Authors: Giles MacDonogh
Bavaria
The East Prussian writer Ernst Wiechert had been waiting for this moment. He had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, who had thrown him into Buchenwald. Now he could muster a brief moment of happiness: ‘The patient had been stronger than the strong.’ American forces passed through the village. One moment they were there, the next they were gone, but ‘with the dust behind their vehicles an era sank; one of evil, darkness and bloody violence and we didn’t have to think of the past, but of what was to come . . .’
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Wiechert was refreshed by the thought that the guillotine would cease its bloody business, that the gallows would rot, that death would cease its nightly visits to women and children in cellars. His wish was not to be granted at once.
Once Wiechert explained to the Americans who he was, they treated him with kindness. The CO sent up a couple of men to keep watch over his house and one of them killed a deer for him - ‘so that you don’t go hungry’, he said. It was a world of humanity Germans had forgotten over the past dozen years. But not all the Allies proved such perfect gentle knights. When the French came four days later they surprised the house while the guards were off duty, locked the Wiecherts in the kitchen and stole everything of value: silver, jewellery, watches and typewriters.
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Wiechert was a celebrity and now he received visits from the literary world in uniform: ‘Captain’ Auden, one of Thomas Mann’s sons-in-law, Mann’s son Golo, and Pastor Niemöller (another German who had suffered under the Nazis) and his wife, together with numerous journalists. Wiechert was not happy with his own people, however. His outspoken attitude to Nazism and the privileged treatment accorded to him by the Americans aroused the envy of the locals. His writings were deplored and the man who had preferred inner emigration, and criticised those who had actually left, was forced to flee to Switzerland, at a time when other exiles were drifting home.
The Jew Victor Klemperer had made a miraculous escape from the ashes of Dresden. He had kept his head down in a small Bavarian village until the war ended. On 11 May he also expressed his shock at the German attitude to the very recent past.
The people are absolutely without history, in every respect. In the evening a young woman came . . . young, not unintelligent. She seemed to be originally from Munich, and had been by bicycle to Munich for a day . . . I asked the woman if she had heard anything of Hitler and the other big names of the NSDAP:
no
, she had not had time to ask about that, in other words: this did not interest her any more. The Third Reich is already as good as forgotten, everyone had been opposed to it, had ‘always’ been opposed.
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Klemperer naturally saw things from his perspective. Like many other Germans, the Munich woman had evidently lost faith in Nazism some time before; with the terror apparatus halted, she could now breathe freely.
Jewish prisoners in an outside dependency of Dachau could not believe their eyes when they saw American tanks flying white flags. They wondered if they were imagining things. They thought at first it might be a German trick. Once they had conquered their apprehensions they went down to the streets where the Americans were waiting. They tidied up their prison uniforms on the way.
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The French reached Jettingen on 26 April. It was a pretty old town filled with half-timbered houses. Ursula von Kardorff, a former journalist from an old Prussian noble family who had been in contact with many members of the opposition to Hitler, had taken refuge there since fleeing Berlin in February. Her decision to head for Jettingen had been influenced by the fact that it was the home town of Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the man who had placed the bomb at the Wolfsschanze in the July Plot against Hitler of 1944. Suddenly the main street was filled with men in khaki uniforms. The next day they politely requisitioned her room at the Hotel Adler and evicted her friends from the Schloss, although the officer in charge said that the valuables could be locked up in the dining room, and they could take the key away with them.
The gloves were off the next day when ‘two nasty characters’ came round to her digs in pursuit of eggs and ‘snaps’. Ursula von Kardorff was firm with them. ‘Wir die besten Soldaten of the world!’ they shouted at her. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she replied. Later she had a furious argument with a Gaullist officer, who offered her coffee for all that. He told her that the Berliners would suffer the same fate as the Russians under German occupation: ‘I became angry. I told him that the fate of the Germans would not be so easy to deal with. I had not risked life and limb for twelve years fighting against the Nazis in order to be held to account for all the crimes committed by the SS. Both my brothers fought in Russia and one died there, and they would never have behaved as the French are doing now at the Klingenburg [Schloss in Jettingen].’
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The French captain was impressed. The plunder ceased, and Ursula von Kardorff was able to indulge a few long-cherished ambitions, such as throwing a collection of Party badges into the River Mindel. “We are now free from the Nazis, there is no Gestapo now to summons, disturb, arrest, torture or persecute us. We cannot praise our good fortune enough for this; but even now we are not free, we must still obey and comply with the curfew, and follow the orders as they are posted.’
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The other occupying army (the Americans had arrived in the wake of the French) presented few problems at first. Ursula von Kardorff was concealing the identity of her friend Wilhelm Bürklin, who was a colonel of the General Staff. In the eyes of the Western Allies a General Staff officer was an even more pungent commodity than a high-ranking Nazi. Bürklin had learned to keep his mouth shut when the Americans were present. They brought the women chocolate and spoke to them about politics in ‘fabulously bad English’. Her friend Erna Bähr washed a uniform jacket for one of them, and received packets of tea and soap. Later they also received buckets filled with slops from the mess. These were granted to a stylish Berlin woman of their acquaintance, to feed her wolfhound. What the dog didn’t want was given to them. Once they had volunteered to wash and iron the Americans’ uniform blouses the women received unheard-of treats: real coffee, meat, salad and chocolate pudding, such as they had not eaten for years.
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Unlike some, Ursula von Kardorff lived those first moments of occupation in relative calm. She had found peace after the struggle and its aftermath that had seen so many of her friends strung up in Plötzensee Prison after the July Bomb Plot. The Allies were courteous towards this member of the old governing class, at least, and she had wine as a consolation in her ‘small, warm island in the chaos’.
