A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking

by Samuel Fuller;Christa Lang Fuller;Jerome Henry Rudes

  "No! No! No!" I said. "You know the music: Pum, pum, pum, paaahh- hhh. "

  "There's so many guys that come and go in our outfit, it's hard to remember their names."

  "Goddamnit, he's a composer. Like Irving Berlin."

  Johnson shook his head. He took one final guess. "Wasn't he one of the bigwigs who inspected the troops at Slapton Sands? You know, with Churchill? Before we invaded France?"

  "For cryin' out loud, you've got to have heard of Beethoven!"

  But he hadn't. Until then, I didn't believe that somebody in the United States of America could grow up, even on some godforsaken farm in Tennessee, without ever having heard of Beethoven, let alone his music. Despite my exasperation with Johnson, nothing could diminish my wonder and joy that, in the middle of a goddamned world war, I'd gotten to sleep in the childhood home of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of my heroes.

  On March io, with Bonn securely in American hands, we prepared to cross the Rhine on the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen and enlarge the bridgehead that had been opened in a furious offensive on March 7 by other elements of the First Army while we were assaulting Bonn. The Germans tried to blow up that bridge as well. Under tremendous machinegun fire, dogfaces dashed across the span and took it, discovering later that the only thing that prevented the Nazi demolition boys from destroying the bridge as they retreated was a stray bullet that severed the detonator.

  Thousands of troops and tons of supplies began to move across the Ludendorff Bridge. We got our chance on March 17, and what a chance it was. Only a few hours after we'd crossed to the other side, the bridge collapsed, with four hundred soldiers still on it, killing and wounding many in the incident. We had to build a pontoon bridge across the Rhine so that Allied soldiers and materials could continue pouring into Germany.

  Protected from enemy lookouts by smokescreens, we now moved northward to the front line, relieving elements of the 31oth Infantry, Seventy-eighth Division. Ten relentless days of vicious, bitter combat awaited us toward the end of March in the so-called Ruhr Pocket, perhaps the most intense fighting on the entire western front. The Big Red One moved through a string of German towns-Weyerbusch, Laasphe, Win- terberg, Buren, and Geseke-until the German hold was finally broken and the enemy driven north of the Sieg River. The strategy was to box in the retreating Nazis as the Ninth Army advanced to the north. It worked, at the cost of many American lives.

  At the beginning of April 1945, my outfit was sent into the heavily forested Harz Mountains to spearhead the Allied attack to the east. Suddenly we were trekking up steep roads, delayed constantly by roadblocks and trees blown down by the retreating Germans. It was clear the enemy was in a state of confusion. Resistance was spotty. Among enemy infantry thrown up to fight us were youngsters and recently drafted civilians. Yet those days and nights were hell. The Nazis still had enough tanks and artillery, sharpshooters and land mines to wreak havoc on us. Besides, melting snow made road conditions terrible.

  Despite the continued resistance to our advance, we sensed the war was winding down. Rumors were flying again, this time about the Germans surrendering at any moment. Our sergeant warned us to ignore all the hearsay. It was just bullshit until Nazi leaders and the Allied commanders officially inked an armistice. One bullet, either random or well aimed, could still rip off your head.

  One last bullet almost did get me. It came from a German sharpshooter positioned strategically in an ancient castle overlooking a steep pass in the Harz Mountains. On our march toward Czechoslovakia, somewhere between Sieber and Sankt Andreasberg, we had to get through that pass. The medieval stone castle seemed to have grown organically out of the side of a cliff above a grotto. Water from a mountain stream rushed down the valley and roared below the castle.

  I was talking to a dogface next to me named Switkolski about something stupid-maybe dry socks again-when a sniper's bullet zinged by my head and hit Switkolski in the chest, killing him instantly. Everybody dove behind trees and rocks for cover, firing back at the castle. The nest of snipers could have been located behind any one of a score of high windows. Led by our sergeant, a few of us quickly zigzagged up to the castle's massive front doors. One of them was ajar. Cautiously we moved up a stone stairway. It was dark in there. Far above us, we heard a shot from a Mauser. The bolt action was reloaded, then another shot was fired off quickly. The crack of the German gun echoed off the centuries-old stone walls. We listened motionlessly. No doubt about it, there was just one sharpshooter patiently picking off targets from his deadly vantage point above us. We had to put him out of commission.

