The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  were excused from work and restricted to half rations; as a result they were rapidly starving to death.11

  Gustav’s group was given two days’ rest then put to work. Perhaps it was because he was weakened by increasing age, the general wear and tear of five and a half years in the camps, or the torment of the journey from Auschwitz; more likely it was the sheer unmitigated hel of this place that shattered Gustav like nothing had shattered him before. Every day, reveille came at 3 am. In the depth of winter it felt like the middle of the night.12 The reason for starting at this unholy hour quickly became apparent. After a typically long drawn‑out roll call, the work details marched to the railroad that ran by the camp, where they boarded a train and traveled back in the direction of the main Mittelbau‑

  Dora camp. Halfway was a village called Woffleben; this was where the main work site was located, in a series of tunnels bored into the roots of the hills on which the main camp stood.13

  It resembled a quarry, with stepped cliff faces cut into the hillside; at the base, great openings like the entrances to aircraft hangars had been excavated.

  The whole outer area of the tunnels was covered with scaffolding elaborately draped in camouflage. The work that went on inside, in the deeps of the earth, was top secret and, for the forced laborers, absolute hell.

  The Mittelbau complex had been established in response to the Allied bomb‑

  ing campaign against Germany’s armaments industry. It was one of a number of locations where arms production had been moved underground, out of reach of the bombs. In the Woffleben tunnels under the Mittelbau hills—carved out at appalling human cost by prisoner labor—they were manufacturing V‑2 bal‑

  listic missiles, the most advanced and most terrifying of Hitler’s secret weapons.

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 287

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  288 S u r v i v a l

  The labor detail into which Gustav was drafted was busily delving new tunnels just to the west of the main complex. He was put with a group con‑

  sisting mostly of Russian prisoners of war, doing the backbreaking work of laying railroad tracks underground. The kapos and engineers under whom they worked were true slavedrivers, harassing and lashing out with canes at anyone and everyone who caught their eye. Gustav had known nothing like it since the quarry at Buchenwald. This was worse; day after day it went on, without friends, on rations that wouldn’t sustain a bed‑bound invalid: two bowls of thin soup each day, with a piece of bread. For two weeks in a row they had to make do without the bread, just the watery soup alone, on which to endure a shift lasting from dawn until 7:30 in the evening. He lived in filth, and within weeks he was as wasted and riddled with lice as the rest.

  Ellrich’s camp director was SS‑Sergeant Otto Brinkmann, a little weasel of a man who was both a sadist and unfit for his responsibility. He’d been posted here by the former commandant of Mittelbau‑Dora, SS‑Major Förschner, who had treated Ellrich like a trash can into which he shed his unwanted SS personnel and those prisoners who were least likely to survive. Förschner had since been replaced by Richard Baer, the former commandant of Auschwitz, who escalated the system of repression still further.14 At evening roll call in Ellrich, when the men were exhausted to the point of collapse, Brinkmann forced the prisoners to do exercises, lying down on the sharp stones of the unmade parade ground.

  By Gustav’s reckoning, fifty to sixty people a day were dying of starva‑

  tion and abuse—“the perfect bone mill.” But there was a grit in him that even now would not submit. “One can scarcely drag oneself along,” he wrote, “but I have made a pact with myself that I will survive to the end. I take Gandhi, the Indian freedom fighter, as my model. He is so thin and yet lives. And every day I say a prayer to myself: Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth—the SS murderers must not beat you.”

  He thought of the line he’d put in his poem “Quarry Kaleidoscope” five years earlier:

  Smack!—down on all fours he lies,

  But still the dog just will not die.

  Recalling that image of resistance now, he wrote: “I think to myself, the dogs will make it to the end.” His faith in that outcome was a rock, as firm as his belief that his boy was safe, that Fritzl must have reached Vienna by now.

