By early April 1945 what was left of Germany between the Rhine and Oder rivers, including Austria and Bohemia-Moravia, was to be conquered within six weeks until the capitulation on May 8. The entire surviving concentration camp population was still located in this restricted territory, either in the camps (in descending order from north to south) of Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Dora-Mittelbau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Dachau, or in their innumerable Kommandos.
What happened to the concentration camp population during those few weeks is generally described as the “liberation of the camps.” This is a convenient expression, but it does not convey an accurate picture of events. In most cases the prisoners were liberated outside of what had been their camps at the outset. Before being “liberated” they were “evacuated” under extremely varying, more or less tragic conditions. Evacuations usually took place in the form of railway convoys, although barges were sometimes used. When neither trains nor barges were available, the prisoners were sent off in columns on foot, a procedure that has since come to be known as a “death march,” which was sometimes very long and very deadly. The term “death march” is not appropriate, however, to describe all the evacuations.
With regard to the Dora-Mittelbau complex, virtually all of the prisoners were evacuated one way or another, and the story of their evacuations will be told in the following chapters. On their way they crossed paths with various prisoners from Neuengamme, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen, which will also be included in the story. It will therefore be possible to assess what happened throughout the whole of northern Germany regardless of whether the liberators were Americans, British, or Soviets.
It is impossible to discuss the evacuations without simultaneously taking into account military operations. The advancing Western and Soviet armies gradually triggered the evacuation process. The pace and orientation of the successive offensives either speeded or delayed the liberation of prisoners in the highly varied places where they found themselves.
THE “TRANSPORT” TRADITION IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMP WORLD. The German word Transport, which is the same in English, was one of the most common words in the concentration camp vocabulary as well as one of the most dreaded. It was never good to “leave in a transport,” as the unknown would no doubt be worse than the known. A look at the various circumstances in which the word was used will make this attitude understandable.
The first type of transport experienced by foreign prisoners in the Reich was their “deportation.” In the case of French prisoners (and other nationals arrested in France) the point of departure was usually the Compiègne train station near the Royallieu camp where prisoners were grouped together. The Drancy camp was used to group together Jews. The destination was one of the large Reich camps. Another type of transport, which did not become known until later on, took numerous Jews to extermination camps such as Treblinka, where the survivors of the Warsaw ghetto were eliminated.
Inside the Reich, transports between the major camps played an important role, as the previous chapters have shown. Buchenwald continued to receive Polish, Czech, Russian, and Hungarian Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz, but other prisoners left Buchenwald for Mauthausen or Flossenbürg. In such cases the convoys carried hundreds of prisoners, but there are also examples of smaller transports, such as sending “medical” personnel from Dachau to Stutthof (Kientzler and Weil) or to Dora (Lassus and Pahor). The individual transfer of Durand from Mauthausen to Dora was an extreme case but by no means exceptional.
Regardless of the size of the transport there was constant movement of prisoners from one camp to another up to the very end. A typical example was the transfer of twenty-six female Jehovah’s Witnesses from Bergen-Belsen to Dora on March 5, 1945. They replaced the prisoners who were in charge of maintaining the SS camp, such as Rassinier, who was then the dogmaster’s “Schwung.”
In addition to these movements between camps, which had always existed, starting in 1943 there were also all the transports from main camps to ancillary camps or Kommandos, e.g., from Buchenwald to Dora, Laura, Wieda, or Blankenburg, or yet again, Gandersheim, Langenstein, or Neu Stassfurt. Finally, the transports to “rest” camps such as Maïdanek or Bergen-Belsen must not be forgotten. This long tradition must be borne in mind in examining the 1945 evacuation transports, both those from the Eastern European camps in January and February and those from the other camps in April and May.
EVACUATION PROCEDURES. The most important common feature was the total predominance of railway transport. Raul Hilberg has clearly demonstrated the close cooperation between the SS and the Reichsbahn regarding the transport of Jews to Auschwitz and the death camps. As far as transporting “travelers” was concerned, the SS were regular, influential customers of the German railways who duly paid their fares. They were entitled to requisitions of equipment and personnel until the very end, which will be discussed later.
The use of railways naturally involved special constraints. The tracks had to be clear and intact, which is seldom the case when enemy airpower dominates in wartime. Access to railway bridges, which were few and far between, was necessary to cross rivers such as the Elbe. It is therefore not surprising that train routes were highly complicated and it took a very long time to cover limited distances.
