The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler. Bruce Henderson
commonly solitary confinement for long periods of time or twenty-five strokes across the back with a whip that cut into the flesh. But the list of offenses for which prisoners received savage penalties at Dachau was long. An escape attempt meant death, warned a notice posted in the courtyard, as did “sabotage, mutiny or agitation.” Anyone who attacked a guard, “refused obedience,” or declined to work at assigned labor was to be “shot dead on the spot as a mutineer or subsequently hanged.”
Prisoners particularly dreaded Saturday afternoon inspections. Beforehand, the stubble on the men’s heads was trimmed to the skin. Room 4 had two dull hair clippers for two hundred men; with their dull blades, the clippers pulled out clumps of hair. Aluminum food bowls were inspected. The bowls had to be spotless, even though there was no soap and the men were prohibited from scrubbing with anything abrasive. Beatings were given out when guards found specks of food or scratches on the bowls.
When Martin failed one inspection, he had to stand at attention, motionless, while a leather-gloved guard repeatedly slapped his face. Martin had seen others similarly punished. The more they flinched, the longer the beatings lasted. With incredible determination not to show fear, he kept his reflexes under control and did not recoil from the blows. The guard gave up and moved on. It was a test of grit and resolve that Martin did not forget.
The cruelty of the SS was unlike anything Martin had imagined men could be capable of inflicting. He suspected that guard duty at Dachau was not a choice assignment, and that many of them were ordered there to be trained in brutality for duties in other camps and newly conquered territories. Dachau’s was a hierarchy of violence: the young soldiers were subject to such harsh treatment by their leaders that they were quick to vent their pent-up anger on the inmates. The process reminded Martin of training attack dogs.
One evening at roll call, the camp commandant announced that a prisoner had escaped. As punishment, all inmates would be held at attention in the main yard until the escapee was caught and returned. The long hours of the night crawled by, and it was bitterly cold under the bright spotlights. When the guard shifts changed, the men standing in the assembly area heard the clicking of machine guns in the gun towers—the loaded weapons were being checked.
Martin stood at the end of one row of prisoners. After midnight, exhausted and nearly frozen, he began to drift off to sleep on his feet. He must have swayed, though he was still standing when a rifle butt struck him in midback with painful force. He struggled to keep his balance and not fall.
In the morning, the assembly area was littered with men who had collapsed during the night—as far as Martin could tell, all were dead. The other prisoners were taken away briefly for food and water, then returned to the parade ground. The bodies had been removed.
Everyone remained standing until four that afternoon, when the escapee was returned to camp. Whisked out of sight, he was never seen again.
The man’s death would not have been easy, Martin knew. A favorite torture technique at Dachau had its roots in the medieval Inquisition: a victim was placed underneath a gallowslike structure, hands shackled behind his back, and pulled into the air by ropes attached to his wrists. Weights were added to the victim as he swung to inflict more intense pain on his arms and shoulders. Martin knew of men who had dangled helplessly for up to an hour as punishment for some real or imagined infraction. Most ended up with dislocated or broken bones and joints; some were permanently crippled.
Despite the horror of the consequences, there continued to be escape attempts by desperate men, but they seldom resulted in freedom. Some inmates chose another type of escape. A man would run toward the fence, attracting a hail of bullets from the gun towers. If he made it all the way, he would throw himself against the wire to be electrocuted. The SS guards usually made the quick kill, but not always. One prisoner, shot before reaching the fence, was left on the ground to writhe. His cries lasted all night.
On nights like that, with moans and shrieks sounding in the air and the constant cold biting at his body, Martin did more thinking than sleeping.
The big question was always: Why? As an avid reader with an interest in history—he had hoped to go to college, but when he turned sixteen in 1934, he was told he had received all the schooling to which a Jew was entitled in Germany—he knew about medieval Europe and the Inquisition. What difference was there between the suffering of men four centuries ago—ad majorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God)—and what the Nazis were doing now? Suffering was still suffering. And if there was supposedly only one God, whose was it?
Some inmates at Dachau, like Ernst Dingfelder, were devoutly religious when they arrived. Others became more religious the longer they stayed. And then there were those who found they could no longer believe in God—any God—because of what was taking place. Martin identified with this group. He would, he decided, observe and participate in the traditions and ceremonies he had grown up with, out of a desire to acknowledge his Jewish heritage. But for the rest of his life, he knew, he would just be going through the motions. The horrors of Dachau had destroyed his belief in God.
Prisoners were allowed to write one letter a week, though with Nazi censors reading all outgoing mail, there was little they could say. Martin could not describe the effects of the starvation diet and all the weight he had lost, or the painful, open frostbite sores on his feet that made walking a torment. If the inmates failed to say everything was fine, their letters would not be mailed. Since his letters were the only documentation his family had that he was still alive, Martin wrote dutifully each week. Under the sender’s name was the line: “Concentration Camp Dachau.” The return address included the words Schutzhaft-Jude, or “Jew in Protective Custody.”
On January 1, 1939, Martin turned twenty-one. As he was now of legal age, Uncle Julius was no longer his guardian or trustee of the home his mother had left Martin. How camp officials discovered these facts he never knew, but shortly after his birthday, Martin was summoned to an administrative office and shown a document mostly covered by a blotter. He was told not to attempt to read the paper—only to sign it.
“Was ist das?” he dared to ask.
“Sie haben drei Sekunden.” He had three seconds to sign. “Sonst.” Or else.
He signed, and the paper was taken away. Only then was he told that he had signed a power of attorney allowing his mother’s house to be sold.
Martin Selling knew then that he would not be going home.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
–STATUE OF LIBERTY INSCRIPTION
by nineteenth-century Jewish poet Emma Lazarus
For nearly twelve years, Günther Stern had the best of childhoods.
He spent those idyllic days in Hildesheim, one of the oldest and most picturesque towns in northern Germany, built along the windswept banks of the Innerste River and surrounded by rolling hills dotted with farms, dairies, and grazing livestock. The town’s cobblestone streets were