From concentration camp hell to Hollywood

He talks to Lindsay Jennings about his remarkable life - including the day he interviewed Mrs Goering.

HIS clothes taken from him the moment he arrives in camp, Gerd Treuhaft is pushed roughly into a cold shower and given a uniform before being marched towards an office. Here he first sets eyes on SS 'Scharfuhrer' Lutje-Meyer, who he will come to know as the devil of Dachau. It is June 11, 1938, and Gerd's welcome to one of the most notorious concentration camps in history is in the form of several punches and kicks from Lutje-Meyer before he is told to sit, knees bent, with the others. In this crippling position, they hold their arms outstretched in the blazing sunshine for an unrelenting seven hours.

"I remember the number they gave me - 15642," recalls Gerd, now 88, in his autobiography, Goodbye Yesterday. "Some numbers you never forget. At the time, though, I was determined to survive."

Gerd had been born to a Jewish Austrian mother before being taken to an orphanage and adopted by a wealthy Berlin couple. He became a journalist for a Czech newspaper and was living in Berlin as the Nazis came to power. Through his mother, Gerd had sought Austrian citizenship and his articles, sent via the Czech Embassy, grew more and more critical of the Third Reich.

But when German troops marched into Poland in March 1938, Gerd recognised the dangers of staying in Berlin. He planned to emigrate and went to the local police station to see if his Austrian passport was still valid. Unbeknown to him, it was this move which brought him under the gaze of the Gestapo.

Despite having destroyed everything with an anti-Nazi leaning, Gerd was arrested and taken away into "protective custody" for "offending the German state". He was 19 years old.

"I was still convinced that the Gestapo had no right to arrest me because I had not written any articles since the occupation of Austria," he says. "All my contributions had been written when Austria was an independent state, and I had complied with the law. But I was soon to find out that legal rights meant nothing to this new dictatorship.

"I had to sign a document and it felt as if I were signing my own death warrant. I knew then that I would eventually end up in a concentration camp."

At Dachau, Gerd soon became acquainted with the other prisoners - a Jewish fur dealer accused of cheating his customers, a butcher who had spent four years in prison for sleeping with a non-Jewish girl, even Max and Ernst von Hohenberg - sons of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose murder at Sarajevo had sparked the First World War.

After four months, Gerd was transferred to Buchenwald and given a new number - 8880. The routine turned the men into robots, but terror was never far away.

"You dared not speak," he recalls. "If an SS guard saw your lips move, you were in trouble. The punishment for this 'crime' could be either being hung on a tree for an hour or 25 lashes with an iron whip. The latter could cripple you for life even if the gates to freedom were ever opened again."

Then, on November 9, 1938, came Kristallnacht - The Night of Broken Glass - sparked after a Polish-Jewish youth shot a German embassy official in Paris. The Holocaust was unleashed. Suddenly, lorry loads of Jews began to turn up at the camp. In some cases, there were more than 2,500 prisoners packed into a single hut where there was standing room only. "Driven half insane and unable to bear the hellish conditions any longer, some ran madly against the electrically charged fence at roll-calls. Heading for certain death, the guards on the machine-gun tower still opened fire," says Gerd.

'Others broke the panes of windows and cut their arteries. Some fell into the open dug latrines in the darkness and suffocated in misery.

"On the first night, SS men went into the huts, picked out Jews at random and took them outside to be flogged with steel birches, or killed with clubs. Throughout the night I heard shots and cries of mortal terror. In the morning, I was ordered to take buckets of food to our 'comrades of race' and help fetch in the dead."

By the end of 1938, Gerd was attached to a new working party - removing the dead men and piling their bodies into coffins. Often, he would wish he was one of the corpses.

"I kept telling myself that having seen so much awful misery, I could not be afraid of anything any more," he says. "To keep sane, I told myself that the bodies I was heaving into the coffins were now liberated; they were free and could not be tormented any more.

"I began thinking that only a miracle could save me now."

In their thin prison clothes, it was not unusual to find some men had frozen to death. During one parade, which lasted six hours, 60 prisoners suffered this fate.

