Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  In late April 1945, Stephan Lewy and the 6th Armored awaited the Russians near Chemnitz, some fifty miles from the German-Czech border. No one in the division was pleased when they withdrew west of the Mulde River to avoid any clashes with the Russians. After having spent the war moving forward, the 6th’s commander, Major General Grow, hated to go backward and give up “any of our ground.”

  Contact was made on May 6 when two Soviet infantry divisions arrived in Chemnitz. Naturally, everyone in the 6th was eager to see the infamous hordes from the east, and they weren’t disappointed by what they saw. The Red Army had utilized every possible kind of vehicle, including horse-drawn wagons, to transport troops and equipment. The parade included civilians mixed in with soldiers in myriad uniforms, everyone all scrambled into columns that seemed to have no order. Young and old, men and women, Mongolians and Caucasians, all marched together, completely out of step with one another, and looking less like an army and more like a band of misfits. Their weapons and equipment seemed so antiquated and unimpressive that some GIs openly questioned how this ragtag outfit had been able to so soundly defeat the Germans on the eastern front.

  Two nights later, the generals of both armies and their staffs held a shindig that started off stiffly but loosened up after many shots of Russian vodka. One decorated U.S. airborne colonel and regimental commander, after going through the entire war without sustaining an injury, leapt from a second-story window to show the Russians how American paratroopers jumped from airplanes. He fractured his leg on landing.

  There were east-meets-west parties for the lower ranks as well. At one of them that same evening, Stephan and another Ritchie Boy, speaking Yiddish, attempted to convince a Russian Jewish soldier to defect to the American side in order to have a better life. He listened to their pitch with evident interest, but demurred. I can’t, he finally said. My family is being detained in Russia. If I do anything like that, they will suffer.

  The next day, May 9, all active operations in the European Theater of Operations ended under terms of Germany’s unconditional surrender. The 6th Armored, after a short period of rehabilitation and maintenance, was sent to Aschaffenburg for occupational duties that included maintaining public safety and setting up a military government.

  General Eisenhower had ordered the arrest of all leaders of Nazi organizations. As the National Socialist Party was organized down to neighborhood blocks, in a city such as Aschaffenburg, with thirty thousand residents, that meant a significant number of Nazis to be rounded up. Stephan was quick to volunteer for the job.

  The first thing he did was go to the local police station.

  “I want the names of all the Nazi block leaders in the city,” he told the clerk behind the counter, who himself was likely a Nazi. Germans kept good records, Stephan knew, and luckily the station hadn’t been leveled in the weeklong battle that had ended in early April when the Germans defended the city with particular determination, resulting in house-to-house fighting and widespread urban destruction.

  The clerk dutifully pulled bound records off the shelves from a bookcase against the wall. They contained names, addresses, and group affiliations. Stephan enlisted two husky MPs, and they set to work. Twice weekly—on Tuesdays and Thursdays—they left at 4 A.M. in a 2.5-ton truck and went block by block knocking on doors, just as the Nazis in Berlin had knocked on doors at all hours looking for his father and other Jewish men. When they found someone on the list, he was loaded in the back of the truck. When there was no more room, Stephan would drop off the newly captured Nazis at MP headquarters, where they were held in cells and prisoner cages for questioning. As word spread around town, Stephan often only had to knock once, and the man of the house, fully dressed and clutching a small suitcase, would instantly open the door, say goodbye to his wife, and climb into the truck.

  Stephan wished his father could see these Nazi roundups.

