The two preceding chapters recounted what happened to the railway convoys that evacuated the prisoners of Dora, Ellrich, Woffleben, and Wieda and some of the prisoners from Harzungen and Rottleberode in April 1945.
Due to the swift advance of the American forces in the north and south of the Harz the convoys could not be used everywhere, and columns of prisoners on foot set out marching eastward under varying conditions, often with tragic consequences. It is difficult to study these “death marches” in a systematic way, for the itineraries are not always well known, and they sometimes crossed paths or have been confused with each other. In addition, the marches were often relayed by trains or barges.
This chapter is devoted primarily to the evacuation on foot of prisoners from the Dora-Mittelbau complex, i.e., Harzungen, Rottleberode, Rossla, Kelbra, and Blankenburg. At the same time the fate of the satellite Kommandos of Buchenwald, which were marching under the same conditions in the same geographical area, will also be examined. These mainly include the Kommando of Gandersheim, located west of the Harz, and those of Langenstein and Neu Stassfurt to the east.
To simplify the account, this chapter will deal with the following topics in order:
• columns of prisoners that were joined and liberated by the American troops, particularly the last column to leave Harzungen;
• columns that crossed the Elbe going northeast, such as those of Rottleberode and Rossla;
• the odyssey of the Blankenburg Kommando, which took place in the same geographic region;
• the evacuation of Langenstein, ending up across the Elbe in the region of Wittenberg;
• columns, such as the one from Neu Stassfurt, which remained for several weeks between the Americans and Soviets in the center and eastern part of Saxony, on both sides of the Elbe, and in the Sudeten. Sometimes the marches were relayed by trains (as in the case of the Gandersheim column) or barges. The prisoners in these columns were generally the ones who suffered most.
THE EVACUATION OF HARZUNGEN ON FOOT, AND THE LIBERATION OF THE LAST COLUMN. It was noted in chapter 18 that a railway convoy left Niedersachswerfen on April 5, 1945, with prisoners from Harzungen, particularly sick prisoners from the Revier. The day before, a long column of some two thousand men had left the camp on foot. Numerous firsthand accounts, especially from Belgians and Frenchmen, have been given of this evacuation. The departure took place on April 4 at about 3 P.M. The column left Harzungen going north and crossed the Harz by Hasselfelde. It arrived on the 6th at the Blankenburg camp, which had been evacuated except for twenty or so of the ill who stayed behind.
There were also prisoners in the rear of the column who could not keep up. Georges Desprez, who played the role of doctor at Harzungen, which was mentioned earlier, was widely accepted by the SS. As a Belgian witness1 recalls: “He managed to isolate 116 sick prisoners from Harzungen and Blankenburg from the rest of the convoy. He had them transported first by carts, then by train. It was to take them four days, from 7 to 11 April to cover less than sixty-two miles. They ended up being housed at the Beendorf camp, near Helmstedt. They were finally liberated on 13 April and most of them were then treated at the Helmstedt hospital.”
It was not until after Blankenburg that several columns were formed, the destinies of which were later to diverge. The following description concerns the last column, which was also the largest and the first to be liberated. According to the Belgian chroniclers,2 “When we arrived in Langenstein, the column took a detour westward via Derenberg to Minsleben. In Minsleben, the prisoners were put onto a train that soon came under machine gun fire and was bombed. There were several escapes. The train wandered all night long in the direction of Magdeburg, then turned back. The next morning, the prisoners found themselves in the surroundings of their starting point. They got off the train and found the main road at Heudeber.” The attempt to launch a sixth railway convoy across the Altmark had failed.
By the time the column was formed again, it was already far behind the previous ones. It went off toward Schönebeck, through Halberstadt, Oschersleben, Borne, and Biere, and was finally intercepted by the Americans. The liberation of the prisoners took place in great confusion, as shown in extracts from the account by André Rogerie,3 once again a precious witness. A similar situation was to be encountered in early May west of Mecklenburg, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
Rogerie was paired up for the march with an older prisoner, a forty-five-year-old former miner who ran a bistro in Lens. His name was Daguin, and Rogerie calls him his “old man.” “We walked and we walked. Eighteen miles a day without anything to eat. Sometimes in villages at night, we would be given boiled potatoes, three or four small ones. I was very thin. [ . . . ] It was difficult to keep going with my old man, who was making it hard for me. Unshaven, dirty and skinny, barefooted, dressed in pants that were too large held up by an electric wire and a jacket fastened in the same way, with a large rectangle of striped fabric on the back, I arrived on the night of Wednesday, 11 April, at about 5 p.m., at a farm in a small village located nine miles from Madgeburg. [ . . . ]”
Rogerie and Daguin considered escaping, but the column was formed again, with puzzled-looking SS. “Suddenly, there was a very violent explosion in the village. The SS thought they were surrounded. They got together and discussed the matter, and then suddenly started out again. Daguin and I, along with several others, stayed behind. No one paid any attention to us, and as soon as the column had disappeared, we found ourselves [ . . . ] ‘free’ on the road.
“Our freedom was precarious and our weariness great. We had been walking for eight days, and sustained only by the rattling of American machine guns, we went back to the village. There, as I have recounted, the guards ordered us to leave and then went off themselves. A woman gave us some soup. [ . . . ]
“Under cover of night, with our hunger somewhat abated, the two of us arrived at an old abandoned windmill on a hillock, where we decided to spend the night. The sky was clear, it was springtime. Feeling my way in the dark, I pushed aside a few stones on the floor of the mill with a roof that was half caved-in. Then I looked in the distance and could see fighting. We were between the lines, with the Americans on the right and the Germans on the left. With the rumbling of guns for a lullaby, we went to sleep. [ . . . ]
“It was daybreak. I had slept well, with a big stone for a pillow, and Daguin was still asleep. I got up and climbed against the wall up to a small window. [ . . . ] I woke up old Daguin and we went back down to the village. I did not feel safe; the Germans had fled, but the Americans were not there. I got some potatoes and matches from a woman. The people were terror-stricken, and no longer dared refuse us anything. I spotted a little girl who ran away as soon as she saw us. It is true that we did not look good.
