Traitors in Treblinka

By J. H. Ahlin

Embark on a gripping journey through the annals of history in "Traitors in Treblinka", a poignant and deeply personal narrative that unveils the harrowing confrontations with horror within a society once considered among the pinnacles of civilization. Delving into individual experiences, the novel unveils the tragic deg

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.H. Ahlin
• Release date: Feb 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781917116374

Book preview

Traitors in Treblinka

A Jenz Ramsgrund Novel

J. H. Ahlin

Copyright © 2023 J.H. Ahlin

All Rights Reserved.

No Part of this book may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the author’s written permission.

ISBN: 978-1-961392-95-3

Dedication

Traitors in Treblinka is dedicated to the millions of victims of Nazi oppression who had their homes, possessions, and very lives stolen. The world will never know the extent of our loss. How many composers, scientists, leaders, and inventors were lost to the crematoriums? Our tragedy is ongoing and unending.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1 The School Years

Chapter 2 Hitler Youth Camp – Summer, 1936

Chapter 3 Incident on Königsalee 26, Bucherer’s Jewelry Shop, Downtown Düsseldorf

Chapter 4 My Introduction to the SS

Chapter 5 Peenemünde, The Wehrmacht Secret Research Center

Chapter 6 Our Trip to Treblinka

Chapter 7 Entering Hell on Earth

Chapter 8 Saving a Few from the Gas Chambers

Chapter 9 The Killing Machine

Chapter 10 Male Selection for our Research Center in Peenemünde

Chapter 11 Killing the Elderly and Children

Chapter 12 The Sobibor Death Camp

Chapter 13 Saving a Family

Chapter 14 Stopped and Searched by Local Police

Chapter 15 Getting Aryan Papers

Chapter 16 Nazi Command Center, Krakow, Poland

Chapter 17 A Disastrous Encounter with a Childhood Bully

Chapter 18 Auschwitz, A Murderous Machine

Chapter 19 Historical Anti-Semitism

Chapter 20 A New Transport Arrives at Auschwitz

Chapter 21 The Selection Process

Chapter 22 Saving a Few Families from Auschwitz

Chapter 23 Digging in at Auschwitz

Chapter 24 A Visit to the Prisoners’ Hospital (Häftlingskrankenbau or HKB)

Chapter 25 Miracle Doctors at Auschwitz

Chapter 26 Physicians Who Heal

Chapter 27 Surviving Auschwitz

Chapter 28 A Tour of Crematorium # One at Auschwitz

Chapter 29 Herta’s Story

Chapter 30 A Snag in Getting Out of Auschwitz

Chapter 31 Missing Ilsa

Chapter 32 Getting Back to Peenemünde

Chapter 33 The Gestapo Catches Up with Us

Chapter 34 A Horrifying Trip in a Gestapo Van

Chapter 35 A Meeting with the Minister of War Production

Chapter 36 A Report to General Dornberger

Chapter 37 A Chance to See the Love of My Life

Chapter 38 A Knock on the Door

Chapter 39 A Surprise Note from the Commanding Officer

Chapter 40 A Curious Meeting at the Hospital in Greifswald

Chapter 41 Avoiding Disaster

Chapter 42 The War Comes Closer to the Reich

Chapter 43 The Gestapo Follows us to Nordhausen

Chapter 44 A Surprising Dinner in Nordhausen

Chapter 45 Horror at Babi Yar

Chapter 46 Knowledge of the Real Enemy

Chapter 47 Epiphany

Chapter 48 A Plan to Exit the Reich

Chapter 49 A Small Complication Leaving the Reich

Chapter 50 Camouflaging the Missiles on the Train

Chapter 51 Saving an Allied Bomber Crew

Chapter 52 Crossing into Denmark

Chapter 53 The Gestapo at the Aalborg Luftwaffe Base

Chapter 54 Gestapo Intimidation

Chapter 55 Some Difficulty Leaving the Reich for Sweden

Chapter 56 Observations from Small-Town America

Chapter 57 The Nazi Nightmare in America

Chapter 58 Author’s Personal Notes

Chapter 59 The Author’s Family History

Chapter 60 Credits to Very Deserving Authors

Prologue

What follows is a personal account of confronting horror. Scenes of cruelty, suffering, and explicit sexuality may not be suitable for young readers.

Individual experiences in this story, in fact, reflect the degradation of an entire society, previously among civilization’s most advanced. Implicit in the story, then, is the question: What brought about the collapse of values and decency within Germany? Included is the debilitating hyperinflation of the post-World War I Weimer Republic, and its undermining of the trust, civility and work ethic of the German people.

