The capitulation of May 8, 1945, marked a brutal historical rupture. Not only did it put an end in Europe to a long and hard war, but at the same time it turned Germany into a country without a government, placed entirely under the control and responsibility of four victorious powers. It is in this framework that a certain number of events and debates that characterized the post-Dora period for several years must be situated.
The complexities of American politics and the ambiguities of Soviet politics were characteristic of this necessarily confused transition period, the detailed history of which goes beyond the scope of this book.1
Three realms deserve to be explored, in that they prolong the history of Dora itself. There was, first of all, beginning with the V2 experiment, rocket research that migrated from Germany to the United States and the USSR, and even France and Great Britain. The period of the Dora Tunnel was thus seen as a mere episode, left aside for many long years. There were the trials of the war criminals, especially those connected to the concentration camps, including Dora. And there were, lastly, the consequences for historians and public opinion of the discovery of the concentration camp system. The Buchenwald camp was at the heart of the debate—which meant that the Dora camp was also concerned.
In mid-May 1945 there were no more prisoners from Dora-Mittelbau on location in the Mittelraum. The last of them, in need of medical repatriation, had left from the Nordhausen airfield. The others had either already gone home or were waiting to leave from the distant regions where the evacuations had taken them. Nor were there any more SS on location. The evacuations had dispersed them as well, and they were either prisoners of war or sometimes in hiding. The German communists who had been camp leaders had been liquidated by the SS—some of them at the very last moment. Tens of thousands of men who had, for the past twenty months, played a prominent role in the activity of the region had thus vanished. The concentration camp apparatus had entirely collapsed.
There remained around the abandoned factory idle work sites and deserted camps, several thousand unemployed German civilians—”specialists” of every level more or less dependent on the Americans who had occupied the region for a month. This American presence was not to last, however, because of the agreements with the Soviets regarding the demarcation of the zones of occupation.
Indeed, though Germany’s capitulation on May 8, 1945, led to the de facto division of the Reich according to the positions the various Allied armies had reached by that date, what still remained was to move from that state of affairs to the division that had been agreed upon by the Allied governments regarding the zones of occupation in Germany as well as Austria. This exchange would be completed by the beginning of July 1945. As it turned out, on May 8 virtually everything to do with the V2s—sites, facilities, already constructed rockets and rocket parts, archives, personnel—was very largely under American control in the zones that had to be retroceded. The Americans therefore had only several weeks to take a certain number of initiatives if they were not to lose this control.
THE PARTITION OF GERMANY INTO OCCUPIED ZONES. The dividing-up of the various regions of Germany into the future Soviet, British, American, and French occupation zones was generally carried out along traditional border lines. The agreement arrived at can be described by looking at how the Länder in present-day Germany are divided.2
The city of Berlin had to be first of all isolated from the rest of Brandenburg in order to establish a quadripartite occupation with four “sectors.” The rest of Brandenburg remained under Soviet occupation with the exception of the territories located to the east of the Oder-Neisse line, which were ceded to Poland. It was in this reduced Brandenburg that Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, and Ravensbrück were located. With the exception of a small territory to the east of the Neisse, Saxony was located in the Soviet zone. It expanded into the part of Lower Silesia that was located to the west of the Neisse. Mecklenburg was included in the Soviet zone along with “Fore” Pomerania (Vorpommern) to the west of the Oder. It was in this part of Pomerania that Peenemünde was located. The Hanoverian territory located north of the Elbe was also attached to Mecklenburg.3
Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia completed the Soviet zone. The traditional—and generally age-old—political borders were respected in the demarcation with Lower Saxony, Hesse, and Bavaria. Only a few enclaves of Brunswick and of Hesse were incorporated into Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. Buchenwald was included in the Soviet zone along with virtually all of its Kommandos such as Ohrdruf, Laura, and Langenstein. But Gandersheim was located in Lower Saxony.
The situation is more complex to describe with regard to the Dora-Mittelbau complex. The Dora camp and factory were in Thuringia, as were Nordhausen and Harzungen, Bleicherode and Kleinbodungen. This was also the case for the city of Ellrich, but the demarcation line actually ran right through the Ellrich-Station camp. The heights including the crematorium and the hamlet of Juliushütte with the SS camp were located in the district of Walkenried and were, for this reason, in Lower Saxony in the British zone whereas the prisoners’ blocks were in Thuringia. In the same way, Wieda was located in Lower Saxony as were Osterhagen and Nüxei whereas Mackenrode and Günzerode were in Thuringia. Blankenburg, Rottleberode, Kelbra, Rossla, and Sangerhausen were all located in Saxony-Anhalt along with Langenstein and Stassfurt as well as Gardelegen.
The British-occupied zone was comprised of four Länder: Schleswig-Holstein with Lübeck, Hamburg (including the Neuengamme camp), Lower Saxony, and North Rhineland-Westphalia. The Land of Bremen with its port was later included in the American zone. Porta Westfalica was located in Westphalia, and Gandersheim, Osterode, Wieda, and Walkenried in Lower Saxony. The same went for Helmstedt, whereas the Beendorf and Weferlingen installations were in Saxony-Anhalt. The site of Bergen-Belsen was situated in the heart of the British zone, in Lower Saxony.
Americans and French divided up the southern part of Germany. Dachau and Flossenbürg remained under American control. Friedrichshafen ended up included in the French zone.
RETROCESSIONS BY THE AMERICANS. With regard to the limits agreed upon, the Americans made the greatest concessions. They had to retrocede to the Soviets the western part of Mecklenburg, with Schwerin, Wöbbelin, and Ludwigslust, the better part of Saxony-Anhalt including Magdeburg, Dessau, and Halle, the western part of Saxony including Leipzig and Chemnitz, and all of Thuringia. They also had to withdraw from the west of Bohemia including Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary). They also had to give the British a part of Lower Saxony and the better part of North Rhineland-Westphalia, but obtained Bremen in exchange.
They began their retreat by the north, leaving the British in control of the west of Mecklenburg until it was ceded to the Soviets. When Marcel Baillon and his friends left Neubrandenburg at the end of May 1945 it was in British military transport trucks that had come from Schwerin to get them. They had transported Soviet citizens returning home—willingly or unwillingly—in the other direction. The Americans then turned their position in the Altmark and Lower Saxony over to the British.
But it was the Americans themselves who gave Thuringia as well as those territories under their control to the east of Thuringia to the Soviets. These explanations are necessary if one is to understand what happened on the ground in May–June 1945.
THE FATE OF THE PEOPLE FROM PEENEMÜNDE. As shown in chapter 16, five hundred selected specialists from Peenemünde were evacuated by Kammler’s special train in early April from the region of Nordhausen all the way to Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. Von Braun, due to his injury, made the trip by car. Dornberger and his entourage left Bad Sachsa at the same time to meet up with them. The other specialists waited where they were in the villages in the Nordhausen area for the arrival of the Americans. Leaders such as Sawatzki and Rickhey remained at Ilfeld.
At Oberammergau4 those concerned first set up in a comfortable barracks, nevertheless surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by members of the SD. After several days, Kammler left for an unknown destination. He was never to be seen again. He is known to have pulled back from Halle to Dresden and then to Prague. He is thought to have been killed in last-minute fighting on May 9.
His replacement at Oberammergau, an SS officer named Kummer, allowed himself to be persuaded of the risk of an air raid on the barracks and accepted that the specialists be dispersed, still under guard, in the neighboring districts. Wernher von Braun first established himself more to the north, in Weilheim, then went to a hospital in Sonthofen south of Kempten to have his arm attended to by a surgeon. He remained there until April 25, when an ambulance sent by Dornberger came to get him, taking him to a hotel at Oberjoch near the Austrian border. A small group met there, including Dornberger and Magnus von Braun, Wernher’s younger brother. It was on May 2, after the radio had announced Hitler’s death, that Magnus von Braun, who spoke English, went down into the valley by bicycle to make contact with the American authorities.5 He met an antitank company and was taken to explain himself to Reutte, in the neighboring Tyrol area. He obtained safe-conducts for seven people: his brother Wernher and himself, Dornberger and his assistant Axster, Lindenberg (a combustion chamber specialist), Bernhard Tessmann, and Dieter Huzel. The two latter men, after having hidden the V2 archives at Dörnten, as seen in chapter 16, reconnected with their colleagues by their own means.