“We met up with a French prisoner of war who was housed in the village, and he took us to his room where we were finally able to shave. [ . . . ] At about 3 p.m., we were in a village where an American tank and a tiny car went through. We were to learn subsequently that it was the famous Jeep. [ . . . ]
“We lay down outside, at the foot of a tree, and we slept until morning. We were awakened by the sound of disarmed German soldiers, looking sad and defeated, who did not know where to go to avoid being taken prisoner. [ . . . ] The two of us set off again toward the next village which was called Glöthe.” It was Friday, April 13, and they were greeted by a large Kommando of French prisoners of war housed on a big farm. “As we were very dirty, we took a warm bath in a large vat.”
Jean de Sesmaisons4 was in the area at the time. On Wednesday, April 11, he had escaped with Maurice Berrod. Caught by people from the Volkssturm and locked in a barn, they were taken out the next day. They escaped once again, and from the marsh where they were hiding they could see the American tanks arriving. They went back to the village, which was Eickendorf. In the same area René Chapel5 also managed to lose his guards, as did Marillier,6 on the morning of the 12th in Klein Mühlingen. All these villages, which were close to one another, were located south of Schönebeck.
THE “TRUCE” BETWEEN SCHÖNEBECK AND STASSFURT. Sesmaisons, Berrod, and another prisoner decided to set off immediately in the other direction. They requisitioned three bicycles in Gross Mühlingen and rode toward Halberstadt, where they arrived on the 15th. Sesmaisons notes that fighting was still going on in the Harz south of Derenburg. He reached Wernigerode on the 16th, Bad Harzburg on the 17th, Northeim and then Göttingen on the 19th, where he was suffering from dysentery. He was repatriated by air on April 24 with Berrod.
Rogerie7 left too. Daguin, who was exhausted, refused to go with him. He did not get far: “Thus, I walked for about nine miles, but I was tired. I stopped in the little town of Stassfurt. There I met up with a political deportee like myself. He told me that there were some thirty deportees living in the school and that they were well fed. According to the Americans, our departure was near. So, tempted by the easy life, I settled in with them in the school to wait for the repatriation convoys. I stayed there for a month. [ . . . ] In the school yard, I made crepes on a stove. [ . . . ] A month went by, during which I gained back 37 pounds and, one morning, the American trucks arrived.” The return took place by train through Hanover, Maestricht, and Charleroi. Rogerie was back in France by May 17.
While Rogerie was putting on weight in Stassfurt, Wolf Wexler was busy in Biere. The following account8 of his adventures has been considerably simplified. Wexler was a French prisoner who belonged to a Russian family that had arrived in France at the turn of the century. He spoke German, Russian, and English.
He was in Biere when the Americans arrived. He was not the only one. There were numerous prisoners, particularly Russians, who, like him, had just been liberated. There were foreign civilian workers. There were also French prisoners of war settled in with the local population. In all, some “two or three hundred displaced persons.”
The village mayor, “an old, quite sickly man,” hearing that Wexler spoke German and English, asked him to go with him to Schönebeck to present his problems to the American administration. Wexler translated the mayor’s words and then spoke for himself and told them what had happened in the camps. He then told them what he thought about the village situation: the ill, the displaced persons, etc. The American lieutenant in charge of the area promised to go to Biere. Wexler recounts his visit:
“Indeed, a few days later, he arrived in the village by jeep. He had everyone—the inhabitants, the deportees, the prisoners, etc.—brought together in the town square, not far from the town hall and the church. He got up onto a bench, and, striking his two revolvers (it was a scene right out of the Far West), he said, pointing to me: ‘This is the mayor. From now on, you do what he tells you.’ I was translating, and, dumbfounded, I wound up mayor of Biere. He left promising to send me food, blankets, etc.
“So, I went into the town hall as mayor to organize the attribution of housing billets, food distribution, etc. I appointed a militia to keep order. Then, I went to see the school where I had a Revier set up, with the help of the schoolmaster, incidentally, who swore by all the gods—like everyone else—that he had never been a Nazi. Many women came and offered to work as nurses.”
Wexler provides a savory description of various aspects of his term as mayor and concludes: “On 10 or 11 May, the Americans sent us trucks. We were told to assemble in front of the church—deportees, prisoners of war, STO workers. A hundred of us got into the trucks. Some of the German women were weeping!” Wexler was on the same repatriation train as Rogerie. He went to the Lutétia Hotel, whereas Rogerie went by himself from Jeumont to Angoulême. A month elapsed between the liberation and the return of Rogerie and Wexler, who were both in relatively good physical condition. This sort of decompression period was no doubt important from a psychological standpoint. We might call this period a “truce,” which is the term used by Primo Levi.9 In a book entitled La Tregua, he chose the word to describe the events that occurred between his departure from Auschwitz and his return to Turin. There was also a period of truce for some prisoners in Mecklenburg in May 1945, which will be described at the end of the next chapter.
THE OTHER LIBERATIONS SOUTH OF MAGDEBURG. The liberation of the last column from Harzungen by the American forces south of Magdeburg is best known from firsthand accounts in French, but others took place in the same region.
The Kommando of Wansleben am See, west of Halle, was evacuated on April 12 and went off in the direction of Dessau. In Könnern at the crossing of the Saale, the column met up with other columns such as those from Neu Stassfurt and Aschersleben. On April 14 the Americans arrived in Hinsdorf, east of Köthen, and the Wansleben prisoners were free. The Americans halted their offensive shortly thereafter, once they had gained control of the highway between Berlin and Leipzig. The column of the Leau Kommando, which had started out on April 12 from Bernburg-Plömnitz, was also liberated on the same day in Hinsdorf. It had been caught earlier in a tank battle.
Farther south, one of the railway evacuation convoys from Buchenwald, which had set out on April 10, was forced to stop on the 11th in Jena with its locomotive out of order. A column was formed and stragglers were shot. It reached Gera on April 12. After violent fighting that caused numerous losses in the column, it was liberated on the 13th.
Altogether, only a few columns were liberated in this fashion, and often the survivors were gravely ill. André Cozette,10 who was liberated in Hinsdorf with the Wansleben column, was transferred with others by the Americans to the Revier at Dora before being repatriated by air from the Nordhausen airfield. Another exceptional situation occurred farther north, concerning a camp that was liberated on April 12 without being evacuated by its commander, an officer of the Wehrmacht. This was the Gazelle Kommando at Weferlingen.11
The departure of three convoys of Jews from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt was noted in chapter 18. One of those convoys was abandoned by its guards and liberated near Magdeburg.
