The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (7 page)

Harry Feinberg, who has detailed memories of Ohrdruf, kept the Tri-State (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) Chapter of the 4th Armored Division Association going for years
.

Levitt continued:

The Americans going through this camp are very quiet. They have already seen much death, but they stare at this death, which is uglier and harder to look at than the death of war, with impassive faces and big eyes.

Major John R. Scotti of Brooklyn, N.Y., Combat Command A’s medical officer-in-charge, burst out in a loud voice, not speaking to anyone in particular. He just stood in the middle of the camp and shouted out what he felt and no one acted surprised to hear his voice booming out big like that.

“I tell you,” he said, and his angry voice was shaking, “all that German medical science is nil. This is how they have progressed in the last four years. They have now found the cure-all for typhus and malnutrition. It’s a bullet through the head.”

Doc Scotti was the man Harry Feinberg was looking for shortly after arriving in the camp at Ohrdruf. Feinberg says, “I started walking around, and these bodies laying all over, some were clothed, some had just this striped thing. Their heads were all shaven and none of them are breathing. And I look, and I see one guy, his eyes back, and he’s laying. I don’t know if he was Jewish or what, but he had no face; everything was just”—at this point Feinberg scrunches his face, looking pained. “And I see him just gasping for air, so I looked at him, so suddenly he looks up at me. I don’t know how he opened his eyes, and he says,
‘Amerikaner?’
I says, ‘
Ja, Amerikaner.’”

The man acknowledged the information with a labored sigh. Feinberg recalls looking at the other bodies surrounding him. “Nobody else is breathing, just this one guy. I ran over to the tank, got on the horn, I said, ‘Medics, medics, come out here, I’m in so-and-so area. Get Doc Scotti here.’ He was our battalion surgeon, an Italian guy, he was the greatest. He was the salt of the earth, had a heart as big as a whale. And he came over in his jeep, and I motioned to him.

“I said, ‘Doc, the guy’s still breathing. I see him gasping.’ So Dr. Scotti, he gets on his horn and says, ‘Ambulance, come here, we’re in this sector.’” While they were waiting, the doctor examined the prisoner. Harry recalls how gentle he was. “Somehow he just touched here, touched here, and he listened. Didn’t take his stethoscope out, he just touched. He says, ‘Get the litter carrier’”—it was just two oak poles and OD canvas stretched between them. “Then Doc Scotti said, ‘Very, very carefully, pick this guy up.’ This guy didn’t have any strength, just enough to say
‘Amerikaner.’
So evidently he was one of the guys who knew that we liberated him. But that’s the only one I saw.”

After helping rescue the lone survivor, Feinberg and some other men from his unit began to walk through the camp. “All of us took our handkerchiefs out, and we had to cover ourselves. It was impossible to breathe because the odor was terrible. At one point, I even went over to one of the barracks. I opened the doors, and there’s bodies laying over these wood beds, two-decker beds. I had to close the door. Dead, dead. I didn’t go inside; I couldn’t go inside. They were just, all of them the same, heads shaven.”

Feinberg also saw the trench with the bodies. He remembers it as “a big hole about fifty feet by maybe two hundred feet with railroad ties shoved in there. They were going to bulldoze the bodies in there and then set the thing on fire and then cover it up so the Americans can’t see what they’d done.”

Continuing through the camp, Feinberg came across the commander of the 4th Armored’s Combat Command B, Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, who would go on to become the U.S. commander in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972 and then Army chief of staff from 1972 until his death in 1974. “I see him with tears. I couldn’t believe that. He’s a very nice guy. He didn’t try to show you how tough he was or anything. And gets on his tank and says, ‘Okay, guys, let’s settle here.’ We found out that the troops that were guarding the camps, they took off, so he had a few tanks go down the road. The little [spotter] airplane was up above, he called the plane and said, ‘Let us know [if] somebody’s trying to escape. Get their position.’ And he got a platoon of tanks, five, six tanks, had them go after them. I understood that they put on full steam ahead and got them and just annihilated these guys. I didn’t see them.

“But anyway, Abrams gets on his tank and says, ‘Don’t touch anything. The best bet is to get away from this area because there must be a lot of disease floating around.’ He himself had had no idea. The colonel in charge of a whole battalion had no idea what was going on, had no idea there was concentration camps. And that surprised me.”

Bernard Diamond, from the Bronx, was only eighteen years old when his unit, the 89th Infantry Division, came into Ohrdruf to relieve the 4th Armored. He was a member of a weapons platoon: mortars and machine guns. And he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge near Bastogne almost immediately after arriving in Europe. “You know, I was eighteen years old. Was I terrified? I think I was just stupid.

“When I got to Ohrdruf, and I’m walking into a courtyard, and I see piles of shirts and piles of suitcases. And what I thought were baskets of pebbles, but when I looked closer, they weren’t pebbles. They were teeth with gold in them. And I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ You know, I didn’t know anything about [the camps]. But when I saw some prisoners there, the first thing they wanted was my weapon because the Germans were still running out and escaping.”

