The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  After going inside the walls and wire of Mauthausen, Ellmann lost it. “I went crazy. I did. You know, when I went out into that field and I saw these farmers out there and I stopped them and said, ‘What goes on in that camp?,’ and they said they didn’t know. I carried a Thompson submachine gun, .45-caliber. I was just about ready to blast those people. Those people were in jeopardy, because that hatred was instilled in me at that point. And I had to kill people; why the hell couldn’t I kill them? My jeep driver backed my gun down.

  “And then I went back in, and I said to the commanding officer, ‘I think every one of those people in that village should be made to come into this place, see what exists here, and then be made to clean it up. Bury those people with a proper ceremony and a proper grave, and make every one of them see what’s going on here.’ And they did that.”

  Like Ellmann, Shelby Keeton, a veteran of the 11th Armored Division from Monticello, Kentucky, has been unable to put the war out of his mind. He was born in 1918 and was married and had three children before he volunteered to leave the farm and join the Army in 1944. He’d been married more than fifty years before he told his wife about being at Gusen and Mauthausen with the armored infantry. Her reaction was shock, but he believes she understood why he hadn’t told her all those years. Telling her at last, he said, was necessary. “I had to talk to somebody, to get the pressure off of me, I guess. You don’t forget something like that. You can’t forget something like that. It leaves scars on you. Your memory is scarred.”

  Keeton says that unless you’ve been through it, it’s impossible to imagine the burden. Not only was he at Mauthausen, he was also at one of the nearby Gusen subcamps shortly after it was liberated. “One of those commanders at Gusen, the inmates lynched him and hung him. And he had a little twelve-year-old boy, and they brought this boy up and showed him his dad hanging there dead, and the boy spit on him. In disdain. He was just disgusted with his father and spit on him. They called him Junior. He had a .22 rifle, and he would use the inmates, prisoners’ heads, for target practice. We heard he killed over two hundred inmates, shot ‘em.”

  Keeton graphically describes other encounters between the newly freed inmates and German guards they’d captured, adding that the Americans didn’t intervene—“they couldn’t.” What the Americans did do is force the local German civilians to come to the camp to bury the dead in trenches dug by bulldozers. Just as at other camps, the locals protested that they hadn’t known. “Oh, bull feathers,” says Keeton. “They lied. They could smell ‘em for two miles. I know it. But we didn’t swallow that line, you know? We made ‘em put ‘em down there.” The GIs made them do it at the point of a gun or a bayonet, whatever it took to make sure that the victims got a proper burial.

  Duane Mahlen, a buddy of Keeton, was part of Headquarters Company in Combat Command B. By the time he got to Mauthausen, he’d seen what he described as “the most shocking thing ever” at Flossenbürg, not quite two hundred miles to the north, a camp where thousands had been killed and “the survivors looked like they were dead.” But what he remembers most from Mauthausen is the piles of dead. “I always picture this like a stack of cordwood.”

  Orville Larson, from San Diego, was also a friend of Keeton. He’s now ninety-one years old and still has visions of “dead people all over, piles of them” but says it didn’t affect him the way it did the younger soldiers. He was twenty-seven at the time and took great satisfaction in forcing the Austrian civilians to bury the dead.

  LeRoy Petersohn was a medic with the 11th Armored Division when he saved a three-week-old baby’s life at Mauthausen.

  Duane Mahlen says, “I was there when they dug one of the massive holes to bury them. The mayor had lots of locals over there to look at it, and it was their first, allegedly, look—but we’ll never really know how much they did know. Everybody was mad at the Germans and Austrians for allowing it. But we were all deeply stunned, obviously, and surprised.

  LeRoy “Pete” Petersohn, a close friend of Mahlen, is one of the few surviving liberators of Mauthausen who has a positive story to tell—one that started at the end of the war and continued into the next century. Born in 1922 and now living in Montgomery, Illinois, he was a T/5 medic in the 11th Armored Division who had his first taste of combat when Patton’s army charged across France to help rescue the beleaguered 101st Airborne Division. Pete has two Bronze Stars, the Combat Medic Badge, a Purple Heart, and shrapnel inside him from the Battle of the Bulge.

  Around 11 A.M. on May 5, his unit got a radio message ordering it to proceed to a position where it would meet an element of the 41st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron (Mechanized) and drive to Mauthausen. The trip from the Gusen camps was about a dozen miles, but when they were still about five miles out, men in the six-vehicle convoy—scout cars, a light tank, and jeeps—began smelling a foul odor.

  When they arrived at the camp, Petersohn was approached by an inmate who spoke perfect English and offered to take him on a tour of the camp. Since the doctor he was traveling with, Combat Command B surgeon Major Harold Stacey, had gone into the office formerly occupied by the SS guards, the young medic accepted the offer. He was shown the crematorium furnaces, which were still burning, piles of bloody victims who had been recently killed by blows to the head, and what he describes as “the most devastating sight at that moment was piles of bodies, piled against the walls. And the piles were full of rats eating on the dead bodies, which was a horrible sight to see.

  “The camp,” he recalls, “was enclosed on three sides with quarry stone. And the fourth side, they had a high-wattage barbed-wire fence, and during the course of this fellow taking me through the camp, I was standing with him talking, and there were two women that appeared that just threw themselves against the barbed-wire fence. And of course, that being charged, they immediately were killed. And then the fellow told me that they probably were gals that were prostitutes for the German soldiers. And he said that many of the inmates knew them and what they did, and he said they probably didn’t want to be taken alive.”

  Petersohn didn’t think to ask the inmate serving as his guide where he was from, but the man did tell him that he’d been a college professor and that’s what had led to his being arrested. “I taught kids, and I was an anti-Nazi. It didn’t take them long before they caught up with me.”

  Despite having been warned by Dr. Stacey to stay away from the inmates as much as possible because they were diseased, Petersohn, who was wearing a helmet with the Red Cross symbol of a medic on three sides, was unable to resist calls for help. “The very first barracks I went in, a fellow came up to me, and he had a slash on his arm. I couldn’t get a word out of him as to what happened, but there was a fellow laying in the top bunk, and he had his arm hanging out. I went over and felt his arm, and he had a slight pulse, very faint. But then I walked over and checked another fellow, and he had a good, strong pulse. He was younger. I went back to the fellow with the arm hanging out, and he was gone.

  “The inmates just swarmed around me, and in one case, there was a fellow had gone down, he fell or just fell over, and come to find out he had been an SSer, and somebody had taken a piece of glass and had hit his heart. There were several of them that had changed clothes and were trying to mingle in among the inmates, hoping to convince us. But the inmates recognized them and killed them.

  “I had seen a lot before we ever got to that camp, but I was more affected by seeing the people that were starved and just skin and bone. And all the things that they did to those people affected me far more than having to be out in the field, patching some of our men up.”

  But then there’s the one incredibly positive experience Pete Petersohn had at Mauthausen. He had gone into one of the women’s barracks and discovered a mother with a little baby girl that was “a mass of infection.” She was covered with furuncles—pus-filled boils that, if not treated, could result in a staph infection spreading to her spinal cord, brain, and internal organs, ultimately killing her. The
infant, a girl named Hana, was just twenty-four days old and had been born in a slave-labor camp called Freiberg, one of the Flossenbürg subcamps.

  Her mother, Priska Loewenbein, had been shipped to Freiberg from Auschwitz to work in a converted textile factory that was manufacturing warplanes. The day after Hana’s birth, she and her mother were loaded onto cattle cars with two thousand other women to begin what turned into a seventeen-day stop-and-start journey to find a camp with the facilities to kill them.

  Years later, Hana’s mother told her daughter about the kindness of strangers that had probably saved her life during that journey. The train had headed south from Freiberg into Czechoslovakia and at one stop, people in the station at Horni Bříza, near Pilsen, heard the baby crying. Though the prisoners were receiving little or nothing to eat, the German guards were also hungry and running out of provisions. Hana’s mother told her that the townspeople bargained with the guards. “If they were allowed to help the mother and child, they will provide for the guards. And that happened, the guards allowed that.” They even provided clothing and diapers for her. Until then, she’d had nothing but a little shirt and hat (which are now part of the collection at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington).

  The distance between Freiberg and Mauthausen was only about 240 miles as the crow flies, but the train ride lasted an excruciating seventeen days as the Germans moved every which way to avoid the advancing Russian and American armies. The irony is that the delay in getting to Mauthausen probably saved their lives, because just before they arrived one evening, the Nazis killed a final batch of prisoners in the gas chamber—and then ran out of poison gas.

  When they were unloaded from the train, the camp guards took everything Hana’s mother had been given for the baby. And then she was told that no children were allowed in the camp. Hana says her mother told her, “When the guards tried to remove me from her hands, she started to fight with them, at which point a woman who was Polish, a guard, came to her and said she didn’t see a child for six years and wanted to play—so she saved my life by saying she wanted to play with me, which apparently she did, and allowed my mother to watch it from outside through the window.”

  After examining baby Hana, Dr. Stacey determined that her body was riddled with skin infections, and since the hospital at Mauthausen was a filthy mess, they would have to take the baby to the hospital at Gusen. Pete recalls the doctor explaining it to Hana’s mother in German, although Hana says her mother was fluent in English and would have understood. Nevertheless, there were a lot of tears when her mother handed the baby to the doctor and watched the two Americans drive away with her in a jeep.

  As soon as they got to Gusen, Petersohn went to the nearby 81st Medical Battalion to get some vials of penicillin that they had under refrigeration. By the time he returned, the doc was working on the child. “He was already lancing these blisters, and then my job was to take swabs and penicillin and clean them out. There were some that were in bad enough shape that we had to stitch.”

  The antibiotic did the trick, and they returned the child to her mother at Mauthausen, where Dr. Stacey offered to help Hana’s mother come to the United States because he thought additional medical treatment was necessary, treatment she was unlikely to get in postwar Europe. But she wanted to go back to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and look for her husband. The two of them had originally been taken to Auschwitz in September 1944, when Mrs. Loewenbein was two months pregnant.

  Near the end of May, Hana and her mother boarded a boat going down the Danube for the 160-mile voyage to Bratislava, and Pete Petersohn was left to wonder for nearly sixty years what had happened to them.

  Combat troops weren’t the only Americans to enter the concentration camps. At Gusen and Mauthausen, female nurses of the 131st Evacuation Hospital helped save lives as well.

  Phyllis LaMont Law from Leroy, Pennsylvania, was twenty years old and just out of nurse training when she volunteered for the Army because she wanted experience and excitement. As a second lieutenant, she was attached to the 131st at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and around Christmas 1944, the unit boarded the Queen Elizabeth in New York harbor to sail across the Atlantic at thirty knots, zigzagging the entire way. She remembers all forty nurses being told to keep their clothes on for the voyage in case there was a submarine attack and they had to abandon ship.

  The unit went from England to France and then rode railcars and trucks to Bierbach, Germany, where they set up to care for the wounded. From there, all their travel was by covered truck. “We never saw the countryside at all,” Law says. “We were inside covered trucks because of snipers, they told us.”

  The 131st was set up near Nuremberg as a fully functioning hospital servicing combat units throughout the area. It had a total of 277 personnel, including 32 doctors, dentists, and medical service officers, the 40 nurses, and 205 enlisted men—lab and X-ray technicians, sterilization specialists, medics, clerks, drivers, and cooks. They performed all their services in tents that could be broken down, loaded onto trucks, transported, and set up again in a matter of a couple of days. As early as April 12, unit records indicate that they had hired freed Russian and Polish slave laborers to help with meals, but even by late April, the 131st hadn’t been sent to any of the liberated concentration camps.

  The caption Army nurse Phyllis LaMont (right) typed in 1945 appears to say all that needed to be said about the concentration camp known as Gusen.

  On May 9, a day after the war in Europe officially ended, the 131st arrived at Mauthausen, tasked to “take care of malnourished and typhus infected DPs.”

  Initially, in an act of what today would be considered male chauvinism, the female nurses were separated from their unit and sent elsewhere. Phyllis Law says, “We were left in a field for a few days until the boys went into the concentration camp. Our colonel wouldn’t let us go into the camps.” When the prohibition was lifted, the nurses were trucked into Gusen One but first they were all dosed with DDT from hand-pumped flit guns as a precaution against typhus, which is carried by fleas and lice. Law remembers the morning well. “They dosed us down and let us in, and we had to make up a lot of supplies first. And what we saw were all these horrible, horrible people in bunks that were five and ten across, and every one of them emaciated, and no clothes or few clothes, dirty clothes and whatnot. And they all had diarrhea and all kinds of sickness, so what we had to do was just pass pills at first. And some of the boys had set up intravenous and blood [transfusions]. Some of them were dead before they were completed.

  “You feel bad. That’s about all you can do; it’s kind of a shock, you know, when you’re young. The situation is kind of hopeless. You just hope you can save a few. You know how it happened because they talk about it all the time while you’re there. And to see all the piles and piles of people that are outside, stacks of them, bones, and that’s about all. Watch them being thrown into a big hole in the ground.”

  By May 11, a 1,500-bed hospital had been established near the main camp and a 600-bed female hospital was started near the town of Mauthausen. By May 12, a total of 1,804 patients were being treated at Mauthausen, Gusen One, Gusen Two, and the Quarry Camp. Existing buildings were converted to hospitals, and at the Mauthausen camp, more than 600 patients were cared for in the former SS barracks. By May 15, the 131st Evacuation Hospital was caring for 3,496 patients in buildings and tents, in beds and litters, and it had begun dispatching displaced persons back to their home countries, with an initial shipment of 950 Poles from Gusen One.

  Phyllis Law, who was at Gusen from early May through July 1945, says they weren’t allowed to write home about what they were doing, because everything was censored. And when she got home, she says, “nobody wants to hear about it, anyway.” She didn’t try talking about it, either. “My folks just weren’t interested, you know. All they were interested in was me, I got home. And they were farmers and went about their work and didn’t have radios or anything like that to keep up with anything. That was my
experience. My sister was a nurse, but she was also busy in a hospital. People don’t think about it. They think about the war, sure, but they were more concerned with the war than what we’d been through.”

  CHAPTER 16

  YOU ARE STILL INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY RESPONSIBLE

  MAY 7, 1945

  FALKENAU AN DER EGER (NOW SOKOLOV),

  CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  50 miles north-northeast of Flossenbürg, Germany

  107 miles northeast of Nuremberg, Germany

  At 2:41 A.M. local time, the German high command surrendered all land, sea, and air forces unconditionally to the Allied forces. The surrender act was signed at Reims, France. The order went out to American units that on receipt of this news in the field, “all offensive operations are immediately halted, and organization of defensive positions is to begin.”

  The day before, elements of the 9th Armored Division attached to the 1st Infantry Division had attacked into Czechoslovakia along the Cheb-Falkenau road. This area was the Sudetenland, inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. On the morning after the signing of the surrender, they reached what was then called Falkenau an der Eger.

  Owen Tripp, now of Bremerton, Washington, was a member of C Company of the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion. He’d been sent overseas just a few months earlier, had joined the 9th Armored Division as a replacement, and had fought with it at the Remagen bridge. He’d been aware of the concentration camps before going to Europe, but he’d never expected to see one.

  On the morning of May 7, Tripp’s outfit came across three 40 and 8 boxcars sitting on a rail siding outside the main entrance to what they learned was the Flossenbürg subcamp of Falkeneau. “This sticks with me because they each were about a third full of bodies. Nude bodies. Some I suspect were not completely dead but very close to it. I don’t think they’d been there any great length of time, as there was no odor or anything of that nature. It was a revolting scene.”