As has already been indicated, it was not until April–May of 1944 that a real, properly organized camp came into being in the valley of Dora. It was, however, primarily a sort of small dormitory city for the prisoners working in the nearby tunnel factory and the corresponding maintenance departments. At the same time the Sonderstab Kammler (see chapter 11) launched a series of work sites in the surrounding area and opened new camps. The workforce generally came from Buchenwald and sometimes passed through the Dora camp, where some prisoners stayed for a while. Sick patients received care at Dora, where there was also a crematorium. The entire group remained, however, under the authority of Buchenwald.
This confusing situation came to an end in the autumn of 1944. The decision was made to grant autonomy to the new Dora-Mittelbau camp on September 28, and it took effect on November 1. In addition to the Dora camp itself, the new entity included a specific number of camps and Kommandos. The details of the new structure that was set up at the time will be presented in chapter 15. A few weeks later, in early 1945, the arrival of trains evacuating the camps in Eastern Europe disrupted the balance in this system.
The present chapter deals only with the Dora camp, taken in the strict sense, until the end of 1944.
BETWEEN THE REDS AND THE GREENS. As in all camps of a certain size, internal administration was left to prisoners—in other words, practically speaking, to German prisoners. At Dora like everywhere else, the SS had to choose between the Reds and the Greens, i.e., between political prisoners and common criminals, first of all for the position of Lagerältester, or senior member of the camp.
During the first months the LÄ1 and 2 were communists named Georg Thomas and Ludwig Sczymczak, who arrived at Buchenwald after the first convoy. They were relieved of their functions in February 1944 for refusing to carry out hangings, and camp management was placed in the hands of Willy Zwiener, a Green. It would appear, however, that the second most influential person after Förschner, the camp commander, was another Red, Albert Kuntz, the Bautechniker, who was in charge of camp construction.
It seems that he was the one who persuaded Förschner and Pister, the Buchenwald commander who came to inspect Dora, to designate two communist leaders, Joseph Gamisch and Christian Beham, who were sent from Buchenwald to become LÄ1 and 2. These men were of higher caliber than Thomas and Sczymczak. Later accounts by Czechs and Poles were favorable to them. Apparently the objective was to put the Dora camp under an authority comparable to the one imposed at Buchenwald. It would seem that in order to ensure the smooth running of the factory, the workers were to be properly treated in the camp. Another communist leader, Fritz Pröll, simultaneously arrived from Buchenwald at the Dora Revier.
It is difficult to determine the exact date on which Gamisch and Beham assumed their functions, but it appears to have been sometime in July. Certainly the months that followed were the least unpleasant in the Dora camp for those lucky enough to remain there. The communist leaders at Dora were arrested in late 1944 and early 1945, which will be discussed later, and camp management was again placed in the hands of a Green, Roman Drung, who remained the LÄ to the end.
Aside from the top leadership of the camp, in the summer of 1944 Reds played the main roles in camp administration at the Revier, kitchen, etc., but there were not enough of them to exert real control over the entire base—that is, to manage the blocks.
BLOCK ORGANIZATION. Each concentration camp in Nazi Germany contained a number of blocks. Some were permanent structures and others were made of wood. At Buchenwald some blocks had two floors. When the prisoners were housed in preexisting buildings that were not always suitable, such as those at Ellrich, the buildings were called blocks. The tunnel “dormitories” were supposed to be blocks.
In the Dora camp, which was methodically constructed, the blocks were all built on the same model, out of wood and assembled using prefabricated components, with their sanitary and other facilities. The entrance was in the middle of the façade, and each building had two wings, called Flügel. In each wing were two succeeding rooms; the first was used as a dining hall with tables and benches, and the second was the dormitory, with bedsteads. Each wing was heated by a stove in the refectory. In the center of the block was the Waschraum, a sort of shower room with basins and toilets.
The block hierarchy was composed of a Blockältester—or block elder—and his two deputies the Stubendienst, each one in charge of a wing. The Blockältester was the “senior member of the block,” but, in French, he was almost always called the block chief, which generated a certain amount of confusion with the Blockführer, who will be discussed shortly. The other important person in the block was the Schreiber or secretary, who kept track of the number of people in the workforce. In one block there was also a Friseur, who was a hairdresser, along with various other aides who had a more or less permanent status, such as a night watchman. In each wing a corner was set aside in the rear of the first room for the Blockältester, the Schreiber, etc.
Each block was under the authority of an SS man, the Blockführer, who could intervene at any time but was usually content to make regular inspection visits and sign the papers kept by the Schreiber. The personal relationship between the Blockführer and the Blockältester was important.
LIFE IN THE BLOCKS. Many of the blocks at Dora were occupied by tunnel specialists working in shifts in Kommandos that had almost unvarying head counts, which ensured a great deal of stability. The two shifts of the Ko Scherer relieved each other in Block 104 from May 1944 to April 1945, and the prisoners such as Guy Boisot and André Fortané, René Souquet and André Sellier, Joseph Béninger and Aurélien Féliziani, and many others got used to sleeping head to foot on the same straw mattress day after day. The Bünemann Kommando, as Breton notes, was in Block 102.
The block was first and foremost a dormitory, and the role of the Blockältester and the Stubendienst was to enforce discipline and cleanliness. Some of them took advantage of their authority in the long-standing concentration camp tradition to become overzealous regarding muddy shoes or the alignment of blankets. This was one of the ways prisoners were terrorized at the Breendonck fort in Belgium; but at Dora, the authorities rarely went that far.
The block was also the place where soup was served and rations distributed. Strict rationing was a characteristic feature of most of the Buchenwald blocks, but that was seldom the case at Dora. The Blockältester and the people around him tended with more or less discretion to put some aside for themselves. The very limited rations also encouraged stealing, especially of bread, among prisoners. In the camp blocks there was no longer any organized looting like that in the tunnel dormitories. Yet the temptation remained strong, and theft was often severely punished.
Packages and letters were another major problem, because of the address. When new prisoners arrived at Buchenwald in quarantine, they were allowed to write to their families (unless they were classified NN) and give them the number of a Buchenwald block. After their transfer to Dora their address remained Weimar-Buchenwald; Block 17 meant Dora. Then the number of the block at Dora was added, and the address became, for example, 17/14. Later, Weimar-Buchenwald disappeared and was replaced by Sangerhausen, a town in Prussian Saxony twenty-five miles from Nordhausen. The same address was used for packages. Hence it was important not to change camps and consequently identity numbers.
Packages arrived intact at Buchenwald. At Dora they were more or less looted even before they reached the block. It was therefore generally a good idea to be generous with the Blockältester, if what was left in the package was worth anything. The most extraordinary experience in this regard is recounted by Rassinier, who arrived at Dora in March 1944.
According to Rassinier’s account1 he was saved by his packages and the way he made use of them. First, he earned the protection of his block chief, who wore a black triangle, by sharing a “huge piece of bacon” with him. As a result the packages addressed to his identity number were no longer looted. He thus had the advantage of a “precious exchange currency” allowing him to go to the Revier and stay there. He claims that he received a package every day. By comparison Birin2 was at a severe disadvantage. “Out of the 219 packages sent by my family, colleagues and friends from Épernay,” he writes, “no more than twenty actually reached me, and they were usually looted.”
The vast majority of French deportees, aware of the problems of getting fresh supplies and of the cost of living in France in 1944, were naturally impressed by the volume of Rassinier’s packages. They received fewer, more modestly sized packages, which indicates how precious sharing among small groups of comrades in the same Kommando actually was.
Daily life in Dora depended in large part on the atmosphere of the block and the Blockältester’s personality. Sadron3 talks about Block 104: “Naturally, our Block chief was a German. He was very dignified, with a dark, impassive, odd-looking face. Apparently, he was a highly esteemed crook, and therefore enjoyed the esteem of the SS who gave him small gifts. He lived in a small enclosure in a corner of the refectory, decorated with lace and paintings.
“The Stubendienst maintained this holy place with fearful enthusiasm. The Stubendienst, who was also German, was merely a petty criminal without any stature. Prognathous, with a low forehead, short nose and outsized arms and legs, he was nicknamed the ‘Pithecanthropus.’ For a few quarts of soup, he became totally enslaved to the Block chief. He, in turn, supported a small circle of friends, mostly Russians, who did the work he was supposed to do. He compensated them by giving them food stolen from our rations.
