The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (13 page)

PFC Rip Rice’s mission was to take him past Nordhausen, where his job was to find a water source and set up a purification unit to supply the American forces moving through the area. Now a PhD living in Maryland and lecturing worldwide on the subject of ozone, Rice was one week shy of his twenty-first birthday when he stopped at Nordhausen with the 104th Infantry’s engineer battalion. Until that day, he’d had a rather positive outlook on the war and his fate, often saying that he had the safest job a guy could have in a combat zone. “I was always in back of the front—except in the unusual event of maybe a counterattack—and I was not at the rear echelon. I was in between them, so that I was too far back from the front to get any small-arms or mortar fire, and I was too close up to get any artillery [since] that would go over our heads and get to the rear.”

He credits the good fortune of that assignment to the unlikely combination of “God and chemistry.” He was pulled from one of the line companies in the engineering battalion when the captain asked, “Who knows the definition of the term pH?” When no one else responded, Rice reluctantly raised his hand and said, “Sir, pH is the potential of the hydrogen ion.” At that moment, he says, “college paid off. But I was lucky. Something told me to volunteer. I didn’t know why. Against my principles, I volunteered. Thank God I did; that’s where he gets into the act and gets some credit for this, because I didn’t do it on my own.”

Next thing he knew, the captain said, “Rice, fall out. Company dismissed. Rice, you’re transferred to headquarters; they need a chemist at the water point.” From that time on, his job was to leapfrog with one of the four division water points to keep the units supplied with fresh water, sourcing it from local streams or rivers. From the perspective of sixty-four years later, he looks back on what they did in World War II and says, “My God, how could we have drunk that swill? But that’s another story.”

On April 12, 1945, Rice recalls being on his unit’s ten-ton truck, trailer in tow, heading east from Kassel in a valley roughly ten miles from Nordhausen, when they began smelling a strange odor that reminded him of the Fort Worth stockyards. “They didn’t care much about air pollution at the time, and when they did the slaughtering, they’d have things left over that they’d burn. From the animals. And that’s what it smelled like: burning animals. Only it wasn’t exactly that; there was something more to it. And that odor kept getting stronger and stronger, and we didn’t know what the heck it was.”

As they approached an intersection with a rural road, an MP stopped them. “Guys, the captain wants you to make a detour here. Turn left and go into town, there’s something you gotta see.” They drove a couple of miles to the outskirts of Nordhausen, and then “We turned into this yard where all these bodies are—and the stench was just—I mean, we got there and every one of us, we just tossed our cookies, we couldn’t stand it.”

Rice says there were hundreds of bodies—“they were stacked five and six high, in big mounds. And there were more inside buildings—it could have been two, it could have been three. I was so upset by this horror that I was looking at. We didn’t know that this was the day or the day after the camp was liberated. We didn’t know anything about making missiles in the mountains there. We thought this was a concentration camp, but we didn’t know what to call it. Well, it turns out it wasn’t that—it was a slave-labor camp. They just worked these folks to death and didn’t feed ‘em right, and oh, jeesh, it was just total horror. I got sick as a dog. Everybody else did.”

Rice, it turned out, was dealing with more than just the horrific sights and smells. He was dealing with his heritage. “I stood there, see—half of me is Jewish. I had no idea what these bodies were. You couldn’t tell anything about their religion. The other half of me is German. And I just sat there, stood there, throwing up my guts and saying ‘I never want to see another German as long as I live.’ The saving grace was when the commanding officer, whoever he was, had sent a detail into town to get the German civilians to come through this area to see what had happened. And as they came in, every one of them threw up his cookies. That’s the only thing that saved the German people as far as I was concerned at that time. They were human beings, too. But it didn’t bring these people back to life.”

Nowadays, when he hears some kid say, “Hey, it never happened, it was just a figment of everybody’s imagination,” it pushes the wrong button, and he responds. “I’m just—‘Bullshit, buster. I wish I could have rubbed your nose in that smell, you’d never forget it.’ And anybody who says it didn’t is just doomed to repeat history. I was just an observer that came by after the liberation of Nordhausen. But I can sure tell you what a revolting experience that was. Little boys became men all of a sudden.”

On the second day, unit commanders sent men into the town of Nordhausen to round up civilians to help with the burial detail. Private Sigmund Liberman, a twenty-two-year-old Texan who’d been raised as a conservative Jew and had been aware of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews before he enlisted, drew the assignment because he could communicate in Yiddish with the Germans. In the process, the civilians told him they hadn’t even known there was a camp nearby. He helped herd them onto the division’s trucks after ordering them to bring shovels. Asked if they argued or tried to fight, Liberman said, “No, no, they were worried we were going to kill them. I was wanting to do something, but I never did.”

