The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  Yet, as dawn came, their mood lifted. It was a beautiful spring day and the trees were in bud and the daffodils in bloom.11 Following the course of the Danube, they passed through landscape largely untouched by the war. ‘It was a delightful drive through lovely rolling country, past quiet farmhouses and fields with every now and then a stretch of dark pines,’ Payne Best recalled. Crossing the Danube at Deggendorf, they drove up into the Bavarian hills: ‘It was the sort of trip that, in more settled times, tourists pay money to enjoy,’ Hugh Falconer noted wryly.12

  Around eleven o’clock, they stopped outside an inn at Schönberg, a village of tall, pastel-coloured houses in the middle of the forest. Bader got out and went inside to talk to the innkeeper. Some minutes later, he reappeared. Their accommodation was not yet ready and they would have to wait. A crowd of villagers had gathered around the buses. Mostly old women, dressed in peasant clothes, they stared stonily up at the prisoners. Bader had told the innkeeper that he was transporting SS families and word had quickly spread. ‘The upshot,’ Ännerle remembered, ‘was that the inhabitants didn’t want to have anything to do with us.’13 Later, Fey learned that the village had suffered terribly at the hands of the local People’s Court, one of hundreds set up by the Nazis: ‘There were no professional judges; whichever local Nazi happened to be around had the power to arrest anyone on the spot. When someone was denounced there was no attempt to weigh the evidence. Justice was administered swiftly, often by firing squad. It was enough to have spoken out against the war or to be related to soldiers who had deserted or even surrendered. Most people lived in fear of the authorities and tried to keep out of sight.’

  An order, issued by SS headquarters, had gone out to clear two schools in the village to accommodate the newcomers, further arousing the indignation of the inhabitants. The schools were being used as hospitals for troops and, throughout the morning, sick and wounded soldiers limped past the convoy on their way to look for beds in the next village. As Fey described, the long wait, facing the mutely hostile crowd, was discomforting; further, none of the prisoners had had anything to eat since leaving Regensburg: ‘Bader told us that no arrangements had been, or could be, made for feeding us. This village of 700 inhabitants already housed 1,300 refugees and when the mayor heard that another sixty-odd had been wished on him, he refused to draw on his reserves. The Gestapo had brought them and the Gestapo must feed them. Bader said there was nothing he could do as he had no more fuel to go in search of food, so we would have to do without.’

  After several hours, Bader disappeared again and Ännerle and some of the others were able to speak to the villagers: ‘We lost no time in explaining the situation and secretly giving them our names, for example Stauffenberg, Goerdeler and Lindemann.14, fn2 The result was amazing! All the inhabitants were on our side and wanted to help us. They said they would bring us food.’

  The schools – a boys’ school and a girls’ school, situated side by side in the village square – were cleared by seven o’clock in the evening. There were four large rooms for the sixty prisoners. As there were many more men than women, for the first time since their imprisonment, the Sippenhäftlinge slept in the same room. ‘Some funny scenes took place in those overcrowded rooms, with men and women sleeping together,’ Fey recalled. ‘For instance, the guards had arranged for a small basin to be placed in the centre of our big room for washing. We agreed that when the women were washing the men would stand in the corridor, and vice versa. This seemed to be working perfectly except that, when it was our turn to wash, the elderly Fritz Thyssen asked if we would mind if he stayed on, since he was a slow dresser and still had to shave. He assured us he would look the other way when we women were naked. What we had not noticed was the angle of Thyssen’s shaving mirror. It kept us in his full view at all times. When we half laughingly accused him of being a dirty old man, he replied that he had already seen many women “in the costume of Eve” and that old men should be allowed such “small pleasures”. As if this was not enough, he crept round to each woman’s bed in the evenings, paying old-fashioned compliments.’

