Forgotten Land (30 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
The grand guests came: foreigners like Henderson, the Hungarian Prime Minister Gömbös, the Finnish Marshal Mannerheim, the German Field Marshal von Brauchitsch and the crude greedy Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. The Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, was despised, one senior officer calling Koch, who had once worked on the railways, ‘the ticket puncher’. What moved Frevert most were the wartime fighter pilots who had won the Knight’s Cross and been rewarded by Göring with a stag at Rominten. Months or weeks after they had left, he often heard of their deaths in battle.
There was order at Rominten. When a foreign ambassador or statesman coincided with a German guest, the stag shot by the foreigner should be the better of the two. The best heads were kept for Göring; everyone quaked at the prospect of the furious, pumpkin-like face of the Reichsjägermeister if, by mistake, a guest shot a reserved animal. Like many of the Nazis, he was fascinated by the planned breeding of species, particularly if there was a link to an ancient Germany. He encouraged the revival of the extinct aurochs, a massive beast that it was thought could transform cattle farming, letting these loose at Rominten, and he had Trakehner horses pull some of the wagons. Dogs he disliked, although Frevert, characteristically, persuaded the Reichsjägermeister to love one of his bloodhounds; and he was terrified of
snakes. He ordered three hundred hedgehogs to be let loose on another of his properties, having heard that these were lethal to adders.
snakes. He ordered three hundred hedgehogs to be let loose on another of his properties, having heard that these were lethal to adders.
Göring thought most creatures tame beside his real favourite – ‘there are animals,’ he told Frevert, ‘and there are lions.’ In 1937 the foresters at Rominten waited to greet their master with a fanfare on their horns. As the cavalcade approached, an officer ran ahead, shouting, ‘Don’t blow – the lion will go mad.’ Special trains were put at these creatures’ disposal, although in the hunting lodge they were confined to the bathroom when not wanted by the Reichsjägermeister.
For Oberforstmeister (Senior Forest Master) Frevert, these were rich years. To him, a life without style or plenty – ‘luxury’ – was worthless and he lived at Nassawen ‘like a little Prince’, with four horses, a smallholding with cattle and pigs and vegetables, a car, two drivers, a housekeeper and two maids. Each year, at the start of the Rominten winter, after Göring’s longest annual visit, Frevert was allowed to invite some friends of his own. After the stalking came the ritualized relaxation: the drinking from a beaker of horn and silver, engraved with the words, ‘To hunt is the highest pleasure on earth.’
One event Walter Frevert considered the high point of this time, perhaps of his life: the great Berlin international hunting exhibition in November 1937. It was not only the pride that he felt in the heads and trophies from Rominten, a spectacular part of the display, but the sense also that the improved forest and his achievements there had become part of Germany’s rise from humiliation. In Berlin, Frevert could also indulge his love of music, nurtured during visits to the festivals at Bayreuth and Salzburg. Later he recalled particularly a special performance at the Berlin Staatsoper of Weber’s
Der Freischütz
, attended by leaders and huntsmen from all over the world. Göring posed with some of the guests – the Reichsjägermeister in his uniform with the foresters and gamekeepers also formally dressed, clustered around him.
Der Freischütz
, attended by leaders and huntsmen from all over the world. Göring posed with some of the guests – the Reichsjägermeister in his uniform with the foresters and gamekeepers also formally dressed, clustered around him.
Frevert claimed later never to have been an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism, despite photographs of him in SA uniform in Battenberg before he came to Rominten. He admired Göring’s revival of hunting and forest management and, like so many of his ‘hardened generation’, welcomed the new national feeling brought by the Third Reich: ‘our proud Great German empire … from the Lithuanian frontier to Luxembourg, from Schleswig to Karawanken.’ But when Prague was seized by Hitler in March 1939, it became obvious that such coups must end in conflict. Frevert wrote later about the second great war of his lifetime, publicly condemning its ‘criminal nonsense’. He thought that the German conquests showed the folly of trying to impose a different culture on people. But he qualified this with the claim that the victor’s influence could do good if his culture was of a higher kind than that of the defeated. No doubt Frevert was thinking here of the vast, undeveloped lands of Eastern Europe.
