The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  Trudi Birger and her mother were sent to build tank emplacements. In December 1944, the front was less than 150 miles from Stutthof, and the Germans were frantically constructing defences around towns and cities in the area. ‘This was harder work than we had ever done before,’ Trudi wrote.37 ‘Using picks and shovels, we had to dig deep pits in the earth and smooth them around the edges … The tank emplacements were three to four metres deep … I had to stand at the bottom of the pits and throw shovelfuls of dirt far above my head. Only a young girl, I worked in the shadow of those high walls, with the guard, armed with his machine gun, standing on top, grinning to see what a strain it was.’

  That November, typhoid struck the camp. Due to the overcrowding, and the appalling sanitary conditions, it quickly developed into an epidemic. As SS medic Otto Knott testified, the rapid spread of the disease obviated the need to gas prisoners: ‘I would say 3,000–4,000 at most were killed [by gas] … because many of the camp’s inmates died of typhus, a continuous gassing operation was not at all necessary.’38

  By mid December, 7,000 had died from the illness. ‘The camp doctors didn’t bother with us.39 People just died in their beds,’ Maria Rolnikaite recalled. ‘One night, I came back from work. I was freezing cold. I got into bed and nestled right up against my neighbour’s back, pushing my hands under her armpits. I didn’t notice anything in the night. I thought she was moving and squeezing my fingers. But in the morning, I found out that she was dead. There were so many dead.’fn3

  To begin with, the bodies were left lying in the barracks for days. But as more and more prisoners died, the guards, who did not want to come into contact with the dead themselves, appointed ‘funeral commandos’ to remove the bodies. Maria was one of eight appointed from her barrack. ‘They made us strip the bodies.40 We had to undress them and we were given pliers to extract any gold teeth. The Kapo threatened that if I dared keep one of the teeth, I would be accompanying the body into the afterlife.’

  By the beginning of December, no fewer than 125 prisoners were dying every day. Schoschana Rabinovici was in a barrack next door to Maria’s. ‘Morning after morning the women carried the night’s dead out of the blockhouses and laid them down next to the wall.42 From there they were taken away on wagons beyond the fence. Since the crematoria were no longer sufficient, they began burning the dead on a pyre. It was not far from the Jewish women’s camp, and we could see it on the other side of the fence. First wood was piled up, and then corpses on top, then wood again, and so on. Once the pile had reached a height of about 16 feet, the Germans poured fuel on it and set it on fire. The burning pyre looked as if devils were dancing on it. As the wood burned, the corpses contracted, and suddenly the dead were moving; raising their hands and feet, bending over and sitting up.’

  Political prisoner Władysław Boniński was assigned to the ‘crematorium commando’, the working party responsible for constructing the pyres: ‘The fires were lit between four and five o’clock in the morning.43 About twenty of us worked on them and the preparation took the whole day. Nine hundred bodies were burnt at a time and they would burn for twenty to twenty-four hours.’

  25.

  In Warhorse 1, while Fey and the others saw the glow from the pyres and smelled the burning bodies, they did not know the scale of the atrocities taking place a few hundred yards away. The high wall outside their barrack screened their view of the camp and they had no means of communicating with the other inmates. Their food, however, came from the camp kitchens, where the ‘ordinary’ prisoners worked. Two weeks after the group arrived at Stutthof, most of them, including Fey, caught dysentery: ‘Nearly all of us had to take to our beds. After a few days I started to recover. But I was hardly up and about again when Gagi, who slept next to me, came down with a severely inflamed throat. When the camp commandant realized that most of us were too sick and weak to help ourselves, let alone each other, he suddenly became terribly concerned. That’s how we came to discover the strangest of details regarding our situation.’

  Finally Fey was to understand why they had been kept alive. It was Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, who had given the order that none of them should be allowed to die: ‘We were, in other words, “hostages”. Though for what purpose Himmler intended to use us, the commandant could not say.’

