Auschwitz (45 page)

In February 1945, Himmler's more flexible attitude found expression in the transporting of 1,200 Jews from Theresienstadt to Switzerland. It was a release arranged with the American Union of Orthodox Rabbis via a series of intermediaries—and this time it was not Jews for trucks but Jews for hard currency. Rita Reh
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was one of the inmates of Theresienstadt who made the journey: “When we were on the train the SS [men] came and told us to put on some make-up, comb our hair and dress up so we'd look all right when we arrived. They wanted us to make a good impression on the Swiss.”

The first Adolf Hitler learned of the release of the Theresienstadt Jews was seeing it reported in a Swiss newspaper. He was beside himself with rage. It was true that, as far back as December 1942, Himmler had secured
Hitler's agreement in principle that selected Jews might be ransomed for hard currency—the use of prominent Jews as “hostages” was in line with established Nazi thinking—but the release of the Theresienstadt Jews had occurred without Hitler's knowledge or approval and, now that the war was clearly in its final stages, must have smacked to the Nazi leader of defeatism. Hitler expressly forbade any more such transfers.

Himmler was to go against Hitler's instructions once again, however, when he allowed Bergen-Belsen to be captured by the Allies in April. Hitler had ordered that all concentration camps be destroyed before the Allies arrived. Yet Himmler expressly disobeyed. It is likely that he permitted Bergen-Belsen to be taken intact as a “concession” to the Allies and that he was ignorant about the true nature of the conditions that existed in the camp. Himmler's actions backfired dramatically as pictures of the appalling conditions flashed around the world.

“The things in this camp are beyond describing,” said one British soldier interviewed for a newsreel. “When you actually see them for yourselves, you know what you're fighting for. Pictures in the paper can't describe it all. The things they have committed—well, nobody would think they were human at all.”

Despite this disastrous attempt to curry favor with the Allies, Himmler still continued to act against Hitler's wishes. On April 20, he had a meeting with Norbert Masur, an emissary of the World Jewish Congress, and agreed to release 1000 Jewish women from Ravensbrück concentration camp. Himmler's only stipulation was that they be categorized as “Poles,” not Jews—that way he hoped Hitler would never get to hear of his actions. Later that night, after Masur had gone, Himmler confided to Felix Kersten, his masseur: “If I could have a fresh start I would do many things differently now. But as a loyal soldier I had to obey, for no state can survive without obedience and discipline.”
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It was not just Himmler who was disobeying the German leader during the last moments of the war, but entire SS units. Deep in the Führer's bunker in Berlin, Hitler was woken on April 21 by the noise of artillery. It was the moment he must have believed was inconceivable—the Red Army had reached Berlin. Hitler ordered SS General Felix Steiner to make a counter-attack against the soldiers of Marshal Zhukov's 1st Belorussian
Front who were advancing through the capital's northern suburbs. Steiner refused. “When the order came in,” says Franz Riedweg,
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General Steiner's adjutant, “he said, ‘I will not launch another attack on this Russian avalanche. I'd be sending men to their death. I won't sacrifice my troops for a senseless command.'” When he heard of Steiner's refusal, Hitler shouted and screamed in the worst display of anger that anyone in the bunker had ever seen. The SS had deserted him. All that was left to do now, he said openly, was for him to take his own life.

On April 23, the news of Hitler's outburst was passed to Himmler, who that day was meeting Count Folke Bernadotte, a representative of the Red Cross. Himmler believed that, because Hitler had announced he was going to commit suicide (and might even be dead already), he was now empowered to act on behalf of the Reich. He told Bernadotte that he could take a proposal with him to the Western Allies—Germany would surrender unconditionally to Britain and the United States, but not to the Soviet Union.

Himmler's plan for partial surrender was rejected by the Allies, but news of his attempt to end the war in the West was broadcast on BBC Radio and Hitler learned of it. The German leader was not dead—far from it. When he heard the news Hitler was still able to feel one of the most powerful emotions of all—betrayal. “Of course Hitler was outraged in the extreme,” says Bernd Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven,
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who was a member of the General Staff of the German army and was in the bunker at the time.

Hitler killed himself just before 3.30 P.M. on April 30, 1945, as Red Army soldiers approached the German parliament building, the Reichstag. He died leaving a political testimony composed the previous night—one which blamed the Jews for causing the war. Hitler died as he had lived, consumed with hatred for all Jewish people, and without a hint of remorse. As we have seen, through the twists and turns of the development and implementation of the Nazis' “Final Solution,” Hitler could be closely involved in the detail
of the policy at one moment, more distant at another. But, as Hitler's last dealings with Himmler demonstrate, it was the Führer who was consistent to the end in his fanatical hatred of the Jews. He was the most ideologically driven of all the leading Nazis.

Himmler revealed himself to be more malleable to events than the man he served: not just negotiating to hand over Jews for cash, but even trying to arrange a secret peace settlement. For Himmler, unlike Hitler, appears to have believed in the last days of the war that there was a future beyond the conflict; and by acting as he did he caused consternation among members of his SS entourage. On May 5th, at Admiral Doenitz's headquarters at the Muerwick Navy School in Flensburg in northern Germany, Himmler held a last meeting with senior figures in the SS—among them Rudolf Höss. “Destiny has a great new task for me,” announced Himmler. “I will have to undertake this task alone. So now I give you my last order. Disappear into the Wehrmacht!”