Called back to the army in 1939, Walter Frevert fought in Poland and won a bar to his Iron Cross. In December, he was allowed to take up his civilian duties again at Nassawen, and during this winter his personal life changed. Frevert had married Gertrud Habich, the daughter of a pastor, but they had no children – an affront to Frevert’s belief that a man’s life without children was a life condemned to ‘purposelessness’ although the couple adopted a boy. The forest community respected Walter and liked Gertrud but disliked Frevert’s occasional public humiliations of his wife, such as when he made Gertrud bend over a dead stag while he whacked her playfully with a bunch of twigs. The others who were present laughed at first but quickly became embarrassed, and then shocked. The whacking, apparently, quite spoilt ‘the good atmosphere’.
In the winter of 1939 – 40, Frevert combined the management of his own part of the forest with that of a colleague, Dr Paul Barckhausen, who had been killed in Poland. Barckhausen left a twenty-four-year-old widow, Heinke, and, in spite of the extraordinarily deep snow and temperatures of 35 below freezing,
Frevert made the journey often to the Barckhausen house. Soon there were rumours, reinforced in September 1940 when, under the tutelage of Walter Frevert, Heinke shot a fine stag.
Frevert made the journey often to the Barckhausen house. Soon there were rumours, reinforced in September 1940 when, under the tutelage of Walter Frevert, Heinke shot a fine stag.
Göring inspecting the kill at Rominten. Walter Frevert is behind him, to the left.
It was also during the first winter of the war, and for the next year, until he was called back to military duties in April 1941, that Frevert’s subservience to Göring led him into the most controversial period of his life. In 1937 Göring had taken Frevert to Białowies, the immense virgin forest in eastern Poland. Invited there to shoot boar, wolf and lynx by Count Lipski, the Polish Ambassador to Germany, and Count Potocki, the owner of vast estates, Göring had never forgotten the place and, in 1940, the Reichsjägermeister wanted to enlarge the Rominten reserve south-east into the newly conquered Poland. This involved making
a new hunting and forestry district, ‘the Eagle’s Field’, which, under the thorough new regime, entailed deporting Poles from some ten villages, at very short notice, to distant makeshift settlements. This intimate experience of National Socialist methods shocked Frevert. But he obeyed.
a new hunting and forestry district, ‘the Eagle’s Field’, which, under the thorough new regime, entailed deporting Poles from some ten villages, at very short notice, to distant makeshift settlements. This intimate experience of National Socialist methods shocked Frevert. But he obeyed.
The making of ‘the Eagle’s Field’ coincided with personal tragedy. On 13 October, Frevert celebrated his birthday away from Nassawen, with Heinke Barckhausen. The next day he heard that Frau Frevert – Gertrud – had shot herself with one of his rifles, leaving a note to say that she wanted to leave the way free for Frau Barckhausen. Everyone in the small forest community knew the background to the tragedy, but ‘an iron silence’ descended.
Gertrud Frevert was buried in the small cemetery near the forestry office at Nassawen, where the grave still stands. Those at the funeral said that Frevert’s expression seemed to be set in stone; others reported a complete breakdown in private. For the next three months he was away from Nassawen, on duties in Poland or other parts of East Prussia. In his memoirs Walter Frevert makes no mention of this tragedy. Soon afterwards he married Heinke, who wrote that they were ‘a very happy pair’. Frevert’s wish for children came true; they had five sons and he became stepfather to Heinke’s two daughters from her previous marriage – and the husband of a woman some twenty years younger than he was. Heinke survived him by thirty-five years.
On 1 May 1941, Frevert went back to the front, to serve as a battery commander in the huge army that invaded the Soviet Union a month later. His part in the invasion lasted only a week before another call from Göring – this time ordering him back to work on turning the virgin forest of Białowies, in what had been eastern Poland, into a new national park, for hunting and for the preservation of its unique world.
In Białowies, Frevert found a romance even greater than at Rominten. A thousand years seemed a brief span in this prehistoric place that showed man’s smallness in nature beside the
bison, deer, bears, wolves and other wild creatures which, nonetheless, he had the power to destroy. As in 1940, with the Eagle’s Field, the evacuation of the local people was brutal; Frevert and his troops surrounded the villages and gave the inhabitants half an hour to pack up before they were taken east on wagons for resettlement and the abandoned wooden buildings burned. It’s been estimated that, during the last part of July 1941, some thirty-five villages were destroyed; Jewish men were shot by death squads and others deported. Wehrmacht commanders warned that such tactics would encourage support for partisans who were fighting the Germans. When this happened, Frevert’s group took the hardest measures; up to the summer of 1942, some nine hundred people were killed. It was Frevert who decided which suspects should hang and which should live, if there were any living suspects left.
