The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II by Denis Avey with Rob Broomby.
This book recounts the experiences of Denis Avey, who served in the British Army in World War II. He saw a lot of nasty action in North Africa. He was a prisoner of war in various places from 1941 until the end of hostilities in 1945. Avey was in several major battles, including Tobruk in North Africa. He was captured by the Italians in 1942 and escaped but was quickly recaptured. In 1943, he ended up in a POW camp next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Denis Avey of Essex was a pretty good student with a technical bent, but school bored him. He came from a family of farmers and had a solid upbringing. He was 21 years old in October of 1939 when he enlisted in the army, not to fight for King and Country, but for “the sheer hell of it.” He was a young man looking for adventure. As a callow youth, it had never occurred to him that he wouldn’t come back home.
Avey describes his training which was pretty intense, especially the part about learning to kill with a bayonet. He was a natural sharpshooter, a good thing for an infantryman. By the time he had finished training, Britain was losing the war. In late May and early June of 1940, Dunkirk was seen as a miracle rescue of over 300,000 troops from the clutches of the Germans. In fact, the forced evacuation was the result of the Allies losing the Battle of France to the Nazis who were overrunning Europe.
In August of 1940, he shipped out and went around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of the African continent on his way to Egypt, which had just been conquered by Italian troops that were aligned with Germany as part of the Axis coalition that was fighting the Allies. Avey’s unit was part of the multi-country offensive that was fighting to take back Egypt and North Africa. He was assigned to a Bren gun carrier, an armored vehicle that featured three big automatic guns. The good news was the weaponry. The bad news was that it was slow and hard to maneuver.
The desert experience wasn’t pleasant. The food was pretty bad and there wasn’t much of it. Occasionally troops would barter with the locals to get decent food but that was rare. During the day the heat was almost unbearable but at night the temperature would hit freezing. Water was scarce and rationed. Showers were not allowed. There were bugs everywhere, at best a nuisance and at worst the source of various awful diseases.
In December of 1940 the British attacked the Italians and were pretty successful at pushing them back while capturing 100,000 prisoners. Avey caught dysentery a few weeks into the fight and collapsed on his bed. An officer who disliked Avey wrote him up for dereliction of duty and he lost his private’s stripe. After he recovered, he got malaria and was again out of action.
Avey was often called on to scout out the enemy, which essentially meant sneaking in as close to them as possible to see what was going on. Often, he and his patrol would capture wayward Italian soldiers and add to the prisoner total. Once he was seen by a lookout and Avey killed him with his knife after a brief struggle. It didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would. When you’re in combat you have to do whatever it takes to survive.
His next action was Tobruk, an important battle in the early part of the war. Again, the British forces did well in their part of this major assault at Beda Fomm, defeating a contingent of seventy Italian tanks and support troops.
The British took a break and then went after the retreating Italians. They found them but were outmanned and out-tanked. The commanding British officer did some clever feinting and faking and eventually convinced the Italians to surrender after they had taken heavy casualties, seen most of their tanks destroyed, and heard the sound of approaching British tanks and troops.
The battle scene was ghastly with hundreds of dead bodies and injured soldiers on the field. Avey ran into one of his comrades who observed that he had seen twelve species of wildflowers in the sandy soil where so many had died and been wounded. Sometimes you just need to step back and find something good about where you are.
The troops needed a break so they headed into the nearest town that was populated by Italians and natives who had fled the battle area. Avey found a truck with boxes of Italian lira (money) and he brought several boxes to a bar. He bought drinks for his mates and the house and, through a translator, asked if he could buy the bar. When the bartender saw the dozens of piles of wrapped currency, he shook his head yes. Denis never got a deed but he figures that he owns a bar somewhere in North Africa.
In February of 1941, the Germans attacked in an effort to retake the area. This time the enemy troops were led by the Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, a consummate leader. The North African campaign would swing back and forth for three years and ended in June of 1943 with the Allies defeating the Germans. The Axis controlled much of the territory for much of that time but finally General Rommel’s supplies dried up and he and his Afrika Corps moved on.
In the spring of 1941 Avey was infected by sandflies and was out of action for a few weeks. After he recovered he got malaria and was hospitalized for three weeks. That summer, he was on a beach relaxing with his unit when a person in the water yelled for help. Avey was a strong swimmer and brought the person in and saved his life. For that act, his commanding officer assigned him to travel on a ship and guard hundreds of Italian prisoners who were being sent to South Africa for detention.
