Sühren asked if she needed anything and she said no. She was likely to die at any moment anyway and they’d bring the charrette and she’d exit through the chimney. It was belligerent defiance, but she was determined to go down fighting.
Her condition continued to deteriorate and her glands began to swell again, so it was back to the infirmary. Strangely, all medical exams were conducted with the prisoners completely nude—a disincentive for unnecessary visits, to be sure, but perhaps also for intimidation.
A camp doctor took X-rays of Odette’s throat and told her that she had tuberculosis, a common excuse for extermination. Odette asked to see the X-ray plates but was refused.
When Sühren next visited she demanded to see the plates and he relented. They showed that she did not, in fact, have tuberculosis. But what she overheard the doctor say to someone in passing was even more halting: if she continued living in the Bunker, he said, she’d be dead within a few weeks.
The commandant had a decision to make. If he followed Gestapo orders—keeping Odette in the Bunker—she’d soon be dead. But dark clouds were gathering over the Nazi dream and there were now other considerations. Paris had fallen and the Americans and British had just taken Bruges, Brussels, and Antwerp. It would not be long, he figured, before the Allies stormed the Rhine and he needed insurance.
Frau Churchill was his premium.
He sent Odette again to the infirmary and she was given injections for scurvy, something for her hair, and vitamins. He told her that she would be moved to a cell with light and fresh air once one became available.
Her gland was still the size of a grapefruit, however, and the SS doctor wanted to operate. Odette refused.
Soon thereafter Heinrich Himmler, SS Reichsführer and supervisor of concentration camps, visited. Prisoners who were sick, old, or incapable of work, he told Sühren, were to be executed. Since Odette could hardly stand without assistance, the order placed her squarely in Himmler’s crosshairs.
Ravensbrück crematorium ovens. GERMAN FEDERAL ARCHIVES
The slaughter began. And it wasn’t just Ravensbrück. Himmler’s orders extended to other camps and included executions of those perfectly capable of work. The first week of September, more than seven hundred prisoners were executed by firing squad at the SS concentration camp in Vught, Holland.
Surprisingly, Odette survived the September siege, but the fall brought a new hazard: Allied bombing. In November US bombers began nightly raids on the Siemens factory a mile away and Odette could hear the incendiaries landing dangerously close.
December came and Odette was finally moved to a new cell. She had been in the Bunker three months and eight days.
Heinrich Himmler visiting Ravensbrück. MAHN UND GEDENKSTATTE RAVENSBRüCK
Her new cell, number 32, had light and a window for fresh air, but was located just six yards from the crematorium. Each day ashes and hair would float into her quarters, the last cries of the departed, along with the stench of burned souls. The sight of the cinders, which would cover every inch of her cell—together with the foul smell—was nauseating. Each day, every day, remnants of fellow prisoners—women who only hours before had families and friends and hopes and dreams—were now meaningless specks of rubbish to be swept up and discarded in a trash bin like rotted fruit.
And while she had escaped the screams of the punishment room, she would soon hear something far worse.
To expedite executions, Himmler ordered the construction of a second oven, as well as a gas chamber; countless prisoners could be eliminated this way without the loss of bullets needed by the army.
And so the killings ushered in Christmas.
January 1945
ON JANUARY 12 THE Red Army launched a massive offensive, breaking through the Wehrmacht’s Eastern Front and pushing into Prussia. Five days later the Russians took Warsaw. Knowing that the Communists would soon be pushing into Germany, Himmler ordered the evacuation of camps closest to the advance, and the execution of prisoners incapable of travel. At Auschwitz, thousands of inmates were rounded up and forced to evacuate on foot on the 17th. One in four would perish in what became known as the “death march,” a procedure that occurred at most every camp.
With the closing of Auschwitz, Himmler ordered SS Obersturmführer Johann Schwarzhuber to transfer from there to Ravensbrück, where he became deputy commandant. Soon after arriving, Schwarzhuber was called into a
meeting with Sühren and Dr. Richard Trommer, one of the camp physicians, to receive Himmler’s latest: all women who were sick or incapable of marching were to be executed.
