The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. Bruce Henderson
age of fifty-five, were released without explanation. Martin, his uncle, and about fifteen other men remained in custody. They were marched to the local prison, an old, primitive structure, and locked up in a single cell. There was no running water or toilet—only a metal “honey bucket”—and the food was primitive and scarce. After two days in these cramped quarters, they were sent to Nuremberg, thirty miles away.
The Nuremberg district prison was filled nearly to capacity. Several hundred Sudeten Germans, ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, had also been arrested after raising opposition to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, where three million ethnic Germans lived, two months earlier. The local Jews picked up during Kristallnacht—about a hundred in total from Nuremberg—were locked inside the prison gym, which had been furnished only with bare mattresses on the floor. Martin’s group joined them.
Most of the guards were older men accustomed to dealing with hardened criminals, not political prisoners, and they seemed overwhelmed by the crowded conditions. They did their duty and nothing more, which meant the prisoners were largely left alone. An inmate crew brought food from the kitchen to distribute among the prisoners, and at one point everyone was allowed to take a shower in a communal washroom, which had a row of multiple showerheads. The prisoners were let out of the locked gym in small groups for an hour a day; they could pace circles in the prison yard only after it had been cleared of Aryan prisoners so they would avoid contact with the Jews.
Within a week, some of the Jewish prisoners were released, Martin’s uncle among them. The decisions about who got out and who did not were utterly mysterious to Martin and everyone else. While some of the guards revealed that they had received the release orders from the local Gestapo, none of the feared secret police had shown up at the prison, and no prisoners had been questioned. By December 22—six weeks after Martin’s arrest—nine of his original group remained. On that day, guards thundered down the corridor, announcing that they were being moved to the Dachau concentration camp.
Martin, who was now in his own cell, felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He knew about the existence of Dachau, as did most Germans, but it was spoken about only in ominous whispers. Opened in an old World War I munitions factory near Munich in March 1933, Dachau was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis after they came to power. Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler had announced in the newspapers that Dachau would be utilized to incarcerate those who “threaten the security of the state.” During its first year, the camp held nearly five thousand prisoners, primarily German communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazis.
But Martin had a very personal history with Dachau, too. In April 1933, his cousin, a lawyer in Munich, had been arrested and sent there. He died in Dachau three months later. Based on the grim stories he had heard, Martin considered the move to Dachau to be his own death sentence.
The locks on the cells of the Dachau-bound prisoners were rapidly keyed open and the doors swung ajar by guards. Frantic to write a farewell note to his twin brother, Leopold, who lived with an aunt elsewhere in Germany, and to his uncle Julius, Martin scribbled on a scrap of paper. When he stepped into the corridor and passed the cell of a prisoner he had gotten to know, Martin pushed his folded-up note through the bars.
At the Nuremberg train station, Martin and the eight other men brought in from Ansbach were loaded into a modern passenger train car, where they remained under guard for the hundred-mile ride to the Dachau depot. Upon arrival, their car alone was shunted to a sidetrack. The first thing Martin saw was SS troops in black uniforms with red swastikas, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, surrounding them on all sides.
The SS pushed the prisoners off the train and down the platform, then herded them past some administrative buildings, the guards’ barracks, and an outside shooting range, where the SS practiced their marksmanship. Martin would soon learn that it doubled as an execution site. A heavy iron gate opened onto the prisoners’ fenced compound, above which was a metal sign that read, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, “Work will make you free.”
Electrified barbed wire enclosed the rectangular compound—about three hundred by six hundred yards—on all sides. Tall gun towers rose up at strategic locations. Inside the compound was an infirmary, a laundry, workshops in which inmates produced goods ranging from bread to furniture, and a main yard for roll calls and other assemblies.
The inmates lived in ten single-story barracks made of brick and concrete; each had been built to house 270 prisoners and was subdivided into five rooms designed to hold fifty-four men apiece. The men in each room were referred to, in military fashion, as a platoon. Every room had thin wooden bunks covered with straw and an attached washroom with a few sinks and flush toilets.
When Martin and his group arrived, the guards pushed them into a large room and made them strip off their clothing. After their heads were completely shorn, they were ordered into a cold shower and herded naked into another room, where a camp doctor did a quick examination. They were then given lightweight, blue-and-white-striped uniforms to put on. Some of the men had arrived clutching the small bags they had been allowed to take from home when they were arrested. Now they had to leave the bags, and the only personal items they could take with them were whatever toiletries they could carry.
In prison in Nuremberg, Martin had become friendly with a man named Ernst Dingfelder, who was deeply religious. Now Ernst whispered to Martin that he wanted to keep his Tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. Martin couldn’t believe his ears; it struck him as crazy to try to sneak a Jewish prayer shawl into a Nazi concentration camp. He argued back and forth with Ernst, telling him that if the guards found the shawl, they would likely wrap him in it before shooting him. At last, Martin convinced Ernst to leave it behind.
Each prison uniform at Dachau had a number above the right breast. Martin’s was 31889. He soon realized that, according to Dachau’s numbering system, he was the 31,889th inmate since the camp’s opening. What he did not know was that he was also one of more than ten thousand Jews who had entered the concentration camp in the weeks since Kristallnacht.
It was midnight when Martin’s group reached block 8, room 4. Crammed into the unheated space were two hundred prisoners, four times more than the space was built to hold. To make room, the built-in bunks had been replaced with two levels of six-foot-deep wooden shelving, one at ground level, the other about four feet off the floor. A thin layer of straw crawling with lice and fleas covered each one. Without room to turn over, the men slept body to body, their heads against the wall. Despite the freezing temperature, many spent the night uncovered, as there weren’t enough blankets to go around.
Exhausted after little sleep, at five o’clock the next morning Martin stood for his first roll call. When this was complete, he and the others were led back inside and given watery ersatz coffee and bug-infested porridge. Dachau was a labor camp, but with the rapid influx of so many new prisoners, the officers in charge had not yet been able to schedule them all for forced-labor duties, which consisted of digging in gravel pits, repairing roads, and draining marshes, all under the watchful eyes of the guards. Instead, Martin and the rest of his group spent the day milling around in the main yard, clapping their hands and stamping their feet to keep them from freezing.
That night, dinner was a stew that resembled swill fed to pigs. Whatever meat was in it looked to Martin like chitterlings and other unidentified organs. Every third day, pairs of men shared a small loaf of bread; unfortunately, this wasn’t that day. Ernst, Martin’s friend, recoiled at the sight of the nonkosher meat and refused to touch the mysterious stew. Thereafter, Martin tried to help him stay kosher by trading his bread for Ernst’s stew. In the face of the indignities and deprivation of the Nazi concentration camp, Martin was determined to persevere, and in the process stay true to his principles and commitments. Helping a friend in need was one of them.
Martin saw right away that the prisoners who had been in Dachau longer—months, even years before he arrived—were dulled mentally and weakened physically by the daily grind and the brutal treatment they received at the hands of the guards. Beatings were commonplace, and many prisoners had lingering injuries and bad bruises. Others were feverish and sick. Most were afraid to seek treatment at the infirmary; not only was the medical care deplorable, but anyone reported as being