“The word most frequently used was ‘F. . .’ a word not to be found in the Oxford Dictionary. If you could imagine the offspring of every noun with which this adjective could be combined you would gaze at a string of crossword puzzles combined with an old curiosity shop.”
ALFRED JULIUS BRUCK, 1946
Note: In this post, I introduce readers to Alfred Julius Bruck whose relationship to me is unclear. He wrote a monumental family history ostensibly covering a 1000-year period of our Bruck family, and additionally an account of the almost six years spent in Nazi internment camps during the Second World War. Alfred Bruck was caught in 1939, but as a British citizen he was protected by the Geneva Convention covering foreign nationals. He was interned in civilian internment camps ILAG (“Internierungsläger”) in the Upper Silesian towns of Tost [today: Toszek, Poland] and Kreuzberg [today: Kluczbork, Poland], and liberated in Spittal an der Drau, Austria. Alfred’s memoir detailing his wartime experiences form the basis of this post.
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POST 170: UNIQUE FAMILY PHOTOS FROM MY SECOND COUSIN’S COLLECTION
Alfred Julius Bruck’s name has long been known to me. I first came across it when I visited the FamilySearch Library (formerly the Family History Library) in Salt Lake City many years ago, and uncovered his grandiosely titled manuscript, “The Bruck Family: A Historical Sketch of a Jewish Family through a Thousand Years.” The manuscript documents my family’s origins, tracing its lineage throughout Europe.
Let me provide some context. My friend from Wrocław, Poland (Breslau, Germany), Jakub “Kuba” Stankiewicz, the Director of Jazz Studies at the Karol Lipinski Academy of Music in Wrocław, recently brought a book entitled “No Justice in Germany: The Breslau Diaries, 1933-1941” to my attention. Written by Willy Cohn, an educator and historian from Breslau, it is an eyewitness account of the destruction of the city’s large, vibrant Jewish community under Nazi rule. Cohn details how the Nazi marginalization process gradually unfolded through systematic harassment, violence, and the loss of civil rights; he also describes the Jewish community’s efforts to maintain a semblance of normal life through the maelstrom. Cohn missed his own opportunity to flee while burying himself in his work. While he was able to help his three older children to emigrate, he, his wife, and their two youngest daughters were deported to Lithuania and murdered in 1941.
Because of my own family’s longstanding connection with Breslau, Kuba rightly assumed I would be interested in Willy Cohn’s book. It is not my intention here to discuss the contents of Cohn’s account, an impossible task, but rather explore something I discovered in a footnote to his book. Knowing that his own deportation was quickly coming and that his time left was short, Willy Cohn devoted his remaining days to writing a memoir separate from his diary. Norbert Conrads, the editor of Willy Cohn’s book, added a footnote stating Willy had written a previous memoir that he had entrusted to an acquaintance named Alfred Bruck to transport out of Germany that had been confiscated from Alfred when he was arrested by the Gestapo:
“Cohn had once before written memoirs, between 1935 and 1938, although their scope is not known. In 1939, he gave his only handwritten manuscript to an acquaintance named Alfred Bruck, who was emigrating to England. Bruck, however, was arrested by the Gestapo and the manuscript seized.” (Cohn 2012: p 329)
Uncertain whether the Alfred Bruck cited in Willy Cohn’s book was the documentarian I was familiar with, I turned to my distant cousin Helen Winter asking what she knew of his origins. She confirmed that Alfred Bruck came from Breslau and was indeed the person to whom Willy Cohn had entrusted his original memoir. Helen reminded me that in the Preface to his monumental family history, in paragraph 2, Alfred refers to having been arrested by the Gestapo and interned for the whole of the Second World War. (Figure 1)
Helen also directed me to the Leo Baeck Institute’s website where she told me I could download a detailed diary written by Alfred describing his almost six-year internment in German “Internierungsläger (ILAG)” (Internment Camps) between 1940 and 1945. As a Jewish man born in England, Alfred was sent to an Internierlungslager rather than a concentration camp, a move that unquestionably saved his life. As an incarcerated civilian he was interned in an ILAG rather than a Stalag, an enlisted prisoner-of-war camp.
I can’t do justice to the many topics that Alfred covers in his 145-page diary. Instead, I will highlight and quote some passages that resonated with me and/or that may be of interest to readers. I invite readers curious about Alfred’s complete account to download the full diary from the LBI website. Before quoting and commenting on the extracted passages, let me tell readers a little about ILAGs.
ILAGs were internment camps established by the German Army during the Second World War to hold Allied civilians caught in areas that were occupied by the German Army. These included American citizens caught in Europe after the United States officially entered World War II on December 8, 1941, when Congress passed a declaration of war against Japan following their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the previous day. Following the U.S. declaration, Germany and Italy—members of the Axis powers—declared war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941.
