An Honourable Defeat (36 page)

Acknowledgements

There are not many survivors of the struggle within Germany against Hitler. After the failure of the famous assassination attempt by Graf Stauffenberg at Rastenburg on 20 July 1944, the Gestapo and the Security Service launched an enormous operation (known as ‘Thunderstorm’) in the course of which about 7000 people were arrested, of whom 4500 were executed. In their last orgy of summary justice and killing, the Nazis brought in many thousands who were innocent of any plot to kill the dictator, but who had long been under suspicion — however slight — of disloyalty to the regime. The authorities also found themselves with an excuse to execute many more dissidents who had been in prison or the concentration camps since before the 20 July attempt. Virtually all the leading players in the German Resistance died at the time. In finding witnesses of the period today there is another problem: this book describes events which took place half a century ago; since then natural mortality has thinned even further the ranks of those who took part.

I am very grateful to the relatives and friends of those who died for sharing their memories of them with me, and to the handful of people still alive who experienced the events themselves, as young Army officers, Communist activists, nurses, civil servants, priests and factory workers, to give only a few of their occupations. Several of the names I list below recur in the book in heroic contexts, and I am privileged to have met people capable of not only such physical bravery but also of moral courage. I thank everyone who has helped me in this difficult but rewarding task. Without them I could not have completed it.

For their interest in my work, for their time, expertise, hospitality and generosity I wish to thank: Inge Aicher-Scholl, Professor Theodor Bergmann, Christabel Bielenberg, Birgit Brandau, Major Nigel Browne, Franz Brückl, the late Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche, Clare Colvin, Professor David Dilks, Dr Klaus von Dohnanyi, Nicholas Elliott, Professor Dr Theodor Eschenburg, Eberhard Fechner, Joachim Fest, Professor Dr Ossip K. Flechtheim, Ann Fox, David Fox, George and Nikki Gill, Nicola Gill, Julius Goldstein, Alan Gunn, Ludwig Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, Zenta Herker, Victoria Huntingdon-Whiteley, Dominique Jubien, Ernst Kehler, Eugen Kessler, Dr Lothar Kettenacker of the German Historical Institute, London; Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, the late Professor Ulrich Klug, Wolfgang and Sabine Koch, Barbara von Krauss (
née
Oster), Dr A.E. Laurence, Mark Lucas, Sue Maconachy, Max Mannheimer, Kunigunda Messerschmitt, Jo Morley, Erna Nelki, Gertrud Neubaur (
née
Beck), David Neville, Kate Neville, Dr Traute Page (
née
Lafrenz), Dr Jochen Rasch, Emma Rhind-Tutt, Irmgard Roecken, Manfred Rommel, Connie and Edwin Rosenstiel, Hartmut Schickert, Adam and Elisabeth Schliefer, Fritz Graf von der Schulenburg, David Sincock, Franz Ludwig Graf Stauffenberg, Nina Grafin Schenk von Stauffenberg, Otto-Philipp Graf Stauffenberg, Joe Steeples, John Stevenson, Klaus Täubert, Dr Clarita von Trott zu Solz, Dr Johannes Tuchel, Tom Weldon, the late Sir Dick White, Stephen White, Christa Wichmann, and Dr Jürgen Zarusky.

I also wish to acknowledge the help of the following institutions, their staffs and archivists: the British Library, London; Bundesarchiv Koblenz; Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg i. Br.; Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, Berlin; Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz; the Goethe Institute Library, London; Interessenverband ehemaliger Teilnehmer am antifaschistischen Widerstand, Verfolgter des Naziregimes and Hinterbliebener (IVVdN) e.V.; Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich; Landesarchiv Berlin; Maximilian-Kolbe-Werke; Preussische Staatsbibliothek; Vereinigung des Verfolgten des Naziregimes (VVN); the Wiener Library, London; and the Zentralverband Demokratischer Widerstandskampfer (ZVDW).

*

There is a large amount of material available in Germany on the Resistance. It has been the subject of many and varied commentaries in the last fifty years, and some of what is published, in the absence of much written material from the conspirators themselves, is contradictory and hard to verify. Different periods of history since the war, responding to different political pressures, the most obvious of which was the Cold War, have handled the material in a variety of ways. Fresh sources are becoming available from the archives of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and from Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States generally, though, to judge from what I have seen, it will take many years to explore them fully. I have verified everything here to the best of my ability, and I take responsibility for any errors. All translations from German are my own, unless I have acknowledged them otherwise in the footnotes.

