BUCHENWALD, DORA’S ANTECHAMBER. In mid-1943 the Buchenwald concentration camp sent a large Kommando to a fairly distant site to build the V2s at Peenemünde/Karlshagen. It is not surprising that from the end of August its role was to supply a workforce to Dora, the future camp to be built at the foot of the Kohnstein in Thuringia. Moreover, one of the ongoing functions of Buchenwald for over a year was to receive convoys of prisoners from outside Germany or from other camps within Germany, only to send them on—by thousands and tens of thousands—mostly to external Kommandos, and in particular toward Dora.
From the outset, however, Dora was a very particular Kommando—as will be shown in chapter 4—since the prospective camp was to be closely linked to a factory within a company, the commander of the camp being one of the directors. Dora then became, in the autumn of 1944, an autonomous camp—the last of the main camps created in Nazi Germany. For a year the link between Buchenwald and Dora continued, and the prisoners in Dora who went through Buchenwald—the vast majority, that is—kept their number from Buchenwald right to the end. Thus the recollections of Dora veterans generally begin with a chapter on Buchenwald.
It would be difficult, however, to discuss Buchenwald in a coherent manner on the basis of survivor testimonies alone, for two reasons. First of all, the experience of the majority of these witnesses was limited in time. And the camp at Buchenwald itself greatly evolved between mid-1943 and the liberation in 1945, quite often resulting in various misunderstandings. Therefore it is essential to take a closer look at Buchenwald before turning to a detailed discussion of Dora.
IMAGES OF BUCHENWALD. The images of Buchenwald are varied and in large part contradictory, above all on account of the conditions in which the liberation of the camp came about in 1945. There is no question here of going back into the—altogether passionate—1976 controversy concerning the chronology of events of that afternoon of April 11, 1945. Amouroux—among others—dealt with the subject in 1993.1 What is important to bear in mind is that when the American troops from Patton’s army arrived at Buchenwald they found a camp intact, being administered by the prisoners—a small number of whom had recently armed themselves—with an international organization that had taken things into hand. These exceptional circumstances allowed for the best resolution—given the conditions of the period—of the problem posed by the existence of some twenty-one thousand men to be fed, treated, and then repatriated. There was no disorder, no epidemics, and the repatriation of the French could actually be described as “efficient.”2
Unfortunately, this concerned only half of what the camp population had been on April 6: the SS had meanwhile managed to haul twenty-three thousand prisoners into the evacuation convoys. The often tragic situation of the Kommandos outside of Buchenwald will be dealt with in part 6. Thus, it was not in fact a single camp that was liberated but rather two side-by-side camps. The normal camp was the “large camp,” in which the prisoners were generally able-bodied. But there was also a “small camp” for the ailing that had a very high mortality rate, into which the others were normally not permitted. The image the Americans made public, after their discovery of Ohrdruf on April 5, followed by Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley’s visit to Ohrdruf on April 12, was one of beds in a small camp with its emaciated sick, one of whom was Elie Wiesel. This, along with the crematorium, was what was shown to journalists and delegations coming from the United States—particularly the congressional delegation that arrived at Buchenwald on April 24.3
There are no complementary photographs of able-bodied men, in particular those who had taken up arms. This has resulted in a blurry image that has since been quite troubling to readers—as shown by a page in the weekly, Candide, in 1965, where Joseph Kessel published a review of L’Arbre de Goethe (Goethe’s Tree) by Pierre Julitte. Beneath Kessel’s signature is a picture of a bed in the small camp followed by the surprising caption: “Thus lived those who undertook one of the most remarkable acts of resistance of the last war.”
There is no confusion, however, in the minds of Buchenwald survivors speaking out today. The young Charles Lavallard, having laid down his weapon, thus became a nurse in the former Revier of the SS, to help save the sick, often moribund, whom the stretcher-bearers, particularly the American soldiers, were evacuating from the small camp.4 Jorge Semprun, who stated that “to live in the small camp, during the last winter of the war, was a nightmare; and to survive it was a miracle,”5 does not know if a French doctor—a prisoner—actually managed to save the Jewish man from Budapest, whom he and his friend Albert had heard singing the Kaddish—the prayer of the dead—in a block of the small camp, lying among the corpses.6
It should not be assumed, however, that the Americans were interested only in the corpses and the moribund. Already on April 16, 1945, as Eugen Kogon recounts, “an Intelligence Team from the Psychological Warfare Division arrived in the camp at Buchenwald.”7 “Its mission was to study the living conditions and to show, in a comprehensive report addressed to the SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces), how a German concentration camp was set up, what role it played in the national-socialist state, and what the fate of those placed by the Gestapo in these SS-guarded camps had been. Buchenwald was the first large concentration camp to fall intact into the hands of the Western Allied Forces. It was to serve as an example for studying the system prior to this institution.”
Kogon notes that this team, under the direction of Lt. Albert G. Rosenberg, was made up of Max M. Kimenthal, Richard Akselrad, Alfred H. Sampson, and Ernest S. Biberfeld. Slightly more is known about Lieutenant Rosenberg, thanks to Semprun’s recollections in L’Écriture ou la vie.8 Semprun was one of his sources in the camp—naturally in German. It was Rosenberg who brought those who lived in Weimar to visit Buchenwald. It was he who, on Saint George’s Day, brought Semprun to see Goethe’s summerhouse on the banks of the Ilm, in the vicinity of Weimar. Rosenberg was a twenty-six-year-old Jewish Berliner who had emigrated to the United States in 1933 with his family. Though he had become an American, he remained very immersed in German culture. One can assume, going by their names, that the other members of his group were also Jews of similar origin.
Whatever the case may be, the members of this team played a key role in gaining understanding of the German concentration camp system, by getting Eugen Kogon to write L’État SS. In the introduction to the book, Kogon tells how, in response to their questioning, he ended up writing a report as early as May 1945, in Buchenwald itself, which he had confirmed by fifteen camp leaders, both communist and noncommunist. The interest of this report—passed along by Rosenberg—led British and American leaders to push Kogon to write a book for the general public, extending the subject from the camp at Buchenwald to all the camps. Kogon, housed along with his family in the Frankfurt area, finished the book in November 1945.9 Der SS Staat was published in Germany in 1946 and translated into French in 1947 under the title L’Enfer organisé (Organized Hell). It has remained the basic reference on the camps and was reprinted in France under its real title, L’État SS, in 1970 and later in 1993. As for the Buchenwald Report itself, it got lost in the archives before being later published in the United States, in 1995, from a copy kept by Rosenberg—who himself went on to become a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. He will be mentioned again in the epilogue.
It was in this way that the camp at Buchenwald was to become something of a model camp, civilized by the victory of the Reds over the Greens; of the political prisoners, and above all communists over common-law criminals. It is worth pointing out that Kogon, of Austrian origin, was in no way a communist himself and later went back to a university career in West Germany.
The book’s success was important for another reason: having been written by a German, it revealed the length of the purely German period of the camps, prior to the mass arrivals of the “deportees,” French or otherwise. In this sense it is an excellent starting point from which to assess the camp realities in the summer of 1943—at the very outset of Dora. These realities were very different from those prevailing a year later, particularly with regard to the French.
THE EICKE-STYLE CAMP. In terms of its aims and operation, the camp at Buchenwald in mid-1943 was still very close to the concentration camp model worked out to the last detail by Theodor Eicke, first commander of Dachau, then general-inspector of the camps until 1939. At the head of each camp was a Kommandant (along with his Kommandantur), who was both the head of an SS garrison, of the Totenkopf unit, and of the prisoners’ camp, the Konzentrationslager. This camp fell under the authority of one of the Kommandant’s assistants, the Lagerführer, or camp leader. SS members fell into one of two categories: the first was made up of those who were involved, in one way or another, in the camp or at the work sites; the second was comprised of Posten, guards posted in the watchtowers or patrolling with dogs around the camp perimeters.
Camp administration was looked after by the prisoners, with those principally in charge being chosen by the commandant. The main person was the Lagerältester (LÄ), or camp elder. In the major camps there were sometimes several Lagerführer and Lagerältester (LÄ1, LÄ2) who would take shifts. The prisoners were normally divided, for housing purposes, into blocks, which were either permanent structures or wooden sheds. Constant surveillance of the prisoners was carried on within the blocks. A prisoner, the Blockältester or block elder, assisted by several Stubendienst, was in charge of each block under the authority of an SS member, the Blockführer, or block leader. The latter could, at any moment, come and inspect the block; he came at any rate at least once a day, to initial the registers kept by the Schreiber, or block secretary. The information in these registers had to tally with the figures established by the Schreibstube, or central camp office. At the same time, the prisoners were subjected to head counts, or “roll calls,” that took place on the parade ground in the middle of the camp. The roll calls could be very drawn out if the various figures put together by the Rapportfßhrer—the SS member in charge of the operation—did not match up. Sometimes the roll calls were also prolonged as a form of collective punishment.
Other organizations kept files on the prisoners. One of them, outside the camp, was the Politische Abteilung, or political section, a creation of the Gestapo and the Kripo. It held the prisoners’ political or criminal files, and these files followed them from camp to camp. Moreover, they could be opened at any time by whatever level of the police administration had compiled them. This represented a significant bureaucracy, in which the employed prisoners were the mere secretaries.
The other organization was the Arbeitsstatistik, based within the camp, and was, at Buchenwald at any rate, truly managed by the prisoners. Its role was the allotment of work to everyone. Some were assigned a quiet administrative role. Other Kommandos, like those working in the quarries, were especially hard. Skilled laborers who found work in factories dependent on the camp were better off than those who did heavy manual tasks. Thus the Arbeitsstatistik had significant power; it became significant when it was time to draw up the “transport” lists for the outside Kommandos. This was the case, for example, when it was necessary to supply the SS with the five hundred prisoners they demanded one particular day for Dora, Langenstein, or Ohrdruf. This especially delicate subject will be dealt with later.
The functioning of a camp required the existence of a variety of general services. The fate of the majority of prisoners depended, to a large extent, on how these services were managed. Most important among them was the Revier—a common term referring to a hospital—which could as easily be the SS Revier as the camp Revier. There was also the kitchen, clothing store, showers and disinfection area, laundry, and so on. Finally, there was a sort of internal camp police, whose members were called the Lagerschutz. At the head of all this one finds the Kapos, who were prisoners, each one being under the control of an SS member.
There was another category of Kapos: those who directed the Kommandos, the work teams in the camp or those working in companies. These Kommandos were of various sizes and also more or less stable. The Kapos were assisted by a highly variable number of Vorarbeiter, who could loosely be described as foremen. Certain Kommandos had a Schreiber. In concentration camp jargon, the term Kommando had a very wide range of meanings. It could refer to a small group of prisoners in charge of some temporary duty in a camp, or all the prisoners of Ohrdruf, considered as a Kommando dependent on Buchenwald, in turn broken down into Kommandos of various sizes. The context alone makes it possible to know.
All those in charge who had been chosen among the prisoners wore armbands and enjoyed a variety of privileges—more or less, depending on their importance—in terms of dress, hair length, etc. These were the Prominente. These positions were the object of bitter competition between clans, especially between political prisoners and common criminals—and possibly between prisoners of different nationalities.
IDENTITY NUMBERS AND TRIANGLES. Up to now, “prisoner” has referred to all those interned in a concentration camp, and this will continue to be the case. It is the translation of the German word Häftling, normally used in this sense. The word “deportee” is suitable only for those who had been transferred from their country to Germany—such as the French or the Belgians. It cannot be applied to citizens of the Reich. But the word “deportee” will be used with regard to convoys leaving from Compiègne, for example.
