We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
— THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
(ORDER AT THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD)
USAAF Lieutenant Tom Oliver’s plan to radio the Allies in Italy to tell them that there were some 150 downed American, British and Canadian airmen around Pranjane, Yugoslavia, faced at least two obstacles. First, they lacked a challenge letter—a password—that would indicate the message was truly from downed Allied airmen and not the baiting of a trap. Second, to give their location and status, the message might be long enough to give the Germans time to home in on it, thus revealing the location of the Chetniks’ encampment. Despite these misgivings, Norman Reid agreed with Oliver, who had been an evader one day longer than he had, that the Chetniks weren’t in any hurry to deliver them to the Allies. To their surprise, the Chetniks provided a radio operator.
In the absence of a codebook, the message had to be sent “in clear,” that is, in plain English. “The messages had to be short but had to contain enough air force jargon to pass muster,” explains Reid. “Because the rescue planes would have to land and take off on grass, and because they would have to pick up so many men, many of them wounded, the rescue could be affected only by DC-3 Dakotas, which every flyer called ‘workhorses.’ Accordingly, one message was ‘Shoot a workhorse to us. TKO’ (Thomas K. Oliver),” Reid recalls. Another used the American nickname for pilots and their penchant for nose art: “Driver of Fighting Mudcat down in Yugo, need help.” A third relied on slang: “Situation SNAFU, 150 GIs down, wounded sick. TKO.”
IAN MACDONALD TAKES COMMUNION
Thanks to the maps published in the newspapers showing the relentless push west by the Red Army, MacDonald’s parents were not at all surprised to learn in January 1945 that the previous August MacDonald had been evacuated from Stalag Luft VI in Lithuania, or that he expected “another move in a couple of days’ time for the same reason.” What they didn’t know, of course, was where he was that January or how he—one of millions of POWs, survivors of concentration camps, terrified civilians and Soldaten belonging to broken regiments—were faring on the icy roads of Germany.
MacDonald knew that his parents could answer how his brothers Alexander and Leo were “making out in the Senior Service” in only the most general way.201 Both were serving in the Royal Canadian Navy, Leo as a radar operator in the north of Scotland and Alexander as HMCS Ottawa’s anti-submarine officer. After two years of writing to her prisoner-of-war son, Mary MacDonald didn’t need to refer to the Red Cross’s Revised Regulations Governing Communication with Prisoners of War in Enemy, Enemy Occupied or Neutral Countries to know that she couldn’t even allude to the secret message in Sandor’s 15 May letter: “Oh yes, I ran into your cousin Sandor over here. He’s still in the Merchant Marine and expects to be running out of the South of England for a while.” After some confusion, compounded by the fact that William Alexander MacDonald—but always called “Alexander” or just “Sandor” by his family—signed the letter “Willie,” the MacDonalds realized that he was speaking about himself and that the invasion of France was imminent.
REID LEARNS HELP IS ON THE WAY
Reid’s doubts about whether the Chetniks’ radio operator was playing straight evaporated when the man handed him a paper reading “HELP WILL ARRIVE” and asking for their location. “Using the Chetniks’ maps, determining our longitude and latitude was easy,” says Reid, who later learned that the message was actually received—and disbelieved—by his own 205 (Heavy Bomber) Group. “What was difficult was figuring out how to send the coordinates without alerting the Germans. Oliver hit on the idea of using one of his men’s service numbers, to which we added the longitude and latitude and then the instruction to subtract Staff Sergeant Sullivan’s numbers.”
The Germans may not have broken their code, but when a spotter plane appeared overhead, Reid feared that their directional-finding teams were on to them. The anxiety caused by a lone spotter plane was nothing compared with the frisson that followed the appearance of three Junker JU-52s, which could drop parachute troops. After a few circles, they flew on, likely to the Luftwaffe base a scant seven miles away.
RCAF FLYING OFFICER JOHN HARVIE IS BETRAYED
The German occupation of Paris meant that RCAF navigator John Harvie saw nothing of the traditional pageantry associated with Bastille Day, 14 July, as he sat in the back of a large black car that drove him through the streets of Paris. Though somewhat discomforted by being alone (he’d volunteered to be the first from the four evaders he was with to be moved to another safe house), he took heart from the fact that since being shot down on 5 July northwest of Chartres the men and women he’d relied on for help had embodied the French Revolution’s motto, Liberté, egalité, fraternité.
The car passed the swastika flag–draped Arc de Triomphe, and as Harvie saw soldiers at the ready lining one side of rue des Saussaies, his worry increased, only to ease when the car made a ninety-degree turn and drove through an archway and thus, he thought, away from the Germans. A moment later, the driver slammed on the brakes, and he and the other man in the front seat leaped out of the car, then swung around, revolvers drawn, yelling, “Hands up!”202 The entire incident seemed so much like a B movie that it took Harvie a moment to realize that he’d been delivered to Gestapo headquarters at 11 rue des Saussaies.
The interrogator’s language skills far exceeded his concern with Harvie’s rights as a prisoner of war. The mere mention of the Canadian’s Geneva protections brought a slap to the face, despite the fact that he’d handed over his identity disks.
Mercifully, the threat “It does not matter anyway, you will all be shot within the week” was not carried out.203 Instead, Harvie was taken to Fresnes Prison, which already held a number of RCAF men, including Edward Carter-Edwards (shot down a month earlier) and scores of other Allied flyers; by mid-August, 168 Allied airmen, including 25 other Canadians, were held there.
Deprived of reading material and kept in isolation, Harvie occupied his mind with creating puzzles, whistling the tunes of popular songs, reciting poems learned at school and passages from the Bible, doing Latin translations of texts remembered from high school and debating with himself whether he should become a doctor, lawyer or engineer. The gnawing hunger nearly broke him.
