1944

by Jay Winik

  A plea had gone out for all available medics, doctors, and nurses; but by now, getting such help was nearly an academic question: only a few survivors remained. Some of these fortunate ones had eluded their captors by hiding in their bunks. A few more had fled into the surrounding woods during the evacuation—incidentally, vindicating the WRB’s contention that bombing the camps would have allowed prisoners to escape. The rest had been loaded onto trucks and driven deeper into Germany, to another camp. The weakest, too weak to move, were the ones who had been gunned down on the parade ground. “They didn’t want them to be liberated,” explained the American GI, “even at the end.”

  Ohrdruf was the first Nazi camp inside Germany to be liberated by the Allies.

  So many upturned, unrecognizable faces. So much sorrow.

  Three American generals, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley, heroes of D-Day, came to visit the camp on the morning of April 12, 1945. Patton would write in his diary about what lay on the other side of the door to the woodshed: “A pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purposes of removing the stench.” Eisenhower himself recalled that Patton became physically ill—the famed general vomited after seeing all the dead—and could not bring himself to visit the punishment shed. Both generals did visit the pit where the bodies were burned. Patton described gazing on what he called a “mammoth griddle” consisting of railway tracks laid on brick foundations, where the Germans had attempted to burn the bodies of hundreds of the dead, pouring pitch on top of them and lighting fires below. “They were not very successful in their operations,” he grimly noted, “because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.” Bradley, having seen more than his share of casualties, was dumbstruck. He said later, “The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Lice crawled over the yellowed skin of their sharp, bony frames.”

  Among the things the generals saw as they walked through the camp was a butcher block where jaws had been smashed to remove gold fillings.

  And Ohrdruf was only a satellite camp. It had no gas chamber, no crematorium. The main camp at Buchenwald, liberated on April 11, had far more horrors, including shrunken heads and ashtrays cut from human bone. When the first American troops arrived there, in tanks coming up a dirt road, they expected a firefight with the Germans. The tanks blasted through two layers of barbed-wire fences, felt the electric charge, and rolled toward a cluster of buildings on a hill. The first clear image nineteen-year-old Private First Class Harry Hedger had was of “a monster of a chimney.” It was still smoking. “Black smoke was pouring out of it, and blowing away from us, but we could still smell it. An ugly horrible smell. A vicious smell.” The tanks came to a halt and the men jumped off, ready to flatten themselves on the ground and start firing. Then they saw a group of ragged human beings starting “to creep out of and from between the buildings in front of us.” Hedger remembered a uniform of “horribly coarse cloth,” striped in alternating lines of dull gray and dark blue.

  In weak, parched voices, some asked, “Are you American?”

  Hedger was sent off to guard the fence line and told not to let anyone in or out. When Hedger’s sergeant returned, he said in a very quiet tone that this was “what was called a ‘concentration camp,’ that we were about to see things we were in no way prepared for. He told us to look as long as our stomachs lasted, and then to get out of there for a walk in the woods.” Hedger added, “I didn’t understand, but I was about to learn.” On the entrance gate was a heavy wooden beam, carved in German script with the three words “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Hedger and his fellow soldiers saw, stacked like matchsticks, bodies that had turned a dirty gray-green color. Nearby was a long two-story building. Inside, it was still warm.

  They saw heavy metal trays pulled out of iron doors arranged row by row in a brick wall. And on the trays were partially burned bodies, three to a tray. “Three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays—and the Germans still couldn’t keep up.”

  Then they found the bunks inside buildings that looked like large barns, where hundreds of people were sleeping in one building. Living corpses wedged together stared at them aimlessly, lifelessly, out of sunken eyes. Hedger looked at the bunks and thought of the bodies and asked himself, “Where did the Germans get them all?”

  FOR HIS PART, AT the liberation of Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel remembers throwing himself onto whatever food he could find. The prisoners were so beaten down by the Nazis that “that’s all we thought about. No thought of revenge or of our parents. Only of bread.”

