All of the numerous evacuations discussed in the previous chapter took place, with a few exceptions, particularly that of Blankenburg, in the regions located south of Berlin left untouched first by the offensive of the American forces and subsequently by the Soviets. Quite often the prisoners had to wait for the German surrender to recover their freedom.
The situation was different north of Berlin, in the northern part of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. The SS conducted the evacuation of two large camps, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, and the columns ended up together in the Schwerin region not far from the Wöbbelin camp in early May 1945.
The Soviet offensive from the Oder toward the Elbe and a final American advance beyond the Elbe put an end to any further movement of prisoners. Generally speaking, the survivors were set free “in the middle of countryside” after various episodes.
MILITARY OPERATIONS BETWEEN THE ODER AND THE ELBE. The American armies stopped at the Elbe after their offensive on Magdeburg. At that time Soviet forces were stationed along the Oder River (with a bridgehead at the level of Kiistrin) and the Neisse River to the north of Görlitz.
On the morning of April 16 the offensive in the direction of Berlin was launched, with Zhukov’s armies emerging from the bridgehead and those of Koniev crossing the Neisse between Forst and Muskau. By April 19 the German front had been broken east of Berlin. By April 22 the Ninth German Army was surrounded between Berlin and Cottbus. Zhukov moved north from Berlin and took Oranienburg. Koniev advanced southward beyond Jüterbog. The two armies joined up on April 25 in Ketzin, between Potsdam and Brandenburg. The siege of Berlin had begun. It would end on May 2 with the surrender of the city’s last defenders. Hitler committed suicide on April 30 in the afternoon. Farther south, Koniev’s troops joined up with the American forces on the Elbe at Torgau on April 25.
In the north on April 18, Soviet troops under Rokossovsky began crossing the Oder between Schwedt and Stettin. They took Stettin on April the 26th, Prenzlau on the 27th, Anklam on the 29th, Neustrelitz on the 30th, and Stralsund on May 1. By May 3 the link-up with the Americans was in place north and south of Wittenberge. The American forces, on the right of the British, crossed the Elbe in the direction of the Baltic and took Schwerin and Wismar in early May.
THE REICH FROM HITLER TO DÖNITZ. There is a great deal of confusion concerning the events at the head of the Reich, especially during the final months. It is possible, however, to present the main ones, particularly those that took place in northern Germany, as some of their aspects directly affected the fate of concentration camp prisoners.
First, the role of the International Red Cross must be situated, especially the one played by Count Bernadotte. For a long time the IRC did not do much to help camp prisoners, and after 1945 a number of controversies arose concerning its role. Obviously the operations of the German Red Cross were entirely controlled by the Nazi Party, and the IRC never had a suitable relay organization inside the Reich. Visits to camps were few and far between, and always carefully prepared and supervised.
In early 1945 the IRC stepped up its activity with the support of its correspondents in two neutral countries, the Swiss Red Cross and the Swedish Red Cross. The president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, was led to play a leading role not only from a humanitarian standpoint but also from a political one. The Red Cross had two aims. The first was to obtain the liberation and transfer to neutral countries of as many prisoners as possible. Negotiations were restricted to certain groups, however, and proved to be complicated. Toward the end, for example, it was easier to intervene with certain authorities in favor of Jewish prisoners or Jehovah’s Witnesses than on behalf of other categories of prisoners. The other aim was to deliver packages of food and medicine to the camps.
In order to achieve results, requests had to be addressed to those in control of the concentration camp system, namely the SS. Hence Count Bernadotte addressed himself to the leader of the SS, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. These contacts appear to have been facilitated by Walter Schellenberg, a young SS general, on the occasion of two trips Bernadotte made to Berlin, one in February and one in April. It was only on April 23 that their relations took on a political dimension, with important consequences. First, everything had to be happening at once at the top level of the government.
Aside from negotiations with Bernadotte, Himmler had a meeting on April 21 at the office of his masseur, Kersten, with Dr. Norbert Masur, a Swedish Jew who was representing the World Jewish Congress. Himmler authorized the Jewish women at Ravensbrück to leave for Sweden and those at Theresienstadt to go to Switzerland.
The last important general meeting of Nazi dignitaries, which has been described by numerous authors,1 took place in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on April 20, 1945, on Adolf Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday. To situate the event, a break in the German front east of Berlin had occurred the day before, and the next day the Sachsenhausen camp was to be evacuated. A hundred people were at the meeting, all of them leaders, including Göring, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Bormann, Ley, and Speer as well as Dönitz, Keitel, Jodl, and many others.
Hitler had already announced that he would not leave Berlin. All the others left with the exception of Goebbels and Bormann. Only Speer returned to Berlin on April 24 to say good-bye to Hitler.2 He flew from Rechlin (near Mirow, in Mecklenburg) to Gatow and then back to Rechlin. Himmler and Keitel were in the vicinity.
Himmler was in Hohenlychen at the hospital of his friend, Dr. Gebhardt. He had been hospitalized there in March and had set up his headquarters there. Keitel and Jodl were in Fürstenberg, “with a skeleton OKW.” Most of the Wehrmacht command had withdrawn to the Holstein between Kiel and Lübeck with Dönitz, who was in Plön. On April 25, Speer went to see Himmler3 and found him in a hospital room transformed into an office. Speer himself had been in the same room when he first fell ill in January 1944 (cf. chapter 7). Keitel was the next to visit Himmler. Himmler told Speer he was planning to set up a government and asked him to be part of it. He talked about the negotiations he was conducting with Bernadotte to transfer the concentration camps to the International Red Cross.
Indeed, Bernadotte did achieve some success on behalf of certain prisoners, as mentioned earlier, and as will be discussed again later, but Himmler went even further in his proposals. He proposed the surrender of the German armies on the Western front. According to some accounts the meeting took place in the evening at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck on April 23. More specifically, it is said to have taken place in the cellar of the consulate during a bombing raid and by candlelight because the electric power was out. Schellenberg accompanied Himmler. Bernadotte went back to Stockholm and made the appropriate contacts. Naturally the Western Allies rejected Himmler’s proposal for a separate peace, and Bernadotte came back on April 27 with their refusal.
On April 28, Hitler’s bunker in Berlin picked up a BBC broadcast containing a dispatch from Reuters in Stockholm revealing Himmler’s secret negotiations with Bernadotte. By all accounts Hitler was profoundly disturbed by the treachery of Himmler, who was known as “faithful Heinrich” (der treue Heinrich).
