The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  He was so terrified that he couldn’t answer when the Germans demanded to know if he was French. The shout of “Engländer?” shook him enough to answer “Français. Je suis Français.”209 An SS officer gestured for the naked young Frenchman to start down the slope just beyond the tracks; then the officer fired his rifle and the Frenchman’s body fell down the slope. The helpless airmen watched as the SS officer walked up to the body, put his Luger to the back of the neck and fired.

  “This was the first time I had ever felt hatred towards anyone,” wrote Harvie. “I had often seen photographs and read about wartime atrocities, but they had always been too distant and impersonal to be true. After what had just happened, I felt sick because I realized for the first time that man can be worse than any wild animal.”210

  19 AUGUST 1944, STALAG II-D, STARGARD, NEAR SETTIN, GERMANY

  SAPPER RUSS BURROWS REMEMBERS THE CAULDRON OF DIEPPE

  The memory of the battle. The rattle of machine-gun fire. The body’s recall of the concussive force of an artillery shell or mortar bomb that blew up just far enough away not to kill you. The sight of men with whom you’d trained, showered and got drunk now sprawled on the ground, some with barely a puncture wound, others armless, legless, headless, was never more than a nightmare or, indeed, a quiet moment away. The daily parsing of inadequate rations and husbanding of Red Cross cheese, butter, raisins, chocolate and cigarettes underlined the difference between their lives now and when they stepped onto the stage of history at Dieppe.

  Hugh Smith had been dead these two years, yet when Russ Burrows closed his eyes, the dreariness of camp life receded behind memories of gambling with his fellow sapper, who won at cards and dice. Smith won so often that, long before they had gone into battle, the sapper from Oshawa, Ontario, mocked his friend from Windsor, his imprecations signalling their closeness. “You’re lucky at gambling. Someday we’ll find out, you son of a bitch, if you’re lucky in battle.”

  They had been on the beach for less than half an hour. Exploding mortar bombs, the slicing sound of a machine gun and screams of another injured or dying man providing the metronomic beat by which the minutes ticked by. They were halfway up the beach when Smith asked for a light. Burrows struggled to get his Ronson out of his pocket, still wet from the surf they’d waded through, then tossed it his friend, who tossed it back to him a moment later.

  “As I pushed the lighter back in my pocket, I noticed Hughie’s head fall back. I shimmied over to him and saw that a sniper, who must have seen the small flame of the lighter, put a bullet right through my friend’s head,” says Burrows. “Even though getting up and running made me a bigger target, I figured I’d be safer on the lee side of the seawall.”

  Word that two French escapers had made successful home runs was welcomed by Burrows and his countrymen, as was the nearby raid by heavy bombers, for it showed that after two years, history had almost caught up with them. As they recalled their agony on the beaches of Dieppe and their pain over the past two years, the Canadians could do little more than chuckle when they read the opening sentence of a leaflet their German captors distributed: “As a result of repeated applications from British subjects from all parts of the world, wishing to take part in the common European struggle against Bolshevism, authorization has recently been given for the creation of a British volunteer unit.” However much men like Burrows and Prouse may have been impressed by the author’s grasp of English, they could not help but note how the proposed unit’s very name, “British Free Corps,” was just a little too close to the armed right-wing Freikorps that had tried to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic in the early 1920s and which served as the training ground for the Nazi Party’s own armed wing, the SD. Even more outrageous was the insinuation that, by taking the King’s schilling, they were serving the “interests of Jewry and international finance.”211

  20 AUGUST 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY

  HARVIE AND THE ALLIED AIRMEN PASS THROUGH THE GATES OF HELL

  They knew they weren’t at Dulag Luft because that was in Frankfurt am Main and the sign on the far end of the railway siding read “Weimar.” While they wondered about the squat buildings on either side of the siding, which they later learned were armaments factories, they had no doubt as to the purpose of the submachine gun–toting SS troops who lined the way to what was obviously the prison camp’s main gate. As the airmen climbed down from the train, the stale smell of smoke coming from the tattered clothes that had been returned to them gave way to “air so filled with the stench of burnt death” that Carter-Edwards and others disbelieved their own senses.

