Denis Avey (11 January 1919 – 16 July 2015) was a British veteran of the Second World War who was held as a prisoner of war at E715, a subcamp of Auschwitz concentration camp. While there he saved the life of a Jewish prisoner, Ernst Lobethal, by smuggling cigarettes to him. For that he was made a British Hero of the Holocaust in 2010.
Avey claimed that he exchanged uniforms with a Jewish prisoner and smuggled himself into Auschwitz to witness the treatment of Jewish inmates, whose camp was separate from but adjoined that of British POWs. His claim has been challenged. His memoir The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, written with Rob Broomby, was published in 2011.
Avey was born in Essex, England, in 1919. As a boy he learned boxing, was head boy at school and studied at Leyton technical college. He joined the army in 1939 at the age of 20, and fought in the Western Desert campaign of North Africa in the 7th Armoured Division, (the "Desert Rats"). He was captured by the Germans while attacking Erwin Rommel's forces near Tobruk, Libya, and saw his best friend killed next to him. After his prisoner transport ship was torpedoed he claimed to have escaped to Greece by floating ashore on top of a packing crate, but was recaptured after landing.
After being retaken prisoner, Avey was placed in the E715 prison camp for British prisoners of war (POWs), next to the Auschwitz concentration camp where Jews were imprisoned. He was there from 1943 until January 1945. While there he befriended a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz, Ernst Lobethal, from the adjoining Jewish section. He obtained cigarettes from Ernst's sister, who had escaped from Germany to Britain on a Kindertransport before the war. He secretly passed the cigarettes to Ernst who used them as currency to help him survive.
Avey said that he twice exchanged uniforms with a Jewish inmate to smuggle himself into the inmate's camp in order to witness for himself the treatment of Jews, which he could see was completely different from the treatment of British POWs. While British POWs were forced to work six days a week, they could use their free time to play football and basketball. While their conditions were dreadful, according to one British inmate, "they were as nothing compared to what the Jews next door went through". Avey agreed, and describes the plight of the Jews:
I am telling you I know without exaggeration, nearly 200,000 prisoners in Auschwitz were worked to death. Not killed. Were worked to death and they claimed total innocence. They lived for no more than 4 months. They were clubbed and beaten every day without any justification whatsoever.
Avey explained to The Daily Telegraph that he was the type that needed to see things for himself:
My mates didn't want me to do it but they agreed because they realised I was going to do it, and that was that. I had watched people being murdered literally every day and I knew someone would have to answer for it. I wanted to get in and identify the people responsible.
He was aware that he was taking "a hell of a chance", and states: "When you think about it in today's environment it is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. You wouldn't think anyone would think or do that, but that is how I was. I had red hair and a temperament to match. Nothing would stop me."
Avey escaped during the "death marches" in April 1945 which followed the Nazis' evacuation of Auschwitz. Although suffering from tuberculosis he caught in the camp, he broke away undetected, then made his way through Silesia, Czechoslovakia and Germany. During the march Avey saw an estimated 15,000 dead prisoners, recalling that "the road was littered with corpses". He eventually ran into Americans who helped get him back to England, and to his family who assumed he had died.
After he returned to England, Avey spent the next year and a half hospitalised with tuberculosis. Afterwards, when he tried to report what he saw in Auschwitz, he encountered resistance and indifference. From then on, he chose not to speak of it again to anyone:
In 1947, I went to the military authorities to submit my information about Auschwitz. Their eyes glazed over. I wasn't taken seriously. I was shocked, especially after the risks I'd taken. I felt completely disillusioned, and traumatised as well. So from then on I bottled it up, and tried to piece my life back together.
The author Sir Martin Gilbert explains that by 1947, after the Nuremberg Trials were finished, "people just wanted to get on with their lives". Average citizens were not interested in discussing the war anymore, nor were they interested in hearing war stories from veterans or former POWs like Avey. "It must have been very painful", says Gilbert.
Besides tuberculosis, Avey suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) before it was recognised as a medical illness, a condition few people were aware of. For the following years he battled with nightmares, jumpiness, and an inability to speak about his POW experiences. He suffered from a violent temper, stomach pains and loss of memory. From a beating during his incarceration, he also lost vision in one eye which became cancerous and required being replaced with a glass eye. The cause of the beating, Avey said, came when he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. The officer took his pistol butt and gave Avey a blow directly on his eye.
When war crime prosecutors later sought Avey's testimony for the Nuremberg Trials, they were unable to locate him. He kept the traumatic events about his wartime past a complete secret from everyone, including his first and second wives, along with his daughter. "I knew there was something," said his wife, Audrey. "Naturally, you ask questions. But I never got an answer." Avey explains "The sad irony was that I went in there to find out the truth, so I could tell everybody about the horrors of the Nazi regime. But I was so traumatised at my whole experience of the Auschwitz camps it took me 60 years to be able to recount the horrors I saw."
He first began disclosing these events when invited to appear on the BBC to talk about war pensions. His memories began tumbling out, shocking the television hosts who were unable to believe what they were hearing. As a result, the BBC began production of a documentary, discovering the name of the young Jewish prisoner Avey had befriended in Auschwitz, Ernst Lobethal. When asked why he risked his life to infiltrate the Jewish sections of the concentration camp, he states that he needed to see for himself "the unspeakable things being done to the Jews at Auschwitz". At the age of 91, he reflected back on this episode:
You know the word "conjecture"? It's never been in my vocabulary. I wanted to know exactly what was happening inside there. ... I knew there had to be eventually a reckoning to all this. ... I don't feel like a hero. I'm embarrassed, ... I had certain ideals that I grew up with.
He had assumed that Ernst had died during the death march, but tracked down and met Ernst's sister, Susanne, who also thought he died. She had escaped to England before war broke out in 1939.