The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (5 page)

Such are the mysteries of combat: the shrapnel that’s stopped from penetrating all the way to your heart by the miniature Bible or prayer book carried superstitiously in a breast pocket. The land mine you learn is a dud only after stepping on it and hearing a
click
followed by—nothing. The rifle bullet that slams into your helmet at the perfect angle, so that instead of killing you outright, it runs an orbital path between the steel pot and the helmet liner, resulting in nothing worse than a hellacious headache. Or the incoming shell that bursts in the trees, killing the buddies you share a foxhole with but leaving you alive and unscathed, save for a lifelong case of survivor guilt.

The men of the 4th Armored had experienced all of that and more since they’d landed at Utah Beach on July 11, 1944, and entered combat barely a week later. To attack the Germans at Bastogne in order to help relieve the besieged 101st Airborne Division—the Battered Bloody Bastards of Bastogne—under orders from General George S. Patton they’d raced into Belgium, covering 150 miles in nineteen hours. Even for an armored unit accustomed to outpacing the infantry and artillery, that’s nothing short of incredible.

They fought hard, crossing the Rhine on bridges built by U.S. Army engineers, heading into the heartland of Germany on March 24 and 25. They went east of Frankfurt and drove north to the city of Bad Hersfeld, the last population center in what would come to be known as West Germany. Then they headed east into the future German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany), toward the ultimate objective of Dresden. The map Irzyk switched to in the turret of his tank covered the Erfurt sector of the country. The Americans gambled on traveling down the Autobahn as far as practical, because it was quick going. They were hit; they fought back and kept going. They went through Eisenach and on the following day, April 4, around midmorning, the 4th Armored Division took Gotha without firing a shot, but only because the town’s burgomaster had been given an ultimatum: surrender the city or see it destroyed by artillery fire. Combat Command B, which included the 37th Tank Battalion, formally accepted the surrender of Gotha.

The commander of one of the 37th tanks was Sergeant Harry Feinberg. A lanky, six-foot-tall Jewish kid from Brooklyn, Feinberg had left home in 1937 at the age of seventeen without finishing high school to tour the country for nearly four years with a vaudeville act called Borrah Minevich and His Harmonica Rascals. He practiced a lot, made recordings, and even appeared in a movie with the child star Jane Withers.

In late 1940, with the glamour of show business fading, Harry returned home to work in the building business with his father. Little more than a year later, he was drafted, sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to learn all about tanks and to discover that training was going to require a good imagination: the entire division had only six tanks; they simulated firing at targets made by painting the word
TANK
on big Army trucks.

Eventually, while on exercises in the Mojave Desert, the unit got real tanks as well as a commanding general the men loved, Major General John Wood. Feinberg says that prior to deployment Wood was being questioned by reporters who asked him why the 4th didn’t have a nickname like the other armored divisions, such as “Hell on Wheels” or “Old Ironsides.” According to lore, Wood said, “We don’t need a nickname. We will be known by our deeds alone. Name is enough: 4th Armored Division.” And that’s how the division nickname became “Name Enough.”

At the end of 1943, the division sailed for England in a fifty-two-ship convoy and then trained in the British countryside for months until finally being sent to France weeks after D-Day. It didn’t take long for the reality of war to strike home. They were in the Normandy hedgerows, just beyond Sainte-Mère-Église (recall the famous scene in
The Longest Day
where the paratrooper’s chute is caught on the church steeple next to the clock), and had just jumped off the tanks to begin routine cleaning and maintenance. Feinberg recalls that “As soon as we got off the tank, I hear a whistle. That’s the loudest whistle I ever heard. A plane came over, and right into the next hedgerow, a bomb fell there, and you see a flash, and you hear screaming, ‘Medic! Medic!’ And I started shivering.

“You could hear a lot of excitement. ‘Over here, guys, over here, c’mon!’ And you’d hear another guy say, ‘I can’t feel my legs, I can’t feel my legs.’ And this all came down as a big surprise. You can imagine my head just spinning. What can I do here? Where can I run to?”

Feinberg survived the next several months, which included participation in the Battle of the Bulge. He earned a Purple Heart and screwed up his back for life as a result of the constant jumping down from the tank. By the time his unit stopped in Gotha, he was an experienced soldier, using training, innate smarts, and intuition to survive. But as most war veterans will tell you, it’s when you think you’ve got it figured out that you tend to get careless and take unnecessary risks.

“I was now a tank commander, because our guys were getting killed, so they promoted me. Gave me three stripes. Baloney. I didn’t want those three stripes or any of them. Anyway, we’re on attack, on a paved road. I don’t remember what was on my right side, but on this side I see about eight, ten houses, well-kept two-story homes, and we stopped on the road. We gassed up, oiled up, and greased up and did what we had to, and we’re just waiting for a command to move out. So I said, ‘Hey, guys, I’m going into this house across the road.’ There was a wrought iron fence with fleur-de-lis all on this black fence, and I’m going in there to see what’s in the house, which is the most stupid thing I ever did. I go to the door, and I turn the handle, and the door opens. I go in, I look, and I’m in a big, big living room, and there’s a woman at the other end. She’s dressed from here”—he touches his neck—“down to her ankles, and she had a German honeycomb hair comb. And she says, ‘Come in, come in.’ Being I could speak Yiddish, I was used as a German interpreter, so I understood her. And I looked at her. All I had was my .45 and my grease gun, and I look around, and I see a door here and there, and it didn’t dawn on me until I ran out, what am I doing here? There might be enemy in there. My God, they can make mincemeat of me. Anyway, she says to me, ‘Come in, this is my living room.’ She asked me,
‘Keine Schokolade?’
And I said,
‘Nein.’
She says in German, ‘I’ll make a trade with you. See this lamp here, on the end table? You take this, you give me chocolate, and you can take this home as a souvenir.’ So, I said,
‘Nein, die Schokolade ist für die Kinder,’
because in every town we went to, little five-, six-, eight-year-old kids were not afraid of us, even in Germany. They used to come around to see us, look at us around our tanks. Very poorly fed, very poorly clothed. And the American soldier’s not a tough soldier, he’s a sweetheart, he’s a marshmallow, they see kids, they jump off the tank and give them chewing gum and if we had cookies, oh, these kids would love us. And we’d pick them up and just play with them. They would laugh. And, of course, this is when we’re not firing.