“Upon entering the ‘dining hall,’ one had a favorable impression. The walls were decorated artistically in apple green and brown. They were covered by a number of paintings, some of which were not bad. It is hard to say where they came from. I think our Block chief, in keeping with a long tradition, was the patron of a few artists who were spared drudgery and were given a bit of our food.
“The light wooden tables were covered with multicolored tablecloths. These came from our packages: handkerchiefs, shawls and scarves, imprudently sent by our families. There were also vases filled with artificial flowers. I have no idea where they came from. They lent a rather funereal air to the place, which was rather unfortunate, but we couldn’t expect too much. . . .”
Block 9 was just below Block 104. Georges Soubirous4 remembers his block chief, named Karl, a communist mason who ran his block without any brutality. He pretended not to know about the religious activities of the abbot, Jean-Paul Renard, who, in exchange, was careful to remain discreet.
Block 9 and Block 104 were located in the city center, so to speak, unlike Block 130, which was at the far end of the camp, filled with Gypsies who had only just arrived when Spitz5 assumed his position as Schreiber. Paul, the block chief, another communist, was then transferred to Block 12 and replaced by a half-Polish Green from Upper Silesia named Eric Wyglendatz, who was known as Anna. He engaged in bootlegging alcohol along with the other members of his team. “Folette,” referred to as “the infamous” by Pierre Gabrion,6 who, like Bailly, had to deal with him in Block 24, was also in the area. He was then let loose as the chief of Block 132. Spitz claims to have seen him wearing first a pink, then a red, and finally, a green triangle. How he met his end at Bergen-Belsen will be discussed later.
Anna managed to persuade Maurice de la Pintière,7 a friend of Spitz, to paint a fresco in his block. He had already decorated the canteen and Spitz notes: “I remember, among other things, a village feast where all the people were given the masks of Kapos, Lagerschutz and even familiar SS members, and everyone admired their resemblance.”
CAMP BUREAUCRACY. Administering a German concentration camp always involved a great deal of paperwork. A list of prisoners had to be kept up to date, indicating their current whereabouts (in a block, at the Revier, etc.) and their assignment to a Kommando. Statistics were kept by nationality or by prisoner status, especially in the case of Germans. Even cause of death was recorded.
This meant finding bureaucrats among the prisoners. At Buchenwald the bureaucracy in 1944 was entirely in the hands of German political prisoners and their friends from Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands, etc. At Dora the situation was more confusing: there were few German Reds and the Greens were often mediocre, which meant there were possibilities open to prisoners from other countries who had some knowledge of German. This was also the case for administrative positions in the tunnel.
The basic component of the camp bureaucracy was the Schreibstube, the secretariat, which was associated with the block Schreiber. One witness, Charles Spitz,8 has provided a definition of their work. He became the Schreiber for Block 120 in October 1944 and remained in that position until the evacuation.
“In short, I was in charge of keeping the Block’s ‘accounts.’ I was given a Blockbuch for this purpose, in which the prisoners’ family names, first names, identity numbers and nationalities were written, along with the Kommando to which they were assigned. When I arrived, the Appellbuch listed 239 occupants. The number varied, however, because whenever anyone changed Kommandos, he automatically went to a different Block. There were also hospitalized prisoners who were required to show a paper with their identity number and date of release as soon as they left the Revier. When only the paper arrived, bearing a Saint-Andrew’s cross, it meant that the prisoner had been released via the crematorium. All I had to do was put a similar cross in the Blockbuch, along with the date, and reduce the unit’s headcount.
“At night, we had to prepare for roll-call. It was a big deal. The Appellbuch was divided into two parts. On the left-hand side were the identity numbers of incoming and outgoing prisoners, those who were ill in the Block and those who were in the Bunker. The right-hand side was used for three days. First, the theoretical headcount was entered, then the actual headcount, with an adequate justification for the difference between the two. We were not released until the SS Blockführer had signed his name in the box reserved for the day at the bottom of the page. Roll-call did not end until all of the Blocks had received their final release.”
Spitz’s experience has allowed us to determine how the head count evolved in a block. In Block 120 there were 239 occupants when he arrived; the number rose to 313 and then to 345 on April 1, on the eve of the evacuation.
On the basis of information received from the blocks, the Schreibstube kept his file—the Kartei—up to date. On October 15, 1944, Butet9 was taken on as a typist after a short stay at the Revier. He had to retype some thirty-two thousand Kartei data sheets onto new forms as a consequence of the autonomy that was to be granted Dora-Mittelbau.
The other mainstay of the camp bureaucracy was the Arbeitsstatistik, which kept up-to-date figures on jobs that were filled and jobs that went vacant. As the Kommandos worked for Mittelwerk, there was an Arbeitseinsatz man in the tunnel who noted the needs of the personnel director and presented candidates to him when the position called for a specific skill. The Arbeitsstatistik would search for specialists in the camp by questioning the Schreiber and making announcements on the camp radio. Thus those who worked could find out about vacant jobs and tell their friends about them.
That is what Alfred Birin,10 a fluent German-speaking native of Lorraine, actually did on numerous occasions. When he was working on an excavation he heard on the radio in his block that the Arbeitsstatistik was looking for a Schreiber. He presented himself and was taken on along with another Frenchman, Pierre Ziller. First he worked as an interpreter, then he drew up Kommando lists. Later on, for example, he was the one who had Spitz appointed as Schreiber for Block 130.
A third institution, the Politische Abteilung, did not concern itself with the internal operations of the camp. It kept the political and criminal files that followed the prisoners on their peregrinations between the prisons and the camps. By chance Albert Besançon,11 who went through the small camp of Rechlin-Retzow (in Mecklenburg) before arriving in Ellrich at a late date, was able to get a glimpse of his file, which had accompanied him from Fresnes to Sachsenhausen via Neuenbremme, Trier, Cologne, and Berlin. The prisoners who worked at the Politische Abteilung managed the data sheets but did not have access to the files.
Prisoners were not only tracked by their files but also by their personal “belongings,” as Guido Schreve, a Dutchman arrested in France under the false French identity of André Bérard,12 was to observe. After several weeks at the Lagerkommando, he was assigned as a bureaucrat to the Häftlingsklei-dungskammer, the storehouse where the personal “belongings” of camp prisoners were kept in order. The block was especially fitted out with a big hall and offices. There was a data sheet for each prisoner with an inventory of his stored belongings; clothes were kept separately from valuables. In an envelope bearing his identity number, Bérard found his wallet, his watch, his rings, and a pen, which had been taken away from him when he was imprisoned at Fresnes. The objects had followed him to Buchenwald. When the Dora camp became independent from Buchenwald, the belongings of the prisoners who were transferred to Dora went along with them.
Two other examples may be given to show the care with which these belongings were stored. Michel13 recounts that one day Pierre Rozan was called to the gate of the camp to be given his watch, which had been sent from Buchenwald, for reasons that will soon be explained. André Rogerie14 found himself in Auschwitz after passing through Buchenwald and Dora and being sent in a “transport” to Maïdanek; one day he was summoned to an office to identify his belongings, which had been transferred from Buchenwald.
Death notices were sent to the Kammer. Only then did the prisoners’ belongings become the property of the Reich. In the context, such legalism never ceased to be a source of amazement for those who encountered it.
THE ROLE OF THE BUREAUCRATS. It was important for each of the national communities to have well-placed representatives in positions where they could gather information and help their comrades.
Among the French, as luck would have it, the German-language skills of Pierre Rozan (a “21,000”) were discovered within the first few weeks by the SS-Lagerführer, who made him his Schwung—that is, a sort of orderly. As a result of this position he was to be precious witness later on. Since it was necessary to know the time in his department, he was able to recover his watch under the aforementioned conditions. Similarly, it was important for the French to have the influence of Birin and Zeller in the Arbeitsstatistik.
