The Women who Wrote the War

by Nancy Cladwell Sorel

  Because women were constantly dying, others always arriving, beatings regularly handed out and new illnesses acquired, Ravensbrück seemed like a busy place, whereas in fact there was hardly anything to talk about, and no one had the strength to talk anyway. At night the prisoners lay in agonized exhaustion instead of sleep. That spring the barracks were freshly painted on the outside. It appeared the SS wanted the camp to look its best for whatever might happen, but Colette left before anything did. One day three hundred inmates were given civilian clothes, including stockings and scarves for their heads, and put on trucks driven by Canadian POWs. On a bad stretch in a small Bavarian town they ran out of gasoline and no more could be found, but when three days later some was found, they moved on. At last they crossed the border into Switzerland. Several of the older women, having tasted freedom, died, but the rest made it to Paris.

  Janet Flanner’s simple recitation of this young Frenchwoman’s ordeal as prisoner of the Nazis caused quite a stir when it appeared in the New Yorker that spring. To her American sisters — healthy, well fed, above all safe — that Colette survived at all was almost incomprehensible.

  Marguerite Higgins’s dream of journalistic triumph came true with the liberation of the camp at Dachau in southern Germany by the Forty-second and Forty-fifth divisions of the U.S. Seventh Army. She had joined forces with Stars and Stripes reporter Peter Furst, an American of German birth and Jewish parentage, who understood the geography and people of his native land and possessed a strong survival instinct. Furst admired Maggie’s sharp mind and instinctive courage, and she in turn was not put off by his recklessness. Hurtling along in their jeep, aspiring to be the first reporters to reach the camp that afternoon of April 29, they discovered that eleven kilometers of unsecured road separated them from their destination, and that the battle for a nearby town was perhaps not yet over. But then perhaps it was. They continued on.

  A town draped in white sheets was an encouraging sign, followed in short order by straggling detachments of German troops, lugging their arms but happy to surrender them. Higgins and Furst loaded them into their jeep until it was full; by then Maggie was less afraid of being shot by a German than she was that one of the grenades rattling around in the back of the jeep would go off. In the town of Dachau they were informed that American troops were still fighting the SS on the northern perimeter of the camp, but that buildings on the south side had been observed flying white flags. That was all they needed to hear: a little detour around the fighting and they would be there. As they neared the entrance, the heavy smell of decay became increasingly strong. Some fifty boxcars were sidetracked outside the gate; the men in the cars had been alive when shoved in there; they were now corpses, dead and rotting. A few who had crawled or been pulled out were lying on the ground, shot or beaten to death. Maggie turned aside, convulsed with nausea.

  But there was no time to pause. Joined by two jeeps from the Forty-second Infantry, they approached the SS general at the main gate. Higgins explained that the American officers would accept his surrender, but she and her companion wanted an SS officer to escort them to where the prisoners were confined. They positioned this officer on the hood of their jeep and took off, but even with this recognizable deterrent, Maggie found machine guns trained on them from one of the watchtowers. Running, she realized, was no longer an option. Instead, she turned to face them and called out, “Kommen Sie hier, bitte. Wir sind Amerikaner.” They complied, with their hands raised.

  Higgins continued her story in the Herald Tribune:

  There was not a soul in the yard when the gate was opened. As we learned later, the prisoners themselves had taken over control of their inclosure the night before, refusing to obey any further orders from the German guards, who had retreated to the outside. The prisoners maintained strict discipline among themselves, remaining close to their barracks so as not to give the S.S. men an excuse for mass murder.

  But the minute the two of us entered a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?” in about sixteen languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium.

  Tattered, emaciated men, weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!” swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled. In the confusion they were so hysterically happy that they took the S.S. man for an American. During a wild five minutes he was patted on the back, paraded on shoulders and embraced enthusiastically by prisoners. The arrival of the American soldiers soon straightened out the situation.

