19

Mauthausen

FRITZ FELT THE PINCH of cold steel round his wrists as the handcuffs snapped shut. “If you make any attempt to escape,” said the officer, “you will be shot immediately.”

His three-man escort—an NCO and two privates—marched him to the station. There they all boarded a train bound for Linz. For the third time, Fritz traveled the familiar route: St. Pölten to Blindenmarkt to Amstetten . . . At some point the train must have passed by the spot where he had made his leap. It was unidentifiable now in the light of day with the snow starting to thaw. How vivid it all was in his memory. But no more vivid than his pleasant interlude in St. Pölten; like a blissful vacation, he would always remember it as lasting little more than a week, when in fact it had been closer to three.1 Three weeks of eating well, resting in safety, and having his health restored.

At Linz they changed to a local train for the short journey to Mauthausen, crossing the Danube and doubling back along the north bank. Mauthausen itself was a pleasant little town, nestled in a bow of the Danube beneath rolling green hills checkered with fields and woods. Fritz was marched through it, two paces ahead of the NCO and the soldiers, who kept their rifles trained on his back. The locals, accustomed to living in the shadow of the place that lay out of sight in the hills above the town, paid them no heed.

A winding road led up the valley to the camp. When it came in sight, it was like no concentration camp Fritz had ever seen. He’d heard about it from prisoners transferred to Monowitz, but its appearance was still remarkable—Mauthausen was more like a fortress than a camp, with high, thick stone walls topped by walkways and studded with gun emplacements. There was an angle in the wall, in which there stood a massive, beetling stone gatehouse flanked at one corner by a squat round tower and at the other by an enormous square turret four stories high. Off to one side, emerging through the melting snow, was a fruit garden, and tucked under the wall was an enclosure containing SS barrack buildings. Somewhere within those walls were Fritz’s father and friends. Or so he hoped. One could only imagine how harsh the selections would be in such a camp. But Fritz had faith in his father’s strength, and in the destiny that bound them together; deep down he was certain they would be reunited here—much sooner than they had expected. Fritz would certainly have a story to tell.

Instead of taking him through this imposing gate, his Wehrmacht guards turned left and marched him along the road parallel to the outer wall, past the fruit garden. Mauthausen was built on a steep hill, and on the slope just below, Fritz saw a second camp, smaller and more conventional in appearance, with barbed wire fences and basic watch towers. At the corner of the stone wall, the road swung sharply right, and the ground on one side fell steeply away, ending in a sheer drop into a vast, deep pit lined with jagged cliff faces.

Fritz was looking down into the place that gave Mauthausen its evil name: the granite quarry. Wider and many times deeper than the limestone quarry at Buchenwald, its bottom was a hive of long work sheds teeming with slaves and echoing to the tinkling clangor of picks and chisels on stone; the far rim fell away with the slope of the hill, and on that side was a broad, steep staircase cut into the rock, curving upward in one enormous flight of 186 steps from the bottom of the pit to the rim. Up it hundreds of prisoners were climbing, each carrying a square block of granite on his back. They called it the Stair of Death, and it was the symbol of all that was hideous about Mauthausen.

Unlike the little Buchenwald quarry, whose main purpose had been to provide materials for the camp itself, this was a full-scale industrial operation run by the German construction materials company DESt*1 in conjunction with the SS; the granite extracted here was destined for the monumental building projects conceived by Adolf Hitler. The Führer’s grandiose vision required stone in enormous quantities, and thousands of prisoners had died extracting and carrying it. The Stair of Death was the epitome of SS thinking—why install a more efficient mechanical conveyor when criminal and Jewish labor was so cheap and the process so satisfyingly punishing? Injuries and fatalities were constant—the slightest misstep on the staircase would send a man and his granite block tumbling among the others, setting them off like dominoes, breaking limbs and crushing bodies.

The road around the main camp ran a little way along the edge of the quarry, then turned right into the administrative section, a compound of low barrack huts. Here Fritz’s Wehrmacht guards handed him over to the SS and departed.

Fritz had been expecting an interrogation and a beating but received neither. An SS sergeant marched him to the main gatehouse. This was another titanic construction of stone, a bit like the Buchenwald gatehouse, but built from granite and much more intimidating, with two towers crowned by glazed watch offices decked with floodlights and machine guns. This was the main entrance to the prisoners’ part of the camp (the gatehouse he’d seen at the front led into a courtyard containing the SS garages).

Passing through the gate, Fritz found himself looking at a surprisingly small and ordinary interior; it was smaller than Monowitz and filled with rows of similarly basic single-story wooden barrack blocks on either side of a narrow roll-call ground. The sergeant disappeared through a door into the gatehouse, ordering Fritz to wait by the wall.

A few prisoners were hanging around there. One came over and asked Fritz who he was and what he’d been brought here for. Fritz told him his name and that he was from Vienna. The man walked away and came back a few moments later with another prisoner, who had an air of authority and knowingness, clearly some kind of functionary. He was Viennese and had been in Mauthausen for several years. He studied Fritz, chatted a little. Mauthausen was pretty bad, he said, but the one thing you really didn’t want to be was a Jew. Jews lasted no time at all here. With that, he walked off.

After a few more minutes, the SS sergeant emerged from the gatehouse and, out of the blue, demanded to know whether Fritz had an Auschwitz tattoo. Taken aback, Fritz said no, and to prove it, rolled up his right sleeve. The sergeant—who evidently didn’t know much about Auschwitz practices—seemed satisfied and put Fritz in the custody of a functionary prisoner who took him to the bathhouse.

There he met the Viennese prisoner again. This time he introduced himself properly; his name was Josef Kohl, though everyone called him Pepi for short. Fritz would later learn that Pepi Kohl was the leader of Mauthausen’s resistance. Feeling instantly at ease with him, Fritz admitted the truth for the first time since his escape. Some of the truth, anyway: the fact that he’d been in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and the story of his escape from the transport, right up to his arrest. He kept quiet about being Jewish; any hope he had of surviving here would depend on that fact remaining hidden. Thank goodness his papa was marked as Aryan.

For the third time Fritz went through the ritual of being a new prisoner: the shower, the confiscation of his clothes and belongings, the shaving of his head, and finally registration at the prisoner records office. Mauthausen added its own nuances to the system, but the only really significant novelty was that he went through it alone. The camp took in only eight other prisoners that day, and they came in later.

As his details were being taken, Fritz was told that the sole reason he was brought here was his refusal to give a home address. It was too late for that now. Perhaps acting on advice from Pepi Kohl, Fritz admitted the truth and was entered on the records as a transferee from Auschwitz who had been in the camp system since October 2, 1939. Better that than be subjected to torture by the camp Gestapo—a certain fate if he’d continued to keep silent. The interlude between his escape and his arrival was of no interest to the SS here. Neither was his tattoo; it was noted as a distinguishing feature, but the number wasn’t taken down. He told them he was a German Aryan “protective custody” prisoner, and the clerk didn’t bat an eye. Fritz was entered on the record accordingly and assigned the prisoner number 130039.2

No detailed records had come from Auschwitz, and no inquiries could be made. Auschwitz no longer existed; it had fallen to the Red Army on January 27, less than ten days after the evacuation (the same day Fritz boarded the soldiers’ train at Blindenmarkt). The only souls remaining in Monowitz had been the few hundred half-dead specters in the hospital and their carers, and many of those hadn’t survived long after liberation. Auschwitz and all its secrets were now part of history.3

Fritz gave the name of his cousin Lintschi as his next of kin, and his real Vienna address. Lintschi was officially Aryan, and there was nobody left at Im Werd 11/16 who could be endangered by association with him. When it came to his trade, he calculated his chances. He’d acquired a lot of varied skills in the camps, but which ones should he admit to? It didn’t look as if there was much call for construction workers here, and he guessed that any surplus labor would wind up in the quarry. He told them he was a heating engineer.4 It was half true—he’d helped build and fit out the heating plants at both Buchenwald and Monowitz, and he’d learned from his papa how easy it could be to bluff one’s way into a trade.

Although Fritz’s escape bid had failed in the end, it had done one thing for him: given him respite, during which he’d eaten well and rested, building up his health and strength. He knew well what an advantage this would give him in surviving what was to come.

Fritz was assigned to block 12, at the end of the main walled enclosure. It was unsettlingly close to the camp bunker, which had a gas chamber and crematorium attached. In the next section of the camp, separated by a wall, was the quarantine area and block 20—Mauthausen’s own Death Block, where hundreds of Soviet prisoners of war were kept in appalling conditions, starved and put to murderous hard labor. Fritz learned that there had been a major escape from the Death Block two weeks earlier; the whole camp had been awakened by machine gun fire after the Russians used wet blankets to short the electric fence enclosing that side of the camp. Many had been killed, but four hundred had managed to escape. They were desperate and weak, and for days afterward the local people heard gunshots from the woods as the Russians were hunted down and murdered by the SS.5

The camp was horribly overcrowded, with some blocks intended for three hundred prisoners holding many times that number. Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and the other concentration camps on Reich soil had been receiving countless transports of prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and its subcamps.

