The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (2 page)

It’s unfortunate that because of what I believe to be a well-intentioned but poorly drawn agreement between the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Americans who died in the surf at Omaha Beach or in the Battle of the Bulge, for example, are not given any credit for liberating concentration camp victims, while an entire 15,000-man division that may have had just a handful of its members drive past a camp en route to battle elsewhere is declared to have liberated that camp and honored with the display of its flag at the museum.
^*

The soldiers on the scene were certainly, and importantly, American
witnesses
to the Holocaust—a condition that, as you’ll learn, often had lifelong negative consequences. Nonetheless, the flag of
every
division that landed on European soil,
every
Army Air Corps unit that flew over European soil,
every
Navy, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine command that sailed in support of the war in Europe, should be displayed in a place of honor, and all the men and women who served anywhere in the European Theater of Operations should be honored as
liberators
at the magnificent and moving Holocaust Memorial Museum in our nation’s capital.

I want to thank every one of the men and women who were willing to dredge their minds and their souls to bear witness to the Holocaust in this book. The process often brought forth painful memories that had never been shared even with wives or children and, quite often, tears from both interviewee and interviewer. There were several instances of a wife learning for the first time of her husband’s experiences at the camps by overhearing the interview for this book.

A word of caution: this is a book about crimes against humanity and about the reaction to those crimes by men at war. To soften the images and not tell the complete truth would violate the trust they placed in me when they agreed to speak. It would have been a disservice to them and to history. They know, and want you to know, that war is ugly despite rules and conventions negotiated far from the battlefield to make it less so.

A few words about what this book is not. Though the focus is almost solely on the actions of American fighting units, it is not a traditional military history of the final days of World War II in Europe. There are many of those, nearly all of which share one trait in common: the discovery by the Allied forces of the death camps, the slave-labor camps, and the Nazis’ end-of-days attempts to murder tens of thousands of prisoners are barely a footnote, because they were almost never significant to the achievement of military victory. Bearing witness is not a soldier’s primary job. Even the U.S. Army’s official chronology of World War II, while detailing the day-by-day flow of Allied divisions across Germany—a country only slightly larger than the state of New Mexico—assigns no importance to the horrors discovered by the soldiers.

That said, what
The Liberators
does is trace the course of the final months of the war in Europe, by tracking the American units as they freed the inmates of camp after camp on an almost daily basis from early April 1945 through May 8—VE Day. For this book, bearing witness is the primary mission of the soldiers, whose stories have continued long after the war, when the true cost of war is often revealed.

*
The agreement effectively holds that if just a truckload of troops out of a 15,000-man division reached a specific concentration camp at any time within the first forty-eight hours after the first American unit had reached that camp, the entire division would be declared to be a liberating unit of that camp and the flag of that division would be provided by the Army and placed on permanent display at the USHMM.

CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

JANUARY 1945
ALSACE, OCCUPIED FRANCE

S
ome guys have all the luck. Some guys have none. Since they survived the war, you might say that Army veterans Norman Fellman and Morton Brooks belong in the former category. But don’t make up your mind just yet—because both these former GIs are among the very few American witnesses to the Holocaust who experienced it from the inside, on the wrong side of the barbed wire. Sent to liberate Europe, Fellman and Brooks would instead personally experience the Holocaust. They would be caught up in the Nazis’ compulsion to eliminate all Jews from the face of the earth.

Norman Fellman was drafted into the Army in the spring of 1942, right out of high school in Norfolk, Virginia. He was a well-built kid, six feet tall and weighing 178 pounds. He was trained as a medic and then transferred into the Army Air Corps but was washed out when the training program was shut down because the instructors were needed to fight the war. The Army was forming the 70th Infantry Division at Camp Adair, Oregon, and since he arrived there on an odd day of the month, he became a scout in B Company, 1st Battalion, 275th Infantry Regiment. Had he arrived a day earlier or a day later, he would have been assigned to the artillery and his entire life would likely have been very, very different.

Norman Fellman before shipping out to Europe, where he’d barely survive the Nazi slave-labor camp at Berga an der Elster
.

