Streams of SS personnel and their families passed through the hospital complex, seeking refuge. One morning, Isa and Fey spotted Fräulein Rafforth, the warder from Buchenwald. She was on the run after fleeing from the camp shortly before the Americans arrived. ‘Rafforth was in cracking form and as vulgar as ever, and fatter still than she was at Buchenwald,’ Isa wrote.14 ‘She told us how Fräulein Knocke had gone over to the Western Front under cover of darkness. She had stayed behind with other SS personnel from Sonderbau 15, and she regaled us with stories of “delightful” days in the empty barrack, with no work to do and filled with nothing other than eating and sleeping. Her description of what they managed to fit into those few days, in terms of the amount of alcohol, chocolate and cigarettes they had consumed, was quite staggering. It was all stuff they had raided from the SS canteen.’
Fey described how Rafforth also told them about the evacuation of Buchenwald as the American tanks approached. ‘Just before the end, about a thousand prisoners had been packed into twenty cattle wagons, with food and provisions for three or four days. But the journey from Buchenwald had taken two weeks, and the wagons arrived at Dachau filled with the dead and dying. I was horrified to hear that so many innocent people, like these poor prisoners, were still dying uselessly. What was the point of this monstrous sadism? Everything was on the brink of collapse.’
Security was lax at the hospital and Fey and the others were allowed to move about freely. ‘In order to get away from the SS families, we spent most of our time in the hospital garden, which was spacious and beautifully tended. Our guards only appeared sporadically and were so visibly engrossed in their own concerns, we had little contact with them.’
All the guards were listening to Allied radio stations, which were reporting the capture of one German city after another. In Berlin, the Russians had reached the outskirts of the city and were shelling government buildings in Leipziger Strasse and along Unter den Linden. German radio countered that, in the coming days, the capital now faced ‘its hardest test’ and blamed the fact that the Russians had ‘penetrated so deeply’ on ‘German traitors’ who had guided the Red Army in: ‘Many have been unmasked and given short shrift, each on discovery being hanged from a lamppost or suitable doorway.’15
While the Prominenten over in the main camp believed they were within days of being liberated by the Americans, the Sippenhäftlinge were under no such illusion. In the space of five months the SS had moved them seven times; from the Hindenburg Baude to Stutthof; then to Matzkau, Buchenwald, Lauenburg, Regensburg, Schönberg and Dachau. Always, the moves came at the eleventh hour. It seemed inconceivable that, with Germany collapsing all around them, the SS would spring them from the camp; but time after time it had happened before and they did not doubt that it would happen again.
Uppermost in Fey’s mind were two concerns. The first was that, in the unlikely event they were still at Dachau when the Americans arrived, they would be lumped in with the SS families. Daily, German radio was reporting the shooting of captured SS troops by Allied soldiers who, enraged by the atrocities they had discovered, had not stopped to ask questions. Her second concern – and the most immediate – was that they risked being killed by an American bomb.
Day and night, the air-raid sirens wailed. The Americans were dropping hundreds of tons of explosives on Munich, which was just 10 miles to the south of Dachau. Such was the ferocity of the assault, the sensation, Fey wrote, was like being on a ship in a very rough sea.
At night, when the siren sounded, the guards tried to move the group to a shelter in the nearby SS training school. To begin with, many of them did not want to go. ‘The training school was a far more likely target than the hospital, which had an International Red Cross symbol painted on its roof,’ Fey recalled. ‘Whenever the guards came to get us, we hid under the beds or in cupboards. We continued to play this cat and mouse game until they gave up trying and simply took those of us willing to go. I could not be bothered to get up, get dressed, and move to another place where there was at least an equal chance of being obliterated.’
On 24 April, the night the US fighter planes attacked the SS transport park, Fey ignored the air-raid warning as usual. ‘Everyone left hurriedly for the shelter, even the stalwart Maria von Hammerstein, who usually stayed behind with me. Suddenly, the bombing began and I found myself alone in the middle of that pounding, shaking building. Perhaps it was the solitude, perhaps the noise and the flashing, but I panicked, convinced that the next second would be my last. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my clothes, and dressed in about ten seconds. Still pulling up my trousers and with shoes unlaced, I ran outside as fast as I could. At the entrance to the building, I was almost blown off my feet. The courtyard was filled with an eerie orange light from the phosphorous flares the bombers used to illuminate the target. I dashed toward the training school, scared out of my wits. Finally, to my relief, I plunged in through the open doors. Stopping in the hall to regain my composure, I went downstairs to sit with the others. One of the guards smiled cynically. I just looked at the floor, trying to stop shaking.’
Fey – as she admitted – was completely exhausted, her nerves shattered. ‘There was no doubt the war was coming to an end, but the destruction, the chaos, the senseless loss of yet more lives, made me even more fearful for my children. Germany had become one big bombing target; cities were in flames, and even the countryside was ripped up and overrun by British and American tanks … All I could think about was where, in all this, were Corradino and Robertino? I felt so helpless and trapped I could hardly stand it.’
And still it wasn’t over. At nine o’clock on the morning of 26 April – forty-eight hours before the Americans liberated the camp – the order came to pack.