Then everything began happening at once in Berlin. On April 29, Hitler married Eva Braun. He dictated his “political testament” and appointed Admiral Dönitz “president of the Reich and supreme commander of the armed forces.” He even went so far as to put together a government (which never came into being). Speer was not part of it; he was replaced by Saur.
On April 30 at 3 P.M., Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. On May 1, Goebbels and his family followed suit. Apparently, Bormann was killed trying to leave the city. On May 2 the last defenders of Berlin surrendered.
In Holstein, Dönitz formed his government on May 2. He set it up in Flensburg near the Danish border. Speer was named minister of the economy and of production.
On May 4 in Lüneburg, Adm. Hans von Friedeburg signed the official surrender of all the German forces currently in the northwestern section of the Reich and in Denmark and Holland. On May 5 he arrived in Reims to negotiate the surrender. Jodl joined him there on May 6. On May 7, Jodl signed the unconditional surrender. On May 8, Keitel signed it in Berlin.
ORANIENBURG AND SACHSENHAUSEN. Oranienburg is a city in the northern suburbs of Berlin in what is now Brandenburg state. It is located in a wooded region where between 1933 and 1945 the SS was able to broaden its hold to a considerable extent. The Sachsenhausen concentration camp, named after part of Oranienburg, was an important component of the complex that was gradually built up and can be described as it was in early 1945.
First of all, the SS administrative center, the WVHA under the command of Pohl, which was mentioned in chapter 1, was located in Oranienburg within an enormous complex of varied buildings. All decisions regarding the concentration camps, even those concerning the smallest details, were made there. Kammler was at home there. The complex also contained the barracks of the Brandenburg SS detachment, a major arsenal, motor fuel storage depots, and repair workshops for military vehicles and equipment hidden in the pine forest.
The history of this concentration camp has been written by Jean Bezaut,4 who was a prisoner there. The name of his book is Oranienburg 1933–1935, Sachsenhausen 1936–1945. As the title indicates, as early as 1933 there was already a camp in Oranienburg in a former brewery where the Nazis, in this case the SA, interned their political opponents. The camp came under SS control in 1934 and was closed in 1935. Another one, called Sachsenhausen, was built on a new site starting in July 1936. It quickly grew into a large camp, and prisoners from Sachsenhausen were sent on to open the camps of Neuengamme, Gross Rosen, and Auschwitz.
The Sachsenhausen prisoners worked5 for the SS in the arsenal, the warehouses, and the workshops. Beneath the pine trees there was also a plant where Panzerfaust (bazookas) were produced, and the Klinker brick factory was located near the Havel Canal. Annexed to the camp itself was a DAW armaments factory (as at Buchenwald).
Above all, beginning in August 1942 concentration camp manpower was made available to the large aircraft construction company Heinkel in a factory located in Oranienburg. The experiment was successful, and a Heinkel Kommando was housed at a camp inside the factory itself, which ended up reaching a total head count of 6,000 to 7,000 prisoners. It was so successful that Rudolph, who was chief engineer of the V2 factory at Peenemünde, paid a visit to the Heinkel factory on April 12, 1943, as has been mentioned in chapter 2. His report was favorable, and he too put in a request for a prisoner workforce for Peenemünde. As already indicated, this initiative was responsible for their being employed by Mittelwerk in the tunnel factory at Dora.
The Heinkel Kommando was not the only one working for the armaments industry. There was a “Speer Kommando” at Oranienburg that recycled nonferrous metals from old electricity and telephone cables and scrapped vehicles. A camp was also set up west of Berlin in Falkensee by the DEMAG factories. Degenkolb, head of the Sonderausschuss A4 (cf. chapter 2), and Rickhey, managing director of Mittelwerk as of April 1944 (cf. chapter 7) both came from the DEMAG company.
The Sachsenhausen camp and its Kommandos, of which there were many more than the ones just mentioned, have been described in the collection of firsthand accounts drawn up by the association of French deportees of the camp. The book is entitled Sachso, the familiar name used by these deportees. The camp head count, which was always sizable, reached 28,000 at the end of 1943 and 47,700 at the end of 1944. It grew considerably in early 1945 with the evacuations from the camps in the east.
As at the other large camps, transports left Sachsenhausen and went in various directions. In September 1943, French miners, including Léon Bronchart, were transferred to Dora via Buchenwald to finish digging out tunnel A (cf. chapter 5). When the prisoners who left Buchenwald for Peenemünde in June and July 1943 (cf. chapter 2) came back to Buchenwald to be assigned to Dora (cf. chapter 5), Sachsenhausen was the camp that acted as a relay until the end (cf. chapter 10). Reinforcements were sent in October 1944 to Langenstein (cf. chapter 13).
In April 1945 the strategic withdrawal of the exterior Kommandos to the main camp exacerbated its overcrowding. Newcomers who arrived from the west were comparatively few. It is a fact that the train from Ellrich ended directly at the Heinkel factory, but Dutillieux, who came on foot from Rossla, understood only that he had arrived at “Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen.” He was given a six-figure identity number, which he “hastened to forget.” Wautrecht,6 who arrived from Ellrich, remembers that his was 138551. Lafond’s was 138148.
THE EVACUATION OF SACHSENHAUSEN. The evacuation of the Sachsenhausen camp, which began on April 21, 1945, was the most important operation in the history of the evacuations, for it involved the entire population of a major camp all leaving together in a single direction on foot with no prospect of reaching any other camp by railway convoy.
Only one other previous evacuation was on a similar scale: that of the Auschwitz concentration camp. After an initial “death march,” however, the prisoners had been transported by train to other camps. This time it was no longer possible to form trains, and there were no longer any camps able to receive the prisoners.
An evacuation column leaving Oranienburg on April 21 could go in only one direction: northeast to Schwerin in the western part of Mecklenburg, then to Lübeck, and beyond that to Holstein. Naturally, such a plan was based on the assumption that the Soviet and American forces would stay put, which they did not do. Inevitably the route ultimately turned into a dead-end. There has been a great deal of speculation, after the fact, about what the SS actually had in mind when they decided on the evacuation, which presupposes that they could have decided not to evacuate Sachsenhausen and Oranienburg with all that that implied. Once the decision to evacuate was made, there were no longer any other possibilities. When Keitel and Jodl went to set up headquarters in Fürstenberg and Plön, they were caught in the same geographical trap. In early May it was easy for them to avoid the dead-end route, but one week later it meant surrendering.
During the days preceding the evacuation the Sachsenhausen camp continued operating, since newcomers such as Dutillieux, Wautrecht, and Lafond were given identity numbers. At Ellrich, on the other hand, prisoners arriving from Karlshagen at the beginning of the month were not given identity numbers. The situation was not calm, however, for there were bombing raids, particularly one on March 15 of the Auer factories and the one on April 10 that hit Klinker as well as the SS factories in the pine forest.
