The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (51 page)

These grisly scenes, however, could not prepare the men for what awaited at Buchenwald, just a few miles north of Weimar. Ohrdruf and Nordhausen had been small camps, with only a few survivors to liberate. Bu- chenwald, by contrast, had been one of the largest in the camp system. Buchenwald had been opened in 1937 as a prison chiefly for political opponents of the Nazi regime, but during the war it became a depository for prisoners who were then farmed out as labor to lo- cal arms manufacturers. Over 238,000 people passed through its gates, and 56,000 of them died there. In the early days of 1945, the Germans transported many pris- oners into Buchenwald from the eastern camps; 24,000

prisoners arrived in January 1945 alone, and many of these were near death because of the conditions they had encountered on the death marches. In keeping with the general plan of evacuating the camps before the Allies arrived, Buchenwald’s commandant initiated the partial clearing of the camp on April 4, and in the week before the Americans arrived, 24,500 prisoners were marched out of the camp, and many died during this last transport. Even so, upon their arrival at Bu- chenwald on April 11, American troops found a massive camp filled with 21,000 emaciated, diseased, and ex- hausted prisoners, about 4,000 of them Jews. The camp also held 700 children.
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Just a few days later, farther to the north, British troops entered Bergen-Belsen, where they found an astonishing 60,000 prisoners in a state of total chaos and depravity. And two weeks af- ter that, the Americans reached Dachau, just ten miles from Munich, in Bavaria. They found 35,000 prisoners, amid scenes of unspeakable carnage, including a train of forty boxcars filled with a shipment of evacuated prisoners—all 2,000 of them dead.
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During late April and early May, reports of what the Allies had uncovered in these camps began to appear in news reports; the first impressions of reporters, as well as soldiers who witnessed these days of liberation, have also been widely published. It is worth studying these initial reports about the camps, both for what they say and for what they do not.
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The first striking feature of these reports to a contemporary reader is the absence of any discussion of Jewish victimization. In part, this is explained by the evidence uncovered in these initial encounters: Nordhausen was a slave labor camp, and its inmates had been members of many na- tional groups; Dachau had a long history as a prison

for political opponents of the Nazi regime, as well as criminals, homosexuals, and other “undesirables”; while Buchenwald, upon liberation, was teeming with a multitude of nationalities and POWs. At the moment of liberation, the Jewish presence in these western camps—with the significant exception of Belsen, where most of the survivors were Jews—was fairly small, and so there was no immediate recognition that what the soldiers had uncovered was part of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews. On April 30, Time magazine published a detailed, three-page report on “a series of concentration camps for political prison- ers from most of the nations the Nazis had conquered, including the German nation.” Jews are not mentioned once. When a delegation of U.S. congressmen, hastily gathered at Eisenhower’s urging, came to visit Buchen- wald, Nordhausen, and Dachau, they too seemed en- tirely unaware of the role the concentration camp sys- tem had played in the Jewish catastrophe. Their final sixteen-page report said that these three camps held “slave laborers and political prisoners” and “were typi- cal of all the concentration camps in the Third Reich.” The camps’ main purpose, according to the congress- men, was to incarcerate and work to death “civilians who were opposed to, or who were suspected of being opposed to, the Hitler regime.” As of yet, the story of Jewish persecution and genocide had little or no place

in the emerging reports about the camps.
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But there is another dimension of these accounts that requires scrutiny. The standard narrative of liberation suggests that at the moment of freedom, a bond was established between the Allied troops and the grateful and overjoyed prisoners they freed. Indeed, the emo- tional power of the liberation story depends upon the forging of this bond, and the sense of mutual obliga- tion and respect that it engendered. Yet to hear the wit- nesses tell it, no such bond existed at the moment of liberation of the camps. Rather, for the Allied soldiers and reporters, the overwhelming sentiment was one of physical repulsion and disgust. In these early reports, it is not the closeness but the distance between the lib- erated and the liberators that stands out.

It is remarkable how, in the first accounts of the camps by Western journalists, names of individual prisoners, their countries of origin, and their personal experi- ences are totally absent. Rather, reporters and soldiers described an undifferentiated mass of human refuse. Margaret Bourke-White, the renowned Life magazine photographer, said of her tour of the camps that “using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.” The corpses in Buchenwald, notoriously, were de-

scribed as being “stacked like cordwood”—or as Percy Knauth of Time put it, “stacked more or less the way I stack my firewood back home, not too carefully.” But even the living were reduced to inanimate, nonhuman objects of pity and almost contempt. Knauth went on: “they stink like nothing else on earth and many…have lost the power of coherent speech.” Marcus Smith, a medical officer attached to the Seventh Army, also had trouble seeing anything but a mass of ill and dy- ing specimens: “Starvation diminishes physical dif- ferences,” he noted, “and thus the emaciated inmates look alike: faces without expression, eyes lifeless and sunken, cheekbones prominent, lips cracked, hair (when present) unkempt, skin ashen. Their legs are of- ten swollen; this interferes with knee bending. Starved people find walking difficult or impossible. They shuf- fle along, seem to droop; their breathing is labored…. Their reflexes are sluggish, they lack mental and physi- cal stamina, they seem to be mentally dull, exhausted, and depressed.” General Patton thought the prisoners “looked like feebly animated mummies and seemed to be of the same level of intelligence.” Al Newman of Newsweek referred to the survivors as “miserable wrecks” and “creatures—you could not by any stretch of the imagination call them human beings.” The first

