I have seen that photograph several times in the years since, and every time I see it my stomach rolls a little, my mind goes into some kind of a dance, and it takes me a little time to return to normal. He was caught before all of his weight was on the rope, and they set him back on the table. TTY: 202.488.0406, The first major Nazi camp to be liberated was, Six months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated. I had witnessed their agonies. Founded April 25, 1995 as a "Cybrary of the Holocaust". Some of our guys had been disgusted by a bunch of nurses or WACs in their Class A uniforms taking pictures of the naked dead. Now we could bury the bodies. Between us and the fence and running parallel to the fence was a dirt road, with high guard towers every fifty yards or so. We were flooded with information. While he was eating the bar, I searched around for the old wrapper, found the word “chocolate ” on it, pointed to the word, and pronounced the word “chocolate”. In fact all the interpreter would have needed would have been a few words and a pointed finger. The ten-man combat team which I was a part of was directly involved in a placecalled Gardelegan. I didn’t understand. They thought they knew which of the young boys it was and believed he had been born at Buchenwald. These prisoners greeted the soldiers as their liberators. Another story (to me the most gruesome): German doctors at the camp were doing research on some human diseases. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The tanker on our vehicle assigned to the machine gun was on that weapon and ready to use it, and those of us riding the top were ready to bail off and hit the ground on the run and do whatever it was that we were going to have to do. Two more columns containing the rest of our company, off to our right, made the same maneuver so that all of us presented one front. It was then that the smell of the place started to get to me. My mind was full. That train of thought took me further and further from my own guilt, and, in a little while, I was absolved. I think my only comment was, “Jesus Christ.”. Just inside the door were people on the lower bunks so close to death they didn’t have the strength to rise. They knew early on that I had been there, and they took LIFE magazine. That made me feel a little better; no one could hurt them anymore after their burial. 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 was talked to some more and then he jumped. During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German prisoners of war were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp internees at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II. Bridgman, Jon. Not yet. 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps and the end of Nazi tyranny in Europe. Any prisoner could tell me anything he wished from now on, and I would believe. We learned that only a very few Jews remained at Buchenwald, most of them in terrible physical shape. They subside in my mind, and, then, in the spring always, some small trigger will set them off and I will be immersed in these experiences once more. All of them dead. The lower bunks served as rungs of a ladder to the upper ones. I didn’t know what a concentration camp was, or could be, but I was about to learn. That was enough for then. As we progressed I reached over into my field jacket to pull things out of the pocket to name. The lane we were walking on bent to the right as we cleared the building. We heard stories that night from two professors who had been non-Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald for over four years. Chuck Ferree was the first to share his story on the Cybrary. Write CSS OR LESS and hit save. 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. We wandered off in that direction, coffee cups in hand. A little later in the evening the three of us walked back into the camp, passed by the crematorium and the stacks of bodies, and wandered into the camp proper. I certainly would not attempt to debate the reality of those times. There was a tiny char mark on the table by now, the word apparently having been passed around. One story: The German army had been losing men on the Russian front because they were freezing to death. I have had that under my hat for the past forty-six years. We were starting to communicate. We headed for the mess tent, talking about what had been going on all day long with the press and the visitors. We learned more from an American Lieutenant who had entered the camp later as an interpreter. The three of us at the gate stood there, looked, turned our backs, and walked away. Our antennae were up. Bill and I were vigorous young things with an immense curiosity, and it was difficult standing still in the middle of a hole through a set of three fences. I gave him other things from the K-Ration packages, among them a small can with cheese and bits of bacon, which we opened with the can opener I wore on my dog tag chain. Entering the first of these we found we were entering their home. We hadn’t the vaguest idea what we had run into. The doctors would then move onto another disease, repeating the process. The next morning we did a check on the building, and there they were. We headed for the woods talking softly to each other, the talk full of wonderment–the hows, the whys. There was an aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. © Copyright 1995-2020 Remember.org. There is no way I could present those stories as we heard them, chronologically, after this great a time. We kept talking and time disappeared. The answers were all monosyllabic. There was nothing much going on down in my corner, so it was easy to ignore. The trench knife from my belt helped me make some more of them, and I ended up with a tidy bunch of wood chips. I thought about those things and questions entered my mind, but there were no answers. They entered the, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Liberation of Nazi Camps - ID Card/Oral History. When American forces arrived, they encountered more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. Some of those human beings wore pants made of the material, some had shirt/jackets, and some had hats. Just looking at these bodies made one believe they had been starved to death. I saw a gang of about thirty or forty of the prisoners still wearing their striped garb. In that building were rooms devoted to each of the organs: a kidney room, a liver room, a heart room, etc. (Ed.). He told us to look, to look as long as our stomachs lasted, and then to get out of there for a walk in the woods. He was mystified. A former U.S. soldier who helped liberate one of … Wikimedia Commons American soldiers execute SS camp guards who have been lined up against a wall during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. 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. From them came these human beings, timidly, slowly, deliberately showing their hands, all in a sort of uniform, or bits and pieces of a uniform, made from horribly coarse cloth with stripes running vertically. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. The commotion was centered around that individual. Sleep did not come easily. Some Jewish prisoners worked there too, but they were only trusted with the menial jobs. Much of what I had seen ran counter to everything my mother had brought me up believing. Could I have been that? As they were moving back to Weimar, not even out of sight of the camp, a number of Germans in the group found something to laugh about. Neither did my companions. Our conversation started with nouns, naming things, and progressed to simple verbs, actions, and we were busy with that. There, right in the middle of the hole in the fence, looking up, calling me, was this very small person. It was crowded and the onlookers parted to let the three of us through, and we went to the door of the cell. He told us this story about her: Once, she ordered all of the Jewish prisoners in the camp stripped and lined up; she then marched down the rows of them, and, as she saw a tattoo she liked, she would touch that tattoo with her riding crop; the guards would take the man away immediately to the camp hospital where the doctors would remove the patch of skin with the tattoo, have it tanned, and … As I stood on the top floor looking out, I saw nothing. But now there was a new odor, thick and hanging, and it assaulted the senses. We saw neither hide nor hair of those German guards. I recall that I was very much on the alert. Here we were–five or six of us–fully armed with semi-automatic rifles, and we did not make the Buchenwald prisoners stop. First, I got him to slow down the talk, then I tried to speak to him, but he could not understand a word I said. When I was very young she had taught me how to count in German, and how to sing the German alphabet. 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. 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. 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. Dallas, TX. That was just the “openers”. 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. Goodell, Stephen, and Kevin Mahoney. Death camp liberators to be honored 50 years after end ... - IT HAS BEEN 50 years since William Roberts stared into the hollow eyes of a starving Polish prisoner at the Nordhausen concentration camp. They had intended to kill us, which would have been easy and totheir advantage because they wanted to cover what was going on the edge of townat the time. We must have appeared as giants in their midst: we well-fed, healthy, strong, young men; they gaunt, shrunken, their ugly striped uniforms hanging on them. We let them continue. Blowers painted a picture of truly despicable human beings. In front of us a good bit, but plainly visible. Shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps. He passed us on the way out–and damn he looked mad–about as mad as I had ever seen anyone look. Maybe it was all too human. I was ruminating in this manner when I heard a tiny voice, and my attention came back to the inside of the camp. 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. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. It was then, too, that I noticed a lot of action up in the camp. I’d had the kid standing on the table and had put my field jacket on him, which was much, much too large for him; then I put my steel helmet on his head, and the two of us giggled. I scrunched forward on the table to where I could see almost straight down. About what they did with the women prisoners? Cigarettes were for barter; they were exchange material. I pretty well ignored what happened in the rest of the camp. By the time he reached the top floor I had my belt back on, my rifle in my hands, and was standing by the stair opening. They had been made aware, like most people in the United States, of what had gone on. Those buildings were still two hundred yards or more up the hill from us, but it didn’t take long for those tanks to growl their way up toward those buildings. The man had seen everything I could imagine could be seen, and this place was having this effect on him. The first platoon, ours, had the midnight-to-four, and the noon-to-four shifts. Majdanek was captured virtually intact. The arms and legs were neatly arranged, but an occasional limb dangled oddly. I could have stopped the whole action, and I did not. Our platoon sergeant had us form up some and relax, then signaled that horde of human beings to stand fast; he just held both hands up, palms out, and motioned them backwards slowly. More than 32,000 prisoners were liberated, among them some Englishmen, Canadians, and Americans. We hit those fences with enough speed so that it was unclear to me whether it was the first level, or the second, or the third, but at least one