The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  It was then that Fey understood why, in the few letters she had received from her, her mother had omitted to tell her that her father had been executed: ‘Knowing that I was alone and imprisoned far away from her, she had wanted to shield me from the truth. I thought about how lonely she must feel now that the very essence of her life had been taken away … Those first days at Buchenwald were dominated by this thought of her suffering, and also my own pain. In this shared suffering we were close. It dissolved the physical distance between us.’

  For the first time since Stutthof, Fey and the others were sharing rooms in twos and threes, rather than living communally. The rooms were warm and comfortable; each had a table, a wardrobe, a washstand and a stove, and the bunk beds had proper mattresses. The food was adequate, and they had flour to make their own bread. From time to time, the SS even brought them treats – beer, cocoa and real coffee.

  Completely screened from the rest of the camp by a copse of trees, the barrack was named ‘Sonderbau 15’.fn2 The location of the building was top secret, its isolated position deliberate. Housing some forty prisoners, it had been built for men and women whose faces Himmler decreed must never be seen. In addition to relatives of 20 July plotters, they included prominent individuals who had opposed Hitler – some of them from within the heart of the regime.

  Fritz Thyssen, the former head of Germany’s largest steel conglomerate, was the most well known of the Prominenten, as the SS referred to them. In the early 1930s, his admiration for Hitler led him to donate 1 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party and to support Hitler’s election as Reich chancellor.1 Adhering to the Nazis’ racist policies, he dismissed Jewish employees from his factories. He also welcomed the suppression of left-wing political parties and trade unions. The breaking point for Thyssen, however, came with Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, when Hitler carried out a violent pogrom against the Jews. After resigning from the government, he became an outspoken critic of the Nazis’ warmongering policies and in September 1939, while on holiday in Switzerland, he sent Göring a telegram protesting against the invasion of Poland.2 In reply, Göring offered to guarantee Thyssen’s safety if he returned to Germany. When he refused, his fortune and property were confiscated and a warrant was issued for his arrest. A year later, the SS caught up with him in Vichy France, and he was transported back to Berlin. From there, he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

  Besides Thyssen, the inmates of Sonderbau 15 included relatives of high-ranking Wehrmacht generals, among them Gertrude Halder, the wife of General Franz Halder, chief of the Army High Command from 1938 until 1942. Ulrich von Hassell and his circle of conspirators had plotted with the general to overthrow Hitler in the first years of the war. Halder, a ‘weak man with shattered nerves’, as Hassell described him, had let them down. While, in the spring of 1940, the general had carried a pistol in his pocket, intending to shoot Hitler at one of their regular meetings, he could not bring himself to carry it through.3 Earning Hassell’s contempt, Halder, a ‘caddy for Hitler’, had continued in command, lending his support to the massacre of entire villages during the invasion of Russia. After falling out with Hitler over the conduct of the war in the autumn of 1942, he had retired. Though Halder had not taken part in the 20 July plot, he and his wife had been arrested after the Gestapo discovered his links to the Hassell group and his involvement in earlier attempts to assassinate the Führer.4

  Other Prominenten were hidden around the camp. Some 50 yards from Sonderbau 15, Léon Blum, prime minister of France from 1936 to 1937, was secreted with his wife in a bunker beneath the Falkenhof (Falconry). A Gothic-style building, commissioned by Himmler for the enjoyment of the SS, it housed eagles, falcons and other birds of prey. ‘I was in the hands of the Nazis because I was more than just a French politician – I was a social democrat and a Jew,’ Blum wrote.5 ‘The very reasons that made me such a detestable opponent also made me a precious hostage – as I was not only valuable for exchange purposes to the French State and all its allies, but also to the cause of socialism and international democracy.’

  Despite the danger Blum faced as a Jew and a Socialist leader, he had not fled when the Germans occupied France in June 1940. Arrested and tried by the Vichy government, he and his wife were transferred to Buchenwald in April 1943. In his memoirs, he wrote about their time there: ‘There are no words to describe the feelings of loneliness during our two years at Buchenwald.6 We saw no one except for the 25–30 SS men who guarded us. They were always fidgeting with the sub-machine guns slung over shoulders, and they kept their dogs on tight leashes in the tiny side passage between the barbed-wire fence and the Falkenhof … In reality, this Falkenhof was not a prison, but a tomb. We were completely shut off from the outside world. Some of my friends, who had arrived at Buchenwald before us and had been there for more than 18 months, had no idea we were there.’

  Prominenten were also kept in cells beneath the SS accommodation block – among them the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A Lutheran pastor and a vocal opponent of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, in the mid 1930s he had called for Christians to resist the Nazis: the Church should not simply ‘bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself’.7 With this objective, Bonhoeffer set up an underground network dedicated to preserving Christian values and practices. After war broke out, he joined the Abwehr (German military intelligence). Using his position as cover and exploiting his ecumenical contacts abroad, he served as a courier for the German Resistance, visiting Norway, Sweden and Switzerland in a bid to secure peace terms with the Allies. He was also involved in operations run by anti-Nazis within the Abwehr to help German Jews escape to Switzerland.

  Bonhoeffer had arrived at Buchenwald with three other prisoners: Squadron Leader Hugh Falconer, a British SOE operative arrested in Tunisia; Vatican spy Josef Müller; and Major Ludwig Gehre.8 Müller had used Pope Pius XII as an intermediary to deliver peace proposals, drawn up by Hassell’s circle, to US and British intelligence. Gehre, another Abwehr officer, had been privy to Henning von Tresckow’s plan to assassinate Hitler in March 1943. The four men joined other ‘special prisoners’ in the cells beneath the SS barracks: Vassily Kokorin, a nephew of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet minister for foreign affairs; General Falkenhausen, a former military governor of Nazi-occupied Belgium; Hermann Pünder, one of the founders of the CDU, the German Christian Democratic Party; and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, a British spy who, in November 1939, had been famously kidnapped by the Gestapo at Venlo, a town on Germany’s border with the Netherlands. Himmler regarded Payne Best’s capture as a major coup. The victim of a sting operation run by Gestapo agents posing as anti-Nazis, Payne Best, who was working for ‘Section Z’, a new branch of the British Secret Intelligence Service, had been arrested while trying to foment a coup against Hitler.

  It was just a stone’s throw from Sonderbau 15 to the Falkenhof and the cells where Payne Best and the others were held. Yet the strict regime of secrecy meant that the different groups were unaware of the others’ existence.

  For the forty prisoners in Sonderbau 15, however, it was obvious that Himmler was assembling his Prominenten. The Sippenhäftlinge were the first of the new arrivals; by the end of the second week in March, after movement orders were flashed from SS headquarters in Berlin to concentration camps across Germany, the number of prisoners in the barrack had risen to over sixty. A disparate collection, the newcomers included Isa Vermehren, a famous actress and cabaret artist; Countess von Plettenberg, a member of a Catholic resistance network; relatives of German POWs who had joined the National Committee for a Free Germany – a Soviet-run organization dedicated to overthrowing the Nazi regime – and numerous Wehrmacht officers found guilty of conspiring to murder Hitler.

  Gathered in the communal room in the barrack, the group deliberated their position, using information supplied by the new arrivals. Evidently, SS headquarters had arranged things very precisely; behind the movements of the prisoners was the in
tention to pull the Prominenten together, where they were easily available, at any given time, to take part in some far-reaching future plan. But what plan? Himmler’s security service still worked according to the same methods: complete arbitrariness in all decisions; no explanations given; the greatest secrecy.

  As the days passed, waiting for Himmler to make his next move, the anxiety engendered by the uncertainty of their situation was overtaken by the fearfulness of the misery outside. The high wall that enclosed Sonderbau 15 hid the camp from view, but they could hear people being moved forcibly by the guards and shots being fired. ‘We knew exactly what went on there,’ Fey recalled. ‘The SS employed Russian female prisoners to deliver our coal rations, and through them we learned of the horrific conditions in the rest of the camp.’