If you enjoyed
An Honourable Defeat
you might be interested in
The Journey Back From Hell
by Anton Gill, also published by Endeavour Press.

Extract from
The Journey Back From Hell
by Anton Gill

Prologue

Any writer approaching the subject of the German concentration camps of the Second World War is faced with two main problems: that of scope, and that of the emotions and reactions that treatment of the subject evokes. As far as scope is concerned, one may as well accept that no one is ever going to produce a single work which encompasses every aspect of the camps, from the moment of their inception to their effect on European history and thinking, at least, up to now and into the future. Even though I am limiting myself to the story of KZ survivors’ post-war experiences, I can tell only a fraction of what I have heard. As for the emotions they evoke — we are familiar with them. The camps have a fascination in their revoltingness. We are repelled and attracted — but the attraction (and I am not talking about the perverted titillation which some people feel, to which the trash literature and films relating to the camps testify) lies in an attempt to understand why they came about. Reactions, not least of survivors, to books about the camps are highly sensitive. As a writer on the subject, I seek not to offend; but I accept that there will be passages in this book that are bound to distress or anger somebody. I have kept my own comments to a minimum, noting my reactions and thoughts only where I think it appropriate to do so. I have seen my job as building a bridge between the survivors and the readers of this book. The readers must draw their own conclusions from what the survivors tell them.

The survivors of the concentration camps in this book are all Jews, or former political prisoners of the Nazis, or resistance fighters. They live now in Western Europe, the USA and Israel. For the most part they were born in central and Eastern Europe. Because some of the people I spoke to expressed surprise that I was not going to deal exclusively with the Jewish tragedy, I think I must now say why I have not. It is quite correct that the bulk of attention given to the concentration camps should have centred upon the attempt by the Third Reich to eradicate the Jews, because there is no doubt that no other victims of the camps were so inexorably slated for death. The war Hitler waged against them was the one in which he was all but victor, and the one which he personally continued to press with unabated vigour, without regard for the practical considerations of defending his country, to the bitter end. In September 1939 the Jewish population of the Europe that Germany was to occupy and control for the next five years was 8,301,000. It was long established: the community in Greece was 2,200 years old; in Bulgaria, France, Hungary, Italy and Rumania the communities were not much younger. There had been Joys in Germany for 1,600 years, in Poland for 800. Jew-hatred was nothing new, and there had been three pogroms of increasing severity in Russia, in 1881-4, 1903-6 and 1917-21, leading to a migration westward; but what was to come was beyond the bounds of anyone’s imagination. In the course of five years, 5,978,000 Jews were killed — 72 per cent of the pre-war population. In Poland, where the Jews numbered 3,300,000 (a tenth of the total population of the country and the second largest community in the Diaspora) 2,800,000 were killed — 85 per cent of the original total.
[95]
Today, there are barely 5,000 Jews in Poland; they are mainly old. It is hard for a local community to make up a minyan. There has been only one bar-mitzvah since 1945.
[96]
The reason for this decay is not due to the actions of the SS alone. Many returning Polish Jews, survivors of the concentration camps, were murdered by anti-Semitic Poles in the years immediately following the war, and again in the wake of the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. About half the Jewish survivor population of Poland, and predominantly the young ones, emigrated in the years following the Second World War, and the trend has continued. It is likely that there will soon be no Jews in Poland at all.

