Sarah Helm

by Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins;the Missing Agents of WWII

  It was Berg who had first sketched for Vera the layout inside the prison block, when he was telling her how it was that he had brought four portions of food—thin soup and bread—for the women's last meal, down from the kitchen at the top of the camp. The other prisoners saw Berg do this. Major Van Lanschot had told Vera: “The Kapo of the bunker, his name was Berg, if I remember well, was the one who was to fetch personally food for the people he had in his bunker. So we always knew by him if there were people to be executed.” But on this occasion Berg was not allowed inside the cell to distribute the food; this was done, according to Berg, by the senior Blockfiihrer, Nietsch. Entering the prison block through the back, Vera could easily identify which cell the girls had been in at this stage, as there was only one room large enough to hold all four.

  Shortly after their meal the women were moved into the single cells, so it must have been just before this, when they were still all together, that Berg was asked for a pillow by one of them. This, as he told Vera, he had provided, and he was sure the request had come from Vera Leigh. By the time Walter Schultz arrived in the bunker, the women had been moved into separate cells—small airless cubes with low ceilings where it was impossible to stand. Schultz, who had first seen the women sitting quietly in the political office on their arrival, now wanted a second glimpse of them. A Russian speaker, he had been called to the prison block to speak to a Russian prisoner, and as he walked down the prison block corridor, he opened the traps to get a glimpse of the women inside the cells. Straub, who was there at the time, said to Schultz: “Pretty things, aren't they?” Schultz soon left, and by nine-thirty the only movement inside the crematorium came from Berg, who was stoking the oven.

  To see the exact position of Berg's room, Vera had to enter the crematorium building, and she went in as the girls had done, through the door at the rear. Thanks to Berg's earlier description, Vera felt well prepared to find her way about, although there was very little light inside the first room and it was not clear to her at first that the squat, black iron structure, consisting of a large cylinder about seven feet long and two feet in diameter with pipes running from the top and sides, was the oven.

  She looked to her right and saw the various tools: shovels and pans and long forks and a stretcher, shaped just like a hospital stretcher but made of iron (Berg had called it a “transporter”) leaning up against a wall. Beside it was a pulley mechanism fixed above a trap door. Looking ahead again, as her eyes adjusted to the light she could see that the metal structure was indeed the oven. Its round door at the front end of the cylinder was clamped shut.

  Moving to the other side of the room and turning again to face the metal structure, she saw that attached to the other side of the oven cylinder was the furnace, which was connected to the ceiling by a chimney. Stepping back a little towards the tiny window and still looking upwards, she saw a line of large metal hooks.

  Pipes led from the furnace to the room on her left. These apparently fed hot water to what Berg had said was the bathroom, used by camp staff. The corridor leading off the room to her right was the way to Berg's cell. At the end of the corridor Vera could now see, through an open door, the corner of a gleaming white ceramic slab. She was looking into the dissecting room at the end of the corridor; it was lighter than anywhere else in the building. Passing on down that way, she looked into a small room on the right where lines of small ochre clay urns were lined up on dusty wooden shelves extending from floor to ceiling. Berg's cell, as he had described it, lay just along the corridor from here, but it was hard to judge exactly which it was from his description as there were more small rooms than he had mentioned and the distances seemed much less than he had led Vera to believe.

  Although the camp was silent by the time dusk fell, every prisoner in the barracks outside was straining to look through curtains and shutters to see what would happen next. Sometime just before nine p.m., and certainly before it was completely dark, the medical orderlies, Emil Brüttel and Eugen Forster, received an order telling them to walk up the Lager-strasse to just outside the camp gates, where they were to meet up with other staff who would be coming from the officers' mess in the trees beyond. Brüttel described to Vera what had happened: “I took the phenol with me, about which I knew nothing. It was contained in a dark brown bottle with a glass stopper. Forster took charge of the syringe and needles, and then we reported to the place to which we had been ordered.

  There we met Dr. Plaza, Dr. Rohde, the adjutant Obersturmbannfiihrer, Ganninger, and some Blockfiihrer, among them Nietsch and Ermen-straub. Ganninger insisted on speed, and the whole party entered the camp and the gate was shut behind us.”

  The party then began their procession down the Lagerstrasse to the bottom of the camp. “One of the Blockfiihrer went in front with the oil lantern, which was normally banned for safety reasons,” said Brüttel. “I had the impression that the doctors did not wish to carry the necessary material themselves to the place of execution, and that they wished, by the presence of the greater number of staff, to increase their courage and self-confidence for an action which was obviously extremely unpleasant for them. It was apparent for those reasons we had all to go with them.” He added: “There was no way for Forster and me to turn back since we had no safety lamp with which to walk through the darkened camp, and to walk without a lamp would have been the same as suicide since the sentries would have fired immediately.”

  Albert Guérisse, peering between curtains, observed the group carrying their torch on the way down, and among them he identified the two SS doctors—one in uniform and one in civilian clothes—and several other SS staff and officers.

  The doctors' group now arrived inside the crematorium. Brüttel said that when he entered the crematorium building with them, the light in the furnace room was switched off, so that anyone who didn't know already would not be able to determine what the room was really for.

  Berg was found still stoking the furnace and was ordered away a second time. According to Brüttel, the execution squad then went along the short corridor to a small room just before Berg's cell, where several beds were standing.

  Here Ganninger addressed the execution squad and explained the plan. The two Blockfiihrer, Nietsch and Ermenstraub, were to be sent off to fetch the women, one at a time, from the Zellenbau, the prison block, adjacent to the hospital. The women would then be brought into this room, where they would be injected by the doctors.

  The fetching of the women from the cells was witnessed by several prisoners. Maurice Bruyninckx, another Belgian prisoner, who was in Barrack 15, had been “looking through a small peep-hole in the shutters” when he saw two SS men enter the prison block. “They came away with one of the four women I had previously seen on their arrival in the camp. These same two returned to fetch the second, third, and fourth at about fifteen-minute intervals to take them to the crematorium building.”

  Guérisse had seen the same ritual through his curtains, picking out SS faces by torchlight.

  It was important for Vera to understand precisely how the sequence of events then unfolded. Brüttel said that the plan had been that once a woman had been brought into the injection room, she would be made to lie on a bed, and a doctor would then administer an intravenous injection in her arm.

  In each case 10cc of phenol was used. Brüttel said that it was Dr. Plaza who gave the injections, but others said it was Dr. Rohde. Dr. Rohde himself said that he did give the first injection but was so upset by having to perform the task that Dr. Plaza had to take over. Others said that Dr. Rohde gave two injections and Dr. Plaza the other two, to share the responsibility. Dr. Plaza was to be replaced as camp doctor by Dr. Rohde the following day, and there was some discussion about the fact that this would be his last duty in the camp.

  Brüttel like Berg, also recalled that as the injecting began, one of the women asked “Pourquoi?” and was told “Pour typhus.”

  After receiving an injection, each of the drugged women was then taken to the next r
oom. According to Brüttel, they were carried, not dragged—by Nietsch or Ermenstraub—and there they were laid down and on the order of Otto “nearly completely undressed.” Brüttel also said that at this time he had heard the noise of speaking in a room where the “prisoner stokers” were locked.

  According to Walter Schultz, the events unfolded slightly differently. He said that Straub told him the following day that what had happened was as follows. When the four women were brought from the cells, they were first made to sit on a bench in the corridor that led from the oven to the dissecting room. They were told by Ganninger, who spoke a little French, to undress for medical examination. This they refused to do unless a woman doctor was called. They were also told they would be given injections against illness. The first woman was then taken by Straub into the room where the doctors were and injected in the upper arm. Straub then helped the first woman back to the bench, where she sat down next to the others who were still waiting. The same procedure was followed with the second woman. When Straub arrived back with the second woman after she had been injected, he found that the first was sitting “stiff and stupefied.” The process continued until all four had been injected and were sitting in a stupefied condition. It was then, according to Schultz, that they were taken to the room next to the crematorium. Here they were laid down, and their clothes were taken off by Nietsch and Ermenstraub.

