Churchill's White Rabbit

by Sophie Jackson

  It was a morbid situation to have one’s fate hanging on the death of another man. It was one of those things that could never be resolved easily in a person’s conscience. They also knew that Dietzech would not be averse to hastening a death to ensure his own safety. They all expressed their own desire that nature should be allowed to take its course and, if it should be that one of the men got better, than that was how fate wanted to play it and they would not take that from him. Dietzech was less than impressed by this selflessness, but apparently seems to have obeyed their request.

  After all, there seemed no imminent danger.

  Two weeks passed without incident, and boredom was the only thing that interfered with the men’s days. Forest retrieved Hubble’s chess set and took to playing again. The bond between the escapees gradually strengthened as the time passed, and their thoughts revolved around typhus and freedom. Then came 4 October, and a new supplement was added to the usual roll call. Just as before eleven prisoners from block 17 were being specially summoned and one of the names on the list was Peulevé.

  It was an awful moment. Peulevé felt sick that not only were his colleagues walking to an atrocious death but, by not being with them, he could risk the lives of Forest and Hessel. He could hardly walk out of the hospital and present himself, as that would ruin everything when he was supposed to be dying of typhus, but if the SS came looking what would happen?

  The SS did come looking, even though their usual terror of the sickness that hung around block 46 made them hesitant. But the camp commandant wanted to know where Peulevé was and he had heard he had been transferred to the hospital. Dietzech made himself scarce and the SS men left empty-handed.

  They came back however, and this time Dietzech could not feign absence. The camp commandant was determined to carry out his orders and even when Dietzech protested that no one was allowed to enter the hospital without his express permission, as arranged by Ding, the guards were not persuaded. They told Dietzech that a stretcher was on its way for the patient. Express orders from Berlin had said that Peulevé must be executed, no matter his condition, and if that meant shooting him on the stretcher, so be it.

  Dietzech was deeply worried that the plan was about to crumble around them; the consequences of which were not to be contemplated. Above all else Peulevé must have every appearance of suffering from typhus when the guards next returned, so he was given an injection to mimic the symptoms and within a few hours he was burning with fever.

  When the stretcher finally arrived Peulevé was on the ward boiling with a temperature of 105 and a worried Dietzech was close by. Peulevé’s fake symptoms were now proving as dangerous as if he really had typhus, but at least it convinced the SS men that he was truly sick. Still they wanted to remove him.

  Ding made a hurried appeal to Commandant Pister, explaining that a patient running such a high fever was a serious contamination risk if moved from the hospital. Pister was unmoved – he wanted Peulevé dead sooner rather than later.

  ‘I could give him a lethal injection,’ suggested Ding, desperate to buy time.

  ‘I just want him dead, I don’t care how it’s done. But not by you Ding, I want someone else to give the injection.’

  Was this a sign that the commandant was already having concerns about Ding’s ruthlessness? Ding tried not to think about it as he offered another solution.

  ‘What about Dr Schiedlausky?’

  SS Hauptsturmführer Gerhard Schiedlausky had performed large numbers of experiments on the female patients at Ravensbruck, so to Pister he would have seemed an obvious candidate, but Ding knew he was another doctor who was feeling his conscience prickling under the threat of the Allies – he would eventually be sentenced to death after the war.8 Ding suspected he would send a subordinate to complete the order.

  Ding’s assessment was entirely correct. Good Dr Schiedlausky delegated the execution to an elderly NCO from block 61. This was white-haired Friedrich Wilhelm, a man not known to have any qualms about executing prisoners, but who did have a weakness for schnapps.

  Dietzech greeted him at block 46 with a purloined bottle and offered him a drink. It didn’t take much to persuade Wilhelm to accept the glass, nor the next, and very rapidly he was satisfactorily drunk. Dietzech then led him onto the ward and pointed out one of the other patients who was as seriously ill as Peulevé. Wilhelm hovered over the sick man like a drunken grim reaper, swaying so much on his feet he could barely remain upright.

