After the Reich (77 page)

The American Camps

The Americans honoured their promise to release prisoners early. The idea of slave labour was not popular with their trade unions. Men and women over fifty were let go in June and they made a great flourish by releasing two million prisoners at the end of July 1945. Some came home in triumph like the 12,000 prisoners returned to Austria.
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The reality for a further 1.5 million men was anything but liberty, however: they were promptly ‘loaned’ to other powers - France and the United Kingdom.
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The Americans even offered some men to the Russians. They refused, as they had enough already.
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Also many SS men were retained to help with further inquiries. Later the ‘grey’ or Waffen-SS were allowed to go home, while the ‘black’ or Totenkopf units were put on trial. Deaths on the American continent were low: 491, with seventy-two suicides, seven murders, fourteen men executed and seventy fatal accidents.
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The first
Kriegsgefangener
had been shipped back to America during the war. One of these was Kurt Glaser, who was in a large camp in Texas. The inmates worked in nearby factories, where their status was similar to that of the local blacks. The food was decent, and, it being America, there were frequent film shows. Not long after the end of the war a man speaking German with a Frankfurt accent came to interrogate Glaser. He asked him how it had been for him under National Socialism. Glaser replied, ‘Nicht schlecht’ (Not bad). He then saw his interrogator circle the word ‘Nazi’ on his questionnaire. For inveterate Nazis like Glaser there was a new diet of propaganda. He had to watch a film entitled
Deutschland erwache!
(Germany awake! - the title of an early Nazi song). It was about Belsen and Buchenwald. In July 1946 he was shipped to Britain.
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Another account tells a similar tale of a more literary prisoner in an American camp. The news that reached him on 6 May 1945 led him to quote some lines from Thomas Mann: ‘The fate of the most repulsive monster of our time, National Socialism, has been fulfilled. Had its death struggle been confined to its person, and not at the same time to a great and unfortunate nation, which now does penance for its bewitchment, we might be able to observe the catastrophe with cold satisfaction, for the sake of law and necessity.’
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When he was not working alongside southern blacks, the prisoner lived on a diet of films. On 9 May he could watch the celebrations marking the end of the war while his stomach rumbled. The inmates had just 2,000 calories a day, although the work details had 3,500 to 4,000. In a few months he would have learned to appreciate what he had. Instead of the usual cinematographic diet of Hollywood oaters, the prisoner now had to watch more and more propaganda. He learned new names besides Dachau - Buchenwald was unknown to him. He concluded that it was ‘a
Kulturschande
of the first water, but what can I do about it? I am a German and I share in the guilt.’ He was obliged to go and look at the pictures of ‘his’ victims. A guard with a truncheon stood over him. He felt he needed to wear a ‘consciousness of guilt’ expression as he leafed through the evidence of German crime. Then he signed a list stating that he had been aware of Buchenwald after all
^25
dl
- anything to get them off his back.

