The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  “Going back to the other side, we saw the magazines, the storage rooms. First came the suitcases; they had the names on it. Then they had utensils, little pots, whatever, that the people had been told to bring. Little children, my God, those little dolls. We were pretty hard soldiers to that point; we knew what’s going on. Every one of them—we were only nine Jewish guys in our battery, the battery consisted of eighty-eight people—it was absolutely horrible. Then they had the clothing, men’s and ladies’, then they had the shoes, sorted out neatly, men’s, women’s, and children’s. They had eyeglasses.” At this point Ben Storch pauses briefly, then whispers, “Thousands of pairs. The room with the shoes is huge, a warehouse. In my head and the other guy’s head, my God, I hope my brother’s shoes is not there, my mother’s dress is not there, my grandmother’s dress, and my grandfather and my uncles and my aunts.”

  Storch spent about forty-five minutes in Majdanek. He says there was “no time to think. You went here and here, you made a U-turn, and go out.”

  Was there time to cry? “Oh, yeah. We did. I said Kaddish. The gentile guys kneeled on the floor and prayed. On that big pile of ash, that’s where we said our prayers. Yeah, the tears came to my eyes. I saw so many grave sites in Russia, [yet] that’s the first time in my life during the war I cried.”

  At Majdanek there were no survivors. The only people they discovered were six SS who were hiding in one of the barracks. They learned from the prisoners that as the Russian army was approaching, the Nazis had sent all the concentration camp prisoners to Auschwitz, where some of them survived. Storch says, “The mentality was that ‘we have to move these people somewhere else to kill them.’ All those people in Auschwitz were to have been killed, but they couldn’t do it. So they moved them to Sachsenhausen, to Buchenwald, to Bergen-Belsen, to Austria, to Czechoslovakian camps.”

  Storch recalls that he and the soldiers he was with were perplexed on their march west by the strange priorities of the German high command. “German soldiers fell in our hands because they didn’t have any transportation. The transportation was strictly designed for the Jews; the Jews is the priority. Now, it’s mind-boggling. Usually you’d try to save your people first. But no, for the Nazis, that was the main subject: the Jews have to be destroyed.”

  Leaving Majdanek, the Russians and Poles headed a hundred miles northwest, winding up in August 1944 in a town called Praga Warszawa on the right bank of the Vistula River, opposite the Polish capital city. There they paused because their supply lines were overextended, and also to deal with casualties. Ultimately, the battle for Warsaw ended on September 17, when they crossed the river. The city had been demolished.

  They moved on, heading northwest about 150 miles to the town of Chelmno. In late 1941, it became the first city in Poland where Jews were systematically murdered. They were taken to a church, where they were forced to undress, and then loaded into sealed trucks, the so-called gas vans. Seventy-five Jews were killed in each load by the carbon monoxide gas piped into the van from the truck’s exhaust. Storch says they could find nothing in Chelmno but graves. There were no crematoria; 350,000 dead Jews had been buried; then they were dug up, burned, and buried again.

  They moved on to Zlotów, about seventy-five miles south of the Baltic, the first German city they took. (Today Zlotów is well inside the Polish borders.) The fighting grew ever more intense, with tank battles and Storch’s artillery unit laying down barrages against Panzer brigades as they moved southwest to Paulsdorf, just sixty miles east of Dresden. At that point, American and Russian forces were separated by less than fifty miles.

  On April 15, 1945, an announcement was made that the Russians and Poles would launch a new offensive in the middle of the night. “Forty thousand artillery cannons were firing; night was like day, honest to God,” Storch remembers. “By seven o’clock, my battery was across the Oder River on pontoons, no bridges.” They were heading north to capture Berlin, where Hitler remained in his bunker.

  On April 20, in the face of the advance of the Soviet Forty-seventh Army, SS guards began the evacuation of some 33,000 prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just twenty-one miles north of Berlin. The plan was to march them north to the Baltic in groups of four hundred and load them onto ships, which would then be sunk.

  Two days later, Storch’s unit liberated a section of Sachsenhausen. “It’s the first time we liberated human beings—they hardly could walk. The section I came across were mostly women. Everybody was crying. They didn’t know who we were; our uniforms were different than the Russian uniforms or the German uniforms. All they know is we were soldiers.

  “There was no resistance at all; we didn’t have to break nothing, just open up the door. We caught two SS people; two of my guys just shot ‘em. It was too horrible to see, because when we got there, people were still hanging on the hooks. In the camp, on the walls, in view. Hanging by their throats. I had no idea who they were. Just men, not naked. We would not remove them; can’t put our hands on it, it’s not our mission. Couple bodies laying which were shot.”

  He says most of the women were Hungarians who spoke some German. They were in bad condition and crying uncontrollably. The women were shabbily dressed; nobody had any hair, which made it hard to recognize people. A quick tour turned up a huge infirmary, but people were still dying. They weren’t buried but processed in the two ovens the soldiers found.

  The experience at Sachsenhausen was unique for Storch and his men. Until then, they’d liberated civilians, who’d realized they were free and could go home. “But all of a sudden you come to a camp. Those people have absolutely nothing in their pocket—not even a pocket. No hope at all. Absolutely no idea if anyone from their families is alive. It’s very traumatic. And it’s traumatic for people like us to see that finally we did something for people which had absolutely no power of doing anything, because their dignity was taken away from them. There was nothing. The only thing we left with those people, which is very important, is hope. You are now safe. You will have all the care, you will get all the clothes you need, all the food you need, all the medication. And they did. Even the same day we left, they did. That was a very, very strong moment for me, and for the other guys.”

  It took the Russian army twelve days to take Berlin. Storch’s artillery unit fired its cannon from April 30 to the middle of the night on May 2, when they fired the last salvo. A week later, his division packed up and left by train for Poland, to a town fifty miles from Warsaw. He was discharged from the Army in September 1945. On November 18, in Katowice, he married Ruth, whom he’d known as a child. They both saw Jews who managed to survive the war killed by Polish citizens and knew they would not stay in Poland.

  APRIL 23, 1945 (NINE DAYS BEFORE THE RUSSIANS TOOK BERLIN)

  NEAR THE FLOSSENBÜRG CONCENTRATION CAMP

  70 miles east-northeast of Nuremberg

  140 miles north of Munich

  In U.S. Third Army’s XII Corps area, CCB and CCA of the 11th Armored Division drive quickly from Naab River to Cham, which CCB clears with ease, completing current mission of division. Roads in division zone are clogged with thousands of prisoners and slave laborers … 358th Infantry, 90th Division, overruns Flossenburg—where large concentration camp and an aircraft factory are secured—and Waldthurn.

  —from U.S. Army Center of Military History, U.S. Army in World War II: Special Studies Chronology: 1941–1945

  PFC Tarmo Holma had come to the United States from Finland as a child. He was drafted from his hometown of Milton, Massachusetts, and ultimately assigned to the tank platoon of Headquarters Company, 41st Tank Battalion, of the 11th Armored Division. On April 23, Holma was sitting behind his .50-caliber machine gun, scanning the road ahead of the tank convoy through binoculars, when he saw movement in the distance. “I could see this activity on the road, and the road was filled with people. I assumed they were soldiers, and I said to my commanding officer, ‘The whole German army has to be out there waiting for us.’”
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  PFC Tarmo Holma was manning a .50-caliber machine gun on one of the 11th Armored Division tanks when it came upon the tail end of an SS death march of prisoners from Flossenbürg to the killing camp at Mauthausen.

  And his CO responded, “No, we’re arriving at one of the concentration camps.” Until that moment he had heard only vague descriptions of the Nazi death camps.

  They were traveling in single file on a beautiful spring day down the narrow road near Flossenbürg, which, along with Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, was one of the original concentration camps inside Germany. What they’d happened upon was the last throes of a death march that was to take the inmates to the killing camp at Mauthausen, Austria, about 190 miles to the southeast. By the time the tanks arrived at Flossenbürg, all the SS guards had either run away or had been killed by the prisoners. “We were trying to proceed on the dirt road to continue the combat mission that we were on—to follow the remnants of the German army. But we could hardly move. Where they [the prisoners] were still coming out of the camp onto the main road, we were just standing still. They were so excited; they appeared to be dying as they ran out to greet us.

  “I saw them fall down and not [get up]—I assumed they were dying because they were walking skeletons with a little skin on them.” His voice breaks, and he begins to cry, “It bothers me to this day. I’m surprised I can talk this much about it; usually, I start crying and I can’t talk anymore.

  “They were just waving; they appeared to be so glad to see us. I don’t remember hearing any language, because I’m sitting on top of the tank, I’m eight feet high above their heads. We were going to give them our rations, especially the K rations, they were very good. Because I’m the radio operator, too, I got the message right away: ‘Don’t feed the prisoners, they can’t stand that kind of food that we have.’ They said people coming behind us will take care of their health problems. So we had to keep going as best we could, very slowly.”

  Postwar research determined that approximately 14,000 prisoners had been driven from the camp by the SS in the days preceding the arrival of the Americans; in just three days, more than 4,000 of them died or were killed by the SS. Records show that more than 73,000 prisoners died in the Flossenbürg camp system.

  After passing through miles upon miles of recently freed prisoners, the 11th Armored continued pushing eastward, becoming the first unit to arrive in Austria. Just two weeks after their encounter with Flossenbürg, the unit would come to an even worse hellhole, the Gusen-Mauthausen camp complex.

  APRIL 25, 1945

  BERGEN-BELSEN, GERMANY

  60 miles south of Hamburg

  200 miles west of Berlin

  After leaving Marseilles on April 16, the convoy of 150 American Field Service ambulances plus a handful of accompanying support vehicles headed north. They camped overnight about twenty miles from Paris, continuing the next day into southwestern Belgium, where they stayed for four days at the town of Waregem. Then they headed north through Brussels and into southern Holland to Eindhoven, where they turned east and drove about twenty miles to a vacant seminary.

  Melvin Waters was deemed unfit to be drafted, but he still wanted to serve in the war. He became a volunteer combat ambulance driver with the American Field Service and eventually helped British and Canadian forces evacuate the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen death camp.

  The convoy was split into three platoons, and the next morning Melvin Waters’s group of about forty ambulances with sixty drivers was told to load up equipment and personnel from the British 9th General Hospital. They drove into Germany, seeing destruction on a massive scale for the first time. Waters recalls going through a town where, from one end to the other, there wasn’t anything but rubble and bricks pushed off the road by bulldozers. They crossed the Rhine River on a pontoon bridge, traversed the northern part of the Siegfried Line, and, after two days of zigzagging to miss pockets of German troops, arrived at Bergen-Belsen in the afternoon.

  Waters can still recall the moment. “As we came out of this forest, a little bend, all of a sudden the ambulances in front of us slowed to a crawl. And then, as we got into the opening, we could see the prison or the concentration camp over to our left, and the front gates were open, and people were just milling around. We were just looking at it with our mouths open. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were looking at the women’s section. They were just skeletons.”

  The convoy went on, passing an SS barracks and continuing about a mile and a half to the edge of a forest, where they made camp. They’d stay in this location for the next seven weeks. Initially, they slept in the ambulances but eventually they opted for tents after becoming concerned about the diseases and vermin carried by the people they were transporting.

  The sheer numbers of inmates inside the camp were staggering. At liberation on April 15, the census was set at approximately 60,000. About 7,000 Jewish prisoners whom SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler thought he could use in negotiations with the Allies had been evacuated from the camp by train before the British took over.

  Waters’s first day inside the camp was eye-opening. “We had to drive to the north end of the camp and then down and out the front gate. And we would drive right by a big hole that had been dug, and what was taking place was that flatbed trucks were being used, and they were going through the camp picking up corpses and bringing them up to this big common grave. They were putting one thousand to two thousand people in these graves. They had Germans, either prisoners of war or people they conscripted from some of the nearby towns, down there stacking these bodies. Some of the bodies, you’d look at them, and the eyes would be open and they were looking, just staring.”

  In those early days after liberation, more than five hundred prisoners a day were dying. Their bodies, as well as the ten thousand that had been piled around the camp, were buried in the mass graves. Photos distributed at the time showed British army soldiers using bulldozers because it was the most efficient way to move large quantities of bodies quickly. All told, about 13,000 inmates died after the camp was liberated, many of typhus, which was at epidemic levels.

  How does one erase those images from one’s memory?

  Waters says he wasn’t as badly affected by the horrors as some of his coworkers. He attributes this to some of the combat time he’d had in Italy, where he’d picked up a reputation. “I got criticized when I was in Italy for being sort of hard-hearted, for not being friendly to the patients. And I said, ‘I’m getting them down the damned mountain, don’t I? What else can I do? I’m getting the job done.’ And they said, ‘Well, you can talk to them and offer them cigarettes and do this and that.’ And I guess that I just had hardened myself and that’s the way I got by. I don’t mean [the sights in Bergen-Belsen] didn’t bother me; it did bother me. But I guess it’s like a doctor: you got to the point that you felt for them, but you couldn’t feel for them so much that you couldn’t do your job.”

  Later on the first day he went into the women’s section of the camp working as a stretcher bearer. “These women were laying in bunks, they were so weak, and they couldn’t walk, they couldn’t get out of the bunks. Some of them were delirious.

  “A medical doctor said, ‘Take this one, leave this one, take this one, leave this one.’ There was a unit of English medics, they had their masks on and everything, all their special gloves, and they were stripping these women of their clothes. The ones that were chosen to be carried off, they’d wrap them in a blanket and put them on a stretcher. We would help them. They would strip them off, and we’d put the blanket around them and put them onto the stretcher.

  “I remember we had one woman that fought us like a cat because she thought we were taking her to the crematory. She was completely out of her head. The medics were telling her, ‘We’re here to help you. Don’t be afraid, we’re going to help you.’ But they looked like men from Mars to start with, with all these masks on. We didn’t have that equipment on. They dusted us, and that was about it. So
me of us had on gloves, some didn’t.” Waters says he was dusted with DDT powder so often that for a month he looked as if he had gray hair.

  Near the women’s barracks, Waters recalls seeing what passed for latrine facilities in the camp. “The toilet was nothing but a slit trench with a board over it with holes in it. There was filth all over where someone went to the bathroom. Women would come up and get on one of these planks and pull up their dress. They wouldn’t have any underwear on. I saw so many naked women that I thought I’d never care to see a naked woman again. And they had no modesty whatsoever.”

  The British medical units had turned the former SS barracks about a mile and a half beyond the camp into a hospital. These were four-and five-story brick buildings. In the center of the area were smaller buildings that had once been stables for a cavalry outfit but more recently had been used by the SS as a training area for Panzer divisions. Waters and his fellow AFS drivers would take the inmates from the camp to the stable buildings, where English orderlies and nurses would scrub and bathe them, cut their hair, delouse them, and do whatever else was necessary before they were taken to one of the brick dormitories. Some of the buildings were used for people who could care for themselves; the others were fully staffed hospital wards. Patients who recovered enough were turned into nurses’ aides. “Everybody had a job there; everybody was doing something all the time.”