Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell

Appendix B

APPENDIX B The Special Prisoners One of the best known of the special prisoners of Dachau was Pastor IVlartin :":iemoller, whose opposition to the :":azificatioa of the Protestant churches, as well as his forthright rejection of anti-Semitism, led to his imprisonment in a Berlin jail in 1937. After eight months, he was taken before one of the Fuehrer's Special Courts, established to pass judgment on persons accused of antigovernment attitudes and activities. In the opinion of the three judges, all reliable Nazi Party members, the pastor was guilty of "abuse of the pulpit." He was fined 2,000 marks and sentenced to seven months in jail, but because he had already served eight months, he was released. For a few minutes. Outside the court, he was arrested again and taken to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen where, for two years, he paced back and forth in a cell seven steps long and four steps wide. I In 194I, he was transferred to Dachau, given a new red triangle, a new number, 26,679, a cell in the bunker, and a convicted murderer to act as his orderly. The food was adequate; he was permitted to write, and read books and magazines; his wife visited every two weeks. The door to his cell was open to that he could visit the occupants of adjacent cells, two Roman Catholic priests. Together they spent the mornings in prayer and the early afternoon hours in Bible studies ; in the evenings they played cards. The years passed slowly. In 1944, another concession was granted to Dr. Niemoller-he was permitted to preach. On Christmas Day of 1944, in his cell, he addressed his congregation of six prisoners: a British Army colonel, two Norwegian shipowners , a Yugoslav diplomat, a Greek journalist, and Dr. van Dyck, a Dutch cabinet minister. Subsequently, he was allowed to preach five more times, for the same audience, and in the same location. 268 I In a sense, Dr. Niemoller was lucky. He had been sentenced to death by the State, but the sentence had not been carried out, probably because of his popularity. Despite the efforts of Nazis, he remained a German hero.2 While exercising in the bunker courtyard, the pastor was able to talk briefly with another special prisoner, Major Richard H. Stevens, a British military intelligence officer who occupied a comfortable cell where he painted and listened to his radio. Permitted to wear civilian clothes, he occasionally shopped in Munich . In the camp, he was in solitary confinement, like most of the honorary prisoners. The pastor believed that Stevens had been falsely accused of participation in a plot to kill the Fuehrer (the Venlo Incident), a plot that had been rigged by the Nazis for political reasons.3 Elsewhere in the bunker was a British Secret Service officer, Captain S. Payne Best, imprisoned for the same reason as Stevens . Their story dates back to 1939, when a Gestapo agent, Walter Schellenberg, using an alias, contacted Stevens and Best with a strange story: certain German generals were thinking about kidnapping Hitler. If this happened, could the new government in Germany be assured of fair treatment by the English ? While exploratory contacts were under way, a bomb exploded in the famous Munich Beer Hall on November 8, 1939, twelve minutes after Hitler had completed a scheduled speech and had left the premises. Schellenberg was ordered to kidnap Best and Stevens. He accomplished this the next day on Dutch soil. (This occurred before the invasion of Holland.) One Dutch officer was killed during the foray. Best and Stevens denied all knowledge of the bombing, but the Nazis proclaimed their guilt, saying that they had hired a German Communist, a carpenter named Georg Elser, to construct and detonate the bomb. The two Englishmen were taken to a concentration camp where they spent two years in solitary confinement wearing heavy chains night and day. Elser was interned in the Flossenberg concentration camp where he was permitted to work in a shop and play his zither; an SS guard was posted outside his cell. Despite the guard, he managed to tell Best that the Nazis had commissioned him to construct the bomb. Eventually, all were taken to Dachau, Best and Stevens Appendix B I 269 in 1941, and Elser in 1945 -his second internment there; the first had been in 193 7. Schellenberg became an SS general. Elser was liquidated at Dachau; the order dated April I, 1945, was signed by the...