The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (11 page)

His battalion lost twenty or thirty men during the Battle of the Bulge, with another couple of hundred wounded; roughly a quarter of the outfit. They stayed with the 104th Infantry Division, the Timber-wolves, after the Bulge and built both floating and Bailey bridges while under fire to get them across the Ruhr River.

As they moved into the Harz Mountains, they began to encounter farms being worked by forced laborers kept under guard behind barbed wire, but the Army did not forewarn them about the elaborate concentration camp system they would soon confront. James did run into a very different aspect of Adolf Hitler’s grand plan. “Going through the Harz Mountains we came into this beautiful little town, only women there, and a lot of them were pregnant. It was one of the places where they were breeding a master race. When we went into the town, we started getting some small-arms fire and so we quickly set up a line and somebody contacted those that were firing at us. They were boys in their preteens and their early teens. They had rifles, and they were shooting at us. The mothers would keep these kids until they were a certain age, and then they had to put them in the military schools.”

The next day, the 104th entered the Nordhausen Dora-Mittelbau complex. James doesn’t recall what he saw first, but he remembers what made an impact on him the most. “My platoon had to go down into a railroad yard to see if there were any engineering materials—lumber, steel, anything we can use for roads or bridges. And we got in there, and the German civilians were breaking open the railroad cars and looting what was in them. I remember seeing one that had bags of sugar, and the people were fighting over that.

“Anyhow, there’s a train, I don’t know how big it was, but it was more than ten cars. Nobody was around, and the sergeant and I went over there and we busted open the doors and out slithered dead bodies. Slithered out, that’s the only word that I could use, ‘cause they’d been dead for days and in various degrees of decomposition. What the Germans had done was go load up these people as we were moving forward, they’d load these people up and move ‘em back towards Germany, trying to find ways of getting rid of ‘em.”

“All I know is that I did not have emotional reactions except hate. How the hell can people do this?” The railcars holding the dead bodies were within easy sight of the cars being ransacked for sugar by the townspeople. “That’s the thing that pissed me off so much, was that there were these people looting. Of course, they didn’t have anything to eat, either. But they knew, they knew what was down there. You could smell it. Everybody didn’t know what was happening, that’s the damn thing.” To be clear, James was being ironic with that last comment.

Other American units encountered additional Nazi handiwork at the Nordhausen train yards. Robert Miller wrote a letter to the Minnesota chapter of the 104th Infantry Division Association detailing what he’d seen on April 11. He was a member of an armored patrol that was sent to check and secure the train station and the nearby warehouses. The station had been bombed, and the cleanup was still under way. They heard a train approaching.

One could tell it was a really loaded steam engine. Someone suggested we move one of our three tanks so as to cover the track. The tank was a new one from the states with a high velocity 90mm rifle.

Suddenly, the train could be seen and we debated whether to use the tank’s gun. We realized the shell would go right through the engine and the cars behind it, probably killing anyone in them. Within minutes, the train pulled into the station and stopped. The engineer was looking for the station master and was totally surprised to find the Americans. He became argumentative and ended up getting whacked with a rifle butt. Some of us could speak a little German and asked him what the 42 padlocked box cars contained, but he wouldn’t say. Unknown to us was that only three miles away was a concentration camp called Dora.

My friend, David Peltier, a street-wise guy from Chicago who taught me how to stay alive, went to the first box car, knocked off the lock and pushed open the door. The car was jammed with people standing, packed together like sardines, and appeared to be in a catatonic state. All 42 of the cars were filled with Polish Jews.

Miller and his buddies unlocked all the boxcars, telling the people that they were
“Americanish soldatin.”
He wrote, “They could hardly believe that they had been saved from certain death and that they were free. Stan Pokrzywa, another Chicago man in heavy weapons, spoke Polish and did a wonderful job in comforting the people. We moved them in to the station and warehouses where a large supply of food had been found—food stolen from box cars by the station master—and gave this food as well as water to these former prisoners. Colonel Lovelady approved of this, and let the war wait.”