ILAGs also included citizens from Great Britain and the Commonwealth caught in areas occupied by the German Army. Among the internees were British-born citizens who were resident in the Channel Islands. Alfred Bruck comments on the arrival of these Channel Islanders at the ILAG where he was interned. (see below) These Channel Islanders wound up in an ILAG because of an October 1941 decree by Hitler ordering the internment of 8,000 British, in retaliation for the internment by the British Army of 800 Germans living in Iran. While not carried out until September 1942, it resulted in the deportation to camps in Germany of all British citizens not born in the Channel Islands, about 2,200 men, women, and children.
The inmates in ILAGs were civilians and deemed to be “enemy aliens.” Because these internees were civilians, conditions in ILAGs were expected to follow international laws and treaties (such as the Geneva Convention), and internees often received food packages through the Red Cross. Alfred Bruck often speaks about receiving these packages. Notwithstanding the international laws and treaties governing treatment of the civilian internees, conditions could still be harsh, overcrowded, and highly restrictive.
Alfred Bruck’s diary is entitled “The Sane Asylum.” Below, I quote from his diary periodically adding Editor’s Notes or commenting on Alfred’s observations:
“After having spent well over a year in various German prisons it was my misfortune, or perhaps my luck, to be interned in Tost [today: Toszek, Poland] and Kreuzburg [today: Kluczbork, Poland] in Upper Silesia [today: cross-border region between southern Poland (Opole Voivodeship) and the Czech Republic (the Moravian-Silesian Region)] for the greater part of the war, where the internees were housed, fed and detained in former lunatic asylums. Probably there was an unintentional sense of humor in this, as with the perverted mind of the Nazis there was surely more sanity in the asylums than in the Reich. . .
There were a number of Ilags in Germany and in the German occupied countries. The first one created at the outbreak of the World War II was the Wülzburg camp in southern Germany [EDITOR’S NOTE: ILAG Wülzburg (officially Ilag XIII)], which housed many nationalities; but when Germany occupied one country after the other all were gradually released with the exception of the British. . .
[Some internees]. . .were British by the fact that they were born by accident on British soil, though none of their parents were British. This applied to many of the Jewish internees from Belgium. Their parents had been refugees in England during World War I, when they were born. Their brothers and sisters born in Belgium after their return were Belgian and with their parents met the fate of millions of other European Jews. One man was a gypsy, a typical Berliner, who had a grand sense of humour. He was born in Glasgow by some accident, but was wise enough to take out a British passport before the outbreak of the war, though he could not speak a word of English. His wife and family who were British by marriage were sent with all the other gypsies to the dreaded Auschwitz camp and exterminated. Another group consisted of Poles, Czechs and other nationalities who had emigrated to Canada, returned and lost their citizenship, but were considered fit for internment by the Germans as former citizens of the British Empire. This saved the lives of many who would otherwise have become victims of the Nazi slave gangs. Two others were by some wonder transferred from the Auschwitz camp and had their Auschwitz Nos. tattooed on their arms.
The men came from all walks of life and from all over the world, some kept in the background, mainly those who were somebody outside, others tried to balance their inferiority by making up stories and pretending to be outside what they were not. Thus one joke summed up the men by saying that none were below the rank of a captain while serving in the army and nobody had a position lower than that of a company director. . .Even spies and informers were among the men; the latter were often visited by the ‘Holy Ghost,’ who meted out their just punishment.
. . .in an Ilag, a man of confidence had to be elected by the men and accepted by the Germans without any power to give orders.
. . .nothing helped more to sustain the morale of men than to keep themselves occupied. I personally was very fortunate in that respect: I was the camp secretary for the greater part of my internment, I was in charge of the reference library, I studied, I gave classes and lectures, carried on with my daily physical exercises to keep fit, indulged in gardening in the summer months and always found something to do. But it meant will-power which most men were lacking.
Two institutions kept us alive, spiritually, mentally and bodily: the YMCA and the Red Cross. Both paid us regular visits. . .
Many things were ‘verboten’ [EDITOR’S NOTE: forbidden] including maps. . .We were not allowed to have haversacks, German currency, foreign bank notes, any valuables, cameras, radio sets, books by Jewish authors, but the list of prohibited articles varied with the Camp Kommandants; in some cases even razor blades were limited in number, but we did not shave too often anyhow and many grew beards in the winter.