  Dr. Rohde had said that, after the injection, three of the women were easily undressed. However, the SS Scharfiihrer had difficulty undressing the fourth woman as rigor mortis had already set in. He was therefore unable to take off the pullover she was wearing and had to “tear it open.” Rohde said: “I then yelled at him and told him that the bodies would have to be undressed in a decent manner.”

  All the witnesses were agreed that, once undressed, the women were dragged along the remaining length of the corridor to the oven. They were then placed inside it. The usual practice was to place a body on a transporter and then push it into the oven. Normally bodies were laid out alternately: the first went in feet first and the next head first.

  More than one witness talked of a struggle when the fourth woman was shoved into the fire. According to Brüttel: “As the last body was being placed in the oven, a mistake appeared to have occurred, since the body threatened to slide out of the oven again. The possibility of death not having occurred appears completely out of the question.” He said that as far as he could tell, “after the injections, death occurred within five seconds with the accompaniment of twitching.”

  Schultz's account of what Straub told him was as follows: “When the last woman was halfway in the oven (she had been put in feet first), she had come to her senses and struggled. As there were sufficient men there, they were able to push her into the oven, but not before she had resisted and scratched Straub's face. Straub also said she had shouted: ‘Vive la France.' ” Emile Hoffmann, the military musician from Luxembourg, heard the same cry. And the prisoner Rauson said the whole camp was listening and watching, peeping through gaps in curtains, as these things were happening. “That evening we were listening carefully as we suspected foul play. I myself heard some screams, and I now suppose that the women, still unconscious from the injection but alive, when put in the oven must have recovered consciousness and screamed.”

  In any event, the bodies were burned, as all the camp witnessed. They could see the flames rising from the chimney. Guérisse said: “It should be stated that whenever the oven doors of the crematorium were opened, an increased draught caused the flames to come out of the top of the chimney, and this was clearly visible to the whole camp. It was common knowledge in the camp that whenever flames were seen to come out of the top of the chimney, a body had been put into the crematorium. On this particular night, at intervals of about fifteen minutes, I observed the flames coming out of the top of the chimney on four different occasions.”

  The next day Walter Schultz was in the camp's political office at work and noticed that Magnus Wochner, the political officer, seemed very shocked by what had happened the night before. Peter Straub, however, was still drunk the next morning as the officers and doctors had drunk until late at Dr. Plaza's leaving party in the officers' mess.

  Schultz said: “Straub told me: ‘I have been in Auschwitz for a long time, in my time about four million people have gone up the chimney, but I have never experienced anything like this before. I am finished.' And I noticed that Straub's face had been severely scratched.” The next day Van Lanschot remarked to Berg that there were four fewer portions of food, and Berg said that four prisoners had been burned that night in the crematorium.

  Emil Brüttel was sitting at his desk in Dr. Plaza's room the next morning when a man came over from the Kommandantur and handed the doctor an envelope marked “secret.” Dr. Plaza opened it and found that it contained the execution protocols for the four women. Stonehouse said that a few days later he saw Fernandel “walking up the steps in the middle of the camp, carrying a fur coat.”

  19.

  “Freely on Foot”

  Vera had learned a lot in recent months about the men who gathered at Zum Goldenen Kreuz, the noisy bar on the corner of Karlsruhe's central square. Close to the town hall and the Nazi party offices, it was a favourite haunt of the city's Gestapo men, who came here to pick up gossip from the many bureaucrats and politicians in town.

