The End

futile flailing of a regime on the verge of its own destruction but retaining its murderous capacity to the very end.

As the regime collapsed, decisions on what to do with the prisoners were left increasingly to those guarding them. Only unclear or confused guidelines, though leaving much scope for initiative, came from Himmler and the now faltering concentration camp central administration. Camp commandants were wary of acting prematurely, so gave evacuation orders at the last minute. Max Pauly, commandant of Neuengamme, near Hamburg, told interrogators after the war that in April 1945 he did not know what to do with his prisoners.¹¹² When the marches set out, the fate of the prisoners was entirely in the hands of their guards—by this time far from all SS men, and including many drawn from the Volkssturm. How many were firm believers in Nazi ideology, or even genuine regime loyalists, cannot be known. But all had been in some way ‘schooled’ in how to deal with the ‘enemies of the people’. There was no control over the guards’ actions, no sanction for what they did. Their decisions on who should live or die were arbitrary.

Prisoners were dispatched without a thought on a daily basis by guards to whom they were totally anonymous, lacking all identity. One blond-haired SS guard, only about twenty years old, casually shot a thirteen- year-old boy on a march from Sachsenhausen because he could not keep up with the fast pace, almost running speed. In their anger and despair, the boy’s elder brother, a Jesuit priest, and his father tried to jump on the SS man, but he simply ‘fired a few volleys from his machine gun at them’. ‘The machine guns rattled unceasingly’ as many prisoners were mowed down in the first two days. When, after a night in a barn, one prisoner refused to continue the march, the same young SS brute simply shot him dead, then a few minutes later turned his gun on the prisoner’s distraught brother-in-law who had lagged behind. By now, the blond SS man simply ‘pulled out prisoners who, in his opinion, did not walk fast enough and shot them on the spot’.¹¹³

The guards thought of little besides themselves and their task of delivering their charges at the destination. As long as prisoners were capable of walking, obeying instructions, and serving the needs of their guards—not least keeping them away from the front—they might survive. But any sense that they had become a burden for the guards meant their instant death.¹¹⁴ Once on the marches, no obvious distinction seems to have been drawn by the guards about the prisoners. All, Jewish or not, were subject to their arbitrary murderous actions.¹¹⁵

In some cases, the killings became full-scale massacres. In Celle, 35 kilometres north-east of Hanover, almost 800 prisoners, men and women, fell victim on the night of 8/9 April. The railway wagons transporting them —Russians, Poles and Ukrainians predominantly, some but far from all Jewish—from two satellite camps of Neuengamme at Salzgitter to nearby Bergen-Belsen were caught during a heavy air raid while standing in the station at Celle. Hundreds of prisoners burnt to death while trapped in the wagons.¹¹⁶ Those who escaped the inferno were able to take flight into the nearby woods. The manhunt rapidly set up to track them down consisted not only of their SS guards, but Volkssturm and SA men, local police and Party functionaries, soldiers stationed nearby, members of the Hitler Youth, and also groups of local citizens who spontaneously joined in. When one thirteen-year-old boy enquired about the identity of the prisoners, as shots rang out in the woods, he was told ‘they could well be Jews’. The crowd was easily persuaded that the escapees were dangerous criminals and Communists. The mass shooting of probably around 200 prisoners was thus portrayed, and evidently viewed, as self-protection.¹¹⁷

Shortly afterwards, between 9 and 11 April, about 3,000–4,000 prisoners, many of them from Mittelbau-Dora heading for Bergen-Belsen, Sachenhausen and Neuengamme camps, arrived in the village of Mieste, near Gardelegen, about 40 kilometres north of Magdeburg. When damaged tracks prevented their train from continuing, and the prisoners were force-marched to Gardelegen, the local Kreisleiter, Gerhard Thiele, exploiting stories that escaped prisoners had looted and raped in a village not far away and declaring that he would do everything to prevent such an occurrence in his area, made preparations to have them killed. There was great urgency since the Americans were closing in on the town. The SS were aided in the meantime in guarding the prisoners by detachments from the Wehrmacht, Hitler Youth, the Volkssturm, the local fire brigade and other organizations. When objections were raised that the site of the cavalry school he had proposed for the killing was too close to the town centre, Thiele came up with the idea of a large barn in an isolated position in a field on the outskirts. On 13 April, more than 1,000 prisoners, Jews among them though predominantly ‘politicals’, were herded into the barn. Petrol was poured on the straw, the large doors were sealed, and the barn was set alight. Some prisoners trying desperately to escape were shot by the guards. The remainder died in the flames. Next day, the Americans arrived while the attempt was still being made to bury the charcoaled remains of the prisoners.¹¹⁸

