After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (31 page)

The robotic utterances, the continued invocation of the dead Führer, seemed to create a mantra of death. There seemed no spark of compassion, of humanity – and only the hesitation before the last question revealed the slightest unease. McLaren was left aghast.

McLaren’s interviewee was chilling because of her frankness. Lieutenant General Brian Horrocks, who ordered German women from surrounding towns and villages to help clean up Sandbostel and look after the surviving prisoners, was shocked to relate: ‘When the women arrived we expected some indication of horror or remorse when they saw what their fellow countrymen had been doing. Not a bit of it. I never saw a tear or heard one expression of pity from any of them.’ But Elfie Walther, a high-school girl from nearby Delmenhorst, also brought in to help clean the camp, had a very different reaction. She wrote in her diary on 2 May:

‘Nobody at home would believe us if we told them about it. I can’t stop thinking about how we loved the Führer. Everything he told us was a lie. What is this thing that was called National Socialism? We always thought it was something beautiful and noble. Why is everything actually so cruel? Why do they kill innocent, helpless people?’

Allied soldiers and medical staff were grappling with this question every day. ‘I still shudder when I picture this wilderness of barbed wire,’ McLaren said. ‘Most of us had no doubt in our minds that Germany had to be beaten, but we did not realize the full savagery of the Nazis until we reached Sandbostel.’

Yet a terrible vista was opening up for Elfie Walther. ‘I am dreadfully mixed up,’ she wrote. ‘Can this be true? If it is as the orderlies have told us, then the pictures of Bergen-Belsen are certainly true too. And what else might there be that we have no idea of? Is this what our soldiers were fighting for? I am terrified of tomorrow.’

Trainee doctor Michael Hargrave had arrived at Bergen-Belsen at the beginning of May. Belsen had been liberated two weeks earlier than Sandbostel, but was a much larger camp and its medical staff were still struggling with conditions there. For Hargrave and ninety-four fellow medical students from Westminster Hospital it was an utterly harrowing experience.

‘The first thing that struck me was the bleakness,’ Hargrave wrote in his diary on 3 May. ‘Everything was grey or slate brown. The next thing was the dust …’ It took a while for Hargrave to focus on his surroundings, as if the human eye could not adjust to what lay before it. And then he saw everything fully: ‘There were piles of dead everywhere, right up to the front gate.’

Hargrave recalled a conversation with Brigadier Glyn-Hughes, deputy medical director for the British 2nd Army. Glyn-Hughes, accompanying the British 11th Armoured Division, had been the first medical officer to enter the camp. He had immediately taken charge of the hospital, instituted measures for the control of typhus in the camp and the proper distribution of food. Although the SS had abandoned Bergen-Belsen days earlier, Glyn-Hughes found that the camp commandant and doctor had stayed on, for reasons he could not fathom. What struck him was that neither of the men was at all ashamed.

Around them were piles of dead everywhere – out in the open because the crematorium had broken down. A few of the inmates were leaning against these piles gnawing at scraps of food. Glyn-Hughes made the two assist in the burial of the bodies, but all the time they maintained an air of callous indifference.

It was unusual for German civilians to either openly acknowledge these atrocities, and their acceptance of them, or to show repentance. Most disengaged from the issue altogether. And so – for Allied troops – it became a powerful symbolic act to have Germans – soldiers and civilians alike – assist in the reburial of the camp dead. At the beginning of May General Eisenhower had ordered that Germans help in the reburial of all victims of atrocity ‘to serve as an object lesson for their participation in such crimes’.

Lieutenant David Ichelson of the US 71st Infantry Division described an incident at Gunskirchen Lager: ‘The digging was done by ordinary German soldiers, who had no previous direct connection with the camp,’ Ichelson related. ‘A few feigned illness and complained in order to try and avoid their grisly task. One refused to work and was summarily shot and dumped into one of the mass graves. His horrified comrades thereafter completed their miserable job without a whimper.’

At Dachau, Nordhausen, Buchenwald, Wöbbelin and Flossenbürg, American soldiers insisted that local Germans assume responsibility for burying the dead. Brigadier General Sherman Hasbrouck, artillery commander of the US 97th Division, wrote: ‘I was one of the first senior officers to visit Flossenbürg. I remember the heaps of the dead. It was a horrible sight … I gave orders to the burgermeister to turn out every able-bodied man and boy to dig graves and bury the dead.’

At Wöbbelin concentration camp, 28 miles south of Schwerin on north-west Germany’s Mecklenburg Plain, General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne Division insisted that the local townspeople dig 400 individual graves and then transport the bodies in wheelbarrows. He refused to let them wear gloves.

Gavin forced every adult citizen of nearby Ludwigslust to dig these holes in the lawn of the town square in front of the palace of the Mecklenburg princes. Each body was afforded a private grave.

On the afternoon of 3 May the 82nd Airborne’s chaplain, George Wood, presided over the reburial and then addressed the assembled Germans:

‘Though you claim no knowledge of these acts, you are still individually and collectively responsible for these atrocities – for they were carried out by a government elected in 1933 and continued in office by your indifference to organised brutality. It should be the firm resolve of the German people that never again should any leader or party bring them to such moral degradation as is exhibited here.’

Earlier that day General Gavin had received the surrender of about 150,000 soldiers from the German 21st Army. Noticing their commander, General Kurt von Tippelskirch, staring smugly at the procession of bodies, he struck him in the face and ordered him to take off his cap.

In Austria, the concentration camps at Mauthausen, Gusen and Ebensee were all situated in populated areas. Colonel Richard Seibel of the US 11th Armored Division took charge of Mauthausen – 11 miles east of Linz – on 6 May, a day after its liberation. He reported to SHAEF at Rheims: ‘The inhabitants of the town of Mauthausen and those in its general vicinity must have been aware of what was going on – and the conditions there. Some of the guards and their families lived close by … There was a standing order to the local population that they were to kill on sight any escaped residents of the camp.’

Seibel pointed out that people given such an order could not have been unaware that prisoners were kept near by. He ordered the inhabitants of Mauthausen to assist in the burials at the camp dressed in their Sunday-best clothes.

Mauthausen was a massive slave labour complex that had contained around 60,000 people when the US 11th Armored Division liberated it on 5 May. The thing that immediately struck Seibel and his American comrades was the terrible physical condition of the inmates. ‘I estimated the average weight of most of them was about eighty pounds,’ Seibel said. ‘Many had typhus, dysentery or pneumonia.’

Prisoners were forced to work at a quarry at Mauthausen that contained 186 steps, dragging up this ‘stairway of death’ rough-hewn stones, some as heavy as 110 pounds. One of the survivors, Edward Mosberg, said simply: ‘If you stopped for a moment, the SS either shot you or pushed you off the cliff to your death.’

Survivor stories are utterly heart-rending. Some were told to the liberators in the immediate aftermath of gaining freedom, others took years to coax out. Many could be told here – but there is one that perhaps might speak for the others, in that it transcends physical and emotional cruelty and conjures the world of spiritual depravity and perversion that inhabited these camps.

Lubertus Shapelhouman, a Dutch resistance fighter, was nineteen years old when he was liberated from Mauthausen. He had entered the camp in November 1944 weighing 160 pounds but by May 1945 he had wasted away to 78 pounds and was close to death.

So many perished at Mauthausen and its numerous sub-camps, which operated a policy of
Vernichtung durch Arbeit
, ‘Extermination through labour’, whereby malnourished inmates, living in overcrowded and disease-ridden conditions and subject to frequent beatings, were then killed when they became too weak to work. But Shapelhouman recalled one particular incident that surpassed even this horror, on Christmas Day 1944:

There was a teenage boy – a Hungarian Jew – and both his parents had already been executed before he arrived at Mauthausen. He was in a bad way. A Belgian priest, who was also an inmate, took pity on him – because his suffering was so terrible, even in this place of great suffering. Seeking solace, he told the priest that he wanted to convert to Catholicism. All religious practices were forbidden in the camp. But on Christmas Eve a clandestine baptismal mass was held for the boy and for 28 other prisoners.

Shapelhouman was one of them. But the SS and camp guards found out about the ceremony from an informer: ‘The boy was weak, but he spoke of his desire to go to heaven,’ Shapelhouman continued. ‘But at the moment he was baptised the SS burst into the room and began to beat everyone. There was pandemonium – a storm of blows, punches and kicks rained down upon us.’