Fritz, finding his feet in this new place, was looking forward to his reunion with his papa and friends, who must be somewhere among the multitude. But as he asked around he couldn’t find anyone who knew where they were or who recognized their names. Wherever he inquired, he could find no trace of them. As far as he could gather, although there had been transports from Auschwitz nobody knew of any that had arrived on or around January 26.

His father simply wasn’t here. Neither were any of their old friends from Monowitz. It was as if they had never been here. But if that was the case, where on Earth were they? Fritz had heard dreadful stories about SS atrocities in Poland and the Ostland—about whole transports of Jews murdered in the forests. Was that what had happened to the Auschwitz transport? Was that the fate Fritz had escaped?

Fritz was gone, launched over the side into the freezing night. Pray God he would find his way to home and safety. Gustav sat with his back against the car wall. He was so weak and tired. He’d had no food for days and only a mouthful of snow for moisture. “One man will kill another for a little scrap of bread,” he wrote in his diary. “We are veritable artists of hunger . . . we fish for snow with a mug tied to a string dangled out of the car.”

Later that night the train with its freight of dying men and frozen corpses crossed the Danube and pulled in at the Mauthausen ramp. The train was surrounded by an SS cordon and stood waiting. Hours ticked by; dawn came, and then the morning wore away. Inside the cars, the men who still had strength and wits wondered what was happening. There appeared to be some kind of dispute going on.

A team of prisoners from the camp came along the train, and to the ravenous delight of the men aboard they handed out bread and canned food. There was little of it—half a loaf and one can between five men—and it was devoured in no time.

Eventually, with night drawing in again, the train began to groan and move, heading back the way it had come. Mauthausen’s commandant, with his camp full to bursting, had refused to receive the transport.6 It crossed the Danube and as it passed through Linz, it turned west. Where they were being taken, they had no idea, other than that they were heading in the general direction of the German border. In a matter of hours they would be in Bavaria, and if the train carried on in a straight line it would bring them to Munich. That could mean only one thing: Dachau.

Gustav became aware of voices raised in urgent debate. A dozen of his comrades—including several of the old Buchenwalders—had been inspired by Fritz’s example and were talking of escape. They appealed to Gustav and to Paul Schmidt, who had been Fritz’s kapo in the Buna Werke and had helped conceal him after his faked death. But Gustav could no more face it than when Fritz had tried to persuade him, and Schmidt also declined to go. As the train left Linz behind, twelve of them climbed the sidewall and leapt over. Despite the scale of the exodus there were no shots. The SS seemed oblivious; if more prisoners had had the strength, the train might have reached its destination empty except for the corpses.

Whatever the destination was, it wasn’t Dachau. Passing into Bavaria, the train veered due north. Day followed night—and another, and another. By the fifth day since leaving Mauthausen behind, they were in the German province of Thuringia and appeared to be heading directly for Weimar. Was Gustav going back to Buchenwald? That would be a strange return. But no—the train kept steaming northward, bypassing Weimar, and on Sunday, February 4—two weeks to the day since leaving Gleiwitz—it pulled into the freight yard at Nordhausen, an industrial town on the southern fringe of the Harz mountains.7

It was met by SS and a Sonderkommando from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Gustav and the other exhausted, wasted prisoners climbed over the sidewalls with difficulty. Once the living had disembarked, the dead were lifted out. By the end of the process, 766 corpses lay stacked on the ground. Gustav had seen some terrible things, but this was among the worst. “Starved and murdered,” he wrote in his diary later, “some frozen to death, and the whole thing not to be described.” Many of the survivors were hardly in better condition than the dead—around six hundred of them died in the two days following their arrival, out of a little over three thousand who had survived the transport.8

Tucked in a fold in a wooded ridge north of Nordhausen, the concentration camp had originally been founded in 1943 as a satellite of Buchenwald, code-named Dora. In October 1944 it had become a main camp and given the name Mittelbau.9 It was about the size of the main camp at Buchenwald, but the buildings were laid out haphazardly and the place was dreadfully overcrowded, with over 19,300 prisoners crammed into its barrack blocks.

The new arrivals went through the registration procedure, Gustav receiving prisoner number 106498.10 Assigned to blocks, they gave all their attention to the food—“the first warm meal since the start of our fourteen-day odyssey,” Gustav noted. Each man got half a loaf, a portion of margarine, and a chunk of sausage, “on which we pounce like hungry wolves.”

