The evacuation of the Dora, Ellrich (and Woffleben), and Harzungen camps, as noted, took place on April 4 and 5, 1945. It took place mainly by railway convoys that left from the Ellrich, Woffleben, Niedersachswerfen, and Dora stations.
Nine convoys have been perfectly identified, six of which finally arrived at Bergen-Belsen, which does not, however, appear to have been their original destination.
The vicissitudes encountered by these convoys on their way to Bergen-Belsen will be discussed first, then the situation in the camp until it was liberated and the prisoners left, and finally the circumstances surrounding their repatriation.
THE SIX CONVOYS. The first convoy to leave Ellrich on Wednesday, April 4, was apparently the convoy that evacuated the prisoners who had arrived three days earlier from Karlshagen. These prisoners had not been given new identity numbers and were kept separate from the rest of the prisoners in the camp. It was easy to round them up. Fournier took note of the convoy itinerary. After going around the Harz Mountains through Osterode and Seesen, the train went to Hamburg via Goslar, Braunschweig (Brunswick), Peine, and Hanover. Then it came back toward the south by Lüneburg and Uelzen to Celle and finally went back through Uelzen to reach Bergen-Belsen. The convoy arrived on Sunday, April 8, in the morning. The prisoners were led directly into the barracks near the main camp.
A second convoy left Ellrich, also on April 4 in the morning, with the camp prisoners who were still more or less able-bodied, including Jacques Courtaud, who noted that the convoy was in Hamburg on April 7 and then went south, arriving in Bergen-Belsen on Monday, April 9, at “around 4 o’clock.”
Next, two more convoys left the Ellrich station, one that had been formed in Niedersachswerfen, but they never arrived at Bergen-Belsen. They will be discussed in the next chapter.
Information on the evacuation from the Woffleben station is given in an article in Mémorial.1 A train arrived there with a few freight cars already occupied by prisoners from Harzungen guarded by Luftwaffe soldiers. The train took on prisoners from the Woffleben camp on April 4 under the supervision of Kleemann, who was the camp commander, and his SS. After Osterode and Seesen the train went to Hamburg through Hildesheim and Hanover. It then continued on to Brunsbüttel at the far end of the Elbe estuary in Holstein, where it stopped before turning around and going back to Hamburg. It then went south and arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 10. Other accounts give April 11 as the arrival date.
A map has long been available showing the itinerary of the convoy that left from Niedersachswerfen on April 4 with prisoners from Harzungen. Neither the map nor the excessive commentary that has accompanied it are reliable. What is clear from the various firsthand accounts is that the convoy also went to Hamburg before reaching Bergen-Belsen on April 10. This evacuation of Harzungen involved the prisoners who arrived at Dora on April 3 and the patients from the Revier and the Schonung. The other evacuation left at the same time going east on foot, which will be discussed in chapter 20.
The first of the three convoys used to evacuate the Dora camp itself along with some of the prisoners employed in the camp and in the tunnel left on the afternoon of April 4 from the Dora train station. The route followed by the convoy, which was noted by Charles Vedel,2 was similar to the itinerary of the other convoys that reached Bergen-Belsen. After Osterode and Seesen, the train went through Hildesheim, Lehrte, Celle, Uelzen, and Lüneburg to Bergedorf, in the eastern suburb of Hamburg near the Neuengamme camp. Then it went south through Soltau to Bergen-Belsen where it arrived on April 10.
The second convoy from the Dora camp left on April 5 in the afternoon and arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 10 in the afternoon, after following an unspecified route. The third evacuation convoy, which left Dora in the late afternoon on April 5, never reached Bergen-Belsen. That convoy will be encountered again in the next chapter.
The distance between Dora and Bergen-Belsen is 94 miles as the crow flies, which corresponds roughly to 106 miles by train. The fact that it took between four and six days to cover that distance shows that the situation was by no means simple. First, all the convoys made a detour via Hamburg, which shows what their original destination must have been. It was quite specifically the Neuengamme camp, which was supposed to receive all the prisoners evacuated from Dora-Mittelbau. Similarly, the camp at Flossenbürg, and then Dachau, were supposed to accommodate all the prisoners from Buchenwald, which will be discussed later.
The destination at the outset was thus Hamburg, once the convoys arrived in the plains after going around the Harz Mountains. This was a sensitive area from a military standpoint, bordering on the areas controlled by the American and British armies. The German headquarters would attempt a counteroffensive with the “Clausewitz” Panzer Division, which, incidentally, would be completely crushed. The circulation of convoys of prisoners behind the German front was particularly problematic at that spot.
A FEW STRIKING EPISODES. The convoys were also exposed to bombing raids, such as the one that took place at an unidentified station, recounted by Yves Béon:3 “On Saturday, the train pulled into a large station. It seemed huge to prisoners whose weak condition had deprived them of any sense of proportion but, even so, it was certainly very large. Rows of platforms and tracks were cluttered with an enormous amount of military gear. There were trains filled with troops, equipment and munitions. There were tanks mounted on platforms, with their guns pointed downward, and machine guns grouped together by twos. There were mortars carefully lined up on flat wagons. Through the wide-open doors of the covered cars, we could see boxes of ammunition. The troop trains were overflowing with armed soldiers, looking tired and edgy. Everywhere there were antiaircraft machine guns and rapid-fire guns trained on the sky. On the platforms, worked-up officers shouted orders. The sun flooded the entire setting. It was unusually warm for the season.
