They drove at breakneck speed to the Bad Kreuznach railroad station. The American guards alighted from the buses, and ten of them ran to the station master’s building and ordered him to ready the train for immediate departure despite the disruption of the schedule all down the line. The rest of the guards force-marched the weary and weak prisoners out of the buses and onto the trains. While the American soldiers were brow-beating the civilian train personnel to get them to hurry away from the station against all regulations, the train master sent two employees to local food stores to empty their supplies of meat, cheese, bread, and beer. In the chaos that swirled around the departure frenzy, the food was rushed aboard and distributed by the Germans to their fellow Germans.
Much to the displeasure of the Americans, most of the food had been consumed by the time order was restored. Some of the prisoners had gobbled the rich food so quickly that they were vomiting in the aisles. Recognizing that it was too late to prevent their prisoners from getting their fill, the Americans decided to forget about it and ordered the train to move out, wishing the prisoners good riddance. The prisoners had learned a thing or two about Americana and almost to a man, stuck their hands out the windows and gave their cruel American keepers the finger.
Six hours later, the train pulled into the station in Brienne le Chateâu, a commune in the Aube department in the Champagne-Ardenne region of north-central France. Its population was 1500 people. The town was located a mile from the right bank of the Aube River and about ten miles from the POW internment camp located on the American AAF base.
The prisoners were herded off the trains and into buses with the same urgency that had attended their boarding them in Bad Kreuznach and for much the same reason. Violently angry French people—men, women, and children—had somehow gotten wind that the German
POWs and Disarmed Persons were going to arrive in the town’s railroad station that afternoon. The towns in the Champagne-Ardenne area had been ravaged by the Nazis well within the memories of all of the citizens except for small children. Even they had been thoroughly schooled in hatred for the Huns.
During the Nazi occupation, the military base had been an SS headquarters. From 1940–1945, men from every country under German control were trained there to become conscienceless SS officers. A subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp was located in the town. It provided labor for the SS-Junkerschule and the Zentralbauleitung [Central Administration Building]. As the need for more and more slave laborers for Nazi projects progressed, the base itself became a major holding area. Most of the inmates died during their stay, but that was of no great interest to the SS men and women who ran the camp because the sources of new slaves were many, and the slaves were both cheap and plentiful.
During the war, the base was also a large medical center. There were persistent rumors that heinous medical experiments were carried out there. A legacy of hatred towards the Germans was created, and no one in the region believed that even the slightest sliver of mercy should be shown by the victors to the vanquished. When the Americans and Free-French began to close in on the airfield, the SS purposely flooded the bottom floor of the headquarters to destroy all of their records. A pond was formed due to water seeping out of the building, and that pond was still standing when the POWs were moved into the concentration camp that now belonged to the Americans.
In November of 1953, the 10th Special Forces Group Airborne arrived at the former AAF base/then SS base. The former SS-Junkerschule became the base of the US Army’s First Battalion headquarters. The French living in the region cared little about what occurred on the base or in the concentration camp. They were happy when the emaciated camp internees were marched out in ever widening concentric circles to clear the Nazi minefields. It made life safer in the fields, on the streets, and in the forests for the French citizens, and they were not dismayed when they heard a bomb go off—one less Hun. Or when they saw the plumes of black smoke come from the southwest corner of the camp—many less Huns.
The arrival of the train was another opportunity for the citizens to vent their pent-up and unquenchable rage. As the men were quickly marched off out of the passenger cars of the trains and into the waiting US Army troop trucks, the townspeople rushed forward to club the POWs with hammers and clubs made from tree branches, picks, shovels, and rocks. Considerable blood was shed in the process, but no one was killed or critically injured–much to the chagrin of the French people. Of the Gebirgsjägers, only Antoine had a wound that left another scar on his forehead.
At the gates of the camp, the buses were met by a contingent of International Red Cross volunteers who—against the wishes of the new commandant of the camp—passed out water, croissants, crusty bread, cheese, fresh fruit, and coffee. The prisoners—knowing this was better fare than they were likely to see for sometime—gobbled down the offerings like pigs at a trough. The Red Cross volunteers were disgusted and dismayed by the spectacle, but made an effort to remain stony-faced. Among themselves, they muttered that it was no more than might have been expected from these vermin. When the prisoners tried to tell the volunteers thank you, they were met with expressionless faces and silence.
At the entrance into the American/British POW camp, they were met by the commandant—currently a British general taking his rotation—and four large and menacing other ranks: a corporal, two lance corporals, and a Fusilier. The commandant’s introduction to the camp was terse and harsh.
“You were sent here to die. You are responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, British, and French soldiers and civilians. Do not expect treatment any better than what you gave to the Jews in your murder camps. Do not make trouble. If you do, you will be shot and then burned on a trash dump. No one will ever know you were here. That is all.”
