The Dora camp and tunnel, the Helmetalbahn Kommandos and work sites, the Harzungen, Ellrich, and Woffleben camps along with the new Kohnstein and Himmelberg work sites made up a coherent geographical whole, with numerous exchanges of both healthy and ailing prisoners. But beginning in the spring of 1944 other Kommandos were set up in the area, all round the Harz Mountains, out of Buchenwald. Some of them were later brought under the dependency of Neuengamme. In the autumn of 1944 still others were linked to Dora, Ellrich, and Harzungen, making up Mittelbau. The rest continued to depend on Buchenwald.
Part 6 will show the common destiny of all these camps and Kommandos at the time of their evacuation. The successive study of these neighboring camps will bring to light the names of some very well-known prisoners: Serge Balachowsky, Stéphane Hessel, David Rousset, Robert Antelme, and Robert Desnos.
The transfer of aviation assembly plants into underground installations, which came about in the spring of 1944, was, in the Mittelraum, above all of interest to the Junkers-Betriebe company, whose traditional sites were immediately to the east in Anhalt (Dessau, Bernburg, Köthen) and nearby (Leipzig, Magdeburg).
The workshops transferred to the north part of the Dora Tunnel, evacuated by Mittelwerk on Kammler’s orders, were known as Nordwerk Niedersachswerfen. They did not use concentration camp manpower but rather a largely foreign labor force (5,000 workers as opposed to 500 German civilians) with whom the Mittelwerk prisoners were not supposed to have any contact.
At the same time the Sonderstab Kammler proceeded with setting up a factory in a natural cave at Heimkehle, to the east of Nordhausen, as part of the A 5 operation. At the Schönebeck factory south of Magdeburg there was a large Buchenwald Kommando with skilled workers who had been selected upon the convoys’ arrival. A large number of the Schönebeck personnel was transferred to the Heimkehle cave. Another Kommando of this kind was found in Halberstadt. The new factory, called Thyrawerke Rottleberode, built landing gear.
It was thus that Victor Letourneux,1 from the “20,000”s convoy—which got to Buchenwald in September 1943—arrived from Schönebeck in the Rottleberode camp. Jean Rougier2 came directly from Buchenwald on June 15, 1944. later, Stéphane Hessel would pass only briefly through Schönebeck before getting to Rottleberode on November 4, 1944. The corresponding camp3 was established to the north of the village in the Max Schuck porcelain factory. It was given the code name of Heinrich. There were 903 prisoners on December 31, 1944; their number had grown to 1,700 on the eve of the evacuation. The Revier doctor as of July 1944 was a Belgian, Dr. Fernand Maistriaux,4 from Beauraing.
The French male nurse was the Alsatian student Robert Gandar.5 Rougier and Letourneux have both paid homage to these men’s devotion. Gandar gave Maistriaux medication when he was “afflicted with serious pleurisy in the left lung” prior to the evacuation. There was also the black male nurse named Johnny, who deserves special mention. It is noteworthy that people as different as Stéphane Hessel and Johnny ended up at the same time in Rottleberode.
A little further to the north, at Stempeda, the Sonderstab Kammler opened an underground work site, the B 4, of the same kind as the B 3, B 11, and B 12 already mentioned above. The corresponding Kommando seems to have been made up above all of Hungarian Jews.
STÉPHANE HESSEL AND ALFRED BALACHOWSKY. At the end of March 1944, Stéphane Hessel arrived in France from London in a Lysander, sent by the BCRA on a mission to reorganize radio contacts between the different networks. For this mission, known as Cobra, two young men acted as his agents, Jacques Brun and Jean-Pierre Couture. Hessel and Couture were arrested on July 10, and Brun on July 11.6 (Brun and Couture have already appeared in the preceding chapter in relation to the Ellrich camp and their transfer to the Dora Revier.)
Hessel was of German origin and like Semprun spoke excellent German, which was a significant advantage under certain circumstances at the time. On August 8 he joined a group of thirty-seven Resistance fighters arrested in France, comprised above all of French, several Belgians, three Englishmen, an American, and a Canadian who were transferred from Paris to Buchenwald,7 were they arrived on August 12 and were grouped in Block 17. The newcomers had contacts with the Buchenwald prisoners. Hessel met Pineau, whom he had known in London; Henri Frager met Semprun, who had been a member of his network. They were visited by Alfred (also Serge) Balachowsky, who worked in Block 50, where a vaccination against typhus was being prepared.
Balachowsky, a Frenchman of Russian origin who had arrived in Buchenwald with the first convoy of January 1944, was quickly sent to Dora, where he did spray-painting on the Spitze of the V2s. As he was a well-known scientist at the Pasteur Institute, he was brought back from Dora to Buchenwald following a high-level decision because prisoners could not leave Dora (not at that time at any rate).8
At Buchenwald he was first sent to the bunker, until it was noticed that he kept coming back on a regular basis. He was then assigned to the Block 50 Kommando, which was made up of sixty-five prisoners of all origins, including seven Jews. There were many scholars as well as politicians, in particular the Austrian Eugen Kogon, who had a powerful influence on the SS doctor, Dr. Ding-Schuler. The latter was the head of both Block 50 and Block 46, where medical experiments were carried out on prisoners, in particular against exan-thematic typhus, and where prisoners who were (often terminally) ill with typhus were also hospitalized. Blocks 46 and 50 were isolated from the rest of the camp, and the SS in particular never went in.
On September 8, sixteen of the thirty-seven resistance fighters were “called to the tower” (at the camp entrance) and executed by hanging. The others knew that their turn would come. And it was then that a rescue operation was organized for three among them, through Balachowsky. Kogon gained the complicity of Dr. Ding-Schuler and Dietzsch, the Kapo of Block 46, for an identity swap with the French prisoners dying of typhus. It was in this way that the Englishmen Yeo Thomas and Peuleve and the Frenchman Stéphane Hessel were saved. A detailed account of this operation—dramatic in more ways than one—is given by Kogon in L’État SS (The SS State) and by Hessel in Danse avec le siècle9 (Dance with the Century). Almost all the others, including Frager, were executed.
Hessel,10 assuming the identity of the cutter Michel Boitel, and with identity number 81626, was assigned to Rottleberode via Schönebeck. His knowledge of German enabled him to become a Buchführer—that is, an accountant. He then remained in the camp before returning to the factory, thanks to two Prominente, the Kapo Walter and the Schreiber Ulbricht, politicians who explained the rules of concentration camp life to him.
When he got back to the factory, he and a friend, Robert Lemoine, decided to escape. They slipped away in the course of the walk from the camp to the factory in early February 1945. Quickly caught, they were sent off to Dora and locked up in the bunker. Once again Hessel’s knowledge of German allowed him to minimize the damage. Lemoine and he were sent to the Strafkommando with the Fluchtpunkt of escapees. He had to do earthwork. He was also assigned the task of undressing the corpses from the evacuation convoys coming from the camps to the east.
JOHNNY. The “Negro Johnny” as Rassinier calls him, and as he was known at the time, was already a notable in Buchenwald, where he arrived with one of the January 1944 convoys and passed himself off as a black American. He obtained a position as a doctor in the Revier, where he was quickly recognized for his incompetence and boasting—but also for his generosity. From there he went to the Dora Revier, where Rassinier met up with him.11 Then he became a nurse at the Rottleberode Revier, where Gandar was in charge of his initiatives. He was finally liberated in Mecklenburg after having left the column (in the course of the evacuation of Ravensbrück, which will be dealt with in chapter 21) in the company of the interpreter Georges Schmidt.