“The train from Harzungen pulled up along a platform slightly isolated from the others. A little farther on, between the prisoners and the row of overloaded platforms, there was a convoy topped with a machine gun pointing at the sky. The servers looked at the convicts with astonishment. They were standing about twenty yards away. Charles was opposite a machine gunner who appeared to be the same age as he, about twenty, yet one of them was the master and the other a wretched slave. Tired of the hubbub of the station, the German gazed with interest at the strange creatures. Perhaps he had seen some before, perhaps not; but he had certainly never met men in that condition.
“Suddenly, the sirens started wailing and turmoil descended on the station, like panic in the anthill. [ . . . ] SS and prisoners immediately found themselves packed together between the wagon axles. [ . . . ] Beneath his wagon, Charles spotted a German soldier. He had secured his helmet and aimed his gun. It was a double-barreled machine gun. [ . . . ] Charles looked at the soldier; he couldn’t take his eyes off of him. The soldier kept shooting like a madman, until he couldn’t find anything else to shoot at. Suddenly, he straightened up, surrounded by flames and explosions. His uniform shriveled up and frayed like burnt paper. His face was covered with blisters and began to melt. He collapsed onto his weapon, with its guns pointing straight up at the sky. [ . . . ]
“The planes disappeared, but the station rang out with explosions and fires were burning everywhere. There was nothing left of the trains that had been standing there a few minutes earlier but a heap of twisted metal. The prisoners’ convoy was spared. [ . . . ] Even the track leaving the station was intact. The convicts started off on their journey again.”
This dramatic episode, which has been evoked by several witnesses, was of course only one example of the aerial attacks to which the convoys were subjected during their travels.
Many prisoners were also struck by the sight of Hamburg in ruins. Fournier4 writes: “Most of the maneuvering we did was in the city of Hamburg. All I could see was a ghost town that had been practically destroyed, with the carcasses of buildings still standing but completely burnt out.” He also says: “Through the windows of our car, we saw roads jammed with refugees, women, children, soldiers, on foot, on bicycle, in vehicles of all sorts, some pulled by horses, going in every direction.”
At the Hamburg station, during the night of Sunday, April 8, to Monday, April 9, according to the account by Yves Béon,5 the convoy from Harzungen was turned back at Bergen-Belsen.
“During the night from Sunday to Monday, the train arrived at a railway hub. The number of tracks increased until there were dozens of them crisscrossing and interfering with each other. Huge pylons holding darkened projectors stood like dead trees. Water cranes with their canvas arms and control cabins were scattered about the mineral landscape. From one area to the next, a lighted lamp made the landscape look surreal. The convoy jumped on the junctions and seemed to hesitate between the tracks. It stopped for a few minutes in front of a red light, then started up again and then went to a deserted platform off to the side, where it came to a stop. On a dimly lit neighboring building the name HAMBURG was written in large letters. [ . . . ]
“The convoy leaders leaped onto the platform and did stretching exercises. Military and station officers appeared in uniform. There was a fascist salute and the clicking of heels. They all got into the covered car. Would the train reach its final destination, were they going to unload the prisoners? [ . . . ] The summit conference was over. Once again, there was a fascist salute, a clicking of heels, and the welcoming committee went away. Time passed and nothing happened. The prisoners went back to sleep and all life seemed to cease on the platform. Then the locomotive sent up a spray of steam and the convoy slowly moved off.”
There is no information regarding the circumstances under which the convoys that reached Hamburg were then redirected to Bergen-Belsen. Some of them were sent through Lüneburg, others through Buchholz. Former deportees have reconstructed an itinerary of the period starting from Buchholz and reaching Soltau via Wintermoor, Schneverdingen, and Wolterdingen, and then Münster before moving onto a secondary line. There was still a long distance to Bergen-Belsen to cover on foot from the place where the prisoners got off.
LIFE AND DEATH IN THE CONVOYS. Prisoners bore up under the long journey between the Dora-Mittelbau camps and Bergen-Belsen in very different ways, depending on their state of health at the outset. Some accounts came from survivors who were able to be extremely active in the days following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Yet they also witnessed the death of many of their comrades. The composition of the convoys varied according to the camp from which it departed.
Some German Greens did not take part in the evacuations because they had enlisted in the Volkssturm. When Pinault6 arrived at Ellrich from Karlshagen, he watched them sign up. Sadron and the author remember having seen those from Dora parading with a white armband before our convoy left. The criteria for their selection remain unknown. Those who were in the convoys did not seem to be the most suitable. One of them did not embark, however. It was Anna, the chief of Block 130, described by Spitz (in chapter 10). He tried to escape and was shot, which did not sadden Spitz.7
The convoy from Harzungen included the ill who had been brought out of the Revier and the Schonung. Mialet explains how the operation took place: “As the patients were all in hospital gowns, the clothes in the dressing room were thrown pell-mell into the Revier room. The sick prisoners fought like savages for the least appalling clothes. I soon found myself more or less dressed and equipped with a blanket which I kept attached around my body.” As a consequence, the clothes that each one was wearing carried identity numbers which were not theirs. This explains the problems involved in identifying the numerous bodies found later. The situation was the same for the last convoys that left Dora and Ellrich with sick prisoners.
