Three SS NCOs had died during the revolt – SS-Unterscharführers Rudolf Erler, Willi Freese and Josef Purke – plus at least twelve more SS-TV and Trawnikis wounded. Such was the fury of the camp leadership at the audacity of the resisters that a further 250 men were summarily shot in revenge. A speech was then made to the remaining Sonderkommandos, warning them of terrible consequences if they ever tried anything like this again, before they were dismissed and sent back to work in Crematoria II, III and V.
Once the ‘all clear’ had sounded and the air raid alert was over, the SS launched patrols into the surrounding countryside, including tracker dogs, in an effort to find twelve members of the Crematoria II Sonderkommando who were still unaccounted for. These desperate prisoners had managed to cross the Vistula River, but exhaustion forced them to seek temporary refuge inside an empty building. The SS was soon upon them and they were all killed, their bodies being brought back to the camp.
Once the rebellion had been crushed, the Auschwitz Gestapo launched an immediate investigation. The Germans knew that the Sonderkommandos must have had help in obtaining the explosive materials used to destroy Crematoria IV. On 10 October, Ala Gertner, Ester Wajsblum and Regina Safisztain were arrested in the Women’s Camp and hauled off to Auschwitz I for interrogation. They were charged with stealing explosives and smuggling it to the Sonderkommandos. Later that same day, fourteen of the surviving Sonderkommandos were also arrested and locked inside a bunker in Auschwitz I’s notorious Block 11. The group included Jankiel Handelsman, one of the revolt’s organizers, and five of the Soviet prisoners-of-war. They all died of deliberate starvation.
At Birkenau, in spite of the revolt and damage to the killing facilities, the murders continued. On 10 October, 800 Romani men arrived from Buchenwald Concentration Camp, having been deemed surplus to requirements, and were immediately gassed. On 11 and 14 October, two transports arrived from Ravensbrück containing 217 Romani women and girls. They underwent a second selection where some were sent back to Ravensbrück – the remaining prisoners were all gassed.
The Auschwitz Gestapo continued to hunt out conspirators who had been involved with the Sonderkommando uprising. Two more women, one of whom was Rosa Robota, were arrested in Birkenau’s Women’s Camp and brutally interrogated. They were charged with having had contact with the Sonderkommandos and of transporting explosives to them.
The women were singled out for brutal execution as an example to the rest of the camp. On 6 January 1945, after enduring unspeakable brutality at the hands of the Gestapo, Gartner, Robota, Safisztain and Wajsblum were hanged in the Women’s Camp. Two were hanged during evening roll call in the presence of male and female prisoners who were about to go on to the night shift at the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke munitions factory. Two more were hanged after the return of the day shift. The executions were presided over by SS-Obersturmführer Hössler.
Just twelve days after the women were executed, the Germans, in the face of the rapidly advancing Soviet Red Army, abandoned the Auschwitz Complex. Some 58,000 prisoners were sent on a march into Germany, thousands perishing along the way. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, they discovered only 7,500 ill prisoners left alive, abandoned to their fates by the SS.
Chapter 10
The Rabbit Hunt
‘Do not bring anyone back alive.’
