The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (19 page)

Robert Duoos, a Minnesota boy who was drafted in 1942 and spent some time with the 20th Armored Division before being assigned to the 80th Infantry Division’s reconnaissance troop, arrived at Buchenwald on April 17, five days behind his unit. His recon jeep had broken down, and he was playing catch-up. He spent a short time in Buchenwald and managed to see some of the horrors described in the Army report. “In the hospital, I saw lampshades that were made from human skin, with tattoos, and they had every part of the human body displayed in alcohol jars. And one of the things that was really unusual was that they had cut an inmate’s body in two, from the head to the seat, cut him lengthwise, and he was mounted on a glass inside a tank of alcohol. So you’re looking at the cross section of the inside of a human being.”

Robert Duoos at home in Cambridge, Minnesota
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8. The “Hospital”. A building were [
sic
] moribund persons were sent to die. N
o
medicines being available, hence no therapy was possible. Typhus and tuberculosis were rampant in the camp. About half the wards in the “Hospital” were about 15’ deep with one window at the outside end, by 5½’ wide. From 6 to 9 “patients” occupied such a ward, lying crosswise on the floor, shoulder to shoulder. Room too narrow for most of them to extend their legs. Death rate in the “Hospital” 5 per cent to 10 per cent a day.

9. Medical experiment building. Block 41 was used for medical experiments and vivisections, with prisoners as “guinea pigs.” Medical scientists came from Berlin periodically to reinforce the experimental staff. In particular, new toxins and anti-toxins were tried out on prisoners. Few prisoners who entered this experimental building ever emerged alive.

Shortly after the arrival of the 120th Evac at Buchenwald, Milton Silva and several of his buddies toured the camp. Fairly quickly, they arrived at the crematory building. “Just outside the crematory there were bodies stacked up like cordwood. And I remember peeking in and seeing the incinerator doors open with remains of bodies that had started to be incinerated.” But considering what he would discover next, that was a relatively modest horror.

Silva saw a staircase that led to a lower level, beneath the incinerators. “There were hooks on the wall, a meatpacking plant, where they go ahead and hook up the carcasses on the hooks and moved them along. And you could see on the walls where they would be scratching and kicking, trying to prevent themselves from being strangled by the wires that were put around their neck. I was upset that they hadn’t buried these bodies. But the word came down to leave everything this way; they wanted to record this to make sure no one would ever forget that it actually happened, and they wanted to bring the brass in to see it. And the commanding general, I remember, had everybody in the town walk through.

Robert Duoos of the 80th Infantry Division’s recon unit came around the corner of the crematorium building at Buchenwald and was confronted with a stack of corpses the Nazis hadn’t had time to burn
.

“That was weird. People were looking at it like they’d never seen it before, and probably they never had. I think they knew what was going on, but they just didn’t want to get involved. And I can recall Margaret Bourke-White, she was there from
Life
magazine, and there’s a picture of her taking a picture of these people from the town, walking around, and I remember standing behind her, so that when I see that picture, I can place myself in the area when she was doing this.”

The facility described by Milt Silva was given considerable attention in the Army press release two weeks hence:

10. The Body Disposal plant: The design of this installation was a striking example of “German industrial efficiency.” It had a maximum disposal capacity of about 400 bodies per 10-hour day. All the bodies were reduced to boneash, thus destroying all “evidence”. All gold or gold-filled teeth were extracted from bodies before incineration. This plant was entirely enclosed within a high board fence. N
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one except the small operating force of SS personnel was allowed even to look inside this fence, and no prisoner who passed within it (as a member of a fatigue party or any other reason) ever came out alive. Inside this fence was: (A) a large front yard on the left; (B) a small back yard on the right; (C) the incinerator building centrally located between the two yards. This building was of substantial brick construction with cement floors, one story, with a full-size 12-inch [
sic
—should be 12-foot] high basement beneath. The main floor contained an Administration office at the front end, a locker and washroom for SS personnel at the far end, and the incinerator room in the center. The latter contained, in line, two batteries of three fire-brick incinerators, each incinerator having a capacity of three bodies or a total charge of 18 bodies. Fifteen to twenty minutes were required for the incineration of a charge. The floor of each incinerator consisted of a coarse grate through which the days’ accumulation of boneash was extracted at the end of operation. The fire came from a furnace room occupying the rear two-thirds of the basement. The flames being deflected downwards onto the bodies by baffleplates in the roofs of the furnace. The front end of the basement was occupied by the strangulation room.