In early August, Harvie heard the sound of explosions that, he reasoned, came from long-range Allied guns. To him they beat a tattoo that he hoped heralded his release. Harvie knew nothing of Hitler’s order to destroy Paris, but the 21-year-old was enough of a military man to guess that the warlord who’d ordered the Blitz would not hesitate at ordering the destruction of the City of Light. Fearing that the retreating Germans would bundle their prisoners onto a train and take them to the Reich, on 10 August, Harvie scratched out this message:
F/O John D. Harvie
J 27573
RCAF
Prisoner here
July 14/44–Aug 10/44
God Save the King!
Long Live the Allies!
Oh to be in Canada!204
REID IS RESCUED
For three nights, as he heard the American planes circling overhead, obviously searching for the landing field Reid and Oliver had prepared and marked with a fire in the shape of an “X,” Reid kept thinking, “Here’s your chance to get out of this place—a few thousand feet up in the air is your way home, and they can’t find you!” Then, on the fourth night, instead of the sound of planes coming in for a landing, Reid and Oliver heard a great crash, followed by chickens squawking. They ran toward the chicken coop and found three Americans, OSS Captain George Musulin and two others, radio operators, carrying C-rations and radio gear. “I was, of course, overjoyed to see them. Since the DC-3s that would take us out would not be arriving for another day, I can honestly say that in those hours, the C-rations—or to be more precise, the powdered coffee in them—meant even more. After months of drinking ersatz coffee, powdered coffee tasted like ambrosia, and so did the thick piece of fruitcake.” Musulin paid the woman who owned the shed he had destroyed on landing 15,000 dinars, or $10.
At dawn on the 10th, six DC-3s, flying more in a gaggle than in formation, appeared overhead. The planes were accompanied by a squadron of P-51 Mustangs. “I could tell from their markings that this was not just any squadron. The pilots sent to protect us were the Tuskegee Airmen, the only squadron manned by black Americans.” Once all the planes had landed, the Tuskegee Airmen took the occasion to shoot up the nearby Luftwaffe base.
Before boarding a plane, Reid gave his boots to a Chetnik and his Smith and Wesson pistol to another, who gave him two kisses, one on each cheek—the second one being a sign of how well they’d come to know each other. “It was a tight fit. The DC-3s were designed to hold about 18 people, but each had to take about 25, many of whom were wounded. The takeoff, during which we brushed the trees, was only the beginning of a white-knuckle flight, during which we were protected by the Tuskegee Airmen flying in formation on either side of us,” recalls Reid.
STAN DUTKA SURVIVES STRAFING AND ESCAPES
In the scant seconds the pilots had to decide whether to fire their guns, they looked for a large red cross on the train in a siding near Langeais, France. Instead, they saw men trying to camouflage the train, marking it as a “target of opportunity” for the Allied pilots who now commanded the air. The strafing scattered the Germans and allowed some nearby French women to rush to the train and open its doors.
By the time Stan Dutka jumped from the train, the Germans had returned and were shooting at the prisoners. Instead of running, Dutka stopped to help the wounded, whose numbers soon grew when the planes strafed again. Then the Germans began shooting at some of the women who had helped the POWs.
Covered in other men’s blood, Dutka pretended to be injured and limped to where a guard had gathered some wounded men. The guard told him that the train also contained about a hundred Luftwaffe officers, arrested after a bomb failed to explode in an attempt to kill Hitler a month earlier, which was the first the POW had heard of Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot.
Thinking that Dutka was lame, neither this guard nor the others took much notice when he moved closer to the nearby wood. There he waited until, shrouded by darkness, he was able to slip into the wood and begin running. Before long, he came across two civilians, who took him to a house, where he ate, washed, and was given civilian clothes before being taken to a second house. There he was hidden just over a week, until 14 August, when he was driven to the nearby town of Angers, which had been liberated by General George Patton’s army two days earlier.
HARVIE, RCAF SERGEANT EDWARD CARTER-EDWARDS AND THE OTHER ALLIED AIRMEN ALMOST CHOKE TO DEATH
John Harvie was right.
Even as the sounds of battle closed in on Paris, Harvie’s SS captors loaded him, Edward Carter-Edwards and the other Allied airmen (and, to Carter-Edwards’s horror, the couple that had guided him to Paris) first into trucks and then into boxcars, 90 to a car built to hold 40. The heat of August combined with the fetid smell of unwashed men, vomit, urine and the remains of dysentery attacks that dripped down the legs of embarrassed men to create a nauseous miasma that not even those near the openings between the slats could fully escape.
Not long after it wheezed out of Paris and into a tunnel, the prisoners felt the train jerk to a stop. Their first worry, that the SS would massacre them if the Resistance had blown up the tracks, was quickly replaced with the fear of suffocation as thick black smoke began seeping into the boxcar. Carter-Edwards remembers wondering as the blackening air burned his eyes and throat, and as he heard the choking and coughing around him, if this breath would be his last. As men breathed carbon dioxide and even more deadly carbon monoxide, some began to hallucinate. American pilot Roy Allen, who had been breathing through a sweat-soaked piece of cloth, was aware enough to feel the train backing up. By the time Harvie and Carter-Edwards’s car was opened, Allen and the men in his car were already on a field, gasping in smoke-free air.
A short time later, the SS troops divided the men. One group was hostages. The men in the other, larger group, some of whom were forced to carry German equipment, were marched down a dusty country road. When they neared the far end of the tunnel, they saw that the track had indeed been blown up, thus preventing the train from reaching the bridge that spanned the Marne, the river at which the French had stopped the German advance on Paris in September 1914.
