It is difficult to dissociate the study of the Harzungen camp from that of the Ell-rich camp for a number of reasons. The first is that the two camps’ labor forces were involved on the same series of work sites; the second is that the camps developed simultaneously during the first months, beginning with the first convoys coming from Buchenwald; lastly because there were exchanges of prisoners between the two camps. The Woffleben camp came only later, functioning during the final months to house a portion of the prisoners from Ellrich working on digging out B 12.
The prisoners of the three camps all suffered on the underground-digging sites, where they were placed under similar conditions. But life in the camp was harder for those at Ellrich than for those at Harzungen and, in the end, at Woffleben, who were put into new buildings.
As will be shown, the worst-off prisoners seem to have been those from Ellrich, who traveled back and forth on a daily basis to work site B 13, where they were employed out of doors, whatever the weather, on earthwork projects or backbreaking handling work. They actually ended up, as will be pointed out, envying the miners’ jobs.
It was in March 1944 that Kammler was put in charge of setting up the aircraft industry underground and created Sonderstab Kammler, which was established at Bischofferode at the foot of the Himmelberg. The prisoners were then brought in to get the work sites started, in utterly improvised fashion. To dig out the underground spaces of B 3, B 11, and B 12, and to build the outside infrastructures for B 13, manpower was brought from the Buchenwald camp, which, between March and June 1944, gave priority to sending the newly arrived prisoners, in particular those from the last convoys coming from France and Belgium.
There was not enough room for everyone at Dora. It was the period when construction was finishing up on the camp intended for prisoners employed by the Mittelwerk, where the last inhabitants of the tunnel “dormitories” were to be transferred. Most of the time, those just arriving did not go to Dora or merely passed through. New camps therefore had to be built, and, at the same time, the civilian workers—such as those from the Junkers factory being set up in the north part of the Dora Tunnel—had to be housed. New prisoners’ camps were established at Harzungen to the east of the work zone and next to the Ellrich-Station to the west of the zone.
Building a Barackenlager at Harzungen had been envisaged for several months, as indicated in the recapitulation drawn up on December 31, 1943, by Neu, director of the WIFO’s Ni Agency. In late March 1944, Kammler seems to have envisaged sending the Green Mittelwerk personnel there for reasons of security. Dr. Kettler then refused to allow his personnel to be shut up behind barbed wire; or at any rate, that is what he claimed in a testimony quoted by Bornemann.1 The entirely new camp was henceforth free to take in prisoners. It was at the edge of the village, several miles to the east of Niedersachswerfen.
The site selected at Ellrich for the establishment of the concentration camp was of an entirely different nature. At the beginning it was made up of the abandoned buildings of a plaster factory with a vast tract of uncultivated land to the south of the railway line running from Herzberg to Nordhausen, near the station of the small town of Ellrich.
The chronology of the beginnings of Harzungen and Ellrich is murky, as will be seen from the fragmentary testimonies available. Prior to the camp’s opening, many prisoners coming from Buchenwald were taken to Bischofferode to a former farming operation located between the villages of Woffleben and Appenrode. As mentioned above, it was the real headquarters of the Sonderstab Kammler’s Sonderinspektion B, set up in the old main farm building. The prisoners were temporarily installed in the other building of the “Woffleben farm”—so-called because the operation was located on that district’s territory.
The first testimony is that of Joseph Jourdren,2 who left Buchenwald on March 17, 1944, along with several other French and a number of Polish prisoners and who ended up as the only Frenchman in an uncomfortable camp situated, it would appear, at Niedersachswerfen. He was put to work digging trenches under the supervision of Greens and guarded by soldiers of the Luftwaffe. On April 3 these prisoners were transferred into the new Harzungen camp. “It’s Byzantium!” exclaimed Jourdren. But on April 10 they were again transferred and arrived at the Woffleben farm. There Jourdren met René Gilbert and Roland Coty, who was at the time the camp commander’s Friseur. On May 13, 1944, he was once again transferred—this time to Ellrich.
Gilbert,3 who got to Dora on March 13, 1944, was employed for only a short while in the tunnel and was then transported daily by truck to Woffleben to work on a railway line. He was then transferred to the Woffleben farm and ended up at Ellrich on May I along with Paul Fournial—the day the camp was founded.
Lucien Fayman4 was transferred directly from Buchenwald to Woffleben on April 1, 1944, where he met up with Wolf Wexler and Coty. They were moved to Harzungen in mid-April. Guy Marty, who arrived at Harzungen from Buchenwald on April 26, was at Ellrich from May 2 on. As far as the French were concerned, it was thus above all the deportees from the third convoy of January who were the first to arrive at Harzungen and at Ellrich. Other deportees from this same convoy, as seen in chapter 9, then worked on building the Dora camp.
Bornemann5 assesses the number of prisoners as follows: on April 2 there were 617 prisoners at Harzungen and 300 at Bischofferode/Woffleben. On May 9 the Bischofferode camp was disbanded and the prisoners were transferred to Ellrich, then comprised of 724 internees. There were many Poles and Russians, alongside the French.
New arrivals of prisoners took place throughout May and June 1944. First of all, on May 11 there were the 200 who left the Laura camp for Ellrich. Among the French prisoners—as shown in the preceding chapter—were Courtaud, Tauzin, and Inchauspé. At the same time a convoy of 600 prisoners coming from Buchenwald—and made up above all of Gypsies—arrived at Harzungen after a short stop at Dora. Then came the transports of Poles and Russians, amidst whom was the odd Frenchman, such as Serge Miller. At the end of May the Hungarian Jews arrived at Dora. Many of them were quickly sent to Ellrich.
On June 6 a transport from Buchenwald brought French prisoners from the May 12 convoy from Compiègne—including Maxime Cottet and Albert Bannes—to Dora. They were dispatched between Harzungen and Ellrich. Other deportees from the same convoy left the same day for Wieda, as was seen in the preceding chapter. At the same time the Belgian deportees from the convoys of May 12 and 23, who arrived in large numbers, were also spread out for the most part between Harzungen and Ellrich. Lastly, on June 14 the transport coming from Buchenwald was above all made up of Russians and Poles.
It was in this way that Harzungen and Ellrich’s multiethnic groups progressively came together. Exchanges of prisoners, for no apparent reason, took place frequently between the two camps. Moreover, the Harzungen Revier, the first to be set up, was used for some time for the sick from Ellrich.
THE HARZUNGEN CAMP. In June 1944, construction of the Harzungen camp came to an end. There was no possibility of expanding the site. The camp was first of all surrounded by barbed wire, and then an electric fence was put in by the Zaunbau Kommando, which had just finished the fence around the Dora camp. Gamier and his friends then returned to Dora and were assigned to the tunnel.6
The camp had a quadrilateral shape, along the south side of the Niedersachswerfen road on the western edge of the village next to the church. “It was a pretty little village, with brick houses whose wooden frameworks could be seen, all spruce and fresh,” remembers Mialet.7 The camp was made up of fourteen barracks, ten blocks of which were for housing and prisoners while two others were for the Revier in the southwest angle. A brook ran through the northwest part and a pit was dug in its bed in August 1944. It was subsequently covered over. The camp was planned for a population of some four thousand prisoners. The wardens were initially SS, soon replaced by soldiers from the Luftwaffe. Their two barracks were on the other side of the road.
From June 1944 on the convoys coming from Buchenwald were no longer directed toward Harzungen but toward Dora, and especially toward Ellrich or Blankenburg. This was the case of the Belgian convoys of June 19 and August 10, and the French “77,000”s. In July and August, it is true, prisoners from several Dora Kommandos were transferred to Harzungen, but many of them remained there only a short while. This was the case for Pierre Auchabie, who arrived on August 15 only to leave again on August 30 for Ellrich. Thanks to an “accident on the job” (injured by a stone falling on a work site), Jean Mialet avoided this transfer.8 Those who also remained at Harzungen—such as Raymond Jacob, Joannès Méfret, Lucien Maronneau, Pierre Pointe, and Jean de Sesmaisons—consider themselves lucky.
The testimonies of the Harzungen survivors are very contrasting. They describe their working conditions on the outside work sites as especially difficult, but feel that if they made it through at all it was because of the “acceptable” conditions of life in the camp. They generally avoided brutalities and interminable roll calls. The blocks remained clean, without the proliferation of lice (except toward the end). Food was provided on a more or less regular basis. The notion of “acceptable” is entirely relative. It was above all those such as Jean Mialet, who had experienced Dora’s beginnings, who expressed this opinion. The newcomers, not unjustifiably, did not feel inclined to paint an excessively pleasant picture of Harzungen.
The camp atmosphere made relations between friends possible during free time. In his book of memoirs, Jean Mialet emphasized the comfort that he drew from his contacts with Jean de Sesmaisons and René Haentjens, his classmates from the Saint-Cyr9 officers’ school. Relations remained close between prisoners from the Jura region, victims of various roundups during the month of April. But Maxime Cottet, who kept a diary, recorded the death of several friends who were transferred to Ellrich.
For nine months Cottet was able to keep a small diary and a minuscule pencil and jot down the odd word from time to time in secret. As he says: “I had to keep the booklet hidden; my friends advised me to throw it away, because I ran the risk of death if it were discovered. It made it through maybe thirty or forty frisks. In the end, it was stolen from me by a prisoner. I was sad to lose it, but almost relieved. It was after my return, in September 1945, that it was sent to me by a repatriated Belgian, who had found it in the clothes of a dead prisoner, after the liberation of Harzungen, and who wanted to send it to the family of the supposed ‘dead man.’ I immediately recopied it, because it had become almost indecipherable.”
