The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (10 page)

Skeletonlike survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald wash themselves, probably for the first time in months or even years, with pans, soap, and water provided by GIs of the 80th Infantry Division
.

Myers recalls that First Sergeant Smith found an inmate from Lithuania who could speak some English and asked him about the place. The man said, “This is a labor camp. This camp furnishes labor for all of the industry that is within thirty kilometers of here.” The man said he’d been captured when the Germans invaded Lithuania. “They took everybody from sixteen years old on up that was healthy and could work and sent us all to different labor camps.”

Myers says the inmate also explained to the GIs that most of the SS guards had fled the day before when they heard that the Americans had taken Erfurt, a city just thirteen miles to the west, adding that the inmates had caught seven or nine of the guards and had them “locked up downstairs.” Then the Lithuanian said, “There was a tank that pulled up here yesterday, but they just asked us what it was, and we told them it was a Nazi labor camp, and they just went on. Nobody even stopped.” The man described three Americans in a small tank. Myers’s best guess is that it would have been a recon car from the 6th Armored Division.

“When we were out there, we saw six guys that were pulling a cart, and it was a two-wheel cart, and the inside of that cart had a zinc lining or some kind of metal. They were going around to the different barracks, picking up dead bodies that they would lay outside. The cart had at least six or eight bodies laying in it. And they were taking them to the crematory. And at that time, they had four crematories there. And they claimed that that had been running seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, up until the SS left, and then they shut it down.”

Asked if during the forty minutes he spent inside the camp he saw any evidence of torture, Myers said, “The only torture that I could honestly say that I saw was just them not being fed. They told us that all that they’d had for the past week was potato peelings; that the SS had eaten the inside and they had taken the potato peelings from that and then went out and pulled green grass and mixed it into a soup. And that soup was all they had.”

The three 80th ID men went back to Weimar and reported to their captain. “He called regiment and regiment called division, and they said, ‘Round up the prisoners that are pilfering in town and take them out to the camp, and we will have food there within a reasonable time. Keep them there, and we’ll send medics and food there.’ That evening food arrived.”

Though the sights inside Buchenwald were disturbing to Gerald Myers, the assignment to patrol Weimar wasn’t much easier on his mind. “We had a six-by-six [truck] that we were traveling in around Weimar, looking for these people. We saw one guy come out of a house, and he had a great big potato. He was eating on that thing like he was eating an ice cream cone. We hollered at him to come towards the truck, and about halfway there, he dropped the potato and keeled over. And we picked him up and took him out to the camp, and Dr. Bob said, ‘His system is just so weak that he couldn’t stand all of that starch and nutrition from that potato. The poor sucker is liable to die from it, because he ate too much of it.’

“You were in disbelief that people could be treated that way, and when you saw them, you just felt so damned sorry for them that you wanted to help them, but you didn’t know how. All you were trying to do was to get them out to the camp so somebody else would take care of them, because you really didn’t want to know what happened to them. You didn’t want to see them die. You just couldn’t believe that the Germans could treat people this way and still think that [the Germans] were human beings.”

Myers says he and his buddies tried to go into a mode where they didn’t let what they were experiencing at Buchenwald affect them emotionally. “We’d been hardened to the effects of war, seeing people killed and seeing injured laying along the road. This was actually just something else that happened in a war.”

But years later, denial didn’t work. “I thought about that a lot for a long, long time. I would be going to sleep, and I would think about it. And it affected me probably more after the war than it did at that particular time, because I was used to seeing people killed and wounded.” After the first few months back home, he stopped talking about what he’d seen because people didn’t want to hear it or thought he was exaggerating. He didn’t start talking about it again until 1998, more than half a century later, when a schoolteacher friend invited him to speak about the war.

CHAPTER 5

LITTLE BOYS BECAME MEN

APRIL 11, 1945
NORDHAUSEN, GERMANY
    
168 miles southwest of Berlin
    
45 miles north-northwest of Buchenwald
    
10 miles west of Berga

A
s mid-April approached, there was no doubt that the war would soon end, with the Nazis crushed between the Russians pouring in from the east and a tsunami of Americans, British, Canadians, and French flooding Germany across a wide front from the west.

April 11 saw American forces discover two of the worst-of-the-worst concentration camps. At Buchenwald a significant number of prisoners were found alive with the potential to survive. At the Nordhausen Dora-Mittelbau complex, forty-five miles to the north-northwest, thousands were found dead and unburied all over the grounds. Unlike at Buchenwald, survivors at Nordhausen were relatively few.

The outfits that found the camps believed they were still on a headlong rush to reach Berlin. They’d learn within a day or two, much to the chagrin of their commanding generals, that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had already made up his mind not to go after the capital city, believing the cost in lives would be too great and a victory bittersweet. Rejecting Winston Churchill’s desire, Franklin D. Roosevelt declined to order the Americans to take Berlin. This meant that the Russians would control that part of Germany. In addition, within three months, Ike’s troops would have to cede the territory they currently occupied to the Russians.

Within twenty-four hours of the liberation of Nordhausen and Buchenwald, FDR would die.

Just a week before the Americans arrived at Nordhausen, three-quarters of the city was destroyed by bombers of the Royal Air Force. Roughly 8,800 people died in the raid, including hundreds of inmates who were confined by the SS in aircraft hangars that were targeted by the raiders.

Major Haynes Dugan, the public affairs officer of the 3rd Armored “Spearhead” Division, witnessed the arrival of the division at Nordhausen. A year later, in unusually frank language rarely found in military histories, he published
Spearhead in the West
, in which he wrote:

Although the taking of Nordhausen did not constitute the heaviest fighting of April 11, that city will live forever in the memories of 3rd Armored Division soldiers as a place of horror. The Americans couldn’t believe their eyes. It is all very well to read of a Maidenek, but no written word can properly convey the atmosphere of such a charnel house, the unbearable stench of decomposing bodies, the sigh of live human beings, starved to pallid skeletons, lying cheek to jowl with the ten-day dead.

Hundreds of corpses lay sprawled over the acres of the big compound. More hundreds filled the great barracks. They lay in contorted heaps, half stripped, mouths gaping in the dirt and straw: or, they were piled naked, like cordwood, in the corners and under the stairways.

Everywhere among the dead were the living emaciated, ragged shapes whose fever-bright eyes waited passively for the release of death. Over all the area clung the terrible odor of decomposition and, like a dirge of forlorn hope, the combined cries of these unfortunates rose and fell in weak undulations. It was a fabric of moans and whimpers, of delirium and outright madness. Here and there a single shape tottered about, walking slowly, like a man dreaming.

Nordhausen was taken by Task Force Welborn and Task Force Lovelady, under the command of Brigadier General Truman E. Boudinot. Colonel John C. Welborn’s assault elements approached from the north as Lieutenant Colonel William B. Lovelady’s men came in from the south. As John Toland writes in
The Last 100 Days
, “The commanders had been alerted by Intelligence to expect something a little unusual in the Nordhausen area. They thought at first this meant the town’s concentration camp, where about 5,000 decayed bodies were lying in the open and in the barracks. But several miles northwest of Nordhausen, in the foothills of the Harz, they ran into other prisoners in dirty striped pajamas who told them there was ‘something fantastic’ inside the mountain.”

What lay inside were two tunnels that had originally been salt mines, approximately two miles in length and fifty feet in width and height, connected to each other by forty-eight smaller tunnels. For more than two years, some 60,000 prisoners had slaved in them, building the V-1 unmanned radio-controlled aircraft and V-2 medium-range ballistic missile used to attack England, in a program supervised by physicist Wernher von Braun. Just days before the Americans arrived, von Braun had supervised the removal of fourteen tons of documents detailing his research. They were hidden in an underground iron mine and eventually removed by U.S. forces and brought to America, along with a hundred complete V-2 rockets, most of which were ultimately test-fired at White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. Von Braun, who was delivered to the United States as part of the secret Operation Overcast, became known derisively as one of “our Nazis,” as opposed to “their Nazis”—the rocket scientists snatched up by the Soviets—and later as “the father of the American space program.” (Unlike the U.S. government, the satirist/folk singer Tom Lehrer pulled no punches in the song he wrote and named for the ex-Nazi scientist: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”)

Lieutenant Ernest James of Berkeley, California, was part of the 238th Combat Engineer Battalion, an outfit that was moved around, attached to, and detached from fighting units as needed. James’s tour of duty in Europe began inauspiciously on D-Day, when the small boat he was on with a company of men and thirteen vehicles began to sink. They used their own equipment to keep the thing afloat and managed to explain to the powers that be that either they had to land quickly, ahead of the actual fighting outfits, or they weren’t going to make it at all. As a result, they were among the first troops to land on Utah Beach. Their job, as the invasion force fought its way inland, was to build bridges, blast defensive installations, and build and repair roads. Although they were not tasked to fight, they were always close to combat operations.

James was in a position to watch troop-carrying gliders land close by. “It was quite a spectacular sight to see these gliders come down right over your head and watch bullets going through them.” He also had the sobering experience of seeing the same thing happen to American paratroopers. Confusion reigned, with the one positive thing being the quick surrender of impressed Ukrainians, who had been captured in their homeland by the Nazis and “then given their so-called freedom if they’d come and fight for Germany.”