We made another cup of cocoa, this time over a Sterno can rather than a fire on the table. As a P.F.C. His face went through a variety of colors before he hung still. Would they think it was worth it? Bill, Tim, and I started off through the trees, down the hill to the front gate which was only a couple of hundred yards away. I could have accepted a likeness to some members of the German army whom we had fought, but there were many I would have been uncomfortable with. Could I have been that? I dug a cigar out of my jacket, lit it, and enjoyed it, and I studied the landscape around the camp. They told us the story of one prisoner who was so close to death that even thinned chicken broth was too rich for his stomach. Neither did my companions. We saw neither hide nor hair of those German guards. The whole idea was to get rid ofthe prisoners permanently and make a gain of free labor in the process. The Holocaust History – A People's and Survivor History – Remember.org, Holocaust Picture Book – The Story of Granny Girl as a Child, Anne Frank: The Biography | 1998 Holocaust Book, Holocaust history and stories from Holocaust Photos, Survivors, Liberators, Books and Art, Introduction to “The Fight Against Hate” gopher site at Jerusalem One, Joseph Weismann – Remembering with After the Roundup, Holocaust Curriculum for Middle School and High School 7-12 (Part 2), The following is a series of concentration camp photos taken by Josh C, After the Roundup by Joseph Weismann – Part 1 of Chapter 3, Liberation of Auschwitz 75 years later – a poem, Forever Alert German Child Survivors in Action Before 1945 and Beyond by Philipp Sonntag. I am a WW2 vet who was in the 102nd Infantry Division which spear- headed the 9thArmy drive across Europe to the Elbe River where we met the Russians. He was talked to some more and then he jumped. The rules of the U.S. Army state that a liberator is a soldier who arrived at a concentration camp within 48 hours of the first soldier to enter the camp. Those of us assigned to the towers at the beginning had missed a great deal of what had gone on, and we were catching up. In no way is it the same. We walked through the gate to the door that opened to the cell area. It was liberated in the summer of 1944 as Soviet forces advanced westward. In December 1987, as chief of the We let them continue. We were inching closer together when our platoon sergeant was called back to one of the tanks and got on the radio. The things we found then were grotesque enough without knowing some of the other things we did learn later. While the world celebrated, the weary men of Company "K", 5th Regiment, 71st Infantry Division, commanded by Capt. Write CSS OR LESS and hit save. 1016 Jewish prisoners were being burned alive there in a barnon the edge of town by the SS troops who held the town. There were children prisoners, some of them born in the camp. There are still altogether too many things that flood my mind once a trigger is pulled. Entering the first of these we found we were entering their home. (Ed.). His helmet was gleaming and elaborately decorated, his uniform spic and span, his pistol highly polished and oddly shaped, and, by God, there he was: it was George Patton himself touring this place. What were those photos doing in my father’s trunk? After some moments we figured out they wanted our cigarettes. Those buildings were still two hundred yards or more up the hill from us, but it didn’t take long for those tanks to growl their way up toward those buildings. We started again from scratch, both of us deciding that names were the proper things with which to start, so we traded names. I set all my things down and surveyed the scene in front of me. CTRL + SPACE for auto-complete. A group of guys from the company noticed us and said, “Wait till you see in there.”. We hit those fences with enough speed so that it was unclear to me whether it was the first level, or the second, or the third, but at least one of those levels was hot with electricity. We looked and said not a word. I would follow the bazooka man: wherever he went I would go. We asked them questions and we were given answers. It took him a little while but he finished the candy bar, looking at me with wonderment the whole time. When we split at the end of the four hours, he pointed to my pack of cigarettes. When we broke through the first of those fences we got a clue, the first clue as to what we had come upon, but we had no real comprehension at all of what was to assault our senses for the next hours, the next days. In one sense, they had not committed murder; rather, the German had committed suicide. I still have mine after 52 years. Beyond the fence were two more layers of barbed wire fence not quite as tall. The guys who actually witnessed thesethings are fast leaving the face of the planet. The camps, most of which were small could be drawn on for “free” labor.Political prisoners were worked to death and it didn’t matter to the Germans, asthere were plenty more where they came from. I came across a chocolate bar and taught him the word “candy”. Strochlitz and Meed were serving then as co-chairpersons on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council's Days of Remembrance Committee. There was water in my canteen. I salute the thousands andthousands of GIs and soldiers of other nations who gave their lives to put an endto this madness. I felt I knew why the prisoners of Buchenwald did what they did – so I did not stop them. What I remember now are bits and pieces, and certain of those bits surface more rapidly than others. Maybe those K-Rations would be used for barter–that was all right with me. One particular night our bombers flew over the camp to the factory, which they pulverized. Then there were all of those dead bodies outside that must have come from here. The guard was assisted on to the table and instructed to fix the rope to the light fixture. The sound of his footsteps coming up the stairs was almost instantaneous. I was ruminating in this manner when I heard a tiny voice, and my attention came back to the inside of the camp. They came out of the buildings and just stood there, making me feel foolish with all of that firepower hanging on me. I do not expect a complete purging — that would be expecting too much — but if I can get these memories to crawl deeper into my mind, to reappear less vividly, and less frequently, it will be a help. There was an aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. Upstairs, I relieved the guy before me and put my rifle over in the corner, threw the rifle belt under the table, crawled on the table, lit a cigar, and my thoughts continued. He was mystified. The three of us headed through the gate, through the twenty or thirty feet to the other side of the building. Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Concentration camp liberator. TheDivision Commander, General Keating, ordered the towns people to construct acemetery and memorial as an attempt to honor the victims. The Buchenwald prisoners had found one of their German guards in a nearby village dressed in civilian clothes, and they had him now in a cell in one of the buildings and were interrogating him. In front of us a good bit, but plainly visible. It had all happened not too long before we arrived. There are so many things from that week I wish would go away, things I wish could be scrubbed from my memory. We headed for the mess tent, talking about what had been going on all day long with the press and the visitors. Bill, Tim, and I grew very quiet. He ate the cheese mixture (which I ate only when I was very hungry), and sorted out the words “cheese” and “bacon”, and he loved the stuff. I certainly would not attempt to debate the reality of those times. On the way back up the road our moods lightened a little with the stories about the little fellow, we had started to feel a little better. He chattered up a storm and I could not understand one word. Thus, as Allied troops launched offensives within Germany, they encountered tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps. I reviewed in my mind the multiple things the Buchenwald prisoners had gone through, the length of time they had been living through hell, and I didn’t have to rationalize their actions. The dead were better off, and the factory was out of business also. It was a grand home, luxuriously furnished, but messy now from the many feet trudging through it all day long. US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, as well as Dachau, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, and Dora-Mittelbau; check with your local VFW to see if a liberator is available to speak to students. We had nothing else with us they really wanted, but they stuck with us and guided us to another set of buildings, which had the look of large barns with wide doors in the middle of the front. The little fellow in the tower with me became all excited and tried to explain things to me. I had no idea how rich one was when one had a whole pack of cigarettes. Here we were–five or six of us–fully armed with semi-automatic rifles, and we did not make the Buchenwald prisoners stop. There were stacks of bunks five or six high, crowded together with very little room between a bunk and the one above it. I stared out at the darkness, and there were two reasons for not seeing anything: my eyes couldn’t see anything, and my mind wouldn’t see anything. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. © Copyright 1995-2020 Remember.org. The next day we heard that after returning to their town, the mayor of Weimar and his wife both committed suicide. We were flooded with information. Soon Sergeant Blowers came by and told us that all of the people inside of the camp had been told to stay inside of the fence, that we were down by the holes to make sure they stayed inside. I spent the rest of my four-hour tour with him. That was not what was bothering me, however. He repeated it again, and he had the pronunciation close. The tank which we were riding, along with two other tanks in our column, wheeled to the left so that the three of them made a front. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. The full explanation was given the prisoners, and there was no problem, they understood. He was dressed in bits and pieces of everything, ragged at best, and very dirty. On one tray was a skull partially burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. As the Soviet troops approached Majdanek at the end of July, the remaining camp personnel hastily abandoned the Majdanek concentration camp without fully dismantling it. I quit. On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind.The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the scale of Nazi crimes. Containing the prisoners was not expected to be any trouble because they understood the need, and they were being provided for in every way that we could think of: the field hospital had just arrived, a big mess unit was on the way, loads of PX rations were coming. In the weeks preceding the arrival of Soviet units, Auschwitz camp personnel had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward in what would become known as "death marches." First, I got him to slow down the talk, then I tried to speak to him, but he could not understand a word I said. He had them all inside his shirt and went streaking back through the whole in the fence and on up the hill. Some of our guys had been disgusted by a bunch of nurses or WACs in their Class A uniforms taking pictures of the naked dead. The bunch of us walked around to our towers and some of us walked very quietly. We looked for the lamp shades–we found only the lamp bases where they had been. Things I could not yet understand–could never understand. It dawned on me much later–the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays–and the Germans still couldn’t keep up. Scowling, we quietly walked back to the barracks. He eventually sent in an engineering outfit with bulldozers to dig a mass grave for those bodies. As the first presence from the outside world, the Allied liberators presented a dual reality for detainees in concentration camps. Our platoon sergeant had us form up some and relax, then signaled that horde of human beings to stand fast; he just held both hands up, palms out, and motioned them backwards slowly. He repeated it, and I corrected him. Goodell, Stephen, and Susan D. Bachrach. They were intelligent. They liberated Mauthausen in early May. Four of us asking questions, two providing the answers. Sergeant Blowers told us that some of the prisoners spoke English. 