Right until the end, the Harzungen prisoners’ wardens were soldiers from the Luftwaffe, “no longer young men, who, in general, were not nasty,” observes Mialet,10 who on one occasion was able to chat with one of them about the Gaillac region, where he had been a prisoner of war during World War I. The camp commander was himself fairly liberal. He authorized a Mass in the camp on Christmas Day, 1944. Boxing matches were even held (for the better fed). On December 25 a talent contest was held in Block 7—Cottet’s block: he sang and won two hundred grams of bread.11
There was a more or less equivalent number of Russians, Poles, French, and Belgians in the camp, whose influence balanced itself out. But the Germans, generally Greens, made up most of the supervision, along with certain Gypsies, who were German-speaking themselves.
A Belgian priest, François Poiré,12 after three months’ work in the tunnel, nevertheless became Schreiber of Block 8 and then Block 5. It was he who asked the camp commander for authorization to celebrate Mass on December 25, and a noncommissioned officer was sent to Nordhausen to get what was required, including the hosts. One of the three Belgian priests in the camp, the others serving as acolytes, thus officiated in the presence of the commander and a certain number of noncommissioned officers.
Marcel Martin went from the kitchen at Dora to the kitchen at Harzungen. “Thanks to an astonishing gift for languages and a lively intelligence, he had become one of the important figures in the camp.” Mialet, who was delighted by this, claims to owe him a great deal.13 But far and away the most noteworthy institution in the camp was the Revier, which will be mentioned shortly.
USING THE HARZUNGEN LABOR FORCE. Testimonies, though nuanced with regard to the camp’s relatively human character, as opposed to Ellrich, are unanimous regarding the harsh work conditions. All the prisoners who did not have a job in the camp were occupied on outside work sites, especially on underground digging operations. Several accounts, including Mialet’s, spoke of a tunnel at Niedersachswerfen, which may have been B 11.
But it seems that the teams coming from Harzungen mostly worked on B 3 at the same time as the teams coming from Ellrich. It was at any rate strictly the same work, in the same rock, digging out identical galleries. Bannes14 noted that the Ellrich prisoners were in worse shape than those from Harzungen. What was characteristic about work site B 3 was that the hill (Himmelberg) was attacked simultaneously at the base through different galleries bearing numbers, with corresponding Kommandos. Nicola15 was thus in 2, Bannes in 27 and then 5, Cottet in 14 and then in 21 and 23.
The “miners”—that is, the borers (die Bohrer)—made up a particular category, and their Meister were themselves veritable miners. Nicola explains the role of the borer: “We worked in teams of two. On a long plank about twenty-five feet long by fifteen inches wide, the borer sits behind the compressed-air drill, fitted out with a bit twelve feet long and at least two or two and a half inches in diameter, and pushes the machine with his feet. His teammate sits behind him, back to back. His job is to press very hard against his buddy’s back to help him drive the bit into the rock face. The work requires a very good level of understanding between teammates. There were eight teams of us braced up against eight drills, boring eight holes spread out over the width of the upper tunnel. Below us, other forced laborers, using jackhammers, brought down the back fill so that we borers could bore out another line of holes, and so on right to the bottom of the tunnel. It goes without saying that the scaffolding that held us up was not very stable and accidents were frequent.”
Mialet,16 who learned the work from an experienced French fellow prisoner, Raymond—a pharmacist’s assistant from Saint-Claude—describes it as follows; “The work consisted of using a drill which turned long steel bits to bore eighteen-foot-deep holes into the rock face, which were then packed with dynamite intended to pulverize the rock. It was a far less disagreeable task than the slow torture of shoveling. It did not require as violent and continuous a physical effort, but required, mentally, sustained concentration. While the drill was boring the hole, the bit had to be watched carefully, the compressed air checked on, and, between drillings, the bits chosen and the machine greased.”
The testimony of the Belgian Raymond Wautrecht17 makes it possible to complete the picture, for he notes that the miners were “positioned at different heights on the scaffolding or on the rock piles.” The blast then had to be set off, giving off thick smoke while everyone ducked under cover in a cloud of gray dust. Cottet noted various accidents in his diary: collapsing scaffolding or falling rocks.
Cottet18 also emphasized the effects of the dust: “It was full of toxic gases of powder coming from the simultaneous explosion of twenty or thirty mines. This, moreover, led to lung problems: tuberculosis, silicosis, pleurisy, and blood poisoning which led to furonculosis, carbuncles, edema. There was also what was referred to as ‘purple-lip disease,’ with blue all round the eyes, indicating the disappearance of the blood’s hemoglobin, arrested by the toxic gases. It led to death within three days.”
Other prisoners, still more disadvantaged, filled the carts for the evacuation of the backfill. Conditions were the same as during the digging of tunnel A in the Kohnstein, mentioned in chapter 5, when Butet and the others were in the “stones.” But the work seems to have been better organized this time round, and accounts are less devastating in this respect. Before becoming a miner, Mialet19 had been a well-digger. He had been part of the Schachtbau Kommando, digging vertical ventilation shafts straight down from the hill’s summit into the new underground galleries. Fayman20 on the other hand recalls building a bridge over a stream for trucks to pass over.
The digging operations required few “specialists” such as those who were then working in the Dora Tunnel. There were nevertheless jobs for carpenters, and electricians for the gallery lighting. An important member of the French Résistance, André Schock (under the code name André Chevalier) was the Kapo of a small Kommando made up above all of the Frenchmen André Clavé, René Haentjens, Raymond Jacob, and Jean de Sesmaisons.21 Fayman pointed out that “they moved about constantly in the perimeter of the neighboring work sites, supervised by two or three sentries, to check on the electrical and other mains.”
The galleries were dug in three eight-hour shifts: from six o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon (Morgenschicht); from two o’clock in the afternoon until ten o’clock in the evening (Nachmittagschicht); and from ten o’clock in the evening until six o’clock in the morning (Nachtschicht). The teams changed shift every week.
To get from the Harzungen camp to the work sites, military trucks were used at first, then tractors with trailers, and then a train starting in August 1944. A line had indeed been built from Harzungen to Niedersachswerfen by prisoners from the Harzungen camp. It was the most extensive “earthwork” mentioned in the testimonies.
Once they had arrived at Niedersachswerfen, the prisoners had to go to the far end of a narrow-gauge railway that circled around Mühlberg and Himmelberg by the north to reach the entranceways to the B 3 galleries. The route was especially cruel in bad weather, as Raymond Wautrecht pointed out:22 “A further short march was required to get to the other narrow-gauge railway; after having been counted once again, we had to climb into little carts where we were sometimes as many as twenty-five, jammed in next to one another, our feet in water or on ice, without being able to avoid the biting wind or the pelting rain. A little locomotive hauled this long line of carts freighted with miserable human hulks: it would stop and start, with sudden lurches, which would hurl us against one another. A good half-hour of veritable torture in order to get to the work site.” This line continued as far as Cleysingen, where the anhydrite extracted from B 3 formed a slag heap.
In February 1945, as Cottet pointed out, when coal was in short supply, the train from Harzungen to Niedersachswerfen was stopped and the prisoners had to do the six miles on foot to reach the work sites.
To appreciate just how tiring the work conditions were for the prisoners of Harzungen, it must be borne in mind how long this drudgery went on. Cottet went from camp to work site from June 11, 1944, to March 2, 1945, with a single one-week interruption at the Revier in February. On March 3 he was transferred to Ellrich along with Wautrecht. The same misadventure had befallen Bannes at the end of January.
The elimination took place progressively, and Cottet recorded the deaths of his fellow prisoners in his diary beginning at the end of December. Some died and others were evacuated to Nordhausen on February 28. The camp’s more or less acceptable conditions simply prevented things from getting any worse, and the Revier could not do anything about exhaustion. Those who found work in the camp doing masonry work such as Jean Marillier,23 or who became butchers in the kitchen like Lucien Maronneau,24 were of course privileged—however, they were but a tiny minority.
THE HARZUNGEN REVIER. The Harzungen Revier functioned throughout the entire duration of the camp in very particular conditions, under the de facto direction of two French “doctors”—who were not doctors at all but who played a highly positive role. The structure of this Revier is exceptionally well known through a document that has often been reproduced: the so-called Dienstplan dating from December 12, 1944, initialed by the Lagerarzt—the camp doctor—who was a military doctor with the Luftwaffe.25 It provides a complete table of the medical and paramedical personnel chosen by the prisoners.
The Kapo was a German, Heinz Jessen, and the Schreiber, a Belgian, Louis Clukkers. The surgical ward (Chirurgische Abteilung) was run by Dr. Jacques Desprez, who was the surgeon, and Dr. Paul Lagey. The internal medicine ward was under Dr. Georges Desprez’s authority. Jacques and Georges Desprez were brothers, but had not arrived at Buchenwald by the same convoy, were not arrested together, and by all accounts scarcely had anything to do with each other—not even in the camp.
In fact, Jacques Desprez was a dentist in the French department of the Aisne and spoke German. He had arrived at Dora in September 1943 and was a doctor in the Revier until February 1944. Jean Michel, who had introduced him into the dentistry ward and who knew him well for several months, described him as cyclothymic: highly jovial one minute, gloomy the next.26 Sidelined at Dora, he resurfaced in the Revier at Harzungen right from the beginnings of the camp and held onto his position until the evacuation to Bergen-Belsen.