Private John Marcinek was part of D Company, 414th Infantry Regiment, of the 104th, and recalls riding on a 3rd Armored Division tank the day they discovered Nordhausen. He was twenty-three years old and had been drafted two years earlier while working for his folks’ beer distributorship in the Shamokin, Pennsylvania, area. He was a veteran of fighting all the way from Holland, where he had spent most of seventeen days immersed in water because the Germans had flooded the area, to the crossing of the Rhine on the famous Remagen bridge and on into central Germany.

As they approached the Nordhausen area, the tanks his unit was riding on stopped. A call came over the radio asking if anyone could speak a Slovak language. Marcinek says that growing up he had eight years of exposure to fractured Slovak, Polish, and Russian languages, so he responded. Turns out that the major who was commanding the lead vehicle was trying without success to interrogate several slave laborers dressed in striped clothing who had escaped from a nearby camp.

Marcinek had difficulty with the translation, but with a combination of charades and language he determined that the emaciated men had, indeed, escaped when several SS guards had abandoned their posts, presumably because they knew the Americans were approaching. The major directed him to take four GIs and one of the escapees to investigate while the tank convoy continued down the highway.

About a mile down a side road, the lightly armed group approached several buildings with white sheets hanging from the windows. Just a day or so before they’d gone through Paderborn, and the townspeople had used the same device to signal surrender. These buildings were behind a double barbed-wire fence, and there were more emaciated prisoners holding on to the wires and watching them approach. As they moved in closer, he suddenly heard a woman scream out, “They’re going to shoot at you,” and he hit the dirt. He remembers the shooting being erratic, nothing even coming close to him. When they moved forward, he and his men discovered that the shots were coming from what appeared to be the mouth of a tunnel. Once the gunfire stopped, the GIs moved in and were surrounded by about two hundred emaciated people, begging for food. “Some were saying, ‘Thank you, Americans,’ but they were more concerned about getting some food. They weren’t clapping hands or doing anything like that. It was a rather somber-type thing.”

His reaction was similarly restrained, and he’s very deliberate as he describes his emotions at the time. “I shouldn’t say that we were—you’re not hardened, but you get the feeling that you’re kind of a changed person. You’re dealing with realism, and I don’t think there’s a lot of emotion, at least there wasn’t in my case. It was business.”

Marcinek’s little squad was directed by the prisoners to the commandant’s office, but the man he found there was not a hard-core SS veteran. “This commandant appeared to be about thirty years of age, with reasonable command of English. He apologized for the unauthorized gunfire and surrendered his sidearm, a P38 pistol. In response to the clamoring for food, the commandant relayed our promise to have medics and food [provided] by our military support personnel. The commandant explained that his former guards were members of the elite SS.” He had been in a Catholic seminary, where he had been studying to become a priest when he was drafted into the army.

Marcinek had no way of knowing at the time, but the tunnel he’d discovered was part of the complex at Dora where the Germans manufactured the rockets he’d seen flying overhead earlier in the war.

By the time he got to Nordhausen, Sergeant Aurio J. Pierro had already earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart commanding a Sherman tank platoon in the 3rd Armored Division’s Task Force Lovelady and had been recommended for a direct commission. Now retired from the practice of law, Pierro has lived in the same house in Lexington, Massachusetts, for all of his ninety-one years.

Recalling the discovery of what was most likely the camp at Dora, three miles from the field of death they would soon discover at Nordhausen, he says, “I was moving the platoon in an area there, and I came to a fence. I didn’t know what it was. There was a gate, and there was a barracks on the other side of the fence. And then we waited, and all of a sudden the prisoners came out of the barracks, opened the gates, and they realized who we were—they started jumping for joy, but my crew stayed in their tank. They didn’t know what was happening, what could happen.

“One individual there, he was hoppin’ around on one foot, just as happy as the others. In a little time my guys were wandering around on foot there, and they came back and said, ‘You gotta look in that building over there.’ So it was a brick building. I went in, and there was, like, an operating table with dead prisoners, emaciated bodies there, tied hand and foot, on the floor, on the table. Why tied hand and foot? No clothes on, naked bodies.”