Combat Engineer Morris Sunshine, also Jewish, had to confront the good citizens of Nordhausen, who protested. “Some people, they didn’t want to do it, and [they asked], ‘What is this? We don’t know anything about it.’ The usual thing. How anybody couldn’t know anything about it, the stench was so terrible, it’s amazing to me that they were able to live with this smell.” He supposes that the citizens “were probably afraid of the [German] leadership—they were still afraid of the leadership at that time, too.” But he doesn’t excuse them. “The anger—my hate for the German language and the German people is terrible. It’s something that I’ve never forgiven them for.”

The assignment of actually burying those bodies fell, in part, to the men of the 238th Combat Engineer Battalion, including Lieutenant Ernest James. He, too, was not impressed by the civilians’ “we know nothing” defense. He says they found out later that many of the same civilians from Nordhausen had been working down in the tunnels at nearby Dora. “For Christ’s sake, you had to know what was happening,” he said. “Down in the tunnels, if an inmate got into trouble, they’d hang ‘em on hooks for everybody to see.”

James says that an area for mass graves was selected near the town, on the opposite side from the tunnels, and the unit came in with its bulldozers. The trenches were four or five feet deep and as wide as a dozer blade. He doesn’t recall how long they were, but they were long enough to accommodate almost 3,000 bodies. The German civilians were made to get into the trenches and clean out the loose dirt, so that the final resting place would be “neatly prepared.” James says the commander of the 104th ordered all able-bodied German men to work, no gloves, no masks. “He made them handle these dead bodies with their bare hands. Mean as hell.”

But the Americans weren’t shedding any tears for the Germans. One artillery battalion commander said his men had to be restrained from physically attacking the civilians. And as for the townspeople, James says, “They’d fabricate things to carry them out—a door, a piece of carpet, or they’d take two poles and put them through the arms of the clothes to make litters. And then four men would carry one body—they wouldn’t put two bodies on or anything like that. They laid them out neatly, and God, I’ve got pictures of one, a little baby, apparently with its mother.”

When all of the bodies had been laid in the trench, a memorial service was held with division chaplains leading the prayers.

And within a day or two, the 104th Infantry Division moved on, leaving the recovering survivors in the care of behind-the-lines medical units.

CHAPTER 6

MERE DEATH WAS NOT BAD ENOUGH FOR THE NAZIS

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER
On a Walk from Ettersburg to Buchenwald
One Mile and 200 Years Long
By Warren E. Priest

(Priest was an orthopedic surgical technician with the 120th Evacuation Hospital at Buchenwald. Forty-five years after the liberation, he wrote this poem describing his initial approach to the camp and his first contact with survivors.)

Walking up the pathway, through the forest of beech trees
,
Leaves April green; the smooth, gray bark
Soft, clean and oh, so manicured
,
How could I know what those trees concealed
At the brow of the hill, amidst the beech trees—the
buchenwald,
In that land where Goethe and Schiller wandered in the summer months?
But, suddenly, unexpectedly, who are these strange men, dressed in
Their striped nightclothes
Moving to the side of the pathway as I approach?
I hold my GI issue carbine ready for any possibility
I approach them; they stop, a halting tentative progress
Emaciated, fleshless faces, bearded, unclean;
They stretch out their bony fingers to me like street beggars
Yet they seem to want nothing from me. I am bewildered
.
There is no hostility here!
They fall to their knees; their hands now clasped together
as if in prayer, Durer-like
.
They reach out skeletal arms tentatively as I approach, as
if I am the Christ, wearing the clothes of immortality
I think, what have I done to, for these four men, a mere 21-year-old soldier
From Massachusetts, in the service of his country?
Hesitantly, wordlessly, I pass them by, embarrassed because I
must be the good soldier; I must not fraternize
.
But I cannot ignore their glistening, dark eyes
,
Their hands still extended, one so feebly clutching at my calf
but his weak hands lose their grip, more like a caress
.
I recalled pictures of saints at the moment of beatification having such
expressions on their faces!
I cannot understand what is happening, for no words have been spoken;
Dutifully, I move on to the fence just beyond
An electrified fence, a double fence, one inside another, with barbed
wire barriers at the top of each, an impenetrable barrier to me, so
I walk along the periphery
,
I arrive at the opening to the fence, a towering gateway
,
At the top of the gate is an iron inscription:
“Jedem das Seine”
I know the meaning:
You get what you deserve
.
And I enter the compound through the gate;
How could I know that my journey has just begun?

Warren E. Priest served with the 120th Evacuation Hospital at Buchenwald and never forgot what he saw there. After the war, he became a teacher in Newton, Massachusetts, and started a camp for inner-city children as well as the Center for Affective Learning in New Hampshire
.