At one point on the three-mile forced march, a few prisoners broke file to go to a well near the side of the road. A few hand pumps brought forth a welcome flow of cool water and threats by the guards that they’d shoot the men if they didn’t get back in line. Some of the people in the hamlets they passed bravely gave the “V” sign made famous by Churchill and threw them potatoes, tomatoes and small loaves of bread. A few even “darted out from their doorways, carrying cups of water or cider, even wine.”205 Despite his weakened state, Harvie considered charging down the slope and into the river but then realized that the Germans could toss hand grenades into the water.
The POWs expected that once they were in the town they’d be taken to a prison and so were surprised when they were led across another bridge and to a waiting train. Before forcing the prisoners onto it, the SS guards allowed Red Cross workers to give them rough brown bread, sweetened with “jam” that left a decidedly chemical taste. While this group of POWs ate, the second group of prisoners arrived.
HARVIE LEARNS TO HATE THE GERMANS
This cattle car was somewhat less crowded than the previous one, and it had a barrel for use as a latrine. But what heartened Harvie and the other men most was that, just before leaving the car, the French workman who had been covering the ventilation cuts with barbed wire dropped to his knee and with his hammer pried up a floorboard. Escaping was not, however, simply a question of waiting until the train was underway and then dropping to freedom, for a barbed-wire broom had been attached to the rear of the train. To survive, an escaper would have to roll over the rail and between the wheels of the moving train.
A total of five men, including RCAF pilot Joel Stevenson, escaped before the Germans realized what was happening and started searching the underside of the cars.206 As three men stood on the plank to hold it in place while the guards prodded beneath the car, Harvie thought the prisoners had caught a break when the train inched forward, which he took as the signal for the guards to climb aboard. He knew they hadn’t when he heard a burst of gunfire and the train stopped. A few moments later, the guards stormed into the car and nailed shut the escape hatch.
As mile after mile of France slipped away beneath them, the earlier threat that they’d be shot began to seem less ominous. Then, shortly after dawn, the train stopped and the door to Harvie’s car was opened, revealing a row of young SS troopers pointing machine guns at the other prisoners. Some of the SS men entered the car, screaming, “Raus, ihr Schweine.”207 When the “pigs” refused to move, a few of the heavily armed troopers started shoving POWs toward the door; others pulled whomever they could reach to the ground. Soon some 50 men, including Harvie, were standing in a field in the middle of France and ordered to strip. “The bastards,” Harvie feared, “are going to shoot us naked so that our clothing can be recovered … without bullet holes and blood stains!”208
The SS’s plan proved more benign. Stripping the POWs naked ensured that they would not try to escape from the train. A few hours later, the train stopped again. The men who had dived for the floor upon hearing a submachine-gun blast had just climbed to their feet when the Germans opened the car’s door and demanded to know who had been looking out the vent. For a long moment, no one moved. Then a young prisoner came forward. The SS men ignored the cries of the other POWs that the boy needed medical attention for the hand just hit by bullets fired to enforce the order against looking out the vent. Instead, Himmler’s men grabbed the boy and pulled him to the ground.
He was so terrified that he couldn’t answer when the Germans demanded to know if he was French. The shout of “Engländer?” shook him enough to answer “Français. Je suis Français.”209 An SS officer gestured for the naked young Frenchman to start down the slope just beyond the tracks; then the officer fired his rifle and the Frenchman’s body fell down the slope. The helpless airmen watched as the SS officer walked up to the body, put his Luger to the back of the neck and fired.
“This was the first time I had ever felt hatred towards anyone,” wrote Harvie. “I had often seen photographs and read about wartime atrocities, but they had always been too distant and impersonal to be true. After what had just happened, I felt sick because I realized for the first time that man can be worse than any wild animal.”210
SAPPER RUSS BURROWS REMEMBERS THE CAULDRON OF DIEPPE
The memory of the battle. The rattle of machine-gun fire. The body’s recall of the concussive force of an artillery shell or mortar bomb that blew up just far enough away not to kill you. The sight of men with whom you’d trained, showered and got drunk now sprawled on the ground, some with barely a puncture wound, others armless, legless, headless, was never more than a nightmare or, indeed, a quiet moment away. The daily parsing of inadequate rations and husbanding of Red Cross cheese, butter, raisins, chocolate and cigarettes underlined the difference between their lives now and when they stepped onto the stage of history at Dieppe.
Hugh Smith had been dead these two years, yet when Russ Burrows closed his eyes, the dreariness of camp life receded behind memories of gambling with his fellow sapper, who won at cards and dice. Smith won so often that, long before they had gone into battle, the sapper from Oshawa, Ontario, mocked his friend from Windsor, his imprecations signalling their closeness. “You’re lucky at gambling. Someday we’ll find out, you son of a bitch, if you’re lucky in battle.”
They had been on the beach for less than half an hour. Exploding mortar bombs, the slicing sound of a machine gun and screams of another injured or dying man providing the metronomic beat by which the minutes ticked by. They were halfway up the beach when Smith asked for a light. Burrows struggled to get his Ronson out of his pocket, still wet from the surf they’d waded through, then tossed it his friend, who tossed it back to him a moment later.
“As I pushed the lighter back in my pocket, I noticed Hughie’s head fall back. I shimmied over to him and saw that a sniper, who must have seen the small flame of the lighter, put a bullet right through my friend’s head,” says Burrows. “Even though getting up and running made me a bigger target, I figured I’d be safer on the lee side of the seawall.”