  ‘It seems a waste of Phenol to inject the man when he will be dead in hours,’ Dietzech mused as Wilhelm tottered dangerously. ‘And a waste of your time too. Look, leave the injection with me and if he is still breathing by the morning I’ll give it to him myself.’

  Everything hung on how conscientious of his duty Wilhelm was: if he insisted on performing the execution now then Peulevé could not allow an innocent man to be hastened to his death. He would have to reveal himself and that would reveal them all. Whether Dietzech would have allowed such a thing to happen (what he had at stake was just as huge) is another matter. He would have no concerns about ushering another victim off quickly to save his own skin.

  Fortunately for them all Wilhelm was too drunk to really care who killed who and happily handed the injection over to Dietzech, then wandered away to sleep off his schnapps. He later reported to Schiedlausky that the deed had been done.

  Once again it was a narrow escape, but still a corpse was needed to prove that Peulevé was dead, and his chosen double, Marcel Seigneur, was proving to have a fighting spirit. He had clung to life through his illness for far longer than anyone could have expected, though it seemed as if he had now taken a turn for the worse. Dietzech kept trying to persuade the agents to let him quicken his death, but still they refused. Amazingly he obeyed them: perhaps twenty years in a concentration camp under Nazi rule had instilled an almost pathological inability to disobey his superiors! But on the morning of 9 October Seigneur finally succumbed and, with Peulevé’s number painted on his thigh, he was sent off to the crematorium.

  Peulevé had successfully switched identities and his elation could be hardly contained. He wrote a note to Kogon thanking him in vague terms for his help.

  This left Forest and Hessel hanging in a limbo of fear. They did not know for certain the fates of the men who had been called forward on the 5 October. As far as they were aware they must have been executed by slow strangulation and it was a thought that played on their minds (in fact, one of the officers in the party had been granted his request that they be executed by firing squad). It could only be a matter of time before Hessel and Forest (still known to the SS as Dodkin) were also summoned to their deaths.

  As the days before the next execution order sped by, Maurice Chouquet (Forest’s double) suddenly took a turn for the worse and died on Friday 13 October. Never had such an ominous day seemed so lucky to Forest. Kenneth Dodkin was officially recorded as yet another victim of typhus and Forest could relax a little. Now the only person left was Hessel.

  He was frightened that the delay on his behalf would betray everyone, and the longer they hid at block 46, the more people learned about their presence and the deception. How long before they were betrayed? Hessel was a bundle of nerves, and as he feared the approaching of another execution order, he started to doubt the plan. He asked Kogon to make arrangements to ship him from the camp in one of the work parties, anything to put himself at a distance from the SS men, but Kogon refused. Hessel could hardly contain himself, the confinement and waiting seemed yet another torture, then on 20 October, his 27th birthday, news arrived that Michel Boitel had died. Suddenly Hessel was saved.

  * * *

  Notes

  1. Segev, T., Soldiers of Evil.

  2. SOE official files ‘Information required on Buchenwald Concentration Camp’ 29 June 1945.

  3. SOE official files, untitled report on Buchenwald, 17 November 1945.

  4. F Section letter, 1/11/1945.

  5. Perrin, N., Spirit of R
esistance: The Life of SOE agent Henri Peulevé.

  6. Excerpts taken from typescript of original letter kept in Yeo-Thomas’ SOE personnel file.

  7. Seaman, Op cit.

  8. Schiedlausky’s official SS records do not list him at Buchenwald in 1944. It appears that he transferred there in 1943, but his record does not indicate when he left. He served at Ravensbruck between 1941 and 1943.

  – 16 –

  A Final Adventure

  Every man in the camp knew that Block 46 was a dreadful place. Only a very few people in the camp had an exact idea of what was going on in Block 46. A dreadful horror seized anyone who was brought into any kind of connection with this block. If people were selected and taken to Block 46 through the sick bay, then they knew that the affair was a fatal one. The untold horror, which was attached to this block, made things even worse.1

  So said Kogon at the Nuremburg War Crime Trials where he served as a witness for the prosecution. It was the sort of testimony Ding was desperately trying to insure himself against with the saving of Peulevé, Hessel and Forest. Even so, he lost faith in the effectiveness of their statements and killed himself before he could be brought to trial.

