The senior civil servant at the Foreign Office in receipt of the telegram scrawled a note at the bottom of it: ‘I think this is poor stuff and that Bernadotte has been fooled.’19
Ten days after his second meeting with Bernadotte, Himmler met Norbert Masur – Sweden’s representative to the World Jewish Congress – at Kersten’s farm about 50 miles north of Berlin. It was the night of 20 April – Hitler’s birthday – and Himmler arrived at two o’clock in the morning having come straight from the muted celebrations in the Führer’s bunker, located beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery. According to Masur, a German Jew forced to flee Germany before the war, ‘Himmler was elegantly dressed, in a beautifully cut uniform, wearing all his medals and the insignia of his rank.20 He looked well-kempt, and appeared fresh and wide awake despite the lateness of the hour. He was outwardly calm and controlled.’
It was the first time Himmler had met a Jew on equal terms. Almost immediately he launched into an apologia for the Holocaust, which lasted forty-five minutes. He told Masur that the emigration policy he had devised in the late 1930s, which ‘could have been very advantageous to the Jews’, had been sabotaged by other nations who would not receive them. ‘Then the war,’ he continued, ‘brought us in contact with the proletarianised Jewish masses of the Eastern countries, thereby creating new problems.21 We could not suffer such an enemy in our rear. The Jewish masses were infected with terrible epidemics; in particular, spotted typhus raged. I myself have lost thousands of my best SS men through these epidemics. Moreover, the Jews helped the partisans.’
To Masur’s question, ‘How could the Jews help the partisans when the Germans had concentrated them all in large ghettos?’ Himmler replied: ‘They conveyed intelligence to the partisans.22 Moreover, they shot at our troops in the ghetto. In order to put a stop to the epidemics, we were forced to burn the bodies of incalculable numbers of people who had been destroyed by disease. We were therefore forced to build crematoria, and on this account they are knotting a noose for us.’ He then complained bitterly of the ‘false’ atrocity propaganda that the Allies were making out of conditions at Belsen and Buchenwald, which had just been liberated by the Americans. ‘Nobody has had so much mud slung at him in the last ten years as I have.23 Even in Germany any man can say about me what he pleases. Newspapers abroad have started a campaign against me which is no encouragement to me to continue handing over the camps.’
Masur asked Himmler for the following assurances: that no more Jews would be killed and that the remaining Jews should be kept in the camps and under no circumstances evacuated.24 Himmler replied that he had already given these orders. On condition that their conversation remain absolutely secret, he agreed to the release of more prisoners and repeated his pledge not to evacuate the camps – a promise that, unsurprisingly, he would not honour.
The meeting ended at four-thirty in the morning and Himmler drove straight to Hohenlychen, an SS sanatorium, 30 miles further north, where he had agreed to have breakfast with Count Bernadotte. He repeated the assurances he had made to Masur and, in addition, offered to release ‘women of all nationalities’ from Ravensbrück.
Three days later – on 23 April – certain that he had done enough to convince the Allies that he was a credible negotiating partner, Himmler arranged a fourth meeting with Bernadotte, which was scheduled to take place at the Swedish Consulate in Lübeck at 23:00 hours.25 A severe air raid meant the two men were forced to take shelter in the consulate cellar and it was only at midnight – and by candlelight – that the meeting began.
Within hours, the conversation would be flashed in a series of top-secret reports to London, Moscow and Washington. The US Ambassador to Sweden summarized its content in a telegram to the US State Department:
(1) COUNT BERNADOTTE MET HIMMLER AT LÜBECK AT 1 O’CLOCK [SIC] THE MORNING OF APRIL 24, AT HIMMLER’S REQUEST.26
(2) HIMMLER SAID THAT HITLER WAS SO ILL HE MIGHT ALREADY BE DEAD AND COULD NOT LIVE MORE THAN TWO DAYS (GENERAL SCHELLENBERG, HIMMLER’S CONFIDENTIAL STAFF OFFICER, SAID HITLER WAS SUFFERING FROM A BRAIN HAEMORRHAGE, AND THAT HE, HIMMLER, WAS THEREFORE IN A POSITION OF FULL AUTHORITY).
