Another incident which I aim to tell—I hope My Lord will permit me to do it—concerned a person called Sverre Emil Halvorsen. He was one day—that must have been in the autumn or in August or October 1943—a little bit swollen up and very unhappy; and he said they had treated him so bad, but he and some of his friends had been in some sort of a court where they had been told that they were to be shot the next day. They placed a sort of sentence upon them, just to set an example.
Well, Halvorsen had, naturally, a headache and felt very ill, and I asked the guard to bring—the head guard, that was a person named Herr Götz. He came and asked what the devil I wanted. I said, “My comrade is very ill, could not he have some aspirins?” “Oh no,” he said, “it is a waste to give him aspirin, because he is to be shot in the morning.”
Next morning he was brought out of the cell, and after the war they found him up at Trondheim together with other Norwegians in a grave there with a bullet through his neck.
Well, the Moellergate 19, in Oslo, the prison where I was for about 25 months, was a house of horror. I heard every night—nearly every night—people screaming and groaning. One day, it must have been in December 1943, about the 8th of December, they came into my cell and told me to dress. It was in the night. I put on my ragged clothes, what I had. Now I had recovered, practically. I was naturally lame on the one side, could not walk so well, but I could walk; and I went down in the corridor and there they placed me as usual against the wall, and I waited that they would bring me away and shoot me. But they did not shoot me; they brought me to Germany together with lots of other Norwegians. I learned afterwards about some few of my friends—and by friends, I mean Norwegians. We were so-called “Nacht und Nebel” prisoners, “Night and Mist” prisoners. We were brought to a camp called Natzweiler, in Alsace. It was a very bad camp, I must say.
We had to work to take stones out of the mountains. But I shall not bore you about my tales from Natzweiler, My Lord, I will only say that people of all other nations—French, Russians, Dutch, and Belgians—were there and we are about five hundred Norwegians who have been there. Between 60 and 70 percent died there or in other camps of concentration. Also, two Danes were there.
Well, we saw many cruel things there, so cruel that they need—they are well known. The camp had to be evacuated in September 1944. We were then brought to Dachau near Munich, but we did not stay long there; at least, I didn’t stay long there. I was sent to a Kommando called Aurich in East Friesland, where we were about—that was an under-Kommando of Neuengamme, near Hamburg. We were about fifteen hundred prisoners. We had to dig tank traps. Well, we had to walk every day about 3 or 4 hours, and go by train for 1 hour to the Panzer Gräben where we worked. The work was so strong and so hard and the way they treated us so bad, that most of them died there. I suppose about half of the prisoners died of dysentery or of ill-treatment in the five or six weeks we were there. It was too much even for the SS, who had to take care of the camp, so they gave it up, I suppose; and I was sent from Neuengamme, near Hamburg, to a camp called Gross-Rosen, in Silesia; it is near Breslau. That was a very bad camp, too. We were about 40 Norwegians there; and of those 40 Norwegians we were about 10 left after 4 to 5 weeks.
THE PRESIDENT: You will be some little time longer, so I think we better adjourn now for 10 minutes.
[A recess was taken.]
M. DUBOST: M. Cappelen, will you continue to speak to us of your passage through those camps, particularly of what you know of the camp of Natzweiler and the role at Natzweiler of Dr. Hirt, Hirch, or Hirtz of the German medical faculty of Strasbourg?
CAPPELEN: Well, in Natzweiler, yes, there were also carried on experiments. Just beside the camp there was a farm they called Struthof. That was practically a part of the camp; and some of the prisoners had to work there to clean up the rooms; and—well not so often, but sometimes—they were taken out. For instance, one day, I remember, all the Gypsies were taken out, and then they were brought down to Struthof. They were very afraid of being brought down there.