  Most of the men he brought in—about seventy-five each day—were interviewed and released. The official Allied policy of “de-Nazification” was to ferret out Nazi officials and remove them from whatever positions they held, but the impracticality of the program soon became apparent (it was officially ended in 1948). Nazis had been running the power plants, sanitation departments, railroads, and sundry other necessary functions for years, and their expertise was needed if the new Germany was to recover from the devastation of war. It bothered Stephan that so many Nazi Party followers were put back on the streets and into their old jobs, but there was nothing he could do about it. Besides, he knew it would be impossible to keep every Nazi block leader in jail because there weren’t enough cells in the country. His mission had been to find them, bring them in, and lock them up. Regardless of how long they stayed behind bars, Stephan reveled in the satisfaction of this assignment. He knew he was scaring the Nazis by picking them up, and disrupting their lives by taking them from their families, however briefly, just the way they had scared him and his father and mother, split their family apart, and disrupted their lives. All in all, it was one of the more gratifying jobs of his time in the army.

  One day, Stephan was walking down the street with another GI when a woman ran up, screaming in German to arrest a man.

  “Verhaftet ihn! Verhaftet diesen Mann!”

  She pointed to a well-dressed man on the sidewalk who was hurrying away. In perfect English, the man said over his shoulder, “That woman is demented.” Stephan ordered the man to stop until he could get more information. The man protested but did as he was told.

  The woman said she recognized him as a Nazi doctor who had done medical and chemical experiments on concentration camp inmates.

  Stephan asked, “Wie kannst du das wissen?” (How do you know?)

  She lifted her skirt and showed her terribly scarred legs.

  “Ich war eines seiner Opfer,” she said. (I was one of his victims.)

  Stephan turned to the man and told him he would have to come in for questioning.

  In an interrogation room at MP headquarters, the man admitted he was a medical doctor but denied ever working in a concentration camp. His nervous, sweaty demeanor suggested otherwise.

  The man’s ID gave his home address. Stephan, while others continued to question the doctor, paid a visit to his home with one of his beefy MPs. A woman answered the door. Stephan told her he needed to speak to her about her husband.

  She let them in, and they followed her into the kitchen. She was wringing her hands as she stood by the sink, acting every bit as nervous as the doctor. As she poured a glass of water, her hands trembled. Stephan sat at the kitchen table with the MP behind him.

  “Ja,” she said warily.

  Stephan asked if her husband had been a doctor in a concentration camp.

  Oh, no.

  Did he perform experiments on prisoners?

  He didn’t do that.

  Stephan wanted the truth, and he knew he hadn’t gotten it from the doctor or his wife up till now. He casually placed his .45 pistol on the table simply as a stage prop, but it was a very effective one.

  Without changing his tone, he said if he couldn’t get the information he required, he would wait for her husband to come home. Her eyes fixed on the gun, she began to backtrack.

  I think he worked in a camp. Ja.

  The doctor’s claim of never working in a concentration camp was soon demolished by his wife, who handed over papers that gave the names of camps and the dates that he had been assigned there.

  Back at headquarters, Stephan arranged for the Nazi doctor’s transfer to another military prison facility, and for other agencies to take over the investigation and gather additional evidence for a war crime trial.

  For Stephan Lewy, his return to Germany had turned personal.

  After Manny Steinfeld’s 82nd Airborne Order of Battle team was disbanded, he was assigned to the three-man military government office in the city of Boizenburg, some thirty miles west of Ludwigslust.

  Until April 30, Boizenburg had its own concentrati
on camp, one of eighty subcamps in the Neuengamme system that was responsible for at least fifty thousand deaths from forced labor, lack of food, improper sanitation, disease, and Nazi brutality. Wöbbelin, which Manny would never forget after seeing its prisoners and assisting with the burial ceremony in Ludwigslust, had also been a Neuengamme subcamp.

  In another one of those chance encounters taking place on the streets of Germany between newly freed survivors and their Nazi oppressors trying to meld back into society or escape to safer havens, a woman who had survived five years of imprisonment at Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp was using a coupon to buy bread at a bakery in Boizenburg in May 1945 when she spotted a man in high boots. Although she only glimpsed him from the side, the sight of him made the blood rush to her heart. Was it really him? She felt she had no choice but to make sure.

  The woman was Margarete Buber-Neumann, the forty-five-year-old widow of Heinz Neumann, once a leading German communist, with whom she had gone to Moscow in 1937. After her husband was arrested and shot in a Stalin purge, she spent two years in the gulag before being handed over to the Nazis with other German communists as part of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939. The Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück with other so-called undesirables. Since gaining her freedom in April, she had been on a tortuous journey to Bavaria by foot and bicycle. Malnourished, ill, and not even halfway there, she had stopped to rest for a few days in Boizenburg.

  As she followed the man, the distance between them grew shorter. She looked for American soldiers to hail but saw none. If it was him, should she grab him by the arm to hold him? No, he would only knock her over with blows of his fists as he had done to so many defenseless women. At one point he stopped to look in a shop window, and she had to walk past him. Then, after she paused at a window farther down the sidewalk, he overtook her again, then turned into a side street. She knew it would soon be too late. He would get away and might never be seen again by anyone who knew who he was. She was now certain the man in the high boots was Ludwig Ramdohr.

  For the past three years, Ramdohr had been the Gestapo chief at Ravensbrück, the only Nazi concentration camp built for women. Between 1939 and 1945, 130,000 women from all over Europe were imprisoned there. The women were beaten, starved, tortured, forced into slave labor, and randomly executed by firing squad, by public hanging, or at outside gassing facilities. In early 1945, Ravensbrück became an extermination camp when the SS installed a gas chamber, and some five thousand to six thousand women were gassed in only a few months.* Even in such a murderous setting, Ramdohr was notorious for his bestial cruelty. He specially designed his own interrogation room for working over prisoners. His methods were crude and brutal. He would start off by making them stand with a strap pulled through ankle shackles and tied around their neck, forcing them to bend over at a painful angle. Or he would lash them with his leather whip or give them an injection of narcotics.

  Ramdohr rarely wore a uniform, preferring a dark flannel suit. He didn’t care what the SS commandant thought, because Ramdohr answered only to his Gestapo bosses in Berlin. He ran an elaborate spy network based on rewards and punishment, seeking incriminating evidence on prisoners as well as guards and administrators. To extort the information he wanted, he would force a woman to lie stomach down on a table; then, with her head hanging over one edge, he would grab her hair and submerge her face in a bucket of water until she nearly drowned. Another of his torture techniques was to have a woman fold her hands, then he inserted pencils between her fingers and pressed down on her hands until her fingers broke. A favorite device he designed was a coffin with ventilation holes that he could close and metal claws that penetrated the flesh. He also used his infamous “shower method,” where a woman was brought into a special shower-bath and made to take off all her clothes. Ramdohr turned on cold water from all sides, including fire-hose strength sprays from the top and bottom. When she tried to move or use her hands to protect herself, she would have a bucket of water thrown into her face, or she would be set upon by an attack dog.

  After a session with Ramdohr, most women couldn’t walk and had to be dragged back to their cell unconscious. They were brought back another day for more of the same if Ramdohr was unhappy with the results of his interrogations, which often drew false confessions and groundless accusations to stop the agony. Hearing the name “Ramdohr” was enough to make women in Ravensbrück tremble, as Margarete did now when she saw him on the streets of Boizenburg.

  At last, she spotted three American soldiers walking down the street and rushed to them, speaking German. “Bitte verhaften Sie diesen Mann!”

  Manny Steinfeld was the only one who understood her, and he asked why she wanted a man arrested. She told him who Ramdohr was and gestured wildly toward where he had turned the corner. Manny saw that she still wore a striped camp shirt under her light jacket. He told her to stay where she was, and he and the other soldiers took off after the man in the high boots and caught up with him a few blocks away.

  “Hände hoch!” Manny yelled.

  Ramdohr put his hands up as ordered, and he was searched for weapons. They brought him back and stood him in front of Margarete.

  He looked so different now with fear contorting his face, she thought. It was a look she had never seen on him before.

  Are you Ramdohr? she asked tentatively.

  Frau Buber, you do me wrong. I also once was against the Nazis.

