by Sam Pivnik
Mengele almost certainly died in a drowning accident in Brazil and six years later his body, buried with the papers of ‘Wolfgang Gerhard’ was exhumed and autopsied. The telltale gap in his teeth alone proved who he was, but DNA confirmed it. His son is on record as saying that the Angel of Death remained an unrepentant Nazi to the end and claimed that he had never hurt anyone. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands who fell victim to the casual flicks of his doeskin gloves. Nobody wanted the body of Josef Mengele. To this day it lies in a vault in the Sao Paulo Institute of Forensic Medicine in Brazil.
Below the SS who ran Auschwitz-Birkenau were the Kapos, Jew and Gentile, who actively participated in the brutality and the murder. Men like Rudi in the Quarantine Block were too often able to vanish into the chaos of postwar Germany, knowing that most of their victims were dead, changing their names, keeping their heads down. They became fathers, grandfathers, sweet old men growing older gracefully, and no one wanted to dig up graves or revisit the past. And of course, the Kapos had been vulnerable themselves, even in the camps. As long as they danced to the SS tune, they were useful, perhaps even indispensable. But if they transgressed in any way, helped themselves too much, showed kindness, then they would be on their way to the ovens too.
The one who stands out for me is of course Gutscha. I could never really see her as a Kapo. She was a nice lady, warm and kind, and lived out her years in Israel. I don’t know what she did at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Research and the memoirs of others have confirmed that the women working in Kanada did not have their heads shaved like the others; that Höss set up a brothel, strictly for the SS and certain selected Kapos. It is very likely that several members of the SS put aside their ideological revulsion of Jews and had sex with the inmates of the women’s camp. I never talked to Gutscha about any of this. All three of her children died in the camp; she’d been through enough. Starting a new life in Tel Aviv, she met and married Moniek Diamond and they had two children, Miriam and Emmanuel. Gutscha died in 2001. She was a lovely woman.
The other Kapo – the one who may well have saved my life – was Manfred. Because he was not in my block, I didn’t see much of him at Auschwitz-Birkenau and I was never able to thank him for his intervention in the hospital. What happened to him remains a mystery.
What about the boxer, ‘Kajtek’? The SS had used him as a punch-bag in Auschwitz-Birkenau, pitting him against bigger, fitter men as their idea of sport. And I am delighted to say he survived, returning to Poland after the war and coaching other boxers. He died in a respected old age in 2003.
Fürstengrube was the scene of a massacre after we left. The last I’d seen of the place was in the darkness of a January night after we’d stood for most of the day on the Appellplatz and the SS were burning papers. Those who made the stark choice to stay because they couldn’t walk, probably somewhere around 120 of them, the Muselmänner and the diseased who had lost the will to live, were left there for a day or two with just a skeleton guard, without water and without food. Some of them, I’m sure, hobbled out of the camp now that the watchtowers held so few. How many of them made it and how many of them were given help by the locals, I have no idea. But the majority didn’t even have the strength to do that and they lay on their bunks or wandered the Appellplatz, lost, starving and confused, until, even with the sound of Russian artillery getting ever closer, a Waffen-SS patrol turned up, machine-gunned men in their beds and torched the barracks. Anyone who had dodged the bullets burned to death. I don’t think there is a record of how many the Red Army found alive a couple of days later, but it couldn’t have been many.
Most of the people from the Prince’s Mine joined me on the death march so their fates belong to the last phase of my story. My friends Herzko Bawnik, Hersh Goldberg and Peter Abramovitch emigrated to the United States after the war, where Goldberg and Abramovitch became builders. Herzko married and his children and grandchildren adore him still. Hermann Josef, that most slippery of survivors, served a prison sentence – where and for how long, I don’t know – and he lived out the rest of his life working as an architect in Nuremberg.
Someone who did not join us on the march was Rapportführer Anton Lukoschek. I have no idea what happened to him until 1948, but on 20 February that year he was sentenced in a Kraków court to ten years’ imprisonment. This was the man who had orchestrated the hangings of Maurice, Leon, Nathan and the man who kept the chickens.
Mauthausen was liberated on 5 May by twenty-three soldiers of the 11th Armoured Division of General Patton’s Third Army. There were large numbers of Spanish political prisoners there, Communists interned during the Spanish Civil War. The SS had specific orders to herd the prisoners into the camp’s tunnels and blow them up, but this didn’t happen. A photograph taken the next day shows prisoners hauling down the eagle emblem over the camp’s main gate and standing gratefully alongside a homemade banner reading, in Spanish, ‘The Spanish Anti-Fascists Salute the Liberating Forces.’ The previous night a kangaroo court made up of prisoners had tried and executed eight Kapos and six SS men. The 186 steps and the Parachute Wall would be used no more.
Buchenwald had been freed earlier, on 11 April, and by only four soldiers. It must have been surreal for those men of Patton’s 6th Armoured Division as they walked in, unopposed, under the clock tower of the main gate. The day before, the prisoners had launched an attack on the SS guards, killed several and drove the rest to hide in the woods nearby. Captain Frederic Keffer, who commanded the unit, was thrown up in a blanket by the hysterical prisoners so many times that he had to put a stop to it. He recalled in an interview years later, ‘My, but it was a great day!’ If you go to Buchenwald today, you will find the clock tower more or less as Keffer found it and the clock is permanently set at a quarter past three, the time the inmates began to run the asylum and the SS were driven out of Buchenwald.
The Dora-Mittelbau complex, including Tormalin in the Harz Mountains, was liberated on the same day as Buchenwald, this time by the American 104th Infantry Division. They found 3,000 corpses and 750 Muselmänner and they took photographs of everything they saw. These are available on-line today – evidence, if it were needed, of the inhumanity of the Reich and the reality of the Holocaust. The Americans burned the disease-ridden barracks and forced local men, who of course professed their ignorance of the camp’s existence, to bury the dead. It was the Russians who later filled in the tunnels where the V-1 and V-2 rockets were made.
But the Americans left an indelible stain on Dora-Mittelbau because on 20 June 1945 they whisked away a team from the camp’s engineering section and eventually afforded them honour and distinction. I didn’t know it at the time but the leading designer of the V-2 rockets, which caused such terror in Britain, was Wernher von Braun who had been a card-carrying Nazi since 1937 and a member of the SS since 1940. He constantly told people after the war that he was forced into both these situations so that he could work on his rocket engineering, about which he was fanatical. He denied ever having visited Dora-Mittelbau where an estimated 20,000 men died and claimed that when he heard about the brutality he upbraided an SS man who threatened to put him in a striped uniform if he didn’t mind his own business. Since Von Braun was by then a Sturmbannführer (major) in the SS, this simply doesn’t ring true. French prisoners at the camp claimed that he personally ordered them flogged for sloppy workmanship. I know who I believe.
Two years after I became a naturalised citizen in Britain, von Braun followed suit in America. His role in that country’s space programme via NASA is well-documented. Less well known is the rewriting of his recent past by American authorities in 1945 in which he was ‘de-Nazified’. I remember seeing a photograph in the early 1960s of von Braun in earnest conversation with President Kennedy – the leader of the free world chatting warmly to a Sturmbannführer of the SS. It made my blood run cold.
* * *
The desire for vengeance that many Jews of my generation have has nothing to do with cashing in and everything to do with j
ustice. The world is an unjust place and today we have an insane contradiction to deal with. We have a blame culture – everything must be somebody’s fault and the fault almost always comes with a price tag. On the other hand, we have a culture in which no one owns up, no one puts up his hand and says, ‘Yes, I did it,’ or ‘Yes, I am to blame.’ And since the end of World War II, the only way to gain justice after the appalling experience of the Holocaust is via the courts. The problem with that is that the courts are hidebound by abstract legal issues that rarely make sense to ordinary individuals and they are all too often run by people who are, conversely, too easily seduced by peer pressure. The issue of German guilt was of course hopelessly muddled until the last months of 1989 by the fact that there were two Germanies – East and West – each of them operating under different moral and political imperatives. One instance in which the courts did make sense took place in the late 1950s and it involved Nathan. He effectively sued the German government for wrongful imprisonment.
