No sooner had the first two columns marched out of the camp than the commandant’s evacuation plan began to go awry. On the road outside, the queue of refugees and carts stretched back more than 10 miles to Kahlberg on the banks of the Nehrung, where the trekkers had crossed the ice. ‘Oh this awful Nehrung Road! This was destined to be the most shocking part of our flight,’ one trekker recalled.4 ‘In addition to being mushy with snow and churned up by mud, there was one hole after another, each one half as big as a room … There were many halts and everything was chaotic. A third of the carts had been left behind on the ice; a further third broke down here. If anyone in front of us had a broken wheel, it was hours before we could go further … Progressing in this way, it took us a whole day to do one or two miles.’
Now, with the snow falling, and the wind blowing it into drifts, the 10-mile-long queue had ground to a halt. The scene at the entrance to the camp was horrific. People and horses were dying by the side of the road; frightened children ran up and down, looking for mothers from whom they had become separated; women, young and old, shovelled snow, trying to free a wheel, or to clear the drifts from the road. With the Russians on their heels, the trekkers were desperate to get moving and fights broke out as people tried to push their way through.
Thick forest bordered the road on either side. In the confined space, the Stutthof guards had no means of forcing a gap between the lines of trekkers to allow the columns of prisoners to proceed. By nightfall, the snow lay 3 feet deep. Of the forty-one columns of 1,000–1,500 prisoners, only seven had left the camp.
It was three o’clock in the morning when the eighth column, made up of 820 men, got under way. It had stopped snowing and the lines of refugees were moving again. Thirteen-year-old Schoschana Rabinovici and her mother, Raja, were due to leave in the next column, comprising 1,300 women, most of whom were Jewish. They had been woken by Sergeant Foth, who had come into their barracks and ordered them to undress. Prior to the march, their clothes needed to be disinfected and he told them to wash while they waited for their things to be returned. Minutes later, the guards ambushed the women in the shower room, herding them into the yard outside. ‘Snow, frost, ice, rattling cold – none of these words can sum up what I experienced on the night of 25th–26th January 1945, as I stood naked in the open air,’ Schoschana recalled.5
I found myself in the middle of a ball of women who were trying to warm one another by rubbing their naked bodies against each other. The cold enveloped us, but the worst cold came from beneath us. We were standing on snow and ice, our feet were bare and we couldn’t stand still because the cold burned the soles of our feet. So we hopped from one leg to the other, often stepping on each other’s feet in the crush …
Sometimes, I was pushed aside by the women who stood outside the circle and who were trying to get in. We shoved and were shoved – constant shoving and being shoved. Raja stayed beside me the whole time, fighting for a space for us both in the tangle of bodies, and rubbing my back with her cold wet hands, urging me to keep moving.
But I didn’t want to go on. You can’t imagine this cold. It seemed to me that the cold was not only on my skin; that it wasn’t only my legs that had lost all sensation, so that I didn’t care if anyone trod on them; that not only my hands were so frozen that I couldn’t move them any more – I was cold, deep down inside … I was trying to stand next to women who were taller than me, so that at least from above I would be somewhat shielded from the cold air.
The cold made us want to urinate the whole time and even I couldn’t hold back. The women would let themselves go, all over their own and their neighbours’ legs whilst they were grouped closely together. It didn’t bother anyone. On the contrary, for a brief moment, one blessed moment, the urine warmed our feet.
The hours went by; I couldn’t count them. Again and again, Raja said this was probably our final ordeal, for we had heard that the front was no longer far away. She comforted me: ‘It’s good the wind off the sea is not so strong today; it’s good it’s not snowing tonight.’
No, it wasn’t snowing that night; that night there was no wind. The air was frozen and so stiff it seemed you could cut it with a knife. It was minus 25 degrees centigrade (13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). One woman crumpled to the ground and couldn’t get up again. Another one collapsed. Hands stretched out to pull them back up, but it was too late; they could no longer be helped. Finished.
At first light the women’s clothes arrived back from the disinfecting station. They were told to dress and given cups of weak tea.