His older brother Georges was neither a doctor nor a dentist. According to Lucien Fayman27 he had “a certain amount of embryonic and fragmentary medical knowledge, but commanding a level of nerve beyond anything that can be imagined, and possessing a very lively intelligence, and highly developed powers of observation, boundless loquacity and an optimal quality of human contact, he had acquired a level of authority to which the Luftwaffe Stabsarzt himself, as supervisor of the Revier, would acquiesce.” It will be seen in chapter 20 what he managed to obtain during the evacuation. Paul Lagey, who really was a doctor, arrived in the last months of 1944 as indicated by his identity number 89622. The team of eighteen male nurses—the Pfleger—seems to have been put together quickly, either at the Woffleben farm or very early on at Harzungen. It was comprised of four French (Roland Coty, Rémy Chevalier, Georges Daubèze, and Georges Gos), three Belgians (Jean Dumont, Jean Rémy, and Jean Petit), two Dutch (Job Franssen and Jack Sänger), a Swiss arrested in France (Gottlieb Fuchs), a German, four Poles, and three Russians. Fayman, who had been a borer and was sent to the Revier, stayed on there as a masseur in October 1944. He was a privileged witness who paid particular homage to his friend Georges Mazellier, who until November 1944 was in charge of supplies at the Revier.
This team was a great help to a certain number of prisoners in difficulty, by giving them notes for the Schonung, switching them from one Kommando to another, assigning them to the camp, and so on. Mialet for instance was able to relax for a week by going, along with a Russian who was even more myopic than himself, to get glasses at Dora which, as it turned out, they never got. But these initiatives quickly reached their limit in a concentration camp dependent upon Kammler.
THE ELLRICH CAMP: THE SITE. There is only one usable map of the Ellrich camp. It was drawn up in 1987 by Manfred Bornemann28 on the basis of indications provided by former inhabitants of the area and former prisoners, whose names he gives. All traces of the camp had indeed disappeared in circumstances after 1945, which will be pointed out later. The site included a more or less flat section where the building occupied by the prisoners and by the SS was located. It was dominated to the south by a hill that was a distant prolongation of the Kohnstein to the west. The plans mention the site of the quarries (Steinbruch) and the galleries (Stollen) corresponding to the former anhydrite mines.
Superimposed upon these natural relief lines runs a very old and important political border. Part of the plain is on the Ellrich District’s territory; the rest of the plain and the hill are on the territory of the Walkenried District. Ellrich was part of the Hohnstein, a territory attached in 1648—by the treaties of Westphalia—to Brandenburg, which subsequently became the kingdom of Prussia. For centuries Walkenried belonged to the duchy of Brunswick. It so happens that in this region, this same border that would be used in 1945 to distinguish the Soviet and British zones of occupation would subsequently separate the GDR (German Democratic Republic, or East Germany) from the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany). Since the reunification of Germany it has been the limit between the Länder of Thuringia and Lower Saxony. The prisoners’ camp was situated at Ellrich. The SS were established in the neighboring hamlet of Juliushütte, further to the west and dependent on Walkenried.
In 1944, to the south of the Ellrich-Station, at the foot of the hill, the abandoned buildings of the former Kohlmann plaster works (Gipswerk) were still standing. A first building, in half-timber and brick, two or three stories high, was occupied on May 1, 1944, and divided into three blocks, 1, 2, and 3, with separate entranceways. The prisoners slept initially on the ground; bunks were later installed. Upstairs in Block 1, accessible by an exterior wooden staircase, there was a sort of Revier. There was no washroom; a mere pit served as a latrine. At the end of May, Block 3’s stairway, overloaded, collapsed—leading to injuries.
It was at this period that a second industrial brick building, located behind the first one, began to be used, and became Block 4. The Mémorial contains an evocation of this block at its origins, no doubt due to Louis-Clément Terral, who was the Friseur there.29 “From the outside, Block 4 does not look anything like the Blocks at Buchenwald or even at Dora, which are painted green. The Ellrich camp was organized in an old abandoned plaster works, and Block 4 was nothing but a miserable transformed hangar, two hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, forty feet high.
“A shed, put up by the Häftling, extended the building a further forty or so feet. Gray and dirty, facing directly north, its façade was ominous looking with its large gate, its two doors and six high windows that never a sunbeam would cross.
“On the inside, three partitions reaching the roof divided the Block into four rooms of unequal size. The big gate opened first of all into a large unadorned room, sixty-five feet by fifty, which served as a place for regrouping, handing out food, a Friseur’s stool, a theater of corporal punishment. The ground was made up of great stone slabs, the roof itself served as a ceiling. Not long before, ten or so wobbly tables, twenty wooden stools and a wood stove had been brought in as the only furnishings.
“In front, a door opened onto the Stube, the Block larder where rations were prepared. It was also the door leading to the room of the Stubendienst and the Schreiber, and to that of the Block chief. That was everyone’s focal point, for it was from within that terror in person could emerge, truncheon in hand. And that was also where the much-awaited soup came from.
“To the left, three low doors opened onto the dormitory. 105 feet long and sixty feet wide, it was the largest room in the Block—and it was also the coldest and most sordid; it had an uneven earthen floor; the walls were made of uncovered stone, which, saltpetered by humidity, reached some thirty-five feet up to the roof, which was covered in clouds of cobwebs.
“A twilight fell from the excessively high windows and the dust reduced visibility still further. In this half-darkness, men are like ghosts, bumping into the shivering shapes which stagger along past the beds. These were arranged in squares three stories high and made up small boxes along three rows in extension of the three doors. 150 men could fit in without much comfort; up to 845 were often piled in.”
One of the first barracks to be built was the guard post at the camp entrance, which was located to the north, near the station where a special platform had been set up for the prisoners. Another barracks housed the kitchen. A barracks was then built for the Revier, transferred to Block 1, in August. A certain number of others followed, but not all the blocks could be identified on the plan. They were normal, with washrooms and toilets. But, as Jacques Courtaud has written,30 “Ellrich’s major characteristic was the virtually perpetual lack of water.” The result was inevitable: “The latrines became a veritable cesspool: you literally walked about in shit.”
A sort of swamp with reeds was located in the western part of the camp, at the foot of the hill. It was known as the Kleiner Pontel; there was also a Grosser Pontel on the other side of Juliushütte. The SS having decided to fill in the Kleiner Pontel, the reeds first had to be gotten rid of—under conditions described below. It then had to be filled in with stones that the prisoners had to bring with them when they returned from their work sites.
The SS barracks were concentrated at Juliushütte. Villas were requisitioned for the officers and barracks built for the soldiers. A factory—the Trinks factory—continued to function in this area and certain prisoners worked there, including René Ardouin and Henri Barat.
The last building put up in the Ellrich camp was the crematorium, built on the hill (thus at Walkenried), which would only be used in March 1945.
THE ELLRICH CAMP: THE PEOPLE. The camp was guarded by the SS, though some of the wardens came from the Luftwaffe. It was thus that Bornemann31 obtained (from his daughter) letters that Stefan Pauler—a Gefreiter (corporal) in the Luftwaffe, assigned to Ellrich on September 19, 1944, as SS-Rottenführer—had sent to his family. He quotes—often highly disabused—passages from them in his Chronique du camp d’Ellrich that he published in 1987. The last letter was dated February 4, 1945. Pauler was subsequently reported missing.
Regarding the original SS the language was unequivocal, as shown by Serge Miller32 in describing how the newcomers of May 20, 1944, were received: “We saw an SS officer, or rather a puppet, a lanky looking fellow, moving toward us. He crossed his arms on his chest, threw his head back, and jeered at us: ‘So! That’s how you remove your forage caps, is it? You must think you’re still at Buchenwald! In the Sanatorium! With the Bolsheviks! Well, that’s all over now, I’m in charge here and to start with, you bunch of louts are going to do a half-hour of exercise.’ On paper, that may not have the same effect, but, I swear, it had one on us. He didn’t speak, he bellowed, gesticulated, and frothed at the mouth as if he had been bitten by a rabid dog. And those who didn’t speak German must have wondered if it was the devil himself in front of us. All the soldiers and noncommissioned officers who supervised us were from the Luftwaffe, but the commander—which is who he was—was with the SS.”
The man in question was no doubt Ritz, who subsequently became Lagerführer when Karl Fritzsch was appointed Lagerkommandant on September 10, 1944. The latter, after having been at Dachau, was the assistant to Höss at Auschwitz, where he carried out gassings. At some point, perhaps in October, Stötzler—the Lagerführer at Dora—became Lagerkommandant at Ellrich, replacing Fritzsch, whose subsequent fate remains unknown. Meanwhile, Otto Brinkmann—Rapportführer at Dora—became Lagerführer at Ellrich. Both seem to have kept their positions right to the end.
The Greens, or Blacks, held the principal positions in the camp administration. They were all the more fearsome that they had already been banished first from Buchenwald and then from Dora. They were the SS’s zealous assistants. It was observed that they were often accompanied by an entourage of young Gypsies, who could also be extremely fearsome. Richard Walenta, Blockältester since May 1944, became Lagerältester in the course of the summer. He was then transferred to Dora. He was replaced by someone by the name of Arthur Schimmeck. Courtaud recalls three successive LÄ, all Greens, all detestable, but does not know their names.
As indicated above, beginning in the months of May and June 1944 there were prisoners of every nationality at Ellrich, who had transited through Bischofferode/Woffleben or Harzungen, and then arrived from Buchenwald, in some cases via Dora. There were Poles and Russians as well as Czechs, French and Belgians, Hungarian Jews, and German Gypsies. The population at the end of May was 1,696 persons—and by the end of June had reached 2,880.
From July to September, with the transfers from Dora and Harzungen and the arrival of new convoys arriving particularly from France and Belgium—whose deportees were largely assigned to Ellrich (or Blankenburg for the Belgians)—the camp grew in size. The population went from 4,104 persons in late July to 6,187 at the end of August, and to 8,189 by the end of September. It had dropped to 7,957 by the end of October. There would only be 6,571 by the end of January 1945.
