Before the Third Reich, Moritz Choinowski had been a vigorous self-made businessman, running a thriving tailor’s store and workshop. Now he was weak and ailing, with the SS tattoo on his pale arm a constant reminder of who had destroyed his existence. He could only work occasionally, and then only with painkillers. Employed mainly by a local dry cleaner and tailor, he earned an average of $125 a month by the mid-1950s, barely enough to live. Meanwhile, his claims for reparations, submitted years earlier, had come to nothing, despite the efforts of his daughter in Germany, with whom he had finally reestablished contact in 1953 (she had last heard from him nine years earlier, in a postcard from Auschwitz). In April 1957, Choinowski appealed directly to the president of the Bavarian Reparations Office, which had dragged out his case, to “save me from my hardship.” A few months later, he received a first payment, but he continued to live in humble circumstances. Despite his poor health he was grateful for having survived the camps, he told his daughter in one of his last letters, but he questioned what all the suffering had been for: “Humanity has learned nothing from the wars, on the contrary, almost all nations are arming once more for warfare and that will probably be the end for humanity.” Choinowski died in Toledo Hospital on the evening of March 9, 1967, aged seventy-two.3
By that time, his former Dachau comrade Edgar Kupfer was living as a recluse on the Italian island of Sardinia. He had also struggled in the early years after liberation. The bombing raid on Dachau had left him with a badly damaged foot and he suffered from a depression that pushed him to the edge of suicide. He felt like a stranger in his native Germany, and in 1953, after a spell in Switzerland and Italy, he gained entry to the United States, like Choinowski before him. But he never settled. He was plagued by pain and by nightmares about the KL, and following a breakdown in 1960, the destitute fifty-six-year-old told an acquaintance: “My life here in America has not been blessed by fortune: bellboy in a hotel, security guard in a warehouse, dishwasher, professional Santa Claus, and finally here [in Hollywood] doorman in a large cinema.”
Edgar Kupfer returned to Europe soon after and spent more than two decades in Italy, increasingly withdrawn and isolated. Bitter about the lack of interest in his chronicle of Dachau, he lived in abject poverty; again and again, he had to “tighten the belt, not to say starve,” as he put it. He had received some reparation payments in the 1950s, after a lengthy struggle in the courts. From the 1960s, he also drew a pension from the German authorities, though it was only small because unsympathetic assessors had minimized his mental anguish. The indignity was compounded by the authorities’ failure to ensure timely payments. After yet another late transfer, the normally reserved and formal Kupfer lost his composure. All these years after liberation and he still had to beg for every scrap. “Trust me, this life makes me sick,” he wrote to the Stuttgart Office for Reparations in November 1979, adding: “It would probably be best if I took my life, then you would have one troublemaker less and the German state would only have to pay for my funeral, nothing more. But I am not sure if I want to give this satisfaction to those responsible.” Kupfer eventually returned to Germany and died in a nursing home on July 7, 1991, in complete obscurity.4
All survivors had their own stories, some happier, some even more miserable than Kupfer and Choinowski. Whatever happened to them, they often faced similar hardships: the lasting pain of injury and illness, the search for a new home and job, the indifference of wider society, and the undignified struggle for compensation. And they were left with all the agonizing memories, the final cruelty of the camps. The memory of the crimes was far more torturous for survivors than for perpetrators, who often settled into quiet lives and forgot about the KL, as long as they could escape justice.5 Survivors could not hope for such oblivion.
