The Nazi Hunters (5 page)

All of which ensured an orgy of violence—endorsed by the top Soviet leadership. In his orders to the First Belorussian Front just before the January 1945 offensive in Poland and then Germany, Marshal Georgy Zhukov declared: “
Woe to the land of the murderers. We will get our terrible revenge for everything.”

Even before they reached the German heartland, the Red Army troops had acquired a reputation for raping women—in Hungary, Romania, and then Silesia, where often little distinction was made between German and Polish women who were trapped in the historically disputed borderland of their two countries. Once the Soviet offensive reached deeper into German territory, horrifying tales of rape emerged from almost every city and village taken by Red Army troops. Vasily Grossman, the Russian novelist and war correspondent, wrote: “
Terrible things are happening to German women. A cultivated German man explains with expressive
gestures and broken Russian words that his wife has been raped by ten men that day.”

Of course such accounts did not appear in Grossman’s officially sanctioned dispatches. In some cases, superior officers did stop the rampages and a degree of order was gradually restored a few months after the German surrender on May 8, but far from completely. Rough estimates put the number of German women raped by Soviet forces in the final period of the war and in the months afterward at
1.9 million; there was also a huge surge of suicides by women who had been raped, often multiple times.

As late as November 6 and 7, 1945, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hermann Matzkowski, a German communist who was appointed as the mayor of a district of Königsberg by the new Soviet authorities, noted that the occupiers appeared to have been given official sanction for additional retribution. “
Men were beaten, most women were raped, including my seventy-one-year-old mother, who died by Christmas,” he wrote. The only well-fed Germans in the town, he added, “are women who have become pregnant by Russian soldiers.”

Soviet soldiers were not the only ones who raped German women. According to a British woman who was married to a German in a village in the Black Forest, French Moroccan troops “
came at night and surrounded every house in the village and raped every female between 12 and 80.” American troops were also responsible for rapes, but nothing like on the scale that was happening in the territory conquered by the Red Army. Unlike what was taking place further east, these were usually individual instances of rape, and at least in some cases punishment was meted out to the rapists. John C. Woods, the U.S. Army hangman, executed American murderers and rapists before he performed his much more famous duties at Nuremberg.

Retribution also came in the form of the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from the parts of the Reich that would be allocated to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union (Königsberg, to be renamed Kaliningrad) according to the newly redrawn map of the region, as established
by the victors. Millions of Germans had already begun their chaotic flight from those territories as the Red Army advanced. Some had followed Hitler’s armies east only six years earlier, participating in the brutal measures against the local population that would now come back to haunt them.

According to the Potsdam agreement signed by Stalin, the new U.S. President Harry Truman, and the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee on August 1, 1945, the population transfers after the war were to take place “
in a humane and orderly fashion.” But the reality of the situation stood in stark contrast to such reassuring rhetoric. Aside from dying from hunger and exhaustion on their desperate treks west, the expellees were often attacked by their former subjects—including forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners who had managed to survive the death marches and executions by their Nazi overlords right up until the last days of the war. And even those who had endured less were eager for revenge.

A Czech member of a militia unit recalled the fate of one victim. “
In one town, civilians dragged a German into the middle of a crossroads and set alight to him. . . . I could do nothing, because if I had said something, I should have been attacked in my turn.” A Red Army soldier finally shot the German to finish him off. The total of expelled ethnic Germans from East-Central Europe in the late 1940s is usually put at
12 million, with estimates of the death toll varying widely. In the 1950s, the West German government claimed that more than one million had died; more recent estimates put the number at about 500,000. Whatever the exact numbers, there was little agonizing about the fate of those Germans among the victors in the East. They were making good on Marshal Zhukov’s promise of “terrible revenge.”

• • •

On April 29, 1945, the U.S. Army’s 42nd Infantry Division, known as the Rainbow Division because it was initially composed of National Guard units from twenty-six states and Washington, D.C., entered Dachau and liberated the approximately 32,000 survivors in the main camp. Although not technically an extermination camp and its one crematorium had
never been used, the main camp and a network of subcamps had worked, tortured, and starved thousands of prisoners to death.
Designed as the first full-fledged concentration camp of the Nazi era, it was used mostly for those categorized as political prisoners, although the proportion of Jewish inmates increased during the war years.

