Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (11 page)

Hannelore von Cmuda, aged only seventeen, was raped repeatedly by drunken troops, then shot three times and left for dead. Anneliese Antz was dragged from her mother’s bed just before dawn and taken screaming to an apartment, where a Soviet officer roughly assaulted her. Her sister Ilse was stripped naked by another soldier who mistook her half-starved body for a man’s before realizing his mistake and raping her. “That’s what the Germans did in Russia,” he told her, after he had finished.

Eighteen-year-old Juliane Brochnik hid behind the sofa in her father’s cellar when the Russians came. She was safe until two elderly Germans in the adjoining cellar told the Russians where she was. Margarete Probst concealed her blond hair under a cap, dirtied her face, and put a large bandage on her cheek to make herself unattractive. She succeeded, but other women in the shelter with her at Kreuzberg were less fortunate: “The girls were simply rounded up and taken to the apartments upstairs,” she remembered. “We could hear their screams all night. The sound even penetrated down to the cellars.”
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One of them, a woman of eighty, was raped repeatedly by the Russians despite her advanced age.

In another shelter, Margarete Promeist, too, was raped, despite telling her assailant that she was far too old for him. Margarete was supposed to be in charge of the shelter, but there was nothing she could do against the Russians: “For two days and two nights, wave after wave of Russians came into my shelter raping and looting. Women were killed if they refused. Some were shot and killed anyway. In one room alone I found the bodies of six or seven women, all lying in the position in which they were raped, their heads battered in.”
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Actress Magda Wieland hid herself in a cupboard, only to be hauled out by an Asiatic soldier, who then suffered premature ejaculation at the sight of a beautiful blonde. His companion raped her instead. Downstairs, Magda’s Jewish friend Ellen Götz was dragged out and raped, too, despite the protests of the Germans who were sheltering her. Ellen had hidden in the cellar after escaping from the prison in Lehrterstrasse, but her Jewishness did not save her from the Russians. They raped Jewish women and Communists as well, party members who had concealed their membership from the Nazis for twelve long years and had initially welcomed the Soviets with open arms.

Children were raped, too, young girls of eleven or twelve with torn ligaments, bleeding to death from punctured bowels after what the Russians had done to them. Few females were too young or too old for the Russians’ attention. Their officers sometimes tried to stop them, but more often than not they just laughed instead or attempted to join in. Women soldiers laughed, too, amused at the sight of their comrades openly violating German women on the street. Individual Russian soldiers were occasionally kind and gentle, but as an army, they showed no mercy as they fell on Berlin. Their country had suffered too much in the past four years for them to show any mercy. And the people of Germany hadn’t suffered enough.

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BELSEN

IN BELSEN,
the British had just finished burying the bodies. There had been ten thousand bodies when they liberated the camp on April 15, the vast majority dead from typhus or starvation. The guards had refused to dispose of them for fear of infection, and the remaining prisoners had lacked the strength, so the bodies had been abandoned instead, dumped in great piles around the camp and left to rot.

The British had been shocked beyond belief at the sight of so many corpses. The first soldiers to reach the wire had retched at once, overcome by the smell of death before they even entered the camp. The living had seemed almost as terrible as the dead, skeletal figures fighting over scraps of food or lying uncaring in their own excrement. The British were hardened troops who thought they had seen it all in the fight across Europe. But Belsen had made them cry like babies.

The worst of it was that Belsen was not even an extermination camp. It had no purpose-built gas chambers or execution sheds. It was simply a holding camp that had gone wrong, overflowing with prisoners from elsewhere who had been moved to Belsen to escape the Russians advancing from the east. The Germans had never fed the prisoners well, but they had found it difficult to feed them at all when the food supply was disrupted by the British advance. The Germans had left the prisoners to starve instead, while remaining perfectly well nourished themselves.

