Dachau concentration camp
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| Dachau |
Earlier that week I saw shocking photos of scenes in camps like Buchenwald and others in Poland already freed. After deciding to watch newsreel about the events, I realised that I would either have to withdraw or that I would have to prepare myself psychologically for seeing heaps of naked and twisted corpses. I chose the second course as the arrangements for the visit were already advanced.
We learnt that Dachau concentration camp, the first of its type dating back to only a few weeks after Hitler came into power in 1933, had just been freed. We also learnt that a typhoid epidemic was raging and that the inmates could not yet be released. We left a few days later, on 7 May 1945, with an American Air Force Dakota to Munich in Bavaria (South Germany). The Americans had invited newspaper editors from Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Poland, as well as from Fleet Street in London on the trip.
Munich carried many wounds of war and large parts had been flattened. We stayed in a pre-war five-star hotel which was still habitable but which would not have qualified for one star a week after the invasion of the city. There were, however, warm water and reasonable beds. Two of the American crew managed to arrange bedmates by exchanging a hot bath – and possibly a bit of chocolate – for a young Dutch and equally young German girl who walked in ‘looking for a bath’. The next morning early we left in small bus for Dachau.
It was a beautiful day, and incidentally V-day, Victory Day in Europe. The road wove through green fields and cultivated areas. About 15 kilometers east of Munich we arrived at the road leading to Dachau. At that point we encountered one of those colourful typical south-German wooden road signs, depicting a group of singing and dancing rural individuals with a concertina player with the motto: ‘Zum Konzentrationslager Dachau’. Was this intentional sadism or only to mislead the population?
Off the left of the entrance on the siding the so-called ‘death-train’ from Buchenwald stood. Five-hundred of the inmates released from there had arrived dead. Just inside the outer gate with its huge quarantine announcement we were taken to a clinic for a typhoid injection – and after that sprayed with DDT powder. This also applied to the American ambassador in Paris.
At the main gate a young Dutchman was addressing a number of farmers who had arrived with their horse-drawn wagons in German. Despite his new uniform and a weeks’ proper rations since the relief of the camp, he looked under-nourished and emaciated. His name was Willem ‘Bib’ van Landschot, an erstwhile Dutch golf champion and a lieutenant in the Dutch army. He and a few others had escaped death narrowly when the Natzweiler extermination camp in Alsace Lorraine was evacuated with the advance of the Allied troops. They had already been brought to the over-burdened Dachau camp where several could, in the growing chaos and death rate of more than 120 a day, change their identity. (Dachau was originally meant for 10 000 inmates, but the number incarcerated was at that stage 36 0000). Van Landschot and other Dutch prisoners – like Hans Gerritson, Louis Reyntjes, Casper Vermeulen and the priest P. Van Gestel – were all NN (Nacht und Nebel) inmates of the Natzweiler camp and were branded for extermination. Only through good underground organisation and, as put by Van Landschot, being able to ‘each arrange a corpse’ had they remained alive. Van Landschot later showed us the deep sores on his legs, known as phlegmona, brought on by systematic undernourishment.
Instead of abusing them this young Dutchman talked like a father to these German farmers: ‘You farmers probably didn’t know what was going on inside. We have asked you to bring your wagons to help us remove those hundreds of corpses and to bury them. In this way you can as proud people of Bavaria help to wipe this scandal out.’ I was immensely impressed by Van Lanschot’s attitude in the light of the brutality that he had been subjected to. As far as these rural people were concerned, he was probably correct. Late that afternoon we looked down from the hospital’s second floor on this sad convoy of wagons packed with corpses leaving the outer gate. I saw the elderly farmer who was leading the front wagon through the many pedestrians, leaving crying and sobbing.
It was a day of cruel contrasts. The wide road between the two rows of huts was brightened up with flags and loud hailers played marching music. V-day and the ambassador’s visit had to be acknowledged. Festive sounds from Paris, London and Brussels, and victory messages from Churchill, Truman and De Gaulle could be heard in many languages. The moving masses dawdled in the dusty road in the early summer sun, stopped to listen occasionally, but there was no cheering or joy. Their victory day was a week earlier when the camp was relieved and when some of their guards who resisted were shot dead in front of them. Their lives were then saved – because was it not Himmler’s order that no prisoner should fall in Allied hands? (Himmler’s written order was later showed to us by the American military authorities).
