Fritz felt utterly isolated and friendless. Despondency took hold of him, as it had briefly in Monowitz. He scarcely noticed the passage of days through March and April; they remained in his memory only as a hellish blur.
The prisoners in the tunnels wasted away through starvation, while the SS and the green-triangle kapos murdered them at will. During March alone nearly three thousand were declared unfit for work and despatched to Mauthausen, where most of them died. When a truckload of food was delivered to the camp by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the SS plundered it, taking the best for themselves, then pierced the remaining cans of food and condensed milk; laughing, they threw the leaking cans among the prisoners. Yet despite the death rate, the population grew rapidly as more and more death marches from evacuated camps across Austria were brought in.19 They died in their thousands, and their unburied corpses piled up in the camps.
Physically as well as mentally Fritz altered. The conditions in Mauthausen-Gusen eroded him in two months from the lean young man he’d been when he left the Wehrmacht barracks in St Pölten, whittling the flesh from his bones, until by late April he resembled the spectral, skeletal Muselmänner. The world in which he lived was the worst he had ever seen. Nothing but time – and a brief period at that – separated him from becoming another bony corpse on the heaps.
And yet, depressed as he was, he still didn’t give up entirely as the Muselmänner did. There was an end in sight, if only he could cling on long enough to see it. Sounds of war were approaching – the familiar thumping of artillery in the far distance. The Americans were on their way.
The SS had planned for this. The Nazis had no intention of letting their top-secret jet-fighter production facility be captured – or their thousands of prisoners. On 14 April, Heinrich Himmler sent a telegram to all concentration camp commandants: ‘No prisoner may fall alive into the hands of the enemy.’20 In Himmler’s mind, that meant evacuation, and his telegram said as much. But in the mind of Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, it was understood to mean a total liquidation. He laid his plans accordingly.
On the morning of 28 April, all the prisoners in Gusen were held back from going to work. At ten forty-five the air-raid sirens sounded. Instantly, the SS and kapos began urgently herding the tens of thousands of prisoners towards the Kellerbau tunnels, the second set of underground works at Gusen.21 They filed in through one of the three entrances – a huge maw as wide and high as a railway tunnel.
Inside, the granite and concrete walls were danker and colder than the sandstone of the Bergkristall tunnels. Due to the expense of excavating such hard stone and their vulnerability to flooding, the Kellerbau tunnels had never been completed,22 but they were convenient as an air-raid shelter for the camps.
Fritz stood in the damp chill and waited, listening for the sounds of bombers and the thump of explosions. The minutes passed, but no sounds came.
He had never been in the Kellerbau tunnels, but some of those who had might have noticed as they filed in that two of the three entrances had been bricked up, leaving only this one open. Even the sharpest-eyed were unaware that, after they had entered, SS machine-gunners had set up positions outside. The prisoners were also ignorant of the fact that during the previous few days, this last entrance had been mined with explosives on orders from Ziereis. The operation was codenamed Feuerzeug – Lighter.
The task had been undertaken by the civilian manager in charge of tunnel construction, Paul Wolfram; he and his colleagues were told that their own and their families’ lives would be in jeopardy if they botched the job or revealed the secret.23 Wolfram had laced the entrance with all the explosives he had to hand. It was insufficient, so he added a couple of dozen aerial bombs and two truckloads of marine mines. During the night before the air-raid alert, the explosives had been wired up.
Now, with all the prisoners inside and the machine-gunners ready to prevent escape, the tunnel entrance was ready to be blown. The inmates, sealed inside, would suffocate to death.
20. The End of Days
אבא
By the close of March, when he’d been at Ellrich about a month and a half, things had improved a little for Gustav; just enough to nourish his will and keep his body and soul together.
He’d been taken off track-laying and was working in the tunnels as a carpenter. His kapo was a decent man named Erich, who had secret sources of food for himself and donated his soup ration to Gustav1 – just enough to slow but not reverse the process of starvation. Meanwhile he grew more filthy and lice-infested with every passing day.
Gustav lived his days underground. It was like the fourth circle of the pit of Dante’s Hell: most of the labouring slaves were on the brink of death, the stronger preying on the weak, robbing them of their paltry rations. The only plentiful thing was corpses, and there had been occurrences of cannibalism. Over a thousand prisoners had died in March, and a further sixteen hundred walking skeletons had been sent to an army barracks in Nordhausen which served as a dump for the spent and useless.2
By April, American forces were only days away, and the SS began pulling the plug. Work was halted and preparations began for evacuation. That same night, the RAF fire-bombed Nordhausen, hitting the barracks and killing hundreds of sick prisoners. They visited again the next night, razing the town and adding more prisoners to the death toll.3
The evacuation of Ellrich took two days. Gustav and all the other prisoners who were fit to move were loaded into cattle wagons. As the final train prepared to leave on 5 April, the last SS man to depart the camp shot the dozen or so remaining sick prisoners. When the US 104th Infantry Division reached Ellrich a week later they found not a living soul.4
אבא
Gustav thought back on the journey from Auschwitz. The weather was milder now, he had room to sit, and they even got a little food. Not nearly as much as they should have received, however; supply wagons stocked with food had been coupled to the rear of the train when it left Ellrich, but at some point they had been disconnected. A little relief came when the train stopped at a town where there was a bread factory.5 A British prisoner of war gave Gustav two kilos of bread and pumpernickel – enough to keep him and his immediate comrades going for three days.
The train had come far into the north of Germany, past Hanover, and on 9 April it reached its final destination: the small town of Bergen, the unloading place for Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
With the ring of enemies closing in ever more tightly, Himmler was determined to hold on to his surviving prisoners. They were intended to serve one final purpose – as hostages. Bergen-Belsen was one of the last concentration camps remaining on German-held soil. By the time Gustav arrived, the camp, designed for only a few thousand, had swollen beyond all sense or reason, and despite thousands of deaths every month from starvation and disease – 7,000 in February, 18,000 in March, 9,000 in the first days of April – the living population had climbed to over 60,000 souls, existing among piles of unburied corpses in an atmosphere rife with typhus. In Himmler’s peculiar mind, he was saving them, trying to win favour with the Allies by showing how merciful he was to the Jews, rather than the architect of their mass murder.6
Into this boiling mass of humanity, Gustav and the other survivors of Ellrich were to be driven.
Many had not survived the journey, and there was the usual cargo of corpses to be unloaded from the train. As the survivors marched from the station towards the camp, an astonishing thing happened which was both terrible and wonderful. The column of ghosts met another marching in the same direction; they were Hungarian Jews – men, women, children, all starving and wretched. Many of the Ellrich survivors were Hungarian also, and to Gustav’s amazement, first one person then another and another from one column recognized relatives in the other. They broke ranks and ran to them, calling their names. Friends, mothers, sisters, fathers, children, long separated and thinking their dear ones dead, found them again on the road to Belsen. It was both joyous and heartrending, and
Gustav could not find the words to describe what he saw – ‘one can only imagine such a reunion’. What would he not have given to be so reunited with Tini and Herta and Fritz. But not here, not in this place.
There were no anchors left, no touchstones, no certainties; even the camp system had broken down. With Belsen full to bursting, the fifteen thousand who arrived from the Mittelbau camps were turned away. Their SS escorts found accommodation for them at a nearby Wehrmacht panzer training school between Belsen and Hohne. Its barracks were pressed into service as an overflow concentration camp, designated Belsen Camp 2, under the command of SS-Captain Franz Hössler, who had accompanied the transports.7 A thuggish-looking individual with a jutting chin and sunken mouth, before Mittelbau Hössler had commanded one of the women’s sections in Auschwitz-Birkenau, participating in selections and gassings and countless acts of individual murder. It had been Hössler who had selected the women ‘volunteers’ for the Monowitz brothel.8
Physically the panzer training school was a pleasant change for the prisoners: clean, airy white buildings set around tarmac squares dispersed among woodland. The Wehrmacht staff – now consisting of a Hungarian regiment – helped the SS guards manage the prisoners.
The rations improved in quality, but the quantities were pathetically inadequate. Gustav and his comrades were reduced to foraging potato and turnip peelings from the rubbish bins outside the barrack kitchens – ‘anything to relieve the hunger’, he noted in his diary.
In all Gustav’s time in the camps, he had never been surrounded by so much tight-pressed humanity, or seen helpless starvation on such a colossal scale. After all he had endured, here in Belsen the faith in himself that had kept him going started to waver. What made him special? Why should he make it to the end when so many millions had not or would not?
In their own way, the Hungarian troops were as brutal as the SS. Most of the officers were well groomed, with pomaded hair, and had instilled in their mostly illiterate men an anti-Semitic fascist ideology which was on a par with anything the SS could provide. They were callous and apt to shoot inmates for entertainment. Their main duty was to protect the kitchens, and they would stand in the square between the barracks taking shots at the prisoners foraging for scraps, killing dozens of them.9 Some retained a mystic devotion to the Nazi cause. One told a Jewish woman that he regretted the work of exterminating her people remained incomplete, telling her that Hitler would surely return, ‘and again we shall fight side by side’.10
On his first night in Belsen 2, Gustav stood vigil in the upper storey of his building. In the south he saw the dark sky glowing orange. It looked to him as if a town – possibly Celle, twenty or so kilometres away – was in flames. Even as Gustav watched, it flashed and erupted with explosions. This wasn’t aerial bombing – it was a battle front.11
His sinking heart began to rise. ‘I think to myself, now the liberators must be here soon – and I have faith again. I think to myself still, the Lord God does not forsake us.’
Two days later, on 12 April, local Wehrmacht commanders made contact with British forces and negotiated for the peaceful surrender of Bergen-Belsen. In order to contain the epidemic of typhus, a zone of several kilometres around the camp would become neutral territory.
In the barracks, Gustav noticed that most of the Hungarian soldiers had begun wearing white armbands as a token of neutrality. Even some of the SS were doing the same – including the camp leader, SS-Corporal Sommer, whom Gustav had known in Auschwitz as ‘one of the bloodhounds’. It seemed that the prisoners would be handed over to the British without bloodshed. ‘It is high time,’ Gustav wrote, because the SS ‘wanted to make of us a St Bartholomew’s Night massacre under English illumination, but the Hungarian colonel didn’t want any part of it, and so they have left us alone.’
On 14 April, Gustav saw the first British tanks in the distance. The word spread through the barracks, bringing joy at the news, and the celebrations went on all night.
חברים
Captain Derrick Sington struggled to make himself heard over the convoy of tanks clanking and roaring through the town of Winsen. Following a race to catch up with the armoured vehicles of the 23rd Hussars, Sington had found the regiment’s intelligence officer, and was trying to inform him of his special mission over the din of military traffic.
Derrick Sington was commander of No. 14 Amplifying Unit of the Army Intelligence Corps. Equipped with light trucks mounted with loudspeakers, their role was to disseminate information and propaganda. His orders were to accompany the advance column of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, which would be establishing the neutral zone surrounding the Bergen-Belsen camp. The prisoners – or ‘internees’ as the British were officially calling them – must not be allowed to leave the zone, due to disease. Captain Sington’s urgent mission was to locate the camp and make the requisite announcements to the inmates. As a German speaker, he would also act as interpreter for Lieutenant Colonel Taylor of the 63rd, who would be in overall command of the zone.12
Yelling at the top of his voice over the clattering of tracks and roaring engines, Sington explained all this to the Hussars officer, who leaned out of the turret of his tank with his hand cupped over his ear. He nodded and told Sington to fall into line. Sington jumped back into his seat, gestured to his driver, and they pulled into the road, joining the flow of armour.
Beyond Winsen, the column passed through open countryside, which gave way to thick woodlands of firs, whose powerful scent mingled with the exhaust fumes and the stench of burning. The infantry were torching the undergrowth on either side with flamethrowers; they weren’t taking any chances with concealed German anti-tank weapons or snipers.
Not far up the road, Sington saw the first warning notices – ‘DANGER TYPHUS’ – marking the perimeter of the neutral zone. Two German NCOs passed him a note written in bad English inviting him to meet the Wehrmacht commandant at Bergen-Belsen.
As the road swung eastwards Sington spotted the camp – an enclosure of high barbed-wire fences and watchtowers among forest, flanking the side of the road. He was met at the gate by a small group of very smartly dressed enemy officers: one in the field-grey of the Wehrmacht, a highly decorated Hungarian captain in khaki, and a bulky, fleshy-faced SS officer with a simian jaw and a scar on his cheek who proved to be SS-Captain Josef Kramer, the former commandant.
While they waited for the arrival of Colonel Taylor, Sington fell into polite conversation with Kramer. He asked him how many prisoners were in the camp; Kramer answered forty thousand, and an additional fifteen thousand in Camp 2 up the road. And what kind of prisoners were they? ‘Habitual criminals and homosexuals,’ said Kramer, looking furtively at the Englishman. Sington said nothing, but later noted that he had ‘reason to believe it was an incomplete statement’.13
Their conversation was mercifully cut short by the arrival of Colonel Taylor’s jeep. He ordered Sington to go in and make his announcement, then roared on up the road towards Bergen. At Sington’s invitation Kramer climbed up on the running board of the loudspeaker truck, and they drove in through the gates.
Sington had tried many times to imagine what the inside of a concentration camp would be like, but it was unlike anything he had pictured. There was a road through the centre, with separate compounds on either side, each filled with wooden barrack blocks. The place was suffused with ‘a smell of ordure’ which reminded Sington of ‘the smell of a monkey-house’ in a zoo; ‘sad blue smoke floated like a ground mist between the low buildings’. The excited inmates ‘crowded to the barbed wire fences … with their shaven heads and their obscenely striped penitentiary suits, which were so dehumanising’. Sington had witnessed gratitude from many different liberated peoples since Normandy, but the cheers from these skeletal, wasted ghosts, ‘in their terrible motley, who had once been Polish officers, land-workers in the Ukraine, Budapest doctors, and students in France, impelled a stronger emotion, and I had to fight back my tears’.14
He stopped his
truck at intervals, the loudspeakers blaring out the announcements that the camp zone was in quarantine under British administration; the SS had surrendered control and would now withdraw; the Hungarian regiment would remain, but under direct command of the British army; prisoners must not leave the area due to the risk of spreading typhus; food and medical supplies were being rushed to the camp with all haste.
The joyful inmates spilled out of the compounds and surrounded the truck. Kramer was alarmed, and a Hungarian soldier began firing directly over the heads of the prisoners. Sington jumped out of his truck. ‘Stop shooting!’ he ordered, pulling his revolver, and the soldier lowered his rifle. But no sooner had he stopped than, to Sington’s amazement, a band of men in prisoner uniforms armed with cudgels ran into the crowd, lashing and beating with appalling brutality.
Arriving back at the main gate, Sington said to Kramer, ‘You’ve made a fine hell here.’15 His brief tour had shown him only the throng of survivors, and it would be a day or two before he finally discovered the burial pits, the crematorium, and the grounds strewn and stacked with thousands of naked, emaciated corpses.
Pulling out of the gate, he turned his truck towards Camp 2, to repeat his round of announcements.
אבא
A day had passed since Gustav had seen the tanks in the distance. At long last the British column came rolling up the main Bergen road, passing by the camp altogether. Little seemed to happen. Then the loudspeaker truck arrived in Camp 2. The prisoners gathered round to hear the British officer’s announcement, which was drowned out by cheering.
The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz Page 30