CHAPTER FOUR

“A CURIOUS PEARLY
COLOR”

On 21 April 1945, Robert Reid was back at Buchenwald reporting for the BBC. The Americans had already erected a temporary plinth to commemorate the fifty thousand–plus prisoners estimated to have died there. This time Reid visited the crematorium, and saw for himself the industrial-size elevator that carried the bodies of executed prisoners directly to the incinerators. Accompanying him were members of a British parliamentary delegation who had responded to Eisenhower’s request and flown out to Germany for a short but exhaustive visit to see the horrors for themselves.

As the first major camp to be liberated, Buchenwald was to be visited repeatedly over the next few days by similar delegations, but the British group was the first to arrive, landing within twenty-four hours of Eisenhower’s telegram. It included members of all the political parties, both men and women. Soon three members of the United States Congress joined them. The American Party included Clare Booth-Luce, wife of the influential Harry Luce, founder and publisher of Time and Life magazines.

On the gentle hillside overlooking Weimar, now greening with spring growth, American medical teams had been strenuously at work for days trying to save the dying. But the situation was still dreadful and not all the bodies had yet been buried. Shocked, the civilian observers hurriedly walked through the temporary hospitals, listened to testimonies from survivors, and saw hundreds of emaciated bodies in pits that had been hastily dug by US Army bulldozers. “One of the most horrible things about the whole place,” said one of the stunned parliamentarians to Robert Reid after viewing the crematorium, “is the cold-blooded, typically thorough German way in which everything was organized.”

They had all seen photographs beforehand, and knew what to expect, but none of the pictures could convey the smell of death and disease that filled their nostrils, or prepare them for the experience of talking face to face with the victims. “Not only were they shown through the rat holes of hutments where thousands of prisoners have lived and died, the starved skeletons of what were once men awaiting a decent Christian [sic] burial, and the crematorium with the charred bones still in the ovens,” a somber Reid told his BBC listeners in Britain, “they also had an opportunity of talking with many of the prisoners and all they heard confirms every newspaper and radio reporter’s story of the place.”

It was in part the vivid and shocking coexistence of the beauty of the landscape and the brutality within the camp that inspired Eisenhower to insist that German civilians from Weimar be forced to witness the horrors that had taken place in their own back yard. He wanted no arguing or protesting about German innocence in years to come. At least a thousand inhabitants of the city, he demanded, were to view the camp and the hospital. Half of them should be women. “Those who are required to make the trip include: men and women from 18 to 45, particularly those who belonged to the NSDAP,” read his orders.

Two thirds of those are to be of the more prosperous classes and one third the less. They must be strong enough to endure the march and the inspection (it will last about six hours; the distance is 25 kilometers). Food is to be brought and is to be consumed before visiting the camp. Nothing will happen to the partakers. The march will be accompanied by trucks of the German Red Cross and doctors in order to give help if anyone needs it.¹

Reid was there to witness the scene. A dozen or so processions of German men, women, girls and boys were herded through the camp, escorted by US military police and some of the camp’s block leaders, and forced to gaze, Reid told his BBC listeners, “on the mound of skeletons covered with their tight parchment of purplish skin.” It was a hot afternoon, he explained, “and the dusty compound of Buchenwald stank with the corruption of festering death all around. Some of the more stolid Germans just looked at those bodies and said nothing. It was impossible to probe through their skulls and look into their minds to see what they were thinking.”

His anger was partly personal. He and Vera had taken a Jewish refugee from Vienna into their home. He knew from what she had told them how ordinary, respectable people had simply turned their backs on Hitler’s victims and chosen not to know what was happening.²

Buchenwald made headlines around the world. But British citizens were transfixed even more grimly by a similar horror recently uncovered by their own troops in the pine forests of northern Germany.

Celle is a small town lying on the Aller River about thirty miles north-east of Hanover on the road to Hamburg. Close by, Montgomery’s British forces had established a corps headquarters as the front line advancing steadily towards the Baltic. Ahead lay Lüneberg Heath. On Thursday 12 April, a colonel of the Wehrmacht approached the British lines on a motorcycle waving a white flag. He asked to speak with a senior British officer. Blindfolded, he was taken to the headquarters.

The colonel was seeking a local truce. The reason, he explained, was that an epidemic of typhus had broken out in a nearby concentration camp. If the fighting engulfed the camp, it was feared, prisoners might escape and spread the disease. After some discussion and amendments his proposal was accepted. It was agreed that when British forces reached a certain point, a truce zone would come into force.

