The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (12 page)

Morris Sunshine was part of the 294th Combat Engineer Battalion attached to the 104th Infantry Division when Nordhausen was liberated. He says the sight was indescribable and the smell was unimaginable
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Back in Brooklyn before the war, he’d heard stories about the Germans from people they called refugees who spoke about prisons that they’d come from. But he knew nothing about concentration camps. On the morning of April 12, they began to smell Nordhausen from ten or fifteen miles away. And then they arrived at the camp, which he recalls as being adjacent to the road, next to the town. “We saw these skeletonlike people, dressed in the striped uniforms, and some of them moved. Some of them didn’t move. It was a shocking sight. This was some kind of something that’s indescribable, you know. And the smell—it was horrible, such a horrible smell of death that hasn’t been put into the ground, it’s unimaginable.

“I do remember that some of these people got out, and they wandered into some of the German houses looking for food. I was a buck-ass sergeant, and [the Germans] came out looking for me ‘cause I spoke Yiddish, and I was able to converse with these people. And they told me that there were some people in this house, and the woman of the house is screaming and yelling, panicking. I went in, and what the story was, the member of the concentration camp, there was bread on the table and he grabbed it. And she was screaming at him that ‘This is for my family!’ and she was appealing to me that I should get the bread from the concentration camp guy, which, of course, I didn’t have any sympathy for her at all.

“I mean, I was so angry at what you saw, and the depravity. Some of them couldn’t walk. [They ate] whatever we gave them, some of them threw up; it was too much for their stomach to take. But this—of course we didn’t know at the time. We found that out in a day or so, two days—they were collapsing on us.”

Sunshine went into the yard at Nordhausen where hundreds of bodies lay because he was curious. He wanted to know who the people were, what they were doing. “Most of them could not speak; it was kind of an unintelligent gibberish to me. They might not have been speaking German. Could have been speaking Russian or Hungarian or anything like that. But I didn’t know that. I just went at them with my Deutsche.

“I did get that they had been captured. The story I got was the German guards knew that we were coming—how they knew that, I don’t know, but they knew it. And [the guards] tried to get gasoline, kerosene to burn some of the camp and some of the victims. Somehow, some of these internees, the concentration camp victims, were able to overpower some of these guards, which to me sounds strange, because they had such little strength. But evidently, something like that did happen, and they beat up on a few of them and they never got to fire up the camp.”

John Rheney, Jr., was a staff sergeant, a rifle squad leader in the 413th Infantry Regiment of the Timberwolves. After the war, Rheney spent forty years as a pediatrician. He’s now retired in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he does physicals five days a week on recruits coming into Fort Jackson. He was twenty-two when he got orders to go see Nordhausen, which had been liberated by the 414th, and he’s never forgotten what he saw there. “It didn’t look too bad from the outside, but when you got inside there were just stacks and stacks of corpses. All of them had apparently starved to death. There were a few people up that I remember, and they greeted us like we’ve never been greeted before. Most of them, I think, were French.

“They were in rags. They, too, were starved, but for some reason they had survived a little bit. They just greeted us like we had saved ‘em, which I guess we had.” Rheney didn’t go into the tunnels at nearby Dora, but he went fairly deep into Nordhausen, where the bodies had been accumulated for disposal. “It shook everybody. I’d read about the Civil War and the slaughter that took place there, and the camps they had such as Andersonville, but even those were not like this was.”

Corporal Forrest Robinson was a military policeman with the 104th. That’s probably why his commanding officer asked that he accompany him into the barracks buildings at Nordhausen. On a visit to the camp fifty years later with his son to participate in the dedication of a museum at the site, the now-ordained minister had a full-blown flashback. “In a searing flash, horrid memory swept over me, and I could see it all once again—row upon row of devastated human bodies, emaciated, starved, mutilated, gray, and rotting in the hot sun. There were open pits in which bodies were burning. The stench was horrid, doing almost final violence to the senses.”

Questioned (in writing because of his extreme hearing loss) about his experiences on April 12, 1945, he writes of being nearly overwhelmed, feeling he would lose it all having just walked with his CO through the open yard. “You would have thought that the previous moments would somehow have prepared me for what I was to experience [inside the barracks], but it was even worse.

“Along the full length of the wall to our left, iron cots had been jammed together, and on the cots were the dead and the dying, side by side. I’m certain some of the dead had been so for weeks, their grotesque and distended bodies emitting the foulest of gases. Occasionally a figure on one of the cots would stir and cry out for help. But we were helpless. We weren’t medics! The horrid stench of it all is indescribable.