  In a panic, Hoppe asked Dr Goerdeler, who was a GP, what medicines he needed and ordered blood tests for everyone in the group. Since their imprisonment was ‘top secret’, a trusted SS doctor was summoned to take the tests – one of the very same doctors who, on a daily basis, administered lethal injections to the sick and the elderly in the camp infirmary.

  The results indicated that Gagi’s sore throat was in fact scarlet fever. Fey had had the illness as a child and, as she was one of the few on her feet, it was decided that she should move into an isolation room with Gagi so that she could nurse her under Dr Goerdeler’s supervision. It was coming up to Christmas and, confined to the sickroom, Fey made crib figures out of cardboard to take her mind off the boys.

  On Christmas Day, after spending ten days alone with Gagi, Fey was allowed out on condition she disinfected her clothes and hands. Half of the group – including Alex – were still ill in bed, and she gathered with the others in the communal room in the barrack. Midway through the morning, Sergeant Foth appeared bearing a small Christmas tree and other festive gifts, which he distributed with his best seasonal wishes.

  Foth had spent the previous evening on the parade ground in the main camp, where the guards had assembled the inmates. ‘The Germans put up a beautiful Christmas tree,’ Schoschana Rabinovici remembered.1 ‘It was big and decorated with coloured candles. All the prisoners were called to roll call late in the evening. This roll call lasted for hours. Suddenly a young Pole was brought into the middle of the square. Only then did we realise that a set of gallows had been erected next to the festively decorated tree. After the SS officers had conversed for a long time and had abused the youth over and over again, he was hanged in front of our eyes. On the eve of that high Christian holiday the prisoners were made to view the hanging – as if the Germans wanted to let us know that the cruelty would not stop, despite the holiday. The young man had been condemned to death for the theft of bread.’

  Fey was taking quinine, which she had packed in her suitcase at Brazzà, in the hope of warding off illness. But on Boxing Day, she developed a sore throat and a high temperature. A number of the others were also showing symptoms of serious illness and, once again, Commandant Hoppe appeared and ordered new blood tests. The results revealed that Fey, Mika and Jutta Goerdeler had typhoid; Lotte and her daughter, Ännerle, had scarlet fever; and Mrs Goerdeler and her daughter, Benigna, had bacillary dysentery, a potentially dangerous, and highly contagious, form of the disease.fn1 ‘In order to at least appear in control of the situation, Hoppe decided that a sickroom should be organized for the seven of us,’ Fey recalled. ‘He ordered proper beds to be sent from the camp infirmary, rather than the wooden pallets we usually slept on. Crammed together in the isolation room, there was a danger we would swap these highly contagious diseases. After this “ingenious” order, Hoppe vanished. We didn’t see him or Foth for several weeks; they were terrified of catching our diseases.’

  It fell on Dr Goerdeler to care for the group. Fey was running a temperature and, equipped only with a rusty stethoscope and the medicine that Hoppe’s guards left at the back door to the barrack, he attended her daily. ‘He would give me injections to strengthen my heart against the constant changes in my temperature. He had a sort of chronic cold, so that when he leaned over me there was always a drop glistening on the end of his nose. Funny to recall that so vividly. Although I waited for the drop to fall, it never did.’

  Fey remained seriously ill for three weeks, with a 40-degree temperature: ‘The whole of that period passed in a blur. The Russians were getting closer, and they had started bombing the camp. I lay there, listening to the sounds of the sirens and bombs crashing around me, delirious, an
d too weak to move. For the first time, I felt that I might not make it. In my feverish state, I was racked by the thought of dying so far away from my family. I worried constantly about my sons, fearful for their future if I should perish. Having lost them to the SS, I was convinced that I, and only I, could get them back.’

