The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Following the road along the edge of the quarry, Fritz and his guards came to a compound of low barrack huts. Here the Wehrmacht guards handed him over to the SS and departed.

  Fritz had been expecting an interrogation and a beating, but received neither. They still weren’t sure what to make of him. An SS sergeant marched him to the main gatehouse, another titanic construction of granite, with two towers crowned by lookout posts decked with floodlights and machine guns. This was the main entrance to the prisoners’ part of the camp (the gatehouse he’d seen at the front led to the SS garages).

  Passing into the fortress, Fritz found himself in a surprisingly small and ordinary interior; it was more compact than Monowitz, and filled with rows of similarly basic wooden barracks arranged either side of a narrow roll-call ground. The sergeant disappeared into the gatehouse, ordering Fritz to wait by the wall.

  A few prisoners were hanging around there. One came over and studied Fritz’s civilian clothes. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What’re you here for?’

  ‘My name’s Fritz Kleinmann. I’m from Vienna.’

  The man nodded and walked off. A few moments later he came back accompanied by another prisoner, who had an air of authority, clearly some kind of functionary.

  ‘You’re from Vienna,’ he said. ‘Me too. Been here for years.’ He studied Fritz. ‘This place is pretty bad, but the one thing you really don’t want to be here is a Jew. Jews last no time at all.’ With that, he walked off.

  Eventually the sergeant emerged from the gatehouse and, to Fritz’s surprise, asked whether he had an Auschwitz tattoo. There had been a few transports in from Auschwitz lately, and they were on the lookout for strays.

  ‘No,’ said Fritz. He rolled up his right sleeve. ‘See, nothing.’ The full head of hair and the healthy look of him were convincing enough, and the sergeant seemed satisfied. He put Fritz in the custody of a functionary prisoner who took him to the bathhouse.

  There he met the Viennese prisoner again. This time he introduced himself properly; his name was Josef Kohl, though everyone called him Pepi. He was clearly a man of some importance; Fritz learned later that he was the leader of Mauthausen’s resistance. Feeling instantly at ease with him, Fritz finally admitted the truth. Some of it, anyway: the fact that he’d been in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and the story of his escape from the transport, right up to his arrest. That was all. He’d been a political prisoner, he claimed. Any hope of surviving here would depend on hiding his Jewishness.

  For the third time Fritz went through the ritual of being a new prisoner: the shower; clothes and belongings confiscated. When the clippers ran over his scalp and his new-grown hair fell in clumps, he knew he was back in the nightmare for good.

  ‘Paying the price for keeping your address secret,’ said the Gestapo clerk as his details were taken down. Fritz looked enquiringly at him. ‘Only reason you’re here,’ said the clerk, nodding at a note from the Wehrmacht officer on his desk. Seeing Fritz’s expression, he added, ‘Too late for that now, my lad.’

  Did they still think he was a spy? Fritz was in a hideous dilemma. If he confessed the truth, there would be no hope of finding a way out of this situation. The sight of that quarry confirmed all he had ever heard about Mauthausen’s evil reputation. But if he kept silent he would be tortured and probably shot.

  He decided it would be safest to confess, sticking to the same half-truth he’d given Pepi Kohl. Admitting he’d gone astray from the Auschwitz transport, he rolled up his left sleeve and revealed the tattoo. ‘Grounds for imprisonment?’ the clerk asked.

  ‘Protective custody,’ Fritz answered. ‘German Aryan, political.’

  The clerk didn’t bat an eye. Fritz was entered on the records and assigned his third prisoner number: 130039.2 No enquiries could be made about him, even if the Gestapo had been interested in doing so. Auschwitz no longer existed; it had finally fallen to the Red Army on 27 January – the same day Fritz boarded the soldiers’ train at Blindenmarkt. The only souls found in Monowitz had been the few hundred half-dead spectres in the hospital, many of whom didn’t survive long after liberation.3

  Fritz gave the name of his cousin Lintschi – who was officially Aryan – as his next of kin, and his real Vienna address. As far as he knew from Fredl Wocher, there was nobody living there to be endangered by association with him. As for his trade, he calculated his answer. He’d acquired a variety of skills in the camps, but which ones should he admit to? It didn’t look like there’d be much call for builders here, and he guessed that any surplus workers would end up in the quarry. So he told them he was a heating engineer.4 It was half-true – he’d helped build and fit out a few heating plants, and had learned from his papa how easy it could be to bluff one’s way in a trade.

