Martha Gellhorn: A Life by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409079484
Publisher: Vintage

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For many months now, all through the summer and autumn of 1944, the war correspondents had been hearing about the concentration camps. Among the refugees trudging west along the roads were men and women who talked about places where Jews and other people Hitler did not want were taken, and where they starved to death, or were so badly treated that they died of their injuries. Early in 1945, Martha had come across a young Frenchman who had managed to escape from one of the camps, and he told her about the way that 2,700 people were gassed every day, and about how the smell of burning flesh from the bodies packed into incinerators had made him retch. He described the dignity of the people as they walked to the gas chambers.

Though the Russians had liberated Madjanek, outside Lublin, in July 1944, and had gone on to take Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor that same summer, and Auschwitz in January 1945, these camps had been frantically dismantled by the retreating Germans as they left, and their prisoners driven westwards on death marches, so the full horror of what had been done was not apparent. There had been articles in European newspapers, of course, and statements in the House of Commons, and rumours circulating since the spring of 1942, but it was not until the British entered Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945, where a typhus epidemic had left thousands of skeletal bodies rotting in the open, and shot films which were then transmitted around the world, that the full extent of the German atrocities became clear. It was only now that the world was really forced to know.

What the reporters accompanying the liberating troops saw was so shocking that writers whose normal style was colourful and emphatic were stupefied into careful, controlled prose. The early reports were quiet and very precise. There was no need for adjectives. ‘I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,’ Ed Murrow said in his broadcast for CBS. ‘I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words.’

On 29 April, the US Seventh Army reached Dachau. A thousand prisoners had been murdered as the Germans fled, but 33,000 remained, some of whom had been there for the past twelve years. In the woods nearby, the Allies found two rooms which had been used as torture chambers. Dachau was Hitler’s model SS camp, set up in 1933 to hold people in ‘protective custody’, his euphemism for political prisoners. Léon Blum, the former French President, had been in Dachau, and Stalin’s son, Jacob, and the Protestant priest, Martin Niemöller. Dachau was where Martha’s German friends in the International Brigades in Spain had lost their nails and teeth. In her wanderings around Germany, seeing for herself the legacy and the victims of Nazi rule, Dachau had become for her its symbol, something to hate with a ‘single-hearted passion’. Opening its gates had been her ‘personal war aim’.

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