The last days of Dora-Mittelbau fell between April 1 and April 11—the day the Americans arrived in Nordhausen. It was a brief period marked by various—often highly significant—events that should not be disassociated if their full importance is to be grasped. The best solution seems to be to proceed in chronological order, moving from one place to another according to circumstances—in particular the Dora camp and tunnel to Bleicherode, the Boelcke Kaserne, and Ellrich.
In 1945, Easter fell on April 1. All the witnesses who belonged to the Catholic Church have made special reference to this exceptional day. Jacques-Christian Bailly’s account is revealing. The Schreiber Kommando was in the tunnel. “At noon, we gathered together in front of our offices to go back to the camp. Lined up in rows of five, facing the Kapo, we waited for the rest of the Kommando. Jean-Paul [Renard] being tall, towered above the group. He stared, keeping a close eye on the gallery. As usual, Paul, the Protestant minister, was at his side. Everything was calm. Jean-Paul took from his pocket the little shoe-polish box he used as a ciborium and took communion. He gave the box to the minister who held it out religiously to Bernard. Passing through, the French, Belgian, or Polish Catholics took a small host, rediscovering the simple gestures of their faith. The others, Protestant or agnostic, passed the precious viaticum around with caution and respect for the convictions of their fellow prisoners. The green Kapo watched the scene. He understood the significance of it and knew his complicity exposed him to retaliations. Prudent, he kept an eye out for any SS. The ciborium went back to Jean-Paul. The Kapo looked at him inquisitively, then gave the order to leave. In silence, lost in my thoughts, I walked through the deserted halls where the rockets made a strange backdrop for this Easter service.”1
HIDING THE ARCHIVES. On April 1, information reached von Braun about the advance of the Americans—moreover premature—making him worry about the damage that would ensue if Hitler’s “scorched earth” policy were carried out. He wanted at least—suspecting they might one day be useful—to save the rocket construction archives. With the agreement of Dornberger he decided to hide them. Two trustworthy collaborators, Dieter Huzel and Bernard Tessmann, were put in charge of a triple mission—for which they were given the requisite means.
First, they were to bring together, classify, and pack each element found either in Mittelwerk’s departments at Dora or at Bleicherode, having originally come from Peenemünde. When the work was completed on April 3, it represented fourteen tons of paper. Next, an underground site had to be found that was unoccupied and relatively accessible. After a good deal of searching, a former explosives warehouse of an abandoned mine was chosen somewhat to the north of the Harz Mountains at Dörnten, between Goslar and Salzgitter.
A convoy of three trucks—of which two had trailers—was involved in this search, laden with the fourteen tons. They were then unloaded and the crates carted into the cache. The access to the gallery was then blown up. On April 7, Huzel and Tessman left the region to join up again with von Braun, who had left for Bavaria—as will be seen later. McGovern’s book gives the details of this operation and the precautions taken to avoid identification of the depot’s whereabouts.2
SHUTTING DOWN THE TUNNEL FACTORY. André Ribault, who worked—as seen earlier—on drafting the plans, noted what happened in the tunnel on April 1 and 2. “1 April 1945—Easter Sunday. Down into the Tunnel at seven in the morning. Hall 41 off limits to Häftlings. Why? Pass through A. Einsatz. Return to the camp. 2nd April—seven in the morning down in the Tunnel. Get to the offices where all documents have been burned. Looks completely destroyed. Not a single ‘cigar’ left on the assembly line. Return to the camp around nine in the morning.”3
Charles Sadron made the same observations:4 “At the factory this morning (on 1 April), we did a sort of inventory. Active, we were full of good intentions. The civilians busied themselves with mysterious work. We were made to rip down notices and signs. We had to hand over written material we had on our persons. It was not the moment to compromise our lives for a folly committed in extremis: like my fellow prisoners, I handed over—with a heavy heart—all I possessed. There was a paper on the social role of scientific research, four lines of a sonnet I would never finish, and some technical notes. The value of these writings was uneven. [. . .] Wellner was lost in a mountain of paperwork. We had no time to get lost in thought: the Kapo came to get us and take us back up to the camp, even though it was only eleven in the morning. [. . .] Orders and counterorders came one after the other all throughout the day.
“The next morning (2 April) we went down to the factory at the regular time. We found our work benches destroyed, the verification apparatuses ripped out, the warehouse emptied of its gyroscopes and Mischgeräte. During the night, the civilians had carried out all this work. Everything to do with the V2 telemechanics installation had become unrecognizable. There was hardly anyone except for ourselves—and the engineers—who could bear witness to what had been there. This idea worried us a little. [. . .] The factory was silent. The motors were turned off. All that remained was the vague hubbub of people milling about in the tunnels. Our workshop was calm. The women were gone. We waited rather anxiously. Our useless presence, in this dead factory, worried me. Finally, we went back up. Apparently for the last time.”
The destruction was not as thoroughgoing as one might have expected. Part of the paperwork sorted by Wellner was carted off with the archives. Only copies of documents or documents of no interest were actually burned. The machines stayed where they were. The electricity, ventilation, and telephone continued working. No information is available as to what happened to the aircraft engine factory of Nordwerk in the north part of the tunnel.
