Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

by Nicholas Best

* * *

  WHILE THE MEN of the Thunderbird Division advanced through the SS barracks, clearing it of the enemy before turning their attention to the prisoners in the adjacent concentration camp, other American troops were approaching from a different direction. An advance party from the Forty-second Rainbow Division was probing forward toward Munich, but had been urged by some war correspondents to make a quick detour to Dachau on the way, even though it wasn’t part of the plan. With thirty thousand inmates in imminent danger of execution, the division’s commander had needed little persuading. He had sent Brigadier-General Henning Linden forward to reach Dachau and report back on what he found there.

  Linden was a small man brandishing a swagger stick just like General Patton’s. Accompanied by a posse of reporters, he followed the railway spur to the abandoned boxcars and then drove east around the perimeter of the camp toward the main gate. They were almost there when they heard shooting. Thinking it was aimed at them, Linden’s party abandoned their Jeeps and ran for cover in a drainage ditch. The shooting stopped after a while and an SS officer strolled over to make contact. He declined to put up his hands at first, but was persuaded to do so after Henning hit him on the side of the head with his stick.

  The Germans were waiting to surrender the camp at the main gate. They were led by Lieutenant Heinrich Wicker, Dachau’s new commandant, who had only been at the camp two days. The real commandant had fled the day before, leaving Wicker to surrender to the Americans and take the blame for something that had had nothing to do with him.

  Wicker was not a happy man as he stood at the gate, a very junior officer recently arrived from the Russian front and now saddled with the responsibility for appalling crimes committed by other people. He, too, had wanted to flee that morning, but had been persuaded to stay by Victor Maurer, a Swiss representative of the Red Cross. Maurer argued that Wicker should continue to keep order in the camp until the Americans took over, for fear that the prisoners would riot into the town otherwise, spreading typhus in all directions and wreaking havoc on the local population. Maurer had assured Wicker that the Americans would give the German garrison safe conduct once the camp had been handed over, allowing them to return unharmed to their own lines. The two of them had negotiated an agreement to that effect, after which Wicker had ordered his men to remain at their posts and offer no resistance when the Americans appeared.

  Carrying a white flag on a broomstick, Maurer accompanied Wicker toward General Linden. Wicker saluted and formally surrendered the camp to Linden. The general didn’t have enough troops with him to move in at once, so he sent to the rear for reinforcements and stood waiting for a few minutes until they arrived. In an account hotly disputed by others, Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune claimed that she and Sergeant Peter Furst of Stars and Stripes then became the first Americans to enter the camp, in the company of an SS guide:

  There was not a soul in the yard when the gate was opened. As we learned later, the prisoners themselves had taken over control of their enclosure the night before, refusing to obey any further orders from the German guards, who had retreated to the outside. The prisoners maintained strict discipline among themselves, remaining close to their barracks so as not to give the SS men an excuse for mass murder.

  But the minute we entered, a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?” in about sixteen languages came from the barracks two hundred yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium.

  Tattered, emaciated men weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!” swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled. In the confusion, they were so hysterically happy that they took the SS man for an American. During a wild five minutes, he was patted on the back, paraded on shoulders and embraced enthusiastically by the prisoners. The arrival of the American soldiers soon straightened out the situation.5

  General Linden, too, remembered the enthusiasm of the prisoners:

  I moved in with my guards and found that the inmates—having seen the American uniform of my guards there, and those of the 45th Division—approaching the main stockade from the east, had stormed to the fence in riotous joy. This seething mass increased in intensity until the surge against the steel barbed wire fence was such that it broke in several places, and inmates poured out into the roadway between the fence and the moat. In this process, several were electrocuted on the charged fence.6

  Colonel Sparks saw what was happening and tried to calm the prisoners down:

  I told Karl Mann, my interpreter, to yell at them and tell them that we couldn’t let them out, but that food and medicine would be arriving soon. He yelled himself hoarse. Then I saw bodies flying through the air, with the prisoners tearing at them with their hands. I had Karl ask what was going on. The prisoners told him that they were killing the informers among them. They actually tore them to pieces with their bare hands. This went on for about five minutes until they wore themselves out. I had Karl tell them to send their leaders to the fence, where I told them to keep calm, that medicine and food would be coming soon. This seemed to settle them down.7