Inside the sleeping huts were hundreds leaning against the long walls, so weak that they were just waiting to die. No normal food could save them and intravenous feeding was not possible on that scale. The hospital was packed to capacity. We paused at the side of one inmate. He was apparently a Pole because, when the Polish journalist said something there was a flicker in his dull-looking eyes while one huge tear fell – without clinging – over his parchment-like cheek. We walked on hastily. A young boy of about thirteen showed us two corpses which were placed on one side to be removed – like empty milk bottles every morning. For him this was not strange and neither he nor the others showed any emotion. No wonder because statistics showed that 13 000 people lost their lives there during the first four months of 1945. Since the release the previous week a further thousand had died. It would be correct to say that we were more touched by those alive, those living-dead who were lying down or standing like scarecrows – or wandering around without purpose with dull glass-looking eyes.
We were taken through a fence and a type of ditch, but still part of the camp, to the crematorium. The wagons were being loaded from two heaps of several hundred corpses. It looked like branches and tree trunks that were left by storm water against the wall. I suddenly used all my defense mechanisms and blinkers with which I had armed myself psychologically. I tried to see human beings as branches, trunks and stones.
Inside the front entrance of the big room just on the left of the glowing ovens a sign indicated ‘Brausebad’ and there was a flower pot with a few dried-up flowers on a corner stand. Inside the rubber-lined entrance door it looked like a series of shower cubicles with about 50 shower heads protruding from the ceiling. On the far side the big gas pipes feeding the ‘shower room’ were operated from behind a glass-covered watch hole. On the other side of the room was another air tight door leading directly into the ovens. But the ovens could only cremate a maximum of 100 corpses per day. During the last months of the relief many had to be buried outside but, despite this, the Americans found substantially more than 1000 corpses unburied.
Dachau was also used as a SS training camp. Rows of houses for the officers were located outside the camp. Evidence was found of experiments on prisoners to assist the Africa Corps in tropical situations. One-hundred and seventy-eight clerics were for instance subjected to malaria experiments. Those who did not die as a result were permanently physically broken, and suffered fever attacks. The Jesuit priest, P. van Gestel van Maastricht, said that of the more than 2000 clerics from 24 countries who were sent to Dachau, more than half perished, mostly as result of intentional under-feeding coupled with heavy physical labour.
Part of our instruction was to launch an investigation into direct torture and brutality and much evidence of this was found. It is, however, not my intention to dwell further on these atrocities in this account. Several examples were included in our parliamentary report, and anyone who visits Dachau today will find that the West German Government is openly prepared – almost in a masochistic manner – to reveal those Nazi cruelties.
The misery around me and the jubilation from the outside did not sit well with me: it was unrealistic and only left a lump in my throat. Immediately after my return to London I dictated a short talk to my secretary for possible use by Radio News Reel. It was titled ‘V-Day in Dachau’ and came straight from my heart. I tried a few years ago to obtain a copy of that talk from the BBC and was pleasantly surprised when I was told that it was in its archives. Eventually I obtained a copy of what I had said on 12 May 1945. The final paragraph, translated from English, is as follows [translated back from Afrikaans]:
‘When I reflected finally on the visions of the thousands who will probably survive this hell, I realised what V-Day really meant. Not really a victory, but the beginning of the struggle towards a better world to live in’.
* * * *
From a young age I was an admirer of German music, literature, art and scientific achievements. In 1927 our German teacher, Dr. Kuschke, came into the form 1 class with a lieder book in his hand. We learnt more German that way than through grammar. As from form 2 play-time was over and his successor, a brilliant teacher Victor Hesse, inculcated a strong love for the language and culture. Thus, when I was confronted with the atrocities of the Nazis during the war, in particular my personal experience with the concentration camps, my reaction was to draw a clear line between the genuine German and the Nazi regime. As already acknowledged Hitler did a lot initially towards the upliftment of a defeated nation. The huge power that he obtained, the immeasurable ambition and latent hate in him, were brought to the surface through a gang of eccentric lieutenants. In the atmosphere of a destructive and inhuman world war, it degenerated for the true German and his culture into something as different as day is to night. This is possibly what the West German Government wants to demonstrate in the Dachau museum near Munich where no atrocity is left out or diminished.
Munich was of course one of the key locations in the early history of the Nazi Party. In the ‘Burgerbräukeler’ the well known beer-hall ‘Putsch’ of the Nazi Party took place which had overthrown the state government of Bavaria. Later a Party museum was erected. We visited it that evening and found most of the exhibition cabinets broken. On the floor I came across a few inflation notes – over-printed notes worth millions of marks – which I still have. I also still have a fragment of a Persian vase with the swastika figure which was in the exhibition cabinet at the SS training facility in Dachau. This was to show the Aryan blood-line to the early Persians.
That night, and possibly during the day while we were at Dachau, the American crew went on a looting spree for mementoes in Munich, using cigarettes and chocolates as payment. The next day they loaded piles of goods. There were cases of German wine, steel helmets, uniforms and literally hundreds of swords which are probably today exhibited with pride in many parts of the United States.
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