In the week preceding the arrival of the Americans, the Nazis moved 23,000 prisoners out of Buchenwald, lest they fall into enemy hands. Two trains with 4,600 prisoners were sent to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, 160 miles to the east. Another train, with 4,800 prisoners destined for Dachau, was liberated en route. Still another, with 4,500 prisoners bound for Dachau, made it only to Gera, forty-five miles east of Buchenwald, where it was liberated. A train with 1,500 prisoners was sent 170 miles east, to Leitmeritz, Czechoslovakia. And two trains were dispatched to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, 120 miles to the south. One train, with 3,105 inmates, arrived there. The other, with 4,500 prisoners, was detoured through Czechoslovakia, taking its human cargo on a hellish three-week journey that ultimately ended at Dachau.
Captain Melvin Rappaport was part of a headquarters unit with the 6th Armored Division. He’d been going to the City College of New York when he opted to join the Army six months before Pearl Harbor. He volunteered for Officer Candidate School (OCS) and was commissioned a second lieutenant assigned as a platoon leader in the newly organized 6th Armored Division. He went overseas with the unit and became a liaison for air support, wandering the countryside in a half-track talking to the fighter planes overhead via UHF radio. He was at Bastogne, where he remembers losing about a third of the division in the bitter fighting. “Somehow we survived it. Youth, that was the thing,” he recalls in his Queens, New York, home. “When you’re twenty, twenty-one years old, you can take anything. We got through the Siegfried Line, etc., and then it was April.”
Mel knew a bit more than his buddies about Germans and Jews: he’d learned it from the movies. “There was a movie with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan called The Mortal Storm, a 1940 film in which they played a couple in Germany. Her father was a professor and they were Jewish, so they threw them in a concentration camp. That was the first time I ever heard the words ‘concentration camp.’”
He saw his first concentration camp on April 13. “The stench was beyond your wildest dreams. It was unbelievable. And I still remember this crazy thing. On top of one of these carts—actually it had rubber wheels, it wasn’t a wagon—there was this naked body on the top, big fat guy about 220 pounds like me, with a crew cut and his tongue sticking out. So I remember I spoke to one of the inmates, a Polish youngster, twenty years old. He was in there because his father and his two brothers were members of the underground, so they threw them into the camp. He spoke English rather well, and I said, ‘Who’s that?’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s Herman the guard.’ Before he could get out, the prisoners grabbed him and stripped him and killed him and threw him on the top there. So there was this big fat German guy, all nude, laying on the top. All the bodies were like skeletons, all black and discolored, and he was laying up there, nice pink skin, you know.
“I can’t explain what I was feeling. First of all, the war was still on, and I shouldn’t have been here. Literally, we were supposed to be in headquarters in case something happened, and I was hoping to God the chief of staff of the corps headquarters wouldn’t be looking for me. I realized my time was limited, so I wandered around, and maybe two hundred yards to the rear was a little concentration camp within a concentration camp. A big huge barbed-wire entanglement, double barbed wire, and big chains on the front, and behind it was these young boys, as I found out later on, there were 850 of them, ages of about six to sixteen. I found out one was Elie Wiesel, and the other, six years old, later became chief rabbi of Jerusalem. His name was Rabbi Israel Lau. They were starving and hungry and cold and miserable. It was like a pack of wild beasts, just running around this enclave in there. They looked at me, and I was looking at them. I didn’t know what to say. It was unbelievable. All youngsters. They had snot coming out of their nose—they all had colds. Oh, God, what a mess.”
Many of the children had been relocated to the barbed-wire enclosure from the kleine Lager, the little camp. It was actually the first place Mel was dropped off. All he could say about it was that “it was even worse than the main camp, if that’s possible.” The Army’s press release says more:
6. The “Little Camp.” Prisoners here slept on triple-decked shelves, each shelf about 12′ × 12′, 16 prisoners to a shelf, the clearance height between each shelve being a little over 2’. Cubage figured out to about 35 cubic feet per man, as against the minimum for health of 600 cubic feet prescribed by U.S. Army Regulations. All arriving new prisoners were initiated by spending at least six weeks here before being “graduated to the ‘regular barracks’.” During this initiation, prisoners were expected to lose about 40 percent in weight. Jews, however, seldom if ever graduated to the regular barracks. Camp disciplinary measures included transferring recalcitrant prisoners back to the “Little Camp”. As persons became too feeble to work, there [sic] were also sent back to this camp, or to the “Hospital”. Rations were less than at regular camps, and death rate was very high here; recently 2 per cent to 4 per cent, per day.
While the kleine Lager was the worst that Buchenwald had to offer adult inmates, release to the main camp and the “regular barracks” did not offer a life that, objectively, was appreciably better. Mel Rappaport still remembers his first look at those regular barracks.
“We kicked the doors open to some of the barracks, and again the stench was just unbelievable. It just hit you in the face. The latrines were out in the street, the toilets, all the toilets right in the street there, and the inmates, they had huge boards where they slept on, where maybe you could hold maybe normally thirty people, they had maybe three hundred in there, packed in there.”
Rappaport’s vivid description is supported by the Army’s press report:
7. The “Regular Barracks.” The dormitory rooms were approximately 42′ × 23′, about 10’ high; or a content of less than 9,500 cubic feet. In such a room, there were installed triple-deck 38 stacks of 3 cots each; or a total of 114 cots, each cot 32” by 72” outside measurement. Most of these cots were double (i.e. 2 parallel cots occupying a space of 60” by 72”), aisles were too narrow (less than 24”) to permit movement except with body edgewise, 114 cots into 9,500 makes less than 85 cubic feet per person. But since the war 250 persons have been made to sleep in each such room (5 persons on each 60” by 72” double cot, and 2 persons on each 30” by 72” single cot); or less than 40 cubic feet per person. There was less than one blanket per prisoner. Blankets were thin and shoddy, and undersize. There was no heat in these dormitories.
The troops who came through Buchenwald on the first couple of days were in combat units. Their job was to keep the pressure on the enemy, and as a result, they often spent no more than a few hours inside the concentration camp. It would be another two days before the first Army medical unit would arrive and attempt to save the 20,000 inmates who remained in Buchenwald.
CHAPTER 7
IKE KNEW THIS WOULD BE DENIED
APRIL 12, 1945
AHLEM, GERMANY
180 miles west-southwest of Berlin
140 miles north-northwest of Buchenwald
With the end of the war in sight, the objective for U.S. Ninth Army units was to reach the Elbe River and link up with the advancing Russians. Ultimately, the Elbe would be part of the border between what became known as East and West Germany. By mid-April, advance units of both the 84th Infantry Division and the 102nd Infantry Division had caught up with the spearheading 2nd Armored Division—Hell on Wheels, which was halted at the Elbe.
In the course of its rush eastward, the 84th liberated the slave-labor camp at Ahlem, a subcamp of Neuengamme, near Hannover. The inmates were primarily Jewish men and boys from the liquidated Lódź ghetto in Poland. Corporal Vernon Tott, a 335th Infantry Regiment radio operator from Iowa, took photographs there and at Salzwedel, a camp they would liberate a day later, and, when he came home, stashed the photos in a shoe box that remained in his basement for more than fifty years. Tott, who died of cancer in 2005, also left a highly detailed written description of his day at Ahlem, wh
ich he said was “hell on earth.”
He wrote:
My memory of what we saw when we first entered the camp was the pile of dead bodies. The men alive were in ragged clothing and they were just skin and bones. They came towards us with smiles on their faces. They knew their horrible nightmare was finally coming to an end. We motioned them back as we didn’t want them to get too close to us. We feared they were full of disease and lice. Then we went into one of the barracks. What we saw in there is something that a person could never forget. There were prisoners laying in bunks too weak to get up. There were dead bodies in some of the bunks. In one particular bunk, there was a boy, about fifteen years old, who was lying in his own vomit, urine, and stool. I could see he was near death. When he looked at me, I could see he was crying for help. Over the years, every time I would think about Ahlem, I could still see the look on this boy’s face.
Next, I went into another barracks and it was just as bad as the first one. There was a prisoner there that could speak English. He told me he was a doctor from Belgium, and said that this was the infirmary. He explained that he was the camp doctor. The prisoners here, I could see, were near death. He had no medicines or bandages to help treat the prisoners. Then he took me to look out the back window. There were trashcans full of dead bodies. What a horrible, inhuman way to die! Our troop had just come through six months of bloody battle but what we were seeing here made us sick to our stomachs and some even cried.
What I saw in this camp was so shocking that I wanted pictures to send home to show my family. I took eighteen photos of everyone that was alive in the camp. In the Army, we had no radios or newspapers so I didn’t know Hitler was treating the Jewish people in this manner.*
Wayne “Roy” Ogle, then of Knoxville, Tennessee, now a retired horticulture professor at Clemson, was a college student when he enlisted in the reserve. He was called up and went to Europe as part of an antitank platoon in the 333rd Infantry Regiment, 84th Infantry Division. Ogle spent six weeks fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, but he says it felt more like six years. His time on the line ended when a chunk of shrapnel lodged in his chest, just millimeters from his heart. It was probably the freezing cold that saved his life. “I had on a real heavy overcoat, plus a field jacket, plus everything else I could get on. The shrapnel went through that double lining of the lapel on the overcoat, and went through my field jacket, and all the other clothing, and it lodged in my chest. [The clothing] slowed it enough to where it didn’t kill me. I was lucky.” He managed to get out of the hospital in about two weeks, just short of the time limit after which he’d be sent to a replacement depot rather than back to his old unit. He was with the buddies he’d trained and fought with when his unit discovered Ahlem.
“I was never as shocked in all of my life when I saw those guys. They were skeletons.” The first units to liberate the camp had the job of corralling the newly freed inmates and getting them back behind the barbed wire for their own safety. The gates had been closed by the time Ogle arrived.
“The thing I remember best is they had really become jubilant about the fact that they were free. They had run all over camp, and they had spilled flour on the ground. They were rebelling, basically, is what it was, they were just having a fine time of it.
“I also remember that there were some British and some American prisoners there. Not many, maybe a half dozen, and they got those guys out, pronto.”
Ken Ayers was with the 84th Infantry Division at the liberation of Salzwedel. Ayers, who is still active in veterans’ affairs, celebrated his ninetieth birthday in 2009 at home in Tallahassee, Florida.
Like others who liberated camps, Ogle has dreamt about the experience. “About those scarecrows that came out, it was terrible. It’s worse than seeing a corpse, I’ll tell you that, and I’ve seen plenty of those.”
Two days later, other units of the 84th Infantry Division led an attack to liberate another subcamp of Neuengamme, Salzwedel. First Lieutenant Kenneth Ayers, from Tallahassee, Florida, was a twenty-five-year-old platoon leader in A Company of the 333rd Regiment.
Ayers had been part of a National Guard unit at West Palm Beach that was federalized late in 1940. His unit eventually ended up at Fort Benning, Georgia, serving as what he calls “demonstration troops.” After a year at Benning, he was the only man left in the outfit with a high school education, so he was sent to OCS. He became a ninety-day wonder, graduated from Officer Candidate School with an infantry commission, and was sent to Camp Wheeler, Georgia, to train troops. “I was a southern boy, and they sent me to a colored regiment.” Those were the days of the segregated Army, and he knew the assignment was no accident. “I stayed there one year and was reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana.”
The 84th arrived in Europe in October 1944, and Ayers is a bit understated in describing what it was like for a twenty-five-year-old to be leading men in combat for the first time. “Don’t overlook the word ‘scared,’” he says, “because I was.” The men in his platoon were from all over the United States and from all walks of life. Not surprisingly, he has a fairly forthright assessment of their fighting ability. “Let me say this: the ones that caused the most trouble in civilian life sometimes turned out to be the best soldiers. In other words—I won’t use this word literally—but a gangster on the streets of New York was a helluva soldier in the field.”
Despite the fact that he was his company’s executive officer as well as a platoon leader responsible for dozens of enlisted men, Ayers was given no advance warning that they might encounter concentration camps. His introduction to the subject was intense: “I literally saw the guards on the gate there in Salzwedel shot and killed. I personally didn’t fire a shot—I was behind.”
Salzwedel had begun operations with a thousand female slave laborers less than a year earlier, in mid-1944. This subcamp of Neuengamme existed to provide workers for a privately owned company whose primary mission was the production of explosives and bullets. The factory operated around the clock, with the women working under brutal SS supervision in twelve-hour shifts with one fifteen-minute meal break.
By the beginning of April 1945, Salzwedel was being used as a collecting point for transports of female prisoners from camps being evacuated to avoid the oncoming Russians. In its final days, there were more than 3,000 crowded into the camp, including a large contingent of Dutch women evacuated from Ravensbrück. The guards outside the barbed wire were generally Wehrmacht soldiers unfit to serve in combat units. On the inside, security was provided by approximately ten male SS members supervising an equal number of female guards, some of whom attempted to blow up the camp and its inmates as the American soldiers approached.
Lea Fuchs-Chayen was a teenager standing near the gates of Salzwedel when an American tank rolled up. In 1997, from her home in Tel Aviv, she wrote a public letter describing her liberation and thanking the GIs:
A U.S. soldier jumped off the tank, opened the gates and announced, “You are free.” To us, he and the others from the U.S. Army were angels from heaven. I was standing fairly near the gate and tried to say “thank you” in English, German or even Hungarian, but no sound would pass my lips.
I ran back to my room in my hut, where several girls were lying on the floor, burning with fever, some even vomiting blood. I wanted to tell them that we were free, but no sound came out. It seems that the excitement of that morning was too much for my dilapidated condition.
The burning barracks at Salzwedel described by survivor Lea Fuchs-Chayen was sketched by 84th Infantry Division combat artist Walter Chapman.
For the past 48 hours, we had heard gunfire and that morning, we could hear the noise of tanks. When our liberators arrived, the Germans lifted their hands above their heads in capitulation. A few U.S. soldiers rounded them up. One SS officer started to run away and was shot dead.
The Army organized food for us and told us we would be taken to decent quarters. After we left the infested camp, it was burnt down.
A doctor came and took note of the patients who needed hospitalization. About three days later, trucks took us to a German air force training school. The buildings were pleasant and roomy and our liberators had expelled all the cadets, after having made them clean the place for us. We were told not to drag anything and should we want to rearrange our rooms, we should ask a U.S. soldier and he would give orders for it to be done. Each of us received a bar of soap, the first in a year. We had hot water for 24 hours a day and so we could shower three or four times a day, as if to wash away all the mental hurt inflicted by the Germans. We had proper beds with sheets and received clean towels every day. After our first shower, we were asked not to put on our old rags, as they were full of lice. We were given clean clothes.
The U.S. Army had organized a special diet for us as we had to get used to eating again. We had the normal facilities of a dining room and we sat on chairs at tables, like human beings again. There were always several Army people present to make sure that all was well, and all this at a time when the United States was still fighting a war.
The most astonishing thing I found, then and today, was how wonderfully kind they were to us. How remarkable it was that under the dirt, disease, rags and lice, these soldiers could see human beings, young girls. Their kindness and their thoughtfulness gave us back our belief in the human race.
A doctor came around to each room to examine us, recommended treatment or said, with a smile, “You will be fine, miss, with good food inside you again.”
In the evenings, time and time again, there would be a knock on the door and soldiers would come in and do conjuring tricks or other silly things to get us to laugh or at least smile again. It took some time before we learned to smile again.
The Liberators Page 10