Word that two French escapers had made successful home runs was welcomed by Burrows and his countrymen, as was the nearby raid by heavy bombers, for it showed that after two years, history had almost caught up with them. As they recalled their agony on the beaches of Dieppe and their pain over the past two years, the Canadians could do little more than chuckle when they read the opening sentence of a leaflet their German captors distributed: “As a result of repeated applications from British subjects from all parts of the world, wishing to take part in the common European struggle against Bolshevism, authorization has recently been given for the creation of a British volunteer unit.” However much men like Burrows and Prouse may have been impressed by the author’s grasp of English, they could not help but note how the proposed unit’s very name, “British Free Corps,” was just a little too close to the armed right-wing Freikorps that had tried to overthrow the fledgling Weimar Republic in the early 1920s and which served as the training ground for the Nazi Party’s own armed wing, the SD. Even more outrageous was the insinuation that, by taking the King’s schilling, they were serving the “interests of Jewry and international finance.”211
HARVIE AND THE ALLIED AIRMEN PASS THROUGH THE GATES OF HELL
They knew they weren’t at Dulag Luft because that was in Frankfurt am Main and the sign on the far end of the railway siding read “Weimar.” While they wondered about the squat buildings on either side of the siding, which they later learned were armaments factories, they had no doubt as to the purpose of the submachine gun–toting SS troops who lined the way to what was obviously the prison camp’s main gate. As the airmen climbed down from the train, the stale smell of smoke coming from the tattered clothes that had been returned to them gave way to “air so filled with the stench of burnt death” that Carter-Edwards and others disbelieved their own senses.
Moments later, the airmen saw their first evidence that Buchenwald, which took its name from the beech-tree woods that surround it, was no ordinary prison camp. Barely had they spotted the gallows that rose above the electrified barbed-wire fence when they saw hundreds of spectral forms of men and women, with gaunt faces and impossibly thin arms, their heads shaved bare, and each with a yellow, red, purple, black, brown, green, or pink triangle pinned to the striped “pyjamas” that hung off their bodies. As the men were marched through the gate, set incongruously in a faux rustic wooden structure that recalled a Teutonic hunting lodge, topped by a clock tower, a few of them saw that a short distance beyond the gate and set strategically behind a screen of trees was a small Zoologischer Garten, where guards could rest peacefully and watch animals frolic.
THREE CANADIAN SECRET AGENTS ARE ALSO IN BUCHENWALD
Harvie, Carter-Edwards and the other 24 RCAF officers were not the only Canadians in this patch of hell. Two days earlier, a train carrying 37 Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents, including three Canadians and a number of French Resistance agents, arrived at Buchenwald. Though the airmen had never met the SOE agents, they’d heard their screams as they were tortured in Fresnes Prison.
Romeo Sabourin, who in 1940 lied about his age to join the Fusiliers Mont-Royal and later joined the SOE, had been in the Gestapo’s hands since shortly after he was inserted into France in early 1944. Frank Pickersgill and Kenneth Macalister (before joining SOE, Pickersgill had been a civilian; Macalister had been an officer in the Intelligence Corps) were picked up by the Gestapo within hours of their landing in France on 19 June 1943; their radio and codes allowed a faux “Pickersgill” to “play the radio game,” calling in drops of arms, supplies and, sadly, more SOE agents, who were scooped up.212
Over the next year, Pickersgill and Macalister were transferred between several prisons, where they were repeatedly tortured. Knowing that Pickersgill’s brother, Jack, was Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s principal secretary, the Gestapo tried to suborn him. At Fresnes Prison, Pickersgill attacked a guard with a bottle and jumped through a second-story window. He was shot, recaptured and tortured.
On 8 August 1944, the SOE agents and Resistance men were bundled into a stifling train compartment. The following night, a strafing run damaged the train. The guards manning the trucks sent to pick them up kicked, punched and beat the prisoners with their rifle butts before taking them to a concentration camp near Saarbrücken. Five days later, they were again pushed and prodded into a cattle car. When, that afternoon, they were transferred to a passenger carriage, prisoner solidarity soon broke down. After a Resistance fighter picked the lock to his handcuffs and opened several others, the SOE agents and some of the other Resistance fighters argued that, if the opportunity arose, they should kill the German guards and try to escape. Others believed the German promise that “their destination was a special camp for officers where they would enjoy concerts, a cinema and theatre, a well-stocked library, and perhaps even the company of women.”213
LEARNING THE WAYS OF BUCHENWALD
In the first light of day, as the picturesque farms and villages, and, even more hopefully, a church spire shimmered into view, Harvie could almost forget the first hours he spent in Buchenwald. For hours they stood—without food or water—on the Appellplatz, then led into a building where their heads, faces and crotches were shaved before being swabbed with a burning disinfectant, after which they were issued shapeless, worn civilian clothes. Nothing could weaken the memory of the sleepless night he spent without even the barest of blankets on a patch of ground littered with sharp pieces of coal. In that same place in 1939, hundreds of Polish prisoners had died from exposure.
The light of dawn, however, revealed the horrors of the night: six bodies were carried from the barracks area. “If this many died on a summer night,” Harvie recalled thinking, “how many might die in the cold of winter?”214 The answer was tens of thousands, an untold number shivering into death as cold winds bled away the last bit of heat from their emaciated bodies as they stood on the Appellplatz clad only in thin pajamas.
Harvie wondered where the huge cemetery was that would be needed to bury the dead and how the record-keeping system that notified next of kin was organized. “Was any kind of a service said for them to mark their passing in this place, far from their homes and loved ones?” he wondered. Later, after learning that the oily smoke and white ash rising from the smokestack above a squat brown building few hundred yards to the right of the main gate were the remains of Jews, Roma, Russians, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners and others who, according to the Nazis’ twisted lights, received their due, as proclaimed by the words cut into the camp’s steel gate—Jedem das Seine—this last question must have seemed impossibly naive.
