In order to handle this massive influx, the facilities at Auschwitz would have to be upgraded, the staff trained and the process made even more efficient. They would need someone to run this enormous logistical undertaking—someone with experience, someone they could trust.
On May 6, 1944, Rudolf received a telegram from Heinz Karl Fanslau, the chief of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate’s personnel division. The order stated that while he would retain his appointment as head of Amtsgruppe D1, he was to travel immediately to Auschwitz to “proceed with the expected new arrivals,” which was a euphemistic code for “oversee the mass extermination of the Hungarian Jews.”
Rudolf arrived back in Auschwitz on May 8, 1944. His first stop was to visit Hedwig and the children, who were still living at the villa. He had last seen Annagret six months earlier, when she was only two months old. Hedwig was not happy that Rudolf had been absent for so long. She often said, “Don’t think of your duty all the time, think of your family too.” But this visit was no different; Rudolf did not have time to play with his children—there would be no rowing on the Sola River or petting the animals in the garden—for the trains would soon start rumbling out of Budapest towards Poland.
Rudolf set about making the camp ready for the arrival of the Hungarian Jews straightaway. He believed that Arthur Liebehenschel, his replacement as Kommandant of Auschwitz, had been too soft and quickly imposed strict rules and regulations on his staff. Liebehenschel himself had already left to take command of an extermination camp in Majdanek. Rudolf conducted an inventory of the Auschwitz camps and ordered that major repairs to the crematoria be undertaken, with additional pits dug nearby in which to burn the corpses. New railway lines that extended to within a few yards of the crematoria had finally been completed, so he also ordered the guards to keep the short walk to the gas chambers free of obstacles. Within a few days the camp was ready for the transports.
Jewish women and children in Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944
On May 15, 1944, the first trains from Hungary arrived in Auschwitz. By July 8 more than 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported on 151 transports. Of those trains, 136 were sent to Auschwitz, where 90 percent of the prisoners were exterminated upon arrival. The “selections” were overseen by Josef Mengele and Fritz Klein, the camp doctors. The crematoria were unable to keep up with the number of prisoners being killed, so the extra bodies were dragged out to the newly dug pits, where they were doused in oil and burned. The black smoke from the pyres could be seen miles away.
This extermination program was code-named “Aktion Höss” by the Germans, for it was Rudolf who oversaw the mass murder of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz. On July 29, senior Nazi figures gathered in Solahütte, a retreat a few miles from the camp, to celebrate Rudolf and the successful completion of the operation.
Front row (left to right): Karl Höcker, Otto Moll, Rudolf Höss, Richard Baer, Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler, and Josef Mengele, July 1944
At the end of the month, Rudolf was recalled to Berlin to resume his job as chief of Amtsgruppe D1. Now that Auschwitz was once again running smoothly, Richard Baer—who had previously worked as Oswald Pohl’s assistant—took command of Auschwitz I.
Rudolf spent the latter half of 1944 visiting the camps under his purview, noting how conditions had worsened as the German government tightened its belt during its final push to win the war. One of the camps he visited was Belsen. Until 1943, this camp had acted as a holding facility for prisoners of war. Himmler had then ordered that it be used to process the Austauschjuden—a ransom system in which high-profile Jews, mostly from the Netherlands, were released for large quantities of money or exchanged for German citizens held in other countries. Compared with other concentration camps, conditions in Belsen had been fairly reasonable. That was until the spring of 1944, when the camp had become a holding center for the diseased and dying. At this time the camp housed more than 15,000 Jewish inmates from around Europe, double the number that the camp had been designed to hold.
By the time of his visit in the autumn of 1944, Rudolf saw that the camp had deteriorated rapidly.
The camp was in a wretched state. The huts for the inmates, the buildings for the staff and even the barracks for the guards were badly dilapidated. Sanitation was far worse than in Auschwitz. In spite of all that I had become accustomed to at Auschwitz, even I must describe the conditions here as terrible.