The prison transport was a luxury liner and the crew treated Avey and his fellow POW guards like royalty. He got to South Africa and lived a life of luxury, including traveling all over the country with a woman he met. He was feeling guilty, so after a few months of the high life he decided to take a ship back to North Africa to rejoin his unit.
After having to explain why he was “present without official leave”, he was back in the fight. By now, Rommel had taken back most of the territory that the Brits had won. In November of 1941, Avey was part of Operation Crusader which wasn’t going well. Rommel was a genius at hitting and running, and he often confused the Allied troops. The war was going even worse for Denis who was shot in a firefight and captured by the Germans.
Over the next few months he recovered and was shipped to various prison camps. He was on a ship being transported to Europe when it was torpedoed. Avey managed to grab onto a crate to use as a float and ended up on a rocky beach in Greece.
This guy has more lives than a cat.
Anyway, after finding a friendly farmer who fed him for a few days, Avey took off to try to get to Allied troops. He didn’t make it. He was captured by Italian soldiers who were occupying Greece. He was put in a warehouse with hundreds of other prisoners until he was sent to a relatively decent facility in Italy. After a few weeks there, he decided to escape and head north to Switzerland. That didn't work. After two days on the run, he was captured and returned to his camp.
He spent a miserable year there, with regular bouts of insect-caused diseases and very bad food and not much of it. He and his fellow prisoners were put on a train and sent off to Germany. He was placed in several camps, often with Russian prisoners who were separated from the Brits and others. The German guards treated the Russians much worse than the other prisoners, including occasionally shooting them for no apparent reason.
Auschwitz
Finally, in 1944, Avey and crew ended up in Poland, in the village of Oświęcim, in E 715, a subcamp of Auschwitz, the German name for the town. The prison camp itself was relatively decent, with electric lights and semi-real straw beds. The first day they left their camp to walk one-and-a-half miles to work in the larger enclosure. There they saw thousands of prisoners, mostly Jewish, being worked to death as they built a giant factory for IG Farben, a German chemical manufacturing corporation.
During the day, the prisoners of war worked alongside the “stripeys” which referred to the uniforms the Jewish inmates wore. Avey witnessed routine cruelty to the concentration camp prisoners, including random killings. He also noticed a persistent sickly-sweet odor in the air which came from giant smokestacks that he later learned were part of the crematoria that dispatched the men and women and children of Auschwitz.
In early 1944, the POWs were moved to a new camp closer to the work site. There they saw that a lot of Russian soldiers were interned and were treated as poorly as the Jews. The Allied prisoners, unlike the rest of the camp, did get Sundays off. They formed singing and theater groups and started a football (soccer) league. The Germans took pictures of the prisoners playing games. Later Avey learned that these photos were used as propaganda to show how wonderful the Germans were to their prisoners.
The British POWs got a bit more food than the other inmates but they worked the same 11 hours a day as everyone else. The Jewish prisoners were essentially there to be worked to death. Kapos were prisoners who were put in charge of keeping things moving. Many of them were career criminals and they could be brutal. The people who survived concentration camps learned how to make friends with the kapos who literally ran things.
Avey and his colleagues became friends with a Ukrainian woman who was involved in checking in new equipment and that was delivered to the camp to be sent out to the Reich for various projects. She would tip off Avey and his mates when a critical component came in and they would do their best to sabotage the materials. They would swap mailing labels so that the material ended up in the wrong place or they would loosen nuts and rivets to guarantee early failure.
Cigarettes were critical to survival. They could be traded for just about anything needed for life. Denis didn’t smoke but he did arrange to have his uncle in England regularly send him cigarettes through the Red Cross. He often gave them to other prisoners so that they would have something to barter with to stay alive.
While moving building materials, he got to know Ernst, a young man who was on the labor crew. Ernst was from Germany and had a sister in London, which Avey found fascinating. They became friends, something that ended up having a major impact on Avey’s story.
Sneaking into Auschwitz
Avey also made friends with another work colleague, Hans, who ended up switching places so that Avey could get into the concentration camp and Hans could catch a break eating better food in the British compound of Auschwitz. Avey used a lot of cigarettes to bribe kapos and anyone else that he needed to pull off the switch.
They worked on the switch for weeks. They would exchange clothing so that Hans would look like a British soldier and Avey would wear a stripey uniform. Avey had to learn how to walk in wooden clogs, the shoes of the Jewish inmates. He had to learn how to be completely submissive to kapos and other authorities.
Avey made the switch with Hans twice and only stayed overnight. The POWs and the Jewish prisoners were together at roll call in the morning and evening which is when they switched. He saw how the prisoners were moaning at night and being brutalized by the guards. Some would not live to see the morning.
Avey made the switch to see for himself what was going on. The longer he was at the camp, the more outraged he became. He was sure that the Allies would win and he wanted to be able to bear witness to the Nazi atrocities when the time came to hold people accountable for the horrors they had perpetrated.
Hans and Avey switched outfits and positions in line in a minute so that they would not be noticed. Hans' clothing was full of bugs and lice. Once inside, Avey saw that many of the inmates spent hours dragging bodies of the recently dead to be cremated. If a prisoner stumbled or fell while moving a body, he would be shot or beaten to death. Avey saw the body of a hanged prisoner that had been left up to send a message.
Once he reached the barracks, he was surprised to hear classical music played by a band of prisoners. There were no beds, just planks, with three people to one big slat. The evening meal was rancid soup. His bedmates told him about the terrors of day-to-day life. If you got sick or injured, you were summarily executed. Avey was happy to switch back to his camp in the morning. Both times, he gave cigarettes to the kapos who looked the other way as the switch was made.
He reflected on his time inside. He noted the total desperation of the prisoners and the way the system was set to kill people without having to use a gas chamber of a bullet.
In August of 1944, the camp was bombed by the Allies and some POWs were killed. Around then, Avey received a letter from his mother. He had written, asking her to send a letter to Ernst's sister, Susanne. She had and got a letter response which she sent to her son. Denis was delighted to give Ernst her letter.
In January of 1945 the Russians were closing in so the Germans moved the POWs and the other inmates away from the Russians and to other camps. The Jewish prisoners had no winter clothing and little food, and many - probably 50% - died on the march. The British POWs had to walk around the frozen bodies.
As the march progressed, the German soldiers knew that the war was almost over. They paid less and less attention to their charges so Avey walked away. He made his way south for a few days and ran into an American tank unit. He got food and water and clothing, but they had no room for him. He walked into a friendly German village where he met up with a bunch of American former POWs. They had a party.
After the war
Avey made his way through Allied channels until he was flown to England in a British bomber. The former POWs were greeted by English ladies who gave them tea and cakes, quite a switch from prison camp fare. He took the train home to Essex and surprised his mother. He had lost about one-quarter of his weight but was glad to be home. His father had lied about his age and joined the army. He also ended up a POW. His dad came home a few days after Denis. Neither of them ever talked about their experiences in the war. Both were suffering from what we call PTSD, but back then it didn’t officially exist and there were no treatments available. The only prescribed remedy was, “Get over it.” Avey had frequent flashbacks and nightmares of some of his worst experiences in the camps. He also would black out for a long time, with no memory of what he had done or where he had been. He visited the families of local lads who had not made it home, and that didn’t help his mental state.
Once things had settled down, army officials contacted him to ask him about his time as a POW. Once he started talking about the Auschwitz atrocities, they tuned him out. People were sick of all the awful war stuff, and the Holocaust had not yet registered on the global radar screen.
After being officially demobilized in 1946, Denis traveled around England seeking out his war comrades. They had the same flashbacks and nightmares that he was having. Back home, he felt alone since most of his contemporaries who had fought left Essex for greener pastures. He also had crushing headaches, severe stomach aches, and severe fatigue. It turned out that he had a very serious case of tuberculosis that he probably picked up in the camps. He needed major surgery and a long hospitalization. It took him 18 months to fully recover. Right after he got over the TB, his mother died. She was relatively young. He thought that the war had just worn her down.
Avey met a woman, Irene, and they got married. He got a job as a steam engineer in a factory. While at work one day, a big piece of equipment broke down and the repair crew couldn’t get by to fix it for a few days. Denis said that he could do it and he did. He was a natural engineer and had received some formal training but not his degree. The company was impressed and promoted him to chief engineer.
At home, he still had flashbacks and bad dreams. During a really awful nightmare, he woke up and found himself strangling Irene. He reported it to the police who referred him to a doctor who gave him some useless pills. He tried judo and Buddhism but he continued to have bad experiences. After a few years, he and Irene divorced.
Over time, he got a bit better. He continued to be successful as an engineer, gaining regular promotions. He met Audrey and they married in the 1960s. He had to have an eye that had been whacked by a Nazi guard removed, but his health and marriage were good for the next thirty years.
He still was frustrated that no one was interested in hearing about what happened at Auschwitz. In 1999, an Auschwitz survivor got a major article published on the atrocities and people started to take notice. Avey was also irked that the British government seemed to have no idea how hard the POWs had to work in Auschwitz, a classic hard labor camp. He sent letters to politicians and the media and finally a non-profit charged with compensating victims of the camps recognized what had happened to the soldiers.