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 288

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  M a u t h a u s e n 289

  Fritz looked despondently at his food: a hunk of bread not much bigger than his hand and a small bowl of thin turnip stew. That, along with a mug of acorn coffee, was his ration, meant to sustain him through the whole day’s labor. Sometimes he got extra stew, but it wouldn’t hold his soul to his body for long. Looking at his wrists, they were already visibly thinner. He could feel the sharpening of the bones in his face. Little more than a month had passed since his arrival at Mauthausen, but he had never felt so abandoned, so devoid of friendship and support. Those bonds that had sustained him through Buchenwald and Auschwitz were no longer there; he had cut them away when he jumped from the train.

  Pepi Kohl was a force for good in Mauthausen, but Fritz was no longer in the main camp. He’d been transferred to a subcamp at the village of Gusen, four kilometers away. The path that had brought him here was, in its own way, even stranger than the one that had brought him to Mauthausen in the first place. In early March, with Germany fighting for its very existence and desperately short of men, the camp commandant, SS‑Colonel Franz Ziereis, had announced that German and Austrian prisoners who were of Aryan blood could earn their freedom by volunteering for the SS. They would form special units, be provided with uniforms and weapons, and would fight alongside the regular SS for the survival of the Fatherland.15

  At a meeting of the Mauthausen resistance, Pepi Kohl and the other leaders agreed that around 120 suitable prisoners should volunteer. They guessed that the SS leadership would attempt to use these units as cannon fodder or turn them against their fellow prisoners.16 By infiltrating resisters into their ranks, they could turn the SS’s own scheme against them; at the crucial moment, the volunteers would turn their weapons on the regular SS.

  Among the “volunteers” Pepi chose was Fritz Kleinmann. He was officially Aryan and had the air of a fighter. Fritz was deeply reluctant; after years of being abused and tortured by the SS, the very thought of putting on their uniform and joining their ranks sickened him, even if it was done with the best of motives. But Pepi was insistent and wasn’t the sort of man to be easily denied. So Fritz Kleinmann, Viennese Jew, went along with the others to the commandant’s office and signed up for the SS Death’s Head special unit.17

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 289

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  290 S u r v i v a l

  Fritz and his comrades were taken from the camp and posted to a nearby training school, where they began a hasty program of indoctrination and instruction. Other volunteers may have been able to focus on the ends and live with what they were doing, but Fritz couldn’t. The whole thing felt so pro‑

  foundly wrong that he began to misbehave, with the intention of getting kicked out. It was a dangerous thing to do—knowing the SS and given the extremely tense circumstances, it was potentially a path to a bullet in the back of the head or a gallows. In fact it earned him punishment and—just as he desired—

  dismissal from the unit. He became a prisoner again and was sent back to the camp. His SS career was over before it had properly begun.

  He’d been back in Mauthausen no more than a few days when on March 15 he was transferred to the subcamp at Gusen. Fritz was one of a batch of 284 skilled workers moved that day, all of them perfect strangers to whom he felt little attachment. They were a cosmopolitan selection—Jews, politicals, and protective custody prisoners from all the lands of the Reich: Polish, French, German, Austrian, Belgian, Greek, Russian, Dutch. Besides Fritz (in the guise of heating engineer), there were electricians, fitters, plumbers, painters, metal‑

  workers, and a
large group of general mechanics, plus one solitary Ukrainian aircraft mechanic.18

  The subcamp of Gusen II accommodated around ten thousand prison‑

  ers, many of them technical workers. It was one of three subcamps supplying labor to the secret underground aircraft factories that had been constructed in tunnels bored under the hills. As at Mittelbau‑Dora, this was another attempt to shield armaments production from Allied bombing. The factories under Gusen and the neighboring village of St. Georgen were operated by the firms of Steyr‑Daimler‑Puch and Messerschmitt.19 Fritz and the others were assigned to labor battalion Ba III, a code name for a subunit working in the B8 “Berg‑

  kristall” aircraft plant in the tunnels by St. Georgen, where Messerschmitt built fuselages for its ultra‑advanced Me 262 jet fighter.20

