I spent the afternoon in a daze, trying to process what I’d seen at Mittelwerk—but the scale of the suffering was too great to “make sense of.”
I wanted to make amends.
There was no way to make amends.
Even if I could have personally freed every man in that tunnel, it still wouldn’t be enough. They’d endured conditions and pain and torture that were beyond anything that could be forgiven. Even if they were liberated right that minute, they’d be scarred for the rest of their lives.
Jürgen and I had an odd kind of argument that night—scribbling furiously on paper as we tried to negotiate a safe way to discuss what I’d seen. I wanted to go to another hotel so we could speak freely. He refused—saying it would arouse suspicion. He wanted to “talk about it another time,” which I suspected meant he didn’t want to talk about it at all. Eventually, I all but dragged him to the bathroom and slammed the door behind us, then turned the faucet on.
“We have to talk about this,” I hissed.
“The V-2s have caused significant damage to London…to a few other cities too. That in itself is a tragedy that keeps me up at night. Our intelligence suggests maybe a few thousand people have died,” he whispered thickly. “It’s horrific. But…”
“But…？” I repeated, scanning his face.
“The guilt of that makes me sick to my stomach, but it doesn’t even end there,” he croaked. “We are losing that many prisoners every week manufacturing rockets. Maybe more. Between accidents, beatings, disease…they take train carriages full of bodies out every day. We produce two things in those tunnels—rockets and death. Mittelwerk is an extermination site, without even the pathetically small mercy of a fast death for its victims.”
I thought about how quickly word would spread if Jürgen took a stand and refused to join the SS. Whispers would race like wildfire from Nordhausen to Berlin—through party lines both official and unofficial. Maybe Berlin would fall within just a few months anyway, but it was likely I would be interrogated by the Gestapo too, and I couldn’t even be certain I would survive. The children would potentially be left without either of us.
But one day, the war would end. The endless bombardment of Nazi propaganda would stop. And my children could learn that their parents had tried to do the right thing. Too little, too late—yes. But they would at least know that there had been a line we refused to cross.
“Follow your conscience wherever it leads you, Jürgen,” I blurted. “Do whatever you have to do.”
After eleven years of ups and downs and varying degrees of distance between us, Jürgen and I were exactly together, on the same page.
The next morning, Jürgen and I faced one another as I stood beside my car. His eyes were red and so were mine. The sun was low on the horizon and the wind was icy—but the sky above us was blue. I wanted to feel every aspect of the moment. I wanted to remember every detail of those moments with Jürgen, as fraught and terrifying as they were.
We agreed we wouldn’t make a fuss that morning, but he and I both knew this would likely be our last goodbye. We discussed trying to bring the children for a final visit—but to arrange that would take time we didn’t have. I couldn’t bear to lose him, but I knew what the cost would be to keep him. He wasn’t willing to pay that price, and now that I’d seen Mittelwerk with my own eyes, nor was I.
To fail a test of loyalty like Otto’s invitation for Jürgen to join the SS was suicide. Jürgen was just determined that his death would come on his terms. He didn’t have a clear plan for the specifics—he was just going to go to Mittelwerk and look for an opportunity to make one first and last act of defiance, maybe to free a prisoner or two, or to sabotage the line itself somehow.
“I love you more than I knew I could love another person,” I said. My whole body was shaking with the effort it was taking to hold back my tears.
His expression softened, and Jürgen reached to cup my cheek in his hand.
“You have made my life, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes. My last thoughts will be of how grateful I have been to share it with you.”
And then we kissed, one last time, and I slipped into my car and drove away. Just a few miles out of Nordhausen, I had to pull over to the side of the road because I was sobbing too hard.
Sometimes, I thought I had, by necessity, grown used to living apart from Jürgen. Only now that our connection was likely about to be severed permanently did I understand that it was all that had kept me going through these years.