Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line

by James V Milano

  The shadows were still heavy over Austria when the Americans arrived in May 1945. Two days after they had installed themselves in Salzburg, Milano and Del Greco were eating dinner in their hotel when two of their lieutenants came up to them in a state of great distress. They were both red-eyed from weeping. They had just come back from Mauthausen concentration camp and were still shaking from the horrors they had seen. One of them, John Gassaway, a Jewish refugee from Austria who had enlisted in the U.S. Army, had seen the place where his parents had been murdered.

  Mauthausen was near Linz, Hitler's hometown, but on the north bank of the Danube. It was a work camp, not an extermination camp like Birkenau or Treblinka. This meant that prisoners were not gassed as soon as they arrived but were worked to death in the limestone quarries. In the last three months of the war, over 30,000 people had been murdered there or had died of overwork, disease, or starvation. It was the last major camp liberated by the U.S. Army, on May 4, 1945. In those desperate, final days, though Hitler was besieged in Berlin, and even after he was dead, when Berlin had fallen and German armies were surrendering piecemeal around Europe, the SS guards had tried to evacuate the survivors in Mauthausen and its satellite camps and march them deeper into the Reich. There were 110,000 altogether, and in one of the satellite camps, Ebensee, 30,000 prisoners had been ordered into a tunnel that had been packed with explosives. They were intended to be one last holocaust of the "Final Solution." But they refused to go, and, after a long hesitation, the guards decided not to slaughter them on the spot.

  When the Americans reached Mauthausen, they found ten thousand bodies in one vast communal grave. There were other bodies piled everywhere, and thousands of dying people. The soldiers, with misguided generosity, handed out chocolate and army rations to the skeletal inmates, many of whom then died of the shock of eating their fill. Hundreds of people died every day of disease or, in the first few days, of overeating, despite the best efforts of the American doctors and medics. The Americans remained for only a few days and then handed the camp over to the Soviets because the camp was in their zone. First Lieutenant Gassaway and his friend First Lieutenant Martin Wolf had driven up to the camp gates and had been admitted and shown around by the Soviet troops who had just arrived and were guarding the place. The Russians were as shocked and angered as the Americans. They had helped the two young men search through the camp records, which had not been destroyed, and had found the dates when Gassaway's parents had been brought there and when they had died. The Russians showed them lampshades made out of human skin and evidence of bestial medical experiments conducted on the inmates. About a quarter of the survivors were Jews. The rest were gypsies, Russian prisoners of war, Spanish Republicans who had escaped from Spain after Franco's victory and had been deported to Mauthausen from France, and political opponents of the Nazis or Fascists from all over Europe. There were even POWs from the Western allies, including a very distinguished British naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Patrick O'Leary, GC, DSO, who has left a graphic account of the abominations he observed.*

  The two young men talked obsessively and emotionally, far into the night, of what they had seen and what it meant. Gassaway was distraught, not only that his parents were dead but that they had died so horribly. He had seen the dead and the dying and was in agony that his parents had perished in that manner. At the same time, news reports were coming in from Dachau, Belsen, and a dozen lesser camps in western Germany, and the Soviets were showing Auschwitz and Majdanek in the east. In those pretelevision days, it took weeks before the full enormity of the crimes committed by the Germans became known and understood, before the news accounts were published and the newsreels were distributed. This was the first direct report that Milano had heard.

  The mass murder of the Jews had begun in June 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. The formal decision to kill all the Jews of Europe by gas had been made on January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin. It was an operation conducted in the deepest secrecy, but the killings were on so vast a scale, involving so many tens of thousands of people, that the news had inevitably leaked out. The first rumors of atrocities had reached the West in 1942, and detailed, specific reports from Auschwitz had come a year later. Some had been supplied by Oskar Schindler, through contacts with resistance movements in Hungary. The news had been greeted with incredulity by many who heard it, although the British and American governments had issued a detailed report and denunciation and had announced that those responsible would be tried for their crimes after the war. Milano had heard of the extermination of the Jews in 1943, but he had refused to believe. His unit had reached Naples during the advance up Italy, and one evening, in the mess hall, a colleague, First Lieutenant Leon Marcus, had told a group of intelligence officers that he had heard from his relatives in America that stories of terrible things were coming out of occupied Europe. Jews escaping from Poland claimed that the Germans were systematically gassing all the Jews of Europe in death camps. The little group of American intelligence officers, sitting in their mess in liberated Naples, listening to Marcus's thirdhand account of unimaginable horrors, could not bring themselves to believe. Many of them were Jews: the intelligence services included many Jews, particularly recent immigrants who spoke German and other languages. They had no trouble believing that their coreligionists and relatives were being mistreated and that many had been murdered, but the notion of a considered policy of extermination was impossible to accept. Their war was in Italy, where relations between the U.S. Army and Italian civilians, though former enemies, were always excellent. They might have been less skeptical if they had fought the German Army in Eastern Europe and seen the atrocities for themselves, as the advancing Russians did.

  The reports continued to trickle in as the Allies advanced on Berlin, but they were never thoroughly substantiated until the camps themselves were liberated at the end of the war. Milano noticed that stories of the murder of Jews never appeared in the army paper, The Stars and Stripes, nor in The Morgantown Post, his home paper from West Virginia, which used to arrive in bundles of a dozen or more. It was a local paper, but it carried syndicated columns from the major newspapers and chains, as well as agency reports. He thought that surely if it were true, and known, that the Germans were murdering the Jews, it would be reported in the papers. Now, after the war, the nightmare stories were proved true-and short of the truth.

  When the two distraught young officers told what they had seen at Mauthausen, Milano and Del Greco decided they had to see the place for themselves. It was a long drive from Salzburg, and they left early the next morning. They took cigarettes and chocolate for the Soviet border guards, but they were not needed. They drove across the Danube bridge into the Soviet zone and then into Mauthausen without query.

  It was all true, the stories they had heard, and worse than they could ever have imagined. This is a problem that all survivors, and those who saw the camps, have faced ever since. They are not doubted, except by fools, charlatans, and anti-Semites who seek to justify Hitler by denying his crimes. But the survivors and witnesses have usually found it impossible to convey the enormity of what they saw. The camps were huge: there was room in Mauthausen for more than a hundred thousand prisoners. Auschwitz was far bigger. That dimension may be understood, but the stench of death, fortunately, is something that cannot be re-created. The filth cannot be imagined, nor can the effect of tens of thousands of corpses. When the camps were liberated, the dead had to be shoveled into mass graves by bulldozers, whose drivers wore masks to preserve themselves from the smells and the dangers of typhus. The survivors, so emaciated that every bone could be seen through their skin, were too sick and exhausted to show much emotion. They sat or lay on the ground or in their bunks, in their own filth, and waited to die or for relief to be brought to them. Milano and Del Greco saw all this and tried to imagine what the camp had been like ten days earlier, at the moment of its liberation. The Americans, first, and then the Russians, helped by Jewish r
elief organizations, had worked feverishly to save as many of the survivors as they could, but Mauthausen was still a charnel house. After an hour, Milano and Del Greco could bear it no more and returned to Salzburg. It was the worst thing they had ever seen, and they regretted that they had gone, for surely they would dream of the horrors for months to come. They were young men, though they had been through years of war, and they could not conceive how human beings could do such things. Fifty years later, they still cannot understand.

  The experience of seeing the camps permanently affected Milano, as it did everyone else who shared it. It influenced his actions for years afterward. As an intelligence officer, he had much to do with the refugee question, because refugees were among the best sources of information on the East. There were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust scattered in camps across the breadth of Europe. Despite their best efforts, the Nazis had not finished the "Final Solution." There were four camps of Jewish DPs in the American zone of Austria and many others in the rest of the country. These were only a fraction of the refugees in Austria, who included large numbers from every country in Eastern Europe and people from all over the Soviet Union. As late as May 1947, there were still more than 181,000 DPs in the American zone, including 21,250 Jews. There were, however, two peculiarities of the Jews, apart from their uniquely horrible recent history. Unlike the other refugees, the Jews had the help of Jewish organizations based in the United States, which followed immediately behind the advancing Allied lines to rescue them immediately and alleviated their conditions rapidly in the months after the war. The other unusual feature was the presence among them of Zionists intent on getting as many of them as possible to Palestine. These groups also used the Jewish network in Europe, based on the relief organizations and the people in the camps, to smuggle arms to Palestine for use in the struggle against the British and, after Israel's independence, against the Arabs who attacked it.

  Britain had conquered Palestine from the Turks in 1918, and after the First World War had taken it as a mandate from the League of Nations. Under the terms of the mandate, approved by the League, Britain was to implement the Balfour Declaration, which promised to set up a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine without making clear just what was meant by that phrase. The Jews thought it meant allowing unrestricted immigration into Palestine, but when the native inhabitants objected, particularly when Hitler's rise to power in 1933 impelled the first rush of refugees from Germany, the British decided that immigration should be severely limited. They could not foresee that closing the door to the Jews meant condemning them to death. In a government white paper issued in 1939, they ruled that Palestine would not be partitioned but would be given its independence ten years later as a unified state. During that period, Jewish immigration would be limited to a total of 125,000. The white paper's limits were kept in force throughout the war, and those Jews who managed to reach Haifa, and were caught, were interned in Cyprus or on Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. They at least survived. Many perished on the way, partly because they had no legal destination. One notorious case was a cattle boat, the Struma, which escaped Romania loaded with refugees at the end of 1941. It was interned by the Turks in the Bosporus because the British refused its passengers visas to Palestine, and it sank there in February 1942. Seven hundred sixty-seven of its passengers drowned.

  The Jews, both in Palestine and abroad, were bitterly opposed to the white paper policy and did everything in their power to circumvent it. British officials in Palestine were less than enthusiastic about enforcement, and as a result about 200,000 illegal immigrants reached Palestine between 1944 and Israel's independence in 1948. The British thus, deservedly, got the worst of both worlds: they were blamed by the Jews for impeding immigration to Palestine while excoriated by the Arabs for permitting it.

  The Jewish Agency, which administered Jewish affairs in Palestine and which in due course became the government of Israel, took a close interest in the activities of the "underground railroad" that developed soon after the war, smuggling Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. There were many routes, the most important running through the ports of the Mediterranean and its affluents. The one that concerned the American intelligence operation in Austria ran through that country and across the Alps to Trieste, at the head of the Adriatic. Refugees would sail from Trieste to Salonika, at the head of the Aegean, where they would be put onto small ships for the run to Palestine.

  Trieste lies to the east of Venice, on the Istrian Peninsula. It had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had been annexed by Italy after World War I. The peninsula itself, and Fiume, on its eastern side, had also been annexed, and, when Italy went down to defeat in 1945, Yugoslavia, under Tito, claimed the whole of Istria, including the two cities. The British had promised Trieste and Istria to Yugoslavia during the war but by the end of it were having second thoughts. Tito seized the place as the Germans retreated. He was allowed to keep Fiume (which was renamed Rijeka) and most of Istria, but the British evicted him from Trieste and occupied it themselves. They then invited the Americans to join them (years later it was awarded to Italy). The British and Americans administered Trieste as a free port, and it was therefore the preferred entrepot for shipments of arms to Palestine-and to other places, too. Those sending arms to the Haganah, the Jewish army in Palestine, naturally arranged to make their shipments through the American section of Trieste. They soon discovered that the United States was observing their activities but doing nothing to interfere.

  This permissive attitude was not government policy but was the unexpressed view of so many Americans that the Jews could safely rely on it. Jim Milano, an Italian-American Catholic from West Virginia, was a good example of the sympathies the underground railroad encountered. On one occasion, the Military Government in Austria, which monitored rail traffic through the American zone, checked a trainload of steel products being sent from Czechoslovakia to North Africa by way of Trieste. Czechoslovakia was still a democratic country at the time, and there was nothing unusual about the shipment-except that the steel products, on inspection, turned out to be arms and ammunition manufactured by the Skoda works. It was legitimate to suppose that the destination on the manifest was as deceptive as the list of contents and that the arms were destined for the Haganah. The military authorities informed the CIC, which informed its superiors. The report was ignored. Neither headquarters nor the Pentagon wished to know anything about it. The U.S. military deliberately turned a blind eye to the shipment of arms to Palestine even though the weapons might be used against the British, who were fighting a Jewish terrorist campaign there.

  This was an important incident, because it meant that further shipments would also be permitted, and no doubt the Jewish Agency took advantage of the opening. The Skoda works were one of the major centers of the European armament industry and had been a major addition to Hitler's power when he annexed Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. The main light machine gun of the British army in World War II and for years afterward was the Bren, whose name is an acronym for Brno-Enfield. It was designed at the Skoda works at Brno in association with the British Royal Ordnance Factory at Enfield. Now the Haganah was getting a supply.

  Milano did nothing to interfere, beyond informing headquarters in Vienna and the Pentagon. After what he had seen at Mauthausen, he was wholly on the Jews' side. He was equally discreet when one of his assistants, Ed Gestaldo, came to see him with some surprising information. Gestaldo was in charge of the MIS, which interrogated prisoners of war and directed security in internment camps. His staff, like all intelligence operations at the time, included many Jews who had the necessary languages. Gestaldo had agents in all the refugee camps, two of them in one of the Jewish camps near Linz, called Wegssheid. What Gestaldo had to report was that the two were spending their evenings translating U.S. military field manuals into Yiddish and Hebrew. These manuals taught the use of small arms and military tactics and would be of great use to the Haganah. What is more, it appeared
that the two officers were also training young Jews in the camps in the use of small arms and conducting close-order drill. Obviously their pupils expected to reach Palestine soon and to put their new skills to immediate use.

  Milano was astonished at the news. He told Gestaldo that he knew of no provision in the code of military law that would prohibit soldiers translating manuals. The documents were not secret. Nor was he aware of any rules against training DPs in military tactics. He had no intention of informing himself more closely but decided, first, that he would pass on the information verbally to his immediate superior, Colonel Bixell, next time he reported to him and, second, that Gestaldo should tell his two zealous subordinates that their conduct was inappropriate. He added, however, "I wouldn't waste any time checking that they are taking your advice seriously." In other words, the blind eye would remain turned in their direction unless an explicit order came down the line from headquarters.

  It never did. Milano made his report to his superiors, who noted it and offered no comment, let alone a prohibition. Gestaldo made his pro forma order to the two to stop their extracurricular activities and then took steps not to discover whether he had been obeyed. It is to be presumed that the two young lieutenants continued translating manuals and training soldiers, though they were more discreet than before.

  The U.S. intelligence staff in Austria kept a close watch on the Jewish organizations, both officially and unofficially. In their official capacity, the Americans were concerned that the Soviets might infiltrate spies into the West via the refugee camps. All refugees were carefully screened, and the Americans relied on the Brycha to filter out suspicious people. This was the Jewish relief organization set up in 1939 to get as many Jews out of occupied Europe as possible. After the war, it provided relief to the Jewish survivors in the camps and played a large role in the underground railroad to Palestine. Its chief contribution was money; the actual smuggling was organized out of Palestine itself. Unofficially, Milano and his colleagues were most interested in the underground railroad. With great care and much discretion, Milano was sending a few dozen Soviet deserters down his Rat Line to South America every year, while the Brycha was sending whole trainloads and shiploads of people, including trained fighters, to Palestine under the noses of the British. He was interested in how it was done, and in 1947, at the same time as the incident of the translation of U.S. manuals occurred, an opportunity arose to check the underground railroad most efficiently. Ed Gestaldo found an American volunteer to go down the railroad himself, all the way to Palestine, to observe and to report.