Piles of exhumed bodies, again announced with placards, sat around the site.
Ashes, unmistakably awful in origin, were piled high next to the destroyed gas chambers or lined the entranceways into the huge camp.
Medical specimens, clearly human, were laid out along the sleepers of the rail line, containing anything from dissected livers to whole foetuses.
Everywhere there were pictures… ones that had been taken by correspondents attached to the 322nd Rifle Division when it stumbled across the awfulness that was Auschwitz on 27th January 1945.
Wherever the eye looked, the awfulness and sheer barbarity of purpose was evident.
It shook hardened men to the very core.
The messages intended to divide the Camerone Division were everywhere, both written and visual.
And divide they did.
A veritable chasm opened up between the German and other legionnaires present, one that was punctuated by oaths and disbelief, by suspicion and hate.
Haefali, the senior officer present, did the only thing he could do, and dispatched a message to his commander.
Knocke stepped out of the Kfz 71, already sensing the pain in the men around him.
He saluted the large group of officers that had gathered around the gates of what had once been known as Auschwitz II.
Birkenau.
A place that had clearly once been the closest thing to hell on earth.
Intelligence reports had stated that during the Soviet occupation Auschwitz I had been used as a hospital, whereas Birkenau had been an NKVD prison camp, whose conditions were as bad as could be, probably no different to what it had been under Nazi rule but without the death chambers operating day and night.
Intelligence also stated, and the evidence before their own eyes would confirm, that the local population had ravaged the area, seeking firewood from the huts and disturbing the mass graves in the search for artefacts and gold teeth amongst the human wreckage.
The Soviets themselves had looted much of the I.G Farben machinery from the Buna Werke at Monowitz, known as Auschwitz-III.
Knocke had read the report before, and refreshed himself on its contents as he drove to the camp, but was still unprepared for the desolation that awaited him.
The Soviet ‘dressing’ was very apparent, and he took in the signs, immediately understanding their purpose and the challenge that now faced him.
He noticed that the group had split into two defined sections; German and French legion officers separated as never before, separated by the place… the sights… the stories… association… the allocation of blame… anger…
He understood why the message from Haefali had urgently requested him to come to this place on Christmas Day.
His very division, perhaps the Corps D’Assaut itself, was at stake, as clearly these men, probably over eighty of his leaders, were visibly distraught and angered by the vision that had greeted them.
“Gentlemen, Merry Christmas to you all… although such a greeting seems so very out of place in a place such as this. Come.”
He boldly strode forward and swept through the divide between the two groups, deliberately leading them through the central arch under which the railway had carried its hundreds of thousands of victims during the Nazi Holocaust.
The narrow way through the piled ashes brought them back in close proximity, but the absence of comradeship between the two groups was extremely noticeable.
Tensions rose.
The party walked on, past the medical specimens, each lighting gantry with its own special sort of horror dangling by a neck, the walk swiftly allowing the men to move apart into two distinct groups, until finally Knocke came to a halt at the central point between the infamous entrance and the distant ruins of what had once been the chambers where men, women, and children were destroyed by the regime for which many of those present had fought.
Knocke had walked the extra distance so that he could compose himself, and prepare for one of the most important messages he had ever delivered.
He stopped, turned, performed the trademark pulling down of his jacket, and gathered his men around him in a semi-circle.
Albrecht Haefali had gravitated to his right side but Knocke felt a coldness between them like never before.
“So, here we are… in this place… this… this abomination.”
All around them were huts, some complete, others no more than a brick chimney rising from a bed of blackened timbers.
To their right, the railway lines, side by side.
As far as the eye could see there were bodies, placards, and the detritus of man’s unspeakable inhumanity, as prepared on the orders of Beria.
Unwittingly, Knocke had gathered his men in the area where much of the selection process had taken place; where a simple push in one direction or the other spelt either a life of servitude and miserable living conditions or immediate death in the chambers.
“Perhaps it is fate that brings us here… perhaps it’s something else entirely. I wish we were somewhere else because for me, as a German, this place will forever tarnish my country, long after the last holders of its experiences and memories are gone from this earth.”
He looked around, seeing pain and contempt, depending on which group he looked at.
“Our unit has been based on comradeship forged in the most desperate of circumstances… that of combat. Now, in front of my eyes, I see men… comrades all… who have trusted each other with their lives broken apart by the sights of this place… the understanding of what happened here… and our association wit…”
There was a rumble from the German officers.
“Yes… our association with this place and others like it.”
He addressed the Germans directly.
“We are associated with it, Kameraden, in the first place for no other reason than we wore the same insignia as those who oversaw this place. We cannot hide from that!”
Knocke dropped his voice down to a normal one and continued.
“I’ll not speak for you… none of you. I’ll just speak for me.”
He turned his back on the group and swept his hands across the from left to right, from kitchen block, past dormitories, gas chambers, more dormitories until he dropped his hand back to his side.
‘Oh my god… I never imagined this to be… never thought… it could never be possible…’
Knocke had prepared himself to heal the wounds caused by the awfulness of their surroundings and the uniforms he and his men once wore. He had simply not expected to find that he had wounds of his own that would need attention before he could address those of his men.
“I knew of this.”
He turned back and saw genuine horror and disappointment on the faces of all of his men; French and German alike.
“No… not what it was… not what it did… but I was aware of its existence. I admit, I heard some rumours of its purpose, rumours I dismissed as propaganda by our enemies… set to cause discord… set to fire their armies and civilians to greater efforts against us.”
He grabbed his jaw and wiped his hand slowly across his face.
“Rumours… Mein Gott!”
He closed his eyes and held back tears.
Tears for those comrades who had died in defence of the cause that was capable of visiting such horrors upon fellow human beings.
Tears for those who had perished in the frenzy of Nazi idealism.
“How could I even have begun to believe them… at that time… eh? How could I ever have conceived that such monstrousness was actually being perpetrated?”
He picked at the corner of his eyes where moisture had started to form.
“What do you feel here?”
No one answered and he hadn’t expected them to.