  The other women in the makeshift sickroom were also dangerously ill, and it was during this period that a letter arrived from the People’s Court in Berlin to inform Lotte von Hofacker that her husband had been executed. As she and her daughter, Ännerle, were confined with scarlet fever, Eberhard, her sixteen-year-old son, had opened the letter.2 He went straight to Dr Goerdeler and begged to be allowed to break the news to his mother. But Goerdeler refused; both women were in a critical condition, and he feared that it would jeopardize their recovery.

  For four days, Eberhard shouldered the traumatic knowledge of his father’s death. It was the second blow in the space of only a few months. A serious boy, who seemed far older than his years, he was still struggling to come to terms with his father’s part in the 20 July plot. Born in 1930, Eberhard had grown up under the Nazis. After joining the Hitler Youth at a young age, he had been inculcated with negative propaganda concerning the ‘Enemy’, and the idea that his father had plotted against Hitler had come as a terrible shock. Fey noticed his disquiet when she first met him: ‘You could see that a part of him was suffering a lot. Yet at the same time he felt responsible for his mother and his sister. He was the “man” of the family now, he wanted to be strong.’

  It was not until Lotte’s condition showed signs of improvement that Dr Goerdeler relented. The risk of contagion was too great to allow Eberhard into the isolation room, but the doctor permitted him to write a letter to his mother. Ännerle’s condition, however, remained critical. With all his authority, Goerdeler impressed on the boy that, as well as breaking the awful news, it was imperative to keep it from his sister.

  On 10 January, three weeks after his father had been executed, Eberhard sat down to write the letter. He thought about how his mother would react and wanted to break the news gently. Yet at the same time he was terrified of losing his sister. At a loss to find words to stop Lotte from venting her grief and alerting Ännerle, who was in the bed beside her, at the top of the page he wrote ‘Please read all the way through first!!!’:3

  Dear Mummy

  Today, unfortunately I have to prepare you for the serious and sad news that is contained in the enclosed letter. Therefore, darling Mummy, please don’t be too shocked when I tell you that our dear, beloved father is no longer alive, as confirmed officially by the letter from the People’s Court of Justice, which came last Saturday. It is a terrible blow for all of us, but particularly for you, and you can imagine how my heart almost stopped when I opened it, unaware of what it would contain. It hits us all the more now as we had, justifiably, built up our hopes so much recently, and I still can’t understand how Our Lord would do something this terrible to us, but He must know why. I am so dreadfully sorry that I have to leave you on your own with this deep sorrow and bitter pain. But take some comfort in the thought of how we have borne up so resolutely in captivity.

  Now I have a big favour to ask of you; for now, please keep this news to yourself. Please don’t on any account tell Ännerle or Fey, or the others who are ill, especially old Mrs Goerdeler, and don’t let it show. In Dr Goerdeler’s view, as well as everyone else here, Ännerle, who has reached the critical phase of the scarlet fever, would not be able to cope with this news. Even if she could, it would only cause a serious setback … I know that you will have to make an enormous effort to pull yourself together – but you’ll do it. Later, once she is better, you can tell her.

  We must – and we will – pull through! We will overcome our fate, however hard it may be. So darling, farewell. All the very best.

  Your Eberhard

  Dr Goerdeler was equally concerned about Fey, and his sister-in-law, Anneliese, both of whom remained critical. Cäsar von Hofacker’s execution had come late in the day; the relatives of others in the group had been executed immediately after the coup. Knowing that Fey believed her father was alive and that Anneliese was convinced that her husband, Ulrich, was safe, he feared that the news of Hofacker’s execution might cause them to abandon hope. A doctor of long standing, he recognized that hope was key to a patient’s survival. For this reason, he had also spoken to Alex.

  Like everyone else in the group, Goerdeler was aware of Alex’s close relationship with Fey. Knowing that she was in danger of dying, he thought it important that Alex should see her. Tactfully, in a display of sensitivity that belied his brusque manner, he gave him a pretext to enter the sickroom. On condition that he kept his distance from the patients, he assigned Alex the job of looking after the small stove.

  Alex watched over Fey throughout her illness. Aside from Goerdeler, he was the only other person allowed in. His presence was a huge comfort to Fey: ‘Alex would come in the morning, and again in the afternoon. I could hear him when he entered, rustling around with his armful of logs and stoking the little iron stove in the corner of the room. Both of us had a great longing to speak to one another, but we were not allowed to because of the risk of contagion. I was too weak to say much anyway. Then unexpectedly, one afternoon early in January, Alex came over to me and pressed a piece of paper into my hand. It was a poem he had composed for me, a very lovely poem.’

  It was the first poem Alex had written for her, and the first time he had expressed the strength of his feelings:

  With longing, exquisite and tender, I greet you

  But only in dreams

  So let me dream.

  It was not until Fey began to feel better that she understood its full meaning: ‘I realized then that the poem was a play on an old German myth that whatever you dream in the twelve nights after Christmas will come true. I must have read that verse a thousand times.’

  By the middle of January, Dr Goerdeler pronounced Fey well enough to leave the sickroom for short periods. Still weak, and suffering from dizzy spells, she was looked after by Alex, who made her cups of tea and ensured that she was as well fed as possible. Surrounded by the others, there was never an opportunity for them to talk alone and, as the days went by, they saw less and less of each other. Outside, it was bitterly cold, the temperature dropping as low as minus 25 degrees on some nights – so cold that the group took to spending most of the day in bed, fully dressed in their clothes.

  Aside from Alex, and eighteen-year-old Otto Philipp, the men were too weak to chop the piles of wood the guards left in the yard outside and it became impossible to keep the small stoves going. Commandant Hoppe, still worried about their survival, assigned two Russian female prisoners to do the job instead, and it was then that they learned of the horrendous conditions in the rest of the camp. While the women did not speak German, Mika von Stauffenberg and Aunt Anni were able to speak to them in Russian. For the first time, Fey heard how the gas chambers were being used systematically in camps across Germany and in the occupied countries, and she was deeply shaken when she discovered the truth about Sergeant Foth.

  The horrors taking place yards from the barrack preoccupied the group. Sensing that some sort of endgame was approaching, they wondered about their own fate. While they had no access to the radio, or to newspapers, it was clear that the war was going badly for the Germans. Russian planes flew over constantly, sometimes buzzing low over the rooftop of the bunkhouse. Soon, they began to hear the rumble of shells in the distance. Uncle Moppel, a veteran of the First World War, was able to calculate how far away the fighting was from the sound of the explosions. He warned them that the front line was getting closer; perhaps 20 or 30 miles away – no more. ‘Our dread of the Russians dominated everything,’ Fey recalled. ‘Because of our associations with men who had served as high-ranking military commanders under the Nazis – men who had led the Wehrmacht’s campaign in Russia – we were terrified of falling into Russian hands. The fact that our r
elatives had conspired to kill Hitler was immaterial. In all probability, we would be sent to a Gulag in Siberia.’

  With the Russians closing in by the hour, the imperative was to escape. By the last week in January, however, escape from Stutthof – whether for the SS, the 60,000 camp inmates, or for the prisoners in Warhorse 1 – was looking ever more unlikely. The launch of the Soviet winter offensive had precipitated the biggest panic migration in history and the only route out – the narrow forest road that ran past the camp – was blocked by 450,000 German civilians, all of them fleeing for their lives.

  26.

  The Soviet assault on East Prussia had begun in thick fog early on the morning of 13 January. Three armies – a force of nearly 1.7 million men – were deployed against 580,000 German troops, 80,000 of which were Volkssturm soldiers, a ragged army of young boys and old men.1 The temperature that morning was minus 10 degrees Celsius and a thin layer of frost enveloped the Soviet tanks, ensuring that they were well camouflaged in the snow-covered landscape.2 Slogans, painted by the crews, were emblazoned on the turrets: ‘Forward into the Fascist Lair!’ and ‘Revenge and Death to the German Occupiers!’3