One characteristic common to all the prisoners, whatever their function may have been, was no longer to be referred to by name but rather by an identity number. Everyone had to be able to state his number in German and above all to recognize it when it was called out. The number was assigned upon arrival in a large camp, a main camp often referred to as the Stammlager. Someone leaving a large camp for a Kommando that depended on it did not change his identity number. Thus prisoners from Dora continued to wear the number they had been assigned upon their arrival at Buchenwald, just as the prisoners from Wiener Neustadt continued to wear their number from Mauthausen. But the moment they were transferred—as will be seen later—from Wiener Neustadt to Dora via Buchenwald, they were given numbers from Buchenwald. Michel Fliecx and André Rogerie’s changes in identity numbers will be pointed out further on. The recollection of their identity number or numbers is not only a sort of proof of deportation for former prisoners—as it has been alleged—but also a way of situating them amid successive convoys. Reference will frequently be made, with regard to Dora, to the “14,000s,” the “20,000s,” and the “21,000s” or, later on, of the “77,000s.” This way of speaking is convenient for those concerned, as for the author who is himself a “39,000.”
The identity number was not the only element of identification used in the camps. There was also the color of the triangle sewn onto the jacket, at least as far as the Germans were concerned, which of course also included Austrians, Sudetens, and so on. Green triangles designated criminals, some of them serving sentences, others considered to be so many professional delinquents (along the lines of those shipped off to prison colonies in former times). Black triangles designated asocial types—a vague category. On the eve of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, in order to clean up the city, there was a roundup of beggars, bums, pimps, and so on, who were then interned in Sachsenhausen and made to wear a black triangle; most of them died shortly thereafter.10 Repeated absenteeism from work was all that was required to fall into this category. Red triangles were for political prisoners, a portion of whom were well-identified activists: communists, social democrats, Austrian monarchists, etc. Many others were there for having at some time or other expressed opinions hostile to the regime. At Dora, former soldiers from the French Foreign Legion could also be found.
There were other colors of triangles as well. Pink triangles designated homosexuals, condemned for offense to the German race. For this reason, only Germans—or those considered to be German—were concerned. During the war an Alsatian from Mulhouse was lumped into this category. Purple triangles were reserved for Bibelforscher—that is, “fundamentalists” or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Also in the camps were those who had been condemned by military tribunals: French SS members were thus interned in Dachau and Stutthof.
Except for the Germans, as well as the Jews and Gypsies, all the prisoners wore red triangles. Overall they really were political prisoners in the broad sense of the term (including hostages), but the Germans also deported individuals with whom they had various problems in conjunction with the black market, procuring, brawling, and so on. This was true for the French, the Belgians, and the Dutch, among others. But criminals in the occupied countries were judged by the courts in their countries and were not deported to Germany. Because Poles and Czechs, however, were at the time citizens of the Reich, it seems that their criminals were interned in the camps in the same way as German Greens.
An initial on the triangle indicated nationality: F for the French, B for the Belgians, P for the Poles, and so on. In certain cases, determining nationality raised problems, which will be examined in chapter 8. Jews and Gypsies who were interned as such had yellow or brown triangles. Their history at Dora was, generally speaking, distinct from that of the other prisoners.
QUARANTINE. Some of the Dora prisoners, as will be seen, spent various lengths of time at Buchenwald before being registered on a “transport” list for Dora. They thus experienced Dora at different times. But for most of the others, their only experience of Buchenwald was the “quarantine”—and it should be pointed out what this entailed. Originally it consisted of the period during which the newcomers were isolated in order to avoid the possible spread of epidemics. Typhus above all was feared in the camps; indeed, it killed many people at the time of the liberation in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. This preoccupation was very real at Buchenwald, where a quarantine was prolonged in March 1944 following the outbreak of a contagious illness.
But quarantine took on another dimension in 1943–44, once there was a sustained demand for putting together convoys of prisoners for external Kommandos—and especially for Dora. The time of the quarantine was thus put to use for choosing between those who were to be admitted into the Buchenwald camp and those who were to be put “in transport.” Immediately after the end of the quarantine period, the latter were sent on their way to their destination.
The quarantine took place in a complex of quarantine blocks, which made up the little camp separate from the large camp. When quarantine came to an end, as a sanitary measure, with the end of the convoys of foreign prisoners, the small camp was transformed into an enclosure filled with the sick and the moribund mentioned above. Dora survivors would, upon their return, see photographs in which they recognized their quarantine pallet beds but not their occupants.