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Not everyone had been so lucky. When the women visited a Stauffenberg castle that had apparently been set on fire, the tenant took them over the plundered, windowless property and stopped to show them the bed where his daughter had been raped by American soldiers and the bullet holes in the wall. ‘In a way I am not so unhappy about the plundering, it shows that soldiers will always be soldiers and that the others are therefore also not necessarily better than us.’
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One of Ursula von Kardorff ’s friends was Gräfin Alexandrine von Üxküll-Gyllenbrand, who was the sister of the Stauffenberg brothers’ mother. The children of Claus and Berthold had been taken away by the SS after their fathers’ arrest, and given new names and identities. A French POW had tipped off Ursula and Bärchen that the children were in Bad Sachsa. The two women set off on bicycles to obtain a pass for Gräfin von Üxküll so that she could go and fetch the children. They rode as far as Günzburg to see the local American commander, Captain Herrell. While they waited, two Americans made indecent propositions. Herrell had not heard of Graf von Stauffenberg, but examined the women to find out if they were ‘good Germans’. They passed muster, and the Stauffenberg children were recovered in June.
On the night of 1 May, Ursula von Kardorff and her friends listened to their wireless set in secret. Hitler was dead.
This is the moment that I have so hotly awaited these last years, and that for which I have prayed and implored. And now? As the National Anthem was played just now I stiffened as I have not done for years. Is that just sentimentality? Jürgen’s death, the deportation of the Jews, our defiled land . . . Fritzi Schulenburg, Halem, Hassell, Leber, Haeften, Stauffenberg . . . Mutius, Mandelsloh, Wolf Schulenburg, Raschke, three Schweinitz brothers, three Lehndorff brothers, Veltheim - all of them who have lost their lives either here or out there, but for Germany?
ab
But we will manage. We will work, be happy with our lot, modest - and trust in God. Maybe one day there will be a new, admirable Germany again. The death of so many by the bullet or the rope - was it in vain? Or was there a deeper purpose?
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The Americans liberated the terrible camp at Flossenbürg on 26 April. Just 2,000 half-starved prisoners remained to welcome them. Another 15,000 had been marched off, many of them shot along the way.
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It was not until the 29th that the Americans reached Dachau. They were appalled by what they saw. Dachau was the original concentration camp - a vast place and the centre of 240 subsidiaries, some of which had operated for barely a month, others for years.
Buchenwald had been built around Goethe’s oak, Dachau had been set up in a former artists’ colony complete with Schloss, the Bavarian Barbizon - famous for the misty light that rose off the marshy plain. Dachau boasted the full range of prisoners, apart from the Jews, who had been sent east when ‘facilities’ were created for them there. At the end of the war they had returned and made up around a third of the inmates.
ac
In essence there were two camps at Dachau: a work camp with comparatively healthy prisoners, and another, more sinister division, a ‘Little Camp’, housing the bedraggled transfers.
Dachau was liberated by the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th US Division, as well as by the 222nd of the 42nd, which converged on the town to take a bridge that would bring them to their prize - Munich. They wanted to rescue the
Prominenten
, who had been housed in the ‘Special Building’, but they were already gone.
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Various plans had been aired to kill the prisoners by bombing the camp or by poisoning their soup, but fortunately these had proved unfeasible in the chaos of the time.
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There was a little resistance from the SS units guarding the place, but that was soon wound up, then the Americans found freight trains filled with as many as 2,000 corpses from the ‘Little Camp’. There were the usual scenes of revulsion and physical sickness brought on by the sight and stench of the living and the dead. The Americans described the neat stacks of bodies as looking ‘like cordwood’.
It was said that an SS man briefly turned his submachine gun on the prisoners who left their huts to watch the arrival of the Americans. This led to fury on the part of the conquerors, who shot anyone they found defending the complex and flushed the guards out of the watchtowers and killed them. They were left with an initial bag of 122 prisoners. One American shot the lot with his machine gun. Just as he was killing the last three who were standing - two with their hands up, the other defiant with his arms crossed
ae
- an officer arrived and kicked him in the head. ‘The violence of Dachau had a way of implicating all, even the liberators.’
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At first the prisoners indulged in an innocent game of making the guards dance to their tune. They shouted ‘Mützen ab!’ And the SS men had to doff their caps. Then the Americans aided and abetted the prisoners in their revenge. One soldier lent an inmate a bayonet to behead a guard. A kapo was found lying naked with cuts all over his body and a gunshot wound to his head. They had rubbed salt into his wounds. Another was beaten to death with spades. Other guards were shot in the legs to immobilise them. Later reports drew a veil over what happened then, although it is clear that some of the Germans were ripped limb from limb. It seems that around forty more guards and kapos died this way.
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Once enough blood had been let to satisfy occupants and occupiers, the Americans were shown over the camp. The crematoria and the gas chamber were an important part of the tour, although it was never clear whether the latter had been put to use. The normal method of execution was the
Genicksschuss
- a shot in the back of the head - and there was a special part of the camp where the killing took place.
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To gas the Dachauer, the usual method was to transfer them to Hartheim, across the border in Austria. Over 3,000 died in this way.
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The prisoners were moved into the SS barracks, but they continued to die in droves. In May alone, 2,266 perished.
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Later the Americans intercepted a party of 3,000 prisoners from Straubing Prison that had been sent to Dachau but had been forced to turn back when the warders learned that Dachau had been liberated.
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In the bombed-out towns and cities a humanitarian disaster loomed. In Bayreuth, for example, the water was contaminated, the sewers fractured. Typhus and diphtheria swept through the town. There was no medicine left to deal with the epidemic.
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