It is difficult from this point on to appreciate the development of the total population because of the arrival of prisoners evacuated from the camps in the East. At the same time the mortality rate rose steeply, in particular among the newcomers. Lastly, there were large transfers between Ellrich, Harzungen, and Dora. At the beginning of March 1945 there was an overall population of 8,000 prisoners, including those in Camp B 12 at Woffleben. But many of them were invalids.
During the month of March the structure of the population continued to change. Many people disappeared because of deaths and above all because of the “convoy of March 3,” which will be mentioned below. A subsequent and very large transfer from Harzungen to Ellrich did not suffice to bring the population back up. The last count, on March 31, gave a total of 7,259 prisoners.
THE FATE OF THE YOUNG HUNGARIAN JEWS. The Hungarian Jews were not spared—a fact testified to by a number of French prisoners. They speak above all of the children. Jean-Pierre Couture relates the following:33 “In Block 5, the ground floor of Block 6, every night, some twenty children grouped together in a corner of the large room. The adult prisoners refrained from taking over this space—though the Block was overcrowded to such an extent that, at night, only a pathway through the center aisle remained free to enable people to get to the toilet. Everywhere else, jammed up against one another on the bricks on the ground, prisoners of every nationality pressed together. There were even people under the bunk beds which were themselves overcrowded. In the space that remained free, there were several blankets and sawdust. That was where the little Hungarian Jews—from about eleven to fifteen years old—slept. Slept is a figure of speech. Throughout the blackout (from around eleven o’clock at night until five o’clock in the morning), the voices of these children could be heard whimpering, and, so it seemed, calling out for their parents who would never come. Moreover, as it was supposed that they had smaller appetites because they were only children, these poor kids sometimes only got reduced rations—even though they were integrated into the adult work Kommandos. The whimpers of those children are my most distressing memory, and are the origin—or rather the confirmation—of my tenacious hatred of their tormentors.”
“Toward the end of May 1944,” Gilbert34 witnessed the arrival “of young Hungarian Jews between ten and fifteen years old. Under the whip of the Kapos and the SS, they worked without a break at clearing away the dilapidated buildings of the former plaster works. They were all decimated in a very short time.”
Jourdren35 remained at Ellrich from May 13 until July 16. He was then sent to the Dora Revier because of a foot injury. One day in May he was put to work tearing out the rhizomes of the reeds from the Kleiner Pontel, which was to be filled in. “The water was very muddy and came halfway up our thighs. With our bare hands, and with our stomach, shoulders, even our chins as well as our hands in the muck, we ripped out those horrible roots until nightfall. [ . . . ] When we got back to the camp, there was obviously no way for us to wash ourselves, and still less to dry ourselves off. On top of which, we reeked.” The following day the task was assigned to a group of almost two hundred young Hungarian Jews. They were all dead within three days.
Lafond36 recalls having seen a convoy of Jewish children, this time in November 1944: “It was very late in the evening because we had come back from Woffleben. Coming out of Block 3 by the back stairway, I saw all along the fence which bordered the rails a whole group of young Jews, their heads covered with dark-green-colored woolen caps. I never saw these children in the camp again.”
THE LESSONS OF THE ARBEITSEINTEILUNG. Between May and September 1944, thousands of prisoners were thus piled into Ellrich, in generally detestable material circumstances. As in all the camps, a Lagerkommando was set up. A small number of prisoners were employed in general services and upkeep of the camp. Those who in the first weeks managed to get themselves appointed to these positions endeavored to maintain their privilege. Thus the newcomers had ever less chance to avoid the outside Kommandos. This was what virtually all the French prisoners—whose identity numbers were in the “77,000”s—noticed upon their arrival. Of course, the existent industrial buildings had to be turned into blocks, and then new barracks had to be put up for the prisoners and the SS, and the camp had to be fenced in—but that was all finished within a few months. Pierre Goasguen,37 who was involved with metal work, nevertheless remained employed in his field right to the end.
From the first day on, a maximum number of prisoners were required for the work sites dependent on the Sonderstab Kammler, whether for digging out underground galleries or for any number of civil engineering projects on the surface, enabling the outfitting and servicing of the vast industrial complex that was to be set up in these galleries.
A document dated January 29, 1945, gives the Arbeitseinteilung—the “distribution of work”—for that particular day and for all the prisoners at Ellrich.38 The detailed descriptions are not always intelligible because there are proper nouns corresponding to various companies. There were 333 prisoners employed in the camp out of a total of 4,280 at work—in other words, 7.8 percent. This figure includes both the two LÄ, fourteen Friseur, and twenty Kartoffelschäler.
The rest of the population was supposed to be at the work sites, more or less removed from Ellrich. The closest-by were the B 3, underground, at Bischofferode, with 669 prisoners, and the B 13, outside, nearby, with 599 prisoners. Further afield, at Woffleben, was the B 12, with 668 employees in a twelve-hour-long day shift, and 721 spread out more or less equally in three eight-hour shifts, for a total of 1,389 prisoners. The work site furthest away was B 11, at Niedersachswerfen, with 576 prisoners.
Moreover, 309 prisoners were employed at B 17, the most recent work site, which will be mentioned further on. Another 336 were spread out between a wide variety of Kommandos, which are difficult to define and to locate. Lastly, seventy prisoners worked for the Sonderinspektion II of the Sonderstab Kammler, which was set up at Bischofferode, as mentioned in chapter 11.
The Ellrich survivors’ testimonies as to the work they were made to do on these work sites is often not very explicit. Many of them were indeed considered mere slaves, indifferently forced to do earthworks or handling tasks. This was confirmed by Max Oesch:39 “At Ellrich, we were very often shifted from one Kommando to another, for no apparent reason.” The “miners,” working in three teams like their fellow prisoners living at Harzungen, ended up by appearing, in the work sites taken as a whole, to be privileged. An illustration of this will be seen further along with regard to the B 12 camp at Woffleben.
Jules Bouvet40—a schoolteacher from a village in the Orne region—did nothing but moving work “with buckets, spades, and carts” at the Buchenwald quarry from December 1943 to March 1944, at Dora from March to August 1944, and at Ellrich from August 1944 until March 1945. Exhausted, he was in the Harzungen Revier at the time of the evacuation in April.
TOILING ON THE OUTSIDE WORK SITES. The few testimonies that exist regarding the outside work sites provide only a very partial view of what took place for months on end somewhere between Bischofferode and Niedersachswerfen. Tauzin was at Ellrich on May 11, having come from Laura. As he writes:41 “When we got there, Woffleben was a vast plain of fertile fields, located at the foot of a sort of steep-banked hill; three months later, it was an immense work site, crisscrossed with railway lines. I was put to work on an earthworks project with a pick and a pail, then on building the wooden barracks, and then on carrying cement and all kinds of other materials. It was exhausting. And packing it on our already very gaunt shoulders—which by now were already sore, and becoming ever sorer as the days went by until the skin was utterly raw and scabs began to form! And then what torture it was to have to bear the weight of a rail or the corner of a cement block! We had to clench our fists and teeth with pain, and nevertheless do the job—under threat of death.
“And our feet in wooden clogs without soles or completely worn out on one side, or even split right down the middle and cobbled back together with a piece of wire. And when you had to walk miles on end with shoes like that, every single step was an indescribable torment, which nevertheless had to be overcome in order to move forward one way or another.”
Serge Miller42 had to unload the carts. As he writes: “That was really the most useless and the most painful way to die. And with each shovel-full of coal, and with every plank on my shoulder, I saw death looming. After eight days unloading the carts, I was nothing but skin and bones.”
One of Miller’s friends explained to him what had been going on since the beginning of the camp: “A whole area had been planted with wheat. There were 500 of us, at the beginning, and we formed the Ellrich camp. We were brought here by truck. It was in April, Easter Monday. Our first job was to spread out over the immense field and to stamp down the wheat as much as possible with our feet. Tractors were brought in to help us out and finish the destruction—and that scene was, for me anyway, the best illustration of the times of sheer madness in which we were living. In the Woffleben station, trains of material were waiting. Since then, as you have noticed, we’ve never stopped. Roads were cut, and the stream, which wound its way past the mountain, and would have caused problems for opening the tunnels, was diverted, and a picturesque little spot was turned into hell on earth.”
One of the anonymous witnesses of the Mémorial43 mentioned the work-site latrines: “When you went to the latrines, you would always try and stay there for a while; but you didn’t just go when you felt like it. You needed the Vorarbeiter’s permission, because he had to be able to account for his men at every moment.
“In the four corners of the vast work site stood three or four green shacks—the latrines. They were, just as in the Ellrich camp, highly frequented places. It was there that we went to relieve ourselves, and it was there that we went to get away from the exhausting work for a moment or two. And because, quite apart from real needs, everyone tried to pass by the latrines unnecessarily, you were almost always sure to come upon a friend to chat with.
“And so everyone prolonged each visit to these smelly places as long as he could; and next to the Häftling squatting down, there were always a bunch of others, who, their pants pulled back up, made the time last. You were better off there than down by the rails, lugging the cement or doing earthwork, and when the bad wind blew on the work site or the rain fell, there was a veritable pile-up at the latrines. From time to time, the facilities would be cleared out from one second to the next in the frenzy of a headlong rush, when a Kapo came to evacuate the area.”
DIGGING THE TUNNELS. The Ellrich prisoners were to dig tunnels B 3, B 11, and B 12. Only their testimonies regarding the B 12 have been preserved. In the Mémorial under the title “The Woffleben Tunnel” is a description of the digging of the tunnel.
