The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (21 page)

14 April—Evidence of mass Nazi atrocities is found at Gardelegen
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—from U.S. Army Center of Military History,
U.S. Army in World War II: Special Studies Chronology: 1941–1945

A
s part of the Ninth Army’s rush to the Elbe River, units of the 102nd Infantry Division moved eastward on the right flank of the 84th Division, arriving in the town of Gardelegen, just thirty miles from the Elbe, on the evening of April 14. The ancient, moat-protected town was the site of an important airfield and a German air force replacement center, and it had been heavily defended.

This is the barn on the outskirts of Gardelegen where the local gauleiter organized townsfolk, members of the Hitler Youth, and local Luftwaffe cadets to assist a handful of SS in burning to death more than a thousand Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp inmates. They had been marched away from the approaching American troops after the trains they were packed into could go no farther. The mass murder occurred with American forces little more than a days march away
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Some time before the fighting elements of the division arrived, several crews from the 102nd Signal Company laying communication wire had been captured, along with a liaison officer between the 102nd Division headquarters and the 701st Tank Battalion, Lieutenant Emerson Hunt. He pulled off a ruse and had the German commander convinced, according to the division’s history, “that American tanks within the half-hour would blast Gardelegen from the face of Germany.” Not knowing exactly where his battalion was, Hunt convinced the Luftwaffe colonel to surrender the garrison to the nearest American commander.

Unfortunately, the surrender came too late. On the morning of April 15, soldiers of the 102nd discovered a still-smoking grain barn on the Isenschnibbe estate a few miles outside Gardelegen. The floor had been covered with a foot-deep layer of gasoline-soaked straw; then 1,016 concentration camp prisoners on a death march had been forced inside and deliberately burned to death.

Minnesotan Ed Motzko was one of the soldiers from the 102nd Infantry Division charged with forcing the resentful citizens of Gardelegen to dig graves and bury the bodies of those who’d been murdered in the barn
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Ralph J. Baringer, of Defiance, Ohio, was about to turn twenty when the 102nd Infantry Division arrived at the still-smoldering barn. And that is all he remembers. “I’ve been trying to forget it all my life,” he said by phone from his Ohio home.

Elton Oltjenbruns, now of Holyoke, Colorado, was a medic with the 2nd Battalion, 405th Infantry Regiment. He remembers seeing the bodies, but mostly he remembers “the smell, the burning flesh.” By that time in the war, he says, “I’d had all the death that I could handle.”

Edmund Motzko of the 548th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion, attached to the 102nd, hasn’t tried to forget it. He’s donated the pictures he took to museums in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Gardelegen itself. The barn was torched on Friday, the thirteenth, and the Minnesota native arrived either the following day or the day after. His commanding officer told the troops, “What you’re going to see—you won’t believe this could ever have happened.” His CO was right.

The local German officials had enlisted civilians to help dig two trenches into which bodies that hadn’t been completely incinerated were to be buried. The task was supposed to have been completed before the advancing Americans arrived. It wasn’t. Motzko says, “Two piles of bodies were still smoldering when I got there, on the left side of the building by two huge doors. The people had piled up by the door, trying to get out. That was bad enough, of course, but there was all these dead bodies alongside the building that did get out, and they shot them. Then I went around to the back side of the building, and that’s where they had dug a long trench for burial. I didn’t know, but they had already five hundred buried under where I was taking pictures.”

There are several accounts of what led up to the Gardelegen massacre. Most agree that approximately 2,000 prisoners, the majority of whom wore a red badge identifying them as political prisoners rather than as Jews, had been put on two trains from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp. The trains, like many of the death marches leaving concentration camps at this stage of the war, were to keep the prisoners from falling into the hands of the advancing Allies.

One of the trains arrived at the town of Mieste, seventeen miles from Gardelegen, on April 9. A second train arrived at Letzlingen, just seven miles away. They were unable to go farther because Allied aircraft had bombed the tracks. According to several accounts, the Nazi Party leader of the district of Gardelegen was thirty-four-year-old Gerhard Thiele. He had told his staff and other officials that he’d been ordered by Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan that any prisoners who were caught looting or tried to escape should be immediately shot.

