From Plattling, Schwerin von Krosigk was transferred to Ludwigsburg, where he was reacquainted with his cousin, Bodo von Alvensleben, the former president of the Herrenklub in Berlin. The Herrenklub was the city’s most aristocratic club, and Franz von Papen was a member. It was at the Herrenklub that it was decided to allow Hitler to become chancellor - the distinguished gentlemen thought they could control him. Alvensleben joked that the reason he was in Ludwigsburg was that he was Hitler’s grandmother: he had admitted Papen, who had admitted Hitler. The next stop for Schwerin von Krosigk was Dachau, before he was returned to Alaska. While he was in Dachau he learned that the Poles were demanding his extradition, because as minister of finance he had introduced Reich taxes into Poland.44 After that the Americans transferred him to Nuremberg for his trial.
Another distinguished German who languished in a POW camp was Carl Schmitt (not to be confused with the post-war conservative politician Carlo Schmid), who was at one time known as the ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’, although he fell foul of the regime before the war, and before the Final Solution was put into effect. The Americans had him locked up, and were anxious to have him put on trial at Nuremberg. Schmitt was interrogated, and not let go until 1947.45
The end of Salomon’s ordeal was Langwasser, which was set up in the incomplete buildings of the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg. The prisoners were beaten and harried from Plattling to the train. Salomon protected himself with a bundle of blankets, but another was not so lucky:In front of me an old man fell, his cap was snatched from his head, and I recognized the elderly, white-haired conductor of the Bayreuth orchestra, Professor Reinhardt. The Americans were beating him, but two other American soldiers sprang forward and helped him to his feet. ‘So there are decent individuals among them,’ I thought to myself. Then I saw the two warm-hearted GIs cut the string with which the professor had tied his violin to the top of his pack. The road was several miles long.46
Another Langwasser inmate was Franz von Papen. After being sentenced to eight years’ hard labour he had gone straight from the court to a hospital in Fürth. When that closed he was packed off to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and then Regensburg. While he was in Regensburg he was set upon by an SS man in the washhouse who beat him bloody, fracturing his nose and cheekbone and splitting his lips and eyelids. He was sewn up by another prisoner, a surgeon. Papen says he was singled out for special treatment. Meanwhile he was convinced that the right way to get out was to appeal for a shorter sentence rather than a retrial, which might have taken years to bring about.47
Once in Langwasser the prisoners were starved once more. There was an army kitchen near by, and when the wind blew in the right direction there was a delicate aroma of dried fruit. Every now and then they were slipped something by the cooks, ‘negro soldiers, good-natured boys with whom the SS got on very well. “You second-class, me second-class,” they would say, and they would give us food whenever they dared.’ Albert Speer attested to the particular kindness of black American guards at Nuremberg.48 Langwasser had gathered up all the senior Nazis and generals who were awaiting trail at Nuremberg. They signed a ‘golden book’ from the Langwasser Theatre. Salomon noticed some of the other names: Schwerin von Krosigk, who had written something in Latin or Greek, Field Marshals von Manstein (‘For us the Reich must endure . . .’) and von Brauchitsch (‘Keep the sunshine in your heart, whether it snow or hail . . .’). It was the signal for Salomon’s release. The order sheet was headed ‘Subject: Release of erroneous arrestees’.49
The camps described by Salomon were not a figment of his imagination. In the spring of 1946 the former concentration camp dependency of Plattling contained 2,786 inmates and 1,464 foreigners of eleven nationalities; Langwasser was much bigger with 11,761 Germans and 1,389 foreigners from the same number of countries. For some reason Salomon chose to disguise the name of his first camp. This was almost certainly Auerbach on the far side of Deggendorf, which had 10,488 prisoners and 238 foreigners, as well as a women’s section.50 Another notorious camp was Zuffenhausen near Ludwigsburg in Württemberg. Otto Kumm, the last commander of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, recalled the conditions: no food to speak of, wooden planks for beds, ‘some of us were so undernourished that we could hardly get up’. For months lunch was turnip soup, with half a potato for dinner. ‘Deliberately they collected heaps of food outside the fence, which was burnt once a month in front of our eyes.’51
The long arm of American retribution spared no one; not even the princes. One of those whose spirit was broken in an American compound was the Kaiser’s Nazi son Augustus William, or ‘Auwi’. He was taken prisoner at the retirement home of his grandmother Empress ‘Vicky’ of Great Britain - Kronberg near Frankfurt-am-Main. He was in a pitiful state, but there were no medicaments to treat him. The Americans dragged him through thirty-three camps and prisons, where he slept on the ground, and denied him even the Bible to read. His sister Princess Victoria visited him in a camp near Stuttgart. She found him sitting outside a hut looking very thin. She was able to visit him again as a result of a theft at Kronberg, when some of the booty had been traced to America. Auwi was required to make a statement about the missing objects. He spent a short time after his release in Langenburg, in one of the castles of the Hohenlohes, and, for want of anywhere else to bury a Prussian prince, he was interred in the Hohenlohe family mausoleum there.52
Another prominent American prisoner was Prince Philip of Hesse. Philip had already suffered a good deal. He had been arrested on Hitler’s orders following Mussolini’s fall in 1943 and incarcerated in Flossenbürg in the Upper Palatinate. His wife Mafalda, daughter of the Italian king, was sent to Buchenwald, where she died from injuries sustained in an Allied air-raid. He was liberated in the South Tyrol with other prominent prisoners in April 1945, but the Americans had not finished with him. Philip had been an early member of the Nazi Party and the SA and the Nazi president of Hesse-Nassau. They hauled him through twenty more camps and prisons before he was released on New Year’s Day 1948. He died in Rome in 1980.53
The art historian Prince Franz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein took refuge at the Schloss of his brother-in-law Prince Ysenburg at Budingen in Hesse. He had been a simple soldier, possibly because his mother had remarried the Jewish banker Richard Merton. He had deserted at the end and discarded his uniform. Prince Ysenburg had been a Pg, and was imprisoned in the schoolhouse from where he was initially sent out to sweep the streets. The Americans began to look for a tougher approach and locked him up in the prison in Butzbach, then in a camp at Schwarzenborn near Kassel. Sayn-Wittgenstein was also incarcerated in a former Polish camp near Hirzenhain. There were men and women there. The men were obliged to camp outside, while the women inhabited the cells. He was allowed to visit his wife, who was there with him. There was no question of sleep, and the place was crawling with insects. From there he was transferred to a POW camp near Giessen. The 2,000 soldiers there were discharged only to work as slave labour in France, while their numbers grew to around 8,000. Sayn-Wittgenstein had Prince Hubert of Prussia for companionship, but mainly remembered the boredom of his prison time. He was set free on the orders of an American officer who had fallen in love with his sister-in-law and who was broad-minded enough to arrange for Prince Ysenburg’s release as well. 54
Dachau was generally used for members of the SS, but not exclusively. It was also the main depot and transit camp for American prisoners. One of the oddest inmates was Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter. He had originally been taken to Augsburg, but he was such a valuable witness to events between 1933 and 1945 that he was constantly being released to appear in trials. He was taken to Paris for Philippe Pétain’s hearings, and was able to enjoy the cafés on the Champs Elysées and a meal at Fouquets, before being returned to a cell in Mannheim. He was naturally a key witness at the Nuremberg trials, and interpreted for the American psychoanalysts who were trying to assess the personalities of the war criminals. He was close enough to the gallows to hear the ‘dull bl
ows’ of the men setting it up. Schmidt was released in 1948 at a time of a general amnesty for lesser internees who had served two years. 55
Some tough nuts suspected of major war crimes were kept in the old penitentiary in the pretty town of Schwäbisch Hall near Stuttgart. Here prisoners were subjected to some particularly nasty forms of interrogation. Old boys included SS commanders Sepp Dietrich, Fritz Kraemer and Hermann Priess, all of whom denied issuing orders to shoot prisoners of war. Seventy-four SS men were finally arraigned for the massacre of American servicemen at Malmédy, but many of their confessions were subsequently withdrawn because they said they had been extracted under torture.56 One of the last to break was the cigar-chewing SS officer Jochen Peiper, who was suspected of being chiefly responsible for the massacre. The Americans had used methods similar to those employed by the SS in Dachau. One of these was keeping the prisoner for long periods in solitary confinement. At Oberursel Peiper had been alone for seven weeks while his guards had subjected him to extremes of heat and cold. At Zuffenhausen he had been kept in a dark cellar for another five weeks. The prisoners were subjected to mock trials that resembled sessions of the Klu Klux Klan. Worse still were the mock executions, where the men were led off in hoods, while their guards told them they were approaching the gallows. Prisoners were actually lifted bodily off the ground to convince them they were about to swing.
