The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  PFC James Dorris had finished his freshman year at the University of Chattanooga in his hometown when he was drafted, and turned into a BAR (Browning automatic rifle) man with the 222nd Regiment. Like most of the others in his outfit, he’d never heard anything about concentration camps until Dachau.

  James Dorris in 2008

  Leaving the site of the death train, Dorris and his platoon came to a wide avenue and started down it. He says, “I think they called it SS Strasse, this big, wide road leading to the camp, and we were marching single file, one file on each side of the road. And all of a sudden we could smell the crematory. And immediately I realized what it was. It was a horrible, horrible odor that was so bad that first I tried not to breathe, and then you can’t go very long doing that, so finally I started breathing as lightly as I could until I more or less got used to it.”

  Dorris’s platoon entered the camp through the nearest gate, and once inside, his lieutenant ordered him to take his BAR and position himself between a high concrete wall and the barbed-wire fence that had, until the Americans turned the power off, been charged with enough electricity to kill on contact. His only instruction: don’t let anybody out. The rest of the platoon headed into the camp while Dorris walked about a hundred yards toward one of the now-abandoned guard towers.

  The young soldier was almost immediately confronted with the brutality of life inside Dachau. “There was a man, a body, lying there between the fence and the wall—well, he looked like a rag doll that’d been thrown down, arms and legs all different positions, and one of his eyes was laying out on his cheek where he’d been beaten so badly. I couldn’t imagine how this body got there unless they’d thrown it over the fence. Right at that point, I looked inside, and there was a long row of naked bodies lying on the ground, about maybe fifty feet from me, and on the other side, toward the prison houses, was about two hundred, two hundred fifty prisoners standing there, just looking at me. [They were wearing] all kinds of rags that supposedly were uniforms, prison uniforms, and some of them in real bad shape. Not saying a word. Doing nothing but looking at me.

  “Right about that time, one of the guys jumped over the bodies and ran towards me and leaned over and picked up, like he was picking something up off the ground and held it up. I couldn’t see anything there to pick up, but he acted like that and started running with it, back towards the houses. Well, three more guys left the group and started chasing him, and they tackled him and knocked him down and were on top of him, kicking him and hitting him, trying to get his hands open to see what he had. Well, I thought, ‘They’re gonna beat this guy to death, gosh, they’re all crazy, going through what all I imagined them having gone through.’”

  Dorris was about to fire a burst from his rifle over their heads but stopped when he realized the bullets might go into the nearby barracks. So he did nothing. “I just stood there and looked, and I thought, ‘This is what Hell is like.’ That’s the only thing I could think. And in my condition, mental condition, I thought I even saw the Devil coming out of the ground. It’s a horrible-looking man with a real red face. I was imagining all this, and I looked up in the sky and said, ‘God, get me out of this place.’

  “Well, right at that point, when I looked back down, another prisoner had left and come over to the fence where I was, and he said, ‘Haben Sie einen Zigarette?’ Do you have a cigarette? I thought, I’ve got four or five packs on me, but seeing all those people, if I bring those out, I don’t have enough to give all of them, and I’d have a riot on my hands, so I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Ein moment,’ and he turned around and ran back towards the houses.

  “Then I looked back where these people were on top of that man, and they’ve gotten his hands open, and there was nothing in them. So in disgust, they got up off of him and went back with the other prisoners. Well, by that time, the man that had run off past me for a cigarette ran back to the fence, and he stuck his hand through the wire fence, and he had a little tiny rusty can. Took the top of off it. Inside was a cigarette butt about, oh, maybe three quarters of an inch long. It was all water-stained, and he handed that to me, and he said, I can’t remember the exact German words, but ‘This is in thanks for rescuing us.’ Well, that just really got to me. Tears came to my eyes, and I had a complete different change from the way I had felt just two minutes before, and I thought, ‘I’m really doing some good here.’ And I felt that was God answering my prayer, because I felt like I was really despairing when I said, ‘God, get me out of here,’ and this fellow coming over and giving me that cigarette butt that he’d been saving. That was his treasure. No telling how long he’d been saving that.

  “I took it and thanked him profusely, shook his hand, and I looked out at the other prisoners—they were still all standing there, and I waved to them, and they all waved and started smiling and laughing and talking. And this guy that handed me the cigarette butt was standing there smiling. He turned around and went back into the prison.”

  Russ Weiskircher had entered the camp with the command group of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry. When they got inside, they found themselves in an area that was still free of all but a handful of prisoners.

  They quickly surveyed the administrative buildings near the gate, including one that contained an entire IBM keypunch system that identified every inmate, but were struck by the fact that they weren’t seeing a mass of living prisoners. Weiskircher says, “We didn’t see anybody. It was eerie, and you know why we didn’t? ‘Cause the Germans told them that the Americans were coming, and when they got there, the Americans would kill everybody in the camp. And since they’d already suffered from the bombing right outside the camp, they probably were ready to believe anything.

  “Then some people crawled out from under the barracks, the crawl spaces. Hollow-eyed people that you couldn’t believe. They crawled out of there and crawled toward the gate and called out, and the GIs ran toward the [internal] gate. Now, the gate was locked. We got orders we could not go in and we could not let them out. They had every disease known to man, and we weren’t inoculated for anything.”

  He and the other soldiers had what by now had become an almost ubiquitous experience of giving chocolate or rations to the starving inmates, with almost immediate, disastrous results.

  Now an ordained minister, Weiskircher acknowledges an upgrading in the adjectives he uses to describe situations back then. But he still can feel the anger—and express it. “Listen, I’m still profane as I ever was, except then I spoke a barracks language. I’m amazed. I’m shocked. I’m nearly out of my gourd. And it was real hard to keep your cool.”

  Peter DeMarzo of Annapolis, Maryland, a rifleman with Company L of the 157th Infantry, had seen the death train, a sight that caused what he calls “complete shock.” The shock was magnified once he got into the camp. “I never saw so many dead people in all my life. There were stacks of bodies.”

  Contact with surviving prisoners was also shocking for DeMarzo. “Oh, my God. This poor guy came over and kissed me. He must’ve weighed about seventy pounds. I thought, oh, God, it was terrible.” Yet he recalls that he managed to kiss him back. “What’m I gonna do, you know?”

  DeMarzo heard shooting inside the camp and became aware that inmates were tracking down and killing their former guards or kapos who hadn’t escaped when the SS evacuated before the Americans arrived. He says the prisoners “would point them out, and somebody would walk over and shoot them.” DeMarzo also recalls seeing inmates throw a suspected camp guard into a fire, burning him alive.

  He’s reluctant to talk about an incident mentioned in the inspector general’s report on events that took place during the liberation of Dachau. The report describes an inmate asking DeMarzo to lend him his rifle, which he reportedly did. The inmate presumably used the weapon to kill one or more Germans still hiding inside the camp and then returned it to DeMarzo. While from the perspective of sixty-five years later, it may seem a strange thing for a soldier to do, the fact that similar incidents hav
e been reported by GIs who were at several other concentration camps tends to give credence to the notion that it wasn’t an unreasonable response under the circumstances, even though Army brass might not have endorsed it.

  Early in their exploration of Dachau, Lieutenant Colonel Sparks had become aware that the anger level of the men of I Company was off the charts, and he’d ordered Weiskircher to contact higher headquarters and ask for replacements before the place exploded.

  Sparks’s fears were realized not long afterward at an area near the SS hospital that was the coal yard for the Dachau power plant. It was there that SS prisoners from the nearby hospital, the NCO school, and finance center were being collected and guarded by soldiers under the command of the same Lieutenant Walsh who’d shot the German medics at the death train.

  Walsh ordered a young machine gunner and other soldiers to train their weapons on the SS prisoners and shoot them if they made a move.

  Karl Mann remembers Sparks disappearing around a corner near the coal yard, and when he did, “the I Company officers decided that they were going to shoot these Germans.” Mann’s memory contradicts the inspector general’s report, which says that when the machine gunner placed a belt of ammunition in the gun and cocked it, the Germans thought they were about to be executed and moved forward, at which point he opened fire. Seventeen Germans were killed before Lieutenant Colonel Sparks, firing his .45 in the air while shouting “Cease fire!,” kicked the gunner away from the weapon and the shooting stopped. The incident has generated controversy for years, with troops from the other division inside Dachau, the 42nd, insisting that as many as 350 German soldiers who had been patients in the SS hospital were lined up and executed, by the men of I Company. The IG report says it didn’t happen, and there’s no photographic evidence supporting it, unlike a significant number of photos and bullet hole forensics that tend to confirm the IG’s conclusion that no more than seventeen Germans were killed at the wall.

  The incident does give credence to reports that I Company was out of control, which led to its men being withdrawn from inside the camp and replaced with soldiers from another battalion.

  For Russ Weiskircher, there was one moment inside Dachau that was memorable because it was just plain goofy. He was deep inside the camp when “Some dumb sonofagun who put on lederhosen and an Alpine hat and got a walking stick came strolling by. Said he was on his way to the mountains, trying to convince people he was a Dachau [town] citizen. He was someplace hiding, and he decided to dress up like he belonged to The Sound of Music. And the prisoners were yelling in German, “The captain!” He was desperate. He also had been educated in the United States; spoke better English than I did.”

  Herbert Butt of Company A, 222nd Infantry, 42nd Infantry Division, is fairly controlled when talking about the horrors he saw in Dachau, but when asked about the crematorium, a look passes across his face that gives pause. “Early on, I could break down just bigger than shit. Outside the crematory I can remember—and the thing that stuck with me the longest was all of those shoes laid there from these prisoners outside, and they were all killed. And that vision, I can see that almost to this day. That was just something that jarred my whole reserves.”

  Butt has another memory as well. “I got the smell. There was a stockyard area between Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas, and it was a stink that you noticed as you drove by. It just plain stunk, and I made the statement that I couldn’t see how people could live in that area. While we were there, they brought people in from the city of Dachau itself and took them through. And they didn’t know anything like that was going on.” The look of disgust on his face says it all.

  Corporal Eli Heimberg was a twenty-eight-year-old assistant to the 42nd Division’s Jewish chaplain when Dachau was liberated. He’d gotten the job because he could sort of play the organ, and the brand-new chaplain, Captain Eli A. Bohnen, was desperate for a reasonably observant Jew who could drive a jeep, pour wine into a Kiddush cup, and handle an M-1—sequentially, not simultaneously. They were in Salzburg when word came to them about Dachau, and they immediately drove to the camp to try to minister to surviving Jewish prisoners. The South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, veteran, now in his early nineties, says, “I remember very vividly, it remains as a nightmare sometimes. Crossing the moat on a bridge, enough for one car at a time. And on the other side of the bridge, several big piles of clothing. Lots of clothing. Quite a few piles about three feet high and ten feet square.” He also saw shoes piled fifteen feet high.

  They were very quiet driving through the gate, just observing. They found someone to direct them to what he calls “the Jewish section.” That may have been just one or two barracks, because at liberation, there were just 2,539 Jews, including 225 women, out of a population of just over 31,000.

  Heimberg says, “Chaplain Bohnen announced in Yiddish, ‘Ich bin ein amerikaner Rabbiner.’ At that moment, it was as if all the pent-up emotions of the years in misery were unleashed in that room. There was a burst of wailing and crying. We stood there for a moment, unsuccessfully trying to control our emotions as the victims, who were able to, surged forward to kiss our feet and hug our hands. I felt humble and uncomfortable, for it was I who should have been hugging and kissing them.”

  The first group they found didn’t number more than twenty-five, many of whom said they had relatives in the United States and wanted the chaplain to contact them. “People said, ‘Look, just ask for—he lives in New York, my uncle. His name is Sam Cohen. You’ll find him.’ So we took the names anyway, and where we could get a telephone number, we’d take a phone number.”

  The Jews they met with were Polish and had come from other camps. He remembers them talking about Bergen-Belsen in Germany and Birkenau, part of Auschwitz, in Poland. And after just talking with the survivors, Rabbi Bohnen held a brief memorial service, chanting the traditional memorial prayer, El Moleh Rachamim, as the newly freed inmates sobbed.

  The next day, Chaplain Bohnen wrote a letter to his wife, Eleanor, describing the experience. “Nothing you can put in words would adequately describe what I saw there. The human mind refuses to believe what the eyes see. All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated….

  “The Jews were the worst off. Many of them looked worse than the dead. They cried as they saw us. I spoke to a large group of Jews. I don’t remember what I said, I was under such mental strain, but Heim berg tells me that they cried as I spoke. Some of the people were crying all the time we were there. They were emaciated, diseased, beaten, miserable caricatures of human beings. I don’t know how they didn’t all go mad. There were thousands and thousands of prisoners in the camp … and as I said, the Jews were the worst. Even the other prisoners who suffered miseries themselves couldn’t get over the horrible treatment meted out to the Jews. I shall never forget what I saw, and in my nightmares the scenes recur…. No possible punishment would ever repay the ones who were responsible.”

  Chicagoan Morris Eisenstein had already earned two Silver Stars for gallantry with the 42nd Division by the time his outfit got to Dachau. But the concentration camp terrified him in ways that combat did not. Now ninety-one years old and dealing with the aftereffects of a severe stroke, the Delray Beach, Florida, resident remembers walking into the prisoner compound and being swallowed up by 10,000 or more people. “I figured I’ve got to identify myself, so I fired a clip up in the air to quiet everybody down, and I remembered a prayer I learned in Hebrew school. I said to them, ‘Barukh attah Adonai eloheinu melekh ha-olam, shehecheyanu v’kiyemanu v’higianu laz’man hazeh.’ It’s the Shehecheyanu prayer, said on special occasions, that translates as ‘Blessed art thou, Lord our God, Master of the universe, who has kept us alive and sustained us and has brought us to this special time.’”

  The prayer had the desired effect. Eisenstein—they called him Ike—says the prisoners began whispering in Yiddish, “Ehr ist ein Yid” (He’s a Jew), a reaction of surprise that was common at liberation. After talking w
ith him in Yiddish for a while, some of the prisoners took Eisenstein on a tour of the camp. As he was about to leave, he stumbled over a man who was sitting on the ground. “He looked like he was dying, he looked like he was dead, and I didn’t know what to do, so I figured maybe I can help him out. I wanted to make sure that he stays there, because I knew our rear echelon had medics and everybody else would be coming up soon. I said to him, ‘Ich bin amerikaner yiddisher Soldat,’ and he looked at me.

  Morris Eisenstein outside his Florida home, proudly wearing his Jewish War Veterans cap displaying his two Silver Stars and Combat Infantryman Badge.

  “At that time, I got down on my knees next to him, and in my pocket I had about twenty thousand marks. We killed some SS in a firefight the week before, and we got some loot. I took it out and I put it in his hand. And he grabbed my hand, and he said to me in Yiddish, ‘I cannot take this. It’s not proper. I must give you something in return.’ Here’s a man who was absolutely emaciated, just about dead. You think philosophically about what he just said. So I kept looking at the Star of David pinned to his uniform, and he saw me looking. He unhooked the pin and gave me the star.” Eisenstein left Dachau in tears. That star is now on display at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C.

  Dallas Peyton came to Dachau with the 70th Armored Infantry of the 20th Armored Division and is more than a bit cynical about the ongoing battle of who got there first, the 42nd, the 45th, or the 20th. He’s clear that the three divisions had elements that hit the concentration camp at roughly the same time, certainly on the same day. He’s also clear that the argument will end when there’s only one man left standing who can claim the honor because there’ll be nobody else to argue about it.

  Peyton has blocked out most of what happened at Dachau on April 29, except for two things that he’s seen in his mind’s eye for the last sixty-five years. “One of them was that train. At first I thought it was people in there, and then I realized, no, that’s not people. They’re just thrown in there like little logs. I don’t know what I thought. Shock beyond belief. And the other’s when we got inside the camp and saw two of what I call ‘walking skeletons’ shuffling along, one in front of me and the other coming towards us. And those two guys stopped, stared at each other for a few minutes, then screamed and ran together, hugging, kissing, hollering, and crying. Up until that moment, neither knew the other was still alive, and I can see that right now.”