The rations distributed at both Dora and Ellrich when the convoy was about to depart included a large loaf of bread and a tin, which was supposed to cover the prisoners’ needs for a three-day journey. They were not given anything else. Hunger only made the seriously ill prisoners even weaker. Dysentery and pulmonary problems ravaged the group. Whenever the train stopped, corpses were removed from the freight cars and stretcher bearers carried them to a freight car at the rear.
Mialet8 recounts: “The train stopped for a long time near a farm. The harvest of corpses during this halt was particularly fruitful. Bodies fell out of all the cars. [ . . . ] The dead were buried at that site. A hundred and fifty-seven. They were interred near a pond that had given the village its name: Grossmore. We stayed there all night.” It was in fact Wintermoor where Lucien Fayman9 remembers digging a mass grave in which all the corpses from the convoy were thrown without being identified. That was where the young Polish nurse Yanouk was murdered by an SS, as Jacques Desprez later told Jean Michel.10
For many prisoners the march from the train stop to Bergen-Belsen was a painful ordeal, which is how Courtaud11 remembers it: “I can still see myself getting off at I don’t know which station, on a platform that seemed endless. We went off in rows of five, of course, in the direction of the camp, which was located a few miles away. [ . . . ] Several of those who formed the convoy did not reach their destination. Woe betide anyone whose strength gave out, for they were shot without any pity by the SS, who continued to terrorize us until the very end. There was nothing we could hope for from them.”
Courtaud’s account is not quite accurate. He and his comrade went in the direction not of the Bergen-Belsen camp but of a neighboring camp made up of barracks. All the prisoners from five of the six convoys were led to these barracks. Many of those from the Woffleben convoy then went into the Bergen-Belsen camp itself.
It appears that the place where most of the convoys unloaded prisoners was a sort of “halt” which is still used today for troops on maneuvers who are housed in the barracks. The convoy from Harzungen stopped at the Bergen-Sülze station, located five mile from the barracks.
TWO ESCAPES. There are two accounts of successful escapes from these convoys. One of them has been told at length by Serge Miller,12 who left the convoy from Ellrich somewhere near Lüneburg together with three French comrades and a Russian. They got their chance as a result of a night attack on the train by a passing plane. After hiding for several days, they saw the Americans arrive on their way toward the Elbe.
The second account is that of Stéphane Hessel,13 who was in a convoy coming from Dora. “The train stopped at nightfall, after going through the Lüneburg station. A childhood memory: Lüneburger Heide, it sounded familiar, a Nordic landscape somewhere in the direction of Lübeck. It was time to jump off. The board operation went off well. The Russians didn’t see anything, nor did the Germans. I slid under the train first. Someone fired shots. The four others, thinking the shots were aimed at me, decided not to jump. I stayed alone at the edge of the ballast. The darkness welcomed me. Once again, I was free.
“At this point, my memory wavers. How could I have covered the ninety-four miles from Lüneburg to Hanover, walking at night and sleeping by day in abandoned barns? How did I find sympathetic Poles and French compulsory workers who gave me clothes and money? By 12 April, I was at the gates of the city. Hanover had been evacuated by the army. Helpless civilians wandered in the streets. What was everyone waiting for? I started up a conversation. Does anyone know where the American troops are? ‘They bombed the barracks. The shooting was coming from over there [ . . . ].’ My guardian angel had not left me: at the bend of the road, I could see tanks with the US star on them.”
THE DEATH MARCH FROM KLEINBODUNGEN TO BERGEN-BELSEN. Shortly after the convoys a column of prisoners from the Kleinbodungen Kommando arrived at Bergen-Belsen on foot. They had walked out on April 4 and Jean Voisin,14 one of the survivors, has recalled the various stages with the corresponding dates: Osterode on the 5th, Seesen the 6th, Salzgitter the 7th, Rüningen (in the suburb of Brunswick) the 8th, Ohof the 9th, Husted (north of Celle) the 10th, and Bergen-Belsen the 11th. The column was then sent to the barracks.
During the march they walked very quickly, covering twelve to eighteen miles a day. It was a real “death march,” with stragglers being shot along the way. The evacuation of Kleinbodungen was supposed to have been ensured by railway convoy, but a bombing raid prevented them from leaving at Herzberg.
A small group of prisoners from the last convoy out of Dora joined the column en route. They were coming from Oker after crossing the Harz Mountains. Most of their comrades, as the next chapter will explain, had got onto a train that took them to Ravensbrück.
