At the beginning of January 1945 the Deutsches Reich could still sustain a certain illusion of power. In the west, around Aachen, a small part of what was traditionally German territory fell under Allied control; German troops, however, still clung to the last pocket of Colmar in Alsace. In the east the Soviets were still only on the fringes of East Prussia and on the Vistula facing Warsaw. They had already taken over part of the General Government of Poland, along with Lvov and Lublin; but Posen and Silesia remained entirely German. In the southeast, fighting continued in the western part of Hungary, protecting Austria, as German and Hungarian troops held out in Budapest. In Italy the Allies were halted between Ravenna and Bologna.
The concentration camp system was still largely intact. The prisoners from Struthof in Alsace had been transferred to Dachau or into Kommandos in southern Germany. Those prisoners from Maïdanek close to Lublin went toward the west. The Soviets had reached Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec, but these “killing centers” for Jews had been carefully destroyed after use.
Some three hundred miles still separated the Peenemünde base from the Soviet troops. Three months later, however, at the beginning of April, Peenemünde no longer existed. It had been evacuated and then destroyed—anticipating the Soviet arrival. And, as the Americans were making rapid advances, the factory in the Dora Tunnel had then to be abandoned. This chapter recounts the different stages in this collapse.
THE SOVIET OFFENSIVE FROM THE VISTULA TO THE ODER. On January 12, 1945, Soviet troops launched an offensive all along the front line from East Prussia to the Carpathians. It was toward the center that the most rapid advances were made. Warsaw fell on January 17, Lodz (then known as Litzmannstadt) on January 19, and Gniezno (then known as Gnesen) on January 22. Poznan (then known as Posen) was surrounded and fell on February 22. The Oder, to the northeast of Berlin, was reached on January 31. Further to the north the Soviets seized Olsztyn (then known as Allenstein) on the 22nd and Bydgoszcz (then known as Bromberg) on the 26th. They quickly reached and surrounded Pila (then known as Schneidemühl)—the city that was home to Krüger, Meister of Ko Scherer from the Mittelwerk who was in charge of the gyroscopes. From this central axis the offensives directed toward the Baltic isolated Königsberg, Danzig, and the other Prussian and East Pomeranian ports.
The advance in the south of Poland and Silesia was just as rapid. The Soviets took Czestochowa on January 17 and Krakow on January 19. The Upper Silesian basin was conquered between January 24 and 28—before the Germans were able to destroy the industrial installations. Moving down the Oder, they surrounded Breslau on February 16; the Soviets applied pressure in the direction of Moravia but did not attempt to penetrate into Bohemia from Silesia. This decision was to have consequences on the fate of a certain number of convoys and columns of evacuated prisoners in the following months.
The entrance of Soviet troops into the regions of Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia, which had German populations, resulted in a considerable exodus of the civilian population, affecting in total several million people. A significant number of them were transported by sea to Mecklenburg and Holstein.
THE EVACUATION OF STUTTHOF. Three principal concentration camps—along with their camp annexes and Kommandos—were then threatened by Soviet troops: Stutthof, Auschwitz, and Gross Rosen.
The Stutthof camp was in West Prussia, near the Baltic and east of Danzig. The prisoners, both men and women, were above all Polish, Baltic, Russian, and Jewish. Very few prisoners came from Western countries and there are few accounts available, other than the joint account of Alphonse Kientzler and Paul Weil, in Témoignages strasbourgeois (Strasbourg Testimonies).1 The two men were doctors there who were sent from Dachau in September 1944. On January 25, 1945, the evacuation toward Pomerania in the west was decided. It took place in snow and mud. After a six-week stop in a work camp, the exodus continued on. The survivors were liberated in Putzig by Soviet troops on March 12, 1945. The evacuation of Stutthof was a significant event. It was in fact the only one for which an explicit SS document is available and in which the camp commander, Sturmbannführer Hoppe, explains how the evacuation was to take place.2 The reality reported by Kientzler and Weil was far more tragic.