Gustav remained in the Mittelbau-Dora camp for only two days. Then he was selected for transfer to one of the smaller satellite camps. There were no transports, so they had to march the whole way, skirting the hill on which Mittelbau-Dora was built and following the valley northwest to a concentration camp beside the railroad on the edge of the village of Ellrich—a walk of fourteen kilometers.

Ellrich concentration camp was by some margin the worst Gustav had yet experienced. It wasn’t large, but it contained around eight thousand prisoners in wretchedly insanitary conditions. Despite intakes from elsewhere, the population was constantly falling due to the horrific death toll from starvation and disease. From around a hundred deaths per month the previous fall the fatality rate had escalated to nearly five hundred in January. There were no washing or laundry facilities, with the result that lice were endemic; an attempted delousing program in the fall had simply resulted in destroying hundreds of prisoners’ uniforms, which had never been replaced. When Gustav and the others arrived on February 6, they were confronted by the sight of filthy inmates, many of them in rags, some of them naked but for their underwear. The “unclothed” were excused from work and restricted to half rations; as a result they were rapidly starving to death.11

Gustav’s group was given two days’ rest then put to work. Perhaps it was because he was weakened by increasing age, the general wear and tear of five and a half years in the camps, or the torment of the journey from Auschwitz; more likely it was the sheer unmitigated hell of this place that shattered Gustav like nothing had shattered him before. Every day, reveille came at 3 AM. In the depth of winter it felt like the middle of the night.12 The reason for starting at this unholy hour quickly became apparent. After a typically long drawn-out roll call, the work details marched to the railroad that ran by the camp, where they boarded a train and traveled back in the direction of the main Mittelbau-Dora camp. Halfway was a village called Woffleben; this was where the main work site was located, in a series of tunnels bored into the roots of the hills on which the main camp stood.13

It resembled a quarry, with stepped cliff faces cut into the hillside; at the base, great openings like the entrances to aircraft hangars had been excavated. The whole outer area of the tunnels was covered with scaffolding elaborately draped in camouflage. The work that went on inside, in the deeps of the earth, was top secret and, for the forced laborers, absolute hell.

The Mittelbau complex had been established in response to the Allied bombing campaign against Germany’s armaments industry. It was one of a number of locations where arms production had been moved underground, out of reach of the bombs. In the Woffleben tunnels under the Mittelbau hills—carved out at appalling human cost by prisoner labor—they were manufacturing V-2 ballistic missiles, the most advanced and most terrifying of Hitler’s secret weapons.

The labor detail into which Gustav was drafted was busily delving new tunnels just to the west of the main complex. He was put with a group consisting mostly of Russian prisoners of war, doing the backbreaking work of laying railroad tracks underground. The kapos and engineers under whom they worked were true slavedrivers, harassing and lashing out with canes at anyone and everyone who caught their eye. Gustav had known nothing like it since the quarry at Buchenwald. This was worse; day after day it went on, without friends, on rations that wouldn’t sustain a bed-bound invalid: two bowls of thin soup each day, with a piece of bread. For two weeks in a row they had to make do without the bread, just the watery soup alone, on which to endure a shift lasting from dawn until 7:30 in the evening. He lived in filth, and within weeks he was as wasted and riddled with lice as the rest.

Ellrich’s camp director was SS-Sergeant Otto Brinkmann, a little weasel of a man who was both a sadist and unfit for his responsibility. He’d been posted here by the former commandant of Mittelbau-Dora, SS-Major Förschner, who had treated Ellrich like a trash can into which he shed his unwanted SS personnel and those prisoners who were least likely to survive. Förschner had since been replaced by Richard Baer, the former commandant of Auschwitz, who escalated the system of repression still further.14 At evening roll call in Ellrich, when the men were exhausted to the point of collapse, Brinkmann forced the prisoners to do exercises, lying down on the sharp stones of the unmade parade ground.

By Gustav’s reckoning, fifty to sixty people a day were dying of starvation and abuse—“the perfect bone mill.” But there was a grit in him that even now would not submit. “One can scarcely drag oneself along,” he wrote, “but I have made a pact with myself that I will survive to the end. I take Gandhi, the Indian freedom fighter, as my model. He is so thin and yet lives. And every day I say a prayer to myself: Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth—the SS murderers must not beat you.”