On April 8, several days after liberation, while the 4th Armored was still waiting to be relieved by the 89th Infantry Division, Combat Command A’s Colonel Hayden Sears ordered his men to go into the nearby town of Ohrdruf with trucks and bring back the citizens to the camp. In his
Yank
magazine article, Sergeant Levitt describes Ohrdruf as “a neat, well-to-do suburban town with hedges around some of its brick houses and concrete walks leading to their main entrances. The richest man in Ohrdruf is a painting contractor who made a lot of money in the last few years on war work for the German Army and now owns a castle on the way to the concentration camp.”

Harry Feinberg recalls the scene when the townspeople arrived at the camp: “They came up and had handkerchiefs over their mouths. And they dressed in their Sunday best, every one of them. The women had nice hats, and they were taken through the camp.”

The enforced tour ended at the site in the woods where ten bodies lay on a grill made of train rails, prepared for cremation. Colonel Sears said to the townspeople, “This is why Americans cannot be your friends.” Then he turned to a German medical officer and asked, “Does this meet with your conception of the German master race?” It took a few moments for a response. “I cannot believe that Germans did this.”

In
Yank
, Levitt wrote:

The crowd of the best people in Ohrdruf stood around the dead and looked at the bodies sullenly. One of them said at last: “This is the work of only one per cent of the German Army and you should not blame the rest.”

Then the colonel spoke briefly and impersonally through an interpreter. “Tell them,” he said, “that they have been brought here to see with their own eyes what is reprehensible from any human standard and that we hold the entire German nation responsible by their support and toleration of the Nazi government.”

The crowd stared at the dead and not at the colonel. Then the people of Ohrdruf went back to their houses.

The colonel and his soldiers went back to their tanks, and we went out of this place and through Ohrdruf and Gotha, where the names of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms are set in shining gold letters across the front of the opera house.

CHAPTER 4

SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

APRIL 5, 1945
BERGA AN DER ELSTER, GERMANY
    80 miles east of Ohrdruf

S
ometime during the first week of April, the Berga POWs began hearing that they were to be moved to another camp. Morton Brooks says that initially the men weren’t sure whether or not it was an April Fool’s joke. (Strange as it may seem in this context, that custom actually originated in Germany in the 1860s with the playing of elaborate practical jokes and hoaxes, so the notion was not completely improbable.)

The rumor about being moved wasn’t a joke or a hoax—except for the part about going to another camp. This was to be a forced march, destination unknown. Surely the SS knew that most of the men were unlikely to survive, but they’d long ago tossed the rules of the Geneva Conventions; additional deaths of American POWs were of little concern. The apparent reason for the evacuation of the Americans was the rapid approach of Soviet troops advancing along the eastern front, to the northeast of Berga.

On April 5, instead of being marched the mile-plus distance to the tunnels they’d been blasting into the mountain, the regular camp guards greeted the prisoners with “We’re marching out, we’re going out.” Morton Brooks, who had arrived at Berga about a hundred days earlier weighing roughly 145 pounds, had lost almost half his body weight. He recalls that the men were lined up and marched out the gates and past the townspeople, who threw things at them. Those were the same good Germans who a month or less hence would be greeting the occupying Allied forces with smiles and shouting the quickly mastered welcome
“Nicht Nazi.”

Just under three hundred Americans began the impossible march south on a road alongside the Elster River, guarded by twenty-eight soldiers. Fortunately, the weather was springlike, and the Berga survivors were not required to cope with winter conditions that surely would have felled a good number of them within days. They’d each received subminimal rations for the march, a tenth of a loaf of bread and part of a Red Cross parcel; perhaps their captors thought they’d find additional food along the way, perhaps not.

The first day they managed to travel about ten miles. The prisoners straggled along, stopping often to relieve themselves—diarrhea had been a constant in their lives for months—which caused the guards to berate them, urging them to be quick. An occasional German civilian offered them something to eat, but more often than not the civilians just wanted the men to move quickly past their property lest they dirty it.

They were all wearing the remnants of the clothes they’d had on when they’d been captured four months earlier. Brooks’s socks had disintegrated, and his combat boots had worn the skin off his toes; he could actually see the bones. Nevertheless, he continued to trudge along.

Norman Fellman wasn’t quite so fortunate. After a couple of days, he couldn’t walk. “My boots had burst, and I had an infection in one leg. A lot of people in that situation were shot, but in the particular group that I was with, they put us into a cart. Now, try and picture the cart: it was used to carry vegetables to market for farmers. It was about maybe twenty feet long, and it was narrow on the bottom, with V-shaped sides to it. They were at an angle—they bellied out. And you could probably get eight, nine people on there without crowding. They put thirty. Invariably, somebody on the bottom would suffocate. It was Russian roulette—you prayed like hell you were not the first one on the cart, because if you were, there was a good chance you were not gonna be breathing when they took you off.”

The cart was loaded by prisoners who could still move; occasionally prisoners were dumped into it by the guards. For most of the time on the road, the cart was pushed and pulled by POWs. For a short period of time he recalls a broken-down horse taken from a local farmer being used.

Given that the Germans had not been averse to shooting or beating prisoners to death, why not now? “I think if it wasn’t for the proximity of Allied troops, they would’ve shot us, because earlier, when people fell out of line, that’s what happened, they shot them. But I think the fear was there,” says Fellman. “The only thing that saved our asses, I believe, was that we were pretty close to American lines.”