Holocaust Heroes

by Felton, Mark;

  Though the actual armed uprising in Dachau had been short and ineffective, resistance had also sprouted in the towns of Landshut and Penzburg, requiring more SS and Gestapo troops to suppress. In Munich, a major battle flared between Bavarian Freedom Action forces and those of Gauleiter Giesler. But as in Dachau, the outcome was never really in doubt. SS troops managed to retake the newspaper offices and radio stations, but Munich City Hall held out for a time. Hauptmann Gerngross and many others managed to flee to safety before the building fell. Giesler’s vengeance was terrible – he had fifty-seven members of the resistance summarily shot. But nothing was going to stop the advance of the US Army, and the next day Gauleiter Giesler and the SS abandoned the city rather than fight to the last. Giesler fled to Berchtesgaden. The four rebellions at Munich, Dachau, Landshut and Penzburg had seriously unsettled the Nazis.13 If their own army and people were turning against them, perhaps it was time to flee.

  At Dachau Concentration Camp, SS-Untersturmführer Wicker awaited orders that did not come. On 29 April, Red Cross official Victor Maurer convinced Wicker not to attempt to evacuate the camp, which would have killed thousands, and instead to surrender the facility and its inmates to the Americans. Maurer promised that if Wicker did this, then he and his men would be allowed to flee unmolested. Of course, the Americans had no idea of this agreement.

  The Americans did, however, have some inkling of the possible horrors that they would find at Dachau from an escaped inmate. On 28 April, Karl Riemer had managed to get out of the camp and walked through the night to the town of Pfaffenhofen. US forces had already reached the settlement, and Riemer briefed them about conditions at the camp and the desperate plight of the remaining prisoners.

  Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks, commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, was ordered to relieve Dachau. He wasn’t impressed by the job, considering the camp to be a non-military target. At 9.22am on 29 April, Sparks received a message from the 157th Infantry’s S-3 sent to all companies that upon the capture of Dachau they were to post guards around the camp and touch nothing, and also ensure that no-one left the compound. Spark commanded a small task force consisting of his own battalion from the 157th Infantry and the 191st Tank Battalion. He split the task force into two prongs, advancing on parallel roads towards Dachau, the first column under his personal command and the second under Major George Kessler.14

  The problem for the Americans was that units from two of its infantry divisions were converging on Dachau. Sparks’ 157th Infantry from the 45th Division would arrive around the same time as elements of the 222nd Infantry Regiment, 42nd Infantry Division, creating severe jurisdictional confrontations.

  At 10.00am, Lieutenant Colonel Donald E. Dounard, commanding the 2nd Battalion, 222nd Infantry, reported a skirmish at a roadblock near the camp and captured several Germans. An hour later, Colonel Sparks’ men also had a brief firefight with retreating German forces.15

  At noon, inmates inside the camp saw American soldiers for the first time, outside the perimeter. They rushed cheering and crying towards the perimeter fences, but the SS opened fire, shooting down one man. Fifteen minutes later, Sparks briefly conferred with Lieutenant William Walsh, commanding I Company, 157th Infantry, ordering him to secure the camp and to keep the prisoners inside. ‘Don’t let them out,’ ordered Sparks. ‘We got all kinds of food and medicine and what have you coming in behind us, and we’re going to take good care of them.’16

  Sparks ordered M Company’s Machine Gun Platoon to accompany I Company. Simultaneously, Sparks sent L Company to secure Dachau town. Although Sparks did not know it, Wicker and many Germans had gathered, unarmed, at the camp’s main gate, awaiting the arrival of the Americans. Fearing heavy resistance, Sparks ordered I Company to advance up the railway line to the spur instead of through the main gate.17

  On the railway line, I Company discovered an abandoned, engineless train. They counted thirty-nine wooden wagons. Sprawled on the track and around the fields bordering the line were many bodies, most showing signs of gunshot wounds. When the GIs hauled open one of the wagon doors, they were dumbfounded by what they discovered. It was eventually established that there were 2,310 bodies of men, women and children on or near the train, some naked, some wearing striped concentration camp uniforms. They were all severely thin, and many appeared to have died of starvation or thirst inside the locked carriages, callously left to die by the fleeing SS, while others showed evidence of execution by gunfire.18 The GIs were furious, many vomiting and retching at the stench of decomposing flesh. Many also sought immediate vengeance on any Germans that they managed to capture. Shortly afterwards, I Company commanding officer Lieutenant Walsh shot four surrendering SS inside a wooden railway wagon. Private Albert Pruitt had then climbed inside and finished off each of the Germans with a shot to the head with his pistol.

  Walsh’s men took Colonel Sparks to see the SS dog kennels, where the Germans kept Alsatian guard dogs. Most of the animals were already lying in pools of blood after enraged GIs shot dead twenty-five to thirty of them.19

  Whilst Sparks and his men from 45th Infantry Division moved deeper into the camp, units from the US 42nd Infantry Division began entering Dachau town at 1.00pm. The Assistant Divisional Commander, Brigadier General Henning Linden, quickly put together a small task force in five Jeeps. Led by Linden, the group also included Brigadier General Charles Banfill, Deputy Commander Operations, US Eighth Army Air Force, several staff officers and a handful of war correspondents and photographers.20 Linden’s group raced off to the camp’s main entrance, by way of the abandoned train and its gruesome human cargo. After ducking from a burst of incoming small arms fire, Linden’s party dismounted from their Jeeps and cautiously approached the gate house, its large wooden gates topped with a huge Nazi eagle and swastika, with pistols drawn and M-3 Grease Guns locked and loaded.

  SS-Untersturmführer Wicker, accompanied by an unarmed aide and Red Cross representative Victor Maurer, went out to meet Linden’s party. They found General Linden and his soldiers in a very dark frame of mind. Linden actually struck Wicker with a swagger stick that he carried ‘British-style’, forcing the German officer to raise his hands. On Linden’s order, Wicker was taken to see the evidence. Shortly after, the last commandant of Dachau was killed in mysterious circumstances. Subsequent investigations suggest that inmates used the rifle of a young American GI to execute Wicker and his aide. A court-martial of this private first-class was begun, but later abandoned.21 Wicker, though an SS-TV officer and a concentration camp veteran, had nonetheless stayed behind to surrender the camp to the Americans and should have been treated as a prisoner-of-war. But the atmosphere on that day of liberation was very ugly, as US troops confronted what men from Wicker’s arm of service had done to the prisoners at Dachau.

  Troops from H Company, 222nd Infantry Regiment, caught up with General Linden’s party before the main gate. By now, a huge mob of prisoners, cheering hysterically, surged towards the American soldiers. Twenty-five-year-old war correspondent Marguerite Higgins wanted to enter the camp and get her big scoop – the liberation of Dachau. But Colonel Sparks and men from the 157th Infantry Regiment arrived. Arguments between the officers of the two competing divisions broke out against the backdrop of the cheering prisoners. Sparks categorically refused to permit Higgins entry to the camp, as per his orders.22 Linden, outranking Sparks, attempted to overrule him. But Higgins managed to get inside, only to be mobbed and nearly trampled to death by hundreds of inmates. Soldiers from the 222nd and 157th Infantry both fired their weapons into the air to disperse the out of control inmates and rescue Higgins. It appears that General Linden took offence at one of Sparks’ soldiers, who was swigging from a bottle, and rapped him on the helmet with his swagger stick. Sparks, in an outrageous display of gross insubordination, perhaps fuelled by the grim and emotional sights in the camp, drew his Colt .45 pistol and levelled it at General Linden, saying: ‘If you don’t get the fuck out
of here I’m going to blow your brains out!’ Another version of this story has Sparks yell: ‘If you ever touch one of my men again, I’ll kill you!’ Either way, the two men almost came to blows before Lieutenant Colonel Walter Fellenz, on Linden’s staff, jumped between them. But a fresh confrontation developed between Sparks and Fellenz.

  ‘I’ll see you after the war!’ threatened Fellenz.

  ‘You son of a bitch,’ yelled back Sparks. ‘What’s the matter with right now?’23

  Fortunately, Linden’s group left before things became any worse. In the meantime, troops from both the 222nd and 157th Infantry Regiments entered the camp.

  One unit machine-gunned to death sixteen SS who had their hands raised in a coal yard. They were part of a larger group that included Wehrmacht troops from the nearby hospital, captured by I Company, 157th Infantry Regiment. I Company executive officer Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead, a Sioux Indian, segregated the SS from the other prisoners and marched them into the coal yard. The young GI manning the machine gun shouted that the prisoners were trying to run away, and opened fire. An officer kicked the teenager away from the weapon, but he and his squad had managed to kill or wound many of the prisoners.24

  Prisoners beat another SS man to death at this location. Between twenty-five and fifty SS and Kapos were summarily dispatched by enraged prisoners, the American soldiers standing back and watching. In some cases, GIs handed the prisoners weapons. A further seventeen SS were executed outside Guard Tower B, while many more were shot by sickened American troops, horrified and deeply traumatized by the piles of rotting, skeletal bodies that lay unburied throughout the facility. Eventually, their officers brought US troops under control and order was restored.