THE BERGEN-BELSEN CAMP IN EARLY APRIL 1945. A brief glance at the history of Bergen-Belsen is necessary to understand what transpired at the camp in April and May 1945 and the complexity of its concentration camp population. Bergen-Belsen was located in the center of Lower Saxony just west of the road from Hanover to Hamburg that crosses the Lüneburger Heide, the Lüneburg moor. It was a poor region that had always been used to house military training camps, and even today one of the largest in Germany is located there, in the area west of the small town of Bergen. Belsen is a village situated slightly to the south, which belongs to the town of Bergen. Barracks were built there to house troops on maneuvers.
The Bergen-Belsen camp itself was located south of the barracks. The camp was first renovated by French prisoners of war and was then initially occupied in 1941 by Soviet prisoners of war, fifty thousand of whom are believed to have died in this “Stalag 311.” The corresponding cemetery is still there, and a memorial has been put up in their honor.
In April 1943 the Wehrmacht transferred the running of the camp to the SS WVHA, led by Pohl. On April 27 it once again became a concentration camp, under the command of Adolf Haas. Prisoners from various other camps were sent there to prepare the site. The plan was to make it a camp for Jews who could be exchanged or used as hostages.
From the very beginning therefore Bergen-Belsen was different from all the other large camps. Four separate sections were set up in succession for groups of Jews subject to special regulations. First there was the “star camp” (Sternlager), which was the largest, then the “neutral” camp, the Polish camp, and finally the Hungarian camp. Some of the Jews were indeed sent to Switzerland following negotiations or exchanges. Others on the contrary were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz. It was a complicated business involving a total of nearly ten thousand people, both men and women. The camp for ordinary prisoners working on the site was smaller than the special camps and separate from them. Its survivors were transferred to Sachsenhausen in February 1944.
In early 1944 the camp was assigned a new use. In addition to the sections reserved for Jews, Bergen-Belsen was transformed into a “rest camp” where other camps sent their sick prisoners. The first “transport” of 1,000 prisoners, already discussed in chapter 6, arrived from Dora on March 27, 1944. Most of the ill died at Bergen-Belsen, some of them very quickly, such as Colonel d’Astorg. Some came back to Dora via Buchenwald. Others survived until the camp was liberated, such as Michel Fliecx and Aimé Blanc.
After Dora, other camps organized transports for their sick prisoners including Laura, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Neuengamme, and Buchenwald. Dr. Fréjafon,15 who devoted himself to caring for his comrades, has recounted in particular the “last days of Georges Valois,” who was transferred from Neuengamme in December 1944 and died in February 1945. Louis Martin-Chauffier also arrived from Neuengamme. At the last moment, on March 6, 1945, another transport, mentioned in chapter 15, left the Boelcke Kaserne at Nordhausen for Bergen-Belsen.
In the final months of 1944 the SS transferred numerous prisoners from Auschwitz to more centrally located camps, examples of which—concerning non-Jews—were given in chapter 14. At the same time Jews, especially women, arrived at Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank was part of a transport in December. She died in March 1945. The largest influx, however, took place in January and February 1945, due to the evacuation of Auschwitz and the other eastern camps. Simone Jacob (Simone Weil)16 arrived at Bergen-Belsen at that time, after a very short stopover in Dora.
The arrival of transports of sick and evacuated prisoners during the final weeks reached such a pace that the camp became incredibly overcrowded. According to some estimates the head count is believed to have risen from 15,250 prisoners on December 2, 1944, to nearly 22,300 on January 15, 1945, and more than 45,000 by March 31 (14,700 men and 30,400 women).
Hygiene conditions were appalling, typhus appeared, and by March, 800 to 1,000 prisoners were dying every day. There were corpses everywhere, as the crematorium ovens could not burn them all. By mid-March bonfires were lit, but the experiment was stopped partly because of complaints from the residents of Bergen who found the smoke unpleasant and partly because their glowing was visible from the air at night. Mass graves had to be dug.
On March 31, 1945, Jean-Pierre Renouard17 was still with his friend Jean Mattéoli near Hanover in the Misburg Kommando, which was attached to Neuengamme. The next day he arrived at Bergen-Belsen. He described his activity on April 2: “On the road, there was an SS guard next to a handcart and a few camp prisoners who were standing there waiting. He shouted at me to come and we left, hitched to the empty handcart. He opened a barbed wire gate and we went into the women’s camp. The road was winding, and the huts were set back from it, surrounded by young trees. Lying at various spots along the edge of the road were corpses of naked women piled up like logs, as in the men’s camp. We loaded them into the handcart, and when it was full we came back by the central road toward the rear of the camp, pulling and pushing. The SS guard told us to stop, and we came up to a large mass grave, about nine yards deep, half filled with corpses that had been tossed in pell-mell. There were already quite a large number of them. I no longer paid any attention to the all-pervasive stench of death. Once the handcart was emptied, we went back to the women’s camp to fill it up again, and I made the same trip back and forth all day long, without stopping, without drinking or eating.”
On December 2, 1944, Haas was replaced as camp commander by the Hauptsturmführer Joseph Kramer, who had been commander of Birkenau. There was no longer any real administration or internal hierarchy in the camp. The SS were afraid of typhus and hardly strayed from the main roads that went through the camp.