THE DEPARTURE OF FIVE HUNDRED SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS. On April 1 it was Kammler who decided to evacuate—by himself and under his supervision—five hundred selected specialists to the Bavarian Alps. He had a special train in the area at his disposal. His headquarters as of March 20—as mentioned in chapter 14—was in the region north of Lippstadt. The train was ironically baptized Vergeltungs-Express—the “retaliation express”—and allowed him to move between Peenemünde, Nordhausen, Blizna, The Hague, and other sites connected with the V2s.
The five hundred specialists—scientists and engineers—left for Oberammergau on the night of April 2 with one hundred guards from the SD. Von Braun traveled by car because of his injury and arrived there on April 4. Kammler escorted the convoy, then left. Dornberger, who had left Bad Sachsa, set up nearby. Some forty-five hundred specialists stayed in the area in the villages around Nordhausen and Bleicherode.5
It was around the same time as von Braun’s people got onto Kammler’s train that another train—as was seen in chapter 14—took the surviving prisoners from Peenemünde/Karlshagen to Ellrich after a difficult evacuation.
THE AIR STRIKES AS SEEN FROM DORA. From the Dora camp—climbing the hill behind the bunker—a plain was visible, while to the southeast were the church towers of Nordhausen. At the beginning of April many of those prisoners who were not in the tunnel saw the city being bombed. Ribault6 provides a detailed account.
“1 April, 10 a.m. Air raid on Nordhausen and surrounding area by single-engined fighter planes. Dive bombings, as well as bomb, cannon, and machine-gun attacks. Duration: at least an hour.
“3 April, 4 p.m. sharp. The bombing of Nordhausen during overcast sky, low cloud-cover. The planes that ‘purr heavily’ fly through the cotton-batting. First some explosive bombs over the city, then a raining down of fire bombs, and once again explosives. No antiaircraft fire. Five well lined-up bombs fell on the factory’s sorting platforms. Bombs were also falling on Salza. A half hour later—during a sunny break in the clouds—another air raid by the single-engine fighter planes. Antiaircraft fire.
“4 April. During the night, a long stream of planes fly over. At nine in the morning, half overcast with threatening cloud cover, numerous four-engined planes, flying quite low over us in every direction. A few minutes later the bombs began to fall. At first a few explosions over Nordhausen, then the fire bombs began raining down, followed once again by explosives. During the fire bombing, a four-engine plane in flames plummeted over Nordhausen. No antiaircraft fire. After the strikes, yet another attack by fighter planes. That night, Nordhausen seemed like nothing more than an immense inferno reddening the sky. During the night, many planes flying over.”
Unbeknownst to those at Dora, their fellow prisoners in the Boelcke Kaserne in Nordhausen were under the bombings. The accounts made by those of them who survived were, of course, very personal and not always mutually consistent—depending on where they were at the time. The following extracts show the extent of the damage and losses, and just how widespread the disorganization was.
THE APRIL 3 BOMBING. The accounts refer first of all to the Tuesday, April 3 bombing: “Right from the first blast, I took shelter under the concrete staircase of the Revier. A bomb hit the Block and the staircase was demolished. I ran to the middle of the camp, to a shelter dug right into the ground, where there were already a dozen civilians, women, children, and also an SS man—as green from fear as his uniform—who could only stammer: ‘Schrecklich! Schrecklich!’ (Horrible! Horrible!) And indeed, it was not a pretty sight; corpses every five or six yards, headless or their innards ripped open. [ . . . ] The barbed-wire enclosure had been blown to smithereens. The watch towers were gone. Some of the SS had disappeared.
“We were tempted to escape—but where to? I hadn’t even had breakfast! I had spent the evening collecting up the corpses. In all, there were around two-hundred dead. Two horses had been killed, that the cooks had already skinned for the next day. The Revier was full. Three per bed and no medicine.” (Pierre Maho.)7
“The first day of bombing was enough to blast out the large metallic doors which collapsed on top of the prisoners. One flew through the hall and crashed into the lean-to where the corpses were piled together. There was an enormous puncture in the floor upstairs, and thus up above in the roof’s concrete arch as well. Having spent time on the main floor a few days earlier, I had noticed the concrete roof’s sturdiness reinforced by enormous doubling. It hadn’t been enough to stop the bombs.” (Jean-Pierre Couture—who notes that the horses killed were pulling a cart passing behind the camp.)8
That night the SS took things back into hand, and Delogne even spoke of an “evening roll call.”9 But, everyone thought the bombing would start up again the next day. The night was calm, and in the morning pears and marmalade were handed out.
The Nordhausen prison was also hit. The doors to the cells were open and there was an opening leading outside; but, because it was guarded, no one attempted to escape.10
THE APRIL 4 BOMBING. The bombing of Wednesday, April 4 was more fierce and dismantled the whole organization. The majority of the prisoners withstood it inside the camp.
Xavier Delogne was in a block when the bombing began. “The string of bombs began falling. Terrified, I lay down flat on my stomach in the center of the garage, right in the midst of the bombing; others preferred running away, but as soon as they stood up they were flattened by the shrapnel. All of a sudden there was a horrifying blast. Nothing could be made out, the place was filled with fumes, powder and dust. A few yards from me, one of the immense iron doors collapsed, crushing several poor souls under its weight. The roof was ripped off.”11
Halkin’s account was no different: “This time the bombing was fast, brutal and massive. I went back to my spot at the back of the garage, under a main beam. [ . . . ] I heard the carpet bombing going on over my head from left to right with an implacable regularity. [ . . . ] The bombing grew in intensity. I protected my chest with my knees, my face with my hands. [ . . . ] Through the gash opened up in front of us, shrapnel flew into the garage. Blocks of cement broke off from the ceiling. [ . . . ] A terrible blow plowed into my chest. I lost consciousness. [ . . . ] When I came to, I was lying among the dead, covered in dust and blood. [ . . . ] My wrists were bleeding, but they had saved my eyes from the bomb’s shrapnel.”12
Jean-Pierre Couture found shelter—as he had the night before—in the lubricating pit. Auchabie was in a block during the bombing, was injured in the left foot, and crawled out of the building, which collapsed behind him. He dragged himself into a bomb crater where five injured French were already huddled.13
As soon as the bombing began, escapes from the prison multiplied. Poupault and Boyer left, followed by Bordier, Donnier, and Denais. The bombs fell, Poupault was injured and fainted, and Boyer died from a direct hit. The other were in shock.14
Maho,15 however, left the camp with other prisoners before the bombing began and reached the nearby countryside: “We rushed toward a small bridge already congested with runaways, civilian workers, Germans, prisoners, soldiers. A plane at two thousand meters veered around to the camp we had left behind us, and dropped two star rockets. This time it meant business. After crossing the bridge we took off into the countryside and looked for some sort of shelter. A streambed with high, sheer banks offered us relative safety. We were half a mile from the camp. There they were, the squadrons were right above us. They let the bombs go and we watched them fall. In the din of chains and whistling, we heard the bombs strike our Blocks. That was it; nothing more could be seen of the camp, now consumed by smoke and flames. For twenty minutes, the hurricane was unleashed and spread out over Nordhausen.
“Moreover, the bombers neutralized a zone infinitely more vast than the city and the air-force camp alone. Even being a ways from the camp, the bombs fell close behind us. One of them landed ten yards away. The earth reeled like the deck of a ship in mid-ocean; in an inky black cloud, my jacket caught fire then was put out by the ten or so square feet of earth that came down on me. The water’s course had been diverted. I ended up with three gudgeons in my hand. [ . . . ]! Swamped in mud, earth and soot, de Poortère, Dutois and I ran off into the countryside—in the opposite direction from Nordhausen. Every fifty yards a crater, every twenty yards an opened or abandoned suitcase, a throbbing member or a body.
“The bombing had ceased, but the Spitfires and Hurricanes with their machine guns gave chase to isolated individuals. Because, from a distance, they didn’t know who we were, it was best to remain wary. We’d fix a far-off rallying point, a farm we would go to individually. To travel in groups would have been dangerous. Twice a plane spotted me and I had to duck for cover behind the apple trees. Unfortunately, they shot in a dive and there was no dead angle for protection. A remarkable thing was that I no longer felt my injured foot, though I had been walking for two hours on churned up earth and shell holes.
“At eleven o’clock I got to the farm. We talked the situation over. What to do? Go back to the camp? It no longer existed. The SS had left; the barbed wire obliterated, the Blocks destroyed. We were without direction, without shelter. We decided to wait in the barn.”
Roger Abada,16 a “45,000” from Auschwitz—having arrived at Dora from Gross Rosen in February—gave a very similar account: “I hid in a sort of irrigation canal. After the bombing, came the machine gunning in a dive. I got through it, I don’t know how.” Everyone reacted as best he could. Gaillard ran off into the countryside looking for haystacks and woods in which to hide.17 As did Hofstein and four friends18 as well as Poupault and Bordier, after having given up on finding Boyer.
Xavier Delogne first left the camp and made his way “through the field plowed up by bombs, toward a house in flames.” He met two Frenchmen and crawled into a shell crater with them, where they sat eating margarine. Then they went back to see what was happening at the camp.
“The inside and surrounding area were covered in corpses. From the collapsed ceilings legs and arms were hanging, bodies horribly mutilated. The poor souls who remained on the first floor were for the most part reduced to ashes.” He stayed the night with friends, among the block ruins, in the midst of the wounded.19
Nicola and six friends spent the night in a shell crater in front of a block.20
Normand stayed with the sick in a Revier that was partially spared. Couture, out of his lubricating pit, was called upon by two SS. “Devastated, in the loose stones of the broken up road, they pulled along a four-wheeled cart on which they had laid their kits and a pile of belongings. I had to pull this vehicle right up to the camp exit, to the bridge over the small river where I managed to clear off, little concerned with escorting them in their retreat.” Later, he and his friend Marcel Brière did their best to minister to the injured. He pointed out—as did Delogne—the danger of bombs that had timing devices, which continued to blow up for more than twenty-four hours.21
The horrible accounts of April 3 and 4 are mixed with colorful accounts about food provisions. Although there was no longer soup and bread distribution, the bombing in the surrounding area of the camp gave the prisoners access to various food reserves—in addition to horse meat. Delogne spoke of jam, margarine, and potatoes.22 Maho, after having to make do with sugar beets close to the barn, found butter, blood sausage, canned asparagus, and grape juice.23
All that was left for the prisoners was to wait—wherever they were—for the Americans to arrive. This proved to be, as will be seen, a long and painful wait.
DISORDER AT DORA. Between April 2 and 5 the entire administrative structure of the Dora camp was progressively dismantled. Two factors contributed to the disorder. The first was the shutting down of the tunnel factory, which employed a large part of the camp population. All that remained was an immense mass of people with nothing to do. And the second was the absence of real authority and the incompetence of the gang of Greens who were the block leaders, the Kapos, and so on.
In any case, on April 2 and 3, the SS carried out major transfers between the Mittelbau camps. The first operation was the sending of a thousand prisoners from Dora to Harzungen. On April 2, as Yves Béon24 related, not all the workers went down into the tunnel. Many of them were kept at the far end of the roll-call area. “The Lagerschutz began to surround the prisoners. It was the end, we couldn’t do anything anymore. But in fact, yes, something could always be done. The revolt, the turning upside down, that unthinkable, unimaginable thing happened. Michel screamed to Charles: ‘Let’s get out!’ The moment he yelled that the movement leapt up like a spark and reached instantly the thousands of men separated from the rest of the camp. It was a mad rush, in all senses, in all directions. The Lagerschutz charged with their truncheons out, but it was too late. They were powerless against this horde of madmen scattering to the left and right, and racing toward the hills, looking to conceal themselves amid the Blocks.”
Little by little, however—the camp remaining closed in any case—the prisoners with armbands managed to group their people together at the roll-call area. The idea was to lead some of the prisoners to the disinfecting block in preparation for a “transport.” This was not—not yet—the beginning of the evacuation, but a simple transfer from Dora to Harzungen. It was the next morning, Tuesday, April 3, that the group got under way. Upon arrival at Harzungen the newcomers were brought together to be told that the work Kommandos would be made up the next day. Then the alert was given: it was the beginning of Nordhausen’s first bombing—a few miles away.
A supplementary operation took place the same day: a thousand prisoners returned to Dora who had been in Nordhausen, considered as more or less able-bodied. It is not known why the transfer from Dora to Harzungen took place. Perhaps it had already been planned, combined with a transfer of the sick from Harzungen to the Boelcke Kaserne, and a “transport” from Nordhausen to Bergen-Belsen. That transport was ready: after the bombing, Couture—wandering in the area—saw a train of cattle cars on a garage track with new wire meshing on the windows.
The prisoners who remained at Dora—the majority—were moving about in the camp on the morning of Tuesday the 3rd and Wednesday the 4th when the bombings—for which Ribault was present—took place. The bombings on April 4 were just coming to an end when at around half past ten the camp loudspeakers summoned “everyone, without exception, to the roll-call area with two blankets, for a departure.” At the same time the papers in the Arbeitsstatistik and in the other offices had begun to be burned.
Initially this announcement resulted in indescribable disorder. The food and clothing storehouses were pounced on. “The Russians and the Poles exhibited thoroughgoing knowledge of the science of pillaging,” as Ribault25 as well as Hagenmuller26 pointed out. The Germans were not to be outdone. The blocks themselves were devastated.
It seemed that there were at a certain moment measures taken to organize the departures that were more or less thwarted by the initiatives of someone or other. Everyone—as Ribault explained—sought to stay in the camp as long as possible. Concerning the Ko Scherer group—if Sadron is to be believed—things even took a rather surprising twist: “The Kapos busily arrived: they were given orders to separate those who were—among the French mostly—the best workers. It appeared to be a measure of preference. What did it mean? We jostled each other to be chosen. Thank God, almost all our good friends were there, together. The clan stayed intact, except for the dead, of course.”27
In any case it was the Russians at whom the departure orders were first aimed. Four thousand were brought together and led on foot to Woffleben and Ellrich, passing along the Kohnstein road—north of the camp. Thus they were involved in several separated evacuation convoys except for the “last” convoy from Dora—that in which the prisoners would turn up at Ravensbriick.
The last evening in the blocks reflected the general disorder. Sadron described the situation of Block 104: “The Block was overwhelmed. The artificial flowers, the shawl-carpets, the paintings on the walls, all the things we had considered as sacred before had disappeared or were lying trampled on the floor. The Pithecanthrope could not be seen. A pity! The Block chief has disappeared. In the evening, under cover of darkness, he came back to sleep in his devastated cubicle with two women from the brothel.”28 Ribault mentioned Block 113: “Scene with the Block chief, who had gone completely crazy. Jean-Paul Renard was given a flogging and chased from the Block, but managed to find asylum at 122, where the majority of the Kommando were.”29
THE EVACUATIONS GET UNDER WAY. The decision to begin evacuating the Dora camp along with the neighboring camps seems to have been taken the morning of Wednesday, April 4, at the time of the second bombing of Nordhausen. Essentially what was arranged was an evacuation by railway convoys to the north—with an important constraint. That constraint was imposed by the contours of the region. There was no normal track going across the Harz Mountains, a medium-sized range—but making up a very compact whole—with deep valleys. Therefore it was necessary to go around the Harz by the west and then return back to the plain of northern Germany—which would mean, in a certain manner, meeting up with the Americans.