Gerd had begun to lose hope of ever leaving the camp, but the new year began with rumours of the release of racial and political prisoners. Then, one morning at roll-call, an announcement cackled over the loudspeakers:

"The following prisoners will go immediately to Post 2 where they will be freed. Treuhaft, Gerd. 8880 born 10.4.18. Place of birth Berlin..."

After a visit to the SS doctor, Gerd changed out of his striped prison uniform into civilian clothes before being handed a pardon, on the condition that he left Germany.

Gerd returned to Berlin and was briefly reunited with his adoptive mother before heading for England and the Lord Kitchener transit camp in Kent, just before the Second World War broke out. On December 19, 1939, Gerd swore the Oath to King George VI and joined the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps (AMPC). With the pioneer corps banned from joining the fighting units until 1942, he spent five years peeling potatoes, cleaning lavatories and making tea instead of taking revenge on the brutal Nazi regime as he would have wished.

But when his company moved to Darlington during the war, Gerd took up journalism again, writing features for the town's journal, The Wheatsheaf, under his pen name Josef Geta.

He was discharged in the spring of 1944 and found work in London as a dishwasher at a restaurant, in between writing freelance articles.

In 1948, Gerd returned to Berlin as a correspondent for Peace News and United Nations News. He managed to track down his uncle and learned the fate of his Jewish relatives.

"One cousin had tried to escape the Gestapo by jumping out of a window and breaking his legs," he says. "The Gestapo had first sent him to hospital, but as soon as he could walk again he was sent to the gas chamber."

In London, Gerd met his future wife, Joan, and from politics, branched out into the world of showbusiness, interviewing Hollywood stars for Austrian and German film magazines. His interviewees included Sophia Loren, Noel Coward, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor.

One of the most difficult stars, he recalls, was Eartha Kitt, who stormed out of the room when he asked her if she spoke a little German. It later transpired each of the French, Italian and Spanish journalists had asked her similar questions about their own languages.

"What do you think I am, a linguist?" she had shouted at Gerd.

Then, in the late 1950s, Gerd found himself in the bizarre position of being asked by a German magazine to use his Fleet Street contacts to sell the memoirs of Emmy Goering, wife of Hermann Goering. Goering had been tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946 and was sentenced to death by hanging. But he escaped the hangman's noose by way of a cyanide capsule.

Unable to get Fleet Street's interest, Gerd flew to Munich with his wife to interview Mrs Goering.

"When I introduced myself," says Gerd, "I told her that I was a survivor of two concentration camps and that I was Jewish, to which she immediately said 'Mr Treuhaft, I can assure you that I never knew anything about what happened in those camps. Hermann always told me that they were only for people to be re-educated should they offend the Fuhrer and the Third Reich. He also told me not to interfere in politics'."

She told Gerd that her husband had never wanted the war and had approached contacts in Sweden in September 1939 to suggest Britain and Germany could work together, but that Hitler had refused to compromise.

Shortly afterwards, Mrs Goering ended the interview.

"When I asked her how she thought her husband was able to receive the cyanide pill, she wouldn't reply," he says.

Not long after the interview, Gerd, who now lives in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, returned to Dachau as part of an assignment. It was barely recognisable as the torture camp it had once been.

"The hut I was once billeted in and all but one like it had disappeared, and one large stone, like a gravestone, stood where they all once where," he says. "The one hut left was now a museum giving visitors the history in text and pictures of starved inmates before the liberation by the Americans in 1945."

Fifty years after the end of the Second World War, Gerd was also invited back to Berlin as a Jewish survivor for a week of events held to mark the anniversary.

He found a city rife with crime since the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and, disturbingly, slogans such as Auslander Raus (foreigners out) and Keine Juden Hier (no Jews here) and the demolition of graves at Jewish cemeteries. He visited a friend who told him the rebirth of Nazism was becoming increasingly apparent.

To this day, it has left him wary about the future.

"I was happy to leave Berlin and share with the other guests the feeling that while there may be some forgiveness for what happened here, we shall never forget. But as for the future, there are no guarantees."

l Goodbye Yesterday by Gerd Treuhaft (Book Guild Publishing, £16.99)