SS-Standartenführer Franz Ziereis
Commandant, Mauthausen Concentration Camp, 1945
Mauthausen Concentration Camp was one of the largest complexes of camps and sub-camps in the Nazi universe. Based around the Austrian villages of Mauthausen and Gusen, it was only 12 miles from Hitler’s childhood home of Linz. Founded shortly after the Anschluss in 1938, the camp consisted of quarries, mines, munitions and weapons factories and, by early 1945, assembly plants for the latest German wonder weapon, the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet.1 In January 1945, the camp held approximately 85,000 brutalized slave labourers.2
But, as with other huge concentration camps, Mauthausen had its own hell within hell known as Block 20. This was a camp within a camp, where thousands of prisoners were housed with the sole purpose of killing them very slowly. Block 20 was known by all in the camp as the ‘Todesblock’, or ‘Death Block’. It was isolated from the main camp by a relatively low granite wall standing 2.5 metres high that was topped with electrified barbed wire. Watching over this space were three watchtowers, each mounted with a machine gun.3
In April 1944, the SS had transferred 4,300 Red Army officers to Block 20. Conditions were appalling, designed with maximum sadism to slowly starve these men to death. The prisoners-of-war received only one quarter of the already lean rations given to the rest of the camp. They were issued with neither spoons nor plates, but were instead fed like pigs from washbasins. Block 20 was unheated and, to add to the prisoners’ misery, in winter the SS would hose the floor of the block with water, turning it to ice. The block also lacked window panes or frames and the prisoners were denied bunks on which to sleep.4
In order to increase the PoWs’ suffering, SS-Unterscharführer Josef Niedermayer, who ruled over this kingdom of pain, would force the prisoners into the squatting position with their hands behind their heads, then march them like geese around the exercise yard for up to 3km at a time.5
This kind of bestial treatment soon thinned the numbers of Soviet officers dramatically. Four thousand three hundred had arrived in April 1944. By November, there were only 1,300 left alive. By January 1945, this figure had reached just 800 men. Every so often, visiting SS officers would be taken up one of the watchtowers to view the Soviet prisoners’ agonies. They apparently watched with great interest and often lingered for some time.
The SS, however, had underestimated the resourcefulness of the Red Army. Though the Germans considered the shaven-headed and emaciated prisoners nothing but human waste, they were still trained army officers. They retained their discipline and their ability to plan. And they knew that if they did nothing, eventually they were all going to die. It was a situation where it was probably better to die trying than to meekly submit to death at the hands of the Nazis. But the Red Army officers faced a very difficult situation to overcome, requiring some extremely creative thinking.
As mentioned, a wall surrounded the compound in which Block 20 sat. This wall was certainly climbable as it wasn’t particularly high, but the electric fencing running along its top carried a lethal 380-volt charge.6 The three guard towers that overlooked the compounds were each mounted with an MG34 belt-fed machine gun. These rapid-firing weapons could easily mow down anyone attempting to scale the wall. The prisoners looked to their own quarters for weapons, but there was hardly a thing that they could use. But there was one place in Block 20 that could provide the necessary equipment – the Kapos accommodation.
Much of the day-to-day running of the block was the responsibility of some very brutal kapos. There were eight of these men, with their own accommodation in the middle of the block. This included bunks, a shower, tables and a bath with a wooden cover used for drowning prisoners. There were also latrines, and an area with iron hooks set into the walls that were used for strangling prisoners to death.
A rudimentary plan was hatched shortly after the arrival on the block of a fresh group of seventeen Red Army officers, mostly from the air force. These men had urged immediate action, largely because they were still in reasonable physical condition. A plan was ready for action, set to occur on the night of 28–29 January 1945, but two days before that the SS suddenly seized twenty-five prisoners, including all seventeen new men, and summarily shot them. There were probably informers among the mass of prisoners on Block 20 who might have sought to increase their chances of surviving, or maybe the Germans just got lucky.7
A new attempt was prepared for the night of 2 February. The plan was simple. Firstly, the PoWs would creep into the area of the block that housed the kapos, kill them all and break up furniture for weapons. One officer would then dress as the chief kapo and, using
a whistle, order all the prisoners out into the yard. This was not unusual, for the SS often ordered such parades in the early hours to add to the prisoners’ torture. This movement of the prisoners into the yard should confuse the guards in the tower for a few vital seconds. Then, using anything heavy that they could find, hundreds of the PoWs were to bombard two of the guard towers with missiles in the hope of preventing the exposed sentries from taking proper aim with their machine guns, while hundreds more officers charged the wall, taking with them tables and chairs from the kapos quarters. This furniture would be piled against the walls, and then blankets soaked in water flung over the electric fence to short it out.8
A vital component in the plan was two fire extinguishers from the kapos’ quarters. Two teams would climb onto the wall and then scale each guard tower, using the fire extinguishers to disable the sentries. The machine guns could then be turned on other towers, or on the SS as they reacted to the revolt, covering the main force of PoWs as they charged across the open ground towards the camp’s outer fence and freedom. The advantages that the PoWs had were their discipline and organization – they were trained army officers and combat veterans. But the disadvantages of the plan were huge – even reaching the wall and scaling the towers looked remote when faced by the awesome firepower that the Germans had at their disposal.
