The train rolled on for almost three whole days, and there was relief when finally they broke the ice on the locks and the door of the wagon opened, because the faces of the guards who greeted us were vaguely European and not Oriental, which seemed to indicate that we’d been spared Sakhalin. Not all of us had been spared, however. As men jumped down from the wagon, it was clear that one man had managed to hang himself from a wooden peg. It was the man who had been crying.

Several hundred of us lined up beside the track awaiting our new orders. Wherever we were now was cold, but not nearly as cold as Stalingrad; perhaps it was the weather, but a new rumor—that we were home—quickly murmured its way through the ranks like a Hindu’s mantra.

“This is Germany! We’re home.”

Unlike most of the rumors to which we German plenis were often prey, there was some truth in this one, for it seemed that we were just across the border in what many of my more rabidly Nazi comrades probably still thought of as the German Protectorate of Bohemia, otherwise known as Czechoslovakia.

And excitement mounted as we marched into Saxony.

“They’re going to let us go! Why else would they have brought us all the way from Russia?”

Why else indeed? But it wasn’t long before our hopes of an early release were dashed.

We marched into a little mining town called Johannesgeorgenstadt and then out the other side, up a hill with a fine view of the local Lutheran church and several tall chimneys, and through the gates of an old Nazi concentration camp—one of almost a hundred subcamps in the Flossenburg complex. Most of us imagined that all of Germany’s KZs had been closed, so it was a bit of a shock to discover one still open and ready for business. A greater shock awaited us, however.

There were almost two hundred German plenis already living and working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt KZ, and even by the poor standards of Soviet prisoner welfare, none of these looked well. The SGO, SS General Klause, soon explained why:

“I’m sorry to see you here, men,” he said. “I wish I could have been welcoming you back to Germany with pleasure, but I’m afraid I can’t. If any of you are familiar with the Erzgebirge mountains, you will know that the area is rich with pitchblende, from which uranium ore is extracted. Uranium is radioactive and has a number of uses, but there’s only one use for it that the Ivans are interested in. Uranium in large quantities is vital for the Soviet atom bomb project, and it’s no exaggeration to say that they perceive the development of such a weapon as a matter of the highest priority. And certainly a much higher priority than your health.