The collapse of the front east of Berlin on April 19 set off the evacuation on April 21. Indeed, by Sunday, April 22 in the afternoon, Soviet troops had arrived in Oranienburg. The Falkensee camp west of Spandau could not be evacuated because it was caught when Berlin was surrounded.
It is impossible to say how many prisoners were involved in the evacuation of Sachsenhausen. In his book published in 1989, Bezaut,7 who studied all the literature on the subject, wrote: “The headcount of those on the march varies from 30,000 to 42,000; the headcount of the survivors, between 18,000 and 28,000. That means there must have been between 12,000 and 15,000 poor wretches who were struck down by SS bullets or who died of hunger or exhaustion along the way, and many in the Below woods.” In this mass of prisoners, there was nothing unusual about the fate of the prisoners from Ellrich and Rossla. At the time of the evacuation, prisoners who were too ill to move were left behind.
The departure was organized by nationality: first the Germans and the Czechs, then the Poles, the Russians and the Ukrainians, and finally the French and the Belgians, to mention only the most heavily represented nationalities. A group of twenty-seven natives of Luxembourg arrived in the front of the column in Schwerin. They are well known for having kept a precious diary of the march. The column was divided into “detachments” of five hundred prisoners under the supervision of SS and armed Green Kapos. This order was not strictly maintained throughout the evacuation.
THE STAGES OF THE EVACUATION. There were three periods in the evacuation. The first, from April 21 to 25, was the real death march to Wittstock. The itinerary, which varied depending on the detachment, was as follows: Sachsenhausen-Hohenbruch on April 21, Löwenberg-Herzberg-Neuruppin on April 22, Katerbow-Rägelin-Rossow-Herzsprung on April 23, Papenbruch on April 24, and Wittstock-Eichenfelde and the arrival at Below Woods on April 25. At that point they were on the border of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg.
Some thirty-seven miles to the east, Speer and Keitel were visiting Himmler at Hohenlychen on April 25.
The second phase took place in the Below Woods, where all of the columns were immobilized while awaiting no one knows what. Their stay in the cold and rain, without food, was fatal to many of the prisoners. Hundreds of corpses were abandoned at the site. On April 28, Red Cross trucks arrived carrying packages that were divided up after the SS and Kapos had first helped themselves. The firsthand accounts of the Red Cross delegates who brought the packages to the site are particularly valuable and coincide with those of the prisoners.
On April 26 the prisoners from Dora began evacuating Ravensbrück. Keitel and Himmler had to leave Fürstenberg and Hohenlychen. The third phase included four days of march: Freyenstein-Stepenitz on April 29, Redlin-Pankow-Siggelkow on April 30, Parchim-List-Neuruthenbeck on May 1, and Crivitz-Pinnow on May 2. A little farther on the group from Luxembourg spotted the first American tank, and the SS vanished. The other prisoners still marching behind them were left to their fate somewhere between Parchim and Schwerin, and gradually arrived in Schwerin. A large percentage of the prisoners had in fact been “liberated” during their sleep in the country.
The succinct accounts by former Ellrich and Rossla prisoners are part of this story. Dutillieux8 says that when he and his companions awoke on May 2 after sleeping close to the fire, they noticed that the SS were gone. Besançon, Henri Ertlen, and Raymond Grand have the same memory. Rémy Vincent9 was in Parchim. He notes that it was the town of the famous von Moltke family. At some point he was able to flee and was given care and food by French POWs.
Pierre Choquenet,10 a prisoner from Sachsenhausen, spent the night of May 1 to 2 with a hundred other prisoners in a barn filled with straw, guarded by SS. By morning the SS were gone. He had a fright in retrospect when he learned what had happened at Gardelegen.
There were few successful escapes during the journey. One example was Harry Paylon11 and Louis Lévy, who left their column before Wittstock, hence on April 25, and hid in the vicinity of Blumenthal in Dannenwalde. The Russians arrived there on May 2.
THE “AWFUL WEEKS AT WÖBBELIN.” On April 30, before moving in the direction of Schwerin, the American forces that had just crossed the Elbe liberated the Wöbbelin camp. This is the camp mentioned in chapter 19, a satellite of Neuengamme, where the convoy of prisoners from Helmstedt went after making a detour through Altmark. It arrived on about April 12. Two weeks then went by before the arrival of the Americans. David Rousset,12 who was in that convoy, talked about the “awful weeks in Wöbbelin” in his book L’Univers concentrationnaire:
“The last weeks in Wöbbelin were rather blurred. Several transports found themselves gathered together in this encampment, and the men did not know each other well. A distance of about two hundred and eighteen yards separated the kitchens from the Revier, and a dozen armed men were needed to protect the soup cans that were brought to the sick. Every day, violent acts were committed on the wasteland surrounding the barracks. As soon as the distribution was completed, groups of about ten prisoners got together and attacked the weakest ones, isolating them in order to steal their food. There were three cases of cannibalism and the morgue had to be put under guard.
“There was not a drop of medicine; men were dying by the line. Soon, it became difficult to transport them. The stench of the mass graves was horrible. There were scenes of madness every night in the Schonung Block, a branch of the Revier, where the weak and the dying were crowded in together, and a few others lay low to avoid drudgery. Every night people were killed and the screams went on until dawn. From time to time, the Kapos would intervene, striking the prisoners with their clubs.”
Wieslaw Kielar,13 in Anus mundi, talks about the camp at length in identical terms. It suffices to quote a single paragraph: “There were countless corpses. In one barrack, the skeletons were piled up to the ceiling, and the rats had the run of the building. The authorities had absolutely no interest in what was going on in the camp. They left us to ourselves, and were content to keep watch over the walls to be sure we did not escape. [ . . . ] It only took us a few days to turn into ‘Muselmänner’ who were indistinguishable from the rest of the inhabitants of the camp.”
The camp remained under surveillance until the last moment. The SS and the German Kapos departed shortly before American tanks came up along the fences. Kielar even says: “The sentry in the nearest watchtower came rushing down, abandoning his weapons and running as fast as he could into a thicket nearby.” The fighting continued in the neighboring forest, but the army had already taken control of Ludwigslust to the south.
“The prisoners stormed the wagons loaded with food parked on a siding. They came back with their arms filled with bread, sugar, flour and tinned food.” Kielar and his comrades went off on foot toward Ludwigslust.
THE STAY OF DORA PRISONERS AT RAVENSBRÜCK. The third of the Altmark convoys that crossed the Elbe finally arrived in Ravensbrück, where the largest women’s concentration camp of the Reich was located. The first prisoners arrived there in May 1939. The camp was situated north of Brandenburg a few miles from Mecklenburg, directly east of the small town of Fürstenberg. Hohenlychen was located seven miles farther east.
The same variety of origins and nationalities existing in the large men’s camps was also found at Ravensbrück. There were many French prisoners, virtually all of whom were liberated in April 1945, even before the evacuation. The first ones, 299 in all, were taken out on April 3 by Swiss Red Cross trucks. The others were liberated on April 23 by the Swedish Red Cross following the negotiations between Bernadotte and Himmler and transferred to Sweden. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier remained voluntarily at the camp, and she was still there when the Russians arrived.
When the Dora prisoners arrived on April 14 by the convoy that had come from Goslar via Magdeburg, Wittenberge, and Oranienburg, they were not sent to the main camp but rather to the Jugendlager, a satellite camp that had served as a sort of “little camp” for aged and invalid prisoners who were ultimately eliminated. Contrary to a widely held opinion, there was no correlation between their arrival and the liberation of the French women prisoners by the Swedish Red Cross, which took place later.
There was no communication between the two camps from April 14 to 26, the date on which the evacuation of the Jugendlager began. The Dora prisoners did not see the liberation of the French women prisoners nor did they know they were close neighbors of Keitel and Himmler.
Of the prisoners in the three Altmark convoys who arrived at Wöbbelin, Ravensbrück, and Oranienburg, those from Dora were better off than the others. They were alone in their new camp, and most of them had already cohabited for more than a year under generally peaceful terms, which reduced friction between them.
Furthermore, their existence was well known to the Red Cross. Benès14 and Litomisky15 noted the presence of six white IRC trucks on the site the day they arrived. They brought packages, which were distributed for the first time on the third day. Benès explains: “It was the first package of its kind I received. The contents were fantastic. There was even some chocolate, raisins, tinned meat, margarine, powdered milk and, imagine this, real (instant) coffee.” Several accounts mention insomnia caused by the coffee. The packages also contained soap, toilet paper, and cigarettes. The packages were individual American army rations.
The Red Cross also brought medicine, which was used in the improvised Revier. The author, who arrived with erysipelas, swallowed something (no doubt sulfa drugs) and was back on his feet in a few days. He was able to join those among his comrades who went every day to dig antitank ditches in the surrounding sand with a total lack of enthusiasm and efficiency.
As has already been explained, the evacuation from Dora had been a terrible ordeal due to the long forced march through the Harz and the absence of any food distribution after the departure, in other words, between April 5 and 14. The rations distributed upon departure were supposed to last three days. The oldest prisoners appear to have suffered the most. Some died, including Reverend Heuzé, who was a forty-seven-year old “21,000.”
THE EVACUATION FROM RAVENSBRÜCK TO MALCHOW AND PARCHIM. The evacuation of Dora had been triggered by the approach of the American forces, who were presumed to be in Kassel some fifty-six miles away. It ended at Ravensbrück, which was located about forty-seven miles from Schwedt on the left bank of the Oder River with Soviet troops already opposite them on the right bank.
After Zhukov and Koniev, it was Rokossovsky’s turn to cross the Oder, which he did on April 18. First he had to take Stettin, which fell on April 26. From then on he was free to move through western Pomerania, northern Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg. There was nothing left for the Germans to do but evacuate Hohenlychen, Ravensbrück, and Fürstenberg.
The first phase of the evacuation, which began on April 26, took the columns from Ravensbrück to Malchow, where a second camp was set up. The sick prisoners stayed at the camp; they will be discussed later. Some prisoners who were still weak, such as Jean-Paul Renard, Raymond de Miribel, and Richard Pouzet, were transported directly to Malchow by four gas-generator trucks.
The others set out on foot in columns of a hundred men. The SS escorting them were no longer the same as those who had been on guard between Dora and Ravensbrück. The latter had presumably gone off at last to fight the war. Those who replaced them were rather older men, “reservists.” They seemed peaceful but no one trusted them, for they were armed and wearing SS uniforms. While they proved to be harmless, no one could have foreseen that. At the time of departure each prisoner was given a Red Cross package, but there were none left for the last ones leaving. The SS must have helped themselves beforehand.
The itinerary noted by Woussen was as follows: Steinförde-Menow-Strasen-Wustrow on April 26, with an encampment in a small wood for the night; Wesenberg-Zirtow-Mirow on April 27; Lärz-Vipperow-Röbel on April 28, and again a small wood (after Lärz, the column was in the vicinity of Rechlin, where the airfield used by Speer was located); Sietow-Roez-Malchow on April 29. Ribault’s column went farther north but also arrived in Malchow.
The author remembers two anecdotes. After the first night in the woods the SS wanted to form their columns of a hundred men again, but one of the prisoners had gone to join a friend in another column. The first SS counted his flock, once, twice, and found only 99. Stück said that there had been an escape and gave the signal to depart. The second SS counted his flock and found 101 several times, ended by shrugging his shoulders, and also gave the signal to depart, without comment. Later there was a pause in the center of the village. Prisoners exchanged a part of their packages, soap for potatoes, with some peasants. An SS came up and set some sort of exchange rate, to be sure “his” prisoners were not cheated.
The only concern of these old SS was to go west as quickly as possible and be taken prisoner by the American forces and not by the Soviets. They could lose a few prisoners en route without worrying about it. The main thing was that enough of them remain to justify their employment. The adventures of those who “escaped” before Malchow will be discussed later.
At the camp in Malchow a number of prisoners gave up trying to go any farther. One of them was Woussen. Again there were sick prisoners in need of care, and their fate also will be discussed later. The others set out again, going around Lake Plau. The columns had become totally slack, and a great many prisoners scattered in the countryside east of Parchim, hiding in small groups, since any armed detachment could still be dangerous even if they were not SS. There are a number of firsthand accounts in French. The interpreter Georges Schmidt16 was in the company of Johnny.
In Lübz between Plau and Parchim, prisoners17 who were there saw an American vanguard arrive on May 2 at 8:30 P.M. The next morning the American forces had withdrawn. The Russians arrived next, slightly delayed by rearguard fighting with German soldiers who were protecting the withdrawal of the mass of their comrades. The Russians finally joined up with the Americans, who had been in control of Parchim for some time.