Then a motorcycle escort appeared, followed by a black car containing Commandant Hoppe and some SS officers. ‘We got the order to line up in rows of four and to begin moving in the direction of the main gates,’ Schoschana recalled.6 ‘Thus began the death march.’
Just two more columns left Stutthof that day. Soon after Schoschana’s column marched out of the camp, it started snowing again. Owing to the conditions on the road, the commandant abandoned the evacuation of the remaining thirty columns – a total of some 36,000 prisoners.
With the Russians closing in and the weather getting worse by the minute, his priority now was to evacuate the special prisoners in Warhorse 1.
28.
The heavy snow meant it was not until four o’clock the following afternoon – 27 January – that Hoppe ordered Fey and the others to pack their bags and get ready to leave. More than forty-eight hours had passed since they had first heard the warning sirens, and they had spent an anxious time listening to the distant shellfire drawing closer, fearing that the SS had abandoned them to the Russians.
‘You will leave in one hour!’ Hoppe ordered. ‘Anyone not ready will be left behind!’
Eight of the group, including Dr Goerdeler, who had finally succumbed to illness, were too weak to stand. Fey doubted whether they could survive a long journey: ‘I was fearful for the weaker members … Onkel Moppel already had a high temperature and kept shivering uncontrollably. We were convinced he had caught typhoid. Clemens von Stauffenberg’s hands and feet were swollen, and he had great difficulty breathing, and Lotte and Ännerle still hadn’t recovered from scarlet fever.’
The stronger ones helped the others to pack and gathered blankets for the journey. Then Hoppe marched them out into a raging blizzard. Those too frail to walk were loaded into two makeshift ambulances; the rest of the group were left to stagger in the dark to the railway station at the entrance to the camp – the very same ‘Woodland Camp’ station at which the trains carrying tens of thousands of ‘ordinary’ prisoners had arrived the summer before.
‘There, an old third-class carriage awaited us,’ Fey recalled. ‘It had a sliding door, which was jammed and would not close, and most of the windows were broken. The snow blew in in gusts and settled in great heaps on the hard wooden benches. The wind howled outside, and it was icy cold. I struggled to find a place beside healthy people, because I could no longer bear the company of the sick.’
‘We had to brush the snow off the benches,’ fifteen-year-old Ännerle von Hofacker remembered.1 ‘Two stoves gave off a little warmth, but it was all for nothing as there were no doors to the carriage. We lay down on the benches, covered in blankets and coats. But we were still freezing. It took an hour until everything was ready. We had to wait while another wagon was coupled to our carriage. Finally the commandant came to bid us farewell. Accompanying us were two SS guards – Fräulein Papke and Sergeant Kupfer.’
What none of the special prisoners realized was quite how privileged they were. With the road to Danzig clogged with trekkers, the SS had prioritized their evacuation over all other civilian and military traffic. After 24 January, when the Red Army severed the last main rail link to the Reich, the tiny branch line from Stutthof to Danzig was the only land route open to the west. The order to evacuate the special prisoners had in fact come through on 25 January, but the snow had prevented the train from leaving, and it had been waiting at the station ever since.
The train set off at a crawl, the icy wind blowing in through the open door. After a few hundred yards, the line, no more than a tram track, merged with the road to Danzig and continued parallel to it. Gas lamps lit the way at intervals, casting pools of green-white light. Dimly, through the swirling snow, Fey and the others could see the trekkers. They were only 10 yards or so away from the train, but the snow deadened and hushed everything. As if frozen, the unending line of carts, animals and people stood soundlessly, unmoving – a sinister pointer to some calamity ahead. Seated between Alex and Eberhard von Hofacker, Fey felt sick with fear: ‘Aside from the air raids, we had been completely cut off from the war in our barrack at Stutthof. Now we were in the middle of it, journeying into the unknown. Would the Russians catch up with us? Were they behind us, or ahead of us? Seeing the unending lines of refugees I was convinced this was the end for us all.’
Ten minutes after the train left Stutthof, it came to a halt. Snow blocked the line ahead and the SS came into the carriage, calling for ‘volunteers’ to help in the almost impossible task of clearing it away. Alex was one of them. He returned two hours later, soaked and frozen to the core. Grimly, he reported that the carriage behind theirs was an open cattle wagon, full of Hungarians and German soldiers accused of spying by the SS. Some of the prisoners had already frozen to death, and the guards had simply tossed their bodies on to the tracks.
Still the train did not move. It was stranded in open country on the outskirts of Steegen, where the line veered away from the Danzig road. To avoid the queues, trekkers travelling on foot or horseback had opted to follow the tram track and streams of people went past – shadowy figures Fey was unable to see in the pitch dark. It was only when dawn broke that she was confronted with the scene around her: ‘Silent and grim, they swarmed doggedly over the railway line, groping their way westward. Some wore tattered uniforms and greatcoats, but most were just wrapped in woollen clothing, salvaged at the last moment. Many, too weak to go on, had collapsed and lay dead or dying beside the corpses of mules and horses. The sight of these poor people moved us terribly. There we were complaining about our own conditions. We were certainly in no paradise, but it was nothing compared to their situation. I thought of an old Italian proverb: “One must always turn round and look back. For the person who complains about only having figs to eat will discover another eating the discarded skins.” It might seem banal, but confronted with that terrible reality, I realized at that moment that this proverb contained a profound truth.’
Watching the kaleidoscope of horror passing before her eyes, two images would stay with Fey. The first was of Fräulein Papke, swathed in her fur-trimmed SS greatcoat, coolly eating a sandwich from the ‘picnic’ she had brought with her, while craning to see the carnage outside. The second was the sight of a small boy, who lay unmoving in the snow: ‘Sergeant Kupfer picked him up. At first I thought he must be dead, but after a vigorous massage the boy regained consciousness and was given some food. Shortly afterward he was handed down to the care of a group of retreating soldiers. This incident had a profound effect on me and once again sent me into a fit of despair and depression thinking of the fate of my own children. I was completely silent for hours afterwards.’
Midday came, and they were still at Steegen. At a loss, Kupfer, who was in charge of the transport, sent a radio message to Stutthof and at two in the afternoon a party of prisoners was dispatched from the camp to clear the line ahead. Someone had hung coats and blankets around the door in an attempt to block out the freezing air but, as Fey described, the wind blew in through every crack in the carriage: ‘Listless and silent, we sat huddled and shivering for hour after freezing hour, concentrating only on warmth and survival. Relieving oneself meant going out into the storm, where within seconds one’s hands became so stiff and numb that it was impossible to undo the necessary buttons. After many hours had passed, the few able-bodied men still left were once more ordered out to try and help the prisoners shift the snow. Finally, the train jerked forward.’
They reached the mouth of the Vistula at seven o’clock that evening. It was just 10 miles from Stutthof and they had been on the train for over twenty-four hours. There was no sign of the ferry that was supposed to take them across. Along the bank of the river, tens of thousands of refugees were camped in the fields, the line of carts stretching as far as the eye could see. It had finally stopped snowing and it was a clear night with a brilliant full moon. The flat, open country bordering the Gulf of Danzig offered no cover and, looking across at the scene, Fey feared they were a sitting target for Russian bombers.
For five tense hours, they waited for the ferry. When it finally arrived, the ferryman refused to load their train. He told Sergeant Kupfer that he was only authorized to ship troops and refugees, not concentration-camp prisoners. Ännerle von Hofacker witnessed the row that ensued: ‘Kupfer had a go at the ferryman.2 “These are not prisoners,” he said. “They are relatives of members of the SS and as such take precedence, even over troops.” Against his will, the ferryman obeyed, full of resentment. When he came to load our carriages, he loaded them with such force that they were hanging over the buffers of the ferry, almost tipping over, and only by a whisker avoided falling into the water.’
It was two o’clock in the morning when the ferry docked on the other side of the river, but their journey, as Fey described, was not over: ‘After several more hours, we arrived half-dead in Danzig, having covered 30 kilometres in thirty-seven hours. There, the guards ordered us roughly out of the carriage, telling us that all trains had been commandeered by troops or refugee transports, and we would have to continue by road. Of course, they refused to tell us where we were going.’
