Leaving the city, she felt torn: ‘I was barely 15 miles from Mutti and Almuth. I could walk to Ebenhausen. But I didn’t have the courage. The time in captivity had made me passive and frightened. I didn’t want to be alone under any circumstances. But more than anything else, I could not bear the thought of leaving Alex.’
A few miles outside Munich, the bus turned off the main road. ‘Dachau 7 km’ was written on the signpost.
34.
It was coming up to noon when the bus pulled up at a side entrance to the camp. The double-fronted gate, 12 feet high and made of solid oak, was shut. Straight away, Bader jumped down and disappeared. As he left, he instructed the SS guards to lock the prisoners in; on no account were they to leave the bus until he returned.
The day was warm and close and clouds of dust, churned up by passing military vehicles, came in through the open windows. Two high walls ran along the road on either side; the huge bronze eagle that towered above the gate heightened the feeling of being hemmed in. Its talons clutched a swastika and its wings were spread, the wingspan stretching almost the entire width of the gate.
The name ‘Dachau’ resonated horribly with all the prisoners waiting in the locked bus. Built in 1933, it was the oldest and most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps. Himmler, then chief of police in Munich, officially named it ‘the first concentration camp for political prisoners’.1 During the first year, some 5,000 men, primarily German Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists, had been imprisoned. Later, in 1938 after Kristallnacht, more than 10,000 Jewish men had been interned there.2 Fey remembered her father speaking of friends and colleagues – both Jews and political opponents of the Nazis – who had ‘disappeared’ from Dachau. Others in the group also knew of people who had vanished.
Fey described the fear that overtook them all: ‘With the sun beating down, it was hot and suffocating. As the minutes and then the hours rolled by, everyone became more and more anxious. Some of us were so frightened we simply had to relieve ourselves on the spot.’
Shortly before three o’clock – almost three hours after the bus pulled up at the gate – Bader appeared with another SS officer. They ordered the group to repack their bags, jettisoning all but essentials, then disappeared again, only to return some minutes later to countermand the order. This charade continued for the next few hours, infuriating Isa: ‘Both men came to see us three or four times during the afternoon constantly bringing new orders.3 Just as we were about to obey these orders, they would leave, remarking that they only wanted to see whether we would comply and that they would be back soon. When they returned they issued new orders, which they again revoked. They admitted that they were facing difficulties in arranging things, but the manner in which they told us, laughing patronisingly at us, was so shameless, one wanted to hit them, and it was an effort to control oneself.’
It was another two or three hours before they were finally ordered off the bus and marched through the gate, where they were told to wait in front of a large brick building. ‘Behind it, an entire town of houses, barracks and streets stretched out almost as far as the eye could see,’ Fey remembered; ‘although it was only mid-April, the early-evening sun beat down relentlessly.’
They had been there for an hour when an SS official arrived and ordered the male prisoners to line up against the wall of the building. After inspecting the men, he shouted at them to follow him ‘at the double’. Recruits were needed for the Volkssturm – Himmler’s last-ditch army of boys and old men – and they were to join a local brigade. Looking on with the other women, Fey was horrified: ‘Some of us started to cry openly as the men were marched off. For all we knew, the Volkssturm idea was just an excuse for the SS to take the men away and murder them inside the camp.’
The SS left the women outside the building for another three hours. It was dark when – some ten hours after they had arrived – SS Lieutenant Colonel Eduard Weiter, the camp commandant, appeared. Full of apologies, he announced that there was no intention to separate the men from the women and it had all been an unfortunate ‘misunderstanding’. In his mid forties, immaculately turned out in his SS uniform, Weiter had run the camp since 1943. Tens of thousands of men and women had died during his tenure.fn1 And yet here he was, apologizing. He was very sorry that they had been kept waiting for so long but Dachau was very crowded and it had really been most difficult to find suitable accommodation for such distinguished guests.4 He had done his best but, even so, the quarters to which they were about to be conducted were far inferior to those they deserved and he hoped they would forgive their shortcomings. Then, after clicking his heels and bowing to the women, he added that they would find their menfolk waiting for them in the barrack.
Fey and the others clambered back on to the bus. Situated outside the main camp, the barrack was a short drive away along the Avenue of the SS, the majestic four-lane approach road to Dachau. The darkness prevented the women from seeing the flowers or the splendid villas that lined the avenue. But, ten days later, when the Americans arrived to liberate the camp, a lieutenant colonel in the 42nd Division of the US 7th Army would drive along this same road. ‘One could imagine from the impressive massiveness of the grey Administration Buildings and Barracks, the fine lawns, great walls and black iron-grilled gates, that you were approaching a wealthy girls’ finishing school in the suburbs of one of our great cities,’ he wrote. ‘All was so neat, so orderly, so beautiful.’5
The commandant’s ‘welcome’ speech was one he had made many times in the preceding days. Finally, after months of manoeuvring, involving large detachments of SS guards and perilous journeys in the face of the Allies’ advancing armies, Himmler had pulled his Prominenten back to one place. With Europe in the last throes of war, Weiter was now the custodian of 137 men, women and children whom the Reichsführer SS intended to use as bargaining counters in negotiations that he hoped to set in train with the Western Allies.