They were not fed again for two days. During that time, they were required to dig out shallow pits in the dirt by hand for their sleeping arrangements. They were deloused, and their bodies were shaved of all hair except about the groin. They were prodded into the pond by the former SS-Junkerschule—now administration building for the 10th Special Forces Group Airborne—given bars of crude rough soap and brushes. Those who were unable or unwilling to use the brushes on their newly shaved and nicked skin were assisted by camp prisoners already interned there who were promised a hot meal if they were especially vigorous with the stiff-bristled brushes. After drying with rough towels, they were issued prison clothes—bright red and white striped shirt, trousers, soft brimless cap, and shoes with uppers made of canvas and soles made of used and discarded rubber tires.
The Gebirgsjägers had experienced brutality, indifference, neglect, injustice, and all had witnessed wanton murders by psychopaths; but in the British commandant, they saw and experienced an even worse monster. He was a sadist of the worst kind. The Geneva Convention meant nothing. He actually took pleasure when inflicting pain or if a German suffered. Of all of the beasts they had suffered under, the officers of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Divison of the SS hated this man the most.
Antoine made the cardinal mistake of protesting when the general whipped a Wehrmacht officer until he was unconscious and covered with blood. For that, he was driven to the ground with an electric cattle prod; until he, too, was unconscious.
When he regained consciousness and found himself lying in the mud, confused, and feeling pain in every muscle and joint in his body, Antoine swore an oath, “This man will pay and will pay dearly. I will stay alive no matter what it takes to destroy him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
POW Camp 63 Brienne le Chateâu, France [Kriegsgefangenenpost 62: POW Post Office], September 1, 1954
This was an important day for the camp. The operation of the prisoner facilities and labor force was being turned over to the newly reorganized French army. This was the prisoners’ opportunity to meet the new commandant–the first French officer to take over an American or British base. It was much heralded in town—Brienne le Chateâu—and in the region—Bar-sur-Aube, Troyes, Chaum
ont, and Saint Dizier newspapers and magazines. There was even a mention in France Soir in Paris the next day. It was a matter of monumental indifference to the prisoners. That day was regarded as no different from the day before; none of those days were another day in paradise, or even the upgrade to the equivalent of a Parisian slum.
At ten in the morning all prisoners were brought back from their now far-flung fields of labor disarming mines and as slave labor for local farmers. The Americans started the practice, and it was continued by the British during their turn at running the camp. The unspoken policy was akin to the black market in Germany, but it had a distinct stamp of French flair—please the officers and guides of the camp with profits over and above their military salaries, please the townspeople and farmers who benefited from having free labor, and the concerns of the prisoner/slaves be damned. From September 1945 on, it was estimated by the French authorities that two thousand prisoners were being maimed and killed each month in accidents.
Outgoing British camp commandant Lieutenant General Sir Cyril Goeffrey Robert Hill-Brownwell, RA, stood before the assembled prisoners and announced, “Per orders from SHAEF headquarters, the American and British occupation of the prisoner of war system comes to an end today. Henceforward, the French army will assume its rightful role as the master of its own destiny in matters military in France. We have the honor to be the first American or British base to turn over command to the French, and it is particularly fitting that the new commandant is to be Lieutenant Général de division Étienne Malboeuf, hero of the Battle of Berlin. I give you, with pride and pleasure, General Malboeuf.”
Antoine and his Gebirgsjägers remained at attention with only their facial expressions telling of their intense hatred for the man. Each of the former French officers of the 33rd Waffen-Grenadier SS Division remembered with a fiery exactness the man who had served as the second in command to Maréchal de France [Marshal of France] Philippe François Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque, and who had ordered the summary execution of what the French believed were the last twelve men who served the Nazis with great courage and pitiless excess since the unit was established in 1942.
The men had been defeated, captured, and rendered defenseless in the last few days of the war. The scene was a clearing in a woodland near the Bavarian village of Karlstein. They were brought before General Malboeuf of Leclerk’s Second Armored Division, a man who walked with the strutting pride of a martinet in front of the wholly conquered men. His face assumed the disdainful and condescending expression of a haughty great avenger—the god of the day. After a stinging condemnation of each man as a traitor to his country and to civilized humanity, he turned his back to them, and, with a mere flicking of his swagger stick, ordered the firing squad to machine gun the prisoners. He was not aware that another fourteen French members of the 33rd Division witnessed the executions. It would not have mattered a whit to him anyway, and no one was ever to hear about or from those men. They were subsequently captured by the Red Army and eventually transported to Siberian gulags.
The hauteur and rigid pomposity of the French general was unchanged on this day as he stood in front of the helpless prisoners from his demeanor on that dreadful day in 1945 when the atrocity was committed. His uniform was perfectly tailored—a new one in the cavalry style, personally designed by the general himself. His képi of a ereal de division—with its red top, wide brim, high cap, and wide black band bearing a striking gold oakleaf cluster—his knee-high riding boots, polished to a degree that they reflected the sun, his epaulets with three stars, and his spotless freshly pressed coat, blouse, and trousers bespoke a man of supreme authority, inflexible rigidity, and an insufferable dandy. His vanity was stroked by his wearing the medals he had won—not just the campaign ribbons. He was less a handsome man than he was regal with a thick crop of well-coifed silver-white hair without the slightest hint of balding. He carried a hardwood swagger stick containing a concealed blade under his left armpit, and affectation he had copied from American General George S. Patton.
