The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  Ditmann, by contrast, intended to stay and fight to the last. A brutal man in his early fifties, he started threatening the prisoners as the Americans closed in. ‘I shall still have my pistol with one shot for you and one for me,’ he told Payne Best.18 ‘You will never leave this place alive.’

  On 2 April – Easter Monday – the Russian women disclosed a new development. At dawn that morning, a gang of prisoners, mostly criminals with long sentences, had reported to the gate for a secret assignment with the SS.19 Their orders were to dig a trench 10 to 15 yards long and 6 feet wide, and they were to work in shifts until it was finished. The fear in the camp was that this was a liquidation detail and that the SS were constructing a mass grave for the bodies of prisoners they intended to execute.

  In his cell under the SS barracks, Payne Best was pessimistic. ‘This has been a hell of a month,’ he wrote in his diary.20 ‘Doubt much whether shall ever get home. Probably shall be liquidated by a pistol bullet if our troops get too near. Only real hope is if our troops land here from the air. The Germans say we intend to destroy them and see no reason to spare those of us who are in their power.’

  On the morning of 3 April, the Americans reached Erfurt, just 13 miles from Buchenwald. Later that day, the SS doubled the guard in Sonderbau 15, and in the cells where Payne Best and the others were held.

  None of the prisoners anticipated what actually happened.

  At midday on 3 April, Fey was in her room when she heard a commotion outside: ‘I could hear the SS storming along the passage, shouting: “Pack up! You can only take a small bag, the rest stays behind! We’re leaving in an hour!” How? This was my first reaction. From the constant roar of shellfire and the streams of American fighter planes overhead, it was obvious the camp was surrounded.’

  Along the passage, Isa was in the communal room with the others when the troops burst in: ‘Pure rage came from the Stauffenbergs, a shaking of the head from Thyssen, a sigh of confusion from Frau Schroeder – from everyone, however, determined resistance.21 Fräulein Gisevius buzzed around with excitement, flying rather than walking through the rooms. The whole barrack took on the appearance of a startled hen coop.’

  Everyone rushed to pack, protesting that an hour was not long enough. The order to take only what they could carry caused consternation and most of the group, including Fey, rebelled against it: ‘The things we had carried with us for over 1,500 kilometres were precious. They were not just things, they represented all we had left of ourselves: photographs of our families, clothes we’d worn in happier times, and all sorts of objects of sentimental value … I still had some of the children’s things – items that been left behind the day they were taken from me at Innsbruck: toys, pairs of odd socks, their little vests and a drawing book of Corrado’s.’

  Few things were discarded and the mound of luggage was ready and waiting in the hall by one o’clock. Isa was amazed at the sheer volume of it: ‘From the heavy, opulent suitcases of the Thyssen family, around twelve in total, to the Stauffenbergs’ enormous pile of luggage, it included countless bits of hand baggage, shapeless rucksacks and bundles and even crates, chests and boxes … Gisela [von Plettenberg] and I were the only sensible ones; we carefully packed the most indispensable stuff in a small bag, the less important things in a large suitcase and what we could do without in a cardboard box.22 This we decided we would jettison if the SS insisted, and the large suitcase after that. Whatever the cost, we were determined to hold on to our small bags and my accordion.’

  One hour extended to three. The SS told them the delay was due to the fact that no transport was available. Nerves began to fray as they waited, the camp siren sounding constantly. Isa was irritated by the way the others fretted over their luggage: ‘First of all they took everything outside and heaped it up along the wall by the gate.23 Then it began to rain, so they brought everything back in. Then they thought it would be a while before departure, and they began to unpack, move things around and then pack again.’

  The afternoon came and went and there was no sign of their ‘imminent departure’. Food was brought over to the barrack, and there was more unpacking as everyone searched for plates and cutlery.