  Jimmy Gentry, who may have arrived later, saw little excitement in the faces of the prisoners. On a ration of six hundred calories a day, most were simply too apathetic for sustained celebration as the Americans appeared:

  There was not a lot of screaming and yelling and jubilation, not at all. They were blank faced, they were stunned. They did come up to you and hug you and someone, I don’t know who, someone in my squad, said “Don’t let them kiss you on the mouth.” They had diseases, typhus fever, for example, and they would fall down to their knees and hug you around the legs, and kiss your legs and kiss your boots. And of course we didn’t know enough German to know what they were saying and some of them weren’t German. We just knew they were happy to be released, but they were a pitiful sight.8

  Filth, squalor, bodies heaped in piles. A gas chamber and crematorium. Medical experiments, guard dogs, arbitrary execution. The prisoners of Dachau came from all over Europe, but they had all suffered unimaginably at the hands of the Nazis, the German prisoners as much as anyone else. They were in no mood for forgiveness as they embraced their liberators. Their first thoughts were of revenge, summary justice for the guards who had tormented them. It wasn’t enough to have killed the informers in their midst. The prisoners wanted to see their jailers suffer, too, see them writhe in pain and plead miserably for their lives, as the prisoners had done. Some of the inmates had waited years for the day. They were not to be denied, now that it had come.

  Lieutenant George Jackson of the Forty-second Division couldn’t bring himself to intervene as he spotted some prisoners cornering a German soldier who, like Lieutenant Wicker, had probably just come from the front:

  As I entered the camp, I noticed a group of several hundred people on one side of the compound. Going closer, I observed a circle of about two hundred prisoners who were watching an action in their midst. A German soldier with full field pack and rifle who had been trying to escape from Dachau was in the middle of the circle. Two emaciated prisoners were trying to catch him. There was complete silence. It seemed as if there was a ritual taking place, and in a real sense, there was. They were trying to grab hold of him.

  Finally, an inmate who couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds, managed to catch his coat tails. Another inmate grabbed his rifle and began to pound the German soldier on the head. At that point, I realised that if I intervened, which could have been one of my duties, it would have become a very disturbing event. So I turned around and walked away to another part of the camp for about fifteen minutes. When I came back, his head had been battered away. He was dead. They had all disappeared.9

  The Americans, too, continued to kill Germans. Many GIs had alcohol with them, bottles they had been carefully saving for the day the war ended. After half an hour at Dachau, they had decided they needed them at once. One of General Linden’s officers snatched a bottle from a soldier of the Forty-fift
h and threw it into the canal, but others were blind drunk as they lurched through the camp, looking for Germans to kill. And some were mad. Chaplain Leland Loy was standing by a Jeep with his driver when a panic-stricken German came running around the corner with an American GI in pursuit:

  We grabbed him as he came to our jeep, and a 42nd Division soldier came around the corner right behind him. We were standing not more than three feet apart and this 42nd Division man whirled the guy around and said: “Here you are, you sonofabitch,” and machine-gunned him. I said: “Look, fella, you’re crazy. This guy was a prisoner.”

  But the soldier’s only response was: “Gotta kill ‘em, gotta kill ‘em, gotta kill’em.” This guy was psycho.10

  The killing continued well into the evening, when a German counterattack on the camp was quickly repulsed. The final count of Germans killed at Dachau that day may have reached five hundred, although no accurate figures exist. The only certainty is that many died, among them the camp’s hapless commandant, Lieutenant Wicker. The guarantee of safe conduct that he had negotiated with the Red Cross turned out to be worthless. Whether the prisoners killed him, or whether the American army did, Heinrich Wicker’s body wasn’t found and he was never heard of again.

  * * *

  YET NONE OF THE AMERICANS was worrying about the Germans as they advanced through the camp. Dachau had been a model camp once, a Nazi showcase that Hitler’s people had been happy to show to the Red Cross. But the disruption caused by the Allied advance had hit Dachau as well as Belsen. Supplies had failed, typhus had broken out, and the crematorium had been overwhelmed, leaving hundreds of bodies dumped in piles to await incineration. Dead guards and the corpses of murdered informers added to the picture. It was not a scene the Americans would ever forget as they pushed open the gates and struggled to hold the prisoners back, sometimes firing over their heads to prevent them from storming all over the countryside before food and medication could arrive.

  Like other camps yet to be revealed, Dachau had seen medical experiments conducted on prisoners, tests for the Luftwaffe on the limits of human endurance at high altitude or in the freezing cold of the sea. The Americans were taken at once to the medical block, where a Belgian prisoner showed Lieutenant Walsh the place where the experiments had been carried out. The tests had apparently been conducted on criminals condemned to death or on Russian prisoners suspected of being political commissars. Nazi doctors had placed some in compression chambers and subjected them to the atmospheric conditions of up to sixty thousand feet above sea level, sucking the air out of the chamber and observing the prisoners’ reactions through the glass as they lost consciousness and died. Others they had immersed for hours at a time in a tank of freezing water, leaving some to die of cold, some to be revived by a variety of methods, including the bodily warmth of prostitutes. The experiments had been carefully controlled and perfectly scientific, but the subjects had been human beings, not laboratory rats.

  There had been execution squads, too, torture chambers, a brothel—all the usual paraphernalia of the Nazi system. It was a scoop for the journalists accompanying the Forty-second Division, just what they had been hoping for when they asked to be taken to the camp. The Herald Tribune’s Marguerite Higgins made a nuisance of herself when she arrived, demanding to be allowed in at once to interview some of the prominent figures known to have been prisoners there. She mentioned Kurt von Schuschnigg, the former Austrian chancellor; Martin Niemöller, the anti-Nazi pastor; Léon Blum, the former French prime minister; and various European royals, including Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia, Prince Louis de Bourbon, and Prince Xavier of Luxembourg. It was rumoured that Stalin’s son Jacob was in Dachau, too, although no one knew for sure.

  But Linden and Sparks refused to allow her in immediately, pointing to the huge crowd of prisoners pressing at the gate. Ignoring them, Higgins removed the bar holding the gate shut, only to be overwhelmed as the prisoners poured out. The Americans had to use force to get them back in, while Higgins retreated, chastened, to her Jeep. She filed a story in due course, but not the one she wanted. The important prisoners, the Prominente, as the Germans called them, weren’t at Dachau anymore. They had been removed a few days earlier and taken south as hostages, to be used as bargaining chips in the hands of the Nazi leaders as they prepared to negotiate a surrender.

  * * *

  THE PROMINENTE were in Villabassa, known also as Niederdorf, a mountain village in the South Tyrol. They had been driven there in a convoy of coaches under the guard of the SS. But they weren’t expecting to be used as bargaining chips. While the Americans were capturing Dachau, the camp’s most important prisoners were expecting to be shot at any moment, executed in a last act of defiance before the Allies arrived to save them.

  The Prominente were a mixed bunch, high-profile prisoners from perhaps twenty-two different nations across Europe. They ranged in age from four to seventy-three: men, women, and children, Greek generals, British agents, a former Hungarian prime minister and his cabinet, a grandson of the Italian leader Garibaldi. There was no sign of Stalin’s son, but Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was among the prisoners, as was Hjalmar Schacht, the former economics minister of Germany and president of the Reichsbank. So, too, were several German generals who had refused to carry out Hitler’s orders, and the families of Klaus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators in the many unsuccessful attempts to kill him. They had all been collected from Dachau and similar camps and taken south through the Alps to escape the Russian and American armies converging on them from different directions.

