The British had their first experience of a Nazi death camp near Celle as they advanced towards the Elbe in the second week of April 1945. The 11th Armoured Division was pushing towards its military objectives when its forward troops were met by a Mercedes staff car containing two Wehrmacht colonels. They had come to offer them Bergen-Belsen camp, where, they said, the inmates were dying of typhus. It was three days before the British entered the camp, and they were naturally horrified by what they saw.117
Belsen was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, Treblinka or Majdanek. It had been set up as recently as 1943 to house ‘exchange Jews’. These were Jews with non-German passports who Himmler believed could be bartered for money or for German nationals in Allied captivity. The idea of selling Jews to the West went back to the abortive Evian Conference of 1938. Conditions at Belsen had been as good as any until the end of the war, when the SS began driving the inmates of the camps west, in order to prevent them falling into the hands of the advancing Red Army. As much as possible, evidence of the Final Solution was to be destroyed. Hitler was furious with Himmler when he learned on 13 or 14 April that the Americans had liberated Buchenwald and found 20,000 prisoners the SS had failed to evacuate or shoot. Hitler had barked into the telephone at the SS chief: ‘. . . make sure that your people don’t become sentimental!’118
Large numbers of former prisoners from eastern camps were shipped into Belsen. They were not only Jews. Estimates for the number of Jews in Belsen at the time of the liberation vary, but at most they were not much more than half. There were prisoners from all over Europe as well as the usual concentration camp inmates: political prisoners, ‘anti-social elements’ and criminals - including homosexuals - who had contravened Article 175 of the Prussian Legal Code. Not only were the food and medical supplies inadequate to deal with them, but they brought typhus. Lack of food had resulted in outbreaks of cannibalism. By the time the British had made up their minds to go in, the plague had reached epidemic proportions. Over the next few weeks a quarter of the 60,000 inhabitants would die. Most of these were deemed to have been beyond medical care, but some died because the British were at a loss to know how to treat and feed them.119 In hindsight it is easy to accuse them of negligence, but they still had military objectives. There was a war to be won, and a pressing need to prevent the Red Army from absorbing the whole of Germany. Himmler knew that many Britons wanted to push on and fight the Russians, and while he bartered Jews with the Swedish count Bernadotte, he hoped that he himself might be retained in the fight against Bolshevism.
The living skeletons of Belsen wrought their revenge on the hated kapos, throwing some 150 of them out of first-floor windows under the eyes of the British soldiers.120
Baden and Württemberg
The Badenese university town of Heidelberg was liberated by the Americans on 30 March. The philosopher Karl Jaspers recorded the event in his diary. He had been put out to grass because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife Gertrud - or Trudlein - and they had lived through recent years in mortal fear that she would be deported to the east.
No electricity, no water, no gas. We are trying to equip ourselves. A spirit stove will do for a short time. Water can be fetched from the spring at the Klingentor. The young people are in the best mood. It is magnificent fun for them to live like Indians . . .
. . . this morning the Americans arrived on the Neuenheimerlandstrasse, they found all the bridges destroyed and stood in front of them with tanks. They discovered the boathouse near the new bridge, took the paddleboats and paddled across the river, landing at the grammar school where they are stationed. They must have arrived upstream by the Neckar.