Now, in the centennial year of my life, I am remembering and recounting the time my friend Ezekiel and I had to visit the death camps in Poland. We were sent to these places of inhuman horror by our boss at the secret Army Rocket Research Facility in northern Germany near the town of Peenemünde.¹ General Dornberger was in charge of this secret rocket research and testing facility. His primary concern was the health of his Jewish slave-laborer workforce, who constructed, tested, and finished the secret V-I and V-II missiles. The general was determined to know why his Jewish technicians and laborers were lasting only a few months before getting ill and often succumbing to sickness or exhaustion.

I remember our orders read: Discover why our Jewish prison workers are dying of disease or exhaustion after only a few months at our facility. The General appointed Ezekiel and me to discover what was happening to our Jews in the two labor camps supplying most of our laborers: Treblinka and Auschwitz.

It has been over 8 decades since those unforgettable and horrifying visits to the death camps, and I beg the reader’s forgiveness. Forgiveness for being an unwilling participant in the most corrupt criminal conspiracy ever to be perpetuated on an unsuspecting nation. My beautiful country, Germany, was brought to near-total ruin by greedy and self-serving politicians and their criminal henchmen during the 1930s and 40s.²

I was an unwilling participant because I looked very Aryan. At age sixteen, I was six feet four and a half inches tall with sandy blond hair and steel blue-grey eyes. My biggest problem, and the problem that saved my life, was that I was Jewish. My mother’s family was one hundred percent Jewish, and my dad was Swedish- Christian. Although I never thought too deeply about my faith growing up, I found it most interesting to be comfortable attending either church or synagogue.

I always tried to be attentive to the teachings of the Bible or the written Torah. Many of the prayers I had learned in my early years attending our synagogue and church helped me and my childhood and my life-long friend, Ezekiel Leven, get through the terribly sad and difficult years of the Holocaust.

When Traitors in the Gestapo was completed, I knew I had purposely left out a several-month period of time near the end of 1942-1943 when Ezekiel and I were ordered to the concentration labor camps to find an answer to General Dornberger’s question. He was determined to know why his Jewish technicians and laborers were only lasting a few months before they became ill or succumbed to disease or exhaustion. These few months were painful and dangerous for Ezekiel and me. Whenever I thought about our time at Auschwitz and Treblinka, I had trouble breathing and seeing clearly through watery eyes for several years. It was the most heartbreaking period in our lives. To this day, I find myself shaking and weeping at the thought of the murder of so many children, and innocent victims of the Nazi occupation forces.³

My lifelong friend Ezekiel and I severely underestimated the risk these camps posed to us. We really had no idea we were heading toward imminent danger. In addition, neither of us realized the Gestapo* was on to us until it was almost too late. Writing about these times is very difficult, but this is our story.

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1 Major General Dr. Walter Robert Dornberger was a German artillery officer whose career spanned two wars. He was captured by the armed forces of the United States in WW I and spent almost 2 years in a French POW camp. He rose to the rank of General as the leader of the Wehrmacht secret rocket base at Peenemünde in northern Germany during WW II. After WW II, General Dornberger was brought to the United States along with 1600 other German engineers and scientists to work for the United States Government rocket development program under the secret intel code, Operation Paperclip.

2 From 1950-1965, Dr. Dornberger worked for the Bell Aircraft Corporation, rising to the level of Vice President. He was a major contributor to the X-15 project and instrumental in advancing the United States space exploration. Following retirement, he returned to Germany and died on 27 July 1980 at Baden-Württemberg. He was 95 years old.

3 Gestapo is an abbreviation of the German name for Geheime Staatspolizei, translated as the (Secret State Police). On February 10th, 1936, the Nazi Reichstag passed the Gestapo Law, which included the following statement: Neither the instructions nor the affairs of the Gestapo will be open to review by the administrative courts. This meant the Gestapo was now above the law, and there could be no legal appeal regarding anything it did. Gestapo Headquarters on No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, Berlin, brought fear and trepidation to German citizens who could often hear the cries and screams of those unlucky enough to be questioned by the Gestapo.

Introduction

The commanding officer of Germany’s very secret rocket training group, Major General Walter Dornberger, had a problem. It was a simple problem but with a rather complex solution, with dire implications if handled incorrectly.

In the 1930s, before the start of World War II, the Nazi top-secret rocket program was based on the northern coast of Germany on Usedom Island in the Baltic Sea. This Army research facility was so secret most people in the German Army knew nothing about it. Even senior officers in the Wehrmacht knew nothing about what was going on in this northern outpost. The German public was completely unaware of the cutting-edge advanced research being accomplished on this military facility; most folks were not even aware there was a military base at this location.

In 1936 on April second, the German Ministry of Aviation paid 750,000DMarks to the town of Wolgast for the entire northern half of the Island of Usedom in the Baltic Sea. This peninsula became the home of the secret Army Research Center for developing rockets for military use.

The German High Command was able to investigate rocket research because this form of armament was not specifically prohibited or even contemplated by the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the Great War (WW I). This loophole in the treaty allowed the Nazis to secretly develop the V-I and V-II missiles as weapons of war without violating the Versailles Treaty.

General Dornberger’s principal problem was that he didn’t like or ever want to work for the head boss at SS headquarters, Reichführer Heinrich Himmler.

The General considered Himmler and his entire SS organization a para-military organization that, at best, provided the Wehrmacht and the German people very little protection or benefit for the vast sums of money the Reich was spending on developing it. Even more concerning to the General, the SS perpetuated what seemed to be a thug-like club-like atmosphere that was only one step above the SA (Brownshirts) and the Gestapo, the National German Secret State Police.

The Schutzstaffel, or SS was originally designed in 1925 as a protective squadron or echelon for our Führer, Adolf Hitler. In the 1930s, Reichführer Himmler had set up and staffed the labor camps that supplied slave labor for rocket manufacturing at Peenemünde.⁴

After the British bombed the secret missile development base on Peenemünde in August 1943, labor from the Dora Concentration Camp was used to build and maintain the gypsum mine in Nordhausen near the geographic center of Germany. The research and manufacturing of the V-1 and V-2 missiles were moved to the gypsum mine to avoid the range and detection of the Allied and Russian bombers.

The Dora Camp supplied slave labor to build out the gypsum mine for rocket development and manufacturing. The protective-custody leader and Commandant of the Dora Camp was a monster named SS-Obersturmführer Hans Karl Moeser.

These labor camps were built in Germany, Poland, and all-over Eastern Europe. A particular criminal element in the SS called the SS Death’s Head Division was tasked with guarding and running these labor or concentration camps.

The Rocket Research Center had to be moved from Peenemünde, on Germany’s northern coast, to the gypsum mine in Thuringia, Germany. Mittelwerk (Central Works) near the town of Nordhausen was chosen because the British had discovered the research center on Peenemünde and bombed it on the 17th and 18th of August 1943. The new manufacturing and assembly plant for the rockets had to be far from the reach of the Russian and Allied bombers.

The concentration camp inmates that Himmler sent the General to the Army Research Rocket Center in Peenemünde and Mittelwerk to manufacture the rockets were very talented slave laborers. The workers included electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, teachers, electricians, jewelers, clockmakers, and all sorts of technically skilled people. The problem was that almost one hundred percent of the workers sent by Himmler from the camps were sick, malnourished, and exhausted.

By the time these skilled Jewish workers mastered the manufacturing process for the V-1 and V-2 missiles, they were literally completely spent. They rarely lasted more than two or three months.⁵ If they didn’t die of diseases picked up at the camps, they died of injuries because their bodies couldn’t take the rigors of rocket manufacturing and army life at the research center, even though the food and living conditions were much improved over the dire conditions that existed in the labor camps. There was speculation that many prisoners died because of the abrupt change to an improved diet.⁶

The labor situation at Peenemünde finally reached the point where General Dornberger decided to send out two men to investigate the concentration or labor camps. He could not replace his labor force fast enough to build and test the wonder weapons he was developing. The general wanted to see what could be done to improve the health of the slave labor workers he was getting to assemble his rockets. He decided on one of his tall SS First Lieutenants, Jens Ramsgrund, and one newly indoctrinated Wehrmacht scientist, Vitali Carapezza. These men were to head the investigation into the nutrition, health care, and typical accommodations at the different labor or concentration camps.

The general directed the investigation to start at the camps where most of their workers were coming from: Treblinka, 60 kilometers northeast of Warsaw, and Auschwitz in southern Poland. General Dornberger had no idea the camp at Treblinka was not a labor camp at all but, indeed, a death camp built specifically to liquidate the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. These victims had been living peacefully with the city residents until the Nazis invaded their country.

The general also didn’t realize that his SS First Lieutenant had a Jewish mother, and the newly Wehrmacht indoctrinated scientist wasn’t Vitali Carapezza, but the First Lieutenant’s boyhood friend, who also happened to be Jewish, Ezekiel Leven.

Despite their being Jews, both men were eager to investigate the labor camps and find out what was really going on within those barbed wire walls. Jenz mentioned to Vitali when they were alone, Zeke, we just might be the best choice the General could have made. You might say we are ‘uniquely qualified’ to get an ‘up-front’ and accurate report to General Dornberger.