He thought of the line he’d put in his poem “Quarry Kaleidoscope” five years earlier:

Smack!—down on all fours he lies,

But still the dog just will not die.

Recalling that image of resistance now, he wrote: “I think to myself, the dogs will make it to the end.” His faith in that outcome was a rock, as firm as his belief that his boy was safe, that Fritzl must have reached Vienna by now.

Fritz looked despondently at his food: a hunk of bread not much bigger than his hand and a small bowl of thin turnip stew. That, along with a mug of acorn coffee, was his ration, meant to sustain him through the whole day’s labor. Sometimes he got extra stew, but it wouldn’t hold his soul to his body for long. Looking at his wrists, they were already visibly thinner. He could feel the sharpening of the bones in his face. Little more than a month had passed since his arrival at Mauthausen, but he had never felt so abandoned, so devoid of friendship and support. Those bonds that had sustained him through Buchenwald and Auschwitz were no longer there; he had cut them away when he jumped from the train.

Pepi Kohl was a force for good in Mauthausen, but Fritz was no longer in the main camp. He’d been transferred to a subcamp at the village of Gusen, four kilometers away. The path that had brought him here was, in its own way, even stranger than the one that had brought him to Mauthausen in the first place. In early March, with Germany fighting for its very existence and desperately short of men, the camp commandant, SS-Colonel Franz Ziereis, had announced that German and Austrian prisoners who were of Aryan blood could earn their freedom by volunteering for the SS. They would form special units, be provided with uniforms and weapons, and would fight alongside the regular SS for the survival of the Fatherland.15

At a meeting of the Mauthausen resistance, Pepi Kohl and the other leaders agreed that around 120 suitable prisoners should volunteer. They guessed that the SS leadership would attempt to use these units as cannon fodder or turn them against their fellow prisoners.16 By infiltrating resisters into their ranks, they could turn the SS’s own scheme against them; at the crucial moment, the volunteers would turn their weapons on the regular SS.

Among the “volunteers” Pepi chose was Fritz Kleinmann. He was officially Aryan and had the air of a fighter. Fritz was deeply reluctant; after years of being abused and tortured by the SS, the very thought of putting on their uniform and joining their ranks sickened him, even if it was done with the best of motives. But Pepi was insistent and wasn’t the sort of man to be easily denied. So Fritz Kleinmann, Viennese Jew, went along with the others to the commandant’s office and signed up for the SS Death’s Head special unit.17

Fritz and his comrades were taken from the camp and posted to a nearby training school, where they began a hasty program of indoctrination and instruction. Other volunteers may have been able to focus on the ends and live with what they were doing, but Fritz couldn’t. The whole thing felt so profoundly wrong that he began to misbehave, with the intention of getting kicked out. It was a dangerous thing to do—knowing the SS and given the extremely tense circumstances, it was potentially a path to a bullet in the back of the head or a gallows. In fact it earned him punishment and—just as he desired—dismissal from the unit. He became a prisoner again and was sent back to the camp. His SS career was over before it had properly begun.

He’d been back in Mauthausen no more than a few days when on March 15 he was transferred to the subcamp at Gusen. Fritz was one of a batch of 284 skilled workers moved that day, all of them perfect strangers to whom he felt little attachment. They were a cosmopolitan selection—Jews, politicals, and protective custody prisoners from all the lands of the Reich: Polish, French, German, Austrian, Belgian, Greek, Russian, Dutch. Besides Fritz (in the guise of heating engineer), there were electricians, fitters, plumbers, painters, metalworkers, and a large group of general mechanics, plus one solitary Ukrainian aircraft mechanic.18

The subcamp of Gusen II accommodated around ten thousand prisoners, many of them technical workers. It was one of three subcamps supplying labor to the secret underground aircraft factories that had been constructed in tunnels bored under the hills. As at Mittelbau-Dora, this was another attempt to shield armaments production from Allied bombing. The factories under Gusen and the neighboring village of St. Georgen were operated by the firms of Steyr-Daimler-Puch and Messerschmitt.19 Fritz and the others were assigned to labor battalion Ba III, a code name for a subunit working in the B8 “Bergkristall” aircraft plant in the tunnels by St. Georgen, where Messerschmitt built fuselages for its ultra-advanced Me 262 jet fighter.20