The inevitable delay followed, and it was almost dusk when the Sippenhäftlinge left the hospital – this time on foot.
Thirty-seven in number, they were led by the guards back along the Avenue of the SS, past the grand villas with their immaculately kept lawns, to the entrance of the main camp. Due to the bomb damage on the perimeter road, they were told they would have to walk through the camp to the railway station, where a fleet of buses waited to transport them south. The guards refused to disclose their destination – ‘It’s a journey into the blue,’ one taunted.
It was a thirty-minute walk to the station, past rows and rows of seemingly empty barracks. Enclosed by barbed-wire fences, with scrubby compounds in front, later Fey learned they were full of sick and dying prisoners – some 42,500 in total – who were too weak to be evacuated from the camp.
Himmler had not kept his promise to halt the evacuations from concentration camps. At Dachau, they had been in progress for three days. Some 5,000 prisoners had left by train on 24 and 25 April; 7,000 more were due to leave on foot that evening.16 Destined for the Tyrol, one of the last remaining territories of the Reich still controlled by the Nazis, they were to be deployed in armaments factories that had been built in bunkers under the Alps.
As the Sippenhäftlinge approached the parade ground, they caught up with the inmates who were leaving that evening. Fey was almost knocked off her feet in the crush: ‘There were thousands and thousands of them. The whole camp seemed to be on the march, streaming from all corners to the parade ground … Shoulder-to-shoulder, they moved slowly towards the exit in complete silence.’
Bludgeoning their way through the prisoners, the guards led the Sippenhäftlinge to another floodlit parade ground, which had been ringed off. Frenetic activity ruled in this open space: SS men of every rank ran back and forth; motorcycles arrived and left; lorries moved at speed. US fighter planes buzzed low over the camp, watching the proceedings. The SS carried on blithely, safe in the knowledge that the presence of thousands of prisoners prevented the planes from shooting.
Three trucks stood parked in a corner of the square. As the Sippenhäftlinge waited to board, a low murmur rippled through the inmates, massed on the other side of the troops. Kurt Schuschnigg, together with h
is wife and daughter, was being escorted from the KA building. The camp held a large number of Austrians – both Jews, and non-Jews imprisoned for resisting the Nazis. Some recognized their former chancellor. ‘Our departure was dramatic,’ Schuschnigg wrote.17 ‘A narrow aisle was kept open by the guards, through which we were to go. Suddenly, as we passed, a worn-out hand stretched out from the mass. Here someone called, there a familiar face smiled tiredly. At first only a few, then more and more, hundreds, thousands even … Hands were raised in salute – some of them in the Hitler salute by force of habit, others with the closed fist … It was perhaps the most impressive moment of all these years.’
The last to arrive at Dachau and the last to leave, the Sippenhäftlinge were being transported with two other groups of special prisoners: the ‘Seydlitz group’ – relatives of Wehrmacht soldiers now fighting for the Red Army on the Eastern Front; and the politicians, Kurt Schuschnigg and Léon Blum. After boarding the trucks, they waited for several hours. Their convoy could not leave until the columns of inmates, passing through a nearby gate to begin the forced march to the Alps, left the camp. ‘The sight of the evacuation,’ Léon Blum wrote in his memoirs, ‘is the most appalling thing that I can ever remember … The prisoners were pushed along the roads with blows from rubber truncheons and the ones who couldn’t go any further were shot on the spot.’18 Fey also had a view of the entrance: ‘Thin and worn out, column after column passed in front of us. They were not carrying any clothes or belongings with them; instead there were one or two overloaded carts, which groups of prisoners, their backs bent double, were trying to push. Some were too weak to walk any distance, and I could see several of them on their hands and knees. The guards would go over and shout at them, poking them with their rifles. If they couldn’t get up, they were shot through the back of the neck. As I watched, helpless, from the truck, it was all I could do not to be sick. What was the murdering SS intending to do with these poor, stumbling people? How they could be capable of such cruelty was incomprehensible. After hours of this agony, our trucks moved forward. On the road outside, we passed by these columns terrified and with hearts full of pity for these poor people.’fn2
Skirting Munich, the convoy of trucks headed south towards Austria. The drivers drove fast, anxious to reach their destination before daylight. ‘The fact that we were being driven at such high speed heightened our frayed nerves,’ Isa wrote.19 ‘We felt the pull of leaving the Western Front further and further behind. To resign oneself to the evident senselessness of this journey was an act of real courage and we had to exercise a great deal of self-control in order not to drag each other down into the vortex of despair and frustration we were all feeling.’
They crossed into Austria over the Scharnitz Pass and, by dawn, they were in a deep valley, flanked by snow-capped mountains, the summits tinged pink from the first streaks of sunlight. The convoy made two short stops in the hours that followed. At the first, the trucks drew up alongside a bread van, which the SS had miraculously coordinated to meet them on an isolated stretch of road. The tarpaulins on the trucks had not been properly fastened and the prisoners were able to help themselves to as much bread as they liked from the open-backed van. The second stop was unscheduled. US fighter planes were patrolling the valley, and the drivers were forced to turn off the road, down a forest track, to shelter under trees to avoid being attacked.