Yet instructions continued to arrive from Oranienburg, and Kramer carried them out. They concerned in particular the departure of Jewish prisoners from the special camps, which the historian Eberhard Kolb18 recalls in his monograph on Bergen-Belsen: “Three trains left Bergen-Belsen carrying prisoners from the ‘Star camp,’ the Hungarian camp, the special camp and those who were still left in the ‘neutral’ camps, 7,000 people in all. One of the trains arrived on 21 April in Theresienstadt with 1,712 prisoners. The two other trains, which were also en route to Theresienstadt, went along for days across northern Germany, prey to aerial attacks, and finally stopped, one near Magdeburg, on 14 April and the other in the village of Tröbitz, in Lower Lusace (southeast of Berlin) on 23 April. The sentinels fled, and the Russian soldiers in Tröbitz and the other American soldiers in Magdeburg took care of the prisoners who were liberated at last.” Chapter 20 will deal with Theresienstadt and the grouping of Jewish prisoners in that camp during the final weeks.
THE DORA-MITTELBAU PRISONERS IN THE BERGEN-BELSEN BARRACKS. When prisoners in the convoys from Dora-Mittelbau (except some of those from Woffleben) arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 9 and 10, as explained earlier, they were not taken to the concentration camp by the SS but rather to the barracks. In all likelihood when the train halted in Hamburg, those in charge of the convoy were given instructions to go there with their prisoners. Perhaps Kleemann, who went with his convoy from Woffleben to Brunsbüttel, did not receive these instructions in time.
A Kasernenlager or “barracks-camp” was formed “outside” the Bergen-Belsen camp. It had its own commander, the Obersturmführer Franz Hössler, who had just been the Transportführer of the first convoy from Dora on April 4. Formerly at Auschwitz, he had then become the Schutzhaftlagerführer at Dora.
When the prisoners arrived, most of them were at the end of their rope, particularly due to the conditions under which they had marched from the train stop. The firsthand accounts on the subject are telling. Bronchart19 recalls: “We no longer had any control over our actions or gestures; we were completely exhausted. People fell wherever they stopped, out of neither desire nor choice, and they were lost. How long did it take? I never worried about that.”
According to Courtaud,20 “We had turned into amorphous, nonexistent creatures.” Raoul-Duval21 indicates: “We collapsed onto the sandy ground where I slept for several hours, in spite of a sharp wind.” They occupied the buildings in a disorderly fashion, grouping themselves together on the basis of affinities. Blocs were formed by ethnic groups: the Russians, who were especially numerous, the Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarian Jews. Minority groups such as the Belgians, the Dutch, etc., went with the French, who were numerous.
Among the arrivals was the team from the Harzungen Revier, with Jacques Desprez, Roland Coty, Lucien Fayman, etc. They moved the ill into barracks rooms. They looked after Brother Birin and Jean Michel in particular, who were weak after their stay in the Dora bunker. The Revier teams from Dora and Ellrich were not included in the convoys that reached Bergen-Belsen.
The prisoners were left to their own devices except for roll calls, which took place right up to the very last day. Spitz and Mialet have emphasized that the roll calls were always accompanied by the ritual cry “Mützen ab! Mützen auf!” The primary problem was lack of food. Once a day, a clear soup was provided by the kitchen of the neighboring camp. Raoul-Duval also talks of “a very small amount of tinned meat and sometimes a slice of black bread.” A rumor subsequently went around that an attempt had been made to eliminate the prisoners by giving them poisoned bread (cf. Birin, Spitz, La Pintière, Mialet, Raoul-Duval). It appears that this was suggested to some of the prisoners by the SS doctor, Dr. Karl Kahr, Dr. Kurzke’s predecessor at Dora. A supplement could be had by looting silos of rutabaga, but then prisoners ran the risk of being killed by the SS. Sharing the spoils afterward generated fights as well, in which the Russians especially distinguished themselves.
THE ANGLO-GERMAN CONVENTION ON THE SURRENDER OF BERGEN-BELSEN. The “liberation” of Bergen-Belsen took place on April 15 under very special conditions, and the prisoners’ accounts mention surprising scenes. To help the reader understand what happened there is a remarkable account entitled The First Four Days in Belsen, written by William E. Roach22 in 1946, one of the British officers who took part in the operation.
It all began on the morning of April 12, 1945, in Celle, where portions of General Roberts’s Eleventh Armored Division were stationed. Their position was located to the extreme east opposite the British positions, close to the Americans who had taken Hanover and were moving through the Altmark toward the Elbe. The Germans were to the north beyond the Aller River. The English in Celle saw a vehicle from the German headquarters arrive, flying a white flag. It was coming from Winsen with two officers from the health service who had been instructed to warn the division of the existence of a camp with a large population in the region. A typhus epidemic had broken out there, and they asked that the area around the camp be declared a neutral zone.
