“But anyway, Abrams gets on his tank and says, ‘Don’t touch anything. The best bet is to get away from this area because there must be a lot of disease floating around.’ He himself had had no idea. The colonel in charge of a whole battalion had no idea what was going on, had no idea there was concentration camps. And that surprised me.”
Bernard Diamond, from the Bronx, was only eighteen years old when his unit, the 89th Infantry Division, came into Ohrdruf to relieve the 4th Armored. He was a member of a weapons platoon: mortars and machine guns. And he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge near Bastogne almost immediately after arriving in Europe. “You know, I was eighteen years old. Was I terrified? I think I was just stupid.
“When I got to Ohrdruf, and I’m walking into a courtyard, and I see piles of shirts and piles of suitcases. And what I thought were baskets of pebbles, but when I looked closer, they weren’t pebbles. They were teeth with gold in them. And I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ You know, I didn’t know anything about [the camps]. But when I saw some prisoners there, the first thing they wanted was my weapon because the Germans were still running out and escaping.”
On April 8, several days after liberation, while the 4th Armored was still waiting to be relieved by the 89th Infantry Division, Combat Command A’s Colonel Hayden Sears ordered his men to go into the nearby town of Ohrdruf with trucks and bring back the citizens to the camp. In his Yank magazine article, Sergeant Levitt describes Ohrdruf as “a neat, well-to-do suburban town with hedges around some of its brick houses and concrete walks leading to their main entrances. The richest man in Ohrdruf is a painting contractor who made a lot of money in the last few years on war work for the German Army and now owns a castle on the way to the concentration camp.”
Harry Feinberg recalls the scene when the townspeople arrived at the camp: “They came up and had handkerchiefs over their mouths. And they dressed in their Sunday best, every one of them. The women had nice hats, and they were taken through the camp.”
The enforced tour ended at the site in the woods where ten bodies lay on a grill made of train rails, prepared for cremation. Colonel Sears said to the townspeople, “This is why Americans cannot be your friends.” Then he turned to a German medical officer and asked, “Does this meet with your conception of the German master race?” It took a few moments for a response. “I cannot believe that Germans did this.”
In Yank, Levitt wrote:
The crowd of the best people in Ohrdruf stood around the dead and looked at the bodies sullenly. One of them said at last: “This is the work of only one per cent of the German Army and you should not blame the rest.”
Then the colonel spoke briefly and impersonally through an interpreter. “Tell them,” he said, “that they have been brought here to see with their own eyes what is reprehensible from any human standard and that we hold the entire German nation responsible by their support and toleration of the Nazi government.”
The crowd stared at the dead and not at the colonel. Then the people of Ohrdruf went back to their houses.
The colonel and his soldiers went back to their tanks, and we went out of this place and through Ohrdruf and Gotha, where the names of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms are set in shining gold letters across the front of the opera house.
CHAPTER 4
SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER
APRIL 5, 1945
BERGA AN DER ELSTER, GERMANY
80 miles east of Ohrdruf
Sometime during the first week of April, the Berga POWs began hearing that they were to be moved to another camp. Morton Brooks says that initially the men weren’t sure whether or not it was an April Fool’s joke. (Strange as it may seem in this context, that custom actually originated in Germany in the 1860s with the playing of elaborate practical jokes and hoaxes, so the notion was not completely improbable.)
The rumor about being moved wasn’t a joke or a hoax—except for the part about going to another camp. This was to be a forced march, destination unknown. Surely the SS knew that most of the men were unlikely to survive, but they’d long ago tossed the rules of the Geneva Conventions; additional deaths of American POWs were of little concern. The apparent reason for the evacuation of the Americans was the rapid approach of Soviet troops advancing along the eastern front, to the northeast of Berga.
On April 5, instead of being marched the mile-plus distance to the tunnels they’d been blasting into the mountain, the regular camp guards greeted the prisoners with “We’re marching out, we’re going out.” Morton Brooks, who had arrived at Berga about a hundred days earlier weighing roughly 145 pounds, had lost almost half his body weight. He recalls that the men were lined up and marched out the gates and past the townspeople, who threw things at them. Those were the same good Germans who a month or less hence would be greeting the occupying Allied forces with smiles and shouting the quickly mastered welcome “Nicht Nazi.”
Just under three hundred Americans began the impossible march south on a road alongside the Elster River, guarded by twenty-eight soldiers. Fortunately, the weather was springlike, and the Berga survivors were not required to cope with winter conditions that surely would have felled a good number of them within days. They’d each received subminimal rations for the march, a tenth of a loaf of bread and part of a Red Cross parcel; perhaps their captors thought they’d find additional food along the way, perhaps not.
The first day they managed to travel about ten miles. The prisoners straggled along, stopping often to relieve themselves—diarrhea had been a constant in their lives for months—which caused the guards to berate them, urging them to be quick. An occasional German civilian offered them something to eat, but more often than not the civilians just wanted the men to move quickly past their property lest they dirty it.
They were all wearing the remnants of the clothes they’d had on when they’d been captured four months earlier. Brooks’s socks had disintegrated, and his combat boots had worn the skin off his toes; he could actually see the bones. Nevertheless, he continued to trudge along.
Norman Fellman wasn’t quite so fortunate. After a couple of days, he couldn’t walk. “My boots had burst, and I had an infection in one leg. A lot of people in that situation were shot, but in the particular group that I was with, they put us into a cart. Now, try and picture the cart: it was used to carry vegetables to market for farmers. It was about maybe twenty feet long, and it was narrow on the bottom, with V-shaped sides to it. They were at an angle—they bellied out. And you could probably get eight, nine people on there without crowding. They put thirty. Invariably, somebody on the bottom would suffocate. It was Russian roulette—you prayed like hell you were not the first one on the cart, because if you were, there was a good chance you were not gonna be breathing when they took you off.”
The cart was loaded by prisoners who could still move; occasionally prisoners were dumped into it by the guards. For most of the time on the road, the cart was pushed and pulled by POWs. For a short period of time he recalls a broken-down horse taken from a local farmer being used.
Given that the Germans had not been averse to shooting or beating prisoners to death, why not now? “I think if it wasn’t for the proximity of Allied troops, they would’ve shot us, because earlier, when people fell out of line, that’s what happened, they shot them. But I think the fear was there,” says Fellman. “The only thing that saved our asses, I believe, was that we were pretty close to American lines.”
Nevertheless, at least thirty-five Americans died on the march from Berga. Four perished the first night as the prisoners were lodged in a school. A day later, another four died in a castle. Then three died on the road; another eleven died while the group was kept in a barn for five days. Thirteen more died as the prisoners were forced to march farther south.
As the men in Morton Brooks’s group trudged along the road not quite two weeks into the march, they began passing hundreds of bodies, nearly all showing signs of having been shot at close range in the back of the head. They
’d been following the same route that had been taken by the death march of the political prisoners from Berga. These were the same skeletal figures with the big eyes that the POWs had seen when they’d first arrived at the concentration camp; the same people who had worked near them, drilling tunnels into the mountain. Confronted with the insensible brutality of the Nazis even though the war was clearly lost, it was difficult to keep the faith, to believe that survival was not only possible but probable. Brooks, age nineteen and weighing less than 80 pounds, still had enough strength left to carry his buddies physically and psychologically. “You just say, ‘You gotta keep going. We’re gonna be freed soon. We’re gonna make it.’ Those who didn’t believe it usually died. People gave up, just went.”
The sight of the bodies of the Eastern European Jews compelled Brooks to make a decision. He had to escape. He said to his buddy Seymour Fahrer, “‘This is gonna be our end, let’s see if we can get outta here.’ So we agreed that we’d make the attempt, and the following day we just kept falling behind, falling behind, like we couldn’t keep up, and the guard who was at the end didn’t bother too much. We just straggled along until it got dark. And then Seymour and I took off and went into the woods.”
His feet were still incredibly painful, which is why he says with a laugh now, “We trudged, we didn’t run. The next day we saw this farmhouse. There was some vegetables on the porch, and we tried to get it. The farmer came out with a shotgun, and we were taken into the town for the night and put into a dungeon—an underground hole. The following day there was some sisters of some order who attempted to do something with my feet. But then we were taken back to the group.”
Surprisingly, the two would-be escapees weren’t punished—perhaps because the German guards’ focus had shifted from making the lives of the prisoners more miserable to figuring out how to make sure they were captured by American soldiers rather than the Russians. Word had already spread throughout Germany that the Russian soldiers were brutal; for them it was payback for what the German army had done to the Russian people as they had advanced toward Leningrad. Wholesale rape was the order of the day. Pillaging. A take-no-prisoners policy. And the Russians were already west of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), less than three hundred miles from Berlin. There were even rumblings among the German high command of trying to work out an alliance with the Americans against the Russians.
APRIL 10, 1945
ERFURT, GERMANY
With the 80th Infantry Division
Robert Burrows was working as a produce clerk in Royal Oak, Michigan, when he turned eighteen in October 1942. He tried to enlist as an air cadet but acknowledges that he paid for having dropped out of high school when he flunked the test. So he went down the hall and tried to join the Marines. But there was a sign on the door that said, “Not taking any enlistments.” So he volunteered for the Army. After basic training, he became a medic and was stationed at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. It was tough duty, but someone had to do it. He stayed there working as a clerk in the lab, participated in a couple of autopsies, and practiced his putting. Being young and clearly not recognizing a good thing, he tried to volunteer for the paratroopers but was turned down. But in February 1944, the need for warm bodies in Europe became pressing, and he was assigned to the XII Corps headquarters.
In December, during the Battle of the Bulge, infantry units were crying for replacements, and Burrows volunteered, much to the chagrin of his boss, Major General Manton S. Eddy, the XII Corps commander and former commanding officer of the 9th Infantry Division. After a ten-minute talk, the general gave him the opportunity to serve with any infantry outfit in Europe. Sergeant Burrows said it made no difference to him, so Eddy sent him to the 2nd Battalion, 317th Infantry Regiment, of the 80th Infantry Division, where his former aide de camp was the commander. Burrows was assigned to S2, the battalion intelligence section.
For the next three weeks he saw heavy combat and was the only survivor among a group of six when the last artillery round of a morning barrage near the town of Borscheid, Luxembourg, fell on their position.
Shortly thereafter, rumors began to spread. He heard that a camp with a lot of bodies had been found, and the rumor mill was saying they were POWs. “They weren’t talking about Holocaust versus Jews or Poles or Ukrainians or Russians or anything. The rumors were spread person to person. We had no radios. Somebody said something, and that’s the way it went. We really wiped these things out of our minds, anyway. You couldn’t go on and be concerned about what’s happened. You had a job to do.”
Their job on April 10 was to take Erfurt, a city about fifteen miles from Weimar. It would mark the last battle of the war where his unit would lose people. One of them would be his own commander, Lieutenant McAlpine. The next morning, the eleventh, they started for Weimar, and they began hearing rumors again. The 6th Armored Division was ahead of them, and it had found something. But at that point there were just rumors.
What they’d found was Buchenwald, which had been taken over on April 10 by Communist-led inmates who had been arming themselves for the day the Allied armies would approach the camp. The underground movement had nearly a thousand armed men, who had taken over after the hard-core SS guards fled as the U.S. Army approached Weimar. The underground fought against a small number of young German soldiers, overpowering and imprisoning those they caught in a place called “the dungeon.” A couple of the young soldiers tried to impersonate inmates but were caught, and it’s claimed that they subsequently hanged themselves.
Buchenwald was built in 1937 in a wooded area about five miles northwest of Weimar, in east-central Germany. The early inmates were predominantly political prisoners; however, after Kristallnacht in 1938, almost 10,000 Jews were sent to the camp. As the years went on, the Nazi regime sent a variety of people there: hardened criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, military deserters, and so-called asocials. In its final years, Buchenwald also held POWs from various countries, former government officials of Nazi-occupied countries, resistance fighters, and slave laborers brought to Germany from captured lands.
By February 1945, the population of Buchenwald and its nearly one hundred subcamps reached 112,000, most of whom were being worked by various businesses owned and operated for profit by the SS. In addition, medical experimentation on inmates, similar to that conducted at other concentration camps, took place at the main camp. Prisoners deemed no longer fit to work were usually selected for transport to other camps, where they were systematically killed. Though there was no gas chamber at Buchenwald, there was a crematorium building that the Americans discovered not only disposed of prisoners who died in the camp but contained a macabre mechanism for the killing of undesirable inmates.
Early in 1945, as the Russian army moved through Poland, the Germans emptied the death camps at Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, sending thousands of prisoners on forced marches to Buchenwald and leaving thousands more dead along the roadside. In the first week of April, with American forces closing in, the Germans attempted to send almost 30,000 Buchenwald prisoners on foot and by train to other camps.
On the morning of April 11, a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy, Menachem Lipshitz, from Częstochowa, Poland, the location of a famous Catholic shrine, climbed to the roof of the hospital building at Buchenwald. He was being hidden in the hospital by Poles who were imprisoned in the camp. Speaking from his home in Nashville, the man, now known as Menachem Limor, says rumors of liberation had been spreading through Buchenwald. When they saw that the Germans had abandoned their guard posts, they began to believe that the rumors might be true. “When we heard that the Americans were coming, we went on the roof of the hospital, and then I saw American tanks coming from both sides of the camp. A jeep with American soldiers came into the camp, and that’s the first time I saw an American soldier in my life. And that’s how we were liberated.”
A few days before the Americans arrived, Limor says, the Germans “took up a lot of the people for the march of the death.” T
he day before, he’d known something was afoot because he’d seen one of the Russians in the camp walking through the hospital carrying a rifle. “We were afraid that maybe the Germans will take everyone out from the camp, and in the hospital, there was a group that say, ‘We won’t go. We will run away.’ And they had even clothes, you know, not inmate clothes, the civilian clothes. And I was lucky to be with them, that they said they would take me with them if we have to go. So there was an underground, but I was a young boy, so I wasn’t that familiar with it, but I know that there was.” In June, Limor left Buchenwald, which had been converted to a displaced persons (DP) camp after liberation, after his brother, who had been liberated in Poland, found him. They went to Hamburg and from there to Israel, where he was one of the first soldiers in the nascent Israeli army. He settled in the United States in 1969 with his wife, Leah, also a Buchenwald survivor, and their three children.
At about three in the afternoon on April 11, the day the fourteen-year-old Menachem Lipshitz was watching American tanks approach the main camp, Staff Sergeant Robert Burrows and his driver, Ben, were in their jeep, scouting ahead of the 2nd Battalion, 317th Infantry Regiment, of the 80th Infantry Division. It was a lightly overcast day, and they were driving through the slight rolling hills. To their right was a grassy meadow, but on a rise to the left they could see a camp, fenced with barbed wire, with a building right next to the gate. “This gate was here,” he says, gesturing with his hands, “and these fellows were standing to the left. Two POWs in their striped uniforms. Just standing there, watching me. They didn’t move. Just had their hands on the wire like they were resting, just like this. Both of ‘em. And I thought it was strange, but I didn’t want to be bothered, to be honest with you. I had things on my mind. I was supposed to be out scouting ahead of the battalion, and if I run into anything to let ‘em know [by radio]. But I went up to the front of this office building—it had a walk-in door—here. I didn’t go in the gate. The gate was closed. It was on the left side of the administration building. It said, ‘Arbeit macht frei.’” (The phrase, loosely translated as “Work will make you free” or “Work will liberate you,” was displayed on or above the entryway of many of the Nazi concentration camps.)
The Liberators Page 5