Colin Burgess - Destination Buchenwald: The Astonishing Survival Story of Australian and New Zealand Airmen in a Nazi Death Camp

Colin Burgess

Destination Buchenwald

The astonishing survival story of Australian and New Zealand airmen in a Nazi death camp

DESTINATION BUCHENWALD: The astonishing survival story of Australian and New Zealand airmen in a Nazi death camp

First published in Australia in 1995 by Kangaroo Press

This revised edition published in 2022 by Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited

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Colin Burgess 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 9781761106712

eISBN: 9781761106729

Cover design by Luke Causby/Blue Cork

Cover image: Gateway and gatehouse in Buchenwald concentration camp, Weimar, 1945 (2008.002.003) from the collection of The National WWII Museum, New Orleans

This book is dedicated to the two airmen who never left Buchenwald:

Flying Officer Philip Derek Hemmens, RAF

First Lieutenant Levitt Clinton Beck, Jr, USAAF

Only those who have been prisoners have any conception of the horrors of being a prisoner, or of the ineffable joy of release; of the terrible rise and fall of the spirit, the fluctuations between the delirium of happiness and madness of despair, attendant upon the fluctuating hopes and fears as the possibility of release advances and retreats.

Percival Christopher Wren,Beggars Horses

The Diggers of Colditz (with Jack Champ)

Prisoners of War (with Hugh Clarke and Russell Braddon)

Barbed Wire and Bamboo (with Hugh Clarke)

Australias Greatest Escapes (originally published as Freedom or Death)

Australias Dambusters: Flying into Hell with 617 Squadron

Bush Parker: An Australian Battle of Britain Pilot in Colditz

I T IS DIFFICULT TO COMPREHEND the totality of the evil which existed in Buchenwald, just as it is beyond human understanding to grasp the meaning of The Absolute or the ultimate and unknowable. It was an evil as black as night.

I am honoured to be asked to write a foreword to Colin Burgess excellent and well-researched book which opens the gates on one of Hitlers most notorious concentration camps, and leaves us in no doubt about the brutality and bestiality which caused tens of thousands to suffer the torments of Hell. We can feel the blows of the SS, hear the stamping of jackboots and the screams of the prisoners resounding across the Appellplatz [parade ground] through lice-infested huts, the stinking aborts [toilets], the places of execution and the crematorium.

The Allied airmen who arrived in Buchenwald during that summer of 1944, when our armies were sweeping towards Paris, were all young men who had been on normal air operations; they had no expectation, if sanguine, of eventual survival; if unlucky they could expect the chop or if very unlucky they might end up in a prisoner of war camp such was an airmans outlook during the war. Instead they were fated to undergo a nightmare experience which nearly had a macabre ending for them all. Shot down, often betrayed on the escape line, handed over to the Gestapo, imprisoned in Fresnes where they were beaten and tortured, packed tightly into cattle trucks, they were transported to Buchenwald, or Forest of Beeches surely the most euphemistic name for the death camp into which they were clubbed and kicked by demented SS guards.

The horrendous crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps have been well documented since the war. It is still difficult for most people to imagine how it felt to be subjected to such degrading and inhuman treatment, which left permanent physical and mental scars on many survivors, even destroying some. When the airmen were released and sent to Stalag Luft III they tried to describe their experiences, but the other prisoners of war had great difficulty in believing them. I spent over a year in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Flossenbrg and Dachau, and so I know something of what the airmen must have suffered in Buchenwald. My experience came after I had been in normal prisoner of war camps so I was at least inured to barbed wire, but for all of us the dividing line between life and death was very thin.

The utter despair, exhaustion, starvation and death engendered by the deliberate Nazi system of brutality and sadism operated by the Kommandant, his vicious wife and the SS guards are described in horrifying detail; the murder of the gypsy children and the strangulation of the SOE agents are indelibly printed on the mind. Shafts of light relieve the blackness of this hell on earth; there is the resolute and wise leadership of the New Zealand Squadron Leader Phil Lamason, the fortitude of all airmen under the most harrowing conditions, the humour, resource and heroism of Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas (the White Rabbit) and the final miracle of the release engineered by the SOE agent Christopher Burney who, himself, narrowly escaped a ghastly death.

Squadron Leader Stanley Booker describes his first return to Buchenwald after nearly 40 years: No birds sang and the ghosts of the past rose up to haunt me. I returned to Sachsenhausen with Colonel Jack Churchill in 1975, 30 years after liberation; it was, like Buchenwald, a vast, bare and silent memorial. We went into the Zellenbau [cell block] where we had spent five months in death cells. The aura of evil had lingered on; I felt the cold hand of death once more on me, and suddenly the ghosts of so many tortured and murdered here seemed very close.

Should we not lay these troublesome ghosts of the past? It is traumatic, for those who experienced them, to recall the horrors of the concentration camps, but we feel we should remind the world, particularly those unborn at the time, that such things can happen in any country if freedom is not guarded.

Squadron Leader B. A. James, MC, RAF (19152008)

I WAS PRIVILEGED TO HAVE had a lengthy correspondence and friendship over many years with Squadron Leader Bertram Arthur James, MC, better known as Jimmy James, and we even met once in London a truly memorable day. Jimmy was one of the motivators and heroes of the so-called Great Escape from Stalag Luft III, the German POW camp in Sagan, Lower Silesia, Nazi Germany (now aga, Poland). An incorrigible and determined evader, James had a long history of bold escape attempts before being sent off to Stalag Luft III, where he became part of the famed X escape organisation under fellow squadron leader, Roger Bushell.