Dautmergen-Schomberg
Dautmergen-Schomberg Near the Swabian Alps, close to the town of Rottweil in Germany where the nice doggies come from, lies the town of Dautmergen. During the last phases of the war, there was a concentration camp here of some 180,000 square feet, a village of death for people assembled from many lands of Europe. Dautmergen Camp, surrounded by high barbed wire perimeters, became the last stop for thousands. In the summer of 1944, after the Germans lost the strategic Rumanian oilfields at Ploesti, they turned to the shale oil deposits near the Swabian Alps. The Gestapo asked the commandant of the Natzweiler Concentration Camp in Alsace to establish new concentration camps near the oil fields, and in a few days time, thanks to slave labor, the watchtowers and barbed wire fences were up, and the first shipments of prisoners began rolling in. Prisoners slept in the open; there were no blankets, mattresses, kitchens, or sanitary facilities. Very soon there were outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid, and deaths due to exposure and cold. About 50,000 victims were deported to these camps between late summer of 1944 and the end of the European War in April 1945. At least half of them died. Thousands perished of starvation. The guards, themselves undernourished, looted the small rations that were meant for the prisoners. Thousands more froze to death, others died by violence. At this point, Erwin Dold was assigned to take over the camp as commandant. Dold was a Nazi officer, a fighter pilot rather than a Party regular, who had been shot down in the Crimean campaign. He had spent, he wrote in his diaries, months in various hospitals in Rumania and Eastern Germany. Found unfit for further duty as a fighter pilot, he was returned to limited duty at Freiburg Air Force Base, not far from his home town of Buchenbach in the southern Black Forest region. In mid-1944 he was ordered to the administration of the Haslach slave labor camp. "I had no idea," he wrote. "Haslach was a labor concentration camp. Up to that time, I had taken no notice of the existence of such camps. Our family ran a small sawmill and guest house. We never spoke of such things. "I will never forget the moment I first entered Haslach," he went on. "Filthy, half-starved people, suffering with diseases and scarred by abuse, stared at me with terror. Not one or two, but thousands were living here in the most desperate need, and more were arriving every day!" Dold was then only 24, already a combat veteran. He made up his mind in that first minute: "My folks raised me to be a good Catholic and taught me that we were supposed to help other people. But here it was pointless to try to help one or another of these victims. I had to think about all of them. 1 had to think of myself, in a sense, as one of them. I would have to do something about food, clothing, and medical care. Never mind if they were, as we were told, enemies of the Nazi State or parasites on the German people. I determined that they would survive." In the autumn of 1944 Dold was ordered to take over Dautmergen. Just a few days before, in Dautmergen, SS Unterscharfuehrer (section leader) Kruth had shot to death a Polish Jew named Mirka on the march to work in the oil shale fields because Mirka had dared to pick up a rotten apple from the gutter. The camp was in a swampy area. There were no floors in the barracks. Every day another 40 to 50 people died. Out of one transport of a thousand Jews from Riga, for example, eight people survived.Of the Norwegian prisoners, who had it better, only 30 survived out of 80. The Norwegian concentration camp prisoner Alf Knudsen, who had been in many camps, testified later before a French war crimes tribunal: "Dautmergen, that was absolute hell. It was beyond comparison with any other camp. Until Erwin Dold arrived there." "I was in sick bay," testified a Polish Jew named Tubiaszewicz, remembering his first meeting with the new camp commandant. "Jews were forbidden to be in sick bay. When Dold came in, I sprang up from the cot and stood trembling before him. He could kill me on the spot. I began to beg for my life. He laid his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Why are you [polite form of address) afraid? You are clearly sick, and you are a person [Mensch] no different from me.' I will never forget those words. Erwin Dold was sent to us from heaven." Dold moved quickly to save the 2,000-plus half-starved and feeble captives. Recognizing that many, perhaps most of them would not survive the grueling work in the oil fields, he placed the whole camp under a contagious disease quarantine. That not only gave him a breathing space, it ensured that higher authorities would not be likely to pop in for an inspection visit. Of course, had he been betrayed by an informer, had it become known what he was doing and why, he would not only have been removed but certainly shot. "My move was met with fury all the way up to Berlin," he wrote. "In any case, we were somehow able to secure building materials, and we began to improve the barracks and the sanitary facilities. Without compounding tricks and lies, it would have been impossible to do any of this." For those Jewish prisoners who were beyond treatment and for some others there was a terminal barracks, which in the black-hu-mor