Three days later the British forces reached the line. Among them was a twenty-three-year-old major in the Eleventh Armored Division, David Finnie. He was leading a troop of half-track guns along a narrow road packed with vehicles towards the village of Bergen. They reached a bridge over the Aller, and then, suddenly, the convoy stopped. On either side was a boggy field; beyond, lay dense pine forests. They were stuck. “We sat still on a pleasant spring day,” Finnie recalled, “waiting.” Occasionally, a German shell exploded nearby.

Eventually, he was briefed for the first time about the truce. They had reached the edge of the agreed zone. He duly marked the area on his map.³

Meanwhile, a small British party had entered the camp. One of the first to arrive was a young intelligence officer, Derrick Sington, who never forgot what met his eyes, or his nose:

It reminded me of the entrance to a zoo. We came into a smell of ordure–like the smell of a monkey camp. A sad, blue smoke floated like ground mist between low buildings. I had tried to imagine the interior of a concentration camp, but I had not imagined it like this. Nor had I imagined the strange, simian throng, who crowded the barbed wire fence surrounding their compounds, with their shaven heads and their obscene striped penitentiary suits . . . We had been welcomed before, but the half-credulous cheers of these almost lost men, of these clowns in their terrible motley, who had once been Polish officers, land workers in the Ukraine, Budapest doctors and students in France, impelled a stronger emotion, and I had to fight back my tears.4

At the main gate, the senior British officer charged with taking control of the camp met with its commander, a Wehrmacht officer, and was then escorted to meet the person who was really in charge, SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Josef Kramer, a veteran of Auschwitz. The first thing Kramer did was insist that his men should not be disarmed. If they were, he explained, they would be torn to pieces by the inmates. It was agreed that, for the time being, they could keep their weapons.

Kramer then showed the British around, falling over himself to explain that he had only recently arrived and most of what they saw had therefore been out of his control. He appeared to have no shame, and said he had tried to do his best. But what the British soldiers saw that day they never forgot, and all those who followed, writes one historian, “felt the same sequence of emotions: disbelief, bewilderment, horror and anger.”⁵

Bergen-Belsen was in reality two camps within one. In Camp 1 were crammed up to fifty thousand inmates, half of them women; of these, some eighteen thousand were Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Czech or German Jews, most of whom were the sole survivors of families who had perished in the gas chambers at Birkenau (Auschwitz) or Treblinka. The rest of the women were Russians, Yugoslavs, Poles, French and Belgians who had been arrested for resistance activities. Camp 2 was situated next to a Panzer training school on the same site, and consisted solely of men–some fifteen thousand of them. The largest group was Russian, who made up some 60 percent of the total, followed by Poles. There were between 1,600 and 1,800 Germans, approximately 500 each of Greeks, French, Belgians and Czechs, and the rest were Dutch and Yugoslavian.⁶

By far the worse of the two was Camp 1. Here, crammed into a hundred single-story wooden huts, or lying around the compound exposed to the elements, lay tens of thousands of sick and emaciated prisoners. Most were racked with dysentery, tuberculosis or typhus. The men were dressed in the standard concentration camp garb of striped material resembling pajamas, or wore filthy rags. The women were in striped flannel gowns. Few of either sex wore shoes. For days, as a result of the approaching battle front, there had been no electricity or water. The sanitation, always primitive at best, was now non-existent. The inmates were dying at the rate of five hundred a day. Outside one of the women’s huts lay a pile of unburied bodies. Inside, dead women were lying in the passage, and in the main room was a mass of bodies blocking any further access.

The place stank of rotting flesh, feces and urine. “It was just a barren wilderness, as bare and devoid of vegetation as a chicken run,” recorded one officer from an army ambulance unit.

Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles where they had been dumped by the other inmates, sometimes singly or in pairs where they had fallen as they shuffled along the dirt tracks . . . [I] saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to roll over and men eating worms as they clutched half a loaf of bread purely because they had to eat and could now scarcely tell the difference between worms and bread. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself up against them as she cooked the food we gave her over an open flame. Men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bodies, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

This was only the most visible misery to meet the eye. Inside the packed wooden huts the liberating British troops encountered scenes from Dante’s Hell. Frantic efforts were mounted to save as many lives as possible, but the task proved almost insurmountable.

The first desperate need was for food and water, and within twenty-four hours convoys of water tanks, food and kitchen equipment arrived on the scene. However, much of the food proved too rich for the sick: many of them simply wolfed it down, were promptly ill, and died. But it was the sheer scale of the medical emergency that overwhelmed the liberators. After a rapid survey, it was decided that some seventeen thousand of the women in Camp 1 required instant hospital treatment, but there was no hospital. An emergency one could be set up in the Panzer training school, but that would take time. And although an evacuation timetable was put in place, there were inevitable delays. Meanwhile, the death toll continued to mount.

