The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (33 page)

On the ground floor, sheltering behind a window, he spotted four young men. They were attached to one of the home defence units created late in the war and had a girl with them. At the sight of Michel they ran up the stairs to the first floor, leaving the girl behind. Michel caught her and pursued the men, climbing the stairs with the girl in front of him as a human shield. The men had tried to enter the apartments on the first floor, but found all the doors bolted against them. Michel shouted in German that anyone who provided shelter would have their apartments destroyed by the American Army. Trapped at the end of the corridor, the young men threw down their weapons and surrendered.

The soldiers were handcuffed and driven in a truck to HQ. The girl sat in the back of the jeep beside Michel. She told him that she was a singer who had tagged along with her friends and been prepared to fight. At the end of their journey Michel told her that she was free to go. But she was reluctant to leave and said she wanted to be with him. That night, in a flagrant violation of the non-fraternisation order, Michel went to bed with her. ‘I didn’t try to seduce her - she offered herself. I suppose, looking back on it, she had become psychologically dependent on her captor. I remember it mostly because it meant nothing. It was purely physical for both of us. I felt neither intellectual nor emotional conflict about a one-night stand with this particular enemy. I can hardly recall what she looked like - in contrast to the piano-playing rocket engineer, who remains forever etched in my memory.’

After four days’ fighting the city was taken. Men from the Thunderbirds raised the Stars and Stripes in Luitpold Stadium, where Adolf Hitler had once been worshipped by hundreds of thousands of the party faithful.

Amid the triumph Michel received terrible news: Gerard Sachs, his friend and soulmate from Philadelphia, had been killed in combat. ‘This brave man, this hero, who had fought all through Italy and France and Germany, killed so close to the end of the war. In Nuremberg. It was a bitter blow.’

On the road between Nuremberg and Munich stood the town of Dachau and its concentration camp. Small in comparison to the others, the camp was thought to house in excess of thirty thousand people. Rumours about conditions in the various camps and the pitiful state of the survivors had been circulating through the army since the middle of the month. There had been stories about the nature of these places for some time, but battle-weary troops were cynical and wondered if they were not further examples of wartime propaganda. The Soviet Army had overrun and liberated camps in Poland - including Auschwitz - at the end of January, but little information came from that quarter and not much of it was believed.

Then, on 11 April, the 3rd Armored Division reached Nordhausen, on the south of the Harz Mountains, and finally there were American soldiers who were eyewitnesses to the horror. Nearby were the vast caverns carved out of the mountains that housed the underground complex where the giant V-2 rockets were built, and beside them stood Camp Dora, which had once held tens of thousands of slave labourers who serviced the gigantic factory.

As the GIs approached the camp, they were confronted with walking skeletons, stumbling ghostlike along the roads. They were everywhere, shuffling along barely alive in their striped prison garb, or lying sprawled by the side of the road too weak to move. It was often impossible even to tell the sex of the survivors, who seemed to belong to a different species.

The troops then entered the camp itself. There were twenty-three thousand survivors and three thousand unburied bodies rotting inside the buildings. Thirty thousand others had already been exterminated. ‘It was a fabric of moans and whimpers of delirium and outright madness,’ one soldier said. ‘Here and there a single shape tottered about, walking slowly, like a man dreaming.’
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The surviving slave labourers were found in a condition ‘almost unrecognisable as human. All were little more than skeletons. The dead lay beside the sick and dying in the same beds; filth and human excrement covered the floors. No attempt had been made to alleviate the disease and gangrene that had spread unchecked among the prisoners.’
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At one town on the way south, the Thunderbirds moved forward unexpectedly first thing in the morning, and Michel was forced to leave his things in the deserted house where he had spent the night. He returned late in the afternoon to pick them up and surprised a gang of half a dozen scraggly youths in their late teens going through his belongings. Thinking they were German looters, he unholstered his gun and yelled at them. The youths froze and dropped everything they held on to the floor as he bore down on them brandishing the automatic. Their fear was pitiful, and Michel heard one cry out in anguish,
‘Oy Gottenew!’

The despairing voice shook him to his soul. The terrified boy was saying ‘Oh dear God’ in Yiddish. The young men were not looters but recently liberated inmates from a camp. It was Michel’s first encounter with survivors of the German concentration camps. He holstered his pistol and tried to make amends. ‘Until then I forgot to cry. And still I did not cry, but tears came to my eyes. Tears of shame. It tore me, and still does. An immense hurt - an emotional stab in the eyes. That in my first encounter with Jewish survivors I had threatened and frightened them. It shames me to have shouted at them. To have waved a pistol at them. It shames me still.’

On 15 April Edward R. Murrow, the famous CBS war correspondent, broadcast a report about Buchenwald, a camp just outside Weimar. He described the barracks. ‘When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled eighty horses. There were twelve hundred men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.’ As he walked out into the fresh air of the courtyard, a man fell dead. He visited the part of the camp where the children were kept, some only six years old and all tattooed with a number. ‘The children,’ an old man said. ‘Enemies of the state.’ In the hospital two hundred people had died the previous day and a doctor reeled off the causes of death: ‘Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live.’ In a garage Murrow found approximately five hundred bodies stacked neatly like cordwood. Five different men, who had experience of other camps, told him that they were all worse than Buchenwald. The broadcast was deeply disturbing and shocking at the time to those who heard it. There was no way of knowing that the horrors described were only the tip of the iceberg of what would become known as the Holocaust.
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The mission to liberate Dachau was assigned to the 5rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment of the Thunderbirds, and Michel attached himself in his capacity as a CIC agent, and steeled himself against the horrors to come. On 29 April 1945, a cold Sunday, two columns of infantry, riding on tanks and armoured bulldozers, moved through the eerily silent town towards the camp itself.
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As the infantry grew close to the camp they became aware of a sickening stench. One column of troops came across thirty-nine railroad cars in a siding filled with thousands of rotting human corpses. GIs began to throw up. Some broke down and wept, others entered a frozen zone of deep shock, while some exploded into vengeful combat rage. ‘Let’s kill every one of these bastards,’ GIs started yelling. ‘Don’t take any SS alive!’
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An SS man wearing Red Cross patches tried to make a break for it and was shot down. Four others, who came out of hiding with their hands in the air, were herded into one of the railcars by an enraged lieutenant, who emptied his pistol into them. The troops were shot at as they entered the main gate of the camp and took cover. They moved forward when they saw a white flag, but SS guards opened fire again. When a second flag appeared, the troops advanced cautiously.