  Although his escape bid had failed, it had at least given him a respite in which he’d built up his health and strength. He knew well what an advantage this would give him in surviving. What he didn’t know was just how crucial that would be. Even after spending all his adult life in a hell on earth, the worst was yet to come.

  בן

  Fritz was assigned to a block unsettlingly close to the camp bunker, which had a gas chamber and crematorium attached. In the next section of the camp, separated by a wall, hundreds of Soviet prisoners of war were kept in appalling conditions, starved and put to murderous hard labour. There had been a major escape two weeks earlier, the Russians using wet blankets to short the electric fence. Many were machine-gunned, but four hundred got out. For days afterwards the local people had heard gunshots from the woods as the Russians were hunted down and executed.5

  The camp was overcrowded, with blocks intended for three hundred prisoners holding many times that number. Like all concentration camps on Reich soil, Mauthausen was overflowing with evacuees from Auschwitz.

  Fritz was looking forward to his reunion with his papa and friends, who must be somewhere among the multitude. But as he asked around, he couldn’t find anyone who knew where they were, or who recognized their names. As far as he could gather, although there had been transports from Auschwitz, nobody knew of any that had arrived on or about 26 January.

  Eventually he had to conclude that his papa simply wasn’t here, and never had been. But if that was the case, where on earth was he? Fritz had heard stories of atrocities in Poland and the Ostland – whole transports of Jews murdered in the forests. Was that what had happened to the Auschwitz transport? Was that the fate Fritz had escaped?

  אבא

  Gustav sat with his back against the wagon wall. Fritz was gone, launched over the side into the freezing night. Pray God he would find his way to home and safety. Gustav was desperately weak and tired. He’d had no food for days, and only a mouthful of snow for moisture. ‘One man will kill another for a little scrap of bread,’ he wrote. ‘We are veritable artists of hunger … we fish for snow with a mug tied to a string dangled out of the wagon.’

  Later that night the train with its freight of dying men and corpses pulled in at the Mauthausen ramp. An SS cordon surrounded it. Hours ticked by; dawn came, and then the morning wore away. Inside the wagons, the men who still had their wits wondered what was happening. There appeared to be some kind of dispute going on.

  A team of prisoners from the camp came along the train and handed out bread and canned food. There was little of it – half a loaf and one can between five men. It was devoured with terrifying savagery.

  Eventually, with night drawing in again, the train began to groan and move, heading back the way it had come. Mauthausen’s commandant, with his camp full to bursting, had refused to receive it.6 It crossed the Danube again and turned west, in the direction of the German border. In a matter of hours they would be in Bavaria, and if the train carried on in a straight line it would bring them to Munich. That could mean only one thing: Dachau.

  Gustav became aware of voices raised in urgent debate. A dozen of his comrades – including several of the old Buchenwalders – had been inspired by Fritz’s
example, and were talking of escape. They appealed to Gustav and to Paul Schmidt, who had been Fritz’s kapo in the Buna Werke and had helped conceal him after his faked death. But Gustav could no more face it now than when Fritz had tried to persuade him, and Schmidt also declined to go. As the train trundled out of Linz, twelve of them climbed the sidewall and leapt over. Despite the scale of the exodus there were no shots. The SS seemed oblivious; if more prisoners had had the strength, the train might have reached its destination empty except for the corpses.

  Passing into Bavaria, they veered due north. Not Dachau, then. Day followed night – and another, and another, and still Gustav clung on to life. On the fifth day since leaving Mauthausen, they were in the German province of Thuringia, not far from Weimar. The train kept steaming north, and on Sunday 4 February – two weeks to the day since leaving Gleiwitz – it pulled into the freight yard at Nordhausen, an industrial town on the southern fringe of the Harz Mountains.7

  It was met by SS guards and a Sonderkommando from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Gustav climbed over the sidewall with extreme difficulty. Once the living had helped each other down, the dead were lifted out. By the end of the disembarkation, 766 corpses lay stacked on the loading ramp.

