The role reversal

One of the Jewish prisoners with whom Avey worked at the Buna construction site was Ernst Lobethal, from Breslau. He told Avey about his sister Susana, who fled to Britain and lived in Birmingham. Avey wrote his mother a letter to be sent to Lobethal's sister. It stated that Lobethal was still alive and he asked his sister to send him cigarettes via Denis Avey. After four months, Avey received from Lobethal's sister a package of 200 branded cigarettes and a bar of chocolate, which he passed on to Lobethal.

Around this time, Avey made the decision to sneak into the concentration camp, or try. He wanted to conduct military reconnaissance, without orders from above, at his own responsibility. Above all, he wanted to know what was happening in the concentration camp and somehow put it outside. Avey asked Lobethal for help, but Lobethal did not qualify for the role reversal because he was smaller than Avey. Avey, however, discovered a Jewish prisoner from the Netherlands, who resembled him more closely. The concentration camp inmate accepted the risky offer - also because he knew he would get better food in the British camp.

For weeks, the two prepared their plan. Avey got a pair of wooden shoes, as the concentration camp prisoners carried them, and bribed guards and prisoners with cigarettes, including with Lobethal's help. He memorized the processes on the construction site exactly: When was the change of guards, which routes were the guards and which corner was ignored? "Orders were orders for the Nazis and had to be executed accurately," Avey tells the Times , and he used that for his cause.

Then it happened: While working on the construction site, Avey and the Dutch concentration camp prisoner sneaked into an unused shack on the grounds and exchanged clothes. Avey put on the blue and gray striped clothes of the concentration camp prisoners and the wooden shoes, he smeared dirt on his face and shaved his head, all concentration camp prisoners were shorn. Then both sneaked back to the construction crew and took each other's place. In the evening, Avey's Dutch accomplice went to the POW camp, and Avey joined the train of concentration camp inmates.

He believed that the prisoner train from the construction site would lead directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. But the forced laborers of the Buna Works had long had their own concentration camp, Avey had never asked where the concentration camp prisoners went. "I was an idiot," he says to this miscalculation. Ignoring the fact that he ended up in a different concentration camp than expected, everything went as planned. Avey stayed one night and changed clothes and camps with the Dutch concentration camp prisoner on the construction site the next day. A little later he repeated the role reversal even a second time, he wanted to learn more, especially about the selections, after which disabled prisoners were taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

The second attempt worked, only the third time he was almost caught. An SS man spotted him as he was about to sneak up to the barrack where he had an appointment with the Dutchman. Avey mumbled an apology, and the SS man let him go. After that, Avey decided to have seen enough. The risk had become too big.

Nearly 70 years later, there are neither documents nor testimonies that support his story, nor those that speak against it. Only a few prisoners from camp E715 are still alive. One of them is Brian Bishop, 91. He does not know Avey personally, but he doubts his statements. "Avey would have had so many followers, Kapos and prisoners in the concentration camp, bribed guards, other prisoners of war, that would not have been kept secret!" Piotr Setkiewicz, head of research at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is also skeptical: "Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think we should be careful with such stories. "

Would not the E715 guards have been suspicious of Avey having suddenly turned up on the construction site with his head shaved bald after his first night in the concentration camp? Possibly. On the other hand, it is known today that the prisoners of war of E715 were not guarded with the severity and severity of those in the concentration camp, so some Britons have even sneaked out of the camp to meet women in neighboring villages. Under these circumstances, it is not inconceivable that prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates exchange clothes while working in a barrack.

"That's something you can imagine given the huge construction site," says Sybille Steinbacher, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and Auschwitz expert. And indeed, there was one prisoner of war from camp E715, who claimed to have sneaked into the Buna / Monowitz concentration camp. His name is Charles Coward, and he became a little celebrity after the war, his story was even filmed in The Password is Courage with Dirk Bogarde.

However, Auschwitz researcher Setkiewicz also doubts Coward's statements, even though he repeated his role reversal story even in court. The main criticism, however, concerns Avey's long silence. "Why is he coming out with it?" Asks his fellow inmate Brian Bishop, audibly excited. Perhaps this question must be answered: Denis Avey did not feel that anyone would listen to him after the war, let alone believe him. When the camp E715 was disbanded in January 1945, Avey found after several months of wandering through half of Europe back to England. For the next two years he was hospitalized for tuberculosis and his right eye, which had injured the SS man, had to be taken out.

After that, in 1947, Avey says, he told his supervisor about it. He did not believe him, and Avey was so disappointed he never told anyone about it. He also had other problems, depression, nightmares in the post-war years, and probably just what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. "The sad irony of the events is that I snuck into concentration camp to tell everyone about the atrocities of the Nazi regime. But I was so traumatized that it took me 60 years to be able to do that, "he says in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

It was not until the 1990s that the British public began listening to the British from Auschwitz, books and documentary films appeared, and a few years ago BBC journalist Rob Broomby interviewed Denis Avey about his efforts to compensate for his forced labor at IG Farben receive. Avey told him about his nights in the concentration camp, and Broomby went in search of evidence. He found Susana Timms, nee Lobethal, the sister of the Jewish inmate Ernst Lobethal. So Avey learned that Lobethal had survived the Holocaust, he had emigrated to the United States after the war and only died in 2002.

Before that, however, he had given an interview to the Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg, in which he told of a British prisoner of war named Ginger, "Redhead," who had given him 200 cigarettes from his sister. "It was like someone gave me the Rockefeller Center," says Lobethal on the videotape. Avey used to have red hair, Ginger had been his nickname. So this part of Denis Avey's story is secured.

The Dutch Jew, who helped Denis Avey to sneak into concentration camp, saw Avey at the Buna construction site several times in the weeks following their role reversal. Then no more. Presumably, the Dutchman shares the fate of the many other Jews who were murdered in Auschwitz.