More conventional methods of torture included kicks to the groin, deprivation of sleep and food, and savage beatings. When the Americans set up a commission of inquiry into the methods used by their investigators, they found that, of the 139 cases they examined, 137 had ‘had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team’. It was an indication of what happened if you failed to say what the investigators wanted.57 The screams of the prisoners in Schwäbisch Hall could be heard throughout the little country town. The torturers were not all American: they included vengeful Polish guards like those mentioned by Salomon. The archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings, kept a tally of reports of American brutality.58
The viciousness of the interrogators at Schwäbisch Hall was eventually brought to Clay’s attention. The men charged were Harry Thon, Bruno Jacobs, Frank Steiner and Joseph Kirschbaum - all German or German Jewish names. Most probably they all spoke fluent German - they would have needed it to be efficient interrogators. The man in charge was William Perl, a Czech psychologist trained in Vienna. It was Perl who organised the mock trials. Thon was a German refugee, ‘excitable and untrained’.59 Clay pronounced a muted apology that was tantamount to an admission: ‘Unfortunately, in the heat of the aftermath of war, we did use measures to obtain evidence that we would not have employed later when initial heat was expended.’ On the other hand he thought that the accusation of ‘unbelievable cruelty’ from Sergeant Bersin, one of the SS men, gave a distorted picture. He dismissed the appeals of the Malmédy prisoners, finding no evidence of maltreatment.60
British Camps
In May 1945 the British admitted to having 2.5 million prisoners as well as half a million wounded and a growing number of refugees from the east. Captivity was an easygoing thing in those days. An officer in the Welsh Guards, Andrew Gibson-Watt, recounts scenes of bacchic camaraderie in the South Tyrol at the end of the war, when guardsmen and German paratroopers had an all-night party with wine, exchanging cigarettes and family snapshots.61 Fleeing from Mecklenburg, Charlotte von der Schulenburg and her children found themselves in the middle of a huge POW camp in eastern Holstein. The prisoners were living in barns and stables and receiving very short commons from their captors. She recalled the monotonous noise of soldiers crushing grain with stones to make gruel which was at least some sort of nourishment. The camp was known as the ‘Kraal’. She recalled the extraordinary cultural activity of the place. Among the thousands of prisoners were actors, musicians, poets and theatre directors. Chamber music was performed, plays produced in barns. A poet read his works to hundreds of captured soldiers, sometimes under a wide-spreading tree, sometimes standing on the dung heap in the middle of the courtyard.62
The prisoners mixed freely with the refugees and helped one another. They organised their lives together, finding oats and shoes for the horses, chopping wood for heating and making schnapps on the sly. One night Charlotte von der Schulenburg recalled their slaughtering a cow. The animal was cut up and distributed and then all trace of the act was cleared away, so that when the gendarmes came looking for the culprits the next day they found nothing. For Charlotte the worry about feeding her six children was salutary: it prevented her from being overwhelmed by grief after the death of her husband.63
Some soldiers with homes to go to were gradually released. There remained the East Prussians, Pomeranians and Mecklenburger who had no way of knowing what had happened to their nearest and dearest. There were rumours that the senior officers were to be shipped to a camp in Belgium.dn As the countess had learned to read cards, generals would bring her provisions from their scanty stores in order to learn a little more of their fate.64 Not all the East Elbians were content to wait for news. One day Charlotte concealed herself in some straw in the back of a lorry travelling towards the Schulenburg mansion at Tressow in Mecklenburg. She wanted to fetch some provisions for the children, and the British were still in control of the western sector of the old Grand Duchy, as far as Lake Schwerin. After a while she realised she was not alone. She heard a rustling in the straw and turned round to see a man emerge looking like a cattle dealer. He was a von Wedel - like the Schulenburgs, of ancient Prussian lineage. He was escaping from the camp because he wanted to locate his family in the east.65