After the war, research was done on “Johnny Nicolas,” the results of which are as follows:
“Johnny was not American, but French. His real name was Jean Marcel Nicolas. He was born in 1918 in Haiti. His parents came from Guadeloupe and were French citizens. He had learned American English from the Marines based in Haiti. Jean did a part of his studies in France and served for a time in the French Navy. He was living in France when the war broke out. During the German occupation, he claimed he was a pilot with the US Air Force and called himself Johnny Nicolas. He did intelligence work for the Allies, but was denounced in Paris by his ‘girlfriend.’ He was sent to Buchenwald, then to Dora. He survived the war, but died in France in September 1945. According to Dr. Groeneveld, Johnny was a boy with a character, who knew German well, which allowed him to survive and help out his fellow prisoners in the camp.” Johnny was a phenomenon who fascinated a good many prisoners, especially the young Russians who had never seen a black man before.
Blankenburg is a small town located in the northeast part of the Harz Mountains, on the opposite side from Nordhausen. Like most everywhere else in the Harz area there are mines and quarries nearby, some abandoned, some not. The Todt Organization decided in mid-1944 to open a work site in the area, defined by the testimony of Justin Gruat. He mentions “miners and frame-workers working in an abandoned mine, in order to enlarge the galleries and turn them into an underground factory.”
The camp, called Klosterwerke, was located in Oesig, a town to the west of Blankenburg. Thanks to Belgian testimonies, in particular Albert Van Hoey’s12 and Narcisse Dufrane’s, its history is known. It was opened on August 23, 1944, by a group of 500 prisoners who had arrived by train directly from Buchenwald. Among them there were 369 Belgians belonging to the August 10 convoy and several Frenchmen arrested either in Belgium, such as Hubert Tumerelle, or in the north of France such as Boleslas Leciejewski, from Lens.13 The other prisoners were Greens involved in supervising the blocks, the Kommandos, the Poles and Russians, and so on.
The prisoners were first housed in a camp of tents. Some of them, including Van Hoey, were assigned to constructing a camp of barracks for which the plans exist, drawn up by Van Hoey and Maurice Bouchez. It was occupied on October 1. The other prisoners were sent off for digging and stone removal work or transporting bags of cement and iron reinforcing bars in the same conditions as those on the Sonderstab Kammler work sites. The French doctor from the Revier, Dr. Georges Ropers, who came from Ellrich, did what he could, but he too lacked medicines. The mortality rate was high. The corpses, stripped of their clothes, were thrown into mass graves.
Another camp was set up at the end of January 1945 in Regenstein, a hill located to the north of Blankenburg. Its code name was Turmalin. The prisoners were Jews evacuated from the Fürstengrübe Kommando, dependent on Auschwitz.14
Work remained unfinished when Turmalin and Klosterwerke were evacuated, both on the same day.
A camp at Osterode is known to have existed because of the decision taken at the end of 1944 to link it to Dora, at the same time as Rottleberode and Blankenburg. It was known as Heber and had 286 prisoners at the time. It was set up at Freiheit in August–September and manufactured aeronautical equipment.15
A second camp, at Osterode-Petershütte, corresponded to the Dachs IV project and had to do with underground work carried out by the Todt Organization for refining mineral oil. It is known about through Hofstein’s testimony. In January 1945, Dr. Jules Hofstein,16 a French Jew, found himself at Dora following an evacuation from Auschwitz. He came from the Bismarckshütte annex Kommando, where he had been the doctor. He was transferred to Osterode, also as a doctor.
He provides some highly valuable details: “The camp was just in the process of being finished. There were, at the time, 800 prisoners, who, in three teams, were digging galleries into the mountain, where underground factories were to be installed. As if this heavy work were not enough, there was also camp-setup duty.” Hofstein managed to have prisoners who were in the Schonung exempted from these duties. He was backed up by the LÄ, an old Bavarian communist.
He adds the following surprising fact: “Strange detail, but, during burials, a doctor was supposed to accompany the duty and make sure the service was properly carried out. I thus had the occasion to take part in the burial of Jewish prisoners in the Jewish cemetery—which had been neither destroyed nor ravaged by the Nazis, as was usually the case. I point this unusual fact out in passing as it is doubtless unique in Hitler’s Germany.
“Around the 15 March 1945, we had to leave Osterode to make room for Russian prisoners of war. We were divided into three convoys. Mine landed in the Nordhausen camp.” What then happened to Hofstein between his stay in the Boelcke Kaserne and his liberation at Theresienstadt will be seen later.
In Langenstein, halfway between the cities of Halberstadt and Blankenburg, there was a large concentration camp in 1944–45. It was located less than six miles from the Blankenburg-Oesig camp. However, there was no connection between the two camps or between their corresponding work sites. The Langenstein work site was the Sonderstab Kammler’s B 2 work site. Until October 1944 the two camps were Buchenwald Kommandos. At that time Blankenburg was linked to Dora and Langenstein still depended on Buchenwald. In April 1945 the evacuations took place under very different circumstances. The Langenstein camp, unknown for a long time, was studied in exemplary fashion by Paul Le Goupil, who in 1996 put together a “Mémorial des Français” (“Memorial to the French”)17 who had passed through—of which he was one. The document includes a history of the camp from which the principal facts can be drawn. The camp was also known by the name of Zwieberge. Indeed it was set up at the foot of a clay hill that bears the name because of its two crowning summits.
The first prisoners arrived from Buchenwald on April 21, 1944, and the second group from Neuengamme on April 27. All the other convoys up until February 1945 came from Buchenwald with the exception of the October 15, 1944, convoy, which brought five hundred prisoners directly from Sachsenhausen. Every nationality was represented: Germans of course, but also many French, Poles, Russians, and Czechs, for instance. The arrival of Latvians on August 8, 1944, from a camp near Riga via Buchenwald was noted. There were no convoys of Hungarian Jews such as there were at Dora. The Jews coming from Auschwitz in February 1945 via Buchenwald were of all different nationalities.
As was generally the case, the prisoners in the first convoys were housed in temporary buildings, and some of them built the permanent camp blocks while the others were sent directly to the earthwork, digging, and handling work sites.
It was in August 1944 that the Zwieberge camp was occupied by some 2,000 prisoners. Their number reached 3,590 by early January 1945 and attained its maximum on February 18 of 5,160, after the arrival of convoys of 1,000 each; it was only 4,191 in April because of the number of deaths. But an annex camp known as the “Junkers camp” or “little camp” also has to be taken into account, for it was there that the prisoners (885 in all) arrived from the Junkers’ factory Kommandos in Halberstadt, Aschersleben, and Niederorschel. Le Goupil’s toll is as follows, taking account of the Junkers camp: in all, 7,013 prisoners passed through Langenstein, and, on April 3, 1945, there were only 5,089 left. Because 295 had been sent back to Buchenwald, 1,629 died in the camp. Until March 16, 1945, the dead were incinerated at the Quedlinburg crematorium, then thrown into a mass grave. There were also at this same date 483 prisoners in the Revier and 1,251 in the Schonung. That is, a total of 1,734—in other words, 34.1 percent of the surviving prisoner population, which is not negligible. It was the work in the tunnel, beneath the Thekenberge, which was essentially responsible for the mortality of some and the exhaustion of others.
The Langenstein “Mémorial” includes a chapter entitled “Extermination Through Work and Life in the Camp,” which is an excellent synthesis of the testimonies the author brought together. Hélie de Saint-Marc’s text18 should also be mentioned, and is included as a conclusion to the book Leçons de ténèbres (Lessons of Darkness) under the title “The Place of People’s Absolute Truth.” He owes his survival at Langenstein to a Latvian miner who took him under his protection. Georges Petit19 has also recently published, in the journal Vingtième Siècle, his thoughts on his concentration camp experience, in particular at Langenstein.
Further along, in chapter 20, mention will be made of the camp’s liberation and of the tragic circumstances of its evacuation. At that time the work was not sufficiently advanced to allow the underground galleries to be used.
