The Proof

I have read many accounts written by prisoners interred in both concentration camps and the death camps. The most compelling accounts I have found, however, come from our own Army troops as they liberated these camps. A new book has just been published called The Liberators: America’s Witnesses to the Holocaust, writ­ten by Michael Hirsch. Hirsch interviewed more than one hundred fifty soldiers who were eyewitnesses to this horror. At the time of these interviews they ranged in age from eighty-three to ninety-six. Before we get to specific testimonials let me tell you of a handful of remarks made by practically every soldier. In describing the dead bodies found in every camp they were described as “stacked like cordwood.” Invariably they would describe the stench as something they smelled from miles away, and some have said it was a smell that has stayed with them all these years. The prisoner’s hollow blank eyes and expressionless faces were mentioned by nearly all, also, and invariably it was mentioned they were dressed in rags and looked like skeletons, with many weighing as little as seventy pounds. And now it is time for individual testimony. At Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, Joe Vanacore of the 4th Armored Division re­members the first thing he saw was a big pile of bodies, five or six feet high, like a haystack. He said the smell got to him so bad he couldn’t eat for a week. In a tour of the camp they witnessed a prisoner run up and clobber a man in the head and then kill him with a bayonet. It was explained by a prisoner who spoke good English that the man killed was a German guard who was pretending to be a prisoner. This happened many times in all the camps as the prisoners turned on their torturers and in practically every case the Americans mere­ly stood by and watched without interfering in the “justice” being meted out. Later troops from the 4th Armored went into the town of Ohrdruf with trucks and ordered the townspeople into them and brought them to the camp and made them see all the bodies. Defiant to the end, many Germans denied what they were seeing.

At Nordhausen camp PFC Rip Rice of the 104th Infantry remem­bered they began to smell a strange odor many miles from the camp. He said it reminded him of the Fort Worth stockyards. As they ap­proached an intersection they were directed by an MP to the village about two miles away. They entered the camp and there were hun­dreds of bodies stacked five or six feet high in big mounds. He re­membered they all got sick as dogs. On the second day they went to town and rounded up civilians for a burial detail. The engineers came in with bulldozers and dug trenches four or five feet deep and long enough to accommodate three thousand bodies. The Company Commander made the Ger­man civilians lay the bodies out neatly and reverently with their bare hands, no gloves, no masks. Lieutenant Ernest James, remembering the C.O., said, “he made them handle these dead bodies with their bare hands. [He was] mean as hell.” Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, after getting reports about the horrors uncovered at Ohrdruf, flew there. Upon arrival he insisted on seeing it all and hearing it all. He ordered it all filmed. He also ordered generals Omar Bradley and George Pat­ton in to also see it all. Before leaving Eisenhower issued this order: “I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place. We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” One final note: the Burgermeister (mayor) and his wife were brought to the camp and forced to view it all. The next morning their bodies were discovered in their home. They had hanged themselves. They left behind a note that read “We didn’t know! But we knew.” In his memoirs General Patton described the camp as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen.” One of the largest camps to be liberated was Buchenwald. The citizens of Weimar, where the camp was located, denied any knowl­edge of the camp, yet prisoners testified that the residents spat on them and called them dogs as they were offloaded from the trains and marched to the camp. General Patton was infuriated when he heard this and ordered every civilian of Weimar capable of walking be marched to the camp for a complete tour. He then declared, “To­day,

no citizen of Weimar can claim not to know of Buchenwald and they have been forcibly shown the things they had not seen.”

Gardlegen is an ancient moat-protected town. The 102nd Infan­try Division arrived there on April 14, 1945. The next morning sol­diers discovered a still smoking grain barn. The floor of the barn had a foot-deep layer of straw which had been saturated with gasoline. One thousand sixteen prisoners from the nearby Dora-Millelbrau concentration camp had been marched there, forced inside, and then burned to death.

Ralph Barringer of the 102nd arrived at the still-smoldering barn and all he cared to state was very brief and to the point: “I don’t want to talk about it, I’ve been trying to forget it all my life.”

Elton Oltjenbruns, who was with the 405th Regiment, remem­bers seeing the bodies, but mostly remembers the smell, the burning flesh. By that time in the war he said, “I’d had all the death I could handle.”

Captain John Middlebrook was one of the first to open the barn doors. He said, “It was a horrible sight, bodies were ten feet high at the door where they died trying to get out. Our division commander made all the townspeople go to see this sight, then made them take the bodies out of the barn and later bury them. General Frank Keat­ing ordered “for every dead prisoner a grave has to be made. Each body has to be taken from the barn and from the mass graves [dis­covered at the camp] and properly buried by the men of Gardlegen and surroundings. Buried properly by the Good Germans who had helped murder them.”

In Part III next week, some explanations and some facts you per­haps are not aware of; and a truly miraculous story to bring this tril­ogy to a close.