Von Braun and his party traveled first to Reutte, and were from there taken to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, to a barracks where the Americans had gathered the specialists from Peenemünde whom they had come upon in the area. After willingly responding to the questioning of diversely qualified technicians, conducted by Dr. Richard Porter (of General Electric), who had arrived from London for the very purpose on May 8, von Braun wrote a report on May 15 and Dornberger another on May 17. It was then that the contact was established with the team that went into action in Thuringia.
SALVAGING ONE HUNDRED ROCKETS AND ARCHIVES. As shown in chapter 17, the Americans had discovered the entrance to the Dora Tunnel on April 11. But no experts could get there as long as the Nordhausen region remained a combat zone. The Eleventh German Army, encircled in the Harz Mountains, still had to be vanquished; the last units capitulated on April 20.
The V2 recovery operations were directed from Washington by Col. Gervais William Trichel, who since September 1943 had been the head of the rocket office.6 He had signed a contract with the General Electric Company for the creation of a firing range at White Sands, New Mexico. He sent Maj. Robert Staver to London in February 1945; an artilleryman, Staver was responsible for identifying, with the help of the British services, both the sites of V2 production and the competent German technicians. The announcement of the discovery of Kohnstein came as no surprise to him. He still had to locate the corresponding documentation and get his hands on von Braun and the others.
Staver got to Nordhausen on May 3. He made various contacts in the region and ended up convincing Karl Otto Fleischer, the commercial director of Elektromechanische Werke, to start looking for the archives.7 And indeed Huzel and Tessmann had confided in him on this matter before they left for Bavaria. On May 20, not without some difficulty, Fleischer and another former Peenemünde collaborator, Dr. Eberhard Rees, located the cache of the cases of archives in the Dörnten mine. The question remained as to how to transport them. This was all the more urgent as Dörnten happened to be in Lower Saxony in a zone that had to be retroceded to the British, whereas the Americans wanted to keep the treasure all for themselves.
Finally, the fourteen tons of documents were transferred by trucks to Nordhausen on May 27, then to Paris, and then shipped on to Aberdeen, Maryland—under heavy guard the whole way. The logistics of the operation were organized by the Paris representative of Ordnance—the U.S. Army’s armaments office—Col. Holger Toftoy, whom Colonel Trichel had asked to have a hundred or so V2s delivered for trials at White Sands.8
There were practically no entirely assembled rockets on location. The corresponding pieces for that quantity of units had to be gathered together in the Dora factory, packed up, and loaded. For this task a unit of the 144th Motor Vehicle Assembly Company was brought in from Cherbourg and arrived on May 18; the first convoy was ready to leave on May 22. It was followed by eight convoys every day until May 31.
All in all the operation involved 340 freight cars carrying 450 tons of material. The coordination was ensured by Maj. James Hamill based in Fulda, assisted on location by Major Bromley and Dr. Louis Woodruff. They had to identify the elements to be shipped and then find the corresponding railway cars. The convoys arrived in Antwerp and the cases were loaded onto sixteen Liberty ships after the most fragile pieces had been repacked. The cases were unloaded in New Orleans at the end of June, then shipped by railroad to the White Sands base, where they awaited assembly.
THE ORIGINS OF OPERATION OVERCAST. The Allied troops moving across Germany were followed by groups of experts dealing with a wide variety of curiosities. In chapter 3 the Rosenberg team, from the Psychological Warfare Division, has already been mentioned; they arrived at Buchenwald on April 16, 1945, to study the functioning of a concentration camp. Other teams made up of technical officers and civilian scientists were preoccupied with the state of advancement of German research in such domains as aeronautics, nuclear development, rockets, and medicine. They reported to an American-British organization called the CIOS (Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee). There was, in the nuclear field, a mission known as Alsos. Dr. Porter’s Hermes group was in charge of the rockets.
Their goal was not merely to recover the equipment and the archives but to get their hands on the German experts and convince them to collaborate.8 Above all they had to secure their services for a sufficiently long period to be sure to be able to take advantage of all their experience. With regard to the rockets, a significant group of German specialists had been gathered together at Garmisch, but the others had remained in Thuringia—a region that had to be retroceded to the Soviets. The Americans hoped that the experts would settle in their zone of occupation. They especially wanted to make sure that the families of the experts at Garmisch did not stay in the Soviet zone as potential hostages.
Staver had the department heads from Peenemünde who were at Garmisch return to Nordhausen to hook up with their principal collaborators and convince them to join the Americans. Steinhoff and others arrived on June 8, and von Braun himself arrived on June 19. Vehicles of every description were driving back and forth across the region and gathered some thousand people at the Nordhausen station. On June 20 a fifty-carriage train took them to Witzenhausen in Hesse, several miles from Thuringia.9
These sorts of evacuations were thought to be taking place in extremis as Soviet troops were expected the same day. It turned out to be a false alarm. In fact, Stalin had wanted to delay the western entrance into Berlin until July 1 and consequently postponed the arrival of the Soviets in Thuringia.
The grouping of the people from Peenemünde at Witzenhausen and in the neighboring town of Eschwege was a preservative measure, because the Americans were not yet in a position to make them precise offers. Some of the administration in Washington was hostile to allowing German citizens—civilians as much as military personnel—into the United States. But the American specialists, each in his field, felt it important that this opportunity to make technical progress in fields of key significance not be lost. They shored up their point of view with the need to strengthen their means to curtail the war against Japan.
It was only at the beginning of July 1945 that Operation Overcast, designed to bring German civilian scientists to the United States for a limited period, was decided upon. This secret decision took effect on July 17.
GERMANY AND THE CAPITULATION. The capitulation of Germany on May 7 and 8, 1945, was signed in Reims by Jodl, then in Berlin by Keitel on instructions from Dönitz, designated by Hitler as his successor. His government was established at Flensburg in the far north of the territory of the Reich in a zone that had not yet been occupied by the British army. The very act of capitulating stripped his government of its legitimacy, for there was no more German state even if there continued to be a Germany, whose fate was henceforth in the hands of the victorious powers. In the confusion of the moment Dönitz’s government, as Speer reports in his memoirs,10 nevertheless continued to sit until its “activity” was interrupted and its members finally arrested on May 23.
Already in October 1943, in the course of a meeting in Moscow, the EAC, or European Advisory Commission, had been created at the level of the American, British, and Soviet ministers of foreign affairs. It was this same commission that on September 12, 1944, in the London protocol, decided on the division of Germany into three zones of occupation and of Berlin into three sectors. At the Yalta summit in February 1945 a zone in Germany and a sector in Berlin were added for France by drawing upon the American and British zones and sectors. The following June 5 a “Berlin declaration” was published by the four Allied commanders in chief “exercising supreme control in Germany” who were at the time Eisenhower, Montgomery, Zhukov, and de Lattre de Tassigny. In this way an Allied Control Committee was set up for Germany, and for Berlin an Allied Berlin Command—the Kommandatura—which were in charge of the country’s government.
The problem at the time was to know whether there would be common administrations for all of Germany under quadripartite control. The Soviet Union, wishing to extend its influence to the country as a whole, was favorable. France, wanting Germany to remain divided, stated its opposition in the course of a meeting in London in September–October 1945. France particularly wanted to isolate the Saarland from the rest of Germany, both politically and economically. This blocking action consequently led to the development of distinct policies in the four zones, the occupation’s quadripartite aspect remaining expressed in concrete terms only in Berlin.
It is how the American zone functioned that most concerns the post-Dora phase. The key person was Gen. Lucius Clay, Eisenhower’s assistant, and then his successor Gen. Joseph McNarney. The American government, caught up in internal problems and having to deal with the war against Japan and the fighting in the Pacific, left great freedom to Clay, who acted—effectively as it turned out—as a “proconsul.” On October 1, 1945, he set up the OMGUS—the Office of the Military Government of the United States—in Frankfurt. In parallel, however, at least for several months, the activities of a certain number of organizations accompanying the advance of the American troops continued—and not necessarily in coordinated fashion.