Frau von Jaffe came to congratulate us that at last our Trudlein is free: a moment without words. It is a miracle that we are still alive.121
Jaspers clearly enjoyed the spectacle of the limp German resistance. It was not long before the Americans sought him out as a representative of the ‘other Germany’ and gave him responsibility for the university. Jaspers had none of the misgivings about the liberators that Germans felt elsewhere; when he delivered the principal speech on the reopening of parts of the university on 15 August, he dwelt on the experience of liberation. Most likely his attitude towards the Americans was one of heartfelt gratitude. 122
The end of the war found the future mayor of Berlin and president of the Federal Republic Richard von Weizsäcker at a family chicken farm near Lindau on Lake Constance crammed full of family members, almost exclusively women. There was his sister, a refugee from East Prussia, whose husband had been missing since 1944 and was never to return; his aunt Olympia from Breslau, with her two daughters - both sons had been killed and her husband interned like his brother, the physicist Carl Friedrich. In the summer another pair joined them - his sister’s parents-in-law, the eighty-year-old Siegfried Eulenburg (who had commanded the First Foot in the Great War) and his wife. They had come from their estates in East Prussia in an old landau driven by three horses.123
The town of Pforzheim had suffered horribly in the bombing. With great interest Alfred Döblin, novelist and psychiatrist, watched people climbing on top of heaps of rubble: ‘What was their business there? Did they want to dig something out? They carried flowers in their hands. On the heap they set up crosses and signs. These were graves. They put down the flowers, knelt and said their prayers.’124 Another writer, Ernst Jünger, witnessed the scenes in Pforzheim that year. He too saw the walls of rubble, the white crosses and the flowers for those who had been buried alive.125
Baden was also an objective of French forces, and it was in the Black Forest that their behaviour got out of hand. The French were officially supposed to follow behind the Americans, but, with the backing of de Gaulle, the commander de Lattre de Tassigny disobeyed orders. De Gaulle had told him, ‘You must cross the Rhine even if the Americans are not agreeable . . . Karlsruhe and Stuttgart await you.’126 The French II Army Corps had taken Speyer before advancing to Karlsruhe. On 12 April they reached Baden-Baden before entering the Black Forest and heading for Freudenstadt. A further French army was to join them there after liberating Strasbourg. Whether the French commander was in some way influenced by the name of the town is not easy to say now, but Freudenstadt (it means ‘town of joy’), the so-called ‘pearl of the Black Forest’, was subjected to three days of killing, plunder, arson and rape.
There had been reports of a band of Werewolves under a Hans Zöberlein, who had recently killed German civilians he considered had lost some of their National Socialist zeal. The town, however, was undefended, and filled with hospitals, but it may be that the French were unaware of that; or it may be that the very absence of soldiers gave them the idea of getting their revenge for countless barbaric acts committed by the Germans during their occupation of France.127 One of the French officers is supposed to have said, ‘We are the avengers, the SS of the French Army.’128
On 17 April they shelled the small town, completely destroying the centre. The units that entered Freudenstadt were made up of French soldiers from the 5th Armoured Division, Foreign Legionaries and Moroccan and Algerian troops from the 2nd Moroccan and the 3rd Algerian Infantry Divisions. It is reported that local Polish workers joined in. From the first the French made it clear that the people were going to be properly punished. There would be three days of plunder. A sergeant said that the troops would be released from discipline, and a quartermaster added, ‘In the next few nights no woman will go untouched.’129
The patients were robbed of their watches in the hospitals, and a Frenchman they found there was gunned down in his bed. The surviving houses were systematically destroyed with benzene: 649 were burned down in this way. It was now open season for any women aged between sixteen and eighty. It is generally said that the Moroccans behaved worst.130 Anyone who tried to stand in the way was simply shot. One of the victims was a stout lady lorry-driver called Sofie Hengher who tried to stop the soldiers assaulting her children. After the French passed on, some 600 women rep
orted to the local hospital. Ten per cent of those examined were pregnant. Seventy people had been killed. Freudenstadt was certainly the most prominent example of a breakdown of discipline in the French army, but there were others, and the French were not above threatening Königsfeld and the university town of Tübingen with similar treatment.
French soldiers’ behaviour in Stuttgart, where perhaps 3,000 women and eight men were raped, was thought to have added to American fury at their overstepping their lines.ag A further 500 women were raped in Vaihingen, where the French army found a large number of dead and dying in a satellite concentration camp. The villagers in nearby Neuenbürg were cleared out to make way for the sick and the French garrison.131 In all these instances the Moroccans were blamed.132 The American general Devers wrote to complain to de Lattre. Freudenstadt had not added to the reputation of the French army.133 Later the Germans wanted to know who had allowed the troops to run riot in this way. The commander in Freudenstadt appeared to have been a swarthy southern type called Major Deleuze; but a Captain de l’Estrange was also mentioned, as well as a Major Chapigneulles and his adjutant, Poncet from Lorraine, who was a famous beater. Tortures were carried out by one Guyot and an alleged former Jesuit called Pinson. The British press blamed the atrocities on a Major de Castries, a scion of one of France’s oldest families.
