This was the kind of reckoning Hitler had carried out once before, when he had taken the opportunity of the purge of Ernst R̈hm’s stormtroopers at the end of June 1934 to settle old scores and eliminate possible members of an alternative government. But now it was being done on a much larger scale. Among the victims was the former Communist leader Ernst Tḧlmann. Incarcerated in a variety of prisons and camps since 1933, Tḧlmann had few illusions about his fate should the Red Army succeed in entering Germany. In August 1943 he was moved to the state prison at Bautzen, and a few months later his wife and daughter were arrested and taken to the Ravensbr̈ck concentration camp. ‘Tḧlmann,’ Himmler jotted down in his notes for a meeting with Hitler on 14 August 1944, ‘is to be executed.’ Hitler signed the order, and three days later Tḧlmann was taken out of his cell and driven to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Before he arrived, the prisoners, who included many former Communists, were locked into their barracks. One Polish inmate managed none the less to conceal himself near the entrance to the crematorium area, where the ovens were being stoked up in readiness for the disposal of Tḧlmann’s corpse. He saw a large automobile arrive, and a broad-shouldered man get out, flanked by two Gestapo officers. The man was not wearing a hat, and the Pole noticed that he was bald. Prodded forward by the Gestapo, the man passed through the crematorium entrance, which was flanked by SS men. Immediately, three shots could be heard, then shortly afterwards, a fourth. The door was closed, then, twenty-five minutes later or so, they were reopened and the SS men came out. The Pole overheard their conversation. ‘Do you know who that was?’ one SS man asked his fellow officer. ‘That was the Communist leader Tḧlmann,’ came the answer. The official announcement of his death blamed it on a British air raid.
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A similar fate was clearly intended for a number of other prominent prisoners of the regime, including the ex-Chief of the Army General Staff General Franz Halder, the former Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, the sacked head of Army Procurement General Georg Thomas (all three arrested after the bomb plot), the last Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, the French politician and ex-Prime Minister L’on Blum, the Confessing Church leader Martin Niem̈ller, the former Hungarian Prime Minister Mikl’s Kall’y, the bomb plotter Fabian von Schlabrendorff, and the families of a number of his co-conspirators, including the Stauffenbergs, Goerdelers and von Hassells, along with a nephew of the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, assorted British agents, and army commanders from countries formerly allied to Germany. Some 160 people in all were gathered together in an SS convoy and taken to a mountainous area of the South Tyrol on 28 April 1945. Here, it had been decided, they were all to be shot and their bodies disposed of.
When a guard accidentally let slip their intended fate, one of the prisoners managed to contact the local German army commander, who sent a subordinate officer, Captain Wichard von Alvensleben, to investigate: gathering a posse of armed troops, the captain arrived at the scene, and before anything could happen, he used his aristocratic
hauteur
to browbeat the SS men into releasing their prisoners. They were all unharmed, but it had been a narrow escape.
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III
There were still some 700,000 prisoners in the concentration camps altogether at the beginning of 1945. As well as the main camps, there were at least 662 sub-camps dotted across the Reich and the incorporated territories at this time. By now, they held more prisoners in total than were housed in principal centres such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbr̈ck. As the Red Army advanced, Himmler ordered the camps in its path to be evacuated. Precisely when and how this was to be done was left largely to the commandants’ own initiative. The largest of the camp complexes, at Auschwitz, held no fewer than 155,000 prisoners. Most of them were Poles and Russians. Roughly half of them were transported to camps further west. Huge quantities of material, equipment and personal effects went with the evacuees from Auschwitz. While the evacuation was in progress, work continued on new buildings, including a large set of additional facilities at Birkenau, dubbed ‘Mexico’ by the prisoners. Only in October 1944 was building work halted. The same month saw some 40,000 people perish in the existing gas chambers at Birkenau. In November, however, Himmler ordered all the gas chambers in every camp to be closed down and dismantled. At Auschwitz, the trenches used to incinerate corpses were levelled out, mass burial areas were filled up with earth and turfed over, the ovens and crematoria were dismantled, and the gas chambers destroyed or converted into air-raid bunkers.