Discussions got under way with the division headquarters to delimit the area involved. Finally it was decided that a small detachment of British forces equipped with a safe-conduct would cross the German lines and take charge of the camp, which would be accessible on April 14 at 10 A.M. The detachment was formed on the morning of the 14th with sixty men from two antiaircraft batteries, one headed by Major Chapman, the detachment commander, and the other by Roach, who was operating as a captain. Everything took place according to plan. The crossing of the Aller was delayed owing to the destruction of a bridge. The safe-conduct had become useless as the Germans had withdrawn beyond the camp. The detachment arrived at Bergen-Belsen in midmorning on April 15.
On April 11, Himmler had agreed to not conduct the evacuation of Bergen-Belsen. The Standartenführer, Kurt Becher, had therefore sent his order allowing the camp to surrender to the British without delay. Between April 11 and 15 most of the SS withdrew toward Neuengamme, and Hungarian soldiers in khaki uniforms with white armbands were placed on guard outside the camp. Kramer and Hössler stayed on the site with some fifty SS and SS supervisors, including Irma Greese. They also wore white armbands and were in charge of handing over both parts of the camp to the British detachment. The transfer took place on April 15 at about 3 P.M. There were witnesses to the scene.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE BRITISH AT BERGEN-BELSEN. The camp and the barracks were liberated simultaneously, though separately, on April 15. Late in the morning, barracks prisoners saw tanks going by at great speed on a neighboring road but were unable to identify them. At 3 P.M. a British jeep entered their camp. Fliecx,23 who had been at Bergen-Belsen for a year, recounts what was going on in the main camp at the time. An hour after seeing the tanks go by, “a loud noise drew us out of the barracks: a British army radio-car, bearing the badge of Saint George, was going by and repeating through its double loudspeaker in every language the blessed words: ‘You are free! You are free!’
“Kramer, still arrogant, was on the running board of the car, wearing a white armband, with his gun still in his belt. [ . . . ] When the car arrived at our section, the crowd of the living dead, gaunt, filthy, ragged and scrawny broke like a tidal wave through the fences and rushed towards the barrels of soup placed in front of the entrance to the section. The prisoners all tried to plunge their bowls in at the same time and the barrel overturned. Most of them, however, rushed in a cloud of dust towards the kitchens and the last pile of rutabagas. There were 2,000 or 3,000 of these ghosts swarming in the small space between the huts and the kitchen.
“Overtaken by the flow, I was carried along to the spot where the English car had stopped. There I saw a scene that has enshrined forever the murderous madness of the SS. Kramer got down, took his gun and took a few steps forward. He shot straight ahead, without aiming, knowing he would kill someone in the crowd. At the kitchen door, the chef, still in his white apron, was shooting his gun like a lunatic, killing prisoners at point-blank. Farther on, sentinels were also shooting. Men were rolling in the dust.
“One of the Englishmen got out of the car. He was out of his depth and did not know what to do. From behind, I saw him draw his Colt, wanting to fire into the air, hesitate and then drop his gun. I could understand his stupefaction quite easily. He was one person who would certainly remember Belsen. The crowd surged back from the kitchen to avoid the murderous shooting of the chef. Several bodies were lying on the ground. [ . . . ]
“The Englishman got back into the car and Kramer onto the running board. They went back to the rear of the camp. When they came back, Kramer no longer had his gun or the look of an animal of prey out hunting, but rather the look of a filthy wild beast caught in a trap. [ . . . ] By then, the English had seen the mass graves and understood the terrible tragedy of Belsen.”
As soon as the British tanks had gone by on the road through the camp, the Russian prisoners went in search of the block chiefs, Kapos, Vorarbeiter, Lagerschutz, etc. “They were simply murdered on the spot, either by being thrown out windows, or by having their heads smashed in with paving stones.” One of the most well-known victims was Folette, the chief of Block 132. A drawing by Léon Delarbre24 depicts his corpse.
BERGEN-BELSEN AFTER THE LIBERATION. The British were aghast by what they discovered, as indicated in reports on the subject by various officers, such as Gen. Glyn Hughes of the Health Service. Reporters soon came to take pictures and films. Maurice Druon25 was a member of the Interallied Information Commission in April 1945, which had to “view” the filmed images of Bergen-Belsen. He remembers: “Three hours of projection of tapes made by several cameramen, hence, necessarily repetitive images, whether silent or not. The raw ‘material,’ as one says so atrociously. [ . . . ] I can still feel the physical sensation of sickness that overwhelmed everyone in that small room, or, as we say more exactly in Italian, of malessere or ill-being. Officers who had distinguished themselves in the war during rough fighting, couldn’t stand it and left. We had the impression we were holding onto our souls with our teeth. It was truly an unbearable sight.”
In the meantime Chapman, Roach, and their sixty men had few resources to cope with the situation while waiting to be relayed by other sections of their division. As there were two camps to administer, Chapman took charge of the most difficult, the main camp, which became the women’s camp, although there were still some men in it. Roach took over the barracks camp, which became the men’s camp. A reading of Roach’s account gives an idea of the problems Chapman was facing. He explained the situation in these terms:
“At division headquarters, they thought it would be enough to change the guard of the camp. Everyone presumed that the concentration camp had an orderly administration and that the Germans would continue to take care of it, along with supplying food, medicine and medical care, until the arrival of a duly equipped detachment a few days later. No one in the hierarchy, from the general down to the lowest-ranking soldier, had any idea of what a German concentration camp was like, particularly Bergen-Belsen in the state in which we found it.”