On the night of 2 February, all was routine at Block 20. Following a full day of victimization and hardly any food, the Soviet PoWs were ordered into their accommodation and SS-Unterscharführer Niedermayer and the other SS left the compound. The kapos also returned to their accommodation, blissfully unaware of what lay in wait for them. At the appointed time, the Soviet PoWs began creeping up towards the middle of the block, where the kapos slept. The chief kapo, an Austrian, had his throat slit, while a gang of prisoners dealt with his seven underlings, strangling them all with their bare hands.9 By 12.50am on 3 February, everything was ready. All of the prisoners would be taking part, except sixty-five who were too sick to be moved. They would have to be left behind to face execution by the SS afterwards.
One prisoner had dressed himself in the chief kapo’s uniform, with its armband marked ‘BL 20’. He strode out into the yard, blowing a whistle and yelling the order: ‘Kanaken raus!’ The rest of the prisoners piled outside, many now carrying furniture or homemade weapons quickly crafted in the kapos’ accommodation. It was now or never. The guards in the watchtowers leaned over their machine guns, watching the milling throng below, momentarily unsure of what was occurring. They couldn’t see Niedermayer or any other SS men with the prisoners, only the chief kapo. Suddenly, the cry of ‘Urrah!’ went up, soon joined by hundreds of voices yelling the Russian battle cry. Almost as one, the crowd suddenly began to charge the wall, with distinct groups forming to carry out their assigned tasks.
As the SS in the towers struggled to bring their weapons to bear on the Soviet PoWs below, the towers began to come under sustained attack. Hundreds of prisoners stood below pelting the two closest towers with a barrage of missiles. Lumps of coal, stones, wooden concentration camp clogs and hard lumps of soap peppered the towers. The guards could barely get off a few bursts with their MG34s before they were forced to take shelter behind the wooden walls of their towers. This afforded the prisoners a slim chance. The Germans only managed to shoot down about fourteen prisoners. Other groups of inmates had reached the wall and were busily piling the stolen furniture against it. Moving swiftly, several clambered up and threw clothes and blankets soaked in water onto the fence, immediately shorting it.10 In an instant, the entire camp was plunged into darkness; the only sounds the mournful wail of alarm klaxons, occasional shots and the roar of hundreds of prisoners fighting their way to freedom.
Two three-man groups, each armed with a fire extinguisher, assaulted each guard tower. At one of the towers, one of these improvised assault groups managed to surprise the guard, who was crouching down under a hail of thrown missiles. He was quickly blasted with the fire extinguisher, blinding him before being beaten to death. The three-man team of Soviet officers seized the machine gun and turned it on the next nearest tower, killing the German gunner. This tower was also swiftly taken by the prisoners, who now had in their possession two machine guns and several belts of ammunition.11 These were used to liberally spray the third tower that covered Block 20 and the large numbers of shouting and screaming SS that were surging towards the compound in an attempt to crush the rebellion.
Those who managed to cross the Block 20 perimeter wall now faced several hundred yards of open ground to the main camp’s perimeter wall. Unfortunately, they also came under the guns of a further six wooden guard towers that watched over this section of the perimeter. Around 300 yards to the right of the camp was a farm, and 800 yards further some woods. The woods were not thick enough to conceal the escapees.
One large group of escaped Soviet officers burst into the nearby Schloss Marbach, looting food, shoes, clothing and any weapons that they could find, but this location soon proved to be exceedingly unlucky. The castle was being used as an SS officers’ hostel, and the SS, woken from their beds by the commotion downstairs, began shooting at any Soviets that they could see and then proceeded to organize a pursuit of the remainder.
