The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (27 page)

There were eleven camps named for the nearest railway station, called Kaufering. They were all subcamps of the oldest concentration camp established by the Reich, Dachau, which was just north of Munich. The Kaufering camps had been built to house prisoners who would be used as slave labor to build three underground bunkers where parts for the ME-262, the Messerschmitt jet fighter plane, would be manufactured.

The first prisoners to arrive came from Auschwitz in June 1944. By the time the Kaufering camps were liberated, just under 29,000 prisoners had been sent there, and half of them had died, some of illness, the others worked to death. Israel Cohen was determined not to be one of them.

On Wednesday, April 25, Cohen came out of the barrack he slept in to discover that the SS guards had disappeared from the towers placed at intervals along the barbed-wire fence. The inmates took it as a sign that the artillery explosions they’d seen and heard the previous night were more than just meaningless sound and fury; they signified freedom. A group of the inmates broke into the camp kitchen and took potatoes, flour, cabbage, and bread—a virtual feast and a crime for which they would have been shot immediately just a day earlier.

What they had no way of knowing was that even though elements of two American armored divisions and four infantry divisions were heading toward the Kaufering camps on their way to Munich, the nearest GIs were still roughly seventeen miles away. The Germans, however, figured it out: liberation was not imminent for their prisoners, so they returned. The guttural voices of the SS cut through the air: “Everyone in a row! Roll call!”

The onrushing force of American infantry and armor was not yet close enough to stop the killing in the camps. It would go on for two more days until units of the 10th and 12th Armored Divisions and the 63rd Infantry Division were at the gates and, a day or so behind them, the 101st Airborne and 36th Infantry Divisions.

If he and his group of young friends, all Gerer Chasidic Jews from Lódź, were to survive, they’d have to find the strength to live by their wits until the GIs arrived.

APRIL 25, 1945
LEIPHEIM, GERMANY
    
19 miles southwest of Dillingen
    
40 miles northwest of Kaufering

W
hile the 12th Armored Division was coming down from the north, the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 254th Infantry Regiment of the 63rd Division crossed a damaged bridge over the Danube near Riedheim and moved two more miles to the southeast, taking the town of Leipheim and repelling a tank-supported counterattack by the Germans.

Irv Schlocker had left his high school in Philadelphia with half a year to go and joined the Army, ultimately being assigned to the 254th. He says every kid wanted to do his duty, and it was a common thing for kids to lie about their age to get in. He personally knew one fifteen-year-old and one sixteen-year-old in the division and seemed surprised that they weren’t found out because they looked “so damn young.”

Schlocker’s outfit arrived in the European Theater of Operations (ETO) in time for the Battle of the Bulge. The stories he enjoys telling are about getting there from Marseilles in 40 and 8 railcars. “Did you know how men went to the toilet?” the former staff sergeant and squad leader asks. “In their helmets?” ventures the interviewer.

“No, no,” he says, a broad smile creeping into his voice because he knows what he’s about to say will gross out well-mannered civilians. “They had big, open sliding doors. And you extended your arms in each direction, your right and your left, and a big, hopefully strong guy held each arm and you squatted and did your business while the train was moving. Picturesque, isn’t it?” The vision of American infantrymen mooning the French countryside from a rolling freight train is worth a smile. It becomes a full laugh with Schlocker’s next instance of providing too much information: “And if you had to urinate, that was easy. They had a big bucket in there. And they waited until the train slowed down to empty it out, or else the guys in the car behind you got sprayed.” By now Schlocker is in full-throated laughter as he adds, “It was unbelievably filthy.”

He saw combat in Alsace-Lorraine, including action in the Colmar pocket, and recalls being “as frightened as you could be and still do your duty,” but he was never told about the concentration camps. He did, however, run into anti-Semitism in his own unit. “There was one guy who was an extreme anti-Semitic sonofabitch. I’m Jewish. And he had the same stupid fucking dumb joke all the time. He used to tell this story before I got a couple stripes. ‘What’s the fastest thing in the world? A Jew riding through Germany on a bicycle.’ You know what I mean? This was his humor. As a matter of fact, when I first made corporal, my first duty was to take him out on what they call prisoner watch. You went to the stockade at the base, in Camp Van Dorn, picked the sonofabitch up, and we stayed with him all day—he had to do everything the company did—and at the end of the day, we had to take him back to the stockade. They worked their ass off up there. I was a prisoner chaser, they called it. And they gave me a loaded weapon. And he said, ‘You wouldn’t shoot me, would you, Corporal?’ I said, ‘Nick, I got a loaded fucking carbine, I don’t like you to begin with, and if you make one fucking move, I’ll put a bullet in you. Whether I’ll kill you or not, I don’t know; but I will shoot you, I guarantee that. I’m not going to lose these stripes over an asshole like you.’ That’s exactly what I said to him, and he shut up. If he’s still alive, he’s got to be the head of the local Ku Klux Klan somewhere. He got in a fight later on with a nice old Polish guy in our outfit who was maybe thirty, thirty-five years old—and he was ten years younger than the Polish guy. And afterwards, we threw a blanket on Nick and every noncom in the company kicked the shit out of the guy.”

