On April 4 and 5, nine railway convoys left the Dora-Mittelbau camps moving toward the northwest. As explained in the preceding chapter, only six of them finally brought their prisoners to Bergen-Belsen after first going to Hamburg. At the moment they reached their final destination the three others arrived in Altmark and tried to cross the Elbe. This was also the case of two other convoys: one formed in Wernigerode with prisoners who left on foot from Wieda, and the other in Helmstedt where there was a Kommando attached to Neuengamme that was noted earlier. Altmark is a part of the plains region of northern Germany, west of the Elbe and north of Magdeburg. It is the northern part of what is now the land of Saxony-Anhalt. The main centers of this region are Stendal, Salzwedel, and Gardelegen.
As Simpson’s Ninth American Army advanced, it caught the center of Altmark in a stranglehold in the area of Gardelegen. In the south it reached the Elbe near Magdeburg on April 11. In the north, leaving from Hanover, it arrived at the Elbe north of Tangermünde a little later.
Of the five convoys from Altmark, three managed to cross the Elbe. After a number of vicissitudes, the Ellrich prisoners finally ended up at Oranienburg, those from Dora at Ravensbrück, those from Helmstedt at Wöbbelin. The other convoys were stopped near Gardelegen, and only a minority of the prisoners escaped the massacre.
According to Virondeau’s account in chapter 17, the last surviving prisoners of Ellrich set off in a convoy of freight cars on April 5 late in the afternoon. Many of them had come out of the Revier and the Schonung. The Revier staff was also there, including the French prisoners Ségelle, Oesch, Grand, and Besançon. The convoy continued on the track used for evacuating the third and last convoy from Dora, which will be discussed later.
The route they followed can be established on the basis of information provided by the Belgian prisoners Gabriel Sprung,1 Roland Bossue, and Joseph Uyttenhoef and by the French prisoner Albert Besançon.2 The first part of this itinerary, which went through Osterode, Seesen, Salzgitter, and Brunswick, was the same one followed by the previous convoys. Next the train went eastward to Helmstedt, then it turned north and went through Oebisfelde, Buchhorst (April 9), Gifhorn, and Wittingen before arriving in Uelzen on April 11. As it was no longer possible to reach Bergen-Belsen in place of Neuengamme, orders arrived to go toward Sachsenhausen. The convoy went past Salzwedel and prepared to cross the Elbe at Dömitz the same day.
Once it had crossed the Elbe it went toward the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, taking a detour via Ludwigslust and Wittenberge. On April 13 at 5 P.M. the convoy was close to the radio station in Nauen, sixteen miles from Spandau. At the time the Nauen wireless station was well known in Europe. At that point the convoy was bombed, as Besançon reported: “Bombing of our convoy by heavy machine guns and light bombs from English Mosquitoes. The SS took cover on the sides of the railway track, and, their guns against their cheeks, forbid us to take cover under the freight cars, most of which were open. [ . . . ] After the bombing, an SS requisitioned me to review the freight cars and take official note of the damage. I was to present the wounded and the dying to him. He finished off those who were the worst hit with his revolver. All the dead were loaded into a freight car.”
The convoy went back to Neustadt, some forty-seven miles from Berlin. A mass grave was dug near the tracks, at a town called Segeletz, for 186 victims who had died of exhaustion or the bombing. On April 15 the convoy again went to Nauen and came back to Neustadt. Finally “on 16 April, at 6 A.M., imagine my surprise to observe that our train was parked in front of Heinkel at Oranienburg, which I had left nine months earlier,” writes Besançon. Bergen-Belsen had been liberated the previous day.
The train went along for ten days and eleven nights. The distance between Nordhausen and Oranienburg is 134 miles as the crow flies. Upon arrival the prisoners had to dig another mass grave for the corpses from the train.
Of all the railway evacuations from Dora-Mittelbau, the one from Ellrich to Oranienburg was the most deadly due to the number of sick prisoners at the outset and the length of the journey. There are few accounts of the trip. A few remarks can be found in Étienne Lafond’s account:3 “Finally the trip began which was to last twelve days, nine of them without anything to eat or drink. It was terrible and I still have trouble recalling that part of my adventure. [ . . . ] We watched each other die with a calmness and an apparent indifference that were frightening. Friends would say to you at night: ‘I will be dead by morning.’ They went to sleep never to wake again. [ . . . ] The dead, by the way, were anonymous. Naked at the outset; we donned whatever clothes we could find. As a result, none of us was wearing his own identity number.” When the train arrived in Oranienburg, Lafond weighed seventy pounds.
