Each of us worked on with bitter determination, as though victory depended on our labors. And when, in April, the Oder front collapsed, we devoted the greatest effort to keeping the prisoners at full pitch in the war factories that still remained to us. We used every means in our power. We even considered turning out emergency war materials in our extremely primitive substitute camps. Any man in our sphere who neglected his work on the grounds that it did not matter any more was roughly dealt with. Maurer wished a member of his staff brought before an SS court-martial on this account, even though Berlin was already encircled and we were preparing to pull out.
I have referred on many occasions to the mad evacuation of the concentration camps.
The scenes I saw, and which resulted from the evacuation order, made such an impression on me that I shall never forget them.
When Pohl received no further reports from Baer during the evacuation of Auschwitz, he sent me posthaste to Silesia to put matters in order. I first found Baer at Gross-Rosen, where he was making preparations for the reception of the prisoners.[95]
He had no idea where his camp might be wandering. The original plan had had to be scrapped because of the Russian push to the south. I immediately drove on, in the hope of reaching Auschwitz in time to make sure that the order for the destruction of everything important had been properly carried out. But I was only able to get as far as the Oder, near Ratïbor, for the Russian armored spearheads were already fanning out on the far side of that river.
On all the roads and tracks in Upper Silesia west of the Oder I now met columns of prisoners, struggling through the deep snow. They had no food. Most of the noncommissioned officers in charge of these stumbling columns of corpses had no idea where they were supposed to be going. They only knew that their final destination was Gross-Rosen. But how to get there was a mystery. On their own authority they requisitioned food from the villages through which they passed, rested for a few hours, then trudged on again. There was no question of spending the night in barns or schools, since these were all crammed with refugees. The route taken by these miserable columns was easy to follow, since every few hundred yards lay the bodies of prisoners who had collapsed or been shot. I directed all the columns I could reach to go westward, into the Sudetenland, so as to avoid the, incredibly chaotic bottleneck near Neisse. I gave strict orders to the men in charge of all these columns that they were not to shoot prisoners incapable of further marching. They were to hand them over in the villages to the Volkssturm.[96]
During the first night, on the road near Leobschütz, I constantly came upon the bodies of prisoners who had just been shot, and which were therefore still bleeding. On one occasion, as I stopped my car by a dead body, I heard revolver shots quite near. I ran toward the sound, and saw a soldier in the act of stopping his motorcycle and shooting a prisoner leaning against a tree. I shouted at him, asking him what he thought he was doing, and what harm the prisoner had done him. He laughed impertinently in my face, and asked me what I proposed to do about it. I drew my pistol and shot him forthwith. He was a sergeant major in the air force.
Every now and then I also met officers from Auschwitz, who had managed somehow or other to get hold of a vehicle, I posted them at crossroads to collect these wandering columns of prisoners, and move them westward, eventually perhaps by train. I saw open coal trucks, loaded with frozen corpses, whole trainloads of prisoners who had been shunted onto open sidings and left there without food or shelter. Then again there were groups of prisoners, often without guards, who had escaped or whose guards had simply vanished. They too were making their way peacefully westward. I also met unaccompanied British prisoners of war doing the same: they were determined on no account to fall into the hands of the Russians. I saw SS men and prisoners huddled together on the refugees’ vehicles. I came upon columns of construction workers and agricultural laborers. No one knew where he was trying to go. Gross-Rosen was the final destination of them all. There was deep snow at the time and it was very cold. The roads were blocked by army and air force columns, and by the crowds of refugees. The slippery surface caused innumerable car accidents.
Beside the roads were not only dead prisoners, but also refugees, women and children. Outside one village I saw a woman sitting on a tree stump and singing to her child as she rocked it in her arms. The child had been dead for a long time and the. woman was mad. Many women struggled through the snow pushing baby carriages stacked high with their belongings. They had only one aim, to get away and not fall into the hands of the Russians.
Gross-Rosen was crammed to overflowing. Schmauser had already arranged for it to be evacuated.[97]
I traveled to Breslau to tell him what was happening and to urge him to stop the evacuation. He showed me the radio message from the Reichsführer SS which made him responsible for seeing that not a single healthy prisoner remained in any camp under his authority.
At the railroad station in Gross-Rosen the transports coming in were immediately sent on. Only the smallest ones could be fed. Gross-Rosen itself had no more food.
Dead SS men lay peacefully in the open cars between dead prisoners. Those still alive sat on top of them, chewing their piece of bread. Terrible scenes, best not described.
I lived through the evacuation of Sachsenhausen and of Ravensbrück. The scenes were the same here. By good fortune it was warmer and dry, so the columns could sleep in the open. But after two or three days there was no food left. The Red Cross helped by distributing food parcels. There was no more food to be found in the villages, through which columns of refugees had been passing for weeks on end. In addition there was the constant menace of low-flying planes, which systematically shot up every road.
Until the very end I tried my utmost to bring some order into this chaos. But it was all in vain. We ourselves had to flee. Since the end of 1944 my family had been living in the immediate neighborhood of Ravensbrück. I was therefore able to take them with me when the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps moved himself. We went first of all toward the Darss,[98] then after two days we headed for Schleswig-Holstein. All this was in accordance with the orders of the Reichführer SS. What we were supposed to do for him, or what duties we were still intended to perform, we could not imagine. I had to look after Frau Eicke and her daughter and children, and several other families too, and see that they did not fall into the hands of the enemy. Our flight was a gruesome journey. We traveled by night, without lights, along roads crowded with vehicles moving bumper to bumper. I had to be constantly on the lookout to see that all our trucks remained together, for I was responsible for the whole column. Glücks and Maurer took another route, via Warnemunde. In Rostock two of my large trucks containing all the radio equipment broke down, and by the time they were repaired the enemy tanks had nabbed them. For days on end we scurried from one clump of trees to the next, for the enemy’s low-flying planes were continually machine-gunning this principal escape route.
In Wismar Keitel himself stood in the street, arresting deserters from the front. On the way we heard in a farmhouse that the Führer was dead.
When we heard this, my wife and I were simultaneously struck by the same thought: now we, too, must go! With the Führer gone, our world had gone. Was there any point in going on living? We would be pursued and persecuted wherever we went. We wanted to take poison. I had obtained some for my wife, lest she and the children fall alive into the hands of the Russians in the event of their making an unexpected advance.
95
Gross-Rosen, near Schweidnitz in Lower Silesia, had been a concentration camp since May 1941. In 1944 it contained some 12,000 inmates. Gross-Rosen with its numerous subsidiary camps scattered throughout Lower Silesia, East Saxony, and the Sudetenland was to receive the inmates from Auschwitz according to the evacuation plan. However, as early as March 21, 1945, Gross-Rosen had itself to be evacuated, and was moved to Reichenau in Bohemia, where the camp was finally liberated on April 5, 1945.
96
The “People’s Levy” called out at the very end of the war, roughly equivalent to the British Home Guard of 1940.
97
Heinrich Schmauser, an SS general, was Leader of the Southeast District (Silesia) and simultaneously senior SS and Police Leader in this province. As such he was responsible for the carrying out of Himmler’s orders for the evacuation of Auschwitz and of the Silesian Camps.