The SS’s power went beyond its monopoly on the use of force, the naked display of which included beating prisoners senseless, making Jewish prisoners sing anti-Semitic songs and rubbing their faces in excrement. The same guards who forced elderly men to climb trees and then shook them so violently that the old men fell and broke their necks controlled how long the airmen would suffer on the old coal dump. The guards fed their snarling dogs meat, milk, cereal, potatoes, eggs and claret, while issuing a scant seven ounces of poor-grade boiled horsemeat per prisoner per week. They dined on “steaks of heroic size,” washed down with real coffee and wines and brandy stolen from occupied countries or bought at ruinous exchange rates, while giving inmates rotten potatoes, or “liver sausage” that contained ground fish bones.215 Rations were so insufficient that a few months after the Canadians arrived at Buchenwald, the Organisation Todt complained that chronic starvation made it difficult to form an efficient slave labour workforce from the Buchenwald inmates.
The men who had broken the spirits and bodies of hundreds of thousands understood the importance of soldierly comportment and used it to ill effect. In the latrine, men had to crouch over an open cesspool, balanced on a rail that was never cleaned; all knew that those who had fallen in had drowned with gulps of this seething mass in their mouths. The same SS that spent more than 250,000 reichsmarks building Kommandant Karl-Otto Koch’s wife, Ilse (“The Bitch of Buchenwald”), a 30,000-square-foot riding hall with mirrored walls did not provide either toilet paper or water to wash with after using the Abort.
HARVIE SEEKS MEDICAL AID FROM A RUSSIAN “MEDIC”
Exhaustion from nights spent trying to sleep on the rocky ground, the dehydrating effects of dysentery, hunger, and scenes and stories of horror tore at Harvie’s morale. So too did the infected flea and lice bites on the bottom of his bare feet, which Harvie feared would lead to sepsis. (Perhaps in a backhand compliment for the airmen’s penchant for escaping, the SS did not issue them even the rudimentary wooden clogs given to other prisoners.) Harvie never considered going to the infirmary, where, he had been warned, patients were used for research that ended with another body being carried across the compound to the building above which, several times a week, a flame roared.
Worried that the infections would grow worse, Harvie took his chances with a “medic” in the Russian compound. The Russian did not speak English, but upon seeing the pustules understood the situation and pricked them open with an unsterilized needle so he could squeeze out the yellow liquid filled with dead white blood cells. The Russian then swabbed the affected areas with a purple disinfectant and wrapped them in a crepe paper–like bandage.
THE BOMBING OF BUCHENWALD
Carter-Edwards calls it the “best damned pinpoint bombing I’ve ever seen,” but every Allied airman knew that, despite its impressive name, strategic bombing was anything but an exact science. Even after Pathfinder aircraft started marking targets with flares, “creep back” meant that most of the bombers dropped their loads miles short of their intended targets; indeed, only one in five bombs fell within five miles of its intended target. Thus, near noon, the turn from elation, which the men felt when they first saw the two box formations of American B-17s, to horror, when unseen anti-aircraft guns hit their marks and planes began breaking apart, to sheer terror, when more than 50 bombers broke away from the main stream and headed directly toward the concentration camp. Even as he cursed the Americans for flying so high they couldn’t see him, Harvie wanted to jump up, wave his arms and scream, “No! No! No! Can’t you see that we are fellow airmen! Stay away you fools, you’ll kill us by mistake!”216
Buchenwald had no bomb shelters, so there was nowhere to run. Instead, tens of thousands of prisoners threw themselves on the ground and did their best to shield their heads from the falling flak. In spite of his rising panic, Harvie calculated when and where the bombs would have to be released for them to hit the camp. He knew he was right when he saw the flare dropped by the first bomber as it passed over the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke, which manufactured ammunition, and Gustloff-Werke factory, which in addition to other armaments made components of V1 and V2 rockets. Then came the black specks, moving so fast that they didn’t seem to grow much larger before he heard the express train–like sound wave their fall generated. Before it had fully ended, the sound wave caused by the explosion of 150 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs washed over him, and the ground heaved.
Barely had the earth stopped trembling when Harvie saw about 70 B-17s bank 90 degrees and streak toward the camp. Through the “agonies of fear and despair,” he correctly calculated that they’d drop their bombs somewhat closer to where he and the other Allied airmen were lying on the ground, their mouths open to prevent the tremendous forces generated by detonation of some 500 bombs from bursting their eardrums. By the time the force of the explosions had died away and Harvie looked up, the stream of Flying Fortresses had already turned westward for home.
Thick black smoke rose above the blasted remnants of the factories and lighter, thinner smoke billowed forth from the SS compound and from parts of the prisoner compound. Save for some superficial flash burns, the airmen were unhurt, but hundreds of other prisoners closer to the targets had been torn apart or burned by the incendiary bombs; when a proper Appell was conducted, it became clear that hundreds of prisoners had been killed, and some bodies had simply ceased to exist. The rumour that the Kommandant and his family were killed was quickly dispelled. On 27 August, the SS reported to Berlin that 80 SS men had been killed, 65 were missing and presumed dead, 238 had been wounded and 24 wives and children of SS men had been killed; as well, 316 prisoners were killed and 1,462 wounded. One famous casualty in the camp was the Goethe Eiche, a several-hundred-year-old oak tree that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust, Germany’s greatest poem, rested under during his many visits to the area.
When Harvie realized the scope of the damage and that fire raged in the SS compound, he expected the SS to massacre what the Germans called Luftgangsters. So he was not surprised when, within minutes, the Kapo arrived with a number of SS officers, Schmeisser machine guns at the ready and swinging bullwhips and clubs, and calling for the Americans and the English to move.