  Moments later, the airmen saw their first evidence that Buchenwald, which took its name from the beech-tree woods that surround it, was no ordinary prison camp. Barely had they spotted the gallows that rose above the electrified barbed-wire fence when they saw hundreds of spectral forms of men and women, with gaunt faces and impossibly thin arms, their heads shaved bare, and each with a yellow, red, purple, black, brown, green, or pink triangle pinned to the striped “pyjamas” that hung off their bodies. As the men were marched through the gate, set incongruously in a faux rustic wooden structure that recalled a Teutonic hunting lodge, topped by a clock tower, a few of them saw that a short distance beyond the gate and set strategically behind a screen of trees was a small Zoologischer Garten, where guards could rest peacefully and watch animals frolic.

  21 AUGUST 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION GAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY

  THREE CANADIAN SECRET AGENTS ARE ALSO IN BUCHENWALD

  Harvie, Carter-Edwards and the other 24 RCAF officers were not the only Canadians in this patch of hell. Two days earlier, a train carrying 37 Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents, including three Canadians and a number of French Resistance agents, arrived at Buchenwald. Though the airmen had never met the SOE agents, they’d heard their screams as they were tortured in Fresnes Prison.

  Romeo Sabourin, who in 1940 lied about his age to join the Fusiliers Mont-Royal and later joined the SOE, had been in the Gestapo’s hands since shortly after he was inserted into France in early 1944. Frank Pickersgill and Kenneth Macalister (before joining SOE, Pickersgill had been a civilian; Macalister had been an officer in the Intelligence Corps) were picked up by the Gestapo within hours of their landing in France on 19 June 1943; their radio and codes allowed a faux “Pickersgill” to “play the radio game,” calling in drops of arms, supplies and, sadly, more SOE agents, who were scooped up.212

  Over the next year, Pickersgill and Macalister were transferred between several prisons, where they were repeatedly tortured. Knowing that Pickersgill’s brother, Jack, was Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s principal secretary, the Gestapo tried to suborn him. At Fresnes Prison, Pickersgill attacked a guard with a bottle and jumped through a second-story window. He was shot, recaptured and tortured.

  On 8 August 1944, the SOE agents and Resistance men were bundled into a stifling train compartment. The following night, a strafing run damaged the train. The guards manning the trucks sent to pick them up kicked, punched and beat the prisoners with their rifle butts before taking them to a concentration camp near Saarbrücken. Five days later, they were again pushed and prodded into a cattle car. When, that afternoon, they were transferred to a passenger carriage, prisoner solidarity soon broke down. After a Resistance fighter picked the lock to his handcuffs and opened several others, the SOE agents and some of the other Resistance fighters argued that, if the opportunity arose, they should kill the German guards and try to escape. Others believed the German promise that “their destination was a special camp for officers where they would enjoy concerts, a cinema and theatre, a well-stocked library, and perhaps even the company of women.”213

  22 AUGUST 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY

  LEARNING THE WAYS OF BUCHENWALD

  In the first light of day, as the picturesque farms and villages, and, even more hopefully, a church spire shimmered into view, Harvie could almost forget
the first hours he spent in Buchenwald. For hours they stood—without food or water—on the Appellplatz, then led into a building where their heads, faces and crotches were shaved before being swabbed with a burning disinfectant, after which they were issued shapeless, worn civilian clothes. Nothing could weaken the memory of the sleepless night he spent without even the barest of blankets on a patch of ground littered with sharp pieces of coal. In that same place in 1939, hundreds of Polish prisoners had died from exposure.

  The light of dawn, however, revealed the horrors of the night: six bodies were carried from the barracks area. “If this many died on a summer night,” Harvie recalled thinking, “how many might die in the cold of winter?”214 The answer was tens of thousands, an untold number shivering into death as cold winds bled away the last bit of heat from their emaciated bodies as they stood on the Appellplatz clad only in thin pajamas.