The prisoners scattered in the vicinity were free. They mention Lübz, Parchim, Spornitz, and Stolpe as the places of their liberation. Most of them quickly went to the zone controlled by the American forces18 at various points: Neustadt-Glewe, Ludwigslust, and Grabow. Ribault19 has provided the chronology of a repatriation: by truck on May 6, Ludwigslust-Jessenitz (Americans); May 11, Jessenitz-Celle (British camp); May 13, Celle-Sulingen; May 15 and 16, Sulingen-Rheine-Bocholt-Kevelaer; by train on May 17, Kevelaer-Brussels-Lille.
In early May 1945 the American troops formed a sort of barrier between the Elbe and the Baltic in the western part of Mecklenburg around the capital city, Schwerin, where many columns converged. They had hardly finished liberating the prisoners at Wöbbelin when they found themselves on May 2 faced with the long column of prisoners from Sachsenhausen, which stretched along the road from Pinnow to Crivitz and Parchim and had just lost its guards. It was sixteen miles from Wöbbelin to Parchim.
Immediately to the east of Parchim, all around Lübz, the prisoners from Ravensbrück had just arrived. The Soviet troops were on their heels. The junction between the Americans and the Soviets was made during the day on May 3, and the war was over in that part of Germany.
The accounts of the prisoners from Wöbbelin, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück mention that they met up with columns of women prisoners, but there is no consistent view of their movements. There are no accounts by French women deportees at Ravensbrück on this subject because they were transferred separately to Sweden.
That was when Milan Filipcic, one of the Slovenes in the Ko Scherer, met his sister, who unbeknownst to him had been deported to Ravensbrück. He himself had been arrested in the part of Slovenia annexed by Italy in 1941 and then occupied by the Germans in 1943. His elder sister, Zmagoslava Filipcic, had remained in Maribor (Marburg in German) in 1941, in the part annexed by the Reich. She was arrested there in April 1944 under the germanized name of Victoria Filiptschitsch and arrived at Ravensbriick in July.
Filipcic recalls:20 “Towards evening, we arrived in Malchow. There was a small camp there with a few barracks. We went inside and fell on the ground, half-dead with fatigue. During the night we were awakened by the arrival of other prisoners. It was a transport of women. In the morning, in the general confusion, I spotted a young girl with a red triangle and the initial ‘J.’ I recognized her, for we had gone to the same school for a while. I called to her by her name and told her mine. She told me that my sister was there and went to fetch her. We had not seen each other for four years. We embraced on the camp road. A woman SS guard came running up to hit my sister. People cried out that we were brother and sister and she did not insist.”
Filipcic’s column and that of his sister then set out going west, not far from each other, and were liberated by American tanks. The Russians arrived next. They were cavalrymen with accordions. Filipcic concludes: “For the first time in a long while, we danced.”
A very special case was that of Margarete Buber-Neumann.21 A German communist activist who had emigrated to the USSR, she was interned in a gulag and her companion, Heinz Neumann, was a victim of the 1937 purges. She was handed over to the Gestapo by the Soviets at Brest-Litovsk in 1940 and was a prisoner at Ravensbrück until 1945. She was part of a group of some sixty Czech and German women, all “veterans” of the camp, who were suddenly liberated on April 21 “with a certificate stating that we had been freed, but that we were to go and present ourselves within three days to our local Gestapo office.” They left the camp in rows, walking toward Fürstenberg. “We didn’t have any money or any ration tickets, and all we had to sustain ourselves were a few slices of bread.”
She found a refugee train in Fürstenberg that went right past all the stations until Güstrow. People from the Volkssturm gave her money and tinned food. After many a fright, she ended up with the Americans in Bad Kleinen (to the north on the edge of Lake Schwerin). Given her past, she did not wish to be “liberated” by the Russians. She finally went home to her family in Franconia by bicycle.
Concentration camp prisoners, both men and women, accounted for only a small portion of the mass of people moving westward. Most of them were from what was left of the “Vistula” group of German armies, who were trying to avoid captivity in the Soviet Union. There are two accounts on this subject, one by the Czech prisoner Jiri Benès and one by the Pole Wieslaw Kielar.
Benès22 had just arrived in Parchim: “Everywhere along the roads lay thousands, tens of thousands of weapons, silent guns frozen in their last firing position. On all sides, heaps of shells. On the way out of the village, the first German suicides. [ . . . ] And the roads were overrun with a crowd of frantic, terror-stricken people staggering westward. In the villages, hundreds of soldiers. A few of them shattered their weapons against boundary stones and telephone poles.”
Kielar23 was already farther west, in Ludwigslust: “We were in danger of being separated from each other in the crowd of Germans who were coming to give themselves up. We were fascinated by the sight of them. They were standing in rows on either side of the street, in which American soldiers were patrolling, and from time to time, shouting incomprehensible orders. On a wide avenue harshly lit up by floodlights arrived an uninterrupted flow of vehicles of all kinds, gigantic tanks, armored cars, guns of every caliber hitched to each other. Soldiers from all the armed forces were hanging onto these vehicles in bunches. The earth shook and the windowpanes of the abandoned houses vibrated as these monstrous vehicles rolled by.”
Among the soldiers in German uniform who arrived in the region of Schwerin were French SS.24 They were the remains of the “Charlemagne Division,” which had joined the fighting in Pomerania in February and March 1945 and suffered considerable losses. Those who were able to get away (about 1,100 men) regrouped on March 24 in Mecklenburg east of Neustrelitz. Their headquarters was in Carpin, twelve miles north of Ravensbrück. At the time their head count broke down into 400 workers and 700 combatants. Three hundred and fifty of the combatants went to Berlin on April 24 and were among the last defenders of the Reich Chancellery. The 350 other combatants and 400 workers were evacuated westward on foot along the Malchin-Teterow-Güstrow route. They surrendered to the British. The Dora prisoners who had escaped from their columns met up with isolated French SS moving southward under circumstances that will be described later.
There was also the pathetic exodus of civilians of all ages, reminiscent of other earlier ones in other places. Some had come from great distances with their carts from Pomerania or even East Prussia.
THE ESCAPES OF JOUANIN, BRETON, AND SCHREVE. During the first days of the evacuation of Ravensbrück, various escapes took place. All of them have not been the subject matter of a detailed account, but there are six which have been recounted in French. In short, this section will discuss the escapes of Baillon, Boisot, Breton, Jouanin, Schreve, and Thiercelin, with the understanding that each of these prisoners had, of course, excellent companions during their adventures, except for Jouanin who acted alone.
There is no connection among these escapes, which took place under different circumstances and ultimately took varied routes. They are presented in no particular order, except that Baillon’s escape is described last, since the participants made the longest journey and were the last to return.
