The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (25 page)

Leaving Majdanek, the Russians and Poles headed a hundred miles northwest, winding up in August 1944 in a town called Praga Warszawa on the right bank of the Vistula River, opposite the Polish capital city. There they paused because their supply lines were overextended, and also to deal with casualties. Ultimately, the battle for Warsaw ended on September 17, when they crossed the river. The city had been demolished.

They moved on, heading northwest about 150 miles to the town of Chelmno. In late 1941, it became the first city in Poland where Jews were systematically murdered. They were taken to a church, where they were forced to undress, and then loaded into sealed trucks, the so-called gas vans. Seventy-five Jews were killed in each load by the carbon monoxide gas piped into the van from the truck’s exhaust. Storch says they could find nothing in Chelmno but graves. There were no crematoria; 350,000 dead Jews had been buried; then they were dug up, burned, and buried again.

They moved on to Zlotów, about seventy-five miles south of the Baltic, the first German city they took. (Today Zlotów is well inside the Polish borders.) The fighting grew ever more intense, with tank battles and Storch’s artillery unit laying down barrages against Panzer brigades as they moved southwest to Paulsdorf, just sixty miles east of Dresden. At that point, American and Russian forces were separated by less than fifty miles.

On April 15, 1945, an announcement was made that the Russians and Poles would launch a new offensive in the middle of the night. “Forty thousand artillery cannons were firing; night was like day, honest to God,” Storch remembers. “By seven o’clock, my battery was across the Oder River on pontoons, no bridges.” They were heading north to capture Berlin, where Hitler remained in his bunker.

On April 20, in the face of the advance of the Soviet Forty-seventh Army, SS guards began the evacuation of some 33,000 prisoners from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just twenty-one miles north of Berlin. The plan was to march them north to the Baltic in groups of four hundred and load them onto ships, which would then be sunk.

Two days later, Storch’s unit liberated a section of Sachsenhausen. “It’s the first time we liberated human beings—they hardly could walk. The section I came across were mostly women. Everybody was crying. They didn’t know who we were; our uniforms were different than the Russian uniforms or the German uniforms. All they know is we were soldiers.

“There was no resistance at all; we didn’t have to break nothing, just open up the door. We caught two SS people; two of my guys just shot ‘em. It was too horrible to see, because when we got there, people were still hanging on the hooks. In the camp, on the walls, in view. Hanging by their throats. I had no idea who they were. Just men, not naked. We would not remove them; can’t put our hands on it, it’s not our mission. Couple bodies laying which were shot.”

He says most of the women were Hungarians who spoke some German. They were in bad condition and crying uncontrollably. The women were shabbily dressed; nobody had any hair, which made it hard to recognize people. A quick tour turned up a huge infirmary, but people were still dying. They weren’t buried but processed in the two ovens the soldiers found.

The experience at Sachsenhausen was unique for Storch and his men. Until then, they’d liberated civilians, who’d realized they were free and could go home. “But all of a sudden you come to a camp. Those people have absolutely nothing in their pocket—not even a pocket. No hope at all. Absolutely no idea if anyone from their families is alive. It’s very traumatic. And it’s traumatic for people like us to see that finally we did something for people which had absolutely no power of doing anything, because their dignity was taken away from them. There was nothing. The only thing we left with those people, which is very important, is hope. You are now safe. You will have all the care, you will get all the clothes you need, all the food you need, all the medication. And they did. Even the same day we left, they did. That was a very, very strong moment for me, and for the other guys.”

It took the Russian army twelve days to take Berlin. Storch’s artillery unit fired its cannon from April 30 to the middle of the night on May 2, when they fired the last salvo. A week later, his division packed up and left by train for Poland, to a town fifty miles from Warsaw. He was discharged from the Army in September 1945. On November 18, in Katowice, he married Ruth, whom he’d known as a child. They both saw Jews who managed to survive the war killed by Polish citizens and knew they would not stay in Poland.

APRIL 23, 1945 (NINE DAYS BEFORE THE RUSSIANS TOOK BERLIN)
NEAR THE FLOSSENBÜRG CONCENTRATION CAMP
    
70 miles east-northeast of Nuremberg
    
140 miles north of Munich

In U.S. Third Army’s XII Corps area, CCB and CCA of the 11th Armored Division drive quickly from Naab River to Cham, which CCB clears with ease, completing current mission of division. Roads in division zone are clogged with thousands of prisoners and slave laborers … 358th Infantry, 90th Division, overruns Flossenburg—where large concentration camp and an aircraft factory are secured—and Waldthurn
.