In Mémorial4 there is an anonymous account of this convoy. Xavier Delogne has indicated that the author is Paul Caton, who had known his brother Yves well. The following passages are taken from his account: “When the Häftling emerged from their blankets in the morning, Roger’s face [he had been knocked out by a Kapo] was so battered and swollen that he was almost unrecognizable. He told his neighbors that it didn’t hurt too much, and indeed, he did not seem to be suffering. In the afternoon, however, leaning against the wall, his head fell onto his chest and, without a word, he died.
“Once again, we were all amazed at how simple, how calm, almost gentle death was. No doubt our suffering was the result of the struggle put up by our physical forces, and when, beyond a certain point of weakness and exhaustion, the forces of life no longer struggled, the suffering stopped and life simply went out.
“Seeing so many dead around them, the living were worried at every stop that they would find their closest comrades, the ones they did not want to be separated from, the ones with whom they had suffered so much, the ones they wanted so much to be with at the moment of their return they had talked so much about.”
Caton continues further on in his account: “At each stop, everyone could tell merely by taking a few steps how much weaker they had become, how much heavier the dead were to carry, and some, whose legs refused to carry them, wondered if they could make it back to their freight car. [ . . . ] Each day, the traces of the ordeal were more visible in the faces, where ordinary daily filth was mixed with coal dust and a growing beard, and each man could follow his own degeneration on the features of his neighbor.”
Yves Delogne, “the Belgian child of 20, had spent his night sitting on top of the five dead bodies” in the freight car when the train arrived in Oranienburg on April 16. At the time his brother Xavier, who had come from the Boelcke Kaserne, was waiting at the Dora Revier to be repatriated.
Chapter 21 will describe what happened to the survivors of the convoy.
The conditions under which the last evacuation convoy from Dora started out on the evening of Thursday, April 5, 1945, have already been mentioned in chapter 16. Most of the prisoners involved finally ended up at Ravensbrück on Saturday, April 14. Others, who remained in Osterode, were liberated on April 9 west of the Harz Mountains. Still others died en route under various circumstances.
FROM DORA TO OSTERODE. The itinerary of most of the prisoners, which has been well defined thanks to observations made by three members of the convoy, will be examined first. The earliest report known to the French research services comes from Yves Aleste.5 The Belgian prisoner Joseph Woussen6 made a similar report. Finally, André Ribault7 has also discussed the topic.
During the first few days the convoy moved extremely slowly. It stopped first at Niedersachswerfen, then at Ellrich. By April 7 it had only reached Osterhagen, and arrived on Sunday, April 8, in the morning at Osterode. The train was considerably delayed given the fact that, by then, convoys that had left on April 4 were already in Hamburg. The major delay was due to serious problems with the preceding convoy, which will be discussed later on. It was no longer possible to go around the Harz Mountains: of the nine convoys, this was the only one that was unable to do so.
The SS had the prisoners get out of the train. Those unable to walk were killed. Quite a large group was formed by those who were ready to cover sixteen miles on foot; more than three thousand prisoners set out in a column. They crossed the Harz range from south to north. A number of them had overestimated their strength. In reality the journey involved twenty-four miles.
The rest (there were several hundred of them) were lined up on a dirt road. That group included survivors who were ill as well as those who feared a forced march, such as Mathieu Anfriani, François Le Lionnais, and Andrès Pontoizeau. What happened to them will be seen subsequently. The prisoners who left to cross the Harz Mountains were convinced they would never again see them alive.
CROSSING THE HARZ MOUNTAINS. The author remembers the first part of the journey up to the town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld, walking at a normal pace in radiant spring weather. The prisoners in the column who for the most part had not left the camp or the tunnel for more than a year gazed at the landscape. Soubirous8 recalls: “A little farther up, on the left, ducks were swimming in a pond in front of a little house, not far from the road.”
Then he recounts a murder that still moves him deeply fifty years later: “We had stopped and were standing in rows of five, arm in arm. I was third in the row. Behind me stood a young Dutchman, about twenty years of age. In the camp, he wore the armband of a Dolmetscher (interpreter).”
“A noncommissioned SS officer came up slowly behind us. I had noticed him at the factory when he did his rounds, because of the dark navy blue scarf with white polka dots he wore around his neck. After saluting the SS, the young Dutchman, who spoke perfect German, asked the noncommissioned officer for permission to drink from the stream that was flowing close by. Permission granted. Our comrade knelt down and leaned over to drink right from the river.
“The SS man calmly took two steps and stood between my neighbor on the right and me. With his legs spread and his arm held out straight, holding his gun, he carefully took aim three or four yards below, and put a bullet through the neck of the wretched lad as he was carrying water to his mouth with his hand. He fell headfirst into the water. An order was given not to touch him. We moved on slowly. Another stop. The same SS man, who was decidedly feeling his oats, shot a duck in the pond. A few minutes later, the SS adjutant, no doubt alerted by the owner of the duck, came up to reprimand his subordinate for killing a duck.”
Louis Coutaud and Eugène Laurent have also given accounts of the murder.
Next the convoy stopped in a square in Clausthal. The author noticed agitation at the SS headquarters, with emissaries going back and forth on motorcycles. He did not learn until much later9 that the Obersturmführer Sell (who was Arbeitseinsatzführer at Dora), in charge of coordinating the evacuation of Mittelbau, was there with the Transportführer Hans Möser. The former finally found a solution, and the column set off again.
It went in the direction of Oker, through Zellerfeld, Schulenberg, and Romkerhalle. “The road went down into a valley hemmed in by a mountain torrent that we could hear flowing. The hillsides were wooded and when night came, it was pitch black. Each prisoner followed the one in front of him, trying not to stumble. We marched in silence, and aside from the noise of the torrent, the only sounds we heard were gun shots whenever a straggler was killed, which happened frequently.”
At about 9 P.M. the head of the column arrived at the Oker station. A train of cattle wagons was waiting, and the prisoners got in one after another as they arrived. Oker belongs to the town of Goslar, with a station situated at the end of the road on which the column was. It is remarkable that the SS were able to obtain the formation of a sizable train so quickly from the Reichsbahn. Its last stop was in Ravensbrück.
FROM GOSLAR TO RAVENSBRÜCK. The train left at daybreak on April 9. The destination was still Neuengamme, but traffic on the lines led the convoy eastward. The train went around Brunswick by the south to reach Helmstedt, and then Magdeburg, where violent bombing at the end of the day caused a withdrawal to Barleben, slightly to the north. On April 10 the convoy tried twice to get to Magdeburg in order to cross the Elbe, but both times it was forced to return to Wolmirstedt.
Since it was impossible to cross at Magdeburg, another solution had to be found. The train set off across the Altmark on the morning of April 11 and went through Haldensleben and Calvörde before arriving at Oebisfelde. There Möser learned that Bergen-Belsen would be abandoned to the British and that his convoy was to go to Sachsenhausen. It set off again in the direction of Salzwedel and Arendsee to cross the Elbe at Wittenberge by night. This was the same day the convoy from Ellrich crossed the Elbe at Dömitz, some thirty-two miles downstream.
The Dora evacuation convoy crossed by the Wittenberge bridge10 from south to north. Twelve days earlier the same bridge had been crossed from north to south by the Karlshagen evacuation convoy on its way to Ellrich, as described in chapter 14. Those prisoners then arrived at Bergen-Belsen.
Once the convoy had crossed the Elbe it immediately went toward Sachsenhausen. It reached Nauen, continued on to Flatow and Kremmen, and had to come back to Nauen on April 12. It made another attempt as far as Döberitz, a station located south of Falkensee, in vain. The train departed again on April 13 and got as far as Nauen, Kremmen, and Oranienburg, which was then bombed. After a long stop, access to the Heinkel Kommando in Oranienburg proved to be impossible. The convoy left again and this time managed to reach Ravensbrück via Gransee and Fürstenberg on April 14 at 1:30 P.M. Two days later the Ellrich convoy was admitted to Oranienburg. It had been delayed by two days, perhaps due to crossing the Elbe farther downstream than the Dora convoy.
The reports made by Aleste and Woussen note mass graves dug for corpses in Wolmirstedt, Calvörde, and Döberitz, but there were far fewer losses than in the convoy from Ellrich. Indeed, the ill who had survived were left in Osterode, and those who crossed the Harz Mountains were mainly tunnel specialists who were in relatively good health.
The journey was nevertheless trying due to hunger. The prisoners were given no further food supplies from the time of departure from Dora all the way to Ravensbrück. They grew weaker and, on arrival, Abbot Renard had to hold up Reverend Heuzé and Pierre Gáti had to hold up Pierre Hémery. In addition, some prisoners died of erysipelas, which the author contracted during the last days of the journey. He was given medicine by the Red Cross at Ravensbrück, which will be discussed in chapter 21.
LIBERATION AT MÜNCHEHOF. The Dora prisoners who were “lined up on a dirt road” in Osterode on Sunday morning, April 8, watched their comrades leave to cross the Harz Mountains, and then they got back on the train. It continued on to Münchehof, where they were liberated. On the basis of extracts from Pontoizeau’s11 account, it is possible to reconstruct the subsequent events.
“There were about 300 of us left, the ill, the disabled, except for about twenty of us, including me, who were considered healthy. Just as we, too, were about to start off on foot, we had to hurry and get back into the wagons. We thought it was an air raid and we tore down the embankment. It took us a while to get back into the wagons, because we had to help the sick climb up, pushing them from below and pulling from above; somehow, they all managed to get in. The doors were closed and the train pulled out in the direction of Nordhausen. We reached another station, but it was obvious that no one wanted us. [ . . . ] By evening, we were back within a mile of Osterode.
