The liberation of the SS hostages
Eighty years ago, in the last days of the Second World War, a miracle occurred near the village of Farsleben, north of Magdeburg. On 12 April 1945, a death march came to a halt here, with 2,500 Jewish prisoners crammed into it, mostly women and children, who were coming from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
As the British and American troops approached the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the SS sent three trains with prisoners, with the destination of Theresienstadt. Only one of the three transports arrived there. The other two travelled around for days. One was liberated by the Soviet army after two weeks in southern Brandenburg and was later dubbed the ‘lost train’. The other one, which came to a halt near Farsleben, was later called the ‘stranded train’. The prisoners in it came from Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland and Greece and were wearing their own clothes. The SS had planned to use these people as hostages; they were originally supposed to be exchanged for captured Germans.
But the advancing Allied troops blocked this route. The SS men line up the exhausted prisoners and then, a day later, make a hasty retreat. At noon on 13 April, a unit of the 743rd US Tank Division reaches the train. ‘When we realised that they were Americans, we were relieved. Many cried, including my mother,’ recalls Peter Lantos, who was five years old at the time. An American officer photographed the moving moments of liberation. For a long time, these photos were considered the only source of images. They document an episode of the war that had been forgotten by the public.
Until two years ago, Susanne Oehme from the Wolmirstedt Museum discovered a four-minute film in the American National Archives in Washington, presumably made by an American army film crew. A sensation. The images show people gazing in disbelief at the camera, seemingly unable to believe that they have escaped death at the last second. Emaciated and haggard, some of them are even dead.
The soldiers provided the survivors with food and took them to the town of Hillersleben, a few kilometres away, where they were housed in a former barracks and in the residential buildings of the army research centre. Many of the exhausted people died in the following days, worn out by the hardships or from typhus. They were buried in a Jewish cemetery in Hillersleben.
In September 1945, the Jewish survivors scattered to the four winds, emigrating to Palestine, the United States or their old homelands. But the story does not end there. After the Americans left in July 1945, Soviet soldiers moved into the barracks. The Jewish cemetery was turned into a sports field. The barracks area is now fenced in and no longer accessible to the public.
At times, up to 30,000 Soviet soldiers are stationed in Hillersleben, earning the town the nickname ‘Little Moscow’. Because, over time, relatives repeatedly want to visit the graves of their loved ones who died in 1945, the GDR resorts to a trick in 1984. A memorial stone was erected in the Hillersleben cemetery with the inscription: ‘Here rest 32 unknown Jewish concentration camp prisoners who were murdered by the fascists on the death march from Bergen-Belsen and found their final resting place here in April 1945.’
It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that historian Klaus-Peter Keweloh from Hillersleben and his son Daniel uncovered the historical truth. They stayed in contact with survivors like Peter Lantos and led the children of the former train passengers to the authentic sites. They have their say in the MDR documentary, as do the young filmmaker Robert Hirschmann, who produced a short film about the events of that time, and the student Johanna Mücke. While still at school in Wolmirstedt, she had already studied the history of the train and translated letters and interviews with the survivors.
