We Who Are Alive and Remain (26 page)

We couldn’t help but notice that in Germany there seemed less damage to the buildings and homes than in other countries we had been through. Many of the German people seemed to be living in relative luxury—beautiful homes in immaculate condition, plenty of food and material goods.

Late in April 1945, Easy Company came to Buchloe in the foothills of the Alps, near Landsberg. We went on patrol. It was a clear, still day with no wind at all. We were spread out going through the woods when we smelled a putrid odor. I looked at the other men a little ways apart from me and saw that they had the same questioning look. We kept walking in the same direction, and the smell got stronger as we approached very high fencing. It was about twelve feet high with posts about eight feet apart and four feet of tipped-in barbed wire around the top. Between the posts was extra-heavy fencing like chicken wire, but so much stronger, like quarter-inch welded grating. The posts were made out of unpeeled trees, just cut and put in the ground. The wire fencing had been buried deep in the ground so no one could dig under it. It was a big compound, planned out with low buildings about twelve feet apart and a space for elevated guard posts that covered each twelve-foot space between the buildings. There were rows and rows of buildings. Some buildings were just three-sided sheds.

As we got closer we saw the open side of some of the sheds. Stacks of bodies were piled there, probably waiting to be burned to render out the fat. We approached cautiously. We smelled another odor now: horrible, sickening, sweet, putrid—it was burning flesh. What we saw then was the most unbelievable sight I have ever witnessed: human beings, some standing like mummies, most lying on shelves in buildings, live bodies mixed with dead bodies, all together on shallow shelves so hundreds of them would fit in the buildings. There were also piles of bodies burning. The constant sounds of low moaning and crying could be heard. The sound made you want to plug your ears to get away from it. I became sick to my stomach, as did many of us.

The people we saw were mostly adults, but some could have been as young as ten or twelve years old. The only food anywhere was a few buckets of discolored water with dippers. It might have been some kind of broth or boiled grain water. Some people had yellow armbands that signified they were Jews. Others could have been Polish or Austrian. Most prisoners were naked or had striped rags hanging on their bodies. We saw no evidence that they had any clothes for the cold winter that had just passed. How man can do such a thing to man is beyond comprehension.

Later we learned that the Germans had locked up the camp and fled immediately before we got there. Some of our men said later that they had found a boxcar full of rotting dead people. They could hardly talk about it. Many of them were still vomiting when they got back to camp.

Pretty soon our officers ushered us out of the camp. They didn’t want us to have prolonged contact with the prisoners because they were full of body lice and all types of infection and disease. The Graves Registration and the medics were rushed in as we were led out. General Taylor declared martial law in the area. The next day he ordered the citizens in nearby Landsberg to go to the concentration camp with shovels and rakes and take care of the dead bodies. The prisoners that were still alive were treated by our health units.

If anyone ever says there were no concentration camps in Germany, tell them it isn’t so. I saw, smelled, and heard the agony of those prisoners. It happened, I was there. I am a living witness to it. On that day we all knew instantly why we were there. We saw for ourselves the nature of evil that was being practiced by the Germans. We were told later that this was a work camp, not an extermination camp. It was one of a half dozen or more that were a part of the Dachau complex. God have mercy on them for their unspeakable sins.

Coming through Germany, I saw the concentration camps. It was sickening what the Germans did. It turned my stomach. These poor people—my heart went out to them. What we had, we gave to them. They were starving. Just like skeletons.

Something that stands out in my mind—the worst thing I ever saw was one of those concentration camps. These prisoners in there were really starving to death. God, that was really horrible. We walked up the road, they were hanging on the fence, just walking skeletons. Terrible. Terrible. We gave them everything we had to eat, probably killed a few. They told us later we shouldn’t have done that because their systems were so starved. The Germans had locked the gates and run. We blew the gates open, then went on through and set up in the next little town.