B 12 may have been better organized than the other digging sites. Jean Gineston44 indicates how the stones were evacuated. “When you came out of the tunnel, there was a Decauville-type train. The numerous carts were typical pivoting-bin affairs and were filled up with stones. The Decauville hauled along quite a line-up of carts without any trouble.” The fact that the B 12 miners were entitled to their own camp from January 1945 on—as will be seen—shows the particular attention devoted to this particular work site.
Alongside the miners digging the galleries, there were specialized Kommandos, and in particular Kommandos of electricians. This was the case at Dora for the AEG Kommando (which will be mentioned further along), or at Harzungen for the Kommando of which Schock was the Kapo. The Kommando of electricians based at Ellrich and that worked on B 3 depended on Siemens. It so happens that two of the principal witnesses of what went on at Ellrich, Serge Miller45 and Jacques Courtaud,46 were both members, after other more disagreeable experiences, of this Kommando.
Miller, who spoke German, was a sort of interpreter in a group made up for the most part of French and Belgians. Courtaud joined up with three members of his network—and they were the Three Musketeers to whom Miller makes reference. Courtaud and Miller designated a certain number of their friends, either by their first names or nicknames, or by pseudonyms—which makes crosschecking tricky. It can nevertheless be established that Courtaud’s Lefauve, who died on March 2, is Miller’s Lucien: in both cases he left a widow and orphans at Lyons-la-Forêt. It is more or less certain that Miller’s Paco is Courtaud himself, but it is not sure that Courtaud’s Mahler is truly Miller. In any case the Kapo was a German, Rudolph, a noncommunist anti-Nazi who had been a naval officer and then an engineer—with Siemens.
Another specialized Kommando was that of the forge where Jacques Grandcoin47 worked. As he points out, “Amongst other jobs I was assigned, there was one tempering jumpers for the mine. The jumpers would wear out and would have to be forged once again. There were tilt hammers; we would reforge the jumpers on the tilt hammers, and then temper them.” But the workshop engaged in other activities as well, for instance making pots and pans for civilians in exchange for bread. In the same way, as Abel48 explains, “the woodworking Kommando had a Spanish Kapo who spoke French, by the name of Emilio. Before Christmas 1944, we made toys for the Luftwaffe sentries, who paid for them with bread.”
There was also the painters’ Kommando, which Jacques Vern49 had already been part of at Dora. “Our job consisted of camouflaging stones and other rubble that had been hauled out by carts from the tunnels being dug by the prisoners. [ . . . ] To make the camouflage, powder of all colors had to be mixed with water and a liquid fixer.” Vern remained at Ellrich from July 1944 up until the evacuation. Claude Marchand,50 a professional painter, was engaged in the same activity.
There was also a Kommando of “surveyors” as at Dora, made up above all of more or less qualified Belgians.
ON THE TRAIN BETWEEN ELLRICH AND THE WORK SITES. The trip from the Ellrich station to the work sites was made by train in the morning, leaving at around five o’clock, and left more or less on time. There was a stop when it got to Bischofferode, another at Woffleben, and yet another at Niedersachswerfen. But the return trip was always delayed, and all the testimonies confirm that it was a very painful ordeal.
Tauzin51 provides the following account: “When the workday was over, at around six p.m., we had to wait until eleven p.m. and sometimes even until mid-night for the train which had to take us back to the camp. This wait in the Niedersachswerfen roll-call area, after an exhausting day of prolonged work, and beyond our forces and our physical resistance, was perhaps for me personally the most terribly sad thing I have ever lived through, the most extreme point, not of suffering, but of human distress. [ . . . ] And as this waiting went on for hours and hours, and often in the driving rain, with our clothes utterly soaked, we were overcome by an immense weariness and nevertheless we still reacted.”
He continues, a little further on: “When the train finally arrived [ . . . ] we were crammed into the cars, and then there was the sickly, and actually sickening smell of wet flesh, soaked clothes and, then, of course, we had to get back out, still in the pouring rain, which fell long and hard. Then came the roll call and, finally, the return to the Lager.”
THE AEG KOMMANDO’S EXILE AT ELLRICH. In the first months of the Dora Tunnel, as seen in chapter 5, the AEG Kommando, in charge of the electrical installation, had appeared as a privileged Kommando. It was the last one, on the day of Pentecost 1944, to leave the tunnel dormitories for a block (first Block 113, then another, headed up by a Czech) in the recently established Dora camp. There was then a relatively fruitful period that came to an end one Sunday at the end of July. The Kommando was transferred to Harzungen on foot, and then a week later to Ellrich. It was not, however, assigned to the Sonderstab Kammler’s work sites, but continued to work in the Dora Tunnel. Every day its members went back and forth by train from Ellrich to Niedersachswerfen with the others before making their way to the tunnel on foot. There is in Témoignages strasbourgeois an account by Eugène Greff52 entitled “A Ellrich, près Dora” on this episode of the Kommando’s history, which came to an end on November 10, 1944. That day most of its members returned to the Dora camp, to Block 24, according to Bronchart.53 Others remained at Ellrich and many of them were never to return.
Bronchart, Greff, and Walter’s54 accounts—along with those of several other prisoners—of the hundred days they spent at Ellrich do not add any original information on living conditions in the camp or the daily transports. They tally with other testimonies. One may question the reasons for this sort of exile, which appears to have been something of a sanction. Bronchart believes it had to do with trafficking, the silver from the high-tension fuses having been melted down by some people to make rings. But Bernard d’Astorg55 has doubts about this. Bronchart also thinks that the sanction was lifted following a very direct discussion he had with an engineer from AEG, after having been caught along with other prisoners hiding in a transformer to relax.
THE B12 CAMP AT WOFFLEBEN. In early January 1945, certain prisoners from Ellrich working on work site B 12 stopped going back and forth every day by train between Ellrich and Woffleben and were housed in a new camp that was built on location. They were some of the prisoners working on the digging operations, on eight-hour shifts. The first prisoners concerned were those on the night shift, joined in the following weeks by those from the afternoon shift.
It was made up initially of 242 prisoners on January 3. There were 375 on February 20, 905 on March 1, and 840 on March 31. They were “miners” who were advantaged in comparison to the others because they avoided the fatigue of the transports and the roll calls. This is the very illustration of the situation mentioned above. This inequality of treatment was painfully felt by the other workers, as shown in the following passage from an account by Étienne Lafond: “I talked about the tunnel workers; they were the only ones to curry the SS’s favor—in ridiculous and revolting fashion. Cost what it may, the tunnel had to move forward and only those workers had the privilege of eating, of living.”
A testimony from the Mémorial56 entitled “Lager Woffleben” gives some idea of the inside of the blocks: “The Blocks were new barracks with two floors of wooden partitions. The Häftling slept not on straw mattresses but on a bed of wood shavings, and everyone’s greatest concern when they arrived was to try and recover the shavings that the neighbors on one side or the other might have stolen and slid underneath themselves.
“Space was very reduced—so reduced that instead of being able to sleep on our backs, we had to sleep on our sides, closely hemmed in by two neighbors. Our emaciated sides, which had a hard time bearing any weight, obliged us to change sides fairly often, which could only be done at the same time as all those in the same row. But however reduced the space may have been, at least we were sure of finding a place every day. And everyone infinitely appreciated, three-quarters of an hour after leaving the tunnel, already being ‘back home’ lying down.
“Then we had a table in the barracks where we were served soup and bread; there was scarcely any room on the bench for both buttocks at the same time and we had to wait our turns outside to come and sit down, but when we did sit down we no longer had to worry about finding a tin dish from which two or three others had already swallowed their soup.” According to Gineston, before the evacuation there were seven or eight blocks, and one of them had still not been occupied.
At Woffleben the improvement of material conditions in comparison to Ellrich went hand in hand with more humane overseers. One witness in the Mémorial57 points out that the C Shift Kapos had changed. Instead of two Greens there was a German Red, Walter, and a Pole from Silesia, Stachek. “He was a sturdy fellow with pale skin, a direct gaze, always clean-shaven amongst the dirty and hairy Häftling; he was there, it was alleged, for having been a lieutenant in the international brigades in Spain.” Above all, the two Schreiber were two Belgians (who spoke German), Ernest Abel and Émile Delaunois. There was a (very insignificant) Revier with a French doctor, for several weeks at any rate, and Belgian or French male nurses.
The sick, however, were numerous, because work in the tunnel was harsh and the conditions over the past months had been grueling. The seriously sick were evacuated to Ellrich, and the dead were transported in boxes. On April 1 some seven hundred prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen arrived at Woffleben. They were in very bad shape, but it was claimed they were to be made to work at B 12. The evacuation from Woffleben to Bergen-Belsen took place several days later.
A new SS camp commander, Kleemann, also arrived from Auschwitz along with a new Lagerältester, Bruno Brodniewicz, former LÄ at Auschwitz I, who would supervise the evacuation. Abel58 felt it important to pay homage to a noncommissioned SS officer at Woffleben, Sepp Zwerger, who was the B 12 Arbeitseinsatzführer. In his office Abel was able to listen to the news broadcasts from Luxembourg, freed by the Americans. He adds: “In March 1945, Zwerger deserted with other Austrians by stealing an armed vehicle and took refuge in the mountains of his country. I went and visited him in 1950 to thank him for everything he had done for us as far as he was able.”
THE OHNE KLEIDER. Thanks to the creation of the Woffleben camp, the miners in B 12 avoided for the most part during the final months the consequences of the dramatic negligence that characterized from beginning to end how the Ellrich camp was run. It was caused as much by the SS as by the prisoners they put into positions of responsibility.
