The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

  Getting ready for a journey consisted in having my handcuffs put on and a black hood placed over my head. I was taken along a passage and down some steps which led to the courtyard. There I was told to get into a car and then, to my great comfort, Grothe and Dr. Schäfer got in with me. We drove for some distance through Berlin streets and I could see darkly through my hood that our direction was northward, apparently towards Spandau. In front of us was another car, a large Horch, which seemed to be acting as our guide. After leaving the town we drove for about twenty miles along a country road, passing several villages and one larger town. The road was unfamiliar to me and I could not make out where I was being taken. Then, we turned off to the left and came to a road bounded on the right by a high and forbidding looking wall. We came to a large white building and both cars came to a standstill. The people in the front car spoke to a man who seemed, as far as I could see, to be a sentry in uniform. By this time I had the wind-up quite badly and longed to be back in my dear, familiar Gestapo home. Our cars drove on for another couple of hundred yards or so until we came to a gate in the wall through which we passed. As far as I could see there seemed to be rows upon rows of men in greyish looking clothes standing to attention and the air was filled with a strong smell of sweat and dirt.

  We went through yet another gate and stopped before a low concrete building. Although I did not know then where I was, we had arrived at the Bunker, or cellular prison of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which for the next five and a quarter years was to be my home. That I was ‘in’ for the duration I had recognized almost from the moment of capture and even then I had decided that duration probably meant five years. I had expected internment in a camp for military or civilian prisoners of war and association with other prisoners of my own nationality—I had never expected imprisonment which segregated me from all contact with my countrymen.

  1 I have since been told that the book in question was not white but some other colour. The Germans however always spoke of ‘Das Weiss Buch’.

  CHAPTER III

  TWO men, Oberführers Müller and (I shall in future refer to Schaemmel by his real name) Schellenberg, got out of the front car, and were welcomed with loud cries of ‘Heil Hitler’ by a group of officers standing outside the entrance. Then our car drew up and I was told to get out. As I did so, someone pulled the hood off my head and as I went in I saw a long passage before me and similar passages to the right and left; towels were hanging at intervals along them on doors; it was clear that I was in a prison. I was not given much time for observation for, after a few steps, I was ordered to turn and stand with my face to the wall. I heard the jingling of keys and much marching of heavy boots and, after some five minutes or so, I was told to ‘come along’ and was taken to the end of the passage which had faced me as I entered and into the last door on the right. I found myself in a bare whitewashed cell which contained as only furniture a low wooden bunk, raised a few inches from the floor, and a bucket. The latter offered a modest contribution to the intolerable stink which filled the whole building.

  I was ordered to sit on the bunk and a soldier stood on guard at the door with his hand on his pistol holster; an evil-looking fellow whose lip had once been split right open and which had healed askew. Later, I was to get to know him well for he was one of the warders. His name was Drexl and he came from Oberammergau; in spite of his ferocious appearance he was really a very kind-hearted, good-natured fellow and, because I knew his part of the country well, often came for a chat to satisfy his nostalgic longing for his mountain home. At our first meeting though his appearance made me believe him to be one of the Nazi thugs about whom one had heard so much.

  After about a quarter of an hour, the door was thrown open and Schellenberg and Müller appeared and told me to come with them. We went right the way back along the passage, and I was taken to one of the last cells on the left. As I entered I saw a bed covered with a clean red and white squared coverlet and next to it a small table and a stool. I was told to sit on this stool with my back to the window which was some six feet from the ground. A man in uniform placed the table in front of me and the Oberführer said: “That is your place, you are to stay there.” A crowd of officers then came in, with them Schäfer and Grothe, and stood looking at me apparently with some degree of satisfaction.

  Someone said, “He should take off his overcoat,” and my handcuffs were unlocked so that I could take it off, but were at once put on again. Then it was discovered that there was no place to hang my coat and a little double shelf with hooks under it was brought in and nailed to the wall close to the door. There was a further conference and some apparent indecision. I heard Müller say, “No, the door must never be locked,” and something about courteous behaviour and, no conversation. Two soldiers then brought in another table and stool which was placed facing me by the door and one of the men sat down there. Müller seemed satisfied at last and turning to me again he pointed to one of the officers with him and said, “Oberführer Lohritz now has charge of you and if you are wise you will obey his orders without demur—if you don’t, or if there are any complaints about your behaviour—well, so much the worse for you.”

  Schellenberg then came up too and spoke his piece. “I have had you brought here for it will be much better and pleasanter for you than in Berlin. There you could never go into the fresh air, but here you can have regular exercise every day. I am trying to do everything that I can for you, but I advise you to be less cheeky than you have so far been—you are now in the hands of the State Police and under the jurisdiction of the Camp Kommandantur—don’t expect them to stand any nonsense. They will treat you as an officer or as a criminal according to your behaviour.”

  Everyone then went away and I was left alone with my guard. He was a dapper little man, swarthy, almost a gipsy in appearance; although I did not know it then, he was to become the first of a series of guards who proved themselves my loyal friends and to whose kindness I owe every pleasant memory of my imprisonment. On this first evening though my feelings towards him were the reverse of friendly. I was tired, unshaven and dishevelled, I felt dirty, and I was very hungry; the combination of hunger and the fearful stench of the place made me absolutely sick. It is therefore not surprising that my normal kindly feeling towards my fellow men had given way to loathing, to the vicious hatred one sees in the eyes of a cornered animal. There we sat, each on his uncomfortable stool behind his little table, with nothing to do except glower at one another.

  A warder brought in an aluminium bowl filled with potatoes boiled in their jackets and a saucer containing a greenish-looking sauce. Did I want some coffee? No! (Damn your eyes and to hell with you and everything!) How many slices of bread would I like for breakfast? I said, two. Try, handcuffed, to skin and eat tepid boiled potatoes, half of them rotten and you may perhaps share my hatred for the world and all its works. Then I sat again glowering at my guard, my hunger unstilled and sticky, potato-covered hands adding to my discomfort. The cell door opened and a young soldier came in and took the place of my previous guard; my dislike of him was immediate, particularly because he was smoking an evil-smelling pipe. An hour or so later, a warder whom I had not yet seen, opened the door and said: “Wash.” I followed him, accompanied by my guard, to the lavatory which was next to my cell. That this was so, I had already deduced from the sound of rushing waters which intermittently punctured the silence of my cell. This lavatory was to be the plague of my existence for the next three years.

  Between four and five o’clock in the morning some seventy or more prisoners came at the double from their cells each carrying his open pail which, still at the double, he had to empty into one of the two w.c.s; then, to the other side of the room, hold his pail for a moment under a running tap and back at the double to his cell. Loud shouts and threats from the supervising warder; one, of whom I shall have more to say, had a long leather-covered whip which he cracked in the air and with which he caught any prisoner who was too slow a slash across but
tocks or back. The same process was repeated in the evening at four or five o’clock. The stench which came from the open unwashed pails as they passed my door and through the windows of the lavatory into my cell, hung about for an hour or more afterwards and rendered life an abomination to a sensitive nose. Occasionally I was fated to go to the lavatory before it had been cleaned up when the floor was covered with excrement which had missed its intended receptacle.

  The building contained eighty cells; light, airy cells and adequately warmed, but none were provided with water closets. Consequently, all prisoners, except the privileged few, of whom I was one, had to do their doings in a pail. No one had ever thought of providing proper sanitary pails; all that was available were lidless tins which had started life as containers of the jam which we received for breakfast. They were rusty, battered and never washed, and how they stank. At the time when I came to the prison such a pail was the only article of furniture in the cells of most of the prisoners; cells, of which the windows were boarded up so as to make them almost completely dark. They were punishment cells for prisoners in protective custody at the camp who had committed some offence and the usual term was three weeks sometimes spiced with weekly beatings of twenty-five lashes. Compared to these unfortunates mine was the life of a gentleman of leisure. Not having suffered such a lot, I cannot say what it was like nor what courage was needed to bear it. I feel that it is shameful for me to complain about the brief discomfort which the intrusion of their misery brought me, but I am writing about my own reactions and experiences, and until a merciful dispensation put my sense of smell out of action my nose seemed to be permanently coated with the effluvium of human excrement.

  Plan of the ‘Bunker’ at Sachsenhausen where the author spent five and a quarter years, first in Cell No. 51 and afterwards in No. 43.

  Pages from one of the author’s diaries, showing part of an account of his capture written about a month later.

  The water closets, of which there were three, separated only by a thin wall from my bed, were flushed by a press-button system which emitted a stream of water with hydrant force for some half-minute and then turned it off suddenly with a dull thud. All day long and frequently at night I was startled by this noise to which I could never become accustomed. Never, while I occupied this cell did I have more than an hour or two’s undisturbed sleep and my nerves suffered more from this than from any other circumstance of my imprisonment. Forgive this long dissertation on an unsavoury subject, but, unfortunately, it was one of the most important features of my life for over three years.

  On my first visit to the lavatory I was handed a towel and a piece of soap. The warder removed my handcuffs while I washed at a sort of fountain from which five or six taps spurted thin streams of water to a circular trough below. I did the other things necessary before bedtime and returned to my cell, undressed and got into bed. The warder then put on my handcuffs again, but he was a decent fellow and closed them only so far that although my hands could not slip through, I could still turn my wrists in them. Then he gave the key another turn in the lock which he said would prevent the ratchet slipping in further while I slept. Sleep, no, I did not have much that night. Over my bed was an unshaded sixty-watt lamp. On account of the black-out, a blanket covered the window, there was no ventilation and my guards were chain smokers. The central heating was hot as hell and my bed, a straw mattress, felt like the top of a furnace; it was too, full of lumps, brickbats they felt like. Every so often the door would be pulled open with a jerk, a door that fitted so closely that one could feel the suction when it was opened, and a warder would come to my bed and flash his torch in my face or there would be a change of guard. This first night was typical of all my nights for many months to come. I never slept deeply nor undisturbed for any length of time but dozed for short spells by day and by night whenever I could.

  It was before five next morning when Drexl, the plug-ugly warder, opened the door and shouted: “Wash!” When I came back to my cell, the window was wide open, my bed had been made and the floor swept. I asked whether I could lie down again, but the answer was, “It is forbidden to lie on the bed in the daytime.” My handcuffs had, of course, been put on again, and there was nothing for me to do but sit on my stool and look at my guard. The man this time was a stout, florid fellow with a truly magnificent Kaiser William moustache. His name was Hoffman, and although he was on duty in my cell for nearly two years, I never succeeded in making friends with him, and he remained surly to the last.

  About eight o’clock the warder came in and brought me a plate with two slices of bread thickly spread with butter and honey; the best food that I had tasted since my capture. He told me that I could have more if I wished, so I had another couple. He also brought me a mug of coffee but, in the light of past experience I funked this and asked for cold water instead. This time my handcuffs were removed while I ate and when I had finished I really began to feel a little better and my outlook on life became less venomous, but again I was handcuffed and left to sit on my stool with nothing to do but stare at my guard.

  Sometime during the morning the commandant paid me a visit. He was a squat square figure and reminded me always of the frog who would a-wooing go. He had pop eyes, an enormous mouth full of glittering gold crowns, and obviously loved to surround himself with the pomp and circumstance of his exalted station. Whenever I saw him he was accompanied by a chorus of smartly turned out officers and N.C.O.s and when he came into my cell these draped themselves picturesquely at the door. On this first visit on the morning after my arrival at his establishment, his attitude was as friendly as that of a hotel keeper welcoming a new guest and it was with every appearance of solicitude that he inquired as to my health and well-being. I was feeling rather sour and met his overtures with merely a silent glance at my handcuffed wrists. “Oh yes, those can be taken off now. I am sure that you are going to be reasonable and will not make trouble for yourself and for us. Remember though, if you make the slightest attempt to injure yourself or to escape, I shall have you put in irons night and day, and both your arms and legs will be fettered. We want you to be comfortable here and everything is done for your own good. All you have to do is to obey orders. You can have as much to eat as you like and if you want more, have only to say so. Never hesitate to ask for me if you want to see me.”

  This sounded all very nice so I ventured to suggest that I should like something to smoke and something to read. Now Germans are on the whole extremely good-natured people and hate having to refuse any request which is made to them. It upsets them in fact to such a point that they immediately put on a pretence of being very angry and are apt to snort at you like grampusses. My humble request completely ruined the good humour of my host and he at once began a tirade about Englishmen who never knew when they were well off and seemed to think that when they came to Germany they could have everything their own way. The Führer would soon teach them how mistaken they were. “I was a prisoner of the French in the last war and I had to sleep on a plank and eat food only fit for pigs. That is the way you would be treated if I had my own way.”

  I regretted this breach of our amicable relations but at all events deduced from what he said, that he was by no means a free agent and that instructions regarding my treatment and the privileges permitted me came to him from a higher level. It was, of course, very important for me to know this as it determined my attitude to the people with whom I came in contact and the degree in which I could hope to ameliorate the circumstances of my life. If the commandant and the warders had no real authority over me but had to refer everything to the Gestapo, then obviously it would be safe for me to chance my arm to a much greater extent than would otherwise be the case. I know something of army methods and the dislike of every subordinate officer to referring his troubles to a superior and asking for help when small matters of detail are at stake. I really believe that it was at this time that I first had the glimmering of a plan of behaviour which, carried out with varying success and many se
tbacks, eventually brought me to the point where I became, as it were, the undisputed ruler of my little domain; but this time was yet very far away in the future.

  My handcuffs were taken off and with my hands free I had an almost irresistible impulse to punch the commandant and knock his words down his throat. This man, Lohritz was his name, was one of those people whom I disliked from the first moment that I set eyes on him. Probably I was unjust, for I really believe that in his way he tried to be kind to me and that also he was really rather proud of having so distinguished a person in his charge. Anyhow, we never became buddies and in the end he had every reason to wish that he had never set eyes on me.

  After he had gone it was not long before the door was opened again and the warder said: “Follow me.” He took me past the door to the lavatory, to a little room in the passage which lay to the left and at right angles to the one in which my cell lay. I saw then, that the prison was built in the form of a letter T and that my passage was the longest of the three. The three wings thus formed were called Blocks A, B and C, and my cell was No. 51 in Block C. The room to which I was taken was called the ‘Interrogation Room’ and was simply an ordinary sized cell of which the six-foot high window had been replaced by a normal low one. When I went in I found Dr. Schafer sitting with his back to the window at a large table. He told me to sit down opposite him and as soon as the warder had gone, asked me what sort of a night I had had and whether I had been given enough to eat. I told him that I was disgusted at the treatment, especially at being handcuffed. He said that he knew it must be very unpleasant but that he hoped steps would be taken to render life more tolerable for me. He then handed me a packet of cigarettes and gave me a light. For the present I must not smoke in my cell nor when out at exercise, but he would try to come and see me as often as possible and when I was with him I could smoke as much as I liked. He hoped that in any case it would not be long before I was also allowed to smoke in my cell and to have books, but for the time being, orders had been given that such privileges were not to be allowed.