The Allies’ attitude hardened, however, partly because they had witnessed or had been made to witness the barbarities committed by the Germans, and partly because they saw a use for the men as slave-labourers. At Bergen-Belsen they fed the SS men on starvation rations and made them carry the dead without gloves. The idea was to ‘work them to death’. They achieved this in twenty out of fifty cases, but then a higher authority intervened. The SS were taken away and ordinary German POWs were made to do the work.66 The British disposed of a great many camps in Britain itself. In 1944 there were already 250,000 German POWs in Britain and Northern Ireland. There were also camps filled with Russians who had been fighting alongside the Germans - at Malton in Yorkshire, for example, where they sought solace in drinking methylated spirits. The peak figure was achieved in the third quarter of 1946, when there were 391,880 working prisoners in Britain.67 In 1948, a year before they were disbanded, there were 600 camps. The regime was not so hard, and in terms of percentages the number of men who died in British custody is strikingly low compared to the other Allies: 1,254.68 Prisoners were taken first to the ‘cages’ that were set up on racetracks or football grounds to be interrogated by the PWIS or Prisoner of War Interrogation Section. These had the job of questioning the prisoners in the camp and awarding them grades A, B or C. A was ‘white’, or free from Nazism; B was grey, or mildly tainted; C was black, Nazi. Then they were allocated to camps that might have been just a collection of tents or Nissen huts, or, if they were lucky, a ramshackle stately home.
Country houses such as Crewe Hall in Cheshire, Grizedale Hall in Lancashire, Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire and the Duke of Roxburghe’s Sunlaws in the Borders were filled with prisoners. Colonel Wedgwood complained in the House of Commons about the use of this sort of luxury accommodation and asked facetiously why they had not considered the Ritz Hotel. Not all German POWs had been treated so well, and Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London was also used to house them. Jewish Pioneer Corps soldiers were given the job of guarding them at Bourton-on-the-Hill, Watton in Caithness, Moreton-in-Marsh, Cattistock, Tiveton, Cheltenham and Kempton Park.
The leading fliers were housed in a camp outside London. In order to prepare the cases for the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials, microphones were concealed to listen to the conversations between Milch, Bodenschatz, Koller
and Galland. The British wanted to know about Göring, and to do so they planted listening devices like the Reichsmarschall’s Forschungsamt (Research Office) or Stalin’s NKVD. That way the British learned that Göring’s generals did not hold their master in high regard. He was ‘ungrateful’ and he painted his fingernails mauve. Galland, however, corrected his comrades: it was transparent varnish, not paint. An American Major Emery was sent in as an agent provocateur on 5 June 1945 and told the generals that Göring had been blackening their names in his prison in Luxembourg. The men fell for it, and began retailing stories about how corrupt Göring had been.69
In Scotland Camp 21 at Comrie was used to house 4,000 hard-bitten Nazis - U-boat crews and Waffen-SS men who gruesomely lynched Sergeant Wolfgang Rosterg. He had expressed doubt at Germany’s final victory and threatened to uncover a plot to rise up against the guards. He was hung up in the latrines. They also chased and beat Gerhard Rettig to death. Five of the murderers were hanged in Pentonville Prison in London on 6 October 1946, and another two were executed the following month. It took a tough former Prussian officer, and holder of the Iron Cross, Herbert Sulzbach to show them the error of their ways. He had written a respected book on trench warfare, but when the Nazis came to power they put him in a concentration camp as a Jew. Once more England’s gain was Germany’s loss. After leaving Comrie, Sulzbach went to Haltwhistle. This was a progressive camp with its own newspaper, orchestra, theatre and university which laid on exhibitions of prisoners’ art. Sulzbach struck up friendly relations with many prisoners that continued after their release. He was considered the apostle of democratic ideas and a political confessor.70 The youth camp at Cambridge possessed a similar figure in the pioneer Captain Starbroke who looked like a ‘caricature from [the antisemitic paper] Der Stürmer’, but was so respected by the prisoners that he was treated as if he had been made of porcelain.71
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