The relationship with Pepi Kohl and his resistance group that Fritz had begun in Mauthausen had been severed before having a chance to develop any further, and in Gusen he felt utterly isolated: “Here I was on my own, without any contact with any other group.” A despondency like that which had pushed him toward thoughts of suicide in Monowitz took hold of him again, and he scarcely noticed the passage of days through March and April 1945; they did not stick in his memory other than as a hellish blur. The prisoners labored in the tunnels and wasted away through lack of nourishment, while the SS and the green-triangle kapos murdered them at will. Besides those killed on the spot, during March alone nearly three thousand were declared unfit for work and despatched to Mauthausen, where most of them died. When a truckload of food was delivered to the camp by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the SS plundered it, taking the best for themselves, then pierced the remaining cans of food and condensed milk; laughing, they threw the leaking cans among the prisoners. Yet despite the death rate, the population grew rapidly as more and more death marches from evacuated camps across Austria were brought in.21 They died in thousands, and their unburied corpses piled up in the camps.

Physically as well as mentally Fritz had altered from the undersized boy of 1940; during his time in Robert Siewert’s construction detail in Buchenwald, then the Buna Werke and the Monowitz resistance, he’d had a passable diet, and was now 170 centimeters tall.*2 But the conditions in Mauthausen-Gusen eroded him in two months from the lean, healthy state he’d been in when he left the Wehrmacht barracks in St. Pölten, starvation whittling the flesh from his bones until by late April 1945 he resembled the spectral, skeletal Muselmänner of Auschwitz.

And yet he did not give up as they had. In Gusen at least there was an end in sight, if Fritz could just cling on by his bony fingers long enough to see it. As the end of April approached, so did the sounds of war—the familiar thumping of artillery and crackle of gunfire in the far distance. The Americans were coming.

The Mauthausen SS leadership and their seniors in Berlin had planned for this. They had no intention of letting their top secret jet fighter production facility and their tens of thousands of skilled workers fall into enemy hands. On April 14, Heinrich Himmler sent a telegram to all concentration camp commandants insisting that “No prisoner may fall alive into the hands of the enemy.”22 In Himmler’s mind, that meant evacuation (except in certain special cases where he planned to bargain with the Allies), and his telegram said so. But in the minds of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA, and Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, it was understood to mean a total liquidation. This had long been the intention, and as far as they were concerned it remained so. Ziereis laid his plans accordingly.

At 10:45 in the morning on April 28, the air raid sirens sounded in Gusen I and II, which were right next-door to each other. It was a Saturday, but the prisoners had not yet been sent to work. As soon as the alarm went off, the SS and kapos began urgently herding the tens of thousands of prisoners from both camps toward the Kellerbau tunnels. The only ones left behind were seven hundred invalids in the hospital, who were too sick to be moved.23

There were two sets of underground works at Gusen—the Bergkristall tunnels near the village of St. Georgen, where Fritz and the other Gusen II prisoners worked, and the Kellerbau tunnels, immediately to the north of the camps. It was toward these that the prisoners were shepherded. They filed in through one of the tunnel entrances—a huge maw as wide and high as a railroad tunnel.

Inside, the granite and concrete walls were danker and colder than the Bergkristall tunnels, which were cut into sandstone (and therefore less stable and more prone to collapse). Due to the expense of excavating in this rock, and the presence of underground springs that flooded them, the Kellerbau tunnel system had never been fully completed, and Messerschmitt had moved most of its aircraft production to Bergkristall.24 But Kellerbau remained more convenient as an air raid shelter for the camps. Fritz and thousands of fellow prisoners stood in the damp chill and waited, listening for the sounds of bombers and the thump of explosions. The minutes passed, and nothing happened.

Those among them who were most observant, and most familiar with Kellerbau, might have noticed as they filed in that two of the three entrances to the tunnels had been bricked up, leaving only this one open. Even the sharpest-eyed were unaware that, after they had entered, SS machine-gunners set up positions outside. The prisoners were also ignorant of the fact that over the previous few days, this last entrance had been mined with explosives. The task had been organized by the DESt plant manager in charge of tunnel construction, a civilian named Paul Wolfram, on orders from Commandant Ziereis. The operation was codenamed Feuerzeug—lighter. Wolfram and his colleagues were told that their own and their families’ lives would be in jeopardy if they botched the job or revealed the secret.25 Wolfram had laced the entrance with all the explosives he had in stock. According to his calculations, it wouldn’t be sufficient, so the charge was supplemented by a couple of dozen aerial bombs and two truckloads of marine mines. During the night before the air raid alert, the explosives had been wired up. Once all the prisoners were inside and the machine-gunners were ready to prevent any escaping, the tunnel entrance was to be blown. The prisoners would be trapped inside and suffocate to death.