Cruel World (82 page)

The French authorities had set up twenty-one reception centers, five supply depots, and four rail transit centers along its borders with Germany and Belgium, designed to deal with 40,000 people a day. They would need all the help they could get. What started as a trickle was a deluge by March 1945. In April alone, 262,197 persons returned; by V-E Day, May 8, the total would be 500,000, and by June 30, 1.2 million. Hundreds of thousands more returned from Germany to Belgium and Holland, or were moved through France to Greece and Italy. A U.S. Army summary of these events, dated June 30, proudly reported:

The report also noted in passing that “the Russians were moved eastward to the border of the Russian-American zone of occupation” and were turned over to representatives of their countries. That had not been a small operation either: the total Russian repatriation count was believed to be over five million individuals.

The optimistic U.S. Army report, written in France, had also made reference to a new category of DP that it called “problem nationals”:

Maintaining the “non-repatriables” had almost immediately become a challenge. The Allied armies, which needed enormous maintenance themselves, were still fighting hard on all fronts. They did not cross the Rhine into the heart of Germany until March 22, 1945, and still faced some six weeks of battle. The care of the millions of mobile DPs who were heading home was already a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, and their numbers continued to increase. To avoid excessive clogging of roads and trains, the authorities detained many thousands in transit centers and sent them back to their home countries in stages. This process sometimes required a long stay, and after a time it became clear that a large number of the refugees did not want to move on. In the transit camps little attention could be paid at first to the segregation of disparate groups, nor was there time to make more than minimal improvements to the accommodations that were set up in whatever edifices were still standing in the rubble of cities, or in castles, barns, and warehouses in the hinterlands. Despite the gradual arrival of UNRRA teams to help the military, there were never enough workers. Inspectors found unofficial encampments of DPs in every conceivable place. Many DPs, exhorted to do so by Allied leaflets and radio broadcasts, had deserted their jobs before the liberation and taken to the countryside, where they preyed on farms and villages in their search for food.

To these relatively healthy wanderers would soon be added a quite different sort of problem national. In the beginning of April, Allied forces reached and liberated the first major concentration and labor camps in Germany. These had been swollen enormously beyond their normal overcrowding by the continuing evacuation of outlying camps of all types, as the SS attempted to cover up atrocities and to salvage workers. The first death marches from Auschwitz and other camps in the East had been only a tiny part of the massive relocations of prisoners of all ages that had ended in the center of Germany. On the way, tens of thousands had died, but so vast were the numbers of inmates that many more thousands would still be found at Belsen, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Dachau, to name only the best-known camps; and there were scores of others, large and small, with every variety of prisoner.
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Now it was the turn of the Western Allies to see what had been described and rumored, but had to date been beyond their imagination. This time there was no question about the press running the stories. After Eisenhower saw the horrors of the rather small camp at Ohrdruf, near Weimar, which he visited with Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, he sent photographers in to record the terrible scene, so that no one could ever say it was a propaganda stunt. Later he wrote that he had “never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.”
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A horrified German boy, along with the rest of the residents of his town, is required by U.S. soldiers to view Nazi atrocity victims
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(photo credit 15.3)

But even then it was hard to believe that each camp was not some sort of aberration.
Life
photographer Margaret Bourke-White said:

