The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (33 page)

They moved through the Jourhaus gate into “a bedlam type situation. The prisoners were milling about, shouting and obviously expecting to be given freedom immediately…. I would say hundreds and possibly a thousand or more. I do remember two ranks of bodies, mostly unclothed, piled near the entranceway, as if placed there earlier to be hauled away.”

Once inside the prisoner compound, they learned that their assignment was to work their way from front to back, down the road that would take them past sixteen or seventeen barracks on either side. Fink wrote:

I think we went down the center roadway, clinging to the left side and using the barracks for protection from any possible sniper fire or any other resistance we might encounter. We were trailing the riflemen who were cautiously leap-frogging ahead, two or three at a time, always using the next barracks for immediate cover.

As this was going on slowly, there were no prisoners to be seen outside but we did notice emaciated people peering out at us from doorways, with those haunting, deep-set eyes. We were later to learn that these captives were so weak and non-functional that they could not work their way up to the Jourhaus entrance area prior to our arrival.

About half way to the rear, this one brave man came forth with the intention of coming down the street toward us, but he would fall down, crawl, regain his feet, fall down again, and so on. When he finally reached us he was hysterical—laughing, crying, hugging, kissing. This prompted others to come out, many just able to crawl along the ground, others clinging to each other for a bit of support.

This was easily the most poignant experience of my life and to this day the scene plays out in my mind as in slow motion, probably because of the extreme and total weakness of the people.

PFC James Dorris had finished his freshman year at the University of Chattanooga in his hometown when he was drafted, and turned into a BAR (Browning automatic rifle) man with the 222nd Regiment. Like most of the others in his outfit, he’d never heard anything about concentration camps until Dachau.

James Dorris in 2008

Leaving the site of the death train, Dorris and his platoon came to a wide avenue and started down it. He says, “I think they called it SS Strasse, this big, wide road leading to the camp, and we were marching single file, one file on each side of the road. And all of a sudden we could smell the crematory. And immediately I realized what it was. It was a horrible, horrible odor that was so bad that first I tried not to breathe, and then you can’t go very long doing that, so finally I started breathing as lightly as I could until I more or less got used to it.”

Dorris’s platoon entered the camp through the nearest gate, and once inside, his lieutenant ordered him to take his BAR and position himself between a high concrete wall and the barbed-wire fence that had, until the Americans turned the power off, been charged with enough electricity to kill on contact. His only instruction: don’t let anybody out. The rest of the platoon headed into the camp while Dorris walked about a hundred yards toward one of the now-abandoned guard towers.

The young soldier was almost immediately confronted with the brutality of life inside Dachau. “There was a man, a body, lying there between the fence and the wall—well, he looked like a rag doll that’d been thrown down, arms and legs all different positions, and one of his eyes was laying out on his cheek where he’d been beaten so badly. I couldn’t imagine how this body got there unless they’d thrown it over the fence. Right at that point, I looked inside, and there was a long row of naked bodies lying on the ground, about maybe fifty feet from me, and on the other side, toward the prison houses, was about two hundred, two hundred fifty prisoners standing there, just looking at me. [They were wearing] all kinds of rags that supposedly were uniforms, prison uniforms, and some of them in real bad shape. Not saying a word. Doing nothing but looking at me.

“Right about that time, one of the guys jumped over the bodies and ran towards me and leaned over and picked up, like he was picking something up off the ground and held it up. I couldn’t see anything there to pick up, but he acted like that and started running with it, back towards the houses. Well, three more guys left the group and started chasing him, and they tackled him and knocked him down and were on top of him, kicking him and hitting him, trying to get his hands open to see what he had. Well, I thought, ‘They’re gonna beat this guy to death, gosh, they’re all crazy, going through what all I imagined them having gone through.’”

Dorris was about to fire a burst from his rifle over their heads but stopped when he realized the bullets might go into the nearby barracks. So he did nothing. “I just stood there and looked, and I thought, ‘This is what Hell is like.’ That’s the only thing I could think. And in my condition, mental condition, I thought I even saw the Devil coming out of the ground. It’s a horrible-looking man with a real red face. I was imagining all this, and I looked up in the sky and said, ‘God, get me out of this place.’

“Well, right at that point, when I looked back down, another prisoner had left and come over to the fence where I was, and he said,
‘Haben Sie einen Zigarette?’
Do you have a cigarette? I thought, I’ve got four or five packs on me, but seeing all those people, if I bring those out, I don’t have enough to give all of them, and I’d have a riot on my hands, so I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘
Ein moment,’
and he turned around and ran back towards the houses.

“Then I looked back where these people were on top of that man, and they’ve gotten his hands open, and there was nothing in them. So in disgust, they got up off of him and went back with the other prisoners. Well, by that time, the man that had run off past me for a cigarette ran back to the fence, and he stuck his hand through the wire fence, and he had a little tiny rusty can. Took the top of off it. Inside was a cigarette butt about, oh, maybe three quarters of an inch long. It was all water-stained, and he handed that to me, and he said, I can’t remember the exact German words, but ‘This is in thanks for rescuing us.’ Well, that just really got to me. Tears came to my eyes, and I had a complete different change from the way I had felt just two minutes before, and I thought, ‘I’m really doing some good here.’ And I felt that was God answering my prayer, because I felt like I was really despairing when I said, ‘God, get me out of here,’ and this fellow coming over and giving me that cigarette butt that he’d been saving. That was his treasure. No telling how long he’d been saving that.