I still have the documentation and find the legalistic language almost laughable. ‘The claimant [Nathan] was subjected to the National Socialist persecutory measures due to his Jewish descent … The International Missing Persons Service in Arolsen has confirmed the following details i.e. the claimant’s arrest in Bendsberg [Bedzin] on 28.03.1943, the subsequent transportation … to Buchenwald concentration camp on 10.02.1945 … It was at the end of the war that he found himself in a German concentration camp and he had been imprisoned up to this point on the grounds of race.’
Nathan suffered ill-health all his life after the camps and this is why he was demanding compensation. He got it – 3,600 Deutschmarks for a two-year period, the judgment delivered in February 1957. And I got a German pension! Because I had worked in the Killov factory and had paid my ‘stamp’ at the time, I was entitled to one. It came through as a lump sum in the 1980s, a bizarre and quite extraordinary legacy of the German occupation of Poland, of one man’s quest for ‘living space’ for his people.
Often, though, justice was not done, and that was the case of SS Oberscharführer Max Schmidt. I am no Simon Wiesenthal, no dedicated Nazi hunter determined to track down every last one of the bastards who killed innocent people for a barbarous cause. But Schmidt was different. We’d slept in his pigsty. In his house. As it happened, I’d also slept with his sister-in-law and Herzko Bawnik had slept with his wife. We’d eaten at his table. And we’d let him get away.
It didn’t look good from the start. Between December 1963 and August 1965, twenty-one former SS officers from the Auschwitz camp complex faced trial at Frankfurt am Main. They ran through the whole gamut of excuses, from ‘just obeying orders’ to claiming to have had nothing to do with any brutality at all. I didn’t recognise any of the names I read in the papers but I knew the charges against them were the truth. Of the twenty-one, six were sentenced to life imprisonment; these were cases of mass execution of a minimum of 475 people. Eleven received prison sentences of anything from three and a half years to fourteen years’ hard labour. Three were acquitted. When I read these results, I couldn’t believe it, but it was a measure of the times. Twenty years had gone by since the Holocaust came to an end and there were many in Germany and elsewhere who wanted to forget the past, draw a line and move on. So Pery Broad of the camp Gestapo was found guilty of twenty-two joint murders and complicity in the deaths of a thousand people – he got four years’ hard labour. Dr Franz Lucas, a medical officer with Mengele, was found guilty of complicity in the murder of one thousand people. In the dock he said, ‘I naturally sought to save as many Jewish lives as possible.’ Naturally. He got three and a half years.
I began to assemble a case against Schmidt. I knew he was responsible for the executions of Leon, Maurice, Nathan and the man who fed his chickens. He also ordered the hanging of the five Polish intellectuals at Fürstengrube. There he shot Chaskele, who had failed to maintain the boiler, and the Russian officer who had tried to escape through the watchtower. In his capacity as Lagerführer he ordered the execution of those left behind at Fürstengrube while we took to the roads on the death march and there was a similar massacre at Tormalin. He was responsible for the murder of Kapo Hans the miner. By this reckoning, Max Schmidt had killed, either by his own hand or by his order, several hundred people. And yet he was a free man. My only problem was how to find him.
I contacted the German embassy in London. They didn’t want to know. They had lost a war and must have found it very difficult to be operating in a country that had brought them defeat and humiliation by the spring of 1945. One of the minions there actually said to me, ‘What do you people want?’
‘Justice,’ I told him. ‘No more and no less.’
In the end they had no choice but to file my complaint on Schmidt. After all, I knew where he lived, and my accusations were so explicit they could not be ignored. The problem of many people trying to bring Nazis to justice is that, years later, they were relying on their fading memories and pointing fingers at old men. Who could believe that that sweet elderly gentleman Klaus Altmann was actually Hauptscharführer Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon who sent the children of Izieu to Auschwitz, where I heard their screams and saw their bodies? But he was.
