THE BOOK

“If you feel like that, then why are you here? Why haven’t you gone into exile like so many others?”

“We have thought of that many times,” I replied. “Frances and I had discussed this possibility and we agreed wholeheartedly. Last October, after the anti-Jewish excesses, I went to the German Consulate and talked to a good friend, telling him I could not take it any longer and that I was through and would quit. However he talked me out of it, reasoning our only salvation is that moderation and common sense will overcome this fanaticism and extremism in Germany. ‘If all the people who feel like you do quit,’ he continued, ‘then we are really lost.’ This is also what my parents had told me when they visited me in New York in 1934.”

I explained to Mrs. Thomsen,

“It may have been utterly naive to stay on, but now it is too late to change my mind. Frances has suggested that I ask her family in Denver to help me get a job there, but I am too proud to do that. And it would only cause embarrassment. Besides, Frances’ brother is a reserve officer. If it comes to a war between the United States and Germany, which is not only possible but likely, then people might say of me, ‘He quit because he is a spy,’ and they would intern me, perhaps for many years. As you know, the campaign against Germany is constantly being pitched to a higher and higher crescendo. The United States’ press hardly makes the distinction between the Nazis and the German people any more.”

I continued, “In fact, as you also know, in a radio broadcast to the nation last month, Roosevelt assured us that he would direct all the efforts of his government toward keeping the United States out of war. But in the same speech he also said that the American people could not be expected to stay neutral in thought and conscience. That sounded suspiciously similar to Hitler. Hitler, too, had been assuring the German people that ‘no German mother will have to weep for her son.’ But look where we are now! Roosevelt, without any doubt, will use every means to get this country into the war, even to the point of discouraging England and France from making a compromise peace, if they should be willing to do so.

“I am going into this with eyes wide open and no illusions. One morning last year, after finishing night work, I walked for two hours through Central Park in desperation. Should I follow my conscience and quit, or follow my reasoning and stay? I have spent many sleepless nights thinking it over. Perhaps what compels me not to quit is a combination of a number of factors. Perhaps it is love for my country and my family in Germany. Perhaps it is false loyalty. Perhaps, even, it is a bit of opportunism or a mixture of all of these. Most emigrants, and I heartily sympathize with them, had no choice and were lucky to save their lives. But as far as I am concerned, it does not appeal to me to sit here in safety and be forced to write tirades of hatred against my own people. If we can do anything against this regime, we can only do it from the inside. I hope that I can accomplish more working with your husband, trying to help shorten the war.”

Baby then remarked,

“Yes, it must be a terrible conflict of conscience for every German living in this country who has intelligence and moral standards.” Looking at Frances she added, “Fortunately you seem to have a very understanding and courageous wife for whom all this must be just as much of a torture as for you. I have listened with deepest sympathy to your story, Frances. How you were caught by the war last month, and how you got out through Switzerland and Italy. You two must love each other very much if you are willing to take the consequences and stick to your husband after this terrifying experience.” Baby switched the ignition back on and drove us back through the beautiful park to our hotel. The smell of fallen leaves and the sunlight filtering through the trees made everything look so peaceful that our problems seemed remote, almost unreal.

On the morning of the 20th of July, 1944, the radio announced that Hitler was dead—that he had been assassinated at his headquarters in East Prussia. Frances and I were jubilant. This was the day we had been waiting and praying for, for many years. We waited eagerly for further details. We had a few guests for lunch that day, including newspaperman Helmuth Lindemann and his wife, and Senta Beye and Annemarie Stumbke, who had been Dr. Kurt Sell’s secretary in Washington. Turning the radio on again, our elation was shattered by the hoarse voice of Adolf Hitler himself! He was alive. There was no mistaking that screaming, guttural voice. What had happened? The devil had protected him again. Only a few seconds before the bomb—hidden in an attaché case and placed near Hitler by Count von Stauffenberg—had exploded, Hitler had walked away from it! A revolt, even then, would have succeeded if it had been better organized. General Erich Fellgiebel, chief of the Army Information Service and one of the conspirators, had forgotten the most elementary precaution—to cut off all telephone connections between Hitler’s headquarters and Berlin, especially the “hot line” between him and Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels simply took the telephone receiver and called Hitler, and Hitler answered. Goebbels told him that there was a Captain Rehmer here who wanted to arrest him, saying that Hitler was dead. Then Goebbels handed the receiver to the captain, and Hitler told him, “What they told you is a big lie.” Hitler then gave Rehmer orders to arrest the conspirators. If it had not been for this telephone conversation, the plot could have succeeded, and the wavering generals might have acted more forcefully.