“Before night fell, we started off again: the Osterode station had been seriously damaged; the tracks were gashed, wagons lay ripped open across the tracks, buildings had collapsed under the explosions or from direct hits. This was war, the real thing. We kept going and the landscape changed. The train was now running along fields where farmers were still plowing the last furrows. [ . . .]
“At daybreak, we were stopped in the little station of Münchehof. From the wagon we got a glimpse of a few isolated houses and a rather large village. We got down from the wagon. As we had presumed, there were only a few Kapos left. We got ready to leave [with a few comrades]. We looked for blankets, and once we were equipped, we tried to get out of the station. Immediately, however, we ran into an SS man, quite fat and old, who despite his gun, did not look the least bit fierce. Next to him stood two adolescents from the Hitlerjugend, who were infinitely more dangerous with their automatic pistols.
“Once again, we were promised food supplies and we began to line up by five for the distribution. First, we had to bring down the dead from the wagons and the corpses were piled up on the grass at the edge of the stream. The distribution began; everything got in line in a more or less orderly fashion. Once the supplies had been given out, we were directed toward a Lager abandoned by the Arbeitsfront, less than half a mile from the village. We walked there, conversing with each other. [ . . . ] Late in the morning, we heard the gun. [ . . . ]
“At 3 p.m., perhaps a hundred German soldiers—Volkssturm and Hitlerjugend—stole by the edge of the woods along the Lager. [ . . . ] Shells began falling. [ . . . ]. It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I had been assigned to peel potatoes at the sink near the door. Suddenly, at the far end of the square, I saw the silhouettes of soldiers creeping along the Blocks. My heart stopped. I heard a sound nearby and turned around. An American officer was looking at me in surprise. I fell into his arms and said, stupidly ‘What are you doing here?’* and he answered ‘The war.’* [ . . . ] We were free at last!” This occurred on April 9 in the evening. They were the first prisoners from Dora-Mittelbau to be liberated.
An account by Robert Roulard12 helps complete the one by Pontoizeau. He says that it was Dr. Groeneveld (“in his legendary white coat”) who talked the noncommissioned SS officer into ordering us back into the wagons. He gives April 10 as the date on which the Americans arrived at the Arbeitsfront Lager in Münchehof, where the prisoners had been housed and found food.
Groeneveld,13 who escaped with a few nurses, was finally liberated by the Americans after three years in captivity. He asked to have some means to get home as quickly as possible, and for want of a car he was given a bicycle, “yellow with red tires” along with “a document stating, for your information, I was a doctor who has been liberated from the Dora concentration camp.” Thus he set off to cover between 250 and 312 miles, sleeping in barns. One day he finally arrived home in Nijmegen.
There is another account of the escape by Rassinier14 which makes up the final chapter in the book Passage de la ligne. The style is very different from the rest of the book, and no doubt the chapter was written separately. On the basis of a few details it would seem that Rassinier jumped from a train and was liberated by the Americans near Seesen.
MEDICAL ATTENTION AND REPATRIATION. Pontoizeau and Roulard recall that several days elapsed between the arrival of American vanguard, who quickly went off again to prevent the German troops from regrouping, and the moment a system capable of taking charge of the ill and a few prisoners wounded during the fighting was actually set up. There was widespread disorder throughout the region.
With the help of some countrymen (prisoners of war “transformed” into civilian workers), Roulard15 was able to “requisition” a hotel in a town very close to Seesen, where his comrades who had stayed behind in Münchehof were transferred by carts. He was aided by the new anti-Nazi burgermeister of the town and by a group of young Russian and Polish women awaiting repatriation. Some of the sick were in dire condition. Douay had to help Brun reach the place where he was to have the fluid drained from his lungs. The two of them had gone to school together. Fifty years later they discovered they had not recognized each other at the time.16
On April 30 the French Secours Catholique team arrived in Seesen, found the deportees, and transferred them that very day by truck or ambulance to Eisenach. The next day Roulard17 and many of his comrades, such as Guy Marquet18 and Léonce and Gérard Pichot,19 were taken by truck to Saint Avold, then to Metz, where they arrived in a snowstorm on May 1. Others were later repatriated from Eisenach by train via Kaiserslautern and Saint Avold. Brun was back in Paris at Bichat Hospital by May 7. In his highly detailed account, Roulard was very critical of the conditions of repatriation, which ties up with observations made concerning Bergen-Belsen in the previous chapter.
Pontoizeau20 reached Seesen, then Münden (near Kassel) where he directed the regrouping of Frenchmen for repatriation in early May, which was not without problems.