There were times when we were hungry and cold, when we would have given a fortune for a piece of bread, when we were eating black and green and frozen potatoes and even with the peeling, when we had to endure cold without heating and sufficient blankets, when before the arrival of Red Cross clothing we at times had little to wear, when during our sleep the heavy tread of the Jerry boots on their inspection rounds had rudely to awaken us, when during air raids we were kept in the barracks without air raid shelters and were prepared for our last hour, but trusted to some unknown power that the worst would not happen, there were times when life seemed so barren, when we had an eternity of time at our disposal to brood and think and to enquire into our own self, when we were building castles in the air, dreaming of the past, of the future.
In this long period of enforced idleness and in these morbid surroundings we slowly built a new life. Necessity became the mother of invention, out of boards, boxes, tins we made things to better our lives. . .The professional electricians knew how to divert the current from the switch boxes. . .and when the Germans locked and padlocked the fuse and switch boxes, we still found ways to overcome the new difficulty. Thus we were provided with electric lights, with cookers, heaters, radio, until one fine day the electricity works made a complaint to the Kommandant that the main cable to our camp was getting so hot at certain hours of the day that it might burn through and cut us off altogether.
Humour was our greatest asset, the one thing the Germans could never grasp or understand. . .Our humour always puzzled them: to ridicule ourselves, to cheer the Germans when they announced a great victory or burst out in roars of laughter when the radio proclaimed with all the solemn ritual of the German war propaganda machinery the sinking of another 100,000 tons of British shipping made them either think that our mind was slowly being affected by barbed-wireritis or that the German propaganda had worked. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when he said of the German Intelligence Service in World War I that they were ‘Everything else but intelligent’.”
According to his diary, Alfred Bruck arrived at internment camp in Tost [Toszek, Poland] at 8pm on Thursday, December 12th, 1940, along with five other men from Breslau [Wroclaw, Poland]. The following morning, he had to complete all sorts of forms and was assigned the number 1133 on a piece of cardboard (Figure 2) which was later exchanged for a metal disc, which he had to wear on a piece of cord around his neck.
ILAGs, like Stalags, were run by the German Army, the Wehrmacht, versus the Gestapo, although the Gestapo had a security officer attached to the ILAG. The Kommandant was a lieutenant colonel who was rarely present. The running of the camp was mainly in the hands of the Oberleutnants or first lieutenants.
The camp in Tost where Alfred was held was a former lunatic asylum. After the asylum inmates were transferred, political prisoners were housed there for a time, then Poles, after which it became an ILAG. Building I was a dormitory with many rooms and a chapel; Building II contained the mess rooms and dining rooms, tailor and cobbler workshops, and the canteen with hardly anything to be had. Building III, dubbed the “White House,” is where concerts, services, lectures, classes, etc. took place.
When Alfred arrived at the ILAG, there were 1,135 prisoners, mostly from Holland, Belgium, France, and a few from Poland, Germany, and Norway.
There was a set program for the day. Reveille was at 6am, breakfast 7-7:30, roll call at 8:45, two dinner seatings at 12:15 and at 1pm, tea at 4-4:45pm, then evening roll call at 8pm, and lights out at 9:15pm.
The main topics of discussion were of course the political situation, military rumors, and the question of food, not enough meat, the awful cooking, and jealousy if one got more than another.
Internees could receive an unrestricted number of letters, but were only allotted four postcards, and three letter cards a month to send to their nearest relatives.
During one thorough search of the dormitory, Alfred’s diary was found: “A soldier had my diary in his hands: when he asked about it I told him that I was teaching in the camp and that these were the notes I needed for the class. The text was in English, written in an exercise book, and he did not understand English anyhow; so he was glad when I could enlighten him in German. But ever since I was careful to hide my diary. I wrote it out again in a very small hand-writing and stuck the sheets between the inner layer and the leather of my suitcase. Later I had it in the hollowed-out plank of a case which I took out and placed in its original position. The diary sheets were never found in subsequent searches, though beds, straw sacks, pillows, valises were thoroughly examined.”
Alfred Bruck was one of the few internees in the ILAG who knew English and German fluently. When he arrived in the internment camp, word erroneously got out that he was a reporter for the “Times” [presumably the “London Times”], something he denied. In real life, he was an art-print publisher, writer, and historian. Because he was bilingual, he could give out the news from the not entirely truthful German-language newspapers available to internees, so developed a regular news bulletin in the camp. Once the news bulletin in his dormitory room got known, others requested Alfred read out the news in their rooms; he was occasionally rewarded with cigarettes (since he didn’t smoke, he could easily exchange these for foodstuffs), sweets, and chocolate. This made Alfred very popular in camp.