Two weeks after entering the camp, the British Army’s medical services were still so overburdened that they called desperately on the help of ninety-six medical students from London. Each was allocated a hut and told to make conditions as tolerable as possible while the inmates waited to be transferred to a proper hospital bed. They also had to make sure that everyone got their fair share of rations–otherwise the strong simply stole from the weak.

One student left a vivid account of his hut:

It was full of the most emaciated people I have ever seen in my life. There was supposed to be a loo at the far end but they couldn’t get up to go to it. [The hut] was almost up to the top of one’s boots in excreta. One just stumped about in it. People by now were too weak to use [the toilet] and were just lying in their own faeces and urine which dripped down from one bunk to the next.

Another student captured a singular moment of horror.

I was standing aghast in the midst of all this filth, trying to get used to the smell which was a mixture of post-mortem room, a sewer, sweat, and foul pus, when I heard a scrabbling on the floor. I looked down in the half light and saw a woman crouching at my feet. She had black matted hair, well populated [by lice] and her ribs stood out as though there was nothing between them, her arms were so thin that they were horrible. She was defecating, but she was so weak that she could not lift her buttocks from the floor and, as she had diarrhoea, the liquid yellow stools bubbled over her thighs.

As the students moved through the huts, women clutched at their sleeves in desperation, crying out, “Herr Doktor! Herr Doktor!” and telling them their pitiful stories: “My mother and father were burned in Auschwitz”; “My husband was flogged to death by the SS”; or, they asked them pleadingly, “Will I ever be beautiful again, Herr Doktor?”⁷

Registration of the victims had long since been abandoned, or had been non-existent from the start. To make matters worse, relatives were sometimes mistakenly separated in the course of the evacuation, a fact that caused immense distress. Gradually, however, nurses began to make out personal history cards for the survivors, along with details of missing relatives. This process again revealed the shocking inhumanity of the Nazis, as was recalled by a nurse in the Swiss Red Cross who asked a patient to state her name, nationality and place of origin: “The woman did not know what to say. At last she pulled up the sleeve of her nightgown and stammered, ‘Me . . . no name–only number–no country, just a Jewess, do you understand? I am only a dog.’ ’’⁸

The most urgent problem was typhus. Thanks to the filthy conditions, it was spreading rapidly through the camp. The louse is the main carrier of typhus, which first reveals itself with a skin rash, followed by fever, acute headache and pain, then renal failure and gangrene. Eventually it penetrates the central nervous system, causing an agonizing, convulsive death. One of its victims was Anne Frank, who had died in Belsen that February.

To stop the disease’s spread, the lice had to be killed. So everyone in the camp, prisoner or otherwise, as well as all visitors, was sprayed liberally with DDT. “A squirt up each sleeve. One down the trousers. Two more squirts down the back and the front of the shirt and a final shot on the hair,” remembered one visitor. Severe speed restrictions were also imposed on all vehicles in and around the camp to keep down the dust that carried and spread the deadly feces of the lice. Slowly, the death rate came down, and by the end of the month it stood at three hundred a day. As each of the filthy and contaminated huts was emptied, it was burned to the ground.

Meanwhile, as the doctors and nurses tended to the living, the work of burying the dead went on relentlessly. The numbers were too great for individual graves to be dug, or for any dignity to be observed in burial. Instead, as at Buchenwald, army bulldozers excavated great open-air pits and the bodies were manhandled in. At first this grim task was given to the remaining SS guards, who were deliberately fed the pathetic rations handed out to the prisoners before their liberation. After a couple of days, two of them committed suicide, one collapsed and another disguised himself as a prisoner and was shot while trying to escape.

A war correspondent, Alan Moorehead, accompanying the British forces in northwest Germany, observed one of the burial scenes:

We came on a group of German guards flinging the bodies into a pit about a hundred feet square. They brought the bodies up in handcarts, and as they were flung into the grave a British soldier kept a tally of the numbers. When the total reached five hundred a bulldozer driven by another soldier came up and started nudging the earth into the grave. There was a curious pearly colour about the piled up bodies, and they were small like the bodies of children . . . all the normal features by which you know a human being had practically disappeared.”⁹

Eventually, it was decided to speed up matters by simply bulldozing the corpses into the pits. A Christian padre and a Jewish rabbi then said prayers over the site.

