As a small boy growing up during World War II, Dieter Michaelis knew to keep away from the old salt mine. The only hint of what was going on inside came when prisoners wearing blue-striped uniforms arrived under SS guard to collect bread from the bakery.
”We were told they were bad people. They were enemies of Germany. They had to be locked up,” Michaelis (68) said. ”We didn’t talk about it at school.”
It was here in Wansleben am See that one of the last secrets of the Nazis was hidden. Now, 60 years after the war, documents found in the archive of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, reveal how the Nazis used a vast subterranean complex as a concentration camp.
A retired pit foreman, Horst Bringezu, stumbled on evidence while researching a local history of the mining industry. Documents revealed that about 1 500 prisoners worked among its vaults; many died. They also revealed that the SS had used the secret tunnels linking two mine shafts to store rare books, priceless paintings and letters by Goethe — all now vanished.
In 1944, the SS picked 300 workers from other camps, including Buchenwald 120km away, to hack out vast underground chambers. Out of reach of allied bombers, production equipment was lowered into the mine. Deep underground, the Polish, French and Russian workers — some Jewish — assembled parts for Germany’s war industry.
Failed escape
”We worked in three shifts, 6am to 2pm, 2pm to 10pm and 10pm to 6am,” said Geoffroy de Clercq, a French resistance fighter who arrived in Wansleben in March 1944, and survived the war. ”We slept above ground in bunks. Underground we didn’t suffer from the cold. The temperature was constant — about 24 degrees Celsius.
”One of my French friends tried to escape. He was captured three days later. He was brought back to the camp and hanged with two Russians. We all had to watch. The camp was not as terrible as others, like Auschwitz. But by March and April 1945, there was less and less to eat. The Germans had nothing to give us. The soup was clear.”
Letters from inmates found in the Stasi archive paint the same grim picture. According to Karol Zeglicki, a Pole, prisoners worked in the gloom ”with open wounds”. Those too ill to work disappeared, their bodies apparently cremated in nearby Halle, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. Some raw materials used to make weapons came from churches looted by the Nazis, Zeglicki said.
”There were crucifixes, candelabras, chalices and candlesticks.”
Tale of survival
On April 11 1945, with allied forces closing in, SS guards forced surviving prisoners to leave the camp.
”It was a death march,” said De Clercq, now 84 and living near Poitiers. ”Those who couldn’t walk were shot by the side of the road. Between 50 and 70 of my comrades were killed.”
De Clercq escaped, only for another SS patrol to recapture him. The patrol decided to execute him. An SS officer shot him in the head. Amazingly, De Clercq survived, waking up hours later to discover the bullet had passed through his ear and jaw. He returned to Wansleben, and hid with the village grocer. The Americans liberated Wansleben the following day.
Michaelis, who still lives in the village, recalled: ”After the Americans came, the prisoners came knocking on our door asking for clothes. My mother gave them some underpants. They were extremely thin.”
Days earlier, the SS commandant had stolen his father’s car in an attempt to escape, he added.
Forgotten
The camp’s existence was swiftly forgotten as United States investigators concentrated on another camp in nearby Nordhausen, where sensational diagrams of Hitler’s secret V2 rocket were found.
In 1943, Germany’s most famous scientific academy, the Leopoldina in Halle, had sent its entire collection of rare 16th- and 17th-century medical and botanical books to Wansleben to be stored underground. More than 7 000 books were hidden, together with 13 oil paintings. The Russians — who arrived 11 weeks after the Americans — later took the entire collection back to Moscow.
In the 1960s, East Germany’s communist regime launched a secret investigation into the mine. A Stasi investigator, Sergeant Meyer, went down the pit and was confronted with ”an evil smell” that probably came from the ”corpses of former prisoners”, he reported.
He found a postcard from ”a 14- to 15-year-old child — probably of Jewish origin” — and several sacks full of SS documents. Of the precious books and paintings there was no sign. Communist officials sealed the mine, and its secrets, shortly afterwards.
Jochen Thamm, the Leopoldina’s director, said only 50 books have been returned to his library from the vanished collection. The rest are still in Russia, he said.
”We’ve had a few things back from the Georgians. But so far the Russians haven’t given us anything.”
The lost books include an early volume by the astronomer Johannes Kepler; a Paracelsus text from 1589; and a unique 1543 anatomy atlas by Andreas Vesalius.
Not much left
Today, there is little to identify the old mine as a former Nazi camp. Above ground there are few clues: a cobbled street where the prisoners marched, a few outbuildings and a railway cutting overgrown with bushes, brambles and apple trees. There is no monument.
”It’s in very bad shape,” said Ines Valhaus, a member of Wansleben’s local history society, as she toured the bleak landscape. The lake was pumped dry in the 19th century. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most jobs have disappeared.
”We would like to put up some kind of memorial here. But we don’t have any money,” she said.
There is a monument in the village square erected under the communist regime to the ”victims of fascism”.
The world may have forgotten Wansleben, but the prisoners who survived did not.
”One of the overseers at the camp was a Herr Spiess,” Michaelis said. ”He fled to southern Germany after the war. He later came back heavily disguised and with a beard. One of the Poles who had been in the camp and stayed on in the village recognised Spiess. He killed him.” — Guardian Unlimited Â