THE EVACUATION OF AUSCHWITZ. The Auschwitz camp was in Upper Silesia, in a part of Poland that was directly incorporated into the Reich in 1939. (The Polish name of the small nearby town is Oswiecim.) The camp was opened in June 1940 by the Polish under the supervision of Greens from Sachsenhausen.3 The Czech, Russian, and other prisoners came next, but the Polish—still numerous—were in the end the most influential, alongside the Germans. The camp was for a long time particularly harsh; the 1942 convoys of French hostages, men (the “45,000”s) and women (the “31,000”s) experienced considerable losses.4 Afterward the situation improved for the survivors, and André Rogerie—who came to Dora via Maïdanek in 1944—considered he had seen worse. He was close at hand during the “selections” of Hungarian Jews and was one of the first to make mention of it in his memoirs published in 1946.5
While still remaining a concentration camp in keeping with the norms for all camps as defined by Eicke in 1942, the camp at Auschwitz actually became an extermination camp for Jews of various origins: first from Slovakia, then France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece (particularly from Salonica), and also—to some extent—from Poland. The final large convoys came from Hungary in the spring of 1944, sent by Eichmann. In the Auschwitz compound—which comprised in fact three camps—Jewish men and women who had escaped the gas chambers during the selections were put to work under often severe conditions. A special camp for Gypsies was also established at Auschwitz.
In 1943 and 1944, as noted in the preceding chapters, Auschwitz had a large labor pool to draw upon made up of Polish, Czech, and Russian as well as Hungarian Jewish and Gypsy prisoners who went from there to Dora via Buchenwald.
During the last months of 1944 a number of the non-Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz—often the more senior prisoners—were dispersed between the various other camps. In this way Hermann Langbein—an influential Austrian Red—found himself in August at Neuengamme;6 Wieslaw Kielar—who arrived at Auschwitz in the first convoy of Poles—was transferred to Porta Westfalica;7 and the majority of French survivors from the convoy of the “45,000”s were sent on to Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, or Gross Rosen.8 The objective of these departures—so it seems—was to disorganize the (clandestine) political structures of prisoner groups set up for the purposes of escape during evacuation.
On the other hand, Himmler decided on November 26, 1944, to eliminate all of the death camp installations, as had already been done at Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. The gas chambers were destroyed and the pits, where the corpses of Hungarian Jews were burned, camouflaged.
With the advance of Soviet troops—they seized Krakow the very next day, some thirty miles to the east—the evacuation, by foot, began on the morning of January 18, 1945. The purpose of this forced march was to reach an annex camp in Gleiwitz to the west of the mineral basin of Upper Silesia. It was very cold, many of the prisoners were quickly exhausted, and those who could no longer keep up were shot. It was one of the worst “death marches” in the history of the evacuations. Concerning this episode there are numerous testimonies available. One account was made by André Rogerie, who spoke of a three-hour rest period after a twenty-hour march, most of it at night, and of being forced to leave again just as a violent gale started up.9 A similar account is given by Marc Klein in Témoignages strasbourgeois.10
The prisoners, men and women, Jewish and non-Jewish, came from the major camps or outside Kommandos; such as Simone Jacob (Simone Weil), who arrived with her mother and sister from the Bobreck Kommando;11 or like Jules Hofstein, who arrived from the Bismarckshütte Kommando.12 As the next chapter will show, they ended up at Dora.
In the end there remained the sick, who, considered contagious, were abandoned at Auschwitz, including the Italian Jew Primo Levi13 and the Slovenian Porocevalec, who, like Rogerie, had arrived there from Dora via Maïdanek. In the end the camp was liberated only on January 27, at the moment of the final battles in the region—marked by the takeover of Katowice.