  There was, for example, Otto Preis, who was one of the landlord's closest friends. Preis's job with the Gestapo was to watch over foreign workers brought to Karlsruhe as forced labourers. He saw to it that they were horsewhipped for laziness and killed for any more serious misdemeanour. Preis was also called on when any “dirty work” was needed, any quick killing—of a spy, an escaping airman, a Jew. His speciality was the Genickschuss, a shot from a 7.65mm pistol to the base of the skull, followed by a shot to the heart. In Zum Goldenen Kreuz they heard Preis boast about his prowess with the pistol.

  Vera had also learned about Hermann Rösner. His department of the Gestapo picked up escaped prisoners heading for the French border close by, or hunted down infiltrators, commandos, or parachutists. His boast at the bar was that he once took a tank into the Warsaw Ghetto at the height of the uprising.

  Having cleared up the case at Natzweiler, Vera was now concentrating all her energies on tracing the second group of women, who left Karlsruhe prison in September 1944. Vera had learned that this group were picked up from the jail by the Karlsruhe Gestapo. She was looking in particular for Preis and Rösner, who might know where they went.

  It had taken Vera several further interrogations in Karlsruhe itself to establish for sure that it was the local Gestapo who took away Madeleine Damerment, Yolande Beekman, and Eliane Plewman. Her first clues had come from Else Sauer, Hedwig Müller's friend, who had shared a cell with Madeleine Damerment in Hedwig s final days in the Karlsruhe jail. Else had given Vera a detailed account of Madeleine's departure.

  During the daytime on September 11 Madeleine had been taken by Fräulein Becker to collect a little case containing her belongings, which had been taken from her on arrival. Then Madeleine was returned to the cell. In the small hours of the next morning Else, Madeleine, and a third cellmate, Frau Wipfler, heard a man's footsteps stop outside cell sixteen. Else recalled: “ ‘Get up, Plewman,' said a voice. Then a knock came to our door and a man opened the hatch. ‘Get up, Dussautoy.' Then the footsteps disappeared along the corridor in the direction of cell twenty-five, where Yolande was. The man came back and called out: ‘Get out, Plewman.' Then he came to our door. He opened the door, and I could see through a crack a girl whom I recognised to be Eliane Plewman. He called out, ‘Get out, Dussautoy' Frau Wipfler then said, ‘Wie spät ist es, Herr Spät?' (What time is it, Mr. Spät?) and he answered, ‘One-thirty'

  Frau Wipfler had recognised the man as an official from the male prison, “small, shrunken and grey-looking.” The group then left. “Frau Wipfler and I were listening carefully and heard the heavy footsteps of Spät echo down the co
rridor,” said Else. “Suddenly there was complete silence, we both said that it was as if the earth had swallowed them up.”

  Else's evidence had led Vera to Herr Spät, an elderly night-watchman, who revealed that three Karlsruhe Gestapo men had taken the women away. He didn't know who the men were, but with Spät's help Vera established whose orders they were under. Gestapo cases were always “special cases,” said Spät, which meant the destination of departing prisoners could not be recorded in the register. Sometimes the Gestapo just ordered the gatekeepers to write “Einem KZ.” But often the words written were deliberately meaningless. A man named Hermann Rösner always told the jailers to write in the register “fr Fuss.” As Vera knew now from the records that she had inspected at Gaggenau, the words fr Fuss were used to describe the manner in which these three women left the prison, and this link led her to suspect the order was from Rösner.

  Vera's suspicion that Otto Preis was also involved was purely instinctive. After months of fruitless enquiries in Poland, Russia, and throughout Germany, she began to suspect that these three women were never taken east, as witnesses had first suggested, but were killed very close to Karlsruhe. In this case Preis was the most likely executioner; he had carried out scores of executions, including that of an escaped British airman whose case Vera had helped with. The airman, who had been impossible to identify, was being taken to Natzweiler for execution, but Preis finished him off with a Genickschuss on the way. It happened on the edge of a wood, and afterwards Preis wrapped the body in a piece of canvas and dumped it outside the crematorium, stopping only to give the camp office the Sonderbefehl, or order for “special” treatment.