Pierro’s men weren’t able to do any extensive exploring. “We had to stay with the tanks. If you were out of the tank, all you had was your sidearm, and you never knew what was going to happen. A crew outside the tank is defenseless, really.”

At age ninety-one, he’s able to deflect the remembered horror by recalling the bigger picture. “Well, you know, it’s not like with something new, but at the time we’d seen a lot of dead people and a lot of hurt people. We had a mission to move forward, long as we were able. We took casualties, and those that were casualties stayed behind and the rest of the crews moved forward. We had casualties, we got replacements, and we went forward.”

Private John Olson from Duluth, Minnesota, was one of the youngest men in the 415th Infantry Regiment. He’d been drafted the previous October and had joined the 104th Division near Aachen after riding in 40 and 8 railcars from Le Havre to Verviers, Belgium, and then by truck into Germany. For more than sixty years he’s held on to one indelible memory of Nordhausen. “I don’t know why we were riding on a jeep trailer, but we were. It was a dark kind of rainy day. We were in a long column of trucks, tanks, and jeeps—I think we were near the beginning of the line. I was sitting on the trailer facing to the left, and as we went along the street, I looked down this side street and I saw this ten-foot-high wire fence and a big gate. The gate was open, and I saw these two prisoners in their striped suits standing by the gate, and they had these beautiful smiles on their faces because they knew now they were being set free. We never went into the camp ourselves. But I just saw these two there, and I hope I never forget what they looked like. They just beamed, although they were just human skeletons, so thin. I had no idea what kind of camp it was; I’d heard about concentration camps, but I really didn’t know much about them. I would’ve loved to have been able to go over and talk to them, but I couldn’t do that.”

Olson returned to Minnesota, where he became a Baptist minister, a career choice he made, in part, as a result of his experiences during the war. “I think I realized a little better how fortunate I, and we, are to be in America. As I look back, I count it a privilege to have served in the Army and Europe and to have been a part of that. And to think that I was a part of releasing those guys from that prison, that makes me feel good about it. I don’t boast about it. I’m just glad I was a part of it. I count all of it by the grace of God that he took me through it, protected me. It was all a positive experience, even though it didn’t seem so at the time.”

Corporal Robert Ray, who’d been a photographer for the
Nashville Banner
before he enlisted after Pearl Harbor, was riding with his squad from the 36th Armored Infantry Battalion aboard a 3rd Armored Division tank when they arrived outside the walled prison. “We didn’t know anything about this Holocaust, didn’t have no idea, but we saw flatcars on the side track there that was loaded with bodies, some of them you could see they’d move a foot or a leg once in a while, have a little life in them. The people lived around there, they claimed they didn’t know anything about it, but that was a bunch of nonsense, because they could smell it as far as that’s concerned.

“We reached this prisoner-of-war camp, and one of the tanks just busted a big hole in the wall—brick, concrete wall, or something. And all them poor devils come screaming out of there, some of them so dadgummed thin from malnutrition, we gave them all the rations we had. They’d eat cigarettes just like they’re candy.”

Morris Sunshine was a twenty-year-old from Brooklyn who ended up in a combat engineer battalion because, of all things, he played drums and piano and the unit’s band was looking for musicians. He played at Newport News, he played at Camp Gordon, Georgia, he played in Nashville and the Mojave Desert. He wasn’t playing on the
Susan B. Anthony
on the way to Omaha Beach at H-Hour when the ship hit a mine. His unit lost all its equipment as the captain balanced the ship by having the troops on board move from side to side, and eventually Sunshine ended up on an English vessel with “no helmet, no guns, no nothing,” and they watched the
Anthony
sink. He thought they’d take him back to England, but instead he and a few of his guys were dumped on Utah Beach. It took almost three weeks before his unit was put back together again and took off on the great march across Europe, where they eventually built the first bridge across the Rhine.