There were from time to time individual initiatives that were striking because they were the exception, such as those of Theo.59 “Theo, the big Kapo, was named Block chief, and that nonpolitical prisoner turned out to be a good chief. A mason by trade, energetic and hardworking, he transformed Block 4 from top to bottom. He had the scaffolding demolished and improved sleeping conditions very measurably by dividing the dormitory into little boxes for eighteen men. He had the latrines fixed up. He got the showers working—and that was a genuine feat, because if there was coal, there was no water, and when the water was running there was no coal. But Theo ‘organized’ things—in other words, he stole. Every evening, the prisoners brought back a bit of wood, a bit of coal from their Kommandos.”
In the jargon of the camps, the verb organisieren meant procuring what was lacking by more or less licit means. As in the quotation, the term did not necessarily have a pejorative connotation. An example of negligence was the lack of tin dishes for the soup at a certain point. Abel60 drew attention to this: “At noon, the soup was distributed on work site B 12 by the Kapos. There were neither tin dishes, nor spoons. We had to take rusty tin cans—thrown on a garbage pile by the civilian workers—without being able to clean them. It was only in the days to come that we managed to make ourselves spoons, by carving out pieces of wood.”
Far and away the most serious problem was the lack of clothes and shoes, mentioned to the fullest extent in the text entitled “Histoire d’un Block” in the Mémorial.61 Reference is to Block 4: “Everyone who left for the work sites [at the beginning of the cold period] was dressed in rags, jackets with only one arm, pants which left bums exposed, forty shirts for a hundred men, scarcely a single sweater, sixty pairs of socks for a hundred workers!
“During the first days of November [ . . . ] the Blocks were still cluttered with the sick and the SS declared: ‘Those who do not work must be naked.’ So the sick had to remove their clothes and give all they had to those on the work sites. [ . . . ] Those who had had their clothes and shoes stolen ended up every morning almost naked in the roll-call area. The SS sent them back to the Block, declaring them to be ‘Ohne Kleider’ (unclad). Considered to be sick, they didn’t work, but were absolutely naked.
“A disinfecting brought this sad story to a head. We had to bundle up our clothes indicating our identity number, but we didn’t have any pencils. Moreover, ‘putting those rags through an overheated machine ended up destroying what was still hanging together.’ The next day, many of the prisoners were Ohne Kleider. The number of prisoners unfit for work became enormous. [ . . . ] A nudist’s situation was doubtless more enviable than that of his friends who left in a Kommando. But the SS decided to class the weaker amongst the Ohne Kleider in the ‘Transport’ category.
“Of the 600 men in his Block, Theo had 250 nudists. [ . . . ] He kept the nudists busy with trifling work. [ . . . ] With a blanket around the waist, they came and went, and they were known as the ‘Peplum.’ As the rhythm of death accelerated, the SS no longer dared to carry out a roll call of the naked men in the glacial field and allowed it to take place inside the Block, but with all the windows open.” Theo blocked the windows.
In the month of January 1945, clothing arrived; the Ohne Kleider were dressed again and sent off to the work sites where most of them soon died. Roger Agnès62 made it through but lost his buddy Jean Grignola. At the end of the same month the sick left Block 4 for the Schonung, recently set up in Block 10.
The account given by Miller63 ties in with that in the Mémorial but allows it to be clarified on two points. The disinfecting, which multiplied the number of Ohne Kleider, took place in September 1944, and the situation apparently lasted three months. Especially “for those who were out of work involuntarily, the commander decided to give them only a half-ration of bread and margarine.” Those prisoners affected by this measure found themselves terribly weakened as a consequence and were unable to withstand being reclothed and sent back out on the work sites.
Even apart from the cases of the Ohne Kleider, testimonies as to the lack of clothes and absence of hygiene abound. René André64 writes: “I spent eight months at Ellrich without taking a single shower, without changing my clothes, without getting undressed.” Lafond65 notes: “I wore the same shirt for eight months. No underwear, no sweater, no socks, no overcoat. Just a jacket, canvas trousers and wooden shoes that wore out in a month.”
FAMINE AT ELLRICH. In mid-February 1945 a new and dramatic situation developed with the food. Miller66 describes the situation as follows: “The bread factory which supplied us was destroyed sometime in mid-February and the only food that had prevented us from collapsing was taken away. The soup, for months, had been nothing but turnip and rutabaga water; it became our sole and unique food. A quart at four o’clock in the morning to replace the bread, and our usual quart when we got home in the evening. An average of seventeen hours without eating went by between the two rations. Panic set in, because it was famine in the truest sense of the word. The soup could no longer be felt a half-hour after we had swallowed it. It was nothing but a mere enema, which obliged us to urinate more than usual.
“On the work site, during the midday break, groups of men, like famished wolves around a village, would linger near the civilian canteen, attracted by the odor of the cooking. Vegetable refuse in the garbage, the stalks of cabbages, potato peels were all the object of fierce battles. Those who got their hands on them, after washing them, put them all in a pot and made a soup on a wood fire. It was nothing but water and peelings, without salt or fat, but when they swallowed it down, you would have thought they were eating roast goose.”
Miller continues: “On the fourth evening without bread, the kitchen was attacked on the side where the rutabaga stock was kept. Some fifty prisoners, under cover of darkness, and in spite of the fact that it was forbidden to move about, smashed the window that gave onto the kitchen and a full-scale pillage began. A violent wind covered all the noise, but the sound of disputes and yells attracted the attention of a sentry who was in a nearby watchtower. The soldier opened fire with a machine gun in the direction the noise was coming from, and at dawn, the prisoners who went off for KP duty found two dead prisoners stiff from the cold and several others wounded, who were half frozen.
“The sixth evening the undertakers who undressed the corpses in front of one of the sheds of the Revier caught sight of a Gypsy in the throes of cutting himself a beefsteak from the buttocks of a dead prisoner. The camp commander, informed by the Kapo of the Revier about this first case of cannibalism, brought his wife and his entire staff out to watch the scene. I was informed in time to get there myself, and the Gypsy did not hesitate, following a sign from the commander who had brought a piece of bread and salt with him, to continue again in public what he had begun in secret. The sight of the bread whet his appetite, and after having carved another slice from the corpse, and salted it well, made himself a sandwich which he devoured in several minutes. I was well placed to see the color of the human flesh, which was dark red, as well as the commander who smiled at his wife, as if to say: ‘My dear, I am offering you a rare spectacle.’ Late that night, the Gypsy was executed by prisoners of all different nationalities.”
There are varying accounts of this event, but they do not come from eyewitnesses. Already in 1945, Lafond67 reported a camp rumor: “A Russian partially ate the calves of four corpses. He was discovered and he had to repeat his horrible act in the presence of two prisoner doctors and the German Lagerarzt—which he did without hesitation, asking for bread and salt. To punish him, he was handed over to his compatriots who stoned him to death.” The account put together by Bornemann68 in 1987 goes much further: “On the sixth day without bread, the undertakers noticed that the corpses had been cut into in order to remove flesh. Looking at the wounds, a doctor from the Revier came to the conclusion that it had been the work of an expert. The Revier Kapo informed the SS. Everyone was on their guard, and indeed, a Russian medical student was arrested early in the morning. The camp commander and his aides carried out an interrogation and decided to put on a show for the Prominente: the prisoner had to castrate a dead body, was given a slice of bread, salt and pepper, and was ordered to eat it all. That evening, after roll call, the Russian was lynched.”
On March 8, Courtaud69 noted the following in his diary: “Yesterday, a quarter of a bread: general rejoicing.” The food shortage had lasted three weeks. Bread delivery also came to a halt during the same period at Dora and Harz-ungen. But the consequences were less serious than at Ellrich. Potatoes compensated to some extent, and the shortage was shorter lived. The disorder that reigned at Ellrich made all problems worse.
THE ELLRICH REVIER. Information on the Ellrich Revier is fragmentary. The fundamental text is anonymous and was published in the Mémorial, entitled “Le Revier.”70 Further indications are provided by the typewritten memoirs of Max Oesch,71 and by short testimonies. The Revier was initially installed in the main building of the former plaster works. Oesch notes that it occupied the first and second floors. “On the first floor was the room for surgical patients. [ . . . ] On the second were the patients from the medical ward, contagious for the most part.”
As at Dora in the autumn of 1943, the Revier’s functioning had disquieting aspects: “The surgeon saved for himself those operations which consisted almost entirely in opening abscesses. Until October 1944, this surgeon was Jupp, a Belgian from Saint-Vith who refused to be anything but German and who pretended to understand neither French nor Flemish. He was, by trade, a porter at the Cologne railway station.”
The doctors and male nurses with the medical ambulance, run by a good Polish doctor from Warsaw, did what they could. “They handed out a quarter of an aspirin tablet to those with a fever; to those with dysentery, a spoonful of kaolin or coal diluted in dirty water, hard to swallow because there wasn’t much water, and the sick person suffocated on this overly dry paste. When a prisoner had a fever of more than 40°C, he was allowed to rest in his Block where he had to put up with every imaginable rebuff if not actually do duties. Those who seemed in danger of dying were admitted into the Revier if space was available, corresponding to the number of deaths the day before.”
Greff,72 in the AEG Kommando, confirms this picture: “In what was known as the Revier, the sick were accepted if they were already half dead. The doctors abstained, moreover, from giving them any care. They were left alone to finish dying.” Miller’s account is similar:73 “Every day, several prisoners from the Block left for the Revier and were never seen again. Some died directly in their berths without any sickness; they just flickered out like burned-down candles.”