Corporal Forrest Robinson was a military policeman with the 104th Infantry Division at Nordhausen. After going inside buildings and finding survivors lying among dozens and dozens of dead bodies, he suffered what he now describes as “total physical and spiritual exhaustion.” Now an ordained minister, Robinson says he has no memory of anything that occurred in the two weeks after Nordhausen
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“Under a stairway, there were bodies stacked like cordwood. I simply could take no more and suddenly bolted and ran out the door back onto the concourse, grabbing the side of our commander’s jeep to steady myself. But a strange thing was happening. One of our men had managed to sneak overseas a portable radio and it was playing in the back seat, and of all songs, Glenn Miller’s ‘Sunrise Serenade.’ It was hideous.

“Utterly overwhelmed by this crushing mixture of circumstances, I literally lost it. I raised my head to the heavens and cursed God in the vilest of language. I screamed there could not be a God who could allow a thing such as the Holocaust, and dismissed civilization as but a thin skin covering a basic savage. Suddenly, in total physical and spiritual exhaustion, I fell over the side of the jeep and vomited.” Reverend Robinson writes that he has no memory of anything that occurred in the subsequent two weeks. “That period is a total blank in my mind.”

Chicagoan Arthur Leu was part of a military police company of about 175 men, broken into three units: one guarded headquarters, one dealt with traffic control, and the third, his section, handled POWs. He was in a forward compound; his unit’s job was to take prisoners from the advance units and contain them, have them questioned by intelligence officers, sort out the SS from the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm, and then ship them to the rear.

By the time Leu got to Nordhausen, the first units in were already starting to bring survivors out and, at the same time, moving bodies from inside buildings to the open area. Leu says there were hundreds and hundreds of bodies. “You can’t believe it. You cannot absolutely believe that the human body can be that thin, that devoid of any substance. You can’t believe that people could be treated like that, that a human being could exact that kind of punishment on another human. You’re horrified.”

Leu watched survivors being carried out on stretchers, “and there were some of them sitting against the walls that had been brought out, that were obviously alive and barely so. Men and women. Most of them naked.” In the early hours, he says, there were not enough medics on hand, because no one had expected to be confronted with the horrors they found.

“It was very busy, but it was quiet,” he recalls. “These people were hardly even capable of being noisy, their moaning or whatever it was. There was no shouting, there was no screaming, none of that going on. But they must have been grateful that there was an activity there that was being of help to them as opposed to what they were going through before.”

Arthur Leu’s unit probably spent less than an hour inside Nordhausen before leaving to set up a prisoner compound not far from the camp.

Almost as soon as the 3rd Armored Division medics arrived at Nordhausen, they notified the 104th Infantry Division following behind them that a full-blown medical rescue operation would be needed if any of those still living in the camp were to survive. The weight of that mission fell on the 329th Medical Battalion, with its four companies of personnel plus a headquarters unit. One of the men there was Ragene Farris, who, in 1996, described that day in exquisite detail for the division association’s newspaper,
Timberwolf Howl:

Going immediately to the scene, the Timberwolf medics found a square of bomb-scarred buildings, reminiscent of a large college campus, which until six weeks previously had housed the motor shops of the German SS troopers. Upon entry, litters in hand, the men saw rows of bodies stretched out the length of the large concrete floored room. Grotesquely still, evident that they had hung tenaciously to a last breath of life, these prison-marked men lay in an indescribable symbol of death. The initial shock of the bestiality, the inhumane cruelty of this deed, did not register with the men. Their job was to evacuate the living; to hospitalize and nourish; to bring men and women, and children back to the realm of human decency.

In many cases the living had been too weak to move the dead from their sides. One hunched-drawn French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm, having no mental concept that the friend had died, and unable to move his limbs…. In their prison garments of striped coats, huddled in rags or old dirty blankets, it was like reaching into another world apart, to bring these shadow-men from their environment onto a litter, and into a clean American ambulance.

Not long after the evacuation of the living had begun, troops were sent to the nearby town to bring back several hundred German civilians to assist with the rescue effort. Many of those same Germans would be pressed into burial details in the days to come. Farris wrote:

These were the people who lived in unconcern as thousands of people had been driven as slaves, then left to die. Each medic learned several German words: “schnell” (hurry) and “tempo” (the same—hurry) and with a mixture of emotion soon had a fast-moving litter line going from building, shell and bomb craters, cellars, etc., wherever the patients were found to be yet alive. For seven hours with truck and ambulance, drivers carried away load after load of these shadow-men, taking them to hospital facilities set up by other Timberwolves Medics (section hospitalization). Litters carrying men of every disease and condition, continued to flow into a central evacuation point.

The final score of evacuated patients was well over 700. Fifteen patients died enroute to the hospital area. Three hundred patients were so eaten away by malnutrition that their bodies will never respond to treatment or gain health again. Lying in the camp area were 2,800 bodies.