CAPPELEN: Yes, 1945 I mean. One day we were placed upon a so-called “Appellplatz” (roll call ground). We were very feeble, all of us. We had hard work, little food, and all sorts of ill-treatment. Well, we started to walk in parties of about 2,000 to 3,000. In the party I was with, we were about 2,500 to 2,800. We heard so and so many when they took up the numbers.
Well, we started to walk, and we had SS guards on each side. They were very nervous and almost like mad persons. Several were drunk. We couldn’t walk fast enough, and they smashed in the heads of five who could not keep up. They said in German, “That is what happens to those who cannot walk.” The others would have been treated in the same way if they had not been able to follow. We walked the best we could. We attempted to help one another, but we were all too exhausted. After walking for 6 to 8 hours we came to a station, a railway station. It was very cold and we had only striped prison clothes on, and bad boots; but we said, “Oh, we are glad that we have come to a railway station. It is better to stand in a cow truck than to walk, in the middle of winter.” It was very cold, 10 to 12 degrees below zero (centigrade). It was a long train with open cars. In Norway we call them sand cars, and we were kicked on to those cars, about 80 on each car. We had to sit together and on this car we sat for about 5 days without food, cold, and without water. When it was snowing we made like this [indicating] just to get some water into the mouth and, after a long, long time—it seemed to me years—we came to a place which I afterwards learned was Dora. That is in the neighborhood of Buchenwald.
Well, we arrived there. They kicked us down from the cars, but many were dead. The man who sat next to me was dead, but I had no right to get away. I had to sit with a dead man for the last day. I didn’t see the figures myself, naturally, but about one-third of us or half of us were dead, getting stiff. And they told us that one-third—I heard the figure afterwards in Dora—that the dead on our train numbered 1,447.
Well, from Dora I don’t remember so much, because I was more or less dead. I have always been a man of good humor and high spirited, to help myself first and my friends; but I had nearly given up.
I do not remember so much before, so I had a good chance, because Bernadotte’s action came and we were rescued and brought to Neuengamme, near Hamburg; and when we arrived, there were some of my old friends, the student from Norway who had been deported to Germany, other prisoners who came from Sachsenhausen and other camps, and the few, comparatively few, Norwegian “NN” prisoners who were living, all in very bad condition. Many of my friends are still in the hospital in Norway. Some died after coming home.
That’s what happened to me and my comrades in the three and three-quarter years I was in prison. I am fully aware that it is impossible for me to give details more than I have done; but I have taken, so to say, the parts of it which show, I hope, the way they behaved against Norwegians, and in Norway, the German SS.
M. DUBOST: For what reason were you arrested?
CAPPELEN: I was arrested the 29th of November 1941, in a place called then Hoistly. That is a sort of sanitarium where one goes skiing.
M. DUBOST: What had you done? What was held against you?
CAPPELEN: Well, what I had done. Like most of us Norwegians, we regarded ourselves to be at war with Germany in one way or another; and naturally we, most of us, were against them by feelings; and also, as the Gestapo asked me, I remember, “What do you think of Mr. Quisling?” I only answered, “What would you have done if a German officer—even a major—when your country was at war and your government had given an order of mobilization, he came and said, ‘Better forget the Mobilization Order?’ ” A man can’t do that with respect.