Ordinarily, military trucks were seldom used to transport prisoners. They were used to bring prisoners from Buchenwald to Dora during the first few months, but only because of the considerable manpower requirements at the time. That was not the case for the evacuations. Transport by barges or marches in columns on foot were only stopgap solutions for want of railway transport. On a number of occasions prisoners who were marching on foot were put onto trains to finish the journey.
The SS rules regarding transports were simple and had not changed for a long time. Transports involved conveying a number of prisoners from one spot under their control to another spot under their control, and delivering the prisoners in exchange for a receipt. As the next few chapters will show, those in charge of the April 1945 railway convoys from Dora-Mittelbau tried so hard to follow the routine that the transports proved to be almost a caricature. If they failed to reach Neuengamme, they succeeded in delivering their prisoners to Bergen-Belsen, Oranienburg, and Ravensbrück. Similarly, convoys from other camps ended up at Dachau.
THE “DEATH MARCHES” AND THEIR ACTUAL SIZES. On several occasions since 1945 and again recently, some authors have separated the “death marches” from the rest of the evacuations in an attempt to show that the SS deliberately used them to eliminate prisoners, or at least certain categories among them. The position adopted by these writers was not the result of a careful analysis of the facts, which were well known, but rather involved a thesis for which they selected firsthand accounts that were the most likely to support their views.1
In fact, as many witnesses observed, the SS preferred railway evacuations for obvious reasons. In addition to freight cars of one type or another (closed cars or platforms) where run-of-the-mill prisoners were crammed together, there were cars and compartments for the SS as well as for prisoner-supervisors wearing armbands so they could travel comfortably. Turns of duty could be easily ensured and food supplies normally divided up. Quite often female staff took part in the evacuation. Each person was allowed to take along a minimum of baggage.
The situation was altogether different for the SS who had to accompany, either on foot or sometimes by bicycle, columns of prisoners being evacuated by road. These prisoners often had great difficulty keeping up with the pace imposed on them. Eager to avoid delays, the SS eliminated any prisoners who fainted, as leaving behind prisoners who were still alive was ruled out. Those were the “death marches.”
The next few chapters will describe the variety of actual situations, ranging from the march from Kleinbodungen to Bergen-Belsen, conducted quickly over a predetermined route, to the lengthy wandering of evacuees from Neu Stassfurt, who still had not reached any destination on the day the Germans capitulated. In northern Germany, compared to railway convoys, marches at first concerned only a minority of prisoners, the most unlucky ones. With the evacuation of Sachsenhausen at the end of April, the proportion changed, but there was no longer any question of using trains to move away from Berlin.
MILITARY OPERATIONS AND EVACUATIONS. The evacuations will be described in the next few chapters, together with information on concomitant military operations, but first, here is a brief overview of the operations in northern Germany.
1. The decisive importance of the simultaneous advance of three American armies that had crossed the Rhine, i.e., Simpson’s Ninth Army, Hodges’s First Army, and Patton’s Third Army, has already been mentioned. Simpson and Hodges joined forces at Lippstadt on April 2, 1945, closing in on Model’s group of German armies in the Ruhr. Next they went on toward the Elbe, with Simpson moving north of the Harz Mountains and Hodges to the south. Simpson’s troops crossed the Weser River on April 6, first taking Hanover on the 10th, then Brunswick, and a vanguard following the highway reached the Elbe near Magdeburg on April 11. At the same time, once a breakthrough of the German front was achieved northeast of Hanover, other troops moved north toward the Elbe through Salzwedel and Gardelegen.
Hodges’s troops also crossed the Weser, farther south, on April 6, took Osterode and Nordhausen on the 11th, and joined up again with Simpson’s troops in the Magdeburg region on April 13. By then the German Eleventh Army was trapped in the Harz Mountains. The Germans gradually gave ground until the last troops surrendered in Blankenburg on April 20. This double offensive brought on what was virtually a total evacuation of the Dora-Mittelbau complex between April 4 and April 11 along with the other Kommandos of the region, particularly Gandersheim, Helmstedt, Langenstein, and Neu Stassfurt. Farther to the south, Patton’s troops, which had reached Ohrdruf by April 5, liberated Buchenwald on the 1 ith and crossed the Saale on the 12th. The offensive continued until Halle and Leipzig were taken on April 19, followed by Chemnitz and Dessau.