The bus carrying the Sippenhäftlinge was the last to arrive at Dachau. Between 8 and 17 April – the day they arrived – over forty special prisoners had been transported from Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps around Germany. They were secreted, out of view from Dachau’s 35,000 inmates, in closely guarded buildings within the main camp.
The new arrivals joined other prominent individuals, many of whom had been there for months. One barrack housed members of the Wittelsbach family, whose dynasty had produced two Holy Roman Emperors and reigned as Kings of Bavaria until 1918. Another held Prince Xavier of Bourbon, the pretender to the Spanish throne. Arrested in France when the Gestapo discovered his links to resistance leaders, he had spent eighteen months in solitary confinement in the Starvation Bunker at Dachau and weighed under 6 stone. Prince Leopold of Prussia, a cousin of Germany’s last kaiser, had been equally harshly treated. Born into one of Europe’s wealthiest families, he was arrested after the servants at his castle informed the Gestapo that he was homosexual. Arriving at Dachau in September 1944, the prince had been assigned the job of cleaning the camp latrines and had nearly died from diphtheria.6 On his recovery, Commandant Weiter had transferred him to the camp brothel, where he had worked as a batman and errand boy for the prostitutes.
Acting on orders from the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin, Weiter had closed the brothel at the beginning of April to make space for the new arrivals. A remarkable collection of courageous individuals, many were celebrities in their own countries, famous for resisting the Nazis. From all over Europe, they included clergymen, resistance leaders, high-ranking military figures, former government ministers, journalists, senior civil servants and scientists. Among the most well known were Monsignor Gabriel Piguet, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, arrested in Vichy France for harbouring Jews and anti-Nazi priests; Alexandros Papagos, the commander-in-chief of the Greek Army; Italian partisan leader General Sante Garibaldi, grandson of the famous politician and nationalist; Georg Elser, the German factory worker who had almost succeeded in killing Hitler an
d other leading Nazis in Munich before the war; Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor who had resisted the Nazification of German Protestant churches; Nikolaus von Kallay, a former Hungarian prime minister; Léon Blum, the ex-prime minister of France; and Kurt von Schuschnigg, chancellor of Austria at the time of the Anschluss.
There was also a sizeable British contingent.7 With the exception of Captain Payne Best, the British spy arrested in the Venlo incident, the fourteen men were prisoners of war. Two bore the name Churchill: Lieutenant Colonel Jack Churchill, captured leading the Commandos in Yugoslavia; and SOE officer Peter Churchill, who, early on in the war, had led four clandestine missions to France, for which he was awarded the DSO and the Croix de Guerre. Himmler erroneously believed the two officers were related to Winston Churchill. Three of the British POWs had survived the massacre that followed the ‘Great Escape’ from Stalag Luft III in March 1944 – men who had taken part in the breakout and whose lives for some mysterious reason the SS had spared.fn2 They were Wing Commander ‘Wings’ Day and Flight Lieutenants Sydney Dowse and ‘Jimmy’ James. On the night of 23 September 1944 all three had succeeded in tunnelling their way out of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were taken after Stalag Luft III, but had been recaptured the next day.
There were Polish, Hungarian and Russian prisoners of war too, among them several Russian generals captured on the Eastern Front, and Vassily Kokorin, the nephew of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov.
Exactly what conditions Himmler intended to extract from the Allies in exchange for these 137 prisoners it is impossible to determine. Few records relating to the Prominenten survived the war. Yet fragments of information remain, making it possible at least to speculate about Himmler’s intentions after 17 April – the day the Sippenhäftlinge arrived at Dachau.
Numerous sources – US intelligence cables, top-secret British government telegrams, intercepted German signals traffic and conversations the prisoners themselves had with their SS guards – indicate that, initially, Himmler planned to use the Prominenten to barter for his own life; possibly, even, his intention was also to use them as a human shield. For this plan to be viable, with the Americans closing in on Dachau, it was imperative that he retained control over them until the last moment. Himmler’s immediate priority, therefore, was to move the prisoners to a secure location, out of reach from the Allies.
The obvious place was the Austrian Alps.
By 17 April, it was clear that Germany’s war was over. In Berlin, 360 miles to the north of Dachau, Hitler had not left his bunker under the Reichstag for three months. The day before, a Soviet force of 2.5 million troops, 6,150 tanks and some 42,000 pieces of artillery and mortars had begun its assault on the capital, attacking from the south and east.8 To the west, city after city had fallen to the British and American armies. Berlin was all but encircled.