On his return to Berlin, Rudolf persuaded Glücks that he must remove the Kommandant of Belsen and replace him with his old adjutant from Auschwitz, Josef Kramer. Rudolf hoped that a new leader might improve conditions in the camp.
As he traveled the country, passing through Hamburg, Dresden and Frankfurt, Rudolf found many of Germany’s greatest cities in ruins following months of Allied aerial bombardments. Tens of thousands of civilians had now been killed, more had been wounded and millions had been rendered homeless. The attacks were also felt in Berlin, as the city underwent intense fire bombings from the Allies.
Not only was there physical damage—life in the big cities was in great disorder—the psychological effects were also far-reaching. Anyone observing the faces and behavior of people in the public air-raid shelters, or in the private shelters of apartment buildings, could see their distress and fear of death, whether or not they tried to conceal it, as the carpet-bombing came closer and closer. They clung together, seeking protection from the men when buildings shook and parts of them collapsed.
As life in Germany became increasingly treacherous, Rudolf decided his family should be in Berlin. If things turned out badly, they would be close by in case he had to make a quick exit.
*
In early January 1945, Rudolf was ordered back to Upper Silesia to instruct those in charge of Auschwitz how best to prepare for the oncoming Red Army. He never made it. By the time he reached the outskirts of Krakow, the Soviet forces had cut off access to the camp. Just before their arrival, and under direct instructions from Berlin, the guards had destroyed any evidence of genocide by blowing up the crematoria, dismantling the gas chambers and scattering the doors in a nearby field, and burning all the documents in the administration block. They had then ordered almost the entire population of the camp, many of whom could barely walk, out of Auschwitz, and into the freezing countryside, thereby commencing a forced march away from the approaching Red Army. It was this scene that Rudolf came across, a few miles away from Auschwitz.
I saw columns of prisoners forging a way with difficulty through the deep snow, without any food. Most of the noncommissioned officers leading these processions of the walking dead no longer knew which way they were supposed to be going . . . It was easy to follow this trail of human suffering, for every few hundred meters you came upon a prisoner who had collapsed or had been shot . . . The dead at the roadsides were not only prisoners but also refugees, women and children. At the way out of one village I saw a woman sitting on a tree stump, rocking her child and singing. The child had died some time ago, and the woman had lost her mind.
More than 60,000 men, women and children were forced on a thirty-five-mile march to trains waiting for them in Loslau. They wore only thin shirts and trousers. The majority had no shoes or socks. Despite being weakened by years of starvation and hard labor, they were pushed forward at gunpoint, trudging through snowdrifts, across icy roads and in winter storms. More than 15,000 Auschwitz prisoners died during this forced march.
The lucky few who survived were then herded onto cattle cars on which they spent four days, without food or heat, traveling to what they were told was a “convalescent camp.” The prisoners had no blankets to fend off the freezing temperatures, so they kept warm by blowing on each other’s freezing bodies and sang songs to keep their spirits up. After four wretched days the train was brought to a halt and the prisoners were forced to march for hours across the barren landscape to the camp at Belsen.
In the middle of March 1945, Rudolf returned to Belsen with Pohl. This would be his las
t visit to the camp. By now its population had risen to 50,000—seven times the camp’s capacity—with as many as five hundred dying every day. Kramer had proven unable, or unwilling, to improve conditions. Food and water supplies, already scarce, were now unavailable for days on end. Raw sewage ran through open gutters into a nearby field. Belsen had reached a point of total horror: typhus and other infectious diseases had spread rapidly, starvation was rife, and thousands of corpses were left unburied. One in ten prisoners had resorted to cannibalism, cutting up the dead bodies that lay around the camp and eating their flesh. “Kramer was unable to do anything about it,” Rudolf said. “Even Pohl was shaken when he saw the state the place was in.”
*
When Rudolf returned to Berlin he was greeted by shocking news: the war had arrived at the doorstep of the German capital. Having swept through Poland and Silesia, capturing Warsaw and Krakow, the Red Army was now gathered along the eastern banks of the Oder River, less than forty miles from Berlin’s city limits. The combined Soviet forces included over two million men, 100,000 vehicles and 6,000 tanks. At the same time, Berlin continued to suffer from the British and American air forces’ unrelenting aerial campaign, with thousands of bombs striking the city. It was clear to everyone that the war had reached a critical juncture.
When Hedwig saw Rudolf she asked about their future. “How are we going to win the war?” she said. “Do we really still have anything in reserve that will decide it in our favor?”
Rudolf realized that the end was near, but even now he found himself unable to answer with honesty. There was still hope, he replied. But he knew better. On his trips he had seen the dysfunctional arms factories, the madness of the camp evacuations and the plummeting morale of the troops.
Time had run out. Rudolf began to make preparations for the family’s hurried departure from Berlin.
12
HANNS
BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
1945
* * *
Lieutenant Hanns Alexander arrived at the Bruxelles-Nord station on May 8, 1945. Wearing his green khaki uniform and peaked hat, and carrying a duffel bag, he crossed the busy street and checked into the Grand Hotel. In his jacket pocket he kept a small photograph of Ann.
Hanns was under orders to report to the British headquarters in Uccle, a Brussels suburb. However, the residents of the Belgian capital were in no mood to allow a dapper young British officer to pass untoasted, for Hanns had arrived on Victory in Europe Day. The city had erupted in national celebration: business owners placed photographs of King Leopold in their windows; the Belgian flag fluttered from balconies; grocers, haberdashers, chocolatiers and tailors had arranged their windows so that the goods displayed the red, yellow and black of the national flag. In the midst of this euphoria, Hanns was pulled into bars, beer was bought for him and girls were kissing him on the lips.
The victory brought Hanns great satisfaction, but it did not bring him relief. For he remained on active duty and he had no idea when he would be returning home.
It took three days for Hanns to make it to Uccle. Upon arrival, he was told that he had been assigned to the Interpreters’ Pool, and that he was to help with the interrogation of SS officers who had been captured at a recently liberated concentration camp.
He was in an upbeat mood that morning when he and his driver climbed into their small army truck. As they were leaving, the adjutant told them half jokingly, “Avoid the military police. Every time you see them, they’ll want to give you an injection for typhoid.” Never having heard of Belsen, which the British had liberated only three weeks earlier, Hanns had no idea what he was talking about.
Clearing Belsen concentration camp, April–May 1945
They drove three hundred miles, north through Belgium and the Netherlands and then east towards the German border. Alongside the road lay the detritus of five years of war: burned-out tanks, overturned trucks, shelled-out buildings. This was the site of some of the heaviest fighting. There were few civilians, as much of the area had been evacuated during the battle for Aachen, which American troops had won only a few months before. Those still resident had hung white flags outside their houses to indicate compliance. The first major city they came to was Cologne, but after suffering more than two hundred air raids, including one with more than a thousand bombers, there was little left. Its bridges had collapsed, its buildings lay in ruins, its streets were filled with rubble. They skirted the edge of the city and continued on, seeing similar scenes as they passed Düsseldorf and Dortmund. The only vehicles on the roads were military ones, on their way to resupply the forward-positioned forces. This was the first time that Hanns had been in his native country since 1936. The destruction was both disorientating and shocking.
It was early evening on May 12, 1945, when they arrived at the barbed-wire gates of Belsen. Inside the camp, corpses lay piled on top of each other. Bulldozers had begun the work of disposing of the bodies, pushing the dead into mass graves. The living prisoners were so thin that their ribs poked through their skin. Mothers clutched dead children; shaven-headed survivors in black-and-white-striped uniforms stared vacantly by decrepit wooden barracks; painted signs warning of typhus epidemics were everywhere. There was no water, no food, inadequate medical supplies and little shelter.
Hanns’s first impressions of Belsen were visceral.