The various groups of escaped PoWs split up in their desperate attempts to get away from the environs of the camp. Colonel Grigori Zabolotniak led his group south towards the Danube. During their journey, this plucky band of desperadoes came upon a Luftwaffe antiaircraft battery that was set up in a field. Creeping up on the Germans, the Soviet officers surprised the battery and overpowered the gun crews with their bare hands. Snatching weapons and a truck, Zabolotniak had his wounded and sick loaded aboard before they drove off at speed. Unfortunately, the Soviet PoWs’ luck ran out later that night when the truck was overtaken by a column of pursuing motorized infantry and annihilated in a brief but fierce firefight.12
The commandant of Mauthausen, SS-Standartenführer Franz Ziereis, immediately began calling local Gestapo, Gendarmerie and Order Police units, informing them that a major breakout of ‘dangerous criminals’ had occurred and ordering them not to take any of the apprehended escapees alive. All police, SS, army and Volkssturm units were to kill the Soviets on sight. In an even darker turn of events, ordinary Austrians willingly took part in the hunting down and murder of hundreds of escaped PoWs. The Austrian Volkssturm Home Guard-style militia was to be particularly active in killing escaped Soviet officers.13
The reaction of ordinary Austrians to SS orders was not helped by the fact that the Germans sent trucks fitted with loudspeakers into the surrounding area. As these trucks drove through villages, the loudspeakers blared the following threat to local Austrians: ‘For hiding: death! For assistance: death!’ Perhaps even more remarkable than the animosity local Austrians were to show to the escaped Mauthausen inmates were the brave few who exercised humanity and risked everything to help some of the Soviet officers. But these few decent civilians were in a tiny minority. It has subsequently come to light that some of the savagery of the citizenry towards the Soviet PoWs was due to an inculcated fear of Russians, whom most seemed to have thought would do them immediate harm.14 But the Soviets PoWs, for their part, thought that the Austrians, as a conquered and occupied people themselves, would offer them assistance, and they behaved in a proper way towards any civilians that they encountered.
The entire shameful episode was encapsulated by the SS with the term ‘The Great Rabbit Hunt’, four days of blood-letting that ensured that almost all of the escaped Soviets perished.
The Austrian Gendarmerie was reluctant to execute recaptured Soviet PoWs. This led to several confrontations between local police and Nazi officials, who were hell bent on carrying out SS-Standartenführer Ziereis’ orders to the letter. In the small community of Schwertberg, local police had managed to apprehend seven PoWs, but contrary to orders, police chief Johann Kohout had the emaciated men placed in a cell rather than shot. When local Nazi Party leader Leopold
Boehmberger got wind of the captives’ presence in his town, he marched into the police station and berated Kohout, making clear Ziereis’ order. Unwilling to make a stand against Boehmberger, Kohout ordered the cell door unlocked and the Soviets were taken outside. In the yard, Boehmberger personally shot all seven prisoners with a pistol.
As more and more of the escaped prisoners were hunted down and killed, their corpses were taken back to Mauthausen so that they could be identified and logged. The bodies were then transferred to the camp crematorium and burned. Many of the escapees that were apprehended by local Austrians were simply shot or beaten to death at the moment of capture. It is interesting to note that the Nazis never forced any of the locals to take part in the hunt – all those that did, did so of their own free will. Compassion was outside the remit of the hunt. For example, one Austrian Volkssturm unit delivered a group of live PoWs to Mauthausen, only to receive a dressing down from SS officers at the camp for failing to adhere to Commandant Ziereis’ explicit order that had stated that units are ‘not to bring anyone back alive’. On the first night of the hunt, fifty-seven live prisoners were brought back to Mauthausen, only to be shot on Ziereis’ orders.15
After several days of slaughter, it had become apparent to the SS that some of the escaped prisoners remained unaccounted for. Eventually, the SS authorities determined that of the several hundred who had managed to escape from the camp, between seventeen and nineteen remained free. It was obvious that despite dire warnings to the contrary, some local Austrians had risked their lives sheltering fugitives.
Holocaust Heroes Page 17