Almost every afternoon Schwarzhuber would confer with other camp officials and prepare a list for that day’s executions in the gas chamber. The victims would be told that they were being transferred to “Mittwerda,” a fictitious concentration camp, and that evening they were loaded onto a truck and driven to the killing building. They were told to undress for delousing and 150 were sent into the chamber at a time, the doors locked behind them. A male inmate would drop a canister of poison gas in from the roof, shut the hatch, and wait until the sounds ceased.
“I heard moaning and whimpering from inside,” Schwarzhuber later testified.
* * *
FROM JANUARY ON, WITH the Red Army on their doorstep, SS camps began executing prisoners at a breakneck pace. On January 15, concentration camps had reached their maximum number of inmates: 714,211. By April 1, between executions and deaths from starvation and disease, that number had been reduced to 550,000.42
At Ravensbrück, Sühren estimated that 1,500 women were killed in the gas chamber alone, but his figure was highly conservative; the more likely number was between 4,500 and 6,000.43
With the passage of each week the carnage came closer and closer to Odette. From her cell one day she heard prisoners being herded into the crematorium.
Living prisoners.
“I could hear them screaming and struggling,” she later testified, “and I could hear the doors being opened and shut.”
As always, it was Nazi efficient: the line, the lock, and the screams.
Endless screams.
Odette could only wonder when hers would be next.
Auxerre, France
HUGO BLEICHER, MEANWHILE, HAD gone to ground. When Paris was on the verge of falling, he had requested that Colonel Reile post him to Auxerre. A number of Hugo’s former agents had gone there and it was far enough from Paris to be safe, he thought. He requested ten agents from the Paris office and Reile sent them, but within days they all fled. It was now just him and his mistress, Suzanne.
Which made it almost too easy.
The men surrounding Hugo’s house each night waited for their chance.
They would kill the traitor girlfriend, too.
* * *
WITHOUT AN EFFECTIVE FORCE, Hugo decided to join the main army for the time being. He had been staying in a private house but the Maquis were raiding homes and he decided to relocate to the local garrison. The four hundred troops in Auxerre, however, were pitiful—mostly elderly and Russians recruited from POW camps. When British forces were heard to be in Sens, only fifty miles away, the Auxerre troops disappeared. Worse still, the Maquis had blocked the line of retreat to Dijon.
Hugo was surrounded.
He decided to flee with Suzanne but soon discovered that his car had been stolen. Within hours he requisitioned a new Citroën and they set out to run the gauntlet. Fully aware that some of his French agents had joined the Maquis and would be looking for him, he brought along a machine pistol and several hand grenades. It would be the ultimate game of cat and mouse and he welcomed the challenge.
Along the main road leaving Auxerre, the Maquis were waiting. They had set up a road block and several surrounded the Citroën, guns pointed. Hugo spoke a few words of English and casually handed over his stolen identity papers.
Captain in the British Special Air Service.
The Maquis apologized and shook his hand. Hugo waved as he pulled away, gunning up. From Dijon, Hugo and Suzanne hightailed it to Holland. There he was posted to Nijmegen, although he wasn’t given any specific duties. As he waited for an assignment, one morning in March a sentry burst into his apartment.
“The town is encircled,” he said. “The British paratroopers are here.”
Hugo and Suzanne bolted for Utrecht, twenty miles south of Amsterdam, where German intelligence had set up underground operations. No sooner than they arrived, however, the Canadian army pushed in from the North Sea and took control. Once again, Hugo was cut off.
After three weeks Hugo’s local captain called him in, saying that they had negotiated a capitulation to the Canadians and that everyone would go to a prisoner of war camp as one body.
Hugo refused.
“You are a soldier and must obey,” the captain said.
“I can obey no order that obliges me to be taken prisoner.”
Hugo pulled his hat down, walked out, and again went to ground.
He was now the ferret.
Germany
THE ALLIES, MEANWHILE, WERE racing through the German heartland. On February 26 the American Ninth Army had reached the Rhine near Düsseldorf and a week later, on March 7, the Third Army crossed it at Remagen. In the east, the Red Army entered Austria on the 30th, and also took Danzig in the north.
At Ravensbrück, help finally began to arrive. On April 4 a convoy of American and Canadian Red Cross trucks rolled into camp. In high-level negotiations between Carl Burckhardt, president of the International Red Cross, and SD intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg, the parties agreed that 300 inmates would be evacuated to Switzerland, 299 of whom were French.