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Now working for the concentration camp inspectorate, the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Ḧss, was sent by Oswald Pohl to the camp towards the end of 1944 ‘in the hope of reaching Auschwitz in time to make sure that the order for the destruction of everything important had been properly carried out’, as he later recalled. Ḧss drove some distance across Silesia but was unable to reach the camp in the face of the relentless advance of the Red Army. ‘On all the roads and tracks in Upper Silesia west of the Oder,’ he reported, ‘I now met columns of prisoners, struggling through the deep snow. They had no food. Most of the non-commissioned officers in charge of these stumbling columns of corpses had no idea where they were supposed to be going.’ They requisitioned food from the villages through which they passed, but ‘there was no question of spending the night in barns or schools, since these were all crammed with refugees’. Ḧss ‘saw open coal trucks, loaded with frozen corpses, whole trainloads of prisoners who had been shunted on to open sidings and left there without food or shelter’. There were German refugees, too, in headlong flight from the advancing Russians, women ‘pushing perambulators stacked high with their belongings’. The route taken by the ‘miserable columns’ of evacuated prisoners was easy to follow, he added, ‘since every few hundred yards lay the bodies of prisoners who had collapsed or been shot’. Stopping his car by a dead body, he got out to investigate shots he heard near by ‘and saw a soldier in the act of stopping his motor-cycle and shooting a prisoner leaning against a tree. I shouted at him, asking him what he thought he was doing, and what harm the prisoner had done him. He laughed impertinently in my face, and asked me what I proposed to do about it.’ Ḧss’s reaction to this challenge to his authority as a senior officer in the SS was unequivocal: ‘I drew my pistol and shot him forthwith.’
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On 19 January 1945, despite Ḧss’s failure to reach the camp, 58,000 prisoners began to make their way slowly out of Auschwitz westwards, most of them on foot, a few by train. SS guards shot stragglers and left their bodies by the roadside. As many as 15,000 of the prisoners died of starvation or cold or were killed by the SS. A few Poles defied the threats of the SS and gave some of them food or shelter; ethnic Germans stayed indoors. In the end, some 43,000 prisoners reached camps in the west. Only the very sick remained at Auschwitz, where the SS were desperately trying to blow up the remaining installations and burn incriminating documents before the Red Army arrived. The camp’s building, administration and political department files were taken westwards; many ended up at Gross-Rosen. Medical equipment used in experimentation was dismantled or destroyed. In the chaos, the Special Detachment prisoners, key witnesses to mass murder, managed to melt into the crowds marching out of the camp and evade the SS, who had planned to kill them. The camp doctor Josef Mengele also absconded, taking his research notes and papers with him. On 20- 21 January 1945, the SS guards abandoned the watchtowers, blew up the remains of the principal crematoria and set fire to the vast store of personal effects known to the inmates as ‘Canada’. Executions continued right up to the last minute, until Crematorium V, where they took place, was blown up too, on 25-6 January 1945. The SS killed some 700 prisoners at the various camps and sub-camps belonging to the Auschwitz complex before they left, but they did not have the time to murder them all. On 27 January 1945 the Red Army marched in. 600 corpses were lying on the ground outside, but some 7,000 prisoners were still alive, many in a very weak condition. In the storerooms that had not been burned, the Russian soldiers painstakingly catalogued 837,000 women’s coats and dresses, 44,000 pairs of shoes and 7.7 tons of human hair.
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Jewish prisoners were a particular target on the forced marches out of Auschwitz and other camps. When the prisoners employed on the manufacture of armoured personnel carriers at the Adler Works in Frankfurt were evacuated in March 1945 as the Americans approached the city, the SS pulled out the Jewish prisoners from the marching column and shot them; some of the victims were pointed out by their Polish fellow prisoners.
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In East Prussia, some 5,000 mostly female Jewish prisoners were marched out of the various sub-camps belonging to Stutthof until they came to a halt at the fishing village of Palmnicken, where their way was blocked; the Regional Leader of East Prussia, together with the sub-camp commandants and local officers of the SS and the Todt Organization decided to kill them, and shot all apart from two or three hundred.