In the end the solution to the problem fell into my lap. I was contacted by the German authorities in 1979 because they intended to prosecute Max Hans Peter Schmidt for war crimes. Three of us ex-prisoners were contacted – Bronek Jakubowicz, who was now calling himself Ben Jacobs and living in the United States, me and someone else whose identity I don’t know. I presented the accusations you’ve read above and waited to be called. I never was. For ten years Schmidt had worked as a coal miner in the Rhineland, in the heartlands of Germany’s Ruhr region, and lived under the false identity of Kapo Hans, the miner who he had shot at Tormalin. He must have kept in close contact with his family at Neuglasau because over the years he and Gerda produced three sons. I don’t want to sound vindictive, but perhaps there was a vengeful God after all in the case of Max Schmidt; two of his boys died in accidents as teenagers – one drowned and the other was killed on a motorbike.
And it was a motorbike that probably saved Oberscharführer Schmidt from life imprisonment. On trial in Kiel before the High Court there he claimed he knew nothing about the killings on the death march because he had not been there at the time but had been ahead of the column on his bike arranging the next leg of the journey. Needless to say, there was no mention of Chaskele, the hangings at Fürstengrube, the massacre there which I believe he engineered or of the shooting of the Russian officer and Kapo Hans. Since I wasn’t called to the court, I couldn’t give any testimony under oath and various character witnesses from Neuglasau testified to what a fine fellow he was. Ostholstein had a reputation of being fiercely Nazi under the Third Reich and communities like that, insular and rural, don’t shake off old ways quickly. Max Schmidt was a good man. He was a good father. What a tragedy about his sons. And it was all so long ago. You could just hear the old excuses being trotted out. But the depositions Jakubowicz and I had sent couldn’t be ignored. There could be no question that men had died in large numbers on Oberscharführer Schmidt’s watch and because of that, the High Court of Kiel gave him a ten-year probation sentence. Not bad for a man guilty of mass murder.
In the late 1980s, I was contacted by Dr Gerhard Hoch, an historian from Alveslohe, north of Hamburg. He was carrying out research into the Nazi period in his native Ostholstein and wanted my help. He had come across my name as a deponent in Max Schmidt’s trial and was intrigued. Hoch himself had been brought up as a Nazi, had joined the Hitler Youth in the year of its creation and fought in the Wehrmacht during the war. It was his experiences after the war that changed him. He spent three years in England and became a Christian and with this new perspective went back to Germany determined to stamp out elements of anti-Semitism and bring war criminals to justice. The result of his research was a book, Von Auschwitz Nach Holstein: Die Jüdischen Häftlinge von Fürst
engrube – From Auschwitz to Holstein: The Jewish Prisoners of Fürstengrube – which sadly is only available in German. It carries the photo of me taken in those weeks after liberation when I was living in his part of what once had been the Reich.
The other result was a television documentary made by Norddeutscher Rundfunk editor Bernd Janssen. I wasn’t sure whether to take part in this or not. A television crew were asking me to return to my past, to the end of the death march with men being shot behind barns and the expectation that at any moment the SS might yet kill us. By the 1980s the Holocaust deniers were in full cry. They called themselves Revisionists, which in their case meant they intended to rubbish the truth of the past, especially the war years. So a few Jews died. A lot of people died between 1939 and 1945. Things like that happen in war. As for a systematic plan to carry out genocide, they said, where was the evidence? Of course hundreds of empty cans of Zyklon B are preserved in the museum in Auschwitz-Birkenau; Zyklon B was a disinfectant, used for de-lousing the camps. Rather than a murder weapon, the stuff was used to prevent typhus – it was designed to help us.
But I had survived all that. And more. There was something at the back of my mind, a sense that I had unfinished business in Neuglasau; a job not yet done. So I went, along with help from the 45 Aid Society that regularly supports Holocaust victims, and they sent along Barry Davis, a lecturer in History from Ealing College of Higher Education. The man was an expert on the Holocaust and spoke Yiddish so I felt at home even as I walked again the bleak roads of my memory.
April 1989 was not at all springlike. Hamburg was grey and cold and I was glad to get into the welcoming warmth of Gerhard Hoch’s house. With us were three young German techies – the camera and sound crew – and we talked from our different viewpoints about the insanity that was the Third Reich. With us too was Moritz Koopman, a Jew from Amsterdam. He had joined our death march somewhere en route to Neustadt and he and I were going to tell our stories in front of the camera.