of those levels was hot with electricity. A major reason I need a catharsis. This wasn’t something that happened consciously, it was just something that happened. Treatment of the prisoners varied also, depending on ethnic origin. Abzug, Robert H. GIs Remember: Liberating the Concentration Camps. A table was brought to the center of the room and placed under a very strong looking electrical fixture. I was too far down the hill to discern the nature of what was going on, but I was betting it was the people from Weimar touring the camp after being marched out from the city. After some moments we figured out they wanted our cigarettes. Later, when I thought more about it, I realized whatever growing he had done had been on the rations of that camp. I left the building with Bill and Tim close behind me. The next morning while we were sipping coffee after breakfast, a great commotion broke out down at the gate. At least, as absolved as I was ever going to be. Slowly, as we formed up, a ragged group of human beings started to creep out of and from between the buildings in front of us. Where did the Germans get them all? The German was standing at attention in the middle of the room and was being peppered with questions that we did not understand. He was being led back into the prison. A group of guys from the company noticed us and said, “Wait till you see in there.”. Lee Berg. The barbed wire in those fences was laced in a fine mesh, so finely meshed no one was going to get through it. There are still altogether too many things that flood my mind once a trigger is pulled. The three of us looked, and we walked down the edge of those stacks. Psychoanalyst. After I was relieved and heading back up the hill, I saw Tim coming down the road behind me and I slowed until he caught up. Tears were coming down his cheeks. The sergeant left us there with instructions that we were to let no one through that hole from either direction. Weliberated a number of the death and work camps as we went along. Sergeant Blowers told us some things about the Commandant of Buchenwald and his wife. On the eve of the American liberation of Dachau, there were 67,665 registered prisoners at the concentration camp and roughly a third of them were Jewish. In one sense, they had not committed murder; rather, the German had committed suicide. Later on, when things became quieter, military government people arrived to help the prisoners get home–if there were homes for them to get to. On the first sip he looked at me with a large smile and said the word “chocolate”. The bodies we could see were all face up. We were doing everything we possibly could for the prisoners. No one knew how this gang of prisoners had been able to sneak out the hole in the fence to get to the village. The next day we heard that after returning to their town, the mayor of Weimar and his wife both committed suicide. That was probably the most brutal night I have ever lived through. I have become some kind of a sophist for myself now. I was not about to sleep, however. The previous spring, the SS had evacuated most of the Majdanek prisoners and camp personnel. The only life he knew was that of the concentration camp. He repeated it, and I corrected him. Buchenwald was filled with those who had to “spectate.” People were walking around and through the aisles of those stacks of dead bodies. They gave way and moved along with us. 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. In a clumsy way I attempted to translate the inscription to Bill and Tim as, “Work will make you free”. They appeared to be skin covering bones and nothing more. The SS bought itand surrendered. There was the slightest of communication. Thayer Greene, 93, looks for a photograph of his German friend who went by the nickname of "Friete". This all happened to a group of us on April 11, 1945. This meant he had to study the dog tags. It took him a little while but he finished the candy bar, looking at me with wonderment the whole time. It had two barn-like doors on either end of the building we were looking at, and the doors were standing open. What were those photos doing in my father’s trunk? They were, literally, skeletons covered with skin–nothing more than that–there appeared to be no substance to them. Human bodies neatly stacked, naked, ready for disposal. Hesitatingly we inched closer to that strange group as they also started inching closer to us. It was difficult to imagine what must have been going on. One particular night our bombers flew over the camp to the factory, which they pulverized. They were then trundled into the hospital, and every effort was made to revive them. When he was finished, he had a very proper hangman’s noose, thirteen turns of the rope and all. While the world celebrated, the weary men of Company "K", 5th Regiment, 71st Infantry Division, commanded by Capt. This may give you a glimmer of an idea of what Ilse Koch was like–and her husband–and the camp “doctors.”. I salute the thousands andthousands of GIs and soldiers of other nations who gave their lives to put an endto this madness. We started again from scratch, both of us deciding that names were the proper things with which to start, so we traded names. When they entered the camp, Soviet soldiers found over six thousand emaciated prisoners alive. As we passed through the door someone from the company said, “the crematorium.” Until then I had no idea what a crematorium was. Later that evening, a bunch of us from the company were sitting on the front steps of the barracks, talking. Some of them spoke English, and asked, “Are you American?” We said we were, and the reaction of the whole mass was immediate: simultaneously on their faces were relaxation, ease, joy, and they all began chattering to us in a babble of tongues that we couldn’t answer–but we could, and did, point the muzzles of our weapons at the ground, making it obvious these weapons were not “at the