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At a sub-camp of Flossenb̈rg, Helmbrechts, near the Franconian town of Hof, which housed mostly Polish and Russian women working in an arms factory, just over 1,100 prisoners were marched out in three groups on 13 April 1945, accompanied by forty-seven armed guards, male and female. Working their way towards no fixed destination, they had marched 195 miles by 3 May. Leaving the non-Jews behind after the first week, the guards proceeded southwards, beating and shooting the stragglers and the sick and depriving the prisoners of food and drink. More beatings were administered when local townspeople on occasion took pity on the prisoners and tried to throw them scraps of food. On 4 May, reaching the Czech border town of Prachtice, the column was attacked by an American plane, killing one of the guards; the remaining guards opened fire on the prisoners indiscriminately. Some of the survivors were marched up a nearby wooded hill and shot one by one as they collapsed with exhaustion. Before they fled, the guards set the others to walk into the town, where Czech townspeople gave them food and shelter. For many it was too late; twenty-six died before or shortly after the arrival of US troops, on 6 May 1945. Altogether at least 178 Jewish prisoners had perished on the march; a US army doctor later claimed that half the survivors were only saved by the prompt attentions of his medical team. Not for nothing were such aimless and murderous treks known by prisoners as ‘death marches’. Many had no clear destination. Some of the marches, indeed, meandered across the country, even doubling back on themselves; a death march from Flossenb̈rg covered a good 250 miles, going north for a third of the way, then turning south, passing not far from the camp itself before continuing on to Regensburg.
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The evacuation of the concentration camp at Neuengamme, which housed, with its fifty-seven sub-camps, some 50,000 prisoners, was undertaken in co-operation with the Regional Leader of nearby Hamburg, Karl Kaufmann. Most of the sub-camp inmates were taken on murderous and exhausting ‘death marches’ to ‘collection camps’, including Bergen-Belsen, by mid-April. That still left 14,000 in the main camp. Kaufmann had already decided, after representations from business and military leaders, to surrender the city to the Allies. Kaufmann feared that if he had the prisoners released, they would descend upon the city in the search for food and shelter. By this time there were no other camps left on the German side of the front line to which they could be evacuated, so Kaufmann decided to put them on board ships. 4,000 Danish and Norwegian prisoners had already been taken to Sweden in March 1945 on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, with the agreement of Count Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross. Himmler hoped thereby to gain the confidence of the Swedish royal family, of which Bernadotte was a member, as intermediaries for the negotiations he felt (entirely without any justification) that he could carry out with the British. The remaining 10,000 prisoners from the main camp at Neuengamme were marched off to L̈beck between 21 and 26 April 1945 and put on to three ships Kaufmann had commandeered as ‘floating concentration camps’ - the freighters
Athens
and
Thielbeck
, and a luxury liner, the
Cap Arcona
. No provision had been made for the prisoners, who were crammed into the holds, with no toilets and no water. Cauldrons of soup were lowered down when the SS opened the hatches, but there were no bowls or spoons, and much of the food spilled over on to the floor of the hold, mixing with the excrement now rapidly piling up. The SS took away the lifebelts to prevent escapes. Every day a launch brought out fresh water and returned to the shore with the corpses of prisoners who had died in the night. On 3 May 1945 British fighter-bombers spotted the ships, identified them as troop transports and attacked them with their rockets. The
Thielbeck
and
Cap Arcona
were badly hit. The
Thielbeck
sank, drowning all but fifty of the 2,800 prisoners on board. The
Cap Arcona
caught fire. Most of its lifeboats were destroyed in the inferno. As prisoners leaped into the icy waters of the Baltic, their clothes ablaze, a huge explosion ripped through the ship. It listed on to its port side and came to rest on the shallow bottom of the bay, half of the hull still above the water-line. 4,250 of the prisoners on board were drowned, burned to death, or shot by the bullets that filled the air as the planes exchanged fire with a group of U-boats in the nearby harbour. 350 prisoners were rescued after clinging to the hull for several hours. 400 of the 500 SS officers on board survived.
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