by Alex Kershaw
PART FOUR
AFTER THE FALL
It was a world where people exterminated for pleasure and where the murderers were treated as heroes. It already seemed far away, like a nightmare one would prefer to forget. And yet the poisoned yeast is still ready to rise. Men have not the right to forget so quickly. They have not the right. Never….
—JACQUES DELARUE, The Gestapo: A History of Horror
TWENTY
ONE DAY IN MAY
DAWN ARRIVED SLOWLY on May 3, 1945. There were low clouds and a thin drizzle. In the Thielbek’s hold, Phillip felt the ship begin to move. The British were less than twenty miles from the Bay of Lübeck, and the SS had ordered the prison ships to leave the port of Lübeck and head out into the Baltic before they could be liberated.
Since being placed in the hold, Phillip had seen several men die. Now their bodies were piled up at one end of the hold. The SS opened a hatch, flooding the inmates with harsh light, and then lowered a rope with a hook at one end. The corpses were pulled up to the deck and thrown overboard. At the bottom of the hold, meanwhile, Phillip and others watched, barely able to move, it was so crowded. There were, in fact, more than 2,500 inmates crammed beside Phillip and his father. Almost 8,000 more were being held in nearby ships.
It was dark, cold, and damp. There were no toilets and no water. It was obvious that the Germans were going to kill them all, but how and when?
—
FIFTY MILES away, at Ahlhorn air base, young men in dark blue uniforms, veteran Hawker Typhoon fighter-bomber pilots, arrived sleepy-eyed in their mess for a breakfast of bacon and eggs. Twenty-three-year-old squadron leader Martin Rumbold of the RAF’s 263 Squadron joined his men at the breakfast table. Not long after, he
briefed them on that day’s mission. They were to “destroy a great number of ships assembled in the Baltic Sea.” For weeks they had been shooting at pretty much anything that moved in Germany, meeting very little resistance from the Luftwaffe. Later that morning Rumbold received more specific orders. The squadron was to sink all “enemy naval formations” in the Bay of Lübeck.
—
ABOARD THE Thielbek, conditions were ever more horrific. Hundreds of people had acute dysentery. Yet more dead bodies had piled up, so many that Phillip felt as if he were in a slaughterhouse. It was around midday when he made his way to a metal ladder leading from the hold to the deck above. He was desperate for fresh air, determined to fill his lungs with something other than the stench of feces and decaying flesh. He began to climb the ladder. Near the top he saw a guard. He looked old and haggard and was armed with a Mauser rifle.
“Be a good man,” Phillip begged. “Let me breathe some clean air.”
To his surprise, the guard did not strike him as Phillip stepped onto the Thielbek’s main deck. He filled his lungs with sea air and looked up at the overcast sky. He breathed in again. Then he saw several planes far in the distance. Their pilots had been given orders to sink any German boat still afloat in the Baltic. Some had also been told that the Thielbek and the other ships in the bay contained thousands of SS soldiers trying to flee justice.
Pilot John Byrne remembered that he and his fellow British pilots were flying in close formation until they arrived over the Bay of Lübeck.
“There they are,” cried one pilot.
Byrne looked down and saw the Cap Arcona making out to sea. There were two other vessels that were also quickly visible. One was the Thielbek.
“Come on,” said Byrne. “Let’s get it over.”
The Typhoons banked toward the targets.
“Okay, down we go,” ordered the squadron leader. “Going down, going down, now.”
The pilots concentrated hard, determined to hit one of the boats. Antiaircraft fire exploded around them as they dived at around 500 miles an hour. They had been ordered to sink the ships and then to strafe any survivors they saw in the water. At about 3,500 feet, they opened fire.
Squadron leader Derek Stevenson was leading the first wave of attackers. “We had been in action for days blowing up railways, refineries and ships,” he recalled. “For us this was just another job, but knowing the SS were on board made us all the more determined to destroy the ships. We came in at 9,000ft, dived to 3,000ft and I fired all eight rockets and every cannon round at one ship.”