LIBERATIONS NORTH OF MAGDEBURG. The swift advance of the American forces, as mentioned earlier, made it possible for a number of prisoners to escape, thereby avoiding the massacre in the Gardelegen region. It was also favorable to members of the Osterode Heber Kommando,12 which set out on foot on April 5 and reached Gifhorn on the 8th. Three groups were formed. The first one went in the direction of Celle and was liberated on the 9th in a woods near Ohof. The Americans caught up with the second one, which had gone in the direction of Salzwedel, in Ehra, northwest of Gifhorn, also on the 9th.
Going west from Hanover, the Americans reached the Elbe north of Tangermünde. Farther west beyond Celle the British were moving north. In between, the Germans retained control for a while of an area on the left bank of the Elbe, where the third group was finally liberated on April 18 in Tannenkrug.
LIBERATION OF THE SICK. The general rule governing evacuations was that prisoners were not to fall alive into the hands of enemy troops. If they could not be evacuated, they had to be killed. That is what happened in Ohrdruf, which led to the first large macabre discovery made by the Americans in early April 1945. In Gandersheim as well, those who were too ill to leave on foot were executed on April 4, as Antelme explained.13
As described earlier, the SS put the sick prisoners from Ellrich, Harzungen, Wieda, and Rottleberode and most of the patients from Dora into railway convoys. Only at Dora did the Americans find patients who had been spared in the Revier. They also found some at the Boelcke Kaserne in Nordhausen, but under very unusual conditions.
The situation in Langenstein14 was also an exception to the rule, because no “transport” had been organized to Bergen-Belsen. On April 9, the day of evacuation, of a total of 4,900 prisoners, only 3,000 were able to set off on foot. The others were abandoned in the Revier (some 500), the Schonung (1,200), or in the camp. When the Americans discovered the camp on April 13, they found many corpses as well as survivors in very poor condition. Hélie de Saint-Marc, for example, was unconscious. They were transported to an American field hospital set up in a barracks in Halberstadt. In Langenstein, as in Nordhausen, the civilian population was requisitioned to bury the dead and had to provide food and clothing.
In numerous camps evacuated by marches, such as Neu Stassfurt, the sick were put in carts. Most of them quickly died. In these instances, when the Americans arrived, the camps were empty.
PRISONERS FROM GÜNZERODE WITH THE SS DURING FIGHTING IN THE HARZ. A number of prisoners were liberated in the very heart of the Harz, where they had been taken. As mentioned in Chapter 17, the advance of Simpson’s army in the north of the Harz and Hodges’s army in the south, followed by their junction on April 13 in the Magdeburg region, isolated an entire German army in the Harz. It took some time before this new pocket could be gradually reduced. When Sesmaisons went by bicycle to Derenburg on April 16, he heard the sound of fighting near Blankenburg.15
Some of the prisoners that had been grouped together at the Ellrich-Theater camp in early April left by convoy. They ended up in Gardelegen. Others set off in columns going eastward. There were 350 prisoners left, including 60 Frenchmen, among them Denis Guillon,16 who has recounted their highly unusual evacuation. It began on Tuesday, April 10, at 8 P.M. The column was led by the usual guards “as well as an SS combat section, at the head of which the prisoners had the displeasure of recognizing the former commander of Günzerode, sitting stride a big motorcycle, with hand grenades in his boots and his machine gun slung from around his neck.” The column went in the direction of Sülzhayn, then Benneckenstein. On April 11 a fighter plane destroyed two German tanks, which exploded at the head of the column.
After a relatively continuous march through Trautenstein, the column reached Hasselfelde on April 12 at the end of the afternoon. It was in Güntersberge by nighttime on Friday, April 13, where it stopped at a lumber mill. Women workers from Poland took charge of getting the guards drunk. Numerous escapes took place in the dead of night, including that of Guillon and six other Frenchmen. They scrambled out of the way, into the forest.
After several episodes they were caught by SS fighters and brought back to Hasselfelde, where they had to help the soldiers consolidate their positions. They were fed properly. They managed to be out of view in a cellar when the SS pulled back. They heard the noise of shells and grenades and were brought out of the cellar manu militari, not by Germans but by American soldiers. That was on Tuesday, April 17.
Guillon and his friend Xavier Piguet stayed with the Americans and took part in mopping up operations. Four Kapos from Günzerode were caught and executed. On May 28 the two were repatriated by airplane from Hildesheim to Le Bourget.
Inasmuch as plans for the first evacuations were decided at SS headquarters in Oranienburg, it appears that the Dora-Mittelbau prisoners were to be taken to Neuengamme and those from Buchenwald to Flossenbürg. Broadly speaking, it was impossible to follow these instructions, but traces of them remained in some surprising routes, such as that of Gandersheim, which will be examined later.
THE EVACUATION OF ROSSLA. The prisoners from Rossla left in a column on the morning of April 5 to cross the Harz in the direction of Halberstadt. Max Dutillieux17 has described that evacuation. He points out that the column was joined en route by others, with prisoners in even worse condition. They were probably prisoners who had left on foot from Rottleberode and Stempeda.
“The SS supervised the long column closely. Our SS from Rossla turned savage again. [ . . . ] At first, they were content to bark out orders from time to time, because the carts were moving along at a good pace. We were still far from exhaustion—at least those of us from Rossla—and as long as we had a few more sacks of potatoes, we could hold up. [ . . . ] At night, we slept in barns in farmyards. It seems that our guards always found enough potatoes or grain to make soup. [ . . . ]
“We crossed through forests, villages, towns, but only a few cities, including Halberstadt, where the inhabitants had disappeared, leaving everything there. [ . . . ] Our forced march took us on secondary routes. Stragglers were shot in cold blood. [ . . . ] We went on in this fashion to Oranienburg, without meeting a soul on our long route. It was as if we were the only people who were fleeing. The villages and cities we crossed seemed weirdly empty.
“Upon our arrival in Magdeburg, the SS speeded up the pace. We crossed the bridge and it was blown up half an hour later. The column continued quickly on its way along the highway toward Berlin. Then it turned off onto secondary roads. On the way, our column had grown considerably and by the time we arrived in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, it had swollen into a human river made up of numerous tributaries.”
THE EVACUATION OF ROTTLEBERODE. Among the columns moving toward Oranienburg was the one formed by prisoners from Rottleberode and Stempeda who were unable to join Brauny’s convoy at Niedersachswerfen. After crossing the Harz through Stolberg and Güntersberge, they reached Quedlinburg on April 8. They went northward to Oschersleben, Seehausen, and Haldensleben.
On April 9, north of Seehausen in Drackenstedt, young people from the RAD (the German Labor Service) massacred prisoners from this column who had hidden in a haystack in a barn. A young Alsatian named Jean Uhl witnessed the scene.18
After Haldensleben the column went eastward to cross the Elbe by ferry between Rogätz and Bittkau. In Genthin on April 12 a train took the surviving prisoners to Oranienburg, where they arrived on April 16 after going through Brandenburg and Potsdam.
THE EVACUATION OF SCHÖNEBECK. The prisoners from Rossla and Rottleberode were not the only ones to cross the Elbe in that area before the Americans arrived. Some of the prisoners of the Schönebeck Kommando were to cross upstream at Barby on April 12, whereas the others were liberated on the spot along with the last column from Harzungen.
The itineraries of the two columns from Schönebeck19 starting from Barby are known. The first one went all the way to Oranienburg via Brandenburg. It is possible that this itinerary was ultimately confused with the one mentioned by Dutillieux. In any case, as will be seen in the next chapter, all the new arrivals were fated to leave Sachsenhausen quickly for a new evacuation to Schwerin. The second itinerary starting from Barby began farther south and went toward Berlin. It turned north at Potsdam, through Nauen and Fehrbellin, then northwest to Neustadt-Glewe, near Wöbbelin. The Helmstedt convoy in which David Rousset was traveling arrived at Wöbbelin as well as the small Kommando from Kelbra after crossing the Altmark and following an unspecified route. One way or another, those who were sent toward the northeast to flee the American forces arriving at the Elbe were sent on to the northwest to flee from the Soviets as they took over Berlin.
THE ODYSSEY OF THE BLANKENBURG KOMMANDO. Of all the Mittelraum Kommandos evacuated in April 1945 that started by a march, the route followed by the Blankenburg Kommando was the most varied. It began on April 6 north of the Harz, and the survivors returned from Sweden in mid-July.
Some of the prisoners in this Kommando did not take part in the march. On April 4 a group was transferred to Dora, and it followed the evacuation of that camp. A small group of sick prisoners was left behind. As previously mentioned, Georges Desprez, who was caring for the ill in a column arriving from Harzungen, took charge of the group two days later. He had them all transported to Beendorf.
The other prisoners from Blankenburg-Oesig (Klosterwerke), most of whom were Belgians,20 and a few Frenchmen such as Gruat, Tumerelle, and Leciejewski were put together in a column that went through Halberstadt, Oschersleben, Egeln, and Langenweddingen. It reached Magdeburg on April 8. The pace was very fast, and prisoners who were too weak to keep up were killed en route. The itinerary taken by the Jews from the Blankenburg-Regenstein camp (Turmalin) is unknown, but they reached Magdeburg at the same time as the others.
In Magdeburg they were all put on a Dutch barge, the Wilma, which went down the Elbe toward Hamburg. There is a painting by Jean-Baptiste Deknibber of the embarkation. The inside of the barge was totally lacking in comfort. Nothing had been planned for sleeping. “The first ones to arrive, who thought they were ensuring themselves a good spot by leaning up against the walls, soon realized their mistake: they were penetrated by dampness and when they tried to move toward the center to take advantage of the warmth of the group, they were mercilessly shoved back against the damp shell.” Everyone suffered from hunger and thirst. Neuengamme may have been the first destination the authorities had in mind, but at Lauenburg the barge left the Elbe and entered the Elbe-Lübeck canal. On April 12 in the evening it came alongside in Lübeck.
On April 13 the prisoners were once again put into columns, first the Jews, then the others. A seventeen-mile march took the Jews via Schwartau and Ahrensbök to Siblin in Holstein. The others went a few miles farther, to Sarau-Glasau. There were more victims along this route. Various firsthand accounts of the period that followed have been provided by Belgians. The prisoners arrived exhausted in a huge barn and began their wait, which turned out to be very long, as it lasted from April 13 to 30. The British did not arrive in this region until the Germans had surrendered.
“After three or four days, those who were put to work for private individuals were given a few potatoes, a piece of meat or an egg, but they were a minority.” During this period, prisoners died from hunger in the barn, and their comrades barely had the strength to drag the corpses outside to a mass grave. The same situation was occurring in the Wöbbelin camp at the same time, which will be discussed in the next chapter.
On April 30, trucks belonging not to Allied troops but to the Swedish Red Cross arrived, combing the region in search of prisoners in need of emergency care. According to an arrangement between Count Folke Bernadotte and Himmler, the Swedes were allowed to take Western prisoners, not only from Scandinavia but also from France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, out of Germany. The Blankenburg prisoners of these nationalities were taken to Lübeck. The others, both Jews and non-Jews, set out on foot in the direction of Neustadt. They stopped in Süsel, where the Swedish Red Cross again arrived on May 1 and carried out a similar selection of prisoners, this time including the Czechs.21
Those selected were put onto two Swedish Red Cross boats,22 the Magdalena and the Lillie Matthiessen. The others went to Neustadt and joined the prisoners crowded into two ships, the Cap Arcona and the Athen. A British bombing on May 3 left many of these prisoners dead.
After a perilous crossing, the two Swedish boats arrived on May 2 in the port of Trelleborg. The sick were immediately hospitalized. The prisoners were given new clothes. “Our striped rags were burned. We were only allowed to keep a piece of uniform with our identity number on it.
“After two weeks in quarantine, we were divided up into various groups and sent to places that were able to receive us. I arrived in Veinge, about 16 miles southeast of Halmstad,” explains Albert Van Hoey. “Outside of mealtime, we went about in the town whose inhabitants were very kind, receiving us in their homes and offering us sweets.”
The repatriation to Belgium and the other countries began in June (the 13th for Gruat) and continued in July. There were exceptions, however, such as Van Hoey, who fell seriously ill on June 4 and was hospitalized with the effects of typhus. He was not repatriated until August 11, when he was flown from Copenhagen to Brussels via Malmö. Soon afterward the village of Stekene got its schoolteacher back.
THE EVACUATION OF LANGENSTEIN. The circumstances surrounding this evacuation are among the best known, thanks to the work of Paul Le Goupil,23 who has already been quoted in chapter 13. He himself was part of “Column no. 1,” and he noted down the route it took. He gathered and analyzed various firsthand accounts, including a considerable one by the Pole Rudolf John. In his memoirs he discusses this period. The evacuation took place in two stages: first the SS fled from the American forces, then from the Soviets within a gradually shrinking area. After hesitating, the camp commander ordered the evacuation on Monday morning, April 9, 1945. The circumstances no longer permitted a withdrawal to the main camp of Buchenwald as the other Kommandos had done. This time the group had to go east. The camp head count was nearly 4,900 prisoners. Some 3,000 of them left that night on foot, in six columns of 500 prisoners. The rest of them, as already noted, would not see the Americans arrive until April 13.
Column no. 1 set off toward the east on a country path and crossed the city of Quedlinburg under the cloak of darkness. They spent the night of April 10 to 11 in Ermsleben, then went on to Wiederstedt, taking small roads. During the night of April 12 to 13 there was a forced march to cross the Saale at Könnern before the bridges were destroyed. That night the column reached Hinsdorf east of Köthen. The Americans were still very close. The prisoners had to go through Wolfen and Bitterfeld quickly. At that point on April 14 the Americans stopped their offensive.
At first the column camped in the Dübener Heide, then crossed the Elbe on the 16th by a bridge made of boats. It stayed until the evening of the 19th in a marshy field near Prettin. Then the SS, who learned that the Soviets had crossed the Oder on April 16, had to decide which direction to take. Those from Langenstein decided to set off quickly toward the north, going west of Berlin.
The column went from Prettin to Jessen during the night of April 19 to 20, then from Jessen to Wittenberg during the night of April 20 to 21 on dirt roads in the midst of the panic-stricken population and the routed German troops. On April 21 it crossed the city during the daytime and then split up in the countryside near Griebo. Until then the other columns had followed roughly the same itinerary as Le Goupil’s column. The column whose story has been told by the Czech Josef Trailer had to march one more day, to Zieko.
The ordeal was much longer for the column to which the Pole Rudolf John belonged, which continued on its way northward. It managed to reach Wiesenburg in Brandenburg on April 22. Then, in order to escape the Russians, it drew close to the Elbe. It was in Ziesar on the 24th, Genthin on the 26th and Güsen on the 27th, just a few miles away from the Americans. John escaped on the 28th.
In his memoirs Le Goupil24 recalls in detail what happened to him from the moment his column split up on April 21. First he hid with his friend Serge in the country until April 27, when they were caught by other German soldiers and put into the prison at Coswig. They were released the next day and went on to Buro. On April 30 they were liberated by the Americans coming from Rosslau, and then the Russians arrived. It was not until May 24 that the French were authorized to cross the Elbe into the American zone. On May 30, Le Goupil arrived in Thionville.
Stragglers were massacred from the very first day. There were many victims when the column set out from Prettin, and again from Jessen. Then, many died in Wittenberg. There were more than 120 men in John’s column after Wittenberg, but when John himself escaped only 32 were left.
Le Goupil sought to find out what had happened to the 953 Frenchmen who had arrived in Langenstein by various convoys starting in April 1944. Four hundred and fifty-one of them returned to France and were alive on July 1, 1945. He found no trace of the other 48, who no doubt died in Germany. Of the 454 identified dead, 351 died in the camp or in hospitals prior to June 30, 1945. The 103 others died within a few days on the death march. No similar study has been carried out on the other nationalities, but the losses were probably of the same order.
Compared to others, the march of the columns from Langenstein was not unusual either in terms of distance or length, but it was particularly deadly for two reasons: the prisoners had already suffered a great deal physically, and on two occasions the SS forced them to go at a very rapid pace.
THE FATE OF PRISONERS EVACUATED FROM CENTRAL GERMANY IN SAXONY AND THE SUDETENLAND. As chapter 17 explained, once the American troops arrived in Magdeburg they settled in along the left bank of the Elbe in the Altmark without crossing the river. Farther south, after gaining control of the major cities of Dessau, Halle, Leipzig, and Chemnitz, they halted their offensive eastward. The central and eastern part of Saxony therefore remained in the hands of German troops under Marshal Schörner, who still held all of Bohemia.
When the Soviets under Koniev began the maneuver to surround Berlin from the south, they were attacked on their left flank (to no effect) by Schörner’s troops. The Soviets did not undertake the conquest of Saxony until after the fall of Berlin.
The prisoners who had not been liberated by the American advance thus found themselves east and south of two fronts that remained practically stable for several weeks. Evacuation could only proceed by the south, through Sudetenland and the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.
The term Sudetenland traditionally designates the mountainous area separating Bohemia from Silesia. It is also used for the population of the region, which was German-speaking at the time. In 1938, after Munich, the part of Czechoslovakia annexed by Germany was formed into a Gau called Sudetenland, enlarged beyond Sudetenland proper to include regions south of Erzgebirge and east of Böhmerwald. Here “Sudetenland” has been used in the latter, extended sense of the term.
The events that transpired in Saxony and Sudetenland in April–May 1945 were extremely complex. The information available also varies enormously from one column to another, and the inventory that follows is no doubt incomplete. The details of the routes are provided only to give an idea of the density of the itineraries followed within a restricted territory, some ninety-four miles from north to south and from west to east.
GANDERSHEIM AND ASCHERSLEBEN. The column that made the longest journey on foot before arriving at the border of Saxony was the one that left Gandersheim on April 4 and was unable to reach Buchenwald. The conditions of that evacuation have been described in detail in the book L’Espèce humaine by Robert Antelme,25 mentioned earlier. It would be impossible to take extracts from this account, which runs from page 213 to page 306; the entire passage would have to be quoted.
At the outset the column comprised about 450 prisoners—Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, and Italians. After four days it reached Wernigerode on the northern border of the Harz. All stragglers were executed along the way. There were escapes, however. Except for a short five-mile interlude by railway, the march continued via Halle until it arrived in Bitterfeld on April 14, where a train was waiting. In the end the Americans did not catch up with the column, since they did not take Halle until the 19th.
There are more than ninety-four miles as the crow flies between Gandersheim and Bitterfeld, and the route was not direct. The survivors who boarded the train in Bitterfeld were therefore already exhausted before facing the journey by railway through Saxony, Sudetenland, Bohemia, and Bavaria, which proved to be horrendous until their arrival in Dachau on April 27, thirteen days later. This will be discussed later.
Another train convoy started out in the same direction from Freiberg on about April 21. It was made up of prisoners who had left Aschersleben,26 west of Bernburg, on foot on April 11. They too crossed the Saale at Könnern, then spent ten days on small roads east of Leipzig before arriving in Freiberg. Their convoy will also be discussed later.