—from U.S. Army Center of Military History,
U.S. Army in World War II: Special Studies Chronology: 1941–1945

P
FC Tarmo Holma had come to the United States from Finland as a child. He was drafted from his hometown of Milton, Massachusetts, and ultimately assigned to the tank platoon of Headquarters Company, 41st Tank Battalion, of the 11th Armored Division. On April 23, Holma was sitting behind his .50-caliber machine gun, scanning the road ahead of the tank convoy through binoculars, when he saw movement in the distance. “I could see this activity on the road, and the road was filled with people. I assumed they were soldiers, and I said to my commanding officer, ‘The whole German army has to be out there waiting for us.’”

PFC Tarmo Holma was manning a .50-caliber machine gun on one of the 11th Armored Division tanks when it came upon the tail end of an SS death march of prisoners from Flossenbürg to the killing camp at Mauthausen
.

And his CO responded, “No, we’re arriving at one of the concentration camps.” Until that moment he had heard only vague descriptions of the Nazi death camps.

They were traveling in single file on a beautiful spring day down the narrow road near Flossenbürg, which, along with Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau, was one of the original concentration camps inside Germany. What they’d happened upon was the last throes of a death march that was to take the inmates to the killing camp at Mauthausen, Austria, about 190 miles to the southeast. By the time the tanks arrived at Flossenbürg, all the SS guards had either run away or had been killed by the prisoners. “We were trying to proceed on the dirt road to continue the combat mission that we were on—to follow the remnants of the German army. But we could hardly move. Where they [the prisoners] were still coming out of the camp onto the main road, we were just standing still. They were so excited; they appeared to be dying as they ran out to greet us.

“I saw them fall down and not [get up]—I assumed they were dying because they were walking skeletons with a little skin on them.” His voice breaks, and he begins to cry, “It bothers me to this day. I’m surprised I can talk this much about it; usually, I start crying and I can’t talk anymore.

“They were just waving; they appeared to be so glad to see us. I don’t remember hearing any language, because I’m sitting on top of the tank, I’m eight feet high above their heads. We were going to give them our rations, especially the K rations, they were very good. Because I’m the radio operator, too, I got the message right away: ‘Don’t feed the prisoners, they can’t stand that kind of food that we have.’ They said people coming behind us will take care of their health problems. So we had to keep going as best we could, very slowly.”

Postwar research determined that approximately 14,000 prisoners had been driven from the camp by the SS in the days preceding the arrival of the Americans; in just three days, more than 4,000 of them died or were killed by the SS. Records show that more than 73,000 prisoners died in the Flossenbürg camp system.

After passing through miles upon miles of recently freed prisoners, the 11th Armored continued pushing eastward, becoming the first unit to arrive in Austria. Just two weeks after their encounter with Flossenbürg, the unit would come to an even worse hellhole, the Gusen-Mauthausen camp complex.

APRIL 25, 1945
BERGEN-BELSEN, GERMANY
    
60 miles south of Hamburg
    
200 miles west of Berlin

A
fter leaving Marseilles on April 16, the convoy of 150 American Field Service ambulances plus a handful of accompanying support vehicles headed north. They camped overnight about twenty miles from Paris, continuing the next day into southwestern Belgium, where they stayed for four days at the town of Waregem. Then they headed north through Brussels and into southern Holland to Eindhoven, where they turned east and drove about twenty miles to a vacant seminary.

Melvin Waters was deemed unfit to be drafted, but he still wanted to serve in the war. He became a volunteer combat ambulance driver with the American Field Service and eventually helped British and Canadian forces evacuate the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen death camp
.

The convoy was split into three platoons, and the next morning Melvin Waters’s group of about forty ambulances with sixty drivers was told to load up equipment and personnel from the British 9th General Hospital. They drove into Germany, seeing destruction on a massive scale for the first time. Waters recalls going through a town where, from one end to the other, there wasn’t anything but rubble and bricks pushed off the road by bulldozers. They crossed the Rhine River on a pontoon bridge, traversed the northern part of the Siegfried Line, and, after two days of zigzagging to miss pockets of German troops, arrived at Bergen-Belsen in the afternoon.