In early December 1944, the 275th Regiment sailed aboard the troopship
West Point
, landing in Marseilles, France, ten days later after stops in North Africa. Originally commissioned in 1939 as the luxury liner
America
, the flagship of the United States Lines, the ship was fast and made the crossing without benefit of convoy. The landing on European soil on December 16 coincided with the German offensive that the Wehrmacht called Operation Watch on the Rhine. The U.S. Army officially named it the Battle of the Ardennes, but it came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. The German intent was to split the British and American line in half, capturing the vital port at Antwerp, Belgium, in the process. It was essential to the Allies that the Germans not succeed, and in an effort to prevent that from happening, they threw every available unit into the fray, whether or not they were deemed combat-ready.

At almost the same time that Fellman’s outfit was landing in Europe, Morton Brooks’s unit, part of the advance elements of the 42nd Infantry Division (designated Task Force Linden for its assistant division commander, Brigadier General Henning Linden), landed in southern France, rushed there after less than two weeks of training in England. The task force included three infantry regiments and a headquarters detachment, but no supporting artillery units.

Brooks had grown up in Brooklyn and enlisted in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) just shy of his eighteenth birthday. He was sent to Syracuse University, but when the program was shut down because the Army needed line troops, he was assigned to the 42nd—the Rainbow Division—as a rifleman.

Instead of having weeks to acclimate and train with its supporting artillery units, Norm Fellman’s 275th Regiment was given just four days, and then loaded onto 40 and 8 railroad boxcars, so named because they could carry forty infantrymen or eight horses, and sent five hundred miles north, arriving in Brumath, France, just north of Strasbourg, on Christmas Eve. The men were now part of Task Force Herren, which would soon be attached to the Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division. They were about to confront well-equipped German army units that would be executing a surprise attack in the snow-covered ridges of the Low Vosges Mountains. The Germans called it Operation Nordwind. It was designed to cause the Allied armies to shift forces away from the Bulge, where German troop movements had stalled. Nordwind would be the last gasp of the Third Reich, but that would prove to be of little comfort to Norm Fellman.

By January 4, his Company B was tasked to hold Falkenberg Hill, twelve kilometers outside Philippsbourg, a village in the heart of the Alsace region of northeastern France that was valued for the nearby rail lines and road network. Snowstorms began during their first night on the hill. Temperatures plummeted. The winter had already been declared the harshest in decades.

The Germans let loose with constant artillery barrages, supplemented by Nebelwerfer rockets, which the GIs called Screaming Meemies. Communications were cut off with A and C Companies on adjacent hills, and Fellman’s company commander was wounded. B Company held the hill for five nights and six days. “By the end of the third or fourth day,” Fellman recalls, “we were running short of supplies. Food was pretty much gone. Whatever we had in the way of candy bars or rations went to the wounded, which were beginning to pile up. We had water from melted snow, but that was it.”

At the end of the sixth day, the Germans surrounded his unit with flamethrowing tanks, and the surviving officers decided to surrender. They’d sent three or four patrols out; they later learned that only one man had gotten through to the American lines. Fellman says, “We could starve to death or we could freeze to death, or we could surrender, and that was the choice they made.”

There were no more than forty survivors out of a company of roughly 160 men. As a private first class, Fellman says he had a very limited view of what went on. “I remember that we assembled, there was a cease-fire, and that we attempted to destroy whatever weapons we had. We were then marched down to an area at the base of the hill, and from there we were marched toward a railhead twelve kilometers behind the lines.”

It was during that march that he realized the Germans were probably on their last legs. “They had nothing mechanized. They had horses pulling trucks and wagons. They had no gasoline to use for anything except frontline activity.”

But that fact was of little comfort. “You are their prisoner, and you realize that you have no more control over anything. You’re subject to their whim as to whether you live or breathe. I had my first lesson—we were passing a concrete abutment on the side of the road, and there was an icicle hanging from it. I stepped out of line to grab an icicle, and I got my first rifle butt. So, you learned quick that you had no choice at all. It takes a little while for everything to begin to build up. But your first feelings are the anger and the fact that you just have no idea what’s ahead, so there’s some fear involved. And later on, it becomes just a struggle for existence.”