  The villagers kept their promise and delivered large quantities of food to the kitchen where the SS cooks prepared the prisoners’ meals. After a few days, however, it emerged that the cooks were keeping all the food for themselves and a means had to be found to smuggle supplies in. ‘Stiller, with most of the SS escort, disappeared soon after our arrival, leaving only a Sergeant and two men to guard us,’ Hugh Falconer recalled.fn3,15 ‘The advantage of this situation was that, with only two guards (one on duty and one off), the Gestapo could only watch one side of the house at a time. As we had windows on all four sides, we were able to open them and talk to any passer-by who was prepared to stop and chat. Quite a number of people were too nervous to do this, but one who came every morning to enquire how we were getting along was the mayor of the village.’

  Once the mayor realized that provisions were not getting through, he organized a party of villagers to deliver the food at night. For fifteen-year-old Ännerle, they were ‘midnight feasts’: ‘When the sun set over Schönberg we started living it up! Every evening when the guard left us and it became dark, some of us would go to the window with a long rope to await the delivery of the things that were being smuggled to us.16 Our relationship with the baker was particularly close. Every evening he would attach a bucket to the end of the rope, filled with bread, butter, apples, sweets and chocolate. Often, we’d send the empty bucket back down two or three times and he would fill it up again!’ One delivery alone consisted of twenty loaves of bread, two pounds of butter, two long sausages, two packets of tobacco, two packets of cigarettes, two enormous bags of biscuits and sweets, and a bucket of marmalade.

  It was Isa’s job to smuggle supplies to the Blums, who had been assigned a flat on the floor above. To maintain the secrecy order, Bader had erected a door on the landing outside, which he kept permanently locked. ‘The door was an absurd addition,’ she wrote.17 ‘One could get to the Blums’ flat from the window of our room by climbing up the gutter on to another roof. There was also a light well, which ran between our room and theirs, and this provided an alternative means of delivery.’

  Yet, however much the group mocked Bader for his nonsensical observation of the rules, he remained a figure of terror. A few days after they arrived, they watched from a window as Bader and his guards hustled Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer into a black Gestapo car. Later, they learned that Bonhoeffer was taken to Flossenbürg, where he was hanged the next day along with Admiral Canaris and other Abwehr men who had plotted against Hitler.

  The stay at Schönberg lasted for two weeks. For Fey, it brought back her time with Alex at the Hindenburg Baude. However shaken she had been by Litta’s visits, she and Alex were as close as ever and they slept side by side in the large room they shared with the others. For the first time in months, they were able to escape into the countryside. ‘The weather was improving and, with a great deal of insistence, we persuaded Bader to let us out for a walk every day. Two guards accompanied us. We were, of course, forbidden to talk to the local people or to say our surnames. This was completely ridiculous as they knew exactly who we were! The pleasure of being able to wander around freely after being cooped up for so many long, cold months is hard to describe. It was an exhilarating feeling. Spring had come. The catkins were out and the fields were carpeted with flowers. The horrors of the war seemed to fade into the background.’

  But, as Fey admitted, she was unable to enjoy the walks with Alex: ‘The children were the greater pull and I had lost them. I knew that all my worrying over them would do no good and only make me miserable in front of Alex. But I simply couldn’t help myself. Realizing that there was nothing to be done only made me more upset. Alex did his best to comfort and reassure me, yet I sensed he was also troubled. While nothing had happened physically between us, I knew he felt guilty about Litta. But we didn’t talk about it and, as the days went by, the combination of my unhappiness and his p
reoccupation clouded the way we were with each other.’

  Litta had not seen Alex before he left Buchenwald. After her visit on Easter Sunday, bad weather had prevented her from returning the next day as she had hoped. ‘Weather very windy.18 Litta didn’t come unfortunately,’ Gagi noted in her diary. ‘She says she can only fly when the weather is good.’