  There were no gas chambers at Buchenwald; technically, it was a work camp, not an extermination camp.9 Nevertheless, 56,000 prisoners perished there. Hunger, illness, inhuman living and working conditions, executions, lethal injections and medical experiments – the causes were many.10 In the first three months of 1945 alone, 13,000 deaths were registered.11

  That winter, while thousands of Jews arrived at the camp after long, brutal marches from concentration camps in Poland, they were in a minority. Prior to the Soviet advances, the practice at Buchenwald had been to send Jews on for gassing at extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. Of approximately 80,000 prisoners held at the camp in March 1945, the majority were ‘politicals’ – men the SS had rounded up and arrested throughout Germany and the Nazi-occupied countries.12 Encompassing some thirty nationalities, they included military deserters, resistance fighters, priests, writers, actors, Gypsies, Communists, monarchists and so-called ‘work-shy’ individuals – people classed by the regime as ‘asocial’ because they could not, or would not, find gainful employment.13

  The prisoners lived in a compound, roughly 300 yards from Sonderbau 15.14 It contained over a hundred accommodation blocks and the living conditions were horrendous; many of the barracks were bare, lacking benches or beds, and the inmates slept on the floor without mattresses or blankets. One block housed 850 children.15 All boys, they were mostly Jewish and a high percentage were orphans. Many had been transported from Auschwitz, where they had seen their parents murdered before their eyes. The youngest ‘partisan’ – as the SS referred to the children – was three years old.

  The work regime was harsh. Inmates, including children as young as seven, worked a fourteen-hour day in the nearby quarry or in the armaments factories located at the southern end of the camp. Their day began with a roll call on the much-feared parade ground, a showplace for public executions and punishments. The crematorium stood in one corner and corpses were used to taunt the prisoners. Frequently, the duty officer would call out over the loudspeaker to the professional criminals operating the ovens: ‘Let’s have the birds in the crematorium take a peek outside!’ Then the attendants would grab the bodies and hold them up to the windows.16

  Blocks 46 and 50 operated as clinical stations where eminent Nazi physicians and scientists used prisoners to test new drugs and medical techniques.17 The SS forcibly selected the guinea pigs – usually Communists, Gypsies and homosexuals. In one experiment, 800 ‘patients’ were inoculated with an anti-typhus vaccine and then inoculated with the virus itself.18 The vaccine failed and 700 out of the 800 died of typhus. Trials to ‘cure’ homosexuality were carried out, which involved planting a synthetically produced hormone in the groin to induce a change in sex drive.19 And there were other experiments. To test the effectiveness of a balm for wounds from incendiary bombs, ‘very severe’ white-phosphorus burns were inflicted on inmates. One SS surgeon used a specially constructed apparatus to cut sections out of the livers of live subjects, who without exception died from these experiments.20 Another drug trial aimed at determining the fatal dose of a type of alkaloid poison.21 According to the testimony of one inmate, four Russian POWs were administered the poison, and when it proved not to be fatal they were ‘strangled in the crematorium’ and subsequently ‘dissected’. Challenged at a post-war trial about the nature of the medical experiments at Buchenwald, the doctor’s defence was that he was ‘a legally appointed executioner’.22

  Between Block 46 and the infirmary stood the ‘Special Building’.23 Under this nondescript name the camp brothel was chastely concealed. From 1942, Himmler encouraged the use of prostitutes in the camps. ‘Women in brothels must be provided for hard-working prisoners,’ he wrote to Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl, the head administrator.24 Driven by the need to increase productivity, brothels were introduced to supplement the existing reward scheme. Hard graft earned the prisoners smaller workloads, extra food and monetary bonuses, and Himmler was of the view that prostitutes would provide a further incentive. Beginning with the Austrian camp at Mauthausen in 1942, the SS opened ten brothels, the biggest of which was at Auschwitz. Jews, however, were banned, owing to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which forbade sexual relations between Jews and Aryans.

  Eighteen young girls were transferred to Buchenwald from Ravensbrück when the brothel opened in the summer of 1943.25 Prior to starting work, they were sent to the camp hospital, where they were given calcium injections, disinfection baths, better food and a stint under a sunlamp. Some were forcibly sterilized.