—
PHILLIP SAW one of the planes swoop down and fire a rocket. He watched as it screamed toward him, trailing white smoke. It was mesmerizing. Phillip was certain it was slightly off target. He just knew it. It exploded fifty yards away but a second followed and did not miss. The next thing Phillip knew, the deck below shifted violently. In shock, stunned by the explosion, he was then dimly aware that the ship was sinking. Amazingly, he had managed to get on deck just before the RAF’s attack. He was not trapped below.
Water began to flood the Thielbek’s hold, where Sumner was surrounded by a pressing, hysterical mass. Men screamed and begged for help as more water flooded in. The only way out was the metal ladder Phillip had earlier used and now men fought furiously to get to. Some placed a foot on the ladder only to be knocked down by others as men started to tear planks from the decking. The water kept rising and men started to drown as others used the planks to keep themselves afloat.
On deck, Phillip tried to make his way to the hold to find his father. The boat was listing badly. Then there was a loud bang. Blood and brains splattered across the deck. An SS guard had shot himself in the head.
Phillip looked around, hoping to catch sight of his father among men scrambling out of the hold. Where was he? More rockets exploded nearby, so Phillip began to strip, casting his clothes aside, knowing he had a better chance of making the shore if he were free of the rags that would weigh him down once he was in the water. When he was naked he made his way to the edge of the deck.
Hell…the ship…It’s going down….I’m going to go down too….
The ship was listing so badly that the ocean was just a couple of feet from him, lapping at the edge of the deck. The boat would soon sink and those still in the hold would surely die. But where was his father? Should he wait a few seconds longer before jumping in the water? There was no sign of his father wherever he looked. He called out for him. Still no sign.
Death was nearby now, closer than ever. Phillip couldn’t wait for his father any longer. So he made his way to the edge of the deck and dropped down into the water. It felt ice-cold as he began to swim away from the boat. He wasn’t in bad shape, had some muscle, and was not too thin, because he had worked in the kitchen, where he had been able to scrounge extra food.
Phillip knew he was a good swimmer. He had learned the breaststroke and the crawl in the choppy waters of the English Channel, thanks to his father, and now he struck out confidently for the shore, about three miles away. He had to get away from the boat before it sank. There would be a cavitation effect as it went under. He could remember a scene from a book his mother had read to him in his bedroom on Avenue Foch. In The Swiss Family Robinson, a boat had sunk, pulling people down after it, sucking them into a whirlpool. He didn’t want that to happen to him. So he swam hard, away from the boat, toward a beach near a small town called Neustadt.
The water was not rough, but it was much colder than the English Channel in August. He kept swimming, focused on the beach far off, unaware that as many as nine thousand men were dead or dying in the waters of the Bay of Lübeck, five thousand from just one boat, the Cap Arcona. The RAF Typhoons were making strafing runs now, their bullets zipping through the air, jolting bodies in the water. Men who had survived years of hell were being slaughtered just four days from the war’s end.
Phillip was aware of boats closing on him. They were powerful, fast, and well armed. The Germans had sent out several launches from the port of Lübeck. One came close to Phillip and then a German sailor was pulling him into it. He was shivering badly. A motor roared and the launch began to return to the shore. Phillip had been among the first to escape the Thielbek and
was the first survivor, he realized, to be pulled into the launch. The German sailors quickly spotted other survivors in the water and pulled some of them into the boat too.
Phillip watched, seated on the deck beside an antiaircraft gun, as the Germans noticed that other survivors in the water had shaved heads. They were not Kriegsmarine men, Germans in the navy. The men in the water were Neuengamme inmates, vermin from the camps. The sailors stopped trying to save people and the boat turned back toward the shore, its antiaircraft gun firing away, the steady bark leaving Phillip almost deafened. Elsewhere in the bay, other German boats rammed men in the water and some Germans opened fire as survivors begged and screamed for their help.
Phillip was extraordinarily fortunate. He was not thrown off the boat. He was not shot, and he was brought back to the shore. Then he heard harsh voices. They belonged to the SS, men in black uniforms, their eyes blazing with hate and insatiable rage, who had already killed about 150 men on the beach nearby, gunning them down with undisguised glee, determined that there would be no survivors even among those who had made it to dry land. Elsewhere, navy cadets and even German locals joined in the killing, pulling out old rifles and double-barreled shotguns and then carrying out a cull along the nearby beaches, which were soon covered with thousands of washed-up corpses and bodies riddled with bullets.