  The weather did not improve for several days and it was not until Thursday 5 April that Litta set off from Weimar, where she was now based, flying a two-seater aerobatic monoplane. It was a ten-minute flight to Buchenwald, but the Americans now controlled the skies over her route and it was extremely risky to fly in daylight. Staying low, rarely climbing above 100 feet, she hugged the trees, arriving without incident.19

  Usually, when circling over the camp, she could see people waving from Sonderbau 15, but this time there was no sign of movement. Dropping low over the barrack, she saw that the compound was empty. A few hundred yards away, piles of bodies were stacked against the wall of the crematorium.20 Even from the air, she could smell the ‘thick and hanging’ odour that clung to the camp. Not knowing whether Alex was among the dead – finally executed like his brothers – or whether he had been transported on again, she landed at a nearby airfield.

  Frantic with worry, she put in an urgent call to the administration office at Buchenwald. She was told that the prisoners of kin had been moved, but the official would not say where. Hubertus von Papen-Köningen, a friend and fellow pilot, was with her and he remembered her taking the news very badly: ‘she was in shock and needed to lie down’.21 A committed anti-Nazi, having lost two brothers on the Eastern Front, he volunteered to call the camp again. Bluffing his way through the conversation, Papen-Köningen claimed he was acting on secret orders from Berlin that had been signed by Himmler himself. The bluff worked. He found out that Alex had been transferred to Straubing – a small town just south of Regensburg – on 3 April.

  The next day Litta obtained an official flight order for ‘a special operation, important to the war effort’ – a remarkable feat given that this unspecified operation was to fly to Straubing to visit the brother of the man who had so nearly assassinated Hitler.22 Straubing turned out to be a false steer; but after flying on to Regensburg, Litta was again able to use her rank and charm to extract her husband’s whereabouts from a Gestapo official. He told her that, less than forty-eight hours before, Alex had been moved from the state prison, and was on his way to Schönberg. Then he gave her a permit to visit him.

  The morning of 8 April was bright and clear, and Litta was in the air by seven. It was less than 50 miles to Schönberg. Following the course of the Straubing–Passau railway line, she was able to fly just 30 feet above the ground. As she passed through a small village, a wounded serviceman was standing at the door of his house.23 Intrigued by the sight of the unusually low-flying plane, he watched its progress.

  Seconds later, an American fighter jet ‘thundered past’. Lieutenant Thomas A. Norbourne of the US Air Force 15th Squadron reconnaissance unit, then tasked with sweeping railway lines for trains, was also following the Straubing–Passau line.24 Mistaking Litta’s unarmed plane for a Focke-Wulf fighter and reluctant to miss such an unexpected opportunity, he fired ‘two salvos of about five to eight shots’.25 A retired railway foreman saw the encounter.26 He watched as Litta’s plane veered to the left and then spun into a field. There was no sound of an explosion, and no smoke. The railwayman grabbed his bicycle and pedalled over to the site, joined en route by a French POW who was working nearby.

  The two men were the first to arrive on the scene.27 To their great surprise, they saw an elegant woman in her early forties sitting in the pilot’s seat. From her composure, they did not consider her condition to be critical. ‘She just said please help me,’ the railwayman reported. After freeing her from the wreckage, they laid her on the ground. One of her legs seemed to be broken, and her other foot appeared ‘unnaturally twisted’.

  Shortly after, the local military took over the site and a Luftwaffe doctor arrived to treat Litta. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital at a nearby airfield where, a few hours later, she died. The cause of death on the certificate issued by the medical superintendent was a fracture at the base of her skull.

  Mysteriously, a substantial amount of cash and expensive items of jewellery were found among her belongings.28 In speculating about her death, her sister, Jutta, thought the flight to Schönberg in the two-seater plane was a ‘bold attempt’ to rescue Alex, one that Litta had ‘long since planned and was long overdue’. That she had intended to fly them both across the lines to the Allies in the hope of beginning a new life in the West was evident in the ‘disproportionately large’ sums of money found among her possessions.