On Alfred’s birthday in 1941, March 28th, an illegal radio was turned on for the first time. Alfred got on the German’s radar, and he was warned by the camp office only to read the news in the rooms to avoid anything official. In June, he was called to the Gestapo captain and security officer accused of spreading “propaganda with the intent of undermining the morale of the camp” by giving out news obtained from newspapers, radio, or possibly illegal sources. He was severely reprimanded and warned that he could be punished with imprisonment up to 10 years or even executed. The extent of Alfred’s treasonable offense became evident the following day when the Germans published their own news sheet in the camp. It was nothing but the official party line translated into English and French. The contemptible part was that a subscription to this official communique by the German Supreme Command had to be paid for out of camp funds!
On the rumor that Russia had entered the war, Alfred remarks:
“June 22nd Russia was in the war. The news became known in the camp early in the morning and opinion was very divided whether it was rumour or a fact. At 12:30 we heard on the radio officially that Germany had invaded Russia. The night before searchlights had been observed by some internees and for weeks we had watched the trains and the endless convoys clattering along the rads to the East, even Red Cross cars full of soldiers and anti-aircraft guns scattered in between. . .”
Regarding the inhuman treatment of Russians:
“In October [1941] I was working on a farm at Kesslern for a few days, sorting and loading potatoes. . .The guard who was in charge of us had recently arrived from Lamsdorf [EDITOR’S NOTE: Łambinowice, Poland], and unknowingly he confirmed to me that the Russian prisoners there were dying like flies and were receiving inhuman treatment, but he said that it was their own fault, as they had not signed the Geneva Convention. I am sure that if they had signed it the Germans would have found some other excuse.”
As I discussed in Post 194, I visited the former prisoner-of-war camp at Łambinowice (Lamsdorf-Stalag VIIIB) in August 2025 to visit ongoing metal detecting going on there in connection with archaeological excavations. My purpose was to see firsthand the POW camp where my father’s first cousin, Heinz Löwenstein, had been interned and where he’d successfully escaped from. Coincidentally, on the very day my wife and I visited, the collapsed tunnel my father’s cousin used to escape was exposed by metal detectorists. In any case, on the large compound where the Lamsdorf POW camp was located now stands a memorial to the many Russian soldiers who died there in numbers far more than soldiers of other nationalities. (Figure 3)
When the occasion presented itself, British soldiers at the ILAG would share food with Soviet internees. Nazi Germany treated Soviet prisoners with extreme brutality due to Hitler’s Weltanschauung (Worldview), which deemed the war in the East as a racial war of annihilation. Hitler categorized Slavic peoples and Communists as Untermensch (subhumans) and a “Judeo-Bolshevik” threat. This ideological framework justified the deliberate starvation, execution, and enslavement of millions of Soviet captives.
Also, as Alfred notes, because the Soviets were not signatories to the 1929 Geneva Convention, Nazi Germany’s high command used this as a justification to declare they were not bound by the treaty, resulting in horrific mistreatment and starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. As an aside, the Soviet Union only signed the four primary 1949 Geneva Conventions on August 12, 1949, and formerly ratified them on May 24, 1954. Following the 1991 collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation inherited and continues to abide by its core commitments.
Regarding trading items from Red Cross parcels with local Poles:
“The coal [for heating] for the camp was generally brought from the station by outside carts. Three young Poles were the drivers. They used to trade things, toothpaste, lighters, etc. for cigarettes, soap, chocolate, things on which people in the village were very keen. The smell of English cigarettes betrayed them one day; their boss gave them away and they were arrested by the Gestapo.”
On the arrival of the so-called Wulzbergers and the segregation of Jews:
“. . .the main camp for civilian internees was the Wulzburg [see above], the first to be established in the Third Reich. It housed all the early internees arrested in Germany and Poland, later also those arrested in Denmark and Norway. There were other nationalities apart from the British, but they were later released when Germany took over the rule of the occupied countries. End of September the camp was disbanded and was to be used for Russian prisoners.
On Friday, October 3rd, these Wulzbergers arrived at our camp. . .On the whole the Wulzbergers were very unruly.
Their arrival caused a great stir in the camp, as they were used to more freedom and less discipline; they gave our camp a new spirit, particularly for shows, concerts, lectures, education and news service.
The majority were housed in room 501, my old room. One fellow caused all Jews to be removed to room 407 on the day of their arrival, but our [EDITOR’S NOTE: English] Camp Captain got this order withdrawn two days later and the following day all those who wanted to return to their old rooms could do so, though many chose to stay there including all the Jews from the Wulzberg where they had been segregated.”
On the treatment of informers:
“Beginning of December Perry, an informer, got a ducking [sic]; he was awarded the Order of the Bath on two successive nights. He was fetched from his room, dragged along the corridor to the top floor outside room 501, where a bath tub with water was standing for fire emergency. The fellows used to stand around it, spit into the filthy water, throw their matches and cigarette ends in and now it served a novel purpose. When Perry came out of his ordeal he rushed down leaving wet foot prints all along the stairs and corridors. I saw Patton coming out of his room and glancing at the wet marks; he pulled a face and knew why: he was also down for it. Perry went to hospital with stomach catarrh the next day, remained in the sick room until a few weeks later he was transferred to another camp to continue his pro-German activities.”