“I took it and thanked him profusely, shook his hand, and I looked out at the other prisoners—they were still all standing there, and I waved to them, and they all waved and started smiling and laughing and talking. And this guy that handed me the cigarette butt was standing there smiling. He turned around and went back into the prison.”

Russ Weiskircher had entered the camp with the command group of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry. When they got inside, they found themselves in an area that was still free of all but a handful of prisoners.

They quickly surveyed the administrative buildings near the gate, including one that contained an entire IBM keypunch system that identified every inmate, but were struck by the fact that they weren’t seeing a mass of living prisoners. Weiskircher says, “We didn’t see anybody. It was eerie, and you know why we didn’t? ‘Cause the Germans told them that the Americans were coming, and when they got there, the Americans would kill everybody in the camp. And since they’d already suffered from the bombing right outside the camp, they probably were ready to believe anything.

“Then some people crawled out from under the barracks, the crawl spaces. Hollow-eyed people that you couldn’t believe. They crawled out of there and crawled toward the gate and called out, and the GIs ran toward the [internal] gate. Now, the gate was locked. We got orders we could not go in and we could not let them out. They had every disease known to man, and we weren’t inoculated for anything.”

He and the other soldiers had what by now had become an almost ubiquitous experience of giving chocolate or rations to the starving inmates, with almost immediate, disastrous results.

Now an ordained minister, Weiskircher acknowledges an upgrading in the adjectives he uses to describe situations back then. But he still can feel the anger—and express it. “Listen, I’m still profane as I ever was, except then I spoke a barracks language. I’m amazed. I’m shocked. I’m nearly out of my gourd. And it was real hard to keep your cool.”

Peter DeMarzo of Annapolis, Maryland, a rifleman with Company L of the 157th Infantry, had seen the death train, a sight that caused what he calls “complete shock.” The shock was magnified once he got into the camp. “I never saw so many dead people in all my life. There were stacks of bodies.”

Contact with surviving prisoners was also shocking for DeMarzo. “Oh, my God. This poor guy came over and kissed me. He must’ve weighed about seventy pounds. I thought, oh, God, it was terrible.” Yet he recalls that he managed to kiss him back. “What’m I gonna do, you know?”

DeMarzo heard shooting inside the camp and became aware that inmates were tracking down and killing their former guards or kapos who hadn’t escaped when the SS evacuated before the Americans arrived. He says the prisoners “would point them out, and somebody would walk over and shoot them.” DeMarzo also recalls seeing inmates throw a suspected camp guard into a fire, burning him alive.

He’s reluctant to talk about an incident mentioned in the inspector general’s report on events that took place during the liberation of Dachau. The report describes an inmate asking DeMarzo to lend him his rifle, which he reportedly did. The inmate presumably used the weapon to kill one or more Germans still hiding inside the camp and then returned it to DeMarzo. While from the perspective of sixty-five years later, it may seem a strange thing for a soldier to do, the fact that similar incidents have been reported by GIs who were at several other concentration camps tends to give credence to the notion that it wasn’t an unreasonable response under the circumstances, even though Army brass might not have endorsed it.

Early in their exploration of Dachau, Lieutenant Colonel Sparks had become aware that the anger level of the men of I Company was off the charts, and he’d ordered Weiskircher to contact higher headquarters and ask for replacements before the place exploded.

Sparks’s fears were realized not long afterward at an area near the SS hospital that was the coal yard for the Dachau power plant. It was there that SS prisoners from the nearby hospital, the NCO school, and finance center were being collected and guarded by soldiers under the command of the same Lieutenant Walsh who’d shot the German medics at the death train.

Walsh ordered a young machine gunner and other soldiers to train their weapons on the SS prisoners and shoot them if they made a move.

Karl Mann remembers Sparks disappearing around a corner near the coal yard, and when he did, “the I Company officers decided that they were going to shoot these Germans.” Mann’s memory contradicts the inspector general’s report, which says that when the machine gunner placed a belt of ammunition in the gun and cocked it, the Germans thought they were about to be executed and moved forward, at which point he opened fire. Seventeen Germans were killed before Lieutenant Colonel Sparks, firing his .45 in the air while shouting “Cease fire!,” kicked the gunner away from the weapon and the shooting stopped. The incident has generated controversy for years, with troops from the other division inside Dachau, the 42nd, insisting that as many as 350 German soldiers who had been patients in the SS hospital were lined up and executed, by the men of I Company. The IG report says it didn’t happen, and there’s no photographic evidence supporting it, unlike a significant number of photos and bullet hole forensics that tend to confirm the IG’s conclusion that no more than seventeen Germans were killed at the wall.

The incident does give credence to reports that I Company was out of control, which led to its men being withdrawn from inside the camp and replaced with soldiers from another battalion.

For Russ Weiskircher, there was one moment inside Dachau that was memorable because it was just plain goofy. He was deep inside the camp when “Some dumb sonofagun who put on lederhosen and an Alpine hat and got a walking stick came strolling by. Said he was on his way to the mountains, trying to convince people he was a Dachau [town] citizen. He was someplace hiding, and he decided to dress up like he belonged to
The Sound of Music
. And the prisoners were yelling in German, “The captain!” He was desperate. He also had been educated in the United States; spoke better English than I did.”

Herbert Butt of Company A, 222nd Infantry, 42nd Infantry Division, is fairly controlled when talking about the horrors he saw in Dachau, but when asked about the crematorium, a look passes across his face that gives pause. “Early on, I could break down just bigger than shit. Outside the crematory I can remember—and the thing that stuck with me the longest was all of those shoes laid there from these prisoners outside, and they were all killed. And that vision, I can see that almost to this day. That was just something that jarred my whole reserves.”