Authors: Roger Moorhouse
As one of his fellow prisoners recalled:
The Dutchman [. . .] came into the medical barrack as his feet were
completely frozen and inflamed [but] on the orders of Dr Baumkötter
[the SS camp doctor] he was not allowed to be treated. He had no
blanket and lay on the bunk only in his shirt. His feet were not band-
aged. The skin was falling off them. In places the muscles were already
decomposing and the flies fed on his wounds. He lay there for a few
weeks. Then, one day, he was taken away to the crematorium.65
Many more did not survive the ordeal. One Jewish inmate testified
in a post-war trial that only 24 of his 60 comrades survived a three-day
assignment to the shoe testing facility. As one historian has summarised,
transfer to the ‘shoe testing course’ was ‘practically a death sentence’.66
Sachsenhausen is also synonymous with an altogether different
enterprise – ‘Operation Bernhard’. Beginning in 1942, the Nazis began
the large-scale forgery of British banknotes, with the intention of
undermining not only the British economy, but also global confidence
in sterling. Using 142 Jewish prisoners, labouring in workshops within
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the camp, the SS began what would become the largest forgery oper-
ation in history. At their peak, the forgers of Blocks 18 and 19 were
producing over 600,000 banknotes per month, with a total yield of
over £130 million. To cap it all, the forgeries were not mere pale imita-
tions; they were regarded by the Bank of England itself as the most
perfect counterfeits ever produced.
Though the forgers had successfully produced millions of pounds
worth of excellent forgeries, their work was never put into circulation
in the way that had been foreseen. The Nazis appear to have balked at
their original plan of dropping the forged notes over Britain from the
air. Instead, it seems the notes were used to pay off German spies –
one of whom even sued as a result – and to purchase raw materials and
currency in neutral countries.67
The project did at least save the lives of many of the forgers involved.
Given the importance and delicacy of their task, they lived in compar-
atively luxurious conditions, with clean cotton sheets, improved rations
and a modicum of leisure time. One of them spent much of his free
time playing table tennis with his SS guards – being careful not to
win.68 At a Christmas revue the forgers sang and danced to entertain
their SS overlords. Moreover, given the importance of the forgery
programme, requests for the delivery of the Jewish forgers to
Auschwitz were persistently refused.69 Sachsenhausen thereby became
a perverse sort of refuge for the forgers, but few of them were under
any illusions. As one of their number would pithily summarise, they
saw themselves as ‘dead men on holiday’.70
Another challenge for the inmates was the lack of food. With the
outbreak of war, rations for concentration camp prisoners had been
halved and would continue to deteriorate as the conflict progressed.
But such stipulations – though far from generous – often proved to be
theoretical, and prisoners found themselves forced to subsist on much
less. Some supplemented their diet by scavenging for food, raiding the
bins of the kitchen block or even eating grass.71 Those that were respon-
sible for the camp’s pigsties, for example, stole the animals’ food.72
All concentration camp prisoners suffered from gnawing hunger, but
there was real danger for those who didn’t take drastic action. Those
who were more squeamish, or lacked the imagination or opportunity
to find additional sources of food, ran the very real risk of starvation
and physical collapse. As one inmate of Sachsenhausen recalled, the
the watchers and the watched
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physical effects could be shocking: ‘What I see before me does not even
look like a human body; these ghostly figures don’t even look like skele-
tons . . . the skin hangs on their bones in loose folds, as though there is
no flesh left beneath. Every bone sticks out and is visible, whether it be
the collarbone, the vertebrae, a rib or a knee-cap.’73
Violence, too, was ever-present. Like all concentration camps,
Sachsenhausen was a place where caprice and the vagaries of fate
were as likely to decide one’s destiny as anything else. Human life, it
seemed, really did hang by a thread. Prisoners were not even safe from
physical abuse within their barracks. There they were exposed to the
arbitrary brutality of the
Kapos
or ‘senior prisoners’, who were held
responsible by the SS for each barrack and were quite adept at dishing
out their own brand of sadism. Armed with cudgels and clubs, the
Kapos
and their henchmen would routinely beat prisoners who crossed
their path – and sometimes they went further. In one instance, three
brothers were murdered in the latrine of a barrack block at
Sachsenhausen. As a witness would later testify:
After the brothers had been in the camp for about 8 days, they were
drowned by the room senior of block 11 in one of the basins . . . I
personally saw how the arms of the second prisoner were held behind
his back. The first two brothers defended themselves and yelled out
for help . . . The third of the three brothers, who was left standing
outside in front of the block, had to listen to his brothers’ call for help
and soon started crying out for help himself. He was . . . hanged in the
washroom during the following night.74
It is not clear what the brothers had done to so displease their block
leader.
Sachsenhausen had the usual instruments for dealing with those
who dared resist the harsh regimen of the camp. On the eastern side
of the site was the punishment block, where prisoners would be held
in isolation, interrogated and tortured. Just outside it stood a wooden
pillory, where public punishments – such as the strappado, or ‘reverse
hanging’ – would be carried out.
On the opposite edge of the camp was an even more sinister instal-
lation. ‘Station Z’ was a purpose-built execution site. Initially consisting
simply of a deep, sloping trench, lined with logs, it would grow more
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sophisticated in time, with the addition of a room where prisoners
could be surreptitiously shot in the back of the neck, while undergoing
a medical ‘examination’. In 1943, the site was augmented by the building
of a crematorium and a small gas chamber, disguised as a shower room,
which was used primarily for the execution of those prisoners no longer
able to work.75 The numbers killed there are unknown.
