The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (26 page)

Waters can still recall the moment. “As we came out of this forest, a little bend, all of a sudden the ambulances in front of us slowed to a crawl. And then, as we got into the opening, we could see the prison or the concentration camp over to our left, and the front gates were open, and people were just milling around. We were just looking at it with our mouths open. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were looking at the women’s section. They were just skeletons.”

The convoy went on, passing an SS barracks and continuing about a mile and a half to the edge of a forest, where they made camp. They’d stay in this location for the next seven weeks. Initially, they slept in the ambulances but eventually they opted for tents after becoming concerned about the diseases and vermin carried by the people they were transporting.

The sheer numbers of inmates inside the camp were staggering. At liberation on April 15, the census was set at approximately 60,000. About 7,000 Jewish prisoners whom SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler thought he could use in negotiations with the Allies had been evacuated from the camp by train before the British took over.

Waters’s first day inside the camp was eye-opening. “We had to drive to the north end of the camp and then down and out the front gate. And we would drive right by a big hole that had been dug, and what was taking place was that flatbed trucks were being used, and they were going through the camp picking up corpses and bringing them up to this big common grave. They were putting one thousand to two thousand people in these graves. They had Germans, either prisoners of war or people they conscripted from some of the nearby towns, down there stacking these bodies. Some of the bodies, you’d look at them, and the eyes would be open and they were looking, just staring.”

In those early days after liberation, more than five hundred prisoners a day were dying. Their bodies, as well as the ten thousand that had been piled around the camp, were buried in the mass graves. Photos distributed at the time showed British army soldiers using bulldozers because it was the most efficient way to move large quantities of bodies quickly. All told, about 13,000 inmates died after the camp was liberated, many of typhus, which was at epidemic levels.

How does one erase those images from one’s memory?

Waters says he wasn’t as badly affected by the horrors as some of his coworkers. He attributes this to some of the combat time he’d had in Italy, where he’d picked up a reputation. “I got criticized when I was in Italy for being sort of hard-hearted, for not being friendly to the patients. And I said, ‘I’m getting them down the damned mountain, don’t I? What else can I do? I’m getting the job done.’ And they said, ‘Well, you can talk to them and offer them cigarettes and do this and that.’ And I guess that I just had hardened myself and that’s the way I got by. I don’t mean [the sights in Bergen-Belsen] didn’t bother me; it did bother me. But I guess it’s like a doctor: you got to the point that you felt for them, but you couldn’t feel for them so much that you couldn’t do your job.”

Later on the first day he went into the women’s section of the camp working as a stretcher bearer. “These women were laying in bunks, they were so weak, and they couldn’t walk, they couldn’t get out of the bunks. Some of them were delirious.

“A medical doctor said, ‘Take this one, leave this one, take this one, leave this one.’ There was a unit of English medics, they had their masks on and everything, all their special gloves, and they were stripping these women of their clothes. The ones that were chosen to be carried off, they’d wrap them in a blanket and put them on a stretcher. We would help them. They would strip them off, and we’d put the blanket around them and put them onto the stretcher.

“I remember we had one woman that fought us like a cat because she thought we were taking her to the crematory. She was completely out of her head. The medics were telling her, ‘We’re here to help you. Don’t be afraid, we’re going to help you.’ But they looked like men from Mars to start with, with all these masks on. We didn’t have that equipment on. They dusted us, and that was about it. Some of us had on gloves, some didn’t.” Waters says he was dusted with DDT powder so often that for a month he looked as if he had gray hair.

Near the women’s barracks, Waters recalls seeing what passed for latrine facilities in the camp. “The toilet was nothing but a slit trench with a board over it with holes in it. There was filth all over where someone went to the bathroom. Women would come up and get on one of these planks and pull up their dress. They wouldn’t have any underwear on. I saw so many naked women that I thought I’d never care to see a naked woman again. And they had no modesty whatsoever.”

The British medical units had turned the former SS barracks about a mile and a half beyond the camp into a hospital. These were four-and five-story brick buildings. In the center of the area were smaller buildings that had once been stables for a cavalry outfit but more recently had been used by the SS as a training area for Panzer divisions. Waters and his fellow AFS drivers would take the inmates from the camp to the stable buildings, where English orderlies and nurses would scrub and bathe them, cut their hair, delouse them, and do whatever else was necessary before they were taken to one of the brick dormitories. Some of the buildings were used for people who could care for themselves; the others were fully staffed hospital wards. Patients who recovered enough were turned into nurses’ aides. “Everybody had a job there; everybody was doing something all the time.”

By the third week in May, the camp itself had been emptied of prisoners. The survivors either were still in the hospital barracks or had already been processed and sent elsewhere. The Swedish government offered to take 7,000 survivors.

