Dachau to Dolomites. Tom Wall
Rome, information about the existence of the document had somehow become known to the Germans. The Irish Ambassador sent a coded message to Dublin containing information about O’Shaughnessy’s visit and McGrath’s report and it seems the Germans had broken the code.49 As a consequence, McGrath was arrested by order of the head of Abwehr II, Erwin von Lahousen.50 A search of his room seemed to provide evidence that he was gathering information on those being trained by the Abwehr, although McGrath insisted that all they found was a list of recipients of Red Cross parcels.51 He was handed over to the Gestapo in November 1942 for in-depth interrogation.52 He was stripped and his uniform, even his shoes, were ripped apart, presumably in the hope of finding documents or other incriminating items. When nothing was found, he was taken to Sachsenhausen and deposited in a cell in the camp’s prison. His future prospects were dim. His action in smuggling out details about Friesack would have been viewed by the Germans as espionage, for which the death penalty applied.
By this stage, any hopes the Abwehr had for the Irish camp were rapidly fading. Apart from the escape attempts, a riot had occurred in which loudspeakers were disabled and propaganda posters torn down and burnt.53 The Abwehr decided to abandon the project and the inmates were dispersed to other camps. Walsh, Cushing, Murphy and O’Brien were deemed to know too much and, after a period of Gestapo detention, they too were sent to Sachsenhausen, although to a different section than McGrath. His position was more serious. He was being accused of having espionage contacts outside Friesack54 and was threatened with execution unless he named them.55 He was, as he later said, ‘locked up in an ordinary prison cell, with not even the privileges of a convict. I was now under the S.S. for whom I have not a good word to say.’56
Beyond this terse statement, McGrath never recounted his experiences in the Sachsenhausen bunker. Judging by the experience of others, he would have been kept in solitary confinement and manacled to the wall or floor during the night. He would have been subjected to a process of ‘intensified interrogation’, kept in isolation and deprived of sleep.57 McGrath, although physically diminished, survived the ordeal. He may have been spared execution due to news of his presence in Friesack being made known to the British and Irish authorities thanks to Father O’Shaughnessy. The Germans were anxious to keep secret their executions of prisoners, not least a citizen of a country the Germans wished to remain neutral.
McGrath would have suffered most from being isolated. A naturally gregarious person, his only human contact was with his ever-present guards, but as he didn’t speak German he, unlike Payne Best, wouldn’t have been able to establish any meaningful communications with them. Payne Best and Stevens were in the same bunker at that time, although they were kept apart and he never met them there, although McGrath caught a glimpse of the former on one occasion. The Irishman continued to be deprived of all home contacts. His father had died in 1936, but he didn’t know if his mother was alive or dead. In fact she was alive, and writing to the war office expressing her concern about not hearing from her son for over a year. She died in October 1944 without ever knowing if her son was alive or dead.
John McGrath spent ten months in solitary confinement in the Sachsenhausen bunker before being taken to Dachau. The reputation of his new abode would have been known to him and he would have journeyed there with some trepidation. He was not to know it then, but his relocation was to result in some improvement in his conditions.
We will encounter McGrath again. In the meantime, we will focus on the misadventures of other military figures who were later to become his colleagues in the Prominenten. Among them, his former charges in Friesack – Cushing, Walsh, Murphy and O’Brien – who were located in a special section of Sachsenhausen, sharing accommodation with two notable Soviet prisoners.
CHAPTER THREE
THE DEATH OF STALIN’S SON
Near Moscow, March 1945
Meeting with Stalin at his dacha, Marshal Zhukov asked the General Secretary if anything had been heard of his son Yakov. Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s son from his first marriage, had been captured by the Germans while serving as a lieutenant in charge of an anti-tank battery in 1941. Stalin remained silent. Zhukov must have regretted asking. Three years previously, when given command of the defence of Leningrad, he had ordered that ‘all the families of those who surrender to the enemy will be shot’. Although echoing a similar order by Stalin, he would not have known that this could, technically at least, imply that Stalin be shot. However, Stalin eventually replied, saying ‘Yakov is never going to get out of prison alive. The murderers will shoot him.’1
Sonderlager ‘A’, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, 14 April 1943
Almost two years prior to this conversation, Yakov Dzhugashvili stood alone outside his prison hut in despair, hurting physically and mentally. A short time earlier he had been in a brawl with some Irish prisoners who were billeted with him. He asked to see the Camp Commander, probably to request a transfer, but the request was denied. His mental anguish may have hurt more than any blows he received. He had earlier been taunted by the allegation that his father was responsible for the murder of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals, whose remains had been discovered in a mass grave in Katyn Forrest. The news had been broadcast on German radio the previous day. He may not have believed it, but it was another reminder of his awful predicament. His relationship with his father was never good. Despite his best efforts to win his approval, Stalin seemed to dislike him.2 Now he had irredeemably shamed him by allowing himself to be captured by the Germans.
It was dusk and past curfew and he was being ordered to go into his hut. He remained standing. A rifle was trained on him from the watchtower. With increasing urgency he was being warned that he would be shot if he didn’t obey. Some of his fellow prisoners, including Thomas Cushing, watched from a hut window. He still wouldn’t move. Perhaps he reasoned that this was a way out of his dilemma. A sacrificial death might reconcile him with his father, a last act of tortured fidelity. It would at least end his torment.
Dzhugashvili suffered bouts of depression,3 which is not surprising given his background. He was the only child of Stalin’s first marriage to Kato Svanidze. She died when he was an infant and he was left in the care of his maternal grandmother and aunt in Georgia while Stalin pursued his revolutionary career. His father had little or no contact with him until he was taken to Moscow by his mother’s relatives at fourteen years of age in 1921. Stalin was at that time a close ally of Lenin within the Communist Party and he was in a position to provide his son with a good education. To the disappointment of his father, Yakov didn’t do well in school; which must have been, at least partly, attributable to the fact that he spoke only Georgian when he arrived. Although installed into the Stalin household, which now included two uncles and an aunt who had travelled with him from Georgia, he seems to have been despised by his father, who considered him soft and worthless.4 Stalin regularly humiliated Yakov in front of others, referring to him as ‘my fool’.5 He was, however, protected somewhat by his stepmother, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyev, known in the household as Nadya.6 When he was only sixteen years old, Yakov announced that he wanted to marry a fellow high school student, but Stalin objected – not so much because of their youth, but because he didn’t approve of the girl’s ‘social behaviour’ and the fact that she was the daughter of a priest.7 Yakov married his sweetheart notwithstanding, but the union didn’t prosper; a child died in infancy before the couple separated, in part at least due to Stalin’s interference. The separation didn’t improve the father-and-son relationship. In his early twenties, following another disagreement, an upset Yakov attempted suicide. He put a gun to his chest, but the bullet narrowly missed his heart and he was only wounded. This further alienated him from Stalin who told Nadya that Yakov was ‘a hooligan and a blackmailer, with whom I have nothing in common and with whom I can have nothing further to do. Let him live wherever he wants with whomever he wants.’8 Stalin, rather than seeing Yakov’s action as a cry of despair at his father’s relentless disapproval, viewed it as an attempt to exert pressure on him.9 For eight years they were completely estranged.
He remarried – again Stalin didn’t approve – and his new wife Yulia bore him a daughter, Gulia, in 1938. By then he was a Red Army officer cadet and this contributed to a reconciliation of sorts that allowed him return to the Stalin household. Relations,