Belsen had never been an official extermination center, like Auschwitz or Treblinka. Nor was it one of the prewar concentration camps for political opponents of the Nazis, like Buchenwald or Dachau, where Fey von Hassell was still interned. Ironically, it had been built in 1943 as a relatively lenient camp for privileged prisoners, mostly prominent Jews with important connections whom the Nazis hoped to exchange for Germans interned in allied countries. Only a handful were ever traded in this way, however, and by late 1944 the camp had degenerated into just another miserable hellhole in the vast gulag of Nazi barbed wire that criss-crossed Hitler’s new Europe, “the terminus, the last station,” it has been said, “of the Holocaust.”¹⁰

Soon it was packed with prisoners being evacuated from Poland and eastern Germany ahead of the advancing Russians, the sick from labor camps across the Reich, and thousands of others being shipped around Hitler’s disintegrating empire for no clear or obvious reason. The only clear thing that emerged from the chaos was that Himmler hoped to strike a deal that would save his life. In March, one of his principal deputies, SS Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, had visited the camp at the pleading of Josef Kramer. Shocked by what he saw, he arranged for the rapid removal of seven thousand of the remaining “exchange Jews,” obviously in the hope that they could still be traded with the allies for something that would save his boss. But, even as they left, more transports continued to arrive.

By early April, the number of prisoners had grown to some forty thousand from only fifteen thousand in December, and several more thousand arrived in the following weeks. Conditions were made substantially worse by the transfer of administrative SS staff from Auschwitz, men and women who were well hardened to brutality and death. Kramer was a keen and obedient Nazi whose sheer indifference to the squalor that surrounded him defied belief. One of his first acts was to impose a vicious regime by appointing Aryan “kapos” (trusted inmates) for each of the huts and terrorizing the prisoners with endless roll-calls. Typhus had first broken out in February. By March, efforts to bury the dead had simply been abandoned.

A French musician who had played in the camp’s orchestra had fallen ill with typhus just two weeks before the British arrived. She recalled:

I had the most abominable dysentery. I was just a sick animal lying in its own excrement. From 8 April everything around me became nightmarish. I merely existed as a bursting head, an intestine, a perpetually active anus. One tier above me was a French girl I didn’t know; in my moments of lucidity, I heard her saying in a clear, calm, even pleasant voice, “I must shit, but I must shit on your head, it’s more hygienic!” She had gone mad; others, equally unhinged, guffawed interminably or fought. No one came to see us any more, not even the SS. They’d turned off the water.11

Around the world, broadcasts, press headlines and photographs from Belsen, along with newsreels of the horrors, triggered universal shock and disgust. Kramer and his SS guards, both male and female, were denounced as “The Beasts of Belsen.” Within hours of the camp’s liberation, Kramer was put under close arrest in his own quarters. The next day, he was removed from the camp and placed in a cellar below the officers’ quarters. Here, he was interrogated by field security officers and then–by this time being execrated in headlines as “The Shackled Monster of Belsen”–he was taken to the Celle prisoner-of-war camp.

The female guards of Belsen provoked a special loathing, as their behavior flew in the face of everything women were supposed to represent. “They played their vile part in torturing and starving thousands of helpless men, women and children,” read one caption beneath a photograph showing three of the well-nourished women. “They flogged starving women too weak to walk, and whooped with joy round their dying victims.” Other captions described them as “she-thugs” who “happily wielded whips for Himmler.” If anything were needed to prove that the allies were fighting a just cause, this was it. The Germans, screamed one headline, were “The Beasts of Europe.”¹² Clearly, the liberating forces believed the whole nation was collectively responsible for Nazi crimes.

Nine days after the British forces entered the camp, the burger-meisters of Celle and neighboring towns were brought to Belsen and shown around. They were led to the burial pit, still half full of bodies, and forced to line up with the SS men and women. Then the British commandant read out a long denunciation. “What you will see here,” he told them, “is the final and utter condemnation of the Nazi Party. It justifies every measure which the United Nations will take to exterminate the Party. What you will see here is such a disgrace to the German people that their names must forever be erased from the list of civilized nations.” Above all, he made clear his desire to implicate them, too. “Who bears the final responsibility?” he asked rhetorically. “You, who have allowed your Führer to carry out his terrible whims. You who have proved incapable of doing anything to check his perverted triumphs . . . You who did not rise up spontaneously to cleanse the name of Germany, not fearing the personal consequence. You stand here judged through what you will see in the camp.” One of the mayors covered his face with his hands and wept. Another vomited. Another refused to look at the pit in front of him. They all said that they had never dreamed that this was going on.¹³

Under the terms of the truce, the camp guards remained temporarily on duty. Cooks and other service personnel also remained in their jobs until replaced by the British. Furthermore, it was agreed that no more than six days after the arrival of British forces, any Wehrmacht personnel would be conveyed back to the German lines with their arms, their equipment and their vehicles. This did not, however, apply to the SS.