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4 Heinrich Luitpold Himmler, a former chicken farmer, was the main architect of the Holocaust. He became head of the SS in 1929 and developed and organized the concentration camps throughout the Third Reich. He was greatly feared by friends and foes alike. He was captured by the Russians while trying to flee the country after the war. He was turned over to the British at their headquarters in Lüneburg, Germany, in May 1945. Upon examination by a British medical doctor, Himmler kept jerking his head away when it came time for an oral examination. Under threat of a forced oral examination, Himmler took the coward’s way out, crushed a potassium cyanide pill, and died in 15 minutes on 23 May 1945. The man responsible for the murder of six million Jewish, Romani, and Russian Prisoners of War and countless other men, women, and children was 45 years old.

5

6 In December 1945, an American Military Tribunal sentenced Moeser to death. At his hanging, his last words were: The same way, with the same pleasure, you shoot deer, I shoot a human being. When I came to the SS and had to shoot the first three persons, my food didn’t taste good for three days, but now it is a pleasure. It is a joy for me.

Chapter 1 The School Years

My name is Jenz Ramsgrund. I was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1920 on the 16th of September. My mom was a German Jew, and my dad was a Swedish Christian. Although I grew up in Nazi Germany, I never considered the Nazi political party a threat to our country until my 15th birthday in 1935.

My best friend in grade school was a fellow Jew named Ezekiel Leven. We had known each other since the first day of the first grade of school in our hometown of Düsseldorf, Germany. Ezekiel changed my life. Of course, I didn’t realize it then, but Zeke was to become a major influence in how we thought about and survived the coming dark days of history known as the Holocaust.

Both Zeke’s parents were Jewish. His mom, Mrs. Leven, was a dear lady who kept a wonderful home in an upscale section of Düsseldorf. His father, Dr. Leven, was a prominent thoracic surgeon at the University Hospital in our city. After the Summer Olympics in 1936, the restrictions on Jews in Düsseldorf and throughout Germany became increasingly difficult for all Jewish families. There were book burnings of writings from prominent Jewish authors. Jewish physicians found it increasingly difficult to practice medicine at most hospitals in the Reich.

Even workers at my dad’s plant, which had been consolidated into I. G. Farben had experienced instances of anti-Semitic activity against some of their staff members. One of my dad’s colleagues had been dragged out of his office on some pretense, beaten, and was never seen again. When my father went down to the local Gestapo office in Düsseldorf to inquire about his colleague, he was told never to come back and to never inquire about the individual again.

My dad did call back using an assumed name two weeks later. When he inquired about his colleague from Farben, there was no notice or record of him ever being arrested or held by the Gestapo. It was a very sad time for the worker’s family.

I was quite large for my age. I could never seem to get enough to eat. I was always a little hungry, even at the end of a meal. In the third grade, I was almost the size of my teachers. My best friend Zeke was more normal-sized. We could always intuitively know what the other was thinking. This intuitive thinking was a great help when later in our lives, we had to outthink some of the nastiest criminals in all recorded history – the Gestapo.

While I was growing up and attending school, Zeke and I became best friends. We spent most of our time in and out of school, studying, eating meals, and attending school functions. We even went to each other’s church and synagogue. Our parents also became friends. We would go on picnics together in the nearby woods.

On one occasion, our families had traveled quite deep into the forest north of Düsseldorf and were enjoying a quiet picnic near a picturesque stream It was late afternoon and the sun sent slanting spears of light through the tall pines.

We heard some noises and stomping in the nearby brush and two wild boars came charging out of the brush at us from about thirty meters away. Everyone got up and headed quickly back to the car park. I just stood there, amazed at the size and threatening noises of the grunting boars.

As one started to come at me in a loping charge, he made what sounded like a high-pitched scream, I just stood my ground and gave it a swift kick on the snout as soon as it got near me. My kick rolled the boar over. The animal seemed surprised and discouraged; both the boars waddled off into the brush.

My parents warned me never to try that trick again. Dr. Leven said the boar can become enraged and quite dangerous. It’s best to leave them alone unless you are armed with a rifle. Your large size perhaps discouraged the boars.

While in grade school, many of my classmates would make fun of me in a somewhat lighthearted teasing way because I was a little oversized. My mom was a German Jew. Although quite tall and athletic, she married someone even taller. My dad was a Swede who grew to a little over six feet five inches. They had met at a conference my father’s company had in Sweden just after the Great War ended in November 1919.

Mom was always concerned with the amount of food I could consume. She was forever trying to get me to eat more whole grains and less baked goods. My problem: I was almost continuously hungry. Often, I felt I could eat another meal directly after eating lunch or dinner. If I skipped a meal or was late in eating at my normal time, I could get a little peckish. My mom was quite