  We split up and quickly made it to the rooftop. We heard the sniper's running footsteps. There was silence. Bullets caromed off the stone walls, one grazing the sergeant's helmet. We finally trapped the Nazi sniper. One of our men jumped him as he was jamming another round into the Mauser's chamber. Hell, he was just a kid, not more than ten years old!

  The boy wore a Hitlerjugend armband with a swastika. His eyes were filled with murder. He screamed at us that he was a soldier and not afraid to die for Hitler and the Reich. The sergeant knocked him down with a slap. The boy jumped up and went for the sergeant, who cuffed him again, this time harder. His mouth bleeding, the boy got up again, ready to charge. The kid had guts.

  "What do we do with the little sonofabitch?" asked a dogface.

  "Shoot him," answered the sergeant.

  "He's just a goddamn kid," I said.

  "We're supposed to kill any bastard that kills us," said another doggie.

  The boy had put a bullet in Switkolski and would have gladly shot me, too. But nobody wanted to shoot a child, even if he was a Nazi.

  `Heil Hitler!"yelled the boy.

  "That's enough of this crap," said the sergeant.

  We shrugged. Nobody would pull a trigger. Disgusted, the sergeant lifted his rifle, took off the safety, and aimed it at the boy's chest. The boy stood as erect as he could, proud to be executed like a German soldier. The sergeant paused, then mumbled a curse to himself and put the rifle down. He grabbed the boy by the scruff of his uniform and pulled his pants down to his knees. The boy screamed like a pig on his way to slaughter and struggled furiously. The sergeant sat down and tore off the boy's underpants, exposing his bare ass. With the kid imprisoned across his lap, the sergeant began spanking that little ass with his big hand. The boy exploded in rage, demanding to be treated like a soldier. Ignoring his pleas, the sergeant whacked away at the kid's ass until his two little cheeks began to show welts. Suddenly the little sonofabitch began to cry.

  Petty gibble-gabble about the end of the war, or the approach of the end, was a pain in the neck. I drew this to poke fun at GIs who were tempted to let their guard down. Every minute of every day was another chance to die.

  "Papi! Papi! Papi!" he screamed, now nothing more than a child being spanked by his father for having been naughty. We stood there, mouths agape, observing the heart-wrenching scene. An end to the monumental struggle with the Nazis could not be far off. All that would be left of Hitler's thousand-year Reich was a river of children's tears.

  Falkenau

  21

  By the end of April 1945, we'd advanced all the way into the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Six years earlier, on March 15, 1939, the Nazis had marched into the Sudetenland and dissolved Czechoslovakia, making it a German protectorate. The pretense was that the Czechs discriminated against people with a German background. In Sudetenland, Hitler had first shown his true colors as an empire-building, nation-crushing tyrant. Nobody discouraged Nazi aggression at the time. Now the war to stop Hitler had come full circle, back to its birthplace.

  Our ultimate objective on this drive was Karlsbad, squeezing the Nazis between our advance and the Russians moving westward. Berlin fell. German armies in Denmark, Holland, and the North surrendered. Still the enemy held out in Czechoslovakia. If the Nazis wouldn't give up, we'd compel them to fight. On May 6, we were moving from the town of Eger toward Falkenau, a distance of about thirty kilomete
rs, when enemy antitank guns knocked out four of our tanks. The regiment suffered fifty-one casualties before nightfall. The next morning, the assault was resumed. Our commanding officer, General Clift Andrus, sent an urgent order from HQ to "cease all forward movement." The minutes ground away while we waited to hear about the definitive German capitulation. Word finally came down a couple hours later that the Germans had signed a formal surrender and were attempting to communicate with their troops in Czechoslovakia and Austria to order them to stop fighting. The ceasefire of May 7 was universal.

  We moved into Falkenau that night and were slapped hard in the face, first by hordes of Germans streaming into town from Karlsbad, fleeing the Russians in order to surrender to the Americans. There were thousands of soldiers, many accompanied by their wives and children. More than fortyfive thousand POWs moved through Falkenau in the next three days, creating the monumental job of handling all those people. The most profound shock awaited us as we entered the front gate of the Falkenau concentration camp only a few thousand yards from the town, surrounded by barbed wire barriers. Between the camp's two main watchtowers, there was an ominous sign that said KONZENTRATIONSLAGER FALKENAU.

  There were a few die-hard SS at the camp who didn't know the war was over. They fired at us, then tried to make a break for it in a command car. One of our doggies hit the car with a bazooka, ending their escape in a flaming mushroom of fire and smoke. We ran down the remaining Nazis and disarmed them. Then we discovered the horrible truth about the camp. In the barracks were men and women with hollow eyes, unable to move their emaciated bodies. They'd been tortured, beaten, and experimented upon. In another building were corpses thrown on top of each other like old newspapers. A few of them weren't corpses yet. Like zombies, they raised their bald heads and looked at us, eyes sunken in anguish, their mouths agape, a hand here and there reaching out, grasping for anything, begging us for assistance in helpless silence.

  What had been happening in that concentration camp was beyond belief, beyond our darkest nightmares. We were overwhelmed to come face-to-face with all the carnage. I still tremble to remember those images of the living hunkered down with the dead. The stench of rotting bodies welled up in your face and made you want to stop breathing. In one building, we plopped down behind a white mound to take cover from any last Nazi defenders. It was only then that I realized that the mound was a heap of human teeth wrenched from the camp's victims. Farther over were heaps of toothbrushes, eyeglasses, and shaving brushes. Even more appalling was a smaller hill of artificial limbs. In a hut against one of the camp's walls was a pile of naked corpses stacked up like firewood.

  One final vision of horror awaited us: the crematorium. When we burst into that building, smoke from the grenades we'd thrown through the windows filled the room. It was silent now. The row of steel doors to the ovens stretched in front of us. I stared at the ovens and then looked into the first one. When I saw the remains of the cremated bodies in there, I couldn't control my revulsion. I vomited. I wanted out of there at any cost, but I couldn't stop myself from looking into the second oven, then the third, mesmerized by the impossible. For Chrissakes, people had actually been cooked in those ovens! The incontrovertible proof lay right in front of my own eyes.

  One of our soldiers, a doggie we affectionately called Weasel, checked inside the fourth oven. Staring back at Weasel were the frightened eyes of an SS who'd crawled in there backward to hide among the charred corpses. The Schmeisser in the Nazi's hands was useless, for he was frozen with fear. From basic training throughout the war, Weasel always had a problem with killing. Pulling the trigger on his Mi was the hardest thing in the world. At that moment, however, he was so overcome with loathing that he fired point-blank between the eyes of the SS. Again and again, he pulled the trigger, emptying his clip. Then he jammed in another clip and emptied that one too. Wordlessly, we walked out of the crematorium as stiff as mummies, pressing handkerchiefs to our mouths and noses, trying to come to terms with the stench and revulsion.

  The realization of what the SS had been doing to the inmates of the Falkenau camp was too much to bear. We found pictures of naked women chased by ferocious dogs running past grinning SS guards. They were perverse murderers, killing innocent civilians, a tragic mix of Jews, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and antifascist Germans.

  The SS we'd rounded up at the camp immediately began denouncing each other. In defeat, the entire Nazi mentality-their grand philosophy of courage, loyalty, and Aryan superiority-turned to mush. I rarely saw soldiers behave that way. If only Hitler could have been there to watch his beloved SS turn on each other. Goebbels wouldn't shake hands with Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics because his superrace was superior. How I wished Goebbels could see his superrace in defeat, livid with fear, ready to sell out Hitler and each other. They were like vicious, cornered animals.

  The medics arrived right away with food, medicine, and blood, trying to save as many lives as possible. We went back into the barracks full of undernourished inmates and separated the living from the dead. The survivors had macabre hands and bony arms with tattooed numbers, an Edgar Allan Poe tale come to life. We had to work with rags over our noses because the stench from the piles of corpses made you retch involuntarily. When we carried out a featherweight survivor, it was like cradling an infant. The forced labor and malnutrition would take a terrible toll. We were liberating them. But there was no way of saving them. Very few would survive. They were only free to die.