1945: The Year of Liberation. The fixture held. Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust. Liberation of Woebbelin Concentration Camp by a U.S. unit. We would be covering all of the holes we had ripped in the fence. I was an assistant bazooka man, and I had a sack with ten bazooka rounds hung over my shoulder; I had an M1 Garand, and some bandoleers of ammo for that; some grenades hanging one place and another; a fully loaded cartridge belt; and I was on my toes ready to scramble off that tank at the first sign of trouble. Lee Berg. They had intended to kill us, which would have been easy and totheir advantage because they wanted to cover what was going on the edge of townat the time. They did not place the rope around the man’s neck. But what kind of work would I have done? The first thing he got was another chocolate bar, and he took his time with that while we worked some more on our language. Our conversation started with nouns, naming things, and progressed to simple verbs, actions, and we were busy with that. A table was brought to the center of the room and placed under a very strong looking electrical fixture. That night I sat in the dark and went through two or three cigars, and several cigarettes. But now there was a new odor, thick and hanging, and it assaulted the senses. On April 29th, 1945, the Dachau concentration camp (KZ Dachau) was liberated by units of the US Seventh Army. There, right in the middle of the hole in the fence, looking up, calling me, was this very small person. They knew early on that I had been there, and they took LIFE magazine. There were temporary lights strung around for the medics to do their work. After the SS Colonel surrendered, the barn where thesepolitical prisoners were being roasted to death was discovered at the edge oftown. These prisoners greeted the soldiers as their liberators. Remember.org shares art, discussion, photos, poems, and facts to preserve powerful memories. He told us this story about her: Once, she ordered all of the Jewish prisoners in the camp stripped and lined up; she then marched down the rows of them, and, as she saw a tattoo she liked, she would touch that tattoo with her riding crop; the guards would take the man away immediately to the camp hospital where the doctors would remove the patch of skin with the tattoo, have it tanned, and patch it together with others to make lamp shades. Bill and I were told to go into the tower, go to the top floor, to stay there, and to keep people from coming out through the hole. Sergeant Blowers told us some things about the Commandant of Buchenwald and his wife. The bunks were much too short even for short people. I had more cigarettes to give him when we parted too. When he was finished, he had a very proper hangman’s noose, thirteen turns of the rope and all. That was enough for me. I tried to give him some boxes of K-Rations, but, hell, he was eating better than that at the mess tent. I walked down, and caught up to Bill on the road. TTY: 202.488.0406, The first major Nazi camp to be liberated was, Six months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated. He did so immediately. Lee Berg served in the 102nd Infantry Division and 5th Army. Others were full of talk about tomorrow. 95AD, remember.org. In the wall were small openings fitted with iron doors. Majdanek was captured virtually intact. It appeared that those trays could hold three bodies at a time. High up above the opening for the gate was a heavy wooden beam with words carved into it in German script, Arbeit Macht Frei. The three of us watched, but we couldn’t understand what was being said, so we turned and left. A major reason I need a catharsis. The two named some of the diseases studied, but I have forgotten (willfully?) Chamberlin, Brewster S., and Marcia Feldman, editors. He wasn’t there but a few minutes, came back, formed up our platoon, and took us back away, toward the place where we had entered the camp, back toward the fences through which we had ripped holes. Thayer Greene reflects on the wounds of war. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987. When I was very young she had taught me how to count in German, and how to sing the German alphabet. Everything was very quiet. We had done what we could for the wounded and then had got on with the job that had to be done. Bill and I were vigorous young things with an immense curiosity, and it was difficult standing still in the middle of a hole through a set of three fences. We turned and walked away. Why had he made notes on the back... Two Weeks at Nordhausen. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW He took the photograph, but out of sight in the darkness of the building, behind the man, were the people propping him up. After a quickly gobbled lunch at the mess tent, we took off for our towers and relieved the third platoon men. There was a railway siding en route to the entrance of Dachau, along which there were 40 railway wagons. Nothing had happened during my shift, and that was what I reported to him when he reached the top. (Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) (It was my thought that one would have a rough time merely rolling over.) Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. All of the German guards had packed up and moved out about three hours before our arrival. Liberation of Gunskirchen, Austria – May 4, 1945 This pamphlet was produced by the US Army after theyliberated a concentration camp in Austria called Gunskirchen Lager.The book recounts in detail, and with very graphic photos, the tragedy they found in the camp. The Buchenwald prisoners stayed on to view their handiwork. They were heading back toward the camp, which mystified me, because they should not have been outside of the camp in the first place. Sgt. The rules state that a liberator is a soldier who arrived at a concentration camp within 48 hours of the first soldier to enter the camp. Groups of Jewish prisoners would be selected (which must have been some kind of an admission they were human beings) and inoculated with the diseases. It did not even begin to enter my mind that he might have been Jewish and shouldn’t have been eating bacon. After listening to all of this, a half dozen or so of us went down to the Camp Commandant’s home, walked in, and looked around. Soviet troops first arrived at Majdanek during the night of July 22–23 and captured Lublin on July 24. This all happened to a group of us on April 11, 1945. When the Germans left, the crematorium was still going full blast, burning up a storm, the chimney belching out that black smoke. As they were moving back to Weimar, not even out of sight of the camp, a number of Germans in the group found something to laugh about. These are my memories. After I was relieved and heading back up the hill, I saw Tim coming down the road behind me and I slowed until he caught up. We must have appeared as giants in their midst: we well-fed, healthy, strong, young men; they gaunt, shrunken, their ugly striped uniforms hanging on them. If you'd like to share your story on Remember.org, let us know, all we ask is that you give permission to students and teachers to use the materials in a non-commercial setting. I imagined it would be very beautiful there in the summer with all of the trees leafed out. Thayer Greene, 93, looks for a photograph of his German friend who went by the nickname of "Friete". Psychoanalyst. Ours and other infantry divisions were not capable of sustaining a continuousattack. US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945. Much of what I had seen ran counter to everything my mother had brought me up believing. There was nothing much going on down in my corner, so it was easy to ignore. I have become some kind of a sophist for myself now. It goes without saying the experiment failed–again. After the tour had been administered, the group headed back out of the gate and back down the road to Weimar. I have never ever told her, or my father either, most of these stories about Buchenwald. … As I stood on the top floor looking out, I saw nothing. Into the jeep and he was all over the place in just a few minutes. Strange things. Things that he had learned interviewing prisoners in the hospital. That April, US troops also liberated Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, and Flossenbürg. Weliberated a number of the death and work camps as we went along. I got to my tower, crawled up the staircase, and relieved the fellow from the third platoon. I broke off a corner and put it in my mouth and chewed it. ButIguess time has a way of altering history. My mind was full. Shortly after the Soviet capture of Majdanek in July 1944, British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. An interpreter met them at the gate, marched them around, and, according to the word I heard later, carefully explained in great detail what had been going on in the camp. By the time he reached the top floor I had my belt back on, my rifle in my hands, and was standing by the stair opening. We had barely made the turn, and there it was. The answers were all monosyllabic. Nothing could really hurt them further, but it hurt me that they were now an exhibition. Treatment of the prisoners varied also, depending on ethnic origin. The next time he stepped gently off the end, and the table was quickly slid away from him and out of his reach, and he dangled there. Another division would “pass” through usto give us a breather. How many hundreds of people slept in this one building was beyond me. Ever since that day I have been convincing myself that I understood why the Buchenwald prisoners did what they did. We kept talking and time disappeared. The trays at the crematorium would be emptied also. It is unclear how many SS members were killed in the incident but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50. One story: The German army had been losing men on the Russian front because they were freezing to death. From them came these human beings, timidly, slowly, deliberately showing their hands, all in a sort of uniform, or bits and pieces of a uniform, made from horribly coarse cloth with stripes running vertically. Cigarettes were for barter; they were exchange material. "The odor of death could be detected outside the camp… I just can’t conceive of anyone not believing that these things happened. None of us–well, none of us in the lower ranks–knew what it was we were up to or where we were, but we were fully expecting a fire fight with German troops, whose camp we had just stormed and taken, and we thought they would be angry at us. Everyone working there was killed, but that didn’t seem to matter to the two professors; not one bomb had missed the factory, not one bomb had fallen inside Buchenwald. My stomach did not want to hold food any longer. An ugly horrible smell. That was the start. Sleep did not come easily. We still had no idea what this place was. We had aged years in a few short hours. A little later in the evening the three of us walked back into the camp, passed by the crematorium and the stacks of bodies, and wandered into the camp proper. I had everything I needed for a cup of coffee except heat.
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