Now they had to sit and listen to this tirade of fuming rage, hatred, and revenge. Hitler declared the “people’s war” against all his enemies and swore that they would all lose their heads. So hundreds of thousands more would have to be sacrificed. None of those present at our luncheon made any bones about how they felt. They all left feeling terribly depressed. And it now became a “people’s war” against everybody suspected of being “defeatist” or “enemies of the regime.”

(The total number of German non-Jews executed by the Nazis or who died in concentration camps has never been precisely determined, because the victims were listed in the camp registers together with Czechs, Poles, and other nationalities. It has been estimated that at least 100,000, probably closer to 150,000, were killed. Between 750,000 and 1.2 million Germans went through concentration camps before the war. Of these, 500,000 to 600,000 were political prisoners.)

A few weeks later we had another visitor with whom we could talk openly, Minister Braun von Stumm. We gave a dinner for him, and, after the others had left, I talked alone to him. He looked more depressed than I had ever seen him. I showed him newspaper clippings from Russian newspapers, which had been reprinted in the Swedish press. They showed pictures of, and stories about, the “corpse factories,” as they were called then, near Lublin and Maideneck in Poland, which were so horrible that they were hard to believe. Stumm told me the stories were true. He had talked to a diplomat friend who had been drafted as liaison officer to one of the army corps. This eyewitness had seen mass executions of prisoners accused of partisan activities. They had had to dig their own graves. He then sadly added,

“To continue working for such a government is the greatest punishment that God has enjoined on me in my life. We have to look on while the hangmen do their work, and we will be damned by the world for the rest of our lives . . . if we survive.” He left the following day, like all the others, with his suitcases packed with presents for his secretaries, friends, and children. He had learned that his Italian wife had committed suicide by jumping out of a window, because she could not stand it any longer.

A short time after Frances, Sigrid, and Teddy’s arrival in Stockholm, Dr. Thomsen came back from a visit to Berlin and Fuschl, the castle in Upper Bavaria, where Ribbentrop had established his headquarters. After Dr. Thomsen’s staff conference the following morning, he asked everybody to stay, as he wanted to read them a decree from Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. Pale, and with a monotonous voice that betrayed the shame and disgust he felt, Dr. Thomsen read to his staff the “Sippenhaft” law (co-liability of family). It was one of the most barbaric laws ever invented and characterized the situation in Germany. There had been an increasing number of desertions by diplomats, newspapermen, and other officials representing German interests in neutral countries. (There had been many new desertions in Bern, Madrid, and Lisbon. In Stockholm, one of the officials employed in the Cultural Department had deserted. He was a Mr. Kappner, married to a Swedish woman. He had been recalled to Berlin and refused to go.) From now on, the entire family would be held responsible for such desertions, meaning family members living in Germany. “The slightest act of disloyalty,” the decree said, “would be punished in the most ruthless manner, by taking all family members into immediate custody.” In other words, throwing them into concentration camps.

So this was it. Not only wives and children, but also parents, were to be held as hostages. We had suspected this was coming, but now it was official. A few days later it became clear to the Stockholm Legation that Hitler was not bluffing when the parents of a German newspaper correspondent in Helsinki were arrested and thrown into a concentration camp. The correspondent had quit and had openly stated what he thought of his government. When Berlin had asked him to return immediately, he had refused. It later became known that this man’s father had died in the concentration camp.

The ship left Stockholm on August 21, 1945. It took one day to reach Germany. After having anchored during the night near Travemuende, a seaside resort near Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, the ship sailed up a river channel to the port. The industrial plants on both sides of the channel gave a desolate impression—everything silent, dead, half of them in ruins. Not one chimney was smoking. The passengers disembarked on the “Slaughter House” pier. The British could not have chosen a more fitting place, as it gave us a foreboding of what was to come. The passengers were herded from the ship by British soldiers, and those of us who were not fast enough were aided by gun butts. I saw my secretary, Miss Stuembke, fall down after an especially vicious push.