One of the first steps Roach took was to isolate the SS along with all the German prisoners from the rest of the camp population in order to put a stop to the vengeance being wrought. An arrangement was reached with the Hungarian soldiers who continued to guard the outside.
With information provided by an SS, an inventory of the food reserves (including those of the SS) was conducted, which revealed an amount sufficient to cover several days of mediocre food. Among the British soldiers were a mechanic and an electrician who got a pump and a generator running again.
To administer the camp, in view of the total insufficiency of the SS, it was necessary to ensure the cooperation of the prisoners, who numbered more than fifteen thousand in the men’s camp alone. They had divided themselves into barracks, as mentioned earlier, by ethnic group. According to Roach: “The French, Czech, Belgian and Dutch groups were well-organized and disciplined. The Russians were neither, and the Poles were not much better.”
The main problem was distributing food from seven centers, at which Roach noted the head count on the second day. There were two centers for the Russians (2,528 and 2,010 men), one for the Poles (2,463), one for the Russians and the Poles (2,319), one for the French, Belgians, Dutch, and various other nationalities (2,616), one for the Czechs, Germans and Gypsies (1,806), and one for the Jews, mostly Hungarians (1,473).
The circumstances had brought to Bergen-Belsen important leaders of the French Resistance. Coming from Dora, they included most of those who had been arrested in November and released from the bunker shortly before their departure, such as Debeaumarché, Lauth, Birin, Michel, Caruana, and Latry. Poupault, Boyer, and Bordier, as mentioned in chapter 16, were at the prison of Nordhausen.
A large percentage of the tunnel prisoners were also left from Dora, including members of the drawing Kommando: Dejussieu, Cogny, Julitte, and the AEG Kommando including Brochart. Others had positions in the camp such as Bollaert the night watchman, Spitz the Schreiber, or Leschi. A French committee was set up with Bollaert as chairman. He took a census of all the French prisoners with the help of comrades from various convoys such as Butet from Dora, Schock from Harzungen, Goasguen from Ellrich, and Duale, a former prisoner at Karlshagen.
The French and Belgians from the Harzungen Revier set up a sort of hospital in the camp. Roland Coty, who spoke English and German, was extremely helpful to Roach as an interpreter and intermediary with other national committees. Latry, son of the owner of a French restaurant in London, was also a precious interpreter. The other nationalities besides the French also set up their committees. Unfortunately we do not know how things went for the Soviets.
Another step had been taken toward forming a central camp committee. Bollaert was elected chairman of the board officers on a proposal by the Russian and Dutch delegates. Lauth, who spoke English, was to assist him. Subcommissions studied proposals that would be transmitted to the British authorities. Roach notes: “I spent most of my time receiving delegations, listening to all sorts of complaints and suggestions that in most cases I could not accept, since I did not have the resources they called for. [ . . . ] I was constantly being asked for authorization to leave Belsen on the spot. [ . . . ] They had no idea of the situation outside the camp, nor of the problems involved in moving about a region where combat had just taken place.”
Roach received Chapman in his camp and then went to visit the former camp with Chapman. “He had not been exaggerating. What was happening there was so horrible, much worse because it involved [mainly] women and children, that I was relieved to return to the men’s camp.”
Chapman, Roach, and their men arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 15. On the 16th, Chapman went to headquarters to stress the catastrophic proportions of the situation. On the 17th the physician from headquarters (Glyn Hughes) and his assistant came to inspect the site. On April 19 in the middle of the morning, new troops arrived with food and sanitary equipment. Chapman’s detachment went back to combat. Roach concluded: “We have spent exactly ninety-six hours in Belsen, the most terrible ninety-six hours of my life.” The Hungarian soldiers left with them to cross the German lines on the Elbe with a safe-conduct.
The British remained in charge of the camp until the end. Prisoners continued to die with the development of the typhus epidemic. No one thought of anything except leaving the camp and going home.
REPATRIATING THE WESTERNERS. The problem of repatriation first arose for prisoners from Western countries that had already been liberated, i.e., the French, the Belgians, and the Dutch (in part). First, means of transport had to be found.
The first departure of French prisoners was organized for April 24 and the second for April 25. The prisoners were divided up more or less according to alphabetical order. First, the groups were taken by truck to Rheine, site of a large camp where deportees, prisoners of war, and compulsory workers were assembled.
Those who left Bergen-Belsen on the 24th went from Rheine to Brussels on April 26 in two departures. Upon their arrival they were given “a warm, extraordinary, unforgettable welcome.”26 Among them were Barbier, Bronchart, Clairin, Doumeau, Goasguen, Mialet, and Michel. The next leg of the journey was by train to Lille and then Paris. They arrived in Paris on April 29 in the morning.