The most notorious American POW camps were the so-called Rheinwiesenlager. When these were closed some of the prisoners were transferred to the camp at Mons in Belgium and were able to tell their fellow countrymen about the conditions they had experienced. They had been pushed into large, open areas by the banks of the Rhine, described as ‘concentration areas’ or PWTE - ‘Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures’.
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The Americans had burned their kit, so they had nothing to protect them from the elements. April and May 1945 were particularly cold and wet, and there was plenty of snow. The soldiers were forced to endure this in open fields without tents; ‘many dug holes in the earth with a spoon or a tin can or whatever was to hand, but with the constant rain the ground was soft and every night the holes collapsed and the people who had sought protection from them were buried. There was no night that passed that did not see the deaths of several men on the meadows.’
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The prisoners in Mons learned of the two most infamous camps, Rheinberg and Büderich. At its height the first contained 90,000 men. Büderich was slightly smaller with 77,000. If all twelve camps established by the Rhine and Nahe between May and July 1945 are taken together, the number of inmates was around a million men. They stretched from Düsseldorf in the north to Mannheim in the south, with the main concentration between Koblenz and Mainz. At Bad Kreuznach on the Nahe, the site of the camp was occasionally given as the ‘Galgenberg’ or ‘Gallows Hill’, although it is more likely that it was laid out between the railway line and the river. The camp at Remagen was arranged along a five-by-two-kilometre stretch of the river. Between the two camps at Remagen and Sinzig there were 400,000 prisoners. The Americans abandoned the camps in July. Britain was given Rheinberg, Büderich and Wickramberg, and the French Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, Sinzig, Andernach and Koblenz. The others were in the American Zone anyhow.
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In order to receive their rations the men had to walk along a slippery, muddy passage. Two tins were then tossed to them. Those who fell while trying to catch them were beaten with truncheons. Anyone caught stealing food had to eat himself sick. In another instance the thief was forced to eat all he had stolen covered with sugar. The prisoners discussed the merits of the different Allies: ‘In general it was best to be with the English.’ That guaranteed ‘decent treatment’.
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The Rhine Meadow camps operated from February to July, with the worst outrages ending with the war, in May. Those hard-won tins were not enough - for the prisoners they were ‘hunger camps’. The writer John Dos Passos, who was shown round the camps, came to the conclusion that the Germans were being deliberately starved. They were also systematically robbed of their wristwatches, cameras and any Nazi souvenirs the guards fancied. The men were deprived of anything they had on them when they arrived. In the circumstances prisoners showed they could be resourceful. Writing letters was prohibited to DEPs - as they were called here - but a postal service grew up for all that. A prisoner cut through the wire and escaped with the post. He would pick up supplies and slip back through the wires.
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It has been difficult to come to a reliable estimate of the number of Germans who died in the Rhine mud. The American figures do not even tally with the graves in the local cemeteries. The Americans admit to 2,310 by the end of May and 5,912 to July. The German tally is 32,000. Graves indicate nearly 2,000 prisoners died in the shadow of the vineyards in Bad Kreuznach; the Americans admit to just over half that number. In Rheinberg, where 140,000 Germans were crammed into 1,000 hectares of mud during the months it was open, the official figures account for 438 deaths. The real number might be between two and three thousand now that mass graves have been found within the camp. The total number of deaths in the Rhine Meadows is now thought to be as high as 40,000.
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The picture is complicated by the fact that the Americans may well have released all their Wehrmacht prisoners early - or lent them to others - but that rule did not apply to SS men and political prisoners. They came under the category of ‘Automatic Arrests’ or AAs. A POW or DEP could be released from custody and automatically rearrested on suspicion of being a Nazi or a member of the SS. The Americans maintained camps for up to 1.5 million of these.
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As well as the AAs there were STs (Security Threats) from the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst, BLs (Black-Listed men) and WCs (war criminals).
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At Ebensee in Austria there were 44,000 SS men behind barbed wire, watched over by Polish KZler in one of Mauthausen’s most gruesome former dependencies.
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The Americans believed they had a case against the writer Ernst von Salomon, and he tells us what it was like to be at the receiving end. They came for him at 6.00 a.m. at his home in Siegsdorf near Salzburg where he lived with his mistress, Ille Gotthelft. Two men called Murphy and Sullivan told him that he was to be interrogated across the border in Kitzbühel. They told Salomon it was because he was ‘a big Nazi’. When Ille protested that she was Jewish, they took her as well. Even if the two men had no knowledge of who Salomon was on their arrival, they could have gleaned it as they went through the books in his workroom. It was clear that they assumed that only a Nazi would have been involved in the killing of the Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922. His mistress’s protests must have been seen as at best irrelevant, at worst a lie. She suffered for her temerity, and was only released when she came close to death though sickness.