U.S. Army report on Buchenwald declared the survi- vors to be “unpleasant to look on. It is easy to adopt

the Nazi theory that they are subhuman, for many have in fact been deprived of their humanity.” These men and women and children were “gibbering idiots” or “ape-like living skeletons” lying in “piles of filthy straw fouled by their own excrement. Only a handful could stand on their rickety, pipestem legs.” Said one Ameri- can private of the survivors at Gunskirchen Lager in Austria, “they seemed to have no hair, big eyes, big sockets in the eyes, bony arms reaching out for food, just hard to describe. The only similarity to human be- ings is, they were standing.”
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Edward R. Murrow, the renowned CBS broadcaster, reported from Buchenwald three days after its libera- tion. He clearly was not ready for what he encountered. “ There surged around me an evil-smelling horde. Men and boys reached out to touch me; they were in rags and the remnants of uniform. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes.” Inside one of the barracks, Murrow said, he found 1,200 men. “ The stink was beyond all descrip- tion,” he said. “As I walked down to the end of the bar- racks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of ba- bies.” Percy Knauth considered these broken forms in the camps quite inhuman. “ You cannot adequately de- scribe starved men; they just look awful and unnatural.

Their skin is stretched with incredible tightness over their bones, as if it would burst at a touch, revealing emptiness. The rounded parts, the curving and the flat places, the swelling muscles that men usually have— all these are missing. They walk or creep or lie around and seem about as animate as the barracks and fence posts and stones on Buchenwald’s bare, hard-packed earth.” If they saw the smallest morsel of food, “they struggled for it blindly, as a baby struggles instinctively to fill its empty stomach at its mother’s breast.” A fel- low reporter for Time, Sidney Olson, vividly recalled his discomfort when the prisoners got too close to him: “ They began to kiss us, and there is nothing you can do when a lot of hysterical, unshaven, lice-bitten, half- drunk, typhus-infected men want to kiss you. Nothing at all. You cannot hit them, and besides they all kiss you at the same time. It is no good trying to explain that you are only a correspondent.”
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One British member of Parliament who toured Buchen- wald was aware that she and her colleagues were un- able to consider these pitiful survivors as human. “One realized,” she recalled, “that though one had looked at them with pity and dismay, one was still failing to ap- preciate them as living humanity with feelings and re- actions similar to one’s own. That was the most appall- ing and shocking thing.” And she went on to prove her

own point, by saying that, although there were many naked and half-dressed men on the camp grounds, a woman felt “no more embarrassment in Buchenwald than there would be in passing a heap of dying rabbits, so little did these people give the impression of being ordinary human beings.” For Harold Denny, the New York Times correspondent who reported on liberated Buchenwald, “there was hardly a man of those hun- dreds who could be restored to humanity now. Easy death was the most life could now offer them.”
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If anything could exceed the vileness of Buchenwald, it was Bergen-Belsen. Liberated by British troops on April 15, just four days after the Americans had arrived at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen was in a state of anar- chy and horror—indeed, British press reports referred to it as the “horror camp.” Belsen had at one point been considered a “good” camp—that is, it was not an extermination or work camp, but a prison for promi- nent prisoners who might have some future use as bar- gaining chips with other countries. In the last months of the war, however, Belsen—because of its location in north-central Germany, near Hannover—was chosen as one of the final roundup destinations for the prison- ers trekking in from the eastern camps. Thus, while in December 1944 there were just over 15,000 prisoners in the camp, during the spring of 1945 thousands more

arrived, most in a terrible state of decrepitude. By April 15, there were 60,000 people imprisoned here, yet the structure of the camp had fallen apart, so there was no food distribution and even the rudimentary medi- cal services of the camp had ceased to function. The mortality rate was staggering: 7,000 prisoners died in February, 18,000 in March, and 9,000 in just the first two weeks of April. There were no facilities for burial, and most of the corpses were simply piled up randomly around the camp. No water, no sanitation, dysentery and typhus rampant, the ground littered with the dead and dying: a scene of total depravity.
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The comments of the young British men and women who first encountered this camp reveal the same sense of pity and disgust as do those of the Americans at Bu- chenwald and Ohrdruf. They naturally had no previous experience of this sort of human degradation, nor did they really know what to make of these ghastly-looking prisoners. Lieutenant Derek Sington, part of an intel- ligence unit and the first British officer to enter liber- ated Belsen, recalled the camp smelled like “a mon- key-house” and described the prisoners as a “strange simian throng.” Their “shaven heads and their obscene striped penitentiary suits” were “dehumanizing”; these “almost lost men” could manage only a few halfhearted cheers for the arriving British soldiers; even then, the

survivors looked liked “prancing zebras.”
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Lieuten- ant- Colonel J. A. D. Johnston of the Royal Army Medi- cal Corps (RAMC) described the prisoners as “a dense mass of emaciated, apathetic scarecrows.” The prison- ers had been reduced to a less than human state: “I heard a scrabbling on the floor,” recalled Alan MacAus- lan, a young medical student volunteer. “I looked down in the half light, and saw a woman crouching at my feet. She had black matted hair, well-populated, and her ribs stood out as though there were nothing between them…. She was defecating, but she was so weak that she could not lift her buttocks from the floor, and as she had diarrhea, the yellow liquid stools bubbled up over her thighs. Her feet were white and podgy from famine edema, and she had scabies. As she crouched, she scratched her genital parts, which were scabetic too.” Two or three prisoners shared each bunk in the barracks, and they were all stricken with dysentery: “urine and feces dribbled through the wooden boards of the top two bunks on to the lowest one, and as this was the least comfortable, all the dying and weaker pa- tients could be found there.” As for the dead, another medical student said, “there were thousands and thou- sands of dead bodies and you couldn’t really relate to them as people, you couldn’t really consider them to be your aunt or your mother or your brother or your father because there were just too many and they were being