With regard to the French, it seems that quarantine conditions changed greatly between the summer of 1943 and the beginning of 1944. In a recent article,11 Daniel Chlique, the author’s brother-in-law, provided the lyrics (and music) of the “Chant des déportés” (“Prisoners’ Song”), which he composed in quarantine in Block 47. He adds: “The song was sung, at the request of a Block leader—a German political prisoner—by a chorus of three hundred French prisoners, designated for the convoy of 25 February heading for Mauthausen.” Various testimonies of singing and popular-song sessions that took place during this period, in quarantine, have been provided by Tauzin,12 Rassinier,13 and Brother Birin.14 Even today they give rise to great surprise among those from the earlier convoys.
THE STATE OF THE BUCHENWALD CAMP IN THE SUMMER OF 1943. The Buchenwald camp was set up in 1937 with the arrival of a first group of Greens on July 19. On August 6 there were 1,400 prisoners on the site—at once Reds, Greens, and Purples. Kogon’s account of the camp’s beginnings is accurate.15 On this well-known subject, Rassinier put together a totally mythical text to illustrate his theories about the camps.16 The first years were very hard for the Germans and Austrians who, at the time, made up the mass of the prisoners. The “fundamentalists” and the Jews particularly suffered. The observation that, in 1944, the camp had become a “sanitarium” was widespread among survivors at that time, and although surprising for those who had only recently arrived, was no doubt sincere.
In early 1943 work within the concentration camp complex itself still exceeded industrial activities. The most striking example is the construction of the eight-mile-long railway line linking Weimar to Buchenwald, decided on in March 1943. On June 21, the appointed date, after working day and night at a maniacal pace, the line was inaugurated by the SS elite, led by Kammler. The very next day, work had to start up again on a six-month project.17 The prisoners coming from Compiègne on September 18, 1943, arrived at the Weimar station and were subsequently transported to Buchenwald by truck.18 The January 1944 railway convoys, however, went right to Buchenwald. The transport list of arrivals at Buchenwald, which was not available until after March 1943, indicates that prisoners came from Wewelsburg in April. They carried out work in one of the SS’s major centers, south of Paderborn.
Nevertheless, in Buchenwald itself, arms-industry-related factories were set up. That of the DAW—Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke—belonged to the SS and was located inside the barbed-wire fences. Himmler finally obtained Speer’s authorization to construct the Gustloff’s thirteen halls outside the camp; a large Kommando, however, was already set up in the Gustloff factories in Weimar. There was also the Mibau Werke factory, where gyroscopes were built.19 A more distant Kommando was set up in the Junkers factories in Schönebeck, near Magdeburg.
All these factories required personnel, which the managers imagined they could find among the prisoners who were arriving—the French for instance. It was thus recommended that those arriving present themselves as Facharbeiter,20 that is, as qualified workers, or at least as Handwerker, manual laborers. The others, intellectuals or farmers, could be used for outside Kommandos, for the terrace.21
In actual fact they were far more likely to be registered on transport lists heading for Dora or Laura—another Buchenwald Kommando that will be mentioned further on. Guy Raoul-Duval, before arriving at Dora in January 1944, remained in Buchenwald, assigned to an outside Kommando in October 1943. According to his recollection, this experience was not too bad.22 In the concentration camp universe, where nothing was ever really sure, many prisoners had a succession of contrasting experiences. This was the case for the Czech prisoners Benès23 and Litomisky,24 who passed through Buchenwald in the autumn of 1943 on their way from Auschwitz to Dora. They felt that they had landed on another planet.
They were struck above all by two things: on the one hand, the limited nature of the brutalities inflicted by the prisoners wearing armbands and the SS, not overly present in the camp; and on the other hand, the regularity with which rations were handed out and packages distributed. The definitive takeover of the camp administration by the Reds—communists as it happened—was decisive in this regard. It came about in June 1943.