THE INQUIRY CARRIED OUT BY THE WESTERN POWERS. In 1945 in the Western countries and especially among Americans there was considerable curiosity about the state of German science and technology and interest in the Reich’s economic performance. The manifestation of this is seen in the attention shown in what Speer had to say. He was questioned continuously for several months.11
The first to meet him were three important American special advisers, Paul Nitze, George Ball, and John Kenneth Galbraith, who had been President Roosevelt’s advisers. They directed the USSBS—the United States Strategic Bombing Survey—responsible for analyzing the impact of the bombings on production and civilian morale. They came to see him especially in the Glücksburg castle near Flensburg, where he was being put up by the duke of Mecklenburg-Holstein.
Subsequently arrested along with the other ministers on May 23, Speer was taken with them to Mondorf in Luxembourg, where he found other Nazi dignitaries such as Göring. Two weeks later he was transferred for further interrogation by the British and the Americans to Versailles, where General Eisenhower had his headquarters. When they were moved to Frankfurt, Speer was taken back to Germany and interned at Kransberg in an outbuilding of one of Göring’s castles. There he met up with several of his collaborators as well as such financiers as Hjalmar Schacht, leaders of industry such as Ernst Heinkel and Ferdinand Porsche, and a whole series of scientists and technicians. He was once again interrogated, then transferred to Nuremberg along with Schacht to stand trial beginning on November 20, 1945.
As seen above, a team of American technicians had gone to Bavaria as early as May 1945 to begin questioning von Braun and the other specialists from Peenemünde. Inquiries began very rapidly in other fields as well, as they had with Speer. It was only after several weeks that these investigations were brought together at Kransberg. There were exceptions however: the atomic physicists were questioned in England.
At Kransberg a whole inquiry apparatus was set up by a specialized organization known as FIAT, Field Information Agency, Technical. The interned Germans left there progressively, either to stand trial, to be hired on a contract basis, or merely to be released. The receptacle of competency came to be known by the rather unflattering code name “Dustbin.” Among those hired were a good number involved in Operation Overcast, which will be mentioned shortly. Other camps took in the Reich’s political and economic executives. Sawatzki, one of the directors of the Mittelwerk, seems to have disappeared from a camp in the Frankfurt region at the beginning of May 1945, but he had previously given the names of those in charge at Mittelwerk and of the SS officers at Dora. Extremely varied hypotheses have been advanced as to his fate.12
OPERATION OVERCAST AND THE RECRUITMENT OF THE ROCKET SPECIALISTS. Operation Overcast, providing for the hiring of German (or Austrian) specialists by the American authorities, was approved on July 6, 1945, by the interallied general staff13 and took effect on July 17. One of the arguments put forward was the ongoing war against Japan. In the terms in which it was presented, its scope was limited. The Germans concerned had to have a particular specialization. They had to be grouped in precise zones. Their contracts had to be established for a limited period. It was in this general framework that the recruitment of the rocket specialists took place.
In Washington, Colonel Trichel having been assigned to the operation in the Pacific theater, Col. Holger Toftoy was named head of the rocket office in late June 1945.14 Promoted to general, he remained in charge of this sector for several years. He traveled to Europe at the end of July, first to Paris, then to Hesse, where the rocket specialists were housed with their families, in precarious conditions, at Witzenhausen and at Eschwege.15 Von Braun was in discussions with Staver and Porter to draw up a departure list for the United States. The number of specialists had already been reduced from 500 to 300 when Toftoy arrived with an offer of only 100 short-term contracts. He stretched the quota to 115 on his own authority. In awaiting their departure it was planned that they be put up in a barracks in Landshut in Bavaria with their families. The establishment of the list was thus based on purely technical considerations, without individual inquiries.
THE BRITISH EPISODE. The Americans’ isolated initiatives did not satisfy the British. In June they had already tried to stop the crates containing the one hundred rockets from leaving Antwerp for New Orleans. They too sought to reconstitute a certain number of V2s in order to fire them from Cuxhaven over the North Sea, and the Americans lent them several specialists for this purpose. This was known as Operation Backfire.16
In August the British even managed to have von Braun, Dornberger, and four other experts come to England for questioning. They seized the opportunity to make them offers, but without success. Finally, von Braun and the four civilian experts returned to Germany, without Dornberger, who was considered a prisoner of war and interned in Wales with other high-ranking officers. The British wanted to put him on trial as responsible for the V2 bombings of London. The charge would ultimately be dropped. Dornberger was in command of the training of the specialized artillerymen but not of carrying out the firing itself. Above all, a trial regarding the firing of the V2s would have made it possible to bring up the massive bombings of German cities by the Royal Air Force.
Operation Backfire came to an end with three fruitless launches at Cuxhaven in September in the presence of Allied observers including the American Toftoy and the Soviet Serge Korolev. The British continued their tests in Australia, at Woomera, and then gave them up.
THE SOVIETS IN THURINGIA. The Soviet troops who arrived on May 5 at Peenemünde in Pomerania found nothing but ruins. Conversely, at Dora, on July 5, the Mittelwerk factory was intact except for certain machines such as the inspection devices, which had been destroyed by the German specialists in early April prior to their leaving. The Americans had contented themselves with getting their hands on the plans and packing away the components for the construction of one hundred rockets. The situation was identical in the Kleinbodungen workshops and at the engine test center at Lehesten.17
The Soviets’ problem was the disappearance of the German specialists who had emigrated from Thuringia to Hesse or Lower Saxony. They sought to bring them back with tempting offers of salaries, housing, or food rations, which were broadcast widely, including by radio. Very few were seduced by these attempts. The most important among them was Helmut Gröttrup. He had been arrested by the Gestapo in early 1944 with von Braun and was considered left-wing. But his rallying to the Soviets does not seem to have been ideologically motivated. He did not like Toftoy’s offers and seems to have been influenced by his seductive wife Irmgard, whose strong personality—already noticed at Peenemünde—would again stand out in the Soviet Union. Gröttrup was put at the head of a so-called Rabe Institut, the Raketenbetriebe Bleicherode, and the Mittelwerke became—somewhat uninspiredly—Zentralwerke. The German team was made up of some two hundred men of an average technical level.
Top-level Soviet experts came and set up in Thuringia. The most important among them, Serge Korolev, born in 1907, was already a great rocket specialist when he had been sent to the gulag in 1938 in the wave of purges at the time. He was released in 1944 but not rehabilitated. His identity remained secret. He moved to Bleicherode in the villa left vacant by von Braun.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE “PEENEMÜNDER” IN THE UNITED STATES. The V2 specialists were not the first Germans to arrive in the United States in the framework of Overcast. Nor were they the most numerous. In the end they would number 127, as opposed to 146 aeronautical specialists at the Army Air Force’s Wright Field in Ohio. But they made up by far and away the most homogeneous group in terms of their origin and conditions of recruitment.
Von Braun, back from London, also ended up at Kransberg at the same time as Speer before leaving for the United States.18 He left Frankfurt on September 12, 1945, with six of his former collaborators from Peenemünde. From France they crossed the Atlantic in a cargo plane with demobilized GIs. Upon their arrival in Boston on September 20 they were taken to Fort Strong, a fortress on an island in Boston Bay where they underwent a series of questionings before being transferred to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. There, waiting to be sorted through, were the fourteen tons of documents recuperated at Dörnten. According to McGovern, they represented 310,000 drawings and 3,500 reports.
Von Braun alone was taken to the Pentagon, then made the journey to El Paso, Texas, by train with Maj. James Hamill, who had returned from Germany and was in charge of the rocket operation under orders from Toftoy. El Paso is a large city in the far west of Texas, separated from Mexico by the Rio Grande. It is in the northeast part of the city that the vast military camp of Fort Bliss begins, straddling the border between Texas and New Mexico. Farther to the north in New Mexico is the White Sands firing range—a gypsum desert 120 miles long and 40 miles wide. Von Braun was first of all joined by his six companions. On December 2, 1945, he was joined by fifty-five more specialists who had crossed the Atlantic by ship from Le Havre to New York. Forty-nine others arrived in February 1946 under the same conditions. Sixteen others came to complete the team of 127.