Moving down into Germany, we were sending patrols out all the time. Near the town of Memmingen, Bull Randleman took two squads of the 1st Platoon on patrol and ran into this huge encamped place. They saw dead bodies all over the yard, so they sent back to tell Lieutenant Winters. We opened up the camp, went inside, and made the mistake of feeding the prisoners we found there. That’s when I lost it. I busted into tears. I had shed a couple tears when Don Hoobler died, but seeing those concentration camps was the first time I cried since I was a kid. I didn’t boo-hoo, but I just swelled up and tears came down. I felt so sorry for these people.

The prisoners came up and grabbed hold of you, wanting to hug you. Just the smell of the place, that didn’t even bother me. What bothered me were the bodies all over the ground. The camp was about four football fields side by side, barbed wire all around. Bodies were stacked everywhere, big ditches dug with bodies thrown in.

We found out later that the Germans knew we were coming. The day before we got there they had left the camp. Before leaving they had shot as many as they could, then got the hell out. There were huge holes dug up with bodies stacked high. We went into the nearest town. None of the civilians knew anything about the concentration camps, they said. That’s bullshit because this was a work camp and these prisoners worked in the farms around the area, too. Colonel Sink made the civilians come into the camp to bury the bodies. That was about the grandest idea I ever saw.

A couple days later we found another camp, near Muhlhausen. A train track ran up through the woods, so we followed that. We weren’t the first there. Some armored outfit had already taken it. We walked into the big shower system where they put the cyanide in the shower heads. One of the inmates showed us how they put the bodies in this huge oven and raked the ashes out. It was a twenty-four-hour-per-day job, every day, killing all these people. This was the work of Hitler’s SS. Who could do that? People had to be insane to do those things.

Toasting Victory

We kept moving forward until we got to Berchtesgaden. Easy Company’s 2nd Battalion was the first to reach it, on May 5, 1945. We took the town and secured the Berchtesgaden
hof
for the regimental headquarters.

Hitler had already killed himself, and his officers knew the inevitable was upon them. We came on it from all sides of the building. We kicked in doors with our rifle butts and were ready to fire. The officers came out to us with their hands up. Nobody fired a gun.

One officer came right up to me. He said he wanted to surrender and handed me his Luger with both hands outstretched. It was still in its holster. He spoke good English. He said that he had gone to school for eight years in the United States. When he went back to Germany to visit his parents the Germans said he had to fight with the German Army or be killed. I took his weapon and saw to it that he was delivered with the other German officers to headquarters. Lieutenant Speirs gave me a permit to keep the Luger and send it home. It was immaculate. It had never been fired, still in its beautiful leather holster, still with the Cosmoline in it.

It was an exhilarating time at the end of the war, and all of us in Berchtesgaden felt it. The fun and games began. Everyone was shooting in the air, looting, drinking the best wine and champagne in Germany. Things were running amok. To the victor belong the spoils, and spoils they were. The place was bursting with money, currency from a dozen countries, and art treasures from all over Europe. It was stuffed with booze, jewelry, and famous cars. Hitler’s silverware was split between Winters and Welsh, who were both still eating with it in their homes forty-five years later.

I soon tired of the revelry. Not being drinkers, I and Tom Gray, who was a family man and also didn’t drink, looked for a different kind of fun. We found an abandoned German airplane. We scrounged around for some gas, put it in the plane, and got it about six feet off the ground. As soon as it ran out of gas, it dropped back to the ground. Then we grabbed a motorcycle and rode around until we found some horses. We got our hands on a jeep and rounded up the horses, about six of them. They were steeplechase horses, beautiful animals. We took them to a nearby stable and got them corraled. Then we decided to go into the mountains to hunt. By that time Jesse Aranda and Dutchy Bauer had joined us in the fun. The four of us found saddles and bridles for the horses, loaded them with supplies, and took off for the mountains to hunt for the red stags that we had seen pictures of at the hof. We camped, hunted, fished, and enjoyed the freedom of being out in the mountains. It was beautiful country. We didn’t see any deer, but I shot two loose pigs and found a square tub of honey. We ate that up and spit out the wax.

None of us drank anything except cool, clear water from mountain streams. We had talked about how anything to drink at the Eagle’s Nest could have been poisoned. They knew we were coming ahead of time. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to get a lot of us.

I joined the 101st at Mourmelon, France, in February 1945. From there I went to E Company as a replacement officer. Joining E Company was okay for me. Right away Earl McClung decided I was a good guy, so they decided they wouldn’t kill me [laughs]. Far from not being accepted, I found that I was accepted just fine. I got along with the men well. I still do today.

We got in DUKWs, land-sea vehicles, to go through Germany. A guy, Bill McGonical, in the 3rd Platoon, was able to get us the best accommodations in all these towns as we went through the country. Paul Rogers and Earl McClung found a cow and we ate well in that particular town, can’t remember which one. McClung, having been a country boy, knew how to butcher it. So we ate well.

Here’s a story about Rogers, a hell of a soldier and a little bit older than most of us. He was my platoon sergeant. Just before we reached Berchtesgaden, word came back that a German panzer unit on one of the bridges had its 88s on us—shots fired in anger. We were just outside of Munich. The war was still on at this point, but I hadn’t seen any real combat yet. Third Platoon was supposed to take them out, which meant it was my responsibility to lead troops into battle, and goddam—here I was a brand-new second lieutenant in the company saying to myself, God, I hope I can take care of it.

Well, along comes Rogers, who had been through all of this before, his voice cool as anything, saying, “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant. Everything’s under control.” That really calmed me down. As it turned out, the German panzer was just a mock-up, just a camouflage unit, and there wasn’t anybody there after all. But that really said something about Rogers.

Near a small hospital on the outskirts of Berchtesgaden our squad was short on vehicles. We saw a nice black German ambulance and figured we’d liberate the vehicle. This happened quite a bit. For instance, our squad leader, Tex Coombs, drove a German Air Force truck by then. So we hopped in the front of the ambulance but suddenly heard a pounding in the back. A German doctor was delivering a baby back there. He didn’t say much, but we figured he could keep the ambulance. We got out and hopped in the back of one of our three-quarter-ton trucks.

Heading into Berchtesgaden, the French armor were beside us. It was a rural area, and as we came up a hill to a plateau, we heard shots. We grabbed our rifles and looked around. The French had caught three German SS troopers. They looked very young, blond. One by one, the French soldiers made the Germans kneel. We watched as the French shot each one in the head. It wasn’t that much of a shock for us to see, we had seen people get shot before, but it made you think—you had to wonder at all the French people had been through by then.

At Berchtesgaden we liberated a lot of Hitler’s booze. Bob Rader, Jim Welling, Clancy Lyall, and five or six of us from our squad took a van up to Hitler’s wine cellar and helped ourselves to the best champagne. We brought down loads of it and kept the bottles in the front room area of a big German villa that we were stationed in. Anytime you wanted a drink, you just walked into the front room and helped yourself. After a while nobody was feeling much pain.

One day Jim Welling and I decided to do some exploring. Across from the SS barracks we found Hitler’s tunnels and followed them for quite a while. If an air raid came, the Germans hid down there. We found all kinds of stuff that belonged to Hitler and Hermann Goering. You took steps down to the air raid shelter at the bottom. It was like a regular home office down there with paneled walls, weapons, clothes strewn all around, Goering’s size fourteen shoes. Jim took some guns and a typewriter. I took some guns, part of a German SS uniform, and some envelopes addressed to Hitler from around the world. I didn’t read German very well, but back in the States I took the envelopes to a German barber I knew who deciphered them for me. Unfortunately, none of the letters were left inside the envelopes, but the envelopes had been sent to Hitler from countries all over the world, including the States. If anything, it showed Hitler had a lot of contacts.

We rolled into Berchtesgaden on May 5. May 8 was V-E Day. Some of the guys shot their rifles up in the air. The mood among the men was very elated, but there was also a lot of thought that we’d go to the Pacific before long. A rumor went around that there was already a boat at Marseilles, France, all set to take us to the other side. We didn’t know when we’d ship out, but we figured it was soon.