HARZUNGEN, SCHWARZHEIDE, HADMERSLEBEN, THEKLA. The first evacuation columns from Harzungen, composed of a few hundred prisoners that had not been liberated by the Americans south of Schönebeck, went farther east. Once they arrived in Schönebeck on April 12, some of them crossed the Elbe at Elbenau, went through Zerbst and skirted Wittenberg by the north. There were many escapes, including those of French prisoners René Haentjens27 and Pierre Pointe. The others, still on foot, went eastward up the Elbe through Jessen, Mühlberg, and Grossenhain. By the time they reached Radeberg they were east of Dresden and entered Sudetenland by Hinterhermsdorf in Swiss Saxony.
The evacuation column from Schwarzheide,28 which was a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen located north of Dresden, also ended up in the same region. It set out on April 19 after the Soviets had crossed the Oder. It went across southern Lusace and reached Warnsdorf west of Zittau in Sudetenland on April 24.
A few prisoners from Harzungen29 joined a column, apparently coming from the Wernigerode Kommando in northern Harz. The column was put onto barges that went up the Elbe past Torgau and Dresden to Leitmeritz (Litomerice) on April 13.
The column that left from Hadmersleben30 (between Halberstadt and Magdeburg) on April 10 reached the Elbe at Aken. On April 15 the prisoners embarked at Rosslau on barges going up the river to Bad Schandau before coming back to Pirna on April 20. It was not until May 7 that they went in the direction of Aussig (Usti) in Sudetenland, to be liberated on May 8 in Lobositz (Lovosice) slightly to the south.
The Kommando column from Thekla31 north of Leipzig started out going eastward at a fast pace on April 13 and by April 17 had arrived in Glaubitz beyond the Elbe, where it paused for three days. The Soviet threat caused it to cross back over the Elbe and set off toward the south on April 24 from Strehla. How the liberation found the column on May 9 in Teplitz (Teplice) in Sudetenland at the foot of the Erzgebirge is not known.
ARTERN, COLDITZ, BERGA, FLÖHA. A column was formed in Artern32 south of Sangerhausen on April 5 to evacuate the recent satellite camp of Dora. The column went through Nebra, Naumburg, and Zeitz and reached the Kommando in Tröglitz, east of Zeitz, on April 8. The members of this Buchenwald Kommando, mainly populated by Jews, were in very poor condition. During the night of April 11 to 12 a train came to pick up 2,200 prisoners, including those from Artern. The convoy passed through Chemnitz and Flöha before stopping for three days in Marienberg with its locomotive out of order. It started up again on April 16 but underwent an air attack in Reitzenhain, on the border of Saxony and Sudetenland. There were prisoners killed in the attack and prisoners who escaped, some of whom were caught and executed: in all, some 250 victims. The survivors set off on foot through Komotau (Chomutov), Postelberg (Postoloprty), and Lobositz, finally arriving in Leitmeritz on the evening of April 20.
Other columns were moving through Central Saxony. One of them started out from Colditz33 on April 14, went through Döbeln and Freiberg, and ended up in Leitmeritz. Another started from Berga34 (south of Gera) on April 11 and crossed Zwickau and Aue before arriving in Leitmeritz as well, after taking an unspecified route. A third column left from Flöha east of Chemnitz and arrived at Theresienstadt on May 9.
THE EVACUATION OF NEU STASSFURT. Finally, among the columns that have been identified, only two remained in Saxony until the end, under quite different circumstances. The first included part of the Junkers Kommando of Halberstadt,35 which set out on April 9, crossed Bitterfeld on April 13, and arrived in Borstendorf east of Chemnitz where it stopped some twelve miles from the Americans. Prisoners died of exhaustion on the way but none were executed. On May 7 the SS commander gave passes to Western nationals, enabling them to join the American lines. They regained their freedom in Mittelbach, southwest of Chemnitz. The other column was from Neu Stassfurt, and its story was typical.
The evacuation of the Neu Stassfurt Kommando,36 like that of Langenstein, is well known from a collection of firsthand accounts already quoted in chapter 13. It began in haste on April 11, for the Americans were advancing quickly. The column crossed the Saale north of Halle on April 12 and moved eastward. On April 14 it went through Delitzsch, south of Bitterfeld, arriving on the 15th in Kossa in the Dübener Heide. The Neu Stassfurt column then camped close by those from Langenstein.
When the Langenstein columns crossed the Elbe on April 16 and then went northward, the Neu Stassfurt column went south, remaining on the left bank of the river. The prisoners from Harzungen did the same thing on the right bank. The trailers transporting the ill were eliminated and the sick prisoners murdered.
Taking small roads, the column reached Oberaudenhain on the 16th, Bockwitz on the 17th, Raitzen on the 18th, and Riemsdorf on the 19th. Then it went by Dresden and on to Kurort Hartha on the 20th, Friedersdorf on the 21st, Nassau on the 22nd, and Clausnitz on the 23rd, where it stopped for two days. When it set off again snow was falling and many of the prisoners were walking barefoot. The survivors arrived at a farm in Dittersbach on April 26 and stayed there for ten days. On average they covered a distance of fourteen miles a day, and every day prisoners died either from weakness or being killed. Some prisoners did try to escape, at considerable risk.
During the first days of May the Soviet troops began their conquest of Saxony. As they drew closer, panic set in among the SS, who got their columns moving again. That was the case, mentioned earlier, of the prisoners from Hadmersleben, who left Pirna on May 7 for Aussig and then Lobositz. Similarly, on May 7, 1945, the Neu Stassfurt column set out again, once those who were too weak to walk had been eliminated. The column again covered twenty-five miles on the 7th and the 8th, crossing the Erzgebirge via Olbernhau, Marienberg, and Mildenau to Annaberg, which was nineteen miles from Chemnitz, where the American forces were located. The survivors were liberated by the Soviets, however, on the day the Germans capitulated.
It has been important to follow the chronicle of this evacuation day by day, for, in a certain sense, it was typical of all the others. The SS obstinately pursued this evacuation from April 16 to May 8 in a frantic headlong flight that served no other purpose than to obey the instructions not to allow the prisoners to be liberated, first by the Americans and later by the Soviets.
The death toll was established by the association of French deportees, of whom there were many in this Kommando: of 493 prisoners, 181 came back alive, 94 died in the camp, and 124 are known to have died en route during the evacuation. There was no trace of the remaining 94 prisoners, most of whom no doubt also died during the evacuation.