TESTING THE V2S AT WHITE SANDS. The German specialists from Peenemünde were not particularly well received by the base commander at Fort Bliss. And the task that awaited them was difficult and unrewarding.19 When they set about to assemble the components of the V2s, they discovered that they were not in the best state of repair. They had been packed up at Dora in May 1945, transported by train to Antwerp, partially repacked, loaded onto Liberty ships, unloaded in New Orleans, and shipped by train to El Paso where they had been stocked for six months without any qualified personnel there to take delivery. To get them into workable condition they had to rely on the personnel from General Electric sent by Porter.
The first static test took place on March 14, 1946, and the first successful launch on June 28—that is, fifteen months after the last V2s were launched on London. But sixteen more months, it is true, passed before the first successful launch in the USSR. The firing then continued and was marked by a serious incident on May 29, 1947.20 A rocket veered off course, crossed the Mexican border, and made a crater in a cemetery in the city of Ciudad Juarez, on the other side of the Rio Grande. There were no victims, but excuses had to be presented to the Mexican government. In all, seventy rockets were fired. The others were not fired, and, for the most part, not assembled.
THE PEENEMÜNDERS’ SHADOWY STATUS. The conditions under which the German specialists were admitted were restrictive, but the planned time frames were not respected. Immigration rules were broken. Discreet measures were taken. A change of code was made on May 13, 1946, and Overcast turned into Paperclip.21 It was then that the conditions were modified: an increase in the number of specialists recruited, an extension of the contracts’ duration, admission of families. President Truman gave his consent, and the administration gave it a broad interpretation. The following information has to do with the Peenemünde people, but the treatment was identical for other German and Austrian specialists.
In October 1946 the contracts were extended for five years. In December 1946 the families began to arrive in Fort Bliss. In the summer of 1946, von Braun had his parents brought from Silesia, which had become Polish, to Landshut.22 Through them in late 1946 he asked for the hand of his cousin Maria. The marriage took place at Landshut on March 1, 1947. Von Braun returned to the United States with his wife and his parents, who stayed five years.
The announcement of the presence of German technicians in the United States was made on December 3, 1946. It caused an outcry, but the onset of the Cold War inhibited the movement from developing further. The Germans remained illegal immigrants nevertheless. Later they were transported by bus from Fort Bliss to Ciudad Juarez, where they were able to obtain visas from the American consulate and legally enter the United States.
Beginning in the summer of 1947 the intelligence services, which had recruited German agents from among former Nazis, managed to block all inquiries into the specialists who had settled in the United States in spite of the State Department’s efforts. It was known, for instance, that Rudolph, Steinhoff, Hermann, and von Braun had been members of the Nazi Party and that von Braun had been made an SS officer. But it became impossible to take any action on those grounds. Rickhey, who had arrived in the United States in different conditions, was, it is true, sent back to Germany in May 1947 to stand trial. His case was rather particular because charges had been laid against him personally, as will be seen, and his behavior in the United States had been disagreeable.23 Conversely, Dornberger, released by the British, was recruited by the U.S. Air Force and sent to Wright Field. Rudolf Hermann, director of the Kochel wind tunnel, was hired by the air force. The wind tunnel itself was reconstructed by the navy at White Oak, Maryland, to the north of Washington.
In 1950 the Fort Bliss site appeared inadequate. Toftoy found a new location on the site of a former arsenal in Huntsville in northern Alabama. The transfer took place on April 1, 1950, under the supervision of Colonel Hamill and von Braun.
THE GERMAN TECHNICIANS FROM THURINGIA TO THE SOVIET UNION. An interallied agreement explicitly forbade the continuation of military research on German territory. That did not particularly bother the Russians, and it was not in order to respect this agreement that they one day decided to leave Thuringia, in entirely surprising conditions that were to be recounted only many years later.
On October 22, 1946, General Gaïdoukov, in charge of the rockets, held a work session with Gröttrup and his collaborators. It was followed by a lengthy dinner where drink flowed freely. After the dinner the German technicians could not go home. A complete moving operation was under way—for both them and their families. Two hundred rocket specialists were all affected. They had to get into the trains awaiting them in the Kleinbodungen station.24 The same operation took place simultaneously throughout the Soviet-occupied zone. Some five thousand specialists in the aeronautical, optical, and mechanical fields all had to leave under the same conditions with their personal possessions. With their families, twenty thousand people all told were involved. The ninety-two-train convoy arrived in Moscow on October 27, 1946.
The Soviet services were well versed in such population transfers.25 During the war they had sent into Central Asia or western Siberia all the “Germans of the Volga,” men, women, and children, then all the Chechens and the Ingouchis, then all the Tatars from the Crimea, and several other peoples of the USSR.
THE GERMANS IN THE SOVIET UNION AND THEIR RETURN. Little is known about the German technicians’ stay in the Soviet Union except that they were kept carefully away from the population and were less and less associated with work on the rockets.26 They were first of all divided into two groups. One went to Gorodomlia, 180 miles northwest of Moscow. The other group remained in Moscow, along with Gröttrup.
Then a firing range was secretly set up at Kapustin Yar in the steppe 120 miles east of Stalingrad. In August 1947, Gröttrup was there with a certain number of Germans. The first successful launch of a V2 took place on October 29, 1947. Eleven reconstituted V2s were fired. Five reached their target.
From 1950 on, Gröttrup’s role was reduced, as was his salary. The German technicians’ return to Germany began in March 1951. The Gröttrups returned on December 28, 1953, and moved to West Germany. In 1958 they both published memoirs of their stay in the USSR.
FRANCE’S RECOURSE TO THE PEENEMÜNDE TECHNICIANS. Beginning in the summer of 1944, French specialists headed by Professor Moureu endeavored to glean information from the debris of the German missiles that had crashed in France—either V1s, a hundred of which had crashed because of the malfunctioning of their launch toward London, or the V2s fired on the Paris area in September–October 1944. Ties were established with American and British colleagues, who were also interested in the concrete structures at Watten and Wizernes.27
In May–June 1945, Moureu traveled to Oberradebach near Friedrichshafen and then to the factory in the Dora Tunnel, and to the engine test center at Lehesten. The Americans delivered four V1s and V2 parts. Another mission was at Kochel in September, just as the wind tunnel was being dismantled for its transfer to the United States. Finally, Moureu traveled to Cuxhaven in October for the launch of the V2s by the British. Right from the beginning, French specialists therefore took part in attempts to make use of German technology in this domain.
Thus the French DEFA—Direction des études et fabrications d’armement, or Office for the Study and Manufacture of Armaments—decided on the creation, on November 14, 1945, of the CEPA—Centre d’études des projectiles autopropulsés, or Center for the Study of Self-Propelled Projectiles—directed by Moureu. On May 17, 1946, the LRBA—Laboratoire de recherches balistiques et aérodynamiques,” or Ballistic and Aerodynamic Research Laboratory—was set up in Vernon. A research department also existed at Emmendingen to the north of Freiburg in the French-occupied zone.
It was there and in the neighboring towns of Riegel and Denzlingen that the hundred German engineers and technicians hired by France were progressively brought together with their families, some of them from Kochel, the others having formerly been at Peenemünde. Among them was Heinz Bringer, who many years later would be the father of the Viking engine of the European launcher Ariane. In the spring of 1947, those who had formerly been at Peenemünde were transferred to France, above all to Vernon, and those from Kochel remained at Emmendingen until the creation of the Franco-German Research Institute in Saint-Louis in 1950.
Attempts to reconstitute a V2 were given up in 1947, and work began in other directions. In the 1950s some of the engineers returned to work in Germany either in the university or in industry. Those who remained at Vernon were integrated in 1971 into the SEP, the “European Propulsion Company.” That was the case for Heinz Bringer and his team.
AMERICANS, FRENCH, AND SOVIETS IN THE ROCKET RACE. Of the four countries occupying Germany in 1945, one ended up by losing interest in rockets. As mentioned above, the British did not continue their research in this domain.