The method of collecting bodies was as follows: Roll call was held every evening, outdoors outside the dormitory buildings. Internees were required to strip, and bring to roll call, the naked bodies of all comrades who had died during the previous 24 hours. After roll call a motor truck drove around the camp, picked up the bodies, and was driven into the frontyard of the incinerator plant to await the next day’s operation. But this was not the only source of bodies. Emaciated prisoners who “had been around long enough” or who committed infractions of discipline, or who “knew too much,” or who refused to be broken in mind, were arbitrarily condemned to death. For instance in the “Little Camp” where prisoners slept 16 on a shelf, an infraction of discipline (and particularly an attempt to escape) not infrequently resulted in all 16 being condemned. Such persons were immediately marched on foot to a small door into the fence of the backyard, at a point immediately adjacent to the right hand front corner of the incinerator building. This door opened inwards until it hit a doorstop which held it in a position parallel to the building wall—thus creating a corridor about four feet wide and three feet deep. At the far end was an opening about four feet by four feet flush with the ground, the head of a concrete shaft about 13 feet deep, the bottom floor of which was a continuation of the concrete floor of the room at the front of the basement. The condemned prisoners, on being hurried and pushed through the door in the fence, inevitably fell into this shaft and crashed 13 feet down to the cement cellar floor. This room on the floor at one end of which they now found themselves, was the strangling room. As they hit the floor they were garroted with a short double-end noose by big SS guards, and hung on hooks along the side wall about 6½ feet from the floor, the row of hooks being 45 in number. When a consignment had been all hung up, any who were still struggling were stunned with a wooden mallet (the mallet and a noose were being held by Commandant L’Hopital). The bodies were left on the hooks until called for by the incinerator crew. An electric elevator, with an estimated capacity of 18 bodies, ran up to the incinerator room which was directly above the strangling room. The day’s quota of approximately 200 bodies was made up of from 120 to 140 prisoners who had died (mostly in the “Hospital,” the “Medical Experiment Building” or the “Little Camp”), and of from 60 to 80 supplied by the strangling room.

For a period of about 10 days in March the coal supply for the incinerator ran out. Awaiting the arrival of a new supply, bodies to the number of about 1,800 were allowed to collect in the front yard, stacked up like cord-wood. To the annoyance of the SS this over-crowded yard with undisposed “evidence,” and a spell of warm weather created a sanitary problem. Moreover, burial was a good deal more troublesome than incineration, and was out of the customary routine. But something had to be done, so a truck detachment and a fatigue detail of internees was organized. The bodies were loaded in the trucks and hauled out of camp. The fatigue detail dug one huge burial pit, threw the bodies into it filling it except for one end, and covered the bodies. Then the SS shot all the members of the fatigue detail, threw their bodies into the vacant end and covered them up.

Shortly afterwards a new supply of coal having been received, the process of incineration was resumed. This process was so abruptly interrupted by the arrival of U.S. armor in the area that the SS had no time to “tidy up,” so that the cycle of operation could be plainly examined and understood. The previous day’s quota of upwards of 120 corpses of prisoners who had died in the camp was parked in a truck in the front yard. The incinerator furnace grates had not yet been cleared of unconsumed hipbone joints and parts of skulls. In addition, the bodies of about 40 inmates who had died since U.S. arrival, in spite of prompt medical and ration attention, were stacked up like cord-wood against the wall of the yard. American surgeons stated that the adult corpses weighed only 60 to 80 pounds, having in practically all cases lost 50 per cent to 60 per cent of their normal weight, and also having shrunken in height.

The initial job of the 120th Evacuation Hospital was to try to keep surviving inmates alive, which wasn’t exactly its specialty. Nearly all of its doctors were surgeons skilled at caring for battlefield casualties, not specialists in internal medicine or infectious diseases. Inmates were dying at the rate of several hundred a day, and Warren Priest remembers that “it was a fairly common experience to see a man walking along feebly and then suddenly collapse and fall, and he was gone. Part of my function was to carry a stethoscope and as bodies were brought into a barracks, lined up on the floor, it was my task to determine if there were heartbeats. If there was a heartbeat, we sent them on to an aid station, and if there was no heartbeat, we had them assigned to a morgue.”

How do you get through a situation like that, hour after hour, day after day? “You do what you have to do. When you’re faced with a situation where you can save people, you save them. And if you find a sign of life, then that is, in a sense, a measure of hope. And you try always to bring that hope back as fully, as vibrantly as possible.”

Which doesn’t speak to those moments of absolute, total heartbreak that the Americans assigned to Buchenwald experienced. The children’s barrack was one of the most difficult places to work, because conditions for inmates were perhaps the worst of all there. Many children were actually born in Buchenwald to women who were forced to work in the camp brothel. The children were removed from the camp on the first day the Americans arrived, and the personnel of the 120th had very little to do with them. “Very little,” says Priest. But not little enough. “I was assigned the task of going through the [children’s barracks] to ascertain that there were no more, of which I did. It was one of those moments that I can describe in some detail and force because it was so horrifying to walk where those kids, some four hundred to five hundred, were kept. I can’t say ‘housed,’ because housing suggests a sense of decency and civilization.