Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  As the soldiers distributed food, army medical personnel went around warning prisoners to start with only small amounts at first, as overeating can stress the digestive system, pancreas, and liver after a near-starvation diet. Unfortunately, not everyone showed such restraint, and some survivors died from overeating in the first few days.

  Stephan took down the symptoms of the various illnesses and diseases that the inmates described to him—typhus, contracted from a lice-borne bacteria, was a major killer—which he relayed to army doctors so they would know what treatments and medications were needed.

  The next day, Stephan and a group of soldiers took several empty 2.5-ton army trucks into the nearest town, Weimar, seven miles away. Finding the town’s mayor, he told him they required a hundred men to come out with them immediately to start cleaning up the camp and burying the dead. Stephan said they would need another hundred civilians the next day and every day after that until the work was done. When the mayor started to object, Stephan cut him off.

  He repeated, “Hundert jeden Tag.” (One hundred every day.)

  The first hundred townsmen were loaded into the army trucks and driven to the camp. When they arrived and stepped from the trucks, they stared with blank expressions at the surroundings and gaunt inmates. Then, as if they were a chorus demanding absolution, they began denying responsibility.

  “Wir wussten nicht.” (We didn’t know.)

  “Niemand sagte uns.” (No one told us.)

  Stephan had no patience for the denials. How could these people not know that such inhumanity was occurring in their own backyard? How could they not have noticed the odor of the dead and dying that filled the countryside and the dark smoke that spiraled from the towering chimney above the crematorium? How could they have lived so close and been oblivious for so long?

  Liberated inmates at Buchenwald stare out from their wooden bunks. Future Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel is pictured in the second row of bunks, seventh from the left, next to the vertical beam. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

  The one hundred locals continued to arrive each day, and they took their orders from Stephan and the other Ritchie Boys. For the most part, Stephan was able to control his feelings, although not always.

  “Der Geruch ist schrecklich,” said one man, complaining that the smell was awful as he helped drag corpses to a mass burial pit.

  Breathe deep, you bastard! Stephan wanted to scream. It is you with your blind obedience to authority that caused this.

  A few of the locals seemed genuinely moved by the pitiful scenes. One older man, wiping his tears as he spoke, told Stephan he knew there were prisoners being detained at Buchenwald, but that was all he knew and he had never imagined this. Stephan had been trained to look for the obvious signs of lying, and this old man did not have the darting eyes or twitchy expressions of a liar. Stephan believed what he was saying, even if he knew the man should have known what was happening so nearby.

  On April 12, elements of the 80th Infantry Division arrived to take control of the camp and start evacuating the liberated prisoners. Several journalists arrived with them, including Edward R. Murrow. His live CBS radio broadcast from Buchenwald became one of his most famous: “I asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled eighty horses. There were twelve hundred men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.”

  The 6th was soon back on the move eastward to capture more towns and bridges in their last battles and deepest thrust into Germany. As he left Buchenwald behind, Stephan was haunted by the reality that the end of the Third Reich was not coming soon enough for so many. He was also aware that it was a miracle his father had lived to make his way to America, and that he hadn’t died in a camp like Buchenwald.

  Stephan Lewy had a strong sense that his father’s decision to send him out of Germany in the summer of 1939 and into the care of the Jewish Rescue Organization in France had likely saved him from a similar fate.

  Guy Stern came to Buchenwald three days after its liberation. First Army headquarters was now at Bad Hersfeld, ninety miles to the west, and there was no military reason to make the trip, but Guy went with several members of his IPW team, including Captain Kann. He felt that he had to.

  As they had advanced farther into Germany, they had been interrogating more prisoners who had served as guards at different concentration camps. During his sessions with them, Guy had found individual Third Reich soldiers unwilling or unable to see the enormity of what they had done or accept any responsibility. They all claimed to have been lowly functionaries only following orders. In the aggregate, they had no conscience about what they had done. Now Guy was to see German barbarism with his own eyes.

  They parked their jeep outside Buchenwald’s main gate and walked right in. Guy was instantly struck by the faces of the inmates: loose-hanging skin and slack jaws not unlike the look he had seen on dead soldiers. Even though this is what he had expected to see, nothing could prepare him for the real thing. Many of the liberated prisoners appeared to be more dead than alive, and yet they were all welcoming and thankful and eager to hug anyone in a U.S. Army uniform.

  Large containers of fresh drinking water had been set up around the camp. Inmates who were unaccustomed to abundant water clustered around them, drinking from tin cups that had been passed out. A short distance away, one man found old habits hard to break, and he bent over to drink from a muddy puddle, as he had surely done many times before. A GI placed a hand under the man’s arm and brought him up, pointing to a container of fresh water. The inmate hobbled over to get a drink.

  Guy noticed that many of the newly freed men still cowered and looked around furtively, as if they expected to see SS guards ready to pounce. When Guy stopped to speak to one group of survivors, another inmate standing nearby started loudly berating his fellow survivors for not coming to attention when speaking to the American soldier, as the Germans had required them to do or be viciously beaten. Being liberated did not mean sudden freedom from the habits enforced and traumas inflicted by their recent enslavers. Guy could see that some of those habits and traumas would fade slowly, if at all.