  AFTER HIS VISIT EISENHOWER sent around a memo asking for all nearby units not on the front lines to be taken to see Ohrdruf. A distraught Patton, after bellowing “See what these bastards did!,” made his own inspection of Buchenwald; he then ordered the mayor of the nearby town of Weimar and every citizen who remained to go through Buchenwald and see what the German people were responsible for. None of the dead were to be buried until the townspeople had come. After visiting the camp, with Buchenwald’s gates still visible behind them, some of the Germans began laughing. Bristling with anger, the American officer in charge made each of them turn around and go through the camp again, walking from building to building, much more slowly. This time it had an effect. “The next day,” Hedger recalled, “we heard that after returning to their town, the mayor of Weimar and his wife both committed suicide.”

  Eisenhower ordered careful documentation of the atrocities perpetrated in the Nazi camps, then called Winston Churchill to describe what he had witnessed. Graphic photographs followed in a special dispatch to London. Churchill, who had long before just about anyone appreciated the monstrosity of the Nazi Holocaust, sent the images to each member of his cabinet.

  But as night fell in Germany on April 12, the general could no longer cable his president to tell what he had seen.

  ON APRIL 9, ROOSEVELT rode the eighty-five miles to Macon, Georgia, to see Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, and she accompanied him back to Warm Springs. The next day, Dr. Bruenn reported that Roosevelt’s color was “much better” and noted that his appetite was “very good,” adding that the president requested “double helpings of food.” But on April 11, when Henry Morgenthau dropped in for dinner, he was decidedly stunned by what he saw. He described Roosevelt as “very haggard,” and noted how his hands shook so that he started to knock over the glasses. “I had to hold each glass,” he added, “as he poured out the cocktail.” Roosevelt’s memory was clouded and he frequently confused names. And Morgenthau was particularly struck by how much difficulty the president had transferring himself from his wheelchair to a regular chair, writing, “I was in agony watching him.”

  The following morning, while Auschwitz overlord Adolf Eichmann was strutting about visiting Theresienstadt one last time, and American bombers were murderously strafing Schweinfurt at will, Roosevelt complained of a slight headache and some stiffness in his neck. Bruenn gave the president a light massage. A friend of Lucy Mercer’s, a painter named Elizabeth Shoumatoff who had come to do a portrait of the president, noticed Roosevelt’s high color, in contrast to his usual gray pallor, late that morning. The flush in his face was actually an ominous warning. At 1:15 in the afternoon of April 12, Franklin Roosevelt raised his hand to his head and said, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.” He slumped over, never to awake again. “The heavy breathing which I heard as soon as I entered the cottage told the story,” wrote Hassett shortly afterward. When he entered Roosevelt’s bedroom, “His eyes were closed—mouth open—the awful breathing . . .” At just past 3:30, Roosevelt ceased to draw breath. Dr. Bruenn tried artificial respiration, a caffeine–sodium benzoate injection, and finally adrenaline injected directly into the heart, but to no effect. At 3:35, President Franklin
Roosevelt was pronounced dead.

  HOURS LATER, WHILE THE news flashed across telegraph wires, and a stunned Harry Truman prepared to take the oath of office, and Eleanor Roosevelt headed to Warm Springs to accompany her husband’s body home, a trainload of 109 Jews left the Vienna station for the camp at Theresienstadt. It was to be the last official Nazi deportation by Eichmann’s department. Days later, the Gestapo would hang twenty Jewish children in the basement of the Damn school in Hamburg.

  On April 14, as hastily arranged funeral rites were being conducted in the East Room of the White House, American troops found a cremation pit for the dead inside another Nazi subcamp; its logs were still burning. And on April 15, the same day that Franklin Roosevelt was to be laid to rest in the rose garden at Hyde Park, American troops entered the Nordhausen camp, while a contingent of British entered the camp at Bergen-Belsen. Ten thousand exposed bodies awaited them. In the bunks, lying amid filth, the dead and the dying were nearly impossible to tell apart. A British colonel described how men and women collapsed “as they walked and fell dead.” Inside the “verminous and stinking barracks,” doctors “marked a red cross on the foreheads of those they thought had a chance of surviving.” Three hundred died each day the first week. After that, for several weeks, some sixty or more died each day. American GIs, trying to be helpful, handed out chocolate bars to the emaciated survivors; but the chocolate was too rich for their systems, and many died as a result. The soldiers also gave away cigarettes. The inmates ate them rather than smoked them.