In remembering what happened to the Jews, it is still important not to forget that other, much smaller groups were scheduled for death — the Gypsies, of whom at least 500,000 were killed; Russian prisoners-of-war; homosexuals. To them one must add the numbers of political prisoners of all those nations occupied by Germany; captured resistance fighters; religious dissidents and other groups to be mentioned in Chapter 2. So that to the appalling figure of six million Jews, with which everyone is familiar, must be added at least a further six million people who met their deaths in the camps. I do not consider that discussion of the degrees of brutality meted out to prisoners who survived will be necessary, since readers will be able to make their own comparisons (as far as these are desirable) and draw their own conclusions; but it should be stated that generally the Jews were treated much more brutally than the non-Jews. Nor should it ever be forgotten that the Jews were abandoned by the rest of the world. Two inter-national conferences (at Evian in 1938 and in Bermuda in 1943) were convened to discuss ways of helping them. Only Holland and Denmark discharged themselves with any credit at Evian.
[97]
In 1938 there might have been some slight excuse for believing that the danger threatening the Jews was exaggerated; but the lack of interest displayed by Western nations in general was interpreted by Hitler as a green light for his plans. In 1943, in Bermuda, there was no excuse at all, as plenty of reports of what was going on had reached the Allies by then. But attitudes had not softened. By a bitter irony, the Bermuda conference was taking place at precisely the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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That the suffering of others should not be forgotten, however, is demonstrated by the story (told in Chapter 11) of Karl Ibach, a German Social Democrat who was first imprisoned in the tiny, short-life concen-tration camp of Kemna, in Wuppertal, at the age of 18 in 1933. He did not see his home again until he was released from the Russian POW camp of Mariupol in November 1947. Those political prisoners, deemed dangerous opponents of Nazism, were condemned to
Nacht and Nebel
— ‘night and mist’. In other words, they were to be made to disappear, either to be worked to death, shot or gassed.

This is a book mainly concerned with the survivors’ lives after liberation. It is a subject that has occupied specialists — physicians and psychiatrists — for decades,
[99]
but one which has had relatively little attention in the vast corpus of literature about the concentration camps themselves, and life in them.
[100]
That is one reason for writing it. Another is that the preconception that the prisoners’ suffering ends when they are liberated must be dispensed with. For many survivors of the KZ, the trials continued, not least because there was no home to return to. Here again a distinction may be drawn between the returning political prisoners or resistance fighters, who were able to come back to an intact house, family, society and even job in their own country, and the tens of thousands of East European Jews (and anti-Communists, but overwhelmingly the people most affected were Jewish) who after years of torment had to gather up what remained of their strength and use it to carve a new home and career in a new country, with a new language and a radically different culture — a country moreover which, while accommodating them, might not otherwise be especially friendly or sympathetic.

The third principal reason is that time is running out. The youngest survivor I interviewed was born in 1934; but the oldest was born in 1898 (Jack Santcross experienced Bergen-Belsen as an 11-year-old; Edith Kramer-Freund was a doctor in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt in her forties) and it will not be long before it will no longer be possible to gain direct testimony from those with adult memories of the camps. Thus this book will be one of the last of its kind, and one of the few ever. Inevitably the disaster of the German concentration camps will become part of history — a scar rather than a wound — but where the scar is, the skin should remain thin, the nerves more sensitive. We must not forget the 12-year-long slaughter and rape of the senses that Nazi Germany perpetrated in its concentration camps, nor that it was premeditated, deliberate, systematic and sustained. If we did forget it, it would be to our eventual peril. There have been massacres of people before and since, but nothing quite like this; and we must never, by indifference or moral laziness, let it happen again.

There is a revived interest in the camps now, originally sparked by the 40th-anniversary celebrations of the end of the war, and by the number of survivors who, previously silent, have now chosen to speak out. This last aspect, and why it may have come about, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. Partly, too, we have reached a point where we can at last look at the concentration camps. There was little interest in the Fifties: people wanted to forget, to get on with rebuilding the world. Economic considerations crushed moral obligations, and only the lonely voices of such people as Elie Wiesel were raised in remembrance, admonishing us, crying in the wilderness; though doctors, faced with the job of trying to heal people whose suffering was without precedent, began research work immediately after the war.

With the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel at the beginning of the Sixties, the lid was taken off, the cupboard door opened. Now we have reached a crucial point. East Germany has for long declined any responsibility for the KZ;
[101]
though one should add that in the course of a long speech delivered on 31 December 1966 Walter Ulbricht mentioned the subject of former Nazis in the DDR. He said, ‘Many millions of people were organized in the Nazi Party and other Nazi organizations. We have passed just sentence on those who committed crimes; but for the others we have provided the opportunity for them to overcome the past in work for peace and the community.’
[102]

The East German courts imposed heavier sentences on former Nazis than their West German counterparts who were sometimes lenient to the point of embarrassment; but that did not prevent former Nazis from holding high office in the DDR.
[103]
Only recently has the DDR decided to compensate Jewish victims of the KZ living in the DDR. (After 43 years few potential beneficiaries remain.)