LEITMERITZ AND THERESIENSTADT. With two exceptions the columns that were in Saxony in April and May 1945 crossed the Erzgebirge and arrived in Sudetenland. At the time they were still in German territory, and there were Kommandos of various sizes in the Gau, which were usually satellites of the Flossenbürg camp in the Upper Palatinate.
The largest one, with some six thousand prisoners, was on the Elbe in Leitmeritz, which led the SS in charge of columns to “deliver” their prisoners there until the very last moment. As mentioned earlier in chapter 11, this Kommando corresponded to the B 5 underground work site of the Sonderstab Kammler. When they were liberated in Lobositz, the Hadmersleben prisoners coming from Pirna were in a sub-Kommando of Leitmeritz.
The area of the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia began immediately to the south with the small fortified town of Theresienstadt (Terezin), which had been transformed into a ghetto for German and Czech Jews who lived there under “privileged” conditions until they were sent, like the others, to Auschwitz. This made it possible to a certain extent to fool visitors such as those from the International Red Cross. When the prisoners from Tröglitz and Artern arrived in Leitmeritz, the Jews were placed in a separate group and sent to Theresienstadt. A convoy was formed with the others and set off southward.
THE EVACUATION COLUMNS IN SUDETENLAND. The Harzungen prisoners37 who arrived in Leitmeritz by the Elbe on April 13 left again by train on the 17th and then went on foot to Landeshut (today Kamienna Gora), where they arrived on April 19. Then they went into Silesia, to a satellite camp of Gross Rosen that still had not been “liberated.” Its liberation took place on May 5, and the Soviets then arrived in Landeshut.
The prisoners in the other columns from Harzungen, who arrived on foot through Swiss Saxony, went through Hohen Leipa (Krasna Lipa) and continued on to Kamnitz (Ceska Kamenice) and finally reached Rabenstein (Rabstejn) on April 26. A satellite camp of Flossenbürg was located there, which was liberated by the Soviets on May 8. In the same region, the prisoners from Schwarzheide remained in Warnsdorf from April 24 to May 8, except for the Jews, who were evacuated by train to Theresienstadt on May 5. On May 8 the SS forced the column to make one more march via Haida (Novy Bor) to Langenau (Skalice). It was not until the morning of the 9th that they finally disappeared.
It would be interesting to learn the fate of all the Kommandos situated in Sudetenland during April and May of 1945, but that task would fall outside the limits of this study. It will have to suffice here to include some information about the two evacuation columns that set out from the women’s camp of Zwodau (Svatava) east of Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), which have been the subject of recent publications.
The first column was made up of Jewish women accompanied by German women prisoners. An account of that evacuation has been given in the controversial book by Daniel J. Goldhagen38 entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The book contains a map showing the itinerary but does not indicate the dates of the various stages of the journey. The evacuation probably began on April 16 with the column moving east along the Böhmerwald, which was still German territory at the time. It was liberated on May 6 in Prachatice, after the Americans crossed the Böhmerwald and entered Bohemia. On April 16 a second column of non-Jewish women, including Brigitte Friang,39 set out from Zwodau. She has recounted this evacuation in a book of memoirs entitled Regarde-toi qui meurs, which has just been republished. The column’s peregrinations continued interminably in northern Bohemia and finally came to an end on May 8 with the arrival of the Soviets in Plochat. Brigitte Friang joined up with the Americans who had reached Karlsbad before being repatriated on May 18.
THE LAST LEG OF JULES HOFSTEIN’S MARCH. Whereas all the SS in charge of columns automatically directed their prisoners toward Leitmeritz, the Jews were often sent to Theresienstadt during the final weeks to be regrouped. As has already been mentioned in chapter 18, three trains filled with Jews with special status left Bergen-Belsen at the time heading for Theresienstadt, and one of them reached the camp on April 21. On the same date the Jews from Tröglitz were transferred from Leitmeritz to Theresienstadt. On May 5 the prisoners from Schwarzheide were transferred by train from Warnsdorf. Jules Hofstein has given a telling firsthand account of these last-minute transfers.
Hofstein40 and four comrades, as mentioned in chapter 16, were in the Gestapo rehabilitation camp of Zöschen. There they met up with other escaped prisoners from Nordhausen. “Soon we were put into closed freight cars, along with several hundred prisoners of all types and of every nationality, seventy-five prisoners to a car. A new odyssey was about to begin, even more hallucinatory than the previous ones, which was to last twenty-one days.” The convoy dragged on aimlessly in Saxony and Sudetenland.
“One day, we had stopped in a small station in Sudetenland, when a train of prisoners from Buchenwald arrived. The next day, the SS went through all the freight cars shouting ‘Juden raus!’ ‘Jews get out!’ I got out with some twenty comrades. We were expecting the worst. We were left standing in front of the freight car, in a single row, for an hour. Then, to our surprise, we were given bread to eat and even sausage, and told to go and join the convoy opposite us, where the same sorting process had been carried out. There, we were given half a liter of warm soup and we got into the freight cars.
“We left that night with the SS. The next morning, to our amazement, they had vanished. We were guarded by men from the Volkssturm wearing illassorted uniforms. At about 10 a.m., we arrived in Leitmeritz station and the Volkssturm handed us over to the Czech gendarmerie (i.e., of the “protectorate”).
“Shortly afterward, around noontime, on 28 April, 1945, we entered Theresienstadt. We were saved. Indeed, all around the city there were big red posters proclaiming that it was under the protection of the International Red Cross. The Germans, who avoided entering, merely bypassed it during their withdrawal. Finally, on 8 May, we were definitively liberated by the Red Army.”
After the liberation there was no reason to maintain the distinction between Jews and non-Jews, and various prisoners were housed at Theresienstadt. That is where Robert Desnos, who had come from Flöha, died of typhus on June 8.
THE CONVOYS THROUGH BOHEMIA. Two trains were formed to evacuate prisoners through Saxony, Sudeten, and Bohemia, one in Bitterfeld on April 14 for prisoners from Gandersheim, and the other in Freiberg on about April 21 for prisoners from Aschersleben.
The convoy from Gandersheim is well known from the highly evocative account provided by Robert Antelme.41 After thirteen days the train arrived in Dachau on April 27, filled with dead and dying prisoners. There has been some discussion as to whether or not the train went through Dresden and Prague, but the details of the itinerary are unknown.