  I happened to be the first through the gate, and the first person to rush up to me turned out to be a Polish Catholic priest, a deputy of August Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, who was not a little startled to discover that the helmeted, uniformed, begoggled individual he had so heartily embraced was not a man.

  Meanwhile, troops from the Forty-second and Forty-fifth made their way into the encampment where they, too, were cheered and hugged. A just-released American flier showed them about the camp: the crowded barracks, the torture room, the crematorium with its piles of corpses, the place where men knelt to be shot in the back of the head. It was a day of conflicting emotions. It was also a front-page story, the unchallenged scoop Maggie had sought. To crown her triumph, for her participation in the liberation of Dachau she was awarded an army campaign ribbon, to her immense pride.

  Patricia Lochridge and Lee Miller reached Dachau the next day. A half century later Pat recalled the boxcars — “dead men spilling out of the boxcars all over the ground.” The memory that still shocked her was “the little kids, four and five years old, running around these prisoners to see if there was anything to take. I’ve often tried to think why they did that,” she mused, “and all I could say was that these prisoners really didn’t look human anymore. They were so very dead.”

  Prisoners scavenging a rubbish dump, Dachau, April 1945.

  PHOTO BY LEE MILLER. © LEE MILLER ARCHIVES.

  Lochridge was present for the compulsory visit to the camp of twenty-five of the town’s leading citizens, men and women. She described them walking solemnly along, looking straight ahead, feigning to be unaffected by the condition of the camp and its inhabitants. It was the crematorium that got through to them. So many hundreds of bodies were not easily ignored.

  Afterward she went about the town talking to people, pressing them to respond. How was it possible, she asked the town’s master baker, that he would not have talked with his customers of what went on at the camp? He protested innocence. “The business at the camp was none of our affair,” the town’s leading physician told her. “We were shamefully deceived, there was nothing we could do.” He insisted he was not a Nazi and therefore not culpable, but the following day she met a “proud Hitlerite,” the official barber for the SS troops at the camp. “You Americans are such sentimentalists,” he sneered. The town matriarch, when approached, was surprised at Pat’s interest. “The state put them there,” she said, dismissing any culpability. “They weren’t good Germans. Most of them weren’t Aryan.” Lochridge questioned another woman whom she had seen crying over the bodies stacked like wood at the crematorium. “Nothing more terrible could have been done than was done at Dachau,” the hausfrau admitted. “But most Germans weren’t involved. The Fuehrer couldn’t have known about it. He would never have permitted such suffering.” Only one woman voiced reactions that Pat could relate to. Her husband had been sentenced to a year’s internment in Dachau for disobeying a military order, and she had moved from Hamburg with her children to be near him. But she had never been allowed to see him, she said, until the day the Americans liberated him.

  Lee Miller hooted at the idea that the townspeople of Dachau could have been unaware of what went on in the camp. She pointed out that it was only just outside the town, and that the railway siding into it ran right past a number of fine villas. She photographed it all. In a small canal running beside the camp a number of dead SS personnel floated, “slithered along in the current, along with a d
ead dog or two and smashed rifles,” she wrote. She also visited the angora rabbit farm, an industry of the prison; the rabbits and the workhorses in the stable were much better cared for than the humans, she noted, although that would not have taken much doing. “Dachau had everything you’ll ever hear or close your ears to about a concentration camp,” Miller concluded.

  Martha Gellhorn reached Dachau a few days later. She did not rush to the fray anymore; she had not done that since she was the first woman to set foot in France after D Day and then was penalized for it. By the time she got to Torgau, the Russians were no longer permitting Americans to cross onto their side of the Elbe. But in the end that hardly mattered, because while she waited, what seemed like half the Russian army poured across to the American side, which made for perhaps an even better story.

  This was true at Dachau, too: five or six days after the camp’s liberation the story was a different one, but just as good. The 116th and 127th Evacuation Hospitals were well into operation. Buildings had been scrubbed clean and smelled of antiseptic, office buildings had been made into wards, and the houses in which the SS officers had lived were now luxurious quarters for the nurses. These houses were just across a stretch of grass from the crematorium, Martha noted; the SS wives and children had lived, apparently contentedly, in the midst of that smell and activity.

  The boxcars at the camp’s entrance had been emptied and the bodies buried, but in one of the hospitals Gellhorn saw a tall Polish man, the only survivor of the boxcar dead. “Now he stood on the bones that were his legs and talked,” she said, “and then suddenly he wept. ‘Everyone is dead,’ he said. A Polish doctor, five years a prisoner, tried to encourage him. ‘In four weeks you will be a young man again,’ he said. ‘You will be fine.’” But Martha did not believe his eyes would ever again be like other people’s eyes.

  In her article for Colliers, Gellhorn reported certain experiments the doctors had witnessed: to see how long an aviator could go without oxygen, for example, or how long pilots could survive in salt water at low temperatures, as might happen if they were shot down over the English Channel. Great vats of seawater were used for that one; prisoners stood in the seawater up to their necks. The limit was two and a half hours at minus eight degrees centigrade. Martha also visited the “jail” where so-called Nacht und Nebel (night and mist) men lived in small white cells, without contact with anyone or ever going outside. How they had borne this treatment was not known, as they were among the eight thousand men who, two days before the Americans arrived, had been taken out on the final transport.

  Gellhorn was still at Dachau when the German army surrendered. She found that suitable. “For surely the war was made to abolish Dachau and all the other places like Dachau and everything that Dachau stands for,” she wrote. “We are not entirely guiltless, we the Allies, because it took us twelve years to open the gates of Dachau. We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again.”

  31

  The Longed-for Day

  By May Day rumors were flying that the war would end that day, tomorrow at the latest, that it had already ended but nobody was being told, that this or that crisis was holding up the inevitable. Each rumor provided the little thrust of flame that fueled the next. All were premature. May 1 was also the day that units of the Forty-fifth Division, U.S. Seventh Army, reached Munich. This was Hitler’s favorite city; since the 1920s he had occupied an apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz. In the mid-thirties he had bought the building, converting the ground floor to quarters for his SS guards and installing bombproof shelters in the basement.

  With the sanction of the Forty-fifth, Lee Miller promptly moved in. The place lacked charm, she said, but connected to Hitler’s bedroom (decorated in chintz) was a very pleasant bathroom, and Lee always liked a good bath. Her Life photographer friend Dave Scherman took a picture of her bathing in Hitler’s tub, which became a classic of the noncombative side of the war. Miller was less appreciative of Hitler’s sculpture and paintings, but it gave one pause to sit at the conference table where Franco and Mussolini had conferred with the Fuehrer and where Chamberlain had given away Czechoslovakia.

  With a guide, Miller went about Munich photographing what had and had not survived Allied bombing. Among the former was a little stucco house, a gift from Hitler to his mistress, Eva Braun. The concrete sentry box inside the gate was unoccupied, and the front door lock shot through. Inside, Lee was fascinated. She labeled the living room “newly bought suburban”; on one table was a brass globe of the world that opened to reveal liqueur glasses. The kitchen did not appear much used. Upstairs, Eva’s ice blue satin coverlet lay pristine, and although her closet was mostly empty, her desk was fitted out with blotters, rulers, pen points, pencils, clips, and stacks of stationery. The medicine chest in the bathroom was stuffed.

  Lee Miller enjoys a bath in Hitler’s bathtub, Munich, May 1945.

  PHOTO BY DAVID E. SCHERMAN. © LEE MILLER ARCHIVES.

  Before she left, Lee took a nap on Eva’s bed and tried the telephones marked “Berlin” and “Berchtesgaden.” There was no connection.

