Churchill's White Rabbit (29 page)

Men die like flies here – I sent a message to you thru (
sic
) Geneva. I hope you received it, but have no means of telling. The bearer of this message will give you all the details so I will not say more – whatever he tells you is Gospel truth, he is no romancer, and he will never be able to really do justice to the horrors perpetrated here. For God’s sake Dizzy [Lt Col Dismore], see to it that our people never let themselves be softened towards the German people, or there will be another war in 15 years’ time and all our lives will have been sacrificed in vain. I leave it to you and others to see that retribution is fierce, it will never be fierce enough.
⁶

Forest also made it clear that there was a great deal of material on bacterial warfare and other research held at the camp that should be seized at all costs. While Forest pitied those who had been subject to the tests it seemed illogical to let the material collected be wasted. He signed off sadly, but for the most part he felt numb to the terror that should have been gripping him.

‘I seemed to have lost all feeling and become a machine’ he commented later. ‘I had no fear of death in any shape or form, and I felt absolutely no apprehension. Never during those days did I worry for myself; it was not a matter of courage, I just cannot explain it.’
⁷

It was in this atmosphere that the Ding plan progressed.

Kogon had been working steadily on his boss, and when Ding had come to the conclusion that he must help some prisoners his secretary was quick with suggestions.

‘What about men from block 17?’ (Forest’s group).

‘Perhaps, but it could only be a maximum of three, any more and it would look suspicious.’

Ding had other concerns: ‘And what about Dietzech? They would need to go into block 46 where he is
kapo.
’

‘I am sure we can find a way to persuade Dietzech to cooperate,’ Kogon said, but in fact he feared that the thuggish Arthur Dietzech might be their biggest stumbling block.

Dietzech was certainly not an easy character to deal with. He might have been a prisoner but that was all that divided him from the Nazis who guarded and ran the camp. He was ruthless and even cruel, had no compunction about doing anything to the guinea-pig prisoners who came before him and tolerated no disobedience or nuisance. If the communists could not illicit his help then Kogon would have to be extra cunning. Fortunately in his duties for Ding he had also gathered quite a bit of evidence on Dietzech and now he moved to blackmailing his second victim.

Dietzech might be a thug but he was not stupid. He recognised that he would not escape a criminal court should he fall into Allied hands and, unlike the SS men who could flee the camp if they needed to, he did not have that option. So when Kogon suggested a way to mitigate the damage his work at Buchenwald had caused he was curious enough to listen.

‘We’ll have the three prisoners sign papers before you help them as evidence of how good you were to them. That will go a long way with the Allied authorities.’ Kogon explained.

‘And the credit will go all to me? I don’t want anyone sharing it and reducing its impact.’

‘Of course, the papers will say you helped them entirely on your own.’

It was a necessary deception to get Dietzech on board, but from now on it was imperative that no one mentioned Ding’s role in the escape lest the
kapo
went back on his word.

Kogon returned to Forest with this news, but he was not happy. He had wanted all twenty-one remaining men saved, not just three.

‘Ding will only agree to three and that is better than nothing. He also insists you must be one of them as the commanding officer, because your evidence has the most weight.’

Forest was distressed. He had already given up on his own escape, he still wanted freedom of course, but he would not put his life before others. If he had to choose three to live he certainly wouldn’t have put himself among them, but now he had no choice. If he argued too much he would ruin everything for the other two men he could save. It was a terrible dilemma, yet Forest had to agree.

The next few days were agonising as he made his decisions about who to take with him in isolation and secrecy. Revealing the plan could result in dreadful despondency among those who were not going, so he plotted alone. His final decision was to take Peulevé and the young Hessel from BCRA. Forest never gave a deep explanation for why he picked these men over the others, in many respects perhaps he could not define the reasons for himself. In the heavy camp atmosphere, decisions were never easy or entirely logical.

Even after his decision was made Forest dared not mention it to the two chosen until the plan came to fruition. He was also still uncertain whether he could trust Dietzech and decided he would have to be a sacrificial victim to test the man’s reliability. With everything settled, one day Forest was smuggled to Dietzech who gave him an injection to induce the symptoms of typhus. Forest quietly returned to his hut and waited for his symptoms to develop. It was only now that Forest pulled Hessel and Peulevé aside and told them the gist of the plan. They were to remain silent, tell no one and wait for further instructions from Balachowski.

That night Forest descended into a prickly fever and, in the morning, reported to the block commander, asking to go see the camp doctor. Typhus was a deadly fear within the camp and the block commander was all too keen to get Forest out of his domain and sent him to the camp hospital where, as arranged, Dietzech was waiting to diagnose him with typhus and have him transferred to the guinea-pig block, 46.

The fever lasted three long days and there was no doubt that at times Forest wondered if Dietzech had proved treacherous. Then on the third day he began to improve and as the effects of fever left him he sent word to Kogon to fetch Peulevé and Hessel.

On 19 September, ten days after the deaths of Hubble, Pickersgill and the others, Dietzech appeared at block 17 looking for guinea pigs for his experiments. It was not uncommon for Dietzech to seek out healthy victims without SS knowledge and no one thought much about it when Peulevé and Hessel were unceremoniously selected. Their colleagues miserably wished them farewell, while Peulevé and Hessel had to control their emotions and not reveal that it was actually those they were leaving behind who were in the greatest danger.

Dietzech marched them through the barbed-wire cordon and into block 46 with no hint of sympathy for the conspirators. It must have been a hair-raising moment as Peulevé and Hessel wondered if they were going to meet Forest or an SS welcoming committee. It would have been so easy to be betrayed, but Dietzech had a lot riding on the plan and kept his side of the bargain.

Forest was waiting for them in a room on the first floor. There were two other occupants who had been initiated into the conspiracy: English-speaking orderlies who had sworn to keep the secret. The room was luxury compared to the huts. There were four individual beds for the men (as opposed to one bunk per two men in their prison accommodation) and the room was divided in two by a line of cupboards. Windows looked out onto the camp and for the first time in many months the men felt relief and a fragile sense of safety. Forest was elated to see them and now hoped for their plan to move forward.

The next step to ensure their escape from instant execution was to use Ding to swap their identities with typhus patients, thus faking their deaths. Then they would work on actually getting out of the camp. But as Forest well knew, nothing was ever that simple.

With no new executions being ordered for block 17 Dietzech and Ding started to relax and believed they had plenty of time to arrange for the swap. Their newest ‘patients’ were safely housed in the hospital room above the wards. No SS guards would dare risk passing the typhus-ridden patients to inspect the room and the three men were even kept busy filling in hospital paperwork. Yet Forest was anxious they should be moving as fast as they possibly could.

A few days after the arrival of the escapees a group of ailing labourers arrived from a work camp in Cologne where there had been a bad typhus outbreak. They were all French and Hessel had the grisly task of interviewing them and assessing which would make suitable candidates for an identity switch. It was not a pleasant chore, but when he was done and could talk with his comrades it was decided that three men – Michel Boitel, Maurice Chouquet and Marcel Seigneur – would prove ideal matches. Now all they had to do was wait until the men died.

It was a morbid situation to have one’s fate hanging on the death of another man. It was one of those things that could never be resolved easily in a person’s conscience. They also knew that Dietzech would not be averse to hastening a death to ensure his own safety. They all expressed their own desire that nature should be allowed to take its course and, if it should be that one of the men got better, than that was how fate wanted to play it and they would not take that from him. Dietzech was less than impressed by this selflessness, but apparently seems to have obeyed their request.

After all, there seemed no imminent danger.

Two weeks passed without incident, and boredom was the only thing that interfered with the men’s days. Forest retrieved Hubble’s chess set and took to playing again. The bond between the escapees gradually strengthened as the time passed, and their thoughts revolved around typhus and freedom. Then came 4 October, and a new supplement was added to the usual roll call. Just as before eleven prisoners from block 17 were being specially summoned and one of the names on the list was Peulevé.

It was an awful moment. Peulevé felt sick that not only were his colleagues walking to an atrocious death but, by not being with them, he could risk the lives of Forest and Hessel. He could hardly walk out of the hospital and present himself, as that would ruin everything when he was supposed to be dying of typhus, but if the SS came looking what would happen?

The SS did come looking, even though their usual terror of the sickness that hung around block 46 made them hesitant. But the camp commandant wanted to know where Peulevé was and he had heard he had been transferred to the hospital. Dietzech made himself scarce and the SS men left empty-handed.

They came back however, and this time Dietzech could not feign absence. The camp commandant was determined to carry out his orders and even when Dietzech protested that no one was allowed to enter the hospital without his express permission, as arranged by Ding, the guards were not persuaded. They told Dietzech that a stretcher was on its way for the patient. Express orders from Berlin had said that Peulevé must be executed, no matter his condition, and if that meant shooting him on the stretcher, so be it.

Dietzech was deeply worried that the plan was about to crumble around them; the consequences of which were not to be contemplated. Above all else Peulevé must have every appearance of suffering from typhus when the guards next returned, so he was given an injection to mimic the symptoms and within a few hours he was burning with fever.

When the stretcher finally arrived Peulevé was on the ward boiling with a temperature of 105 and a worried Dietzech was close by. Peulevé’s fake symptoms were now proving as dangerous as if he really had typhus, but at least it convinced the SS men that he was truly sick. Still they wanted to remove him.

Ding made a hurried appeal to Commandant Pister, explaining that a patient running such a high fever was a serious contamination risk if moved from the hospital. Pister was unmoved – he wanted Peulevé dead sooner rather than later.

‘I could give him a lethal injection,’ suggested Ding, desperate to buy time.

‘I just want him dead, I don’t care how it’s done. But not by you Ding, I want someone else to give the injection.’

Was this a sign that the commandant was already having concerns about Ding’s ruthlessness? Ding tried not to think about it as he offered another solution.

‘What about Dr Schiedlausky?’

SS Hauptsturmführer Gerhard Schiedlausky had performed large numbers of experiments on the female patients at Ravensbruck, so to Pister he would have seemed an obvious candidate, but Ding knew he was another doctor who was feeling his conscience prickling under the threat of the Allies – he would eventually be sentenced to death after the war.
⁸
Ding suspected he would send a subordinate to complete the order.

Ding’s assessment was entirely correct. Good Dr Schiedlausky delegated the execution to an elderly NCO from block 61. This was white-haired Friedrich Wilhelm, a man not known to have any qualms about executing prisoners, but who did have a weakness for schnapps.

Dietzech greeted him at block 46 with a purloined bottle and offered him a drink. It didn’t take much to persuade Wilhelm to accept the glass, nor the next, and very rapidly he was satisfactorily drunk. Dietzech then led him onto the ward and pointed out one of the other patients who was as seriously ill as Peulevé. Wilhelm hovered over the sick man like a drunken grim reaper, swaying so much on his feet he could barely remain upright.

‘It seems a waste of Phenol to inject the man when he will be dead in hours,’ Dietzech mused as Wilhelm tottered dangerously. ‘And a waste of your time too. Look, leave the injection with me and if he is still breathing by the morning I’ll give it to him myself.’