bison, deer, bears, wolves and other wild creatures which, nonetheless, he had the power to destroy. As in 1940, with the Eagle’s Field, the evacuation of the local people was brutal; Frevert and his troops surrounded the villages and gave the inhabitants half an hour to pack up before they were taken east on wagons for resettlement and the abandoned wooden buildings burned. It’s been estimated that, during the last part of July 1941, some thirty-five villages were destroyed; Jewish men were shot by death squads and others deported. Wehrmacht commanders warned that such tactics would encourage support for partisans who were fighting the Germans. When this happened, Frevert’s group took the hardest measures; up to the summer of 1942, some nine hundred people were killed. It was Frevert who decided which suspects should hang and which should live, if there were any living suspects left.
Walter Frevert remarked often upon his luck. In the autumn of 1941, during this devastation, he was taken ill and went to Berlin for an operation, not recovering until the end of March 1942. His defence of what happened was that he was obeying Göring’s orders. Later he wrote that the virgin forest resembled man in the hardness and brutality of its struggle to survive. This brutality threatened him when the war turned. By October 1944, he was back in Rominten – with his own world (and the new schemes for Białowies) on the edge of collapse.
In July 1933, Karl Wolff arranged for Alexander Dohna to join the SS. Himmler thought of him as a friend and in 1934 sent a Christmas gift to Schlobitten of a ceramic ‘un-Christian’ Yule candlestick. With this intimacy came the need to accept certain limits; Dohna was told not to write to the former Emperor, then in exile in Holland, and to abandon his former half-Jewish lawyer. His children joined the Nazi youth organizations and it was while bicycling to a party meeting to celebrate the Führer’s birthday in April 1939 that the eldest boy, Richard, fell, hit his head and died.
The Hitler Youth wanted to cover the coffin with a swastika flag, but Dohna insisted on a bright blue standard embellished with a silver cross and the family’s arms. This tragedy, and the feudal manner of the boy’s funeral, showed that the estates were, as Dohna wrote later, like a family. After their marriage, ‘Titi’ (still in her twenties) was approached by a woman who had worked at Schlobitten for forty years who said, ‘You are like our mother and we are your children.’ The atmosphere, Dohna says, was apolitical; of the five hundred estate workers, few belonged to a political party.
But you couldn’t isolate yourself, even behind such strong walls. It was undeniable that times were improving for farming, with the National Socialist policy of self-sufficiency and the decision to build up the eastern territories. Those days when Dohna had waited with a gun to fight off communist gangs seemed distant in the new ordered land. In 1935, with rearmament under way, former soldiers were given the chance of doing four- to five-week refresher courses. Alexander Dohna attended these each
year at Allenstein until April 1939. By 1937 he was a lieutenant in the reserve, another way, he thought, of influencing Koch. When in 1935 and 1936 fortifications went up near the eastern frontiers, against Poland, the Soviet Union, Lithuania and Latvia, Dohna felt sure that war must come again.
year at Allenstein until April 1939. By 1937 he was a lieutenant in the reserve, another way, he thought, of influencing Koch. When in 1935 and 1936 fortifications went up near the eastern frontiers, against Poland, the Soviet Union, Lithuania and Latvia, Dohna felt sure that war must come again.
His war was mostly on the eastern fronts – in Poland, in the Balkans and in the Soviet Union. Reading his diary years later, Dohna tried to reach behind the flat description of the welcome that the invading troops received in the Ukraine and his pride in liberating the land from Bolshevism; there were no entries about the German atrocities. On 14 October 1941, his unit reached the harbour of Mariopol and he saw the Black Sea. In November at Rostov, when the German army was pushed back and winter began, Dohna realized that they could not win the war. In 1942, a bear was seen near Schlobitten, for the first time since 1732; a year later, another bear was sighted, as if invaders from the east were testing his defences
By September 1942, Dohna was outside Stalingrad. Even in bitter December weather German morale was high, but the terrible fighting, and the gradual encirclement of General Paulus’s army, changed everything. On 16 January 1943, Dohna was told to take a message to army headquarters, on one of the last flights out; his general had, he thought, selected him to be saved because of his young children. After months of near-starvation, his health collapsed and he was given a year’s home leave. Not until January 1944 was he ordered to join a corps in Italy, in Abetone, in the foothills of the Apennines. In March there was an atrocity near Abetone; American prisoners were shot. When Dohna protested, he was sent home, regarded as reliable only for local duties in East Prussia.
In the summer of 1943, he had told his wife and some of the estate staff that they would soon have to leave Schlobitten. ‘Titi’ went with their children, first to her old home in Saxony, then further west to relations in Thuringia. Dohna knew of the plot against Hitler – but not the timing. In July, the day after
the bomb, he was at Rastenburg station, having an appointment with his cousin, who had been one of the conspirators. No one was there to meet him, so he went back. The purpose may have been, he thought, to offer him a role in the new post-Hitler East Prussia; after all, many of the conspirators had, like Dohna, once supported the regime. As news came of the arrests and the suicides – many of the victims were his friends or relations – it became clear that if Dohna had been found on his way to see the cousin, he too would have been under suspicion. The Gestapo called on him to ask if he was hiding Heinrich von Lehndorff.
the bomb, he was at Rastenburg station, having an appointment with his cousin, who had been one of the conspirators. No one was there to meet him, so he went back. The purpose may have been, he thought, to offer him a role in the new post-Hitler East Prussia; after all, many of the conspirators had, like Dohna, once supported the regime. As news came of the arrests and the suicides – many of the victims were his friends or relations – it became clear that if Dohna had been found on his way to see the cousin, he too would have been under suspicion. The Gestapo called on him to ask if he was hiding Heinrich von Lehndorff.
Schlobitten was now clearly at risk. In the late autumn of 1944, Dohna included more of his workers in the plans for flight, even though Hitler had forbidden civilians to leave. He plotted the escape on old army maps – through Pomerania, by Stettin across the Oder, then a route north that avoided Berlin. He spoke to Marion Dönhoff, who was managing the nearby estate of Quittainen; neither of them bought fertilizer that year, saving the money for the forthcoming trek. Dohna had sent some furniture, silver, works of art and archives out to a cousin in Hesse, to his brother-in-law in Saxony and to the relations in Thuringia. But in the subsequent chaos only a small proportion survived of an inventory of the contents of Schlobitten that he had made after Stalingrad: almost none of the fifty-five thousand volumes from the library and a mere fraction of the family papers. By the end of 1944, Alexander Dohna was living in three rooms of the icy palace.
In the middle of October 1944 all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty were ordered to join the Volkssturm, the German equivalent of the British Home Guard. Martin Bergau, back in Palmnicken after his pilot training, and his father reported for duty – to the local commander: Hans Feyerabend, a former First World War officer who ran the estates owned by the amber mine.
The distribution of arms to the new conscripts showed the
extent of previous German conquests: French and Italian carbines, a Norwegian rifle. The terror came closer when Eydtkuhnen on the edge of East Prussia, earlier taken by the Russians, was recaptured and those who had been trapped there told horrific stories of the Red Army’s brutality. The proximity of danger, however, could be exciting for some; Martin Bergau felt a thrill when, while bicycling eastwards towards the enemy with a friend, they found a chicken and killed and cooked it. They saw loose horses and abandoned Russian weapons, then blood in the beds of a deserted house.
extent of previous German conquests: French and Italian carbines, a Norwegian rifle. The terror came closer when Eydtkuhnen on the edge of East Prussia, earlier taken by the Russians, was recaptured and those who had been trapped there told horrific stories of the Red Army’s brutality. The proximity of danger, however, could be exciting for some; Martin Bergau felt a thrill when, while bicycling eastwards towards the enemy with a friend, they found a chicken and killed and cooked it. They saw loose horses and abandoned Russian weapons, then blood in the beds of a deserted house.
The reality of invasion seemed to come in January 1945 when the boy was woken at three in the morning by shots from outside in the snow. Bergau’s first thought was of the Russians – so, disobeying his father’s call to stay inside, he ran out with a pistol and spotted some shadowy shapes. A woman seemed to be trying to come in through the garden gate; seeing the boy, she turned to go out again, there were more shots and she fell. Still sleepy, Bergau could make out a long column of raggedly dressed figures, stumbling forward to the sound of more gunfire, some breaking from the column before being shot like the first woman, others vanishing into the night.