Hermann Langbein, an Austrian who spent a long time in Dachau, then in Auschwitz, is—along with Kogon—the best analyst of the Nazi concentration camp system. In two chapters of his work, La Résistance dans les camps de concentration nationaux-socialistes, he successively examined “The prisoners’ autonomous administration” and “The struggle between the Reds and the Greens.”25 He insists on the need to avoid an excessively black-and-white view of events in seeing Evil on the side of the Greens and Good on the side of the Reds. He nonetheless concludes that, overall, the Reds were by far and away preferable to the Greens, both in the case of communist control as at Buchenwald or Sachsenhausen, or social democratic and Catholic control as in Dachau. The omnipresence of Greens at Dora, in the difficult periods, on the other hand, had tragic consequences.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMP SYSTEM THROUGH STATISTICS. The supply by the SS of an ever larger concentration camp labor force to arms manufacturers and several other factories, starting in 1943, had major consequences on the structure and operation of the camps, which underwent a veritable transformation. The incomplete and inconsistent character of the available documents makes it impossible to carry out a complete statistical study on this subject, but the information that has been gathered is no less significant.
One important indication concerns the number of camps and Kommandos based in them. Wolfgang Sofsky provides some numbers, taken from G. Schwarz.26 “In December 1942, there were only 82 external work Kommandos (Außenkommandos), 29 of these were in Dachau alone. A year later, the total had climbed to 196. Most of the satellite camps were not set up until 1944; in June of that year, there were 341, and by January 1945, there were 13 main camps with a total of 662 Außenkommandos.” The (benign) terminological confusion is of little consequence. What matters is the exceptional progression of the totals. To fill all the camps and Kommandos, an increasing number of prisoners was required. On the basis of three documents stemming from the SS, Sofsky points out the following progression of the total:27 115,000 in August 1942, more than 200,000 in May 1943, 525,000 in August 1944, and 714,000 in January 1945.
With regard simply to “entries” in the Buchenwald camp alone, Kogon drew up a table28 on the basis of the following figures: 14,111 in 1942, 42,177 in 1943, 97,866 in 1944, and 43,823 in the first quarter of 1945. These figures, which correspond to identity numbers, comprise both newcomers into the concentration camp system and prisoners coming from other camps (organized transfers or evacuations). For Buchenwald, the progression appears with the series of identity numbers having to do with the arrivals of French prisoners. In June 1943 the numbers were into the “14,000s,” the “small numbers” having been reused, occasionally several times over, following deaths since the beginning of the camp. The arrival of the “20,000s” and “21,000s” took place in September 1943, the “39,000s” to “44,000s” in January 1944, and the “77,000s” in August 1944. These and other convoys will be studied in greater detail later.
However one looks at these figures, established according to a variety of criteria, what stands out is that the situation in late 1944, before the evacuation of the camps in the east, was incommensurable with that in early 1943, both in terms of the number of prisoners and their geographical distribution.
The observed rise in the number of prisoners results from the conjunction of various factors that Sofsky,29 among others, has enumerated. There was first of all, in late 1942, the transfer into the camps of inmates from prisons in the Reich—those serving sentences of more than eight years in the case of Germans and Czechs, and more than three years for Poles, as it was specified. There was also, progressively, the transfer of more or less free workers into the camps on the basis of a wide variety of accusations, the most often targeted being the Polish and the Ostarbeiter, Ukrainians, or others; the same lot was reserved for many Soviet prisoners of war. It was then decided to use a Jewish or Gypsy labor force outside of the Auschwitz complex. Rather curiously, in his assessments, Sofsky seems to overlook the “deportees” from the occupied countries in the west and south of Europe.
One of the very important consequences of this overall growth in the number of prisoners in the camps was that it made the Germans very much a minority. Langbein provides several examples of this.30 “In Buchenwald, they made up twelve percent after the liberation, almost a third of whom were Austrian; in Mauthausen, in March 1945, the proportion was approximately nine percent, and eight percent in Dora, including all the sub-camps, on 1 April 1945. Twelve prisoners from Sachsenhausen, who were still there immediately after the Liberation, wrote up a report according to which there was, after 1942, no more than a minority of eight to ten percent Germans, very few of whom were political. Dachau, on Liberation day, had no more than three percent Germans and 0.8% Austrians.” Langbein followed up with percentages for Gross Rosen (2 percent), Flossenbürg (5.5 percent), and for Auschwitz (1.9 percent).