Czechs obtained most of the administrative positions (half of them, according to Krokowski),15 especially in the Schreibstube and as Schreiber in the blocks. The others were Polish or French, such as Reverend Heuzé, Barbaud, and Baillon in addition to Spitz, who remembers that the Schreiber of Block 116 was Belgian, a secretary at the town hall of Malines.16
The Polish were well represented in the Politische Abteilung, which was jokingly referred to as the Polnische Abteilung. Above all the Poles succeeded, together with a group of students, in monopolizing the firemen’s Kommando, which was sometimes called outside the camp to intervene after bombing raids. The sampling of nationalities sometimes seems to have been systematic. In the Kleiderkammer, the pseudo-Frenchman Bérard found himself in the company of a Pole, a Czech, and a Belgian.
Largely thanks to Birin, a few odd Frenchmen found relatively peaceful positions. Georges Pescadère, an artist and painter, was called back to Ellrich to become Schriftmaler (letter painter) in a studio for making armbands, where three Czechs were already working. In the final weeks Bramoullé became Schriftmaler at the Politische Abteilung.17 Arsène Doumeau, on the other hand, a former prisoner in Wiener Neustadt, after many vicissitudes, was made Lager-buchbinder (camp bookbinder).
Even in subordinate positions, camp bureaucrats were privileged. After joining the Arbeitsstatistik, Birin18 slept in a block divided into separate rooms, with eight individual beds in each. “The food, moreover, was not as bad. We were given our rations in the office itself, and there were often extras which we were able to share with many of our comrades.”
Butet,19 who became a typist, was assigned to Block 27, a peaceful block with Marien Leschi and his team who were in charge of the camp radio, and Georges Schmidt, the Alsatian polyglot who worked as an interpreter. Bollaert was also there in his capacity as night watchman. “I could have almost as much soup and bread as I wanted.” He was also given a new, clean uniform in keeping with his role.
A FEW ANCILLARY FACILITIES. When the prisoners left the tunnel dormitories to occupy the camp blocks in May 1944, they found not only an administration already set up but a number of facilities typical of large traditional camps: a canteen, a cinema, a library, a whorehouse, and a special block for young prisoners. No documents are available on this topic, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that Kuntz as well as Förschner considered that all of this was necessary in a camp of a certain level. Naturally, appearances had little in common with reality.
In theory the canteen was linked to bonuses for specialists that were given out by Mittelwerk in the form of camp marks—supposedly to allow them to improve on their ordinary fare. When they went to the canteen, they saw that there was almost nothing to buy, which is hardly surprising. Sadron20 mentions red beets and mustard, whereas the author found nothing but cumin seed. Everyone was thus reduced to hoarding. The canteen building mainly served as a meeting place for block chiefs, Kapos and Lagerschutz, which explains why La Pintière’s frescoes met with such success.
The Kino was hardly ever frequented by anyone besides the German “functionaries” in the camp. Some Frenchmen such as Soubirous21 remember going there once out of curiosity and never going back. The building was used for another purpose, which will be discussed later: it was there that people arriving by trains, such as the convoy from Gross Rosen in February 1945, were crammed together.
There really was a library—run by Emile, an Austrian communist—though it was remarkably second-rate. Once, out of curiosity, the author borrowed a treatise on geopolitics by Hausenhofer, a classic of the Nazi period. Garnier22 read a work that was, interestingly enough, highly critical of the USSR and its work camps. Eckert23 took out two books, including a Maigret detective story in French, which was, incidentally, confiscated by an SS man. It certainly did not encourage cultural activity in the camp, which no one cared about anyway. The Puff—that is, the Bordell—operated, as in Buchenwald, only for a minority. The euphemism used for this gathering of interested individuals was Sonderbau, the “special building.” The rest of the camp had nothing to do with it.
The young prisoners’ block was number 115 (Bailly says 31). It housed the Jugendliche, i.e., prisoners under the age of eighteen who were neither Jews nor Gypsies. They wore a white armband with a J surrounded by a black circle. Two Frenchmen who stayed there have each given an account: Jean Gouvenaux24 and above all Jacques-Christian Bailly.25 Most of the occupants were Ukrainians, who were easily given to violence.
Kommandos in charge of various excavation, road, and construction-work projects remained in the Dora camp until August 1944. This included, in particular, the Schachtkommando to which Mialet26 belonged. He describes himself as a “sleepwalker,” digging a trench, building brick walls, and taking part in pouring the concrete for the tunnel halls where the dormitories were located, which were to be used for assembling V1s. Bailly belonged to the Gawabau Kommando, which dug trenches and unloaded freight cars.
These Kommandos disappeared in mid-August and their members were sent to Harzungen (e.g., Mialet) or more often to Ellrich. The AEG Kommando, which had until then been a privileged Kommando, was also sent to Ellrich. They will appear once again in the next chapter.
THE LAGERKOMMANDO. Thus no one was left in the Dora camp except the tunnel workers who came and slept there, shift after shift, and a hodgepodge of prisoners assigned to maintenance services and grouped together under the convenient umbrella term of Lagerkommando. Subsequently there would again be Kommandos working outside the camp and further Mittelwerk sites.
Some Lagerkommando activities were ongoing and organized, such as running the kitchen, the laundry, and disinfecting. Prisoners of all nationalities were assigned to them. Marcel Martin27 was in the kitchen at Dora before changing to the one in Harzungen. Sermot28 worked in the laundry. The Russians and the Poles seemed solidly entrenched there and they fiercely defended their positions.
Two ancillary activities were partly reserved for prisoners released from the Revier with written recommendations. In February 1944, instead of going back to the Maurer Wifo, Mialet29 was assigned for a time to the Kartoffelschäler, the potato peelers. Joseph Jourdren30 remained there from February 5, 1945, until the evacuation. Others patched up striped uniforms. These activities were precarious, however. New candidates were constantly arriving and had to be put someplace. Above all, when new “transports” of sick prisoners were being organized, there was always the danger of being added on to fill the specified head count.
The Lagerkommando was also responsible for the cleanliness of the camp. The roll-call yard had to be swept, for example, which Martin31 did for a while. Delarbre32 did a remarkable drawing representing the “sweeper of the roll-call yard” seen from behind. The SS camp had to be maintained, and for a time Pierre Géhard33 was a member of that team. Le Puillandre34 belonged to a Kommando that tidied up the Nordwerk workshops at night in the northern part of the tunnel.
THE CREMATORIUM. Lagerkommando members lived in dread of being conscripted into the Sonderkommando, the “Special Kommando” that unloaded trucks of corpses from exterior camps such as Ellrich and transported them to the crematorium. There are eyewitness accounts: one by Sermot35 and one by Bérard/Schreve,36 before he joined the Kleiderkammer.
The crematorium was not a priority at Dora. As has already been noted, until March 1944 corpses were transported to Buchenwald for incineration. A temporary crematorium was then built, which Sadron37 has described: “It was a single oven, inside a miserable shed made of planks, surmounted by a long, sheet-metal pipe topped by a cone-shaped cap. It looked like a hovel in a slum. It was quite visible in the center of the camp. Day and night smoke came out of the pipe. First, when the oven was still empty, a curtain of warm air escaped, rippling transparently. Then, suddenly, black, greasy smoke poured out. The smell of burnt flesh seeped into our nostrils; we never could get used to it. After a few minutes, the smoke became bluish and transparent, like cigarette smoke. A body had been consumed.”
According to Maurice Gérard,38 this “country crematorium” was located “high up on the right, a little above Block 109.” Gérard Pichot remembered it as being close by: when he had no news of his father, Léonce, who had gone to the Revier, he dreaded finding him there on a pile of corpses waiting to be burned.39
In late September 1944 a permanent crematorium, which is still in place today, was started up on the northern hillside near the block of tubercular patients from the Revier.
THE NEW KOMMANDOS AT DORA. In the autumn of 1943 the Dora camp was initially planned to house only the prisoners working for Mittelwerk or its own personnel, which was, in fact, the situation until mid-1944. The industrial ambitions of the SS, particularly of Kammler, led to the creation of new Kommandos and the arrival of new prisoners in the camp.
Whereas the specialists working in the tunnel factory were housed in the blocks nearest the roll-call yard, newcomers were sent to the most recently built blocks in the rear of the camp. This was the case, as noted earlier, for the Hungarian Jews and Gypsies arriving from Auschwitz before they were transferred to Ellrich or Harzungen. The specialists hardly had the chance or the free time to loiter about the area. Personally, the author preferred to walk up the hill behind Block 104, where one could have an unobstructed view.