The Americans on the other hand, led by Toftoy and Hamill, consistently supported the coherent team chosen by von Braun, whose technical authority never seems to have been contested. The team never disbanded—and in 1960 there were still eighty-nine former collaborators from Peenemünde at Huntsville. They generally lived on a wooded hill south of the city known as Monte Santo and nicknamed Sauerkraut Hill.28 In 1955 most of them became American citizens, von Braun leading the way. And that same year Oberth came from Germany to join them for three years. Some of them came to hold important positions in American companies, such as Ernst Steinhoff with the Rand Corporation and Dieter Huzel with North American. Dornberger joined Bell Aircraft.
With the greatest discretion the French implemented an identical policy, and the French army beginning in 1945, with the express consent of General de Gaulle, hired specialists from Kochel and then from Peenemünde.
Soviet practices were different. The Russians had only second-rate German specialists aside from Gröttrup and a handful of others. Above all as of 1945 they had their own team, ill-disposed to working in confidence with the Germans, whom they ended up sending back home.
Several remarks are in order regarding the attitude of the various parties. The first is that, in the first years after the war, the point was only to develop military devices, which explains at once the total secrecy and lack of curiosity as to the past history of the German collaborators. Everyone knew what the others were doing, but no one could point an accusing finger. The conspiracy of silence is the rule in such circumstances. It is possible that von Braun and Korolev had at the time already considered a space program, but that was not the decision-makers’ objective.
The second remark is the separation that quickly came about in people’s minds between technical research, such as it had been developed at Peenemünde, and the production conditions of the V2s by Mittelwerk at Dora and elsewhere. The only Mittelwerk director to have been bothered was Rickhey, and he was even taken from the United States to Germany to stand trial. But it will be shown later just what sort of trial it was, and how it turned out.
At the end of 1945 the office of the American military government was established in Frankfurt. It was near Frankfurt that the Kransberg camp was located, where the Americans and British gathered together the scientists, technicians, and economic and financial executives whom they wished to question. The American officers from the Psychological Warfare Division were there too, and, thanks to them, Eugen Kogon moved into the Frankfurt area to write his book on the camps. It was also nearby, in Wiesbaden, that the investigators of the War Crimes Investigating Team were working, preparing cases against the war criminals.
The Americans were not the only ones to pursue the war criminals, and especially those in charge of the concentration camps, but it was they who took on the brunt of the task in this domain. They had significant means at their disposal. Some of them, moreover, had a good knowledge of the German language because of their origins, Jewish or otherwise. They had liberated Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen as well as the camps’ Kommandos. They had discovered Ohrdruf, Nordhausen, Gardelegen, the little Buchenwald camp, typhus at Dachau, Ebensee, and Wöbbelin. In the Schwerin region they had taken in the prisoners evacuated from Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. They were not inclined to indulgence, as will be seen in the first trials.
Three phases can be distinguished in the trials. The first of them took place in late 1945, before Nuremberg. Then came the Nuremberg trial, which ended in 1946. Finally, other trials took place in 1946–47, such as the trial dealing with Dora.
THE TRIALS OF LATE 1945. In the American zone the trials took place at Dachau, and the accused were imprisoned in the former concentration camp. Those condemned to prison sentences were sent to serve them in the Landsberg prison. The first two major trials had to do with the camps of Mauthausen and Dachau. The preparation of the prosecution for these trials was relatively quick. These had been the last camps to be liberated, and the SS had neither the time nor any place to hide. As an American historian put it, the first trials “concentrated on proving guilt by circumstance,” which meant, for instance, that the camp commander was automatically held responsible for all the atrocities perpetrated in his camp. The death sentences and hangings were thus more numerous for Mauthausen and Dachau than they were to be subsequently for Buchenwald.
Among the SS executed was Förschner, commander of Dora when the camp was created and until the beginning of 1945. He had then been placed at the head of the Kaufering camp, one of the most terrible sub-camps of Dachau. His quick elimination would deprive the later Dora trial of a first-rank witness.
Another trial that finished up quickly, between September 17 and November 17, 1945, was that of Bergen-Belsen, in Lüneburg in the British zone. The principal SS leaders—and first and foremost Kramer—were sentenced to death and executed. Among them was Franz Hössler, who had been Transportführer of the first convoy from Dora to arrive at Bergen-Belsen and then, for several days, the commander of the “barracks camp” mentioned in chapter 18.
THE NUREMBERG TRIALS. The trial at Nuremberg of the principal dignitaries of the Nazi regime as war criminals was planned for by the “London charter” established by the representatives of the four occupying powers in June 1945. There were twenty-two defendants, one of whom, Martin Bormann, was judged in absentia. The trial opened on November 20, 1945, and the verdict was announced on October 2, 1946. Three of the accused were acquitted. Eleven were sentenced to death; Göring committed suicide and the others were executed.
Among the accused sentenced to prison was Albert Speer, who would serve his full twenty-year term. He was the only one on trial whose charge had an indirect link with the Dora camp.
THE BUCHENWALD AND DORA TRIALS IN 1947. The Buchenwald trial took place at Dachau from April to August 1947. The camp commander, Hermann Pister, was one of the accused. He was sentenced to death but died of a heart attack in the Landsberg prison in September 1948.
The Dora trial is not referred to as such in the archives. It is either designated as the Nordhausen War Crimes Case, or as the United States of America v. Kurt Andrae et al. Although the name of Nordhausen was emphasized to describe the trial, there is no equivocation. Aside from the title, the documents, starting with the bill of indictment, constantly refer to Dora. One can suppose that it was the discovery on April 11, 1945, of the Boelcke Kaserne in Nordhausen and the notoriety given to this discovery that determined the choice of title. The second formula is a commonplace of American case law: the name of the first of the accused is indicated, followed by “and others.” With regard to the Buchenwald trial the title was United States of America v. Prince Josias zu Waldeck et al. In the absence of any prince at Dora, the first of the accused was taken in alphabetical order, though Kurt Andrae was not really the most important.
The trial opened in Dachau on August 7, 1947. The verdict was announced on December 30. Of the seventeen accused, fourteen were SS; three were acquitted. The only civilian, Rickhey, was acquitted. Three of the four incriminated prisoners were found guilty. The preparations carried out by the American prosecuting officers had been long. They had begun on April 27, 1945, some two years before the trial began. A particularly important role was played by Wincenty Hein, a young Polish lawyer who had been a prisoner at Dora and ended up as Schreiber in Nordhausen during the final weeks. He became the expert witness to the prosecuting officers and helped them exploit the camp documents, which had escaped destruction in the final days. They were found after the evacuation, particularly in the blocks of the SS camp and in the outside Kommandos such as the Boelcke Kaserne. Already in 1945, Hein put together a proposed bill of indictment with an overall description of the Dora-Mittelbau complex and its history. In 1967 he used his documentation for a study published in Polish in Warsaw. In 1969 this study was published in Warsaw in French under the title Conditions de vie et de travail des prisonniers dans le camp de concentration Dora-Mittelbau (Living and Working Conditions in the Dora-Mittelbau Concentration Camp). The author, like many others, found this reference work extremely valuable.
The 1947 trial was not satisfying—but that was not due to any inadequacies in the prosecution. It lacked, both as defendants and witnesses, the main protagonists. The principal defendant should have been Kammler, as much for the tunnel in the first months as for the work sites subsequently under the control of his Sonderstab. He had disappeared in May 1945. The camp’s first commander, Förschner, was not there either: he had been executed after the trial of the Dachau camp. Also missing was his successor, Baer, who was in hiding. He would later be arrested, charged with acts committed at Auschwitz, and would die in prison before coming to trial. Also absent was the SS Dr. Plaza, who was dead.
The two German civilians having played an important role when the tunnel was undergoing modification work were also absent: they were, above all, Sawatzki—who had died in May 1945 under unknown circumstances—and Rudolph, who had left for the United States with his colleagues from Peenemünde, as the role he had played prior to the transfer of the prisoners from Buchenwald to Peenemünde was unknown. It was not, however, impossible to have Germans who had left Germany in the framework of Overcast brought back to stand trial. This is what happened to Rickhey—but he was not involved in what went on in the first months of the tunnel.