  Manny took them both to the military government office. Once there, Ramdohr confirmed to Manny he had been at Ravensbrück but denied being a member of the Gestapo or SS. He said he had only been a police detective investigating financial crimes there, and he should be allowed to go on his way immediately.

  Manny moved to another interrogation room, where he asked Margarete to start at the beginning with all she knew about Ramdohr. She described in graphic detail how Ramdohr abused and tortured the women in camp. Manny tried to remain dispassionate as he took notes, but his hands shook and he tasted bile. He pictured his mother and sister suffering at the hands of such a monster. Margarete said that Ramdohr, after one brutal session with her, kept her in solitary confinement for fifteen weeks of “dark arrest” that nearly drove her mad.

  Manny knew that in order to keep Ramdohr in custody, the first step was getting some proof that he was Gestapo or SS, as all former members of those Nazi organizations were subject to automatic arrest as possible war criminals. That ensured they would not be able to disappear inside Germany or to another country as army investigators found other victims and documented their alleged crimes prior to charges being filed.

  “He claims to have been a police detective, not Gestapo,” Manny said. “He also claims not to have been SS. Did you ever see him in uniform?”

  In Margarete’s recollection, Ramdohr had always worn a business suit. But then she remembered one day when she was still in solitary confinement that a ray of light had abruptly come in through a flap that opened in the door. She had gone up to it and stood blinking, meeting Ramdohr’s glare, and he had been in an SS uniform. It was a chink in Ramdohr’s own story of being only a policeman, and Margarete’s signed statement along with her witness account gave Manny what he needed to hold Ramdohr and refer his case to Allied legal authorities for further investigation.

  Ludwig Ramdohr never again walked the streets a free man. He was convicted twenty months later—after testimony by many of his victims, including Margarete Buber-Neumann—in the first of seven trials for war crimes committed by officials and staff at Ravensbrück. Along with nine of his codefendants, Ramdohr was sentenced to death. He went to the gallows on May 3, 1947.

  By then, Manny was out of the service, and he read of the execution in the newspaper. Feeling neither joy nor remorse, he was only thankful that the U.S. Army and a twist of fate had allowed him to be in Boizenburg, Germany, that day when one brave camp survivor faced down her Nazi tormentor.

  13

  GOING HOME

  After the German surrend
er, Martin Selling was sent to a central depot at Bad Schwalbach, Germany. It was to here that most of the IPW teams in Germany came to be given their new assignments. In addition, the depot was swamped with army officers who had spent the war at home but had arrived in its closing days to gain “combat experience” in furtherance of their careers.

  Martin watched with disdain as these stateside warriors grabbed the choicest assignments in the new military government being established in postwar Germany, and freely discussed pleasure trips to Paris and elsewhere—all while throwing the calling card “Military Intelligence” around to get priority air transportation and hotel accommodations. As it appeared he would be at the depot for a while before getting his new assignment, Martin requested a few days off to search for family members he had lost contact with.

  A newly arrived major denied his request. Martin stared at the breast of the major’s blouse, barren of medals, theater-of-war ribbons, battle stars, or overseas stripes. Martin asked sarcastically whether his combat service counted against him. The indignant major demanded an apology. Martin, who was now a second lieutenant after receiving a battlefield commission, said he would sooner take a court-martial.

  In no time, Martin became quite unpopular among the newly arriving officers who had sat out the war in the States with cushy jobs. And he chafed at the new rules laid down by the Johnny-comelatelies, which centered around lots of “spit and polish” and endless personnel inspections. His open contempt for them apparently served him well, as Martin’s new team was the first to get new orders to another base.

  Assigned three enlisted men and two jeeps, he arrived with his intelligence team at 1st Armored Division headquarters in Gerabronn, a small town in south-central Germany. The division staff was surprised to receive them and didn’t know what to do with them. The division intelligence officer said he had no work for the team at present and would let them know when something came up. Martin decided not to show his face unnecessarily at division headquarters and told his men they were free to do as they pleased as long as he knew where they were and they did not get themselves or him into any trouble.