A Nazi in the Family by Derek Niemann

Author:Derek Niemann [Derek Niemann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780722238
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2015-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

19

Exactly three weeks after the Niemann family entered Dachau, some other visitors arrived at the camp. Battle-weary soldiers of the US Seventh Army had ridden their jeeps into the town unopposed early in the day. They included men of the 42nd Rainbow Infantry Division, the same soldiers who had wiped out Dieter’s Panzer unit only a few weeks before.

In the railway siding close to the camp, they found a train of abandoned cattle trucks, full of the bodies of prisoners who had been transferred from Buchenwald. Those who had not died inside the trucks on the journey had been shot as soon as the doors were opened. The US soldiers pressed on to the camp itself, where they were met with sniper fire from a handful of SS guards who were holding out inside. One by one, the snipers were picked off.

There were more horrors awaiting the soldiers when they were welcomed through the gates of the camp late in the afternoon by other German officers and guards wishing to appease and placate the victors. They found yet more bodies – 3,000 of them crammed in the rooms of the crematorium and piled up in heaps outside. Some of the soldiers, enraged by the deprivation and suffering they found among the emaciated inmates, carried out summary reprisals on their torturers, lining guards up against a wall and shooting them, or handing them over to the inmates who beat the most sadistic of their oppressors to death with spades, shovels, or shot them with pistols that were passed to them for the deed. Typhus was rife in the camp and liberation came too late for more than 3,000 of the inmates, who were to die in the following days.

The four SS families missed all of this, for they had already gone. A Dachau official had faithfully recorded the Niemann family’s arrival in town on 8th April, by typing their details out on a card. Every German was required, by law, to provide information to the relevant authorities about their place of abode at all times; when they arrived, where they had lived before, and where exactly they were going next. Curiously enough, the hitherto law-abiding Niemanns broke the rules by leaving no record of their destination. For the sake of completeness, the Dachau official noted under the column “Departed to”, “Unknown after 26.4.45”.

The SS entourage had set off on the morning of 11th April, the vehicles stocked up with fresh supplies of wood and food. They pressed on south, beyond Munich and towards the snowy peaks of the Alps. The trucks and jeeps reached the foothills, passed the railhead at the lakeside town of Schliersee, then cut off up a narrow, steep road, winding through dark conifer forests where melting snow had turned mountain streams into gushing torrents.

Karl knew the way. He had been up this mountain road four years earlier, for at that time, the tiny village of Spitzingsee, 300 metres above the broader valley of Schliersee, contained a sub-camp of Dachau.

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