Three German communists having occupied functions at the time—Kuntz, Thomas, and Sczymczak—would have been valuable witnesses as to the first months of the tunnel and camp. The SS had eliminated them along with others in 1945. Without Kammler and Förschner, without Sawatzki and Rudolph, without Kuntz and Thomas, the demarcation of fundamental responsibilities during Dora’s crucial period was an impossible task for the judges.
The trials moreover were henceforth limited to determining the personal responsibility of each of the accused in precise circumstances such as hangings, cases of serious brutality, or the assassination of prisoners in the camp or in the outside Kommandos, or during the arrival of the “transports” or the evacuations. Other crimes were also targeted including the theft of packages destined for the prisoners. Rickhey was charged in connection with the tunnel hangings, but his personal guilt could not be established and he was acquitted.
Only one of the SS was condemned to death: Obersturmführer Hans Möser, who, as seen in chapter 19, had been Transportführer of the last evacuation convoy to leave Dora. He was hanged on November 26, 1948. Among the six SS sentenced to life imprisonment were Erhard Brauny, commander of Rottleberode and Transportführer of one of the convoys that arrived at Gardelegen; Otto Brinkmann, commander of Ellrich; and Wilhelm Simon, in charge of the tunnel Arbeitseinsatz.
Three prisoners—all Greens—were sentenced: Willy Zwiener, LÄ at Dora at the beginning of 1944, to twenty-five years’ imprisonment; Richard Walenta, LÄ at Ellrich, and then the SD’s assistant in the bunker, to twenty years’ imprisonment; and Josef Kilian, executioner at Dora, to life imprisonment. Among the witnesses were two German prisoners—Greens—who had volunteered to help the Americans. Roman Drung, the last of the LÄ at Dora, had escaped at Oker from the last convoy along with SS concerned with getting rid of their uniforms. Willy Schmidt, well known to Max Dutillieux as the Kapo in the tunnel and then at Rossla, had also escaped from the evacuation column before passing over the Elbe.
At the same time the main trial was being held, several other annex trials took place with summary proceedings. The Kapo Georg Finkenzeller, “Big George” mentioned in chapter 9, convicted of abuse but not of murder, was thus sentenced in October 1947 to two years’ imprisonment.
THE DORA TRIAL AT ESSEN. Though it took place much later, it is important to mention the trial of three SS from Dora, which was held at Essen between November 17, 1967, and May 8, 1970. On this occasion the trial was before a German court. The creation in 1958 of the special inquiry service on Nazi crimes indeed made it possible to gather evidence and prepare prosecution regarding those cases that had not been judged by the Allied courts.
The three accused in Essen were Obersturmbannführer Helmut Bischoff, head of the Mittelbau SD unit; his collaborator Oberscharführer Ernst Sander; and Hauptscharführer Erwin Busta, nicknamed “Horse Head” as mentioned in chapter 9. The three defendants were given prison sentences.
THE FRENCH TRIALS. Two French trials took place to judge French citizens in connection with Dora. One was aimed at Naegelé, already sentenced to death in absentia in Tours for his role as a Gestapo agent before the Liberation. He was arrested upon his return, judged once again, including for what he had done at Dora, sentenced to death on January 28, 1947, in Paris, and executed.
Charges were also laid before the French military tribunal in Rastatt against Grozdoff, who moreover did not seek to hide. Arrested on July 1, 1946, he was acquitted.29
Great confusion reigned for several years after 1945 with regard to judgments about the concentration camps—essentially because of Soviet policies at that time. The debate had to do with Buchenwald, and parenthetically, Dora. French opinion was affected only by the correlative revelations about the gulag. Things were far more serious in Eastern Europe.
THE VISION OF ROUSSET AND KOGON. At the beginning of May 1945, David Rousset was in Wöbbelin, the camp that had just been liberated by the Americans under the conditions mentioned in chapter 21. Suffering from pulmonary congestion and typhus, he managed to have himself repatriated quickly.30 He had gone from 190 to 104 pounds, and when he got to Paris, Maurice Nadeau found him unrecognizable. He went to spend time recovering at Saint-Jean-de-Monts with his wife Sue, and his memory came back to him as he regained his health. In three weeks he dictated L’Univers concentrationnaire (The Concentration Camp World) to Sue, which was published in the Revue internationale, then published in mid-1946 and awarded the Renaudot Prize. His next book, Les Jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death), demanded more research work and writing effort. It appeared in 1947. Immediately upon their publication, both books became classics on the Nazi concentration camps.
In writing the Jours de notre mort, Rousset acknowledges having used two German documents. The first, published in Weimar under the supervision of former communist prisoners and prefaced by Ernst Busse, was entitled Konzentrationslager Buchenwald. The other was the German manuscript of Eugen Kogon’s work, Der SS Staat. As indicated in chapter 3, Kogon had first of all, at the request of the team from the American Psychological Warfare Division, written—in Buchenwald itself—a report subsequently known as The Buchenwald Report. He then set himself up near Frankfurt and wrote, on that basis, Der SS Staat, a book devoted to the camps in general but which is based especially on the example of Buchenwald. Finished in November 1945, the book was published in Germany in 1946. It was translated into French in 1947 and entitled L’Enfer organisé, then in English in 1950 as The Theory and Practice of Hell.
The dominant picture of the camps that appeared in the Western countries at the time was that of Buchenwald. This was especially true in France, where many former prisoners from Buchenwald would go on to hold notable positions in politics or journalism: Claude Bourdet, Guy Ducoloné, Pierre Durand, Albert Forcinal, Frédéric Manhès, André Marie, Marcel Paul, Christian Pineau, Rémy Roure, Pierre Sudreau, and Eugène Thomas, for instance. They returned at the end of April 1945, as did Louis Sellier, the author’s father, and his friends from Amiens, Louis Despierres and Paul Gaillandre. Pineau became supplies minister in 1945, Marcel Paul became minister of industrial production, and Eugène Thomas became postmaster general.
Among the characteristics that stand out in Rousset’s and Kogon’s schema, the Reds’ victorious struggle against the Greens for the control of the Buchenwald camp’s internal administration is of primary importance—which contributed to the prestige of the communist leaders. This is all the more noteworthy as neither Kogon nor Rousset were communists themselves. Kogon was a Catholic activist and Rousset was a former member of the Socialist students who had turned to Trotskyism. Neither of them was a novice or gullible with regard to political issues. It is also noteworthy that the publication of Kogon’s book was supported by the American officer Rosenberg and the future leader of the British Labour Party, Richard Crossman, as is the fact that it came out in the American-occupied zone.
RASSINIER’S DISSENT. Rousset’s and Kogon’s schema does not, however, reflect a unanimous opinion. In 1946 one of the few British prisoners at Buchenwald, Christopher Burney, published The Dungeon Democracy in which, among other bold assertions, he declared that the communists were nothing but “Nazis painted red.” It should also be pointed out that two members of the Psychological Warfare Division, Egon W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, had passed through Buchenwald before Rosenberg’s team got there and that in a brief report they did not seem very convinced by the testimonies they had gathered. Their text was later exploited against the communists.
But it was in France itself that the most lively dissent arose, from the pen of Paul Rassinier, a French deportee at Dora who had passed his quarantine at Buchenwald in January–March 1944. In 1949 he first published, at his own expense, an account entitled Passage de la ligne. Du vrai à l’humain (Crossing the Line: From the True to the Human) dealing with his deportation. In 1950 he published Le Mensonge d’Ulysse. Regard sur la littérature concentrationnaire (The Lie of Odysseus: Looking at Concentration Camp Writings) in which he criticized other authors of texts on the camps. In 1955 the two texts were collected under the common title Le Mensonge d’Ulysse in two parts: L’Expérience vécue (Lived Experience), corresponding to the earlier Passage de la ligne, and L’Expérience des autres (The Experience of Others), corresponding to the later Mensonge d’Ulysse of 1950.