Already, agents working for the OSS, the US intelligence agency, were reporting that senior Nazis were fleeing to hideouts in the Alps.fn3 That week, Fred Mayer, attached to Operation Greenup, a three-man mission parachuted into Nazi-occupied Austria in February, sent a coded message from Innsbruck to the OSS station at Bari in Italy:
TWO SPECIAL TRAINS WITH OPERATIONS STAFF OF HIGHEST REICH LEADERSHIP LEFT BERLIN APRIL 14. MEMBERS NOW IN OFF LIMITS AREA IMSTERBERG. 18 MEMBERS OF THE MINISTRY OF INTERIOR IN HOTEL POST. UNDER SEC OF STATE VON BURGSDORF IN GARMISCH PARTENKIRCHEN.9
A few days later, Mayer sent a second cable reporting that Himmler was in the area:
HIMMLER ARRIVED WITH STAFF NIGHT OF 17 IN IGLS NEAR INNSBRUCK IN HOTEL GRUENWALDER HOF. THREE SS DIVISIONS EXPECTED BUT SO FAR ONLY ONE REGIMENT OF LEIBSTANDARTE PRESENT OF WHICH COMPANY A IS ROUNDING UP ALL POLITICALS POSSIBLY DANGEROUS. SOURCE KRIPO.fn4,fn5,10
The Grünwalderhof, located in a remote valley close to the Brenner Pass, belonged to the aristocratic Thurn und Taxis family. That Himmler had earmarked the luxury hotel as a hideout for himself, and possibly the Prominenten, is corroborated by a series of Gestapo radio messages intercepted by Lothar Rohde, one of the prisoners at Dachau.
Rohde, a brilliant young electrical engineer, had been arrested by the SS for listening to enemy radio stations.11 Brutally interrogated and threatened with execution, he was granted a reprieve after he claimed that he was close to discovering a means of sabotaging the ignition systems of Allied planes, using a special radio beam. Hearing of his research, Hitler had intervened to save the engineer’s life in the hope that the ‘magic ray’ would end hostile air attacks on Germany. The Führer also ordered that Rohde be given special facilities to develop his weapon at Dachau. Imprisoned with other Prominenten in the Kommandaturarrest – the building reserved for prisoners under the jurisdiction of Commandant Weiter – Rohde was allocated his own room, filled with the latest radio equipment.
His ‘research’ offered the perfect cover. Since he was expected to spend his day with headphones on, he could listen to whatever he liked without fear of being caught by the SS. Abandoning his work, he used the equipment to tune into BBC broadcasts and to listen to the conversations between Gestapo and Wehrmacht units in the vicinity and between the squadron leaders of British and American planes as they flew over the camp.
On the morning of 17 April, Rohde intercepted a series of Gestapo radio signals indicating that he and the other Prominenten were about to be moved to the Alpenfestung (Southern Redoubt) – Hitler’s so-called Alpine fortress.12 Captain Payne Best was imprisoned in the Kommandaturarrest building with Rohde: ‘Hour after hour, Rohde brought us news that we were going to Switzerland to be handed over to the International Red Cross, that we were to be moved to a chateau on Lake Constance, and finally that we were being taken across the Brenner to Italy.’13 The Grünwalderhof, where Himmler would arrive that evening, was just 2 miles from the Brenner Pass; further, while the Gestapo did not mention the Reichsführer SS specifically, Rohde’s eavesdropping revealed that the Prominenten were ‘hostages whose lives could be bartered for those of Nazi leaders’.
A last-minute change of plan for reasons that are not clear meant that none of the prisoners was in fact moved that day. Payne Best was told by one of the SS guards that they were to remain at Dachau until ‘other accommodation’ was found.14 But the fact that Himmler’s intention was to move them possibly explains why the Sippenhäftlinge were kept waiting for so long outside the camp.
Whatever the reason behind the change of plan, a message sent by OSS agent Mayer to Allied military headquarters soon after he reported that the SS chief was staying at the Grünwalderhof ruled out its future use as a secret hideout. To enable the US Air Force to bomb the hotel, Mayer, based on information supplied by a Wehrmacht deserter, wired details of its location. Unusually, given that the hotel was situated in a remote mountain valley, an air-raid shelter had been specially built nearby:
GRUENWALDER HOF IS APPROX 3 KMS FROM IGLS ON ROAD TO PATSCH … THE HOTEL CONSTRUCTED AIR RAID SHELTER IN ROCKS ON EAST SIDE OF ROAD TO PATSCH APPROXIMATELY TEN METRES ABOVE HOTEL. ENTRANCE DIRECTLY FROM ROAD. PROPRIETOR NAME ARNOLD.15
By the time Allied military HQ received Mayer’s message – at 14:00 hours on 18 April – Himmler had left.