Jouanin’s firsthand account25 is short: “In Wesenberg, after the second night in the forest, taking advantage of the chaos when everyone got up, I remained hidden in a thicket of juniper bushes, which are really prickly! The column set off again, with the last ones walking close to my hiding place, and I didn’t flinch. Quickly, keeping close to the ground, I took refuge in a changing cabin near the pond. On 30 April, I was liberated by the Red Army. I was given food and ordered to stay behind the line of fire.” He returned to France on June 5.
Breton’s escape26 actually involved four comrades who had been together for more than a year: Pierre Breton, Maurice Clergue, Michel Deleval, and Louis Gamier. On the evening of April 29, with the column increasingly stretched out, they dropped out without attracting any attention and disappeared into the forest. Mecklenburg is a very wooded area. They slept and then wanted to make a fire. “All of a sudden,” Gamier recalls, “we heard someone yelling behind us. It was an SS man who was limping, the little bastard. He must have had to let go of his unit because he couldn’t keep up, but he was still trying to be useful.”
The SS man pushed the four friends along in single file to a clearing where there was a Luftwaffe captain with several soldiers. There he took his automatic pistol and shot a single bullet (no one knows why), which wounded Gamier in the shoulder. The captain questioned them and then let them go. They were put in a barn and told to wait. There was a brief skirmish outside. The Russians arrived and sent them to the rear. That was on April 30, not far from Fürstenberg. They set off again toward Ravensbrück and were free in the country for a week. Then they were taken to a reassembly camp.
That was when Gamier had to be hospitalized in two consecutive hospitals, due rather to dysentery than to his gunshot wound, which was rather superficial. The second hospital was in Neuruppin, where Soviet noncommissioned officers and soldiers, a group of French prisoners of war, a Belgian deportee, and a few others had gathered. “It was quite an environment,” Gamier recalls. One day the Frenchmen were transferred to Berlin. They were repatriated by airplane on June 21, 1945.
Schreve’s escape27 took place between Lärz and Vipperow, hence on the 28th, according to Woussen’s chronology. There were several Dutchmen and the Frenchman Pierre Rozan. As in Breton’s escape, it involved fleeing into the forest, “taking advantage of a turn in the road.” The escapees heard a group of French SS go by. In Vietzen they went to a castle where they found “a well-dressed lady, with gray hair framing an aristocratic face with gorgeous blue-green eyes,” a young blond girl, and two old servants. They were received very well and slept at the castle.
Dressed in civilian clothes, they mixed in with the refugees. They were in a barn in Rödel when the Russians arrived. From then on they went in the direction of Wittenberge via Stepenitz and Putlitz. All the bridges on the Elbe were down. Downstream in the vicinity of Schnakenburg they had trouble reaching the Americans on the other bank. Schreve, who spoke several languages, was authorized to cross over, after extensive negotiations, and came back with a “paper” allowing him to continue on his way with his companions.
THE ESCAPES OF BOISOT AND THIERCELIN. Boisot’s escape28 involved three closely knit comrades from the Ko Scherer: Guy Boisot, Francis Finelli, and André Fortané. José, another French prisoner, went with them; they never heard from him again after 1945. On April 27 they dropped out of their column, which had stretched out very far and set off across the fields. They found civilian clothes and food in abandoned houses. When they arrived in Mirow on April 30 they moved into the cellar of a house under construction. The Russians arrived on May 1 and threw grenades into the cellar. They came out alive.
From Mirow they went toward Wittenberge after “requisitioning” a carriage pulled by two horses. Fortané, who was a farmer at the time, took the reins. They made a French flag. “When we crossed a Russian cavalry detachment, the soldiers decided our horses were more beautiful than theirs, and without any further discussion, they proceeded to exchange animals.”
They arrived in Wittenberge by the main road through Wittstock, Pritzwalk, and Perleberg, but the bridge was no longer standing and they had to take an American patrol boat to cross the Elbe. “To get to the patrol boat, you needed a Russian exit ticket. To get that ticket, you had to state your identity and the purpose of your trip.” Finelli and Fortané, pretending to be polyglots, managed to have themselves taken on as Schreiber by the Russians, who were completely unable to cope and took a dinghy to reach the patrol boat “taking advantage of the change in the shift of the Russian functionaries.”
Thiercelin29 gave a remarkable account of his escape, which he started writing “on 9 or 10 May” during the period between the Liberation and repatriation. Unfortunately, it can only be summarized here. “On 29 April, taking advantage of a hesitation caused by a military convoy, I made my way to a haystack and hid inside, covering myself with a few bales. A little later, I sensed other movements in the haystack and a dialogue began among the escapees who did not know each other. It turned out there were six of us: Gabriel Lacoste, Henri Calès, Robert Thiercelin, Bernard Aubin, Marcel Minguet and a young man with whom we lost touch afterward.” At the time they must have been near Malchow in Penkow.
The next morning Thiercelin discreetly called out to a French prisoner of war who was pushing a wheelbarrow nearby. He went to get work shifts from his Kommando, which was set up on a large farm. In their new guise the six companions went to the farm, where they ate and slept.
On the evening of May 1 the prisoners of war set off on foot to Lübeck. The six escapees started out accompanying them, but they did not have the strength to keep up. The next day they went toward Goldberg, beyond Karow, and then turned toward Lübz. They discovered two large Kommandos of prisoners, one French and the other Italian, on a big state farm. At that point the Russians arrived. They remained there from May 3 to 5.
The Russians looted shops and brought them food supplies. “Two sacks of sugar and cases of flour that, I seem to remember, was or merely looked like cornstarch. Following the advice of our doctor comrades when we left Ravensbrück, concerning how to readapt to food, the farm milk, sugar and cornstarch provided the makings for excellent dishes and a way to recover our strength during those few days.”
Then, they decided it was time to leave. “We requisitioned a four-wheel wagon at the farm and mounted a wooden chassis which we covered with a big rug from the castle for shelter. A large flag on a wooden pole attached to the frame floated above the team of horses. Henri Calès, who said he had learned something about teams of horses in the artillery division, would be the coachman. We loaded food onto the wagon and a sizable reserve of potatoes.” They went to Parchim and were then allowed to go over to the American side on May 7. On May 8 they had to abandon their wagon and horses and get into American trucks. They were brought to a reassembly center and repatriated to France in stages.
The most important part of the entire account of this route was Thiercelin’s finding of a saxophone. Abandoned on the road by a prisoner in very poor condition, Thiercelin had recovered it. Thus he was able to salute a passing German detachment by playing “Vieux Camarade,” accompany the raising of the French and Italian flags for the two Kommandos at the farm, begin a recital for Soviet officers, and accompany the wagon with military music.