Of the Kommandos attached to the Sonderstab Kammler, the one located farthest west was at Porta Westfalica near Minden on the Weser River. It was directly threatened by the American offensive at the end of March 1945. The Polish prisoner Wieslaw Kielar,21 in Anus Mundi, recounts his evacuation on April 2 by train toward the east. It was the day on which the two American armies joined up at Lippstadt forty-four miles away. The prisoners were told to get down from the train near Brunswick and were led to the Schandelah camp east of Brunswick. Others went as far as Helmstedt, where David Rousset saw comrades arrive from Porta Westfalica.22
On the evening of April 10 they were all put on another train that arrived the next day in the Magdeburg station, almost at the same time as the convoy of Dora prisoners coming from Goslar. The train was unable to go straight on and turned instead toward the north through Altmark, stopping at the station in Stendal and crossing the Elbe in Wittenberge on an unspecified date. Its destination was close at hand: the Wöbbelin camp south of Schwerin, which housed a Kommando attached to Neuengamme.
The evacuation of Porta Westfalica to the sister camp of Helmstedt and the delivery of other prisoners from Neuengamme to Wöbbelin went normally. It was impossible, however, to go any farther, which led to consequences that will be discussed in chapter 21.
THE CONVOY FROM ELLRICH TO MIESTE. It has already been noted that, of the five convoys in the Altmark, three crossed the Elbe at almost the same moment going north before arriving at Oranienburg, Ravensbrück, and Wöbbelin respectively. The other two convoys were stopped en route and, except for a small number who escaped under various circumstances, these prisoners were victims of the Gardelegen tragedy. Before looking at what happened at Gardelegen, it is first necessary to explain how some of them went from Niedersachswerfen to Mieste and the others from Wernigerode to Letzlingen.
The convoy that left Niedersachswerfen has often been called the “Brauny convoy” from the name of its Transportführer, Hauptscharführer Erhard Brauny, who was commander of the Rottleberode camp at the time. The convoy left the camp on April 4 in the evening with a column of four hundred prisoners. The only consistent, though brief, account on this subject is by Dr. Fernand Maistriaux,23 who was the Revier physician mentioned in chapter 13. He says that some prisoners went on foot or in carts through Buchholz and Harzungen to the station at Niedersachswerfen, where freight cars were waiting, including a cattle wagon in which he put his patients.
Another column of some eleven hundred men led by Brauny’s deputy Unterscharführer Lamp set off later, but it was caught in an aerial attack and withdrew to the camp before leaving again for an evacuation on foot toward the north, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
The Brauny convoy went from Niedersachswerfen to Ellrich on April 6, taking on other prisoners, particularly the ill from the Ellrich-Theater camp. The train started up and at one point passed the last convoy from Dora. During a stop in Osterode, prisoners from the Ilfeld Kommando who had arrived on foot were taken aboard. As the convoy was going around the Harz range at Badenhausen it was blocked by an aerial attack. A period of great confusion followed, which gave prisoners a chance to escape, some of them successfully, such as Robert Gandar,24 a nurse from the Rottleberode Revier. A new locomotive had to be brought, which delayed the trains following behind. On April 8 the last Dora convoy, thus waiting in vain to go through Osterode and Möser, decided to cross the Harz Mountains on foot.
When the Brauny convoy started up, it went through Salzgitter and Brunswick on its way north until it reached Gifhorn, where orders were received to go to Sachsenhausen. At that point a bombing raid exploded an ammunition train in the station of Solpke, west of Gardelegen, making the tracks impossible to use. On April 10 the Brauny convoy was forced to stop at the station in Mieste. The Ilfeld Kommando had already set out on foot from Oebisfelde. Another convoy then arrived in Mieste. It was coming from the camp in Stöcken in the western suburbs of Hanover, with three to four hundred sick prisoners accompanied by two French doctors. “Living skeletons” said Doctor Maistriaux.25
On April 11 a column was formed that set off toward Wiepke, six miles north of Gardelegen. No doubt the idea was to get to the bridge over the Elbe on foot, as it was impossible to do so by train. Many of the ill prisoners were abandoned in the train. Others who could not keep up were executed along the way by the SS. Very quickly it turned into a genuine “death march” with numerous victims.
A young Frenchman, René Morel,26 succeeded in escaping during the night after getting to Breitenfeld and reached a wooded hillside east of the road where he was to hide for four nights and three days. The column stayed parked in Wiepke during the night from April 11 to 12. Then it reached Gardelegen after going through Estedt and arriving from the north.
THE CONVOY FROM WERNIGERODE TO LETZLINGEN. At the beginning of April the prisoners in the Baubrigaden were still on their work sites at Osterhagen, Nüxei, and Mackenrode. Bonifas recounts that work did not stop until April 4. On April 6 they were regrouped at the base camp in Wieda, where other comrades such as Lucien Colonel, who was at the Revier, were located. Next they had to leave Wieda toward the north, crossing the Harz Mountains. Two columns went through Braunlage and ended up on April 9 at Wernigerode, where a convoy of cattle wagons was waiting. Those who were ill took the narrow track railway that crossed the Harz range.
As the Baubrigaden were in the end attached to Sachsenhausen, the convoy set off in the direction of Magdeburg via Heudeber, Jerxheim, Schöningen, and Eisleben. Since it was too late to cross the Elbe at Magdeburg or go directly to Stendal, the convoy went instead to Haldensleben where it took a secondary line (which is gone today) through Roxförde and Letzlingen. At Letzlingen the train was immobilized by an aerial attack at noon on April 11.
The double American offensive in the south and the north, as mentioned earlier, had turned the Gardelegen Kreis (circle) into a veritable “cauldron” under fire from Allied planes. Three of the five convoys from the Altmark were fortunate to get out, but the two others in the region were totally blocked.
The train that had stopped at Letzlingen was momentarily abandoned by its guards following a hedgehopping attack by two Canadian fighter planes, according to Lucien Colonel’s account.27 Numerous escapes took place at that moment. Then the SS came back and hunted down the escapees. A number of them were killed. Aimé Bonifas28 and his friend Amaro Castellevi were not caught, which was an exception to the rule. Lucien Colonel and André Girardi went back to the train and concealed themselves.
In the evening the prisoners were grouped together by the SS, and one column set off toward the east in the direction of Burgstall. The next morning those who had remained in the train—some fifty prisoners—were put into groups by Volkssturm members and taken by truck to join the others. That was the case of Colonel and Girardi as well as Alain de Lapoyade.29 They were later able to escape, along with Pierre Garnavault, Deconninck, and Lhoste. Another column was formed, which went off in the direction of Gardelegen. Guy Chamaillard was in it.
WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EVENTS AT GARDELEGEN? In April 1945, Lucien Colonel was not yet twenty years old. After his return home he took up a career as a journalist and went to East Germany on several occasions to get information on the results of the investigation into the Gardelegen events. He later published an article in Le Serment30 in which he determined who played what role in these events. The following account is based on his analysis.
From the moment the prisoners in the two convoys arrived in Gardelegen their fate depended on several authorities who acted in various capacities. First there were the SS who were supervising the prisoners: Erhard Brauny, commander of the convoy that had been stopped in Mieste, his deputy the noncommissioned officer Miel, and chief warrant officer Braun, who was at the head of the column coming from Letzlingen. Then there was the Luftwaffe colonel Walter Milz, commanding the town of Gardelegen, and the captain Joseph Kuhn, interim commander of the cavalry barracks in the center of town.
Finally and above all there was Gerhard Thiele, the Kreisleiter of Gardelegen. In the Nazi system there was a Gauleiter at the head of each Gau, and Gardelegen belonged to the Gau of Magdeburg-Anhalt, the northern part of what is now Saxony-Anhalt. Under him, at the level of the Kreis or circle, was the Kreisleiter, who was therefore an all-powerful figure at the local level.
According to events reconstructed by Colonel, Thiele noticed the arrival of the prisoners from Mieste on the morning of Thursday, April 12, and ordered Brauny to take them to the cavalry school, where Kuhn shut them in the ring. The prisoners led by Braun who were on their way from Letzlingen joined them later.
Thiele, who was very irritated, wanted them all shot immediately. He tried to convince Brauny and Kuhn of this, apparently without success. In the afternoon, Brauny and part of the SS disappeared. Thiele got no further with Milz but did not give up the idea of exterminating the prisoners. He ordered members of the Hitler Youth and the Volkssturm from Gardelegen and the neighboring villages to hunt down prisoners who had escaped into the woods.
On the evening of April 12, Mrs. Bloch von Blochwitz, the lady of the local manor, “organized a farewell party for the Nazi brass at her fancy residence on the Isenschnibbe estate. The local Nazi party officials gathered there with SA, SS and officers from the Wehrmacht. [ . . . ] They drank a great deal and were dazed by the time Thiele burst into the sitting room cursing: ‘Here I am with a thousand criminals on my hands. The Yanks are down the road and will be here within a couple of days. I can’t very well have all these criminals shot in the open country. What can I do?’