  Gustav had seen some terrible things, but this was among the worst. ‘Starved and murdered,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘some frozen to death, and the whole thing not to be described.’ Many of the survivors were hardly in better condition than the dead – around six hundred of them died in the two days following their arrival, out of just over three thousand who had survived the journey.8

  Tucked in a fold in a wooded ridge north of the town, Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp was about the size of Buchenwald. It was overcrowded, with over nineteen thousand prisoners crammed into its barrack blocks.

  The new arrivals went through the registration procedure, Gustav receiving prisoner number 106498.9 Assigned to blocks, they were fed at last – ‘the first warm meal since the start of our fourteen-day odyssey,’ Gustav noted. Each man got half a loaf, a portion of margarine and a chunk of sausage, ‘on which we fell like hungry wolves’.

  Gustav remained in the camp for only two days before being selected for transfer to one of the smaller satellite camps. There were no transports, so they had to march the whole way, skirting the hill on which the main camp was built, and following the valley northwest to the village of Ellrich – a walk of fourteen kilometres.

  Ellrich concentration camp was by some margin the worst Gustav had yet experienced. It wasn’t large, but it contained around eight thousand prisoners in wretchedly insanitary conditions. Despite intakes from elsewhere, the population was constantly falling due to the death toll from starvation and disease. There were no washing or laundry facilities, and lice were endemic; a failed delousing programme in the autumn had destroyed hundreds of prisoners’ uniforms, which had never been replaced. When Gustav and his comrades arrived, they were confronted by the sight of filthy inmates, many of them in rags, some of them naked except for underwear. The ‘unclothed’ were excused work and restricted to half-rations; as a result they were rapidly starving to death.10

  Gustav’s group were given two days’ rest, then put to work.

  Weakened by age and the wear and tear of five and a half years in the camps, plus the torment of the journey from Auschwitz, Gustav was shattered by the sheer unmitigated hell of Ellrich. It got to him in a way that nothing ever had before.

  Every day, reveille came at 3 a.m., which in the depth of winter felt like the middle of the night.11 The reason for this unholy start quickly became apparent. After a typically drawn-out roll call, the work details marched to the railway that ran by the camp and boarded a train which travelled to the village of Woffleben, where the main work site was located in a series of tunnels bored into the roots of the hills.12

  Germany, under constant bombardment from the air, had moved much of its armaments production underground. In the Woffleben tunnels – carved out at appalling human cost by prisoner labour – they manufactured V-2 missiles, the most advanced and most terrifying of Hitler’s secret weapons. The site resembled a quarry, with stepped cliff faces cut into the hillside; at the base, great openings like the entrances to aircraft hangars had been excavated. The whole outer area of the tunnel complex was covered with scaffolding elaborately draped in camouflage. The work that went on inside, in the deeps of the earth, was top secret and, for the forced labourers, an unimaginable hell.

  Gustav was drafted into a labour detail delving new tunnels, just to the west of the main complex. He was put with a group consisting mostly of Russian prisoners of war, doing the backbreaking work of laying railway tracks into the tunnels. The kapos and engineers were truly demonic slave drivers, lashing out with canes at anyone and everyone who caught their eye. Gustav had known nothing like it since the Buchenwald quarry. This was worse, because he had to suffer it without friends and on rations that wouldn’t sustain a bed-bound invalid: two bowls of thin soup a day, with a piece of bread. For two whole weeks the bread issue stopped and they had to make do with just the watery soup, on which to endure a shift lasting from dawn until seven thirty in the evening. He lived in filth, and within weeks was as wasted and riddled with lice as the rest.

  Ellrich was run by SS-Sergeant Otto Brinkmann, a little weasel of a man who was both a sadist and unfit for command. The commandant of Mittelbau-Dora had treated Ellrich like a dustbin into which he dumped his unwanted SS personnel and those prisoners who were least likely to survive. At evening roll call, when the prisoners were exhausted to the point of collapse, Brinkmann forced them to do exercises, lying down on the sharp stones of the unmade parade ground.