Some of the new Kommandos were made available to firms in Nordhausen, where they went to work every day. Thus one morning, Roger Combarel40 and Martial Bel were put into a group that was being taken up in two trailers hitched to two tractors. Their destination was the Schmit und Kraus tractor factory. Combarel’s job consisted in trimming parts that were cut out with a blow torch. The Meister was very unpleasant but the Kapo was a distinguished, very polite German. The factory workforce was made up mainly of French and Russian civilians with whom it was difficult to communicate, since any contact was forbidden. In early 1945 the SS transferred the Kommandos that were employed in Nordhausen to the Boelcke Kaserne, which was still acceptable.
Those Kommandos were relatively privileged. The situation was totally different, however, for those working on the B 11 underground site at Niedersachswerfen. A description of the “new Kammler work sites,” including B 11, will be provided in the next chapter. Here the workers were for the most part housed in Ellrich or Harzungen, but some were at Dora, at least for a while. One of them was Leopold Claessens,41 a Belgian from the “54,000” convoy who “was to dig underground passages in the Kohnstein for Ammoniakwerke of Niedersachswerfen.” Later on, Pierre Maho42 after working on the assembly of V1s, was sent to Kommando 32, which was doing excavation work in Niedersachswerfen.
Claessens and his comrades would later join up with their fellow Belgians in Harzungen. Kommando 32 was transferred to the Boelcke Kaserne of Nordhausen in January 1945. At Dora there was still a whole population about whom very little is known, for it would seem to have been composed mainly of Russians and Poles sent in as reinforcements when deportees stopped arriving from the West, except for a few transfers from Buchenwald. Neander43 has shown that from October 1944 to March 1945 the population of Dora grew perceptibly, whereas it was stable at Ellrich and Harzungen. This increase was used to maintain the head count among workers at the B 11 site and in the tunnel Transportkolonnen.
THE WORKINGS OF THE REVIER. In the camp as it appeared in the summer of 1944, a number of blocks—nine in all—were reserved for the Revier, forming a unit that was closed off from the rest of the camp by a fence. Only Revier personnel were allowed to go back and forth between the Revier and the rest of the camp. The sole SS who were allowed inside were those who belonged to the SS medical department; others were not allowed access in order to avoid contagion.
As Rassinier has noted,44 the blocks were gradually divided into special units for general medicine, surgery, pneumonia, pleurisy, and tuberculosis. The information he has provided does not quite coincide with the available camp map, which itself is subject to caution. In any case, the witnesses who refer to their stay at the Revier never specify the number of the block they were in, which they may never have known.
Two blocks are well known thanks to the plans drawn by André Lobstein.45 The oldest one, number 16, near the roll-call yard, was used for consultations and administration, and the last one to be built, number 129, housed tubercular patients up at the top of the camp near the new crematorium. He has called it 39A in his contribution to Témoignages strasbourgeois.
Other camps were built near Dora in Wieda, Ellrich, Harzungen, Blankenburg, and Rottleberode, which will be discussed in the following chapters, each with its own Revier, which varied widely in operating standards. Sometimes patients were sent to the Revier at Dora.
The extremely difficult conditions under which the Revier at Dora began operating in the last few months of 1943 have already been described in chapter 6. Later the situation gradually improved for three reasons: the premises were considerably expanded, new personnel were brought in, and, from April 1944 until the autumn, there was a sharp drop in patient mortality. The situation once again grew worse during the final months of the year, which will be discussed in part 5.
One of the primary concerns of those in charge of the Revier was the extreme shortage of medicines. There were, it is true, those famous, strikingly colored ointments used in the “outside ambulance.” The black one contained ichthyol and was used to disinfect and heal wounds. The whitish one was zinc oxide, which had a soothing effect. The greenish one was a mercury-based ointment used as an antiseptic. The yellowish one contained sulfur and was used to treat scabies. The only available material for bandages was crepe paper.
THE REVIER STAFF. During the year 1944 the SS doctor—or Lagerarzt—was Dr. Karl Kahr, a distinguished, distant man who had been seriously wounded on the Eastern Front. He was competent and supported improvements in his ward. On the prisoners’ side, authority in the Revier was given to two German Reds, both communists, Fritz Pröli and Schneider. They have both been described as Kapos, according to the sources, but it would seem that Pröli was actually the Schreiber. Whatever may have been the case, it appears that Pröli was sent specially to Buchenwald in April 1944 to take over the Revier, with the consent of the commanders of Buchenwald and Dora. Despite his youth, Pröli had ten years of camp life behind him and was an important figure in the communist hierarchy along with Kuntz, Gamisch, and Beham. When Lobstein46 arrived on September 28 he carried a message for Pröli from the Kapo of the Buchenwald Revier. Pröli was highly intelligent and proved to be a remarkable organizer, according to Rassinier’s account,47 which can hardly be suspected of indulgence toward communists. Furthermore, everyone held him in esteem.
The prisoner personnel was gradually increased. In February 1944, Jan Cespiva, a Czech surgeon, arrived from Auschwitz via Buchenwald. It seems that Dr. Louis Girard also joined the Revier staff in February. The team was further strengthened in March–April by two veterinarians, René Morel and Marcel Petit, director of the veterinary school of Toulouse, and in May by Dr. Jacques Poupault, who became head surgeon of the Revier with Cespiva as his deputy. In September the Belgian radiologist Frans Canivet arrived from Buchenwald and took charge of tuberculosis screening.
Aside from the doctors, scientists such as the bacteriologist Jean-Pierre Ebel and the pharmacist Albert Graf from the University of Strasbourg also played an important role. Ebel and Petit saw to it that the Labor, a test laboratory that was always snowed under with work, operated efficiently. Two medical students, André Lobstein and Jean Doucet, arrived at Dora in September and October 1944. They worked as nurses in the tubercular patients’ block, which will be discussed at length in a later chapter. The Gaillot brothers, Pierre and Jean-Louis, reinforced the team of dentists.
The importance of the Revier in the life of the camp was twofold, from the hospital as well as the political point of view. Despite inadequate resources the doctors managed to save lives. Poupault carried out a successful operation on Edmond Caussin. Paul Rassinier was to return to France after six long stays in the Revier, thanks to special protection.
At the same time the Revier was the only place in the highly fragmented concentration camp that was open. Patients arrived bringing with them information and hearsay of all sorts. The Revier was the place where rumors were disseminated, and Rassinier’s text, when examined closely, is the worst possible document on Dora, for the information it reports is more or less seriously distorted. The Revier staff members were in the best position to make contact inside the camp. The “resistance” in the camp that will be discussed later on, whether on the part of the Germans, the French, or the Czechs, was usually started by staff members from the Revier.
“PAPA” GIRARD. Dr. Jean-Louis Girard, born into a family of modest farmers in 1881 in Haut-Doubs, managed to get through medical school and in 1919, after three years of military service and five years of war and occupation, was appointed an ear-nose-and-throat doctor at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Paris. He soon became a renowned specialist, particularly for mastoid operations.
He was arrested in August 1942, went through Fresnes, Romainville, and Neuenbremme, and finally arrived in Buchenwald in October 1943, where he was assigned the identity number 30088. He was quickly sent to Dora and put on the tunnel excavation crew. He managed to hold up through sheer willpower as well as the protection of a group of young Ukrainians who were filled with respect for “Stari” (the old man). He was then sixty-two and had been unable to get himself recognized as a doctor.
One day he was summoned to report by the loudspeaker in the camp. He arrived before an SS man, his shovel resting on his shoulder and clothes covered with dust. The SS man asked him if he could operate on the mastoid of a ten-year-old child (who may have been his own son). “Doctor Girard said nothing. He put down his shovel, calmly took off his work clothes and donned a white coat. After he washed his hands and face at length, he put a gauze mask over his nose and mouth, took the trephine and hammer that were handed to him, and began striking the hammer with the extreme precision for which he was famous.”
The child survived and the skilled doctor was given a little storeroom in the Revier where, for more than a year, he was able to attend to his comrades until the end. Known as “Papa” Girard, who was “always even-tempered and efficient” according to Groeneveld, he performed fifty-two more mastoid operations. He remained at the Dora Revier during the evacuation.
He died in 1947. His daughter, Anise Postel-Vinay, who was arrested with him, managed to come back alive from Ravensbrück.
