The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  The three 80th ID men went back to Weimar and reported to their captain. “He called regiment and regiment called division, and they said, ‘Round up the prisoners that are pilfering in town and take them out to the camp, and we will have food there within a reasonable time. Keep them there, and we’ll send medics and food there.’ That evening food arrived.”

  Though the sights inside Buchenwald were disturbing to Gerald Myers, the assignment to patrol Weimar wasn’t much easier on his mind. “We had a six-by-six [truck] that we were traveling in around Weimar, looking for these people. We saw one guy come out of a house, and he had a great big potato. He was eating on that thing like he was eating an ice cream cone. We hollered at him to come towards the truck, and about halfway there, he dropped the potato and keeled over. And we picked him up and took him out to the camp, and Dr. Bob said, ‘His system is just so weak that he couldn’t stand all of that starch and nutrition from that potato. The poor sucker is liable to die from it, because he ate too much of it.’

  “You were in disbelief that people could be treated that way, and when you saw them, you just felt so damned sorry for them that you wanted to help them, but you didn’t know how. All you were trying to do was to get them out to the camp so somebody else would take care of them, because you really didn’t want to know what happened to them. You didn’t want to see them die. You just couldn’t believe that the Germans could treat people this way and still think that [the Germans] were human beings.”

  Myers says he and his buddies tried to go into a mode where they didn’t let what they were experiencing at Buchenwald affect them emotionally. “We’d been hardened to the effects of war, seeing people killed and seeing injured laying along the road. This was actually just something else that happened in a war.”

  But years later, denial didn’t work. “I thought about that a lot for a long, long time. I would be going to sleep, and I would think about it. And it affected me probably more after the war than it did at that particular time, because I was used to seeing people killed and wounded.” After the first few months back home, he stopped talking about what he’d seen because people didn’t want to hear it or thought he was exaggerating. He didn’t start talking about it again until 1998, more than half a century later, when a schoolteacher friend invited him to speak about the war.

  CHAPTER 5

  LITTLE BOYS BECAME MEN

  APRIL 11, 1945

  NORDHAUSEN, GERMANY

  168 miles southwest of Berlin

  45 miles north-northwest of Buchenwald

  10 miles west of Berga

  As mid-April approached, there was no doubt that the war would soon end, with the Nazis crushed between the Russians pouring in from the east and a tsunami of Americans, British, Canadians, and French flooding Germany across a wide front from the west.

  April 11 saw American forces discover two of the worst-of-the-worst concentration camps. At Buchenwald a significant number of prisoners were found alive with the potential to survive. At the Nordhausen Dora-Mittelbau complex, forty-five miles to the north-northwest, thousands were found dead and unburied all over the grounds. Unlike at Buchenwald, survivors at Nordhausen were relatively few.

  The outfits that found the camps believed they were still on a headlong rush to reach Berlin. They’d learn within a day or two, much to the chagrin of their commanding generals, that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had already made up his mind not to go after the capital city, believing the cost in lives would be too great and a victory bittersweet. Rejecting Winston Churchill’s desire, Franklin D. Roosevelt declined to order the Americans to take Berlin. This meant that the Russians would control that part of Germany. In addition, within three months, Ike’s troops would have to cede the territory they currently occupied to the Russians.

  Within twenty-four hours of the liberation of Nordhausen and Buchenwald, FDR would die.

  Just a week before the Americans arrived at Nordhausen, three-quarters of the city was destroyed by bombers of the Royal Air Force. Roughly 8,800 people died in the raid, including hundreds of inmates who were confined by the SS in aircraft hangars that were targeted by the raiders.

  Major Haynes Dugan, the public affairs officer of the 3rd Armored “Spearhead” Division, witnessed the arrival of the division at Nordhausen. A year later, in unusually frank language rarely found in military histories, he published Spearhead in the West, in which he wrote:

  Although the taking of Nordhausen did not constitute the heaviest fighting of April 11, that city will live forever in the memories of 3rd Armored Division soldiers as a place of horror. The Americans couldn’t believe their eyes. It is all very well to read of a Maidenek, but no written word can properly convey the atmosphere of such a charnel house, the unbearable stench of decomposing bodies, the sigh of live human beings, starved to pallid skeletons, lying cheek to jowl with the ten-day dead.