The French dug in at Stuttgart and refused to budge. On 13 May they held a provocative Joan of Arc Festival.134 It was just a leap and a bound to the old university town of Tübingen. The 5th Tank Division arrived on 19 April. Tübingen had been saved by declaring itself a hospital town, but there was rape and pillage before the French calmed down. One of the first men to beard the French in the town hall was the professor of law, Carlo Schmid. His mother was a Catalan from near Perpignan and his perfect French must have made the invaders feel at home. He probably spoke less about his time in the administration of Lille during the war. On the 23rd he was denounced as a Werewolf, however, and locked up in a lavatory for two days. The French searched his house and found the texts of his Baudelaire translations.135
On 9 November that year a Frenchman came home to Germany. It was the anniversary of both the Beer-Hall Putsch and Reichskristallnacht. Alfred Döblin had left Germany on 3 March 1933 and, after a harrowing escape, spent the war years in Hollywood. His ship docked in Le Havre. From the deck he watched ‘a body of men, all dressed the same, disappearing into the belly of the vessel; they reappeared dragging casks and cases . . . They were Germans, prisoners of war. That is how I saw them again.’136
He had become a French citizen after leaving Germany. One of his sons had died fighting in the Vosges. After he had seen his friends he crossed the Rhine at Strasbourg. In the waters of the river ‘there lay a felled elephant: the shattered railway bridge’. He was now in Germany. ‘You see the fields, well laid out in an orderly land. They had cleaned up the meadows and swept the paths. The much lauded German woods: the trees were bare, a few still wearing the colourful autumn foliage . . . But now it became more clear: heaps of rubble, holes, grenade or bomb craters, the remaining backs of houses, then fruit trees again, bare with supports. A saw mill intact, but the houses next to it in ruins.’ His train passed though the Black Forest: ‘Then I see your misery and I see that you have not yet learned from what you have learned. It isn’t easy. I’d like to help.’137
Upper Austria
As the Americans crossed into Austria they were able to paint a bigger picture of the Nazi death camps. In the last months of the war Jews had also been shipped from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen to Mauthausen in Upper Austria. A large number of them died or were put to death on the way. Up to now Mauthausen had been a criminal and political camp,ah and many Austrian opponents of Nazism had been sent there from Dachau. Apart from Stutthof, which the Russians allowed to fester until 9 May, Mauthausen was the last big camp to be liberated, when the Americans went in on 5 May.138 The most appalling sight in Mauthausen was the deadly quarry, where many prisoners lost their lives. It was called the ‘Wiener Graben’ after the thoroughfare in Vienna, because from here the stone was excavated for the streets of the capital.139
The Americans found a fully formed committee waiting for them composed of Hans von Becker of the Fatherland Front, the communists Ludwig Soswinski and Heinz Duermayer - who had fought in Spain and was later chief of police in Vienna - Hans Maršálek of the Vienna Czechs, Bruno Schmitz, the son of the mayor of Vienna, and the former minister of justice Baron Hammerstein-Equord. Once again the concentration camp had formed a cadre for later Austrian political life.140
The Americans also liberated the camp at Gusen on the 5th. Gusen was part of the wider Mauthausen complex, which had around fifty satellites including Ebensee. There were between eight and ten thousand inmates including some 1,200 Jews housed in a separate compound. Roughly 3,000 of the prisoners were made up of the ‘work-shy’. The Americans found evidence that inmates had been killed with gas: Russian typhus victims had been sealed up in their huts and gas canisters had been thrown in.141
The third big shock for American forces was Hartheim, which had been used principally for the extermination of the mentally ill. Some of the victims were housed in Niedernhart near Linz, but they were taken to Hartheim to be killed. The Americans compiled a report on the activities in Hartheim, and found evidence that the mental patients often fought their warders after their arrival in the Schloss, and that the Nazis suffered minor injuries at their hands.142
