Avenue of Spies

by Alex Kershaw

  Each evening Toquette and her friends returned to the barracks, where they slept close to each other in a corner. Violette Szabo, the brave SOE agent, lay curled up only a few feet from Toquette in a rickety wooden bunk. Virginia d’Albert-Lake vividly recalled how Szabo would “stretch her limbs like a cat” and chatter about her young daughter Tania back in London. “To me that stretch expressed a love of life and desire to be back in the world of dancing and danger,” d’Albert-Lake added. “Violet was always planning to escape and, night after night, her plan was to be culminated. Somehow, it never worked and, although she spent hours waiting for her chance, it never came.”

  All too soon, that November of 1944, the work detail ended and Toquette and her friends were sent back to Ravensbruck, where the increasingly cold weather began to take a dreadful toll on women working outside. Each morning Toquette stood for two hours in the darkness, shivering, before being sent to a nearby forest to clear ground for a planned landing strip. The next ten hours were a battle against the elements as well as malnutrition. “Unselfish gestures were becoming more and more rare,” recalled d’Albert-Lake. “No one wanted to die, especially in Germany, and the war would soon be over, we knew that. To resist the cold, the hunger, the deprivations, until then was our only aim.”

  The women had no coats or blankets, nothing to protect them from the cold. In late November the first snow arrived. They could never get truly warm, not even as they clung to each other in their lice-infested bunks at night. Some of the Polish women, 40,000 of whom passed through the camp during the war, had stolen all the blankets, leaving none for Toquette and her group of friends.

  Some mornings Toquette looked out of the barrack window and saw to her relief that it was raining, not snowing. Clear skies made the women afraid, for they meant even greater cold. Most days it seemed that time no longer existed. The line between reality and nightmare had blurred. Hope was the most precious thing, far more valuable than bread. All of Toquette’s friends these days looked like the emaciated wraiths whose appearance had so shocked her upon arrival, with dull eyes, hollow cheeks, and gray skin. A Swiss woman called Mina, half Toquette’s age, had lost her will to live and become a haggard old lady who had to be led around like a troubled child.

  As Toquette trudged, bone-tired, between the barracks and various workplaces, the black cinders of the paths crunching in the cold silence beneath her feet, sores itching, lice bites spreading across her neck, dysentery forcing her to the latrines several times a day, she understood that there was a fate worse than death: the annihilation of people’s souls, the single purpose of Ravensbruck. But she was also determined not to be defeated. She would not lower herself like other women, elbowing their way to the soup bowl, stealing others’ food, or simply giving up, lying in a corner in their feces and the dirt, utterly humiliated, broken by Nazism.

  Christmas approached. Those women with children ached for their families more than ever. Toquette had not seen Sumner and Phillip for almost six months. Where were they? Were they together? Were they still alive? There was no way of knowing, but it was impossible to stop asking.

  Toquette tried to celebrate Christmas as best she could. Some women decorated their bunks with pine branches. A few foraged during work details for pieces of wood and then, at great risk, hid them beneath their blouses and smuggled them back into the barracks. They wanted a real fire for once on Christmas Day. Women in several barracks also decided to try to make Christmas cakes with whatever scraps of food could be found.

  On Christmas Eve, the women visited friends elsewhere in the camp and admired their decorations. A tall fir tree stood a few yards from one barracks. Some Russian women had decorated the tree with brightly colored paper and the SS had not pulled it down.

  For most women the absence of loved ones made that December 25, 1944, one of the saddest days of their lives. On New Year’s Eve, the mood in the camp was much different. Some women were so eager and delighted to put the year behind them that, for the first time since arriving at Ravensbruck, they laughed as they light-heartedly argued over whose turn it was to rub their callused hands for a few seconds over the stove. Everyone was eager to heat water to wash with. They all wanted to scrub off a little grime to welcome the first day of a fresh year.

  The cold returned. One morning, at roll call, it was so cold that the very marrow in the women’s bones seemed to freeze. Some collapsed in the snow. Terrible huddles of defeated women soon formed, shivering and sobbing before being hauled to the infirmary where most would die before long. “It was a fearful sight to see them huddled there,” recalled Virginia d’Albert Lake, “one against the other whimpering and moaning—such grey, haggard, shrunken things they were, half alive, half dead.”

  By contrast, for the most part that endless winter Toquette appeared remarkably upbeat, an inspiration to all around her. Virginia d’Albert-Lake recalled that she had never met “a woman with such courage, will power and vitality.” Toquette’s close friend Maisie Renault noted that Toquette was “short and light, very gentle, of joyful appearance and striking bravery. She was very secretive concerning the reasons leading to her arrest.”

  Staying alive was harder every day as the temperature dipped further and the work got more draining. Toquette and the other women had never performed hard physical labor, let alone in freezing conditions and living on starvation rations. “Clad in scanty summer clothes we were near dead with cold and hunger,” recalled d’Albert-Lake. At roll call, more and more women fell unconscious. If no one was able to pick them up and take them to the infirmary, they simply were left in the snow and ice, their limbs turning blue. Some of the corpses were then stored temporarily in a washroom but then quickly incinerated when it was discovered that ravenous inmates had resorted to cannibalism.

  Women like Toquette with children lasted longer than those without. But sooner or later that winter, everyone would succumb to malnutrition, cold, and disease. Toquette would have known that the Soviets were fast approaching from the east. But would they arrive in time to save the women of Ravensbruck? Or would the SS liquidate Toquette and her fellow prisoners in a final spasm of barbarism?

  A stark indicator of the women’s possible fate came on February 5. The SS took twenty-three-year-old Violette Szabo from a cell in the punishment block. She was to appear before the camp commandant, redheaded thirty-six-year-old SS Major Fritz Suhren. That morning he stood wearing his black SS cap with a silver skull, the infamous death’s-head insignia, and watched as Szabo and two other women were brought before him. Szabo was able to walk unaided. It is thought that her fellow British spies from SOE, Lilian Rolfe and Denise Bloch, were carried to the execution spot on stretchers.

  Violette had suffered so greatly, had been beaten and assaulted so often, yet she stood tall, back straight, and looked at Suhren and the execution party with withering contempt as he read out the execution order.

  It was around 7:00 p.m., after dark, on a grassy patch in a yard beside the crematorium. Each woman was made to kneel down. A corporal called Schult then shot each in the back of the neck with a pistol. Szabo was murdered last. “All three were very brave and I was deeply moved,” recalled bystander Johann Schwarzhuber, Suhren’s deputy. When the camp doctor had pronounced them dead, their corpses were taken to the nearby crematorium and burned along with their clothes.

  —

  IT WAS also a long winter for Helmut Knochen, stripped of his rank and assigned to an antitank unit as an SS-Schütze, a private, the previous summer, just before Paris had been liberated. He had then learned that he would serve with the 1st SS Panzer Division, which in December 1944, at the height of the Battle of the Bulge, became notorious for the Malmédy Massacre, in which more than a hundred American POWs were killed in cold blood in Belgium. But then Himmler, apparently realizing how effective Knochen could still be, relented just days before Knochen was to be sent to the front. He was recalled to Berlin, which that January was a fast-spreading ruin, bombed day and night by
the Allies.

  According to a British intelligence report, the notoriously brutal alcoholic Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Knochen’s new boss, hoped that Knochen “would be acceptable to [Walther] Schellenberg [head of the SS’s foreign intelligence service] and that through Knochen he would be able to obtain a better insight into Schellenberg’s work. However, Schellenberg refused to accept the appointment and Knochen, after a short time….became [SS general] Winkelman’s liaison officer at the headquarters of Army Group Rendulic in Hungary.” Knochen could have fared far worse. He was not being bombed around the clock in Berlin. He was safely behind the lines. If he could stay out of the clutches of the Red Army, who would without doubt kill him as a member of the SS, he would surely survive the war.

  While Knochen had managed to avoid frontline combat, his former associate in Paris, Henri Lafont, had been run to ground on a farm just outside the capital. Early on December 27, 1944, in a prison cell, he had told his lawyer: “I don’t regret a thing. I’ve had four years surrounded by orchids, dahlias, and Bentleys—that was worth it. I have lived ten lives so I can afford to lose one. Tell my son not to go to nightclubs….” At 9:50 a.m. that day, his head uncovered, a cigarette plastered as usual to his lips, Henri Lafont was executed by a firing squad.

  EIGHTEEN

  NEUENGAMME

  IT WAS A bitterly cold day. Phillip Jackson was beside his father as he marched into the central square in Neuengamme. It was early January 1945. He could see a brass band made up of some twenty men. The conductor was a small man who stood on a stool. He raised his baton and martial music began. Four men arrived carrying two posts and a crossbeam—a gallows. Soon a long rope with a noose was dangling in the frigid air.

  The band played and the gallows was made ready. Then the music stopped. Phillip watched as a young man in a striped uniform climbed and stood below the gallows. He looked like a teenager, almost Phillip’s age, thin and pale, as his sentence was read out in four languages: German, French, Flemish, and Dutch. He was going to be hanged because of sabotage he had carried out during his work, an SS officer explained, which could have led to the death of German soldiers.

  An order was given. The man did not fall far, just two feet. His neck was not broken but he was barely alive, and the SS soon took him away. Phillip later heard that such cases were carried to a blockhouse, where a particularly vicious Kapo then strangled the “mistakes” using his bare hands. Darkness had fallen by the time Phillip and Sumner were back in their barrack that day. They could no longer see the yellow smoke that streamed without letup from the chimneys of the crematorium.

  Phillip did nothing to celebrate his birthday that January 10 of 1945. It was just another cold day in a world drained of color and humanity. He did his best as usual to stay warm and avoid being beaten by an SS guard called Adolf Speck, one of the Blockführers who derived the greatest joy from striking men in the face with a riding whip. Phillip had seen him do so several times. Speck was just one of several SS officers who had shown themselves to be exceptional sadists, encouraged in their indiscriminate cruelty by thirty-seven-year-old SS major Max Pauly, the camp’s commandant. Upon his arrival four months before, Phillip had learned quickly to stay clear of all of them. One day, however, Pauly had spotted Phillip washing a pair of trousers that had been covered with filth and lice. This was strictly forbidden. “Bash him in the face,” Pauly casually ordered a guard. “Give him a couple clouts.” The block guard did not hesitate to do as he was told.

  By that January of 1945, most inmates had come to recognize Dr. Jackson, the “big American” towering above most others in the morning lineup at 5:00 a.m. At first, the previous fall, he had worked in a forge with a welding torch. He had no face mask and the sparks from the torch had soon hurt his eyes. Not long after, he was sent to the infirmary suffering from acute edema—swelling of the legs and arms caused by malnutrition. Although he was seriously ill, he started to look after other inmates, and the authorities took notice. He was not officially recognized as a doctor by the camp administration, but he was permitted to leave the forge and work instead in the infirmary. However, his health continued to fail and he came down with a serious chest infection. A lifetime of smoking had weakened his lungs.

  Sumner carried on regardless, doing his best to save lives in appalling and insanitary conditions. When operating, he could not sterilize equipment, and one day he cut a finger while treating an inmate. The cut became infected and got steadily worse. Finally, a Czech doctor in the infirmary had to operate on him, removing part of his finger. Still there was no improvement. During a third operation, it was necessary to “disarticulate”—remove—his middle finger, a grave loss for a master surgeon. Indeed, there was little hope of him working at the highest levels in his profession ever again.

  —

  THE INCENDIARY bombs fell in their thousands, whistling down, exploding all across the city, turning parts of Hamburg into a vast inferno. Three hundred and sixty-two B-17 bombers had been sent to destroy key strategic targets, including oil refineries. It was one of 214 raids on the city during the war, and by no means the most destructive. The worst had occurred the previous July, when unusually dry weather and concentrated bombing had created a tornadic inferno with winds of up to 150 miles per hour, with temperatures of up to 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit. Lasting a week, “Operation Gomorrah” killed more than 40,000 civilians, many of whom had died as they vainly tried to find shelter from winds that swept them off the streets like dry leaves.