(3) HIMMLER ASKED THE SWEDISH GOVERNMENT TO ARRANGE FOR HIM TO MEET EISENHOWER IN ORDER TO ARRANGE TO CAPITULATE ON THE WHOLE WESTERN FRONT (INCLUDING HOLLAND). BERNADOTTE ASKED IF NORWAY AND DENMARK WERE INCLUDED IN THE CAPITULATION. HIMMLER AGREED TO ORDER HIS TROOPS IN NORWAY AND DENMARK TO SURRENDER TO AMERICAN, BRITISH OR SWEDISH TROOPS.fn6
(4) HIMMLER SAID HE HOPED TO BE ABLE TO CONTINUE THE FIGHT ON THE EASTERN FRONT AND STIPULATED THAT HIS OFFER WAS FOR THE WESTERN ALLIES ONLY.
Himmler did not doubt that the Allies would accept his offer. After the meeting with Bernadotte, he drove back to the SS sanatorium at Hohenlychen, where he saw Hitler’s architect Albert Speer and told him about his approach to Eisenhower. ‘Himmler was still moving in a fantasy world,’ Speer wrote in his memoirs.27 ‘“Europe cannot manage without me in the future either,” he said. “It will go on needing me as Minister of Police. After I’ve spent an hour with Eisenhower, he’ll appreciate that fact. They’ll soon realise that they’re dependent on me – or they’ll have a hopeless chaos on their hands.”’
Not once in his many conversations with Bernadotte did Himmler mention the Prominenten. Nor do they crop up in the SS and Wehrmacht signal traffic intercepted by decoders at Bletchley Park or in communications between the Reichsführer and other high-ranking Nazi leaders, also intercepted.
It seems that Himmler’s 137 special prisoners were a secret known only to himself and to the guards he entrusted with their safekeeping – a card he was keeping up his sleeve to play only when negotiations with Eisenhower began.
35.
At Dachau, while Himmler carried on with his craven efforts to rebuild his reputation, Commandant Weiter ensured the Prominenten were ‘comfortable’ – and this in the midst of a camp where hundreds were dying daily from typhoid and where, in the preceding years under Weiter’s command, thousands had died from illness or been murdered by the SS.
A large number of the male Prominenten were housed in the brothel. Of the same configuration as those at other concentration camps, it consisted of a large waiting hall off which were rows of rooms where the prostitutes had serviced their clients. Dusty tinsel and withered paper garlands, intended to brighten up the ‘recreation salon’, still hung from the ceiling and extra beds had been brought in for the prisoners.1 The different nationalities divided up the rooms, preferring each other’s company. Much to the British POWs’ amazement, so affronted were the Catholic bishops at being housed in a brothel, they insisted on ‘ridding the building of all vestige of sin’. As Payne Best wrote, ‘every nook and cranny was thoroughly scrubbed and purified with Holy Water’ and ‘one room sanctified for use as a chapel where Mass was celebrated daily’.2
Opposite the brothel was the Kommandaturarrest. It held the group that had been moved from Schönberg a few days before the Sippenhäftlinge left; among them, the Thyssens, the Blums, General Falkenhausen, the Schuschniggs and Captain Payne Best. Initially, the accommodation struck Payne Best as luxurious; the rooms were spacious and light with smart parquet floors, and in the shared bathrooms there was hot water and lavatories that flushed. There was even a garden outside with deckchairs for sunbathing. Soon after he arrived, however, he learned from the gardener that the building had been used for executions. A former clown arrested by the Gestapo for cracking a joke at Goebbels’ expense, he had been assigned the task of tidying the garden for the Prominenten by Weiter. When Payne Best met him, he was busy making a new flower bed beneath a wall: ‘He pointed out thousands of pit marks on the wall and described to me how prisoners had been brought in through a narrow doorway, ordered to turn their faces to the wall, and had then been shot in the back of the neck.3 He said that digging up the beds he had removed a hundredweight of pistol bullets.’
