Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (15 page)

The Germans had done their best to evacuate Majdanek before the Red Army arrived, but in their hurry to leave they had failed to conceal the evidence of what had taken place here. When Soviet troops drove into the compound they discovered a set of gas chambers, six large furnaces with the charred remains of human skeletons scattered around them and, nearby, several enormous mounds of white ash filled with pieces of human bones. The ash mounds overlooked a huge field of vegetables, and the Soviets came to the obvious conclusion: the organizers of Majdanek had been using human remains as fertilizer. ‘This is German food production,’ wrote one Soviet journalist at the time. ‘Kill people; fertilize cabbages.’
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The scale of the killing that had taken place here and in other nearby camps only became apparent when the Soviets opened up some of the buildings that lay between the gas chambers and the crematorium. In one enormous barn-like structure they found hundreds of thousands of pairs of boots and shoes. Another large building was ‘like a vast, five-storey department store’: here they found shelves and shelves of shaving brushes, pen-knives, teddy bears, children’s jigsaw puzzles, and long corridors lined with thousands of overcoats and women’s dresses.
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On the ground floor of this building was the accounts department, which the departing Nazis had not had time to destroy. Here Soviet officials discovered some of the most damning documents of what would later become known as the Holocaust. Majdanek had acted as a central storage depot for a whole network of extermination camps: the belongings of Jews murdered in Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec were brought here to be sorted and then shipped back to the Reich, where they would be given to German families who had been evacuated or bombed out of their houses. In the first few months of 1944 alone, eighteen railway wagons of goods from this warehouse had been sent to Germany.
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Later, after speaking to liberated Soviet prisoners of war who had survived the camp, investigators learned of the gruesomely named‘Harvest Festival’ killings of November 1943. Survivors led them to a series of mass graves where 18,000 Jews were buried.
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The effect of these discoveries was immediate. The Soviet propagandist Konstantin Simonov was sent to Majdanek to write a story on the camp, which appeared in
Pravda
and
Krasnaya Zvezda
at the beginning of August.
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Foreign journalists were also invited to the camp, and large parties of Russian and Polish soldiers were taken there on guided tours so that they could spread the word of what they had seen throughout the Red Army.
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On hearing that Majdanek had been captured virtually intact, Hitler was reportedly incensed. Himmler had gone to great lengths to conceal the Holocaust by dismantling and then levelling the main killing centres – but the discovery of Majdanek provided the first concrete proof that the terrifying reports coming out of Poland were all true.
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Over the coming months a whole network of slave-labour camps, prisoner-of-war camps and extermination camps were found throughout the territories formerly held by the Nazis. Treblinka was discovered shortly after Majdanek, and escapees and captured guards alike described a ‘hell’ where 900,000 Jews were murdered and roasted in furnaces ‘reminiscent of gigantic volcanoes’.
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Six months later the Red Army overran Auschwitz, where almost a million Jews, and over 100,000 Poles, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war were gassed, shot and worked to death.
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Even the Soviets, who had long had their own network of slave-labour camps, or gulags, were shocked at the speed, efficiency and comprehensive nature of the murder.
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As a side note, it has often been claimed that the Soviets made no mention of the fact that most of the victims of these death camps were Jews.
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This is not quite true. In December 1944 Ilya Ehrenburg published an article in
Pravda
in which he claimed:

Ask a captured German why his countrymen destroyed six million innocent people and he will answer: ‘They are Jews. They are black or red-haired. They have different blood’ … All this began with stupid jokes, with the shouts of street kids, with signposts, and it led to Majdanek, Babi Yar, Treblinka, to ditches filled with children’s corpses.
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Another article in
Pravda
about Auschwitz also specifically mentions its Jewish victims.
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Nevertheless, the vast majority of Russian newspaper articles, speeches and later the memorials to the dead, referred to Hitler’s victims merely as ‘Soviet citizens’. Even while the death camps were being discovered the Kremlin was determined to portray the Nazi genocide not as a crime against the Jewish race, but as a crime against the Soviet state.

While these events immediately filled the Soviet press, the reaction in Britain and America was much more muted. The British knew as early as December 1942 that hundreds of thousands of Jews were being ‘slowly worked to death in labour camps’ and even ‘deliberately massacred in mass executions’. But the government was reluctant to publicize the fact too widely in case they might then be expected to do something about it.
¹⁵
The British Ministry of Information were still working to instructions issued earlier on in the war that ‘horror stuff … must be used very sparingly and must deal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent opponents. And not with Jews.’
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The British public were therefore not nearly as well versed in German atrocities as the Soviet people were.