First Steps
A few hours after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on the afternoon of April 15, 1945, Arthur Lehmann clambered across the demolished fence that had enclosed his prisoner sector and rushed to the nearby compounds for women in search of his wife, Gertrude. The SS had ripped them apart in Vught more than a year ago, having already deported their two children to their deaths in Auschwitz. Since then, Lehmann, a middle-aged German Jewish lawyer who emigrated to the Netherlands before the war, had survived an odyssey through the KL complex that finally brought him, via Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Neuengamme, to Bergen-Belsen. In the days after liberation, he continued to search in vain for his wife. Later he learned that she had died just after the arrival of the British troops: “And so the day that brought me freedom brought her death.”6
Gertrude Lehmann was one of an estimated twenty-five to thirty thousand prisoners who were freed in concentration camps in spring 1945, only to perish soon after; in all, at least ten percent of survivors had died by the end of May 1945.7 Mortality was highest in the largest camps, where misery had multiplied at the end of the war. And none of the liberated camps was bigger or deadlier than Bergen-Belsen. British troops found fifty-three thousand prisoners across two sites, with most inmates, including Lehmann and his wife, held on the grounds of the main camp. Here typhus and other illnesses still raged, and the sick and starved had received no food or drink for days. “The dying just continued,” Arthur Lehmann noted later.8
Emergency relief in the liberated KL fell to the individual Allied forces. The soldiers on the ground were poorly prepared for the humanitarian disaster. Whatever information had trickled down during the haphazard planning for the occupation—about the location of camps and conditions inside—was often outdated and inaccurate. Mostly, the troops did not even aim to liberate specific camps, they simply stumbled across them.9 Their initial reaction was shock. They were overwhelmed by the sight of skeletal survivors and decomposing bodies, and by the stench of waste and death.10 Meanwhile, a few predatory soldiers, particularly from the Red Army, used the initial chaos to assault female inmates. “That was the worst, half-dead as I was,” testified Ilse Heinrich, who had survived as an “asocial” in Ravensbrück.11
With Allied commanders unable to provide immediate order and aid, as they scrambled for more staff and supplies, survivors took matters into their own hands. As soon as the Camp SS had departed, they stormed storerooms and depots; in Bergen-Belsen, Arthur Lehmann saw the night sky light up with fires of inmates cooking their first meals in freedom. But as some survivors celebrated, a few drunk on SS champagne, others felt the dark side of inmate self-help. As in the past, inmates fought over the spoils. The weakest often went empty-handed, while some of the stronger ones ate until they were sick. “Most [inmates] immediately gobbled down everything, and a new round of dying began,” Lehmann recalled.12 Survivors also looked beyond the camps in search of supplies, walking to nearby SS settlements, villages, and towns.
The need was greatest for all those prisoners liberated outside the KL, during death transports. Desperate for food, medication, and lodging, they could not count on help from passing Allied troops, and initially had to fend for themselves. For the most part, this meant asking locals, or taking from them. After Renata Laqueur was freed from one of the Bergen-Belsen trains destined for Theresienstadt, she walked to the nearby town of Tröbitz, some ninety miles south of Berlin, which was teeming with Soviet tanks and soldiers. Laqueur entered a German home and demanded food; she ate in silence, watched by the nervous occupants. Then she went to the local shops, which were being ransacked by other survivors of the death train (the Soviet military later gave them official permission to plunder). Packing as much as she could on a stolen bicycle, she slowly made her way back to the train and her gravely ill husband: “Paul’s face—as he saw the meat, bread and bacon, jam and sugar—was more than enough reward for all the effort and agony,” she wrote a few months later.13
Many Germans dreaded encounters with freed prisoners. Some offered help and assistance, including the women of Tröbitz, who later carried Paul Laqueur and other invalids from the train to a makeshift hospital—though it is unclear whether they acted out of charity or ca
lculation.14 Many more stood back, looking at the survivors as a threat. A farmer from the village of Bergen, a couple of miles from the camp, spoke for many when he claimed that robberies by freed prisoners and slave laborers had spread “the greatest horror since the Thirty Years’ War.”15 When it became clear that ordinary Germans had little to fear from feeble survivors, who were often just as scared, the early panic gave way to disgust, with complaints about dirty foreigners defecating everywhere, and bitter resentment about their supposed privileges and profiteering. This hostility grew out of long-standing social and racial prejudices, as well as the more immediate impact of defeat and occupation. Wrapped up in their own sense of victimhood, most locals had little room for compassion.16