On May 21, many of the AFS men had gone to Paris on leave, and Waters had stayed behind in the hospital compound with just a few others. “I saw smoke. The blackest, biggest column of smoke going up in the air with flames. We were about a mile and a half away and somebody said, ‘They’re burning the camp.’ I climbed into my ambulance and drove down there, and what remained of Belsen was being burned.”

Melvin Waters served fourteen months as an ambulance driver with the American Field Service during the war, voluntarily exposing himself to enemy fire and to the diseases and vermin that were rampant in one of the Nazis’ most horrific concentration camps. And he did it all for twenty dollars a month and a lifetime’s worth of satisfaction.

*
For the complete story of Berga and the Americans who were imprisoned there, read
Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble
by Roger Cohen (Knopf, 2005) and
Given Up for Dead: American GIs in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga
by Flint Whitlock (Westview Press, 2005).

CHAPTER 12

LANDSBERG

THE KAUFERING CAMPS

APRIL 23, 1945
DILLINGEN AN DER DONAU, BAVARIA, GERMANY
    
31 miles northwest of Augsburg
    
75 miles northwest of Munich1

O
n April 22, the Hellcats of the 12th Armored Division captured the bridge over the Danube River at Dillingen, an act that had a profound effect on the course of the war in its final weeks. According to the division’s newspaper, a light tank platoon “swept into town with guns blazing, routing more than 1,000 disorganized defenders and shooting up a retreating mechanized column. Surging on to the bridge, the unit captured a handful of demolition men and drove other Nazis away with tank fire before the span could be blown.”

The Germans had planted six 500-pound aerial bombs and a significant quantity of dynamite around the bridge, but the Americans were able to cut the wires. While not as well known as the bridge over the Rhine River at Remagen, the capture of the Dillingen bridge allowed the Americans to continue unimpeded south of the Danube in their push toward Munich and the supposed Nazi redoubt in the Alps. It also meant that they would discover and liberate the Kaufering slave-labor camps near Landsberg and the huge Dachau concentration camp more quickly and, as a result, save more lives.

The Germans attempted to destroy the bridge using artillery as well as fighter planes, but accurate ack-ack fire from division half-tracks brought down half a dozen enemy aircraft and the counterattack was rebuffed.

St. Louis native John Critzas was a gunner on an M-4 Sherman tank in the 714th Tank Battalion, which meant that his view of the Danube, and pretty much all the territory they’d raced through since coming up the Seine River in September 1944 on a landing ship tank (LST) to Rouen, France, was what he could see through his targeting telescope. By the time the unit got to the Danube, the twenty-year-old Critzas had already had three tanks blown out from under him, destroyed by German antitank guns fighting a rearguard action against the onrushing Americans.

“As a gunner, I didn’t know where we were, which direction we were going. I just got a slap on the head from the tank commander. He would say, ‘Target two o’clock,’ and I traversed that area and tried to find out what he was talkin’ about by looking through the telescope. If we were rolling, it was very difficult to shoot accurately.”

In spite of having been in the war since the fall of 1944, Critzas knew nothing about concentration camps or the Holocaust. And he’s emphatic about that. “Zero. Zero. Zero. Absolute zero. We didn’t know about that until April of 1945, after we crossed the Danube.”

From the Danube, Combat Commands A and B of the 12th Armored Division began moving south from the Dillingen bridgehead. Twenty miles to the west, units of the 10th Armored Division, augmented by the 71st Infantry Regiment, 44th Division, cleared the city of Ulm in a coordinated assault and continued pressing on toward Munich, followed by cavalry units of the 103rd Infantry Division. The effect was that of a storm surge rolling across the Bavarian terrain, but instead of raging waters pushed by hurricane winds, it was hundreds of thousands of American troops, motivated by a desire to destroy the German army and put an end to the long and costly war.

By late on the twenty-fifth, several of the advancing units were within twenty miles of the eleven slave-labor camps at Kaufering.

APRIL 25, 1945
KAUFERING IV, BAVARIA, GERMANY
    
6 miles north of Landsberg am Lech
    
40 miles west of Munich
    
43 miles west-southwest of Dachau

I
srael Cohen knew the Americans were coming. At night he could see flashes of light from artillery shells reflected on the clouds, and he could hear explosions, which seemed like giant exclamation points to his prayers. The nineteen-year-old Chasidic Jew had been in various camps for more than six years, and his weight had dropped below 70 pounds. In 1939, Cohen had been confined in the Lódź ghetto in central Poland; he’d survived the evacuation of the ghetto; he’d survived a death march from Auschwitz. And now he was hoping to survive the final days in Kaufering IV, the
Krankenlager
, the sick camp, which was filled with roughly 3,000 inmates suffering from typhus, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and dysentery.