For over a month, the Reichsführer SS had been constantly on the move, rarely staying in one place for more than a night. As the Third Reich collapsed around him, he had devoted his energy to securing his own personal situation. Behind Hitler’s back, in a bid to open up negotiations with the Allies, he had attended a series of secret meetings with representatives from the World Jewish Congress and the Red Cross.
In orchestrating the meetings, Himmler had one objective: to change the way the Allies perceived him. Recognizing that the revulsion to the genocide associated most directly with his name would prevent the Allies from accepting him as a plausible negotiator, his strategy was to establish his credibility.16 He aimed to convince them that, potentially, he was a humanitarian and conciliatory negotiating partner whose primary concern was to ameliorate the suffering
of the Jews and other prisoners in the concentration camps.
Incredibly, given that he had overseen the murder of more than 6 million Jews and many millions of non-Jews in a systematic programme of ethnic and political cleansing, he believed that a few gestures of goodwill would be sufficient. To this end, in mid March, using his personal physician Felix Kersten as an intermediary, he informed the Swedish Foreign Ministry that concentration camps would not be blown up as the Allies advanced. Further, he promised, executions in the camps would stop and inmates would be handed over, rather than be evacuated. Simultaneously, he arranged a meeting with Count Bernadotte, the head of the Swedish Red Cross, to negotiate the release of 10,000 Jewish prisoners.
The shamelessness of the letter Himmler sent Kersten to inform him that 2,700 Jewish men, women and children had been transported to Switzerland is breath-taking: ‘This accomplishment is in line with the policy I and my co-workers had been pursuing for years, until the war, and which the unreasonable attitude it brought in its wake made it impossible to continue.17 You must surely know that in the years 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, and 1940, I founded an organisation, in conjunction with Jewish-American societies, which did excellent work of its kind. The transportation of Jews to Switzerland is a continuation of this work which, in spite of great difficulties, I carried out deliberately in the past.’
Himmler met Count Bernadotte for a second time at the beginning of April. A week later, Sir Victor Mallet, the British Ambassador to Sweden, sent a top-secret telegram to the Foreign Office in London, summarizing the conversation:
COUNT BERNADOTTE TODAY GAVE ME IN STRICT CONFIDENCE SOME ACCOUNT OF HIS INTERVIEW WITH HIMMLER IN BERLIN LAST WEEK WHICH LASTED FOR FOUR HOURS:18
CONTRARY TO WHEN BERNADOTTE SAW HIM 3 WEEKS AGO HIMMLER THIS TIME ADMITTED THAT ALL WAS UP. BERNADOTTE SUGGESTED THAT THE PROPER COURSE WAS IMMEDIATE SURRENDER WHICH WOULD SAVE INNUMERABLE LIVES. HIMMLER REPLIED THAT HE WOULD FAVOUR THIS COURSE BUT THAT HITLER REFUSED TO HEAR OF IT AND HE FELT HIMSELF BOUND BY HIS OATH OF LOYALTY TO HITLER. BERNADOTTE SUGGESTED THAT HIS LOYALTY TO THE GERMAN PEOPLE WAS MORE IMPORTANT BUT HIMMLER ANSWERED THAT HE OWED EVERYTHING TO THE FÜHRER AND COULD NOT DESERT HIM AT THE END. HIMMLER DID NOT APPEAR AT ALL FLUSTERED BUT GAVE THE IMPRESSION OF BEING COMPLETELY SANE AND RETAINING HIS ENERGY AND ORGANISING ABILITY. HE EVEN HAD TIME TO INTEREST HIMSELF IN A BOOK OF RUNIC INSCRIPTIONS WHICH HAVE APPARENTLY ALWAYS BEEN A HOBBY OF HIS. HIMMLER REMARKED THAT HE KNEW HE WAS NO. 1 ON OUR LIST OF WAR CRIMINALS. BERNADOTTE TOLD HIM THAT IT WAS ONLY NATURAL THAT HE SHOULD BE CONSIDERED A WAR CRIMINAL BECAUSE HE WAS HEAD OF THE GESTAPO WHOSE APPALLING CRUELTIES HAD BEEN PROVED. I ASKED BERNADOTTE WHETHER HIMMLER GAVE THE IMPRESSION OF BEING A SADIST AND BERNADOTTE TOLD ME TO HIS SURPRISE HE DID NOT. HIMMLER HIMSELF TOLD HIM THAT HE KNEW THAT OUTSIDE GERMANY HE WAS CONSIDERED BRUTAL BUT IN FACT HE DISLIKED CRUELTY AND AN ENTIRELY FALSE PICTURE OF HIS CHARACTER HAD BEEN BUILT UP ABROAD …
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