When they arrived in Kitzbühel they were put in the town lock-up. Salomon was philosophical. In his salad days he had seen the inside of several prisons, but he worried about his mistress, who had managed to live through the Third Reich without incarceration, and was now being subjected to that indignity by the Americans. Kitzbühel prison was filled with Party officials who were routinely beaten black and blue during interrogation. If Salomon was right it was policy to give them all a ‘work-over’ before returning them to their cells. Salomon was not interrogated in the prison, but taken to the US army HQ in the town, ‘which I now discovered to be an American Gestapo-type operation’.
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He was questioned by a German-speaker who revealed that his parents were artists in Dresden, and Party members. He did not want to believe that Salomon had not been a member. He knew all about the Rathenau murder: ‘lucky for you you did not try to conceal it!’ ‘My dear sir, I’ve written books about it
this
thick.’
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Salomon’s answers were not good enough. He and Ille were put in a lorry and driven to an internment camp he calls ‘Natternberg’ in Lower Bavaria. On the way they picked up other ‘big Nazis’ like a Herr Allin who had been arrested because he had averred in a private conversation with a friend in a café in Kufstein that Poland had started the war.
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When they reached the camp they were driven through the gates with cries of ‘Mak snell!’ (
sic
) and made to line up. When their names were called out they were chased one by one into a hut, beaten with rifle butts, stripped, kicked and punched in the groin while American soldiers fought for space at the windows outside. The internationally acclaimed author was treated no better. Lieutenant ‘Baybee’, the officer sitting at the desk, shouted at him: ‘You are a Nazi!’ Once again Salomon denied it. He was beaten up, losing several teeth.
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His mistress was called to the hut. From where he stood he could see soldiers jostling for places at the window. She had been forced to strip and subjected to an intimate examination to make sure she was concealing nothing about her person. The ‘work-over’ was the prelude to an ordeal that lasted for months, and in some cases years. There were no exceptions - not even generals were immune, although one SS-Standartenführer who had ‘solved the Jewish question’ in Hungary with singular efficiency was treated with awe and absolved from the usual beating. As it transpired, once a prisoner was officially marked down as a ‘war criminal’, the physical abuse ceased. The higher judicial authority would certainly have learned of any beatings. This sort of rough handling was reserved for those the Americans deemed obscure or defenceless, not for Göring or Ribbentrop. There were too many journalists buzzing around the courthouse in Nuremberg.

For the mere soldiers the treatment was less brutal, but could be just as deadly. Hans Johnert was taken prisoner by a GI on 9 April 1945. The soldier snatched his watch and threw away his mess tin: ‘Kriegst du alles neu!’ (You’ll get new ones!). He was taken to the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen and given a tin of beans with bits of meat in it. Then he was transferred to the Pioneers’ Barracks in Worms, where the gloves came off. There were 30,000-40,000 prisoners sitting in the courtyard, jostling for space. With no protection against the rain they froze. They went from Worms to France. As their convoy arrived on French soil, French civilians threw stones and lumps of coal at them. A black guard had to fire his weapon to keep them at bay.
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Behind bars back at Natternberg the violence slackened off, but did not die out. One memorable day the prisoners had to run the gauntlet - a punishment that had made the Prussians infamous in their time. The prisoners were called out in alphabetical order. The Americans formed two lines and the men ran between them while they rained down blows with rubber truncheons. Salomon noted that the elderly were the hardest hit, because they moved most slowly. Once again it was a Polish sergeant who was most feared for his brutality. He was in the middle of one of the rows. When L was called out it was the turn of Hanns Ludin, Hitler’s ambassador to Slovakia. Ludin was determined to drink his cup down to the dregs. He walked slowly through the ranks. ‘When he reached the Polish sergeant he lost one of his wooden shoes. He turned about and with his bare foot fished for the shoe he had lost. The sergeant ran after him, striking him, and dropped his rubber truncheon. Ludin leaned down, picked it up and handed it back to him.
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The physical maltreatment of the inmates came to an end only when General Patton sent up a colonel to inspect the camp. After that the prisoners received proper rations and medical treatment. The earlier violence was attributable to JCS 1067, and ultimately to Morgenthau.
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