  One Allied soldier, Peter Coombs, staring at open graves and a “carpet of dead bodies,” wrote to his wife: “I saw their corpses lying near their hovels, for they crawl or totter out into the sunlight to die. I watched them make their last feeble journeys, and even as I watched, they died. . . . Their end is too inescapable, they are too far gone to be brought back to life. . . . Belsen is a living death . . . and if it is ever necessary, an undoubted answer to those who want to know what we have been fighting for.”

  What we have been fighting for. Those words must have echoed like an antiphon. Indeed, however ravenous the inmates were for food, they were equally ravenous for the Americans. Wherever the Americans arrived, the triumphant scenes were the same, scenes reminiscent of a moment forever frozen in time, Abraham Lincoln being deliriously surrounded by a flock of jubilant former slaves as he came into Richmond at the end of the Civil War in April 1865. J. D. Pletcher of the Seventy-first Division, who helped liberate Gunskirchen Lager (camp), said: “Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans, and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms—perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn’t walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldn’t even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans.”

  The arrival of the Americans was on the lips of every inmate. As for the liberators themselves? Pletcher, like Coombs, observed, “I finally knew what I was fighting for, what the war was all about.”

  THE FUNERAL WREATHS HAD faded and been carried off. Eleanor had originally requested no flowers, but they arrived anyway, first at the White House and then at Hyde Park. In the garden now, the grass was greening and the roses were leafing out. Within weeks, the first buds would swell, and one by one the blooms would open. Around it all was a high evergreen hedge, tempering the breeze. Franklin Roosevelt was finally to be at rest.

  The outpouring of grief had been immediate. It came from Allies abroad and political opponents at home. Stock trading was stopped, baseball games were canceled, church bells rang. Across the fields of Europe, even battle-hardened soldiers wept. For many, too many to count, this was the saddest day of their lives. Hundreds of thousands stood, heads bowed, lining the tracks as the presidential train bearing Roosevelt’s casket made the eight-hundred-mile journey from Warm Springs to Washington. Under the velvety sky, all along the route mourners gathered, watching in stunned silence. They watched, their eyes welling with tears. They watched, clasping hands and quiet. They watched from farms and planting fields and cities, standing mute and still, while bonfires were lit, and the train slowly glided by, like a ghost. Finally it entered Washington.

  As the funeral procession crawled down Constitution Avenue to Eighteenth Street, eventually making its way to the White House, army air force airplanes flew overhead and throngs sobbed. There was a simple service in the East Room—it began with “Faith of our Fathers,” a magnificent hymn the president had loved—and closed with his historic words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Then his body was taken to his beloved Hyde Park, where the sky was a radiant blue, where white lilacs were in bloom, and where the birds were singing. It was a moment of gallantry and reflection. Cannons boomed and army cadets fired three volleys into the air. Finally, the Reverend George Anthony intoned: “We commit his body to the ground. Earth to earth, dust to dust.”

  Once his body was laid to rest, however, the mourning in official Washington was brief. The Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson recalled riding back on the funeral train from Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon, following Roosevelt’s interment. “There was much rushing about by those who had political axes to grind. The subdued tone of the train changed considerably on the return trip,” he noted, adding an understatement: “The loyalties of politicians shift quickly.” Harry Truman was now president, and abroad there was still a war to win.

  It took five days of bitter fighting before Nuremberg eventually fell to Patton’s troops on April 21. At this stage, Eisenhower remarked that the Germans had seen enough of the Allied explosives “to last them for a century.” Then, by April 25, Berlin was cut off. Brazenly, for they were among the most despicable of the Nazis, Himmler and Göring both attempted to arrange an armistice with the western Allies. Hitler ordered both men stripped of their offices. German troops now began to calculate their field positions, hoping to be able to surrender to the Americans rather than to a Russian army thirsting for Nazi blood.

  On April 28, the night sky was a fiery red from the bombardment in Berlin. Hitler’s bunker came under direct assault from Soviet artillery. Shells rained down, and the walls and ceilings shuddered under the explosions. The next morning, the Führer ordered cyanide capsules to be distributed to his staff and administered to his beloved dog, Blondi. After shaking hands with each of his aides, reassuring them, he dictated a final political message appointing his successors and denouncing “Jewry” one last time. Then he hurriedly married Eva Braun. Now came word that there were no more Nazi tanks and the Germans were nearly out of bullets. At best, they could hold off the Soviets for twenty-four hours more.

  Hitler’s final action was, predictably, a suicide pact. By 3:30 in the afternoon on April 30, Eva Braun, sprawled on a sofa, swallowed poison and Adolf Hitler had bitten down on a cyanide capsule and simultaneously pulled the trigger of his pistol, shooting himself in the mouth. By coincidence, he died at nearly the same time of day as Roosevelt. And in a gruesome twist, upon the Führer’s wishes, his and Eva’s bodies were taken into the courtyard, doused with gasoline, and set aflame, the fire eating its way through their flesh and bone just as it had done to Hitler’s millions of victims in crematoriums or open pits.

  The following day, a German general who could speak Russian ventured out, holding a white flag. But he was not authorized to agree to unconditional surrender. Fighting continued until the ammunition was all but spent. Goebbels and his wife poisoned their children and then committed suicide as the Berlin garrison was handed over, unconditionally, to the Soviets. By this stage, as a lone Russian soldier waved the hammer-and-sickle flag over the roof of the Reichstag, the city lay largely in ruins. The Red Army had suffered 300,000 casualties. The civilians of Berlin had suffered 125,000 casualties. And those figures did not begin to capture all the losses.

  When a group of Russian soldiers stum
bled upon small, isolated handfuls of Jews surviving in Berlin, one soldier insisted that it “was not possible” that they were still alive. Staring through clouded eyes, these last few survivors, bedridden or on the verge of death, asked why not. In his awkward, fragmented German, the aghast Russian replied: “Nichts Juden. Juden kaput”—“You can’t be Jews. The Jews are all dead.”

  The unconditional surrender of all German forces was finalized on May 7 and, to great fanfare, VE Day (“Victory in Europe”) was formally announced the next day at a modest schoolhouse in Reims. Almost at once, the people of Moscow, whether in pajamas or fur coats, swarmed into Red Square, and the huge crowd roared, “Long live the great Americans!” The entire world was ecstatic: London, Paris, New York, Ankara, Brussels. And all across America, from Wall Street to Washington, Los Angeles to Chicago, confetti rained down, cannons boomed, and people poured into the streets, cheering and dancing and lingering deliriously for hours. Churchill pronounced the celebration “the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.” It was.

  Here, then, were the fruits of 1944.

  Yet it was not until May 15, 1945, in Yugoslavia, that the last of the German troops silenced their weapons. The war in the Pacific would not end until mid-August, with the dropping of the world-changing atomic weapons that Franklin Roosevelt had championed.

  A WEARY ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD lived to learn of the moving surrender at Appomattox. Franklin Roosevelt did not live to see the fall of Berlin or of Japan. Still, he knew each was coming. His eyes were fixed, as they had been almost since the first bombs fell and the first shots were fired, on the peace to follow. It was an extraordinary vision. Among his final words, an address he wrote for Jefferson Day that he would never give, he stated that “mere conquest of our enemies is not enough.” He did not want just “an end to this war,” he wanted “an end to the beginnings of all wars.” With the body count of World War II amounting to an estimated 36 million—19 million of them civilians—Roosevelt’s sentiment is understandable. Like many humanitarians before him, like many after, he wanted “an abiding peace.”