Bourke-White would have been even more shocked had she known that nearly two weeks after the discovery of Ohrdriuf, the SS, still trying to cover up the extent of their guilt, would hang fifty more of their prisoners in an empty school in Hamburg: twenty-two Jewish children, aged four to twelve, who had been used for medical experiments at the Neuengamme camp; the inmate doctors and nurses who had cared for them; and twenty-four Russian prisoners of war who had had the misfortune to share the same hospital ward and become witnesses to the SS crimes.
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Eisenhower, like the Russian commanders, ordered his troops to view the carnage at Ohrdruf. He did not forget the Germans. The people, some with their children, of this and many other towns were required to file through the camp and were conscripted to help bury the piles of bodies. In Leipzig, the mayor was ordered to provide caskets for the remains of seventy-five inmates of a small camp at Leipzig-Mochau, where an international group of slave laborers had been locked in their barracks and burned alive, while those who managed to escape, according to one witness, were shot by Hitler Youth firing from tanks.
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The dead were given a full-fledged funeral and burial in Leipzig’s most beautiful cemetery. All city officials were required to attend the ceremony, which was conducted by Army chaplains both Christian and Jewish. Nine hundred other Germans came voluntarily and placed flowers on the graves.
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The mayor of the town near Ohrdruf didn’t do so well. After his tour, he and his wife committed suicide. Eisenhower, when told, said, “Maybe there is hope after all.”
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Pravda
did not fail to report the liberation of the camps, but could not let the British and Americans upstage them. Buchenwald, they declared, was “Majdenek, but in miniature. Our Allies had not seen what we had. Now that they too have seen, now that they share what we know, they will understand us better.”
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Military and aid authorities were less concerned about publicity than about how to cope with the massive needs of the concentration camp inmates and still keep up with the DP migrations and the war. Belsen’s 40,000 inmates and Buchenwald’s 20,000 were liberated within days of each other in the second week of April. Among them were some 1,500 children under the age of sixteen, as well as many older teenagers who had entered the camp system several years before and had recently been transferred to Belsen; one of the latter was Anne Frank, who died before the camp was liberated. Belsen was unusual because it was actually surrendered by Wehrmacht troops, who, on April 12, proposed a three-day truce to the British so that they could take it over and thereby “prevent an epidemic.” The first British officers arrived in Belsen late on April 15, far too late for any prevention: typhus had been raging for weeks. Overwhelmed by what they found, the small unit nevertheless managed to bring in water and food the same evening. Within days, relays of British medical teams both military and private, plus ninety-six medical students, were rushed in. This was not easy, as the truce had expired and the camp was surrounded by fighting. Richard Dimbleby of the BBC was one of the first to see it. Like everyone else, he was not prepared: “I think one of the most awful things about it was the suddenness. No one had told us this was
a concentration camp—we understood it was some sort of refugee center where there was an epidemic.”
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The first indicator for most was the smell, which was noticeable four miles away and even to RAF pilots overhead. In a large clearing flanked by forested areas were a hundred or so decrepit wooden huts surrounded by barbed wire. In the huts, designed for about 50 people and now holding 600, and in mud-floored, flimsy tents among the trees, the 40,000 prisoners had been jammed

Dimbleby was appalled to see people falling over before his eyes, and frightened by a woman with “fingers … like old brown pencils, her face a stretched parchment” who clutched at his ankle just before she died and whose age was estimated to be twenty by the doctor escorting him.
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Here too the starvation dysentery seen at Auschwitz had affected everyone, creating unbelievable squalor: “Those lying in the lower bunks had no protection from the excreta dripping from above. On the floors the excrement was six inches deep, mixed with rubbish and rags. The walls were heavily contaminated also.” Muriel Knox Doherty, an Australian nurse brought in to run the Belsen hospital, wrote this description in a letter home, adding that her readers might think it was “sordid and unnecessary” to do so, but insisting that they read on: “The world should know what suffering and degradation this New Order in Europe brought to millions, lest it be quickly forgotten and rise again in another guise.” It appeared that the inmates had not had any food or water for seven days, and precious little before that. The Nazis had also deliberately destroyed the water system before they left, as well as most of the camp records, which made it impossible to identify the dead. There was no shortage of food or medical help in the vicinity. The countryside was full of cattle, and about a mile from the huts was the main part of Belsen, a luxuriously appointed and highly manicured German military base with storerooms bursting with supplies, a huge state-of-the-art military hospital, and all
sorts of amenities, including an officers club with chandeliers, a theater, and a swimming pool.
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In all such camps there was little the rescuers could do at first but give emergency first aid to those who seemed most likely to survive, or in this case, to those closest to the doors of the huts, as it was nearly impossible to reach those farther in without stepping on people. Assembly-line methods for bathing, delousing, and examining the inmates were instituted. The posh German base was turned over to the victims and the “Horror Camp,” once emptied, was burned with much celebrating on May 21. By then the British had buried 23,000 bodies. Very small children were given high priority in the rescue process. There were 500 at Belsen, where a special hospital, which had to be extended into tents, was set up for them. British soldiers made wooden cribs for the littlest ones. Malnourished and riddled with tuberculosis and typhus, the children died in droves. Among them were tiny ones with Auschwitz tattoos, Gypsies, and a boy of undetermined origin with “two tiny sisters” whom he guarded carefully. Most of the children were thought to be orphans, but in many cases this could not be verified.
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Buchenwald, where conditions were much like those at Belsen, was an all-male camp that held nearly 1,000 boys. Some of the young ones had worked in the factories, but many more had been hidden within the camp for months by older inmates. The Americans forced German workers and Hitler Youth to clean out and refurbish several buildings, but it took aid workers some doing to gain the liberated boys’ trust: