The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  There are several accounts of what led up to the Gardelegen massacre. Most agree that approximately 2,000 prisoners, the majority of whom wore a red badge identifying them as political prisoners rather than as Jews, had been put on two trains from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. The trains, like many of the death marches leaving concentration camps at this stage of the war, were to keep the prisoners from falling into the hands of the advancing Allies.

  One of the trains arrived at the town of Mieste, seventeen miles from Gardelegen, on April 9. A second train arrived at Letzlingen, just seven miles away. They were unable to go farther because Allied aircraft had bombed the tracks. According to several accounts, the Nazi Party leader of the district of Gardelegen was thirty-four-year-old Gerhard Thiele. He had told his staff and other officials that he’d been ordered by Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan that any prisoners who were caught looting or tried to escape should be immediately shot.

  Eventually, the U.S. Army investigators would report that Thiele had stressed to the Volkssturm and the citizens of Gardelegen that he would do everything possible to prevent escaped prisoners from looting homes and raping women and children, as was rumored to have happened in the village of Kakerbeck, some twelve miles to the north. This appeared to be their justification for the death march from the trains to the barn on the outskirts of Gardelegen, and for the massacre. The fact that within twenty-four to thirty-six hours, all the prisoners could have been made the responsibility of the onrushing Americans, and that they demonstrably could have been confined in the huge grain storage barn without torching it, seemed not to fit into Thiele or Jordan’s equation.

  One report says that roughly eight hundred prisoners on that death march either died or were killed before the group arrived at its final destination. Some prisoners watched as German civilians carted cans of petrol into the barn and stockpiled ammunition, including grenades and Panzerfausts, outside the stone building. When the remaining prisoners arrived, the sick and the lame were taken from wagons and carried inside. Then the others were herded inside, where they found the cement floor covered in gasoline-soaked straw.

  The doors were shut, and those on the sides were held in place with stones. A pamphlet produced by the 102nd Infantry Division says, “The barn was then deliberately set on fire by German SS and Luftwaffe soldiers and boys from the Hitler Jugend [Youth], according to the survivors. Prisoners who tried to escape from the fire were machine-gunned to death by the Germans guarding the barn, including teen-aged boys in the Hitler Jugend.”

  There are numerous photos showing prisoners who died as they tried to claw their way underneath the walls and doors of the barn. Captain John H. Middlebrooks, who had been a company commander in the 1st Battalion, 405th Infantry Regiment, was among the first American soldiers at the scene. “When we opened the barn door, it was a horrible sight. Bodies were ten feet high at the door where they died trying to get out. Our division commander made all the town people go to see this sight. Made them take the bodies out of the barn and later bury them.”

  What makes this a horror among horrors is that to all of the Germans involved in the Gardelegen massacre, it was clear that the Reich had lost the war. There was no way the German army could hold back the advancing Americans. Local officials knew that the town would soon be occupied by Americans. The Luftwaffe cadets knew that American aircraft ruled the skies; their mission was over. The members of the Volkssturm, who had been recruited—or conscripted—no more than six months earlier, knew that there was no future in fighting for the Fatherland. Perhaps only the Hitler Youth—whose frenzied gunfire drove the prisoners back into the fire—still believed that victory was possible.

  Six to ten of the prisoners managed to survive the ordeal, and Ed Motzko was one of the GIs assigned to protect them while they were recuperating in local homes, where the citizens were forced to feed and care for them. Motzko was able to converse with several of them, including a Hungarian Jew named Bondi Geza.

  “He was my interpreter for the group, and I had quite a time talking with these guys. Bondi Geza was with another fellow, and they managed to get out of the barn. I didn’t fully understand how he got out of the fire or why he didn’t burn, him and this other fellow, but that’s when they started crawling away from the barn. [Bondi] was ahead of him a ways, and an SS trooper—or not SS but this air cadet—come along with a dog and sniffed out the guy behind him, and he was shot. And he says he just curled up and played dead, and the dog never came to him.”

  Motzko said the Americans had a difficult time at Gardelegen. “We knew of some other atrocities, but we didn’t know they were that severe. So it was definitely an eye opener. Our feelings of the German soldiers was bad, but this was the turning point, here. There was only one good German, and that was a dead German.”

  No sympathy was shown by the men of the 102nd when they were ordered to round up residents of Gardelegen and force them to dig graves and bury the bodies. Motzko says, “All able-bodied men had to come out one day—they marched them out there. They had to bury each one individually in graves, and that was supposed to be the duty of that family to take care of that grave site from then on. They had to go into the barn and pick up a body and carry it to the cemetery, which was a short distance away. And by that time, the bodies were in bad shape and quite slippery, and it was quite a mess. We put up infantrymen along the way—the Germans had to move as fast as they could—and they had their bayonets on and they prodded them along to keep them going.”

  Under the supervision of 102nd Infantry Division soldiers, German civilians were forced to exhume bodies, dig graves, and carry bodies bare-handed from near the barn where prisoners had been murdered to a newly created military cemetery.

  There’s a memorial at the site of that massacre now. It honors the memory of the dead from Belgium, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Italy, Yugoslavia, Mexico, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. “Also Jews,” as the English translation of the pamphlet handed out at the memorial site puts it. The pamphlet says that the commanding general of the 102nd, Frank A. Keating, “ordered: for every dead prisoner a grave has to be made.” Each body had to be taken from the barn, from the mass graves, and properly buried by the “men of Gardelegen and surroundings.” Buried properly by the “good Germans” who had helped murder them.

  CHAPTER 10

  BERGEN-BELSEN

  A MONSTROUS SPECTACLE SET TO MUSIC

  APRIL 15, 1945

  BERGEN-BELSEN, GERMANY

  60 miles south of Hamburg

  200 miles west of Berlin

  165 miles north of Buchenwald

  On the same day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was laid to rest in Hyde Park, New York, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was turned over to soldiers of the British Second Army, part of the Allied Twenty-first Army Group, a combined British and Canadian unit. The surrender of the camp had been negotiated over a period of several days. On the afternoon of Sunday, April 15, the first British units to enter the camp arrived in a van with a loudspeaker accompanying elements of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery. One of the soldiers on the tanks was Chaim Herzog of the Intelligence Corps. He would go on to become Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and ultimately the sixth president of the State of Israel.

  Just a week earlier, there had been more than 60,000 prisoners in the camp, nearly half of them recently arrived from other Nazi facilities. From April 11 to April 14, prisoners still able to work were forced to help the SS prepare for the surrender by burying bodies in mass graves. One report says, “While two prisoner’s orchestras played dancing music, 2,000 inmates dragged the corpses using strips of cloth or leather straps tied to the wrists or ankles. This monstrous spectacle went on for four days, from six in the morning until dark. Still, there were 10,000 rotting corpses remaining in the camp.”

  The inmates who survived to see the arrival of the Brits were suffering from starvation, typhus, and other diseases. Circumstances were so
dire that at minimum, another 14,000 of them would die after liberation.

  The day after the camp was liberated, more than a hundred ambulances driven by American civilian volunteers departed in convoy from Italy to Bergen-Belsen to assist in saving the surviving inmates.

  APRIL 15, 1945

  SOUTHERN PO VALLEY, ITALY, NEAR BOLOGNA

  While Allied forces were pushing their way into Germany from the west, units fighting on the so-called second front in Italy were driving north against heavy German resistance. The U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and 88th, 91st, and 34th Infantry Divisions, as well as the 1st Armored Division, moved up the center of the country, while on the Adriatic coast to the east, Polish, Indian, New Zealand, and British soldiers of the Eighth Army were surging northward. To the west of the attacking American divisions, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force also joined the fray. Fighting in dozens of small towns was often house to house. Allied air support was intense: on the afternoon of April 15, more than 760 heavy bombers of the Mediterranean Allied Strategic Air Force attacked enemy defenses around Bologna, as an additional 200 medium bombers and 120 fighter-bombers of the XXII Tactical Air Command hit targets in the Monte Sole area and the Reno valley.

  Not far away, prepared for orders to move out, were several dozen civilian volunteers of the American Field Service (AFS) and their brand-new four-wheel-drive Dodge ambulances. A brief bit of history: in 1914, with World War I under way, American students in Paris organized the AFS to drive troops to the front in taxicabs. On the return trips, they picked up wounded and brought them back to hospitals. After the siege of Paris was over, the students decided that they wanted to continue what they’d been doing and got their parents to back them financially. They bought ambulances that were made by the Ford Motor Company in southern France and continued to volunteer until the war ended. In World War II, Americans who desperately wanted to serve but had been rejected by the U.S. armed forces volunteered with the AFS and, like their predecessors, drove ambulances in combat zones.

  High blood pressure kept Texas-born Melvin Waters out of the Army, but he found his way into combat with the AFS. “We had several people like myself with high blood pressure. Rollins had a curvature of the spine. One boy that I was close to had an arm that was sort of withered—he’d been a bomber copilot in the air force and had been injured in a crash. ‘Bama had a punctured eardrum. A lot of them were minor things you couldn’t tell, and then some of them were apparent what was wrong with the person.”

  There were also a significant number of homosexuals in the AFS. These were men the Army wouldn’t take but the AFS did. Wounded soldiers never seemed to care about the sexual preference of the guy who was saving their lives by driving an ambulance through enemy fire.

  Waters had been a sixteen-year-old senior in high school when the war broke out. He’d wanted to join the Navy immediately, but his mother said she wouldn’t sign the necessary papers—he’d have to wait until he was eighteen and drafted. Waters kept nagging, however, and she relented, allowing him to join the Marine Corps reserve at age seventeen. When he finally got called to active duty, he flunked his physical. It was just a couple of months before D-Day when he saw an ad in the local paper that read, “WANTED—AMBULANCE DRIVERS for immediate deployment overseas.”

  Waters signed up and was sent to a dormitory on Fifty-first Street in New York City for a two-month-long orientation period. He recalls that most of the training dealt with what not to do in combat: “Don’t touch dead bodies, don’t pick up any souvenirs, and don’t walk anywhere that hasn’t been cleared of mines. I was dumb enough not to worry about being injured or crippled for the rest of my life.”

  When he completed training, Waters received orders to go to Italy to serve with the British Eighth Army. His pay was $20 a month. By March he had joined the unit and was quickly put to work ferrying wounded soldiers down tortuous Apennine mountain roads to field hospitals. He’d been with his unit for only about six weeks when in mid-April, the lieutenant in charge came into their dayroom and said, “I’ve got an announcement to make. Company 567 is leaving Italy for an assignment. It’s secret. We can’t tell you where they’re going, and they want ten volunteers to go with them.” Eleven men volunteered. Waters and one of his friends were at the bottom of the seniority list. Both wanted badly to go, so the lieutenant had them cut a deck of cards. Waters drew a trey; his buddy drew a deuce. That’s when the officer said that Waters had one hour to get his gear together—they were leaving that night.

  Waters and the others went by truck to a base on the Arno River, where they met up with Company 567. The unit had been chosen for this mission because it had received 250 new ambulances the previous Christmas. Each one could carry two stretchers on the floor and two hanging, or it could accommodate eight to ten men sitting on pulldown seats. Ultimately, about 150 ambulances convoyed through Florence, past Pisa, and then to one of the ports on Italy’s west coast. The first night, half the group was loaded on board an LST and sailed for Marseilles. Waters was in the second group, departing the next night. He recalls arriving in time to listen to President Harry S Truman deliver a relatively brief State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress at around 6 P.M. local time on April 16, a day after FDR was laid to rest.

  The next morning, the AFS ambulance convoy left Marseilles heading north. It would be more than a week before they reached their ultimate destination: Bergen-Belsen.

  APRIL 15, 1945

  WITH COMPANY K, 395TH INFANTRY REGIMENT,

  99TH INFANTRY DIVISION

  Near Iserlohn, Germany

  Roger Maurice got his Purple Heart from General Patton, but he doesn’t remember the occasion. The nurses at the Second Evacuation Hospital told him about the general’s visit after he woke up following surgery to deal with a bullet wound that entered the front of his left shoulder and came out his back. It happened just a week before VE Day, before the end of the war in Europe, and just a couple of weeks after his nineteenth birthday.

  Maurice had joined the 99th Infantry Division as a replacement around the first of March, just a week before it crossed the famous Remagen bridge. He’d dropped out of high school in Leominster, Massachusetts, twenty miles north of Worcester, to help his family—there were five children—survive during the Great Depression. He was working as a fireman, tending coal-fired furnaces, when President Roosevelt sent him his invitation to join the Army.

  In 1944, the Army was still putting together complete combat divisions as well as training thousands of replacements to ship to Europe. Maurice had completed basic training and received advanced training in communications, as a field lineman and switchboard operator, when he and hundreds of other troops at Camp Crowder, Missouri, were told that they’d volunteered for the infantry. They were shipped to Camp Livingston, Louisiana, for advanced infantry training and then sent to Europe on a seven-day cruise aboard the Queen Mary to Southampton. From there it was a boat ride to Le Havre, railroad boxcars to a point near the Belgian-German border near Liège, then the back end of a deuce and a half to Remagen.

  The division was just finishing operations related to what came to be called the Ruhr Pocket and was near Iserlohn when it came across a barbed-wire-enclosed prison camp. Maurice is not sure exactly where it was, and he doesn’t know its name, but the memory of it has stuck with him for more than six decades.

  When they arrived at the camp, the German guards were fleeing across an open field. There was gunfire, and some of the guards were captured, while others got away. But the focus of the Americans quickly turned to the inmates of the camp.

  “We came to this concentration camp, and the officers told us to guard the outside and not let the prisoners go, ‘cause they wanted a firsthand look at them. We tried to keep ‘em in, but some of them were getting out, whether we wanted to or not, and I was too civilized to kill a man that was starving. So the thing is, some of them got out and they went down to the village. And they brought back a hundred-pound—some
potatoes in a cloth bag. And I helped them get the cloth bag into the camp, and some of them prisoners were so hungry that they were reaching through the wire and getting blades of grass to eat. And then another one, another prisoner came back, and he had a live sheep on his shoulders. So I helped him get the sheep into the camp, and that was, that was the end of the man I seen.”

  His squad stayed at the camp for no more than three or four hours and then moved on, leaving it to follow-on units to care for the inmates. At noon the following day, the town of Iserlohn surrendered. At Hemer, on April 17, the division liberated more than 20,000 Russian POWs kept in horrible conditions at a huge camp.

  And then the 99th was sent to Bavaria, where it fell under the command of Patton’s Third Army, entering combat on April 21 near Schwabach, with Salzburg, Austria, as its objective. The route would take the 99th through Munich and an area filled with subcamps of Dachau.

  APRIL 21, 1945

  HERSBRUCK, GERMANY

  18 miles east of Nuremberg

  110 miles north of Munich

  Leo Serian tried to get into the war when he was seventeen, but his father wouldn’t sign the papers, so he didn’t put on the uniform until the end of 1943. By the time he finished basic training and got bounced around a bit, it was already late January 1945 and he found himself with the 65th Infantry Division at Camp Lucky Strike just outside Le Havre. The Battle of the Bulge was over, and Leo’s outfit was high on gung ho and wondering if they’d get their chance to fight the Nazis. It wasn’t until March, when they arrived at the Franco-German border, that they heard the distant sound of cannons.