One of these blows threw Shapelhouman’s hip out of joint. Then they were all taken outside. It was minus 14 degrees Celsius.

‘The priest and the boy were made to strip naked and embrace,’ Shapelhouman said. ‘Then the guards drenched them with a hose. They froze in that position and died in that position. And the next day – which was Christmas Day – the entire camp was marched out and made to look at them.’

These two deaths are perhaps a symbol of hundreds of thousands of other stories. British and American troops found it inconceivable that Germans did not know about these atrocities. Across Germany and Austria – at concentration camps large and small – American troops now rounded up civilians and compelled them to view the camps, the mass pit graves and the cemeteries where bodies still lay uncovered. General James Gavin ordered that the entire population of Wöbbelin go around the camp. Troops of the US 71st Infantry Division at Gunskirchen Lager went into the nearby town of Lambach, knocked on doors, and made everyone able to walk go and see it.

The concentration camps threw up a kaleidoscope of emotions among the liberators, the medical and support teams that followed them and those survivors who were able to recover from their ordeal. They were part of a cataclysm engulfing Europe. Vast numbers of freed POWs and slave labourers were swamping aid and medical organisations set up by the Allies.

British POW Bob Prouse had hoped that he and his fellow prisoners would be liberated from his work camp at Mühlhausen. But at the beginning of April they were abruptly woken and told to prepare to leave. They joined the chaos of thousands of other prisoners, German troops and civilians on the move. ‘It was a mad beehive of activity,’ Prouse recalled. ‘I felt certain that our guards had orders to march us in circles to avoid having us freed by the advancing British and Americans on one side, and the Russians on the other.’ After several days’ marching, the prisoners ended up at another camp, Stalag IXC, at Bad Sulza. The sounds of fighting could now clearly be heard. When German guards ordered the British on again, they refused to move. The Germans threatened to shoot them.

‘The prisoners held their ground and glared in defiance,’ Prouse remembered. ‘For a moment there was an ominous silence – suddenly broken by the unmistakable sound of approaching tanks. We knew this was our salvation and let out a thunderous cheer. The Germans took to their heels – rushing out of the main gate and disappearing in full flight.’

The tanks of General George Patton’s US Third Army arrived at the camp a few minutes later.

For the POWs, liberation by the American and British forces was a joyous occasion – but the arrival of the Red Army sometimes provoked unease. The transfer of prisoners in the recently liberated camps was a source of administrative tension between the Western Allies and Russia. And yet, the experience of liberation itself often brought East and West closer together. Soviet lieutenant Vasily Bezugly of the 144th Rifle Division never forgot freeing American and British POWs from Stalag Luft I, near the town of Barth on Germany’s Baltic coast. ‘It was a very moving occasion,’ Bezugly said. ‘We shared rations, exchanged addresses – we even taught the POWs to sing our favourite war-time song, “Katyusha”.’ Bezugly and his comrades, masters of the larger-than-life gesture, rounded up several hundred cows and herded them into the camp in Wild West fashion for the hungry inmates to slaughter and eat.

The sheer number of ‘Displaced Persons’ was overwhelming. By the end of March 1945 it had been reckoned at 350,000. On 7 April the figure had increased to 600,000. On 16 April it was estimated at 1,072,000; by early May the figure had nearly doubled to 2,002,000. There were fears that the organisation put in place by the Allies, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), would simply be unable to cope.

UNRRA was struggling over issues of budget, bureaucratic inefficiency and the failure of its director general, Herbert Lehman, to get a grip of the situation. In September 1944 the British Foreign Office had warned: ‘Lehman has never shown a proper understanding of what is required by his organisation, and as result UNRRA has not yet been put “on the map”.’ And yet, it was all there really was. In February 1945 General Eisenhower had signed an agreement with UNRRA to provide 450 teams to look after displaced persons in Germany. Whether it could cope with the influx remained to be seen.

Food supply officer Janet Finlayson remembered the assembly of Team 158 at Joux-la-Ville in France in late April 1945. It was a truly international gathering. The director – who was in charge of the team – was Dutch, the doctor, supply officer and nurse were French, the welfare officer Belgian. They drove through France and Belgium and into Germany in early May, through scenes of rubble and devastation, to a displaced persons camp at Minden.