  In Neuengamme that night of February 24, 1945, the inmates could hear the bombs explode and the crackle and roar of huge fires raging twenty miles away. After the raid, it was decided that a work detail from Neuengamme would be used to clear rubble and remove bodies from the worst-hit areas of the city, half of which had been leveled. “We need a thousand pieces,” the SS declared.

  The pieces were Neuengamme prisoners.

  Sumner hoped Phillip would not be among those selected. He knew that within a couple of weeks most men succumbed to exhaustion and exposure. But during the evening roll call, with the camp’s 15,000 “pieces” arranged in perfect rows, the SS selected a thousand and Sumner soon learned that Phillip was among them. He immediately found an inmate named Jacques Sauvé, one of the Prominenten, the so-called special prisoners being held as hostages in Neuengamme, whom Sumner had befriended during the journey the previous July from Compiègne to Neuengamme.

  “Pete’s been called for the commando,” Sumner explained. “I’m afraid he won’t survive. Can you do something?” Sauvé managed to locate a Kapo named André, and late that night André found Phillip, took him to a nearby building, and told him to change back into his camp clothes and then return to his own barrack. The next morning, at the roll call for the Hamburg work detail, there were exactly 999 people. At the last minute, another inmate was selected to take Phillip’s place. Most of the detail would soon be dead.

  Sumner had managed to save his son, but he knew he would have to do more if he was to keep him alive until the Allies arrived, hopefully in a matter of weeks rather than months. Through connections in the camp administration, he arranged for Phillip to be given one of the best jobs in Neuengamme. One morning Phillip was told to report for work in the kitchen. He would be inside where it was warm, but more important, he would also have the opportunity to steal food. His job consisted of preparing large vats containing four hundred liters of so-called soup. He and another inmate were responsible for three of the massive containers, and had to fill each one with cabbage and beetroots, heat the vats until the liquid boiled, stir it, and then scoop it into large kegs, which they then had to push to a distribution point.

  One day Phillip was pulling one of the vats through the kitchen when the boiling-hot liquid spilled, some of it splashing over his foot. In agony, Phillip took off his wooden shoe as fast as he could but saw to his horror that he had suffered a third-degree burn. He was taken to the camp infirmary, where his father treated the burn—which soon blistered
badly—with a thick brown paste. Although Phillip was in great pain, at least he was able to see his father several times each day.

  Phillip learned that the SS had decreed that no inmate who was a doctor could formally work as such in the camp. So although Sumner should clearly, in a rational world, have overseen the infirmary, it was in fact a taxi driver from Berlin who did so. To Sumner’s surprise, the taxi driver had become quite a skilled surgeon. The taxi driver answered to the SS officer who was formally in charge of the Neuengamme medical facilities: the chief physician of Neuengamme, Dr. Alfred Trzebinski, a bloated, ugly man who always wore polished boots, an immaculate uniform and cap, and carried out live-or-die inspections solely by glancing at patients’ legs. If they looked bad, his victims were sent to their deaths. Dr. Trzebinski had learned his foul trade in Auschwitz, where his fellow SS had by now murdered well over a million Jews. Other SS doctors in Neuengamme also utterly revolted Sumner. One called Kurt Heissmeyer had since the previous November performed medical experiments, injecting twenty Jewish children, aged five to twelve, with tuberculosis before having removed their lymph glands. All the children would be hanged before liberation.

  Other SS monsters who stalked Neuengamme included thirty-two-year-old Anton Thumann, dark-haired, bushy-browed, three silver pips on his uniform’s collar patch, an utter sadist. Thumann never used a whip. He liked to use his fists instead. It made him feel more powerful, Phillip observed, giving him greater pleasure. Phillip also saw him kick people almost to a pulp many times. It appeared Thumann could never get his fill of violence, and he loved to see people die. Phillip noted that the man was always present, reading the death sentences, when inmates were hanged.