ready”. They do now also. US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945. He chattered up a storm and I could not understand one word. How did leaders, diplomats, and citizens around the world respond to the events of the Holocaust? A building in the camp, near the hospital, held all of those preserved specimens. The eyes on some were closed, on others open. We turned and walked back to the building where we found others from our company, along with some of the prisoners milling around in the space between the bodies and the building. This whole situation would have appalled her. It was tough to imagine, but there it was. We had to go near the Commandant’s house, and all of the “tourists” were lined up to go through another “exhibit,” where someone was busy telling “Ilse” stories. When we returned to the barracks we did not tell anyone what we had witnessed. After the tour had been administered, the group headed back out of the gate and back down the road to Weimar. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp. But in those warehouses that remained, Soviet soldiers found personal belongings of the victims. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. It was a warm afternoon so I took my jacket off, dropped it on the table and leaned on the ledge of the opening for a while. It was not the display of the genitals that shook some of us up; it was that final indignity, the exhibition. From time to time the jeep would stop and he would ask questions. 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. Absolved enough to be a little more comfortable with myself. Eventually Sergeant Blowers came down the hall, out the door, and onto the front steps with the rest of us. What I remember now are bits and pieces, and certain of those bits surface more rapidly than others. Upstairs, I relieved the guy before me and put my rifle over in the corner, threw the rifle belt under the table, crawled on the table, lit a cigar, and my thoughts continued. Ours and other infantry divisions were not capable of sustaining a continuousattack. In February 1985, two Holocaust survivors—Sigmund Strochlitz and Benjamin Meed—formally requested permission from the Secretary of the Army, John O. Marsh, Jr., to display in the future Museum the flags of all the US units that participated in the liberation of the Nazi camps. The first thing he got was another chocolate bar, and he took his time with that while we worked some more on our language. The German guard was corrected three or four times, and had to undo some of his work to re-do it correctly. 95AD, remember.org. All of the German guards had packed up and moved out about three hours before our arrival. He did so immediately. We still had no idea what this place was. Those of us riding the top scurried quickly to get behind the turret, while those vehicles just continued to charge. He was young, very small, and he spoke no English. To these people cigarettes were money, and I was getting them free from PX rations. He had no idea what candy was until then. They did not place the rope around the man’s neck. It was liberated in the summer of 1944 as Soviet forces advanced westward. This time, on the march home to Weimar, there was no laughter. Remember.org - The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivors' History. The Holocaust History – A People's and Survivor History – Remember.org, Holocaust Picture Book – The Story of Granny Girl as a Child, Anne Frank: The Biography | 1998 Holocaust Book, Holocaust history and stories from Holocaust Photos, Survivors, Liberators, Books and Art, Introduction to “The Fight Against Hate” gopher site at Jerusalem One, Joseph Weismann – Remembering with After the Roundup, Holocaust Curriculum for Middle School and High School 7-12 (Part 2), The following is a series of concentration camp photos taken by Josh C, After the Roundup by Joseph Weismann – Part 1 of Chapter 3, Liberation of Auschwitz 75 years later – a poem, Forever Alert German Child Survivors in Action Before 1945 and Beyond by Philipp Sonntag. I expected the young boy again, and I wanted to be able to give him everything I could. There were bits and pieces of personal gear still left around the barracks, but not much. Those field hospitals had requested some research on how to revive human beings who were very nearly frozen to death, but were still alive. There seemed to be about five yards between those fences. Some only had one piece of the uniform, others had two, many had all three parts. I do not expect a complete purging — that would be expecting too much — but if I can get these memories to crawl deeper into my mind, to reappear less vividly, and less frequently, it will be a help. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995. Holocaust Survivors Honor Camp Liberator When Vernon Tott came upon Germany's Ahlem concentration camp in April 1945, he and fellow American liberators were … Some one mentioned, while we were eating, that the engineers would be here tomorrow to bury those poor people. Things that he had learned interviewing prisoners in the hospital. We had aged years in a few short hours. The two named some of the diseases studied, but I have forgotten (willfully?) I had more cigarettes to give him when we parted too. In one way the talk was an interrogation: four of us with insatiable curiosities, two who could satisfy those curiosities. I wondered…Suppose my ancestors had not come to the United States; suppose they had stayed in Germany, and, through some fluke, the two people who had become my mother and father had met, and I had been born a German citizen. He was being given instructions, and, as we watched, it wasn’t long before I and the people who had come with me realized he was being told how to tie a noose in the rope. They would then be observed, and all of their reactions charted until death occurred.
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