  Harvie wondered where the huge cemetery was that would be needed to bury the dead and how the record-keeping system that notified next of kin was organized. “Was any kind of a service said for them to mark their passing in this place, far from their homes and loved ones?” he wondered. Later, after learning that the oily smoke and white ash rising from the smokestack above a squat brown building few hundred yards to the right of the main gate were the remains of Jews, Roma, Russians, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners and others who, according to the Nazis’ twisted lights, received their due, as proclaimed by the words cut into the camp’s steel gate—Jedem das Seine—this last question must have seemed impossibly naive.

  The SS’s power went beyond its monopoly on the use of force, the naked display of which included beating prisoners senseless, making Jewish prisoners sing anti-Semitic songs and rubbing their faces in excrement. The same guards who forced elderly men to climb trees and then shook them so violently that the old men fell and broke their necks controlled how long the airmen would suffer on the old coal dump. The guards fed their snarling dogs meat, milk, cereal, potatoes, eggs and claret, while issuing a scant seven ounces of poor-grade boiled horsemeat per prisoner per week. They dined on “steaks of heroic size,” washed down with real coffee and wines and brandy stolen from occupied countries or bought at ruinous exchange rates, while giving inmates rotten potatoes, or “liver sausage” that contained ground fish bones.215 Rations were so insufficient that a few months after the Canadians arrived at Buchenwald, the Organisation Todt complained that chronic starvation made it difficult to form an efficient slave labour workforce from the Buchenwald inmates.

  The men who had broken the spirits and bodies of hundreds of thousands understood the importance of soldierly comportment and used it to ill effect. In the latrine, men had to crouch over an open cesspool, balanced on a rail that was never cleaned; all knew that those who had fallen in had drowned with gulps of this seething mass in their mouths. The same SS that spent more than 250,000 reichsmarks building Kommandant Karl-Otto Koch’s wife, Ilse (“The Bitch of Buchenwald”), a 30,000-square-foot riding hall with mirrored walls did not provide either toilet paper or water to wash with after using the Abort.

  23 AUGUST 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY

  HARVIE SEEKS MEDICAL AID FROM A RUSSIAN “MEDIC”

  Exhaustion from nights spent trying to sleep on the rocky ground, the dehydrating effects of dysentery, hunger, and scenes and stories of horror tore at Harvie’s morale. So too did the infected flea and lice bites on the bottom of his bare feet, which Harvie feared would lead to sepsis. (Perhaps in a backhand compliment for the airmen’s penchant for escaping, the SS did not issue them even the rudimentary wooden clogs given to other prisoners.) Harvie never considered going to the infirmary, where, he had been warned, patients were used for research that ended with another body being carried across the compound to the building above which, several times a week, a flame roared.

  Worried that the infections would grow worse, Harvie took his chances with a “medic” in the Russian compound. The Russian did not speak English, but upon seeing the pustules understood the situation and pricked them open with an unsterilized needle so he could squeeze out the yellow liquid filled with dead white blood cells. The Russian then swabbed the affected areas with a purple disinfectant and wrapped them in a crepe paper–like bandage.

  24 AUGUST 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY

  THE BOMBING OF BUCHENWALD

  Carter-Edwards calls it the “best damned pinpoint bombing I’ve ever seen,” but every Allied airman knew that, despite its impressive name, strategic bombing was anything but an exact science. Even after Pathfinder aircraft started marking targets with flares, “creep back” meant that most of the bombers dropped their loads miles short of their intended targets; indeed, only one in five bombs fell within five miles of its intended target. Thus, near noon, the turn from elation, which the men felt when they first saw the two box formations of American B-17s, to horror, when unseen anti-aircraft guns hit their marks and planes began breaking apart, to sheer terror, when more than 50 bombers broke away from the main stream and headed directly toward the concentration camp. Even as he cursed the Americans for flying so high they couldn’t see him, Harvie wanted to jump up, wave his arms and scream, “No! No! No! Can’t you see that we are fellow airmen! Stay away you fools, you’ll kill us by mistake!”216

  Buchenwald had no bomb shelters, so there was nowhere to run. Instead, tens of thousands of prisoners threw themselves on the ground and did their best to shield their heads from the falling flak. In spite of his rising panic, Harvie calculated when and where the bombs would have to be released for them to hit the camp. He knew he was right when he saw the flare dropped by the first bomber as it passed over the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, which manufactured ammunition, and Gustloff-Werke factory, which in addition to other armaments made components of V1 and V2 rockets. Then came the black specks, moving so fast that they didn’t seem to grow much larger before he heard the express train–like sound wave their fall generated. Before it had fully ended, the sound wave caused by the explosion of 150 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs washed over him, and the ground heaved.

  Barely had the earth stopped trembling when Harvie saw about 70 B-17s bank 90 degrees and streak toward the camp. Through the “agonies of fear and despair,” he correctly calculated that they’d drop their bombs somewhat closer to where he and the other Allied airmen were lying on the ground, their mouths open to prevent the tremendous forces generated by detonation of some 500 bombs from bursting their eardrums. By the time the force of the explosions had died away and Harvie looked up, the stream of Flying Fortresses had already turned westward for home.

  Thick black smoke rose above the blasted remnants of the factories and lighter, thinner smoke billowed forth from the SS compound and from parts of the prisoner compound. Save for some superficial flash burns, the airmen were unhurt, but hundreds of other prisoners closer to the targets had been torn apart or burned by the incendiary bombs; when a proper Appell was conducted, it became clear that hundreds of prisoners had been killed, and some bodies had simply ceased to exist. The rumour that the Kommandant and his family were killed was quickly dispelled. On 27 August, the SS reported to Berlin that 80 SS men had been killed, 65 were missing and presumed dead, 238 had been wounded and 24 wives and children of SS men had been killed; as well, 316 prisoners were killed and 1,462 wounded. One famous casualty in the camp was the Goethe Eiche, a several-hundred-year-old oak tree that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust, Germany’s greatest poem, rested under during his many visits to the area.

  When Harvie realized the scope of the damage and that fire raged in the SS compound, he expected the SS to massacre what the Germans called Luftgangsters. So he was not surprised when, within minutes, the Kapo arrived with a number of SS officers, Schmeisser machine guns at the ready and swinging bullwhips and clubs, and calling for the Americans and the English to move.

  Harvie’s infected feet saved him from
being herded toward the burning armaments plants. Other prisoners, including the American Roy Allen, were forced to fight the fires irrespective of the fact that they were barefoot and lacked hoses or buckets for water. Carter-Edwards was tasked with removing people from the rubble, which cut and burned his bare feet. As Allen and others were sent into the burning factories to try to salvage equipment, other prisoners were forced to carry food and clothing from a warehouse. Yet another prisoner had to defuse an unexploded incendiary bomb.

  Having seen the SS’s casual brutality, the Allied airmen who picked up bodies outside a V2 factory were not surprised to find those people had been shot in the back. Nothing, however, prepared Harvie and the others for the story some told of finding in the rubble a “museum,” prepared for Ilse Koch, in which shrunken heads, and lampshades and book covers made from tattooed human skin, were proudly displayed.

  25 AUGUST 1944, LES HOGUES, NORMANDY

  RCAF SQUADRON LEADER JAMES GRIFFIN YOUNG IS MURDERED

  Within hours of General Charles de Gaulle’s speech from the Paris Hôtel de Ville’s balcony in which he claimed that Paris had liberated herself, one hundred miles to the northeast in Les Hogues, an SS NCO walked toward five Allied prisoners of war in an improvised POW compound calling out, “Where are the Canadians?” His special interest in the Dominion’s soldiers likely stemmed from the fact that, as a member of the 2nd Company of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, he had been engaged with the Canadian Army almost nonstop since D-Day.