12 April 1945: from Auschwitz Fürstengrube to Sarau

“They saw us, they knew what was happening.”

On 12 April 1945 a group of ragged, emaciated and completely exhausted concentration camp prisoners reached the idyllic village of Sarau near Plön in Schleswig-Holstein: It was the home town of SS Man Max Schmidt, who was commandant of the Auschwitz subcamp Fürstengrube until mid-January. The folk of Sarau could see the suffering of these people, because it was literally within touching distance, but they chose to ignore it as far as possible.

The Jewish men represented the pitiful remains of the group that had set off from Fürstengrube some three months earlier. On 19 January 1945 the prisoners has been rounded up in Auschwitz and marched out of the camps. This was also the case with the inmates of Fürstengrube, about one thousand Jewish men. 250 sick prisoners were left behind and shot by the SS a few days later.

It was icy cold in these days of January, minus 20 degrees. Many of the prisoners were wearing wooden clogs and in the end had to walk barefoot. People who fell behind were shot immediately. The road to Gleiwitz was lined with corpses.

This was confirmed by the former Auschwitz commandant Höss in his later notes: “It was easy to trace the routes of suffering. Every few hundred metres a prisoner lay dead, either from exhaustion or from being shot.”

Witness accounts also confirm that Commandant Max Schmidt personally executed prisoners.

Several different columns of prisoners met up in Gleiwitz. The ones from Fürstengrube were loaded onto open cattle wagons together with other prisoners, including eight hundred women. Between 100 and 150 people were crammed together in each wagon. By tragic mistake the train was sent to Mauthausen instead of Nordhausen, as planned.

The prisoners now faced a journey to hell that would last over a week. They were entirely exposed in the open wagons, with no protection from the icy wind, with no food or water. There was no room at all, not even to push the dead prisoners aside. Those who fell had little chance of getting up again. Those who held their heads too high above the sides of the wagon risked being shot by Schmidt and his guards.

When the train arrived at Mauthausen, the camp officials refused to accept the prisoners, and so the endless suffering continued as they travelled towards the north via Nuremberg, Leipzig and Weimar until they reached Nordhausen. “Many people were standing on bridges or beside the tracks. They saw us, they knew what was happening. No reactions, no human feeling.” This is the way Heinz Galinski, later President of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, described his perception of the outside world during this journey.

At this point only three hundred of the prisoners from Fürstengrube were still alive.

In the next few months they laboured deep underground in the galleries of Dora Mittelbau. But in April, as the allied troops approached Nordhausen, Max Schmidt decided not to let his prisoners fall into the hands of his enemies. He rounded them up and left the camp with them in the direction of Magdeburg. This march also resulted in many deaths through shootings. It is uncertain how many prisoners finally arrived in Max Schmidt’s home town; they can hardly have numbered two hundred. They were deployed to work for neighbouring farmers and craftsmen. Schmidt kept twenty hand-picked prisoners to work at his own farm. During this time prisoners were still being mishandled or shot, and the local population must have been aware of the situation.

On 30 April 1945 some of the prisoners were rescued by the Swedish Red Cross. The rest were forced onto another march towards Neustadt on the Baltic coast on 1 May 1945. This, too, was accompanied by executions. Three ships, the Cap Arcona, the Thielbeck and the Athen, were already lying in the Bay of Lübeck, ready to transport these concentration camp prisoners, mainly from Neuengamme, across the Baltic Sea. Max Schmidt’s prisoners were loaded onto the Arcona and the Thielbeck. But as a result of a tragic mistake, the two ships were hit by British fighter bombers on 3 May 1945. They sank very quickly. There were only a few survivors, and many of the prisoners from Fürstengrube drowned. Those who managed to reach the shores of Holstein Bay were still not safe: members of the SS were waiting for them to reach dry land and many prisoners were shot. This was one of the many war crimes that were never prosecuted.

At the end of the war Max Schmidt at first went into hiding but returned to Sarau after several years. His presence was never questioned by the village community. None of them wanted to hear anything about guilt, neither their own nor that of Max Schmidt. Instead the inhabitants of Sarau complained about suffering ‘reprisals’ carried out by the occupying forces during their search for Schmidt. Official inquiries against Schmidt did not begin until 1962 – no charges were ever made.

Sarau’s peace and quiet remained undisturbed until the 1980s, when the historian Gerhard Hoch started researching the history of the Fürstengrube prisoners. His work met with resistance everywhere, from the school which refused to let him look at the school records, the Evangelical Church and the even the local Social Democratic Party. A group of young people, who wanted to look into the history of concentration camps in the area, unwittingly tried to visit Schmidt’s farm to interview him. It resulted in several painful bites from the farm dog. The farm residents had no qualms about setting it onto the young people.

Much has been written since then, to the great satisfaction of Gerhard Hoch. In 1999 the “Signpost Project” was realized. In a summer camp twelve young people designed twelve pillars to mark stations of the final death march. Since then summer camps have been organized each year. The work with young people is being continually extended. And the Ahrensbök Memorial Centre, which focuses on this death march, has just received federal funding for essential renovations.

But the lips of the older generation in Sarau still remain sealed.

back to overview