This development was to the Greens’ benefit in that they had an easier time finding jobs as Kapos, in particular in exterior Kommandos rather than in the large camps. The de facto complicity between them and the SS was reinforced in these Kommandos, as was the case at Ellrich. In the large camps, on the other hand, though not without some difficulty, a link was established between German and Austrian Reds and foreign politicians, in Buchenwald and Dachau for example, as will be shown.
CONVOYS FROM BUCHENWALD AND DORA. Examining the convoys that came to Buchenwald, most of them heading for Dora, between June 1943 and January 1944, makes it possible to appreciate the mechanisms of the transformation in the life of the camps.
What is first of all noticeable is the volume of convoys coming from the Ukraine. The origin was initially Dnepropetrovsk, on July 26, August 26, August 29, and September 19, 1943, then Kirovograd on October 11 and November 17, 1943, and Nikolaiev on October 6, November 27 and 30, 1943, and then March 23, 1944. These convoys correspond to the progressive evacuation of the camps in the Ukraine, accompanying the German retreat after the defeat at Kursk in early July. This amounted to 4,140 deportees from Dnepropetrovsk, 847 from Kirovograd, 1,569 from Nikolaiev, and 233 from Kiev, for a total of 6,789. A very significant portion of these “Ukrainians,” virtually all of whom were young, were transferred to Dora after the quarantine. Thus they showed up again in the tunnel, where they did not go unnoticed. The other group of convoys came from Compiègne: 962 on June 27, 900 on September 4, 989 on September 18, 911 on October 30, 921 on December 16, 1943, 1,939 on January 19, 1,990 on January 24, and 1,580 on January 29. The total of 10,192 deportees is considerable; they were mainly French, with a few foreigners from France; the convoy of January 19 included a group of Spanish Republicans.
From January to May 1943 there had been three large convoys from Compiègne to Sachsenhausen (3,650 deportees at the outset) and two others to Mauthausen (2,000 deportees). Subsequently, right up until March 1944, all the convoys were sent to Buchenwald. The first convoys were made up largely of young people, who, not wanting to do their STO, had gone underground or had attempted to cross the Pyrenees to get to North Africa through Spain.
Subsequently, the proportion of more elderly French Resistance fighters seems to have been greater, the Germans having notably decided to deport those men whom they had long since arrested and had been holding in Fresnes, Romainville, or Compiègne. Three examples can be mentioned: Marcel Baillon, arrested on August 26, 1942, Father Jean-Paul Renard, on November 11, 1942, and Jean-Henry Tauzin, on November 26, 1941.
This series of convoys in the direction of Buchenwald, followed by still others in May and August, accounts for the large proportion of French who were in the camp at the time of the Liberation. But, above all, it accounts for the fact that Dora has occasionally been called the “French cemetery,” the deportees from various convoys very often having been sent to Dora, and then Ellrich and Harzungen. It was pointed out above, in chapter 1, that the Italian government of Badoglio had concluded an armistice with the Allies on September 8, 1943, and that the German troops had occupied Rome on the 12th. The SS then took control of the camps where Yugoslavian partisans were interned: given the zones annexed or occupied by Italy, these were Slovenians, Croatians from Dalmatia, and Montenegrins. Many of them arrived in Dora several weeks later, via Dachau and Buchenwald. With them came Italian soldiers, who had been disarmed and taken prisoner by the Germans in the Balkans or in Italy itself. They had, as will be seen, a special status without really being privileged.
The ethnic makeup of Dora’s original population, to a large extent due to the political circumstances of the moment, is out of keeping with the usual makeup of large German camps. Germans from Buchenwald, a large majority of whom were Greens, were sent to supervise this rarely German-speaking population. The Reds, having control of the Arbeitsstatistik, thus had the chance to get rid of a certain number of them—and not necessarily the most friendly ones. To fill out the numbers, prisoners were brought in from other camps, particularly from Auschwitz. In the first weeks there were several convoys of Poles from Buchenwald to Dora. Czechs also arrived, who, according to available testimony, seem to have already passed through Auschwitz. It was in this way that, in a few months, a diverse population of prisoners came together, the majority of them novices in the universe of the concentration camps, and no doubt for this reason all the more liable to suffer from the conditions that were to be imposed on them.