A COMPARISON. In the summer of 1944 the Buchenwald and Dora camps appear to have operated in roughly the same way. The newly completed Dora camp was organized along the lines of Buchenwald. At Dora, just as at Buchenwald, the Reds held positions of authority in the internal camp administration, and the most important ones were experienced communist activists.
There is nothing surprising about their similarity. Despite its unusual size, Dora continued to be an exterior Kommando of Buchenwald. All the prisoners at Dora had come through Buchenwald and their identity numbers were Buchenwald numbers. There were only a few weeks when the corpses from Dora were not incinerated at Buchenwald.
The vast majority of prisoners, as has already been pointed out, was composed of newcomers to the concentration camp system, but the supervisory staff, the Prominente, were all veterans of Buchenwald who knew the rules and customary practices of the system. They were mainly Germans, both Reds and Greens, and in order to be selected on high by the authorities, at least tacit agreement on the part of the SS commanders of both the camps and the political authorities of the Buchenwald camp was necessary.
The balance of power was not, however, the same in both camps. At Buchenwald the Reds enjoyed unquestioned control. At Dora there were few Reds who were politically aware and hence their situation was precarious. There were more Greens, but they did not seem to form a coherent political group. The eyewitness accounts of prisoners of other nationalities suggest that different clans organized the looting of rations and packages.
Rassinier,48 who claimed to have explained the workings of the camp from his own limited experience, gave a great deal of importance to the Häftlingsführung, or government by the prisoners. He neglected to underscore the fact that, in reality, he himself was connected to a sort of internal camp Mafia, which ensured that his packages were safeguarded and that he was able to enjoy repeated stays at the Revier, as mentioned earlier.
Gamisch and Beham, the two Lagerältester from Buchenwald, assumed their role for a short time—only a few months—which was not long enough for them to develop certain moral practices that had been possible at Buchenwald. Some eyewitness accounts of Buchenwald seem unreal to former prisoners of Dora. The author himself was struck, for example, by the following lines from an account written by Paul Le Goupil:49 “From the corridors, we could enter the common-room where there were cupboards with pigeonholes and several large tables and benches where everyone had a place—even though we could not all sit down at the same time. My soup tin together with my bread and margarine ration were at place 14 on the right-hand side of the first table, located on the left upon entering. If someone was late due to working hours, his rations remained there, all day long if necessary, and no one touched them.” That was in Block 40. Le Goupil was then transferred to Langenstein, where he found the conditions at the new camp altogether different.
In fact, the vast majority of Dora prisoners had no knowledge of Buchenwald beyond the quarantine, often accompanied with latrine and quarry duty, and hence held a poor opinion of daily life in the camp. Those who came from Buchenwald to Dora at the end of 1944, after a more or less long stay interrupted by the destruction of the factories in August, were in the best position to compare the two camps.
One of these prisoners was Olivier Richet,50 who remained at Buchenwald from January 24 to September 22, 1944. He made one point that seemed to him essential: “The great difference between Buchenwald and Dora was that social life at Buchenwald was very wide-reaching. People from one Block visited those in another Block, they could walk around and talk to one another, especially on night duty, when they had much more free time. At Dora, night duty was much harder, and the Blockältester did not encourage walking around at all. Going into another Block to try and talk to friends was definitely not appreciated. Very often, ‘definitely not appreciated’ actually meant that it was prohibited. As a matter of fact, we had very, very little contact with each other at Dora.”
Olivier Richet’s text helps us understand how it was possible at Buchenwald to have a real cultural life in addition to a social life, with a real library and even, discreetly, a jazz band. It should be noted that neither Olivier Richet nor Paul Le Goupil belonged to the camp “functionaries.” They both worked in camp factories (Gustloff, Mibau), which they were forced to leave after their destruction by bombing on August 24. They enjoyed the same status as the tunnel “specialists” at Dora who belonged to the Scherer or Bünemann Kommandos. Richet was then sent to work in the tunnel in a Kommando inspecting V1s.
The most important difference between Buchenwald and Dora was the compartmentalized social life that was restricted to the Kommandos, whose members tended to remain the same and were all housed together in the same blocks. As a result, some found themselves in a privileged environment, which was exactly how our young Bachkir viewed his situation.
POLITICAL LIFE. At the time there was a genuine political life at Buchenwald. The Reds who administered the camp were committed German communists, with an efficient clandestine leadership. Close, well-organized contact was maintained among Czech, Polish, and Dutch communists in the camp. The situation was not as clear-cut among French communists until the arrival of Marcel Paul in May 1944. The German communists also had relationships with other German Reds identified as social democrats or Catholics. The convoys from Compiègne, starting at the end of 1943, brought noncommunist parliamentary representatives and trade union activists who had friends among the French prisoners.
There was no equivalent to this at Dora, where the most outstanding personalities were either military or civil servants involved in the Resistance, as shown on the lists of those who would later become compagnons de la Libération or presidents of the Dora-Ellrich Association. Among the future presidents, Gustave Leroy, Marien Leschi, and Gabriel Lacoste were graduates of Ecole Polytechnique, along with the compagnons Jacques Brunschwig-Bordier and Louis Gentil.
General Pierre Dejussieu, a graduate of Saint-Cyr officers’ academy, head of the Secret Army in July 1944 after the arrest of General Delestraint (who was executed at Dachau at the very end), and then head of the national FFI headquarters, was arrested in May 1944. He was at Dora in August with the “77,000”s and would later be named a compagnon de la Libération and president of the association. With him arrived Émile Bollaert, prefect of the Rhône, who had been removed from office by the Vichy government and appointed in September 1943 to succeed Jean Moulin as the general delegate to the French National Liberation Committee. He was arrested in February 1944 at the same time as Pierre Brossolette. He, too, was to be named a compagnon de la Libération.
The same distinction was given to Edmond Debeaumarché, an important Resistance fighter in the French post office, who was also a “77,000,” Pierre Julitte, a “14,000” who arrived late at Dora after a long stay at Buchenwald, André Schock, who will be encountered later in connection with Harzungen, and, posthumously, André Boyer. The latter, a comrade of Brunschwig-Bordier, was killed during the bombing of Nordhausen under conditions that will be described in chapter 16.
The first former Mittelbau prisoner later to have a political career was Dr. Pierre Ségelle, who experienced not Dora but rather Ellrich, along with the evacuation to Oranienburg and Schwerin. After 1945 he was elected Socialist representative from the Loiret, then mayor of Orléans, and later appointed minister of health and minister of labor. He was also the first president of the DoraEllrich Association until his death in 1960. After 1958, two former Dora prisoners were elected Gaullist deputies to the National Assembly: Pierre Ziller in the Alpes-Maritimes riding and Paul Boudon in the Maine-et-Loire riding.
LOUIS GENTIL. Like Dejussieu and Bollaert, Louis Gentil was a World War I veteran. He was nearly fifty years old when he arrived at Dora and was assigned to V1 construction. He was an artillery colonel and up to date on the modest level of French rocket development. He obtained a leave in the spring of 1943 and was the assistant of Henry Gorce-Franklin, head of the Gallia network, which specialized in military intelligence. He then founded the Darius network in Paris and was called to London, but he was arrested a few days before his departure on May 24, 1944, and was deported in the convoy of the “77,000”s and sent to Dora. He became acquainted with Vis in Hall 45 of the tunnel factory, which he was able to evaluate as a connoisseur. He belonged more or less to the same profession as Dornberger.
He was arrested at Dora on November 3, 1944, having been denounced along with Debeaumarché and Latry by Naegelé, as we shall see in Chapter 15. He was subjected to very rough interrogation and imprisoned in Nordhausen, where, in a weakened condition, he suffered an attack of boils that went untreated. “He had a high fever. His body was covered with lesions. [ . . . ] On his right leg, he had a deep wound that looked like it was festering.” Doctor Poupault, who was in the same cell, got hold of sulfides and bandages, but the wounds suppurated and his fever continued unabated. He was finally transferred to the Revier at Dora, but it was too late and he died of septicemia in March 1945.51
POETRY AND RELIGION. The availability of paper and pencils was a decisive factor not only in drawing maps of the military situation but also for writing poems. Jean-Paul Renard’s reputation as the Dichter has already been mentioned. Upon his return to France he published a book of poems called Chaînes et Lumières (Chains and Light),52 containing the following line, which has often been reproduced: “J’ai vu, j’ai vu et j’ai vécu” [I saw, I saw and I lived]. Gustave Leroy published another text bearing the title À chacun son dû.53 When the author returned to France in 1945 he was able to bring back the writings of his friend André Fortané.