The smell of corrupted bodies was overpowering. ‘When we entered the camp the first thing visible was the source of the odour: a small mountain of decaying bodies. Nearby stood another mountain of discarded clothes and shoes. Thousands of men, women and children stood at the wire, gaunt and unwashed, and tried to express their joy over liberation. GIs just stood on the other side of the wire staring at them in shock. Even though I had fought the Nazis for more than five years and had seen them at what I thought was their worst, Dachau stunned me. It was gut-wrenching. It is one thing to know, another to experience.’

The first concern of the military was to find the SS troops who resisted the advance. Many had changed out of their uniforms into civilian clothes in an attempt to escape in the confusion, although inmates were quick to point them out. ‘The GIs shot a number of them on the spot. Technically, as they were out of uniform, these summary executions could probably be justified by the rules of war. Actually, the treachery of the fake surrender signal that led to casualties, plus outrage over camp conditions, provoked the retribution. Even in retrospect the action does not strike me as harsh, and I can’t say I was upset.’

SS prisoners were herded into a coal yard, lined up and told to keep their hands above their heads. When they saw a GI load a belt of ammo into a machine gun they panicked and bolted. The machine gun opened fire and seventeen were killed. An officer rushed to the machine-gunner and grabbed him by the collar, pulled out his .45 and fired it into the air to attract attention. The machine-gunner began to shake and weep. Another sixteen SS men rousted from a guard tower were also shot down. It was becoming difficult to control the men as hardened combat troops exploded under the strain.
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Michel took photographs: of the dead bodies of paunchy SS soldiers in their civilian clothes; of the heap of naked corpses discarded like so much rubbish; of the mountain of old clothes awaiting its grim sorting; of the half-burned bodies in the ovens of the crematorium; of the
Brausebad
(showers) that was really a gas chamber; of a coloured mural of the SS riding pigs; and of a notice painted on the wall: REINLICHKEIT IST GOTTLICHKEIT - Cleanliness is Godliness.

The world has viewed similar images many times since the war, and they have never lost the power to sicken and shock, but on the day of liberation none of those present had seen such things. It was a vision of twentieth-century inhumanity on such a scale that the senses were overwhelmed. Michel took pictures simply because he thought no description in words could ever convey the scale and systematic nature of the horror. And also because he feared the outside world would refuse to believe it. His friend, Michael Nelken, had committed suicide when his pre-war account of Dachau had not been believed. And in those days conditions had been nothing like this.

Altogether there were thirty-three thousand survivors in Dachau, two thousand, five hundred and thirty-nine of whom were Jews. Nine thousand captives had died in the previous three months, a further fourteen thousand over the winter. Even after the liberation, thousands more died, too far gone from starvation or sickness to be helped. As Michel walked through the camp he examined the railcars full of emaciated bodies, the last death transport of the war from Buchenwald. The German guards had locked the men, women and children inside the freight cars without food or water, and they slowly starved. When the despair of some of the survivors became too loud, or efforts were made to break out, the guards shot randomly into the cars. One survivor, who was found under a pile of the dead, stood on his match-stick legs and wept as he later told a female journalist, ‘Everyone is dead. No one is left. Everyone is dead. I cannot help myself. Here I am and I am finished and cannot help myself. Everyone is dead.’
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Another journalist who witnessed the corpses in the train described them as piled up like branches of cut-down trees, and those at the crematorium looking like a heap of crooked logs ready for some infernal fire.
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The American Army forced Dachau civilians from the town to bury the dead, a task that continued for days. Michel went into the town to find the mayor and local officials and had them brought to the camp with their wives. All of them claimed to have been entirely ignorant of what had happened within its walls.
‘Not know?’
Michel shouted, turning on them in contempt. ‘Mention the name Dachau to the Hottentots and they know!’

Among the prisoners Michel interrogated Emil Mahl, the man in charge of the crematorium and the camp’s hangman, who referred to himself as Capo.
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Mahl’s account of life in Dachau, related without remorse or any sense of guilt, drew a picture of a world that even Michel could scarcely imagine, despite his own experiences in camps. The banality of the lengthy confession, with its quotidian detail, described a routine of casual barbarity. After many hours of interrogation Michel handed Mahl a block of rough paper and a pencil, and told him to write down his confession. The hangman covered six pages on both sides in a neat, even script. ‘Executions and hangings took place in the crematorium at least two days a week, usually on Tuesdays and Thursday...’
[146]

Mahl was originally a common criminal who had been sent to Dachau in October 1940, where he served a year and a half of his sentence. In the inverted value system of the camp world, common criminals enjoyed preferential treatment and privileges. After a period of illness he tried for months to be given a job that provided extra and better food, and was assigned to work with a squad in Munich to remove debris after Allied bombing raids. Later, he was successful in landing a more prestigious job in the camp crematorium, obtained through the influence and special recommendation of two men working there who were about to be released and drafted into the German Army.