Four loading points were possible: the Dora Tunnel marshaling yard, which was in a cul-de-sac, followed by the train stations of Niedersachswerfen, Woffleben, and Ellrich, before the small tunnel between Ellrich and Walkenried. There is no document making it possible to establish with certitude how many convoys left and in what order. Eight can be clearly identified.
Among the first, two convoys left from Ellrich, one with the prisoners who had arrived from Karlshagen a few days earlier, the other with the prisoners from Ellrich—among the most able-bodied. Fournier noted that the prisoners from Karlshagen traveled in “very, very old passenger cars, entirely in wood—even the seats—without compartments and a passageway up the middle.”30 All the other convoys were made up of railway cars alone—cattle cars and uncovered flatbed cars.
Also among the first convoys, one left from Woffleben with the prisoners from the neighboring camp as well as some railway cars of prisoners from Harzungen, and another from Niedersachswerfen with prisoners from Harzungen—particularly the sick. Two other large convoys left from Dora. The common characteristic of all these convoys was that they finally ended up at Bergen-Belsen with varied unanticipated itineraries to be examined in chapter 18.
The next three convoys went in other directions, also unanticipated at the outset. One, with the prisoners from Rottleberode and Ellrich-Theater, was stopped at Mieste. The second, leaving from Ellrich, largely made up of the sick, turned up at Oranienburg. The prisoners from the third—and last—convoy went to Ravensbrück in three stages—the second one on foot. These three convoys will be dealt with in chapter 19.
As for the other prisoners in the Dora-Mittelbau complex, they left on foot in columns of various numbers. On April 4 the columns from Kleinbodungen headed to the north, while that of Gandersheim—dependent on Buchenwald—went east. At the same time the prisoners from the Osterhagen, Nüxei, and Mackenrode Kommandos left to regroup in Wieda. A large column from Harzungen set out on April 4 as well; and those from Rottleberode, Rossla, and Kelbra on April 5. Their destinies proved very different.
Thus in two days almost the entire population of Dora-Mittelbau was dispersed.31 It will be seen under what very particular circumstances a small number of prisoners still in the camp would be “liberated” on location.
THE LIQUIDATION OF DORA’S PROMINENTE. The evacuation of Dora was accompanied by another heinous event, the liquidation of the principal German communist leaders, who had held the highest functions in the camp before being arrested in the last months. Michel, who was with other prisoners in the bunker, reported the following facts: “On the evening of 4 April, motorcycle backfiring. With caution, we watched the small door to the entrance, just facing our dormer window. We saw Sander enter. [ . . . ] Suddenly the voice of an SS: he called out identity numbers in German. Bare feet slipped in the hallway, a door opened in the courtyard. Impossible to see. The shutters of the dormer window had been shut. [ . . . ] Seven shots broke the silence. We heard the bodies fall, the sound of wheels, the impact of bodies being loaded into a cart, then once again the racket of the wheels and the footsteps of the two prisoners pulling the load.”32
The victims were Gamisch, Beham, Thomas, Sczymczak, Schneider, Luzius, and Runki. With Fritz Pröll—who committed suicide on November 29, 1944—and Albert Kuntz—who died on January 22 at the hands of the Gestapo—practically all the camp’s political leadership during its period of normal functioning was dead. Those who survived, like Ludwig Leineweber and August Kroneberg, had played a less important role.
Such executions in extremis of political adversaries were not at that time exceptional. On April 4, Admiral Canaris and the Protestant minister Bonhoeffer were hanged at Flossenbürg. On April 19, General Delestraint was executed at Dachau. Instructions came from Berlin, along with the lists—like that from Buchenwald—which included numerous communist prisoners but also a Catholic like Kogon.33 This ultimate ferocity of the Nazi regime was coherent with its scorched-earth policy.
And yet at the same time French and Czech prisoners—among others—were spared. Louis Gentil was transported to the Revier seriously ill, where he died on April 7. The others joined with the first evacuation convoy from Dora: eighty prisoners from the bunker climbed into an open railway car. This clemency has never been explained. Perhaps at a certain level of the SS, bargaining had actually occurred. Perhaps the information given by Michel—with caution—on Grozdoff’s role was in keeping with reality.
THE LAST DESCENT OF THE “SPECIALISTS” INTO THE TUNNEL. Thursday, April 5 was the last day at Dora. A convoy left that very morning. Those remaining in the camp experienced a surprising day, because they went back down into the tunnel without knowing why. Ribault relates that in his Kommando, which assembled in Hall 41, lists of prisoners were drawn up, then canceled, to be replaced by other lists, which were canceled as well. At half past two in the afternoon, groups of a hundred were formed, of which the Germans were taken out, then the groups of a hundred were re-formed.34 Sadron was more explicit: “We went back down again into the Tunnel. We were afraid of some sort of dirty trick. But, the presence of all those civilians—men and women—who were milling around in the halls reassured us. They wouldn’t slaughter us in front of all those witnesses.
“There were some two thousand of us down there. We were jammed into a deserted hall and we waited. An order came: ‘In fives!’ We lined up, docile, and off we went. An SS man came and bellowed. It seems there was an error: we stopped. All through the morning, orders and counter-orders followed one another with surprising regularity. We fully realized that things were going poorly between the SS and the engineers.
“Around noontime, we were put back into tunnel A. There was unrest in the air. Groups of engineers formed and they argued violently. The SS vanished and gathered at the far south end of the Tunnel—close to the exit. Wehrmacht soldiers came running out of a hall, grenades in hand; others rolled along machine guns. We asked ourselves with curiosity what was going to happen. But, everything calmed down. After an hour a command rang out: it was our turn to go out.
“We walked in silence, not too reassured. I thought, here we were, brought together, all of us who had worked on the most secret aspects of the torpedoes. I thought, machine guns and crates of cartridges had just preceded us. So, in spite of myself, when I saw the rows of heads go through the door I listened hard, expecting to be overcome by the rattling of automatic guns mowing down our lines.
“But nothing. [ . . . ] I was stunned. We went peaceably back up to the camp.”35
The prisoners met up at the roll-call area in groups of five and a hundred. They waited for more than an hour. It was only then, Sadron points out, that a section of German prisoners—former Kapos or Lagerschutz—with guns on their shoulders, white armbands of the Volkssturm on their arms, went down to the factory singing. The author can still picture them, the Kapo of the Ko Scherer in the first row on the right.
The evacuation column went through the camp door for the last time between four and five in the afternoon. Ribault pointed out that in the equipment warehouse, “something was burning, with great puffs of black smoke.” Sadron clarified: “A bit farther along three trucks were burning that were loaded with the secret equipment over which we had been bent for so many hours.” But can he be certain? A train of cars, some flat-wagons, was lined along the shunting tracks. The prisoners got on, a hundred per car; at the same time three SS got on with their chairs. Ribault, with imperturbable precision, noticed that it was from the French National Railways, of the TT series, and measured fifty-six square feet.36
What happened in the tunnel has never been elucidated. It is certain, however, that the prisoners there belonged essentially to Schreiber and verification Kommandos, or were the “specialists” from Bünemann, Heckbau, and so on. Was the plan to get rid of them as Geheimnisträger? This is merely a possibility and is not certain.
THE DEPARTURE OF THE “LAST CONVOY” FROM DORA. Making up part of the convoy with the specialists were the prisoners having to do with the camp administration, like Rozan and Bérard-Schreve. There was also, in other railway cars, a portion of the sick from the Revier taken manu militari from their blocks, like Robert Roulard, Jacques Brun, and Claude Douay. The other sick prisoners who could not be transported remained, however, at the Revier. This was the case of Bordet, Tauzin, Depierre, Georges Lenoir, and also Gaston Pernot suffering from erysipelas, and Gustave Leroy, suffering with typhus. In addition to the sick, Jacques Maillard was hidden in the Revier, referred to as “Thum” because of his height (four-foot-nine).37
The SS doctor Kurzke gave the doctors and nurses the freedom to join the evacuation convoys or to stay—the personal risk being real in either of the two hypotheses.38 Groeneveld, Petit, Lobstein, Doucet, Chabaud, and Lassus, among others, chose to leave. Lemière, Girard, Morel, Croizat, Ebel, Canivet, and also Durand stayed at Dora. Lobstein remembers all the Jews being summoned by loudspeaker to the roll-call area, to which Hermann Scharf—a gynecologist from Temesvar assigned to the Revier after the evacuation of Auschwitz—responded. His fellow prisoners wanted to hide him, but he refused by saying: “I must share the fate of my people.” No one ever saw him again.
THE WAIT AT NORDHAUSEN. On the morning of April 6 there remained in the Dora-Mittelbau area—which the Americans would not reach until Wednesday, April 11—three types of prisoners: those who had not left the Dora Revier, those who had remained at the Boelcke Kaserne in Nordhausen—voluntarily or not—and those who spread out into the neighboring area.
Among the latter was Pierre Maho. The group he was part of turned up on the night of Wednesday the 4th, in a barn not far from Nordhausen to the east. There too were other prisoners and civilian workers of various nationalities as well as Germans who had escaped from prison—including a dwarf. On Friday the 6th, Maho and his fellow prisoners went right to the ruins of the camp and returned with fresh supplies.
At night the barn was taken over by the SS, and no one was to leave anymore. At daybreak, Sunday the 8th, an evacuation column was formed and left in an eastward direction. It quickly became a march to death: those lagging behind were executed—including the dwarf.
In the course of the morning the prisoners were conscripted to clear away the streets of a bombed-out village. At eleven in the morning they noticed that their guards had changed. The SS had left and been replaced by the very peaceable “old men” of the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe made them turn around and escorted them—guns unloaded—to the west, taking breaks along the way. Thus they went through Nordhausen’s ruins and arrived at six in the evening at the Dora camp, which was empty except for the blocks of the Revier—where they were taken. The camp was guarded by German soldiers along with an officer from the Wehrmacht. The former—questioned Monday the 9th by the head nurse—swore on his honor as an officer he would do no harm to the prisoners before the arrival of the Americans. During the night of Monday, April 9 to Tuesday the 10th, the guards disappeared.39
Things did not turn out the same way for Hofstein:40 “Taking advantage of the general confusion, I took off through the woods with four fellow prisoners, to wait out the arrival of the Americans—said to be six or so miles away. We didn’t have the good fortune we had dreamed of. We were recaptured by the Volkssturm, which had been scouring the vicinity. It wouldn’t have taken much for us to have been shot. We were handed back to the police force and taken from prison to prison—from Sangerhausen, Eisleben, Halle. That was how we arrived at the Gestapo reeducation camp of Zöschen (east of Merseburg).” In chapter 20 the surprising end to Hofstein’s peregrinations will be outlined.
This is the way Gaillard recounts his experience: “Run away into the fields, get to Berga, its stacks of straw, its woods, suffer from hunger and thirst until Sunday the 8th, get recaptured. Watched those in hiding being killed and finally escaped to curse and demand justice, thanks to a courageous man—a German—Otto Lamster, for whom man remained a brother and who, seeing me in distress had me come into his home, gave me medical care and fed me.” Gaillard returned to the Dora camp after the SS left.41
Roger Abada42 dressed in civilian clothes he found in a house. He took a large hat to hide his shaved head—knowing the SS were hunting down prisoners and executing them. He joined up with various survivors in the basement of a building and served as nurse, “having lasted around eight days” until the arrival of the Americans.
In his book on Dora, Michel devotes a long chapter on Poupault and his three friends’ march to the west after their escape from prison. They were able to dress as civilians and blend in with the refugees who were heading in all different directions. In the end they met up with the Americans. But Michel’s account is totally lacking in geographical and chronological indications.43
Nicola and his friends, after a night in their bomb crater, remained from the morning of Thursday the 5th to the morning of Monday the 9th hidden in the trucks at the back of the Boelcke Kaserne garages, only leaving in search of food (canned food, sweetened condensed milk, drinks) in a basement. Then “sometime Monday morning, seeming to come out of the waters of the Zorge, twenty or so Schupos swooped on top of us like birds of prey. Hitting with their rifle butts, they dislodged us from our trucks and took us back to the large yard of the garage. There—still hitting with their rifle butts—they searched the rubble to make all those who could still stand up—for better or for worse—come out. That was how the sixty-five of us wound up traveling the six miles that separated us from Dora.”44
When they got there, all sixty-five of them were locked into a barracks after having learned that the next day they would be hanged for pillaging. Nicola added the following passage: “In the middle of the night, we heard bursts of machine-gun fire very close to us, then moving away. And once again, silence. The next morning, a fellow prisoner told us that he saw from his window the SDs getting ready to burn us with flamethrowers and a group of soldiers from the Wehrmacht attacked them with machine-guns, making them run away.”
Michel Thomas seems to have been led the night before from Nordhausen to Dora with another group, some members of which were shot on the way.
Halkin and six others found refuge in the basements of the SS building, from which they left only to fetch water, wood, and potatoes.45 In the end Delogne set up in a corner of the garage with a Luxembourgeois (a pastry chef in Esch) and an old, injured Frenchman; they had straw mattresses and blankets and something to eat; Delogne fetched the water,46 Pierre Bleton and some friends hid on the second floor of the Revier behind the blankets. They had provisions, but Bleton had to go in search of water without being caught. Agnès and Alcaras remained where they were, in equally precarious conditions.
Auchabie, injured, remained for five days in his bomb crater, where his five fellow prisoners died one after the other. In the end he got out and was given medical treatment in the rubble by a fellow prisoner, Marcel Mathieu. When the Americans arrived two days later he was unconscious.47
Doctor Normand and Jean-Pierre Couture did their best to save those sick and injured left in the camp. They were under the threat of the Schupos and members of the Volkssturm patrolling the neighboring area; but the stench from the heaps of corpses kept these patrols at a distance. The two men managed to move themselves to an antiaircraft shelter where they awaited the American military doctors.
Couture recalled a terrible image: “Two days after the bombing, to find the blankets meant for the few injured men I was keeping fed, I climbed what was left of the crumbled staircase to the first floor. The gallery—collapsed at the two ends and from place to place—was a path of corpses. The three-level bunk beds were knocked over and there was no one left alive, no doubt because of the blast of the explosion. And yet there was a cry for help: a Frenchman with a leg injury. I was able to bring him down—with the help of Marcel Brière—by creeping along in the rubble. He hadn’t had food or water for four days.”48
In Nordhausen the Americans ended up appearing unexpectedly among the ruins.
THE WAIT AT DORA. What happened at Dora between the time of the departure of the last convoy on the night of April 5 and the arrival of the Americans on April 11 is unclear. It was a genuine little town that had suddenly been almost totally emptied of its people, and the relationship between the different parts of the whole was nonexistent.
According to Doctor Lemière’s testimony, the SS left the premises after the last convoy and the Wehrmacht soldiers took over from them at the entrance and watchtowers. Their commander announced to the doctors: “You have nothing to fear. The gangsters have left.” The city of Nordhausen could be seen still burning from the camp. The inhabitants, it seems, sought refuge in the tunnel.
One of the sick men who remained in the tuberculosis block was René Bordet, on whom two male nurses, Lobstein and Georges Van der Meer, performed a pulmonary puncture which relieved him greatly. He nevertheless avoided being evacuated. “We remained barely thirty or so, including some corpses.” From his bunk he could see down to the roll-call area. Bordet spoke of what he saw, without being in a position to determine an exact chronology of events.49
One day an unknown vehicle drove up to the roll-call area. It was a jeep with Americans who were heading toward the Revier. “Certain fellow prisoners went down to meet them and brought them back to us; we spoke through gestures and a little French. We asked them for submachine guns. They still needed them to finish going around the camp. Coming back down again they gave us two and left with the promise that the rest of the army was soon to arrive. It was a small reconnaissance mission.”
The next day “two SS went back up to the roll-call area. Certain prisoners were fighting over the submachine guns; two of them were probably the one-legged Russians with the rudimentary crutches. The two SS men went toward the Wäscherei, below the kitchens, and entered it. A moment after, two ‘Häftlings’ emerged. Some gunfire broke out, close by. Nothing like the sporadic shooting in the distance. I got up and went out to look from the gable across from the Block. A small group was coming back with the submachine guns. One of the one-legged men said to me: ‘Zwei kaputt.’I went back up to bed, looking forward to the rest of the troops.”
Two days later in the morning “there arrived a ration of potato soup and big chunks of meat. Racked with hunger—my temperature having gone below 38° C—I found the soup excellent. I took a second liter of it which I ate more slowly. I kept the meat for the afternoon, but I fell asleep.” When he woke up it was a day later and the Americans were in the camp. He was left to sleep, sated.
The very succinct account by Doctor Lemière50 made no mention of this episode. But neither does he make mention of the successive arrival—under differing conditions—of various groups of prisoners from the Boelcke Kaserne, like that of Maho, Michel Thomas, and Nicola. It is impossible to reconcile the accounts with each other. But, all of the witnesses were sick. The morning of Tuesday, April 10, the guards left, and it was Maho who thus noted an exceptional moment: “The camp was absolutely free. We could have gone out if we had wanted to, but where would we go? The weather was splendid, the heavy gunfire had ceased, reigning over the camp and the countryside was a prodigious silence. No more planes. Everything seemed to be quiet as if in expectation of something enormous and wonderful. We cocked our ears to the slightest sound.”51
On Wednesday the 11th at three o’clock in the afternoon a jeep arrived with American soldiers, who were greeted with shouts and tears of joy. They were guided to the camp by a former German Kapo in civilian clothes. The soldiers went around the camp, machine guns in hand. Then they came upon the Revier barracks. The jeep took off again at high speed in search of indispensable medical assistance.
ROGER COUËTDIC’S SECOND ESCAPE. As shown in chapter 10, a certain number of French prisoners had escaped, been recaptured and imprisoned in the bunker, then assigned to a disciplinary Kommando—the Schachtkommando. Among them were two friends, Roger Couëtdic52 and Auguste Henner, who had decided to escape the evacuation and leave the camp at the first opportunity. Like the other members of their Kommando, they now knew the camp perfectly and had spotted a closet under the stairs in the block of the Kammer that could be reached—by a ladder—through a door in the gable. The Kammer was the prisoners’ clothing warehouse. Taking advantage of the unrest during the first days of April, they got into the understairs closet and found there “an enormous pile of new shoes” where they could conceal themselves, and ended up by hiding there on April 4 with some meager provisions.
On April 6 a discreet visit to the neighboring barracks of the Eigentum Verwaltung—already pillaged—allowed them to get their hands on civilian clothes; but they were interrupted by some SS who had come to find some as well, and thus became separated. Henner was able to take refuge in the Revier. Couëtdic hid in an empty block.
During the night he managed—the electrical network no longer working—to walk through the SS camp where there was a fire and to move away from the marshaling yard to reach a road. He then went through the countryside, noticed some soldiers without weapons, deserters from the Wehrmacht, and finally moved around more tranquilly by pretending to be a Dutch worker who had had his belongings stolen.
He walked along the outskirts of Niedersachswerfen, Ilfeld, and Ellrich, went to see his former camp of Nüxei, got something to eat in a neighboring inn, and then in a house in Bartolfelde. He ended up—without incident—by reaching the Americans at Duderstadt on April 10. He met no organized German resistance. Couëtdic then went back, quite tired, to a regrouping camp where he was repatriated. He arrived in Arras on April 25.