The End

collective reprisals that had frequently been inflicted earlier in the war on the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe. When directed by Germans against their fellow countrymen in the last weeks, the horror had a different pattern. Old scores were settled. Personal animosities, little to do with ideology, played their part. So did feelings of sheer revenge. Long-standing opponents were arbitrarily dispatched to prevent their enjoying their moment of triumph.

Ideological indoctrination was, however, far from insignificant. Now as before, the worst of the murderous violence was directed at the perceived racial or political enemies of the regime, foreign workers and, above all, concentration camp prisoners. Out of 288 ‘crimes of the last phase’ bringing convictions in post-war trials in West Germany, 114 (39.6 per cent, the highest single proportion) related to the shooting of prisoners and foreign workers. Apart from members of the Gestapo and other police units, Volkssturm men and prison personnel were most prominent among the convicted killers.⁹⁸

Prominent individuals who had been involved in the resistance to Hitler could not be allowed to witness his downfall. Among those who had formerly belonged to the opposition within the Abwehr (German military counter-intelligence) Hans von Dohnanyi, who had worked for Hitler’s downfall since 1938, was hanged in Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 9 April after a farcical ‘trial’ before an SS court martial. A similar fate in Flossenburg the same day befell Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, former head of the Abwehr, Colonel Hans Oster, who had been part of a plot against Hitler in 1938 and had leaked German invasion plans to the Dutch in 1940, and the evangelical theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose courageous attempts to persuade the western Allies to support the resistance in Germany had come to nothing. In Dachau, Georg Elser, the Swabian joiner who had tried to blow up Hitler in 1939 was also murdered (without even the semblance of a trial).⁹⁹ But such killings were merely the tip of the iceberg. With the regime lurching almost visibly out of control, prisoners, whether in concentration camps or in state penitentiaries, lived or died at the whim of their guards or jailers. Violence towards prisoners, already escalating wildly, now became ubiquitous.¹⁰⁰ It was even prompted in some cases by the military leadership. When his forces were cut off in the Ruhr, Field-Marshal Model ordered on 7 April that prisoners in penitentiaries, including those under remand for political offences, should be handed to the police for ‘examination’. The execution of more than 200 prisoners followed. There were numerous other killings in the final hours before penal institutions were evacuated, or before the Allies arrived. Where an official executioner could not get to a penitentiary on time, prison officials— rewarded with money and cigarettes—carried out the killings. In one subsidiary of Emsland camp, a young apprentice chimney-sweep, wearing an army captain’s uniform, turned up and ordered the execution of dozens of prisoners. Astonishingly, his orders were followed, a sign of the mounting chaos in the collapsing regime. More than a hundred prisoners were executed over the next few days.¹⁰¹

VI

Amid the gathering mayhem and murderous frenzy, the violence and killing of the death marches of concentration camp prisoners in the final weeks of the regime mark a separate unholy chapter.

The hurried, often chaotic, evacuations and subsequent terrible death marches of prisoners from Auschwitz, Gro?-Rosen, Stutthof and other camps in the east, which we followed in Chapter 6, had at least a semblance of underlying rationale—from the regime’s perspective. The prisoners were to be kept out of the hands of the enemy and brought back into the interior of the Reich where—in theory, though scarcely in practice for such emaciated, exhausted, frozen, starved, beaten and otherwise maltreated human beings—they could be available for labour, or, as Himmler saw it, as potential pawns in any deal with the Allies. Those who were not killed en route, or who did not die from exhaustion or exposure to the bitter winter conditions, eventually reached camps within Germany, including Bergen-Belsen.

Following two days of negotiations and, amazingly, Himmler’s permission to hand over rather than evacuate the camp—unaware (given the dramatic decline in the already dreadful conditions in the camp over recent weeks) of exactly what horrors he was revealing, and hoping to exploit his ‘humanitarian’ gesture in his dealings with Bernadotte—British troops entered Bergen-Belsen on 15 April. Most SS guards had by then left. Around 50,000 prisoners, in a state closer to death than life, were liberated. Thousands of decomposing corpses, many of them dead in the typhus epidemic that had raged for weeks lay around. Some 37,000 had died since February, more than 9,000 in the two weeks before the liberation of the camp. Another 14,000 were to die from the effects of their suffering in the camp in the following weeks.¹⁰² That Bergen-Belsen was handed over, not evacuated, was a unique occurrence. The typhus epidemic ruled out evacuation.¹⁰³ In all other camps, an attempt was made to remove the prisoners before the camp could be taken by the enemy.