  Though understandable, the American reprisals constituted a war crime, a potentially deeply embarrassing situation for the Allies. There was serious talk for a time of bringing some officers before courts-martial. However, General George S. Patton, the newly appointed Military Governor of Bavaria, dismissed all charges.

  For many of perpetrators of the horrors of Dachau, and those Germans who suppressed the Bavarian freedom revolts, death caught up with them soon enough. The former commandant of Dachau, Eduard Weiter, tried to hide out in the Austrian mountains. He was probably murdered at Itter by a fellow SS officer on 2 May 1945. The Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, hid in Berchtesgaden, just below Hitler’s private mountaintop retreat on the Obersalzberg, until he and his wife committed suicide on 7 May 1945. Oswald Pöhl, if indeed it was him that ordered the crushing of the Dachau revolt, was hanged at Landsberg Prison in 1951 for crimes against humanity.

  For the leaders of the Dachau town uprising, their bravery in standing up to the Nazis was honoured. The dead are commemorated on a plaque on the town hall wall. Scherer served as deputy mayor until April 1952, while many of the other leaders and resisters continued to lead prosperous lives in the town after the war. In November 1946, six small streets around the town hall were renamed in honour of the fallen and the plaza christened ‘Resistance Square’. The leader of Bavarian Freedom Action, Rupprecht Gerngross, the inspiration for the uprising at Dachau and the man responsible for frightening the SS into abandoning the tens of thousands of vulnerable prisoners at the concentration camp instead of killing them, died in Munich in 1996, aged 80.25

  Chapter 12

  A Measure of Justice

  ‘My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty.’

  Franz Stangl, 1970

  At war’s end, a host of Nazi war criminals that were responsible for many of the heinous crimes outlined in the preceding chapters of this book had a choice to make. They could either answer for those crimes before Allied justice or flee into hiding. Unsurprisingly, considering the nature and gravity of their crimes, most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust chose the latter option.

  For decades after the end of the war, these men remained hidden in countries all over the world. Some, in particular the ‘managers’ of the Holocaust – the RSHA officials, Einsatzgruppen commanders and camp commandants – were actively hunted by the Israelis and a host of selfappointed ‘Nazi hunters’. Others, mostly the lower functionaries of the SS terror state, were left alone while there were bigger fish to fry, and many tried to re-enter their pre-war lives, living unobtrusively in Germany and Austria as decent, law-abiding citizens. But, inevitably, their wartime crimes eventually caught up with them. Some were tried and imprisoned, but many managed to evade meaningful justice to pass away peacefully in retirement homes. A few linger on among us today.

  SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Stangl was a man who was waiting to be exposed once the Nazis surrendered in May 1945 – it seemed almost inevitable, as he had the blood of 800,000 Jews on his hands. Between August 1942 and August 1943, Stangl had been the commandant of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Previously, Stangl had commanded the Sobibor extermination camp, where another 100,000 Jews had perished under his rule. By the summer of 1945, Stangl, in common with many other Nazis, had taken refuge in the Austrian Alps, among the last areas to be overrun by the advancing Western Allies. The small, pretty Alpine villages with their wooden chalets and verdant green pastures were literally crammed with desperate SS men, all looking for a way out of occupied Europe. US Army patrols swept the valleys in a relentless search for high-ranking war crimes suspects. Stangl, who was 37 years old at the time, was hiding in the home of an Austrian policeman and family friend in the village of Altausee.

  By an amazing coincidence, another major war criminal was in Altausee at the same time as Stangl. SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, Reinhard Heydrich’s deputy until his assassination in 1943, and the man who was directly responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution, triggering resistance by Jews across Europe, was a highly sought-after prize for Allied war crimes investigators. Eichmann knew that if he was caught he could expect only a one-way visit to the scaffold.