  The news of Litta’s death did not reach Alex until four days later. Fey was with him at Schönberg when he heard: ‘The SS called him out of our room to give him the tragic news. When he came back in, he was as white as chalk. Everything that remained of his past life had been rubbed out. First, his two brothers executed by firing squad; then his house and treasured library destroyed in a bombing raid; now, his wife killed. In the circumstances, his self-control was incredible. All of us were profoundly shocked and tried to console him. How painful it must have been for him to be surrounded by people at such a moment. But you could see that he didn’t want to be alone. After a while, he asked Elisabeth and me to sit with him, saying he wanted people near him who understood. I tried my best to comfort him, but there was little anyone could do.’

  Rumours of an impending German surrender dominated the last days at Schönberg. In the east, Vienna and Karlsruhe had fallen to the Russians, and in the west, the Americans had taken Cologne. Chaotic lines of retreating soldiers began to stream through the remote village, passing directly beneath the windows of the school. While the group was willing the war to end, the men were, after all, fellow Germans and, as Isa described, the scenes were distressing: ‘Masses of disorderly soldiers in filthy, shredded uniforms made their way along the road.29 Exhausted horses pulled heavy carts with ripped tarpaulins; battered trucks rattled over the market square, piled high with incredible luggage; next to machine guns and gas masks were mattresses and bedheads; next to petrol canisters and crates of ammunition were washing baskets and birdcages.

  ‘More upsetting still,’ Isa continued, ‘was the contrasting attitude of Lieutenant Bader.30 He was suffused with an unshakeable belief in his own omnipotence. He strode through the present as if it was the same as the past, unable to grasp the reality of the collapse taking place around him.’

  Seeing the defeated army, Ännerle worried about her younger siblings at Bad Sachsa: ‘The anxiety over the little ones increased.31 Where were they? Were they still alive? There had been much fighting in the Harz mountains and we were worried that something had happened to them.’ Gagi recognized that, without Litta, they were unlikely to find out: ‘Now, no more news to be had with regard to the children in Bad Sachsa,’ she wrote the night she heard that Litta had been killed.32

  On 15 April, the SS took the prisoners on the floor below away. This was Payne Best’s group – the men who had been imprisoned below the SS barracks at Buchenwald. Fey learned from Lieutenant Bader that they had been taken to Flossenbürg, where Pastor Bonhoeffer and other conspirators in the July plot had been executed: ‘Their removal was depressing. We assumed this was the last we would see of them and we all sensed that it would be our turn next. Amidst all the chaos, it seemed doubtful that we were still considered worth looking after by somebody back in Berlin. The most likely scenario was that we would go to Flossenbürg too.’

  The familiar order came the next day. ‘Pack your bags! Be ready to leave in an hour!’ This time, the departure was prompt. As the group filed into the waiting buses, they were amazed to see that, in spite of the strong SS presence, most of the village had turned out to say goodbye. Standing in the doorways of their houses or leaning out of windows, they looked on in silence. Ännerle was touch
ed by the courage of the dentist’s wife, who came over on the pretext she was owed money for unpaid bills and gave them food for the journey.

  By the time they left Schönberg it was dark. The one consolation was that they were heading away from Flossenbürg. Driving through the night, they arrived at Landshut, near Munich, at dawn. A few hours before, the town had been pounded by American bombers and almost every building was on fire. Gagi jotted down her impressions in her diary: ‘Everywhere we look there are columns of disbanded troops and refugees on the road … Constant sirens – much stopping and crawling in dim light.33 The sky red from the fires.’

  Fey could hardly believe her eyes when they reached Munich. Her mother’s house at Ebenhausen was just a few miles south and she knew the city well. Driving through the ruined streets, she was flooded with memories of childhood shopping expeditions with her parents, and visits to cafés for coffee and cakes, which had been a special treat. ‘As we approached the city centre, it seemed that many buildings were still standing. But as we got closer, I saw that there was nothing behind the walls. The houses were hollow, as in a stage set. There was a profound silence and I did not see any people or cars; the only vehicle in sight was the twisted hulk of a burnt-out tram. It was awful to see and I had a big lump in my throat.’