“At which point, Mrs. Bloch von Blochwitz instantly shot back: ‘There is an old barn up there that belongs to me. Why don’t you put them inside and set it on fire.’ In a footnote, Colonel explains that this firsthand account was provided by Mrs. Rost, a former servant, on April 25, 1976, in Kloster Neuendorf near Isenschnibbe, when she was eighty years old. Mrs. Bloch von Blochwitz was no longer alive to answer the accusation. But the barn that was used was indeed located on her property a few miles east of the town. The next day, on Friday, April 13, Thiele went there with Miel. He decided that the building was suitable and told Miel to get everything ready, the straw and the gasoline. Meanwhile, the prisoners who were caught here and there in the surrounding area were brought to the barracks. Among them was Amaro Castellevi, who was taken by surprise a short distance from Bonifas, who went unseen.31 Another was Dr. Maistriaux, who had stayed with comrades on a hill near Wiepke.32
When they arrived at the barracks, Maistriaux was recognized by an old Austrian noncommissioned officer whom he had treated in Rottleberode a few months earlier and who said to him: “Doctor, doctor, what are you doing here?” They were rushed into a stable and shut inside after being given something to eat. Then they heard a great deal of coming and going outside, then nothing more. The prisoners in the ring suspected nothing. They were given soup, and the Kapos behaved with their customary brutality.
Thiele’s problem was to find people to supervise the column when the prisoners were taken up to the barn. There were only about thirty SS left since Brauny and his team had departed. Both Kuhn and Milz refused to allow their soldiers to be involved in the operation. Kuhn did, however, lend two carts pulled by horses to transport the ill, of whom there were many.
Thiele gathered the Kapos together and promised that they would be spared if they agreed to put on German uniforms and act as an armed escort of the column. About thirty of them accepted. One of the survivors would remember seeing Kapos from Osterhagen wearing SS uniforms. For the rest, they succeeded in mobilizing members of the Volkssturm, the Arbeitsfront, and the Hitler Youth with disparate uniforms and weapons. Thus the procession set out through the streets of the town.
THE BURNING OF THE GARDELEGEN BARN. What took place at the barn starting at 7 P.M. is known to us from the firsthand accounts of three French survivors, Amaro Castellevi33 and Guy Chamaillard34 from the Letzlingen convoy, and Georges Cretin35 from the Mieste convoy. Chamaillard’s account, which is the most frequently published, is considered the authoritative version. He was almost twenty-five years of age at the time.
The column had to climb a hill before it came in view of the barn, which was enormous. The group waited for the ill prisoners to arrive in the carts and be transported inside. Then the other prisoners entered. Inside was a pile of straw three feet high doused with gasoline. Three SS came into the barn with torches and set fire to the straw. According to Colonel, the first one was Miel.
Prisoners tried to get out by forcing the doors, particularly the Russians, but they were shot one after another with machine guns. Bodies piled up in front of the doors. Chamaillard took shelter behind the corpses, which protected him from the straw and burned less quickly. He escaped the flames by remaining vigilant for hours, then everything grew quiet. He recalls:
“Above the charred corpses that now formed a pile more than five feet high, I could see that day was dawning. [ . . . ] There was less smoke, and I could breathe more easily. The fire had practically died out, a few blazes were still burning, but almost nothing. I had not been wounded, but I was covered with blood. It was blood from my comrades who had been killed near me. [ . . . ] I crawled away from the door and went to lie down farther inside. I arranged two corpses and lay down between them, after carefully smearing myself with black in case the SS came back into the barn.”
At daybreak the SS came back. With soldiers and inhabitants of Gardelegen they dug two mass graves to bury the corpses. Chamaillard was a witness: “I heard the noise of shovels and spades. They were digging holes. I raised my head a little and saw a pitchfork come in through the door, stick into a corpse and then pull it outside. [ . . . ] From time to time, they pulled bodies that were only wounded. I could hear the poor wretches screaming, then the laughter of the SS, an explosion, more SS laughter and then nothing more.”
Around midday the sound of battle drew nearer. The gravediggers stopped and went away. Chamaillard was at least no longer in danger. He fell asleep, exhausted.
“When I woke up, I couldn’t hear anything, there was silence everywhere. I was able to move around the barn, crawling as usual. I found a few potatoes half-cooked by the fire and I ate them. [ . . . ] After a moment, I got up and went from one door to the next. There was the same silence. I was cold; I went out and I saw a coat left behind by the SS. I took it and came back into the barn.
“In one corner, corpses were still burning; I went over there to warm up. Next to the fire, I saw a blanket and was surprised that it hadn’t been burned. I pulled on it and underneath I spied two Russians, alive. They had escaped from the bullets by making a hole along the wall. [ . . . ] We sat near the fire and talked in a mixture of German and Russian. From time to time, one of us would go to the door to see if anyone was coming. The Russians had a little tobacco. We smoked.
“After a while, we saw several men coming toward the barn. We immediately hid, but when we heard nothing more, we went back near the fire. Another alert; we hid again. Fifteen minutes went by; my Russian comrades called to me. I came out in turn and saw three men with them. I could tell from their clothes that they were Russian prisoners [of war]. They spoke with my comrades and asked what had happened. After explaining in a few brief words, we went in search of the wounded.”
They found two Frenchmen, Georges Cretin and Amaro Castellevi, two Poles, Wladimir Wognia and Eugene Sieradzki, and a Hungarian Jew, Boudi Gaza. “With my two Russian comrades, we went down on foot to the barracks, and the wounded were transported by a cart by the Russian prisoners. All eight of us were sent to the hospital.” But not immediately.
THE AMERICANS INTERVENE IN GARDELEGEN. By now it was Saturday, April 14, in the afternoon. At about 3 P.M., according to the firsthand account of a neighbor, Thiele left by car dressed in civilian clothes after bidding farewell to his wife. He seemed to have completely disappeared until a recent investigation traced him, after his death, to Düsseldorf, where he had lived under a false identity.36
At around 5 P.M. a dozen escaped prisoners, including several Frenchmen, were in a cabin at the edge of a wood near Burgstall. They were watching the road in the distance. Colonel and his comrades saw two American jeeps arriving and went to meet them. They were taken care of; first they were given new clothes, and they burned their striped ones. Colonel adds: “An ambulance arrived, we were given food, some powder against vermin and were photographed. Those must have been sensational pictures, given the state we were in. On the scales, I weighed in at seventy-nine pounds.” Alain de Lapoyade, who spoke English, contacted members of the Thirty-fifth Infantry Division in Burgstall and asked to enlist in the American army.
That night more troops entered Gardelegen without a fight, under the command of Maj. Gen. F. A. Keating. It was not until the next day that they saw what had happened. Dr. Maistriaux37 and his comrades were freed from their stable by a German officer surrounded by two American soldiers. They met up with a French prisoner in the barracks courtyard, no doubt Georges Cretin, who had been wounded by gunshot in the left thigh. On April 18, Lapoyade was allowed to enlist in the counterespionage department, and he went for his medical exam on April 21 in Gardelegen. That is when he heard Cretin’s account. Afterward he went twice in uniform to the barn. The Americans were horrified by what they discovered, and Major Keating seriously considered having the town bombed in retaliation. The (Protestant) religious authorities of the town managed to dissuade him. (They had not done anything to talk Thiele out of his scheme.)
Major Keating had all the able-bodied men of Gardelegen brought to the barn. Five hundred and seventy-four bodies were dug up and 442 were removed from the barn. In all, 1,016 victims were counted, four of whom were identified by name, 301 by their identity number, whereas the other 711 could not be identified. Many of the bodies showed traces of bullets. The entire population of the town, with the notables at the head, were made to walk in procession past the corpses.
During the days that followed, the Americans had the members of the Hitler Youth and the Volkssturm as well as townspeople dig individual graves. The women had to provide sheets to be used as shrouds, and 1,016 inhabitants of Gardelegen had to walk from the town to the barn in Isenschnibbe, each one carrying a cross. Once the burial was completed, on Wednesday, April 25, a religious ceremony was celebrated and military honors were given to the victims.
Another necropolis was to be established in Estedt in memory of the prisoners who died in the area, particularly during the forced march from Mieste to Wiepke. A veritable manhunt had taken place throughout the region, and many of the prisoners had been killed. The Ilfeld Kommando, which left Oebisfelde on foot, suffered severe losses.
The few survivors of the two convoys, the eight survivors of the barn, those of the barracks stable, and the prisoners who had escaped were sent home, rather quickly in the case of the French and the Belgians. It was not until Bonifas reached Paris, however, that he found his friend Amaro, who he thought had perished in the fire.
VAN DIJK BEYOND THE ELBE. On April 12, 1945, a column of a hundred prisoners left Leztlingen alone, walking eastward towards the Elbe. It was led by Hans Weber, a Kapo from Luxembourg with a black triangle. The Dutchman Van Dijk,38 a veteran of the tunnel (cf. chapter 6) and later transferred to Nüxei, was part of the group.
Once the column crossed the Elbe it went toward Oranienburg via the city of Brandenburg. On about April 24 it arrived at a farm near Tremmen. Van Dijk escaped and was hidden by a Russian Ostarbeiterin who kept him for four days before placing him under the protection of a group of French prisoners of war when the Russians arrived. The Soviet troops met up on April 25 in Ketzin, four miles south of Tremmen, thereby surrounding Berlin. On May 28, Van Dijk was transferred to the British in Fallersleben and was repatriated to the Netherlands on June 2.
Tremmen is quite close to Nauen, where the townsfolk witnessed the passage of the convoys from Dora and Ellrich mentioned earlier in the chapter. This was also the region crossed by the prisoners from Rottleberode, Rossla, and Schönebeck, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
*In English in the original text.