Further on the Russians:
“Red Cross parcels were coming in fairly regularly, and we received two Xmas parcels between three men. I can still see the German guard at the parcel office supervising the issuing and telling us how well off we were compared with the Russians, who were tearing the hearts out of dead bodies and carving pieces of meat from the legs of their dying comrades, scenes he had witnessed as a guard at his previous camp, as he assured us. It did not say much for the treatment the Germans were giving them nor the food rations they issued to the Russian prisoners, if they were all that hungry.”
In the Spring of 1942, following visits by Swiss representatives and the German War Ministry, the internment camp at Tost was condemned as overcrowded and the number had to be reduced. It was decided to establish a branch camp in Kreuzburg [today: Kluczbork, Poland], formerly a French officers’ camp, about 48 miles away (Figure 4), and Alfred was transferred there. (Figure 5) A total of 320 were slated to leave. Alfred recalls when the names were read out: “. . .I was the first, and it soon transpired that all Jews were being called first and conducted to Building I, top floor, which was the Jewish Section. Discrimination was now an established fact, though nowhere was it officially mentioned. All protests were to no avail.”
Regarding Kreuzberg Alfred notes: “Kreuzberg, founded in 1253, was a district town with an important railway junction and it had one advantage that we could see from our camp windows the clocks of two spires, of the church and the townhall, and what was even more, we could hear them strike, though their time was not always correct.”
Again, remarking on Russian prisoners: “In June Russian prisoners, and some fine-looking fellows too, arrived and were accommodated in the Kommandantur building. A request was made to collect our bread crusts for them, as they didn’t get any Red Cross or private parcels and they didn’t have enough to eat, particularly as the potato rations at that time of the year were not adequate. Sally gave one of them some cigarettes; the guard saw it and hit the Russian across the back with his rifles and confiscated the cigarettes. The Germans treated the Russians and Poles just like dirt as long as they were victorious, but later when too many Germans fell into their hands they changed their policy.”
On German Army progress on various fronts:
January 1943 “. . . brought great news, which slowly poured into the camp. Stalingrad, the Caucasus, the Don, North Africa were becoming hot spots for the Germans in spite of their victory propaganda. Rumours with exaggerated news did the rest to buck up the morale and to give us good hopes of an early return. There were quite a number of air raid alarms and January 30th was no national holiday in Germany this year in spite of the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s Third and Last Reich.”
On the arrival of the Channel Islanders:
“March 1st [EDITOR’S NOTE: 1943] a group of men from the Channel Islands arrived. Some had been in jail or institutions. There were quite a number of youngsters among them who had caused trouble to the Germans. They livened up the camp, but in many ways they were a great nuisance, as quite a few were involved in pinching, stealing, racketeering and gambling.”
On the new Kommandant, Capt. Schumann, a lawyer in Berlin:
“Schumann, who remained with us for over a year, turned out to be a very fine Kommandant. He rarely came into the camp, except on roll call, he never bothered us, he was very decent towards the Jews, and a Jewish problem did not exist for him.
The following month he told Feldwebel [EDITOR’S NOTE: typically translated as sergeant or staff sergeant] Pyttel off for his Jew-baiting when he tried to stop the Jews from going out to work. Pyttel hated the Jews and liked to tell them gruesome stories about what had happened in Poland, he was particularly fond of relating the story of the Warsaw Ghetto. . .The day following the telling-off he looked very small on parade and stopped all his cunning jokes.”
On the radio in camp and hearing the BBC news:
“On one fine day we smuggled our own radio components into the camp, first crystal sets and ear phones. . .As time went on all main parts were smuggled in and some experts built a grand set, which was hidden in a cupboard. The Germans knew we had the set, but they closed an eye. Under Capt. Schumann’s regime we had nothing to fear. If a search was to take place somehow or the other we always got a tip in time.”
News reports eventually became a barometer for the morale of the camp. If the news was good the spirits went up, but if a word of caution was issued or the news was not good, then a wave of depression came across the camp.
“July 26th the Duce [Mussolini] resigned. The news came through on the radio at 7a.m. The camp went crazy.”
“When the Russian break-through occurred in January 1945 it was us who received the news and reported the situation and position of the troops to the Germans. They were completely cut off and would not believe us until they were faced with the hard realities.”
“It was during the same month of January 1945 that our camp was removed to Spittal a. D. [Spittal an der Drau, Austria]. We dismantled the set and placed the parts in the medicine ball. The latter was given to the Germans to take along with other sports gear. So they not only unwittingly transported the set for us, but even restored it to us at the new camp.”