  Ding’s fate was the last thing on Forest’s mind as he waited in that house of horror and adapted to being Maurice Chouquet, a 35-year-old carpenter and native of Rouen. What Forest knew about carpentry could be noted on a single sheet of paper. SOE rule no.1: don’t impersonate someone who has a skilled knowledge of a subject you have no idea about, but Forest had had no choice and, as he watched Hessel and Peulevé being dispatched to a working party, he knew he would soon need to be convincing with a hammer and nails.

  Just being transplanted into a new identity was not enough to save the men. They had to get out of the camp, and that need became greater each day. Too many people in block 46 knew about the agents who had been switched with dead Frenchmen, and it was fortunate that no one was inclined to turn traitor, but it was not a situation Forest wanted to prolong. Kogon had been working hard to secure places for the men in work kommandos (labour gangs) now that they had ‘recovered’ from their sickness. Peulevé and Hessel were headed for Schonebeck where Kogon knew the manager. When they left it was bittersweet for Forest, who wished them the best and hoped to see them again after the war. Once again alone in block 46 he had too long to contemplate the friends he could not save, his own precarious future, and the frequent bouts of dysentery that still tormented him.

  Then, in early November, he learned that he was headed for Gleina, where another friend of Kogon’s would be waiting for him and it was be unlikely that he would be recognised. Relief and worry about his next step consumed him, but he remembered his friends from his short stay in block 46; he had even become fond of the thuggish Dietzech. On 9 November 1944, bundled up heavily against a snowstorm and hiding food and clothing and Hubble’s chess set, he boarded a truck and looked forward to freedom.

  Forest was taken from one grim hospital to another. Gleina was as much a death camp as Buchenwald, though in this case the victims were not shot but worked into oblivion. Kogon’s contact at the camp was Walter Hummelsheim, but Forest very rapidly fell in with another doctor, Jean Dulac, the head of the camp hospital. He assured Forest that he would get him listed as an orderly at the hospital (avoiding any need to display carpentry skills) and took him to the building where the sick were supposedly tended.

  Forest quickly realised that the horrors of block 46 could be easily equalled at Gleina. The wards were full of living skeletons, so starved and emaciated that they barely resembled humans at all. Dulac was doing his best for them with limited resources. Many wore pathetic paper bandages that could barely contain the blood and pus seeping out of their wounds and most dressings were filthy. Forest later described it as feeling like stepping into Dante’s ‘Inferno’. The atmosphere was full of soft moans and mumbled prayers and the stench of sickness and death. Those that were still aware looked at the newcomer with dull eyes; there was nothing of hope left in them as they lay wasting away in their bunks. Forest was stunned by the horror of it all.

  But there was a flip side to the hospital. In the corner was a small room where a group of Frenchmen resided, all former members of the resistance. Forest instantly decided to take charge of this little group; he was still planning his big escape after all and would need help. He introduced himself as Colonel Maurice Chouquet – the humble carpenter had been promoted, but Forest knew that to get these men to help he had to ‘pull rank’. He was treated with instant suspicion, not surprising as he had been led into the room by Hummelsheim, a German, and had been discussing the camp with him. At first it seemed that no one would trust him.

  The next day Dulac set to work getting Forest assigned to the hospital as an orderly, and he was instructed to wait with another inmate who had been introduced to him as Pierre Kaan. Pierre had a familiar look about him, but Forest could not place him, which worried him. They slipped into conversation and it seemed Pierre was equally trying to work out where he had seen Forest before. Suddenly he asked: ‘Are you Shelley?’

  Forest was surprised and a little unsettled, as he had worked too hard to have his real identity discovered now. After a moment he answered.

  ‘Shelley is dead, but Chouquet lives.’

  Pierre nodded his understanding.

  ‘In Paris I was known as Biran,’ he said, and realisation dawned on Forest. Biran had been the diligent secretary for the Comite Militaire.

  ‘No one must know I am Shelley. I am Chouquet now,’ he explained.

  ‘I understand, but it would help the others to trust you if I could tell them you were a respected member of the resistance?’

  ‘Yes, you may tell them that.’

  Forest settled into his new life at Gleina, but it wasn’t easy. The camp was the medical centre for the larger working camp at Rehmsdorf, though Forest failed to see anything medical about its operation. There were no supplies and the patients were so ill that he soon discovered his main job was to remove the dead from the building. SS orders stated the dead had to be stripped of the thin rags they were wearing. Carrying the frail, filthy bundles and removing the last of their dignity made Forest violently sick on more than one occasion, but slowly he got used to that as well. It was amazing what a person could adapt to, as so many SS and Gestapo men would testify to when stood on trial.

  One revelation that took Forest by surprise was that the prisoners were allowed coffins. He couldn’t fathom this strange act of dignity in the otherwise degrading procedure of removing the dead. It turned out that the factories that ‘employed’ the workers had to pay for their funerals and the mistress of the camp commandant owned an undertaker’s. Commandant Kenn was in on the deal and was making a healthy profit on every victim he had buried in a cheap coffin supplied by his mistress. The undertakers produced thirteen coffins a day at a cost of 15 marks each, the profits from which fed straight back into Kenn’s pockets.

  The only problem arose when the death toll outnumbered the coffins. On one occasion Forest was forced to double-up corpses, but the cheap and insubstantial coffins were not designed for even the light weight of two emaciated bodies and as luck would have it the bottom of one such coffin gave way and deposited its cargo at the Kenn’s feet. The commandant was irate as he saw his profit margin infringed upon and gave strict orders that the doctors at the camp should ensure that the death toll did not go above thirteen a day. The idiocy of the order and the complete disregard for life only stirred up a deeper hatred of the Nazis in Forest’s mind.

  So Forest’s daily routine consisted of nursing the dying, watching SS doctors sell what few medical supplies were provided, avoiding the many brutes and sadists among the guards, and carrying the dead. He also had the job of collecting the bread ration, but as his dysentery continued even this became a harder and harder chore.

  It was a thin and gaunt Forest that got his first whiff of freedom one day when Hummelsheim, who was allowed the privilege of
going to Leipzig to get supplies, arranged for Forest to come with him. It was, of course, a grand opportunity for escape, but Forest knew that if he did so Hummelsheim would invariably be cruelly executed and he had no intention of getting his new friend punished for his actions. He had to content himself with whispering a message to some British POWs he found working at a factory. He gave them a stilted report of Buchenwald and his life since and a message of hope to Barbara. They promised that when they could they would pass on his words.

  It was only a glimmer of freedom, however, and life was due to get a lot worse before it got better.

  Christmas 1944 was misery for Forest. The other prisoners tried to maintain the celebrations and even smuggled in a small Christmas tree and made gifts for each other. But the jolliness of the event seemed bitter and stupid to Forest when they were surrounded by the dead and dying. Even his continued optimism had faded: the horrors of Gleina had eroded him more than anything that had happened at Buchenwald. It was around this time that Forest, never much of a religious man, came to the conclusion that there could be no god.

  Pierre felt sorry for him and quietly came over and whispered ‘Merry Christmas’ in English, but it was hard to penetrate the isolation and loneliness that had built up around the SOE man. It seemed an eternity ago that he had walked through Paris as a free man and taken pleasure at fooling the Nazis.

  It was that same month the prisoners learned that the Germans wanted to turn Gleina into a British POW camp and all the current inmates would be transferred to Rehmsdorf. Forest wondered if this would improve his chances of escape or worsen them, though with his strength flagging due to his dysentery, his ability to plot escapes had been compromised. There was also the depressing news that Hummelsheim had been caught smuggling a message out of the camp and was to be sent to Buchenwald for execution. Forest didn’t know until later that Kogon had once again proved a heroic rescuer and ensured that Hummelshein was spared. At that time however, all he knew was that his friend was heading for his death. And then they were all moving to Rehmsdorf, the sick and dying bundled into lorries with the relatively healthy. It was just after the new year that all of Gleina was moved to the bigger camp.