Churchill’s German Special Forces by Paul Moorcraft

Author:Paul Moorcraft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Special Forces
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Going home to Deutschland

When the Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany itself there were many surprises in store. For starters, they were amazed to find comfortable farmers and village homes with well-stocked larders, unlike the starvation they had seen in Holland. Sometimes the Germans fought hard on home soil and at other times they surrendered in their droves, eager to become prisoners of the benevolent Yankees. For the Ritchie Boys it was bitter-sweet to return to the land from which many had been forced to leave. The leitmotif was always finding one’s family or at least news of them. Many had received no letters for years. A few Ritchie Boys had got word of their relatives who had fled to Holland before 1939. In a rare case or two, relatives had been found, emaciated and pale, after being hidden for years in the homes of brave Dutch men and women.

The biggest psychological sledgehammer was the discovery of the concentration camps. They had been talked about, but the stories were almost too dreadful to believe. Some Jewish resistance leaders in the east had passed information to the Americans via the Red Cross in Switzerland, begging the Allies to bomb places such as Auschwitz. But no deliberate bombing of camps took place until the last weeks of the war.

Buchenwald stood in a forest of beech trees which gave the forest its name. It was just a few miles from Weimar, where German democracy had briefly flowered after the Great War. Weimar was the centre of the German Enlightenment and the home of Johan Wolfgang von Goethe as well as Franz Liszt and Friedrich Schiller. In tragic cultural contrast, Buchenwald was the site of extermination through labour: Vernichtung durch Arbeit. At the very beginning of April 1945 Sergeant Herbert Gottschalk and another Ritchie Boy, Stephan Lewy, were among the first to reach the camp.

The US army found around 20,000 survivors on the first day of liberation. This included 3,800 Russians, 3,800 Poles, 2,900 French, 2,100 Czechs, 1,800 Germans and 1,200 Hungarians. There were also 4,000 Jews just about alive. In addition, the camp held, temporarily, 168 Allied PoWs.

Stephan Lewy immediately spoke to a Jewish survivor who explained that the prisoners were segregated by their nationality and the colour of their triangular patches, called a Winkel on their striped jackets. Yellow was for Jews, red for communists, black for Gypsies, pink for homosexuals; they all had their own separate barrack blocks.

The Ritchie Boys were tasked by senior US officers to order locals from nearby villages and Weimar to be forced to visit the site of so much horror. They were also told to find 100 male ‘volunteers’ a day to assist with the burials. Although elsewhere the former guards were often forced to deal with all the dead bodies, here the locals pitched up and many seemed genuinely shocked. ‘Wir wussten nicht’ (We didn’t know.) ‘Niemand sagte uns’ (No one told us). And if they were interrogated, they would always say. ‘Ich bin kein Nazi – I am not a Nazi.

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