BAILLON’S ESCAPE. Baillon’s escape30 was barely an escape. It was rather the observation by a group of some ten prisoners that their column had become extremely slack and that they were no longer being guarded. No SS were in sight when they entered a village, and so they walked straight on and entered a cemetery instead of following the road, which turned off to the right. As they were discussing what to do they were overheard by prisoners of war, who went and got them civilian clothes in the abandoned houses in the neighborhood. The author was in this group, with René Souquet, his companion in the Ko Scherer, and Marcel Baillon, with whom he had been active politically in Amiens before the war. He did not know the others. A careful (and very recent) study of a detailed map has allowed him to situate the escape at Zirtow on April 27.
Disguised as Mecklenburg residents more or less in their Sunday best, the ten prisoners blended into the flow of refugees who were moving westward. As in any exodus, there was a mass of civilians on foot or in wagons and isolated soldiers who had become separated from their units. One of them was an SS wearing a “France” badge. Hearing French being spoken, he started up a conversation with the author and explained how he had managed to get out of the “Kolberg pocket.” From an historical point of view the conversation with this young man, who seemed personally rather sympathetic, would have been interesting, but they were not really in equal positions at the time, and the author broke off the surprising conversation after walking a mile at a good pace to wait for his companion, who had not taken any notice.
The group, still mixed in with civilians and prisoners of war (and others) of all nationalities, went past Mirow, Röbel, Malchow, and Karow and that night went to sleep in the loft of a barn, away from the road. They had a noisy awakening: on one side they could see Russian tanks shooting over the barn onto a German rearguard on the other side, which they watched as it finally picked up and left. They made contact with their liberators and were invited to a quick lunch at headquarters. The Russians went off to fight again but not for long, as it was by then May 2. The group did not know this and had to decide on a course of action. There were French prisoners of war throughout the region, from satellite Kommandos of a Stalag located in Neubrandenburg in eastern Mecklenburg. Their instructions were to go to the Stalag. The group of escapees decided to follow their example, in short stages.
Food supplies were not a problem, for abandoned houses were everywhere. The author, who did not have a big appetite, did not overeat. He found an eleven-pound bag of granulated sugar and ate it, bit by bit, with a small spoon. By the time they arrived in Neubrandenburg everyone was apparently in acceptable health. Their reception at the Stalag began with an inspection of their underarms, as the SS bore tattoos on that part of the body. Survivors of the Charlemagne Division were trying to get back to France without being recognized. Repatriation began shortly thereafter, and the oldest prisoner of the Stalag gave priority to the deportees, of whom there were few.
The firsthand accounts of French deportees often include their encounters with groups of prisoners of war. Sometimes they contain grievances that are vehemently expressed. Most of their judgments, however, are very favorable. The French prisoners (and their Belgian, Dutch, and Italian comrades) played an important role in 1945 in rural areas. This was especially obvious in regions that had large farms such as Mecklenburg. The “escapees” in this region owed them a great deal. That was true of Antoine Cirieco,31 an Ellrich prisoner who had gone through Oranienburg and left the evacuation column with a comrade near Parchim. They were quickly camouflaged as French prisoners of war.
British trucks arrived from Schwerin carrying Soviets of every status, prisoners of war, former prisoners, and Ostarbeiter as well as Poles and citizens of other Eastern European countries. They went off with citizens of Western European countries. In Neubrandenburg these were mainly Frenchmen. It was apparent that the repatriation of Westerners to the west was in some way conditioned by the return of all Soviets to the east, some of whom had no desire to go.
It should be noted that British replaced American forces in Schwerin at the end of May 1945, before the transfer of the western part of Mecklenburg to Soviet control. From Schwerin the escapees were transported to Lüneburg, where they were sprayed with DDT and housed, and then sent to Sulingen. From there a train took them to Kevelaer, and the author made the following comments:
“The weather is sunny, it is Sunday, and the people are dressed up to go to Mass. The people of the area, Germans, in a lovely little town, intact. I’m here, like a simpleton, disguised as a Mecklenburg native over my striped uniform, with a rucksack containing a few books found here and there. I feel out of place. I come from another country, a country of madmen, governed by insane rules. It’s true, I have escaped. Now, I am going to escape from any constraints. No one is going to dispose of me at will anymore.”
The author was not quite right about what he wrote. He was minimizing the importance of the few weeks of wandering he had experienced between Zirtow and Neubrandenburg, without papers or money. Well, not exactly. In a piece of corrugated cardboard folded in half, he did have a few letters received at Dora with his name and identity number, including those from his father posted at Buchenwald and Wertmarke testifying to his enthusiasm as a Vertikant controller. This period of “truce,” during which the prisoner was no longer a prisoner but not yet a civilian with family and professional responsibilities, was spent in different ways: Wexler spent it playing the role of burgermeister of Biere, Rogerie spent it making crepes in Stassfurt, and Dutillieux32 spent three weeks in Schwerin doing nothing, for he had just walked nearly 375 miles. Fifty years later, whenever anecdotes come to mind, the first to be told are the ones about the Guy-Francis-André trio in the carriage and Thiercelin’s saxophone.
THE LATE RETURN OF THE LAST SURVIVORS. As has been explained in the previous chapters, due to the vagaries of the evacuations, sick prisoners were more or less abandoned at Dora, Seesen, Bergen-Belsen, Sulingen, Beendorf, and Halberstadt. Doctors and other devoted comrades took care of them with the limited means available prior to the intervention of American or British military, who could not cope themselves when the problems reached the scale of Bergen-Belsen. Similar situations arose between the Elbe and the Oder Rivers, in Sachsenhausen, Schwerin, Malchow, and Ravensbrück.
THE LAST PRISONERS IN ORANIENBURG. When the Sachsenhausen camp was evacuated on Saturday, April 21 in the morning, there were still fifteen hundred patients in the Revier, including sick prisoners transferred by truck from the Heinkel Kommando. Six prisoner doctors stayed with them: two Frenchmen, Émile-Louis Coudert and Marcel Leboucher; two Belgians, Delaunnois and Jean Sommerhausen; and two Dutchmen, Justus Koch and Franz Bischoff. There had been some discussion of blowing up the five blocks of the Revier, but it did not occur.
On April 22 at the end of the afternoon, Russian soldiers appeared, but fighting continued in the vicinity. Those who could went to Bernau, nineteen miles farther east. Others stopped in Basdorf. Oesch,33 after wandering through bombing attacks, joined other Frenchmen in Wandlitz.