SS terminology was called the "Care Block." Naked, laid on the cold earth, those who were near death awaited their end. The only caregivers who attended these houses of horror were those who came to break the gold teeth off the dead and dying. Dold commanded the rehab of these "Care Blocks." The whole camp hospital had only one doctor, a Polish deportee, so the concentration camp commandant arranged for German civilian doctors to come in and serve the camp. His odd justification was that the work of these prisoners was essential to Germany's ultimate victory (how did he get away with this in late 1944?!), and to that end they had to be kept in good health. He managed to procure blankets for the sick, when the German army itself was short on supplies. His strategy was simple: he stole them. "Midnight requisition," I believe it is called. "I got hold of some really potent Black Forest cherry brandy and got the guards of the Schoemberg supply depot dead drunk," he wrote. "While they were out cold, I brought in a pair of trustworthy people from the Dautmergen Camp, and we loaded a heavy freight delivery truck with blankets and underwear." It was of course highly unlikely that the watch standers would ever report the theft, since they would have had to admit to being drunk on watch. Soldiers get shot for that. Still, betrayal by an informer, or even drawing the notice of an attentive soldier or townsperson, would have put paid to Dold and his plots. The prisoners were still on the verge of starvation. Dold at extreme danger to himself requisitioned gasoline and a heavy transport truck. "Generally, we drove by night and fog past the Black Forest to Baden, where I was from, in order to procure potatoes, flour, and once even a whole slaughtered pig, all on the black market. My father gave me the money to buy it all. He told me which acquaintances and neighbors I could call on for help. My father also showed me the back roads I could use to circumvent the control posts." Dold always traveled on these night forays with a couple of concentration camp prisoners, "always the same five or six that I could trust. I dressed them up in Army uniforms, but they still looked so pitiful and hungry that the farmers took pity and willingly sold us food, even though that was a punishable criminal offense." Dold's daily violations of the war regulations placed his own life in constant danger. "When we fell into an unanticipated threatening situation, I played the tough concentration camp commandant. It always worked." Had it not worked even once, the 24-year-old would have been headed for the gallows. Once it nearly happened. Dold had bought a load of black market beef on the hoof from some wholesale farmers nearby to Dautmergen. "My problem was that the concentration camp itself, like all similar installations, was under military guard, to whom I could say nothing. How could I possibly get the cows into the kitchens? "Well, I would run into my office by night and hit the air raid siren alarm. Immediately the watch commandos had to extinguish the perimeter spotlights, and in the ensuing darkness I ran out with a couple of prisoners and we grabbed the cows, whom we had stashed in the woods nearby, and brought them in." A few days later, the police arrived, tipped off by an informer. They were investigating an alleged illegal slaughtering of diverted food, a criminal offense in those late war days. Dold coolly had the senior police officer brought to him and offered to shoot him on the spot. From the mouth of a concentration camp commandant in the winter of 1944/ 45, that was without question a very serious offer. Thereafter the police authorities never looked into the affairs of the camp again. In April 1945 the order came to clean up the camps in the Rottweil area before the Allied advance got there. SS commandos were sent to drive the survivors by forced march to the southeast. Before the march, Dold distributed all the food there was: 12 potatoes and a loaf of bread per person. At one train station, against the objections of the SS, he broke into a railroad car and distributed the contents—chocolate and cigarettes—to the prisoners as supplementary provisions. He rode ahead of the column on a motorcycle, finding sleeping quarters and food for the prisoners. Five days later the prisoners were freed by the French army. In the fall of 1946, Dold himself was brought in chains, together with 49 mass murderers, torturers, and administrators, as "Accused number 41" before the French military tribunal in Rastatt. A scene took place without parallel in the history of war crime trials. One after another, the former prisoners of Dautmergen came forward in tears to beg for the life and freedom of the former concentration camp commandant. When one venerable old Jew appealed for the blessings of heaven for "this man, his children, and his children's children," one of the judges burst into tears. On the 17,th of January, 1947, Erwin Dold was freed from investigative custody. On the morning of 1 February, Judge Jean Ausset, president of the tribunal, sentenced 21 Nazis to death or imprisonment. Erwin Dold was the only concentration camp commandant of the Third Reich who was dismissed as proven completely innocent.
Source: Hoosier State chronicles, 2003
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