Bruce Henderson - The Ritchie Boys - The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler

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 sick was labeled a malingerer and could be subjected to punishment—most 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.