In 2003, Avey, now in his 80’s, was asked to appear on a local radio show to talk about pensions. Instead, the host asked him about his war experiences and Avey took off. It was the first time ever that he could articulate what had happened in the camps. The interview was picked up by the media. A BBC reporter, Rob Broomby, who was doing a story on POW concentration camp labor, called Denis. (It worked out well. Rob is the co-author of this book.)
Rob and Avey stayed in touch. In 2009, Broomby said that the BBC wanted to do a TV interview with Avey about his time in the camps. During the session, Avey talked about his two nights in the concentration camp and about how he took a personal interest in Ernst’s survival. Now Avey was wondering if by some miracle he had survived.
Rob was an investigative reporter so he did some digging, first to find Ernst’s sister, Susanne. It took a few months but they succeeded. She was living near where she had lived 60 years earlier but Avey had given Rob an incorrect last name, He canvassed the neighborhood and found a man who knew Susanne. He put Rob on the phone with her.
She and Avey met at his house. As part of the Shoah Foundation oral history project on the Holocaust, Ernst recorded a DVD on his experiences. He did survive the death march but was assigned to build German V2 rockets at another labor camp. He lied and said that he was a plumber so the Nazis didn't ship him off to die. The Allies kept bombing the factory so the Germans left. Ernst and a friend took off on foot, but after a day they were stopped by German officers who were recruiting every available person to fight to the death. Just when things looked bleak, American tanks arrived and the Germans ran off. Ernst was finally free.
Ernst talked about how the cigarettes that he got from his friend, Ginger (the name Denis used in the camp), helped him survive the march. He used them to buy real boots from a kapo before the march began. The boots enabled him to keep walking when others were falling down and being shot by the Nazis. He also confirmed much of what Avey had talked about in his BBC interview.
Ernst sailed by the Statue of Liberty in September of 1947. He was drafted to fight in the Korean conflict. After that, he became an engineer. Later he became a lawyer. He liked fast sports cars, as did Avey. Ernst made a good life for himself. He died at 77 in 2002. He and Denis never met. Ernst’s last words on the Shoah interview were: “You cannot let things go. You have to fight for what you believe and you can’t be passive, you cannot let somebody else do it for you. If you have to be aggressive to reach your goal and take a stand, then do it.”
That sums up Ernst and Denis. They did it.
Bob’s Take
Avey signed up for an adventure but ended up in a mortal conflict that became a compelling moral imperative. Even as late as 1944 when Avey arrived in Auschwitz, there was no open acknowledgement of the Nazi concentration camp horror. Many leaders suspected or knew what was going on, but the typical soldier had no clue. After Avey saw the brutality first-hand, he changed. He grew up fast and wanted to do something to bring accountability to the people who committed these atrocities.
Denis Avey had an intense wartime experience. He fought in pitched battles, contracted five major diseases, lost an eye, and was shot by a German. Twice he was captured as a prisoner of war. He escaped three times, including his last walk-away. He was probably typical of soldiers in battle in World War II. They went above and beyond what would be expected of normal people in normal times.
Avey had severe PTSD, as did many, if not most, combat veterans. It was not recognized as a problem so there was no treatment for it. Most men were unwilling to even admit that they needed help. Given how pervasive the condition probably was in millions of ex-soldiers, it’s amazing that countries involved in the fighting recovered as well as they did once the shooting stopped. The damage to individuals lived on.
His story has been debunked by some people. It is impossible to confirm many of the details of how he was able to get himself into the concentration camp. Avey acknowledged that his memory of some things may be off. It was hard to believe that anyone would sneak into a concentration camp, even for two nights. Many also believed that such a switch was impossible. Ernst’s Shoah Foundation interview confirmed many of the details of what Denis had said. Even if the switch never happened, this is a compelling and disturbing account of the ugly underside of World War II and a reminder that true evil does exist in the world.
I found the descriptions of the battles at least as compelling as the narrative about prison life. War is hell, especially in a desert, with sandstorms, sand flies, limited water, and lousy British food. Perhaps the biggest challenge was the effectiveness of the German army under General Rommel. He was a gifted leader who eventually had to retreat. It is amazing that he managed to fight the Allies for three years.
In 2010 Denis Avey was awarded the British Hero of the Holocaust award for having saved Ernst's life. Denis died in July of 2015 at the age of 96.