It had only been opened a few days. It had not been cleared yet. It had been closed so that Typhus would not run all over Germany. The SS guards were no longer there, but there were Hungarians who were not much better than the Nazis. Before it came to interpreting it was a question of cleaning the camp out. Everybody did whatever they could. There were dead bodies walking about, dead bodies lying about, people who thought they were alive and they weren’t. It was a terrible sight. Whenever one went in and out of the camp we were sprayed with DDT.
Hanns’s first task was to help bury the corpses strewn across Belsen’s grounds. With the help of other soldiers—one holding the legs, the other grasping the arms—Hanns carried hundreds of bodies to a mass grave. Back and forth he went all day, his arms aching with the strain, the stench awful. Once one grave was full, a British Army rabbi stepped forward and, with Hanns and the other Jewish prisoners and soldiers standing nearby, read the Jewish prayer for the dead. They then moved on to the next mass grave, until that too was full, and so they continued until the grounds had been cleared.
All the British soldiers were deeply disturbed by what they had found in Belsen. But Hanns’s reaction was different. The atrocity at Belsen had happened in the country of his birth; its victims were mostly Jews, his people. He could understand the German-speaking prisoners, people with whom he shared a context and background. Their story could so easily have been his. For Hanns, this was his home, and there would be no respite. It was as if Belsen had tripped a switch in him. No longer was he a carefree, selfish young man. He was gripped by a barely controllable rage. And he sensed a purpose.
For the first time in his life he felt compelled to act. During his first week, he was approached by a nurse from the Red Cross, who asked him to help a five-year-old girl who claimed that her mother had been shipped out just before the camp’s liberation, and was convinced that she was still alive. Hanns realized that finding the girl’s mother among the now millions of displaced people across Europe was a near-impossible task. Nonetheless, he agreed to help and, after asking around, discovered that some Belsen inmates had indeed been evacuated to a camp outside Wolfsburg, near Hanover.
Hanns drove the child and the nurse to Wolfsburg. Once there, he borrowed an armored car from the British commander and told the nurse to climb up onto the roof. They then drove around the camp with the nurse clutching a megaphone to her mouth and clinging onto the roof as she shouted in German for the girl’s mother to come forward. After several minutes they heard a loud shriek from the crowd as a woman came rushing towards the truck. A few seconds later she was reunited with her daughter.
*
&nb
sp; On May 16, a secret telegram was sent from British Army headquarters to Lieutenant Colonel Leo Genn in Belsen: he was instructed to take command of the teams of investigators and interpreters who had assembled at the camp. This new outfit was to be called Number 1 War Crimes Investigation Team, or “1 WCIT.”
In the three weeks since the camp’s liberation a limited number of witness statements had been collected by three investigators: Major Geoffrey Smallwood, Major P. I. Bell and Captain Alfred James Fox. Two young female former prisoners assisted the team, since the original British Army interpreters hadn’t been able to cope with the horrors of Belsen and, according to Smallwood, had “cracked up and gone sick.” Genn was now instructed to set the investigations on a more formal footing. In particular, he was to begin interrogating the former SS guards and officers, many of whom had originally worked in Auschwitz and who were now being held in a prison in Celle, a small medieval town fifteen miles from the Belsen camp.
Genn sought out Hanns, and told him that he would work as an interpreter for 1 WCIT. This would have been a welcome relief for Hanns after the clearing of the camp. By the end of that day, the team had been assembled: Lieutenant Colonel Leo Genn was commander and Major S. E. Champion his assistant. They would be supported by two former detectives—Lieutenant R. E. Robichaud and Captain Fox—who would spearhead the gathering of evidence. These men would in turn be assisted by a small group of interpreters, of whom only one had so far arrived in Belsen, Lieutenant Hanns Alexander. In addition, there were eight noncommissioned officers who would help with driving and administration and provide armed backup when needed. Eight days after Germany’s official surrender in Berlin, Genn’s team of twelve amounted to Britain’s entire in-field war crimes staff.
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