Himmler had not kept his promise to halt executions and it was at this point that Payne Bes
t learned that Georg Elser, a socialist who had almost succeeded in his attempt to assassinate Hitler in November 1939, had been executed in the garden that afternoon. The time bomb Elser planted at a rally, held in a beer hall in Munich to celebrate the anniversary of the 1923 Munich Putsch, had killed eight people and injured sixty-two others. The bomb had exploded on time, but Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis had escaped after leaving early. For Payne Best, the news of Elser’s execution was ominous; he had been arrested at Venlo the day after the bomb attack and falsely accused of having engineered the assassination attempt on behalf of the British government.
Uncertain of their fate and oblivious to Himmler’s manoeuvrings, the threat of execution preoccupied the prisoners. ‘Sudden death was the order of the day; at any moment an order might come for some or all of us to be gassed, shot or hanged,’ Payne Best recalled.4 General Delestraint was the second prisoner in the KA building to be executed.fn1 A personal friend of Charles de Gaulle and a prominent figure in the French Resistance, Delestraint had commanded the Armée Sècrete, the 150,000-strong paramilitary unit that de Gaulle hoped would form the nucleus of a future French Army. One morning, an SS officer came in and picked the general out. He was then escorted through the camp to the crematorium, where he was summarily shot.
No one was sorry when, a few days later, another prisoner was executed. This was Dr Rascher, the former director of medical experiments at Dachau. Yet for Hugh Falconer, who was sharing a cell with the doctor, his execution was both unpleasant and traumatic.
Rascher, as Falconer described in his memoirs, was convinced he would be killed at Dachau – either to prevent his medical research becoming known to the Allies or because Himmler wanted to avenge the false claims he had made regarding women’s ability to bear children at a late age. From the moment he arrived, he sat in the corner of the cell, facing the wall with his back to the door – ‘a position from which he refused to budge’.5 Falconer was in the cell when the inevitable moment came:
At about half past twelve the midday meal arrived.6 In these cells there was a hatch about fifteen inches square in the door, which could be opened from the outside and through which food was passed. When our turn came I went to collect the bowls for Rascher who was still terrified of showing his face. As soon as I arrived, instead of passing the food, the SS man stooped down so that he could see my face. When he recognised me, he shouted:
‘Not you, the other one.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, ‘give it to me. The other one’s not feeling very well.’
‘No,’ insisted the guard, ‘you must each fetch your own.’
I had no alternative but to step aside and, with the greatest reluctance, Rascher went up to the door, approaching it from the side and trying to hide his face. As Rascher came up to the door, the guard fired two shots from his Luger into his stomach and the hatch was slammed shut.
The impact of the heavy bullets fired at so short a range threw Rascher several feet back across the cell and he lay spread-eagled on the floor. There was plainly nothing I could do for him … one of the bullets must have hit his spine for he never regained consciousness and died quite quickly. I think my diagnosis was probably correct for I spent some time searching the cell but I could only find one spent bullet.
I quite expected the guard to return with my lunch – for which I felt little desire – or, more probably, to liquidate the only witness to a cold-blooded murder but I was left undisturbed with the rather messy corpse until late in the afternoon.
With the exception of Himmler’s enemy, Rascher, it was the arbitrariness of the executions that unnerved the prisoners; there appeared to be no logic behind the SS electing to kill one man over another. In this nerve-racking environment, they clung to the hope that the Americans would rescue them.7
Kurt Schuschnigg, imprisoned in the KA building, kept a diary during this time. ‘The Americans advance along the Danube and the River Lech,’ he wrote on 18 April. ‘Occasionally we hear the artillery. The air attacks on Munich and its surroundings increase daily. All of us are virtually sick with excitement. It can’t be long now. It can’t be long. If only they don’t evacuate the camp at the last moment …’
But on 20 April he learned that the SS had evacuated a number of the Prominenten the previous night. ‘The wildest rumours circulate … Nobody can tell us what is going to be done with those of us who remain in Dachau.8 It is said that we, too, will be evacuated. One rumour says that the International Red Cross is going to take over the entire camp. That, of course, would be ideal, but I have learned my lesson about rejoicing too soon and I refuse to believe it.’
