“What is that horrible smell?” Dolibois asked a soldier behind the wheel of one of the stalled vehicles. “What in God’s name are you hauling?”
The captain climbed out of his jeep. He did not say a word but motioned for Dolibois to follow him behind one of the two-and-a-half-ton trucks. In silence, the captain untied a rope and flipped back a sheet of canvas that had obscured the cargo from view until now. Dolibois stared into the body of the truck. It took him a moment for him to realize what he was looking at: rotting corpses. “Putrefied,” he recalled. “Most were naked. Some still wore the pajama-like striped pants, the concentration camp uniforms, now just rotting rags. It was the most horrible sight I had ever seen.”
The army captain spoke in a flat, emotionless tone. “There are thousands of them, five truck loads,” he told Dolibois. “We’re hauling them from one mass grave to another. Don’t ask me why.” These were bodies from Dachau. Corpses found upon liberation. The army captain’s convoy had come to a standstill after one of the vehicles had broken down. They’d been waiting at the roadside for an escort when Dolibois’s convoy from Oberursel had arrived. The captain asked Dolibois if his group could escort them to the next military station down the road. Dolibois agreed. “I found myself leading a bizarre caravan: six empty ambulances, an empty weapons carrier, followed by five two-and-a-half-ton trucks loaded with the obscenity of the Nazi final solution,” remembered Dolibois. The dead bodies were being taken to a proper burial spot on orders from the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS).
Back at Ashcan the world appeared different to him now. There, the rest of Hitler’s inner circle remained, men “directly responsible for that ghastly transport,” said Dolibois. If John Dolibois ever had a shred of doubt about the degree of barbarism and the collective guilt of the men he had spent three months interrogating at Ashcan, in that moment there was no hesitation anymore. At age ninety-three, John Dolibois says, “I still smell that foul odor of death.”
But in August 1945, there was barely any time for the young interrogator to process what he had witnessed. Back at Ashcan he fell into bed and slept hard. Come morning, John Dolibois received new orders from Colonel Andrus. There was still a group of Nazi Bonzen at Ashcan. Dolibois was to be on the team that would move them to the Nuremberg prison. Colonel Andrus had selected John Dolibois to fly with the remaining members of the Nazi high command on a transport plane.
Dawn, August 12, 1945. The sun had not yet risen in the sky. Ashcan’s last group of Nazis were escorted out of the classified interrogation facility and driven in ambulances a short distance to the airport at Luxembourg City. A C-47 transport plane idled on the tarmac, stripped down to its bare bones. Inside the aircraft, a single row of seats ran down each side. There was a honey bucket toilet and a urinal attached to a door at the back of the airplane. To Dolibois, it seemed as if Colonel Andrus was nervous. “Something was cooking,” Dolibois recalled. Security was always on the colonel’s mind. “Aha!” Dolibois realized what it was. “Kaltenbrunner!”
Ernst Kaltenbrunner was considered the most dangerous Nazi among the high command. At 6′4″, he was a giant man with a massive frame, a pockmarked face, and a huge head with seven or eight deep dueling scars running across both sides of his forehead, cheeks, and chin. He drank and smoked heavily and was missing teeth. Kaltenbrunner was described by the British journalist Rebecca West as looking like “a particularly vicious horse.” He held a doctorate in law and specialized in secret police work. He was the head of the Reich Security Main Office and chief of the security police and the security services. He was as actively involved in concentration camp crimes as any Nazi had been. According to the OSS, even Heinrich Himmler was frightened of him.