Höss was astonished. He had clearly been expecting some symbolic last act—not this tawdry instruction to run off and hide. “This was the farewell message from the man to whom I had looked up so much,” wrote Höss, “in whom I had had such firm faith, and whose orders, whose every word had been gospel to me.” Nonetheless, Höss followed Himmler's instructions to “disappear” into the armed services. He picked up a naval uniform and tried to pass himself off as an ordinary member of the German Kriegsmarine.

Himmler's confidence that “destiny” had a great new task for him was, like so many of his beliefs, a fantasy. Just more than two weeks after his last meeting with Höss, on May 23, he committed suicide, having finally realized that there was no possibility that the Allies would do business with a man responsible for the murder of millions. That he ever did entertain such thoughts reveals much about the man: his capacity for delusion, his inflated sense of self-importance, his crazed optimism. Above all, however, it shows his opportunism—how, despite having been Hitler's loyal creature for so many years, when the situation changed he was prepared to be someone else's.

With Hitler and Himmler dead, and other, lesser perpetrators scurrying for cover, the days immediately after the end of the war ought to have been
a time of comfort and recuperation for all those who had suffered in the camps—but they were not.

Helena Citrónová and her sister wandered around newly liberated Germany in confusion during May and June 1945, mingling on the crowded roads with German refugees trying to escape to the West. They slept in barns or bombed out houses, and scavenged food wherever they could. It was not long before they encountered soldiers of the Red Army. As far as Helena and her sister were concerned, however, these men behaved not as liberators but as conquerors. There were occasions when the Soviet soldiers sought out the refugees wherever they were spending the night. “They were drunk—totally drunk,” says Helena. “They were wild animals.” The soldiers entered the places where they slept and “looked for cute girls and raped them.” Helena hid under her sister as this was happening, hoping that the sight of her sister, ten years older than she was and often mistaken for her mother, would cause the soldiers to look elsewhere. It was a ploy that worked, but she still heard everything that the Red Army soldiers did to the other women.

Helena herself had one especially narrow escape. One morning she went for a bike ride and “became ecstatic with riding. I loved to ride a bicycle as a child at home—the freedom and the quiet.” She rode off far into the bright spring countryside. Then, when she stopped for a rest by a deserted warehouse,

The exact number of sexual attacks perpetrated by Soviet soldiers as they advanced through Germany and then in the immediate aftermath of the war will never be known, but the figure is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. In recent years much publicity has been given to the suffering of German women in cities like Berlin. The revelation that women who had already endured so much mistreatment in camps like Auschwitz were then subsequently raped by their liberators, however, adds a level of nausea to the history that did not exist before.

Terrible as the raping of former camp inmates by soldiers of the Red Army undoubtedly was, there remains a special quality to the suffering they inflicted on their own compatriots as they “liberated” the camps. Stalin had said that there were no Soviet prisoners of war held by the Germans—only “betrayers of the motherland.” This attitude also could not have been expressed with more clarity than when units of the Red Army arrived at the concentration camp in southern Poland in which Tatiana Nanieva
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was held.

Captured by the Germans in 1942 when the hospital in which she worked as a nurse had been encircled, she had endured two and a half years of imprisonment and in the process had to witness fellow Soviet women prisoners being raped by the Germans. Then, in January 1945, she heard the soldiers of the Red Army arriving with great “pomp,” singing patriotic songs with their heads held high: “Our feelings were joyful, elated. We believed that victory was at hand and that a normal life would begin again. I was yearning for my motherland, for my family.” Then, as joy flooded through her at the moment of liberation, two Red Army officers approached her. One of them was drunk and he shouted, “So how did you live it up here? You whores!” Tatiana felt her world collapse as he stood swaying, reaching for his pistol. She ran and managed to hide until these
front-line troops who had liberated the camp had sobered up. Whether they were drunk or sober, however, the charge against her was still clear: “Betrayal of the motherland.” For the “crime” of allowing herself to be captured by the Germans she was sentenced to six years in a Gulag and lifetime exile in Siberia.

Pavel Stenkin,
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who had already beaten the odds and survived Auschwitz, had to endure similar treatment at the hands of his fellow countrymen. He had been one of the original 10,000 Soviet prisoners who had been sent in October 1941 to Auschwitz to construct the camp at Birkenau. By the following spring, with only a few hundred of them left alive, he had escaped into the forest and eventually managed to join the advancing Red Army. Instead of being welcomed back and allowed to fight the rest of the war against the Germans as he wished, however, he was interrogated for weeks. The standard question of the SMERSH investigators was “When did you join the German army?” He was sent into internal exile in the closed city of Perm in the Urals, where the questioning did not stop. “I was called up every second night: ‘Admit this, agree to that, we know everything—you are a spy.' They were tormenting and tormenting me.” After some months of working in the day and being interrogated at night, Stenkin was prosecuted on a trumped-up charge and sentenced to several years' imprisonment. Demonstrating the level of cynicism that operated in the Soviet legal system, the judges rushed through his case because they had tickets to the theatre that night. Only in 1953, with the death of Stalin, was Stenkin released. He was one of more than a million Soviet soldiers who were imprisoned twice—once by the Germans and once by their fellow countrymen.

Pavel Stenkin's and Tatiana Nanieva's experiences are particularly important because they so conspicuously lack the redemptive quality that many in the West have come to expect from the history of World War II. For generations of British and Americans, this war has attained the near mythic quality of a fight of “good” against “evil.” And, of course, it is true that Nazism was defeated, and there can be no argument that the world benefited immeasurably from the removal of that scourge. The history of the aftermath, however, is not as simplistic as the popular myth would have us believe. There were certainly few “happy endings” for the Soviet prisoners liberated by the Red Army—or indeed for many others in the East.