The truth was more complex than the obvious enemy threat. What the boy saw was the last throes of the Holocaust. There were several concentration camps east of Danzig, a city that had been retaken by the Germans in 1939. At Soldau, ten thousand people were murdered, including the mentally ill or physically handicapped; at Stutthof several sub-camps started in the summer of 1944 to take Jews evacuated from Baltic cities like Riga and Kaunas; a camp was set up in Königsberg in August 1944, on the site of a rail-coach factory formerly run by a Jew. It was the fate of the prisoners evacuated earlier from Stutthof and from Königsberg that Martin Bergau witnessed in January 1945.
The Red Army offensive into eastern Germany began on 12 January 1945. The plight of the East Prussians has often been described: the slaughter, the mutilation and the rapes; the desperate
rush west across a frozen landscape; the evacuations from the coast – on a much greater scale than Dunkirk – and the tragedies like the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, with the loss of more than 9,400 lives, by a Soviet submarine off Gotenhafen (now Gdynia). Johannes Jänicke accompanied some of his parishioners from Palmnicken to the port of Pillau and felt bitter when saying farewell to them as they boarded the liner
Steuben
. His and his wife’s real home wasn’t in East Prussia: much more in Berlin or Halle. Why was he staying? Jänicke wondered, in a rare moment of consideration for himself. What lay ahead was either a Russian prison camp or death. In fact his decision saved his life, for the
Steuben
was torpedoed; all those whom Johannes Jänicke had seen off were drowned.
rush west across a frozen landscape; the evacuations from the coast – on a much greater scale than Dunkirk – and the tragedies like the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
, with the loss of more than 9,400 lives, by a Soviet submarine off Gotenhafen (now Gdynia). Johannes Jänicke accompanied some of his parishioners from Palmnicken to the port of Pillau and felt bitter when saying farewell to them as they boarded the liner
Steuben
. His and his wife’s real home wasn’t in East Prussia: much more in Berlin or Halle. Why was he staying? Jänicke wondered, in a rare moment of consideration for himself. What lay ahead was either a Russian prison camp or death. In fact his decision saved his life, for the
Steuben
was torpedoed; all those whom Johannes Jänicke had seen off were drowned.
The Germans began to evacuate the camps before the Red Army reached them. Many roads to the west were blocked, but it was still possible to go east to Königsberg, so the winter marches began. Weaker inmates were left dead by the roads, many of them shot. By the middle of January there were probably some seven thousand Jewish prisoners collected in Königsberg – some at the old carriage works, others in a twine factory and a military barracks. The authorities then decided on a final evacuation. On 26 January the Jews who had been brought to the city began the walk to the Samland and to Palmnicken, through the snow and ice, shod in makeshift clogs and wearing only thin blankets and rags. As on the earlier marches, anyone who weakened or fell out was shot or beaten to death with rifle butts.
The column left in the early morning. It moved slowly – and the sky was already darkening, on a bitter, grey afternoon, when a fourteen-year-old girl standing in the street saw SS guards forcing it forward, shooting those who fell out while other guards threw the corpses onto an accompanying lorry. Her description evokes a deadly mime show: an SS man raising his arm, pointing a pistol at the person, who then fell, the shots muffled by distance and the stifling fog. The guards were a mixture: three SS officers (of whom the commanders were Fritz Weber and Otto Knott),
twenty-two SS soldiers and between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty members of Organisation Todt, slave labourers from the conquered territories – Frenchmen, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belgians and Dutchmen in earth-brown uniforms. The army commander of Königsberg, General Lasch, wanted the prisoners out of the city – but the person who had ordered the march was probably the Gestapo district commander, a man named Gormig. The destination – the amber mine at Palmnicken – seems to have been suggested by Gerhard Paul Rasch, the head of the amber works, who was based in Königsberg, as an appropriate place for the final executions. It was assumed, rightly, that the Mayor of Palmnicken, Kurt Friedrichs, would cooperate. Later Gormig killed himself.
twenty-two SS soldiers and between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty members of Organisation Todt, slave labourers from the conquered territories – Frenchmen, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belgians and Dutchmen in earth-brown uniforms. The army commander of Königsberg, General Lasch, wanted the prisoners out of the city – but the person who had ordered the march was probably the Gestapo district commander, a man named Gormig. The destination – the amber mine at Palmnicken – seems to have been suggested by Gerhard Paul Rasch, the head of the amber works, who was based in Königsberg, as an appropriate place for the final executions. It was assumed, rightly, that the Mayor of Palmnicken, Kurt Friedrichs, would cooperate. Later Gormig killed himself.