Phillip was not killed on the beach like so many others. He was herded through the town of Neustadt with some two hundred survivors. The SS made him and others line up against a building. Phillip stood shivering, naked, in shock. Then the young men in black were setting up an MG42 machine gun, placing it in on a tripod, and aiming it at Phillip.
TWENTY-ONE
HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE
PHILLIP COULD SEE the machine gun. Two Germans manned it. There was the sound of tank fire. The Germans looked worried. The firing continued. They abandoned the machine gun and beat a hasty retreat. Phillip stood, in complete shock, barely registering events, knowing only that he was still not dead. He saw a green tank, its treads clanking. Soldiers in wool uniforms followed close behind. He had been saved. The British had finally arrived.
Phillip was alive, one of around 50 people out of 2,750 who survived the sinking of the Thielbek. At some point that afternoon of May 3, 1945, another of the fifty, a Frenchman, told Phillip he had seen his father around a hundred yards from the ship, supporting himself with a plank but “in difficulties.” There was a chance that his father might have made it to shore.
By evening, as the British soldiers began to take traumatized survivors to nearby hospitals for medical care, according to another survivor “an eerie hush” had fallen over the Bay of Lübeck, which had been the scene of one of the greatest maritime disasters in history. The odd wave could be heard crashing on the beaches strewn with bodies. For weeks, corpses would continue to wash up, and as late as 1971 human bones could be found amid less macabre flotsam and jetsam after storms.
Phillip was taken to a hospital in the nearby town of Neustadt to get some rest and receive medical attention. The next morning he found a blanket, draped it around himself, and wandered into the town. Maybe there was a chance of finding his father. It wasn’t long before he came across a British officer who was with a patrol. It was around 10:00 a.m. on May 4, 1945.
The officer had a friendly face.
“Can I do anything for you?” asked Phillip. “I’ve escaped and I’m alone now.”
“You speak German?”
“Yes.”
“Then come with us.”
The British captain told Phillip he needed an interpreter. Although he was still in shock, numbed by his ordeal, he was taken to a barrack nearby. By afternoon he had been issued a uniform, billeted in a sergeant’s mess, and even given a cigarette ration. He was told where he could send and receive mail if he needed to contact relatives. Then he was put to work. A couple of nights later, Frenchman Maurice Gacheny was surprised to see Phillip approach him with the British captain.
“This officer is inquiring for Michel Hollard,” said Phillip. “Some of the others said you might know what had become of him.”
“Do you know Michel Hollard?” asked the British officer.
Phillip translated.
“I knew him better than anyone in camp,” said Gacheny.
“But not as well as we do,” said the British officer.
“How can that be?” asked Gacheny.
The British officer explained that Hollard’s intelligence about Hitler’s rocket program had been of vital use to the Allies. They wanted to find and debrief him, but it was a futile search. Unbeknownst to them, Hollard had already returned to France.
Over the next few days, including May 8, when victory in Europe was declared, Phillip was kept busy with the unit from the British Eighth Army, commanded by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery of El Alamein fame. After the deep and protracted trauma of Neuengamme, not to mention the sinking of the Thielbek, Phillip was at least distracted from feeling or thinking too much about being an orphan—about the loss, he believed, of both his parents. He was proud to be wearing a uniform. He asked another soldier to take photographs of him in it. That May 8 he sent a letter to school friends in Paris explaining what had happened to him since his arrest in May 1944. He was just seventeen but in some ways felt like a grown man. He had learned that “being brave” does not come easily to most of mankind. The cosseted child was gone.
When not helping the British to interrogate German prisoners, Phillip looked for his father’s corpse, cutting a pathetic figure as he traipsed along the local beaches, moving from one washed-up victim to another. There were hundreds of corpses on every beach. Some were around Phillip’s age. A few were children who had been clubbed to death using rifles. The SS had clearly run out of ammunition. The faces of many corpses were bloated beyond recognition, so Phillip began to examine their hands; he was looking for one with a severed finger.