  The relationship with Pepi Kohl and his resistance group that Fritz had begun in Mauthausen had been severed before having a chance to develop any further, and in Gusen he felt utterly isolated: “Here I was on my own, without any contact with any other group.” A despondency like that which had pushed him toward thoughts of suicide in Monowitz took hold of him again, and he scarcely noticed the passage of days through March and April 1945; they did not stick in his memory other than as a hellish blur. The prisoners labored in 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 290

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  M a u t h a u s e n 291

  the tunnels and wasted away through lack of nourishment, while the SS and the green‑triangle kapos murdered them at will. Besides those killed on the spot, during March alone nearly three thousand were declared unfit for work and despatched to Mauthausen, where most of them died. When a truckload of food was delivered to the camp by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the SS plundered it, taking the best for themselves, then pierced the remaining cans of food and condensed milk; laughing, they threw the leaking cans among the prisoners. Yet despite the death rate, the population grew rapidly as more and more death marches from evacuated camps across Austria were brought in.21 They died in thousands, and their unburied corpses piled up in the camps.

  Physically as well as mentally Fritz had altered from the undersized boy of 1940; during his time in Robert Siewert’s construction detail in Buchenwald, then the Buna Werke and the Monowitz resistance, he’d had a passable diet, and was now 170 centimeters tall.* But the conditions in Mauthausen‑Gusen eroded him in two months from the lean, healthy state he’d been in when he left the Wehrmacht barracks in St. Pölten, starvation whittling the flesh from his bones until by late April 1945 he resembled the spectral, skeletal Muselmänner of Auschwitz.

  And yet he did not give up as they had. In Gusen at least there was an end in sight, if Fritz could just cling on by his bony fingers long enough to see it. As the end of April approached, so did the sounds of war—the familiar thumping of artillery and crackle of gunfire in the far distance. The Americans were coming.

  The Mauthausen SS leadership and their seniors in Berlin had planned for this. They had no intention of letting their top secret jet fighter production facility and their tens of thousands of skilled workers fall into enemy hands.

  On April 14, Heinrich Himmler sent a telegram to all concentration camp commandants insisting that “No prisoner may fall alive into the hands of the enemy.”22 In Himmler’s mind, that meant evacuation (except in certain special cases where he planned to bargain with the Allies), and his telegram said so.

  But in the minds of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA, and Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, it was understood to mean a total liquidation. This

  * Five feet, seven inches

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 291

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  292 S u r v i v a l

  had long been the intention, and as far as they were concerned it remained so. Ziereis laid his plans accordingly.

  At 10:45 in the morning on April 28, the air raid sirens sounded in Gusen I and II, which were right next‑door to each other. It was a Saturday, but the prisoners had not yet been sent to work. As soon as the alarm went off, the SS

  and kapos began urgently herding the tens of thousands of prisoners from both camps toward the Kellerbau tunnels. The only ones left behind were seven hundred invalids in the hospital, who were too sick to be moved.23

  There were two sets of underground works at Gusen—the Bergkristall tunnels near the village of St. Georgen, where Fritz and the other Gusen II prisoners worked, and the Kellerbau tunnels, immediately to the north of the camps. It was toward these that the prisoners were shepherded. They filed in through one of the tunnel entrances—a huge maw as wide and high as a railroad tunnel.

  Inside, the granite and concrete wal s were danker and colder than the Bergkristall tunnels, which were cut into sandstone (and therefore less stable and more prone to collapse). Due to the expense of excavating in this rock, and the presence of underground springs that flooded them, the Kellerbau tunnel system had never been fully completed, and Messerschmitt had moved most of its aircraft production to Bergkristall.24 But Kellerbau remained more convenient as an air raid shelter for the camps. Fritz and thousands of fellow prisoners stood in the damp chill and waited, listening for the sounds of bomb‑

  ers and the thump of explosions. The minutes passed, and nothing happened.

  Those among them who were most observant, and most familiar with Kellerbau, might have noticed as they filed in that two of the three entrances to the tunnels had been bricked up, leaving only this one open. Even the sharpest‑

  eyed were unaware that, after they had entered, SS machine‑gunners set up positions outside. The prisoners were also ignorant of the fact that over the previous few days, this last entrance had been mined with explosives. The task had been organized by the DESt plant manager in charge of tunnel construc‑

  tion, a civilian named Paul Wolfram, on orders from Commandant Ziereis.

  The operation was codenamed Feuerzeug—lighter. Wolfram and his col eagues were told that their own and their families’ lives would be in jeopardy if they botched the job or revealed the secret.25 Wolfram had laced the entrance with all the explosives he had in stock. According to his calculations, it wouldn’t be sufficient, so the charge was supplemented by a couple of dozen aerial bombs 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 292

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  M a u t h a u s e n 293

  and two truckloads of marine mines. During the night before the air raid alert, the explosives had been wired up. Once all the prisoners were inside and the machine‑gunners were ready to prevent any escaping, the tunnel entrance was to be blown. The prisoners would be trapped inside and suffocate to death.

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 293

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  20 The End of

  D a y s

  BY THE CLOSE OF MARCH, when he’d been at Ellrich about a month and a half, things had improved a little for Gustav; not much, but just enough to nourish his iron will and keep his body bound to his soul. He’d been taken off track‑laying and was working in the tunnels as a carpenter. His kapo was a decent man named Erich who had secret sources of food for himself and gave Gustav his soup ration.1 Nonetheless, like everyone, Gustav was starving and grew more filthy and infested with lice with every passing day. He lived his days underground, and the society in which he lived likewise descended into the fourth circle of the pit of Hell: most of the slaves were on the brink of death from starvation, the stronger preying on the weak, robbing them of their meager rations. The only plentiful thing was corpses, and there had been occurrences of cannibalism. Over a thousand prisoners had died in March, and a further sixteen hundred walking skeletons had been sent by the SS to an army barracks in Nordhausen that served as a dump for the spent and useless.2

  In April, with American forces only days away, the SS began pulling the plug. On April 3, all work was halted and final preparations began for the evac‑

  uation of Mittelbau‑Dora and its subcamps. That same night, the British Royal Air
Force firebombed Nordhausen, hitting the barracks and killing hundreds of the sick prisoners. The raid spurred on the SS evacuation, which began the next day. That night the RAF bombers visited again, razing the town and adding more prisoners to the death toll.3

  The evacuation of Ellrich began on April 4 and took until the next day to complete. All the prisoners who were fit to move were loaded into cattle cars.

  294

  294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 294

  05/04/2018 14:02:16

  T h e E n d o f D a y s 295

  As the final train prepared to leave on April 5, the last SS man to depart the camp personally shot the dozen or so remaining sick prisoners. The SS left the camp empty, and when the US 104th Infantry Division reached Ellrich a week later they found not a living soul.4

  Gustav thought back on the journey from Auschwitz. The weather was far milder now, and they were in closed cars. Gustav had room to sit, and they even got a little food. Not nearly as much as they should have received, how‑

  ever—supply cars stocked with bread and canned food had been coupled to the rear of the train when it left Ellrich, but at some point they had been disconnected; peering through gaps in the car side, the prisoners could see that the food cars were no longer there. A little relief came around the fourth day when the train stopped off at a town in which there was a bread factory, where they were intended to pick up rations. Gustav met an English prisoner of war who gave him two kilos of bread and pumpernickel—enough to keep him and his comrades going for three days.5

  The train had come far into the north of Germany, past Hanover and on in the direction of Bremen. On April 9 it reached its final destination: the small town of Bergen, the unloading place for Bergen‑Belsen concentration camp.

  With the ring of enemies closing in more and more tightly, the SS, under Himmler’s instructions, was determined to hold on to its prisoners, who were intended to serve one final purpose—as hostages.