After the Reich (80 page)

Germans complained of their treatment at the hands of Scotland and his team, but the work-over seems to have been gentle compared to those carried out by the Americans. The SS officer Otto Baum said he had been slapped and threatened with extradition to the Soviet Union. Scotland vigorously denied the charges, which could have been brought before the courts in an attempt to prove that a confession had been extracted by force. The prisoners naturally had a number of ruses up their sleeves, accusations of torture being just one of them. Another was to blame everything on a man who was dead, or in Soviet captivity - where there was no chance of corroborating the story, and a fair chance that he would eventually perish anyhow if he hadn’t done so already. That Scotland beat and abused prisoners, however, seems beyond doubt. He even admitted as much in his autobiography, although the relevant passages were cut at the request of MI5.
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Scotland’s men were investigating a full-scale massacre of British soldiers that took place at the time of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. The command to kill a hundred or so men mostly from the Royal Warwicks was probably issued by the later SS-Brigadef ührer Wilhelm Mohnke, after his men had taken a pasting from the British during the rearguard action. In connection with the inquiry the Scotland team were able to bring in Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, who was in American custody. Scotland was surprised to find that the former coachman who had become Hitler’s darling was a broken man. He was squat and balding, ‘rough in manners and crude in speech’.
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Scotland had evidently believed what he had heard about the SS superman. He failed to get a confession from Dietrich, or from any other SS man, and concluded that they took their oath of loyalty very seriously.

The British also had their prisons in Germany and Belgium. The Belgian camp was meant to be particularly gruelling, and conditions for the 130,000 prisoners were reported to be “not much better than Belsen’.
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Those awaiting trial for war crimes were housed in the former Prussian town of Minden or in Münsterlager. Conditions here were scandalously bad. When the camp was inspected in April 1947 there were found to be just four functioning lightbulbs in the whole place. There was no fuel, no straw mattresses and no food apart from ‘water soup’. The camp was chiefly guarded by ex-Nazi POWs. The inmates saw no British officers, and even the sighting of an NCO was a rarity. Hygiene was equally nightmarish: there were two washhouses for every 500 men, no soap and no towels.
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British civil servants showed scant concern for the idea that Germans were dying in British camps. Con O’Neill at the Foreign Office minuted a paper written by Hynd in July 1946 to say that a few more deaths might be a good thing, as no one needed more Germans. A suggestion was mooted that the prisoners should be made over to the Russians, as they would know how to deal with them. The Russians would have no foolish sentimentality and would kill them off.
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The British also ran their Civilian Internment Camps or CICs for political prisoners, who had not all been screened or charged, and which contained prisoners as young as sixteen. When questions were asked about the camps in the House of Commons Wing Commander Norman Hulbert called them ‘concentration camps’, the ‘only right and proper description’. This was where the British haphazard denazification took place. Anyone could have ended up there:
Junkertum
, being a member of the east Elbian or Prussian nobility, called for ‘discretionary arrest’. Anyone with ‘von’ before their names had to watch out. The British decided that it might be better to place the civil prisoners offshore; perhaps that way fewer people would see them. The proposal was to create an ‘Alcatraz’ for up to 10,000 prisoners, but this never happened as the RAF was using the available islands for bombing practice. When the new camp Adelheide was opened there were only 473 prisoners, but thirteen of them were over sixty and another 136 over fifty.
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Once convicted of war crimes the Germans might have ended up at Werl near Dortmund. Death row was in the Pied Piper town of Hamelin. Execution exerted severe demands on the British hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, who could not be in all places at once. It took him seven hours to hang six prisoners in pairs. At one point the British were handing out between thirty and fifty death sentences a month, although a third of them were quashed on appeal.
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There was a suggestion that the British might turn to the guillotine, as it was quicker. Soldiers had made it clear that they did not like carrying out firing squads.
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At Bad Nenndorf near Hanover, CSDIC 74 also possessed an interrogation centre where men were tortured. The centre of the town was sealed off with barbed wire. The torture-chamber was the old pumproom. Here they were beaten, deprived of sleep, threatened with execution or unnecessary surgery. As many as 372 men and 44 women passed through Bad Nenndorf before it closed in July 1947.

Initially they were SS men and Pgs, as well as industrialists and ‘plutocrats’ who had done well in the Third Reich. The British were also frightened of Werewolves, and brought in several Hitler Youth leaders for interrogation. Later many of them were Germans who had been ‘turned’ by the Soviets, and were spying on the British Zone. The camp commander was Colonel Robin Stephens, an MI5 officer. His staff consisted of twelve British - including civilian linguists - a Pole, a Dutchman and six German Jews. They were helped by young soldiers. Some of these had been present at the liberation of Belsen and felt no goodwill towards the Germans. Others had committed minor offences of discipline, assault or desertion and were being punished.

The activities in Bad Nenndorf eventually reached the ears of the prime minister, and Sir Sholto Douglas launched an investigation into the abuse of POWs. A court martial opened in Hamburg on 8 June 1948 at which Stephens was tried together with a German-born Jew, Lieutenant Richard Langham. It was transferred to London and heard
in camera.
The officers were acquitted. There was alarm in government circles that the public should learn that the British were running a number of branches of CSDIC in Germany, and that ‘Bad Nenndorf ’ should become a rallying cry. Lord Pakenham expressed his concern about the accusation that the British were treating prisoners in a manner ‘reminiscent of the German concentration camps’. Following the court martial Bad Nenndorf was closed down, but interrogations went on in the British base in Gütersloh. When Pakenham heard of this he complained to Robertson. The military commander apparently took no notice.
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Almost all the men who were not suspected of any great crimes, however, were sent home for Christmas 1948 - that is, if they still had a home to go to, or knew how to locate their families.

The Treatment of the Cossacks and Russian Civilians in Germany

Marshal Zhukov raised the question of the return of Russian POWs as early as 5 June 1945 when the Allied commanders met in Berlin. It had been agreed that these soldiers would be handed over to the Russians. Most of the men were Cossacks and Ukrainians who had fought in German units, chiefly SS. Some of them were also labour conscripts and white Russians who had been caught up in the war zone.
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They did not have to be Russian, as the Russians acted for their clients too. The character of Anna Schmidt in
The Third Man
is one of these. She is from Czechoslovakia. Her lover Harry Lime has had papers made for her. The Soviet authorities allow Lime to carry on hiding in their sector as long as he continues to inform them of cases like hers.

In the film Major Calloway is reluctant to hand Anna over to Brodsky, considering her an insignificant case. In Austria the British co-operated with the NKVD over Russians who had fought in SS units, although they had no doubts that they were leading the prisoners to certain death.
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The Anglo-Americans had 150,000 Russian prisoners. Over of a fifth of these were returned to the Soviets and presumably slaughtered. The Russians were furious not to receive the full tally. One of the most tragic incidents was the handing over of part of Vlasov’s Russian Legion to the Soviets across the border on 24 February 1946. The Russians were housed at Plattling. Guessing their fate, they mutinied one night and the men at nearby ‘Natternberg’ could hear the sound of shooting. They were rounded up and taken to the Czech border. After the Russians were liquidated, Salomon and the other men from Natternberg were transferred to Plattling, along with the Hersbruck camp and the Nuremberg witness camp and the SS men who had been held in Dachau.
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Salomon later learned the whole story. One day a Soviet official had arrived at Plattling and demanded the files on the prisoners. When the Russian POWs got wind of what was going to happen, they mutinied. A senior American officer had placated them by telling them that they would not be handed over, and that they would be resettled
^dq
in southern Europe - the same lie the Welsh Guards used in Carinthia. Then the tanks rolled in. The American guards had been issued with rubber truncheons and went to the Russian huts in the middle of the night, beating them out of their bunks - ‘Mak snell, mak snell’ - and into waiting lorries. They were taken to Zwiesel near the border. American guards reported that corpses could be seen hanging from trees behind the Russian lines. The precise number of Russian soldiers killed is not known. Estimates range from 300 to 3,000.
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The French Camps

A total of 1,065,000 German POWs were attributed to the French. Of these about a quarter - 237,000 - had been captured in France. The rest were an American ‘loan’. Their treatment was particularly brutal,
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probably because the memory of internment in Germany was still fresh in the minds of many French civilians, who had not recovered from the humiliation of occupation either. At the beginning of November 1944, there had been 920,000
poilus
in German POW camps.
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Here was the chance for revenge. Very soon after the end of the war the Red Cross reported that there were 200,000 prisoners on the brink of famine in France. The United States treated this report with some scepticism, but it stopped the transports and brought 130,000 of the worst cases back to the US in 1946 because they were in such poor condition that they could no longer work. The Americans compensated the French with another 100,000
Amerikafahrer
but were careful to deliver food so that the same thing did not happen again. The French received the prisoners only once they had agreed to abide by the Geneva Convention. The good behaviour did not last long.
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When the Americans put pressure on the French to release their prisoners, the latter complained that neither the Americans nor the British had lost as many labourers in the war and that the German slaves were ‘indispensable for the rebuilding of their country’. France hung on to the men until the end of 1948, when the last 23,609 went home. An attempt to make the work voluntary was unsuccessful.
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Neglect and brutality took their toll: officially 21,886 German POWs died in France, or 24,178 men from the Axis powers.
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Salomon cites one case of an elderly Alsatian German historian who starved to death in a French ‘dungeon’.
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In another camp in the Sarthe, prisoners had to survive on 900 calories a day. In the prison hospital an average of twelve POWs died daily. Camp 404 at Septèmes near Marseilles was originally set up by the Americans and was partly run by vicious ‘Jabos’ or Yugoslav guards. It was a gigantic place with twenty-five separate ‘cages’ filled with tents. Solid structures came later. In February 1946, however, Septèmes was handed over to the French as part of the Western Allied loan policy. The Germans felt they had been betrayed. There were ‘indescribable scenes’ of panic and several suicides and self-inflicted injuries. More, there was the nightmare
^dr
- as far as the Germans were concerned - of finding that their new captors were colonial troops.
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The march of German captives through France provided the French public with the chance to tell the
Landser
(privates and NCOs) what they thought of them. One woman who disregarded an order to stop pelting the prisoners with stones was shot by a black American soldier. ‘She lay there in the street. No one took any notice of her . . .
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Another prisoner who was taken to a camp near Annecy to work in the quarries was told that the French were receiving one mark for every prisoner they took off the Americans. As they were marched through France a French soldier showed off to little girls at the roadside by kicking him in the backside. Watch-stealing was almost as common in the west as it was with the Red Army.
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One German describes a sergeant-major who showed him his watch, only to lose it soon afterwards. The prisoner was not so badly treated for all that. After the quarries he was able to work on the land and the local farmers fed him well - all but one, that is, who cooked ‘roast cat’ in a cream sauce that Christmas. He ate some of the sauce, but spurned the cat.
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