Adverse reactions were not restricted to former members of the Nazi national community. Allied officials, too, showed little sympathy at times. Amid all the dirt and disease, they found it hard to see the humanity in survivors, who appeared to them (to use the words of a U.S. congressman visiting Buchenwald) like “absent-minded apes.” They were particularly troubled by the survivors’ behavior. Some liberators had expected docile charges and now decried the inmates’ lack of hygiene, modesty, and morality. One British official in Bergen-Belsen complained that they made “an infernal mess of the camp,” and another recoiled at inmates fighting “for every morsel” like a “swarm of angry monkeys.”17 In part, the lack of empathy stemmed from the discrepancy between the norms of civil society, internalized by the liberators, and the norms of the camp, deeply ingrained in survivors. “Organizing,” for example, had been a basic rule of survival, and inmates naturally continued to “organize” (as they still called it) in the early days of liberation. When a baffled British soldier confronted a Polish boy, who was carrying a large sack of food during the early looting around Bergen-Belsen, and asked him if he knew that stealing was wrong, the boy answered: “Steal? We aren’t stealing, we’re just taking what we want!”18
Such tensions eased after the relief effort gathered strength and conditions gradually improved. In the largest camps, however, the situation remained critical for several weeks after liberation, as Allied officials struggled with the SS legacy of overcrowding, starvation, and epidemics. In Dachau, as French inmates reported on May 8, 1945, some of the barracks, built for seventy-five men, were still packed with up to six hundred sick inmates, who wasted away with little medical help, their bodies entangled with the dead; by the end of the month, 2,221 Dachau survivors had perished.19
The greatest challenge was Bergen-Belsen, where British forces faced an “almost superhuman task,” as Arthur Lehmann noted.20 Early on, they focused on the provision of food and water. Although the war was still raging, the British authorities quickly secured extra supplies. And as more relief workers arrived in late April, among them a group of British medical students, a more orderly refeeding routine could commence, using different diets. “Signs of humanity returning,” one student wrote in his diary on May 5. By then, a special unit had already completed the dusting of barracks and inmates with DDT, an antityphus measure that began here and elsewhere within days of liberation. Despite all these efforts, some thirteen thousand survivors of Bergen-Belsen had perished by the end of May 1945.21
The expansion of medical relief was accompanied by growing Allied control over the freed camps, though not all survivors welcomed this development. The greatest point of contention was the restriction on inmate movements. Several camps went into temporary lockdown, with the U.S. commander of Dachau threatening to shoot anyone who left without permission. The military authorities wanted to contain looting and infectious illnesses and prepare for orderly releases. The survivors, meanwhile, felt like free men caught behind KL wire.22
To maintain discipline, the military relied heavily on selected inmates, building on the existing structures (even terms like “block elders” remained in use in some camps). During the first days, organized inmate groups—often emerging from the prisoner underground—played the central role in many freed camps. With the blessing of the beleaguered liberators, they tried to distribute supplies, enforce discipline, and stop plunder. In Dachau, the camp elder proudly proclaimed the “self-administration of comrades” on May 1, 1945, which even envisaged the continuation of daily roll calls. Over in Buchenwald, armed inmates from the camp police guarded SS officials. They also patrolled the infernal “little camp,” seen by survivors outside as a source of illness and criminality, thereby prolonging the suffering of those still trapped inside; the compound resembled a “concentration camp that has not been liberated,” a U.S. army report found on April 24, 1945.23 Even as more power passed to the Allied commanders, organized inmates—often led by an international committee, as in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen—remained a major force, working with the new administration and enforcing its calls for order. “No chaos, no anarchy!” read an appeal of the Dachau committee on May 8, 1945.24
The international committees were dominated by former political prisoners, who would shape the memory of the camps for years to come; most stood on the left of the political spectrum, leading to enthusiastic celebrations of the Day of Labor (May 1) inside the liberated camps. By contrast, social outsiders had no voice at all, and Jews were marginalized, too. Neither Allied commanders nor inmate leaders acknowledged them as a distinct group, at least not initially. In Dachau and Buchenwald, Jewish survivors had to fight for a place on the international committees. “We demand that Jewish affairs are dealt with by Jewish representatives,” a young Pole wrote in his Buchenwald diary on April 16, 1945.25