  The town of Falkenau was a respectable community with upstanding townspeople living in clean homes with flower boxes on their windows. It didn't seem possible that just over the hill were hundreds of miserable people in subhuman conditions who had only two ways out. Quickly, in a gas chamber. Or slowly, by disease and starvation.

  The commander of our battalion, Captain Kimble R. Richmond, took a squad into Falkenau and rounded up the mayor, the butcher, the baker, and other respected townspeople. He wanted to know how the hell they could go about their everyday lives while people were dying in the nearby camp. Every one of them swore that they didn't have any idea of what was going on in the Konzentrationslager. Most said they were against Hitler. Captain Richmond was disgusted. We'd learned to doubt the avowals from civilians throughout our campaign. Every Arab in North Africa claimed he was anti-Nazi. Every Frenchman swore allegiance to the Free French. Sicilians hated Mussolini. Belgians hated Hitler. We'd discover, as expected, more and more Germans who'd never been members of the Nazi Party.

  Captain Richmond ordered a delegation of townspeople to appear at the gates of the camp the next morning or face a firing squad. Richmond was going to make sure that these people found out what had been happening only a few steps from their front doors. That evening I was called to the battalion CP. Richmond and I had a good relationship ever since he'd been slightly wounded by a Nazi bullet that had punctured his steel helmet. When he came out of the clinic, he was looking everywhere for his helmet. He considered it his good luck charm. I was the one who'd been keeping it for him.

  "Sonofabitch," said Captain Richmond, smiling as I gave him the helmet with the bullet hole, "if you want a helmet like this, Fuller, you'll have to get shot at!"

  Richmond knew my mother had sent me a handheld Bell & Howell 16mm movie camera. The captain wanted me to position myself the next day on a wall overlooking the concentration camp to film the gruesome spectacle. I was about to make my first movie.

  I started shooting footage of Captain Richmond giving the upstanding citizens of Falkenau his orders. They were to prepare the camp's victims for a decent funeral, then take them to the burial site on a wagon. That way, they could never say again that they didn't know what was happening in their own backyard. I filmed a couple dozen corpses being taken out of that putrid hut against the camp's wall and laid out one by one, wrapped in white sheets on the ground, then piled on the wagon. When the wagon was full of corpses, the townspeople pushed it out of the camp to the specially prepared burial site. POWs,
mostly teenage Hitlerjugend, helped place the shrouded corpses in a mass grave. One of our chaplains said a brief prayer. Earth was then shoveled into the mass grave. As paltry a consolation as it was, these Nazi victims were buried with dignity.

  My twenty minutes of 16-mm film had recorded the sober reckoning of those civilians. The spectacle was heart-wrenching, leaving me numb. I'd recorded evidence of man's indescribable cruelty, a reality that the perpetrators might try to deny. However, a motion-picture camera doesn't lie. When I finally got home, in the fall of 1945, I put that footage away and never took it out again. It would be too painful to watch, bringing back all the horrors of the war years. Those twenty minutes were a testament to the victims at Falkenau and to all the millions of people who died in Nazi death camps.

  On a final inspection of the camp's buildings, our sergeant heard a moan behind a pile of worn clothing. He whirled and almost shot the ghastly girl who slowly raised her head. Her black and sunken eyes were frightened. She seemed about eighteen because she was so fragile and gaunt. She could have been younger or older. The sergeant picked up the young girl in his arms and carried her to the SS commandant's ex-quarters.

  Over the next days, as we bivouacked nearby and medical teams tried to save the camp's survivors, the sergeant nursed the young woman back from the threshold of death. He fed her C-rations, then convinced the regimental surgeon to dig up some milk, vegetables, and fruit for her. He even got her a steak. There was a music box in the SS command post. He gave it to her. The young woman was too weak to even speak. Gradually she began to take on a little color in her cheeks. She listened to the music box all day long and sometimes managed to smile. We'd never seen the sergeant so happy. He couldn't accept the fact that his young charge was too sick to survive. "I'm so tired of killing people," he said. "I'd like to keep one alive."