  By Gustav’s reckoning, fifty to sixty people a day were dying of starvation and abuse – ‘the perfect bone mill’. But there was a grit in him which even now would not submit. ‘One can scarcely drag oneself along,’ he wrote, ‘but I have made a pact with myself that I will survive to the end. I take Gandhi, the Indian freedom fighter, as my model. He is so thin and yet lives. And every day I say a prayer to myself: Gustl, do not despair. Grit your teeth – the SS murderers must not beat you.’

  He thought of the line he’d put in his poem ‘Quarry Kaleidoscope’ five years earlier:

  Smack! – down on all fours he lies,

  But still the dog just will not die!

  Recalling that image of resistance now, he wrote: ‘I think to myself, the dogs will make it to the end.’ His faith in that outcome was a rock, as firm as his belief that his boy was safe. Fritz, he was certain, must have reached Vienna by now.

  בן

  Fritz looked despondently at his food: a hunk of bread not much bigger than his hand and a small bowl of thin turnip stew. That, plus a mug of acorn coffee, was meant to sustain him through the whole day’s labour. Sometimes he got extra stew, but it wouldn’t hold his soul to his body for long. Just over a month had passed since his arrival, but his wrists were already visibly thinner and he could feel the sharpening of the bones in his face. He had never felt so abandoned, so devoid of friendship and support. Those bonds that had sustained him through Buchenwald and Auschwitz were no longer there; he had cut them away when he jumped from the train.

  He was now in a sub-camp at the village of Gusen, four kilometres from Mauthausen. The events that had brought him here were, in their way, even stranger than those that had brought him to Mauthausen in the first place. With Germany fighting for its very existence and desperately short of men, the camp commandant, SS-Colonel Franz Ziereis, had announced that German and Austrian prisoners who were of Aryan blood could earn their freedom by volunteering for the SS. They would form special units, provided with uniforms and weapons, and would fight alongside the regular SS for the survival of the Fatherland.13

  At a meeting of the Mauthausen resistance, Pepi Kohl and the other leaders had agreed that some of their people should volunteer. They guessed that the SS would attempt to use these units as cannon fodder or turn th
em against their fellow prisoners.14 By infiltrating resisters into their ranks, the SS’s own scheme could be turned against them; at the crucial moment, the volunteers would turn their weapons on the regular SS.

  Among the 120 ‘volunteers’ Pepi chose was Fritz. He was officially Aryan, healthy, and had the air of a fighter. Fritz was deeply reluctant; the very thought of putting on an SS uniform for any purpose sickened him. But Pepi was insistent, and wasn’t the sort of man to be easily denied. And so it was that Fritz Kleinmann, Viennese Jew, had gone along to the commandant’s office and signed up for the SS Death’s Head special unit.15

  The volunteers were taken to a nearby SS training school, where they began a hasty programme of indoctrination and instruction. While the others managed to focus on their goal and reconcile it with what they were doing, Fritz found that he couldn’t. The whole thing felt so profoundly wrong that he decided he had to leave. Resigning was impossible, so he began to misbehave, hoping to be kicked out. It was a dangerous tactic – potentially a path to a bullet in the back of the head. Eventually, after various punishments for minor infractions, he was dismissed from the unit. He became a prisoner again and was sent back to the camp, his SS career over before it had properly begun.

  He was transferred to the sub-camp at Gusen, one of a batch of 284 skilled workers, all perfect strangers to whom he felt little attachment. They were a cosmopolitan selection – Jews and political prisoners from all over the Reich: Polish, French, Austrian, Greek, Russian, Dutch; electricians, fitters, plumbers, painters, metalworkers and general mechanics, plus one solitary Ukrainian aircraft mechanic.16

  Gusen II held around ten thousand prisoners, many of them technical workers employed in secret aircraft factories in tunnels bored under the hills.17 Fritz was assigned to labour battalion Ba III, a codename for a sub-unit working in the B8 ‘Bergkristall’ aircraft plant in the tunnels by St Georgen, where Messerschmitt built fuselages for its ultra-advanced Me 262 jet fighter.18