The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (6 page)

Beginning after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis established thousands of forced-labor camps—some very small, some holding thousands of prisoners—where inmates were housed while being used by the SS, private firms, or government organizations manufacturing war materiel and other goods for the Reich. Prisoners in these camps were not gassed and conditions were better than in the concentration camps, but some prisoners died nonetheless, from exhaustion, exposure, and starvation.

Prisoner-of-war camps were distinct from the concentration camps. They were harsh but were not part of the SS killing machine. Conditions varied: British and American prisoners fared the best, while 60 percent of Soviet POWs died of maltreatment, exposure, starvation, disease, or outright murder.

The 4th Armored’s Joe Vanacore recalls no shooting going on as the Americans entered Ohrdruf because the Germans who had been there had fled. Another 8th Battalion tanker, New Yorker Paul Glaz, who was living on Long Island when he was drafted in 1941, confirms that the SS guards had left the camp undefended and believes he knows why. “When they heard the 4th Armored was coming, they took off. We had a thing between the SS and the 4th Armored: one or the other had to go. When you fought them, you didn’t take them prisoner, you killed them. If they got us, they did the same with us.”

As Vanacore drove his tank inside the camp, he remembers the view through the periscope. “The first thing I saw was this big pile of bodies, about five, six foot high, like a haystack. I didn’t realize they were bodies—my mind didn’t tell me they were bodies until I got a little closer.”

The men dismounted from the tanks and began to wander, looking around in disbelief at what they saw. Vanacore says, “The smell got me so bad I couldn’t eat for a week.” It’s what stays in his mind, what he thinks of now when he hears people say “the Holocaust was a fake. I really couldn’t stand people to say things like that. We were right there; we saw things with our own eyes.”

Glaz recalls seeing stacks of bodies. “They laid them up like cords of wood, one on top of the other. They were naked, and they’d laid them up about four foot high, lime in between. It was a terrible-looking thing. I remember it smelled like hell. God only knows how long they laid there.”

Several GIs who were at Ohrdruf tell of being offered a guided tour of the camp by a healthy-looking, English-speaking man dressed in prisoner garb. But before the tour could begin, a Polish prisoner ran up and clobbered the man in the head with a piece of lumber, following up that attack by stabbing him to death with a bayonet. The attacker explained that his victim had been one of the German camp guards, who, for some inexplicable reason, had not escaped prior to the arrival of the 4th Armored. The episode was recounted in several interviews conducted for this book and can be found in so many oral history archives and military documents that it has begun to sound apocryphal. What militates against dismissing it as such is that it is a scene described by GIs interviewed for this book at camp after camp: inmates discovering former torturers among them after liberation and brutally killing them as the Americans stood by watching.

Vanacore stayed in the camp for about three or four hours, doing some bulldozing to fill in holes in order to make it more accessible for the Army vehicles that would soon be pouring in to help the survivors and deal with the remains of those who had been killed by the Nazis. At one point he saw a German three-yard dump truck loaded with what he initially thought was sand. “It was ashes from the bodies that they burnt.”

On the morning of April 5, Lieutenant Colonel Irzyk had his jeep brought up and drove to the area where elements of the 8th Battalion’s D Company had discovered bodies in a wooded area. “I got out of the jeep and walked through the woods, and the first thing I saw was this clearing. And I just couldn’t believe what I saw. I could see an elliptical circle of bodies, with the feet in and the heads out. I was absolutely stunned. I’d never seen anything like this before—never expected to see anything like it.” He recalls gasping audibly; his feet seemed leaden as he forced them to move closer. And he gasped again. “Each man had a little red spot here”—he gestured to his forehead—“shot in the head or in the throat, one shot. And these were thin, emaciated, ragged people in this elliptical circle.” The ground around the bodies was blood-soaked.

To the battle-hardened Irzyk, the scene was incomprehensible. He kept asking himself, “What is this?” And that morphed into “How did this happen? But that’s step one. And as you get to this building, this horrible smell, you open the door, and there—again—another unbelievable shock. You’ve got these bodies, probably thirty of them—they’re like skeletons without clothing, but all sorts of marks and bruises, covered with lime, like cordwood, from the floor to the ceiling. Just stacked there. So you open the door and you look at—this is unbelievable! You’ve never seen anything like it. You can’t comprehend it. And that was step two.”

These forty-two emaciated, nude corpses, some showing evidence of having been shot or beaten, were found by the American soldiers in a storage shed at Ohrdruf. This was likely the first instance in the war where GIs saw and described bodies of concentration camp inmates as “stacked like cordwood.” The soldiers were ordered to leave the lime-sprinkled bodies where they lay, so that commanders all the way up to Eisenhower would be able to see them when they came to inspect Ohrdruf
.

Lieutenant Colonel Irzyk, deeply affected by what he was seeing at Ohrdruf, was keenly aware that his men were watching for his reaction to the horror, and he managed to keep himself from vomiting. “Then, as we roam around, the third step was the disposal pits. And by that time, the pattern emerges. You know now what this is. This is totally unexpected, you never heard anything about it, and then suddenly you’re confronted with it. This is unbelievable. It makes an impact that is unforgettable.”

While the horror of a pit filled with the decomposing bodies of slave laborers is incomprehensible, Irzyk saw something worse as he continued to explore Ohrdruf. “The cadavers were stacked on a grill of logs and rails, and firemen with their spruce and pine kept the fires hot and blazing.” Later, he learned that captured SS guards had told interrogators that between December and April, perhaps two or three thousand corpses had been burned in the woods near the camp. The evidence was all around. “The ash was shin high, and the skulls were all over the place. We saw fragments of skin that had not burned.”

As a career soldier, Irzyk had not only seen combat in all its ugliness—he’d been trained to expect it, to control his reactions. But nothing he’d ever seen or expected to see matched up to Ohrdruf. “The first two dead Germans I ever saw were in Normandy, when we were waiting to break out, and I was roving, trying to learn lessons. I came across a German tank—it was a light tank, yeah—it’d been knocked out. This is where the 4th Infantry had gone. I got out of my jeep, and this tank was buttoned up—the hatches were closed. I opened up the hatch, and there were two Germans sitting there, burned to a crisp. It was like black toast. Those were the first two Germans that I ever saw, dead Germans. We’ve hit German tanks, they burned. I saw my tanks burned, I saw my men burned. I went back to the aid station one day, and a guy’s lying on the table, and you talk about guts being—” He paused, as if recalling that scene, then continued, “So we saw some terrible things.”

Stanley Friedenberg had been an accountant in Manhattan before being drafted. He volunteered for Officer Candidate School (OCS) and in 1943 graduated as a Signal Corps officer. Ultimately, he was recruited into the Counter Intelligence Corps and at the end of 1944 went to Europe, where his supervisors at CIC Headquarters on Avenue Victor-Hugo in Paris sent him on what the now-retired attorney describes as “the grand march across Europe.” Friedenberg and the men traveling in his jeep wore uniforms with no identification save for the U.S. pins on their collars; they showed no rank, and their ID cards referred to them as “Mr.” He spoke a bit of French and passable German, which he says was nowhere near good enough for interrogation. His unit was assigned to the 65th Infantry Division for rations and quarters, but they essentially freelanced around Germany, gathering evidence of war crimes.

Late on April 4, they got word via radio that a camp at Ohrdruf had been discovered, and they drove there, arriving on the morning of April 5, probably around the same time that Lieutenant Colonel Irzyk entered the camp.

Speaking on the patio of his winter home in Placida, Florida, Friedenberg recalls seeing the barbed-wire enclosure and what he describes as shabby buildings. “As I walked through the gate, there was a pit the size of this swimming pool, fifteen by thirty, that was filled with naked bodies of men—real ninety-eight-pound skeletons, bones protruding. And I couldn’t tell how many because they were piled one on top of the other. I would guess there were several hundred bodies there. Someone had started to pour lime on the bodies at one end to decompose them. I took one picture—that’s all I could take because it was such a horrible sight. I was going to take more, but I couldn’t. I was just overwhelmed by the sight. I didn’t throw up. Smell is horrible; decomposing bodies. It’s astonishment, really, astonishment.”

Even as a member of CIC, Friedenberg had had no idea about the concentration camps. At that point in the war, news of them had not made it down the chain of command. Some officers in the line units knew the Russians had run into them, and Irzyk says there were “undercurrents about concentration camps, but I don’t think the impact—it never came until we got to Ohrdruf. To see it, to see it”—he pauses, searching for the right word—“it’s staggering, staggering.”

The questions raised for Friedenberg that morning in Ohrdruf still trouble him today. “How can one human being do this to another, no matter how much you hated them? These people were just used and worked and given very little food until they dropped dead in their tracks and were thrown in the pit. How could it be? Is there a god? What causes this? You just can’t believe that it could happen to human beings.”

The camp that the 4th Armored Division’s 8th Tank Battalion found had been built just five months earlier to house prisoners brought from Buchenwald, thirty-two miles away, to work as forced labor on the underground Nazi communications center or the railway leading to it. Just weeks before the liberation of Ohrdruf, the prisoner population was around 11,700, but mere days before the arrival of the Americans, the SS evacuated most of them on a series of death marches to Buchenwald. Many who were too weak to walk were loaded into trucks, and when the trucks were full, the remainder were shot to death. The bodies at the entrance had all been killed with pistols by the last contingent of SS guards to leave the camp—a farewell gesture, no doubt, in observance of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s order not to permit concentration camp prisoners to fall into enemy hands alive.

But there were survivors at Ohrdruf. Some had hidden inside the many barracks that had housed the prisoners; others had taken advantage of the inevitable confusion that ensued as the Nazis attempted to force march thousands of prisoners away and hidden in the nearby woods. When they revealed themselves to the American soldiers, they pleaded for food, and, as would happen thousands of times in the final weeks of the war, the GIs gave everything they had, often with tragic results. The high-calorie military rations were too much for digestive systems that had been systematically starved for months or even years. Prisoners who had survived to be freed died even as they were being fed by their liberators.

Three days after liberation,
Yank
magazine correspondent Sergeant Saul Levitt arrived at Ohrdruf. In his article published on May 18, 1945, he wrote:

The men in the camp included Belgians, French, Russians, Serbs, and Poles. There is one sixteen-year-old Jewish lad among the survivors. There are also three Russian officers who made it. Two of them are doctors … the doctors worked as laborers until a few days before the evacuation of the camp. Then, just before the end, they were put to work on some of the sick in an effort to get them ready for the movement.