The Americans, however, did not push farther into Saxony. Patton’s troops, who controlled Plauen and Hof, did not go into Bohemia but turned instead toward the south in the direction of Bayreuth. In the past this had been Bohemian territory, but the northwestern part, including Karlsbad and Aussig, had been annexed by the Reich in 1938 with the rest of the Gau of Sudetenland. To the north of Magdeburg, Simpson’s troops gradually occupied Altmark but did not cross the Elbe toward Brandenburg.
2. While the Americans were advancing east toward the Elbe, the British, who were on their left, were moving from the Rhine toward the North Sea and the Baltic. They arrived in Osnabrück on April 6, Soltau and Uelzen on April 18, and reached the Elbe near Lauenburg on the 19th. They liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Bremen was taken on April 25 and Hamburg on May 3. The Neuengamme camp was evacuated on April 19 in the direction of Lübeck.
3. The Soviets began their offensive in the direction of Berlin on April 16 by crossing the Oder, and by April 25 their troops had surrounded it. The Sachsenhausen camp together with the Heinkel Kommando from Oranienburg were evacuated toward Schwerin on April 21.
Farther to the north the Soviets crossed the Oder on April 18 between Stettin and Schwedt to conquer western Pomerania and Mecklenburg. The French women prisoners left Ravensbrück for Sweden on April 23. The Ravensbrück camp was evacuated starting on April 26. On May 3 the Soviets coming from the east and the Americans who had crossed the lower Elbe joined up in the region of Parchim. It was then that the prisoners on the march from Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück were liberated.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, and all German resistance in Berlin came to an end on May 2.
4. Between May 2 and 8 the Soviets completed their conquest of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, and part of Saxony.
The Americans crossed the Böhmerwald and occupied the western part of Bohemia. The Germans resisted the Russians in Moravia. When the Germans capitulated, a large portion of Bohemia and a small part of Saxony were still under German control. In these regions prisoners had not yet been liberated, and many of them perished.
As a very general rule, during the final weeks the German authorities made no attempt to force the prisoners of war and foreign civilian workers in the regions threatened by the advancing Allied armies to go elsewhere. Some were taken, along with German civilians, to escape from combat zones, for example, but there was no systematic organization of their evacuation.
On the contrary, to the very end the SS observed the rule that no surviving concentration camp prisoners were to fall into the hands of the Allied troops. Fortunately, as will be explained in detail, the rule could not be applied everywhere nor right up to the end. The evacuation of Bergen-Belsen, for example, where a typhus epidemic had broken out, proved to be impossible. Columns of prisoners on foot met up with the Allied advance, as in the region south of Magdeburg or around Parchim. Nevertheless, all the political, racial, and other prisoners lived under the threat of death to the very end.
The most striking and no doubt most disconcerting fact was that the determination of the SS continued unabated until the very last moment, even though the defeat of the Germans was inevitable. Once the machine had been switched on there was no way of stopping it, and it carried along in its wake the SS auxiliaries—prisoners wearing Kapo and Blockältester armbands who were almost always Germans with green triangles. The latter thus helped convey the other prisoners to Bergen-Belsen, where many of them were subsequently massacred. They helped hunt down survivors of the Boelcke Kaserne and shut the other prisoners into the barn in Gardelegen.
This ultimate barbarity, which was widespread, indiscriminate, and total, has to be taken into account in evoking the final weeks of the German concentration camp system. Here and there the Wehrmacht or the Luftwaffe intervened to save a few prisoners who were abandoned by the SS, but the latter never ceased to inspire fear in everyone.
On April 11, 1945, the Americans in Hodges’s First Army discovered, more or less simultaneously, the Boelcke Kaserne at Nordhausen, the tunnel factory at Dora, and the Dora camp with its Revier. It was important for them to see in the heaps of corpses left by the Nazis the true meaning of the fight in which they were engaged. It was also important for them to take control of the site at which an extraordinary device was being built. Whatever may have been the relative weight of these two discoveries, the matter of utmost urgency involved saving the survivors and burying the dead.
THE AMERICANS AT NORDHAUSEN. The American officers drew up reports at various levels on the situation they had found at Nordhausen and the measures they had taken to cope with it. Raymond Wautrecht has grouped together and translated these documents.
The Third Armored Division, called the “Lucky Spearhead,” was the first to arrive at Nordhausen. On March 25 it had established a bridgehead in Remagen. The following paragraphs are taken from the history of the division.