On Germans forcing Poles to fight for them:
“[One day] I was out in the fields cutting turf for the camp grounds. One guard could hardly speak German. He was a ‘Volksdeutscher’ from Pomerellen [EDITOR’S NOTE: Pomerania], that part of Poland that formerly belonged to the Polish Corridor. He had fought in the Polish Army against Germany; the Germans gave him the choice of remaining a Pole, in which case he would have been sent to a concentration camp meaning certain death, or becoming a German and then joining the army, which at least gave him a chance of survival. He hated the Germans, who had even forbidden the use of the Polish language, though among themselves they took no notice of this order. He was just itching for the day of revenge.”
In June 1944, discussions on P.O.W. exchanges commenced. The news was brought to the camp office from the Swiss Legation in Berlin in a letter, the contents of which were restricted to a very small circle. Alfred Bruck became involved because his skill as an interpreter was needed. Amid his work behind closed doors, news arrived that D-Day had come at last. Since there was no German so-called “Sondermeldung” (Special Announcement), the internees knew the invasion had been successful.
An attempt on Hitler’s life was made on July 20, 1944:
“July 20th the attempt was made on the life of the Fuehrer. There was great anxiety in the camp. What would happen now? The German security officer, Hauptmann Glauch, was walking across the grounds as if he was absent-minded to everything that was going on around him. The expression on his face betrayed that he was opposed to Hitler and was therefore fearing his arrest if the plan was miscarried. Soldiers were whispering to each other. A few days later the ‘Hitler gruss’ [EDITORS’S NOTE: Nazi salute] was introduced in the army, we could not help bursting out in roars of laughter when we saw the guards stretching out their arms on morning roll call. The officers did not seem to like it.”
The above passage warrants a few remarks. Adolf Hitler survived over 40 assassination attempts, with the closest call occurring on July 20, 1944. On this date, German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg successfully planted a briefcase bomb in a conference room at the “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler survived the explosion. The Hitlergruss (German for “Hitler greeting”) is the formal term for the Hitler salute and involved extending the right arm rigidly forward and upward at a 45-degree with the palm facing down. Judging from Alfred Bruck’s observations, the Nazi Party was clearly trying to reassert control over the military and assure they had trusted people in place.
As the Germans fortunes shifted in eastern Europe during the war, the football grounds and the swimming pool meadows at the Kreuzberg internment camp began to be used to accommodate parking carts and horses of the so-called “Volksdeutsche” refugees. These refer to the millions of ethnic Germans who lived outside the borders of Nazi Germany (e.g., in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia) who fled or were forcibly expelled from their homelands during and after the Second World War:
On “Volksdeutsche” refugees:
“They had come with everything they could load on their carts, which were drawn by camels as well as horses. Some of them had been over a year on the go, and more pathetic sights of displaced Germans to the Reich were to follow as time went by.”
The last Christmas behind barbed wire, Christmas 1944:
“At last the last Christmas had arrived, Xmas 1944; it was to be the saddest of them all, but it was to be the last one behind barbed wire. We were living under the shadow of great events, it was the eve of the great Russian offensive, the calm before the storm. There was no heating and it was so cold. There was no food, as by Himmler’s outrageous orders the last Red Cross parcels had been given out in November. Five young fellows managed to catch a cat and had her roasted for their Xmas dinner. The German meal was pretty meagre: peas, potatoes, and goulash, but a feast after the continuous meals of barley, swedes and sauerkraut.”
The Russians break through:
“Slowly the situation was becoming strained. The Russians were advancing, the Germans could not believe their own senses, they simply could not grasp the fact that the Russians had broken through the German lines and were on their march towards Kreuzberg. We, with our secret wireless sets, were better informed than they were, and when we informed them of the capture of Welun [EDITOR’S NOTE: Wieluń, Poland] (FIGURE 6) they replied with a smile that they had only phoned through to their military post during the afternoon and received a reply from there. The next day they found out that we were right: the Russians had surrounded and by-passed the town, leaving the telephone line intact thus giving our Kommandant the impression that we were trying to fool them.
There was talk of the camp removal. . .
With the week starting Monday [January 1945] 15th, things began to move. . .
In the afternoon Tom [the camp’s so-called trusted representative] explained the situation to the camp in the Festsaal [EDITOR’S NOTE: banquet hall] and that if necessary we would have to walk to the nearest station from where we could get transport. He had, however, pointed this impossibility out to the Kommandant and a telegram was sent to the Swiss legation in Berlin. According to the Geneva Convention only military prisoners could be forced to march, but civilians had to be evacuated by transport. We ourselves were none too keen on leaving, we would rather stay and be rescued by the Russians, though a few seemed more scared of the Russians than of the Germans.”
