The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (8 page)

Nevertheless, at least thirty-five Americans died on the march from Berga. Four perished the first night as the prisoners were lodged in a school. A day later, another four died in a castle. Then three died on the road; another eleven died while the group was kept in a barn for five days. Thirteen more died as the prisoners were forced to march farther south.

As the men in Morton Brooks’s group trudged along the road not quite two weeks into the march, they began passing hundreds of bodies, nearly all showing signs of having been shot at close range in the back of the head. They’d been following the same route that had been taken by the death march of the political prisoners from Berga. These were the same skeletal figures with the big eyes that the POWs had seen when they’d first arrived at the concentration camp; the same people who had worked near them, drilling tunnels into the mountain. Confronted with the insensible brutality of the Nazis even though the war was clearly lost, it was difficult to keep the faith, to believe that survival was not only possible but probable. Brooks, age nineteen and weighing less than 80 pounds, still had enough strength left to carry his buddies physically and psychologically. “You just say, ‘You gotta keep going. We’re gonna be freed soon. We’re gonna make it.’ Those who didn’t believe it usually died. People gave up, just went.”

The sight of the bodies of the Eastern European Jews compelled Brooks to make a decision. He had to escape. He said to his buddy Seymour Fahrer, “‘This is gonna be our end, let’s see if we can get outta here.’ So we agreed that we’d make the attempt, and the following day we just kept falling behind, falling behind, like we couldn’t keep up, and the guard who was at the end didn’t bother too much. We just straggled along until it got dark. And then Seymour and I took off and went into the woods.”

His feet were still incredibly painful, which is why he says with a laugh now, “We trudged, we didn’t run. The next day we saw this farmhouse. There was some vegetables on the porch, and we tried to get it. The farmer came out with a shotgun, and we were taken into the town for the night and put into a dungeon—an underground hole. The following day there was some sisters of some order who attempted to do something with my feet. But then we were taken back to the group.”

Surprisingly, the two would-be escapees weren’t punished—perhaps because the German guards’ focus had shifted from making the lives of the prisoners more miserable to figuring out how to make sure they were captured by American soldiers rather than the Russians. Word had already spread throughout Germany that the Russian soldiers were brutal; for them it was payback for what the German army had done to the Russian people as they had advanced toward Leningrad. Wholesale rape was the order of the day. Pillaging. A take-no-prisoners policy. And the Russians were already west of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), less than three hundred miles from Berlin. There were even rumblings among the German high command of trying to work out an alliance with the Americans against the Russians.

APRIL 10, 1945
ERFURT, GERMANY
    
With the 80th Infantry Division

R
obert Burrows was working as a produce clerk in Royal Oak, Michigan, when he turned eighteen in October 1942. He tried to enlist as an air cadet but acknowledges that he paid for having dropped out of high school when he flunked the test. So he went down the hall and tried to join the Marines. But there was a sign on the door that said, “Not taking any enlistments.” So he volunteered for the Army. After basic training, he became a medic and was stationed at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. It was tough duty, but someone had to do it. He stayed there working as a clerk in the lab, participated in a couple of autopsies, and practiced his putting. Being young and clearly not recognizing a good thing, he tried to volunteer for the paratroopers but was turned down. But in February 1944, the need for warm bodies in Europe became pressing, and he was assigned to the XII Corps headquarters.

In December, during the Battle of the Bulge, infantry units were crying for replacements, and Burrows volunteered, much to the chagrin of his boss, Major General Manton S. Eddy, the XII Corps commander and former commanding officer of the 9th Infantry Division. After a ten-minute talk, the general gave him the opportunity to serve with any infantry outfit in Europe. Sergeant Burrows said it made no difference to him, so Eddy sent him to the 2nd Battalion, 317th Infantry Regiment, of the 80th Infantry Division, where his former aide de camp was the commander. Burrows was assigned to S2, the battalion intelligence section.

For the next three weeks he saw heavy combat and was the only survivor among a group of six when the last artillery round of a morning barrage near the town of Borscheid, Luxembourg, fell on their position.

Shortly thereafter, rumors began to spread. He heard that a camp with a lot of bodies had been found, and the rumor mill was saying they were POWs. “They weren’t talking about Holocaust versus Jews or Poles or Ukrainians or Russians or anything. The rumors were spread person to person. We had no radios. Somebody said something, and that’s the way it went. We really wiped these things out of our minds, anyway. You couldn’t go on and be concerned about what’s happened. You had a job to do.”

Their job on April 10 was to take Erfurt, a city about fifteen miles from Weimar. It would mark the last battle of the war where his unit would lose people. One of them would be his own commander, Lieutenant McAlpine. The next morning, the eleventh, they started for Weimar, and they began hearing rumors again. The 6th Armored Division was ahead of them, and it had found something. But at that point there were just rumors.

What they’d found was Buchenwald, which had been taken over on April 10 by Communist-led inmates who had been arming themselves for the day the Allied armies would approach the camp. The underground movement had nearly a thousand armed men, who had taken over after the hard-core SS guards fled as the U.S. Army approached Weimar. The underground fought against a small number of young German soldiers, overpowering and imprisoning those they caught in a place called “the dungeon.” A couple of the young soldiers tried to impersonate inmates but were caught, and it’s claimed that they subsequently hanged themselves.

Buchenwald was built in 1937 in a wooded area about five miles northwest of Weimar, in east-central Germany. The early inmates were predominantly political prisoners; however, after Kristallnacht in 1938, almost 10,000 Jews were sent to the camp. As the years went on, the Nazi regime sent a variety of people there: hardened criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, military deserters, and so-called asocials. In its final years, Buchenwald also held POWs from various countries, former government officials of Nazi-occupied countries, resistance fighters, and slave laborers brought to Germany from captured lands.

