The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (17 page)

Don Timmer recalls that after nearly two hours in the camp, Eisenhower’s staff tried to get the general to leave. He remembers one of them saying, “Ike, we’ve got a war to fight,” and Eisenhower responding, “Don’t bother me. I’ve got to
get
this.”

That’s what impressed Timmer the most—Eisenhower’s reluctance to leave. “It was almost prophetic that he knew this would be denied.”

Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower (third from left), 12th Army Group Commander General Omar Bradley (fourth from left), and Lieutenant General George S. Patton (right) observe the charred remains of prisoners whose bodies were burned on “the griddle” at Ohrdruf
.

Before leaving Ohrdruf, Eisenhower issued an uncharacteristically emotional order. He said, “I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place. We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” It would become evident over the course of the final month of the war that detours to Ohrdruf would not be needed; tragically, American soldiers would have ample opportunity to see Ohrdruf-like vistas of much greater scale as they moved east, trapping the fleeing German army between U.S. and Soviet forces.

Timmer did one more translating job at Ohrdruf after the Eisenhower visit. The bodies of the burgomaster of Ohrdruf and his wife were discovered in their home a day after they’d been brought with other townspeople to see the camp. They had hanged themselves. Timmer was asked to translate their suicide note. He says it read, “We didn’t know! But
we
knew.”

After the visit, Eisenhower sent a cable to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, General George C. Marshall. It said, in part:

The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. [Patton went behind the shed and vomited.] I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

Ohrdruf had a lasting impact on Patton as well. He recorded precise details about the camp in his diary, describing it as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen.” He went on:

In a shed … was a pile of about forty completely naked human bodies in the latest stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench.

When the shed was full—I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the first of January.

When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of sixty-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.

At 5:47
P.M.
Eastern War Time on April 12, radio networks in the United States flashed the bulletin that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died earlier that afternoon at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. It was nearly 11
P.M.
in Germany when the word reached Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, who had returned to their headquarters from Ohrdruf.

In Berlin, the official German news agency, Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, received the Reuters bulletin: “Roosevelt died today at midday.” The historian John Toland wrote in
The Last 100 Days
that when word reached Reichminister Joseph Goebbels, he said, “Now, bring out our best champagne and let’s have a telephone talk with the Führer!” Toland continues:

Some ten people hung over him as he telephoned Hitler. “My Führer,” he said feverishly, “I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday, April the thirteenth!” It was just past midnight. “Fate has laid low your greatest enemy. God has not abandoned us. Twice he has saved you from savage assassins. Death, which the enemy aimed at you in 1939 and 1944, has now struck down our most dangerous enemy. It is a miracle!

American soldiers would learn of the president’s death in
Stars and Stripes
and by word of mouth on the thirteenth. While most of them knew little about their new commander in chief, Harry S Truman, they were reasonably certain that FDR’s death would not affect their own lives in the waning days of the war. Toland reports that the three generals were not so sure, “wondering what effect Roosevelt’s death would have on the future peace” and agreeing that “It was a tragedy that America had to change leaders at such a critical point in history.”

The postscript to the Ohrdruf story is told by two men from the 89th Infantry Division. The first is Ray Little, now of Hobbs, New Mexico. He was part of M Company, 355th Infantry Regiment, which had been attached to the 4th Armored Division during this period.

Days after Ohrdruf was discovered, PFC Little and another soldier were given orders to patrol the camp and keep down any disturbances by the inmates. Apparently, U.S. forces were rounding up displaced persons who had escaped from the Nazis and bringing them into Ohrdruf in order to maintain order as well as centralize them so they could be fed and seen by doctors. Little recalls that “Some of them had gotten out and they’d gotten some schnapps, gotten some rifles, and were gonna go out and kill some of the Germans. That’s when they sent us in there. To keep ‘em calmed down. Just our presence was about all it amounted to, because we didn’t actually do anything.

“I remember one intersection, they had built a bonfire, and they were dancing, these Russians. You know how you’ve seen how they dance squatted down? They were having a ball. They were really enjoying their freedom. I guess they’d been fed, too, but obviously they weren’t lookin’ for food.”

Little and the other soldier had been told to use one of the camp’s administration buildings as their billet, and, as young soldiers do, they took it upon themselves to look around. Apparently, they found at least part of what the 4th Armored had been sent to Ohrdruf to find: the secret communications bunker. “Underneath the room we were in there was an underground, and it was full of electronics. I’ve never known for sure what that was all about, but it looked like it could be a telephone exchange or something. There were several rooms. There was just a mass—walls of wiring and switches and stuff. It was obviously complicated electronics.”

The other man from the 89th tells what amounts to a post-postscript to the Ohrdruf liberation. Charles T. Payne was another GI who had been part of the ASTP program, sent to college by the Army until the Army decided it was more important for him to be in the infantry than to get an engineering degree. Payne, of Augusta, Kansas, shipped overseas as a member of K Company of the 355th in the bitterest winter in decades. They landed at Le Havre, going ashore in a landing craft standing in six inches of icy cold water. Then they were taken by truck in the middle of the night and dumped in a snow-covered field with a pile of tents to erect. “That night, we essentially created Camp Lucky Strike. It was one of the most painful episodes of my life. It was the night when grown men cried.”

Charles T. Payne’s unit drew double duty at Ohrdruf
.

Payne was lucky; he survived frostbite that turned his toes black but, unlike many of his buddies’, didn’t require amputation. Once their equipment finally caught up with them, he was assigned to a mortar squad, and they were sent to the area where France, Germany, and Luxembourg intersect. Still they didn’t face combat—just the aftermath, the bodies, both German and American. One, in particular, had an impact: a GI who’d been shot and then had fallen into the road, his head crushed by a tracked vehicle.

Not long thereafter, PFC Payne was transferred to regimental headquarters company, assigned to accompany a telephone wire-laying crew as their guard. It was a far cry from the infantry, almost enjoyable at times as they wandered the countryside in a jeep.

He got the sense that the tide had turned and war’s end was approaching when they crossed the Rhine in a U.S. Navy landing craft, a sobering experience not because they were under fire but because they could see the wounded, burned, and maimed Americans making the trip in the other direction.

In early April their unit approached Erfurt and then Gotha, and they watched the numbers on the road signs indicating kilometers to Berlin getting smaller. Like other GIs, he was disappointed when word came down that they wouldn’t be taking Hitler’s capital. Instead, he was ordered to Ohrdruf. Close to the camp, he began encountering hundreds of people who had been inmates, out loose, wandering the roads and towns.

When the just-turned-twenty-year-old got into the concentration camp itself, nothing had been touched. The same ellipse of bodies lay at the entrance. The small shed with the stack of bodies covered with lime that had sickened Patton remained untouched, an exhibit ordered by Eisenhower. The body of the SS guard who’d tried to escape by posing as an inmate lay almost at the entry gate, his head beaten in by vengeful former inmates. Speaking from his home in Chicago, Payne recalls not being overwhelmed by the horrors of Ohrdruf. “It was in the middle of the war. I guess I had become able to see all kinds of horrible things and keep going. To me, was this more horrible—except in numbers—than a dead soldier whose head had been run over by a tank? I guess I handled it; I mean, I kept going.”

When his outfit moved on to the territory between Ohrdruf and the Elbe River, Payne thought he’d seen the last of Ohrdruf. But when that region was turned over to the Russians at the end of the war, he was ordered back to pull guard duty for what was being converted to a displaced persons camp. It was there that he had his first opportunity to speak—sort of—with one of the victims of what would come to be known as the Holocaust.

He was on guard duty, and a man who he believes was a Polish Jew came to him and wanted to talk. “We did not have a common language; we both knew a little bit of pidgin German, but that was it. So we just stood there and talked. And what he wanted to tell me, if I understood it, was that the Germans had killed a million Jews and nobody knew about it. And he thought it was important to get the word out. He was talking to anybody he could talk to, and I think that was what he was saying.”