The flight from Kreuzberg finally commenced:
“The march to the station was most interesting, just like a flight. The temperature was 22 degrees below freezing point. The town was deserted, the Kreisleiter [EDITOR’S NOTE: District Leader] had shot himself the day before, the Nazis had all gone, they were the first to leave, the post office was closed, Russian prisoners, locked up in the Gustav Freytag Schule, were looking out of the windows, at all entrances to the town were tank traps, wooden piles driven into the ground, the small bridges undermined, all the work of the Volkssturm with their weekly trench digging had been in vain. The streets were full of lorries, tanks, cars, hardly a soul was about, except soldiers.”
Observation about the train trip to Spittal:
“Outside we heard yelling and shouting. ‘Halt die schnauze’ [EDITOR’S NOTE: “shutup” or “shut your mouth”] and other vile expressions emanating from the uncouth mouths of the inhuman guards with their sticks and to us ‘close the windows,’ threatening to shoot. What a sight! A sight that unrolled the whole Nazi regime, a screaming witness to German Kuktur; if we never knew why the world was fighting Germany we knew it now. There stood a train with open trucks full of Jews standing in the bitter cold, only with a blanket round their head, and ten days on their way from Auschwitz to Dachau. Seventy had already died since they left Auschwitz. They were from all over Europe, mainly from France, Belgium and Holland. The Russians were approaching, and in spite of everything the Germans could find the transport means to get them away by hook or crook. 60,000 they gave as the figure evacuated. In spite of all the shouting we managed to throw some food across to them. They assured us that all we had heard on the radio about Auschwitz was nothing compared to the real truth. A few months later I heard with my own ears on the radio at Spittal when Germany had surrendered that the total figure of murders came to 4,000,000.”
The internee’s relocation from Kreuzberg to Spittal, 360 miles (Figure 7), took 11 days from Friday, January 19, 1945 until Monday, January 29, 1945:
“Thus our journey of eleven days had ended. We were very fortunate to get through without any mishap, not once were we bombed during the day or night when remaining at a railway station, not once were we attacked by dive bombers. Quite a number had escaped, but they were all caught in the end and sentenced to the inevitable 21 days bunker.”
Observations about the increasing number of air raids while interned in Spittal:
“Then in the late afternoon some more planes flew overhead, we were watching them from the windows when suddenly they dropped their loads and hit the station, which was blown sky-high. The boys had done some good work, had hit a supply train with food and munition and war material, had blocked the line for over a week, burnt trucks and twisted the rails. Heavy traffic on the roads, mostly at night, was to replace the rail traffic. The Germans salvaged what they could, and to us it meant almost three weeks of tinned meat instead of fresh meat. Some of the tins were scorched and the meat affected with the result that the camp had diarrhea for almost two weeks.
During all these raids we had to stay in the huts, while the Germans hurried to the shelter. Then when the planes had passed overhead they were sitting at the entrance enjoying the warmth of the Spring sun.
The air raids continued right through March [EDITOR’S NOTE: 1945]. On the 10th a German transport was blown up a few miles away and ten killed. On the 13th we counted 540 planes flying over the camp, they came in wave after wave in wonderful formation; one bomb was dropped by a returning plane as an emergency without doing any damage. That day Regensburg and Munich had been heavily bombed. The following day we observed three fighters rushing across the skies, their white vapour lines looking like snakes across the blue. A whistle sounded and the Jerries disappeared down the shelters like rats down a hole.”
Alfred often remarks about the beauty of the mountains surrounding the internment camp at Spittal, which interestingly internees were occasionally permitted to explore on their own or in the company of German staff sergeants:
“Unteroffizier Schwetz took me, Ted, Crowther, Evrall and Farringer for a nice walk through the woods and over the mountains to the Millstaetter See. . .We had a beautiful view of the lake from St. Wolfgang as far as the Seeboden and across the Millstatt itself. Beautiful was also the view of the mountains with the snow-covered peaks of the Goldeck, Kreuzeck smiling down on the Drau Valley with its green meadows and trees and flowers and Spittal with its red roofs and coloured houses shining in the sun.”
Various observations about the end of the Second World War as seen from Spittal:
“The people in town wanted from me the latest news, wanted to know when the Nazis would go through though they themselves were listening in to the BBC at times. Though nothing was to be had officially except on ration cards we could get postcards, books, papers, much to the annoyance of the Reichsdeutsche [EDITOR’S NOTE: literally “Germans of the Reich” or ethnic Germans], who were cursing the Austrians for all they were worth. I tried to get a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ but there were none to be had. One woman told me that she would keep the only copy in her possession for her children so that they had a souvenir of the wonderful times they had gone through.