The march lasted for about thirty miles, through the icy night, past villages with those distinctive East Prussian names: Metgethen, Drugehnen, Kumehnen, Polennen, Kirpehnen, then Palmnicken. About two thousand of the prisoners were killed or died en route, and many locals saw the column: among them, a boy solder at the anti-aircraft battery, several children and a subordinate of Hans Feyerabend, who was returning from Pillau by horse-drawn sledge after taking some children to the port for evacuation. Two German soldiers, separated from their unit at the front, were making their way west when they saw the first corpses – obviously Jewish, mostly women and children – then the column. The soldiers asked one of the SS men what was happening, only to find that he didn’t speak German; another said that his colleague was a Flemish volunteer and, when challenged about the killing and cruelty, simply said, ‘I wish I wasn’t here.’ At least one of the SS troops was so horrified by it all that he deserted. Two to three hundred corpses were found on the road between Palmnicken and Sorgenau, villages that were not much more than a mile apart.
A few of the prisoners escaped. One, Maria Blitz, watched her sister collapse, saying she wanted to be left by the road – so that she could go to her mother, who had been murdered in Auschwitz;
the SS shot her. Maria broke away, in the village of Kirpehnen, and by luck stumbled into the house of the Hoppe family, where, after a debate, the old grandmother said they must help the young woman. A doctor came and removed the Auschwitz number tattooed on her arm; she slept in clean sheets (‘I believed myself in heaven’), had a bath and was given good food. The neighbours joined in the lie that she was a Pole. Many wanted her to be with them when the Russians came so that they could be seen to have helped a Jew; there were also, she thought later, a few good people among them. German soldiers in retreat streamed through the village, one asking her to marry him, again for protection against the invader – but she was already married. Later, after the Russians came, Maria Blitz went to the new Soviet Königsberg, worked in a bakery and served Germans who pathetically asked for bread.
the SS shot her. Maria broke away, in the village of Kirpehnen, and by luck stumbled into the house of the Hoppe family, where, after a debate, the old grandmother said they must help the young woman. A doctor came and removed the Auschwitz number tattooed on her arm; she slept in clean sheets (‘I believed myself in heaven’), had a bath and was given good food. The neighbours joined in the lie that she was a Pole. Many wanted her to be with them when the Russians came so that they could be seen to have helped a Jew; there were also, she thought later, a few good people among them. German soldiers in retreat streamed through the village, one asking her to marry him, again for protection against the invader – but she was already married. Later, after the Russians came, Maria Blitz went to the new Soviet Königsberg, worked in a bakery and served Germans who pathetically asked for bread.
Johannes Jänicke was away on medical duty, so his wife, Eva, was alone at the Palmnicken rectory when, after opening the window, she saw footsteps in the snow. The woman who worked in the rectory garden told her that a Jew had knocked at their door but she hadn’t dared to help. Another Palmnicken resident, then a child, remembered fifty years later the terrified eyes of a snow-covered Jewish fugitive. Others recalled corpses that lay for days, partly covered by snow, sniffed at by foxes and dogs, encircled by crows.
The director of the amber mine refused to open the mine shaft designated by the authorities in Königsberg for the mass execution. Instead, he let the prisoners and their guards into the mine’s workshop, out of the intense cold. Hans Feyerabend, the local Volkssturm commander, came later that morning – and the SS commander, Weber, found himself eclipsed. A survivor from an older Germany, reminiscent – with his neat moustache, clipped hair and air of authority – of Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau’s pre-1914 world, Feyerabend is remembered among descendants of those who knew him as a fine officer and an estate director who was kind to all his workers – Germans and Poles. Surveying
the horrific scene, he declared that not a single Jew would be killed here; there was no question of another Katy
and the prisoners must be properly looked after. Straw was brought in for bedding, and bread and peas for food, cattle were killed to provide beef and the staff of the kitchen in the works canteen were ordered into action. In vain the mayor of the town, Kurt Friedrichs, protested to Feyerabend that there was no point in looking after these people because they were all to die.
the horrific scene, he declared that not a single Jew would be killed here; there was no question of another Katy
and the prisoners must be properly looked after. Straw was brought in for bedding, and bread and peas for food, cattle were killed to provide beef and the staff of the kitchen in the works canteen were ordered into action. In vain the mayor of the town, Kurt Friedrichs, protested to Feyerabend that there was no point in looking after these people because they were all to die.Other books
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