  It was also on the first of May that news of Hitler’s death in his bunker in Berlin came over Hamburg radio. No woman correspondent reported having heard the actual broadcast — the “Achtung! Achtung!” and three rolls of the drum, followed by the statement that “our Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler ... fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery.” Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, announced as his successor, then took up the microphone to talk of Hitler’s “hero’s death” and his life of service for Germany, followed by a call to every German to “maintain order and discipline” and “do his duty at his own post.”

  Virginia Irwin and jeep driver Sgt. Johnny Wilson in Berlin , May 1945.

  SAINT LOUIS POST-DISPATCH.

  The word “fallen” was no doubt purposely chosen to imply that Russian soldiers had charged the chancellery and shot the Fuehrer as he sent final orders to his generals. In fact, Hitler had not left his bunker, a thirty-two-room structure below the chancellery, since emerging on his birthday, April 20, to “review the troops” — in this case, a nearby SS division and a little group of Hitler Youth. Joseph and Magda Goebbels were there with their six children. Eva Braun had come up from Munich with a wardrobe of clothes (which might explain why Lee Miller found so little in her closet), prepared to die with “poor, poor Adolf” whom she saw as betrayed by all.

  The truth was that he was betrayed by those who most mattered — marshal of the Reich Goering, Sigrid Schultz’s old adversary, who tried a last-minute grab for power, and even more treacherously by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who made an offer of surrender to the western Allies. It was after Hitler heard that, and learned of Mussolini’s capture and public execution — a fate he himself feared — that he determined on a quick suicide. On April 29 he married Eva, and on the thirtieth, with Russian tanks a half mile away, they lunched, said their goodbyes, and retired. Hitler put a gun to his head; his bride took cyanide. As planned, their bodies were wrapped in gray army blankets, soaked with gasoline, and burned in the little garden just outside the bunker entrance. Only a few people knew of these events until later, but what could immediately be observed by anyone near the Platz der Republik that afternoon was the red Soviet flag flying from the Reichstag.

  The capture of Berlin was an event like none other in the entire war, as Virginia Irwin was about to tell the world. She was one of the first three Americans there — although the capital had been decreed absolutely out of bounds to the Allied press. Lee Carson tried, but failed to make it.

  Irwin’s grand adventure began on the day of the Russian-American celebration by the Elbe. She and Andrew Tully of the Boston Traveler had conned a jeep from the Twenty-sixth Infantry, along with driver Sergeant Johnny Wilson. They found a way to ferry the jeep across, as presumably Carson and her buddy, Don Whitehead of AP, did with his “liberated” Mercedes. After the feast and a dance or
two with Russian officers, the women joined their fellow conspirators and sneaked off, headed for Berlin.

  Carson and Whitehead had a little bad luck. First, they lost their map, or rather it was blown away when Lee was using it for a napkin on her lap while she ate a K-ration. Then a gasket blew. A Soviet truck towed them straight through what she referred to later as “the whole Russian army.” “We ran right across their line of march,” she said. “The Russians were simply furious. Big Mongols they were, with wide faces and narrow eyes, waving their arms at us and cursing, ‘Goddam Amerikanski!’” By the time a mechanic had been found and the car fixed, the fighting was too heavy for them to continue. “The Russians were walking on a carpet of dead Germans,” she recalled. “We tried to angle through and finally got caught between the Russian and German lines.” Opting to stick with the Russians, they were taken to a command post for questioning and held for three days before their credentials were pronounced satisfactory.

  Irwin’s better luck was indicated by the banner headline above her story, POST-DISPATCH REPORTER GETS INTO BERLIN:

  From Torgau we started north, behind the Russian lines, traveling sometimes over deserted roads through dark forests. At other times we hit highways clogged with the great body of the Russian Army, beating along in its motley array of horse-drawn vehicles of all sorts.

  There were Russian troops riding in American 2½-ton trucks. There were Russian troops riding in two wheeled carts, phaetons, in old-fashioned pony carts, in gypsy wagons, and surreys with fringed tops. They rode in everything that could be pulled.