Outside the station, the group joined a line of male prisoners waiting to board a fleet of trucks. To their horror, they discovered that these were the prisoners who had been in the open wagons behind them since Stutthof. The fact that they were being transported with men whom the SS had treated like animals filled Fey with foreboding: ‘It indicated a change in our status. I was convinced that wherever we were being taken, it would be worse than our barrack at Stutthof.’
Two hours later, the trucks stopped on a remote country road. High up on a hill, Fey could see a set of gates. The site was enclosed by a tall barbed-wire fence and a medieval cheval de frise – a barrel-shaped structure, covered with projecting spikes. ‘The drive ahead was blocked by snow, so we were ordered off the truck. In our weakened state it was simply impossible to half climb, half swim through the deep drifts toward the gates. One by one we collapsed from exhaustion on the way up. Realizing that we would never reach the top, SS men were sent down to help. Roughly and with brute strength, they dragged us to the top, as if they were hauling up toboggans. I thought we would never make it, especially Clemens and Onkel Moppel. From something one of the guards said, I had the impression they thought we belonged to the SS. But I was past caring. All that mattered was that we were still alive. From there we were directed to a filthy barrack.’
The columns of prisoners who set off from Stutthof in the days before Fey and the others left the camp were still on the road. The march to Lauenburg was supposed to take seven days. In fact, it would be another week before the survivors of the ‘Death March’ arrived at their destination. An estimated 4,500 died – most of them from the segregated columns of Jewish prisoners.3 Once the Nazi authorities finally recognized that the Danzig road was the last route of flight to the Reich, troops and civilians were given priority and Jews were banned from using it. Forced to take back roads, often no more than tracks, thousands died from the cold, or were executed by the SS for falling behind the columns.
A further 5,000 prisoners – all Jewish women – left the camp at the end of January. With the Danzig road closed to Jews, Hoppe ordered them to march east to the port of Pillau on the Baltic Coast. From there, the SS intended to evacuate them to the Reich by ship. On 30 January, after the ships failed to materialize, in one of the last mass atrocities of the war, 3,0
00 were lined up on the iced-over sea outside Pillau and shot.4
29.
‘In the camp. 08.45 hrs. A mass of SS approach us, grab our luggage with compassion and drag us up the hill to the barracks.1 They believe us to be members of the SS. We are done for and exhausted. Tante Anni crashed out with a fever, a suspected lung inflammation.’
This was Gagi von Stauffenberg’s diary entry – hurriedly scribbled at the end of the harrowing journey from Stutthof. After hauling the group up the hill, the SS carried them through the gates to the camp and across a courtyard to a barrack. A squadron of troops bound for the front had just vacated it, and it was full of their rubbish. Owing to the cold, the windows had been closed all night. No one had opened them and the room reeked of the men’s sweat. ‘Our misery was complete, our courage spent,’ Fey wrote.
Located 5 miles south of Danzig, Matzkau – as the camp was called – was a correctional prison for SS troops. With a capacity for 1,600 prisoners, its purpose was to ‘re-educate’ soldiers charged with bringing the SS into disrepute. Their offences included insubordination, military disobedience, drunkenness, corruption and homosexuality. The punishment regime was severe; there was a shoot-to-kill policy for escapees; there were whipping blocks, where the prisoners were beaten over a trestle table; and execution squads for those condemned to death.2
Homosexuals were a targeted group in Nazi Germany. Himmler, on becoming head of the SS, estimated the number to be 7–10 per cent of German men: ‘If this remains the case, it means our Volk will be destroyed by this plague … a people of good race which has too few children has a sure ticket for disgrace.’3, 4 Vowing to eliminate ‘this plague’, he instructed the Gestapo to compile lists of gay men, and 100,000 were arrested.5 Of these, some 50,000 were imprisoned.6 At Matzkau, following an interview with the camp doctor, prisoners judged incapable of renouncing their homosexuality were selected for castration.7
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