Although the taking of Nordhausen did not constitute the heaviest fighting of April 11, that city will live forever in the memories of 3rd Armored Division soldiers as a place of horror. The Americans couldn’t believe their eyes. . . . No written word can properly convey the atmosphere of such a charnel house, the unbearable stench of decomposing bodies, the sight of live human beings, starved to pallid skeletons, lying cheek by jowl with the ten-day dead. [ . . . ] It was a fabric of moans and whimpers, of delirium and outright madness. Here and there, a single shape tottered about, walking slowly, like a man dreaming.”2
On the morning of April 12 the tank crews took up their offensive again in the direction of Sangerhausen. They were relayed by the soldiers of the 104th Infantry Division, called “Timberwolf,” who regularly followed them. The history of this division contains the following account of the intervention of the American authorities. “All medical personnel that could be spared in the Division were rushed to the scene to give medical aid [ . . . ]. A temporary hospital was set up in a row of apartment buildings in the Steinstrasse. Seven hundred camp occupants were evacuated first. [ . . . ] Four hundred of them were then transferred to the 51st Field Hospital due to their critical condition.
“The burgomeister of Nordhausen having fled, his assistant was contacted by the Military Government and given explicit instructions regarding laws and ordnances and the responsibility placed on him . . . . Hundreds of the male citizens of the town were ordered to the camp, where under guard, they worked several days carrying litter cases and collecting corpses by hand. They dug mass graves on a prominent hill near the camp and carried the corpses through the town to the graves. [ . . . ]
“On the first day, 1,200 bodies were taken out of the buildings. By Saturday night, 14 April, all the bodies had been removed from the camp and 1,958 had been buried. [ . . . ] On 15 April at 2 p.m., 2,017 bodies had been interred, which includes those of 59 prisoners who died at the hospital.”3 A film was made of these operations, extracts of which can be seen at La Coupole Museum in Wizernes.
THE AMERICANS AT THE DORA TUNNEL. The last able-bodied Dora prisoners left the tunnel, and then the Dora camp, on April 5. It appears that the German civilians also abandoned their factory on the same day and scattered to their places of residence in the region. They will be encountered once again. For six days the tunnel was no longer guarded, and part of the population of Nordhausen took refuge there after losing their homes in the bombing raids. It was thus possible to recover electrical equipment in particular.
On April 11 in the late afternoon, American officers patrolling near Niedersachswerfen met up with prisoners in striped clothes who guided them to one of the tunnel entrances, which was still lit up. After a quick inspection of the site, the unit’s commander, William Castille, the division information officer, informed the army intelligence service headquarters in Paris of the discovery of a factory for manufacturing V1s and V2s (and aircraft engines). It was decided that access to the tunnel should be prohibited, and specialists were sent to take possession of the factory equipment, the rockets, and their components. First, however, the north of Thuringia had to cease being in the zone of military operations.
The intelligence service was not, in fact, surprised at the discovery of the Dora factory, for it was first brought to their attention by the report of an informer working at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin who managed to reach London on October 3, 1944. In November, Mittelwerk (by that time its code name was perfectly familiar to the Allies) was the object of a special air sortie. The interpretive plan resulting from the sorties, which was drawn up by the Allied Central Intelligence Unit in Medmenham, was very precise, showing the topography of the Kohnstein, the Dora camp, the tunnel entrances, the railway tracks, the electric power cables, etc. The Allied pilots gave up the idea of bombing the site due to the thickness of the rocky layer which, they decided in advance, would prevent the strikes from having any effect.
THE AMERICANS AT THE DORA CAMP. On April 11, 1945, as noted, an American jeep arrived at the Dora camp. The soldiers toured the camp, found the Revier, and went off in search of help, which arrived the following morning at daybreak, according to Maho.4 Military trucks came, “loaded with medicines, bandages, anesthetics and sterile instruments.” Then “in perfect order, a column of German health workers arrived in the camp. They had come to do our chores, change our bandages and clean our Blocks. [ . . . ] The first graves were dug.” The crematorium was no longer in operation.
Bordet5 gives his assessment of the change of regime: “I presented myself and a few hours later I was put in a Block located higher up in the camp, in a room with two bedsteads. I was showered and given a clean shirt, and put on a bed between clean sheets with blankets, while waiting for my jacket and pants to come back cleaned. Good soup, white bread, cold meat, cheese. The next day, coffee with milk, white bread, butter and jam, plus a day’s army ration ‘to nibble on slowly to calm the hunger.’ We were served by German soldier-prisoners. It’s like living in a palace. I’m eating!”
The Revier occupants were either the seriously ill who were not evacuated by the last convoy on April 5 or survivors of the Boelcke Kaserne. They were a sight, and people came to look at them, as Tauzin has recalled:6 “We were visited by the Americans who came by the truckload to see us. [ . . . ] We sang unrestrainedly, first the Madelon, then the Marseillaise, every time we saw new Americans arriving.”