Everywhere in town there were posters from Hitler’s recent proclamation to the German people, one of them was really a joke at this stage of the war, could only be the utterance of a maniac: Berlin bleibt deutsch, Wien wird wieder deutsch, und Europa wird niemals bolschewistisch. (Berlin will remain German, Vienna will be German again, and Europe will never be Bolshevist).
The following evening was the eve of his birthday. Goebbels gave his customary speech on the radio. We could all hear him in the camp on the loudspeaker which was specially placed at the open window of the Kommandatur for our benefit. The leitmotif was ‘Deutsche Treue’ [EDITOR’S NOTE: German loyalty]. To us it sounded like a swan song.
April 20th was the Fuehrer’s birthday, and his last one, too. There were no celebrations, no flags flying. In town the butcher shop seemed to be the only one with the window daily decorated with colours and a picture of Hitler.
Outside in the world at large Mussolini had been captured and lynched, and the Allied Armies had linked up with the Russians.
30th [April]. It was given out on the radio that the German Government had agreed to the British proposal of no further removals of P.o.W. camps and as the German Government was no more in touch with all the camp Kommandants this message should be conveyed to them by all possible means, if necessary by the prisoners themselves, who were not supposed to have radio sets or listen in to the home news. This was great news and with the other political events many internees were going off their head.
But what the camp did not know was that instructions had been received from the British War Office a long time ago as to what precautions we were to take when the war would end. Only a trusted few were informed, and this trusted committee made out a list of all men who could be trusted to act under instructions when the emergency should arise and tasks they were to perform. The lists were all typed out long before the end came, but the Germans surrendered in the end and the Kommandant handed the camp over to the British military in an orderly manner, so that it was never found necessary to apply these instructions.”
The Westlager (West Camp) in Spittal that was the POW and post-war displaced persons camp complex where Alfred was interned was handed over by the German Kommandant to the British Military Authorities on Wednesday, May 9, 1945, at 3pm. In his memoir, Alfred remarked on a grand sight that took place that same day:
“About 4.30 p.m. we were to witness the grandest sight of the day and one of the grandest of the whole war. Planes suddenly appeared overhead, generally in waves of three, and dropped parachutes with tin canisters containing food and medical supplies. They landed on the field, on the camp, on the buildings, the roofs, the observation post of the sentries, crashed on the telephone lines, tore down the electric cables so that for the following two nights we were without light.”
Alfred Bruck’s grandson, Richard Schneider, donated his grandfather’s manuscript to the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) in memory of his mother, Pauline Leonora Julia Schneider, née Bruck (1939-2016). Included in this donation were some photographs including one of the parachutes dropping canisters of food on May 9th. (Figure 8) Also included were some private photographs pertaining to Alfred Bruck and his family. (Figure 9) One particularly noteworthy one was taken in 1950, and shows Alfred Bruck’s daughter, Pauline at age 10, standing behind Rabbi Leo Baeck. (Figure 10)
Alfred and the other internees were eventually repatriated to their countries of origin. In Alfred’s case, he made his way back to England a little more than a month later. Alfred goes into quite a bit of detail on his circuitous trip via truck transport from Spittal, Austria to Naples, Italy, then by boat to England, including the multiple administrative tasks he was assigned along the way and the post-war damage he witnessed on his way to Naples. As mentioned earlier, I invite interested readers to access Alfred’s complete diary.
In Post 170, I discussed some unique family photographs I obtained from my second cousin, Margarita Vilgertshofer, née Bruck. One photograph I illustrated in that post was an undated one of Alfred Bruck with his wife Rosie (Figure 11), which happens to be identical to one that Alfred’s grandson donated to the LBI that is unloaded to the LBI Archives website. Margarita later sent me several other photographs taken in 1958 when Alfred and Rosie Bruck visited her family in Wolfratshausen, Germany in connection with the family tome Alfred was then researching and writing. (Figure 12)
REFERENCES
Bruck, A. (1946). The Sane Asylum [Unpublished manuscript]. Leo Baeck Institute.
The Sane Asylum. (Box 1, Folder 1) Alfred Bruck Collection, DM 325
Bruck, A. J. (1946). The Bruck Family. A Historical Sketch. [Unpublished manuscript]. Leo Baeck Institute.
Bruck, A. J. (1951). The Bruck family: A historical sketch of a Jewish Family through a Thousand Years. [Unpublished manuscript]. Leo Baeck Institute.
Cohn, Willy. No Justice in Germany: The Breslau Diaries, 1933-1941. Edited by Norbert Conrads, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture, 2012.
Very interesting read, as usual.
Thanks for sharing this stories.