Several prisoners were saved by being transferred to the Dora Revier in rather unusual conditions, such as Stéphane Hessel’s two liaison agents, Jacques Brun and Jean-Pierre Couture. Brun responded as follows to a recent questionnaire:74 “Ellrich. Was admitted into the Revier in late October 1944 with dysentery, pleurisy, bronchitis, 40°C of fever under the arm. At that time, there was no medication, no doctors or nurses worthy of the name. Was evacuated to Dora with the transport of corpses to be burned in the crematorium, on a day that their number was insufficient, my survival being considered a matter of mere days, if not hours. Arrived late at night, after the lights had been put out.” It was then that the Dutch doctor looked after him. Brun remained in the Dora Revier until the camp was evacuated.
Couture’s account75 is not very different: “I was evacuated from Ellrich to Dora in a small truck, which, twice a week, carried corpses to the Dora crematorium. Because I wasn’t dead when we got there, I was put into waiting in the Revier, then sent to Nordhausen as a Muselmann.” He remained in the Dora Revier from December 20, 1944, to March 10, 1945. Gilbert,76 the victim of a serious accident, was transported unconscious to the Dora Revier in early October and was treated by Dr. Poupault. He subsequently managed to stay in the Altverwertung (recovery) Kommando until the evacuation.
For Tauzin77 things were more complicated: “Personally, my condition was growing severely worse. My limbs were sometimes completely paralyzed. It was then decided to transfer me to the Dora Revier, where I would apparently be better cared for. In an ambulance car, eight of us left for Dora. By special favor, I was allowed to stay on a stretcher.
“We were only seven miles from the Dora camp, and yet, having left Ellrich at six in the evening, we only got there toward midnight: we were stranded for more than five hours because of a serious breakdown, and as the driver, totally drunk, was never able to put on the spare tire, all seven sick prisoners had to get out—they were all extremely sick, all shivering with fever—and, lying in the snow, underneath the car, were forced to help with the repairs. I should add that I never saw any of them again. Luckily a truck came along, hitched us up, and pulled us to the Dora camp.” Tauzin remained in the Dora Revier from December 1944 until the liberation of the camp.
Conversely, things were much simpler for Mandelbaum,78 alias Lambert, who was transported from Ellrich to Dora in an SS ambulance with the Czech Wodruzeck on December 29, 1944. Fifty years later he still does not know what motivated this favor. Leaving the Revier in February, he became night watchman in Block 108 at Dora.
New barracks were finally built for the Revier and the Schonung, on the other side of the roll-call grounds. The transfer took place in late December 1944 or early January 1945. “The supreme discovery was how the Schonung Block had been organized, divided into three rooms, one for the convalescents, the other for the surgical patients, the third occupied by those who, beyond recovery, were to die as quickly as possible. Almost without any food, in dreadful filth, they were indeed very quickly eliminated.”
For a long time the Kapo of the Revier was Alfred Gutzkow, whom Oesch79 knew from Wieda. It was thanks to Gutzkow that Oesch had got into the Revier as Schreiber and then as Kalfaktor before being dismissed, then reintegrated and becoming a nurse. These vicissitudes corresponded to the varying success of the intrigues carried out by the head nurse of the surgery, Gerhart Erler, a Red who had been imprisoned for a long time who was violently anti-French, as opposed to Gutzkow (who died of tuberculosis several months after the liberation). Gutzkow was transferred to Dora at his request at the end of February 1945. He was replaced, according to Grand,80 by a Volksdeutsch from Romania “who was only interested in the quart of burning alcohol which I received on two occasions and which he made off with to drink.”
With regard to the SS command, Gutzkow enjoyed the support of the camp’s German doctor, Captain Schneeman, who was a member of the Luftwaffe, as well as that of his counterpart at Harzungen. Among the Revier personnel there were French such as Dr. Pierre Ségelle from Orléans, Dr. Henri Duflot from the Pas-de-Calais area (who arrived from Gross Rosen in February), and Dr. Albert Dubois, a Parisian dentist.
One of the very serious problems was the lack of medicines—which is what Raymond Grand ran up against. He was a pharmacist from Paris, whom Gutzkow had recruited as Apotheker for the Revier on Oesch’s recommendation. Highly competent and efficient, he exerted a great influence.
He was helped by Georges Virondeau81 in exceptional circumstances. The latter, who remained at Buchenwald until June 1944, was admitted into the Ell-rich Revier where he found his network leader, Dr. Dubois (known as “Teddy”). By chance Dubois spoke of Virondeau to Captain Schneeman, mentioning to him that he did magic tricks, which was of personal interest to Schneeman. He then hired Virondeau as Kalfaktor in the soldiers’ Revier, located five hundred yards outside the camp.
From October 1944 to April 1945, Virondeau held onto his position and was able, in particular, to provide Grand and Dubois with medications stolen from the soldiers’ pharmacy. He relates: “Every day, a sentry took me there and brought me back. They had me wear very decent-looking civilian clothing because we had to pass by some thirty homes. I had a black armband emblazoned with a red cross and the word ‘Truppenrevier’ in white letters.” Thanks to the complicity of two German soldier-nurses he was able to steal medicines, particularly sulfa drugs, and bring them back to the camp along with cigarettes. He could also listen to the BBC. He thus took major risks, but both he and his correspondents remained discreet right to the end. The only hitch came on January 1, 1945: “The sentry and I came back completely ‘plastered’ (from Rhine wine). When I started to want to sing the Marseillaise in front of my Block, a friend knocked me out and put me to bed.”
Albert Besançon,82 who, having come from Oranienburg, was Schreiber and pharmacist at the Rechlin-Retzow camp Revier in Mecklenburg, got to Ellrich on February 12, 1945, with identity number 114977 and then began working with Grand. (Paul von Gunten83 had arrived on January 4, coming from Alt Ruppin after having passed through Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. He ended up at Woffleben.)
MORTALITY AT ELLRICH. All the surviving witnesses of Ellrich, whenever they may have written their accounts, whatever the differences in the form and the style of what they wrote, present a remarkably homogeneous picture both of the working conditions in the tunnels and the outside Kommandos and of the conditions of life in the camp, in the blocks, and in the Revier.
A certain number of these witnesses had the good fortune to escape death through a transfer to Dora, including Couture, Pescadère, Tauzin, and Greff. Others were ultimately assigned to other, less exposed positions, such as Oesch, Goasguen, Grand, Virondeau, and Terral, or such as Abel, Miller, Courtaud, and Grandcoin. A knowledge of German was a precious advantage for Abel and Miller. Only very few witnesses, such as Auchabie and Lafond, remained exposed right to the end. Later chapters will show what they had to deal with at the last moment and why Lafond entitled his book of memories Survie (Survival).
It is not easy, on the statistical level, to appreciate the extent of the mortality due to Ellrich’s particular conditions. Until August 1944 the number of deaths registered at Ellrich remained remarkably low—seventeen in all—because those prisoners acknowledged to be sick—that is, several hundred—were transferred to the Dora and Harzungen Reviers, where care was available, however limited. There is thus no way whatsoever of knowing how many of those sick prisoners died.
The death rate at Ellrich grew in September (29), in October (107), and in November (144), although the transfer of the sick continued. Beginning in December the mortality rate grew dramatically: 381 deaths were registered in that month, 498 in January 1945, 541 in February, 331 in the first ten days of March, 371 in the second ten days, and 319 in the last ten days.
But these figures underestimate the extent of the losses because there was a simultaneous transfer of Muselmänner to Dora. It was thus that at the beginning of February 1945, Guy Marty84 left his block with a whole group of invalids who had just been dressed. They took the train as far as Woffleben, then made their way to Dora on foot, by way of the Kohnstein route.
The Ellrich camp in the first weeks of 1945 was cluttered with “inactive” prisoners. The Arbeitseinteilung of January 29, 1945, already quoted above, indicated indeed that, of a total of 6,571 Häftling, there were 467 in the Revier, 983 in the Blockschonung, and 203 in Krankentransport and thus ready to be transferred elsewhere as sick. The sum total of these unusable prisoners—some 1,653 of them—represented a quarter of the overall population. It was a considerable percentage, because those actually at the work sites were themselves very often in bad health.
THE CONVOY OF MARCH 3, 1945, AND THE FINAL WEEKS AT ELLRICH. It was in these conditions that a convoy was organized on March 3, 1945, to evacuate 1,602 prisoners of all nationalities from Ellrich. The convoy ended up at Nordhausen’s Boelcke Kaserne. On March 6 a convoy left Nordhausen for an unknown destination with 1,184 of the 1,602 prisoners who had arrived on March 3. Another 346 prisoners died in between times at Nordhausen, or were already dead on arrival. The remaining 76 prisoners managed to stay at the Boelcke Kaserne and later shared the fate of the other camp occupants, in circumstances that will be mentioned in chapter 15. Pierre Auchabie85 was among them.
In all likelihood the March 6 convoy was sent toward Bergen-Belsen, and practically all the prisoners died either during the journey or once they arrived.
Lafond86 lost a good many of his friends in that transport. “That day I was at work and if I had known the departure time, I had the possibility to join up with my friends. I missed the chance.” But he entered the Blockschonung himself on March 15 and only got out on April 5 to get onto an evacuation train.
In the last weeks at Ellrich death was present everywhere in the camp, just as it had been a year before in the Dora Tunnel. Lafond, when he entered Flügel C of the Blockschonung, observed: “Right when you arrive, they take away all your clothes, once and for all, they write your number in ink on your chests and count your gold teeth. The exit is by way of the crematory oven.”