In the summer of 1944, having left the tunnel dormitories, Jean Maupoint once again took up his role as camp cabaret artist. Linotypist at the printer of the local Clermont-Ferrand newspaper in 1943, it was above all as a cabaret artist that he had been known in the city—and certain texts with a double meaning had led, in part, to his being arrested. In the course of going through Compiègne he had continued to compose songs, one of which began with “In Compiègne, in Compiègne, in this camp entirely surrounded by barbed wire”; it was known by all the prisoners who passed through. The lyrics, which were written and sung by him in Dora between August and October 1944, have been preserved. Other songs were written by Gustave Leroy, who relates in the preface to his own collection his collaboration with Jean Maupoint. Both traveled home sick from Dora in May 1945; Maupoint died in Clermont-Ferrand on August 21, 1945. What took place at that time was exceptional; yet the author, present in the camp during that same period, knew nothing about it. But he may have belonged to a different shift than Maupoint.
Jean-Paul Renard was one of the camp poets, but above all he was a priest who played a very important role. In his memoirs, Birin54 recounts the early celebration of the mass at Dora: “I was overjoyed to find some flour and some raisins in my package. The most difficult part was to make the hosts. Later on, it was easy for me to cook the dough in a sardine tin in the Arbeitsstatistik, producing hosts the size of lentils that were consecrated during particularly moving masses following a ritual even more primitive than in the Catacombs.”
Birin gave the names of three priests who left Dora: the Abbot Bourgeois, Father Renard, a Trappist and homonym of Jean-Paul, and Abbot Amyot d’Inville. Louis Coutaud55 recounts that Abbot Bourgeois was taken in a transport to Bergen-Belsen and Abbot Amyot was transferred to Wieda. He was brought back to Senlis in 1945, where he died shortly afterward. In the end Abbot Renard was the only one able to continue his priestly vocation in the camp. François Heumann56 recalls that his Firnrohr Kommando companion, the seminarian François Schwertz, took communion with hosts he provided. It would seem that the celebration of Mass under the conditions prevailing at Dora took on greater importance than at Buchenwald.
JEAN-PAUL RENARD. Jean-Paul Renard, born in 1902, was the parish priest of Miraumont in the Somme when he was arrested by the Gestapo on November 11, 1942. For a long time he continued to go by his Resistance name, Jean-Pol. He was interned for a long time at Fresnes, then in Compiègne, and finally deported to Buchenwald by the first train in January 1944. He was transferred to Dora in early February. He stayed in the tunnel dormitories until May 1944.
With his knowledge of German he was able to become a Schreiber in the Mittelwerk factory, as mentioned earlier. He enjoyed considerable prestige, both in the tunnel and in the camp, both for the calm courage with which he exercised his priestly vocation and for his open-mindedness toward fellow prisoners who were not Catholics. He succeeded in gaining the collusion of both his Kapo and his block chief, who were grateful for his discretion. On April 1, 1945, he celebrated Easter Mass under conditions that will be described in chapter 16.
Eudes de Galzain,57 a fervent Catholic, describes him in the following terms: “Jean-Paul drew people to him. He was cheerful, impulsive, poetic and priestly. As secretary to the civil engineer of Hall 15, he spent his time working in a shed made of planks. By evading the surveillance of the Kapos, we could come and see him on short visits.
“The snatches of traditional teaching he communicated to us during these brief breakaways ceased being dogmatic and became almost subversive. Subjects such as the Trinity, original sin and the Redemption that, under normal circumstances, seemed abstract and timeless, took on an air of bravado as Jean-Paul explained them in the Tunnel, under the nose of the SS. Menschen, fallen human beings, we went against the prohibitions to do our dangerous theology.”
RESISTANCE AT DORA. Discussing the “Resistance” at Buchenwald and at Dora is a delicate task for two reasons. First, because there have been sharp controversies on the topic with respect to Buchenwald, which have resurfaced on occasion. Second, because some witnesses have occasionally lacked restraint in narrating certain events, which antagonized some of their comrades.
As far as the French are concerned, the most recent statement issued by Pierre Durand in 1991 might well serve as the basis for several observations concerning Dora. It is obvious that in late 1943 and early 1944 certain practices enabled certain Frenchmen to avoid the “transports” from Buchenwald to Dora because they were recognized as communists. Conversely, others were classified in such a way as to make their transfer unavoidable. A single quotation from Durand58 will suffice here, for it is characteristic: “Marcel Petit knew one of those false Communists who played a harmful role in the relations between French and German prisoners. He was one of those people who was ready to play any card to his own advantage. I am not confusing these people with the Communists I knew later on, under difficult circumstances. [ . . . ] The fellow I am talking about—we’ll call him ‘Maufaix’—had succeeded in gaining the trust of the Block chief, Erich, in the quarantine camp where we had been since our arrival by the third convoy from Compiègne in January 1944. He claimed to be a Communist and had acquired a privileged position in the Block. He ‘helped’ Erich determine the political opinions of each person. Only later did I learn that he had categorized me as a rather suspect ‘bourgeois reactionary.’ I tried to let Erich know that his trust had been misplaced, but was unable to do so. The individual in question was not unmasked until later on, but by then, he had already done a great deal of harm.” Louis Garnier,59 who was in the same convoy and had talked with Petit, knew the name that “Maufaix” was using at the time and that he was suspected of having denounced his comrades in Toulouse. It was impossible to locate him after 1945. Gamier also knew that the same character appears in the account given by Rassinier,60 who was also in the same convoy, under the name of the “little gimp” who claimed to have identified Thälmann and Breitscheid at Buchenwald. Petit, as was stated earlier, went to Dora and was assigned to the Revier. He saw Rassinier there and later agreed, out of indulgence, to serve as a moral witness for him in a trial.
In his account, Rassinier reveals the low opinion he had of the other members of his convoy, which also included David Rousset and Jorge Semprun—who, of course, were not yet famous. He mentions only the writer Benjamin Crémieux, who was Jewish.
Durand furthermore shows how the leaders of the French Resistance who belonged to the three convoys in January were able to be identified and kept at Buchenwald. Pineau, who was there under the false identity of Grimaux and knew too many secrets to disclose his real identity, allowed Colonel Manhès (whom he calls Manevy) a free hand. Courtaud61 says in his memoirs that he met Manhès. He preferred to remain with his companions and ended up being sent in a transport not to Dora but to the Laura Kommando, which will be discussed in chapter 11.
The French prisoners at Buchenwald entered a new phase with the virtually simultaneous arrival of two trains in May 1944, the second of which had made a detour via Auschwitz. Among the prisoners was Marcel Paul, who managed to establish ties with the German communists and with the noncommunist leaders of the French Resistance.
In an article published in 1997 in the magazine Le Serment, Paul Le Goupil62 was eager to specify the conditions under which the “transport” lists were drawn up and sometimes modified at Buchenwald. This topic, as will be seen later, generated serious debate after the war between German and Soviet communists. Le Goupil thought that Marcel Paul had played a positive role under delicate conditions. Le Goupil belonged to the “tattooed” convoy that went through Auschwitz on its way to Buchenwald in May 1944, along with Marcel Paul and the author’s father, Louis Sellier, who was one of the noncommunist trade union activists (among them Christian Pineau) who had founded the Libé-Nord resistance movement.
Everything that has just been said concerns Frenchmen about whom information is available, even if it is confusing and does not rule out controversy. Regrettably, there is nothing comparable concerning the Czech, Polish, or Dutch prisoners.
At Dora itself no real ties between prisoners, outside of very small groups, were conceivable before June 1944, when a real camp finally came into existence. The French began having a certain amount of influence only when their numbers increased at the Revier and two Frenchmen arrived in the Arbeitsstatistik. Young prisoners working in the tunnel, Claude Lauth and Pierre Hémery, had contacts in the camp. Lauth was a comrade of Jean Michel, who had been at the Revier a long time. Hémery became friends with Marcel Petit. He worked in the Ko Scherer, in Hall 28, where the French members of the Bünemann Kommando also worked.