Gen. Malbeouf spoke in a high-pitched, almost falsetto voice, “Stand at attention, defeated German swine! You are in this corrections camp to make restitution for your crimes during the recent war which you started, and which you lost. When you have paid the uttermost farthing, you will be returned to your country of origin to join those unhappy souls living in poverty and misery brought on by your military misadventures. You will work, and you will obey. Your new masters will tolerate no one who is a slacker and no one who will not obey instantly.
“You will not look a guard or an officer in the eye. You will never speak unless spoken to. When you walk, you will look down at the ground. When you approach a gate or a door, you will wait until a guard appears and gives you permission. You will not register complaints. You will not ask for more food, better clothing, or improved housing. You do not deserve even what you have or will yet be given. Remember when you used to say, ‘Es ist nicht ein Mann; es ist ein Jude?’ [‘It is not a man; it is a Jew.’] You are now the Jews. You once brutalized and tortured the French people. Now you will feel the sting of their hatred and righteous wrath. You are dismissed. Get back to work.”
Antoine watched the general strut past the front row of prisoners. One man made the mistake of looking up at the officer and received a hard swipe of Malbeouf’s swagger stick, an object lesson for the first day. Antoine and his Gebirgsjägers were kicked, shoved, and driven with cattle prods to their work sites and began another day of unearthing mines and disarming them. Gen. Malbeouf was driven by his staff car to his house in the Hôtel de ville Square in Brienne-le-Château for a celebratory picnic with the mayors of the region’s towns, the sheriffs, the French army officers in the Aube department in north-central France, and the American and British army officers who were preparing for their return to the United States and the UK. Malbeouf did not approve of women being invited to such important gatherings.
Malbeouf expressed his personal gratitude to Lieutenant General Sir Cyril Goeffrey Robert Hill-Brownwell, RA for the generosity of the United States which provided the slave labor for the now French camps—740,000 of them (with the promise of 560,000 more) over the course of the upcoming year. The British were credited with handling the administration of the huge prisoner transfer. The annual death rates for the prisoners held in American-run camps—as brutal and neglectful as they were—was about one percent. The French succeeded in raising that number to 2.6 percent. On one occasion during the period of internment, nearly 1000 SS officers were poisoned to death by bread laced with arsenic.
Malbeouf and his guests enjoyed a sumptuous déjeuner of pâté de Foie Gras, Salade Nicoise, savory buckwheat galette filled with ham and cheese, and for dessert, pain au chocolat and Croque Madame. They quaffed Brut Réserve champagne from the house of Billecart-Salmon flown in from Paris for the occasion. The one meal of the day for the POWs and Disarmed Persons was a further lesson and warning for them: grass and weeds picked by their own hands and placed in a tin can containing a thin soup canned specially for the French prisoners. It was more than evident that Gen. Malbeouf and his Frenchmen and Lt. Gen. Hill-Brownwell and his Brits intended for them to die in this place and be forgotten. It was one of the few times the French and the British agreed on anything, and it was cause for another round of champagne.
Over the next several weeks, the men became emaciated and suffered raging dysentery. Many were too weak to dig latrine trenches and few could make it to such a trench if one were present. They were packed into crowded conditions so severe that many could not get to food when it was made available by dumping it on the ground. The slit trenches which were still open were so crowded that many men simply lay down and fell asleep in their own excrement, too exhausted to move or to care. Those men died. None of the French guards made a move to help them, and there was no medical assistance of any kind.
The irony of the camp was that many of the men were nothing more than sharecropper farmers and unskilled workingmen.
They were simple and ignorant, and even if they had been soldiers, they were more victims of the Nazis than they were perpetrators. Work results fell to a minimum despite the vicious beatings delivered upon slackers. The world of the French slave labor POW camp became a Hobbesian nightmare peopled by zombies, many of them having lost their minds. Some of those used their last vestiges of strength to make an insane and suicidal dash for the river to get something to drink and were strafed with machine gun fire.
Antoine and his men were an exception to the starvation. The ODESSA and their former providers—American corporal Jimmie Clemmons and his black markeeters—who brought in food for the Gebirgsjägers in return for the promise of a larger share of the Nazi gold they were assured would be available to them once Jérôme Christophe Mailhot was able to escape with the help of the ODESSA. They were recognized as being able to work and joined approximately four thousand other men who were able to be productive to one degree or another. They were trucked to labor on farms, the minefields having been largely sanitized.
The trucks left the camp at six in the morning on the dot and returned at eight in the evening with equal precision. Any German prisoners who were so exhausted that they staggered, fell down, or lagged behind were clubbed to death—not being considered to be worth a bullet to the head. The bodies were dragged to the side of the road by the other prisoners and left there to be picked up by a burial brigade when they could get to them. Not a few of the men intentionally fell to their knees and awaited the inevitable, preferring a quick death to the slow starvation back at POW Camp 63, which was known to the prisoners as the “killing fields.”
The Charlemagne Murders Page 23