The six days were up on Hitler’s birthday. At eight-thirty that morning, a convoy of British Army trucks rolled into the camp and loaded up four hundred soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Two days before, a roll-call had revealed that only fifty-four of them wished to return to the Reich and that the rest were happy to become prisoners of war. But the British overruled them. One eyewitness recorded:

In their field-grey uniform they marched, carrying their rifles, bazookas, grenades, mortars, the sweat trickling from under their steel helmets, ploughing furrows of dust on their faces. The men of the Wehrmacht were marching to the outer gates of this charnel house to take up their positions against our troops. Our grim-faced men watched them go by . . . Past the clean, green-walled barracks building which had housed them, they tramped looking very cheerful . . . they firmly believed they were not to be assigned to front line fighting. They had been guards so long, they did not know Hitler was putting his schoolboys into the lines.14

As the German troops left the camp, hundreds of those inmates who were strong enough to stand hooted and bayed like animals. One of the prisoners, too ill to join in, dipped a solitary crust of bread into a puddle to make it soft enough to swallow. To add insult to injury, the departing Germans had already deliberately wrecked the water supply in the barracks they left behind.¹⁵

Close by in Lüneberg, Bryan Samain as yet remained unaware of the horrors at Belsen. His sole previous glimpse of what a concentration camp might mean had come at school when he was only thirteen and so had little interest in politics or international affairs. But one day, at chapel, the service was given by a visiting German pastor. The man was a refugee, and bared his arm. A shocked Samain saw the blue number tattooed upon it.¹⁶

His main responsibility since landing in Normandy had been as his unit’s intelligence officer. He had spent six weeks at the British Army’s military intelligence training school at Matlock, in Derbyshire. Housed in a grand prewar spa hotel, it still had potted plants in the reception area and a grand old Victorian conservatory. Its staff included a large number of attractive and distracting young Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) girls. Much of the training involved map and compass work, as well as TEWTS, which Samain quickly discovered stood for “tactical exercises without troops.” This, he recorded, “usually involved standing about on a hill and discussing the movement and deployment of troops, both ‘own’ and ‘enemy’ within the framework of a given scenario.”¹⁷

Most of this work was familiar from his basic training, but there was a lot that was new, too, including how to interrogate prisoners of war, the enemy order of battle, front-line codes, and the skill of writing up crisp, accurate situation reports (sitreps). Samain liked the enemy order of battle course best. It involved learning all about the German Army’s organization and its divisions in Western Europe. It had an element of intellectual puzzle-solving about it. “We soon learned,” he recorded, “that from the capture of a single enemy POW we could deduce, from the name or number of his unit, the regiment he belonged to, the division that regiment was part of, and so on.” Throughout the course he was drilled constantly in the basic reason for his life as an IO (intelligence officer): “This is what I know now, who do I need to inform?”

And that was what he had done for most of the time since crossing the Channel. His unit’s original intelligence officer was killed on D-Day, and Samain was chosen as his replacement on the strength of the Matlock course. His team included a sergeant, a corporal and six marines. Their task, as he later described it, was to collate, analyze and pass on operational information as they gathered it to both their commanding officer and brigade intelligence. “For this last-named purpose,” he said, “I regularly visited Brigade HQ a mile or so behind us, generally on a bicycle. On one occasion, going down a deserted lane, I was blown off the bike into a nearby ditch by a random shell that exploded close by me.” He also had to make sure that the front-line men were kept absolutely up to date with the latest positions of the enemy lines, especially through photo-reconnaissance maps taken just hours before. For this, he frequently found himself crawling forward, delivering the information to the men in slit trenches.

But he had also spent plenty of time crawling about under fire for another reason. This was because his other main area of expertise was as a sniper.

Despite their training, civilians turned soldiers often found it hard to kill. They would try to avoid it, or kill only when it was a matter of one’s own life or the enemy’s. For preference, they did even this at a distance, so they did not have to see the impact on their victims and acknowledge them as human beings. Only a small minority relished the task, and after the war was over few were willing to talk of it. Many felt guilty. Fairly typical was the recollection of one British soldier fighting with Montgomery’s forces:

I was a yokel, yet they taught me to kill in six weeks. Unbelievable. I would never have killed anybody in a million years. There’s no two ways about it, you get acclimatised . . . First of all I killed with a Bren gun–so that was from far away . . . I was squeamish when I first did hand-to-hand fighting–when I did my first bayonet attack. But I was good at closing my mind . . . it’s kill or be killed. If you think they won’t do it to you, you’re dead. So whether he’s going to shoot you or not, you’ve got to be first.18

To kill in cold blood was hard. That was what made snipers special. It was their unique task “to line up their sights on a man’s head and pull the trigger,” notes one historian.

It had to be approached in a calm manner and there was little room for emotions. A few even went so far as to keep “Game Books” in which they logged their daily “bag.” British snipers operating from houses outside Arnhem used pencils to scratch their daily scores on to the furniture or walls of the houses they occupied. Some ordinary infantrymen thought sniping dishonourable and disliked their own snipers as much as they feared the enemy.¹⁹

Yet the practice had a long and accepted place in warfare; it was, after all, a sniper hidden in the rigging of a French ship who had done for Admiral Nelson while he stood on the deck of the Victory at Trafalgar. Historically, the skill had been known as “sharpshooting,” but during the days of the Raj in India, bored British officers had developed the sport of shooting at snipe–small, fast-moving birds that tested all their skills and reflexes–and the new term was now standard.

If caught, a sniper’s fate was rarely happy. Occasionally, he might provide useful intelligence. More usually, he was finished off without much ceremony. “There was no time to muck around with them,” observed Samain, who could not remember a single occasion when an enemy sniper’s life had been spared.

To perfect his own shooting skills, which he had first honed in his school’s cadet corps, he had been sent on a specialized course run by the British Army at Devizes, Wiltshire, for Americans and Canadians as well as British sharpshooters. “A young Canadian backwoodsman I particularly remember,” recalled Samain. “He could hit a tin can with a rifle bullet at a range of 100 yards, then do the same thing to other tin cans with a succession of quickly aimed follow-up shots.” But such talent was taken for granted on the course: the special skills the instructors were looking for were patience, stealth of movement and the ability to fire a single, telling shot at the critical moment.

Samain repeatedly practiced the fieldcraft basic to commando training: the skillful use of natural cover such as hedgerows and ditches, the shadows cast by trees and buildings, and so on. But he also learned how to prepare a sniper’s hide. Typically, this involved digging a shallow trench in a hedgerow and hiding in it covered by branches and foliage, making sure that he had a clear field of fire. His weapon was a standard British Mark I (T) Lee-Enfield rifle with a detachable telescopic sight that he carried separately in a metal case. He also used a pair of standard British Army binoculars.

He would black up his face and the backs of his hands with mud or black cream, then use green-brown netting to cover his body. One of only four snipers in his unit, he had quickly learned in Normandy that there was little time to dig a hide, so instead he made use of natural cover, or the roof of an old building or a deserted barn. Unlike Wehrmacht or French collaborationist soldiers, though, he did not tie himself to a chimney stack or the top of a tree. To have done so would have prevented him from making the often essential quick escape.

Much of the sniper’s life, as his training had stressed, involved long hours of patience. Typical was a patrol he went on with two other snipers. Soon after dawn they set off into no man’s land between British and German lines, making for a deserted farmhouse some eight hundred yards away. The approach lay along rough country tracks, stretches of shell-torn woodland and deserted fields. “The air stank of dead and rotting cattle lying upturned in fields,” he recorded, “and in the woodlands there were German and British corpses alike, including several of our own paratroopers who had dropped on D-Day, still hanging in the trees.” Apart from the occasional bark of artillery in the distance, it was dead quiet.

They found the farmhouse to be empty, so cautiously eased themselves into sniping positions–“up the remains of rickety stairs in the farm building itself,” he wrote, “and into the loft where, through the shattered tile roofing, we could gain some view of the enemy lines about 100 yards to our front.” For two or three hours they watched, all the time being plagued by swarms of mosquitoes. Then, suddenly, they spotted a slight movement behind a hedgerow that obscured the German positions. It was followed by the brief, dull gleam of helmets. It was a small group of men moving across a gap in the hedgerow.

One of the snipers with Samain fired a single shot. After that, there was no sign of any further movement. The commando team lay silent and motionless for some time longer, despite the mosquitoes, waiting to see if any more targets presented themselves. None did. Finally, they withdrew silently, retreating from the farmhouse as cautiously as they had entered it. They could not for certain claim a kill that day, but Samain could comfort himself with the thought that they had made a small contribution towards making the Germans think twice about launching an attack.²⁰

German snipers were in action too, of course, but there were other tricky hazards as well, and Samain was lucky not to have fallen victim to one of them. Shortly after taking over as intelligence officer he had been advancing through a heavily wooded area in Normandy when he walked into a wire strung between two trees and set off a booby trap. The grenade that exploded sent splinters into his chest and lower back and he was quickly stretchered back to a regimental aid post, then transferred by ambulance to a field hospital in Bayeux. He stayed there for two or three weeks, sharing a ward with some badly burned members of a tank crew being fed through straws. When he was well enough to be allowed out, one of the first things he did was attend mass in the local cathedral.