Harvie’s infected feet saved him from being herded toward the burning armaments plants. Other prisoners, including the American Roy Allen, were forced to fight the fires irrespective of the fact that they were barefoot and lacked hoses or buckets for water. Carter-Edwards was tasked with removing people from the rubble, which cut and burned his bare feet. As Allen and others were sent into the burning factories to try to salvage equipment, other prisoners were forced to carry food and clothing from a warehouse. Yet another prisoner had to defuse an unexploded incendiary bomb.
Having seen the SS’s casual brutality, the Allied airmen who picked up bodies outside a V2 factory were not surprised to find those people had been shot in the back. Nothing, however, prepared Harvie and the others for the story some told of finding in the rubble a “museum,” prepared for Ilse Koch, in which shrunken heads, and lampshades and book covers made from tattooed human skin, were proudly displayed.
RCAF SQUADRON LEADER JAMES GRIFFIN YOUNG IS MURDERED
Within hours of General Charles de Gaulle’s speech from the Paris Hôtel de Ville’s balcony in which he claimed that Paris had liberated herself, one hundred miles to the northeast in Les Hogues, an SS NCO walked toward five Allied prisoners of war in an improvised POW compound calling out, “Where are the Canadians?” His special interest in the Dominion’s soldiers likely stemmed from the fact that, as a member of the 2nd Company of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, he had been engaged with the Canadian Army almost nonstop since D-Day.
The NCO ordered the POWs to get up and push a vehicle. Since they did not understand German, they did not move, nor did they respond when he repeated the order in French. The enraged and apparently drunk NCO stormed off, only to return a few moments later with two other soldiers and Obersturmführer Güteman. By then, even though four of the POWs had stood up, Güteman went up to the man who was still sitting, James Young, who had been shot down earlier in the day, pulled him to his feet and began punching him in the face, causing his nose to bleed.
In the meantime, perhaps having realized what their captors wanted, one of the Allied soldiers started walking toward the gate. He was shot in the back. Seeing this, another prisoner started running toward a hillock beyond the gate. He too was shot in the back. A third prisoner managed to get through the gate before he was felled by a rifle shot. The NCO then went up to Young, screaming at him and shaking him by the collar, while another SS man slunk behind Young. Following a signal from Güteman, this second SS man fired directly into Young’s back. The fifth prisoner was shot as he tried to crawl away.
According to a certain Stabsgefreiter named Maier, who defected to the Allies on 27 August, Güteman ordered that the two POWs who had not been killed outright be given the coup de grâce. Young was “finished off” with a shot to his chest. In an attempt to cover up this war crime, Güteman ordered that the men be buried nearby and prepared a report saying that the Canadian and others had been “shot while trying to escape,” which he ordered Maier to sign.
IAN MACDONALD FINDS IT HARDER TO REMAIN OPTIMISTIC DESPITE THE GOOD WAR NEWS
From the camp’s jungle telegraph, Ian MacDonald knew that in just the past week, Romania had switched sides, that Paris, Toulon and Marseilles had been liberated and that the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw. But, for the dutiful son, who had drawn so much strength from his family’s letters, and who continued to be concerned about the finances back in Lourdes, Nova Scotia, and about his brother on HMCS Ottawa, the months without letters weighed heavily on him.
The reason he had not received any parcels recently was purely administrative; his parents had the wrong POW number. But that didn’t make the lack of word from them any less painful for MacDonald. With the end of the war almost in sight, perversely, instead of each passing day being felt as one day closer to the end of his indeterminate sentence, it seemed as if each further day of imprisonment bore the weight of every other day he had been locked away—and that the days to come would bear an even heavier burden. In a letter home, after listing two upcoming birthdays that he hoped to make it back for, he mentioned his father’s, which was in late December, and then wrote, as if to buck himself up, “I prefer to be optimistic.”
GEORGE SHAKER BEGINS A DIARY
The first few entries in George Shaker’s “wartime log,” a slightly larger than 8½-by-11-inch diary bound in dark beige canvas and supplied by the Canadian YMCA, seem oddly like filler. However, the detailed lists of Canadian, British, New Zealand, American and Argentinian Red Cross parcels underline how important they were to their survival. When the Detaining Power bothered to respond to complaints about the adulterated black bread and weak soup provided, the Germans pointed to the calories and nutrients contained in a one-pound tin of Maple Leaf butter (Canadian), a 12-ounce tin of fish or bacon (British), a one-pound tin of cheese (New Zealand), half a pound of chocolate (American) or a one-pound tin of Irish stew (Argentinian) as making up the difference. These supplies helped keep Shaker from falling below 100 pounds, two-thirds of what he weighed when captured in early 1941, and they made all the difference for Paul Gallant and the Canadian officers and ratings in Marlag Nord, on the other side of the camp’s wire, after 4 September when, because the RCN men refused a work order, they were put on half rations.
On 4 September, the men from the A.D. Huff had no choice but to follow a work order. Had they not, their meagre possessions and, more importantly, their stock of Red Cross food would have been contaminated by the gas used to fumigate the barracks. The gas was so poisonous that they had to spend the night on the floor of another building, which, they regretted on that surprisingly cold September night, did not have a stove.
Shaker’s diary entries make no reference to religion. Its importance to him, however, is evident from the sketch of Stella Maris on page 9. To the right and left of the Cross that rises from the altar are the signatures of the eight priests and brothers who had been imprisoned at Milag und Marlag Nord since 1941.
LES RELIGIEUX ARE ALLOWED A RELIGIOUS RETREAT
In German, the word could be translated as Rückzug, which describes what their armies were doing on both the Eastern and Western Fronts.