We were taken in buses to a former school hospital for a short interrogation. After baggage and body search (the men had to undress completely and line up along a wall), we were locked up in one wing called the “red” wing of the hospital. Among us were most of the personnel of the legation including the minister, the military attaché (a general), the naval attaché (an admiral), as well as the teachers of the German school in Stockholm and other semi-officials. Only a few of the smaller fry and a few newspapermen were freed.

When my turn came for interrogation, there was a long conference of several officers in the corner of the room—all now looking at me. Finally one of them came over, and asked, “Do you have a letter of recommendation from a church?” When I said no, he said, “Sorry, then we will have to keep you.” Most of the contents of the luggage and all of my papers, including my diary, were taken from me, for which they issued a receipt. I was allowed to keep my sleeping bag and the bottles of vitamin pills, which proved to be a great blessing during the months ahead.

After two days at the hospital, where the food was sufficient, we were taken to a prison camp in Neumuenster, an industrial town halfway between Hamburg and Kiel in the province of Schleswig-Holstein. It was formerly a leather factory, and in it about 32,000 prisoners had been collected. Thomsen, the attachés, a few others from the legation, and I were put in a large factory hall that was furnished with double bunks. There were 1,167 men in this hall, and they had come from all the strata of German society. There were officers of all ranks, common soldiers, high and low Nazi officials, concentration camp guards, Gestapo officials, and ordinary criminals—some of them escapees from other prisons. We were divided into units of one hundred.

The Stockholm group looked well-fed and healthy compared to most of the other men, most of whom were emaciated and half-starved. I had an upper bunk on the third floor in a corner of the big hall, from where I could look down over the masses of barbed wire and guard houses. There were some interesting men in our unit—schoolteachers, a university professor, officers who had fought in Russia, some welleducated intellectual men, some simple decent people, and some inscrutable, unpleasant types who had plenty to hide. We formed study groups to use our time to better advantage and to forget our problems. I joined a group that studied Russian under a teacher who had taught Russian in school. I found that it was a most expressive and beautiful language.

The next months were the worst in my life, a nightmare so terrible that I would dream about it many years later, and often wake up in a cold sweat. The official daily food rations received by the population in the British Zone were 900 calories, about half of the required minimum intake to maintain a normal human life. But the prisoners received much less than the 900 calories. Once a day we were fed a thin soup of turnips with a few potatoes or some barley, and given two pieces of bread and two cigarettes. The cigarettes could be exchanged for bread from some of the habitual smokers who could not live without smoking. Of course, they were the first ones to die. By December, I had lost about one third of my weight, and was so weak that I could only stand up very slowly without passing out. The only prisoners who looked well-fed were those who worked in the kitchen. That seemed to be a racket—well under the control of the SS men—without the knowledge of the British.

In order to identify and catch the war criminals at the war’s end, the Western Allies put into the prison camps or internment or interrogation camps not only every man who had anything remotely connected to Hitler’s government, whether he was a Nazi party member or not, but also factory owners, doctors, schoolteachers, university professors, military officers, and diplomats. There were more than fifty camps all over Germany. But the Allies did not have the men, the organization, or adequate food supplies to cope with this situation. So, like the Nazis before them in their concentration camps, they selected prisoners to supervise certain chores within the camps. The result was that certain organized groups among the prisoners managed to obtain control of the especially desirable jobs like supervising the kitchens, distributing the food, interpreting, etc.

The 1,167 men interned in my unit were allowed one hour’s walk between high barbed wire fences every day, but there was barely space even for a few hundred people. At the beginning we had Polish guards, understandably full of hatred against us Germans, whom they considered responsible for what had happened to their country. There were cases of beatings of prisoners, and of shooting at the heels of those who were not fast enough getting through the factory door after their daily walk outside. When one of the men was shot and killed by a Polish guard while hanging up his laundry, the Poles were removed and replaced by Scots, who behaved decently.

Shortly after my arrival, we were handed a brown card to send to our families. It contained the following text: “Name of sender. British identification number. (1) I am in British hands. (2) I am healthy. (3) I am in a hospital. Draw a line through whichever of the above do not apply. This card will not be forwarded if it contains any other word or message. At this time, this card may NOT be answered.” Outside the camp, it was called “The Silence Camp” or “The Hunger Camp.”