Shortly before ten o’clock, the convoy drew up outside Reichenau, an SS-run labour camp on the outskirts of Innsbruck. The guards ordered the prisoners out of the trucks. Behind a barbed-wire fence, in the courtyard in front of a block of low, wooden huts, they could see scores of men sitting in deckchairs and milling about, chatting in groups. These were the Prominenten transferred from Dachau on 20 and 25 April.
Some of their faces were familiar to the Sippenhäftlinge from Schönberg, where they had been imprisoned together in the two village schools. Isa described their delight at seeing each other again: ‘We fell into each other’s arms in a wave of genuine sympathy and shared suffering.20 At that moment, it felt as if our entire war had come to a happy end.’ Fey was equally overcome: ‘It was like a surprise birthday party filled with long-lost friends! Immediately, we all began chatting, exchanging stories of what had happened. People mingled freely, moving from one group to the next, calling each other by their names (something they had previously been forbidden to do). There were about 130 prisoners there of all nationalities. It really was a remarkable sight. There were bishops in magnificent red robes, royal princes, dressed in striped prison uniforms, and Italian partisan leaders, strutting about like peacocks. With conversations going on in every European language imaginable, the place was a true Tower of Babel!’
The prisoners outnumbered the SS by five to one and the guards left them alone, retreating to a barrack in the middle of the camp. The weather was gloriously sunny and the mountain landscape spectacular. In this heady atmosphere, chairs were drawn up, cups of tea made and cigarettes handed around. Isa was particularly happy as, in the melee, she met Flight Lieutenant Sydney Dowse. A veteran of four attempted breakouts, including the infamous Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, Dowse had been imprisoned at Sachsenhausen in a cell near her parents.fn3 She had not heard from them since their arrest in the winter of 1943, and it was a great comfort to hear what Dowse had to tell her: ‘My mother, so he told me, spent the greater part of her daily walk allowance under his window, and the conversations with her had been the single most longingly awaited moments of his day.21 In turn, he would always find time during his walks to throw something up to the window of my parents’ cell – a flower, a few cigarettes or a few biscuits. At Christmas, they had traced greetings for each other in the snow.’
The different encounters were an emotional experience for all the prisoners. For Payne Best, though, imprisoned since 1939, his conversations with the British POWs were uncomfortable. ‘It was the first time in nearly five and a half years that I had been able to talk freely to men of my own nationality, men too, who by virtue of their indomitable courage and refusal to accept defeat, were the heroes of all their fellow prisoners.22 They were all extraordinarily nice and kind to me but in my heart I felt very much ashamed that, whilst they had broken out of prison time and time again, I had done nothing but sit in my cell leading the well-fed life of a prize poodle.’
Confronted with so many prisoners, each with their own grapevine, Fey hoped for information relating to the boys. ‘During that afternoon I eagerly sought out people who I thought could tell me about children still being held by the SS. But no one knew anything, only that some were being held in SS “institutes” or had had their names changed and may have been given over for adoption. Though anxious for information, I finally dropped the subject when I saw I was getting nowhere. The fact was that no one really wanted to be bothered with problems that were not immediate, about which nothing could be done. Death and destruction were everywhere, and the main thing was to survive and get free. I must admit that, in the circumstances, even I was able to set my worry about the children aside – at least temporarily.’
Most of the prisoners thought that it was all over, that they might be held at Reichenau for another day or two and then released. Payne Best, however, was sceptical. ‘There was one thing I did not like at all, and that was that I had seen Lieutenant Bader and a considerable number of his SS men in the camp.23 If it was the intention to permit our liberation, why had Bader and his men, whose function was the liquidation of unwanted prisoners, been sent with us?’
While Fey did not imagine that they were about to be killed, she shared Payne Best’s scepticism for different reasons: ‘It was clear that we were hostages not prisoners. From the outset the SS had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep us alive. Why, after carting us from camp to camp, would they suddenly let us go?’
At Supreme Headquarters in Rheinsberg, where Himmler was that day – 27 April – he was still waiting for a reply from the Western Allies.
His offer to
meet General Eisenhower to arrange the capitulation of German forces on the Western Front had been flashed to President Truman and Winston Churchill on 25 April.
That afternoon, Churchill’s War Cabinet met in Whitehall. As the minutes of the meeting reveal, Churchill suspected that Himmler’s reluctance to surrender on the Eastern Front was a move to drive a wedge between Britain, the US and the Soviet Union: ‘The Prime Minister said that this important development must clearly be communicated to Marshal Stalin without delay.24 He thought that we should at the same time make it clear that, so far as His Majesty’s Government were concerned, there could be no question of anything less than unconditional surrender simultaneously to the three Major Powers. Himmler should be told that German soldiers should everywhere surrender themselves, either as individuals or in units, to the Allied troops or representatives on the spot; and until this happens the Allies’ attack upon them in all theatres would be pursued with the utmost vigour.
‘There was no occasion,’ the summary of the meeting continued, ‘for Himmler to meet General Eisenhower, as he had suggested: indeed, it would be inappropriate that such a proposal for a general surrender should be discussed with the military Commander in the field.’
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