Eventually, the U.S. Army investigators would report that Thiele had stressed to the Volkssturm and the citizens of Gardelegen that he would do everything possible to prevent escaped prisoners from looting homes and raping women and children, as was rumored to have happened in the village of Kakerbeck, some twelve miles to the north. This appeared to be their justification for the death march from the trains to the barn on the outskirts of Gardelegen, and for the massacre. The fact that within twenty-four to thirty-six hours, all the prisoners could have been made the responsibility of the onrushing Americans, and that they demonstrably could have been confined in the huge grain storage barn without torching it, seemed not to fit into Thiele or Jordan’s equation.

One report says that roughly eight hundred prisoners on that death march either died or were killed before the group arrived at its final destination. Some prisoners watched as German civilians carted cans of petrol into the barn and stockpiled ammunition, including grenades and Panzerfausts, outside the stone building. When the remaining prisoners arrived, the sick and the lame were taken from wagons and carried inside. Then the others were herded inside, where they found the cement floor covered in gasoline-soaked straw.

The doors were shut, and those on the sides were held in place with stones. A pamphlet produced by the 102nd Infantry Division says, “The barn was then deliberately set on fire by German SS and Luftwaffe soldiers and boys from the Hitler Jugend [Youth], according to the survivors. Prisoners who tried to escape from the fire were machine-gunned to death by the Germans guarding the barn, including teen-aged boys in the Hitler Jugend.”

There are numerous photos showing prisoners who died as they tried to claw their way underneath the walls and doors of the barn. Captain John H. Middlebrooks, who had been a company commander in the 1st Battalion, 405th Infantry Regiment, was among the first American soldiers at the scene. “When we opened the barn door, it was a horrible sight. Bodies were ten feet high at the door where they died trying to get out. Our division commander made all the town people go to see this sight. Made them take the bodies out of the barn and later bury them.”

What makes this a horror among horrors is that to all of the Germans involved in the Gardelegen massacre, it was clear that the Reich had lost the war. There was no way the German army could hold back the advancing Americans. Local officials knew that the town would soon be occupied by Americans. The Luftwaffe cadets knew that American aircraft ruled the skies; their mission was over. The members of the Volkssturm, who had been recruited—or conscripted—no more than six months earlier, knew that there was no future in fighting for the Fatherland. Perhaps only the Hitler Youth—whose frenzied gunfire drove the prisoners back into the fire—still believed that victory was possible.

Six to ten of the prisoners managed to survive the ordeal, and Ed Motzko was one of the GIs assigned to protect them while they were recuperating in local homes, where the citizens were forced to feed and care for them. Motzko was able to converse with several of them, including a Hungarian Jew named Bondi Geza.

“He was my interpreter for the group, and I had quite a time talking with these guys. Bondi Geza was with another fellow, and they managed to get out of the barn. I didn’t fully understand how he got out of the fire or why he didn’t burn, him and this other fellow, but that’s when they started crawling away from the barn. [Bondi] was ahead of him a ways, and an SS trooper—or not SS but this air cadet—come along with a dog and sniffed out the guy behind him, and he was shot. And he says he just curled up and played dead, and the dog never came to him.”

Motzko said the Americans had a difficult time at Gardelegen. “We knew of some other atrocities, but we didn’t know they were that severe. So it was definitely an eye opener. Our feelings of the German soldiers was bad, but this was the turning point, here. There was only one good German, and that was a dead German.”

No sympathy was shown by the men of the 102nd when they were ordered to round up residents of Gardelegen and force them to dig graves and bury the bodies. Motzko says, “All able-bodied men had to come out one day—they marched them out there. They had to bury each one individually in graves, and that was supposed to be the duty of that family to take care of that grave site from then on. They had to go into the barn and pick up a body and carry it to the cemetery, which was a short distance away. And by that time, the bodies were in bad shape and quite slippery, and it was quite a mess. We put up infantrymen along the way—the Germans had to move as fast as they could—and they had their bayonets on and they prodded them along to keep them going.”