By February 1945, the population of Buchenwald and its nearly one hundred subcamps reached 112,000, most of whom were being worked by various businesses owned and operated for profit by the SS. In addition, medical experimentation on inmates, similar to that conducted at other concentration camps, took place at the main camp. Prisoners deemed no longer fit to work were usually selected for transport to other camps, where they were systematically killed. Though there was no gas chamber at Buchenwald, there was a crematorium building that the Americans discovered not only disposed of prisoners who died in the camp but contained a macabre mechanism for the killing of undesirable inmates.

Early in 1945, as the Russian army moved through Poland, the Germans emptied the death camps at Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, sending thousands of prisoners on forced marches to Buchenwald and leaving thousands more dead along the roadside. In the first week of April, with American forces closing in, the Germans attempted to send almost 30,000 Buchenwald prisoners on foot and by train to other camps.

On the morning of April 11, a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy, Menachem Lipshitz, from Częstochowa, Poland, the location of a famous Catholic shrine, climbed to the roof of the hospital building at Buchenwald. He was being hidden in the hospital by Poles who were imprisoned in the camp. Speaking from his home in Nashville, the man, now known as Menachem Limor, says rumors of liberation had been spreading through Buchenwald. When they saw that the Germans had abandoned their guard posts, they began to believe that the rumors might be true. “When we heard that the Americans were coming, we went on the roof of the hospital, and then I saw American tanks coming from both sides of the camp. A jeep with American soldiers came into the camp, and that’s the first time I saw an American soldier in my life. And that’s how we were liberated.”

A few days before the Americans arrived, Limor says, the Germans “took up a lot of the people for the march of the death.” The day before, he’d known something was afoot because he’d seen one of the Russians in the camp walking through the hospital carrying a rifle. “We were afraid that maybe the Germans will take everyone out from the camp, and in the hospital, there was a group that say, ‘We won’t go. We will run away.’ And they had even clothes, you know, not inmate clothes, the civilian clothes. And I was lucky to be with them, that they said they would take me with them if we have to go. So there was an underground, but I was a young boy, so I wasn’t that familiar with it, but I know that there was.” In June, Limor left Buchenwald, which had been converted to a displaced persons (DP) camp after liberation, after his brother, who had been liberated in Poland, found him. They went to Hamburg and from there to Israel, where he was one of the first soldiers in the nascent Israeli army. He settled in the United States in 1969 with his wife, Leah, also a Buchenwald survivor, and their three children.

At about three in the afternoon on April 11, the day the fourteen-year-old Menachem Lipshitz was watching American tanks approach the main camp, Staff Sergeant Robert Burrows and his driver, Ben, were in their jeep, scouting ahead of the 2nd Battalion, 317th Infantry Regiment, of the 80th Infantry Division. It was a lightly overcast day, and they were driving through the slight rolling hills. To their right was a grassy meadow, but on a rise to the left they could see a camp, fenced with barbed wire, with a building right next to the gate. “This gate was here,” he says, gesturing with his hands, “and these fellows were standing to the left. Two POWs in their striped uniforms. Just standing there, watching me. They didn’t move. Just had their hands on the wire like they were resting, just like this. Both of ‘em. And I thought it was strange, but I didn’t want to be bothered, to be honest with you. I had things on my mind. I was supposed to be out scouting ahead of the battalion, and if I run into anything to let ‘em know [by radio]. But I went up to the front of this office building—it had a walk-in door—here. I didn’t go in the gate. The gate was closed. It was on the left side of the administration building. It said,
‘Arbeit macht frei.’”
(The phrase, loosely translated as “Work will make you free” or “Work will liberate you,” was displayed on or above the entryway of many of the Nazi concentration camps.)

Burrows continues, “I went up to the door, and it opened. Nobody inside, nothing. And I went to the office, to the back end, looked out the back end. There were single-story barracks buildings. I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t go out; I didn’t investigate. I couldn’t have done anything anyway by myself. So I walked back out and told Ben, ‘I don’t see anything there. Let’s go.’ And so I did.

“I thought it was strange, you know, but that’s the way it was.” Not long afterward he put two and two together and figured that the people in striped uniforms who he knew were creating havoc and looting in nearby Weimar had been imprisoned in this small, anonymous camp.

There were a lot of things that PFC Clarence Brockman found to be strange about the Army and the war. He was twenty-two and driving a truck in Pennsylvania when he was drafted. Brockman was assigned to the 80th Infantry Division, the Blue Ridge, right out of basic training. He was a private first class and stayed one until he went back to civilian life in October 1945. He went to war aboard the
Queen Mary
, crossing the Atlantic in less than six days. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge in Luxembourg, freezing his butt off but making it through with nothing worse than a hunk of Krupp steel shrapnel in one finger—a souvenir he can still feel.

Talking with Brockman today, you find a man with a cockeyed sense of humor and a ready smile. He was like that during the war, but with a hard edge. During the Bulge, he remembers, there were bad things “about us and them too. You didn’t want to take a prisoner back in that snow ‘cause you’ve got to walk them down to the PW camp and walk back. You took ‘em over the hill and shot ‘em. And there was quite a few of them was shot. On both sides. More so on their side than our side. Because the order came down, we’re to take prisoners now. No more shootin’ ‘em. Take prisoners. So there you are.”

His comments are more than just a suggestion that the rules of the Geneva Conventions were bendable, depending on circumstances. After a German unit machine-gunned more than eighty American POWs at Malmédy, during the Bulge, many GIs say they received orders to take no prisoners. If, as Brockman relates, those orders were rescinded, the soldiers obeyed—to a point. Often that point was the discovery of a death camp, which in his case wouldn’t happen for a few more weeks.