The Americans were “dumbstruck when they saw the small contingent of remaining prisoners come out, gaunt, emaciated and unbelievably thin, since some of them, who were of average height, weighed less than 60 pounds. Those of us who were able, literally dragged ourselves, for we had spent six days alone with almost nothing to eat. Naturally, the doctors and nurses, who were almost all Americans, worked wonders to give us good soup every day and they did not let a day go by without coming to see us.” These visits to Dora by American soldiers were organized systematically on orders from General Eisenhower.
The Dora Revier was used to group together the prisoners from the surrounding area, except for Auchabie, who remained under treatment at the American military hospital. Delogne7 found himself back in Block 36A, which he had left a month earlier. Brière again met up with Doctor Lemière, who had treated him earlier, and gave him a small microscope “organized” in the ruins of Nordhausen as a gift. The health of some of the survivors of the Boelcke Kaserne deteriorated again, including Delogne, who had pleurisy, and Nicola,8 who was suffering from congestion of the lungs and then came down with typhus.
During the first few days after the Liberation the camp barracks was occupied by new arrivals whose attitude shocked Couture and Maho,9 who recalls: “Huge numbers of French, Italian and Polish STO workers rushed in from all around, after being driven out by military operations, and moved into the empty Blocks.” Couture10 describes them as “loud-mouths” and “lively lasses”: “Disorder settled in with their arrival; no one wanted to do any more chores, clean or help in the kitchens. They all grabbed blankets and straw mattresses; no one exercised any control. There were fights, filth and a real threat of famine.” The American commander quickly and vigorously put an end to the situation. Thereafter the camp was used to group together foreigners in the area for repatriation. One of them, a Frenchman named H. D.—he did not wish his name to be mentioned—has provided the following account of his stay there. He worked in Nordhausen at the firm of Schmidt und Kranz, where a Dora Kommando was assigned.
“A few days after our arrival at Dora, one of my comrades met up again with a deportee he had worked with at Schmidt und Kranz. We decided to go with him to the Tunnel to see this underground factory. Alas, American sentinels were guarding the entrance and told us to go back the way we had come. The presence of our comrade in striped clothes had no effect on the determination of the sentinels to comply with the orders they had received. We were very disappointed.
“Within the next few days, again with a few comrades, we went to the Revier to greet the French deportees who were still there. We could not imagine human beings in such a physical condition. Our comrades asked us questions: What are you doing in Germany? Which region do you come from? Were you badly treated, too? [ . . . ] We were overwhelmed by what we saw, and our conversation did not last long. On the other hand, an overly lengthy visit and too many questions would have worn out these men who longed to enjoy a bit of rest.”
On April 17 a Belgian unit, the Sixth Riflemen Battalion attached to the American army, arrived in Nordhausen. It was made up of volunteers who joined up after the liberation of Belgium. Thus Halkin,11 a university professor from Liège, saw former students arrive, and Delogne members of maquis in the Ardennes. During their stay the Belgian soldiers were able to help their countrymen and take care of correspondence between the survivors and their families while they awaited repatriation.
Several firsthand accounts, from Maho and H. D., mention Masses celebrated by priests, first a Belgian, then a Pole. Delogne mentions, however, that plans for a political demonstration on May 1 were ultimately canceled by the commander.
REPATRIATION. Prisoners were repatriated by plane once the Nordhausen airfield was back in operating condition. C-47 Dakotas that flew in to supply American troops flew back out to Le Bourget (Paris) with deportees, prisoners of war, and civilian workers. These departures appear to have begun on April 20. Depierre, Lenoir, Gaillard, Tauzin, and Maho have mentioned that date. Couture12 and Brière requisitioned carts to be taken to the Nordhausen airfield with invalid comrades they had been caring for since the bombing on April 4. Prisoners of war allowed them to be given priority.
The final departures, mostly sick prisoners on stretchers, took place on May 7. Thus Bordet, Delogne, and Nicola left Dora on May 4 in ambulances, but they had to wait for three days in huge tents for the weather to clear. Auchabie13 left with them. He recounts that at the American hospital, they removed shrapnel from his left foot and cared for him energetically. He was considered ready for repatriation on May 7, but “as a few of my comrades and I were at the end of our rope, a military chaplain at the American hospital gave us the last sacraments.”