Eventually, he heard that his unit had returned to England for a refit, so he hitched a lift on a US Air Force Dakota. The plane was full of small crates and other packages from Brussels, which had just been liberated. Mostly it was champagne, scent and silk stockings. At Northolt he was given a lift by a king’s messenger from the Foreign Office, who was waiting for the plane in a Daimler limousine. As they drove into London, Samain realized that he was traveling with several packages of the Brussels loot, which had been packed in the car’s boot.

Even as Belsen was being cleared and deloused, the Nazis were still frantically shuffling concentration camp prisoners ahead of the advancing British forces, who were now rapidly closing in on Hamburg. On the edge of this now bombed-out port, the one-time home of Fred Warner, stood yet another notorious camp, Neuengamme. Once a sub-camp of Sachsenhausen, it subsequently spawned dozens of satellite camps of its own, and by 1945 held some thirteen thousand prisoners, both men and women. It was always a brutal place, characterized by starvation, physical abuse and a total lack of hygiene and medical care, with inmates forced to do hard labor in quarries and munitions plants. The mortality rate was 50 percent.

On Hitler’s birthday, the camp’s commander ordered SS Sturmbannführer Gehrig, his head of administration, to go to Lübeck to oversee the loading of thousands of Neuengamme’s prisoners onto ships. In their thousands, crammed into cattle trucks, or shuffling along in makeshift footwear or often bare feet, they made their way along roads and railway tracks. Hundreds died of exhaustion, or were shot by SS guards when they collapsed. One group, taken south, was herded into a barn which was then shut and set alight, with the guards shooting through the doors. Only twenty-two of the thousand inmates inside survived.

This day, too, in the early afternoon, a column of trucks drove a contingent of Jews from the camp to an empty school building on the northern edge of Hamburg. It contained twenty-two children between the ages of four and twelve, two women and twenty-six men. All had been used for medical experiments. They were taken to the school’s gymnasium and hanged so that none should bear witness to Nazi atrocities.²¹

The day before Gehrig received his orders, the first group of inmates had arrived at Lübeck, packed into cattle wagons. Eventually, eleven thousand Neuengamme inmates were crowded onto the Baltic port’s quayside. But where this caravan of human misery was going, and for what reason, none of them knew.

In the week between Eisenhower’s traumatic visit to Ohrdruf and Hitler’s birthday, episodes such as the bitter SS resistance at Nuremberg and the suicides of the Lord Mayor and his family at Leipzig intensified allied fears about some desperate last stand by Nazi fanatics in the Alpine Redoubt.

Now the very speed of the allied advance itself seemed to be making the threat of a redoubt a reality. By forcing “the German desperadoes back into the hard core of the mountains,” declared British War Office intelligence in mid-April, it would make them hard to dislodge. A few days later, the code-breakers picked up a message that appeared to confirm their worst fears. It came from none other than Heinrich Himmler himself. In a message to his chief subordinate in Bavaria, the SS chief ordered: “Collect the SS units militarily under your command. Defend the Alps for me.”²²

The day after Nuremberg fell, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, held a press conference at SHAEF headquarters. After warning the gathered correspondents that what he was about to say should be kept top secret, he admitted that not much was known about the redoubt. Yet, it was clear that the Germans had been shifting men and matériel there. “Just what we will find down there we don’t know,” he told them. “We are beginning to think it will be a lot more than we expect. Our target now, if we are going to bring this war to an end in a hell of a hurry, is this national redoubt and we are going to organize our strength in that direction . . . We may find that when we have cut the head from the snake the tail won’t wiggle very long.”²³

Unknown to Bedell Smith or allied intelligence, just hours beforehand Hitler had finally issued a directive about the redoubt. In one of the last items of business he took care of on his birthday, he ordered one of his most trusted subordinates, Lieutenant-General Winter, deputy chief of the armed forces operations staff, to fly immediately out of Berlin to Bavaria. With him, Winter carried an order instructing him to organize an “inner fortress” (Kernfestung) in the Alps, designed to serve as the last bulwark of fanatical resistance.