His next entry – on 22 April – consisted of just three words. ‘We are waiting.’9
Payne Best, who had been moved from the KA building to the brothel, was also on tenterhooks. Rohde, via his radio equipment, had made contact with men who were prepared to take a message across the lines to the American forces on the Danube, and Payne Best had heard that one of them had ‘almost certainly succeeded in getting through’.
The next morning – 24 April – air activity over the camp increased and Payne Best reported seeing a number of US planes apparently engaged on reconnaissance. ‘We all got highly excited hoping for a speedy delivery,’ he wrote in his diary.10
These hopes would be dashed.
Some 430 miles to the north of the camp, Himmler had arrived back at Hohenlychen at 4.30 a.m. after his final meeting with Count Bernadotte. At twelve-thirty, his adjutant, General Schellenberg, found him still in bed. He looked ‘the picture of misery and said that he felt ill’.11
From 17 to 24 April, shuttling between Berlin and the north of Germany, Himmler’s uncertainty as to whether the count would agree to convey his offer of surrender to Eisenhower meant that he had left the majority of the Prominenten at Dachau. Only a handful of the prisoners had been moved on to the Alps. Confident now that Eisenhower would negotiate, at some point that morning he gave orders for the remaining prisoners to be moved to a secure location in the Tyrol. There, high in the mountains, they would be ‘safe’ until the negotiations with Eisenhower could begin.
Payne Best and the other prisoners spent that morning crowded around the windows of the brothel, watching the US planes flying over the camp. Then, shortly before midday, an SS guard came in to warn them they would be leaving at five o’clock that afternoon. Incredulous and despairing, they began to gather their things. But at around three-thirty, their hopes were raised again. ‘Just as we had finished packing,’ Payne Best wrote, ‘we saw about half a dozen US fighter planes dancing over the camp and obviously firing on some ground target.12 Garibaldi, who knew the layout of the camp, said that they were firing at the transport park, and a little later we got word that five buses, which were ready to take us on our journey, had been shot up and that we should not move that day. We were to be ready at five o’clock on the next day. Our hopes rose to fever point and I really began to believe that Rohde’s man had been able to get a message through and that steps were now being taken to prevent our removal.
‘When the next afternoon came,’ Payne Best continued, ‘we all clustered round the window from which the transport park could be seen, waiting for our friends the fighter planes. Time went on, three, four and five o’clock. We were told to take our luggage out to the trucks … at last, there was a renewed sound of low-flying planes and of firing. Back into our building and to the window. Six or ten planes diving at the transport park and apparently firing with their guns as well as machine guns … Three of five buses set on fire and thirteen casualties was what we heard. No move apparently that day either, and we all did a sort of dance, jigging from one foot to the other.’
An hour later, however, Payne Best’s group left Dachau. Three buses had been destroyed but the SS had brought in three lorries from Munich to replace them.
On the other side of the perimeter fence, many hundreds of yards from the camp, the Sippenhäftlinge were not privy to Rohde’s intelligence.
Nor, in that last week of April, did they know that the other Prominenten were being moved. Imprisoned in the SS hospital, a large, elegant villa on the Avenue of the SS, they were sharing a wing with the wives of men who had rounded up and overseen the detention of countless thousands of inmates at concentration camps like Dachau.
Refugees now, the women were using the hospital as a staging post on their way south to escape from the Allies. Isa was astounded by the way they responded to their situation: ‘Around 10 to 15 wives of senior SS leaders from Oranienburg and other concentration camps sat there with innumerable children and mountains of luggage – “Ah, this is only hand luggage.13 You know, our large stuff has all been lost. I had so much real coffee among those things and all the lovely silver. You know, my husband, the Obergruppenführer etc. etc.” Eager to prove themselves clever and resourceful wives to their SS husbands, they busied themselves with last-minute preparations for a comfortable continuation of their journey. They genuinely believed they could avoid the horror of retribution or whatever else fate had in store for them. They all said they would be meeting their husbands the following day – “At the latest” – and claimed to be certain that such and such a piece of luggage would turn up. But when you asked them where they thought they were heading, this was greeted with a brazen shrug of the shoulders: “Ah, somewhere” and “We’ll get through all right” and “They won’t do anything to women and children, after all we can’t help it.”’
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