According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, the camp was established on March 24, 1945, with the arrival from Mauthausen of about a thousand male inmates, the majority of whom were metalworkers. They were probably destined to be enslaved by the Flugzeug und Metallbauwerke Wels (Aircraft and Metal Construction Company, Wels). The next day, another thousand inmates arrived from the Ebensee sub-camp. Initially, the inmates were used to clean up the damage at the train station. They were housed in a factory hall that was not fenced and lacked a kitchen and sanitary facilities. The slave laborers were guarded by SS and Volkssturm (home guard) soldiers.
As the Nazis were pressed by Soviet forces, they grew desperate to ship inmates from the easternmost camps to facilities in Austria and Germany. That’s the likely explanation for the presence of Hungarian Jews at Wels on the day the 71st and Private Leonard Lubin of Miami, Florida, arrived.
Lubin, with the 609th Field Artillery Battalion, was not quite twenty when he walked into Wels. When interviewed, he was eighty-three and had recently retired as a solo practice attorney who spent years doing appellate law. He talked about his experiences on that nice spring day in early May 1945 and about how it affected him, as though he were representing clients before a panel of feisty judges. He spoke with precision and intensity, with the knowledge that overt emotionality could undermine his case. Pounding his fist on the lectern never helped. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that what he saw had affected him at both a brain and a gut level—in the kishkes, as Jews of his generation are wont to say.
Private Leonard Lubin of Miami, Florida, was not quite twenty years old when his outfit, the 71st Infantry Division, liberated Wells II, a subcamp of Mauthausen. He had one experience there that, at age eighty-three, he described as “the content of my nightmares.”
There were things he didn’t remember about that afternoon, and even under persistent questioning, he wasn’t inclined to fill in the blanks. He was also aware that soldiers know only what’s immediately surrounding them. Rarely is a private in a position to have even a moderately big picture. That said, Lubin recalled walking down a street, perhaps the equivalent of a four-lane American boulevard with two-and three-story brick apartment buildings on either side. There were a few automobiles parked along the road, and every few yards saplings had been planted.
“I heard sounds before I saw them. The sounds that I heard were ‘Ungarischer Juden.’ Hungarian Jews. I had a smattering of street German; I didn’t know all that much but enough to know what it was. I got behind a car, and I was able to identify three men coming toward me in obvious prison clothing, that kind of striped clothing, and they pointed behind them and said there was a ‘Konzentrationslager,’ a concentration camp, down the street, very excited. I motioned them to continue going in the direction they were and told them in pidgin German with sign languages we all spoke that there were American soldiers behind me who would help them.
“The fact that they were ambulatory, they were not the skeleton kind of prisoners that the photography of the era shows us, the living dead, tells us they were more recent arrivals at the camp.” Lubin’s later study taught him that at labor camps such as Wels, “people went in the front door—new people who are normal people, recently captured—and they were put to work. Out the back door, if that’s the way to put it, are the dead people when they died from work.” But as he walked toward the Konzentrationslager, he knew next to nothing about what he would soon confront. (His unit had not been among the outfits from the 71st that had recently liberated nearby Gunskirchen.) “We knew that the Germans had been persecuting minorities, especially Jews; we’d heard some rumors about killing but had no concept whatever of this. The military had taught us nothing, told us nothing, had no training or expectations, and so much of this sounds crazy.”
Within hours it would become clear to him that the Army knew, at least in general terms, what its men would be uncovering. His officers were to tell him that “We had to go, and they’re telling us that there are units behind us to take care of these people. Well, if that were true, how come we soldiers weren’t oriented to the proposition we were going to be encountering concentration camps? You would have thought if they knew as much to have units prepared to take care of these people, we would have known to expect it.” The question is reasonable, considering that American forces had discovered the first occupied concentration camp almost a full month earlier.
To be precise, Lubin recalled knowing the words “concentration camp,” but only in the same context that America’s civilian population knew them—“a jail facility where you hold people, like we held the Japanese Americans in the United States in World War II. We called them concentration camps—that didn’t mean that they’re killing fields.”
With his carbine at the ready, he continued down the boulevard toward a structure at the end. As he began seeing other American soldiers out of the corner of his eye, he realized that the street he’d been walking on was just one spoke of a wheel—fellow soldiers were converging from other spokes—and in the center of that wheel, inside the traffic circle, was a wall, perhaps fifteen or sixteen feet high. And in the wall was a big gate with two swinging doors. “As I got there, I saw that the doors were ajar and people were pouring out through the gates, out onto the street, into the circle—people of all descriptions, many who could walk. It wasn’t until I got in I saw that there were many more who couldn’t walk. And various degrees of debilitation, some in far better shape, like those three I first encountered a block or two or three up the street, who were the most recent arrivals and therefore the healthiest. And then some who were less well, and less well and less well diminishing in stages and degrees; some extremely feeble, probably close to falling down.”
The sights and sounds rendered his mind blank. “I’m embarrassed to say it, I was stunned, and I can’t tell you I was thinking of anything. It’s like when [you come upon] an automobile accident, if you’ve ever been—I was stunned. I couldn’t formulate much in the way of thought; I wasn’t thinking as much as I was reacting. We soldiers shouted at each other—what to do? ‘Grab them!’ somebody says, ‘Stop them, grab them.’ While all of this was happening, more American soldiers were pouring in, and they started chasing down the people. The people who were escaping, we concluded later, were running from us like crazy in a panic. They saw our uniforms and may not have been able to distinguish us from Germans. That or freedom, I couldn’t tell you, but they ran like hell.”
Lubin stopped talking for a moment and audibly took a breath before continuing. “Here comes the big moment for me, which to me sums up the whole, the whole war, the whole Holocaust, which is the content of my nightmares. Not dead bodies; I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies. I wasn’t in combat all that long, a few months, mostly chasing like crazy up the highway. But I’d seen plenty of dead bodies—theirs and ours. So it wasn’t that. This was something different.
“Here was this guy, and he had found a food can, a tin can—the larger kind that tomatoes sometimes come in. It had been opened with one of those old-fashioned push-and-lift can openers. You punch a hole in it, and then you lift it all the way around, it creates a horribly jagged edge you didn’t want to handle. You didn’t take it all the way to the end, you would get it close to the end of the circle of the can and then push the lid back so it stands up, and you would empty the contents and then push the lid down and throw the can away so you didn’t cut yourself, because it would make brutal cuts very easy.
“This man had found one of these cans and was trying to get the contents out of it. He had it with both of his hands jammed up against his face, trying to get his tongue into it to lick the contents and lick the top lid and the sides of the can, and the blood was pouring down his face, and he was acting totally insane, and that vision is what’s in my mind. If I were an artist and could paint a picture, I would, but I can’t. Didn’t have a camera. So in my nightmares, that’s what I see. And to me, t
hat’s what the Holocaust was…. It wasn’t the death, it was a torment of the kind that can reduce a human being to subanimal status. To be willing to lacerate himself to get a slight bit of nourishment.
“My guy with the tin can, I tried to knock the can out of his hand, to stop him from doing that, and not let the can be there so somebody else can pick it up and do the same thing.”
He saw other examples of the level to which the Holocaust had reduced civilized men—for he realized years later that all he had seen were men, no women, no children. “There were miserable puddles of water at the street edge, the corner of the curb, not large puddles—they must have been old, they were filthy, dirty puddles, and small. Some of the people were falling down on their face to lick up the water from the street. And others ran to the closest trees and were trying to rip bark off and eating the bark. And amid all of this was screaming and crying and carrying on. And American soldiers looking confused, not knowing what the hell to do.”
Lubin remembered that mayhem going on for quite some time before any of the soldiers really entered the camp. “All the effort was concentrated toward attempting to grab these people. I don’t know why. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Through interviews with the inmates of the camp, they later learned that the guards had left just minutes prior to the arrival of the Americans. “They knew we were coming, and they split. They went out the back door, lickety-split. They didn’t want to be there. One minute they were there, and suddenly the guards were gone. And the people see the guards are gone, and those who were the healthier among them headed for the door. That’s all pretty expected, pretty logical.”
Lubin’s time in Wels stretched to what he thought may have been a few hours, almost all of it spent outside the walls of the camp. A couple of times when the gates were opened, he could peer inside. All he could see was an anteyard, buildings. Other men were assigned to go deep inside. One time he got into the yard area, the compound. “It was crammed with people in all stages of debilitation. Some were relatively healthy-looking, like the first ones I saw up the street at that first encounter. Others were in worse shape, skinnier, more hollowed and hollow-cheek-looking. Others were on the verge of falling down, the bones sticking out of their chests, and others were on the ground. We were trying to pick people up or move them around from one place to another. It was during this time that some kind of order was restored.
“My instinct was to stay, although I didn’t know what the hell I would do if I stayed. But someone’s dying there …” He paused in his narrative; it had become difficult to continue. “My instinct was to help save. These were Hungarian Jews. For those dying, pick them up, hold them, recite the Sh’ma, a Jewish prayer. When somebody is dying you say, Sh’ma Yis-ra-eil, A-do-nai E-lo-hei-nu, A-do-nai E-chad—Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. They told us we had to go. So we went.”
Leonard Lubin had been just another nineteen-year-old kid from Miami. On that day, a day that lasted a lifetime, he became much, much more.
MAY 6, 1945
EBENSEE, AUSTRIA
50 miles west of Salzburg
30 miles south of Gunskirchen
60 miles southeast of Mauthausen
Leaving the Buchenwald area on April 12, the three infantry regiments of the 80th Infantry Division—the 317th, 318th, and 319th—began what would be a leapfrogging three-week push into Austria. Initially they moved rapidly to the east, taking Jena and Gera; then, closely following the 4th Armored Division, the 319th cleared Crimmitschau and Glauchau in Saxony, while the 318th prepared to take over the bridgehead at Chemnitz, fifty miles southwest of Dresden.
On April 19, the U.S. Third Army was committed to chasing the Germans into Austria, with XX Corps designating the 71st and 65th Infantry Divisions as initial assault forces, with the 80th Infantry and 13th Armored Divisions in reserve. Two days later the 80th changed direction and headed southwest toward Nuremberg to relieve the 3rd Infantry Division. The 150-mile push took a week. On April 28, in order to follow armor in the zone to the right of the 71st Infantry Division, the 80th was relieved in Nuremberg by the 16th Armored Division. Elements of the 318th and 319th once again turned southwest toward Regensburg, passing through the 65th Infantry Division. At this point, the 80th was roughly seventy-five miles north of Munich, which would soon come under attack from divisions moving from the west, rather than from due north.
On April 29, when Dachau was liberated by the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions, the 80th completed its crossing of the Danube and elements advanced to Köfering in Bavaria. A day later, the 318th crossed the Isar River over the railroad bridge at Mamming and moved southwest toward Dingolfing. On May 2, with the 318th on the left and the 319th on the right, the 80th Division reached the Inn River in the vicinity of Braunau. The 80th was now midway between Munich and Linz and due north of Salzburg.
On May 3, the 11th Armored Division took Linz, while the 80th overtook the 13th Armored near Braunau. The next day, the 71st Infantry Division, operating slightly south and east of the 80th, sped to the Traun River, taking Wels and Lambach, where concentration camps at Gunskirchen and Wels would be liberated. On May 4, final elements of the 80th got across the Inn, and the 317th attacked to the southeast toward Vöcklabruck. At that point, the division was less than twenty miles from the concentration camp at Ebensee. The five-hundred-mile advance from Buchenwald to Ebensee had taken twenty-two days.
Out in front of the 80th was the 3rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, which had landed at Utah Beach a month after D-Day and fought at Metz, France, the Siegfried Line, and the Bulge. Robert Persinger, now of Rockford, Illinois, was a twenty-two-year-old platoon sergeant in one of the 3rd Cavalry’s M24 Chaffee light tanks as the end of the war approached. They took their last casualties on May 5, when they engaged a number of Hungarian soldiers fighting in the German army near Vöcklabruck, Austria. One American tank was destroyed, and two men were killed.
That evening they advanced to the town of Gmunden, Austria, at the north end of Traun Lake. The next morning, they were given the mission to enter Ebensee, about ten miles away along a curving, mountainous road at the south end of the lake, to outpost and hold the town until the end of the war. There were no Nazi soldiers defending the town, which Persinger recalls was one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen. Within hours of arriving, their recon platoon discovered a concentration camp about two and a half miles up the mountain, concealed in a pine forest. His squadron commander ordered two tanks up the hill to the camp gates—one commanded by Persinger, the other by Sergeant Dick Pomante. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday afternoon as they cautiously went up the winding gravel road.
At about ten minutes to three, Pensinger remembers, he was struck by the smell of death. “We made a right-hand turn into this road, and there, a hundred, two hundred feet away, was this concentration camp. There were people standing behind the barbed-wire fences and the two towers there that were used for the entrance, guarding the gate.” The gate was closed, but the inmates opened it to allow the tanks to drive inside. The Americans would soon learn that the SS had left the day before.
Ebensee was one of the sixty-plus subcamps of Mauthausen, the giant killing facility sixty miles to the northeast. Prisoners from Mauthausen began building Ebensee in November 1943, digging tunnels into the mountains and constructing the future concentration camp. A month later there were more than 500 prisoners in the camp, and the first deaths had already occurred. The SS designed the camp to be built in a thick forest in order to avoid detection from the air. By mid-1944, the crematorium was operational.
The camp was initially populated by Italians and French, but in June 1944 about 1,500 Hungarian Jews arrived from Auschwitz. Then came Soviet prisoners of war, followed by Poles from Auschwitz. Initially, prisoners had been selected for Ebensee who would work effectively digging tunnels into the mountains for various plants, including a gasoline production facility that the American forces would ultimately ta
ke over. But in the closing months of the war, prisoners were being sent in open cattle cars from the camps in Poland and northern Germany that were about to be captured by the Russians. Deaths at Ebensee resulted primarily from exhaustion and deliberate exposure to harsh winter conditions. It was the most economical way the Nazis had to kill their prisoners. Roughly 8,000 inmates died at Ebensee, and it’s likely the toll would have been higher but for the fact that seriously ill prisoners were shipped to Mauthausen, which had a greater capacity for processing the dying and dead.
Though acknowledging the horror laid out before them, Staff Sergeant Bob Persinger wasn’t emotionally traumatized by the sight. “We were combat veterans. I saw things I couldn’t imagine on the way to getting there, so it wasn’t too much out of line. It was a horrible sight, but we had been used to seeing horrible sights. We had been in Patton’s Army.”
They had stopped their tanks in the middle of the roll call square and just sat there taking in the scene. “We were looking at thousands of men who were skin and bones, maybe weighing around seventy-five pounds. They were standing in mud that was almost ankle deep, dressed in the striped garment, some with just the trousers, some with just the top, and some with nothing. However, there was so much singing and crying for joy that it was hard to take it all in. We passed out all the rations we had, so a few received a treat that they would never forget, and we felt bad when our supply was depleted.”
Their mission had been to go up to the camp and see if there was any resistance; since there was none, they had no reason to stay. Persinger radioed his lieutenant to ask for orders. But in the meantime, the prisoners were shouting for them to dismount the tanks. What awaited them was difficult. “We knew we were getting into a bunch of filthy human beings, and they were full of lice and fleas and sores and everything else. Of course, we didn’t know, really, how bad, but we heard later that they were loaded with fleas carrying typhoid fever. And they were all over us. They hugged us, doing everything like that.”
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