The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  Jack Kerins was thirty-one years old when he was drafted and ultimately served with the 63rd Infantry Division, which liberated the Landsberg camps. At age ninety-six, he is the oldest veteran interviewed for this book.

  April 28 was a beautiful, sunny day, and from the jeeps of the 2nd Platoon of D Company, 255th Infantry Regiment, they had an incredible view of the Bavarian Alps’ snow-covered peaks. Kerins’s unit was assigned to antiaircraft defense for the column—“only a show,” he says, because the .50-caliber machine guns were not likely to be effective against planes like the Luftwaffe jet that had buzzed them the day before. They had gotten to the far side of Landsberg when a messenger stopped them, saying, “Hold up, don’t chase the Germans any farther than right here.” They disembarked from their jeeps, and that’s when he saw them.

  “I saw these pajama-clad prisoners coming down the little streets. They were holding each other. A lot of them could hardly walk. And the boys were directing them to go where there’d be somebody to take care of them. Suddenly one of the DPs [displaced persons] bolted from the line and ran over to me, grabbed my hand, kneeled down, and began kissing my hand, saying ‘Danke, danke,’ over and over again. Apparently he picked on me as I was the only officer he saw as he rounded the corner. The physical condition of the man was inconceivable. I took hold of him by the arm and raised him up and could not believe what I saw. He had no flesh on his arm, only skin and bone, his eyes were sunken, he had very little hair and only two teeth visible on his upper jaw. His smile, though, was contagious, and the boys around me started calling him Joe and began to offer all of them rations. All of them dug in their pockets and were giving them chocolate bars and K rations—loading them up. I told them, ‘Be careful, boys, they’ll be sicker now than they were before.’

  “I said to my jeep driver, Morgan, ‘There’s a nice house right there. Go in and see if you can get some clothes to put on them. Take those pajamas off them.’ He went in there, and I went on up to the camp, toured it, and came back. And here Joe was: he had a tall silk hat, like when you dress with a tuxedo, and he had a long-tailed formal black coat and striped trousers. No shoes and no shirt. I turned to Morgan, who spoke fluent German, and asked him, ‘What kind of a joke is this?’ I wanted to know if he was making fun of him. He assured me apologetically that the house he entered was that of an undertaker. These were the only items of clothing that fit Joe, and he insisted on taking them anyway.

  “By now Joe had regained some strength from our rations and was smiling broadly with his two widely spaced front teeth showing. He took off his high silk hat and again kneeled down and began kissing my hand and mumbling thanks in German. I gently raised him up by his arm and steered him over to the stragglers’ line. As he passed from our sight, he was still looking back and waving to us.”

  Kerins was, perhaps, fortunate that his visit to Landsberg ended with a happy moment, because what he had seen inside the camp was soul-destroying. “I went into the camp and looked it over. It was a terrible thing. I saw prisoners that were dying from starvation. I went into the little kitchen they had, and there was a half a barrel of sawdust and a half a barrel of flour, and they were mixing flour and sawdust to feed them, and mostly sawdust. And there was a big trench there with an array of bones, dead people, they just threw them in the trench. They hadn’t had time to cover them up. And the GIs, some of the GIs were crying, and I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t help it. The GIs, they were swearing revenge if they would let them go on and catch some of those guards that got away.”

  They wouldn’t have the chance, because shortly after he came out of the camp he received word that the 36th Infantry Division would be going through the 63rd and chasing the Nazis all the way to the Alps. For his unit, combat was over. They were assigned to occupation duty at a town back north called Bad Rappenau.

  As the 63rd Infantry Division prepared to head back north for occupation duty, the 36th Infantry Division T-Patchers were ordered to move through and capture the hard-core SS thought to be hiding in the Reich’s so-called National Redoubt in the Bavarian or Austrian Alps. The assignment was an honor for a division with a significant record in the war, including four hundred days in combat, fourteen Medal of Honor recipients, and the ninth highest casualty rate of any Army division in the Second World War.

  On April 1, the 36th had moved from a rest-and-relaxation (R&R) break in the Saar to occupation duty in the city of Kaiserslautern in the Rhineland. The assignment was described by 36th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop Sergeant Don Latimer, now a resident of Albuquerque, as a safe chore with nonlethal hazards—mostly the nonfraternization policy, which prohibited American soldiers to even speak to German civilians without an officer present.

  Three weeks later, the 36th was given its final assignment and moved to the Danube and then on to the Landsberg area, where the 63rd was still involved with the survivors of the Kaufering camps. To that point in the war, the T-Patchers had seen small groups of Jewish prisoners in striped uniforms but had never been confronted by the Holocaust on a large scale. That changed around April 28. Latimer’s recon outfit was in its armored cars, leading the division down the highway through a little town, when they spotted people walking toward a train of perhaps six to eight boxcars. In quick order, soldiers got to the cars and yelled back, “There’s people in the train.”

  Latimer lowered the hatch and remained on the radio as his car was maneuvered close to the tracks. “I remember seeing these boards. This is before anyone came out of the thing, when we first saw the train. The boards [were] maybe one-by-sixes or two-by-sixes nailed across the train doors. [The Nazis] closed the doors and nailed the boards on them from the outside, where it’d be practically impossible for a person to get out. By that time, a lot of other 36th Division companies were up there, too, and started prying the boards off the doors.”

  When the soldiers began helping the prisoners out, he saw that most were wearing the familiar striped uniforms, but some had on ragged civilian clothes. He never got a count of the number of people on the train but estimated it to be many hundred to perhaps a couple thousand Jews. “A lot of them were dead and many were seriously ill, and there were several babies that had been born while on the train. They had no water, no food, and had had to perform all bodily functions in these boxcars, with only a little hay in them. By the time we got there, the German army train guards had disappeared.”

  The division brought up field kitchens, tents, and medical personnel to tend to the survivors. “Later on, we discovered that some of the healthier Jewish males were entering the German village and were attempting to kill the civilians. We rightfully put a stop to this and ended up putting them inside a field cage made of barbed wire, where we continued to feed them until our rear-echelon troops came forward and took over.”

  In a memoir written long after the war, Latimer says, “This encounter with the trainload of Jews was one of the most traumatic events of the war to me, and it left many of our troops in an ugly mood, which they demonstrated when they later came into contact with German troops.”

  Bernard Schutz has lived his life since the war surrounded by art. His apartment is above a Skokie, Illinois, art gallery; his apartment is an art gallery, where he still practices his violin. Bernie was never supposed to be in combat. He lived on the West Side of Chicago and played violin with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Orchestra. He also had a birth defect that excluded him from combat duty. So when he was called up for his induction physical, the doctor agreed that, with one ear closed, being near explosions would be problematic. Nevertheless, he was accepted by the Army and classified 1-A limited service.

  “What does that mean?” Bernie asked the doctor he’d been talking with for nearly an hour.

  “Well, you won’t go overseas because of your situation.” Which pretty much explains how Bernie wound up in North Africa, Italy, France, and ultimately Germany with the 20th Special Services Unit of the Fifth Army. He earned four battle stars yet neve
r fired a weapon. The entire unit of 109 men and five officers was infantry trained in case something un toward occurred, but their primary job was to break up into small groups, travel around the battlefield picking up additional players from the line outfits, rehearse in the afternoon, and put on a show at night. For a short time, Tony Bennett, a member of the 63rd Infantry Division, was their vocalist.

  Bernard Schutz of Skokie, Illinois, was the master of ceremonies with a Fifth Army special services unit entertaining the troops during the war.

  Bernie, who was born in 1917, was the master of ceremonies, the joke teller. He’d stand there with his fiddle and do intros for the acts. He was doing Jack Benny’s television act long before Benny. “Someone would always holler, ‘Hey, Sarge, you gonna play that fiddle?,’ then at the end of the show I would play it off with a straight semiclassical number. It worked like a charm.”

  Schutz’s outfit was not far from Landsberg when they heard that a camp had been liberated, and he felt compelled to see it for himself. That evening, the day he’d seen the horrors at Landsberg, the day he’d seen recently freed prisoners lynch one of their former guards while his cries for help were spurned by an American captain who said, “They know what they’re doing, leave them alone,” Bernie had to entertain the troops. He says the atrocities he saw changed his life. Yet even in combat, the show must go on. So with what he’d just witnessed etched in his mind and knowing that perhaps that day, more than any other, the troops needed to laugh, he took the makeshift stage, did a couple of flourishes on his fiddle to loosen the audience up, and told this joke:

  Fellow was living in a semirural district and was talking to a neighbor, and he says, “How’s things going?” The neighbor replies, “I can’t believe it. Here we live in a dairy country, and dairy products are so high priced. I never saw such prices.” Fellow says, “Well, why don’t you do what I do?” “What is that?” “Buy a cow, and I’ll teach you how to function with a cow.” So he buys a cow, and things are working out fine. Sometime later, they meet again, and he says, “How you doing?” He says, “Oh, I’m doing fine.” He says, “Would you like to even do better?” He says, “Sure, what?” He says, “You buy a bull, and you’ll be in the business. You’ll be able to have calves and even make some money with it and have a nice existence with it.” So he buys a pedigreed bull for a lot of money, he puts the bull out to pasture, and nothing happens. Every time the bull approaches the cow, the cow waltzes away. So he goes to the vet, and he says, “Listen, I’ve got a problem here. I’ve got a lot of money invested in a bull, and we’re hoping they mate and I get calves. But every time the bull approaches the cow, the cow walks away.” So the veterinarian looks in his book and thinks awhile and says, “Wait a minute. Was that cow bought in Wisconsin?” The man says, “Well, how in the heck would you know that?” The vet says, “Because my wife is from Wisconsin.”

  “We got a million of ‘em!” Bernie Schutz says with a grin.

  Because there were eleven different Kaufering camps in the Landsberg area, and because even at the time, low-ranking combat soldiers didn’t necessarily know precisely where they were, it’s virtually impossible to know which Kaufering camp the soldiers interviewed in this chapter were at or even whether some of them were in the same camps. The exception, of course, was Kaufering IV, the Krankenlager, which stood out because it had been burned.

  The newsreel footage available at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Web site shows American soldiers compelling local German civilians not only to view the Kaufering camps but to dig graves and respectfully carry the dead to those graves and give them a proper burial. In one division record, a soldier is quoted as saying, “They were real nice Germans—the wealthy ones. Let me say here that no one has money unless he is a Nazi. These people were fat and well dressed.” And, as has been mentioned, the Germans impressed into burial duty didn’t hesitate to invoke the mantra du jour: “We knew nothing.”

  And on this April 29, the same day as the U.S. Army units at Landsberg were moving out, some to continue chasing the Germans across Bavaria and into Austria, others reversing course in preparation for occupation duty in cities and towns already captured, men of three other American divisions were about to come face-to-face with Holocaust horrors that would stay with them for a lifetime. Just forty miles to the northeast in the suburbs of Munich, they would discover Dachau.

  CHAPTER 13

  DACHAU

  SHOCK BEYOND BELIEF

  KZ DACHAU

  By Dee R. Eberhart

  Company I, 242nd Infantry, 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow)

  Written four decades after the liberation

  Nazi dawn—Dachau’s gate opened wide,

  Swallowing prisoners for a dozen years,

  Incubator for the Holocaust.

  Long hard roads and a collision course;

  For victims in their gray/blue stripes;

  For gray SS; and American soldiers,

  Rainbow 42nd; Thunderbird 45th,

  All of their dead pointing the way.

  Explosion for the world to see.

  Skeletons, alive and dead.

  Liberators’ tears of rage.

  SS sprawled, in the coal yard, in the moat.

  unmourned by those behind the wire.

  Grill iron work gate swung open.

  Crematorium doors clanged shut.

  Nazi twilight at the end of April.

  One final plume of oily smoke,

  in the outer yard of the Berlin bunker,

  pilot beacon for the fires of hell.

  APRIL 29, 1945

  DACHAU, GERMANY

  12 miles northwest of Munich

  41 miles northeast of Landsberg

  “All of their dead pointing the way,” wrote Dee Eberhart, but he could have written “our dead.” Five months earlier, he’d come over with them as part of a task force named after Henning Linden, the Rainbow Division’s assistant division commander, on the USS General Black. In less than a month, the three infantry regiments, the 222nd, 232nd, and 242nd, found themselves in the middle of a tank battle near Gambsheim, France, where entire rifle platoons ceased to exist. At Hatten in Alsace, along the Maginot Line, they faced the tanks of the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division and the 21st Panzer Division as well as the German 7th Parachute Division.

  “I had three foxhole buddies picked off right beside me,” recalls Eberhart, “one after the other.” They took heavy casualties, from 88s, mortars, from a huge railroad gun, and from the Nebelwerfers, the “Screaming Meemies” that sounded like a freight train going overhead, which were firing high explosives. Their squads were reduced from ten and twelve men down to four.”

  Eberhart says, “I didn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t know how bleak it was. I thought this was the way it always was. Well, it wasn’t. After things turned around, it was a totally different war. We had not been trained for defensive warfare; yet we were on the defense. The Germans were on the offense, and so, psychologically and tactically, none of us had any training. From all that infantry basic [training, what I learned was] fire and movement and lay down a field of fire and try to do a flank attack. And we were good, or we thought we were, at least in training. Later on, we were good at it.”

  Scout and sniper Dee Eberhart of the 42nd Infantry Division.

  Later on, when the war was going the Americans’ way and everyone could see an end to it, they were headed for the supposed redoubt where the Nazi dead enders were to hole up and fight to the last man. His outfit crossed the Danube in assault boats and became part of the great race for the glory of capturing Munich. But on April 29, a bright and sunny morning, at a point past Augsburg on the Autobahn, they were diverted onto secondary roads and eventually were ordered to “detruck and go in this direction.”

  “We kind of fanned out, and we’d been through this so many times it was nothing new. We moved toward what I thought were a bunch of factories, an industrial area of some German town.” He was about to discover Da
chau, first built of the German concentration camps, ostensibly for political prisoners.

  Dee Eberhart of Ellensburg, Washington, has published two volumes of World War II poetry. He was instrumental in organizing the 2008 reunion of the 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow) Association in Mobile, Alabama.

  Dachau was opened by the Nazis in March 1933 on the grounds of a former munitions factory about ten miles northwest of Munich. Over the life of the camp, more than 200,000 prisoners from more than thirty countries were sent to Dachau, a third of them Jews. More than 25,000 died in the camp, and at least another 10,000 died in the many Dachau subcamps. Alongside the prisoner compound, the Nazis built a training center for SS concentration camp guards.

  The prison camp, which is actually inside a larger area that is also part of the concentration camp, consisted of thirty-two barracks, including one reserved for medical experiments. On the western side of the prisoner compound there was an electrified barbed-wire fence, outside of which was the water-filled Wurm Canal, which joined the Amper River just north of the complex. On the northern, eastern, and southern sides of the prisoner enclosure the barrier was a masonry wall about twelve feet high. About ten feet inside the outer wall and fence were two dry moats, about three feet deep and ten feet wide, and on the outer side of the moats was a grid of tanglefoot barbed wire about a foot off the ground.