“She said, ‘For a souvenir, take it home with you.’ So I looked at the lamp, and something shuddered over my body. I got a feeling, because the light was still on and I could see through there, and it was sort of grayish yellow coloring. She said, ‘Do you know what this is made of? This is human skin.’ That’s when I turned—I wheeled around and just waved her down and ran out, and the guys said, ‘Hey, what happened?’ I said, ‘I just did the most stupid thing that I ever did. What the hell did I go in there for?’”

It would not be the last time that American troops were confronted by such hideous creations.

Probably around the time that Harry Feinberg was recovering from his Gotha adventure, Lieutenant Colonel Al Irzyk’s 8th Tank Battalion was literally flagged over to the side of a main Gotha road by the commanding officer of Combat Command A, Colonel Hayden Sears, a huge hulk of a man who dwarfed the much more diminutive battalion commander.

Speaking face-to-face on the sidewalk, Sears told Irzyk that intelligence had received indications that the Nazis had built a huge underground communications installation designed for the headquarters of the entire German army in the event Berlin had to be evacuated. The installation was reported to be somewhere near the town of Ohrdruf, which lay roughly ten miles to the south. Sears’s instructions were simple: “Go to Ohrdruf and look for this complex.”

Today, that’s an eighteen-minute drive. In 1945, in Sherman tanks with bad guys shooting at you, it took a little longer. Irzyk’s memory of the day is remarkably clear, and his recitation of the story comes to life when he spreads out his wartime-era map on the dining room table of his historic Palm Beach, Florida, home. The route his tank battalion and accompanying armored infantry followed six decades ago is easy to see. “The minute we left Gotha, we started hitting resistance.” Initially, they were attacked by Panzerfausts—the German antitank bazooka-type weapon that resembles the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) so common today. Those were followed by mortar and small-arms fire, as well as occasional artillery rounds. Nevertheless, “This is April, the ground is dry. I had my tanks spread out, and we advanced.”

Brigadier General (Ret.) Albin F. Irzyk looks over the map he used to move his 4th Armored Division tank battalion into the area of Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp discovered by American forces
.

At the time, he was confident. “If there was a complex, one of my tanks would have found it. You can’t hide a complex, [or] so we thought as we moved. But we got to Ohrdruf, and it was getting dark. I outposted two towns beyond Ohrdruf,” he recalls, pointing at the map. “And then we dug in for the night.”

Joe Vanacore used the bulldozer blade on his Sherman tank to push through the gates at Ohrdruf
.

Irzyk had been too busy positioning his troops to focus on chatter that had begun late in the day on one of the tank-commander-to-tank-commander radio channels. They were talking about a lot of bodies being found in the woods.

It was either late in the afternoon of that same day or first thing the next morning—the surviving GIs don’t agree—when a barbed-wire enclosure was discovered by a platoon of tanks from Company A that had been sent to observe the area to the front of the 8th Battalion. Twenty-one-year-old Joe Vanacore, from Queens, New York, was driving the only tank in the battalion with a bulldozer blade. He calls it the dirtiest job in an armored unit. Whichever of the three companies was in the lead, Joe’s tank was in second position. His job was to clear the roads so the unit’s trucks could get through. If, for example, aircraft knocked out a Tiger or Supertiger tank and it blocked the road, Joe had to use his thirty-ton Sherman to move it—a tricky task considering that the German tanks weighed sixty to sixty-five tons.

As their tanks approached the barbed-wire enclosure that afternoon, Joe’s view was limited. His world was confined to what he could see through the tank driver’s periscope. He’d been across Europe and into Germany buttoned up. “Half the towns I went through, I couldn’t tell you what they were.” His tank commander, Bill Jenkins, lined him up on the ten-foot-high wooden gates and told him to go, and he pushed them in with the bulldozer blade.

The gates marked the entrance to Ohrdruf Nord, a subcamp of Buchenwald, also known as North Stalag III. Ohrdruf was a small camp but significant because it was the first one discovered by American forces that contained the bodies of hundreds of dead prisoners as well as starved, frail concentration camp inmates who had managed to survive until the liberators arrived. Even though the American high command knew about the death camps in Poland that had been liberated by the advancing Russian army, they had done nothing to prepare their troops for the possibility that they’d be confronted by the unspeakable evil of the Nazis’ slave-labor death machine.

A few words about the Nazi camp system. Between 1933, when Dachau accepted its first prisoners, and the end of the war, the Nazis established approximately 20,000 camps, including concentration camps, forced-labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and ghettos, among other types. Of the main concentration camps whose names people generally know, nearly every one was responsible for more than a hundred subcamps in its geographical area. Prisoners were often shifted from one subcamp to another as the need for slave labor arose. When they were worn out, they were shipped to a main camp, where they were allowed to starve or sicken and die, or to extermination camps such as Auschwitz, which were equipped for efficient mass murder on a scale heretofore unimaginable.