The author has carefully examined Rassinier’s testimony, just as he examined the testimonies of the other Dora prisoners, and refers to it in six different chapters. This analysis confirms that Rassinier only followed the common lot from January 30 to April 8, 1944: his arrival at Buchenwald, quarantine, transfer to Dora, and assignment to an earthworks Kommando. On April 8, 1944, he went into the Dora Revier and remained there under privileged conditions until April 1945. His stay in the Revier was interrupted only by brief returns to the camp and by a stint in the service of a noncommissioned SS officer between December 23, 1944, and March 10, 1945. He thus had no direct experience of the tunnel nor of any of the other Mittelbau camps. Most of the indications that he provides stem from conversations with fellow prisoners who arrived sick in the Revier. They were generally very approximate, and on several occasions entirely erroneous.
Rassinier’s personality is disconcerting. He established no friendships in the camp and had only negative judgments with regard to the other prisoners, both at Buchenwald and at Dora. Entrenched in his solitude and his inaction in the Revier, he fabricated a schema for interpreting the concentration camp world that is at times banal and at others just plain aberrant. As he was naturally given to pontificating, he was known in the Revier as the “professor.” (He has actually kept this title in certain bibliographies in German.)
His first work, in 1949, went unnoticed. The second, in 1950, in which he attacked nominally and successively Brother Birin, Abbot Jean-Paul Renard, Abbot Robert Ploton, Louis Martin-Chauffier, David Rousset, and Eugen Kogon, was necessarily better known—particularly as it was accompanied by a preface by Albert Paraz, casting doubt in passing on Edmond Michelet, a former deportee to Dachau (who also became a minister in 1945), which caused a scandal. In this book the first reservations regarding the gas chambers appeared. But negationism would only develop later on in other writings. At the time, Rassinier’s key objective was to try and replace Rousset’s and Kogon’s schema regarding the camps with his own. He did not manage to do so, but the 1955 collection would be translated into German in 1960, into Spanish in 1961, and into Italian in 1966—as if it were an important reference book. Yet, both with regard to Buchenwald and Dora, it is a document to be treated with caution—to a far greater extent than the books of the authors Rassinier incriminates.
THE SOVIETS AND THE CAMPS IN GERMANY. Given the notoriety of the camps in Germany—and especially of Buchenwald—in the Western countries, one might normally have expected a generally positive attitude as well from the Soviet authorities, henceforth established in the east of Germany and particularly in Thuringia. There was nothing of the sort.
The point of difference in comparison to the Western countries was the reception of the former prisoners of the camps when they were repatriated to the Soviet Union. There was then, as is now known, no indulgence whatsoever with regard to the prisoners of war, generally accused of not having fought to the finish. There was still less indulgence for the Ostarbeiter—the men and women who had come to work in Germany, often in the arms factories, whether voluntarily or not. As the Soviets in the concentration camps were for the most part prisoners of war or Ostarbeiter who had turned into prisoners for real or alleged infractions, they were not entitled, generally speaking, to a warm welcome.
It was hoped that the opening of the Soviet archives would make it possible to gain a clearer perspective on this painful period. This would not appear to be the case—for the time being, at any rate.31 There are only several rare testimonies, such as that of a Ukrainian from Dora, originally from Kremenchug, who was only eighteen years old when arrested in 1943. For this reason he got away with only ten years in the Soviet army, as a simple soldier.
The camps of Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück were not then considered by the Soviets as centers that had to be preserved but as handy installations for whomever they had to intern. In their zone, they of course arrested the Nazi leaders, Gestapo agents, and so on. But they also went after social democratic activists who were hostile to their party joining up with the Communist Party to form the SED.
They above all went after landowners, business leaders, professionals—thereby carrying out a profound social revolution. Buchenwald from September 1945 up until 1950 was one of the indispensable internment centers for these operations.
The communist prisoners at Buchenwald, of whom there were still almost eight hundred in 1945, were entitled, because of the coherency of the bloc which they had constituted, to hope to play an important role in the new Germany liberated from Nazism.32 This is indeed what initially occurred for a certain number of them, who happened to have links with Saxony and Thuringia.
Some of the principal leaders returned home to western Germany. Such was the case for Hans Eiden, who had been LÄ2 in 1943–44, then LÄ1 in 1944–45, and thus during the liberation of the camp; he settled in Trier, where he died in 1950. Paul Schreck, who remained LÄ3 from 1942 to 1945, returned home to Mannheim where he died in 1948. Emil Carlebach, a Jewish communist survivor, returned home to Frankfurt and founded the Frankfurter Rundschau; he would later move to the GDR.
The others started careers in the Soviet zone. Ernst Busse, former member of the Reichstag, had played a leading role in the camp from 1939 to 1945. He was LÄ2 in 1939–40, LÄ1 in 1940–41, then Kapo of the Revier from 1942 to 1945. He was also from 1943 to 1945 one of the three clandestine leaders of the Communist Party. In 1945 he became minister of the interior and vice president of Thuringia. Erich Reschke, first of all Kapo of the Baukommando, was successively LÄ2 in 1940, LÄ3 in 1940–42, LÄ2 in 1942–43, and finally LÄ1 in 1943–44. In 1945 he became Polizeichef in Thuringia. Harry Kuhn, one of the three clandestine leaders of the Communist Party from 1943–45, became in 1945 Bezirksleiter des KPD in Leipzig.
The most important communist leader from Buchenwald was Walter Bartel, who was one of the three clandestine leaders from October 1939 until the liberation of the camp. In 1946 he was the secretary and the spokesman for relations with the press of Wilhelm Pieck, president of the SED, and subsequently president of the GDR.
But these activists who came out of Buchenwald were considered with suspicion by the German communists who returned from Moscow. In the autumn of 1946, in the course of a secret internal procedure, a commission of the SED’s central committee examined the behavior of those who had exerted functions in the camp and questioned the role of Ernst Busse, as Kapo of the Revier, where the SS doctors had carried out mortal injections in certain blocks.33 In the November 7 report the clandestine leadership finally obtained a general acquittal, but certain leaders, including Busse, were later reduced to subaltern functions. Nevertheless, as will be seen later, the issue, in which the Soviets did not get involved, was not closed. It was only the first episode.
DAVID ROUSSET AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE GULAG. In his two books, David Rousset did not hide his consideration for the communist leaders in the camps. He had dedicated Les Jours de notre mort (The Days of Our Death) “to Emil Künder, my German comrade in the concentration-camp universe.” Künder was a Kapo he had known at Helmstedt and at Wöbbelin. This attitude, as seen above, was to earn him Rassinier’s reprobation. In 1950 he nonetheless engaged in a court battle with a Communist-run publication, Les Lettres françaises, this time with regard to the gulag.34
The question as to the existence of concentration camps in the Soviet Union had been raised in 1947 by the publication in France of Kravtchenko’s book, I Chose Freedom—with considerable success. Accused of lying by the communist press, Kravtchenko had summoned Les Lettres françaises to appear in court. The trial had taken place from January to April 1949, and Kravtchenko won his case.
Rousset looked into the subject. He knew Margarete Buber-Neumann’s story, mentioned above in chapter 21. He also had testimonies of Poles who had left the USSR during the war to join the Anders army. Lastly, he came upon the Russian text of the “Code of Correctional Labor in the SSFRR”—the Soviet Socialist Federal Republic of Russia. He launched an appeal to former deportees in the Figaro littéraire of November 12, 1949, for the creation of a commission of inquiry into the matter. The text mentions the existence of a gulag. It was approved by such former deportees as Jean Cayrol, Michel Riquet, Louis Martin-Chauffier, and Rémy Roure.
After much debate, a “French commission of inquiry against the concentration-camp regime” was created on January 24, 1950, demanding the creation of an international commission to lead an inquiry in Spain, Greece, and Yugoslavia as well as in the USSR. The president of the French commission was a former deportee to Buchenwald, A. S. Balachowsky (who was mentioned in chapter 13).
On March 13, 1950, a text was published in L’Humanité entitled “David Rousset disowned by the former German deportees who saved his life.” Among the signatories was Emil Künder, with his identity number (from Neuengamme) 21462. Pierre Daix, himself a former prisoner of Mauthausen, accused Rousset of fraud with regard to a detail of the translation of the Russian code; Rousset brought a lawsuit against Les Lettres françaises. The trial began on November 25, 1950, and concluded on January 12, 1951, with Pierre Daix’s condemnation. Meanwhile, the situation had worsened in the GDR for the former prisoners of Buchenwald.
TRIALS AND INQUIRIES IN EAST GERMANY AND ELSEWHERE. On March 29, 1950, Ernst Busse was arrested by the SMAD, or Sowjetische Militäradministration, the Soviet military administration—the very organization that had interned so many Germans at Buchenwald.35 Charges were laid against him as a Kriegsverbrecher—a war criminal. On June 8, 1950, Reschke was in turn arrested on the same charges. The details of their trials, which remained secret, are known only through anonymous testimony, gathered by Lutz Niethammer and published in Der “gesäuberte” Antifaschismus dealing with the “Roten Kapos von Buchenwald.”
They were condemned in early 1951 to life imprisonment and the confiscation of their possessions. They were sent to the gulag—to the well-known Vorkouta camp. The end of their trial happened to coincide with the end of the Daix trial in France, initiated by Rousset, also regarding the gulag. Busse died at Vorkouta on August 31, 1952. Reschke, as will be seen, would be released in 1955 and would return to Germany. The Soviet involvement was limited to these two instances.
One might almost be tempted to consider that in Busse’s and Reschke’s cases it had to do with incriminations of a personal nature, were it not for the fact that suspicion cast on Walter Bartel in 1953 shows that it was actually the whole system of internal control of the camps by the communists that was being criticized. Bartel is indeed the only one to have been a member of the clandestine leadership, without interruption from 1939 to 1945, but without having at the same time had a notable function involving responsibility in the administration of a camp, such as LÄ, or the Kapo of a Revier or the Arbeitsstatistik.
In the spring of 1953 the supervisory commission of the SED therefore engaged proceedings against Bartel, who was still Pieck’s secretary.36 In this regard the minutes of his questioning on May 29, 1953, are available. In August 1953 he was informed orally that the case would not be pursued further, but he was stripped of all political responsibility and had to accept a position as a teaching assistant in modern history at Leipzig.
The documents gathered and published in extenso by Niethammer show the extent of the criticism leveled at the policies pursued in the camps. Overall the objection was to have agreed to collaborate with the SS to ensure the camps’ functioning. More precisely, it had to do, for example, with having engaged in what was known as “victim swapping”—der Opfertausch. This expression refers to the replacement of threatened prisoners, whether communists or not, by other prisoners, whether known or unknown. This had been the case, in particular, at Buchenwald (as it also had, moreover, at Dachau), during the establishment of lists of transports to the more feared Kommandos such as Dora or Laura, Langenstein, or Ohrdruf. The Soviet—or Soviet-inspired—prosecutors set themselves on the same terrain as such critics as Rassinier. But one wonders whether they were truly acting in good faith.
Indeed, in late 1952 the trial of communist leaders, which would be known as the Slansky trial, took place in Prague. Among the eleven sentenced to death, and hanged on December 3, was Josef Frank, who had worked at the Buchenwald Arbeitsstatistik, where he represented the Czechs, just as Jorge Semprun had represented the Spanish and Daniel Anker the French. He “acknowledged” having, in that capacity, been responsible for the death of several fellow prisoners and having cooperated with the Gestapo. Semprun is utterly convinced of his innocence on this point. In the same trial, another former communist prisoner, from Mauthausen, Artur London, was condemned to life imprisonment, after L’Aveu.
It is possible, as Niethammer believes, that a German variant of the Slansky trial was cooked up.37 In December 1952, Paul Merker, a Jewish leader of the SED, was arrested in connection with this trial. Slansky and London were also Jews. Merker was condemned in 1954 to eight years of forced labor following a secret trial. In May 1953, Franz Dahlem was excluded from the central committee of the SED; he was, like London, a former soldier with the International Brigades in Spain and a former prisoner from Mauthausen.
In Slovenia too, political prisoners who were not Titoists were after 1945 accused of collaboration with the SS and executed. Three remarks are called for at this point.
The first is that the succession of inquiries, trials, and rehabilitation does not make it possible to state clearly if there were, for instance, liquidations of undesirable elements in the Revier or manifest abuses of authority of certain of those wearing armbands. One is inclined to think that the conditions particular to concentration camps did not allow for total innocence.
The second remark concerns Willi Seifert, who had become, in 1941, at the age of twenty-six, Kapo of the Arbeitsstatistik—a position he still held in 1945. If ever a Red Kapo had his authority broadly contested after the fact, it was indeed the Kapo of the Arbeitsstatistik. Yet Seifert was never subsequently bothered for this—even though Frank was executed. Quite to the contrary, he was, from 1957 to 1983, Generalleutnant of the Volkspolizei and took part in this capacity in putting up the Berlin Wall in 1961. Niethammer enumerates, on page 136, the impressive series of decorations he was awarded between 1950 and 1985.
The third concerns the communist officials at Dora, Albert Kuntz in particular. The latter had been one of the first clandestine leaders at Buchenwald, until his imprisonment in the bunker and his being sent to an outside Kommando at Kassel. He was later one of the first to arrive at Dora, where he played, as already noted, an important role. If he had not been eliminated by the Gestapo in early 1945, would he too not have had to account for his actions in the atmosphere of suspicion that prevailed in the early 1950s?
BACK TO NORMAL. The preceding paragraphs have shown the exceptional confusion that reigned with regard to the concentration camps between 1945 and 1953—that is, until Stalin’s death. Subsequently they all came to take their normal places, so to speak.
The Americans, who contributed by prompting the writing of the Buchenwald Report to popularizing through the works of Kogon and Rousset a certain picture of the camps, consigned this report to oblivion because it was favorable to the communists. Its text was made public, everything having by then calmed down, only in 1995, thanks to Rosenberg, who brought out of his personal archives the copy that he had held onto of the Bericht über das Konzentrationslager Buchenwald bei Weimar—the Buchenwald Report’s original German title. An academic in El Paso, Texas (the very city of Fort Bliss), he allowed one of his colleagues from the German department, David A. Hackett, to publish the document.
Hackett translated the entire text into English and wrote a long introduction. It was published by Frederick A. Praeger, whose father died in a camp after having been imprisoned at Buchenwald; in 1945, when he had arrived on location as an American officer, he looked for him in vain before meeting Rosenberg and Kogon in Frankfurt.
The German edition of the original text came out in 1996. It included a translation of Hackett’s introduction and notes. These two publications are most appreciated, because the failure to publish an important text is always frustrating for historians. They did not, however, really modify what was already known about the subject on the basis of Kogon’s book. Until his death in 1987, the latter remained the authority on the subject, along with Hermann Langbein, who was, as a young communist, a prisoner at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Neuengamme. Rousset’s works have lost none of their importance.
It was in East Germany that the situation evolved after 1953, at first progressively and then discreetly. The Soviets’ abandoning the camp facilitated this development, but silence prevailed as to what the site had been used for between 1945 and 1950. In 1955, Reschke, freed from the gulag, returned to Germany and obtained a position in the police force. He was rehabilitated but refrained from any account of his trial and detention. Busse was also rehabilitated posthumously—and in secret. Paul Merker was freed in 1956. Dahlem, rehabilitated in 1956, returned to the central committee in 1957. In 1956, social democrats who remained in prison were still being freed. In Czechoslovakia, Artur London was freed in 1955 and rehabilitated in 1956. Other rehabilitations were subsequently announced, for instance in Czechoslovakia and in Yugoslavia.
It was Walter Bartel’s newfound status that best translated the overall rehabilitation in the GDR of the Buchenwald communists and their leadership. In 1957 he became director in Berlin of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, and then in 1962, Professor für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte (professor of modern and contemporary history) at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1959 he edited the camp’s international committee’s publication of Buchenwald Mahnung und Verpflichtung, which became a fundamental work on the subject. That very German title could be translated as: Buchenwald: Admonition and Obligation.