The French community at Dora did not begin to become organized until the arrival of personalities such as Dejussieu-Pontcarral, Bollaert, and Debeaumarché with the convoy of “77,000”s. Birin in particular was able to keep them in positions in the Dora camp or in the tunnel when most of their companions were transferred to Ellrich. The scope of this development should not be exaggerated. The author himself was vaguely aware of it through Hémery, who was one of his work mates. As Richet notes, however, there was so little contact among prisoner groups that such information, which was necessarily highly confidential, did not get around.
POLICE CONTROL. It should be added that Dora was not only a concentration camp but was located in the heart of the Mittelraum, which was kept under tight police control. Control was exercised first on the Germans themselves, both civilians and military. One civilian named Victor worked with prisoner Marcel Baillon63 in the tunnel tooling workshop. On one occasion he went into the camp without an authorization to do a repair job. When he went home to Erfurt on permission, he talked about the camp to his wife and daughter, who did not hold their tongues. He was arrested, tried, and hanged. Baillon had confirmation on this from his widow after the war.
Two SS men, overcome with drink in a Nordhausen cabaret, threatened to send the boss, who was trying to calm them down, to the Dora camp to teach him a lesson about life. They were tried and shot. The officers who made up the court martial were then asked to a reception given by the camp commander, who had Gypsy prisoners brought in to play music. Pierre Rozan witnessed the scene, which Michel has recounted.64
Two prisoners were convinced that there were other SS executions. Chamboissier65 recalls: “One morning, in the bottom of the hole, we found a sort of smooth tree trunk, stuck in the ground, which turned out to be an execution post, for it was bullet-ridden (I tried in vain to extract one), blood-stained and a rather heavy rope was lying at its foot. As soon as we arrived, we were told to remove the post.”
Maurice Gérard66 recounts: “I remember seeing an SS transporting the body of a comrade who had just been shot. [ . . . ] It was not yet mid-September 1944. The weather was still very warm and the SS man who was pushing the wheelbarrow in which the bloody body lay was completely white.”
Numerous testimonies from Dora as well as the other camps mention prisoners being hanged in public following a well-known, unvarying ritual. According to information contained in the Wincenty Hein report,67 there were forty-nine executions during the year 1944. The victims seem to have been Germans (apparently not executed in public), Poles, and Russians. No French prisoners were executed. The massive numbers of executions at Dora, particularly in the tunnel, did not take place until the early months of 1945, a topic that will be discussed in part 5.
ESCAPES AND THE BUNKER. A few prisoners managed to escape, and there is an account of five Frenchmen who were caught. Gaston Pernot68 escaped on March 15 with three comrades by hiding in a freight car. They were caught in the region of Fulda and brought back to Dora on April 21. On March 16, Luc Clairin69 escaped, again in a wagon train with three comrades. They did not get beyond Halle and were back in Dora by March 26. On July 1, Pierre Jacquin70 tried to escape from an exterior Kommando, under the authority of Wieda, with André Moutel, but he was soon caught and Moutel a bit later. On July 8, Auguste Henner71 escaped (he does not say how); he was arrested two days later in the region of Kassel. On July 27, Roger Couëtdic72 took off from the Nüxei work site and was finally caught on the 29th near Rhumspringe. He was taken to Duderstadt, then to Erfurt, and then to Dora after more than two weeks.
Upon their return, they were locked up in the bunker and thoroughly beaten up, to the point where Henner’s jaw was broken. The length of the investigation and the number of execution threats were proportionate to how long the prisoners had been gone and how far away they had managed to get. Ultimately all these prisoners found themselves in the Schachtkommando wearing a Fluchtpunkt, “a white cloth circle, with a red dot in the middle, that we had to sew beneath our identity number, in the middle of the back and on the right pant leg.”
The most accurate description of the bunker comes from Jacquin. Originally it was merely a room in a shed at the camp entrance, adjacent to the SS command post. The final bunker, which opened at the end of July, “was a permanent one-floor building, containing some thirty cells divided into two wings separated by the entrance door and the SS guard post. The building was surrounded by a high wall with a door that was opened by remote control from the SS guard post. Cell number 7 where I was put measured about six square feet. Inside, there were boards which served as a seat and a latrine. A mesh-covered window, twelve by fifteen inches wide, opened onto the outer wall door. It had wooden shutters that could only be operated from the outside.”
THE SCHACHTKOMMANDO. All the escapees from all the camps in the region were assigned to the Schachtkommando, among them Stéphane Hessel and Robert Lemoine, who escaped from Rottleberode, which will be discussed in chapter 13. The prisoners were of every ethnic origin, with more Russians and Poles than Western Europeans such as Frenchmen, Czechs, Belgians, and Yugoslavians. They were housed in Block 135 in the upper part of the camp. Couëtdic describes at length life in the “SK II” to which he belonged from October 13, 1944, to early April 1945.
The Kommando’s work was not part of the Arbeitsstatistik agenda. It was performed outdoors and included various excavation and unloading tasks in the camp. One of them involved building pyres, whose importance will be discussed later on, which were needed to eliminate corpses upon the arrival of the evacuation transports from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen. Special tasks were often requested by block chiefs who knew the SK II Kapo and the Vorarbeiter, particularly the supplying of wood. Henner and Couëtdic thus became the suppliers of the whorehouse where they were fed a floury soup.
Life outside the camp was very hard due to the mud and cold. Couëtdic comments, however: “The Fluchtpunkt did not lose a single one of their sick patients during those harsh winter weeks.” That was the period when the mortality rate shot up so terribly at Ellrich. But the constraints were far more constant and negligence was widespread, as will be described later.
THE “PLOT.” Until November 1944, life inside Dora appeared rather humdrum. Starting in November, on the contrary, there were more arrests, affecting Czechs, Frenchmen, Russians, and Red Germans. It is not easy to provide a consistent account of these events because the relationship among the events themselves is not always clear-cut. No doubt the story should begin with the French and the Czechs on the basis of four documents: Marcel Petit’s account, which was quoted at length in Durand’s book, Birin’s account, Jean Michel’s book, and Langbein’s statement concerning Cespiva.
The fundamental problem raised at Dora, undoubtedly more than elsewhere, obviously concerned the attitude of the SS as the Allied troops neared the camp. Would they try and exterminate the prisoners? How could the prisoners cope with such a situation? How could it be avoided? Birin73 has summarized the predicament in this way: “As Geheimnisträger (carriers of V1 and V2 secrets), we knew we would be sentenced to death and executed when the Allies drew near. One SS gave us a brutal warning, in confidence: ‘If things should go wrong for us, none of you will come out alive.’ [ . . . ] Perhaps the time had come to try and devise a plan to save ourselves from the massacre. If we had to die [ . . . ] should we let them cut our throats without reacting?” That was the logic Birin claims to have expressed “around mid-October 1944” to his young comrade from the Arbeitsstatistik, the Russian Nicholaï Petrenko, when he asked him to recruit reliable comrades.
Petit74 gives a somewhat different description when he recounts his conversations with Cespiva, who came to see him at the “Labor” Revier set up in Block 16. His account is quite vehement and worth quoting, despite its length, in view of later developments. “Thus, I learned from Cespiva, in bits and pieces, that the matter was already well under way. Nicholaï from the Arbeitsstatistik would answer for the Russians, and he would do so for the Czechs. As for the French, I was to continue on the path I had taken. He did not want to know anyone else. In the event of a serious setback, it would be easier to defend ourselves. The goal was to preserve ties of solidarity between the best members of each nationality, organize small groups familiar with the use of automatic weapons, with practice in explosives, able to group themselves together upon call at a location designated by the chief. [ . . . ]
“Next, we might have to take the initiative. No weapons yet, but that would come. The locations of SS munitions dumps and the tank in front of the Tunnel had already been noted; they would be the first objective, the hardest part would be to get started. Two Russian volunteers—those people were not bothered by metaphysical questions—would be in charge of battering a Posten (a sentinel) to death by surprise. With a uniform and weapons, it would be possible to approach an officer and grab whatever he had, naturally not without risk. There was not a single sentinel up on a watchtower who would not rush to carry out the orders of an officer in uniform.