On September 14, 1944, a Kommando of five hundred prisoners that had arrived from France by the Rethondes convoy of August 18 left Buchenwald. It arrived at Neu Stassfurt, in Germany’s large potash-salt production region. There were two mine shafts, shaft 6 and shaft 7, and the plan was to transform the mines, located at a depth of between 1,300 and 1,500 feet, into underground factories. This fell into the framework of the Sonderstab Kammler’s A-type projects. The work got under way at the same time as did the work at Blankenburg, whereas Langenstein was contemporary with Ellrich and Harzungen.
The Kommando arrived in an already existing camp that had four barracks. Some workers were assigned to surface Kommandos to build roads, lay water mains, and so on. Another camp was also constructed, which would never be used. And holes were dug underground to install test stands for airplane engines. The mine Kommandos had to clear out the rooms and galleries by extracting blocks of salt and pouring concrete in certain areas. That meant, on the surface as well as underground, getting rid of the rubble and handling sacks of cement, reinforcing bars, and so on. Then the machines had to be installed. Once again it was the Siemens Kommando—the electricians’ Kommando—that appears to have been privileged. The work was carried out by companies employing not only prisoners but also civilians, above all Dutch workers, and Soviet prisoners of war. In February 1945, three hundred Russian and Polish prisoners joined the French, but contacts were rare.
An excellent collection of testimonies has been put together by the Amicale des anciens déportés à Neu Stassfurt (Association of Former [French] Deportees to Neu Stassfurt). It was published in 1996 under the title Un pas, encore un pas . . . pour survivre20 (One Step, Another Step . . . to Survive). The title refers to the long and murderous evacuation from Neu Stassfurt all the way to the Erzgebirge, which will be looked at in greater detail in chapter 20. Some 20 percent of the French in the Kommando died in the camp (97 out of 493), above all in the final months. They were incinerated in the Magdeburg crematorium until late February 1945. The crematorium having been destroyed in a bombing raid, the final victims were buried in a mass grave.
In early April 1945 the mines were ready for the installation of an underground factory for producing tank parts, according to the Kommandos’ list of March 25, 1945, found at Buchenwald.
To the south of Neu Stassfurt, another Kommando from Wansleben (Wansleben a. See, to the west of Halle) was working under identical conditions. André Cozette21 was employed getting rid of the stones from the digging of the new galleries. He witnessed the arrival in the new factory of various equipment, including machine tools that he recognized as being French made.
David Rousset22 arrived at Buchenwald in the third convoy from Compiègne in January 1944. One day in March he was part of the Max Eins transport; at the same time the Hannah transport left for Dora. Rousset and his friends were sent to inaugurate a camp at Porta Westfalica, a small town on the Weser River. The account of Rousset’s trajectory, up until his time at Wöbbelin in Mecklenburg in April–May 1945, is incorporated in the “novel” he published in 1947 entitled Les Jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death). Indications already figured in his L’Univers concentrationnaire, written in 1945. As already seen in chapter 11, the headquarters of the Sonderstab Kammler’s Sonderinspektion I was established in Porta Westfalica. It was also the location of work site A 2, which was dependent on it. Rousset does not give any details about it because he did not stay long at Porta.
Pierre Bleton,23 who also arrived in March from Neuenbremme and Buchenwald, remained there until the beginning of September. He worked digging underground galleries. Then as an NN he was targeted for regrouping in Neuengamme. Later, along with other NN, he would go to Gross Rosen and Dora.
Polish prisoner Wieslaw Kielar24 was at Porta in November 1944, coming from Auschwitz through Sachsenhausen. Digging continued at the foot of the Bremsberg hill while a cog railway made it possible to accede to the nine levels of an abandoned mine occupied by the workshops of the Philips factories.
Meanwhile, Rousset was assigned to Neuengamme, which had just replaced Buchenwald as the main camp, which involved changing identity numbers. It must not be forgotten that at this time the convoys coming from Compiègne began to be directed toward Neuengamme. From Neuengamme, Rousset was sent to Helmstedt,25 where he remained until the evacuation. It was also a camp created by a Buchenwald Kommando and was put under Neuengamme’s jurisdiction.