  Guy saw a U.S. Army doctor he had met when he was interrogating wounded German soldiers at a field hospital in France. Guy was struck by how clean and pressed the doctor’s uniform was, even in the middle of Buchenwald. The doctor spoke a little German, and he was cautioning one of the concentration camp survivors who couldn’t stop himself from eating too much too quickly. He was telling the man that overeating right now was dangerous.

  Small bites, he counseled. You can come back for more later.

  The doctor placed his arm around the man, who still wore his filthy prison clothes, and gently led him away from the food. When Guy saw the doctor a short time later, he asked the question he had been mulling over in his mind since they arrived: What were these men’s chances of regaining their health?

  “Well, Sergeant, I can’t give you statistics,” said the doctor, “but a good many won’t make it. Even with the food, water, and medicine we’ve brought in, it’s already too late for some. I’m afraid they’ll be joining the ranks of the dead, and there’s not a damn thing we can do for them.”

  Guy saw groups of German civilians carting remains and placing them on the mounds of naked bodies so decomposed they were falling apart. Overwrought, he could not hold back tears.

  Next to him, the master sergeant of the First Army’s MP company was taking in the same macabre scene. They had been together since Omaha Beach. Master Sergeant Hadley was a beefy, corn-fed Midwestern Protestant from Steubenville, Ohio; he was a disciplinarian with his men and never gave quarter to them or the prisoners in the cage.

  Guy started to step back, not wanting Hadley to see him crying. But then he saw that the tough MP sergeant had turned awa
y and raised a forearm to cover his eyes. Sergeant Hadley was bawling like a baby.

  The camp was crowded with U.S. Army personnel, and more medicine, food, clothing, and other supplies were arriving hourly. Later that day, Guy and the other interrogators left to return to their duties at headquarters. They sat mostly silent during the drive back, all stuck in their own thoughts and feelings.

  For Guy, seeing Buchenwald, the first and last concentration camp he would ever set foot inside, was traumatizing. When his parents saw him off on the SS Hamburg to America in 1937, he believed in his heart that he would see them again, along with his brother and sister. The plan had been for him to settle in St. Louis and find someone to sign their affidavits so they could join him in the United States. For Guy, that expectation had tempered the sadness of saying good-bye. Of course, nothing had gone as they had planned, and yet in the years since his mother’s last letter in 1942 from the Warsaw ghetto, he kept alive the hope that his family would find a way to survive, and that once the war was over they would all be reunited.

  But what he saw at Buchenwald ripped at his heart and took away what hope remained.

  On April 28, 1945, the night before his twenty-first birthday, Manny Steinfeld left 82nd Airborne headquarters to join a late-night patrol across the Elbe River in northern Germany. The mission was to capture some enemy prisoners to interrogate before the division crossed the Elbe in force. On the way to meet the patrol, Manny’s jeep got a flat tire, and he was delayed by an hour while changing it. The flat tire turned out to be an early birthday present for him.

  By the time Manny arrived, the patrol, consisting of eight troopers and a lieutenant, had already pushed off at 10 P.M. as planned, paddling flat-bottomed assault boats across more than four hundred yards of open water. Everything was quiet until they were within fifteen yards of the opposite shore, when they were hit by heavy enemy machine gun fire. The canvas boats were ripped apart and only two survivors were able to swim back to safety.

  At a time like this, these were the worst kind of losses for a veteran outfit like the 82nd, as everyone knew the war was winding down and no one wanted to be counted among its final casualties. The men who had been with the division the longest had made four combat jumps and fought in five campaigns. So far, they had bucked the law of averages, but they knew the longer they were exposed to fighting, the more likely it was that the odds would catch up with them. After everything they had been through, getting killed or maimed now just didn’t seem fair.

  On April 30, the same day Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker as Soviet forces approached the outskirts of Berlin, the 82nd Airborne crossed the Elbe at four places near Bleckede and established a bridgehead against moderate resistance. Under orders from General Eisenhower to make a fast and furious advance toward the Soviets in order to keep them from advancing too far to the west and gobbling up too much territory by war’s end, the paratroopers pushed thirty-six miles the first day. Along the way, they took six hundred German prisoners, many of whom by this time were no longer interested in fighting or dying for Hitler or the Fatherland.

  By the afternoon of May 2, division headquarters was located in the charming town of Ludwigslust, fifty miles east of the Elbe. Standing outside the eighteenth-century Palace of Ludwigslust, which would serve as his last and most opulent command post of the war, General Gavin, in a parachute jumpsuit faded from three years of war and carrying his omnipresent M1 rifle over his shoulder, looked like any other GI but for the two stars on his collar.

  That afternoon, a trooper reported to him that a German officer under a white flag was looking for the U.S. general in charge. Escorted over to Gavin, the Wehrmacht staff officer said he represented General Kurt von Tippelskirch, commander of the 21st German Army Group, who was ready to surrender. A meeting was set for that evening at the palace, located in the middle of a vast garden and English-style park with canals, fountains, and artificial cascades.

  For the rest of the day, large numbers of German soldiers came out of the woods and milled about on the roads. As the hours passed, their numbers increased. Ordered by the Americans to throw away their weapons and start walking to the rear, a long procession of defeated Germans moved westward, heading back toward the Elbe.

  Manny was summoned for the surrender meeting.

  When the appointed hour came, the scene could not have been a starker contrast from the devastation of the war across all of Europe. The formal surrender was carried out in a high-ceilinged room that had quilted silk wall coverings, sparkling chandeliers, and life-sized oil paintings of former residents hung on the walls. General von Tippelskirch was resplendent in a full-length leather coat, belted at the waist. With a cool and proper manner, he offered to surrender if he could keep his army where it now stood and if Gavin would tell the Soviets to cease their attacks from the east. Gavin replied that he had no control over what the Russians would do. Either von Tippelskirch would surrender unconditionally so his men could walk unarmed toward the rear through U.S. forces to the west—or the 82nd Airborne would continue to fight his army and push them eastward, thereby cornering von Tippelskirch’s remaining forces, some of whom would surely fall to the Soviets. Clear that he would rather surrender to the Americans than the Soviets, the German general agreed to the terms. Gavin dictated a surrender document, which was typed up while everyone waited. In an adjacent room, Manny worked on the German translation, which he added to the document underneath the paragraph in English, which read:

  LUDWIGSLUST, GERMANY

  2 MAY 1945

  I, Lieutenant General von Tippelskirch, Commanding General of 21st German Army, hereby unconditionally surrender the 21st German Army, and all of its attachments and equipment and appurtenances thereto, to the Commanding General of the 82nd Airborne Division, United States Army.

  On that day—one “without precedent in American military history,” Gavin later observed—an army group comprising 150,000 troops with all its tanks, vehicles, artillery, assorted equipment, and small arms, surrendered to a single division less than one-tenth its strength.

  Since Manny knew some Russian—he had been required to study it when the army sent him to college in 1943—Gavin had him go with the division’s recon platoon the next morning as it headed east to make contact with the Soviet army. It was a hair-raising ride in a few vehicles that sped past German troops who the Americans hoped had gotten word of their army’s surrender. If they hadn’t, the U.S. vehicles would be easy targets. When they drove into an abandoned area that appeared to be no-man’s-land between the retreating Germans and the advancing Russians, the only evidence of war was piles of discarded German weapons left in the ditches next to the road.

  At approximately 10:25 A.M. on May 3, the forward units of the two great Allied armies that had defeated the German army on the eastern and western fronts met in the town of Grabow. It was the deepest penetration into northern and central Germany by any U.S. division during the war. There were at least thirty Soviet tanks of the 8th Brigade of the 8th Russian Mechanized Corps parked in the streets, and soldiers from both sides came together, laughing and hugging, because they knew the war was over. Manny climbed atop a Soviet tank, wrapped an arm around the main gun barrel, and joined other smiling GIs and Russians as pictures were snapped. It was a memorable few hours, as the soldiers from the two Allied armies relaxed, shook hands, took pictures of one another, and shed some of the weight of the long war.

  But when the Americans returned to Ludwigslust at about 3 P.M., Manny’s mood abruptly plummeted when he learned that he was being dispatched to a concentration camp that had been discovered outside of town. During the war, he had heard many rumors about the existence of Nazi death camps, and he had recently read an article in Stars and Stripes about Buchenwald’s liberation. As he drove to the camp outside of Ludwigslust, Manny knew that he was about to see the human toll for himself.

  Manny Steinfeld (right) greeting Russian soldiers in Grabow, Germany, on May 3, 1945. (Famil
y photograph)

  The main gate of Wöbbelin concentration camp was wide open when he arrived, and the guard towers were deserted. Manny had noticed the stench of death before the camp even came into view. Army medical personnel wearing Red Cross armbands were ministering to living skeletons who wore filthy prison-striped uniforms. A flatbed truck parked just inside the barbed-wire enclosure was stacked with bodies that had turned bluish-black. Manny stepped from the jeep and stopped. He could go no farther.

  The last time he had heard from his mother was a letter in 1941. She said rumors were circulating in their hometown of Josbach that the six Jewish families faced deportation to Poland. Manny had no idea if she and his sister, Irma, had been transported to the east or if they were still in Germany. It now occurred to Manny that Poland was twice as far away from Josbach as Ludwigslust—in fact, some 250 miles farther. Was it possible they had ended up being sent here instead?

  For the longest time, Manny Steinfeld was unable to enter Wöbbelin. He was overwhelmed with fear that he would find his mother and sister among the dead.

  For Werner Angress, watching the German army collapse in April 1945 was almost surreal. He had been born and raised in Berlin, had experienced firsthand the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, and for years after had felt humiliated, threatened, and fearful until he immigrated to America. Now, the end of the war against Hitler and the Nazis felt almost personal.

  On April 30, Werner was standing by a country road crowded with Germans—soldiers and civilians alike—fleeing the Russians and heading west toward the Elbe River, when a passing GI in a jeep called out the news: Hitler had killed himself.