Economic activity in the large industrial zone of Upper Silesia having come to a halt, empty railway cars were not lacking in Gleiwitz and elsewhere, especially the open-top cars for transporting coal; the SS had the prisoners climb into them as soon as they arrived. The trains left one after the other as the Soviet troops drew closer. The Soviets took Gleiwitz on January 24—isolating Upper Silesia.
The itinerary followed by these trains is not well known, as those on the trains were hardly in a state to identify their whereabouts. They appeared to be heading to Moravia before going through Austria or Bohemia to reach one of the large German camps such as Buchenwald or Dora, or even Bergen-Belsen. Roger Climaud, a French Jewish Resistance fighter from Monowitz, arrived directly at Dora.14 But certain trains, where Rogerie15 and Marc Klein16 ended up, headed toward the Gross Rosen camp.
The Gross Rosen camp—like the Stutthof camp—is not well known in Western countries because it did not receive large convoys, either directly like Buchenwald or Dachau or indirectly like Flossenbürg.
THE EVACUATION OF GROSS ROSEN. Gross Rosen was set up in May 1941 on the edge of the Lower Silesian mountains to the west of Breslau. The small neighboring town is now called Rogosnica in Polish. Like Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, Gross Rosen was established in connection with the exploitation—for the SS—of a large quarry. It was considered a particularly inhospitable camp, even by the “45,000”s who came from Auschwitz17 like Roger Abada. The core of the population was made up of Poles, quite unwelcoming to the Western prisoners.
On October 31, 1944, numerous Belgian prisoners were sent there—NN who had been at the Gross Strehlitz prison in Upper Silesia, such as Léon-E. Halkin.18 A number of French prisoners came with them, like Michel Poiteau, who came from the Loos-lez-Lille prison in May.19 On January 5, 1945, the French NNs—Ernest Gaillard, Charles Vedel,20 and Pierre Bleton21—arrived from Neuengamme.
After having conquered Upper Silesia, the Soviet troops moved down the Oder toward Berlin. As previously noted, they ended up surrounding Breslau on February 16, 1945. The SS made the decision to evacuate the Gross Rosen camp, and railway convoys were formed, which, beginning on February 8, made their way toward various camps, in particular to Dora, but also to Hersbruck and Leitmeritz, two Kommandos dependent on Flossenbürg. Klein’s convoy, which wound up in Buchenwald, was one of the least dependable.22 It was one of the last great evacuations of this period, before the major series at the beginning of April. Some of the prisoners who left had only just suffered evacuation from Auschwitz.
The Soviets did not actually attempt to occupy the mountainous border of Upper Silesia right away; they were satisfied to protect their left flank during the advance on Berlin. The Gross Rosen camp, after its evacuation, would only be “liberated” on May 5, 1945.
The conditions in which these evacuations took place—as with the many that followed—make it difficult to assess how many people were actually involved. Concerning Auschwitz it is estimated that there was still a population of some 67,000 prisoners in the concentration camp complex in mid-January 1945, 58,000 of whom were evacuated. What is important is the sheer magnitude. In the same manner it is impossible to evaluate the ethnic or national composition of the various convoys. The only certain element was the large proportion of Jews in the overall number. Indeed, the transports at the end of 1944 from Auschwitz to other camps especially affected the non-Jewish prisoners—German, Polish, French, and so on.
Part of the next chapter will be devoted to the dramatic conditions that awaited the trains coming from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen, in January and February 1945, upon their arrival in Dora, Ellrich, and Nordhausen.
THE MOVING OF PEENEMÜNDE. At the beginning of January 1945, as seen at the end of chapter 7, the rocket-development unit of Wernher von Braun was still at the Peenemünde base under the auspices of a company known as EW, meaning Elektromechanische Werke GmbH. Like Mittelwerk it was dependent on the Armaments Ministry, which appointed Paul Storch as its executive director. The base itself remained military, under the command of General Rossmann. General Dornberger meanwhile was in Schwedt on the Oder, south of Stettin.