The corresponding work site was given code A 3. The camp was not in Helmstedt itself but further to the east, in Beendorf. There were two work sites corresponding to two salt mines. One, situated at Bartensleben, had to be transformed for the Askania Company. The other, known as the Schacht Marie (Maria tunnel), was intended for a Siemens factory.26
As Helmstedt belonged, historically speaking, to the duchy of Brunswick, the city was attached in 1945 to the British occupation zone, then to the province of Lower Saxony in West Germany. It was for decades one of the rare road and rail border crossings with East Germany. But it was on the other side of the line that Beendorf and Bartensleben were to be found, because they had been Brandenburg and subsequently Prussian since the seventeenth century.
It was in the Helmstedt camp that David Rousset became very close to the Kapo Emil Künder, a German communist to whom he dedicated Les Jours de notre mort. Chapter 21 will once again deal with the prisoners from Porta Westfalica and Helmstedt who were evacuated to Wöbbelin such as David Rousset, Emil Künder, Alfred Rohmer, and Wieslaw Kielar.
While jurisdiction over Helmstedt passed from Buchenwald to Neuengamme, Buchenwald set up a new Kommando in August 1944 at Weferlingen, six or so miles to the north of Bartensleben. Its mission was to transform a fifteen-hundred-foot-deep salt mine, and the Kommando was called Gazelle. It is known about thanks to André Chicaud’s testimony.27
This was a Kommando dependent on Buchenwald but was actually quite far away, given that the small town of [Bad] Gandersheim is located some seven miles west of the edge of the Harz Mountains. It is thus not far from Seesen and Münchehof, which will be mentioned in chapter 19 with regard to evacuations.
The Kommando was sent there in September 1944 to supply a factory that manufactured cabins for Heinkel airplanes with a concentration camp labor force. It was equivalent to those then assigned to aircraft construction in Rottleberode, Halberstadt, Aschersleben, Niederorschel, and Langensalza, to mention only the nearest. When it left Buchenwald the Kommando was made up of five hundred men, most of them French, along with some Belgians, Russians, Poles, and of course Germans—Greens, who looked after supervision. Some of the prisoners in the Kommando were more or less qualified workers.
Others were not qualified at all, and their fate was precarious. One of the latter, Robert Antelme, became very well known when he published his memoirs in 1957 under the title L’Espèce humaine28 (The Human Race). It is certainly a great literary work, but the historian is above all grateful to him for having provided a testimony of exceptional quality, remarkably accurate in terms of expression. Antelme devoted some two hundred very dense pages to evoking life in a camp and factory in which no really exceptional event ever took place until the evacuation which, little by little, took on tragic proportions.
It is a text that has to be taken as a whole, without isolating its anecdotal aspects, which are frequent, and without reducing it to its general considerations on the human race, which are deep. Some great works simply cannot be dissected—and The Human Race is one such work. Such is the reaction of a former deportee who can only identify with the work by considering it as a whole, in other words, by taking account both of the title and the first sentence which deliberately reads: “I went off for a pee.” Antelme and the Gandersheim Kommando will be mentioned again in chapter 20 with regard to the evacuations.
For the historian, the temptation is always great to extend the investigation still further. With regard to the Kommandos that existed in March 1945, he could take an even closer look at the entire Reich. He would thus end up at the Loibl Pass29 underground work site, intended to establish a road tunnel between Carinthia and the Carniole, in other words between Austria and what is today Slovenia.
Let it suffice to mention the existence in the same geographical zone as Stassfurt and Wansleben of various Kommandos on Buchenwald, which will come up once again at the time of the evacuations. It is the case in particular of the Schönebeck Kommando south of Magdeburg, which remained sizable in spite of the transfers to Rottleberode. It was also the case for Flöha,30 near Chemnitz, where the poet Robert Desnos was prisoner and which depended on Flossenbürg.