Cruel World (81 page)

London
Times
correspondent Alexander Werth was one of the first to see the gas chambers and skeleton-strewn crematoria. That was just the beginning. There were huge piles of shoes, and a five-story “department store” filled with the possessions of the dead, all carefully sorted out and ready for mail orders from the Reich: “It was like being in a Woolworth store: here were piled up hundreds of safety razors, and shaving brushes, and thousands of pen-knives and pencils. In the next room were … children’s toys: teddy-bears, and celluloid dolls and tin automobiles by the hundred, and simple jigsaw puzzles, and an American-made Mickey Mouse.”
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At one end of the camp were huge piles of human ashes, “among them masses of small human bones … even a small femur, which can only have been that of a child.” Just beyond were fields where acres of luxuriant cabbages, fed by this rich fertilizer, had been planted. Huge trenches in another area contained the bodies that the crematoria, even at their full capacity of 2,000 a day, had not been able to consume in time.
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The Western press, which found the first stories from Majdanek literally unbelievable, did not report them for several weeks. Articles in
Pravda
describing the camp were not immediately picked up, and Werth’s dispatch to the BBC was not used, as editors in London considered it a “Russian propaganda stunt.” The
New York Herald Tribune
also declined to run the story early on, commenting: “Maybe we should wait for further corroboration of the horror story that comes from Lublin. Even on top of all we have been taught of the maniacal Nazi ruthlessness, this example sounds inconceivable.”
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But it was not inconceivable. Six long months later, Russian forces reached the Lodz-Konstantynow camp for “Eastern children,” where hundreds of small figures were found huddled in the cellars of nearby houses, or in whatever shelter they could find, waiting for the battle to pass. One prisoner rescued that day still remembers that the Red Army soldiers wept when they saw the emaciated children, many of whom, as would be the norm for such camp inmates, were in such bad condition that they could not be moved for over a month.
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In Auschwitz, which the Red Army reached on January 27, 1945, they would find 7,000 starving prisoners, including more than 600 children under seventeen, many of them Mengele’s twins. In all these camps the Soviets, aided by the Polish Red Cross, rushed in field hospitals and whatever medical personnel they could spare. The challenge was tremendous, and the ailments they encountered were new to most of the health workers. At Auschwitz alone nearly 5,000 of the inmates, including 200 children, needed immediate, full-time hospital care. Most were stricken with “starvation diarrhea,” which had covered the floors of their barracks with layers of excrement so deep that it “first had to be scraped off with shovels” before the floors could be washed. It was difficult in the terrible winter weather to keep the barracks warm and, as had been true in North Africa, hot water and stoves were minimal. The patients could at first tolerate only one tablespoon of potato soup three times a day, a ration that had to be increased very gradually. The children who had been used for experiments were terrified of any medical procedures, such as injections, and, of course, by the suggestion of a bath. Forty percent of them had tuberculosis, and all were eleven to thirty-seven pounds underweight, even though most, being late deportees, had been in Auschwitz less than six months.
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During the last months of their rule, as we have seen, the Nazi racial agencies did not flag in their duties, even in areas imminently in
danger of Allied conquest. Jews were deported from Rome, Hungary, and Paris until the last moment, and the last transport from the main Dutch transit camp at Westerbork would not leave until September 13, 1944. This one did not go to Poland but to Bergen-Belsen, which was within the borders of Germany, and which was also one of the main destinations for the concentration camp inmates being marched back from the battle zones. The Nazis were not concerned only with these thousands of alien blood. Their institutions and hospitals within the Reich continued their experiments and purification operations, including the starving of unworthy German children. But by March 1945, the directors of the myriad types of homes and camps housing children of “good blood” that were scattered all over the empire were being ordered not only to take their precious charges to safety, but also to disguise any Nazi affiliations. The leaders of a KLV camp for young German bombing evacuees were exhorted by the local Hitler Youth administration as follows:

The camp leaders were then ordered to “keep quiet … give clear commands,” suppress “personal sorrows,” and think only of the children. Under the heading “In Case of Invasion,” they were told to pack carefully and move away from the enemy. Precise lists of clothes and food to be taken along were supplied. If there were not enough backpacks, they should make some “from blankets or BDM skirts (well camouflaged).” The route should be carefully planned to go from one KLV camp to another, and if there were no trucks they should march “during the night.” Before leaving, they must burn all documents including the instruction memo, “which may give the enemy information about KLV.” If the “threat” was imminent, the actions to be taken depended on who the enemy was. If it was the “English-Americans,” the children were to be kept in the camp, but certain preparations were to be made: all Nazi decorations, such as pictures and banners, were to be taken down, uniform badges and camp shields removed, and the installation referred to only as a “residential school.” If it was the Russians, the motto was “No child in the hands of the
barbarous Soviets,” and flight was recommended, with the helpful note that “All difficulties can be conquered with improvisation.”
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The evacuation order for children was an offshoot of a much more dramatic series of directives by Hitler, issued in late March and April, which called for total evacuation of the population from the areas about to be overrun by the Western Allies plus destruction of all industry, communications, and transportation networks. These measures, opposed even by Hitler’s inner circle, were never carried out,
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but the children were moved away from harm.

Just what that meant can be illustrated by the odyssey of a group of very small
Reichsdeutsche
children from an NSV home in Pardubice, near Prague, who made it back as far as Wels, in Austria, just short of the German frontier. The home had started as a day-care center. As the fronts closed in, it began to take in foundlings and German refugee children unable to continue their flight. Some of these were found at railroad stations, or simply wandering along the roads. As the end of the war approached, parents had been asked to come for their children, but a measles epidemic in the home prevented the release of a large number. On May 8, 1945, with the war in fact over, the NSV nurses felt they could wait no longer and, with twenty-three infants and toddlers, most still suffering from measles, they fled by train toward Germany. It took them seventeen days, during which time their food was stolen and they had little water, to go the 185 miles to Wels. Meanwhile, they had acquired three more foundlings, but had lost all the identifying documents for their charges. Two children died on arrival in Wels. The others were simply handed over to families willing to care for them or were put in whatever homes or hospitals were still operating in the vicinity. The nurses, undoubtedly feeling that they had fulfilled their duty, then fled on.
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Similar chaotic scenes were taking place all over Germany, even among Himmler’s special children from the Lebensborn homes.

During the summer of 1944, as the Allies advanced, small groups of Lebensborn babies in Norway, France, and Belgium, along with a few mothers, were brought back to the Reich. By February 1945, the last group departed Poland. In Germany itself, the hapless children and all expectant mothers, in accordance with the instructions on avoiding threats, were shuffled from home to home. As the end neared, some 300 newborns and toddlers, plus Lebensborn’s chief doctors and staff, had been squeezed into the headquarters home, Hochland, at Steinhöring, near Munich.
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Travel had not been luxurious for this elite group either: a French prisoner from Dachau working on a labor gang was shocked to find that some of the blanket-wrapped packages he was loading onto one
of the Lebensborn trucks along with sacks of food were actually babies.
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And not all had been moved. In the Hohehorst home, near Bremen, where much packing and burning of documents had been witnessed, more than fifty children and mothers were in residence when the British arrived. They were still being cared for by a few nurses, who had with foresight traded in their brown Nazi garb for brand-new Red Cross uniforms.
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At Steinhöring, most of the Lebensborn workers did not wait for the arrival of the Allies. Following the evacuation directive rather less than to the letter, they too spent days burning documents in bonfires and packing up food and valuables, after which they left, but without the children. Only Dr. Ebner, chief racial analyst for Lebensborn, and a few nurses stayed behind and continued to deliver and care for the babies until the Americans arrived.
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Some of the homes in which the children of the Eastern workers were kept were also moved back in fits and starts from the combat areas, and their groups too were randomly added to and dispersed. There was no support for such babies from local German authorities. Most of the infants in the group escorted by Eugenia Wolokushina, a twenty-one-year-old Soviet
Ostarbeiterin
, were near death when the Americans arrived in the Austrian town of Mauerkirchen, as the local mayor had refused to provide any food for the
Untermenschen
. Quite by chance, Eugenia saw a car with a Red Cross on it. She flagged it down and, speaking in German, somehow communicated the plight of the children to an American officer. Food was brought in for them, and later they were moved to an UNRRA home. Dutiful Eugenia stayed there with the babies for two more years, until, unclaimed by any parent, they were all repatriated to the USSR.
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From the beginning, British and American officials had known that their job within Germany would be gigantic, and that there would be millions of forced laborers and POWs needing care. This did not include the further millions of German and
Volksdeutsche
refugees who would be fleeing the battle zones. Plans were accordingly made to help each affected country set up efficient units to control and expedite repatriation of its citizens. It was also recognized that some of the displaced persons, or DPs as they came to be called, would not want to go home. These, the Allies theorized, would be resettled by the so far ineffectual Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, just where not being stipulated. Meanwhile, governments were supposed to work with one another, through UNRRA if necessary, and be fair to displaced citizens other than their own nationals, treating and feeding them, without racial, religious, or political discrimination, “as equals.”

American soldiers struggle to feed a swarm of refugees, Germany, 1945
.
(photo credit 15.2)

In the early planning for medical care, the prevalence of malnutrition as well as tuberculosis, malaria, typhus, and other infectious diseases was correctly foreseen but the Western Allies wrongly assumed, in December 1944, before the liberation of any of the concentration and slave labor camps, that “the majority of the displaced nationals of the United Nations in Germany … will be able bodied men, who have been used in Germany as workers and who are likely, for that reason, to have been subject to some medical supervision, and to have been fairly well fed.” And they even more naively assumed that the Germans would continue to feed forced laborers and POWs until the surrender, as “everything possible will be done to impress on the enemy their strict accountability in this respect.” One planning document also predicted that after their long servidude the DPs would be “tractable, grateful, and powerless.”
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But even before the Allied entry into Germany, Civil Affairs officers in contact
with the DPs had become aware of what they termed their “liberation complex,” produced by “revenge, hunger and exultation, which three qualities combined to make displaced persons, when newly liberated, a problem as to behavior and conduct” that could “assume critical proportions at times.”
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They had also become aware that the French aid agencies, though well organized, could not possibly handle the huge projected numbers of DPs that would head home, and liaison teams were sent to help them.