The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  As they approached an intersection with a rural road, an MP stopped them. “Guys, the captain wants you to make a detour here. Turn left and go into town, there’s something you gotta see.” They drove a couple of miles to the outskirts of Nordhausen, and then “We turned into this yard where all these bodies are—and the stench was just—I mean, we got there and every one of us, we just tossed our cookies, we couldn’t stand it.”

  Rice says there were hundreds of bodies—“they were stacked five and six high, in big mounds. And there were more inside buildings—it could have been two, it could have been three. I was so upset by this horror that I was looking at. We didn’t know that this was the day or the day after the camp was liberated. We didn’t know anything about making missiles in the mountains there. We thought this was a concentration camp, but we didn’t know what to call it. Well, it turns out it wasn’t that—it was a slave-labor camp. They just worked these folks to death and didn’t feed ‘em right, and oh, jeesh, it was just total horror. I got sick as a dog. Everybody else did.”

  Rice, it turned out, was dealing with more than just the horrific sights and smells. He was dealing with his heritage. “I stood there, see—half of me is Jewish. I had no idea what these bodies were. You couldn’t tell anything about their religion. The other half of me is German. And I just sat there, stood there, throwing up my guts and saying ‘I never want to see another German as long as I live.’ The saving grace was when the commanding officer, whoever he was, had sent a detail into town to get the German civilians to come through this area to see what had happened. And as they came in, every one of them threw up his cookies. That’s the only thing that saved the German people as far as I was concerned at that time. They were human beings, too. But it didn’t bring these people back to life.”

  Nowadays, when he hears some kid say, “Hey, it never happened, it was just a figment of everybody’s imagination,” it pushes the wrong button, and he responds. “I’m just—‘Bullshit, buster. I wish I could have rubbed your nose in that smell, you’d never forget it.’ And anybody who says it didn’t is just doomed to repeat history. I was just an observer that came by after the liberation of Nordhausen. But I can sure tell you what a revolting experience that was. Little boys became men all of a sudden.”

  On the second day, unit commanders sent men into the town of Nordhausen to round up civilians to help with the burial detail. Private Sigmund Liberman, a twenty-two-year-old Texan who’d been raised as a conservative Jew and had been aware of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews before he enlisted, drew the assignment because he could communicate in Yiddish with the Germans. In the process, the civilians told him they hadn’t even known there was a camp nearby. He helped herd them onto the division’s trucks after ordering them to bring shovels. Asked if they argued or tried to fight, Liberman said, “No, no, they were worried we were going to kill them. I was wanting to do something, but I never did.”

  Combat Engineer Morris Sunshine, also Jewish, had to confront the good citizens of Nordhausen, who protested. “Some people, they didn’t want to do it, and [they asked], ‘What is this? We don’t know anything about it.’ The usual thing. How anybody couldn’t know anything about it, the stench was so terrible, it’s amazing to me that they were able to live with this smell.” He supposes that the citizens “were probably afraid of the [German] leadership—they were still afraid of the leadership at that time, too.” But he doesn’t excuse them. “The anger—my hate for the German language and the German people is terrible. It’s something that I’ve never forgiven them for.”

  The assignment of actually burying those bodies fell, in part, to the men of the 238th Combat Engineer Battalion, including Lieutenant Ernest James. He, too, was not impressed by the civilians’ “we know nothing” defense. He says they found out later that many of the same civilians from Nordhausen had been working down in the tunnels at nearby Dora. “For Christ’s sake, you had to know what was happening,” he said. “Down in the tunnels, if an inmate got into trouble, they’d hang ‘em on hooks for everybody to see.”

  James says that an area for mass graves was selected near the town, on the opposite side from the tunnels, and the unit came in with its bulldozers. The trenches were four or five feet deep and as wide as a dozer blade. He doesn’t recall how long they were, but they were long enough to accommodate almost 3,000 bodies. The German civilians were made to get into the trenches and clean out the loose dirt, so that the final resting place would be “neatly prepared.” James says the commander of the 104th ordered all able-bodied German men to work, no gloves, no masks. “He made them handle these dead bodies with their bare hands. Mean as hell.”

  But the Americans weren’t shedding any tears for the Germans. One artillery battalion commander said his men had to be restrained from physically attacking the civilians. And as for the townspeople, James says, “They’d fabricate things to carry them out—a door, a piece of carpet, or they’d take two poles and put them through the arms of the clothes to make litters. And then four men would carry one body—they wouldn’t put two bodies on or anything like that. They laid them out neatly, and God, I’ve got pictures of one, a little baby, apparently with its mother.”

  When all of the bodies had been laid in the trench, a memorial service was held with division chaplains leading the prayers.

  And within a day or two, the 104th Infantry Division moved on, leaving the recovering survivors in the care of behind-the-lines medical units.

  CHAPTER 6

  MERE DEATH WAS NOT BAD ENOUGH FOR THE NAZIS

  MY FIRST ENCOUNTER

  On a Walk from Ettersburg to Buchenwald

  One Mile and 200 Years Long

  By Warren E. Priest

  (Priest was an orthopedic surgical technician with the 120th Evacuation Hospital at Buchenwald. Forty-five years after the liberation, he wrote this poem describing his initial approach to the camp and his first contact with survivors.)

  Walking up the pathway, through the forest of beech trees,

  Leaves April green; the smooth, gray bark

  Soft, clean and oh, so manicured,

  How could I know what those trees concealed

  At the brow of the hill, amidst the beech trees—the buchenwald,

  In that land where Goethe and Schiller wandered in the summer months?

  But, suddenly, unexpectedly, who are these strange men, dressed in

  Their striped nightclothes

  Moving to the side of the pathway as I approach?

  I hold my GI issue carbine ready for any possibility

  I approach them; they stop, a halting tentative progress

  Emaciated, fleshless faces, bearded, unclean;

  They stretch out their bony fingers to me like street beggars

  Yet they seem to want nothing from me. I am bewildered.

  There is no hostility here!

  They fall to their knees; their hands now clasped together

  as if in prayer, Durer-like.

  They reach out skeletal arms tentatively as I approach, as

  if I am the Christ, wearing the clothes of immortality

  I think, what have I done to, for these four men, a mere 21-year-old soldier

  From Massachusetts, in the service of his country?

  Hesitantly, wordlessly, I pass them by, embarrassed because I

  must be the good soldier; I must not fraternize.

  But I cannot ignore their glistening, dark eyes,

  Their hands still extended, one so feebly clutching at my calf

  but his weak hands lose their grip, more like a caress.

  I recalled pictures of saints at the moment of beatification having such

  expressions on their faces!

  I cannot understand what is happening, for no words have been spoken;

  Dutifully, I move on to the fence just beyond

  An electrified fence, a double fence, one inside another, with barbed

  wire barriers at the top of each, an impenetra
ble barrier to me, so

  I walk along the periphery,

  I arrive at the opening to the fence, a towering gateway,

  At the top of the gate is an iron inscription: “Jedem das Seine”

  I know the meaning:

  You get what you deserve.

  And I enter the compound through the gate;

  How could I know that my journey has just begun?

  Warren E. Priest served with the 120th Evacuation Hospital at Buchenwald and never forgot what he saw there. After the war, he became a teacher in Newton, Massachusetts, and started a camp for inner-city children as well as the Center for Affective Learning in New Hampshire.

  APRIL 12, 1945

  BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP

  Near Weimar, Germany

  Max Schmidt got to Weimar with G Company of the 317th Infantry Regiment, 80th Infantry Division, on April 12, a day after the city was taken. Max was an eighteen-year-old from Brooklyn who had shipped out of Boston just six weeks earlier. By the time he hit Weimar, it had been declared an open city. “In other words, there was no real fighting to liberate Weimar. The Germans surrendered. When you got close to it, you know there was something wrong because you could smell it in the air. In my opinion, that was the key, that’s why the Germans came to us, they came to our commanders and wanted to surrender, because they knew what we’d find, and that would be Buchenwald.”

  Louis Blatz was another eighteen-year-old in the 80th, but he got lucky and arrived in Europe from the Detroit area just in time to serve as a rifleman at the tail end of the Battle of the Bulge. He was maybe five feet six and weighed 135 pounds, and he believed that he was invincible. “I never thought about dying. I’ve always had a feeling, all my life, even when I was a kid, you’re gonna die, there’s nothing you can do about it. Why worry about it and get sick?”

  Blatz, like Schmidt, smelled Buchenwald long before he saw it. “We were walking along the road, our company, and all of a sudden somebody said, ‘Ooh! What’s that odor?’ And I said, ‘It smells like Mount Clemens.’ In the old days Mount Clemens, Michigan, was noted for mineral baths that smelled like rotten eggs, sulfur gas, an unpleasant odor. And farther along, we see the gates were wide open, we went in, and we see all these people standing there. And some of them had already been disrobed. Somebody had gotten there before us, and they were taking all their clothes away from them, spraying them down, washing them.

  “Seeing it, you think, how could anybody be so inhumane as to treat people, fellow human beings, in that manner? All that ran through my mind was these people had no conscience; they didn’t care one way or another. They treated them as animals. It was just horrible. Because it was hard to breathe. The odor, the smell, the air. The crematoriums, some of them still had bodies burning in ‘em, so you could still smell it. And it was a relief on our part to get away from it, but you couldn’t forget, you couldn’t forget. After that, you just say to yourself, nobody better tell me that this didn’t happen.”

  Eugene O’Neil was yet another eighteen-year-old who made it to Europe in time for the end of the Bulge. But the Marylander wasn’t as optimistic about his chances of surviving combat as Blatz was. He was sent from Le Havre by 40 and 8 railcar across France to a replacement depot in Belgium. “It was strange, and it was so cold, we even set the thing on fire trying to light a fire in the middle of the car to keep warm.” It was early January. He was trucked from the depot to C Company of the 1st Battalion, 319th Infantry Regiment. “When we got in, nobody said, ‘Hello, good-bye, go to hell,’ nothin’ else. Because the feeling, I think, was these guys are coming in to die. So nobody wanted to make any friends.” His first battle was at the Our River and then on the Siegfried Line, where he was pinned down for five or six days. “We couldn’t get out of the foxhole, and constant shelling, mortar fire, Screaming Meemies, rocket fire—it was enough to blow your mind. Some guys did lose their minds there.”

  O’Neil’s unit stayed on the outskirts of Weimar. He doesn’t remember how he got to Buchenwald, but he recalls what he saw. “A lot of men who were nothing but skin and bones. The smell was real bad. I didn’t go into the camp.” He says there was so much horror—one thing after another, not just the camp but in war. Somehow, he just dealt with it all. “You gotta realize the difference between an infantryman and some of the other guys that came in afterwards and did the police work, did the cleanup. They were strictly the support troops like the MPs that come in along behind you. But when the infantry hits something, they get them out as quick as they can, particularly in a situation like that. I can picture those human beings there with nothing but flesh and bones, which was one of the most horrible sights that you could see. I didn’t know and didn’t understand the full horror of the camp until after the war was over.” Which may have been what helped him deal with it at the time.

  Ventura De La Torre was just twenty years old when Cannon Company of the 317th Infantry Regiment, 80th Infantry Division, came to Buchenwald. He’d been drafted out of the citrus groves of Orange County, California, and gone to Europe with the division on the Queen Mary. He was a truck driver, towing a 105mm howitzer and hauling the shells for the gun. And he’d never heard of the mass killings or concentration camps until April 12, 1945.

  “I couldn’t believe it. It was a terrible sight, feeling sorry for these people that couldn’t help themselves, nobody to help them. When we arrived, the people just walking toward us, like asking us, ‘Get us out of here.’ That was their feeling.

  “Some just had a piece of blanket covering them. And their knees were nothing but skin and bone. Their ribs … a terrible sight to see them. When we went in, some of those guards, they had changed into inmates’ [uniforms]—but some of the people recognized them. I heard that [the prisoners] killed some of them. And then they had the ovens there. Oh, it was the smell—when I think about it, I can almost smell that.”

  De La Torre was in the camp only three or four hours. His description of the dead—“stacked up like wood”—would be echoed by almost every American who set foot inside this camp and dozens of others. He remembers opening a door to one of the barracks. “Those people lined up shoulder to shoulder, and they were just staring at us. They were so weak; a lot of them couldn’t even get out. And there were dead with them in there, but I guess [the prisoners] just take them out and pile them up outside the barracks.”

  Sixteen days after the 80th arrived at Buchenwald, the War Department Bureau of Public Relations issued a report on Buchenwald, first releasing it to war correspondents in Paris. The late Lieutenant Colonel Edward Temple Phinney, who had been with HQ VIII Corps in the final months of the war, tucked a copy of that report in his foot-locker. There it remained for more than sixty years until his great-nephew and the latter’s wife, Carl and Donna Phinney of Houston, Texas, discovered it and provided it to the author. The report puts into precise, often mathematical terms what the GIs were seeing and experiencing in the camp.

  TEXT OF OFFICIAL REPORT OF BUCKENWALD [sic] ATROCITIES

  The following text of the official report of the Prisoner of War and Displaced Persons Division, United States Group Control Council, has been forwarded from Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces to the War Department. It’s [sic] contents were made available to correspondents in Paris, April 28, 1945.

  The text:

  Inspection of German Concentration camp for political prisoners located at Buckenwald on the north edge of Weimar was made by Brigadier General Eric F. Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Charles K. Ott on the morning of April 16, 1945.

  … 2. History of the camp: It was founded when the Nazi party first came into power in 1933, and has been in continuous operation ever since although its largest populations date from the beginning of the present war. U.S. armor overran the general area in which the camp is located on April 12. Its SS Guard had decamped by the evening of April 11. Some U.S. Administration personnel and supplies reached the camp on “Friday the 13th” of April—a red-letter day
for the surviving inmates.

  3. Surviving population: Numerically, by nationality, as of April 16, 1945:

  French 2,900

  Polish 3,800

  Hungarians 1,240

  Jugoslavs 570

  Russians 4,380

  Dutch 584

  Belgians 622

  Austrians 550

  Italians 242

  Czechs 2,105

  Germans 1,800

  Anti-Franco Spanish and Misc 1,207

  TOTAL 20,000

  (Four thousand of the total were Jews.)

  … 5. Mission of the Camp: An extermination factory. Mere death was not bad enough for anti-Nazis. Means of extermination: Starvation; complicated by hard work, abuse, beatings and tortures, incredibly crowded sleeping conditions (see below), and sickness (for instance, typhus rampant in the camp; and many inmates tubercular). By these means many tens of thousands of the best leadership personnel of Europe (including German democrats and anti-Nazis) have been exterminated. For instance, 6 of the 8 French generals originally committed to the camp, and the son of one of them, had died there.

  The recent death rate was about 200 a day. 5,700 had died or been killed in February; 5,900 in March; and about 2,000 in the first 10 days of April.

  The main elements of the installation included the “Little Camp,” the “Regular Barracks,” “The Hospital,” the medical experimentation building, the body disposal plant, and an ammunition factory immediately adjacent to this camp and separated from it only by a wire fence.

  Melvin Rappaport first heard the words “concentration camp” in a Hollywood movie just before the war. He saw his first one—Buchenwald—on April 13, 1945, and recalls that “the stench was beyond your wildest dreams.” The Queens, New York, native stays in touch by e-mail with dozens of World War II veterans.