For the Oblates, une retraite had a very different meaning. In the letter published in L’Apostolat in December 1944, Brother Roland Cournoyer credits the “sweetness of Providence” for the extraordinary privilege that the Kommandant of Milag und Marlag Nord bestowed on the Oblates. Perhaps in recognition for their work (and perhaps also in an attempt to curry favour) the Nazi officers agreed to allow Cournoyer, Brother Parent and Fathers Pâquet, Barsalou and Charbonneau to join Father Bergeron in a religious retreat. According to Father André Dubois, who knew les religieux, “in the situation they were in, separated from their superiors and often from each other, this opportunity for spiritual renewal was extremely important. At the retreat, in addition to celebrating mass together, they would have spent time in silent meditation and prayer.”
Their meals too were likely also religious events, for instead of eating to the buzz of barracks talk, there would have been either silence or the stately words of a devotional reading. “By pulling back from their day-to-day life in the camps and concentrating on these observances, despite their great distance from Canada, the fathers and brothers were renewing their ties to their community,” says Dubois.
HARVIE AND MOST OF THE OTHER ALLIED AIRMEN ARE SENT TO BLOCK 58
After weeks sleeping on the ground without any cover during unseasonably cool and wet nights, Harvie, who had turned 21 on 3 September, and most of the other airmen were shepherded into Block 58; one who wasn’t was Carter-Edwards, already so sick with pneumonia, pleurisy and grippe that he had no choice but to risk going to the infirmary. The large, windowless, wooden, barnlike structure would have beggared all description. Six hundred men were crammed into a space designed for a third of that. The smell was overwhelming. There was no place to wash; in any event, the bombing raid had destroyed the camp’s water-pumping system.
At Fresnes Prison, each man had had a narrow bunk. In Buchenwald, the blocks were filled with row upon row of wooden shelves fouled with men’s waste; the shelves lacked paillasses and were so narrow that the men had to sleep on their sides. Rather than breathe into each other’s faces, and to provide a modicum of privacy, they lay “on the same side at the same time.” Changing sides required not only everyone’s agreement but also a volunteer to act as “the unlocking key” by working his way out and climbing to the floor so that the other men could turn over, and then shimmying his way back in.217
In September 1944, Buchenwald, designed for some 20,000 prisoners, held upward of 84,000 men, women and children, the largest single group being Russians but also including thousands of Roma, French, Poles, Slovenes, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, the Allied airmen and SOE agents. The desperate thousands were housed in the same appalling conditions the Allied airmen now lived in and were fed the same inadequate food—and had been for years; ironically, the SOE prisoners were fed marginally better rations. The hours on the Appellplatz were an especial torment for these desperately weak men, many of whom collapsed, some in death, while their tormentors tallied up the numbers. Other numbers were tallied up too: those who died working in the quarry; in the infirmary; of having committed suicide by throwing themselves on the electrified fence; of “natural causes”; or by execution in a room with a floor painted red so that the accumulation of blood would not discomfit SS men assigned there, and which was conveniently placed beneath the crematorium. On Sundays, the ropes of the gallows in the centre of the Appellplatz rarely hung limply.
The politics of Buchenwald was entirely different from the politics of the POW camps, where military order existed under the Senior British Officer or senior Allied officer and the camp’s Man of Confidence, who served as the liaison with the German authorities. As at other concentration camps, huts were ruled by Kapos appointed by the SS. He ensured that the inmates appeared on the Appellplatz and were assigned work details, which included picking up the daily dead and small food ration. The Kapo of Block 58 had a private room with a single bed, bedding, a writing table and books and magazines he could read while sitting on a real chair, beside which stood an electric lamp. Whatever injustice the airmen may felt about the Kapo’s perks, the most important one being that he did not have to eat the swill they did. What mattered more was that he was considered a good Kapo, because he didn’t beat or otherwise mistreat either the airmen or the hundreds of Roma under his charge.
Fear and degradation suffused the camp. The broad avenues between the rows of barracks were designed not so the inmates could march eight abreast comfortably, though they could, but so SS machine guns could sweep the lane clear. In the Russian compound, which the Germans patrolled heavily, the SS beat starving POWs with clubs, rifle butts, bullwhips and the sharp end of their jackboots; earlier in the war, to drown out the sound of shooting of 10,000, Himmler’s men forced others to sing loudly, though presumably not the “Buchenwald Song” or the more famous “Peat Bog Soldiers,” with its haunting lyrics: “Up and down the guards are pacing, / No one, no one can get through. / Flight would mean a sure death facing, / Guns and barbed wire greet our view. / We are the peat bog soldiers, / We’re marching with our spades to the bog.”218
GEORGE REID WORKS UNDERGROUND
George Reid knew, thanks to a family story from what he’d grown up calling the Great War, that the elevator was taking him and 20 other Canadian POWs into a salt mine, where they joined Russian murderers, other criminals and women as slave labourers. The mine, however, was not destined to produce salt. Rather, it had been hollowed out to house one of the armament or aircraft factories that Armaments Minister Albert Speer had ordered to be built in such mines so that they were safe from Allied bombers. Although conditions were marginally better than those endured by the Canadians who laboured in the coal mines in Japan, the weakened men did most of the work with shovels and 16-pound sledgehammers.
By September 1944, control of POW labour had passed into Himmler’s hands and the institutionally ruthless Speer organized the labour; thus, this Arbeitskommando bore no resemblance to the brewery and graphite mine Andrew Carswell passed through. For 12 hours a day, six days a week, Reid and the other slave labourers worked filling huge mine cars, with top openings of six by six feet—260 cars per day for each work gang, no matter whether there were 5 or 20 men in the gang. The Germans never provided enough food: only a bowl of soup and a piece of bread each day, its thinning from one and a quarter inches to near one-half inch being a measure of the shrinking Reich. The water ration was so small that torturous thirst caused by the salt dust often caused the slave labourers to faint.
EXECUTION OF FRANK PICKERSGILL, KENNETH MACALISTER, ROMEO SABOURIN AND 13 OTHER SOE AGENTS
The sentence of “Tod” did not surprise Pickersgill, Macalister, Sabourin or the other 13 SOE agents who, after hearing it, were quickly marched to the Zellenbau, a whitewashed one-story building that, on either side of a centre aisle, had cells no larger than small horse stalls. Toward the front of the cellblock were larger rooms, one an office, another a torture chamber equipped with whips, cudgels, chains and electrical equipment that could be attached to the testicles. Each man was savagely beaten, and forced to stand at attention with their faces against the open peepholes in the heavy steel doors for hours on end.
Near 5 p.m. on 10 September, they were forced to drag their bruised and battered bodies across the camp. A hundred or so yards after they passed the main gate, they made a slight left turn and entered a fenced-in area in the middle of which sat a low building with a gabled roof that vaguely resembled a smokehouse. They walked around the building to a narrow flight of concrete stairs leading to the basement, to a room they may never have heard the name of but of which, after they’d finished limping down the steps and their eyes had adjusted to the dim light of one or two bare bulbs, they could have no doubt about its purpose. Lining the walls of the Leichenkeller (corpse cellar) about eight feet from the floor and each separated by about four feet were dozens of large meat hooks.
SS-Scharführer Walter Warnsädt was anxious to squeeze the last quantum of suffering he could from these broken men. Instead of tying their hands behind their back with their wrists crossed, they were tied with the arms parallel, which has the effect of slowly dislocating shoulders, the pain being only increased by the deep breaths taken by the petrified men watching their comrades die.
By design, despite their last request, they did not die cleanly and honourably. Instead, Warnsädt’s men slipped nooses made of thick piano wire around each man’s neck and, after throwing the other end of the wire over a meat hook, hauled the man up to its level before tying off the wire. This was not hanging but the medieval practice of death by suspension, an agonizingly slow death by strangulation as the wire slowly crushed the carotid artery and jugular vein. It was death extended by the involuntary jerks of the body, for each, momentarily, relieved the pressure on the artery and vein, thus allowing blood to once again flow and the brain to revive—only to again feel the pain of the noose—and the mind to clear enough to register the terror of suffocation. It was the destruction of the men’s bodies in the most intimate form.
As they slowly strangled and jerked, in Warnsädt’s men’s eyes, the SOE agents would have turned into mere simulacrums of men, into something akin to puppets with faces blue not from paint but from cyanosis. Long before they died, their bodies would have begun to stink from the involuntarily voiding of urine and feces, which were easily washed down the oversized drain in the middle of the Leichenkeller. The desecrated bodies were loaded into the electric lift that brought them upstairs, where, as tens of thousands had been (and thousands more would be), they were placed on a metal platen that slid into the coke-fired ovens adapted for the SS by a well-known bread-oven manufacturer that still has its factory in nearby Erfurt.220
Father Boulanger’s letter to Father Eugene Marcotte on 24 September shows that he would have benefited greatly from joining the retreat earlier in the month, for his cri de cœur comes close to tipping over into bitterness: “Canadians,” by which he meant French Canadians, “don’t care about religion!” How could this be, given their sufferings on the beaches of Dieppe? Even the English Catholics (most of whom were of Irish background) were less foul-mouthed than the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, a reference to the fact French-Canadian swear words are liturgical, hostie taking the place of “fuck” and tabernac for “shit.”
Boulanger’s observation that “war is not a school for virtue” is hardly original. The additional observation that, for young men, “neither is two or three years of inaction” points to a problem with morale that became more pronounced the closer the end of the war appeared. Just a week earlier from the relatively salubrious confines of his POW camp in Austria, Father Juneau wrote, “This long captivity is dangerous! It is here that man reveals his true self. Life in the barracks is sometimes at an extremely low level—but the priest must be the counterweight.”
FATHER BARSALOU HIDES A FORBIDDEN MESSAGE IN A DISCUSSION ABOUT TOMATOES
The failure at Arnhem, immortalized in the phrase “A bridge too far,” and stiffening of resistance on the Eastern Front meant that the predictions made after the Allies secured Normandy that the war would be over by Christmas had turned to dust. There were scattered cases of the Germans surrendering, but most Soldaten fought on.221 Though the Nazi high command knew that Speer’s armaments production miracle had passed its apogee and, even more ominously, that the Reich’s supply of gasoline and aviation fuel had dropped to critical levels, the state’s organs remained as radical as ever. After severely torturing 60-year-old Joseph Müller, on 11 September the regime beheaded the teacher, who had told a joke in which a mortally wounded Luftwaffe officer asked to place a picture of Hitler on his left and one of Göring on his right so that “now I can die like Jesus.”222
The day-to-day business of the POW camps did, however, continue. On 28 September, the guards at Milag Nord spent part of their day searching for alcohol stills and tunnels. A few earned themselves commendations for finding a complete crystal radio and parts of another, both likely being plants.
The censors too remained active, deleting 12 lines (or almost half) of a letter written by Father Robert Barsalou’s father. Aware that any obvious mention of the deletions would itself be censored, Barsalou deftly places the words “12 lignes censurées” after a long—and triumphal—statement about how his 12 tomato plants have produced 400 tomatoes, albeit ones smaller than those in Canada, and before what the censor no doubt viewed as a routine statement about placing oneself in the hands of divine Providence.