Meanwhile, Toquette was making a slow recovery in a hospital in Malmö, in Sweden. That May, she received a letter from a good friend in Paris:
Your husband and son in Germany safe and free and looking for you/Paris relations all well/will attend [to] money matters….
Her son and husband had, apparently, survived. At least 27,000 of their fellow deportees from France had not.
Before long, Phillip’s letter of May 8 to school friends was forwarded from Paris to Toquette, who received it late that month in the hospital in Malmö. She must, of course, have been delighted that her son had survived, as earlier reported. And she was eager to get in touch with him as soon as possible.
But as she read Phillip’s letter she also learned the truth about her husband:
I am working with H.M.S. forces, living with them and sharing their life.
My father is dead.
I do not know if I shall see my mother.
It is likely I shall still spend a few weeks here.
This life is fine.
Phillip Jackson
O.H.M.S.! [On His Majesty’s Service]
A month later, in a room near Toquette’s in the hospital in Malmö, her close friend Maisie Renault opened a letter from a relative. Inside, she found a copy of Phillip’s letter to his school friends in Paris. She would never forget reading it. “Dear friends,” Phillip had written, “you probably wonder what’s happened to me since a year ago—this is the truth, and it is tragic.” He had then told the story of the day he lost his father before writing: “I think my mother died in a concentration camp…”
Maisie would later remember that she was “struck by the tragic tone and the resignation with which a boy of 17, who had been through such a trauma, believed his whole family had died.” She was also glad to have received the copy of Phillip’s letter, for it gave her hope. If Phillip had survived the tragedy in the Bay of Lübeck, then her brother, Philippe, who had also been imprisoned in Neuengamme, might have also escaped death. Tragically, within a few weeks she would learn that he had not.
Toqu
ette grieved as she continued to recuperate that June in Malmö. In early July, after sending a letter to Phillip confirming she was alive, she returned to France, to the empty apartment at 11, Avenue Foch.
On July 18, 1945, she wrote to Sumner’s sister, Freda, in Maine, passing on what she had learned from Phillip’s letter of May 8 that had been forwarded to her:
Sumner didn’t have a bad heart, but he was very short of breath since he had pneumonia a few years before the war. It was the third finger of his right hand that had to be disarticulated. He had been working in the infirmary of the camp, taking care of his fellow prisoners. Of course, hygiene was very bad and he got an infection. They were always together, father and son, at the camp of Neuengamme, which they never left. It seems his morale was always good, he was so courageous, never knew what fear was.
We were all three arrested on May 25, 1944, not because we were Americans but because we were working for the underground liberation movement that we call the “Resistance.” We were therefore political prisoners and much worse off than regular prisoners of war.
As soon as my health permits, I am going to look for a job. Life is very expensive in France and we have not the means to live on our income.
I want you to know that I never ceased to be in love with Sumner, for whom I had moreover a great admiration and respect. He had such big qualities.
Best remembrance, Freda.
I hope you are a happy wife and mother.
Affectionately,
Toquette
—
IN GERMANY, meanwhile, Phillip Jackson did his best to live in the moment, to escape the past. He focused totally on his new role, not as a victim of Nazism, but rather as a proud member of the British Army. There were moments when he was consumed by rage and wanted to avenge his father’s death, which he had only slowly come to accept. But he was mostly too busy with his new duties, helping the British run a prison camp for German soldiers, millions of whom languished behind barbed wire that summer as the Allies searched among them for war criminals. In his free time he went hunting, roaming a nearby peninsula, on the lookout for rabbit and other game. Amid a stash of weapons he had collected and kept under his bed, he treasured a Belgian .16-caliber side-by-side shotgun. He hunted hares with it, then gave them to a delighted mess cook. “One day,” he recalled, “I was in a wheat field when I saw something reddish. I started aiming and then I saw it was a redheaded boy who was lying on top of a girl—making love to her. He was lucky, very lucky….That was the closest I got to killing a German.”