High Value Prisoners

On 30th April 1945, a group of 139 prisoners were freed from their SS guards at Niederdorf (Italian: Villabassa) in the South Tyrol. This was not in itself remarkable -all across Europe the camps were falling to Allied forces. Dachau had surrendered just the previous day.

The Niedersdorf group, however, was far from ordinary; it consisted of "high value prisoners" who had been removed from Dachau a few days previously to avoid them falling into enemy hands. Amongst the captives were former Prime Ministers of France (Leon Blum, a Jew) and Hungary (Miklos Kallay); the last pre-Anschluss Chancellor of Austria (Kurt Schuschnigg) (1); a number of suspect German officers and relatives of the July 20 plotters (including several members of von Stauffenberg's family); the former commander of the Greek Army; a nephew of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov captured during the Russian campaign; and several British prisoners, including serial escapers such as Jimmy James and Harry Day (2) and two Churchills - neither of them actually relatives of the prime minister but remarkable men in their own right - Lt. Col. Jack Churchill (3) and Capt. Peter Churchill (4).

 Leon Blum, erstwhile Prime Minister of France

Its composition was not the only remarkable thing about this group, however. For they were not freed from the SS by advancing American or British troops, but by German regular forces....

The Dachau transportees were in the custody of an SS unit under Obersturmbannfuhrer Stiller. His orders were to prevent the prisoners falling into enemy hands by any means - including execution. It had been the intention to take them, in a convoy of old trucks and buses, to the forced labour camp at Innsbruck-Reichenau, but the authorities there refused to accept them. So the SS made south, pitching up in Niederdorf, a German speaking village which lies just over the modern Italian border with Austria, expecting to be able to commandeer the hotel there.

Kurt Schuschnigg, former Austrian Chancellor, looking remarkably like a young Captain Mainwairing.

The village hotel, however, proved to be already in use by three German generals and their entourages. This provided a faint opportunity. One of the German prisoners, a Wehrmacht colonel called Bogislaw von Bonin - who had been incarcerated for allowing a retreat during the Russian campaign - managed to slip away to a telephone and get through to one of the officers, General Hans Roettiger. Von Bonin's message was succinct: "Bitte helfen Sie sofort, sonst passiert hier eine große Schweinerei." (Please help immediately, otherwise there will be a huge mess here).

The captioning of the original photo is ambiguous, but I think Bogislaw von Bonin

is the one leaning on his elbows immediately to the left of the guy with the pipe. Photo c.1952

Von Bonin's plea convinced Roettiger, who was minded to intervene. But one of the other officers present was SS General Karl Wolff, head of SS forces in Italy, whose response was, "Es wird nicht passieren." (Nothing will happen.) So Roettiger ordered Captain Wichard von Alvesleben, commander of a regular army unit stationed at Bolzano (German: Bozen) to the west of Niederdorf, to investigate the situation.

 Wichard von Alvensleben

When Alvensleben arrived he ascertained from Stiller that the SS orders provided for the killing of the prisoners, and that indeed Stiller would not regard his job as being over till they were dead. Alarmed, the devout Christian Alvensleben consulted with his cousin Gebhardt, also a Wehrmacht officer in the area, about what to do ("Gut, daß du hier bist, hier ist der Teufel los..." - It's good that you're here, the Devil is loose...). They decided that he must intervene to forestall a massacre, and Alvensleben sent in a sergeant and 16 men (equipped with a machine gun, which they mounted in the Town Hall (5)) to ensure the safety of the prisoners. The SS guards complained furiously to Roettiger, but by now the SS General Wolff had crucially been brought onside, and ordered them to withdraw to Bolzano.

Abandoned by the SS, the prisoners took shelter at another hotel by the nearby Pragser Wildsee (Italian: Lago di Braies) where American troops found them unharmed a few days later (typically, Jack Churchill was long gone, having decided to walk to Verona, 250 kilometres away.)

 Hotel Pragser Wildsee: there are worse places to avoid apparently certain death.

Thus was completed the only known release of concentration camp inmates by German troops, rather than the infamous massacre which might have resulted, owing to a combination of luck, resourceful action by the captives, and the presence of people - in the person of the Alvenslebens - who remained able to make moral decisions amongst the wreckage of Nazism (6).

Notes
[Much of the detail in the account above comes from a 1967 Der Spiegel article, available online (in German) here.]
(1) Schuschnigg's wife, Vera, was present with her baby daughter, despite not officially being a prisoner. She had voluntarily entered the prison camp to be with him and, remarkably, produced the child, Maria Dolores, there.
(2) James and Day were both survivors of the "Great Escape"; Day had, in fact, been selected as one of the 50 men to be executed in reprisal for the mass breakout, of which he was one of the prime instigators, but Hermann Goering then intervened to save him, believing he was too well known to be illegally killed.
(3) It is impossible, in a mere footnote, to do justice to "Mad" Jack Churchill, one of the most colourful characters of WW2, who went into battle with sword and longbow. This page would explode, killing Chuck Norris in the process. Daily Telegraph obituary here, though it seems to have garbled the incident described above a little. Unlike Peter Churchill, Mad Jack never claimed to be a cousin of Winston - his captors just assumed it.
(4) Peter Churchill had been an SOE agent in France along with Odette Sansom. When captured they both stuck, despite torture, to the story that he was related to Winston Churchill and that they were a married couple (she was in fact married with three children, to someone else), and it was this imposture which probably led to Churchill's presence among the high value prisoners in Stiller's convoy. Odette, sent to Ravensbruck, also survived the war, and their story was made into a film starring Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard.
(5) It's not entirely clear in the descriptions I have found where the confrontation between Alvensleben and the SS took place, or where the hotel was. The Town Hall is on the central square in Niederdorf, and there are several hotels nearby, so the convoy may have not moved away from the hotel at all. Google Streetview of the central square now.
(6) There is no reward for virtue; Wichard von Alvensleben lost everything during the war. His wife committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Red Army (if you know anything of the behaviour of Soviet troops towards "liberated" populations, you'll understand this wasn't an uncommon response), and his estate fell within postwar Poland and was lost. Coincidentally, a distant relative, SS Gruppenfuehrer Ludolf von Alvensleben, became a prominent Nazi fugitive; an adjutant of Himmler implicated in massacres in Poland, Ludolf escaped from British custody at the end of the war and fled to Argentina, where he died unpunished in 1970. Virtue is not carried in the blood.