The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  Adams’s half-track was slowly moving down the road when he came upon a scene that’s stuck in his mind for more than sixty years. Prisoners had knocked a man off a bicycle, and they were beating him to death with the bike. He learned that the man had been one of the guards in the camp.

  When they got to the camp itself, which he believes was Mauthausen, Adams was confronted by a completely unexpected sight: women behind a gate asking to be let out. “I found out later they were comfort ladies for the German soldiers. And they were young and well fed and well dressed. They had the barracks right inside the first gate.”

  While he was standing there trying to figure out exactly what he was looking at, a male prisoner came up to him. “He spoke very good English. I still don’t know who he was or what he was, and he said, ‘Can I borrow your carbine for a little while?’ And I said, ‘Well, what the hell, why not?’ I figure he had a good use for it. So [he goes away and] I could hear some shots, and he came back and gave me the gun back. He said, ‘Well, now there’s several of them that you won’t have to take to court.’ And I said, ‘Several what?’ And he said, ‘Kapos.’ And I said, ‘What’s a kapo?’ He told me they were prisoners in charge of barracks, like the one that got killed [with the bicycle].”

  That business out of the way, the prisoner took Adams on a tour of the camp. The first thing he saw was buses used to transport prisoners from Gusen to Mauthausen, killing them in the process. “All of these buses had an enclosed thing for the driver, airtight, and the exhaust gases went back into the bus, and they killed the majority of the people getting from Gusen to Mauthausen.” Each bus held forty or fifty people.

  “And then the next thing he showed me was the gas shower. It was a shower room that held several hundred people, and the showerheads didn’t put out water, they put out gas. So they would eliminate that group of people that way.”

  Adams says there were thousands of bodies strewn about the camp, which, of course, stank. “The ovens where they cremated them were still smoking hot when I went in. They’d probably used them the day before. There were bones in them, not bodies.”

  His guided tour continued with a stop at the rock quarry, where he was told how the Germans would kill prisoners by forcing them to carry huge rocks up the 180 steps from the bottom to the top all day long. If the work didn’t kill them, the SS guards would shove them off the cliff and watch them fall to their death on the rocks below. The prisoner, whose name and nationality he never learned, took him to a building where medical experiments had been conducted and corpses dissected. Adams says that the psychological impact of what he was seeing was blunted because he and his buddies had seen terrible things during the war, including the Americans’ brutal response to the Malmédy massacre, which had included an “absolutely no prisoners, none” unofficial order. Nevertheless, while Adams has told the woman he married in 1946 about some incidents during the war, including what he did to get a Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart, he’s never told her or their five children and thirteen grandchildren about the concentration camps.

  As the first troops from the 11th Armored were entering Mauthausen, Stanley Friedenberg of the 65th Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment was coming into Linz. Since leaving the Ohrdruf concentration camp, he and his small team had been following the Danube all the way into Austria, not knowing if they were entering the country as liberators or conquerors. “So,” he says, “the people threw flowers at us, and we kept submachine guns on our laps.” The first thing they heard in Linz was that the 11th Armored had discovered a huge concentration camp across the river and just twelve miles to the southeast.

  Hurrying to the camp, he saw a sight he’s never forgotten. “The thing I remember is the inmates, wearing the striped pajamas, none of them weighing more than a hundred pounds. Haggard, unshaven, disease-ridden, clinging to the barbed wire with their hands, saying nothing. But the fact that they said nothing said a lot.”

  As he describes the scene while seated on the patio of his winter home in Placida, Florida, the retired lawyer doesn’t even realize that his hands have formed themselves into claws, as though he, himself, were hanging from the Mauthausen barbed-wire fence. When I point this out, he says, “When we visited Yad Vashem [the Holocaust Memorial] in Israel, they had a series of photo murals there, and the last photo mural was maybe four by eight feet, the exact same thing, of the men of Mauthausen clinging to the wires. I came around a corner and came face-to-face with it, and I’m not an emotional man, but I sat down and just cried.”

  At the Mauthausen gate on May 5, because he arrived in an unmarked jeep wearing a uniform that concealed his rank and had the authority that counterintelligence agents carry, he was able to order the GIs who wanted to open the gate to keep it closed. He recalls telling them it would be bad for the prisoners. “They’d wander over the countryside, the Germans will harass them, they’ll die of starvation and disease. Just keep them here and get on your radio and call back for medics, food, and so forth.” Then he entered the camp.

  “They had these long barracks with five-tier-high beds, little narrow aisles between them, and the Sonderkommandos, who were the Jewish people used as help by the Nazis and given a little extra food, used to go through there every morning and clean out the dead bodies. And the place smelled; there were still many, many people laying in the bed too sick to get out, just moaning.

  “It was so emotionally involving, I just want to go in and see what I can do. I couldn’t do a damned thing except hope for some professional help to come there. And we walked through it, and I can’t say how long it was before medics and food wagons came, but it was possibly the end of that day, and they started setting up medical tents there. We set up a separate detachment for Mauthausen. We had three or four men there just to cover it, and try to get who were the guards, the atrocities we could document. Our mission had somewhat changed by now. Now we’re involved in war crimes and tracking down war criminals as well as counterintelligence.”

  George Sherman was a member of the 41st Cavalry Squadron of the 11th Armored Division. The nineteen-year-old from Brooklyn had enlisted in the Army Air Corps just two months before his high school graduation, but he had turned out to be color-blind and thus unqualified for flight training. It wasn’t a problem in an armored outfit, however. It was the Thunderbolts who were sent to the town of Malmédy, where elements of the German 1st SS Panzer Division had massacred at least seventy-one American POWs. Their job was to winch the frozen American bodies out of the field where they’d been murdered and up to a road where they could be put in body bags and loaded onto trucks.

  The day Sherman arrived at Mauthausen started with a simple assignment: look for the Russians coming toward them from eastern Austria. They were patrolling on roads a few miles east of Linz in M24 light tanks when they began smelling an awful odor. Moments later, they came to a big wooden entryway and heard a lot of yelling on the other side. One of the tanks drove through the gate, and then the entire platoon of tanks rolled inside. Sherman says, “We were greeted with the sights, the piles of bodies, these people walking around like God knows what. We dismounted, and the scout sergeant radioed back to the squadron headquarters. He couldn’t explain what the heck it was. And about half an hour or forty-five minutes later, a full tank battalion came up from the 41st, rumbling down with about twenty-odd big Sherman tanks.”

  Those tanks remained on the road outside the camp, but nearly all the men came inside. “We didn’t know what the hell to think. We had heard through Stars and Stripes about a couple of the other camps that were [liberated] early on, the main one [Auschwitz] being found by the Russians. So we surmised what it was. We were dumbfounded. The people—the prisoners coming up to us and not knowing what to say. But it’s just—you have no words. You’re looking at this, and it’s kind of hard to believe.”

  What Sherman and his buddies wondered was, where were the German guards? “That was the thing we were looking for. And there were only a handful, who w
ere, at that point, dead. The prisoners beat them to death, and we were later told that the majority of them had taken off very early in the morning and the night before because they knew we were literally just four or five miles away in Linz. They took off in our direction; they didn’t want to go where the Russians were, of course. So they went west, but we didn’t see them.” After approximately two hours in the camp, the American officers ordered their troops out and told them to continue with their mission.

  T/4 John Stephens was in the village of Mauthausen the day D Troop of the 41st Cavalry liberated the camp. He was just watching what he describes as “little worn men wearing gray-striped pajamas who were still able to walk” come into town. He says, “A German lady came to me to complain that one of the men had stolen her bicycle. I just looked at her and shrugged. After the way the prisoners had been treated, they deserved to steal anything they could get their hands on.

  “While walking around, I had passed a bakery in which customers were being served. So when two of the little men pleaded [with me] for food, I took them to the bakery. The door was now locked. I suppose the proprietors must have seen us coming. Determined to break down the door if necessary, I kept pounding until the baker and his wife leaned out of the upstairs window and told me they were closed. ‘Machen Sie auf oder ich werde schiessen!’ [Open up or I’ll shoot!] brought them downstairs on a run. They didn’t know that the chances were considerably less than zero that I would shoot an unarmed civilian. So they came downstairs immediately and were exceedingly polite. ‘Diese Männer müssen Brot haben’ [These men must have bread], I said. The men chose what they wanted and hurried away. I have often wondered what happened to them. There they were, emaciated and weak, surrounded by a sea of enemies and a long, long way from home. Did they ever manage to reach home? If they did, was anything there?”

  Pastor Colvin Caughey’s memories of Mauthausen are tied closely to recalling the rumors that the end of the war was near. “We’re in this town, and we started taking prisoners by the hundreds and thousands. You couldn’t believe it—Germans were marching in columns, whole units were coming in. There were much more of them than there were of us, but they were coming as prisoners. We couldn’t even guard them; we’d just say, ‘Go over in that field, there.’ They were trying to get away from the Russians, that’s the whole thing—they were eager to surrender to us.”

  It was in the midst of coping with the onrushing surrendering Germans that Caughey’s unit got orders to move to Mauthausen. “They knew about the camp, our leaders did, and they told us, ‘Now, we’re going to this camp and don’t give them any of your food.’ We thought that was kind of a strange order, but we had no idea what we were getting into.

  “As we went down the road we could see, up on top of this hill, this big gray rock, stone building. Like a penitentiary. And that was our first glimpse of Mauthausen. And then, as we got closer, we saw all the barbed-wire fence. And we came to a wire gate and went through there into Mauthausen. And down below us was another huge fenced area with all these barracks and so on, and everywhere we went there were these prisoners all begging for food. They were desperate. You could see how starved they were. And we ignored the orders we’d gotten—we just gave them everything we had.”

  Caughey and his men had driven their half-track quite a way into the camp, but they were unable to dismount because they were immediately surrounded by inmates. Though the camp had actually been liberated a day or two before his unit arrived, he’d been sent with his men to help occupy the place, which meant he had to get out and walk around. Inmates told him the fenced area they’d driven into was called the hospital unit, but the name was just another perversion. “What it really was,” he recalls, “was a big encampment for those who were too sick to work or crippled or whatever. It was just a place for them to wait until they died. And that’s where the bodies were stacked up in big piles. Another thing we noticed when we got there was the stench. This very strong odor—I couldn’t figure out what this was, you know? And it smelled like something might be burning, the whole area smelled like that. And I couldn’t figure what the hell it was all about until several days later I caught on. That was the stench of the crematorium that was still there, days after they’d shut it down. Burning flesh, that’s what the smell was. Burning human flesh. You just shake your head and say how awful it was, just awestruck at how horrible it is. You don’t know how human beings could do such a thing. You’re just—disgusted. Some guys threw up. I didn’t.”

  Colvin Caughey hadn’t been a religious person before the war, but he acknowledges getting religion in combat. As he puts it, “I had a real Christian experience that first day of battle, before I was hit.” By the time he got to Mauthausen, he had committed his life to the ministry, and the horrors of the concentration camp only strengthened his belief. “All you can see is the dire need for something; human nature needs God. I mean, they couldn’t be Christian people doing that. And of course, most of the people in there—not all of them but a vast majority of them—were Jewish people. And you just felt such compassion for those people. You didn’t even know the half of what they’d suffered.”

  Caughey’s unit stayed at Mauthausen for about six weeks. It was springtime, sunny and bright, and they could see the Danube River from up in the camp—although the beautiful blue Danube was dirty brown. They were quartered in a development of fairly new homes built for the SS officers within sight of the prison and stayed to help the medical and quartermaster units brought in to feed and treat the thousands of inmates suffering from malnutrition and disease. He saw the quarry and the death camp barracks. “They were so crammed in there, they just had these big bunks with a little straw if they were lucky, maybe a couple feet between bunks, clear to the ceiling, about four different decks. The bunks were three or four foot wide. And they’d have to sleep four people on each bunk, clear up to the ceiling, and just a very narrow aisle down the middle of the barracks. Just crammed in and dark. I talked to one of the guys there—I remember he wanted something to read, and that was so strange. The only thing I had was my New Testament. I said, ‘Here, that’s all I got.’ He was probably Jewish, and I laugh about it, but it’s all I could give him to read.”

  The inner prison at Mauthausen, the big stone building, was being used by the Americans to keep special German prisoners locked up in cells. Caughey’s squad was assigned to help deal with roughly twenty of those prisoners. That’s when he saw that inmates inside the camp had wreaked their revenge on some of the guards who hadn’t managed to escape. “In that inner prison, I saw big Germans butchered, really, laying down in the inner camp near the gas chamber. The floor was covered with an inch of blood, and several of the German guards, or whoever they were, had been murdered or killed by the inmates. They were fat and healthy, and they had clothing.

  “I was charged with work detail. I had one of these prisoners to do the work, and I was to guard him while he did the job. And he tried to talk to me. He was a big, strong, good-looking guy. Probably SS. And he said in German, ‘What are they going to do to us—or me?’ I forgot which. And I said, ‘Ich weiss nicht.’ I don’t know. And he said, ‘Why? What have I done?’ He said this in German, of course. I said, ‘Der Lager ist schrecklich,’ the camp is terrible. He said, ‘I was a guard on the gate. I didn’t do any of that. All I was, was a guard at the gate.’”

  In order to efficiently process the inmates and help them recover, the Americans got the upper camp cleaned up and kept them there. They also set up a hospital tent camp in an open field outside the Mauthausen wire. Eventually, they brought the German prisoners down into the fetid lower camp and forced them to clean out the huge latrines. Caughey says, “We had one guy on our squad who could speak German pretty good. And those prisoners were going to use the hose, stand outside and kinda hose it down from the outside. He just ordered them to get in there, and you-know-what was flying everywhere. Boy, oh boy, in a couple of hours, they had that place cleaned up.”


  The fact that his outfit remained at the camp for quite some time gave Caughey and his buddies a real sense of satisfaction. “We’re just glad we got there when we did. You felt some gladness that we liberated that darn place, and we felt pretty good about things improving. Gradually, that camp is getting cleaned up, and those people who were there were starting to recover. So there was some good feelings about being there and doing what you were doing.”

  For Werner Ellmann, the fact that he was German-born and could communicate with both local Germans and prisoners inside the camp was not necessarily a positive thing. While his buddies were in shock, some of them throwing up and crying, Ellmann was asking questions. The answers were arguably more disturbing than the atrocities he could see. Take, for example, the stone quarry, where he found and questioned several German civilians who worked in the camp. “They remembered when two hundred American flyers had been captured because they had to parachute from their disabled planes. They took [them] to Mauthausen, and they started them one morning to go down and get those rocks, didn’t stop them until they were dead. Either they collapsed, they were shot, bayoneted, or whatever, but all two hundred of them were liquidated that way. That’s what they did with the prisoners. How sadistic can you be? And how can you walk away with any kind of good feelings about the people who did it, much less than that’s my ancestry?”

  Ellmann can still see the camp in his mind’s eye, and the dying inmates. “We had seen killing. For Christ’s sake, that was nothing new to us, but this was too hard to handle.

  “I want to help people, but I didn’t know how. When you’re looking at a person in that state, you either think to yourself, ‘If I touch him, he’ll fall apart.’ Or maybe it was even—I don’t know—disgust. I don’t think that was in my mind. I think it was more subconscious. But I do feel that I had a compulsion to go through that place without running out of there. Some guys did.”