The region, Hitler instructed Winter, was to be closed from now on to all German and foreign civilians, and the SS was to remove all superfluous foreign workers. Supplies for the armed forces and the existing civilian population were to be stockpiled to the maximum extent possible. War supplies of all kinds, especially for mountain warfare, were to be moved into the area by the armed forces. Long-range courier aircraft and other planes suitable for reconnaissance would also be made available. Emergency factories for producing munitions, bazookas and explosives would be set up by the Ministry of War Production and Armaments. The senior military commander in the area would assume the duties of a fortress commander, while supreme powers over the Nazi Party itself and all civil government would be exercised by the existing Gauleiter and Governor of the Tirol, Franz Hofer. Winter’s directive was made official on Tuesday 24 April.²⁴

That same morning, Fred Warner and the SOE “Historian” party finally got the thumbs-up from their daily dispatch rider for their mission into Austria. Warner spent the day carefully checking his equipment and packing his rucksack. Inside was everything except food that he would need for survival in the mountains: thermal underwear and socks, a sleeping bag, a torch and a specially designed sand-colored waterproof cape that to a casual observer could pass for the innocent garments of a worker or farmer. Underneath, Fred would wear his standard khaki British battle dress. If caught, he would claim combatant status and so hopefully avoid being shot as a spy; this was especially important for returning émigrés like Warner and his group, who would otherwise be promptly dispatched by the Nazis as traitors.

Even more vital items were packed in the pockets of his uniform: compass, maps, a .45 Colt pistol and .22 Belgian Browning, and British Army papers identifying him as Lieutenant Fred Warner. With these items, if the worst came to the worst and he lost his rucksack, he would at least be able to establish where he was and could shoot, threaten or bargain his way out of trouble.

An early dinner followed. It was a somber affair, each man lost in his thoughts, although the chef had done his best to make the meal memorable. It was dusk when they were driven out to a special shed on the edge of the aerodrome used for the final fitting out of agents. The first thing Warner saw, laid out on the floor in front of him, was his jumping suit. This was a huge canvas affair fitted with zippers rather than buttons, gauntlets, a padded hat, and knee and elbow pads. Before putting it on, he carefully fitted his money belt. Concealed inside were two hundred US dollars, six gold sovereigns, and several thousand German Reichsmarks. He decided to do without the fur lining of his jumping suit, which made it bulkier than he liked and uncomfortable. Then he fitted his parachute.

Practicing jumps had formed a large part of his training since he had joined SOE back in 1943. Handling parachutes had begun in Altrincham, a wealthy suburb of Manchester, at a requisitioned private house with peacocks strutting majestically around the grounds. Here, well hidden behind the garden’s trees and bushes, stood the fuselage of an old Whitley airplane. Warner had spent hours jumping from the aircraft, learning how to land without breaking a leg or an ankle by tumbling when hitting the ground.

Further practice followed on a functioning Whitley from Manchester’s Ringway Airport, with the drops taking place at a relatively low altitude over Tatton Park in nearby Cheshire. Sitting on the edge of a hole cut in the floor of the fuselage, he learned to wait for the dispatcher’s command of “Go” before pushing himself into the void at several hundred feet. After several successful drops he earned the right to attach a small parachute badge on the sleeve of his uniform. It was a symbolic moment that meant a lot to him. Finally, he could discard the insignia of the Pioneer Corps with its pick and shovel and all the frustrations and humiliations they meant to him. At last, he felt like a proper soldier doing his bit in the fight against Hitler.

In the darkness of the shed, in their jumping suits, Warner and the others discussed details of the flight with the aircraft’s crew. The plane was a B-24 Liberator, the crew American: pilot, navigator, dispatcher and gunners. This came as bad news to Warner: American crews had a reputation for being happy-go-lucky and not very careful or practiced in where they dropped the agents. But there was nothing he could do about that except hope for good luck. There was a final farewell and handshake from a member of the SOE headquarters staff who had come to see them off and a hurried thank-you to the sergeant who had looked after the group during the weeks of waiting at the Villa Rosso. Then Warner was physically hoisted up by strong hands into the body of the aircraft. Already loaded were the containers holding the radio transmitter–receiver, the explosives the party would need for sabotage operations, and the bulk of their ammunition and food. This would be dropped separately, to be retrieved on the ground later.

Suddenly the silence was broken harshly as the gunners opened fire to check that the aircraft’s weapons were in good order. Then the pilot started up the engines and revved them to a high-pitched scream to satisfy himself that all was well. As the noise died down, the aircraft slowly bumped its way onto the airstrip and trundled to the end of the runway. Three hundred miles to the north and a couple of hours’ flying time across the Alps lay the unknown territory of Hitler’s redoubt.