And I use you, the reader. We were doing everything we possibly could for the prisoners. Everyone working there was killed, but that didn’t seem to matter to the two professors; not one bomb had missed the factory, not one bomb had fallen inside Buchenwald. It wouldbetantamount to arguing with someone who believed the earth is flat…Where do youeven start to debate such a premise? He was mystified. I had had enough. I told the two professors about the young person who had been at my tower the past afternoon, and described him as best I could. I started by stacking my rifle in the corner, took off my belt and put it on the table, and, leaning on the table, I started thinking about all of the things that had happened during the day. They did not pull the table out from under him. They were jabbering, and we wanted to listen, to understand, but there seemed to be no way we could. I quit. The Germans had made no effort to rebuild it. That building was enough. They told us the story of one prisoner who was so close to death that even thinned chicken broth was too rich for his stomach. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of those openings, and on those trays were partially burned bodies. Those of us assigned to the towers at the beginning had missed a great deal of what had gone on, and we were catching up. I didn’t know what a concentration camp was, or could be, but I was about to learn. We had been teased by bits of information, and we wanted to know more. We saw the mountains ofdead bodies, etc., although it was not necessarily new to us as we were directlyinvolved in uncovering this sort of activity, but on a somewhat smaller scale. During one of these lulls in battle we had an opportunityto go to Buchenwald which was a major Death Camp. There, right in the middle of the hole in the fence, looking up, calling me, was this very small person. He used to publically speak about the experience and talked to JNS.org about his long life, including how he has been handling the pandemic. There was the slightest of communication. The research had been done at Buchenwald. Soon Sergeant Blowers came by and told us that all of the people inside of the camp had been told to stay inside of the fence, that we were down by the holes to make sure they stayed inside. More than 32,000 prisoners were liberated, among them some Englishmen, Canadians, and Americans. I scrunched forward on the table to where I could see almost straight down. Between us and the fence and running parallel to the fence was a dirt road, with high guard towers every fifty yards or so. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. Sergeant Blowers told us some things about the Commandant of Buchenwald and his wife. (Harry Herder Jr. served in the Korean War also, where he lost a leg to an enemy land mine.). Some had been still alive when brought to the field hospitals, but had died in spite of the best efforts of the German doctors. I imagined it would be very beautiful there in the summer with all of the trees leafed out. How did leaders, diplomats, and citizens around the world respond to the events of the Holocaust? The prisoners came up and surrounded us, moving with us as they jabbered, but they spoke a language we did not understand–they were probably speaking several languages we did not understand. We could see their house down the hill through the leafless trees from our seats on the front steps. The fixture held. There was still space between us and the group in front of us, the people on both sides now relaxed, one side considerably more jubilant than the other, but all of the tensions were gone. I hadn’t seen him out in the field on the other side of the fence, but there he had been watching, waiting for me. The three of us at the gate stood there, looked, turned our backs, and walked away. His curiosity was immense. This may give you a glimmer of an idea of what Ilse Koch was like–and her husband–and the camp “doctors.”. Indeed, as American veterans' organizations learned of the proposed display of division flags in the Holocaust Museum, the Council received requests from veterans to acknowledge additional divisions as camp liberators. They liberated Mauthausen in early May. In the weeks preceding the arrival of Soviet units, Auschwitz camp personnel had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward in what would become known as "death marches." Soon there will be none of usleft to give eyewitness accounts of what they saw. Thayer Greene reflects on the wounds of war. All of them stripped. He was being led back into the prison. The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood. I was prepared to flatten out on the deck, but it turned out we didn’t have to, and none of us did. On April 29th, 1945, the Dachau concentration camp (KZ Dachau) was liberated by units of the US Seventh Army. Retrieved February 28, 2018, from remember.org Remember.org shares art, discussion, photos, poems, and facts to preserve powerful memories, Remember.org - The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivors' History. In December 1987, as chief of the They took one more group out, freezing them until they were nearly dead, brought them back into the hospital, and put them into bed with naked women. The still ungrateful prisoners simply continued to die. He eventually sent in an engineering outfit with bulldozers to dig a mass grave for those bodies. They appeared to be skin covering bones and nothing more. Six months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. As we progressed I reached over into my field jacket to pull things out of the pocket to name. I pretty well ignored what happened in the rest of the camp. The whole idea was to get rid ofthe prisoners permanently and make a gain of free labor in the process. My whole world shrank to the inside of the fourth floor of the tower and the young boy. In no time we were out of them–they just disappeared. A sophist could rationalize that one I suspect. The guys who actually witnessed thesethings are fast leaving the face of the planet. It was tough to imagine, but there it was. The sergeant left us there with instructions that we were to let no one through that hole from either direction. The two professors thought that was remarkable–to be able to bomb with such precision. Beyond the fence were two more layers of barbed wire fence not quite as tall. Finally, some bright medical type thought there might be a kind of animal heat that would revive them. We had no answers. They entered the, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Liberation of Nazi Camps - ID Card/Oral History. They would then be observed, and all of their reactions charted until death occurred. Then he got even quieter, looked at the ground for as moment, raised his eyes, and looking over our heads, began very softly, so softly we could barely hear him. We saw neither hide nor hair of those German guards. I waved my arm at him letting him know that it was all right to come on through the fence, to come up the tower. One of them disappeared shortly after we arrived. That was probably the most brutal night I have ever lived through. It dawned on me much later–the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays–and the Germans still couldn’t keep up. It is enough for me that I feel what I do feel, and I am now attempting to thin those feelings out. I spent the rest of my four-hour tour with him. I sawBuchenwald first hand shortly after it was liberated. In one sense, they had not committed murder; rather, the German had committed suicide. It was not “human”. Liberation of Gunskirchen, Austria – May 4, 1945 This pamphlet was produced by the US Army after theyliberated a concentration camp in Austria called Gunskirchen Lager.The book recounts in detail, and with very graphic photos, the tragedy they found in the camp. Among these personal items were hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women’s garments, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair. He told us that this is what was called a “concentration camp”, that we were about to see things we were in no way prepared for. Crematory oven at Buchenwald. That made me feel a little better; no one could hurt them anymore after their burial. They extended down the hill, only a slight hill, for fifty to seventy-five feet. There were times when we lit Sterno cans and made ourselves some instant coffee, but the talk never ceased. By the time they returned to the camp the bodies in the stacks were already being loaded on to trucks to be carried away to the mass grave. U.S. Army liberates Dachau concentration camp On April 29, 1945, the U.S. Things that he had learned interviewing prisoners in the hospital. The stack of bodies is vividly displayed in the movie, just as I saw it the first day, but it is not the same. I walked through the crowd, out the door, through the gate, on up to the barracks, and I didn’t say a word. Enough. It was not the display of the genitals that shook some of us up; it was that final indignity, the exhibition. The German people were seeing what had been going on in that place all of those years. God, help us. It did not seem real. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1994. Ours and other infantry divisions were not capable of sustaining a continuousattack. They knew early on that I had been there, and they took LIFE magazine. Then there were all of those dead bodies outside that must have come from here. He worked on the correct pronunciation. To these people cigarettes were money, and I was getting them free from PX rations. The two of us walked slowly until Tim caught up to us. Less than a half an hour later I saw a fire in Bill’s tower and guessed that he had seen what I was up to and done the same thing. They were heading back toward the camp, which mystified me, because they should not have been outside of the camp in the first place. We were slightly apprehensive of what we might see. … I saw a gang of about thirty or forty of the prisoners still wearing their striped garb. I had barely reached the top floor when the young fellow came running up the steps. My first thought was that I didn’t want him to smoke them, but then I remembered the events yesterday in the camp when my pack of cigarettes simply disappeared. Bridgman, Jon. I dug a cigar out of my jacket, lit it, and enjoyed it, and I studied the landscape around the camp. On one tray was a skull partially burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. Patton had assigned a whole field hospital to the place along with a big kitchen unit. The barbed wire in those fences was laced in a fine mesh, so finely meshed no one was going to get through it. Wikimedia Commons American soldiers execute SS camp guards who have been lined up against a wall during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. At Majdanek, the Soviet troops encountered a number of prisoners who had not been evacuated in the spring, mostly Soviet prisoners of war. I often wonder what they would think if they could awaken to seewhat I see around me. Another story (to me the most gruesome): German doctors at the camp were doing research on some human diseases. No great growth could be expected from a diet like that. The evacuated prisoners were sent to concentration camps further west, such as Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen. That is the way Abe Cheslow put it as he began to tell in detail of his hours at Dachau soon after his tank broke into the camp. The evidence was all there; the massive pile of bodies still stacked, just as they were when we first found them; the doors in the crematorium now all open, and more of the trays pulled out with their contents visible. As Allied and Soviet troops moved across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. The lower bunks served as rungs of a ladder to the upper ones. Sergeant Blowers told us that some of the prisoners spoke English. When I was very young she had taught me how to count in German, and how to sing the German alphabet. The Liberators. It seemed that Patton had become so angry at what he had seen in the camp that he scooted into the nearest major town, Weimar, broke the mayor of the town out, and told him he wanted every citizen up the next morning, ready to march to through Buchenwald so as to see what the German people were responsible for. I made up my mind to really load up before I came to the tower the next day. The rules of the U.S. Army state that a liberator is a soldier who arrived at a concentration camp within 48 hours of the first soldier to enter the camp. I had the ability and the means to stop the whole thing, and I did not. When we broke through the first of those fences we got a clue, the first clue as to what we had come upon, but we had no real comprehension at all of what was to assault our senses for the next hours, the next days. In the following months, Soviet units liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and Poland. "This isn't easy." Those who were able began working with the American nurses or helping out in the kitchen. I tried to think of other things, but it was impossible. Shortly after the Soviet capture of Majdanek in July 1944,  Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler  ordered that prisoners in all concentration camps and subcamps in the German-occupied east be forcibly evacuated into the interior of the Reich. They pointed to a long building which was about two stories high, and butted up tightly to the chimney. In the days before the camp's liberation, SS guards at the camp had forced 7,000 … In one way the talk was an interrogation: four of us with insatiable curiosities, two who could satisfy those curiosities. It did not even begin to enter my mind that he might have been Jewish and shouldn’t have been eating bacon. The degree of immersion varies from year to year, but there is no gradual diminution with time. Another division would “pass” through usto give us a breather. Shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps. An interpreter met them at the gate, marched them around, and, according to the word I heard later, carefully explained in great detail what had been going on in the camp. It had two barn-like doors on either end of the building we were looking at, and the doors were standing open. 1945: The Year of Liberation. But now there was a new odor, thick and hanging, and it assaulted the senses. Containing the prisoners was not expected to be any trouble because they understood the need, and they were being provided for in every way that we could think of: the field hospital had just arrived, a big mess unit was on the way, loads of PX rations were coming. All of them dead. We let them continue. The Buchenwald prisoners had found one of their German guards in a nearby village dressed in civilian clothes, and they had him now in a cell in one of the buildings and were interrogating him. American forces liberated concentration camps including Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen. Another story? One particular night our bombers flew over the camp to the factory, which they pulverized. We made another cup of cocoa, this time over a Sterno can rather than a fire on the table. I spent the time straightening my gear out and loading up the pockets of my field jacket. My buddy, Bob Zech, whospoke fluent German, perpetrated a ruse on the SS officer in charge bythreatening a tank attack if he and the other SS troopers who had fallen intothe trap did not surrender within the next twenty minutes or so. Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. He repeated it again, and he had the pronunciation close. As limited as our combat experience had been, we had seen dead men, we had seen wounded men from both sides with the immediacy of battle, with no time for conjecture. I relive that night sitting on that machine gun bench, smoking a cigar, staring at the darkness. After listening to all of this, a half dozen or so of us went down to the Camp Commandant’s home, walked in, and looked around. We turned and walked away. It was murder; there can be no doubt of that. It struck me that he had never tasted chocolate. I tore the wrapper off the chocolate bar and showed him the candy. There were packets of instant coffee (horrible stuff) in my pocket along with packets of sugar. What I remember now are bits and pieces, and certain of those bits surface more rapidly than others. The little fellow in the tower with me became all excited and tried to explain things to me. Groups of Jewish men had been taken outside on winter nights, stripped, and sprayed with a mist of water until they were nearly dead. No. I had never known Sergeant Blowers to be like this. They did not tie the noose, nor did they fix it to the ceiling. The next morning while we were sipping coffee after breakfast, a great commotion broke out down at the gate. The next time he stepped gently off the end, and the table was quickly slid away from him and out of his reach, and he dangled there. The lane we were walking on bent to the right as we cleared the building. The black liberators who helped defeat the Nazis and free the Dutch get their due. I had enough. Buchenwald was filled with those who had to “spectate.” People were walking around and through the aisles of those stacks of dead bodies. None of us, no one in our company, even amongst those who had been the originals, was prepared for what we were now surrounded by. Sergeant Blowers broke us out a little after eleven o’clock that night. There was more, but it was impossible to assimilate it all at once. Bill had noticed the two of us in the tower. He turned them around and marched them, then and there, back through the camp again. He was learning a bit of English, but I was not learning a word of his language–I do not even know what language he spoke. Coming from the west, United States forces liberated Buchenwald and Dachau in April 1945 and the British liberated Bergen-Belsen that same month. The crowd parted again to let us through. I walked down, and caught up to Bill on the road. Rooms full of bottles of organs, all neatly and voluminously labeled. My thoughts kept me too busy. My eyes were closed, but my mind wasn’t. Most of the doors were closed, but down near the middle a few stood open. I have since seen the movie made about Buchenwald. Robert Patton, 88, served in the 65th ID, 3rd Army and helped liberate the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp on May 6, 1945. They had seen and were aware of everything that had happened at the camp. There was water in my canteen. 1 of 10 Birney (cq) Havey, aka 'Chick', was a Soldier in World War II who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. I saw the lights up in the camp, but, at that time of night, nothing distracting was going on. Maybe this is what we are. He was young, very small, and he spoke no English. Abzug, Robert H. GIs Remember: Liberating the Concentration Camps. The inspection I made of the pile was not very close, but the corpses seemed to be all male. Dead forced laborers at Nordhausen-Dora, a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, serving the SS-guarded rocket manufacturing facility at Kohnstein, April-May 1945. We moved gently through those people, through the doors and felt the warmth immediately. What I do remember is that we eventually drove up some gentle valley where there were trees on either side of us, when we made a sharp left turn, so sharp that those of us on the tops of the vehicles were grabbing things to keep from falling off. His eyes opened wide. Ms. Rosenblum's father, Walter Rosenblum, photographed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. All of the way from the tower I had been telling Bill and Tim about the little kid. He ate the cheese mixture (which I ate only when I was very hungry), and sorted out the words “cheese” and “bacon”, and he loved the stuff. He had them all inside his shirt and went streaking back through the whole in the fence and on up the hill. in the U. S. Army, there was no way that I could learn the origin of the orders that started it all.

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