大象传媒

Lt.Martin Bloom A Jewish Hero of the SOE Part 2

By Martin Sugarman

Interrogation

Next day Marcus was taken in manacles to that other notorious location in occupied France, the Gestapo HQ in Avenue Foch, central Paris - where he was questioned about his Resistance Circuit, codes and comrades as well his superiors in London. He refused to say anything but his name, rank and number. He was then marched down a corridor to another room and shoved violently inside. He was pushed into a chair in the middle of the room by two men in suits. One man stood in front of him and again Marcus refused to answer questions, upon which he was struck fiercely in the face by the back of the Gestapo man's hand. Again he refused to answer questions and so the second man came from behind and pointed a revolver at Marcus' temple. Yet again he refused to answer and he was struck on the head by the butt of the gun. He fell to the floor, blood running down his face, as one of the men kicked him. The interrogators left the room and another guard helped Marcus up and he was driven back to Fresnes.

In the cell, Turcan bathed Marcus' wounds with water and he slowly recovered, helped by his anger at those who had beat him, but got nothing out of him. To keep up morale, Marcus persuaded the others to keep clean, exercise, wash their clothes, shave and have daily discussions. Through his strength of character, he welded their resolve to resist.

Marcus' brother Bernard met Turcan many times after the war and he testified to the way in which Marcus had helped him stay alive. He too was taken and beaten at Avenue Foch, and in return Marcus nursed him back to health. When Germaine heard he had been caught and was in Fresnes, she moved to Paris and had food parcels smuggled into him - at great risk to herself - which he always shared with his cell mates.

On a second occasion, Marcus was taken to Avenue Foch and severely beaten about his body; again he said nothing. Much of the time at Fresnes he spent talking to Turcan about his work before he was captured. He also resolved to escape by trying to convince the Germans that if they moved him to a camp, he would be more co-operative; his idea was that whilst in transit he would find it easier to make his getaway, than from a high security prison like Fresnes. Turcan advised against this but eventually, Marcus succeeded and bid farewell to his fellow prisoners.

Mauthausen

Bernard Bloom has been unable to find any information about the next fifteen months of Marcus' imprisonment in Germany. However, the author discovered the personal archive at the Imperial War Museum of the late Vera Atkins. It reveals that her immediate postwar research and interviews with German war criminals and eye witnesses in many campsand prisons over a long period of time, showed that Marcus had arrived from a fortress style camp called Ravitch (Ravitsch) on the Polish /Silesia border , north east of Breslau (now Wroclaw), sometime in August 1944. This was owing to the rapid Soviet advances, and they were marched west by the Germans towards Dresden, then taken to Gusen, a satellite camp of Mauthausen, near Linz in Austria . At Gusen Marcus either met other Dutch and British SOE agents and even one American (see below) there, or they all had come from Ravitsch together. In any case they formed a cohesive group and always kept themselves separate and well fed as far as they could. They were much admired by the other prisoners.

Another letter in the VA file is written by a Capt. Rousset (probably French) who was a POW too, dated 14th Sept. 1945. He says he had been at Ravitsch from April 18th 1944 and he saw the Allied SOE prisoners dressed in blue prison uniform, with a white triangle marked with "I" on the back, and that they were all kept together in the same wing of the Camp. It appears Marcus arrived there in May 1944.

On July 30th 1944, following the aborted attempt on Hitler's life, orders reached various Nazi camp commanders from General Keitel on Aug. 18th, that terrorists and saboteurs should be severely dealt with. Marcus and his comrades realised that this was a death sentence for them.

On September 2nd 1944 the group were taken by lorry from Gusen, through the village of Mauthausen and up the hill to a dark, granite fortress which was the notorious Death and Labour Camp. In front of two high double gates, a guard telephoned and then the gates slowly opened as they drove them into a large cobbled courtyard. To the left stood the main prison wall,to the right were arches each with green double doors. Ahead was a house with a long stone balcony and in front stood the SS Commandant of the camp, looking at them. Some archway doors were opened and the men were shoved through these. In the camp records it is recorded in section 16 ".....arrivals Sept. 2nd ...47 Allied soldiers;39 Dutch;7 Britons;1 USA....".

The archway cavern in which these 47 SOE men were placed was usually a transport depot, cold and dank. There was no food that night and only thin gruel and black bread the next day. On the third afternoon, each man was ordered to open his shirt and numbers from one to forty seven were painted on their chests. This was the order in which they were to be shot.

The end

September 6th was warm and sunny. The doors were thrown open and the men were ordered outside to form up in twos facing the Commandant's house in the courtyard. Witnesses believe Marcus was number three though a list in the Atkins archive shows him as number 29 with a prison number 96529.

From the courtyard it appears the men were taken to the right up some steps but instead of going into the main camp, they were turned, heavily guarded, down a narrow path (away from the prison)that was partly earth and partly covered in irregularly laid stone slabs. Eventually they came to a vast, deep granite quarry, with a sheer drop from the path they were walking. A bluff jutted out into a platform feature overlooking the quarry which the Germans called "The Jew Jump". Here many Jews were pushed to their deaths. The prisoners were marched to the notorious 180 step staircase leading down into the quarry, built of uneven granite slabs and difficult to negotiate. Looking down they could see that the rest of the emaciated camp inmates had been assembled below and were peering up at them. The SOE men scrambled down the steps; they were in better condition than the other prisoners. They were then lined up with their backs to the quarry wall. Armed SS and a mounted machine gun faced them.

Then an SS officer moved forward and screamed at the first man (a Dutchman) in English, "You vill go over there and pick up a big stone and put it on your shoulder. You then run up the stairs". The Dutchman stared to move, pushed by a guard. He put a heavy rock on his shoulder as the officer yelled, "Schnell! Schnell!". The Dutchman started to climb the stairs, the armed guard behind him. After about 14 steps, the officer shouted, "Feuer!"; the guard shot and the Dutchman fell dead. This horrific charade was meant to comply with Keitel's order that the SOE men were to be shot trying to escape.

The second man was murdered in the same way and then Marcus came forward. He ran up the steps with a rock but suddenly turned and threw his rock at the guard striking him fully in the chest; he fell tumbling to the bottom of the steps. Marcus then made a defiant run for it up the stairway of death, but the machine gun cut him down.

It took two days to shoot the whole group. It was witnessed by hundreds of prisoners. They never forgot the courage of Marcus Bloom and his comrades.

However, Atkins' archive contains a till now unknown letter from Prof Karel Neuwirt of 11 Zborovska Mor. Otsrava, Czechoslovakia, to Mr Vaclav Pistora of Prague 1, c. 194, dated December 19th 1945. It gives a slightly different version of events and says he witnessed the Allied soldiers being dragged into the camp by Chief of SS Obersturmfuhrer Schulz (Kommandant Ziereis was in overall command, however). They were wearing their Army uniforms still (contradicting Rousset, above) and they then had their heads crudely shaven with blunt razors. Then a particularly brutal "blockfuehrer" called Farkas (a German Slovak from Bratislava) was called to march the men away towards the infamous quarry. It was then allegedly the SS Hauptscharfuehrer Spatzenger and Kapo Paul Beck who murdered the first group of prisoners that afternoon of Sept. 6th. The rest were taken the next morning. Neuwirt also named SS Oberscharfuehrers Karl Schulz,Werner Fassel and Prellberg and SS men Diehl, Klerner and Roth, as well as Hauptscharfuehrer Wilhelm Muller (Chief of the Crematorium) as particular participants in the war crime. Neuwirt went on to name another surviving witness as Casimir Clement of 11, Ave. Marceau, Solidarite Catalene, 16e, Paris.

Another letter dated December 12th 1945 is addressed to Lt. Commander Pat O'Leary at 4, Rue de Valois Paris, 1er - a very famous and highly decorated member of SOE who was also at Mauthausen. This was sent from Victor Pistora (almost certainly the Vaclav Pistora mentioned above) , another eye witness to the executions. His testimony adds that the SOE men arrived at 1pm that fateful September day, but that they were also given a shower and then changed into prison garb and had a number inscribed on their chests in indelible pencil. They were registered by a prisoner clerk Czech friend of Pistora, a Mr P Dobias. The first 21 were murdered that afternoon. At about 5pm the remaining 27 were returned under heavy SS armed guard, carrying the bodies of their comrades on carts and into the main camp where the others spent the night. The following day the surviving group too were marched to the quarry and were all machine gunned at about 7.30 am. He ends his letter by stating that Prof Neuwirt was his good friend and as a clerk knew all the men and their home addresses.

There are also two more documents in the VA files dated June 6th 1945, from AMX (American Intelligence) to Vera Atkins at Field Intelligence in the British Occupation Zone of Germany. One lists the 47 names of the men "shot whilst trying to escape" and was obtained from a captured German Corporal who witnessed the killings and was in US custody. Remarkably it contains the name of Capt. Isidore Newman , MBE (mistakenly named as Mattheo or Matthieu Newman and corrected in her own hand by Vera Atkins) code name "Julian", another famous Jewish SOE agent; it is amazing that this study should reveal for the first time that they both died together at Mathausen .

The second document is a follow up to the first and states that "Josef Pelzer, a German Kapo of the Strafkompanie at Mauthausen witnessed the executions and named specifically SS man Gockel (a German) and Kisch (a Yugoslav) as the murderers". Strangely, in his death bed confession on May 24th 1945 after being fatally wounded in a fire fight with American troops, Kommandant Zereis never mentioned the murders of the Allied SOE men in his camp, even though he detailed many other atrocities of which he was guilty.

Remembered

So ended the life of a brave man.

Marcus is remembered at the Brookwood memorial, in Surrey, to SOE agents with no known grave, Panel 21, Column 3: at the SOE French Section Memorial at Valency near Paris; on a plaque on his mother's grave at Edmonton Federation Synagogue cemetery, Montague Road (London) in Block X, Row 10, grave 33; on the War memorial of the St John's Wood Synagogue in Grove End Road (formerly in Abbey Road) ; and of course on a memorial at Mathausen camp itself together with that of Isidore Newman. Marcus' family also erected a private obelisk memorial at Mauthausen, inscribed with his name soon after the war.

But perhaps the most moving tribute to him was written in an unsigned testimonial report in French from his comrades in Circuit Prunus, written on May 1st 1945. " Designated as a radio controller for the Pimento Circuit, and to train circuit members in the use of the "S" phone, Marcus was sent on to work for Prunus. Due to technical difficulties, he was unable to transmit for some five months, but he passed his time usefully helping with the accumulation of important stocks of munitions, and in several acts of sabotage, notably the destruction of an enemy train around January 1943. He made important contacts with local postal workerswhich later allowed us to carry out important jobs. He began transmitting in March 1943 and sent and received many important messages until his arrest in April 1943. He was probably denounced by one of his contacts and sent to Fresnes, where he was kept until March 1944. In spite of his accent and British appearance, he never hesitated to accept dangerous missions. When he was ordered to do the demanding job of radio controller, he accepted this despite the fact he knew full well that he was not particularly well qualified for it. His great courage and composure always hugely inspired all those who knew him. We mourn the loss of this congenial and courageous officer. He fought a gun battle with the Gestapo, although heavily outnumbered, until running out of ammunition, killing several of them. He is remembered here by us all with enormous respect".

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank Bernard Bloom, brother of "Urbain", without whose wholehearted support this article could not have been written. It was Gerry Bean of AJEX whose superb survey of Jewish service in World War Two first put me in contact with Bernard whose own very distinguished war service in North Africa, Burma, the Middle East and Italy is in itself an amazing story too, albeit of survival of course.

The staff of the Imperial War Museum Reading Room were also as usual extremely helpful, as was Mark Seaman - an SOE expert - of the Government Cabinet Office. The Readers Advisers and Librarians at the Public Record Office were also of great assistance. I would also like to thank Gill Bennett, Chief Historian of the Records and Historical Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Whitehall; Louise Pilley of Brighton and Hove Sixth Form College; Hadira Elkadi for her French translation skills; Philip Bye of the East Sussex Records Office; and Capt. Ms.Decia Stephenson of the F.A.N.Y Records Office, Chelsea Barracks.

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