This was not the only clash between inmates under the frayed banner of international solidarity. Unresolved political conflicts poisoned the atmosphere, and would continue to do so in Cold War Europe, with entrenched battles between survivor groups over commemoration. Even more pronounced were the tensions between the national groups, yet another legacy of the KL. Nationality became the main marker of the postliberation inmate community, with separate barracks, organizations, and newspapers; during the May 1 celebration, most former prisoners marched under their own country’s flag. Conflicts soon flared up over old resentments and new problems, though they rarely turned as violent as in Ebensee, where Soviet and Polish survivors apparently shot at each other. Most precarious was the position of some German survivors, who faced intense hostility because of their comparatively privileged position in the wartime KL. “To be honest, we should be glad that they did not bash our heads in,” a German inmate wrote in Dachau on April 30, 1945.26
Even the timing of releases was determined by the inmates’ national background, at least in Dachau. Within days of the German surrender on May 7, 1945, U.S. forces started to transfer former prisoners to better-appointed SS barracks and buildings outside the camp compound, with one national group following another. The final communiqué of the international committee appeared on June 2, 1945: “We depart happy and full of joy from this hell: it is over.”27
Other liberated camps were quickly cleared, too. In Bergen-Belsen, British forces moved all survivors out of the main camp within four weeks, one barrack at a time, before burning the empty huts to the ground. The last one was torched in a ceremony on May 21, 1945; soldiers and former prisoners watched as the wooden hut, a large picture of Hitler pinned to one of its walls, was consumed by flames. Sick survivors, meanwhile, had been washed and disinfected, and taken to a huge and reasonably well-equipped British hospital area nearby, with enough space for ten thousand patients. One of them was Arthur Lehmann. He was operated on twice, delirious with fever. But he slowly got better and took great pleasure in the hot baths and clean beds. Most important was the care of the medical staff, especially by the matron on his ward, who sometimes sat down by his side and listened to his story. “I told her about my wife and my children,” he wrote the following year. “She stroked my head and told me that everything would be all right. And that made me believe it, too.”28
Survivors
Trapped in the nightmare of th
e KL, prisoners had often daydreamed about a happy future. Some inmates longed for a peaceful life in the countryside, an Auschwitz prisoner wrote in 1942, whereas others imagined only parties and pleasure.29 After liberation, such visions of quiet contentment or hedonism quickly faded in the cold light of postwar Europe. The great majority of survivors were hoping to return home, though few were certain what would await them there. Once they left the compounds, they had to confront the reality of rebuilding their existence, often from Allied field hospitals and assembly centers crowded with others displaced by Nazi terror. “I have to begin to live again, without wife and family,” the Dutch Jew Jules Schelvis, who had lost his loved ones in Sobibor, wrote in a French military hospital on May 26, 1945, a few weeks after his liberation from a Natzweiler satellite camp.30
At the end of the war, the former territory of the Third Reich was awash with millions of uprooted men, women, and children. While some were making their own way home, the occupation forces discouraged such independent initiatives, concerned about obstructions of military movements, and about the spread of disease and social disorder. Instead, the Allies set a vast repatriation program in motion, moving fast to reduce the number of DPs in their care. Among the first to return were former KL prisoners.31
Although the way home was hard for all survivors of the concentration camps, it proved harder for some than for others. On the whole, western Europeans had better prospects. True, their journey through the war-torn landscape was arduous, traveling on packed trains and trucks, but it rarely lasted for longer than a few weeks. Renata Laqueur and her convalescing husband, for example, left a reception camp near Dresden on July 4, 1945; three weeks later, she was sitting on her sofa in Amsterdam, still wearing a Hitler Youth shirt she had “organized” in Tröbitz. By that time, Arthur Lehmann had been back in the Netherlands for a month, having been flown out from Germany because of his poor health (he weighed just eighty-two pounds). The quickest to be repatriated were probably French inmates, almost all of whom were back home by mid-June, where many received a hero’s welcome. A large group arrived in Paris on May 1, 1945, and marched in formation down the Champs-Élysées—past a tearful crowd, as one of them recalled—to be greeted at the Arc de Triomphe by General de Gaulle, who used the occasion to cement the image of a united “other France” of Nazi resisters, which became the focus of early postwar French national memory; later that year, de Gaulle appointed one of the survivors, Edmond Michelet, as his minister of armed forces.32
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps Page 84