Unlike the earlier death marches that had left from the camps in the east, the thousands of prisoners who had been in every conceivable way degraded and dehumanized now trekked through Germany itself, before the eyes of the German public. As in Gardelegen, their guards were often a motley bunch. Most were drawn from the SS and were well armed and often accompanied by dogs which they did not hesitate to turn on the prisoners. But a march from Ravensbruck in mid-April was guarded only by lightly armed ‘older men’, thought to be auxiliary police. Others had guards composed of SA men or ethnic Germans from different parts of eastern Europe.¹¹⁹

Beatings and shootings of prisoners also took place before the eyes of the public, with no attempt to hide them. The hostile stance of the German population dominates the recollections of the victims, thankful though those doubtless were who benefited momentarily from any sign of human kindness. Post-war German accounts, on the other hand, had good reason to emphasize sympathy for the prisoners and condemnation of the crimes of the SS guards.

Acts of solidarity, friendship or support from bystanders seem at any rate to have been relatively rare. Years of demonization of Jews and indoctrination in racial stereotypes, along with the stoked-up fear of the ‘people’s enemies’—reinforced through lurid radio reports of former Buchenwald prisoners rampaging and marauding through Weimar, and similar stories used to justify the massacre at Gardelegen—had clearly not been without their baleful effect. However much Germans saw themselves, increasingly, as victims of Hitler and the Nazi regime, many of them were not ready to extend their sympathies to concentration camp prisoners, least of all Jews, or to embrace the true victims of Nazism as part of their ‘community’. The human wrecks before their eyes looked like the caricatures of ‘subhumans’ rammed home in incessant propaganda. But in all their evident frailty, they were still, perversely, seen by many as a threat. ‘What crimes they must have committed to be treated so cruelly,’ was one comment. Another person, justifying the shooting by Wehrmacht soldiers of thirteen escaped prisoners (recaptured with help of the local population), remarked: ‘They were political prisoners and mere criminals.’¹²⁰ Survivors of the marches recounted, depressingly but unsurprisingly, numerous cases where they had been insulted, jeered at, spat at, had had stones thrown at them, or were refused food and drink by local inhabitants. In some cases, German civilians, as at Celle, aided guards to capture prisoners who had escaped, and apparently participated in the killing.¹²¹

Alongside the horrific instances of callous support for murderous action, there were, nevertheless, indications that some civilians, even if they were the exceptions, tried to give food or succour to the prisoners passing through their villages. A British report on the massacre at Celle stated that numerous citizens tried, in the face of threats and abuse from the perpetrators, to aid the prisoners by giving them first aid or comforting them.¹²² Around 1,250 weak and starving prisoners who arrived in Hutten in Wurttemberg at the beginning of April were said to have been given food by some local families. The local mayor apparently succeeded in bringing in some supplies for the prisoners and appealed to the Wehrmacht for help. A Wehrmacht officer and veteran of the First World War, called to the scene, then organized a meal for around 200 sick prisoners who remained after the others had been marched off. He also ordered the dead to be properly buried.¹²³

In Altendorf, a village in the Upper Palatinate where 650 prisoners stopped on the night of 21/2 April on their trek from Buchenwald to Dachau, thirteen prisoners who hid in a barn were hunted down by their SS guards with dogs and pitchforks. Twelve were caught and immediately shot. The thirteenth, a Pole, was able to escape when the head of the local constabulary chose not to hand him over to the SS and allowed him to be fed before he disappeared. The dead victims were then buried by Volkssturm men in a mass grave in the cemetery, in contrast to many instances when local inhabitants elsewhere rapidly dug improvised graves where the prisoners had been killed, or simply pushed the corpses into a roadside ditch and covered them over.¹²⁴ The examples could be multiplied of inhabitants recalling feelings of shock and shame at the beatings and shootings that they witnessed, of providing prisoners with food and drink (not just when the guards