The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  Pierro’s men weren’t able to do any extensive exploring. “We had to stay with the tanks. If you were out of the tank, all you had was your sidearm, and you never knew what was going to happen. A crew outside the tank is defenseless, really.”

  At age ninety-one, he’s able to deflect the remembered horror by recalling the bigger picture. “Well, you know, it’s not like with something new, but at the time we’d seen a lot of dead people and a lot of hurt people. We had a mission to move forward, long as we were able. We took casualties, and those that were casualties stayed behind and the rest of the crews moved forward. We had casualties, we got replacements, and we went forward.”

  Private John Olson from Duluth, Minnesota, was one of the youngest men in the 415th Infantry Regiment. He’d been drafted the previous October and had joined the 104th Division near Aachen after riding in 40 and 8 railcars from Le Havre to Verviers, Belgium, and then by truck into Germany. For more than sixty years he’s held on to one indelible memory of Nordhausen. “I don’t know why we were riding on a jeep trailer, but we were. It was a dark kind of rainy day. We were in a long column of trucks, tanks, and jeeps—I think we were near the beginning of the line. I was sitting on the trailer facing to the left, and as we went along the street, I looked down this side street and I saw this ten-foot-high wire fence and a big gate. The gate was open, and I saw these two prisoners in their striped suits standing by the gate, and they had these beautiful smiles on their faces because they knew now they were being set free. We never went into the camp ourselves. But I just saw these two there, and I hope I never forget what they looked like. They just beamed, although they were just human skeletons, so thin. I had no idea what kind of camp it was; I’d heard about concentration camps, but I really didn’t know much about them. I would’ve loved to have been able to go over and talk to them, but I couldn’t do that.”

  Olson returned to Minnesota, where he became a Baptist minister, a career choice he made, in part, as a result of his experiences during the war. “I think I realized a little better how fortunate I, and we, are to be in America. As I look back, I count it a privilege to have served in the Army and Europe and to have been a part of that. And to think that I was a part of releasing those guys from that prison, that makes me feel good about it. I don’t boast about it. I’m just glad I was a part of it. I count all of it by the grace of God that he took me through it, protected me. It was all a positive experience, even though it didn’t seem so at the time.”

  Corporal Robert Ray, who’d been a photographer for the Nashville Banner before he enlisted after Pearl Harbor, was riding with his squad from the 36th Armored Infantry Battalion aboard a 3rd Armored Division tank when they arrived outside the walled prison. “We didn’t know anything about this Holocaust, didn’t have no idea, but we saw flatcars on the side track there that was loaded with bodies, some of them you could see they’d move a foot or a leg once in a while, have a little life in them. The people lived around there, they claimed they didn’t know anything about it, but that was a bunch of nonsense, because they could smell it as far as that’s concerned.

  “We reached this prisoner-of-war camp, and one of the tanks just busted a big hole in the wall—brick, concrete wall, or something. And all them poor devils come screaming out of there, some of them so dadgummed thin from malnutrition, we gave them all the rations we had. They’d eat cigarettes just like they’re candy.”

  Morris Sunshine was a twenty-year-old from Brooklyn who ended up in a combat engineer battalion because, of all things, he played drums and piano and the unit’s band was looking for musicians. He played at Newport News, he played at Camp Gordon, Georgia, he played in Nashville and the Mojave Desert. He wasn’t playing on the Susan B. Anthony on the way to Omaha Beach at H-Hour when the ship hit a mine. His unit lost all its equipment as the captain balanced the ship by having the troops on board move from side to side, and eventually Sunshine ended up on an English vessel with “no helmet, no guns, no nothing,” and they watched the Anthony sink. He thought they’d take him back to England, but instead he and a few of his guys were dumped on Utah Beach. It took almost three weeks before his unit was put back together again and took off on the great march across Europe, where they eventually built the first bridge across the Rhine.

  Morris Sunshine was part of the 294th Combat Engineer Battalion attached to the 104th Infantry Division when Nordhausen was liberated. He says the sight was indescribable and the smell was unimaginable.

  Back in Brooklyn before the war, he’d heard stories about the Germans from people they called refugees who spoke about prisons that they’d come from. But he knew nothing about concentration camps. On the morning of April 12, they began to smell Nordhausen from ten or fifteen miles away. And then they arrived at the camp, which he recalls as being adjacent to the road, next to the town. “We saw these skeletonlike people, dressed in the striped uniforms, and some of them moved. Some of them didn’t move. It was a shocking sight. This was some kind of something that’s indescribable, you know. And the smell—it was horrible, such a horrible smell of death that hasn’t been put into the ground, it’s unimaginable.

  “I do remember that some of these people got out, and they wandered into some of the German houses looking for food. I was a buck-ass sergeant, and [the Germans] came out looking for me ‘cause I spoke Yiddish, and I was able to converse with these people. And they told me that there were some people in this house, and the woman of the house is screaming and yelling, panicking. I went in, and what the story was, the member of the concentration camp, there was bread on the table and he grabbed it. And she was screaming at him that ‘This is for my family!’ and she was appealing to me that I should get the bread from the concentration camp guy, which, of course, I didn’t have any sympathy for her at all.

  “I mean, I was so angry at what you saw, and the depravity. Some of them couldn’t walk. [They ate] whatever we gave them, some of them threw up; it was too much for their stomach to take. But this—of course we didn’t know at the time. We found that out in a day or so, two days—they were collapsing on us.”

  Sunshine went into the yard at Nordhausen where hundreds of bodies lay because he was curious. He wanted to know who the people were, what they were doing. “Most of them could not speak; it was kind of an unintelligent gibberish to me. They might not have been speaking German. Could have been speaking Russian or Hungarian or anything like that. But I didn’t know that. I just went at them with my Deutsche.

  “I did get that they had been captured. The story I got was the German guards knew that we were coming—how they knew that, I don’t know, but they knew it. And [the guards] tried to get gasoline, kerosene to burn some of the camp and some of the victims. Somehow, some of these internees, the concentration camp victims, were able to overpower some of these guards, which to me sounds strange, because they had such little strength. But evidently, something like that did happen, and they beat up on a few of them and they never got to fire up the camp.”

  John Rheney, Jr., was a staff sergeant, a rifle squad leader in the 413th Infantry Regiment of the Timberwolves. After the war, Rheney spent forty years as a pediatrician. He’s now retired in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he does physicals five days a week on recruits coming into Fort Jackson. He was twenty-two when he got orders to go see Nordhausen, which had been liberated by the 414th, and he’s never forgotten what he saw there. “It didn’t look too bad from the outside, but when you got inside there were just stacks and stacks of corpses. All of them had apparently starved to death. There were a few people up that I remember, and they greeted us like we’ve never been greeted before. Most of them, I think, were French.

  “They were in rags. They, too, were starved, but for some reason they had survived a little bit. They just greeted us like we had saved ‘em, which I guess we had.” Rheney didn’t go into the tunnels at nearby Dora, but he went fairly deep into Nordhausen, where the bodies had been accumulated for disposal. “It shook everybody
. I’d read about the Civil War and the slaughter that took place there, and the camps they had such as Andersonville, but even those were not like this was.”

  Corporal Forrest Robinson was a military policeman with the 104th. That’s probably why his commanding officer asked that he accompany him into the barracks buildings at Nordhausen. On a visit to the camp fifty years later with his son to participate in the dedication of a museum at the site, the now-ordained minister had a full-blown flashback. “In a searing flash, horrid memory swept over me, and I could see it all once again—row upon row of devastated human bodies, emaciated, starved, mutilated, gray, and rotting in the hot sun. There were open pits in which bodies were burning. The stench was horrid, doing almost final violence to the senses.”

  Questioned (in writing because of his extreme hearing loss) about his experiences on April 12, 1945, he writes of being nearly overwhelmed, feeling he would lose it all having just walked with his CO through the open yard. “You would have thought that the previous moments would somehow have prepared me for what I was to experience [inside the barracks], but it was even worse.

  “Along the full length of the wall to our left, iron cots had been jammed together, and on the cots were the dead and the dying, side by side. I’m certain some of the dead had been so for weeks, their grotesque and distended bodies emitting the foulest of gases. Occasionally a figure on one of the cots would stir and cry out for help. But we were helpless. We weren’t medics! The horrid stench of it all is indescribable.

  Corporal Forrest Robinson was a military policeman with the 104th Infantry Division at Nordhausen. After going inside buildings and finding survivors lying among dozens and dozens of dead bodies, he suffered what he now describes as “total physical and spiritual exhaustion.” Now an ordained minister, Robinson says he has no memory of anything that occurred in the two weeks after Nordhausen.

  “Under a stairway, there were bodies stacked like cordwood. I simply could take no more and suddenly bolted and ran out the door back onto the concourse, grabbing the side of our commander’s jeep to steady myself. But a strange thing was happening. One of our men had managed to sneak overseas a portable radio and it was playing in the back seat, and of all songs, Glenn Miller’s ‘Sunrise Serenade.’ It was hideous.

  “Utterly overwhelmed by this crushing mixture of circumstances, I literally lost it. I raised my head to the heavens and cursed God in the vilest of language. I screamed there could not be a God who could allow a thing such as the Holocaust, and dismissed civilization as but a thin skin covering a basic savage. Suddenly, in total physical and spiritual exhaustion, I fell over the side of the jeep and vomited.” Reverend Robinson writes that he has no memory of anything that occurred in the subsequent two weeks. “That period is a total blank in my mind.”

  Chicagoan Arthur Leu was part of a military police company of about 175 men, broken into three units: one guarded headquarters, one dealt with traffic control, and the third, his section, handled POWs. He was in a forward compound; his unit’s job was to take prisoners from the advance units and contain them, have them questioned by intelligence officers, sort out the SS from the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm, and then ship them to the rear.

  By the time Leu got to Nordhausen, the first units in were already starting to bring survivors out and, at the same time, moving bodies from inside buildings to the open area. Leu says there were hundreds and hundreds of bodies. “You can’t believe it. You cannot absolutely believe that the human body can be that thin, that devoid of any substance. You can’t believe that people could be treated like that, that a human being could exact that kind of punishment on another human. You’re horrified.”

  Leu watched survivors being carried out on stretchers, “and there were some of them sitting against the walls that had been brought out, that were obviously alive and barely so. Men and women. Most of them naked.” In the early hours, he says, there were not enough medics on hand, because no one had expected to be confronted with the horrors they found.

  “It was very busy, but it was quiet,” he recalls. “These people were hardly even capable of being noisy, their moaning or whatever it was. There was no shouting, there was no screaming, none of that going on. But they must have been grateful that there was an activity there that was being of help to them as opposed to what they were going through before.”

  Arthur Leu’s unit probably spent less than an hour inside Nordhausen before leaving to set up a prisoner compound not far from the camp.

  Almost as soon as the 3rd Armored Division medics arrived at Nordhausen, they notified the 104th Infantry Division following behind them that a full-blown medical rescue operation would be needed if any of those still living in the camp were to survive. The weight of that mission fell on the 329th Medical Battalion, with its four companies of personnel plus a headquarters unit. One of the men there was Ragene Farris, who, in 1996, described that day in exquisite detail for the division association’s newspaper, Timberwolf Howl:

  Going immediately to the scene, the Timberwolf medics found a square of bomb-scarred buildings, reminiscent of a large college campus, which until six weeks previously had housed the motor shops of the German SS troopers. Upon entry, litters in hand, the men saw rows of bodies stretched out the length of the large concrete floored room. Grotesquely still, evident that they had hung tenaciously to a last breath of life, these prison-marked men lay in an indescribable symbol of death. The initial shock of the bestiality, the inhumane cruelty of this deed, did not register with the men. Their job was to evacuate the living; to hospitalize and nourish; to bring men and women, and children back to the realm of human decency.

  In many cases the living had been too weak to move the dead from their sides. One hunched-drawn French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm, having no mental concept that the friend had died, and unable to move his limbs…. In their prison garments of striped coats, huddled in rags or old dirty blankets, it was like reaching into another world apart, to bring these shadow-men from their environment onto a litter, and into a clean American ambulance.

  Not long after the evacuation of the living had begun, troops were sent to the nearby town to bring back several hundred German civilians to assist with the rescue effort. Many of those same Germans would be pressed into burial details in the days to come. Farris wrote:

  These were the people who lived in unconcern as thousands of people had been driven as slaves, then left to die. Each medic learned several German words: “schnell” (hurry) and “tempo” (the same—hurry) and with a mixture of emotion soon had a fast-moving litter line going from building, shell and bomb craters, cellars, etc., wherever the patients were found to be yet alive. For seven hours with truck and ambulance, drivers carried away load after load of these shadow-men, taking them to hospital facilities set up by other Timberwolves Medics (section hospitalization). Litters carrying men of every disease and condition, continued to flow into a central evacuation point.

  The final score of evacuated patients was well over 700. Fifteen patients died enroute to the hospital area. Three hundred patients were so eaten away by malnutrition that their bodies will never respond to treatment or gain health again. Lying in the camp area were 2,800 bodies.

  PFC Rip Rice’s mission was to take him past Nordhausen, where his job was to find a water source and set up a purification unit to supply the American forces moving through the area. Now a PhD living in Maryland and lecturing worldwide on the subject of ozone, Rice was one week shy of his twenty-first birthday when he stopped at Nordhausen with the 104th Infantry’s engineer battalion. Until that day, he’d had a rather positive outlook on the war and his fate, often saying that he had the safest job a guy could have in a combat zone. “I was always in back of the front—except in the unusual event of maybe a counterattack—and I was not at the rear echelon. I was in between them, so that I was too far back from the front to get any small-arms or mortar fire, and I was too close up to get any artillery [since]
that would go over our heads and get to the rear.”

  He credits the good fortune of that assignment to the unlikely combination of “God and chemistry.” He was pulled from one of the line companies in the engineering battalion when the captain asked, “Who knows the definition of the term pH?” When no one else responded, Rice reluctantly raised his hand and said, “Sir, pH is the potential of the hydrogen ion.” At that moment, he says, “college paid off. But I was lucky. Something told me to volunteer. I didn’t know why. Against my principles, I volunteered. Thank God I did; that’s where he gets into the act and gets some credit for this, because I didn’t do it on my own.”

  Next thing he knew, the captain said, “Rice, fall out. Company dismissed. Rice, you’re transferred to headquarters; they need a chemist at the water point.” From that time on, his job was to leapfrog with one of the four division water points to keep the units supplied with fresh water, sourcing it from local streams or rivers. From the perspective of sixty-four years later, he looks back on what they did in World War II and says, “My God, how could we have drunk that swill? But that’s another story.”

  On April 12, 1945, Rice recalls being on his unit’s ten-ton truck, trailer in tow, heading east from Kassel in a valley roughly ten miles from Nordhausen, when they began smelling a strange odor that reminded him of the Fort Worth stockyards. “They didn’t care much about air pollution at the time, and when they did the slaughtering, they’d have things left over that they’d burn. From the animals. And that’s what it smelled like: burning animals. Only it wasn’t exactly that; there was something more to it. And that odor kept getting stronger and stronger, and we didn’t know what the heck it was.”