In West Germany, the mood now is to try to forget, or at least to reduce the impact of the KZ episode in their history. Only a very small number of the youth of West Germany involved themselves in ‘reconciliation’ work, and a third generation has grown up. When I was at school in West Germany for a term on an exchange scheme in 1965, my 17-year-old contemporaries’ first question was always, ‘What do you think of us in England? Do you still hate us? Have you forgiven us?’ But in 1987 a 21-year-old West German girl told me with something amounting to resentment of the
Schadenfreude
with which other tourists viewed German tourists visiting the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem. Dennis B. Klein, Director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, New York, also makes a point about young Germans now aged about 20 who say, ‘The Second World War has absolutely nothing to do with us and we’re fed up with having it rammed down our throats.’
[104]

I sympathize with them; but against this may be set what Menachem Rosensaft told me. He is the son of Josef and Hadassah Rosensaft, both survivors, and was born to them in 1948 in Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons’ Camp, where he spent the first two years of his life: ‘Of the criminal Nazis, many are still around, and very few regret anything more than not winning — or being caught out, if you prefer. And these were and are the parents of our generation — and the crimes of the Second World War have not been especially highlighted in German education up to now. Only a few — Manfred Rommel (Mayor of Stuttgart, and son of the famous general), Johannes Rau (Minister-Prasident, Nordrhein-Westfalen, whose father was a prisoner in Dachau), Richard von Weizsäcker (Federal President of West Germany) — do not shrink from the subject, and square up to Germany’s moral and ethical responsibility. But many Germans want to paper over it or consign it to the past. I certainly don’t harbour a sense of hatred towards Germans and I actively admire such people as Willy Brandt, for example. But for me one thing is crucial: one’s heritage is the good as well as the bad. If a German tells me today that he wants to repudiate his entire heritage and start off anew from 1945, that’s fine with me. But if he wants to have his cake and eat it — that is, he wants Goethe and Bach, Beethoven and Schiller, but he doesn’t want to accept that the same nation was responsible for the Holocaust, then I have no time for him. The Third Reich is part of every German’s heritage, and they must accept it, however hard or unpleasant that is to live with. Equally, no one has the right to forgive the Germans, except on his or her own behalf, and no one has the right to say, “Let’s forget it,” apart from those who suffered, if that’s what they want. Whether any nation would have been capable of doing what the Germans did is a debatable point, though I believe that it is possible. No one has the right to regard Germans visiting Yad Vashem with
Schadenfreude
. Equally, however, no German has the right to resent being thus regarded. It is the German political dissidents who suffered at the hands of the Nazis themselves, often terribly, who are the first to admit this.’

The fact remains that the general feeling in West Germany is that they’ve had enough of it, and have had enough of being treated as the moral lepers of Europe. My own sense is that if they had shown a little more generosity in the question of investigating reparation claims and a little less leniency in the sentences handed down to former Nazis, they might by now have earned a part of the forgiveness some of them think is their right. This seems an appropriate moment to dismiss the so-called ‘revisionist’ historians — those who claim either that the camps never existed, or that nobody was ever gassed in them. As they retreated, the SS desperately tried to destroy the evidence of what they’d done; but they were conscientious about their paperwork (one example of the lunatic criminality of the KZ was that death-certificates giving false but ‘respectable’ reasons for death, such as heart failure, were issued for those gassed, tortured, or simply worked to death) and the Allies captured no fewer than 3,000 tons of documents and photographs relating to the camps.
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This documentation alone is enough to crush the insidious suggestion that the KZ never was. One of the most moving things that happened to me occurred during the early stages of an interview with a couple who had both been in Auschwitz and later married. They were suspicious of me at first because they had recently talked to a journalist who subsequently wrote a ‘revisionist’ article. ‘But Auschwitz did exist,’ they said to me. ‘We went back to see it again. Look — here are photographs. And here is a piece of fern that we picked, which we found growing near the ramp at Birkenau.’