When Delogne arrived at Le Bourget Airport, he was taken to Neuilly Hospital and then to Lariboisière where he was treated for pulmonary disease. He left for Brussels on May 11 by hospital train and arrived home in Bertrix on June 25. Bordet, Nicola, and Auchabie were taken to Bichat Hospital.
Auchabie, who was five-foot-eight, weighed eighty-five pounds at the time. He was considered unable to be moved and spent four months at Bichat. He was not sent on to the hospital in Brive until August 1. He finally arrived home on May 31, 1946. As has already been mentioned in chapter 6, he was the sole survivor of a group of twenty-two deportees from the regions of Corrèze, Dordogne, and Haute-Vienne. After the worst period at Dora he was then sent to Ellrich, put in the transport of May 3, 1945, and survived the bombing of the Boelcke Kaserne. He died in 1997.
Among the repatriated prisoners from Dora in May 1945 was Jacques Can.14 He was an NN, arrested in December 1942 at the age of sixteen, who was sent first to the camp at Hinzert, then to Wittlich, Breslau, and Schweidnitz before arriving at Gross Rosen a month before the evacuation. The evacuation took him to Nordhausen at the same time as Rogerie, and like him, he was transferred to Dora and then came back to the Boelcke Kaserne, which was promptly bombed, and finally returned to the Revier at Dora to be repatriated. He was nineteen years old.
THE LIBERATION “OF” DORA. Strictly speaking, there was no liberation “of” Dora in the sense that there was a liberation “of” Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen. When the Americans arrived on the site, all the able-bodied prisoners had already been evacuated and only the seriously ill remained at Dora (with a few doctors and nurses) and the survivors of the Boelcke Kaserne in Nordhausen. Hence it is only possible to speak of the liberation of prisoners “at” Dora and “at” Nordhausen. As there was nothing left to suggest how the camp had once operated, what was first engraved in the collective memory was the image of the masses of corpses at Boelcke Kaserne and the name of Nordhausen, whether connected to Dora or not.
The documents of the period do not refer to the liberation of the large camp of Ellrich, which was empty on the evening of April 5, 1945, except for the last corpses. Virondeau15 explains why: “On 5 April 1945, in the late afternoon, when the last prisoners had climbed into the freight cars (except the seriously ill, who could not stand up and were left lying on the ground in front of the camp), the SS lieutenant (the only one remaining, as the others were air force military) took his gun and put a bullet in their heads to finish them off. From the visual memory I have, there were about twelve of them. I was the last one to come out of the camp and the SS closed the gate.”
In Harzungen, when the Revier was evacuated a small number of the most seriously ill were left there with some supplies, but they were massacred by a retreating SS unit a few hours before the arrival of the Americans.
After taking Osterode and Nordhausen the Americans took control of Bad Lauterberg, Bad Sachsa, Wieda, Walkenried, Ellrich, and Ilfeld at the edge of the Harz Mountains. The Germans, who had retrenched in the foothills, resisted for a few days.
Neither the Americans nor the Soviets afterward were particularly interested in the concentration camps they found that had been emptied of their prisoners, in the midst of all the camps in the region that still housed thousands of German civilians and foreign workers. Only the firsthand accounts of the survivors of these camps have preserved the memory of their existence.
FOUR CHAPTERS RECOUNTING THE EVACUATIONS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES. As all of the evacuations of the Dora-Mittelbau complex and the other Kommandos of the Mittelraum and their consequences could not be dealt with in a single chapter, this account has been divided somewhat arbitrarily into four chapters. An attempt has been made to group together events that show similarities in terms of geography and operations. At the same time the narrative follows a roughly chronological order with the evacuations starting up one after another as the Allied armies drew closer. In a certain way this simultaneously involved moving from west to east.
Chapter 18 discusses the evacuations ending at Bergen-Belsen for prisoners from Dora, Ellrich, Woffleben, Harzungen, and Kleinbodungen.
Chapter 19 evokes the contrasting fate of five convoys running in the Altmark. Three of them crossed the Elbe, and the prisoners managed to reach Oranienburg, Ravensbrück, and Wöbbelin. Two were blocked en route, and most of the prisoners died in Gardelegen.
Chapter 20 groups together the “death marches” toward the east of prisoners from Harzungen, Langenstein, Neu Stassfurt, and a number of other Kommandos, who were fated to cross paths in Saxony and the neighboring regions. The special “odyssey” of the Blankenburg Kommando is included in this chapter.
Chapter 21 shows the consequences of the Soviet offensive on the prisoners in Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück.