The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  A prisoner named Max Garcia who spoke English wanted to guide Persinger and his men on a tour of the camp. They went with him, even though it was emotionally very difficult.

  “It was hard to put up with—very hard. Just that alone, but walking amongst the dead bodies and seeing them piled around the crematorium, and then into the crematorium. Things like that was what make you feel much worse than looking at those poor people that didn’t have no garments or [were] starving to death.”

  And then they walked into one of the barracks. “Absolutely terrible. People lying on the barracks that would probably be more than half dead, because their eyes never made contact with you at all. Those folks were in very bad shape. Some alive, too, in there. If you were not sick and crying by now, you would be before you exited.”

  That evening, they went back down the mountain to the hotel in Ebensee that the American unit had taken over. Their message to the commanders was simple: the people had to be fed, and they were the only ones able to do it. “The following morning,” Persinger says, “we started collecting vegetables, including potatoes, cabbage, and anything that we could use to make a soup from the surrounding countryside.” They gathered food from stores in the area and bread from bakeries. In one case Sergeant Pomante used the big gun on a tank to persuade a village baker that his regular customers would have to wait; that day’s output would go to the prisoners in the concentration camp.

  Robert Fasnacht with one of the mementos brought to the 80th Infantry Division reunion at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2008.

  By evening, they had a large amount of soup and bread to be served but knew the prisoners would be uncontrollable. They planned carefully and used the machine guns on two tanks to fire live ammo over the starving inmates’ heads when they began to overrun the food lines. Persinger says many gulped the soup so fast that they ended up screaming in agony; some became very ill, and some died on the spot.

  Within a day or two, Army hospital and quartermaster units moved in to care for roughly 18,000 inmates in the camp. Persinger’s platoon stayed for another week before receiving orders to move on, aware that what faced them was a thirty-day furlough followed by a landing in Japan under General Patton.

  While Bob Persinger went to Ebensee under orders, Bob Fasnacht actually made the visit as more or less a tourist. The Canton, Ohio, soldier was nineteen years old when he made the trip across Germany and into Austria with the 80th Division. He’d actually gone overseas with the 70th Division, but with the Battle of the Bulge chewing up infantrymen, he says, “fifteen of the least desirable men out of each company were transferred to the 80th Division, and naturally, I was one of them. They loaded us on trucks in the middle of the afternoon, and we never stopped until we arrived in Luxembourg the next morning about ten o’clock. A noncom said, ‘You guys follow me.’ And we followed him maybe half a mile over the front edge of a mountain, and he said, ‘Dig in here.’ And I said, ‘What’s that racket I hear over on the other side of the valley?’ He says, ‘Those are Tiger tanks.’ I said, ‘What are they doing?’ He said, ‘We don’t know what they’re doing.’ Well, naturally, I dug awfully fast. That was my introduction to combat in the Third Army.”

  After the Bulge, Fasnacht froze his toes during the crossing of the Sauer River when he jumped into water nose deep to hold the boat against the shore while the rest of the guys got to cover on the beach. Unable to change his shoes or socks for five days, he ended up hospitalized for three weeks; then he returned to his outfit. Fighting all through Germany, he knew nothing about concentration camps, nothing about the Holocaust. But then, just days before the cease-fire, the 80th turned south in Austria, and Fasnacht, who’d become the headquarters photographer after looting a factory in Nuremberg of darkroom supplies and liberating an assortment of cameras throughout Germany, heard that one of its units had liberated Ebensee.

  Ebensee had a very active resistance movement, and its members knew the Allies were approaching. According to reports, they collectively resisted an SS plan to force the prisoners into the tunnels, which would then be blown up. The camp commander and many of his staff fled before the arrival of the liberators. In that interim, there was a violent prisoners’ revolt during which many kapos were murdered.

  In fact, the brutally battered body of one of those collaborators was almost the first thing that Bob Fasnacht saw after he hitchhiked to Ebensee. “You couldn’t tell if he was male or female, they had worked him over. And the inmates had propped his arm up into a Nazi salute.” During the 80th’s march through Germany, he’d seen small slave-labor encampments, but nothing like Ebensee. “Factories, big, big buildings, would have guys in striped uniforms working in there. They were slave laborers, but they weren’t all being worked to death or anything.

  “At Ebensee, I thought it was a mine. These people were working about twelve or fourteen hours a day, chopping rocks and that sort of thing, in this monstrous cave. And I didn’t like being in there, so I got out as soon as I could. I remember going into this sort of a mine where they were working, and seeing these men that were just, just skin and bones, and they were still alive. And of course, you’re young, you tended to not want to touch them or talk to them or anything else. The German I spoke then was pretty minuscule, and most of them were not Germans. So there was almost no communication between me and them.

  “It’s funny, even then you didn’t realize the enormity of this. That humans could do this to humans. On such a big scale that—I’ve often wondered if Hitler knew, the scale of this sort of thing. Now, the pictures I’ve taken, I’ve showed those to people. They don’t believe it. The enormity of that horror and the length of time it went on. And nobody did anything about it. And you can’t tell me that American intelligence wasn’t knowing what’s going on there. I almost have a feeling that the Western world’s attitude was ‘Well, they’re killing Jews—who cares?’ Maybe I’m cynical.”

  A few years ago, Bob Fasnacht was invited to a synagogue in Cleveland to talk about the liberation. “This man who was maybe ten years younger than me was ushering me to my seat down in front in this auditorium, and he said, ‘Where were you?’ I said, ‘Well, at Ebensee.’ And he said, ‘Can I hug you?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘I was there when you came.’” He pauses. “You see, I get a little worked up over that; every time I try to tell that, I feel the same way. What a coincidence, but it’s difficult to understand the enormity of those camps.”

  CHAPTER 15

  GUSEN-MAUTHAUSEN

  HOW SADISTIC CAN YOU BE?

  MAY 5, 1945

  NEAR GUSEN-MAUTHAUSEN, AUSTRIA

  16 miles southeast of Linz

  In the spring of 1943, Colvin Caughey—he doesn’t like being called reverend now; pastor is okay—got taken in by an Army recruiter who said, “If you volunteer to go in the Army, take your basic training, then you can transfer to the Air Corps or the cadets.” That’s how the eighteen-year-old originally from Minnesota agreed to be voluntarily inducted and how, after getting into the Army ASTP program for troops who were college material and smarter than the average bear, he ended up in the armored infantry, riding a half-track in the 11th Armored Division.

  Caughey’s outfit, B Company of the 21st Armored Infantry Battalion, landed at Cherbourg on December 16, 1944, which just happened to coincide with the start of the Battle of the Bulge. They were rushed up to northern France in two days, held in reserve, and on the 29th they moved to Bastogne. After several days of tank battles and artillery barrages, the memory of those hours was burned into his brain. More than six decades later, he can still see it and hear it.

  Corporal Colvin Caughey of the 21st Armored Infantry Battalion in 1945 and Pastor Caughey of Auburn, Washington, in 2008.

  “We were a green bunch; the unit had never experienced combat before. First, we had a barrage of artillery against the German positions; it was for fifteen minutes with everything they could fire. And you’ve never heard such a rumble and roar—I mean, it was just
unbelievable. Not only the guns firing behind us, you know, over our heads, all these shells sizzling through the air, and then the horrible rumble, just like a huge roll of thunder, continuously, over where they were landing. There’s nothing like it. You just think, how can anyone survive that kind of barrage, you know? And then in war—the way it’s supposed to work, you give them a big artillery barrage, and then as quickly as possible you rush in the infantry before they can recover. You got to get there quick to get the effect of that barrage.”

  Caughey’s job was to carry a 38-pound machine gun and, with the two others on this team, provide cover for the riflemen. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. His outfit had come under mortar fire, and rather than take cover in a bomb crater, they opted to just hit the ground, counting on incoming blasts to go skyward. “We were still walking, moving forward, when I saw this one thirty yards away. A good big burst. And you know, it’s not like in the movies where you have a big red flash. It’s kind of a black-gray puff, and all these little lines go flying out from there. And I saw this one headed right for me. People wouldn’t believe this, I saw it comin’. I didn’t know where I’d get hit, but I knew it was comin’ right at me. And then all of a sudden, I was hit. I got hit in the face, and I can remember it very clearly. It felt like I’d been hit by someone with their fist, as hard as they could hit me. It hit me right in the jaw, and the world began to spin. I thought I was spinning, but I realized what was happening. I passed out and fell on the ground there.”

  Caughey was hauled back to the nearest command post, where a couple of runners and the first sergeant had no clue how to help him. Now he thinks it’s funny, but back then, when the top sergeant told a buck private to “get out a little handbook and look under ‘Face wounds,’” it wasn’t exactly a thigh-slapper. Eventually, he was evacuated to Neufchâteau, Belgium, where, at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, a doctor gave him a local anesthetic and pulled a chunk of shrapnel out of his jaw. Next stop: England, where it took a while to get to an oral surgeon who could remove the teeth that had been broken off, leaving jagged roots sticking out of his gums.

  His mantra after that experience was “I need to get to the 11th Armored.” And eventually he did, after riding planes, trains, and trucks, being strafed by the Luftwaffe, and ultimately finding his way back to his unit, where the only guy left from his original squad on the halftrack was the driver.

  By the time he got back to his outfit, they knew the end of the war was near—it was just a matter of chasing down the German dead enders, processing POWS in ever-increasing numbers, and not doing anything stupid that could get him another Purple Heart. Concentration camp liberation was not on their minds. Caughey says he’d read some articles about the camps, but didn’t take them very seriously. They weren’t a big issue for his unit.

  Almost at the very end of April—he figures it was a week before they got to Mauthausen on May 5—they came upon a column of civilian prisoners on the road. “We didn’t know it, but they were concentration camp prisoners that were being marched from a camp one place to a camp another place. First, we noticed as we drove along the road, we’d see these dead bodies, you know? People in those pajamas—striped suits? And every so often, there’d be another body. We’d say, ‘What’s that all about?’ We finally caught up to the column, which was being guarded by a bunch of German soldiers or SS men—I don’t know who they were. There were probably a dozen of them.”

  He says there were several hundred prisoners in the column. “They were men and women, and they were in terrible condition, they were just starving. They were all begging for food, which we gave what we had in our half-track, you know, extra food we had. And they were just killing each other, almost, over a bite of food. They were just wild.”

  And the Germans who were guarding them? “Well, that’s another story,” Caughey says. “Those were caught—they abandoned the prisoners and headed across a field toward the woods. And our column moved up fast enough that they didn’t make it to the woods. Some of them might have, I don’t know. But there were quite a few of them still; I mean eight or ten out on that field that didn’t make it to the woods. That was a turkey shoot. They tried to surrender, they held up their hands. It was kind of sad, I hate to tell this, you know. They wanted to surrender and threw their guns down and everything, but the guys weren’t taking prisoners that day. And they shot them all down.”

  The former prisoners of those Germans stood by the side of the road, waving at the GIs, saying thank you in a variety of languages. Then the troops moved on without stopping to question the people on the road. “The war was on—we didn’t stop, we kept moving. But the guys were so furious that the next couple villages mostly burned down. They were just so mad, they just hated the Germans at that point. And I think later, those poor people that lived there, they didn’t know what that was about. They didn’t know why the Americans were so furious or what had happened. All they knew is they caught hell. And same way with those poor guys that were driving those prisoners. They were probably forced to do that,” he says, with a charity rarely exhibited by ex-GIs who had seen the camps.

  Twenty-year-old American kids who’ve killed the enemy and seen their buddies die aren’t big on introspection. They’re just trying to process what they’ve seen. Caughey said it broke down into two simple phrases: “You just can’t believe it. How could people do that? And that,” he says, “was just a taste of what was to come.”

  John Fague, now a retired veterinarian in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, was also in B Company of the 21st Armored Infantry, also twenty years old at the time they found the column of prisoners on the road. “They had all these inmates on the road, they were in their pajama pants is what I called them, striped pants. And it just seems like there was hundreds of them on the road. Some of them would get down on their knees and thank us, but, of course, we couldn’t do anything for them because we weren’t equipped for that. And I always remember my dear captain, he was chasing one of the guards down through the field and swinging his carbine—why he didn’t shoot him, I don’t know.”

  When some concentration camp inmates saw the German-born American soldier Werner Ellmann, they were literally frightened to death: he spoke German, wore a uniform, and had a gun.

  Werner Ellmann was born in Germany in 1924, but at the age of five, along with his mother and younger brother, he emigrated to the Chicago area, where he still lives. Ellmann was drafted and had to convince the Army that he could do more good for them in Europe, because of his language skills, than he could in the Pacific.

  He fought at Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division when it was surrounded, the Nazis demanded surrender, and the division’s acting commanding general, Anthony McAuliffe, famously responded with one word: “Nuts!”

  Ellmann suffered frostbite in that horrendous winter but was never wounded. His closest call came one night. They’d been warned about Germans using English-speaking troops disguised in U.S. uniforms to misdirect traffic or get in close enough to kill. It was a psychological tactic that played hell with the American troops. Soldiers in the line were constantly being challenged with questions like “How many touchdowns did Babe Ruth score?” That sort of thing didn’t make Ellmann very comfortable. “You know, all these kinds of questions—my thought was always that, Christ, they would know that as well as I do because they grew up there. And then they went back.” If you’ve seen the movie Stalag 17, you understand.

  Ellmann remembers his encounter with the fake Americans quite well. “One night, the captain and I had to go through the lines to get to the British, and we’d usually leave around one or two in the morning, and the windshield for the jeep is down. And on the road are these two American soldiers. And I didn’t stop, but that captain said, ‘Stop, let’s see what’s going on.’ Okay, well, right off the bat I thought something was wrong, because these guys had pretty new uniforms. And you didn’t have that at the Bulge. And they’re already in the jeep, and they’re s
itting in the back and the captain and I are sitting in the front. And I kind of took his hand and squeezed it, giving him a signal. I slammed on the brakes, and these guys tumbled right over our heads. And it turned out that they were Germans. I mean, it was horrible.”

  Ellmann had his own encounter with concentration camp inmates on the road. He was part of a long convoy moving quickly toward a rendezvous with the Russians when suddenly “We don’t know what the hell’s going on. The first thing I saw, skeletons walking in certain kinds of uniforms. I go up to three or four of them, and I say, ‘What goes on?,’ and it’s in German. ‘Was ist los hier?’ And they died in front of me, in fright.

  “Yeah, God, they were so close to dead anyway. All of a sudden, the guy collapses. In the meantime, my driver’s feeding somebody, and he dies on him. He just falls down, and he’s gone. We’re in such amazement and such confusion; we don’t know how to make anything out of this.

  “It’s so hard to describe because the condition of these people—they are obviously civilians and not soldiers. They don’t have guns; we do. And they look at us, and they think we’re Germans. I speak German, I’m in uniform, and I got a gun. And they’re just scared shitless.”

  The obvious question: there were no American flags around? “No, that’s movies,” says Ellmann. “We’re just a bunch of hard-fighting guys on our way to a river to hook up with the Russians. We’re pretty sure the war’s almost over.”

  Albert Adams was in the Headquarters Company of the 21st Armored Infantry Battalion, and he had a similar experience while on the road that eventually led to Mauthausen. The twenty-two-year-old who’d honed his shooting skills as a kid hunting deer in Washington State still remembers seeing prisoners coming out of the camps, “and we gave them all the food we could possibly give them, and we killed them. ‘Death warmed over,’ we called them.”