  Visits, overseen by the SS, were carefully regulated. Open from 7 to 10 p.m. every evening, the building closed at times of water or electricity shortages, during air raids and when Hitler’s speeches were broadcast on the radio. To prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the men were given disinfectant ointments before and after each visit, and the women were regularly tested for gonorrhoea and syphilis.

  South of the main camp was the huge compound containing the SS accommodation blocks. Here, 50 yards from Sonderbau 15, the SS lived in lavish barracks, with grocery stores, hospitals and cinemas. They even had their own zoo, where bears and monkeys were kept. The luxury of their situation was made the more grotesque by the continual stream of prisoners who passed beneath the windows of their quarters on their way to work in the camp’s quarries and factories.

  ‘I was never flogged or beaten, no one shaved my head, no one tattooed a number on me, I never had to do any hard labour, all we had to do was sit around in our block from morning until night,’ Isa Vermehren, one of the special prisoners in Sonderbau 15, wrote.26

  Yet, chillingly, Isa articulated the ‘inner, psychological hell’ she experienced: ‘Fear and anxiety filled one’s mind to the exclusion of all else; fear of the cold and of hunger; fear of punishment and pain; fear of being despised, betrayed; anxiety about the hopelessness of one’s situation, about one’s own and the other people’s distress; anxiety about the evil within and around one; anxiety about one’s physical and spiritual death.’27

  Aged twenty-eight when she was imprisoned at Buchenwald, Isa was a well-known actress and cabaret artist. Famous for singing songs that parodied the Nazis, she performed in underground clubs all over Germany until, in 1938, a search for faith, prompted by her loathing of Nazism, led her to join the Order of the Sacred Heart as a novice nun.

  Before she arrived at Buchenwald, unlike the other prisoners in Sonderbau 15, Isa had witnessed the horror of a concentration camp at close quarters. Arrested in 1943, after her brother fled to England and joined the BBC, she had been imprisoned at Ravensbrück. While she had received privileged treatment during the ten months she spent there, the window of her cell overlooked the parade ground at the camp. ‘What I became aware of on a daily basis,’ she wrote, ‘was a drama, which wasn’t being played out by human beings.28 It took a long time until what I saw found an ingress into my heart, so determined was I to block out what was going on outside.’

  At the end of the war, she would recount some of the scenes she witnessed to a war-crimes investigator from the British Army: ‘There was a special cell quite near to mine in which the beatings were given and I heard both the noise and screams of the women being punished
.29 I knew that executions took place. The execution site was behind a wall near the crematorium and was about 5 metres from my cell. I could hear the footsteps of people walking there and also the shots. Shootings took place in the evenings after ten o’clock and that was the hour one became nervous. I heard about sixty executions, and as far as I could gather they were usually Polish or Russian women.’

  Isa’s experiences at Ravensbrück did not cause her to lose her faith: ‘Man’s inhumanity to man was a reflection of what Jesus Christ had had to endure and he never abandoned us,’ she said.30 But they caused her to question whether she could ever be a true Christian. As a religious person, confronted by the conditions at Ravensbrück – and then at Buchenwald – she knew her fear and anxiety constituted weakness: she was meant to trust in God. And she was supposed to be selfless, to put herself in the shoes of the other person before thinking of herself. Instead, so horrific were the conditions in the rest of the camp, she found herself turning away from the suffering around her to focus on her own survival. In examining her conscience, this selfishness represented the death of her soul. In the battle to survive, she had become a dead person, without spiritual concerns. It was what she meant when she wrote about the ‘evil within one’.

  The crises of conscience Isa experienced were common to the other prisoners in Sonderbau 15, the majority of whom were devout Catholics and Protestants. ‘Guilt at our privileged position weighed on us all,’ Fey remembered, ‘but as a group we did not talk about it. It was too painful, too private. There was little talk of anything except the most immediate future. It is surprising how little one communicated with other people. I think everyone simply withdrew into themselves.’