It is possible to get an idea of what the convoy went through by following the route of another convoy that arrived in Dachau on the same day. The information comes from a recently published book by François Bertrand,42 Notre devoir de mémoire. Bertrand belonged to this convoy from Buchenwald, which left Weimar on April 7 in the evening with 5,080 prisoners from the small camp, many of whom were already very weak. Others, such as Bertrand, came from prisons or satellite Kommandos.
There can be no question in this book of studying the conditions under which the Buchenwald camp was partially—and only partially—evacuated in April 1945. Some information on certain points is required, however. At the time of the American offensive toward Thuringia, prisoners from a number of satellite Kommandos were brought back to the main camp. The withdrawal took place under tragic conditions for Springen and Ohrdruf, but far more normally for the prisoners of Mühlhausen, Niederorschel, Halberstadt, (including Henri Thomas), and Langensalza (including Michel Vidal). On the other hand, as was already mentioned, those from Gandersheim, Langenstein, and Neu Stassfurt, for example, left directly in evacuation columns.
Next the SS tried to conduct the evacuation of the Buchenwald camp itself. They succeeded in organizing a few convoys either with prisoners living in the camp or prisoners coming from satellite Kommandos or prisons. That was the case of the Kommando to which Bertrand belonged.
The above-mentioned convoy set off toward the east and took two days to arrive in Dresden via Leipzig on April 9, then two more days to arrive in Pilsen via Aussig on the 11th. The column was initially instructed to go to the Flossenbürg camp, but after the long detour it was assigned a new destination: Dachau. The train slowed down and took eight days, from April 11 to 19, to go through Bavaria to Bayerish-Eisenstein, arriving in Nammering north of Passau, where the convoy stopped until April 24. It set out again with a new locomotive, went through Passau, and finally arrived at Dachau during the night of April 27 to 28. It had taken twenty days to go from Buchenwald to Dachau, a distance of 187 miles as the crow flies. The thirteen-day train route of the Gandersheim convoy from Bitterfeld to Dachau was the quickest journey, but it came after ten days of forced march. The results were the same. Of the 5,080 prisoners who left Weimar, there were 816 survivors, many of them ill, upon arrival at Dachau. Of the 450 prisoners who left Gandersheim there were 122 survivors, as the sick prisoners had been killed prior to departure.
When Robert Antelme got down from the freight car he was in very poor condition. He was recognized in early May by a French mission visiting Dachau, which included François Mitterrand, who was the leader of Antelme’s Resistance group. A veritable expedition was mounted by Dionys Mascolo and Georges Beauchamp on May 8, 1945, to hustle him out of Dachau despite the quarantine in force due to typhus.43 Thus he was saved, as was young Michel Vidal, another new arrival at Buchenwald, through another example of devotion.
The other convoy that left Saxony was the Aschersleben Kommando,44 which pulled out from Freiberg on April 21. The SS wanted to abandon their prisoners at the camp in Leitmeritz, but the stop lasted only one night and the convoy had to start back southward. The train went past Prague, stopped in the middle of the countryside from April 30 to May 7, and then set off again, fleeing from the Russians. On May 8 the SS refused to stop at Budweis (Budejovice), but the convoy was liberated a little farther on by Czech partisans. The same thing happened to the convoy that left Leitmeritz on April 21 with prisoners from Artern45 and Tröglitz. The train went through Kralup a.d. Moldau (Kralupy nad Vltavou) and Prague, coming to a halt on April 30 in Beneschau (Benesov). It did not set out again until May 7, when it went through Tabor and Budweis and was stopped by Czech partisans on May 8 in Kaplitz (Kaplice).
Two other convoys can also be identified that crossed Saxony and Bohemia with prisoners from Buchenwald. One of them left Weimar on April 8, went through Chemnitz and then Karlsbad, and finally arrived in Bavaria via Eisenstein. Then it meandered through southern Bavaria until it was liberated on April 30 by the American forces in Landsham east of Munich.
The other convoy, which left on April 10, first went through Chemnitz, then Komotau, but did not reach Pilsen. It wandered endlessly in Sudeten between Saaz (Zatec) and Aussig in the same zone as Brigitte Friang’s column. It was not until May 7 that the survivors were able to get off in Theresienstadt. It is possible that this Buchenwald convoy is the same one mentioned by Hofstein in his account of the last leg of his march.
THE GREAT JOURNEY OF THE TAIFUN EXPRESS. The evacuation conducted by a train nicknamed the “Taifun Express”46 was a very special one. As already noted, one of the last activities at Peenemünde involved a request from the Luftwaffe to do a study on a small antiaircraft missile called the Taifun (typhoon). Manufacturing had begun in the workshops of the Dora Tunnel.
On April 5 at 7 P.M. a convoy left from the Dora station under the authority of Dr. Klaus Scheufelen, the Taifun specialist, who was an Oberleutnant in the Luftwaffe. The train was being used to move the missiles whether finished or not, along with documents and specialized equipment. Some fifty civilian workers from Mittelwerk as well as Luftwaffe soldiers took part in the convoy. Nearly four hundred prisoners, particularly Greens, also left in the convoy along with SS under the command of Erwin Busta, known as Pferdkopf. Wilhelm Simon, the head of the tunnel Arbeitseinsatz, came with them.
The train set out in the same direction as the evacuation convoys. At one stop in Herzberg freight cars were added on with a Kommando of young Jewish women who had been at Grosswerther for a month. The itinerary was comparable to that of all the principal evacuation convoys. The Taifun Express went through Seesen, Goslar, Magdeburg, Dresden, and Prague, and finally arrived in Linz during the night of April 14 to 15. Despite the special features of the convoy the journey took nearly ten days.
At that point the freight cars of the Grosswerther Kommando were taken on to the Mauthausen camp. It is possible that some Jewish prisoners were then evacuated to Switzerland. The train continued its route to Gmunden am Traunsee, and most of the Dora prisoners went to the Ebensee camp with Busta.
In the train there remained Scheufelen, his equipment and his specialists, and a few prisoners with the SS man Simon. Scheufelen wanted to join von Braun, Dornberger, and the others in the Bavarian Alps. The convoy made a sharp detour through Tyrol to reach Bavaria, but the train came to a halt definitively in Fischbach, south of Rosenheim, where the Americans arrived on May 2. Scheufelen managed to find his Peenemünde colleagues and go with them to the United States.