The others left Rheine by truck via Bocholt to Kevelaer. The next part of the journey took place by train to Paris, through Tilburg, Brussels, and Lille. This group included Spitz and his friend La Pintière, Pageot, Vedel, and Butet. They arrived in Paris on the morning of May 1. It was snowing huge snowflakes when the deportees boarded city buses that took them to the Lutétia Hotel. According to Butet, Bollaert, Dejussieu, and Debeaumarché were flown directly to Brussels by a British liaison plane.
After describing the welcome at the Lutétia, Butet27 recounts the rest of the 1st of May: “After lunch, at about 2 p.m., city buses came to take us to the Champs-Elysées, where we were met by Bollaert, Dejussieu and Debeaumarché who had put on their striped clothes. They headed up a procession in which, no doubt from concentration camp reflex, we lined up by five, and walked up the avenue to the Etoile.
“There were big crowds on the sidewalks. An astonished crowd, moved to tears, at watching these camp ‘survivors’ go by. I am sure that no one of us weighed more than 110 pounds. I was six feet tall, and weighed eighty-eight pounds. [ . . . ] At the Arc de Triomphe, we were received by General de Gaulle. Bollaert, Debeaumarché and Dejussieu placed a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The Aux Morts was sounded and the Marseillaise played. Then we went back to the Lutétia.” A photograph of that parade was on the cover of number 500 of Déporté magazine.28
Not all the Western deportees were well enough to be able to stand repatriation by trucks or ordinary trains. There were still some left at the camp “hospital,” as the word Revier was now banished. Little by little some were repatriated by car and then by hospital train to Roubaix, where a hospitalization center was located. That is how Defiliquier, Duvernois, Foiret, and Fournier came back. Birin left Bergen-Belsen with the last convoy in early May. After varying lengths of time, they went home.
There are, however, firsthand accounts that are not always very clear of seriously ill deportees who remained even longer in Germany. This was the case of Courtaud,29 who was immobilized in a hospital in Sulingen on April 25 after leaving Bergen-Belsen in the morning along with Dupuy, Cottet, and others. He was finally repatriated to Le Bourget Airport from Quakenbrück (south of Cloppenburg) on June 5. This was also the case for Renouard,30 who stayed behind in Bergen-Belsen. He was repatriated from Celle at an unspecified date. He said he was visited by Henri François-Poncet, who also went to the women’s camp. Dupuy mentions his visit to Sulingen.
Annette Wieviorka31 talks of “different repatriation” with regard to Bergen-Belsen based on the memoirs of Dr. Fréjafon, who remained at Bergen-Belsen and took care of the women, especially Jewish ones, who in May had still not yet been repatriated. Simone Jacob did not arrive in Paris with her sister until May 23.32 Next, Dr. Waitz, a former prisoner at Monowitz and Buchenwald, went on assignment to organize the repatriation in early June of the 121 French prisoners still hospitalized in Bergen-Belsen and Sulingen. Even today it is impossible to say who was responsible, but there is no doubt that there was a certain amount of negligence at the time.
THE END OF BERGEN-BELSEN. It would naturally be helpful to have clear information on a number of points. An attempt could be made to calculate, however approximately, the number of prisoners, both men and women, Jews, and others, who died at Bergen-Belsen, which was undoubtedly considerable. Yet, as has already been mentioned, most of them were not “originally from” the camp but were rather sick prisoners that other camps wished to be rid of and prisoners evacuated from other camps under harsh conditions. The latter may, by the way, have been patients taken out of their Revier to be included in an evacuation convoy. The conditions at Bergen-Belsen itself, including undernourishment, overcrowding, and the typhus epidemic, made the situation distinctly worse. If information were available it might be possible to classify the victims according to their origin, but such gruesome accounting is no doubt impossible.
It is a fact that prisoners from Dora-Mittelbau died between their arrival at Bergen-Belsen in April and the repatriation operations, either before or after the liberation of the camp and the barracks. Survivors’ accounts have mentioned names, but the total count is apparently not available. Most of the Western prisoners in the last convoys stayed at Bergen-Belsen only a short time. They arrived between April 9 and 11, were liberated on April 15, and left on April 24 or 25 to be repatriated. They did nothing during this period except for some members of the Woffleben convoy, among them Jean Gineston,33 who had to transport corpses into mass graves.
The other prisoners remained for a longer time, waiting until they could be repatriated. This group included Russians and other Soviets, Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavians. Little is known about what happened to these groups. The young Czech Jew named Theodor Braun joined the other Czechs in a repatriation center in Celle before returning to Prague.34 Not all of them necessarily wanted to go home, and that included the vast majority of Jews. Those who had been arrested in Western countries were repatriated to them. Most of the others went to camps for “displaced persons” before being given the possibility of emigrating.
The camp itself was completely evacuated on May 6 and finally destroyed by the British army with flamethrowers due to the typhus epidemic on May 22. “There is nothing left of the camp but its graves.” The barracks continued to house displaced persons until September 6, 1950.
A commemorative obelisk was erected on the site of the mass graves, where the remains of some 23,200 victims, both men and women, from the main camp lie. A cemetery near the barracks camp received the bodies of several thousand prisoners who died in the camp or after the liberation of the camps.