  Hundreds of corpses lay sprawled over the acres of the big compound. More hundreds filled the great barracks. They lay in contorted heaps, half stripped, mouths gaping in the dirt and straw: or, they were piled naked, like cordwood, in the corners and under the stairways.

  Everywhere among the dead were the living emaciated, ragged shapes whose fever-bright eyes waited passively for the release of death. Over all the area clung the terrible odor of decomposition and, like a dirge of forlorn hope, the combined cries of these unfortunates rose and fell in weak undulations. It was a fabric of moans and whimpers, of delirium and outright madness. Here and there a single shape tottered about, walking slowly, like a man dreaming.

  Nordhausen was taken by Task Force Welborn and Task Force Lovelady, under the command of Brigadier General Truman E. Boudinot. Colonel John C. Welborn’s assault elements approached from the north as Lieutenant Colonel William B. Lovelady’s men came in from the south. As John Toland writes in The Last 100 Days, “The commanders had been alerted by Intelligence to expect something a little unusual in the Nordhausen area. They thought at first this meant the town’s concentration camp, where about 5,000 decayed bodies were lying in the open and in the barracks. But several miles northwest of Nordhausen, in the foothills of the Harz, they ran into other prisoners in dirty striped pajamas who told them there was ‘something fantastic’ inside the mountain.”

  What lay inside were two tunnels that had originally been salt mines, approximately two miles in length and fifty feet in width and height, connected to each other by forty-eight smaller tunnels. For more than two years, some 60,000 prisoners had slaved in them, building the V-1 unmanned radio-controlled aircraft and V-2 medium-range ballistic missile used to attack England, in a program supervised by physicist Wernher von Braun. Just days before the Americans arrived, von Braun had supervised the removal of fourteen tons of documents detailing his research. They were hidden in an underground iron mine and eventually removed by U.S. forces and brought to America, along with a hundred complete V-2 rockets, most of which were ultimately test-fired at White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. Von Braun, who was delivered to the United States as part of the secret Operation Overcast, became known derisively as one of “our Nazis,” as opposed to “their Nazis”—the rocket scientists snatched up by the Soviets—and later as “the father of the American space program.” (Unlike the U.S. government, the satirist/folk singer Tom Lehrer pulled no punches in the song he wrote and named for the ex-Nazi scientist: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”)

  Lieutenant Ernest James of Berkeley, California, was part of the 238th Combat Engineer Battalion, an outfit that was moved around, attached to, and detached from fighting units as needed. James’s tour of duty in Europe began inauspiciously on D-Day, when the small boat he was on with a company of men and thirteen vehicles began to sink. They used their own equipment to keep the thing afloat and managed to explain to the powers that be that either they had to land quickly, ahead of the actual fighting outfits, or they weren’t going to make it a
t all. As a result, they were among the first troops to land on Utah Beach. Their job, as the invasion force fought its way inland, was to build bridges, blast defensive installations, and build and repair roads. Although they were not tasked to fight, they were always close to combat operations.

  James was in a position to watch troop-carrying gliders land close by. “It was quite a spectacular sight to see these gliders come down right over your head and watch bullets going through them.” He also had the sobering experience of seeing the same thing happen to American paratroopers. Confusion reigned, with the one positive thing being the quick surrender of impressed Ukrainians, who had been captured in their homeland by the Nazis and “then given their so-called freedom if they’d come and fight for Germany.”

  His battalion lost twenty or thirty men during the Battle of the Bulge, with another couple of hundred wounded; roughly a quarter of the outfit. They stayed with the 104th Infantry Division, the Timber-wolves, after the Bulge and built both floating and Bailey bridges while under fire to get them across the Ruhr River.

  As they moved into the Harz Mountains, they began to encounter farms being worked by forced laborers kept under guard behind barbed wire, but the Army did not forewarn them about the elaborate concentration camp system they would soon confront. James did run into a very different aspect of Adolf Hitler’s grand plan. “Going through the Harz Mountains we came into this beautiful little town, only women there, and a lot of them were pregnant. It was one of the places where they were breeding a master race. When we went into the town, we started getting some small-arms fire and so we quickly set up a line and somebody contacted those that were firing at us. They were boys in their preteens and their early teens. They had rifles, and they were shooting at us. The mothers would keep these kids until they were a certain age, and then they had to put them in the military schools.”

  The next day, the 104th entered the Nordhausen Dora-Mittelbau complex. James doesn’t recall what he saw first, but he remembers what made an impact on him the most. “My platoon had to go down into a railroad yard to see if there were any engineering materials—lumber, steel, anything we can use for roads or bridges. And we got in there, and the German civilians were breaking open the railroad cars and looting what was in them. I remember seeing one that had bags of sugar, and the people were fighting over that.

  “Anyhow, there’s a train, I don’t know how big it was, but it was more than ten cars. Nobody was around, and the sergeant and I went over there and we busted open the doors and out slithered dead bodies. Slithered out, that’s the only word that I could use, ‘cause they’d been dead for days and in various degrees of decomposition. What the Germans had done was go load up these people as we were moving forward, they’d load these people up and move ‘em back towards Germany, trying to find ways of getting rid of ‘em.”

  “All I know is that I did not have emotional reactions except hate. How the hell can people do this?” The railcars holding the dead bodies were within easy sight of the cars being ransacked for sugar by the townspeople. “That’s the thing that pissed me off so much, was that there were these people looting. Of course, they didn’t have anything to eat, either. But they knew, they knew what was down there. You could smell it. Everybody didn’t know what was happening, that’s the damn thing.” To be clear, James was being ironic with that last comment.

  Other American units encountered additional Nazi handiwork at the Nordhausen train yards. Robert Miller wrote a letter to the Minnesota chapter of the 104th Infantry Division Association detailing what he’d seen on April 11. He was a member of an armored patrol that was sent to check and secure the train station and the nearby warehouses. The station had been bombed, and the cleanup was still under way. They heard a train approaching.

  One could tell it was a really loaded steam engine. Someone suggested we move one of our three tanks so as to cover the track. The tank was a new one from the states with a high velocity 90mm rifle.

  Suddenly, the train could be seen and we debated whether to use the tank’s gun. We realized the shell would go right through the engine and the cars behind it, probably killing anyone in them. Within minutes, the train pulled into the station and stopped. The engineer was looking for the station master and was totally surprised to find the Americans. He became argumentative and ended up getting whacked with a rifle butt. Some of us could speak a little German and asked him what the 42 padlocked box cars contained, but he wouldn’t say. Unknown to us was that only three miles away was a concentration camp called Dora.

  My friend, David Peltier, a street-wise guy from Chicago who taught me how to stay alive, went to the first box car, knocked off the lock and pushed open the door. The car was jammed with people standing, packed together like sardines, and appeared to be in a catatonic state. All 42 of the cars were filled with Polish Jews.

  Miller and his buddies unlocked all the boxcars, telling the people that they were “Americanish soldatin.” He wrote, “They could hardly believe that they had been saved from certain death and that they were free. Stan Pokrzywa, another Chicago man in heavy weapons, spoke Polish and did a wonderful job in comforting the people. We moved them in to the station and warehouses where a large supply of food had been found—food stolen from box cars by the station master—and gave this food as well as water to these former prisoners. Colonel Lovelady approved of this, and let the war wait.”

  Private John Marcinek was part of D Company, 414th Infantry Regiment, of the 104th, and recalls riding on a 3rd Armored Division tank the day they discovered Nordhausen. He was twenty-three years old and had been drafted two years earlier while working for his folks’ beer distributorship in the Shamokin, Pennsylvania, area. He was a veteran of fighting all the way from Holland, where he had spent most of seventeen days immersed in water because the Germans had flooded the area, to the crossing of the Rhine on the famous Remagen bridge and on into central Germany.

  As they approached the Nordhausen area, the tanks his unit was riding on stopped. A call came over the radio asking if anyone could speak a Slovak language. Marcinek says that growing up he had eight years of exposure to fractured Slovak, Polish, and Russian languages, so he responded. Turns out that the major who was commanding the lead vehicle was trying without success to interrogate several slave laborers dressed in striped clothing who had escaped from a nearby camp.

  Marcinek had difficulty with the translation, but with a combination of charades and language he determined that the emaciated men had, indeed, escaped when several SS guards had abandoned their posts, presumably because they knew the Americans were approaching. The major directed him to take four GIs and one of the escapees to investigate while the tank convoy continued down the highway.

  About a mile down a side road, the lightly armed group approached several buildings with white sheets hanging from the windows. Just a day or so before they’d gone through Paderborn, and the townspeople had used the same device to signal surrender. These buildings were behind a double barbed-wire fence, and there were more emaciated prisoners holding on to the wires and watching them approach. As they moved in closer, he suddenly heard a woman scream out, “They’re going to shoot at you,” and he hit the dirt. He remembers the shooting being erratic, nothing even coming close to him. When they moved forward, he and his men discovered that the shots were coming from what appeared to be the mouth of a tunnel. Once the gunfire stopped, the GIs moved in and were surrounded by about two hundred emaciated people, begging for food. “Some were saying, ‘Thank you, Americans,’ but they were more concerned about getting some food. They weren’t clapping hands or doing anything like that. It was a rather somber-type thing.”

  His reaction was similarly restrained, and he’s very deliberate as he describes his emotions at the time. “I shouldn’t say that we were—you’re not hardened, but you get the feeling that you’re kind of a changed person. You’re dealing with realism, and I don’t think there’s a lot of emotion, at least there wasn’t in my case.
It was business.”

  Marcinek’s little squad was directed by the prisoners to the commandant’s office, but the man he found there was not a hard-core SS veteran. “This commandant appeared to be about thirty years of age, with reasonable command of English. He apologized for the unauthorized gunfire and surrendered his sidearm, a P38 pistol. In response to the clamoring for food, the commandant relayed our promise to have medics and food [provided] by our military support personnel. The commandant explained that his former guards were members of the elite SS.” He had been in a Catholic seminary, where he had been studying to become a priest when he was drafted into the army.

  Marcinek had no way of knowing at the time, but the tunnel he’d discovered was part of the complex at Dora where the Germans manufactured the rockets he’d seen flying overhead earlier in the war.

  By the time he got to Nordhausen, Sergeant Aurio J. Pierro had already earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart commanding a Sherman tank platoon in the 3rd Armored Division’s Task Force Lovelady and had been recommended for a direct commission. Now retired from the practice of law, Pierro has lived in the same house in Lexington, Massachusetts, for all of his ninety-one years.

  Recalling the discovery of what was most likely the camp at Dora, three miles from the field of death they would soon discover at Nordhausen, he says, “I was moving the platoon in an area there, and I came to a fence. I didn’t know what it was. There was a gate, and there was a barracks on the other side of the fence. And then we waited, and all of a sudden the prisoners came out of the barracks, opened the gates, and they realized who we were—they started jumping for joy, but my crew stayed in their tank. They didn’t know what was happening, what could happen.

  “One individual there, he was hoppin’ around on one foot, just as happy as the others. In a little time my guys were wandering around on foot there, and they came back and said, ‘You gotta look in that building over there.’ So it was a brick building. I went in, and there was, like, an operating table with dead prisoners, emaciated bodies there, tied hand and foot, on the floor, on the table. Why tied hand and foot? No clothes on, naked bodies.”