Raymond Wautrecht34 has given a highly personal account of what happened at the time in the area: “The Russian officers who came to take stock of the situation advised those of us who were able to walk to leave the camp, get away from the combat zone and take shelter on the other side of the Oder. Helped by other prisoners who were a little more able-bodied than I, I left the camp. [ . . . ] We walked through a forest on a road littered with the debris of military equipment, along with the bodies of German soldiers and horses that had been killed. I confess I felt more pity for the poor animals than for the Germans who had made us suffer so much.
“At the end of the day, we occupied a farm where a French comrade prepared our first meal as free men. A patrol of Russian soldiers brought us a bottle of vodka to celebrate our liberation. Unfortunately, the next day, we found one of our companions who had not been able to handle the feast, and had died during the night. That forced us to be more cautious. I stayed with the group for a few days, and once I had recovered some strength, I decided to go back in the direction of the camp, which I avoided like the plague, and reached the city of Oranienburg, largely empty of its inhabitants.
“As I wandered around the city, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Belgian and French prisoners of war who had left their Stalag with a cavalry horse hitched to a wagon loaded with packages intended for the prisoners but which proved to be impossible to distribute. Together, we settled in an unoccupied apartment building not far from a hospital where I could be treated for my dysentery. There, we began the wait for repatriation. Our group was composed of two French POWs, two Belgian POWs, an American political prisoner and myself. I spent my time walking the horse in the surrounding meadows; we became good friends. From time to time, I would go to the camp for news. I found comrades there who hoped that by staying in the Revier, they would be repatriated sooner. Two thirds of the sick prisoners were there, and the mortality rate was still high.”
Only after two months, on June 24 and 25, did French airplanes transfer the 113 French survivors from Tempelhof to Le Bourget. Those from Bernau and Wandlitz left by truck in early June for the American zone in Dessau. As for Wautrecht, who was evicted along with his comrades from the apartment building and forbidden to remain in the town by order of the burgermeister of Oranienburg, he went through Leipzig to be repatriated. He arrived in Liège on July 5, and an ambulance took him home to his parents in Houdeng-Goegnies.
Some of the sick prisoners arrived in Oranienburg from Ellrich on April 16. One of them was Étienne Lafond.35 First he was assigned to an ordinary block. “I had illusions about my strength. In the company of my comrades, I washed myself from head to toe and shaved. What a relief to become civilized again.” The next day, however, he had to go to the Revier, where he was admitted.
“For the first time in many long months, I looked at myself in a mirror. My hair, which had started growing back, lay shaggy on my emaciated skull. My face was nothing but two sockets, a stretched nose and cheekbones sticking out. As for my body, it had been reduced to the state of a skeleton. I had lived off my buttocks, the way a camel lives off its hump.”
After the Russians arrived, Lafond stayed for eight days with a few comrades in the abandoned Oranienburg camp. On April 30 a Polish ambulance drove him to Sachsenhausen. He was saved. Starting on May 5 he noted the improvements in his condition along with various comments about those around him, such as this one on May 14: “Two beds away from me, there is a Pole who has gone mad and will not take off his bowler hat or let go of his umbrella, which he guards jealously day and night.”
On May 18 he observed, “Since yesterday, a very clear improvement in the food” and “I am fattening up by the minute.” On May 22, “I am starting to devour books.” Then the food declined. On June 3, “For the first time, I got up and went to take some air and sunshine on a garden bench.” He left on June 24. He wrote an account of his deportation in May and June before being repatriated, which was published under the title Survie.
Yves Delogne, the brother of Xavier, finally died there on July 12, 1945.
THE LAST PRISONERS IN SCHWERIN, MALCHOW, AND RAVENSBRÜCK. After the long evacuation march from Sachsenhausen, “most of the survivors stopped in Schwerin,36 which began to look like an unsavory area.” They were housed in the arsenal, in town, or in the Adolf Hitler barracks on the outskirts. After many difficulties, repatriation began in the middle of May. It was carried out by train as far as Hagenow, then either directly by plane or by trucks to Lüneburg and Sulingen. From Sulingen there were trains. The last Frenchmen and Spanish Republicans went back by French planes from Lüneburg to Le Bourget on June 10.
A medical team was working in the barracks in Schwerin with Dr. Ségelle, who had been in the evacuation first from Ellrich to Oranienburg and then from Sachsenhausen to Schwerin. Grand and Besançon were with him.
At the camp in Malchow on April 30 were prisoners who had arrived the night before on foot. They had made the journey from Ravensbrück in several stages and did not have the strength to go back on the road with their comrades. There were also sick prisoners who had been transported by truck from Ravensbrück. There was also a women’s camp, which refused to be dragged into an evacuation.
Finally the SS vanished and the Russians arrived. There was widespread disorder. The Polish took over the Revier, and the French-speaking prisoners set up their own separate organization in the SS infirmary, three hundred yards from the camp. Three French prisoners, Jean Cormont,37 André Cardon, and Roland Filiatre, took charge of this little camp, with two woman prisoners, Lucie Brembéche and Mélanie Gaude. They were helped by Father Aubrun, chaplain of the POWs. After three weeks they succeeded in convincing the American authorities to come and get the Western prisoners from Malchow and bring them to Schwerin. They were repatriated along with the others. Cardon remained in Schwerin with the assignment to see the repatriation through to completion.
Richard Pouzet38 was among the ill who were transported by truck from Ravensbriick to Malchow. He had a serious attack on May 1. He said: “I nearly gave up the fight.” Then he regained consciousness: “After those days of incoherence, raving, delirium and evanescence, I recovered my lucidity, all my lucidity, total lucidity.
“What my eyes could not perceive for lack of light and a mirror, my hands revealed to me as they moved across my face. I had the ‘mask.’ The mask of death was on my face. One by one, I felt its marks: rigid, prominent jaws, angular cheekbones, wrinkled skin, ears sticking out, contorted features, sunken mouth, swollen lips.” He remained for hours struggling in this fashion. He heard the SS leave and felt he was saved. His young friend from Touraine died near him. He did not know his name.
Jean Doucet,39 a medical student and nurse at Buchenwald, then at Dora, was in Ravensbrück at the time of the camp evacuation. Two hundred sick prisoners could not be moved. He remained with them in the company of Dr. Ximenes and waited for the arrival of the Russian tanks.
Two months went by before the surviving Western prisoners were transferred by truck to Lübeck in the British zone. From there an airplane took them directly to Le Bourget on June 27, 1945. He was the last of the Frenchmen who have given firsthand accounts in this book to be repatriated from Germany.