The American government also seemed unwilling to admit that Jews were worse off than any other persecuted group. Despite regular reports of the threat to European Jewry from as early as 1940, and despite Roosevelt’s unequivocal announcement in March 1944 of ‘one of the blackest crimes of all history … the wholesale, systematic murder of the Jews of Europe’, Americans seemed reluctant to believe that the Holocaust was really taking place.
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Even within Roosevelt’s administration there was scepticism, and senior figures like Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his assistant John McCloy regarded ‘special pleading’ by Jews with suspicion. Such attitudes were not born solely from anti-Semitism. Remembering that many of the atrocity stories of the First World War had turned out to be untrue – such as the ‘discovery’ of a factory to manufacture soap out of human fat – they were unsure how much of the information about the death camps they should believe.
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There was a similar scepticism about the death camps in some of the press. The
Sunday Times
correspondent Alexander Werth visited Majdanek shortly after it was liberated, and saw the gas chambers, mass graves and mounds of human remains for himself. And yet when he submitted the story to the BBC they refused to broadcast it because ‘they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt’.
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The
New York Herald Tribune
was equally reticent about the story, claiming that ‘Even on top of all we have been taught of the maniacal Nazi ruthlessness, this example sounds inconceivable.’
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Attitudes changed only when the Western Allies began to discover similar concentration camps for themselves. The first camp to be discovered in the west was the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, which the French army entered on 23 November 1944. Natzweiler-Struthof was one of the principal
Nacht und Nebel
camps – those institutions that were designed to make suspected Resistance fighters disappear into the ‘night and fog’. Here the French discovered a small gas chamber, where prisoners were hung by their wrists from hooks while Zyklon-B gas was pumped into the room. Many of the victims were destined for the autopsy tables of Strasbourg University, where Dr August Hirt had amassed a collection of Jewish skeletons in order to prove the inferiority of the Jewish race through anatomical study. Others, mostly Gypsies brought here from Auschwitz, were subjected to medical experiments within the camp.
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At the beginning of December 1944 the
New York Times
correspondent Milton Bracker visited the camp. Bracker noticed that although many American officers had toured the camp, they still could not bring themselves to accept the full magnitude and detail of the horror. Many seemed to doubt the evidence before their own eyes, and exhibited what Bracker termed ‘double vision’ – a condition where they simultaneously saw and did not see the results of German atrocities. According to other contemporary reports the disbelief of American soldiers infuriated the local population when their stories of German crimes were doubted, or even scoffed at.
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Such ‘double vision’ came to an end the following April, when the Americans liberated Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald’s sub-camps. Ohrdruf is particularly important because General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, visited it on 12 April, just a week after it had been discovered. He brought with him Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton, and insisted on seeing ‘every nook and cranny’ of the camp, ‘because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda’.
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Here they observed torture devices, a butcher’s block used to smash the gold fillings from the mouths of the dead, a room piled to the ceiling with corpses, and the remains of hundreds of bodies that had been burned in a huge pit, as if on ‘some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue’.
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Patton, a man well used to the horrors of the battlefield, took one look at the ‘arms and legs and portions of bodies sticking out of the green water’ in the pit, and was obliged to retire behind a shed to throw up.
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Shortly after the discovery of Ohrdruf came the discovery of Nordhausen, where the bodies of 3,000 slave labourers who had worked in the subterranean V and V-2 flying-bomb factories were found lying in disordered piles. On the same day 21,000 prisoners were discovered barely alive in Buchenwald, just a few miles north of Weimar. Many of these men, women and children had been force-marched here on what would become known as the ‘death marches’ from camps in the east, and were now exhausted, emaciated and riddled with disease. The US Psychological Warfare Division estimated that about 55,000 men, women and children had died in this slave-labour camp during the war.
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As the news of such discoveries became better known, American troops became increasingly disgusted with the Germans. According to Fred Bohm, an Austrian-born American soldier who helped liberate Nordhausen, most of his fellow GIs ‘had no particular feeling for fighting the Germans’ and believed that many of the stories they had heard ‘were either not true or at least exaggerated’. It was only when they arrived at Nordhausen that the truth about Nazi atrocities properly began to ‘sink in’.
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It was precisely to drum this home that Eisenhower ordered all nearby units who were not on front-line duty to visit the camps at Ohrdruf and Nordhausen. Even if the average GI did not quite know ‘what he is fighting for’, said the general, he would now, at least, ‘know what he was fighting against’.
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He also invited British and American government officials to come and tour the newly liberated concentration camps, as well as the world’s press. The newsreel footage from these visits, which finally reached American cinema screens on 1 May, shocked the nation to its core.
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Anger at what the US Army was discovering reached a peak on 29 April, just nine days before the end of the war in Europe, when the 45
^th
Division fought its way through to Dachau. Here they found scenes of utter horror, including piles of naked bodies stacked up in storerooms ‘like cordwood’.
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On the railway sidings they found a train carrying prisoners evacuated from the east. When they opened up its thirty-nine boxcars they found all 2,000 prisoners were dead.
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Unlike other camps, Dachau was liberated by troops on the fringes of a major battle. Some of the American soldiers, who were psychologically prepared for fighting, were not willing to accept the atrocities they witnessed here calmly and decided to take the law into their own hands. One of the company commanders in the 157
^th
Regiment, Lieutenant William P. Walsh, took a group of four SS men who had surrendered to him into one of the railway boxcars and personally shot them. One of his men, Private Albert C. Pruitt, then climbed into the boxcar and finished them off with his rifle. Along with another officer, Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead, Walsh then supervised the separation of the German prisoners into those belonging to the Wehrmacht and those belonging to the SS. The SS soldiers were lined up in a nearby coal yard, where a machine-gun team opened fire on them, killing at least twelve. In the official report that was prepared following an inquiry into this incident, Walsh, Bushyhead and Pruitt were specifically named, as was their battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks. The medical officer who appeared on the scene shortly afterwards, Lieutenant Howard E. Buechner, was also criticized for failing to administer any aid to the German soldiers, some of whom were still alive.
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