On April 26, Schlocker’s 63rd Division unit established contact with Combat Command R of the 12th Armored Division at Günzburg and began a forty-mile sprint to the Landsberg area, where the next day they would discover the Holocaust firsthand.

APRIL 27, 1945
SOMEWHERE NEAR LANDSBERG-KAUFERING, GERMANY

F
or more than twenty-four hours, the 63rd Infantry Division had been leapfrogging its line outfits toward Landsberg, closely following tanks of the 10th and 12th Armored Divisions. The 254th Infantry Regiment was somewhere in the area of the eleven so-called Kaufering camps when they came across their first slave-labor/death camp. Irv Schlocker says there was always somebody in every company who could speak Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, or German, and they were able to learn that the strange people they’d begun to see along the road were prisoners who had just gotten out of a camp.

“There they were,” Schlocker recalls, “sittin’ on the road. Some of them had bags with them, some of them had no shoes, some had little or no clothes on. Our officers came around—especially the medical officers—they begged us not to give them food. They said, ‘They will die if they eat it.’ While we’re marching there, a jeep came down flying a Red Cross flag, and they kept saying, ‘Don’t feed ‘em; give ‘em candy if you want, cigarettes, but don’t feed them.’ We couldn’t understand that at all. We saw how emaciated they looked. We were reasonably intelligent young kids. Can you comprehend it today if you saw it all of a sudden? Okay, same thing for us.”

They figured out that the starving prisoners were civilians, and though they couldn’t feed them, the Americans felt they could at least get them something to wear from the abandoned homes or apartments in the German towns. Schlocker says, “I remember kicking a door in for one of them, and I brought in a few of his buddies with him. I went to a closet—you’ve seen where a guy takes a suit and holds it up to someone and says, ‘This is your size’? I gave them stuff that was in that closet—anything they wanted, just take it. That’s how we outfitted them.”

And as he and his squad members helped the recently freed prisoners, he found his hatred for the Germans intensifying. “I couldn’t even comprehend it, to tell you the truth. I hated the fuckin’ Krauts, being Jewish. But we had no idea about these atrocities. [Though] we knew there was concentration camps, we had no idea what they were like, no concept of what they were.”

Schlocker never went into the camp they came to. His unit kept moving, but they were able to see quite a bit from outside the fence. “It was horrible. There were fires. And I also saw one Kraut—a couple of the prisoners grabbed him, and they actually drowned him in a horse trough. Just held his head in there until he drowned. And we didn’t even bother to stop them.” Asked how emaciated prisoners could pull down and kill a well-fed German soldier, he matter-of-factly says, “We saw what the places were like. We were probably assisting them, maybe shot the guy in the arm or the leg, or even shot ‘em full, killed ‘em. We gave them any assistance that they needed, unquestionably. I seen a German guy killed with his own helmet. They just beat him to death with it. It was the only weapon they had.”

Any shooting that was going on at the time came from the Americans. He says there was no enemy fire at all. “They were hiding. A lot of them—what you would do is find German uniforms all over the place. They just got out of their uniforms and got the civilian clothes.”

And while the survival rate of former SS camp guards was fairly low if they were discovered by their former prisoners, it was no higher if they were captured by the Americans. Schlocker says, “We were looking for German stragglers. We knew enough to look under the left armpit of the Germans to look to see if he was an SS guy. You know what I’m talking about? That tattoo they had? Some tried to escape, shall we say. And they were executed, right on the spot. We knew enough from fighting these bastards, if they looked young and full of pep and piss and vinegar, we made ‘em take off that tunic; we looked under their armpit. If it was that [SS blood-type tattoo], they were shot. No questions asked. It was cold-blooded killing, but it was overlooked. This was done. There’s no way of denying it.”

Inside the turret of their Sherman tank ten miles from Kaufering, T/5 John Critzas and his four crew members began to smell something they couldn’t readily identify. “We knew the odor of combat and we knew the odor of dead soldiers, but we didn’t know the horrendous odor of a concentration camp.” They kept trying to find the source as they continued down the road, but the smell only got worse and they could find nothing to explain it. “You don’t see anything. You don’t know where it’s coming from. And we saw these things that looked like prisons, but we didn’t know what they were. And, of course, we’re looking for the enemy, and there wasn’t any enemy to be found. As we approached, the odor got even worse, and there were no people around to talk to and ask.”

Critzas’s crew did what any self-respecting tank crew would do when faced with a mystery behind a stone wall about ten feet high. “We just went through it. I was instructed to turn the gun around because the 76 protrudes beyond the front of the tank. So I was told ‘traverse 180 degrees,’ and I did that. There wasn’t an impact when we hit the wall. We just went through it and we stopped on the other side and looked at all of these people, maybe two thousand of them. We saw all these emaciated prisoners with striped suits on that looked like two-hundred-pound men starved down to about eighty pounds, the vast majority of them being Jewish. And we found out pretty quickly what it was. They all came up to the tank, and several of them knew English and welcomed us, and they were asking for food.”