The American troops were confronted by scenes of horror they had never imagined possible. In his official report, Brigadier General Henning Linden, the assistant division commander, described what the first glimpse of Dachau was like:

“
Along the railroad running along the northern edge of the Camp, I found a train of some 30–50 cars, some passenger, some flatcars, some boxcars all littered with dead prisoners—20–30 to a car. Some bodies were on the ground alongside the train, itself. As far as I could see, most showed signs of beatings, starvation, shooting, or all three.”

In a letter to his parents, Lieutenant William J. Cowling, Linden’s aide, described what he saw in more graphic language: “
The cars were loaded with dead bodies. Most of them naked and all of them skin and bones. Honest their legs and arms were only a couple of inches around and they had no buttocks at all. Many of the bodies had bullet holes in the back of their heads. It made us sick at our stomach and so mad we could do nothing but clench our fists. I couldn’t even talk.”

Linden was met by an SS officer carrying a white flag, along with a Swiss Red Cross representative. As they explained that they were there to surrender the camp and its SS guards, the Americans heard shots from inside the camp. Linden dispatched Cowling to investigate. Riding on the front of a jeep carrying American reporters, he entered through the gate and came upon a cement square that looked deserted.

“Then suddenly people (few would call them that) came from all directions,” Cowling continued in his letter home. “They were dirty, starved skeletons with torn tattered clothes and they screamed and hollered and cried. They ran up and grabbed us. Myself and the newspaper people and kissed our hands, our feet and all of them tried to touch us. They grabbed us and tossed us into the air screaming at the top of their lungs.”

Linden and more Americans arrived at the scene, and more tragedy
struck. When the prisoners surged forward to embrace them, some ran into the electrified barbed wire and were immediately killed.

As the Americans worked their way through the camp, examining more gruesome piles of naked bodies, and the starved and in many cases typhus-ridden survivors, some SS guards eagerly surrendered but a few opened fire at prisoners who were trying to break through the fence—and some even appeared to challenge the U.S. troops as they entered. In those cases, retaliation was swift.

“
The SS tried to train their machine guns on us,” Lieutenant Colonel Walter J. Fellenz reported, “but we quickly killed them each time a new man attempted to fire the guns. We killed all seventeen SS.”

Other soldiers reported watching prisoners chasing down guards—and feeling no inclination to intervene. Corporal Robert W. Flora recalled that the guards they captured were the lucky ones: “
The ones that we didn’t kill or capture were hunted down by the freed inmates and beaten to death. I saw one inmate just stomping on an SS Trooper’s face. There wasn’t much left of it.”

Flora told the incensed prisoner that he had “a lot of hate in his heart.” The prisoner understood and nodded.

“I don’t blame you,” Flora concluded.

Another liberator, Lieutenant George A. Jackson, came upon a group of about two hundred prisoners who had formed a circle around a German soldier who had been trying to escape. The German was wearing a full field pack and carrying a gun, but there was little he could do as two skeletal prisoners tried to catch him. “
There was complete silence,” Jackson noted. “It seemed as if there was a ritual taking place, and in a real sense it was.”

Finally, one of the prisoners, who Jackson estimated could not have weighed more than seventy pounds, grabbed him by his coattails. The other pursuer seized his rifle and began to hit him on the head. “At that point, I realized that if I intervened, which could have been one of my duties, it would have become a very disturbing event,” Jackson recalled. Instead, he turned and walked away, leaving the area for about fifteen minutes. “When I came back, his head had been battered away,” he noted.
The crowd of prisoners had disappeared; nothing but the corpse was left as evidence of the drama that had just played itself out there.

As for Lieutenant Cowling, his role in liberating Dachau led him to reflect on how he had routinely taken German prisoners up to that point—and how he would change his behavior in the future. “
I will never take another German prisoner armed or unarmed,” he vowed in his letter to his parents two days after that searing experience. “How can they expect to do what they have done and simply say I quit and go scot free. They are not fit to live.”

• • •

As the Red Army advanced, Tuvia Friedman, a young Jew in the central Polish city of Radom, made plans not only to escape the camp where he worked as a slave laborer but also to avenge the loss of most of his family in the Holocaust. “
More and more, I found myself thinking of vengeance, of the day when we Jews would pay the Nazis back, an eye for an eye,” he recalled.

With German troops preparing to evacuate, Friedman and two fellow prisoners escaped through a sewer that led from a factory. Snaking their way through the muck, they emerged into the woods on the other side of the barbed wire of the camp. They washed in a stream and struck out on their own. Friedman later recalled their sense of exhilaration: “We were afraid, but we were free.”

Various Polish partisan units were already operating in the area, fighting not just the Germans but also among themselves. At stake was the future of Poland after the German occupation ended.
The largest and most effective resistance movement in occupied Europe was the Polish Home Army (AK), which was also resolutely anticommunist and reported to the Polish government-in-exile in London. The much smaller People’s Guard (GL) was organized by the communists, serving as the spearhead for the Soviet planned takeover of the country.

Friedman, who was using the name Tadek Jasinski to disguise his Jewish identity not just from Germans but also from anti-Semitic locals, eagerly signed up with a militia unit organized by a Lieutenant Adamski of the communist partisans. Their assignment, as Friedman noted, was
“to put an end to the anarchistic activities” of the Home Army and “to ferret out and arrest Germans, Poles and Ukrainians who had engaged in wartime activity that was ‘detrimental to the best interests of Poland and the Polish people.’ ”

“With burning enthusiasm, I embarked on the last chore,” Friedman reported. “Working with several militiamen who had been placed under my command, feeling my gun securely in my holster, I arrested one known war criminal after another.”

Friedman and his comrades certainly tracked down some genuine war criminals. They found a Ukrainian foreman named Shronski, for instance, “who had beaten more Jews than he could remember,” and who in turn had led them to another Ukrainian who was later hanged. But the definition of what constituted “the best interests of Poland” also often meant arresting anyone who did not welcome the prospect of Soviet domination once the war ended, including some of the bravest Polish resistance fighters during the German occupation.

Even as its army continued to do battle with the retreating German forces, the Kremlin arrested sixteen Home Army leaders in Warsaw and flew them to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. Tortured by the “liberators” of Poland, they were subjected to a show trial in June, shortly after the war in Europe was officially over. Their reward for fighting the Nazis for six years: imprisonment for “
diversionary activities against the Soviet state.”

Such distinctions mattered little to Friedman. He had felt the sting of Polish anti-Semitism on more than one occasion and had thrown in his lot with those who saw the Red Army purely as liberators.

But it wasn’t the ideology of Poland’s soon-to-be new masters that attracted Friedman. His real priority was to inflict payback against the Germans—and the communists simply gave him the opportunity to do so.

Assigned to Danzig, Friedman and five friends from Radom journeyed to the Baltic port city, watching German troops making their way west, trying to get out while they still could. “Some were pitiful sights, unable to walk, their bandaged heads crimson-stained,” Friedman wrote.
“Try as we might we felt no pity, no sympathy. The butchers had run amok; they were responsible for the consequences.”

Much of the city was alight, with Red Army and Polish police units dynamiting buildings that were close to collapsing. “It was like being in Rome at the time of Nero’s famous conflagration,” Friedman added.

The new arrivals were exuberant at the sudden reversal of fortunes. “We felt like men from another planet, whose arrival had sent the inhabitants of earth fleeing in terror.” They swooped into apartments that Germans had evacuated in such haste that their clothing and personal possessions, including German money, were left scattered on the floor. In one dwelling, they came across porcelain vases—“probably Dresden,” Friedman pointed out—and treated them like soccer balls, leaving only smashed pieces behind.