Tyrol
One dramatic discovery made by the Allies was the location of a clutch of Prominenten at Schloss Itter near Kitzbühel. This had been the prison for the French presidents Reynaud and Daladier and the generals Weygand and Gamelin, as well as trade-union leader Léon Jouhaux, Michel Clemenceau, the son of the statesman, the tennis star Jean Borotra, the politician and résistant Colonel de La Rocque and Madame Alfred Cailliau, sister of Charles de Gaulle. The Luftwaffe picket guarding the French had run away at the approach of the Americans, but it was feared that some local SS would harm the prisoners or seek to use them as bargaining tools to ensure a safe passage out of Austria. On 5 May the Schloss was indeed attacked by an SS unit that blew up an American tank. The prisoners helped defend the building. An Austrian, Major Gangl, was killed in the attack.143
One of the most bizarre liberations that April took place in the South Tyrol, Italian since 1919, but whose population was still largely German speaking. On 24 April a lorry - one of several - left Dachau concentration camp for Munich. It contained the former Abwehr officer and Munich lawyer Josef ‘Ochsensepp’ai Müller. Müller looked at the others squashed on to the benches in the back of the lorry: there were Hungarians like the former prime minister Miklós Kállay, his interior minister Peter Baron von Schell, the Dutch minister Dr van Dyck, the Greek field marshal Pagagos and his staff officer, the German generals Halder and Thomas, the former president of the Reichsbank Schacht, Stalin’s nephew Kokorin, General Pjotr Privalov and eight RAF officers.
The lorries went south after Munich, crossing the old Austrian border near Kufstein before proceeding to Innsbruck and the concentration camp at Rosenheim. There the prisoners were taken out. In all, the lorries contained 136 people from seventeen nations. There were fourteen Britons, including a captain bearing the name of Churchill, although no relation, and a ‘Wadim Greenewich’ from the Passport Control Office - that is, MI6 - as well as his colleagues from the 1939 Venlo Incident, Stevens and Payne Best; there were five Russians; the French included the former prime minister Léon Blum and his wife, Gabriel Piquet, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma and the writer Joseph Joos; the Poles included a Zamoyski; there were four Czechs; the Greeks sported their field marshal and no fewer than four major-generals; there was the Dutch minister and six Danes, a Norwegian, a Swede, a Swiss, a Latvian and four Italians, including the partisan Garibaldi - a descendant of the Risorgimento leader - and his chief of staff Ferrero; in the Hungarian team there was not only the prime minister but
Admiral Horthy’s son and his secretary; the Austrians numbered the former chancellor Schuschnigg and his wife and the pre-Anschluss mayor of Vienna, Schmitz, as well as the writer Konrad Praxmarer. The biggest delegation was naturally from Germany: State Secretary Pünder, Prince Philip of Hesse, Halder and his wife, the former military governor of Belgium General von Falkenhausen, the pastor Martin Niemöller, Prince Frederick Leopold of Prussia, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Fritz Thyssen. Another group was made up of Sippen, that is relatives of the 20 July plotters: various Goerdelers, Stauffenbergs, Hammersteins, Lüttwitzes, Plettenbergs and one Gisevius (Hans Bernd had managed to escape), together with relatives of Jakob Kaiser, Isa Vermehren and Fey Pirzio-Biroli, the daughter of the hanged former ambassador to Rome, Ulrich von Hassell.144
The men and women were hostages of the SS: so-called Prominenten to be killed or bartered for freedom as the Allies tightened their grip on Germany. At Rosenheim the Austrian Prominenten in particular were horrified to see Austrian SS guards mercilessly beating members of the Tyrolean freedom movement. The Austrians had themselves been in captivity since March 1938. For Schuschnigg it was ‘difficult to keep one’s self-control’, but there was the pleasure of seeing Schmitz again and meeting the two ‘saints’ on the transport: Niemöller and Piquet.145
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