The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (22 page)

Under the supervision of 102nd Infantry Division soldiers, German civilians were forced to exhume bodies, dig graves, and carry bodies bare-handed from near the barn where prisoners had been murdered to a newly created military cemetery
.

There’s a memorial at the site of that massacre now. It honors the memory of the dead from Belgium, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Italy, Yugoslavia, Mexico, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. “Also Jews,” as the English translation of the pamphlet handed out at the memorial site puts it. The pamphlet says that the commanding general of the 102nd, Frank A. Keating, “ordered: for every dead prisoner a grave has to be made.” Each body had to be taken from the barn, from the mass graves, and properly buried by the “men of Gardelegen and surroundings.” Buried properly by the “good Germans” who had helped murder them.

CHAPTER 10

BERGEN-BELSEN

A MONSTROUS SPECTACLE SET TO MUSIC

APRIL 15, 1945
BERGEN-BELSEN, GERMANY
    60 miles south of Hamburg
    200 miles west of Berlin
    165 miles north of Buchenwald

O
n the same day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was laid to rest in Hyde Park, New York, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was turned over to soldiers of the British Second Army, part of the Allied Twenty-first Army Group, a combined British and Canadian unit. The surrender of the camp had been negotiated over a period of several days. On the afternoon of Sunday, April 15, the first British units to enter the camp arrived in a van with a loudspeaker accompanying elements of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery. One of the soldiers on the tanks was Chaim Herzog of the Intelligence Corps. He would go on to become Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations and ultimately the sixth president of the State of Israel.

Just a week earlier, there had been more than 60,000 prisoners in the camp, nearly half of them recently arrived from other Nazi facilities. From April 11 to April 14, prisoners still able to work were forced to help the SS prepare for the surrender by burying bodies in mass graves. One report says, “While two prisoner’s orchestras played dancing music, 2,000 inmates dragged the corpses using strips of cloth or leather straps tied to the wrists or ankles. This monstrous spectacle went on for four days, from six in the morning until dark. Still, there were 10,000 rotting corpses remaining in the camp.”

The inmates who survived to see the arrival of the Brits were suffering from starvation, typhus, and other diseases. Circumstances were so dire that at minimum, another 14,000 of them would die
after
liberation.

The day after the camp was liberated, more than a hundred ambulances driven by American civilian volunteers departed in convoy from Italy to Bergen-Belsen to assist in saving the surviving inmates.

APRIL 15, 1945
SOUTHERN PO VALLEY, ITALY, NEAR BOLOGNA

W
hile Allied forces were pushing their way into Germany from the west, units fighting on the so-called second front in Italy were driving north against heavy German resistance. The U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and 88th, 91st, and 34th Infantry Divisions, as well as the 1st Armored Division, moved up the center of the country, while on the Adriatic coast to the east, Polish, Indian, New Zealand, and British soldiers of the Eighth Army were surging northward. To the west of the attacking American divisions, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force also joined the fray. Fighting in dozens of small towns was often house to house. Allied air support was intense: on the afternoon of April 15, more than 760 heavy bombers of the Mediterranean Allied Strategic Air Force attacked enemy defenses around Bologna, as an additional 200 medium bombers and 120 fighter-bombers of the XXII Tactical Air Command hit targets in the Monte Sole area and the Reno valley.

Not far away, prepared for orders to move out, were several dozen civilian volunteers of the American Field Service (AFS) and their brand-new four-wheel-drive Dodge ambulances. A brief bit of history: in 1914, with World War I under way, American students in Paris organized the AFS to drive troops to the front in taxicabs. On the return trips, they picked up wounded and brought them back to hospitals. After the siege of Paris was over, the students decided that they wanted to continue what they’d been doing and got their parents to back them financially. They bought ambulances that were made by the Ford Motor Company in southern France and continued to volunteer until the war ended. In World War II, Americans who desperately wanted to serve but had been rejected by the U.S. armed forces volunteered with the AFS and, like their predecessors, drove ambulances in combat zones.

High blood pressure kept Texas-born Melvin Waters out of the Army, but he found his way into combat with the AFS. “We had several people like myself with high blood pressure. Rollins had a curvature of the spine. One boy that I was close to had an arm that was sort of withered—he’d been a bomber copilot in the air force and had been injured in a crash. ‘Bama had a punctured eardrum. A lot of them were minor things you couldn’t tell, and then some of them were apparent what was wrong with the person.”