  They had passed through Munich first, an eye-opener to those who hadn’t set eyes on a city for several years. The place had been heavily bombed by the Allies, pounded so extensively that many houses had been reduced to rubble, with only the odd wall standing here and there. The trams were still running, their smashed windows replaced with cardboard, but the tram stops seemed hard to locate, with few landmarks left to indicate their whereabouts. Allied aircraft ruled the sky, forcing the convoy to stop several times while the guards ran for cover. When they halted for the night, the prisoners had seen fires burning all around. It was obvious that Germany was close to collapse. The war couldn’t go on much longer, not more than a few days at most.

  After Munich, the Prominente had been held at Innsbruck for a while, until the last of them had been gathered together. While waiting, they had listened to a group of Polish prisoners singing patriotic songs as one of their number was hanged. Then they had continued south through the Brenner Pass to Italy, guarded by a squad of SS whose arrogance had evaporated markedly as they left German soil behind. Nobody was in any doubt that the SS had orders to shoot the prisoners before the Allies appeared. But it was clear, too, that the SS were no longer very sure of themselves, with the German army in disarray and the mountains teeming with Italian partisans.

  The Germans’ resolve had begun to waver as the convoy approached Villabassa on April 28. It stopped by a level crossing a mile short of the village while the guards got out to confer among themselves about what to do. Some had wanted to shoot the prisoners at once and loot their possessions before turning around and heading for home. Others had been reluctant. They had stood arguing among themselves while the prisoners eyed them warily from a distance.

  Sigismund Payne Best, a British agent captured in 1939, had decided that bribery was the prisoners’ best hope of survival. He was discussing it with Thyssen and Schacht, the two money men among the prisoners, when some passing cyclists recognized Kurt von Schuschnigg, Austria’s former chancellor and a native of the Tyrol, among the prisoners. Before long, an Italian had appeared, a leader of the local partisans. Introducing himself as Dr. Antonio Ducia, he had told the German guards that food and shelter could be found for them all in the village.

  Scarcely able to believe it after Dachau, the prisoners had been taken to Villabassa and given food and wine in local hotels. For some, it was the first alcohol they had tasted in years. But th
eir troubles were still far from over. While the others tucked in, Best had joined Fritz, one of the guards, for a drink. After he had had one too many, Fritz had produced Best’s death warrant from his pocket.

  “Here is the order for your execution,” he had told him. “You won’t be alive after tomorrow.”

  “Surely no one is going to be such a fool as to shoot any of us at this stage of the war?” Best had demanded incredulously:

  “No, it is quite certain. See, here it is in black and white—an order from the Reichssicherheitsdienst in Berlin,” and Fritz pushed a paper under my nose. He waved it about a good deal and I could not read it all, but it was an order that the following prisoners must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy and were to be liquidated should there be any danger of this occurring. Then followed a long list of names which, as it reached to the bottom of the page, was probably continued on the back which I did not see. I saw the names of Schuschnigg, Blum, Niemöller, Schacht, Müller, Falkenhausen, Thomas and Halder, as well as Stevens and myself.11

  It had been a fraught night thereafter. Warned that his name was on the list, Pastor Niemöller had gone straight to the SS commander and told him that some of the prisoners had weapons and would certainly fight back if attacked. The commander had denied any such intention, but Niemöller, a U-boat captain in the Great War, had prepared for the worst. So had the other prisoners as they settled down uneasily for the night.

  They had been divided by age and sex. Some had been accommodated in hotels, but many of the men had slept on straw in the town hall with an SS sentry at the end of every row of sleepers. The prisoners had taken turns remaining awake and keeping a close eye on the guards. The SS had tried to segregate the British in a room to themselves, only to be told in no uncertain terms that the British were going to sleep in the same rooms as everyone else. They had no intention of being massacred in the night.

  Now it was morning again, Sunday morning, and they were all still alive. While the American army approached Dachau, its most important prisoners were holding a council of war about what to do next. At the suggestion of the partisans, Sante Garibaldi, a general in the Italian army, was proposing to overpower the SS and remove all the Prominente to a resort hotel in the mountains above Villabassa, where they could safely remain until the war was over.