In March, as part of his attempt to reach some arrangement with the Allies, Himmler had ordered that Jews should be treated like other prisoners, informing camp commandants that they were no longer to be killed, and that the death rate among prisoners should be reduced by all possible means.¹⁰⁴ On the last day of March, the commandant of Buchenwald was expecting the camp to be handed over to the Allies. Within less than a week that had diametrically altered. Himmler now ordered the camp’s prisoners, where possible, to be sent to Flossenburg.¹⁰⁵ In this, as an order sent to the commandant of Flossenburg in mid-April made clear, he reverted to the policy that there could be no question of surrendering concentration camps and that no prisoner should be allowed to fall alive into enemy hands.¹⁰⁶ Hitler’s reaction to reports that newly liberated prisoners from Buchenwald had made their way to nearby Weimar and had looted and raped had probably caused the reversion.¹⁰⁷ Himmler now pressed for the swift evacuation of Mittelbau-Dora and Buchenwald. During the night of 4/5 April removal of the Mittelbau prisoners in the direction of the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Ravensbruck and Mauthausen began, and ended within forty-eight hours or so.¹⁰⁸

On 11 April American soldiers reached the camp complex at Mittelbau-Dora, where they found 700 ill and emaciated prisoners, soon afterwards encountering further horrific scenes as they liberated the subsidiary camps. When the Americans arrived in Buchenwald, the largest camp in Germany, on 13 April, an unimaginably gruesome experience, they found around 21,000 prisoners—many little more than walking skeletons—remaining in the camp out of the complement of 48,000 little more than a week earlier. The rest had set out, by rail or on foot, between 7 and 10 April, heading for the concentration camps many kilometres away to the south of Flossenburg and Dachau, themselves bursting at the seams with swollen numbers of prisoners.¹⁰⁹ These camps, too, and those still remaining at Mauthausen (not far from Linz in Austria), Sachsenhausen (just outside Berlin), Neuengamme (near Hamburg) and Ravensbruck (a women’s camp, about 80 kilometres north of Berlin), would evacuate their prisoners capable of marching, under catastrophic circumstances and with no obvious destination, during the second half of April.¹¹⁰

The Buchenwald prisoners were among the numerous long columns of bedraggled, gaunt, shrunken figures from the remaining concentration camps now being driven by their merciless guards hundreds of kilometres criss- cross through parts of Germany in disastrous conditions that defy description or obvious rationale. The prisoners were at this stage of the war plainly not of any use as forced labour (even if capable of working). And given the pace of the Allied advance, they would, even if they reached their destinations, obviously fall in the near future into enemy hands. No consideration appears to have been given to the notion of killing all the prisoners in the camps, which, given the speed of the Allied advance, would in any case scarcely have been practicable. But if those removed were eventually going to be killed anyway, there was little logic to the lengthy treks beforehand. Himmler had not, it is true, given up expectation that the prisoners—or the Jews among them—could be used as pawns in some deal with the Allies. As long as they were alive and within his power, they might still serve a purpose in his illusory scheme.

This dubious rationale apart, the death marches were completely pointless, except as a means of inflicting still further enormous suffering on those designated as the regime’s internal enemies. But the commandants and the guards treating the prisoners on the marches with such sadistic brutality did not seek any rationale. Their system still functioned—after a fashion. They remained, even in its dissolution, set in the same mentality that had earlier seen them torture prisoners pointlessly or force them to carry out pointless backbreaking labour.¹¹¹ Ultimately, by April 1945 the regime just did not know what to do with the hundreds of thousands of prisoners still in its domain. In the gathering chaos of the last weeks, the death marches reflected the