“The specialists were in charge of short-circuiting the electric current in the fences. Finally, we were in contact with anti-Nazi civilians who would get hold of a munitions dump near Nordhausen and join us. There was a war treasure in civilian marks.”
In his account, Birin talks of a “plot.” The word seems rather weak to describe the plan put together by Cespiva, according to Petit. The same Petit, according to Michel, explained that it was necessary to note exactly which tools would be required to cut down trees. At the chosen moment, the cut trees would crush the barbed wire in their fall. After 1945, works published in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland gave more scope to the uprising planned for December 24, 1944. “The rebels proposed, after massacring the SS at the garrison in Dora, to come and liberate Buchenwald. Then, by tens of thousands, the prisoners were supposed to go to Czechoslovakia to join the Soviet partisans.” The altogether extraordinary excesses of such a plan widely contributed to dismissing, after the fact, the already rather mad schemes of the 1944 plotters.
At the Essen trial there was a great deal of speculation about the reality of the transmitter built at the Revier by the Czech Jan Chaloupka (or Halupka), a radio mechanic, who had already assembled a receiver. Langbein75 says: “We don’t know whether or not the radio was used before its components, along with those of the receiver, had to be destroyed in the crematorium. The German court, which questioned the witnesses it was able to contact on this point in Essen in 1968, concluded that it was impossible to get to the bottom of the question concerning the existence and operation of a transmitter.”
When recapitulating the statements it can be noted that Cespiva knew Nicholaï from the beginning, whereas Birin said he contacted him much later. Jean Michel76 on the other hand claims that he came in contact with Cespiva through Cimek, without telling him that he already knew Petrenko. Whatever the case may have been, and lacking any way of establishing the order in which they met, there was indeed a network of “plotters” comprising Czechs and Frenchmen from the Revier as well as a Frenchman and a Russian from the Arbeitsstatistik.
In addition to Cespiva, the Czechs at the Revier included the dentist Otto Cimek and Jan Halupka, the radio mechanic. Among the Frenchmen at the Revier, the one with the most seniority was Jean Michel, and the others included Petit, Poupault, and his friend André Boyer (his network chief), who was hired as a Kalfaktor (waiter). Birin had his own connections, particularly from Épernay, such as Paul Chandon-Moët, whom he knew well enough to entrust him with keeping hosts. The names of Petrenko’s accomplices are not known.
THE ARRESTS. The existence of the plot, if not its strength, was known to the SD since most of the plotters mentioned were arrested at the same time during the night of November 3 and 4. The informer could only have been a certain Grozdoff, who appeared as chief of Block 15 when Cogny was Schreiber there. Perhaps careless words were spoken in the first block, whose Blockältester was French and seemed trustworthy. Perhaps Grozdoff had staged a provocation.
Another informer took simultaneous action in another area. This was a Frenchman named Maurice Naegelé, who became tunnel Kapo overseeing the manufacture of V1s and who deceived Debeaumarché and Lauth. Lauth, who had begun committing acts of sabotage, was arrested as early as October 20 (or 28?), and on November 4, Debeaumarché and Colonel Gentil, who were also working on V1s, were in turn arrested with the others. As will be seen, Grozdoff was a very mysterious character, which was not true of Naegelé, who was an agent of the Gestapo in France before he was caught for embezzlement and deported. At Dora he went back to work for the Gestapo. As he had experience with the French Resistance, he was able to gain the trust of Debeaumarché.
The outcome of this affair will be described in part 5, with an approximate indication of the identity of the prisoners involved. A few comments are not out of order here, however. The first concerns the lack of precise information concerning the grounds for making arrests. Some of the leaders who were heavily involved, like Petit, were forgotten, but Petit had been especially prudent. Puppo was arrested at the same time as Poupault, just in case. The second comment concerns the officers who were not arrested, i.e., neither Dejussieu, nor Cogny (even though he was Schreiber of Block 15 at the time), nor Leroy, nor Cazin d’Honincthun. The action was not directed at them. The third remark concerns the absence of Belgians, who, incidentally, were very few in number at Dora itself. Joseph Woussen77 has explained this quite clearly. He was contracted by the Russians and the French. “In fact, the General refused to embark on this adventure, because he suspected there were informers, thought that the conspirators did not have any weapons, and above all, considered their plans unnecessarily foolhardy. The tragic outcome of the matter confirmed, as it turned out, some of his fears.”
Surprisingly, the outcome was not tragic either for the Czechs or for the French, but it was dreadful for the Russians and for the communist leaders at Dora. Pröll committed suicide before they could arrest him. Kuntz died on January 25 (or 23?), 1945, in the hands of the Gestapo. The others, who were arrested one after another, were almost all executed on April 4, 1945.
These events will be discussed again. It has never been possible to establish a link between the French-Czech affair and the elimination of the German communists. No doubt the history of the Resistance at Dora cannot really be understood by mixing up stories that took place at different levels.
MEANWHILE, AT PEENEMÜNDE. As has already been noted in chapter 4, the Buchenwald prisoners who had been transferred to Karlshagen (i.e, Peenemünde) in June and July 1943 came back to Buchenwald in October and were quickly assigned to Dora. Contrary to what is generally assumed, prisoners still remained at Peenemünde. In fact, the Karlshagen camp was immediately reconstructed, and was to be evacuated only in March 1945 to Ellrich. It appears that the first prisoners concerned, especially the German Greens, Russians, and Poles, came from Sachsenhausen.
They were joined in mid-November 1943 by prisoners from a convoy train from Struthof, which arrived directly at Karlshagen from Schirmeck. One of them was Roger Predi,78 who was incarcerated at the central prison of Metz while awaiting trial. Similarly, within two weeks 350 prisoners found themselves on the island of Usedom. They occupied the last of the four blocks of a camp which would ultimately contain five. Predi says there were various Kommandos. Some prisoners worked in mechanics workshops or at boilermaking, including on V2s, the “cigars.”
Others were put on work sites to repair buildings or extend the airfield. Others unloaded boats. Some could therefore be found both at Peenemünde West, under the Luftwaffe, and in Peenemünde East, where von Braun continued to run his development unit.
A group of 500 prisoners was sent from Sachsenhausen to Karlshagen on October 17, 1944. Among them were 150 Frenchmen, 4 of whom have written up eyewitness accounts. Three of them had arrived directly from France only a short time earlier: Jean Duale,79 Pierre Pinault,80 and Pierre Pujol.81 The other, Jean Fournier,82 was in the “Loos train” (a prison near Lille). Sent from Tourcoing on August 31, just before the Allies arrived, he made a detour by Utrecht and Groningen before finding himself in Cologne, then Magdeburg, and finally arriving in Sachsenhausen. The newcomers were all employed in outside Kommandos and suffered considerably from the cold, especially due to the wind. The mortality rate was high.
Each account recalls an unusual event that occurred on February 8, 1945. A Kommando of ten Russians was put in charge of camouflaging planes. On the aforementioned day they attacked two members of the crew of a Heinkel 111 that had just landed, killed one of them, and forced the other to go back on board along with them. One of the Russians, a certain Deviataev, was a lieutenant pilot who managed to take off. He landed near Warsaw after escaping German fighter planes and was lucky enough to avoid being shot down by his compatriots. To everyone’s surprise, the camp was not punished after this adventure. Deviataev became a “hero of the Soviet Union.”
FROM ONE HELL TO ANOTHER. Chapters 9 and 10 have recounted the ordinary operation of a concentration camp closely connected to a secret weapons factory in the Reich in 1944, covering the period from May to December. In May, German troops still dominated Europe, from Hendaye to Vitebsk and from the North Pole to Greece. By the end of December the Americans were in Aachen and the Soviets at the gates of East Prussia, and a German army was under siege in Budapest. The downfall of Nazi Germany was near.
The Dora prisoners who survived the hellish conditions of the early months, thanks to this period of relative respite, were to be sorely tried during the first three months of 1945 and again during the evacuation. Parts 5 and 6 of the book will be devoted to those periods. Part 4, which follows under the title “Renewed Hell,” recounts what took place in 1944-45 on the work sites and in the open camps in the area surrounding Dora, at Wieda, Blankenburg, and Harzungen, and above all at Ellrich.