The transfer of the Peenemünde installation to an underground site in the Austrian Alps had been planned for the end of 1943 (see chapter 4), but von Braun had not been very cooperative in this regard, and the tunnels dug at Ebensee were ultimately used for another purpose.23 When it appeared necessary in January 1945 to carry out the evacuation of Peenemünde, nothing had been planned, and it had to be improvised.
Indeed, the situation deteriorated rapidly. By the eve of the January 12, 1945, offensive the Soviets were three hundred miles as the crow flies from Peenemünde. On January 31 they were on the Oder close to Küstrin, 105 miles from Peenemünde and 34 miles from Schwedt. The refugees from East Pomerania crossed the island of Usedom, and German civilians had to participate in Volkssturm exercises.24
It was Kammier who on January 31 gave the order to transfer the Peenemünde installation and personnel to the Mittelraum.25 His powers were greater still, Göring having on January 26 given him command of the V1 launching performed by the Luftwaffe; he was thus the head of a program known as Brechung des Luftterrors, or “breaking airborne terror.” He set up an Armeekorps zur Vergeltung—a “retaliatory army corps”—bringing together the V1s and the V2s. As Neufeld puts it, “He was becoming the ruler of a shadow empire of skeleton organizations, false hopes, and self-delusion.”26 In April after the Dora evacuation, Hitler, from his Berlin bunker, would even give him “full control over jet-propulsion aircraft.”
The order to evacuate Peenemünde was, of course, approved by General Leeb, Rossmann’s hierarchical superior. It was followed as well by Dornberger. No one in any case was in a position to oppose Kammler; as Neufeld has emphasized, not even the Gauleiter of Pomerania, whom von Braun mentions in his subsequent writings. The actual transfer from Peenemünde to Mittelraum lasted three weeks. The first train arrived in Thuringia on February 17 and von Braun supervised its unloading. The operation was a success thanks to the organizational ability of the official in charge, Erich Nimwegen, who used the trains, trucks, and barges that were available to their best advantage. Certainly the SS knew how to impose its priorities, as will be seen at the time of the April evacuations. Later von Braun himself acknowledged that he had on this occasion made use of his status as an SS officer. He went to Peenemünde for the last time on February 27. The move was finished at the beginning of March.27
SETTING UP IN THE MITTELRAUM. The EW company headquarters was transferred from Karlshagen to Bleicherode, where von Braun set himself up. The material was divided between various nearby depots, particularly in the potash mines at Sollstedt and Obergebra, and at Bischofferode. A Taifun rocket manufacturing workshop was operating in the Dora Tunnel.28 Von Braun proved himself to be very energetic, traveling all over the region looking for sites to get the research work going again.
He was especially interested—or so it would appear—in the transformation of the Leuchtenburg fortress near Jena, and traveled to Berlin to ask for the credit necessary. In the early morning of March 16—when it was still dark outside—he was in a car accident, his chauffeur having fallen asleep at the wheel. His arm was broken and put in a cast—as seen in the well-known photos of him from this period. He left the hospital on March 21 and returned to Bleicherode.29 Dornberger and his entourage had meanwhile left Schwedt to set up south of Harz, in Bad Sachsa—not far from Wieda. In the west the Dernau factory was also transferred to Artern, northeast of Thuringia. The corresponding Kommando—dependent on Mittelbau—had the code name Adorf.
During the month of March following the Berlin bombings it was Speer’s assistant Saur and his department who came to take refuge in the Dora Tunnel. Sadron has drawn attention to this episode: “Several of the north halls sheltered an evacuated ministry. And my friends who were there on installation duty still laugh when describing the picturesque sight of the men and women in their pajamas sleeping in those sinister galleries. Very well-to-do people it seems—they gave out bread and cigarettes to the prisoners and told them that all was lost.”30
Raoul-Duval witnessed the situation himself: “An Austrian SS man was in charge of a group of four prisoners of which I was one. [ . . . ] We went to clean and set up some rooms for the Armaments Ministry which was moving into the Tunnel. [ . . . ] The SS spent the day looking for food for us. They brought us into the canteen for the ministry civilians where an old Werkschutz man served us soup.” Having moved some furniture, the four prisoners came back with two packs of cigarettes.31 This easing up in the last hours was altogether exceptional, as will be seen in the next chapter.
Saur’s department was dispersed throughout the region, particularly in the town of Blankenburg.
THE END OF THE KARLSHAGEN CAMP. As mentioned at the end of chapter 10, in early 1945 not only was there the rocket development factory with its technicians on the Peenemünde site, but also a concentration camp where the prisoners suffered from the cold, with a high mortality rate.32 The French survivors of this camp, Roger Predi, Pierre Pinault, and Jean Fournier, indicate that two transports of three hundred sick were sent to “rest camps,” the first on January 20 and the second a month later, without knowing their destination, which was no doubt Bergen-Belsen. The final days, in March, were taken up with dismantling of barracks and equipment, which was evacuated by sea. Fournier makes particular mention of a crane.
The evacuation of the camp itself finally took place on March 28: at six in the morning, six hundred prisoners boarded three large metal barges. Fournier noted: “The [Baltic] sea was rough, it was cold, the wind was blowing in gusts, we were huddled up in the back of our boat. The three barges bound together were pulled by a tugboat; with the light load, they bobbed up and down.” The voyage lasted forty-eight hours, arriving in the early morning of Friday, March 30, at Warnemünde—Rostock’s outer harbor—where they disembarked. Pinault noted “a mournful crowd of men and women who watched us in silence.”
The prisoners were immediately loaded onto cattle cars. The train passed by Wismar, Schwerin, Stendal, Magdeburg, and Halle before getting to Ellrich on April 1—Easter Day. The Elbe was crossed—from north to south—by the Wittenberge railway bridge, which will be mentioned again in chapter 19.
THE AMERICAN OFFENSIVE TOWARD THE ELBE. Predi, Duale, Fournier, Pinault, and their friends who had just arrived from Peenemünde/Karlshagen made only a brief stop at Ellrich. Three days later it was no longer the Soviets who would threaten their camp but rather the Americans, and they had to get back onto the trains for a new evacuation.
The final offensive against the Germans in the west at the beginning of 1945 was carried out in the north by the British (as well as the Canadians and the Polish), in the center by the Americans, and in the south by the French. It was the Americans who liberated the Mittelraum camps, generally emptied of the majority of their occupants. At the beginning of March, three American armies occupied the left bank of the Rhine between Wesel and Mainz. Simpson’s Ninth Army crossed the Rhine at Wesel and continued to the north of the Ruhr. Hodges’s First Army seized the bridge at Remagen on March 7 and made its way to the south of the Ruhr. Patton’s Third Army headed from Mainz toward Fulda.
Kammler himself was among the generals who in March 1945 sought to contain the American advance. A document dated March 20 shows his position to be Rietberg southeast of Wiedenbrück, twelve miles north of Lippstadt. His full title was then SS-Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS Dr Ing. Kammler.
It was in Lippstadt that Simpson and Hodges hooked up on April 2, trapping Model’s Army Group B in the Ruhr valley—where he surrendered on April 17. From there each continued to advance. Simpson had to go to the north and Hodges to the south of the Harz range. Patton headed in a more southerly direction. Their common objective was to reach the Elbe at Magdeburg and to seize the major cities west of Saxony such as Halle, Leipzig, and Chemnitz.
Helmstedt was in Simpson’s path, Dora was in Hodges’s, and Buchenwald in Patton’s. On April 4, Simpson was at Hameln, Hodges at Kassel, and Patton at Gotha. The evacuation operations of the threatened camps began. They were the first camps to be evacuated in the west.