Berlin at War (51 page)

As one of his fellow prisoners recalled:

The Dutchman [. . .] came into the medical barrack as his feet were

completely frozen and inflamed [but] on the orders of Dr Baumkötter

[the SS camp doctor] he was not allowed to be treated. He had no

blanket and lay on the bunk only in his shirt. His feet were not band-

aged. The skin was falling off them. In places the muscles were already

decomposing and the flies fed on his wounds. He lay there for a few

weeks. Then, one day, he was taken away to the crematorium.65

Many more did not survive the ordeal. One Jewish inmate testified

in a post-war trial that only 24 of his 60 comrades survived a three-day

assignment to the shoe testing facility. As one historian has summarised,

transfer to the ‘shoe testing course’ was ‘practically a death sentence’.66

Sachsenhausen is also synonymous with an altogether different

enterprise – ‘Operation Bernhard’. Beginning in 1942, the Nazis began

the large-scale forgery of British banknotes, with the intention of

undermining not only the British economy, but also global confidence

in sterling. Using 142 Jewish prisoners, labouring in workshops within

244

berlin at war

the camp, the SS began what would become the largest forgery oper-

ation in history. At their peak, the forgers of Blocks 18 and 19 were

producing over 600,000 banknotes per month, with a total yield of

over £130 million. To cap it all, the forgeries were not mere pale imita-

tions; they were regarded by the Bank of England itself as the most

perfect counterfeits ever produced.

Though the forgers had successfully produced millions of pounds

worth of excellent forgeries, their work was never put into circulation

in the way that had been foreseen. The Nazis appear to have balked at

their original plan of dropping the forged notes over Britain from the

air. Instead, it seems the notes were used to pay off German spies –

one of whom even sued as a result – and to purchase raw materials and

currency in neutral countries.67

The project did at least save the lives of many of the forgers involved.

Given the importance and delicacy of their task, they lived in compar-

atively luxurious conditions, with clean cotton sheets, improved rations

and a modicum of leisure time. One of them spent much of his free

time playing table tennis with his SS guards – being careful not to

win.68 At a Christmas revue the forgers sang and danced to entertain

their SS overlords. Moreover, given the importance of the forgery

programme, requests for the delivery of the Jewish forgers to

Auschwitz were persistently refused.69 Sachsenhausen thereby became

a perverse sort of refuge for the forgers, but few of them were under

any illusions. As one of their number would pithily summarise, they

saw themselves as ‘dead men on holiday’.70

Another challenge for the inmates was the lack of food. With the

outbreak of war, rations for concentration camp prisoners had been

halved and would continue to deteriorate as the conflict progressed.

But such stipulations – though far from generous – often proved to be

theoretical, and prisoners found themselves forced to subsist on much

less. Some supplemented their diet by scavenging for food, raiding the

bins of the kitchen block or even eating grass.71 Those that were respon-

sible for the camp’s pigsties, for example, stole the animals’ food.72

All concentration camp prisoners suffered from gnawing hunger, but

there was real danger for those who didn’t take drastic action. Those

who were more squeamish, or lacked the imagination or opportunity

to find additional sources of food, ran the very real risk of starvation

and physical collapse. As one inmate of Sachsenhausen recalled, the

the watchers and the watched

245

physical effects could be shocking: ‘What I see before me does not even

look like a human body; these ghostly figures don’t even look like skele-

tons . . . the skin hangs on their bones in loose folds, as though there is

no flesh left beneath. Every bone sticks out and is visible, whether it be

the collarbone, the vertebrae, a rib or a knee-cap.’73

Violence, too, was ever-present. Like all concentration camps,

Sachsenhausen was a place where caprice and the vagaries of fate

were as likely to decide one’s destiny as anything else. Human life, it

seemed, really did hang by a thread. Prisoners were not even safe from

physical abuse within their barracks. There they were exposed to the

arbitrary brutality of the
Kapos
or ‘senior prisoners’, who were held

responsible by the SS for each barrack and were quite adept at dishing

out their own brand of sadism. Armed with cudgels and clubs, the

Kapos
and their henchmen would routinely beat prisoners who crossed

their path – and sometimes they went further. In one instance, three

brothers were murdered in the latrine of a barrack block at

Sachsenhausen. As a witness would later testify:

After the brothers had been in the camp for about 8 days, they were

drowned by the room senior of block 11 in one of the basins . . . I

personally saw how the arms of the second prisoner were held behind

his back. The first two brothers defended themselves and yelled out

for help . . . The third of the three brothers, who was left standing

outside in front of the block, had to listen to his brothers’ call for help

and soon started crying out for help himself. He was . . . hanged in the

washroom during the following night.74

It is not clear what the brothers had done to so displease their block

leader.

Sachsenhausen had the usual instruments for dealing with those

who dared resist the harsh regimen of the camp. On the eastern side

of the site was the punishment block, where prisoners would be held

in isolation, interrogated and tortured. Just outside it stood a wooden

pillory, where public punishments – such as the strappado, or ‘reverse

hanging’ – would be carried out.

On the opposite edge of the camp was an even more sinister instal-

lation. ‘Station Z’ was a purpose-built execution site. Initially consisting

simply of a deep, sloping trench, lined with logs, it would grow more

246

berlin at war

sophisticated in time, with the addition of a room where prisoners

could be surreptitiously shot in the back of the neck, while undergoing

a medical ‘examination’. In 1943, the site was augmented by the building

of a crematorium and a small gas chamber, disguised as a shower room,

which was used primarily for the execution of those prisoners no longer

able to work.75 The numbers killed there are unknown.

Aside from such targeted killings, Sachsenhausen also claimed a large

number of lives through hunger and abuse. Stories of the misery endured

by inmates in the camp are legion, but one incident stands as an example

of the casual everyday brutality. In January 1940, as the prisoners returned

from the work details and gathered on the
Appellplatz
for the evening

roll-call, the guards found that a prisoner was missing. As was usual, all

the inmates were then obliged to stand as a collective punishment, until

the matter was cleared up. To maximise the punishment, the SS guards

demanded that the prisoners also do some physical exercises. It took

ten hours for the escapee to be captured; ten hours in which the exhausted

prisoners stood in the snow, ‘exercising’. The following morning, over

four hundred of them were carried away for cremation. The remainder

were sent straight out again to work.76

It is thought that around 30,000 people died at Sachsenhausen. Bruno

Wattermann, whose story opened this chapter, was not one of them.

Transferred to Sachsenhausen in the late summer of 1942, he was given

the prisoner number 46434. There are only sparse details of Wattermann’s

presence in the camp. We know that he was consigned initially to Block

37 and that he was twice sent to the medical barrack, in August and

October 1943.77 Then, in February 1945, Wattermann was transferred

from Sachsenhausen to the infamous concentration camp at Mauthausen

in Austria.78 Thereafter, he disappears from the record. His ultimate fate

is unknown.

12

The Persistent Shadow

Berlin’s Invaliden cemetery was the city’s most prominent burial

ground. First laid out to the north of the city centre in the mid-

eighteenth century – at a time when much of the area was fields and

allotments – the cemetery was initially intended to provide a final

resting place for those killed in the War of the Austrian Succession.

By the early nineteenth century, it was dedicated as the burial ground

for prominent members of the Prussian military and, in this capacity,

it would soon develop into one of the most impressive cemeteries in

the capital, a veritable who’s who of German military history. A

publication from 1925, entitled
The Berlin Invaliden Cemetery: A Site

of Prussian-German Glory
, listed its ‘residents’ as including 11 field

marshals and colonel generals, 7 ministers of war, 9 admirals, 67 generals,

104 lieutenant generals and 93 major generals.1 Among the most cele-

brated of these were General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the hero of

the Napoleonic Wars, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, author of the

eponymous offensive plan employed during the First World War and

the pioneer airman Manfred von Richthofen, the famous ‘Red Baron’.

Bounded to its western edge by the Hohenzollern canal, and shaded

by a generous smattering of linden trees, the Invaliden cemetery was a

riot of grandiose sarcophagi, sombre bronze statuary and earnest inscrip-

tions. Among the statues, angels predominated. Some perched atop lofty

pillars, while others sat pensively upon individual graves. Eagles, too,

were common, either in the traditional Prussian form, or in the grander

type preferred by Imperial Germany and the Third Reich. The tomb of

General Hans von Seeckt, for instance, featured stone eagles at each

corner with wings outstretched, almost caressing the sarcophagus itself.

Variations on the theme of ‘the Spoils of War’ included empty suits

of armour, elaborate plumed helmets, or sheaves of surrendered weapons.

248

berlin at war

The inscriptions were generally short and to the point: ‘He was the

embodiment of honour!’ proclaimed the grave of General Eduard von

Wedel; while the tomb of the crashed pioneer aviatrix Marga von Etzdorf

suggested poignantly that ‘Flight is worth Life’.2 The grave of the ‘Red

Baron’, meanwhile, took that brevity to the extreme. Set in grey granite

close to the canal side, it bore the single word ‘RICHTHOFEN’.

The outbreak of the war in 1939 promised a new intake for Berlin’s

cemeteries. The first to be laid to rest in the Invaliden cemetery was

General Werner von Fritsch. As supreme commander of the Wehrmacht

in the mid-1930s, Fritsch had been a prominent, if discreet, critic of the

Nazis and as a result had been eased out of his post in 1938, when an

elaborate intrigue engineered by Göring had smeared him as a homo-

sexual. Condemned to an ignominious retirement, Fritsch had returned

to the army on the outbreak of war and had taken command of the

unit in which he himself had served during the Great War, the 12th

Artillery Regiment. He was killed in battle, outside Warsaw, on

22 September – the most prominent German casualty of the Polish

campaign. Among both those who knew von Fritsch and those who

had fought alongside him, it was widely suspected that he had committed

suicide by deliberately exposing himself to Polish gunfire close to the

front line.3 William Shirer was told by an ‘unimpeachable source’ that

Fritsch had refused the pleas of his adjutant to let himself be carried to

the rear and had subsequently bled to death.4

Whatever the exact circumstances of his life and death, Fritsch was

lavishly and spectacularly rehabilitated. In an elaborate state funeral,

his coffin – draped in the swastika flag and topped with the general’s

own steel helmet and dagger – was borne aloft by eight officers of

his regiment. Placed upon a black-draped catafalque, it was then

symbolically guarded by four fellow generals with their side arms

drawn. In the pouring rain, and before thousands of spectators,

speeches were made and two battalions of the elite
Grossdeutschland

Division paraded solemnly on Unter den Linden.

All the senior figures of the military and the Nazi Party were in

attendance: Goebbels, Hess, Göring and Rosenberg rubbing shoulders

with admirals, generals and field marshals.5 Only Hitler was absent,

pointedly visiting the front near Warsaw, close to where the general

had met his end. Göring himself laid a wreath before Fritsch was

finally interred in the Invaliden cemetery. His tomb, a flat oblong of

the persistent shadow

249

polished granite, bore the general’s arms beneath a simple cross. At

its foot, a quote from the Book of Revelation: ‘Be thou faithful unto