Hitler's Last Days (14 page)

Montgomery's stunning press conference comments did considerable damage to Anglo-American relations. To Patton, it seems outrageous that Montgomery should be rewarded for such deceptive behavior.

Yet that's precisely what Eisenhower does.

Although four American soldiers serve along the German front for every British one, Eisenhower has caved in to pressure from Winston Churchill in selecting Monty to lead the main charge across the Rhine. The reasons are political, but also practical: The crucial Ruhr industrial region is in northern Germany, as are Montgomery's troops. Theoretically, Monty is capable of quickly laying waste to the lifeblood of Germany's war machine.

Nevertheless, the decision makes George S. Patton furious.

CHAPTER 16

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

OSWIECIM, POLAND
JANUARY 26, 1945
1 A.M.

T
HE
S
OVIET ARMY HAS BLOWN
through the German defenses in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and is rapidly advancing west. The Soviets captured Warsaw and now race through Poland, intent on occupying Berlin before the Americans and the other Allies can get there. The Russians are so close to the concentration camp in Auschwitz that the boom of their artillery can be heard in the distance, and the occasional barrel flash of a launching shell lights the horizon. The Nazi guards at the camp who have been ordered to destroy the crematoriums are anxious to be away, afraid they will soon become Russian prisoners—a certain death sentence for them.

The earth convulses as the crematorium Krema V explodes. Tongues of flame turn the coal-black winter sky a bright red. The guards watch the inferno intently, but only for as long as it takes to know that the destruction is complete and that there will be no need for more dynamite charges. The grisly evidence is now destroyed.

Krema—that horrible redbrick building where hundreds of thousands of prisoners entered, but none walked out. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and the handicapped were led inside, locked in an airtight room, and gassed with a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B dropped through the ventilation system. Death came slowly as the prisoners, unable to breathe, tried to claw their way out of the room, leaving grotesque scratch marks on the walls.

Auschwitz in the distance.
[Mary Evans Picture Library]

Now Krema V is no more. The other four Auschwitz crematoriums have also been detonated. Adolf Hitler has ordered that the murders be stopped and all physical proof of his atrocities destroyed.

From left to right, Anne Frank, Ellen Weinberger, Margot Frank, and Gabrielle Kahn have tea with their dolls after fleeing to Amsterdam from Germany.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Penny Boyer]

Several thousand prisoners mill about the camp or huddle inside the barracks as the guards speed away into the night. The prisoners wait. Are they really free? Or will some worse fate befall them? Because if they've learned anything from their time in the death camps, it's that when things can't seem to get more horrific, they always do.

*   *   *

A fifty-five-year-old German Jew lies in his wooden bunk in the men's sick barracks at Auschwitz. It is 3
P.M.
on January 27, 1945.

Otto Frank and his family moved to the Netherlands when the rise of Nazism increased anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany. Then the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, and the country was taken over.

Two years later, on June 25, 1942, the
Daily Telegraph
in London ran a story with the headline “Germans Murder 700,000 Jews in Poland.” The
Times
of London was soon reporting, “Massacre of Jews: Over 1,000,000 Dead Since the War Began,” whereupon the
Guardian
noted that seven million Jews were now in German custody and that Eastern Europe was a “vast slaughterhouse of Jews.”

In Amsterdam, Frank's family went into hiding soon after those news reports emerged. Life was squalid and claustrophobic in their secret apartment, but at least they were free. For two long years the Franks evaded detection by the Nazis. They were less than a month away from the Allies' arrival in the Netherlands when the end came.

On August 4, 1944, a secret informant, whose name has never become known, gave away the family's hiding place to the Gestapo. The Franks were arrested, and within a month, Otto, his wife, Edith, and his teenage daughters, Margot and Annelies, arrived at Auschwitz.

As soon as they disembarked from their cattle cars, families were disassembled. Men and women were separated, their children taken from them. Otto Frank has not seen his wife and daughters since September.

As he lies in his bunk this cold January day five months later, Frank does not know whether his family is alive or dead. He does not know that the women he loves so much have also suffered the indignities he has: being stripped naked, having their heads shaved to check for lice, then standing in line to get a number tattooed on their left forearms. That number, they were soon told, was their new identity. They no longer had a name.

During their time in hiding, young Annelies—just Anne to her family—kept a detailed journal of what their life in hiding was like. She is five feet four inches tall, with an easy smile and dimples. Her eyes are gray, with just the slightest trace of green. Anne's wavy hair, before the Germans shaved her skull smooth, was brown and fell to her shoulders.

*   *   *

Incredibly, both girls are still alive as Otto Frank hears ecstatic shouts from outside his barracks. “We're free,” the prisoners are shouting. “We're free.”

Soviet soldiers are marching into the camp, taking careful and cautious steps, suspicious of a surprise German attack. They wear winter-white camouflage uniforms and appear out of the snowy mist like apparitions.

Twelve-year-old Anne Frank models a new coat in a photograph taken in Amsterdam, 1941.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eva Schloss]

The Soviet soldiers are not sure what they have stumbled upon. There are corpses everywhere, and people still alive but looking like skeletons, with the hollow faces of those close to death. “When I saw the people, it was skin and bones. They had no shoes, and it was freezing. They couldn't even turn their heads; they stood like dead people,” one of the first Russian officers into the camp will later remember. “I told them, ‘The Russian army liberates you!' They couldn't understand. Some few who could touched our arms and said, ‘Is it true? Is it real?'”

The Soviet soldiers move from barrack to barrack, shocked at what they see. “When I opened the barrack, I saw blood, dead people, and in between them, women still alive and naked,” Soviet officer Anatoly Shapiro will remember. “It stank; you couldn't stay a second. No one took the dead to a grave. It was unbelievable. The soldiers from my battalion asked me, ‘Let us go. We can't stay. This is unbelievable.'”

Survivors of the concentration camp at Wöbbelin, Germany, are evacuated to a U.S. field hospital for care.
[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park Time/Life Syndication, courtesy of Arnold Bauer Barach]

Despite all the horrors these soldiers have seen during their march to Germany, they know that Auschwitz is different. “We ran up to them,” ten-year-old survivor Eva Mozes and her twin sister, Miriam, will later recall. “They gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine, because that replaced the human worth we were starving for. We were not only starved for worth, we were starved for human kindness, and the Soviet army did provide some of that.”

*   *   *

Otto Frank rises from his sickbed to celebrate his newfound freedom. His thoughts immediately turn to finding his family.

But he will never find them. Instead, in the weeks and months and years to come, he will discover threads of their travels, allowing him to piece together their horrible ends.