Outside the corpses piled up, as Max Oesch87 writes: “They were dying in the Revier, dying in the Blocks, dying in the work Kommandos, dying during roll call. All these scrawny corpses were stacked up outside, exactly four steps from the window of my room.” (There was no more gas for the truck that took the cadavers to the Dora crematorium.) “When there got to be about three hundred in the stack, all the bodies were taken to the pyre on the roll-call grounds. It was first of all a pile of straw, on which wooden crosspieces that had been soaked with tar were aligned. The cadavers were placed next to one another, top-to-tail, along two rows. Up above, other crosspieces were placed and then two more rows added. And so on. The next day, in the early morning, someone would set fire to the straw. A thick, acrid smoke would inundate the camp, all day long. In the evening, whatever was still burning was covered over with earth, because of the Anglo-American aircraft.”
Oesch continues: “Along would come an SS holding a box, paper and pencil, and a dentist with tools: they were recuperating the gold teeth. A Kalfaktor pulled the cadavers up one by one, by the feet. Every mouth was inspected. If a gold tooth was found, the dentist pulled it out. An ink stamp on the corresponding stomach. The SS took the tooth, made note of it on his paper, and put it into the box. The Kalfaktors then took the corpse and threw it onto the heap.”
In the month of March 1945, on the hill above the camp, the brand-new crematorium was put into operation.
THREE DRAMATIC TOLLS. At Ellrich, groups of prisoners had disappeared. It was indicated above, at the end of chapter 6, how André Rogerie and Pierre Auchabie had lost their closest companions in the hellish first months at Dora. Similar tolls can be established for the hell of the last months at Ellrich.
The first of these tolls88 concerns the fourteen prisoners from Île-Tudy, a small fishing port in the Finistère region of Brittany, where they were arrested on June 20, 1944. They all arrived at Ellrich with the other “77,000”s. Their names were Joseph Cluyou (77784), François Coupa (77742), Grégoire Coupa (77738), Eugène Cratès (77743), Pierre Diquelou (77787), Georges Goasdoué (77737), Pierre Goasdoué (77739), Aimé Guégen (77801), Edgar-Félix Guinvarch (77757), François Guinvarch (77776), Jean Guinvarch (77741), Gilbert Le Bris (77740), Marcel Perrin (?), and Maurice Voland (77744). All were fishermen or petty officers in the navy on armistice leave. In 1945 there was only one survivor among them, Pierre Goasdoué.
They were young men, born between 1909 and 1924. The hostages taken on August 16, 1944, in the town of Puiseaux, in the Loiret,89 were on the whole much older: the mayor, Émile Tinet (born in 1878) and his son Étienne, veterinarian (1912), the secretary of the town hall Marcel Lange (1883), the priests Henri Retaureau (1881) and Jacques Baranton (1903), the chief of the gendarmerie Georges Detoux (1900) and the gendarme Edmond Marienne (1905), the garage owner Germain Berthier (1893), and the mechanics Lucien Piétrois (1901) and Georges Berthier (1923), confectioner Louis Maris (1902), the potato merchant Maurice Foiry (1899), and the fertilizer merchant Henri Masure (1913). The grocer Raymond Bourdois (1910) was also arrested.
Taken to Fresnes, they were deported from Pantin to Buchenwald and assigned identity numbers between 77398 (Detoux) and 77459 (Lange). Bourdois was given the number 76857. They were all transferred to Dora, and half of them went from there to Ellrich. Out of fourteen deportees, only three came back in 1945, the elder priest Retaureau, Bourdois, and Georges Berthier.
A third toll can be taken from the list of the dead companions to whom Étienne Lafond90 dedicated his book of memoirs. It has to do with those with aristocratic names: the marquis René de Roye (77722), Francis de Buigne (31083), Ivan de Colombel (77040), Christian de Dancourt (53257), Philippe d’Elbée (77538), Richard de la Falaise (77200), to which the name of Robert de Renty (77096) must also be added, as he also died at Ellrich. A detailed knowledge of the list of prisoners—French and Belgian in particular—would make it possible to see how groups of deportees with close ties between them were thus affected by their common belonging to bad Kommandos.
Those who were not actually witnesses have a hard time imagining the terrible circumstances under which some of the Ellrich prisoners died. There is information gathered in 1945 on the death of one of the hostages from Puiseaux, the chief of the gendarmerie, Georges Detoux.91 “Detoux was suffering from dysentery. He was extremely weak, his body was incontinent and gave off a nauseating odor, which provoked the fury of the Block wardens and other prisoners. They jumped on him, beat him up and violently hurled him down the steep stairway from the third floor. Having regained his balance on the floor below, he managed to use his remaining strength to make his way back up. Then he was knocked out with a bed board. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and it was the month of December 1944. His fellow prisoners found him the next morning on the first-floor landing, lying on his back, his mouth open. He had stopped living.”
Overall it seems that, proportionally, the prisoners who arrived later suffered the most. This conclusion was reached after a detailed examination of the lists dealing with the Langenstein camp, which will be seen in the next chapter. At Ellrich it was the prisoners who had been there the longest, such as Serge Miller, Jacques Courtaud, Michel Debeauvais, Rémy Vincent, and Max Oesch, who were able to provide an overall view of the camp’s history.
THE END OF THE KOHNSTEIN AND HIMMELBERG WORK SITES. During the holiday season in late 1944 the work sites were suspended to enable the German civilians to take leave and spend time with their families in a Reich that was still more or less intact, except for Aachen and a fringe of East Prussia. One civilian remained, however, who perhaps no longer had a house or family. He took advantage of the situation to requisition the prisoners and have them transport rails.
Right from the beginning of January work started up again, but the lack of concentration camp manpower was ever more obvious. It was no longer possible to call upon Buchenwald, upon which Ellrich, as will soon be shown, no longer depended. In any case, Buchenwald no longer received convoys of new deportees and had to draw upon the camp population to provide prisoners for the dreadful Ohrdruf Kommando. Ever more precarious, the local labor force had to suffice. Four initiatives were taken in the course of the first quarter of 1945—a particularly harsh winter quarter. In January, as seen above, a delivery of striped uniforms made it possible to reclothe the Ohne Kleider at Ellrich and to send them back out onto the work sites. In December 1944 a Kommando 32 was set up at Dora, which was sent to work on the Niedersachswerfen work sites. Pierre Maho92 was part of that Kommando, which was ultimately established in the unoccupied buildings of the Boelcke Kaserne at Nordhausen.
When frost halted the work on the Helmetalbahn, the prisoners from the Baubrigaden were used from January 2 to February 15. Those from Osterhagen, as already mentioned, came to Woffleben every day by train. Finally, the evacuation of the Auschwitz and Gross Rosen camps having brought a flood of prisoners to Dora, seven hundred of them were transferred on April 1 to the Woffleben camp to be put to work on B 12. The results of these initiatives were practically null because of the newcomers’ physical deficiency. Generally speaking, the only effect was to precipitate their end without speeding up the work.
The information Bornemann93 put together makes it possible to appreciate the situation on the various work sites at the time of the evacuation. The usable surface opened up by the digging, in B 12, over a span of 350 yards in the principal galleries, with between eight and ten transversal galleries, was then 325,000 square feet, as opposed to 1.3 million square feet in the Dora Tunnel and the 1.73 million square feet planned. Its use for aircraft construction had not yet been able to get under way.
The digging of B 3 was further advanced, given that the usable surface was 486,000 square meters as opposed to the 1.4 million initially planned. But the aircraft factory was still not set up. The evolution of project B 11 was different. Not only did the usable surface resulting from the digging reach 572,000 square feet as opposed to the 864,000 planned for, but arrangements were made for the production of jet-aircraft fuel in the framework of the Kuckuck program. The early project was moreover modified and the Kuckuck program was broken down into Kuckuck I and Kuckick II. Kuckuck I remained beneath the Kohnstein for production itself, but another site further to the west, beneath the Kammerforst, was chosen for the refining station, where the refrigeration towers on the outside were easier to camouflage. The two sites were linked by mains laid on concrete platforms hidden by the forest. The second site thus housed Kuckuck II, which was built in the framework of a new project referred to as B 17, through the use of prisoners from Ellrich.
The prisoners in B 17 were above all miners. But Robert Lançon,94 a cabinetmaker by trade, was one of the six members of the Sägewerk (sawmill) Kommando Schmidt up until the evacuation. As already mentioned, work on B 11 and B 17 in particular had been put in the hands of the Ammoniakwerk Merseburg, a company long since established in Niedersachswerfen. It employed in fact more civilian workers—both German and foreign—than prisoners, and work site B 11 is rarely mentioned in the prisoners’ testimonies. What left a mark on people’s minds were work sites B 3 and B 12, and above all the earthworks and carrying jobs on the Woffleben plain, whether or not in the framework of the B 13 work site.
Those who ran the Harzungen, Ellrich, and Woffleben camps between May 1944 and April 1945 were merely following orders. Those who belonged to the Luftwaffe, such as the commander of Harzungen or the doctors at Harzungen and Ellrich, behaved fairly well—given the circumstances of the time. The SS on the other hand were all in all a somber bunch of brutes, and they bear a heavy responsibility in the prisoners’ sufferings.
But it should not be forgotten that the essential responsibility was Kammler’s—for it was he who ran both the work sites and the camps. It is extraordinary that a project as insane as the digging of 4 million square feet of galleries was carried out with such obstinacy, even in the final weeks, and that nothing was done in this regard to protect the existence of an increasingly scarce labor force. Right to the very end there were still leaders and business executives who were willing accomplices in a massacre that, in the apocalypse of the end of Nazism, appeared premeditated.