Richard Dimbleby had been the first to reveal Belsen to the outside world. Reporting for the BBC, he had spoken of living skeletons and cannibalism, corpses with their livers and kidneys cut out, men and women clubbed senseless by the SS and then thrown alive into the crematorium. His report had been measured and calm, but it had been received with frank incredulity by the BBC. They had refused to broadcast it until the story had been verified by independent sources. Dimbleby had telephoned London in a blind rage, swearing that he would never make another broadcast as long as he lived if this one wasn’t transmitted. The BBC had reluctantly complied, while insisting on a few cuts nevertheless, for their own peace of mind.

Yet Dimbleby had told only the half of it. He hadn’t mentioned the children forced to stand and watch as their parents were murdered; the man torn apart by dogs for calling out to his wife; the suspected cannibals made to sit with a dead man’s eyeball between their lips and their arms above their heads, beaten to death as soon as they wavered and couldn’t hold the position any longer. He had said nothing of excrement inches deep in every hut; children throwing stones at corpses; women who hadn’t menstruated since their arrival at the camp; women co-opted into prostitution—fourteen German soldiers a day, five days a week—in return for enough food to keep body and soul together. Nor had he spoken of the prisoners praying for the British to arrive before a planned gas chamber was completed; of guards continuing to kill prisoners even after the British appeared; of invalids screaming with fear whenever anyone came near them with a needle; of others in a blind panic as they were carried on stretchers toward a building with chimneys, which, for Auschwitz survivors, could have only one meaning. Dimbleby hadn’t mentioned any of these things in his broadcast. There had been only so much his listeners could take at a single hearing.

The British had hardly known where to begin after the initial shock had worn off. Feeding the prisoners and nursing the sick had been the most urgent priorities, followed by burying the dead. Unprepared for the complexity of the task, and with the front line still only a few miles away, the British had made mistakes at first, pressing their own rations on prisoners too far gone to digest food properly, killing unknown numbers with kindness instead of saving them as they intended.

Michael Bentine, an intelligence officer with the RAF, had been in Celle, nearby, when a British doctor had appeared in a Jeep, demanding K-rations and chocolate. “I’ve never seen anything so awful in my life,” he had told Bentine. “You just won’t believe it till you see it—for God’s sake come and help them!”
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Others had helped, too. Lieutenant Robert Runcie and Major Willie Whitelaw of the Scots Guards had delivered a Jeepload of sweets and chocolate from their battalion’s own rations for the children in the camp. But British army rations had often proved too rich for stomachs unused to such fare. Prisoners had continued to die at the rate of several hundred a day for weeks after the British arrived.

The bodies all had to be buried. The prison guards had been made to do the work at first, Germans and Hungarians lugging corpses so putrid that the arms sometimes came away in their hands. The guards had complained that they would catch typhus, but had received scant sympathy from the British. SS guards demanding a few minutes’ rest had been made to lie facedown in a burial pit, where they had cowered in fear, expecting to be killed at any moment. One guard had committed suicide after a few hours of burial work. Others had begged to be shot. Progress had been so slow that the British had been forced to take over after a while, putting aside their scruples and using bulldozers to finish the job before the bodies decomposed altogether.

The work had been interrupted on April 20 when a flight of Focke-Wulfs had attacked the camp, machine-gunning the inmates at dawn and killing several noncombatants in a field full of Red Cross vehicles. Four days later, a delegation of German officials had been summoned to the main compound. The mayor of Celle and other local burgomasters had been forced to stand on the brink of an open grave containing a thousand emaciated corpses while a camera filmed them in one take, panning upward from the bodies to the faces of the burgomasters and the surrounding camp to avoid any accusations of trick photography. The SS guards had been summoned as well. All had listened stony-faced as a speech was broadcast in German from a loudspeaker mounted on a Jeep:

What you will see here is the final and utter condemnation of the Nazi party. It justifies every measure which the United Nations will take to exterminate that party. What you will see here is such a disgrace to the German people that their name must be erased from the list of civilised nations.

You who represent the fathers and brothers of German youth see before your eyes a few of the sons and daughters who bear a small part of the direct responsibility for this crime. Only a small part, yet too heavy a burden for the human soul to bear. But who bears the real responsibility? You who have allowed your Führer to carry out his terrible whims. You who have proved incapable of doing anything to check his perverted triumphs. You who had heard about these camps, or had at least a slight conception of what happened in them. You did not rise up spontaneously to cleanse the name of Germany, not fearing the personal consequences. You stand here judged through what you will see in this camp.
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But the burgomasters had proved reluctant to take any of the blame. Leslie Hardman, a rabbi with the British army, had watched with contempt as the officials listened sullenly:

They looked down into the pit of human wreckage and saw something of the outcome of the brutality, sadism and perversion committed in their name. They saw the heaped mounds of earth crouching like huge, patient sheep-dogs waiting to enclose their charges in their final pen. They saw the khaki of the British soldier, the hideous striped garb of the inmate, the white collar of the padre. But they had known nothing, seen nothing, heard nothing.

Stolid, unmoving, they listened to the officer’s words; then one of them, a woman, began to cry. Her sobs broke against their solidity, fell into the vast grave and were lost. The groans of the dead beat against our ears. But the burgomasters had seen, heard and known nothing.
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CHAIM HERZOG
had been a Haganah activist defending Jews in Palestine before the war. Now a British officer, he shared Hardman’s contempt. Herzog had visited several camps as the British advanced, including Belsen. He had never seen the slightest flicker of embarrassment on the faces of ordinary Germans forced to contemplate their countrymen’s handiwork:

When the villagers arrived to confront their nation’s atrocities, neither I nor anyone else I knew saw any expression of horror or remorse at the brutalities done in their name. For Germans to say, then or today, that they knew nothing of what had transpired—as nearly every German claimed—was a desperate lie. I was there. I saw the faces of the ordinary citizens. I saw the close proximity of the towns to the camps. I smelled the rotting corpses of the Jews and gypsies and Poles. Believe me, the German people had to have known—the truth was omnipresent and inescapable.
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Sixteen-year-old Esther Brunstein, transported to Belsen in January but now happily liberated by the British, told them of trudging from Celle station toward the camp:

On the way I remember seeing neat little red-roofed houses. It seemed another world, one in which we had played no part for so long and I was surprised to find it still existed. We could see children and adults peeping through the curtained windows, looking on at the throng of skeletal creatures in striped concentration camp garb. I wondered then and still wonder today what thoughts went through the minds of these onlookers. Were they really unaware, as so many later claimed, of what did go on in their Fatherland?
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Some war correspondents had asked the same question of the local population. A few Germans had admitted to hearing rumors, but had attributed them to Allied propaganda. Only one man, a farmer, had confessed to being aware of Belsen’s reputation. He had turned a blind eye rather than find out more:

I didn’t know very much about it. Each morning I had to drive up there with a cart full of vegetables, swedes and turnips mostly, and one of the SS guards took the horse and cart from me at the gate. After a bit the cart and horse were returned and I drove away. I was never allowed inside and I didn’t want to go in anyway. I knew something horrible was going on, but I didn’t ask about it lest I should find myself inside.
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The farmer did not impress the correspondents, but he found an unlikely ally in Willie Whitelaw. He and Runcie had driven over from Bad Bevensen, where the Scots Guards were resting for a few days before continuing the advance. They had been as shocked as anyone by Belsen and never forgot what they had seen. Yet Whitelaw was prepared to give local Germans the benefit of the doubt when they claimed they hadn’t realised the extent of what was going on: “The countryside around it gave no clue to the horrors inside the compound. I can readily believe that many Germans in the neighbourhood had little appreciation of what was happening.”
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Private Peter Ustinov agreed. As a member of a British army film unit, he had seen footage of Belsen and other camps as it came in, including scenes too awful to show to the public. He, too, was prepared to give ordinary Germans the benefit of the doubt when they refused to believe the extent of the horror in their midst: