The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  Werner Ellmann

  Ellmann remembers a religious epiphany just before his outfit was committed to battle in the Bulge. “We were told we could all go to a service of our denomination. I went to the Catholic Mass, and the priest did nothing but berate the other side and that they should pay for this crime and we should all be preserved and not be hurt, not to die. And I kept sitting there thinking, ‘What the hell’s going on here? My two [German] brothers over there, they’re probably hearing the same thing, except now I’m the bad guy. What’s going on?’ I think that was the first time that I really began to question, and that doesn’t happen overnight. That’s a process.”

  At college, even while battling his drinking problem, he became heavily involved in fighting for the rights of others, at the same time dealing with the shame of being a German who had relatives on the other side during the war.

  He also felt a burning need to go back to Germany and visit with family members who had been there during the war. “You know, in 1972 I said to [my wife,] Liz, ‘I’ve got so much hatred in me, I have to get it loose, and I think the way to do it is to go back to Germany.’ And we did. And I went to visit my brother, and I said, ‘I want to be in a room with just you and me.’ We stayed for six hours in that room, and I blasted him all over the map.”

  It was his oldest brother, Herbert, the oldest of four, about six years older than Werner, whom he confronted. “I told him how I felt about the Germans and what they did. And every time he said to me, ‘Werner, I wasn’t a Nazi,’ I felt like blasting his face with my fist. When we walked out of that room, we had settled some stuff, and I began my healing.”

  In 2008, Werner Ellmann was still working on healing from the things he’d seen and done during World War II. He still wakes up at night screaming, still dreams of someone in a uniform coming at him. And he says he doesn’t believe he’ll ever be cured of that.

  Morris Sunshine

  North Belmore, New York

  NORDHAUSEN

  Morris Sunshine has the heart of a jazz musician. Unfortunately, his arteries are clogged with hate, and he hasn’t been able to find a way to fix it. The smell of Nordhausen never goes away. He readily acknowledges the anger, saying, “My hate for the German language and the German people is terrible. It’s something that I’ve never forgiven them for.”

  Even six decades later. He understands when he hears stories of veterans who didn’t seem to be affected by the war, by seeing the camps, but after they retire begin having nightmares and exhibiting the symptoms of what the docs call delayed-onset post-traumatic stress disorder. “Yeah, I can understand that,” he says. “I can understand it completely. If you’ve got this stuff stored up in yourself, it’s gotta go someplace. I mean—the shock of seeing this kind of outrage, civilian outrage. It’s unforgivable, absolutely unforgivable in my book.

  Morris Sunshine

  I’m very bad—everybody’s taken me to task for this, including my wife, my kids. But if I heard German spoken by young people, anybody, my first reaction is this hate. I can feel it in the back of my head, you know, my hair standing up. Now, these people might be Jews, they might be Austrian Jews, and I have that. But my first emotion is the hate I have for the language and everything else.”

  He’s been in therapy groups; no help. “They always come up to the same thing: you gotta forgive, and these children are really not responsible for what their parents didn’t do or did do. They’re showing me that’s really the right way, but that’s got nothing to do with my emotions. I still smell that, you see. In my head I understand that I’m crazy when it comes to this. But it’s there, you know, and I can’t forgive anybody for this kind of bestiality.”

  When you talk with Morris, it becomes apparent that his anger is directed more at the civilians who lived near the camps and denied knowledge of them than at the Nazi officials themselves. “It was always the same response—that they didn’t know. ‘Ich bin nicht ein Nazi.’ I am not a Nazi. And ‘I had to be part of the Hitler Jugend,’ all that kind of stuff. ‘Ich bin kein Nazi.’ Might not be correct German, but, you know, it’s close enough for jazz.”

  Jazz is probably what kept his hate from eating him alive. Sunshine went to music school when he got back home to New York, studying arranging with Eddie Sauter, who used to write for Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Ray McKinley, and Red Norvo. Eventually he began to teach music, and he began selling and repairing instruments. He married a girl he’d known in high school—they recently celebrated their sixty-second anniversary—and they had three kids.

  And he told them about Nordhausen. He told everyone about Nordhausen. “Everybody I know knows that I opened up a concentration camp. That was like a banner that I used to walk around with. I always used to tell them, ‘Never mind what you see in pictures. The smell of death is the strongest odor in the world.’ And a massive smell, massive bodies, that odor sticks with you forever.”

  So he can’t get rid of the smell—or the hate. But jazz has saved him. “Music is my love,” Morris says, “and that’s been passed down to the next generation. They play music, and we play together. I can sit down with the granddaughter, my daughter, my son, and we play. We swing. No greater force in the world.”

  Manfred Steinfeld

  Chicago, Illinois

  WÖBBELIN

  There’s no one size fits all with veterans on the matter of Germany or German people. Consider Manny Steinfeld. He was born in Germany; his mother and one brother were murdered by the Nazis just three weeks before he participated in the liberation of one of the camps. Yet he’s gone back to Germany and become a benefactor of the current residents of the little town he left as a young teenager.

  Actually, Steinfeld has been back to Germany many times. The first was in the late 1950s, when he went to the furniture show in Cologne. “I drove through the town I was born in; I didn’t even stop. I didn’t want anything to do with them.” That’s how he felt even while acknowledging that there had been very little anti-Semitism in the town where he had lived until the age of fourteen.

  In the year 2000, he was contacted by a young man from the town, about seventy miles north of Frankfurt, who told him he’d been working on dedicating a memorial to the three Jewish families from the town who had been killed by the Nazis—families whose roots went back two hundred years. The man wanted Steinfeld to speak at the dedication. He went and brought eleven people with him. After the dinner, which the town paid for, he said, “Now that you have done this, what can I do for the town?”

  The town fathers said they needed a youth center, and after lengthy correspondence, Manny Steinfeld agreed to pay for it, provided it was named for his younger brother, who had been killed in Palestine. In 2007, the town held a memorial service and dedicated the new building, with a plaque that told the story of his brother’s short life in Germany.

  On that same trip in 2000, Steinfeld paid a visit to the town of Ludwigslust, where he’d watched the funeral service for two hundred of the Wöbbelin victims at the end of the war. “I looked for the cemetery where we buried the two hundred bodies. No sign of the cemetery. Everything was gone.” He contacted an official of the Wöbbelin museum, who told him that all the wooden crosses they’d erected had been removed during the winter of 1948 and burned when no coal or other fuel was available. The town had been in what was then East Germany, and the government had seen to it that only a stone monument remained, dedicating the site to two hundred victims of National Socialism.

  In addition to his personal experiences in postwar Germany, Steinfeld says he’s pleased that many towns with a population greater than 50,000 once again have Jews living in them, and he sees that as the Germans trying to make amends in some reasonable fashion. He also seems to take comfort in the fact that the new Berlin Holocaust Memorial and Jewish Museum is the most visited museum in the country today. “Are [these] all Germans and all young Germans who want to, maybe, clean their conscience?” he asks and then answers, “I don’t know.”

/>   Despite his own history and his family’s tragic past, Manny Steinfeld seems willing to keep an open mind about today’s Germans. Nevertheless, he betrays a sense of caution by telling this story: “When Hitler passed the law that the middle name of any Jew is Israel or Sarah, they went back to all the birth records and added the middle names to all of them. Can you believe that? Dead or alive. And then, in 1947, when it was rescinded, they went back to make the changes again. But that’s the German mentality.”

  Harry Feinberg

  Elmwood Park, New Jersey

  OHRDRUF

  The two dozen men gathered in a New Jersey hotel dining room in spring 2008 had brought wives, children, even grandchildren with them. The occasion was not a happy one. Harry Feinberg, who’d been president of their chapter of the 4th Armored Division Association since 1985, had to tell the membership that the time had come to disband—maybe one or two more meetings after that, no more. They used to meet four times a year, men only. Then they’d cut it to twice a year and let the wives in. Harry says they came from all over the area: Long Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn, south Jersey, upstate New York, Connecticut. But no more. “We’re losing them, we’re losing them too fast. I get these phone calls, I hate to get on the phone. Every time, [my wife will] say, ‘Harry, it’s for you,’ and one of the children or a wife would tell me, ‘Sorry to tell you this, but Bernie just passed away,’ or Charlie. I just got one the other day, a son called. They’re like brothers to me. What we went through, the bond from what we went through, we would do anything for each other. Believe it or not. You go to any of these meetings, and you’ll see guys hugging each other, a kiss on the cheek, you know. And we’re all straight men. But that’s the way it is. I never saw anything like it in my life.”

  If reunions give the veterans a chance to remember the good times in the war—a concept nonveterans may find difficult to understand—they also have a chance to talk about the stuff that still screws with their heads. And the wives have a chance to talk among themselves about their husbands—the physical ailments and the mental.

  Harry acknowledges that his wife, Edie, still has to help him keep it together. The memories of the concentration camps are still there, still vivid. And when the couple moved from the house they’d lived in for decades, the flashbacks got worse. The VA finally sent him to see a psychiatrist—this is more than sixty years after the war. “I go there every three months, every six months, whenever he gives me an appointment. And he wants to hear stories, and I keep telling him these stories, and he questions me. And I said, ‘Doc, do you want me to pull punches?’

  “And I start bawling myself, tears come out of my eyes, which I try to hold back. ‘No, no, I want to hear you. Don’t hold anything back,’ he says. I never went to a psychiatrist in my life, but he wants to hear these stories. ‘Do you dream about it?’ I said, ‘Yes, you know, at times my wife has to nudge me because I’ll start moaning and jumping all over the bed, not vertically, but start tumbling around, and she’ll say, ‘Harry, what’s the matter? Is it the war?’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, Edie, I was just dreaming about the war.’”

  Feinberg says the dreams increased after he retired, and they got bad enough that he wanted to be medicated. “I asked Dr. Falcone, ‘Isn’t there a magic bullet? Give me a pill.’ He says, ‘Mr. Feinberg, you cannot forget it. You will never forget it.’

  “I said, ‘Why am I coming here? I want to forget about this; I want a pill that’s going to soften everything. I don’t want to think about this anymore.’ So he says, ‘There’s no such pill, and you will never forget about it.’”

  Ultimately, the psychiatrist put Harry on a medication that is supposed to help him relax. But he’s still dealing with back problems that began during the war. “My back started acting up. You get up on the tank; to get down, you jump down. Every time I jumped, I would complain to my first sergeant. All he wanted to know is ‘Any bones broken?’ No. ‘Any blood?’ No. ‘Get outta here.’ And he wouldn’t let me see a doctor. If I went over his head, I would be dead now. He would give me some detail.”

  Harry had his first back surgery in 1953; since then, he’s had two more, but he’s coping. And he’s being very careful.

  In 1999, he and some other 4th Armored veterans were invited to return to Gotha, Germany, where they were surprised to discover that the American soldiers were looked upon as saviors. Harry says the German officials insisted that the Americans had liberated them. “I said, ‘How in the hell did we liberate you? We were fighting the German army.’ And he said, ‘No, no, you weren’t fighting the German people; you were fighting the Nazis. All Germans are not Nazis.’ And I opened my mouth, and I said, ‘I can’t believe this. I was there. Imagine that, all these things were kept from us. We thought we were fighting Germans. We were fighting Nazis. Can you believe that?”

  Morris Eisenstein

  Delray Beach,

  Florida DACHAU

  By the time he participated in the capture of Munich, Morris Eisenstein couldn’t count the number of German civilians who had pleaded with the American soldiers, “Nicht Nazi.” “That was the favorite expression of all the Germans, ‘Bitte, bitte, nicht Nazi.’” One German, in particular, sticks in his mind. “He had been an exchange professor at the University of Chicago, in English or German literature. I said to him, ‘How could you possibly have done some of this? You people who gave the world all the great minds in music and culture and art.’ He says, ‘What can I say? We were obeying orders.’ Typical German.”

  Russel R. Weiskircher, PhD

  Cleveland, Georgia

  DACHAU

  Russ Weiskircher knew that the Holocaust would be part of his life forever within minutes of his arrival outside Dachau. He puts it less elegantly. “Right after I tossed my cookies in the first boxcar, you know right then and there that you aren’t going to live this one down. And when we got away from there, I didn’t tell the world. I didn’t even put a mention of it—not a word of it—in my letters home. I couldn’t express it. I wanted to see what was going on, but I couldn’t describe it, and I didn’t really find myself able to discuss it until I got back to the States and I ran into the deniers, telling me that it was a Churchill/Roosevelt/Stalin myth, that there were no concentration camps, and my pictures were lies and I was brainwashed.”

  Rüssel Weiskircher

  He was invited to speak at a German Evangelical United Brethren Church in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. And the pastor, who he says was a Nazi, told his congregation that everything Weiskircher had to say was a lie. “This was an ordained minister of God. A U.S. citizen. I got up and made him look like two cents, and I’ve been spieling ever since.”

  He’d been afflicted with nightmares immediately after the war, always about the crematory and the bodies stacked up. They came back when he was eighty-two years old, when his old commanding officer, Felix Sparks, died. They’d maintained a telephone relationship, and suddenly it ended.

  He says that Dachau was the building block for the rest of his life. “I decided that bad things happened when good people shut up and don’t do anything, so I started out on a crusade of one to let the world know you gotta get off the dime and do something.” He drifts into the practiced cadence of the southern preacher he became, saying, “You ought to wake up, you gotta get up, you gotta stand up, you gotta speak up, and you don’t dare shut up. That’s been my creed for years and years and years.”

  Russ Weiskircher came home from the war with his belief in God strengthened. He believes he survived and that he’s doing what he’s doing because God wants it that way. He says, “The mission now is to do as much as I can to get people involved to study what happened, to overcome bias and prejudice to see that it doesn’t happen again. To get people in a position where they speak up when it’s wrong and when they’re not afraid to do it. If we had opened our borders when the Jewish immigrants needed a place to go, we could’ve lessened the impact of the Holocaust by close to five percent. FDR didn’t do one damn th
ing.”

  And he’s not sure that if it were put to a vote today, Americans would save 200,000 people from certain death in Darfur. “It would be tough. I know how I would vote, but it would be tough to sell it. There’d be people who’d genuinely want to save them and people who didn’t give a damn.”

  Which prompts the question, what do you think we learned from the Holocaust?

  “What I think we learned is, you can’t sit still and wait it out. You can’t let the bastards get away with it. That’s as simple as I know how to put it. You gotta speak up for your neighbor before they come for him and end up coming for you. The last man to go is me,” he says, paraphrasing Reverend Niemöller.

  Yet he’s realistic. He believes the future depends on the impact his generation makes in spreading the word, and he, personally, is doing everything he can. The legacy of which he’s proudest can be found in his work with the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, which has established an institute that teaches public-school teachers how to use the Holocaust to overcome prejudice and bias.

  “Teachers come to learn how to teach, and they get paid. If the school year is going, we pay a substitute to stand in for them. And they get their room and board, and promotional credits. We teach them how to handle diversity, how to create diversity, accept diversity in the classroom, and we teach them how to fight prejudice. We cover a lot of ground when we teach teachers.”

  Russel Weiskircher heard the call at Anzio, and it set him on a religious path for life. But it was at Dachau where he learned that bad things happened when good people shut up and do nothing. And that’s what started him on “a crusade of one to let the world know you gotta get off the dime and do something.”

  David Nichols Pardoe

  David Pardoe, né Nichols

  Huntington, Massachusetts

  LANDSBERG