There were also a significant number of homosexuals in the AFS. These were men the Army wouldn’t take but the AFS did. Wounded soldiers never seemed to care about the sexual preference of the guy who was saving their lives by driving an ambulance through enemy fire.

Waters had been a sixteen-year-old senior in high school when the war broke out. He’d wanted to join the Navy immediately, but his mother said she wouldn’t sign the necessary papers—he’d have to wait until he was eighteen and drafted. Waters kept nagging, however, and she relented, allowing him to join the Marine Corps reserve at age seventeen. When he finally got called to active duty, he flunked his physical. It was just a couple of months before D-Day when he saw an ad in the local paper that read, “
WANTED—AMBULANCE DRIVERS
for immediate deployment overseas.”

Waters signed up and was sent to a dormitory on Fifty-first Street in New York City for a two-month-long orientation period. He recalls that most of the training dealt with what
not
to do in combat: “Don’t touch dead bodies, don’t pick up any souvenirs, and don’t walk anywhere that hasn’t been cleared of mines. I was dumb enough not to worry about being injured or crippled for the rest of my life.”

When he completed training, Waters received orders to go to Italy to serve with the British Eighth Army. His pay was $20 a month. By March he had joined the unit and was quickly put to work ferrying wounded soldiers down tortuous Apennine mountain roads to field hospitals. He’d been with his unit for only about six weeks when in mid-April, the lieutenant in charge came into their dayroom and said, “I’ve got an announcement to make. Company 567 is leaving Italy for an assignment. It’s secret. We can’t tell you where they’re going, and they want ten volunteers to go with them.” Eleven men volunteered. Waters and one of his friends were at the bottom of the seniority list. Both wanted badly to go, so the lieutenant had them cut a deck of cards. Waters drew a trey; his buddy drew a deuce. That’s when the officer said that Waters had one hour to get his gear together—they were leaving that night.

Waters and the others went by truck to a base on the Arno River, where they met up with Company 567. The unit had been chosen for this mission because it had received 250 new ambulances the previous Christmas. Each one could carry two stretchers on the floor and two hanging, or it could accommodate eight to ten men sitting on pulldown seats. Ultimately, about 150 ambulances convoyed through Florence, past Pisa, and then to one of the ports on Italy’s west coast. The first night, half the group was loaded on board an LST and sailed for Marseilles. Waters was in the second group, departing the next night. He recalls arriving in time to listen to President Harry S Truman deliver a relatively brief State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress at around 6
P.M.
local time on April 16, a day after FDR was laid to rest.

The next morning, the AFS ambulance convoy left Marseilles heading north. It would be more than a week before they reached their ultimate destination: Bergen-Belsen.

APRIL 15, 1945
WITH COMPANY K, 395TH INFANTRY REGIMENT
,
99TH INFANTRY DIVISION
    
Near Iserlohn, Germany

R
oger Maurice got his Purple Heart from General Patton, but he doesn’t remember the occasion. The nurses at the Second Evacuation Hospital told him about the general’s visit after he woke up following surgery to deal with a bullet wound that entered the front of his left shoulder and came out his back. It happened just a week before VE Day, before the end of the war in Europe, and just a couple of weeks after his nineteenth birthday.

Maurice had joined the 99th Infantry Division as a replacement around the first of March, just a week before it crossed the famous Remagen bridge. He’d dropped out of high school in Leominster, Massachusetts, twenty miles north of Worcester, to help his family—there were five children—survive during the Great Depression. He was working as a fireman, tending coal-fired furnaces, when President Roosevelt sent him his invitation to join the Army.

In 1944, the Army was still putting together complete combat divisions as well as training thousands of replacements to ship to Europe. Maurice had completed basic training and received advanced training in communications, as a field lineman and switchboard operator, when he and hundreds of other troops at Camp Crowder, Missouri, were told that they’d volunteered for the infantry. They were shipped to Camp Livingston, Louisiana, for advanced infantry training and then sent to Europe on a seven-day cruise aboard the
Queen Mary
to Southampton. From there it was a boat ride to Le Havre, railroad boxcars to a point near the Belgian-German border near Liège, then the back end of a deuce and a half to Remagen.