  Due to the chaos that prevailed after the German surrender, many Nazi suspects were able to pass themselves off as someone else. Stangl, in common with many SS men, discarded his uniform and changed into the tunic of a less controversial part of the German armed forces. All prisoners were processed through interrogation centres in the hope of netting war criminals, but due to the sheer number of German prisoners, the Americans and British were overwhelmed and many Nazi war crimes suspects managed to fool their captors with creaky cover stories and false documentation. Under a standard American interrogation, Stangl admitted that he had been an SS officer, but did not mention either the T-4 programme or his involvement with the Aktion Reinhard death camps. Instead, he told the Americans that he had been employed on anti-partisan duties in Italy and Yugoslavia, which was true, and was convincing enough that his interrogators believed him. Stangl had indeed served in the region after the conclusion of Reinhard, as had nearly all of the men who had staffed the extermination camps, so he was able to speak honestly and from experience. The Americans, believing Stangl to be essentially harmless, duly transferred him to the Glasenbach Prisoner-of-War Camp just south of Salzburg in July 1945. At Glasenbach, Stangl became just another prisoner among 20,000 former German servicemen. Conditions were rough and ready inside the camp, but he was able to see his wife and after a few months the living conditions began to improve, along with the food, as the Americans became better organized.

  Adolf Eichmann remained on the loose while Stangl cooled his heels in a prison camp. Eichmann and his adjutant, SS-Obersturmführer Rudolf Janisch, headed to Salzburg. From there, they continued northwest into Germany. After several close shaves, Eichmann was eventually captured when an American patrol found his blood group tattooed under his left arm, as had been the SS requirement. When confronted with this evidence, Eichmann admitted that he was a cavalry officer by the name of SS-Untersturmführer Otto Eckmann.1 He carefully chose the name Eckmann because of its similarity to his real name, so that if anyone recognized him in a camp and called him by his real name, the Americans probably would not catch o
n. Eichmann was processed through several prison camps, fearing all the while that he would be exposed, but somehow the Allies kept missing this greatest of Nazi prizes.

  In January 1946, Eichmann’s collar suddenly began to feel a little tighter when, barely 30 miles away from his camp, the Nuremberg Trials opened. His name was repeated over and over during the crossquestioning of one of his former subordinates, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny, who was determined to save his own neck by fully cooperating with the tribunal. Eichmann’s role in Aktion Reinhard and other atrocities was carefully outlined. In fear of exposure, he revealed his true identity to several other SS officers in the camp. Some SS officers, who had not been involved with the camps or with the Einsatzgruppen murders, recoiled in disgust at Eichmann’s presence, though for the sake of their SS blood oath, they agreed to help him escape from the camp. On 5 February 1946, Eichmann duly escaped, carrying forged papers in the name of Otto Henninger. He immediately headed 200 miles south to the Bavarian town of Prien, where he hid out in the house of the sister of an SS sergeant whom he had been imprisoned with. But the area was full of US Army patrols so Eichmann decided to move on, eventually finding work through SS contacts as a forester in the village of Eversen, close to Hamburg in northern Germany. Eichmann would stay out of sight in Eversen for the next three years, biding his time until he could flee the country.2

  In the meantime, Franz Stangl sat in Glasenbach PoW Camp, also increasingly worried for his safety. In the summer of 1947, the Austrians had commenced investigations into the T-4 euthanasia programme that Stangl and his Aktion Reinhard colleagues had all been heavily involved in. Stangl was soon identified as a major accomplice to the murders, and was moved to an open prison in Linz to await trial. This was a grave error on the part of the Austrian authorities. They knew nothing yet of Stangl’s involvement with Aktion Reinhard, but Theresa Stangl soon convinced her husband that he must escape or face the hangman. On 30 May 1948, Stangl, in company with another prisoner named Hans Steiner, escaped from Linz. Theresa had given her husband some cash and family jewellery, and Stangl had collected together some canned provisions for the journey. Stangl and Steiner’s first destination was the Austrian city of Graz, 130 miles to the west. The two men walked all the way to save money.3 Stangl avoided arrest in Graz, managing to sell the jewellery. Whilst in Graz, Stangl ran into an old Reinhard colleague from his days at Sobibor – SS-Oberscharführer Gustav Wagner, deputy commandant at Sobibor when around 200,000 Jews had been gassed. Wagner, whom the Jews had feared perhaps more than any other SS overseer because of his vigilance and cold, calculating violence, was now a penniless vagrant, and he begged Stangl to take him with him. Wagner joined Stangl and Steiner, and the three men prepared to cross over the Alps into Italy. They wanted to get to Rome, where it was rumoured that a German bishop named Alois Hudal was using his Vatican connections to help Nazi fugitives escape from Europe.4