  At eight o’clock, Fey gathered with the others in the communal room to listen to the evening bulletin. ‘We were all hoping against hope that the Americans would reach the camp before the SS could whisk us away. The news report was not encouraging. It seemed the German Army was holding out near Erfurt. Then, an hour later, Fräulein Knocke came in, ashen-faced. It was all over, she said. According to the BBC news, which she had been listening to in the SS barracks, the Americans were no more than 10 miles from the camp. Stopping only for a minute, she rushed off to the guardroom. She was so agitated, she did not bother to close the door and someone saw her burning her SS documents and stripping the insignia from her uniform. Apparently, she had procured false papers and was preparing to escape. We went to bed around 10 o’clock. All of us were in high spirits, believing the Americans would liberate the camp the next day.’

  Two long blasts from a whistle woke them shortly before midnight. Isa was the first to stagger along the passageway: ‘SS men were piling into the hall, their weapons drawn.24 Outside, from the entrance to the barrack, all the way to the gate, there were more guards with machine guns, standing at two-metre intervals. One by one, our names were called out and we had to step forward and present ourselves to the transport organiser. The darting spotlight of a pocket torch lit our way to the vehicles.’

  Three grey army buses, with blacked-out windows, waited on the road behind the wall: one for the prisoners of kin, one for the Prominenten from the cells beneath the SS barracks, and a separate one for the former French prime minister, Léon Blum, and his wife.

  SS Lieutenant Bader was in charge of the transport. His hostile attitude and his Aryan features alarmed Fey: ‘Tall, bronzed, lantern-jawed, he was one of the cold, blue-eyed types. He screamed at us to stop complaining and to gather everything and get moving at once. A rumour went round that he belonged to a “Liquidation Commando”. The two female guards who had been in charge of us throughout our imprisonment at Buchenwald were nowhere to be seen. Bader’s gang of tough-acting SS pushed us roughly on to the bus, shouting aggressively: “Get in. You’ve all got to get in. Don’t imagine you deserve any better.” There was really not room for half our number, so we were all squeezed together in the most contorted positions, around and on top of the baggage.’

  33.

  The convoy of buses, the windows sinisterly blacked out, drove through the night and did not stop until the next morning. ‘It was a hell of a journey,’ one prisoner recalled; ‘there was no light, we had nothing to eat or drink … literally, we could none of us move an inch for our legs were embedded in luggage and our arms pinned to our sides.’1

  By this stage, everyone knew that Lieutenant Bader, the officer in charge of the transport, was an executioner. One of the guards had confirmed the rumour to Captain Payne Best: ‘This man Bader was a member of the chief Gestapo execution gang and passed his life in travelling from one concentration camp to another, like a pest officer engaged in the extermination of rats.2 We all realised that the fact that such a man had been chosen to guard us did not presage anything particularly good.’

  Soon after dawn, the convoy pulled over to the side of the road. Seated in the front of the bus, Fey could see they had come to a halt halfway down a long sloping hill. ‘By then we were all in urgent need of relief, so we asked the guards if we could get off for a few minutes. They refused. It was obvious, given the right excuse, they were ready to dispense with us altogether. “Who do you think you are?” snapped Bader. “You’d better be careful: we could treat you differently if we wanted to.” Maria von Hammerstein raised her voice from the back. “If you do not let me off this bus this very minute, I will make a lake right here on the spot! That will not be pleasant for anybody!” When the guards tried to ignore her, Maria forged a path through the luggage, thrustin
g herself against the sergeant at the door. He hesitated, obviously not accustomed to such behaviour. Then, with a shrug, he gave in. Thanks to Maria’s insistence, we were allowed off one at a time, the armed guards watching over us as we relieved ourselves by the side of the road.’

  A short while later, a black Gestapo Mercedes pulled up behind the parked buses. Two Gestapo officers got out and, after conferring briefly with Bader, they ordered the SS guards to fetch Josef Müller, Franz Liedig and Ludwig Gehre.fn1 The three men, Abwehr agents who had worked closely with Admiral Canaris to overthrow Hitler, were travelling with Payne Best: ‘The pile of luggage was pulled down and, after a difficult search, their bags were found and after a curt goodbye and “see you later”, the three men got out … we were all certain that our friends had gone to their death, and that we had seen them for the last time.3 But life goes on and soon we were pretending high spirits to disguise our real feelings.

  ‘Someone recognised a village through which we passed,’ Payne Best continued.4 ‘After discussion, the conclusion was reached that we were on our way to Flossenbürg. Not so good this, for the Flossenbürg concentration camp was primarily used for the extermination of unwanted prisoners.’

  Among the prisoners in Payne Best’s bus was Dr Rascher, a former member of Himmler’s personal staff. Until his arrest for fraud in the spring of 1944, Rascher had planned and supervised the construction of gas chambers at concentration camps in Germany and Poland. He had also persuaded Himmler to allow prisoners to be used as guinea pigs in medical experiments. Based at Dachau, Rascher had conducted his own medical research, experimenting with Polygal, a substance made from beet and apple pectin that was supposed to aid blood clotting.5 His experiments aimed to determine whether it could be used to reduce bleeding from gunshot wounds sustained during combat. To test its efficacy, prisoners were given a Polygal tablet and shot through the neck or chest.

  Rascher’s inclusion in the transport unnerved the other prisoners. His presence undermined the theory that Himmler intended to spare their lives in order to use them as hostages. Rascher’s SS career had ended when, in an attempt to ingratiate himself further with Himmler, he falsely claimed to have found a means of extending child-bearing age. Citing his wife as an example, he sent the Reichsführer photographs of their three children, ‘born’, he said, when she was ‘over the age of 48’. Himmler’s preoccupation with increasing the German birth rate led him to use the photographs for propaganda purposes, and he felt personally betrayed when it was discovered that the couple had either purchased or kidnapped the children. It seemed unlikely that he intended to spare the life of a man who had publicly humiliated him and who he had declared his sworn enemy.

  Around noon, Bader brought the convoy to a halt at the entrance to Flossenbürg camp. He ordered the guards to lock all the vehicles, leaving the prisoners to wait inside. A long delay followed while he and his men spoke to the camp officials in the administration block, a forbidding building, which those on board could see through the gates. ‘When they came out,’ Payne Best recalled, ‘one of them, who was more friendly than the others, said, “You will have to go farther, they can’t take you here.6 Too full.” We weren’t at all sorry at this news, and Rascher became quite optimistic and told us with the authority of a concentration-camp expert that obviously there was no present intention to liquidate us, for Flossenbürg was never so crowded that it could not accommodate a few more corpses.’

  The convoy drove on. Straight away, Fey noticed a change in the guards’ behaviour. ‘They were nervous and irritable. We had landed them with a burden (as one of them put it). Evidently, Lieutenant Bader had left Buchenwald with orders to take us to Flossenbürg and it was obvious that he had no idea what to do with us. Apparently, he had been given vague instructions to continue southwards until he found some place to deposit us. He was in a terrible mood, made worse by the fact that he and his men had not been given any money for food or other expenses. When Alex suggested that he would be “delighted” to put us all up at his family’s castle at Jettingen, which was not that far away, the guards became even more furious. But at least it made us laugh.’

  At dusk, they reached Regensburg, an imposing medieval town on the banks of the Danube. It had started to drizzle and Bader directed the convoy through the darkening cobbled streets, stopping every now and then in front of a building. Inching through the narrow arches that marked the different quarters of the town, they passed through squares lined with Gothic mansions and churches with paired towers. After a while, the buildings took on a familiarity, and it was clear that Bader did not know where he was going. One of the guards said that if they could not find somewhere to stop for the night here, they had no idea what they would do.

  At last they pulled up outside the Landesgefängnis (state prison). A huge white building, dating from the sixteenth century, it was the only place large enough to accommodate the sixty prisoners. Bader and his men ordered them out of the buses and herded them through the entrance into a spacious hall, and up a steep iron staircase. At the top, prodding them in the back with their guns, they marched them along a corridor and shoved them, four or five at a time, into small, dirty cells.

  Fey was sharing a cell with the Hofackers: ‘As they began locking the doors, Major Dietrich Schatz, a young officer who joined us at Buchenwald, lost his temper and shouted, “You’ve no right to lock us up like criminals!” There was then a good hour of heated discussion, following which Lieutenant Bader called in the prison director, an authoritative-looking man with a large bald head and pince-nez glasses. The director explained in a serious tone that the prison rules were that cell doors were to be kept locked at all times. “There can be no exceptions. I regret that, regardless of your status, these rules must be followed!” With that Schatz (still complaining loudly) and the rest of us were pushed back into our dirty little cubicles, with the iron doors bolted firmly behind.’

  On one side of the building, the prisoners’ cells overlooked the train station. While the Allies had largely spared the historic centre of Regensburg, the station was a target. ‘Really I have never seen such a mess in my life,’ Captain Payne Best wrote.7 ‘Engines and coaches lying on their backs with their legs in their air, burnt-out coaches in long rows, and railways sticking up in great hoops like pieces of wire.’ At around ten o’clock, the air-raid alarm sounded and SOE agent Falconer watched as the bombs dropped: ‘The target was the railway marshalling yard and, as this was only separated from the prison by a wall, and our cell window looked straight down on it, we had a splendid view of some very good precision bombing.8 Our interest cooled considerably, however, when a large lump of metal whizzed in through the window, breaking the glass and clanging against the opposite wall.’

  Hammering on the cell door, Falconer demanded to be let out. When it opened, he ran past the guard and slipped the bolts on the other cell doors. Collectively, the prisoners then refused to leave the corridor. ‘The warders, having been told to treat us politely, simply did not know what to do with us,’ Payne Best recalled.9 ‘I heard one old warder say to another, “You try and get them back into the cells. They don’t seem to know that they must obey orders.” Every now and then one of the warders would shout: “Everybody go to his cell”, but this only resulted in laughter and loud cheers. Then one of them had the bright idea of putting food in the cells and after a while most of us were locked up. But then the air-raid alarm went off again and we were all marched down to a shelter in the basement, where the fun started again.’

  The next morning, the helpless warders left the cell doors open: ‘For the first time in the history of Regensburg prison!’ Fey noted. It was also the first time the different groups from Buchenwald had had the chance to meet properly; the atmosphere, as Payne Best described, was more akin to a party than a morning in prison.

  Bader’s orders were to remain at Regensburg until nightfall; the danger of strafing from enemy aircraft was too great to risk moving the prisoners during daylight
hours. Himmler’s strict rules of secrecy meant that the individual groups were not meant to know who the others were, let alone come into contact. To Bader’s irritation, the air-raid siren sounded throughout the afternoon, and he had to sit with them in the shelter beneath the prison while they continued their party.

  Just before dusk, anxious to get moving, he ordered the prisoners to get ready to leave. A few minutes later, they assembled by the waiting buses. The guards instructed them to sit in the same seats as before, and Fey took her place at the front. ‘The confusion among the SS was even greater than previously. We still seemed to have no precise destination. Someone said that we were being taken to Dachau concentration camp. But someone else had heard that Bader had already phoned through to Dachau and was told the place was full. Alarmingly, as we left Regensburg, we realized we were heading east.’

  It started to rain and, as the night wore on, it rained harder and harder. The road seemed to be quite dead and for hours they passed no one. The fields on either side were pitted with bomb craters, and the verges littered with the skeletons of burnt-out vehicles. The buses were powered by wood and gas and the combination of lurching and stopping, due to the erratic supply of fuel to the engine, made sleep impossible. Periodically, those seated at the front passed on their location to the person behind, and it was then relayed, as in a game of Chinese whispers, to the passengers unable to see through the blacked-out windows. Isa was seated at the back of the bus: ‘This nocturnal journey wore down our nerves.10 Not only was our mood affected by the constant starting and stopping and limping along of the engine, we were tormented by the uncertainty and secrecy of this move under the cover of darkness. It worried us that we were heading toward the Czech border, far away from the Western Front and deeper and deeper into the very recesses of the Bavarian Forest.’