Odette was not one of them.
Three days later the Red Cross rescued all of the Danish and Norwegian prisoners. They left food parcels for the remaining prisoners, but between what was looted by the guards and given to the main camp barracks, Odette saw not one item.
* * *
WITH EACH PASSING DAY another stone fell from a Third Reich pillar. On April 9 the Germans lost Königsberg. On the 11th, the Americans and British reached the Elbe, while the Red Army closed from the east, taking Vienna on the 13th. Three days later, marshal Georgy Zhukov began his drive to Berlin.
Himmler recognized the immediate danger: witnesses. The Allies had already liberated two camps—Buchenwald and Dora—and would be at the gates of others within days. On April 15 he called a meeting of his camp administrators and ordered the complete evacuation of all remaining camps. The following day he sent Ravensbrück another order: Execute every prisoner in the Bunker. There could be no witnesses to the horrors of the hellhole.44
Although Odette was not in the Bunker at the moment, that formality was due only to her illness. As one under a death sentence, she was automatically a prisoner of the camp and part of the Bunker roster. Not only that, but having spent more than three months in the pit, she would certainly be called to testify in a war crimes tribunal.
She should be one of the first to go.
For days the stacks burned, their billows a palimpsest of lives snuffed short.
Odette waited.
* * *
THAT SAME WEEK, PETER was informed that he and his fellow prisoners—including the tunnel escapees, all of whom had been recaptured—would be relocated to Flossenbürg.
Peter knew nothing of this concentration camp but would learn soon enough. Upon arrival, the first thing he noticed was smoke rising from the crematorium; it rose all day and inmates he saw were but skeletons, shuffling through their labor until at last their bodies expired.
After quarters assignments, Peter and his fellow officers were allowed time in the yard and they used it to encourage other prisoners. “Keep your chin up!” they whispered through cell doors as they passed along the corridor. “The Allies will be here in a matter of days.”
“It had better be soon,” came one reply. “Only yesterday they took out four men and a woman and hanged them in the shed outside. I saw them pass through the slits in my door. All were naked.”
Three of the naked were notable: Protestant pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and Abwehr deputy chief General Hans Oster, all of whom were implicated in the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life.45 Others would follow.
After five days at Flossenbürg, Peter and twenty other prisoners were crammed into a Black Maria designed for transporting nine.
Included among the group were Prince Philipp of Hesse,46 Baron Wilhelm von Flügge, Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff47—adjutant to Brigadier General Henning von Tresckow—and Josef Müller, chief justice of Bavaria.
Three days later the lorry arrived at the Dachau concentration camp and Müller pulled Peter aside:
“I shall not be coming along with the rest of you,” he said, “for they are taking me to a special cell. I just wanted to tell you that if this is the end for me, as I fear, I shall think to the last of the lovely singing that you and your friends performed as we entered this infamous camp. Good-bye, my friend.”
As Peter clasped Müller’s hand, he couldn’t help thinking that he, too, could be singled out and executed in solitude. The possibility that he might never see Odette again was quite real, he knew, if she was even alive.
Within the hour Peter met Niemöller, as well as the chancellor of Austria, the mayor of Vienna, the German ambassador to Madrid, Bishop Neuhaüsler of Munich, and Bishop Gabriel Piguet of Clermond-Ferrand. Shortly thereafter he met the commander in chief of the Greek army, four of his generals, and General Garibaldi and Colonel Ferraro of the Italian Partisans.
The following morning Peter and this respectable group boarded two coaches bound for yet another camp: Innsbruck. As the lorries drove through Munich, Peter stared at the destruction—no houses, just rubble. Overhead, RAF bombers filled the sky. That night, he could see fires in every direction. Surely the Germans would surrender soon.
On the evening of April 21 they arrived at Innsbruck and marveled at the snow-capped mountains shining majestically in the moonlight. Morning came and with it another delivery of dignitaries, including Dr. Miklós Kállay, prime minister of Hungary, and Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank. Most important of the incoming group were two of Hitler’s top military leaders who had fallen out of favor with the Führer: General Franz Halder, former chief of the German army High Command, and Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin, former chief of the operational branch of the army General Staff.