Aside from such targeted killings, Sachsenhausen also claimed a large
number of lives through hunger and abuse. Stories of the misery endured
by inmates in the camp are legion, but one incident stands as an example
of the casual everyday brutality. In January 1940, as the prisoners returned
from the work details and gathered on the
Appellplatz
for the evening
roll-call, the guards found that a prisoner was missing. As was usual, all
the inmates were then obliged to stand as a collective punishment, until
the matter was cleared up. To maximise the punishment, the SS guards
demanded that the prisoners also do some physical exercises. It took
ten hours for the escapee to be captured; ten hours in which the exhausted
prisoners stood in the snow, ‘exercising’. The following morning, over
four hundred of them were carried away for cremation. The remainder
were sent straight out again to work.76
It is thought that around 30,000 people died at Sachsenhausen. Bruno
Wattermann, whose story opened this chapter, was not one of them.
Transferred to Sachsenhausen in the late summer of 1942, he was given
the prisoner number 46434. There are only sparse details of Wattermann’s
presence in the camp. We know that he was consigned initially to Block
37 and that he was twice sent to the medical barrack, in August and
October 1943.77 Then, in February 1945, Wattermann was transferred
from Sachsenhausen to the infamous concentration camp at Mauthausen
in Austria.78 Thereafter, he disappears from the record. His ultimate fate
is unknown.
12
The Persistent Shadow
Berlin’s Invaliden cemetery was the city’s most prominent burial
ground. First laid out to the north of the city centre in the mid-
eighteenth century – at a time when much of the area was fields and
allotments – the cemetery was initially intended to provide a final
resting place for those killed in the War of the Austrian Succession.
By the early nineteenth century, it was dedicated as the burial ground
for prominent members of the Prussian military and, in this capacity,
it would soon develop into one of the most impressive cemeteries in
the capital, a veritable who’s who of German military history. A
publication from 1925, entitled
The Berlin Invaliden Cemetery: A Site
of Prussian-German Glory
, listed its ‘residents’ as including 11 field
marshals and colonel generals, 7 ministers of war, 9 admirals, 67 generals,
104 lieutenant generals and 93 major generals.1 Among the most cele-
brated of these were General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the hero of
the Napoleonic Wars, Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, author of the
eponymous offensive plan employed during the First World War and
the pioneer airman Manfred von Richthofen, the famous ‘Red Baron’.
Bounded to its western edge by the Hohenzollern canal, and shaded
by a generous smattering of linden trees, the Invaliden cemetery was a
riot of grandiose sarcophagi, sombre bronze statuary and earnest inscrip-
tions. Among the statues, angels predominated. Some perched atop lofty
pillars, while others sat pensively upon individual graves. Eagles, too,
were common, either in the traditional Prussian form, or in the grander
type preferred by Imperial Germany and the Third Reich. The tomb of
General Hans von Seeckt, for instance, featured stone eagles at each
corner with wings outstretched, almost caressing the sarcophagus itself.
Variations on the theme of ‘the Spoils of War’ included empty suits
of armour, elaborate plumed helmets, or sheaves of surrendered weapons.
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berlin at war
The inscriptions were generally short and to the point: ‘He was the
embodiment of honour!’ proclaimed the grave of General Eduard von
Wedel; while the tomb of the crashed pioneer aviatrix Marga von Etzdorf
suggested poignantly that ‘Flight is worth Life’.2 The grave of the ‘Red
Baron’, meanwhile, took that brevity to the extreme. Set in grey granite
close to the canal side, it bore the single word ‘RICHTHOFEN’.
The outbreak of the war in 1939 promised a new intake for Berlin’s
cemeteries. The first to be laid to rest in the Invaliden cemetery was
General Werner von Fritsch. As supreme commander of the Wehrmacht
in the mid-1930s, Fritsch had been a prominent, if discreet, critic of the
Nazis and as a result had been eased out of his post in 1938, when an
elaborate intrigue engineered by Göring had smeared him as a homo-
sexual. Condemned to an ignominious retirement, Fritsch had returned
to the army on the outbreak of war and had taken command of the
unit in which he himself had served during the Great War, the 12th
Artillery Regiment. He was killed in battle, outside Warsaw, on
22 September – the most prominent German casualty of the Polish
campaign. Among both those who knew von Fritsch and those who
had fought alongside him, it was widely suspected that he had committed
suicide by deliberately exposing himself to Polish gunfire close to the
front line.3 William Shirer was told by an ‘unimpeachable source’ that
Fritsch had refused the pleas of his adjutant to let himself be carried to
the rear and had subsequently bled to death.4
Whatever the exact circumstances of his life and death, Fritsch was
lavishly and spectacularly rehabilitated. In an elaborate state funeral,
his coffin – draped in the swastika flag and topped with the general’s
own steel helmet and dagger – was borne aloft by eight officers of
his regiment. Placed upon a black-draped catafalque, it was then
symbolically guarded by four fellow generals with their side arms
drawn. In the pouring rain, and before thousands of spectators,
speeches were made and two battalions of the elite
Grossdeutschland
Division paraded solemnly on Unter den Linden.
All the senior figures of the military and the Nazi Party were in
attendance: Goebbels, Hess, Göring and Rosenberg rubbing shoulders
with admirals, generals and field marshals.5 Only Hitler was absent,
pointedly visiting the front near Warsaw, close to where the general
had met his end. Göring himself laid a wreath before Fritsch was
finally interred in the Invaliden cemetery. His tomb, a flat oblong of
the persistent shadow
249
polished granite, bore the general’s arms beneath a simple cross. At
its foot, a quote from the Book of Revelation: ‘Be thou faithful unto