The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  Silva, who grew up in the family-run funeral business in Fall River, Massachusetts, and was drafted while attending the Boston School of Anatomy and Embalming, says the 120th had set up in the center of a racetrack in the middle of Frankfurt and everyone was having a good time, which included racing a liberated motorcycle on the track. The good time ended with word that they were being moved on a priority basis.

  “We got word that FDR had died,” recalls Silva, now a retired Massachusetts judge whom local prosecutors referred to as “Not Guilty Milty,” “and all hell broke loose. We were told to pack up but not to load any vehicles. Up to this time, what we would do is operate in tandem. We would take the people [to the new location] who were supply and maintenance, the guys that put up the tents and so forth. And we would come back for personnel, and while we were doing that, they’d be setting up the equipment, so by the time we got there with the nurses and the doctors, the hospital would be operational.”

  This move, however, was different. At about six in the morning on April 14, an all-black quartermaster unit showed up with trucks, loaded their vehicles, and with 273 personnel, the 120th Evac moved out. Silva recalls that they drove all day, then into the night under blackout conditions, occasionally hearing small-arms fire. “We didn’t know where we were going. We thought that Patton had started a big offensive and he’d met a lot of resistance from the Germans and there were gonna be a lot of casualties. And as we approached our destination, we started to get this odor.”

  Riding in the truck with Silva was his buddy, truck driver Herbert James, Jr. “Herbie said to me, ‘Milt, there’s something that smells around here.’ I said, ‘Herbie, there’s somebody dead around here.’ Having grown up in the funeral business, the smell of death was not unfamiliar to me, and I thought that we had probably run by some bodies that had been left by the side of the road and had decomposed. But the smell got stronger as we got to wherever we were going. And, lo and behold, with the light of day, we arrived at our destination, which was Buchenwald concentration camp.”

  Corporal Leonard E. Herzmark of Kansas City, Missouri, had just completed his second year of college when he decided to enlist in the Army at the end of 1942. He was eighteen years old, and since he’d been studying chemical engineering, the Army trained him as a combat medic, which was some cause for concern on his part. “You’d go out with a combat company, and you know, you’re wearing a red cross on your helmet, which is a good target.” He also wasn’t armed. “Medics are not supposed to be armed, and that meant you can’t shoot a medic, because they haven’t got a gun. I think that was probably a rule that was promulgated by the Geneva Convention, but nobody paid any attention to that.”

  The future judge Milton Silva during World War II.

  Fortunately, before he went overseas with an infantry unit, he was pulled out and sent to Mississippi, where the 120th Evac was being formed, and he was assigned to be a laboratory technician. That’s where he met Milt Silva.

  Herzmark says that though the unit wasn’t told their specific destination when they left Frankfurt, something was mentioned about a prisoner camp. He remembers getting to the area outside Weimar and bivouacking for the night. But he vividly recalls what happened the next morning. “As we drove up the road, I saw a lot of stuff hanging from trees, and, having come from Mississippi, we had what’s called Spanish moss that used to hang from the trees. My eyesight wasn’t the best—I wear glasses. But as we got closer, I saw those were soldiers, German soldiers, hanging from the trees.” Herzmark surmised that before the SS guards left Buchenwald, they’d blown up the power plants, thrown down their guns, and left. “Since the electrified fence was no longer electrified, the inmates climbed through the fence—this was either two or three actual fences, one inside the other, I should say. And so they took out after the Germans, captured a lot of them, and hung ‘em right there. A mass lynching, for which you cannot blame anyone. The Germans had asked for it.

  “We dismounted from the truck just outside the camp and went to the gate. And as I walked through the gate, I remember seeing a gallows with three bodies hanging from it. Those were not German soldiers, those were inmates who had been hung. This struck me as ‘this ain’t no place I wanna be.’”

  Milt Silva had a similar reaction. “We got beyond the entrance, and we saw these people walking around, almost naked and looking like living skeletons. It was sort of an eerie sight. People were whimpering. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This is not so, you know? Who the hell would treat people like this? And I remember wandering off into an area where a bunch of inmates were surrounding an individual, and they were pelting him and beating the hell out of him. He was one of the guards, and I remember standing there shouting, ‘Kill the sonofabitch!’” Silva now calls that one of his moments of shame.

  At the time, he was so upset about it that he just walked off. “I didn’t want to stay there anymore. I just didn’t want anything to do with what was going on up there, and I went down and started to fix tires. Remember fixing eighteen flats and beating the hell out of the tires with a sledge hammer and feeling pretty good about it.”

  From the Army’s Buchenwald press release:

  11. Miscellaneous: A. Rations: 600 to 700 calories per day for the regular camp, 500 for the Little Camp, both of an unbalanced ration, as against 3,000 to 3,600 calories required for adult health. Black bread, potatoes twice a week, and beet root twice a week served as weak soup, soy bean (or other vegetable “sausage”), jam twice a week, margarine about once a week. Never any greens or fresh vegetables. Heavy deficiency in animal fats and vitamins. No meats. Red Cross packages almost entirely appropriated by SS camp commander, and distributed to suit himself to SS personnel, to citizens of Weimar, even to Nordic German camp prisoners. In two months Commander [René] L’Hopital* received 1⁄10, 1⁄14 and 1⁄7 of one-person weekly French Red Cross parcel. Meals were prepared and “served” by prisoner personnel under SS supervision.

  Warren Priest was an orthopedic surgical technician with the 120th. He’d grown up in Haverhill, New Hampshire, gotten a full scholarship to Boston University in 1940, and been drafted at the end of 1941, when he was nineteen. After basic training, he was selected to attend Fordham University as part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), where he majored in German. The plan was for him to be part of a group that, at the end of the war, would be involved with occupation administration. But after nine months, the special program was dissolved and he was sent to the 104th Infantry Division and, from there, to the newly organized 120th Evac at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

  Before the unit left Frankfurt, he remembers the colonel calling everyone together and saying they had an assignment to go into a camp where they could practice their medical training. “My experience as a kid growing up was that camp was a place where you went swimming and went barefoot in a bathing suit. So I had difficulty trying to determine the nature of the camp. I knew there were people needing medical care, but I had no idea what we had to face.”

  The odor was his first clue that Buchenwald was not summer camp. On the night of the fourteenth, the unit was bivouacked at Schloss Ettersburg, within two or three miles of the concentration camp. Some men stayed in tents, others slept inside a school. “The whole area was permeated by an odor that I had never experienced before, and I later realized it was the odor of burning bodies and decaying bodies that wafted down from the mountains into the valley below. It was something you couldn’t escape.

  “It’s the first thing you encounter and the last thing you forget. I can tell you from experience that I know that I’m not a victim of post-traumatic stress, theoretically, except at those times when I am present and there’s some burning flesh of some kind, it comes back, and it really does a job. For example, I live in a home where I have a wood stove now, and several years ago, I was stoking the fire in the morning with my bathrobe on and didn’t realize in doing so a spark came up and lit the back side of my sleeve, went up my arm to th
e back of my bathrobe, and ignited my hair, and I smelled that burning flesh, burning human. And it kept me awake for months.” Priest went into Buchenwald the following morning with the men of the 120th.

  Initially, the female nurses of the unit went into the camp with the men. Rosella Willis Lane, who’d been a farm girl in Iowa before becoming a nurse and joining the Army, still recalls the ride from Frankfurt to Weimar, with the trucks stopping frequently and the women ordered to crouch behind the wheels because the convoy was being strafed. Now ninety-four years old, she says that what she saw inside Buchenwald can never be forgotten. “The crematorium with the doors open, ribs and bones. DPs on stretchers and walking around, just skin and bones.” She met the fifteen-year-old Elie Wiesel and spent time with him, wondering how he’d ever gotten through that. (Long after the war, Wiesel would attend reunions of the 120th.)

  Her unit was camped at a castle in Weimar, a couple of miles from the concentration camp. Two or three days after arriving, she says a couple of SS soldiers were killed very near their mess tent, and her commander decided that it was no place for women to be assigned. All the nurses were sent on temporary duty elsewhere, while the men of the 120th remained to work in the camp.

  Robert Duoos, a Minnesota boy who was drafted in 1942 and spent some time with the 20th Armored Division before being assigned to the 80th Infantry Division’s reconnaissance troop, arrived at Buchenwald on April 17, five days behind his unit. His recon jeep had broken down, and he was playing catch-up. He spent a short time in Buchenwald and managed to see some of the horrors described in the Army report. “In the hospital, I saw lampshades that were made from human skin, with tattoos, and they had every part of the human body displayed in alcohol jars. And one of the things that was really unusual was that they had cut an inmate’s body in two, from the head to the seat, cut him lengthwise, and he was mounted on a glass inside a tank of alcohol. So you’re looking at the cross section of the inside of a human being.”

  Robert Duoos at home in Cambridge, Minnesota.

  8. The “Hospital”. A building were [sic] moribund persons were sent to die. No medicines being available, hence no therapy was possible. Typhus and tuberculosis were rampant in the camp. About half the wards in the “Hospital” were about 15’ deep with one window at the outside end, by 5½’ wide. From 6 to 9 “patients” occupied such a ward, lying crosswise on the floor, shoulder to shoulder. Room too narrow for most of them to extend their legs. Death rate in the “Hospital” 5 per cent to 10 per cent a day.

  9. Medical experiment building. Block 41 was used for medical experiments and vivisections, with prisoners as “guinea pigs.” Medical scientists came from Berlin periodically to reinforce the experimental staff. In particular, new toxins and anti-toxins were tried out on prisoners. Few prisoners who entered this experimental building ever emerged alive.

  Shortly after the arrival of the 120th Evac at Buchenwald, Milton Silva and several of his buddies toured the camp. Fairly quickly, they arrived at the crematory building. “Just outside the crematory there were bodies stacked up like cordwood. And I remember peeking in and seeing the incinerator doors open with remains of bodies that had started to be incinerated.” But considering what he would discover next, that was a relatively modest horror.

  Silva saw a staircase that led to a lower level, beneath the incinerators. “There were hooks on the wall, a meatpacking plant, where they go ahead and hook up the carcasses on the hooks and moved them along. And you could see on the walls where they would be scratching and kicking, trying to prevent themselves from being strangled by the wires that were put around their neck. I was upset that they hadn’t buried these bodies. But the word came down to leave everything this way; they wanted to record this to make sure no one would ever forget that it actually happened, and they wanted to bring the brass in to see it. And the commanding general, I remember, had everybody in the town walk through.

  Robert Duoos of the 80th Infantry Division’s recon unit came around the corner of the crematorium building at Buchenwald and was confronted with a stack of corpses the Nazis hadn’t had time to burn.

  “That was weird. People were looking at it like they’d never seen it before, and probably they never had. I think they knew what was going on, but they just didn’t want to get involved. And I can recall Margaret Bourke-White, she was there from Life magazine, and there’s a picture of her taking a picture of these people from the town, walking around, and I remember standing behind her, so that when I see that picture, I can place myself in the area when she was doing this.”

  The facility described by Milt Silva was given considerable attention in the Army press release two weeks hence:

  10. The Body Disposal plant: The design of this installation was a striking example of “German industrial efficiency.” It had a maximum disposal capacity of about 400 bodies per 10-hour day. All the bodies were reduced to boneash, thus destroying all “evidence”. All gold or gold-filled teeth were extracted from bodies before incineration. This plant was entirely enclosed within a high board fence. No one except the small operating force of SS personnel was allowed even to look inside this fence, and no prisoner who passed within it (as a member of a fatigue party or any other reason) ever came out alive. Inside this fence was: (A) a large front yard on the left; (B) a small back yard on the right; (C) the incinerator building centrally located between the two yards. This building was of substantial brick construction with cement floors, one story, with a full-size 12-inch [sic—should be 12-foot] high basement beneath. The main floor contained an Administration office at the front end, a locker and washroom for SS personnel at the far end, and the incinerator room in the center. The latter contained, in line, two batteries of three fire-brick incinerators, each incinerator having a capacity of three bodies or a total charge of 18 bodies. Fifteen to twenty minutes were required for the incineration of a charge. The floor of each incinerator consisted of a coarse grate through which the days’ accumulation of boneash was extracted at the end of operation. The fire came from a furnace room occupying the rear two-thirds of the basement. The flames being deflected downwards onto the bodies by baffleplates in the roofs of the furnace. The front end of the basement was occupied by the strangulation room.

  The method of collecting bodies was as follows: Roll call was held every evening, outdoors outside the dormitory buildings. Internees were required to strip, and bring to roll call, the naked bodies of all comrades who had died during the previous 24 hours. After roll call a motor truck drove around the camp, picked up the bodies, and was driven into the frontyard of the incinerator plant to await the next day’s operation. But this was not the only source of bodies. Emaciated prisoners who “had been around long enough” or who committed infractions of discipline, or who “knew too much,” or who refused to be broken in mind, were arbitrarily condemned to death. For instance in the “Little Camp” where prisoners slept 16 on a shelf, an infraction of discipline (and particularly an attempt to escape) not infrequently resulted in all 16 being condemned. Such persons were immediately marched on foot to a small door into the fence of the backyard, at a point immediately adjacent to the right hand front corner of the incinerator building. This door opened inwards until it hit a doorstop which held it in a position parallel to the building wall—thus creating a corridor about four feet wide and three feet deep. At the far end was an opening about four feet by four feet flush with the ground, the head of a concrete shaft about 13 feet deep, the bottom floor of which was a continuation of the concrete floor of the room at the front of the basement. The condemned prisoners, on being hurried and pushed through the door in the fence, inevitably fell into this shaft and crashed 13 feet down to the cement cellar floor. This room on the floor at one end of which they now found themselves, was the strangling room. As they hit the floor they were garroted with a short double-end noose by big SS guards, and hung on hooks along the side wall about 6½ feet from the floor, the row of hooks being 45 in number. When a consignment
had been all hung up, any who were still struggling were stunned with a wooden mallet (the mallet and a noose were being held by Commandant L’Hopital). The bodies were left on the hooks until called for by the incinerator crew. An electric elevator, with an estimated capacity of 18 bodies, ran up to the incinerator room which was directly above the strangling room. The day’s quota of approximately 200 bodies was made up of from 120 to 140 prisoners who had died (mostly in the “Hospital,” the “Medical Experiment Building” or the “Little Camp”), and of from 60 to 80 supplied by the strangling room.

  For a period of about 10 days in March the coal supply for the incinerator ran out. Awaiting the arrival of a new supply, bodies to the number of about 1,800 were allowed to collect in the front yard, stacked up like cord-wood. To the annoyance of the SS this over-crowded yard with undisposed “evidence,” and a spell of warm weather created a sanitary problem. Moreover, burial was a good deal more troublesome than incineration, and was out of the customary routine. But something had to be done, so a truck detachment and a fatigue detail of internees was organized. The bodies were loaded in the trucks and hauled out of camp. The fatigue detail dug one huge burial pit, threw the bodies into it filling it except for one end, and covered the bodies. Then the SS shot all the members of the fatigue detail, threw their bodies into the vacant end and covered them up.

  Shortly afterwards a new supply of coal having been received, the process of incineration was resumed. This process was so abruptly interrupted by the arrival of U.S. armor in the area that the SS had no time to “tidy up,” so that the cycle of operation could be plainly examined and understood. The previous day’s quota of upwards of 120 corpses of prisoners who had died in the camp was parked in a truck in the front yard. The incinerator furnace grates had not yet been cleared of unconsumed hipbone joints and parts of skulls. In addition, the bodies of about 40 inmates who had died since U.S. arrival, in spite of prompt medical and ration attention, were stacked up like cord-wood against the wall of the yard. American surgeons stated that the adult corpses weighed only 60 to 80 pounds, having in practically all cases lost 50 per cent to 60 per cent of their normal weight, and also having shrunken in height.